It’s Award Time Again

I received two awards last week: The Kreativ Blogger from Chris Kelworth at the Kelworth Files, and the Liebster from Cindy Brown at Everyday Underwear. I’m a bit conflicted about these awards. On the one hand, I appreciate receiving them, and I have no problem thanking the bloggers and linking back to them. On the other hand, both are the type that say “pass it on to x number of other bloggers”, and I know too much about exponential functions not to be aware that this is another version of chain letters, Ponzi schemes, population growth, or the failure to recognize limits in economic theory. (Yes, they all depend on exponentials, or rather on most people not understanding how exponentials work.)

I am not going to post another chart showing how many iterations of these awards it would take to reach the entire population of the world. I’ve already done that for awards passed on to five, seven, and eleven other blogs. And I’m going to follow my own advice on the Liebster: since this is the second time I received it, I’m not passing it on.

The Kreativ is also a “Pass it on to seven others” award. I will confine myself to passing it on to one which I really like, but I will follow the other conditions. The first, thank and link back to the awarding blog, as I’ve done above.

2. Answer the seven questions or alternatives. (I’ll provide some alternatives.)

3. Provide 10 random factoids about yourself.

4. Pass on to 7 others? Nope. See above on exponentials. I will, however, pass it on to one I like, and leave it to her to pass it on to seven if she wishes.

The Seven Questions:

1. What’s your favorite song? My alternative, Who are your favorite vocal artists? That one I can answer: Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocceli.

2. What’s your favorite dessert? Unfair to ask a diabetic, but now and then I have a chocolate cocoanut crème brulee from Wolf Run. My alternative, What’s your favorite comfort food?

3. What do you do when you’re upset? My alternative: what sort of thing upsets you? Actually I don’t get upset easily now that I’m retired—except about politics and the way the world is going, which when you really think about it ought to upset anyone.

4. What is your favorite pet? I’ll have to use past tense, because when my last Sheltie died of old age I reluctantly decided that at my age and with poor balance, I really shouldn’t try to replace him. But the one that really was my heart dog was my first, Derry. He was a singleton Sheltie who I really think never figured out that he was a dog, and there’s a post about him in his puppy days on my Sheltie site. He was my first tracking dog, had titles in three activities in two countries, and I really ought to write more about him. My alternative: what do you look for in a pet?

5. Which do you prefer, black or white? The alternative given was do you prefer white or wheat bread? I’ll go a step farther in my alternative, and say what kind of bread do you prefer? Not white or wheat bought in the store! When I eat bread, it’s what I bake myself in the bread machine – apricot-almond and ricotta cheese being my two top favorites. Or Brioche bread. Blue corn bread with sunflower seeds and ancient seed bread are pretty good, too. Maybe I should post some recipes?

6. What is your biggest fear? Blindness. At the time of my retirement, diabetic retinopathy had left me blind in one eye, and the treatments had left my other eye such that I see a straight line as wavy. It seems to be fixed now except for limited peripheral vision, but I’m still worried. The alternate given was name one of your strong points or special skills.

7. What is your attitude mostly? I’d have to say laid back, I guess. Definitely not outgoing or sociable, I’m quite happy to be left alone, and downright uncomfortable in a crowd—though that’s partly due to my vision. The alternative given was Do you think it is better to help people or leave them alone?

Finally, 10 random factoids:

1. I can’t find shoes that fit.

2. I am perfectly happy living by myself. I’ve lived by myself since my second year of college.

3. However, there are times a third hand would be useful.

4. I remember (vaguely) the election of Truman.

5. When I went to junior high, girls had to take a semester of sewing and one of cooking. Boys had to take shop. I envied the boys. In retrospect, shop would have been more useful. I didn’t learn anything in sewing or cooking I hadn’t already learned from my mother.

6. I’ve lived in Alaska for almost 50 years.

7. My first home computer was a KayPro running CP/M and relying on two (literally) floppy discs, one for system and program and one for files.

8. I learned to code FORTRAN on punched cards long before the KayPro. Dropping a deck of 1000 cards was a disaster!

9. I live on a dirt road, with my own well and septic system.

10. I wish I had a dog that would alert to low blood sugar. Which leads into the one blog I plan to pass the Kreativ award on to: Sarah at Animals Help Heal. I love her post about seeing eye horses.

Battery Woes

My computer screen lit up with a message Tuesday morning. Your Bluetooth mouse could quit at any time — change the batteries. Fine – I’ve finally figured out how to change the mouse batteries with the computer on, though it does require attaching my old USB mouse to re-connect to the Bluetooth mouse with fresh batteries. (If there’s a keyboard command for find Bluetooth mouse I haven’t found it.) The problem is that I had changed the mouse batteries the day before.

I use rechargeables, and I try to keep some plugged in and charging all the time. Now rechargeable batteries eventually reach the point where they won’t hold a charge, and I think mine have reached that point. I checked them out on the battery tester. The two I took out of the mouse, which just came off the charger yesterday, tested as weak, and I added them to the sack of dead batteries. (I’m not sure dead batteries are actually recycled locally, but I do turn them in separately to try to keep them out of the landfill.) Guess I’d better put rechargeable batteries on my shopping list; I’m going to have problems the next time the keyboard needs batteries. (It takes three.)

Battery tester–good, fresh battery, but my insulin pump won’t accept it.

That was not my only battery problem recently. My insulin pump runs on one AAA battery. This powers not only the pump itself, but also the backlight, the warning beeps and the vibrator if I don’t respond to the beeps, which I generally don’t hear. The manufacturer recommends non-rechargeable alkaline Energizers, simply because the pump is programmed to respond to their power loss curve as they slowly wear out, in order to give me a timely warning. Because I go through so many and have to have them on hand, I purchased a couple of large packages recently. (I didn’t need a twenty-pack and a twenty-four-pack, but I put the twenty-four pack away and then couldn’t find it until after I bought the twenty-pack.) Both had manufacture dates of 2010. Both claimed a shelf life of seven years. Last time, when neither of the two I tried from the twenty-four-pack worked, I managed to find one that my health supplier shipped. Recently I was out of the extras, and tried two more from the twenty-four-pack. Then three from the twenty-pack. The third one worked, but I now have six AAA batteries that show up as good on the tester but won’t work in my insulin pump. (They are working just fine in my anti-mosquito clip-on.)

I know the pump is picky, but only one battery out of seven? Shall I call Medtronics, or Energiser?

Are we getting too dependent on batteries?

Confederation Legal Structure

As I said last week, the Jarnian Confederation acts only to prevent Human-occupied planets from preying on each other or on other sentient species, or to provide emergency aid. But it needs some structure to do this. The interaction of my characters with this structure provides much of the plot of my fiction.

Originally (and still to a large extent in Homecoming and Tourist Trap) the Confederation as a whole was ruled by the R’il’nai. As their numbers dwindled, the Councils were developed to provide the remaining R’il’nai with information and a part-Human sounding board. Membership was originally determined by tests to determine the fraction of traits R’il’nian-Human hybrids showed that were clearly of R’il’nian origin. Those with over seven-eighths R’il’nian traits were considered part of the Inner Council.

The Outer Council was composed of High R’il’noids, those with more than three-fourths R’il’nian traits, and was primarily an advisory, fact-finding and enforcement body subject to the Inner Council. Those with more than half R’il’nian traits were considered R’il’noid. R’il’noids were essential to the running of the Confederation and were subject to Confederation law but not to planetary law. This was primarily because of problems that had arisen in the past because of planetary laws (such as a ban on travel at the new moon, punishable by death) which prevented R’il’noids from carrying out their professional duties. At that time virtually all adult R’il’noids had the R’il’nian empathy at least to the extent that they could be trusted not to take advantage of their immunity to planetary law.

R’il’nian-human hybrids were rare, is spite of official encouragement for R’il’nian males to father offspring from Human or R’il’noid women. Such matings were often sterile. A R’il’nian scientist, Çeren, developed an in vitro fertilization method that greatly increased the production of crossbreds, and also developed a more objective method of ranking R’il’noids by the fraction of active R’il’nian-derived genes. The unintended consequences of both these developments (which were desperately needed at the time) set up the problems in my science fiction.

By the time of Homecoming the Inner Council was actually making most of the decisions to run the Confederation, though the only surviving R’il’nian, Lai, had absolute veto power at least in theory, though he rarely if ever used it. Barring that veto power, the Inner Council was ruled by a majority vote providing at least 5/6 of the Inner Council members were present and voting. Reconsideration of a vote already taken required a 2/3 plus majority. By the time of the trilogy veto power no longer exists, and this is how the Confederation is ruled and the Horizon War was started.

How do you Eat a Salad?

I like salads. I do not like trying to eat them neatly. Especially in a restaurant.

One of my favorite salads, with leaf lettuce, mangoes, sugared pecans and raspberry dressing.

Salads do not hold together, and holding together helps if you are trying to get a fork under something. Forks do a poor job of sticking in lettuce if you stab at it. The pieces of lettuce are frequently too wide for one bite, though generally far less than a satisfying mouthful. If the salad has small items, like the mangoes and sugared pecans in the mango salad pictured, they roll off a fork. In short, the conventional fork and spoon just do not work very well for eating a salad. (I except things like coleslaw or carrot salad, where the pieces are very small and glued together with dressing.)

At the same time, the dressing makes a salad far too messy to just pick up and eat.

Perhaps we need to invent something that would do a better job of conveying a bite of salad from plate to mouth?

One could wrap it in a bit of tortilla or pita, I suppose, but that is not always the taste desired. Nor do many restaurants serve them that way.

Is it too much to hope for that someone would invent a new eating utensil suitable for salads? Perhaps some kind of eating tongs? Something small enough to take a bite from neatly? Ideas, anybody?

Breakup Season

The usual four seasons, especially as defined by the equinoxes and solstices, don’t work very well for interior Alaska. Show cover is generally established by a month after the autumnal equinox, and stays on the ground until well after the vernal equinox. Rivers freeze a little later and remain frozen longer in the spring, and the only running water for six months of the year is in hot springs and indoors. But there is one season that everyone both longs for and dreads: Breakup.

Breakup is the time of year when snow melts and rivers thaw. The two are connected by more than sunshine and warmer weather. Melting snow makes mud (one of the reasons breakup is a time of some dread) but it also runs into rivers. If the water rises in the upper stretches of a river before lower reaches are thawed, as often happens in Alaska, the result can be ice jams and resultant flooding. I’ll talk about that some other time, but right now I want to discuss the simple process of melting snow.

Clean snow reflects most of the solar energy that strikes it. Some of the sun’s rays are absorbed within the snow pack, and cause internal melting and settling — but this is a slow process. Even clean snow, however, is a very good absorber in thermal infrared wavelengths. The sun doesn’t put out much energy in these wavelengths, but buildings, trees, and just about everything else except polished metal does. As a result, snow near the south side of a building melts much faster than snow out in the open. So does snow near tree trunks.

I see this every year. In addition to the photo of my road, which is rapidly turning into mud, I took two of the north and south yards of my house, minutes apart. Both areas got almost exactly the same amount of snow, and both have very similar exposure to sunlight. The snow stake still has a good 18” of snow. The ground around the birch is almost bare.

Why? Two reasons, actually, and the combination explains why open birch forest is usually the first natural area free of snow around here. First, birch trees hold their seeds through winter, and drop them shortly before breakup. As a result the seeds on the snow around the tree absorb the solar radiation and transfer that energy to the snow, speeding its melt. Natural selection? Quite possibly. It certainly seems likely that the enhanced snow melt, leading to earlier warming of the ground, would help the tree.

Second, the tree itself absorbs some solar energy, and then re-radiates it to the snow in the form of thermal infrared. Just about any object poking through the snow this time of year has a little depression around it. Spruce trees do an even better job of absorbing sunlight than do birches, but they also shade the ground and transfer much of the energy they absorb directly to the air. As a result spruce forest, while it probably does a better job of warming the air than birch forest, is among the last areas to have completely bare ground.

On a different note entirely, one of the fixtures of breakup in Fairbanks is the Beat Beethoven 5 km race, a fundraiser held today for and by the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra. I won’t be running this year, though I did “run” with a cane once — and came in last. The idea is to cover the 5 km before the end of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, about 30 minutes. I’m volunteering this year to park my car along the race route with the radio tuned to 91.5 (KSUA, the campus radio station) blaring out Beethoven’s 5th. I expect temperatures below 50°F and much of the course to be slippery or wet!

Added later (after the race.) This is definitely a family race. There were parents pushing their children in strollers, parents with children in backpacks or riding piggyback, dogs, and one contestant on crutches. (And she wasn’t at the end, either.) I did have a bit of a problem in that instruction to volunteers said if possible, not to have your car idling as the runner went by. I did. And needed a jump to start the car after the battery totally discharged itself.

Guest Blog #IAN

A very quick note. I have a guest blog up on But What Are They Eating about some of the foods my characters eat–and why those using esper talents must eat so much to avoid low blood sugar.

Cold-packed Snow: White Ice

This pile of white ice chunks was scraped off the OLLI parking lot. As you can see, the lot is still white.

I’ve talked about snow that is undisturbed without a temperature gradient, and about disturbed snow without pressure. Today we’re going to take that a step farther and look at snow that is disturbed by pressure—specifically, by car or foot traffic—when temperatures are below freezing. Here in Alaska we call it white ice, and the less-traveled roads and almost all the parking lots are solid white ice this time of year.

Wind or an avalanche will break snow crystals, but it doesn’t in itself press the broken grains together. Walking or driving over dry snow, however, not only breaks the crystals, it also presses them together. If it is near freezing, the pressure may even cause slight melting. In any event the crystals are very firmly welded together. The result is a mass that has some air trapped—that’s why it looks white. But it may be only a little less dense than ice, and is only slightly softer. An icebreaker or a sharp-edged shovel will generally break it much more easily than it will break true ice, but white ice is definitely solid.

Some of the chunks of white ice removed from the road I live on.

As a driving surface, white ice is something most Alaskan drivers learn to deal with. It is not impossibly slippery if it is not polished or near freezing temperature, though most of us drive on it with caution and learn to feather our brakes. Mine are anti-skid, but I’ve learned to brake softly enough that the anti-lock feature almost never engages—except at intersections.  Those are often polished to the point that they are extremely slick, even though graveled.

Yes, graveled. We don’t use salt much because our temperatures are generally so low that even salt water freezes and salt simply will not melt ice. Salt’s used on sidewalks sometimes, but in cold weather each salt pellet simply melts its way down to the pavement without having much effect on the main ice mass—except to make it slicker.

Notice the step left when one lane of my road was plowed a couple of days ago.

The road I live on is gravel, and a coating of white ice actually improves it. But it does do some things you might not think about to paved roads.

First, it covers any marking painted on the road or parking lot—lane markings, turn arrows, lines that mark parking spaces.

Second, it can at times be thick enough that when part of a road is cleared in the spring, a considerable drop-off may result.

Third, and especially a problem when it is overcast and the light is flat, is whiteout conditions. It’s not as bad as in an airplane north of tree line when the pilot may not even be able to see which way is up, but telling what is road and what is not can be very difficult when the road is white ice and the verge is snow and both are exactly the same color. It’s hard to see even with directional light and shadows, but in flat light everything looks the same.

I managed to high-center my car a few weeks ago taking an exit between a four-lane highway and a major side road. The exit was pure white ice, and I couldn’t quite see what was road and what was the curbed triangle between the side road and the exit. I wound up on the triangle and had to be pulled off by a tow truck. Neither the trooper who stopped to see if I needed help nor the tow truck driver seemed to have the slightest problem understanding how I’d gotten there, or even consider my situation unusual. “Whiteout”  was all the explanation I needed.

Inversions and Smokestacks

Why do plumes flatten?

Sometime the plumes from smokestacks just keep gong up until they disappear, but at other times they will stop and start spreading out once they have reached a specific height. Why?

One common explanation is that the plumes have reached a capping inversion and can’t go any higher. There is some truth in this, but it is a major oversimplification. Inversions aren’t something you reach, for one thing. Here in Fairbanks, and throughout the country at night, inversions often start at the ground. Further, they may extend for a considerable distance – up to a mile or more – vertically.

So just what is an inversion?

Under normal circumstances the air gets colder with height. One reason is that air cools as it rises. This is due to conservation of energy: the air is essentially swapping heat for potential energy. For dry air, the cooling rate is about 1°C per hundred meters, or 5.4°F per thousand feet. This is called the adiabatic lapse rate. When water is condensing, such as in a cloud, the air doesn’t cool quite as fast as it rises, because the condensing water adds heat to the air.

In an inversion layer, the air gets warmer with height. The rise can be only a degree or two occurring over a height of a few tens of feet, or it can be up to 20°C or more extending for a kilometer or two. But it is a layer of finite thickness, not just a flat plane at a specific height.

Here in Fairbanks, power plant plumes are generally visible because they contain water, which at low temperatures condenses. As a result it is very obvious when they reach a particular height and suddenly flatten out. But why?

They rise to start with because they are warmer than the surrounding air. They stop rising at the height where their temperature is the same as that of the air around them.

Part of this is because they cool as they rise. But if this were all that were involved, they would rise quite a long way. Suppose the plume temperature when it left the stack were 100°C – the boiling point of water. If it were simply cooling off at the adiabatic rate, it would take 10 kilometers just to reach the freezing point – and I guarantee that the air at 10 kilometers over Fairbanks in the winter never gets that warm.

So why do they flatten out and stop rising?

Because all the time they are rising, they are mixing with the surrounding air. This is actually visible in the photograph – the plume gets wider with height, due to the mixing in of cold environmental air. This works even for very small plumes. I have seen diesel trucks with stacks trailing a plume that flattens only a foot or two above the top of the stack, or stationary sources whose plumes flatten several hundred meters up. It’s a question of how fast the environmental air mixes with the plume as well as the initial plume temperature.

So if you see a plume flatten out, you can be pretty sure it is in an inversion, but not that there is a particular inversion at that particular height.

Technology Index

The Perversity of Inanimate Objects 1 4/10/10
Insulin Pumps 5/20/10
Wars With Word 5/28/10
The Perversity of Inanimate Objects 2 6/4/10
Float Chair (fictional) 6/24/10
Tricycles are not Bicycles 8/8/10
Why Temperature Remembered doesn’t match the Record 4/5/11
Does Banking Software Work? 4/21/11
My New Toy – an iPad 2 5/12/11
Before Computers 6/5/11
How do you Eat a Salad? 4/28/12
Battery Woes 5/12/12

Indexing Blog Posts

500+ posts is too many for me to keep track of, and quite a few are “reference” posts, such as the ones on planet building or horse coat color genetics. So I’m putting in a new feature, an index page that links to posts linking to the posts on a given topic. (Sound confusing? Try doing it!)

These indexing posts start today (see below) and will appear occasionally until the reference posts are all indexed. After that I’ll just be updating the index posts, which will be accessible from the Index tab above.