Non-Breaking Shoelaces

For years I’ve be plagued with a stupid problem: I break the shoelaces on my hiking boots (which is basically the only kind of shoe I wear outdoors) with distressing regularity. Typically they last just two or three days before the first break occurs, and then I live with knotted repairs for weeks until I remember to buy a new pair. The most recent pair I replaced had six knots in them — and they’d been on my shoes for less than a week.

A couple of weeks ago, I got good and fed up with this situation. I’m tired of being a one-man subsidy for the shoelace industry! So I looked all over the web, trying to find shoelaces with a steel-cable core, figuring that they would stand up to my abuse. I failed in that effort, but I found something even better: Kevlar shoelaces, available from Gempler’s. I’ve had them now for a week, and I am delighted to report that they are so strong that I cannot even purposefully break them — much less accidentally.

I bought three pairs, but I suspect it’s going to be a long while before I need the second…

Orientation Ponder

This morning I prepared four envelopes for mailing out checks. I did it production-line stye: first I put stamps on all the envelopes, then return address labels, then stuffed the letters. But when I went to stuff the letters in, I discovered that I’d managed to affix the return address label and stamp on what we normally think of as the “bottom” of the envelope. It gave me a start, and for a moment I was even thinking that I’d have to throw them away and start over — until I realized that the notion of “bottom” was wholly an artificial construct, and that having the postage and address on “upside-down” wouldn’t make any difference at all to the function of the letter.

But my instinctive reaction got the ponder going, and reminded me of a couple of other more interesting examples I’ve heard over the years.

The first one I heard from a comedian (Bill Cosby?). It concerns the way we all eat a slice of pie. This comedian observed that everybody will turn their pie plate until the pointy end of the pie faces them. Why on earth do we do this? I’ve experimented with this, folks (it’s the kind of guy I am, and besides, it was a good excuse to eat more pie!). It makes no difference how the pie is facing, it’s equally easy to eat in all of them. Somewhere deep inside us, there is an “correct orientation” sensor — and it gets unhappy if we have our pie turned the “wrong” way.

The second one I read in a science journal. It was a report on an older piece of research, from the 1930s as I recall. An anthropologist visiting with the Eskimos of northern Canada noted something interesting: all but a few of the Eskimos, when viewing a photograph, would hold the photo in whatever orientation it had when it was handed to them. If they were looking at the photo sideways, or even upside-down, it didn’t make any difference to them at all. Those few Eskimos who did care about the orientation all had something in common: they had learned to read. This anthropologist leapt to the conclusion that visual orientation was irrelevant to humankind until reading was invented — at which time it became crucial. Interesting theory, but most anthropologists and biologists do not believe it’s correct. Gravity on the earth’s surface, just to present one example, definitely has a direction — and orientation to gravity matters a great deal, whether you can read or not. Still, the anthropologist made the observation (and it was subsequently repeated) — and the question remains: why don’t non-reading Eskimos care how a photo is oriented, when the rest of us seem to care a great deal?

I sure don’t have any answers — do you?

Referral of the Day

Someone found my blog this morning by typing this search term into Ask.com:

we have just moved to a rural area what is the red flag on the mailbox for?

As usual, they found my blog because all those words appeared in unrelated posts on the same day — not because I actually answered this question.

I am at a complete loss to explain how someone could live in the U.S. long enough to learn English, and yet not know what the red flag on a mailbox is for.

Or is this just the “country boy” in me? Is this really an obscure fact, only known to gun-toting hayseeds?

Global Warming

Just a few days ago, the Denver Post published an unusually balanced report on global warming. In it they quote meterologist Bill Gray. Dr. Gray is not a household name, but everybody knows his work — he is the preeminent hurricane forecaster, with a far better track record than anyone else in the world. He’s the forecaster the media quotes every year when they talk about the expected number of hurricanes.

Dr. Gray is a skeptic on global warming:

Gray is among the most strident critics, quick to use words like “fraud” or “gang” to describe the modelers.

Instead of model projections, Gray looks at the history and patterns of weather to find trends.

And befitting his 76 years, Gray has a long view. His first report on climate - on the return of the dust bowl - was in the early 1940s when he was in junior high school.

"We’d gone through a warming trend in the '40s, and everybody was saying we were going to win World War II but face terrible droughts,” Gray said.

Soon after, temperatures went into a cooling trend and by 1975, Gray points out, there was talk of a coming ice age.

The Earth does have natural cycles of cooling and warming - during the past 740,000 years there have been eight cycles with four ice ages.

The cycles appear to be tied to slight variations in the tilt of the Earth toward the sun.

During the last ice age - which ended about 10,000 years ago - Earth was on average about 4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler, and what is now Manhattan was buried under ice.

At some point the Earth will wobble on its axis again, setting the stage for an ice age.

There are other phenomena affecting global temperatures over time, such as El Niño, a Pacific Ocean warm-water mass that appears in roughly five-year cycles and changes world weather patterns.

And there is the Atlantic thermohaline current, a conveyor belt moving heat north on the surface and then dropping it to the ocean floor and heading back to the equator - a 1,200-year trip.

Changes in the current lead to changes in temperature. Somehow the models have to account for these natural variations too.

Gray believes that the warmer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are linked to a natural slowing in the thermohaline current, not the carbon dioxide.

Some of the models also show the current is slowing and that, along with warming oceans, adds to hurricane risks.

Dr. Gray is as skeptical of the model-based global warming forecasts as I am — but his weather forecasting credentials are impeccable, whereas mine are non-existant.

I’ll add one point this report didn’t cover: follow the money. Billions of research dollars each year are going to the global warming wing of meterology. Zippity-doo-dah is going to the skeptics. If you were an ambitious meterologist, what would attract you more? Hmmm???

Just one more reason why public funding of science is a mess…

Quote of the Day

In today’s edition of the Liberal Lickspittle Los Angeles Times, Max Boot writes with this conclusion:

The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Read the entire thing.

Then marvel at its appearance in the bird cage liner of choice in Southern California. Quite likely, some editor there is being fired as I write — for surely it’s a firing offence there to publish a piece that doesn’t adhere to the blame-America-first crowd’s spin, and even worse, smacks of red state commonsense…