Dang it! The storm stopped around 1:30 pm, and the forecast said little chance of more, and the weather radar showed nothing on the way – so I shoveled our porch and walkway (about 18" of snow), and plowed our driveway.
Then I headed over (on the tractor) to our neighbor, Nick and Maria S. They have a long driveway and told me they had nobody arranged to plow them out, so I volunteered. On the drive over (about 2 miles on a 15 MPH tractor), it started to snow. By the time I got to their house, it was a full-on blizzard, with visibility down to 100' or so. I plowed them out as best I could see, and headed home.
I was frozen and soaked by the time I got back in the house, so I jumped right into a nice, hot shower. Fifteen minutes later, there was an inch of fresh snow on the ground – and it's still coming down hard.
Dang it!
Plowing the driveway this time was a much different experience than usual. Normally the only challenge is to scrape every square inch while marshaling all the snow off to the side. It's sort of a management problem: not taking too big a bite, having the blade angled right, etc. This time there was a completely different challenge: how to get the vast quantity of snow herded off to some place available to put it. There was a lot of snow to put somewhere! Next time we have a deep snowfall, I'm going to try starting out with the loader bucket, and use that to move the bulk of the snow off to some good place for a pile. Then I'll use the blade to finish it off nicely...
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Newton...
Snowy consequences...
Snowy consequences... The temperature is hovering right around freezing, which means the (totally unpredicted) volumes of snow that we're getting are heavy, gloppy, and wet. For some reason one particular basement casement window is having lots and lots of snow pile into it – to the point where I started to get worried about its physical integrity. The weight of that snow looked like it just might break the window panes!
So I ran out to my shop, found a piece of scrap OSB (chip board), and sawed it up into two 5' x 20" pieces. Then I shoveled all the snow out from around the casement (this is while the roof was dumping more on me!), shoveled out most of the snow inside the casement, and covered it with those two pieces of OSB. It looks like it will hold, and it definitely removed the immediate threat. We're keeping an eye on the other casements, too, but so far none of them are getting large amounts of snow in them. I know not why.
Meanwhile, some photos from around the place to entertain you. If I didn't keep thinking about the work it's going to take to dig us out, I'd be entranced by the beauty of it. The first photo shows our sidewalk after I shoveled off the first 8" or so. In the fifth photo you can see the juncos that just don't care that I'm standing right next to them – they want that food! The last is the same balcony shot I took just a few hours ago – look at all this white stuff!
So I ran out to my shop, found a piece of scrap OSB (chip board), and sawed it up into two 5' x 20" pieces. Then I shoveled all the snow out from around the casement (this is while the roof was dumping more on me!), shoveled out most of the snow inside the casement, and covered it with those two pieces of OSB. It looks like it will hold, and it definitely removed the immediate threat. We're keeping an eye on the other casements, too, but so far none of them are getting large amounts of snow in them. I know not why.
Meanwhile, some photos from around the place to entertain you. If I didn't keep thinking about the work it's going to take to dig us out, I'd be entranced by the beauty of it. The first photo shows our sidewalk after I shoveled off the first 8" or so. In the fifth photo you can see the juncos that just don't care that I'm standing right next to them – they want that food! The last is the same balcony shot I took just a few hours ago – look at all this white stuff!
Our balcony...
The forecast says 3 to 5 inches today, but we've already gotten more than that. Can you spell buried?
Mystery of the cattery pond...
Mystery of the cattery pond... When Debbie went down to our basement cattery this morning, she discovered a small pond in the northeast corner of the room. This was very reminiscent of the indoor ocean we had last summer during a rainstorm, but on that memorable occasion it was quite obvious where the water came from: the casement window had about 8 inches of water in it, and water was streaming through the window frame into the basement.
This time the source wasn't nearly so obvious. We cleaned up the water with mops; the total was about two quarts. That's far too much for a cat to be the source under even the wildest set of assumptions. It's even too much for a water bowl to have been the source. The kitties were puzzled as well; it was not the water feature of their dreams. So we were mystified as we cleaned up, until Debbie spotted some water on a casement window sill. Ah, ha! That had to be the source. But how? The bottom of the casement well had no water. Where did the water come from? How did it get through the window?
Some inspection and thought unveiled the answer. If water came through the casement opening at an angle (as it would if the wind was blowing from the east), then the rain would strike the casement window pane. Then it would run down and into the sill that the window slides in. That sill has a drain to the outside, but it's a small hole – heavy rain could easily overwhelm it. In that case, water would overflow and some of it would run down the inside of the sill, into the cattery. That must have been what happened. It was rainy and windy last night.
I'm going to call that a mystery solved. We've been in the house nearly two years now, and this is the first time anything like that happened. Let's hope it remains a rare occurrence!
This time the source wasn't nearly so obvious. We cleaned up the water with mops; the total was about two quarts. That's far too much for a cat to be the source under even the wildest set of assumptions. It's even too much for a water bowl to have been the source. The kitties were puzzled as well; it was not the water feature of their dreams. So we were mystified as we cleaned up, until Debbie spotted some water on a casement window sill. Ah, ha! That had to be the source. But how? The bottom of the casement well had no water. Where did the water come from? How did it get through the window?
Some inspection and thought unveiled the answer. If water came through the casement opening at an angle (as it would if the wind was blowing from the east), then the rain would strike the casement window pane. Then it would run down and into the sill that the window slides in. That sill has a drain to the outside, but it's a small hole – heavy rain could easily overwhelm it. In that case, water would overflow and some of it would run down the inside of the sill, into the cattery. That must have been what happened. It was rainy and windy last night.
I'm going to call that a mystery solved. We've been in the house nearly two years now, and this is the first time anything like that happened. Let's hope it remains a rare occurrence!
You have to pick cherries...
You have to pick cherries ... if you want to make cherry pie. That's from this new post by Steve McIntyre, continuing his tireless work trying to find some bit of reality in the warmist's research papers. Short version: he hasn't found any yet. From his conclusion:
Unfortunately, Briffa and associates have never set out ex ante criteria for site inclusion/exclusion, resulting in Briffa regional reconstructions seeming more like Calvinball than science, as discussed in many CA posts. However, remarkably, D’Arrigo et al 2009 (though not noticed at the time) had admitted earlier that year to doing exactly what Briffa had denied: the ex post selection of sites in order to obtain a preconceived result (a reconstruction that went up in the 20th century).Do read the whole thing. It's wonderful and satisfying to see a competent observer applying actual science techniques and skepticism. Plus, a Calvin and Hobbes reference!
Paradise ponders...
Paradise ponders... We had an unplanned adventure yesterday. My brother Scott had a new feline at his house – a male kitten, barely old enough to be outside by himself. The kitten (which he named “Furball”) was obviously not feral – he was very familiar with people and wanted into the house. Scott isn't interested in having a kitten as a pet, and we didn't want to see the poor thing tossed back out into the snowstorm, so Debbie and I drove up and picked him up. Furball (tentatively renamed “Newton”) is now ensconced in our basement bathroom, isolated from our cattery kitties. We have an appointment for him with the vet next Wednesday, and Debbie has contacted Four Paws (a rescue volunteer group) to see about finding him a permanent home.
Meanwhile, Debbie has a kitten. If you know her, you can probably imagine just how heartbroken she is about this :) Photos will be forthcoming...
Meanwhile, Debbie has a kitten. If you know her, you can probably imagine just how heartbroken she is about this :) Photos will be forthcoming...
Water is all over Pluto...
Of dates and computers...
Of dates and computers... I stumbled into this article in my reading this morning. It's a good, non-technical explanation of why we have leap years (this year is a leap year, by the way). This is familiar territory for me, as I've written quite a bit of code that deals with these issues. That got me to pondering just how much time I've spent over the years doing this. It's kind of crazy, really, just how hard it is!
The most recent descent into date madness that I took was about 12 years ago, when I was working for a company doing electronic stock and option trading. They had customers located all over the world, in a total of 28 different time zones. The development team was getting all twisted up in the problem of converting dates and times from one time zone to another. Our programming environment (Java) had a standard way of doing this (a “library”), but it always seemed to be missing a few of the time zones we needed. The problem was that time zones changed frequently. Mistakes in the time zone conversions could be very expensive for us, so it was worth considerable effort to get right. I ended up writing a replacement for the standard Java library that we could keep up to date ourselves. I was amazed how complex this seemingly simple problem was, especially when it dawned on me that I had to track not only the current time zones (that was bad enough!) but also the entire history of time zones. Sheesh!
Way back in the '80s I had a consulting job that involved writing code for a different kind of date and time conversion. This time it was a university who needed a way to figure out the relative timing of events in the past, back to around 500 BC. The challenge was that people in different places used to keep entirely different calendars, and these calendars independently changed over time. When someone in Italy wrote a date of (say) February 12, 1204, that wouldn't necessarily have been the same date in (say) Denmark; there it might be December 29, 1203. One of the big challenges to understanding those differences was that the whole concept of a country was quite fluid back then :) Even worse, in some places the researchers cared about, the calendars they used were completely different – not the Julian calendars invented by the Romans, but totally different calendars generally controlled in quite an arbitrary and capricious manner by religious authorities.
That was a really challenging programming problem. Coming up with a model that could handle all these things wasn't too hard, but gathering the information required to fully implement that model was. I ended up getting a grad student assigned to me as my helper, and her only job was to go get answers for me. I'd ask her a question like “When did Amsterdam switch over to the Gregorian calendar?”, and she'd go off to get the answer. In the end, the solution was more a database and less a bunch of code.
I remember one problem the researchers were wrestling with that they never did come up with a satisfactory answer for. The problem arose when interpreting the writings of someone in the past who was writing about events in an area not local to them. For example, an Englishman might write about the purchase of a ship from Amsterdam, saying something like “I bought this ship for 4,000 guineas, and it was delivered on March 17, 1366.” The problem is which March 17, 1366 was he talking about: London's or Amsterdam's? Because they weren't the same. Most likely they'll never figure that one out :)
Anyway, I've spent a lot more programming time dealing with issues like this than I ever thought I would. The problem of dates and times keeps recurring, and I'm not sure that will ever end. For instance, there's a debate currently underway about leap-seconds, and whatever the answer turns out to be, software will have to be written to deal with it...
The most recent descent into date madness that I took was about 12 years ago, when I was working for a company doing electronic stock and option trading. They had customers located all over the world, in a total of 28 different time zones. The development team was getting all twisted up in the problem of converting dates and times from one time zone to another. Our programming environment (Java) had a standard way of doing this (a “library”), but it always seemed to be missing a few of the time zones we needed. The problem was that time zones changed frequently. Mistakes in the time zone conversions could be very expensive for us, so it was worth considerable effort to get right. I ended up writing a replacement for the standard Java library that we could keep up to date ourselves. I was amazed how complex this seemingly simple problem was, especially when it dawned on me that I had to track not only the current time zones (that was bad enough!) but also the entire history of time zones. Sheesh!
Way back in the '80s I had a consulting job that involved writing code for a different kind of date and time conversion. This time it was a university who needed a way to figure out the relative timing of events in the past, back to around 500 BC. The challenge was that people in different places used to keep entirely different calendars, and these calendars independently changed over time. When someone in Italy wrote a date of (say) February 12, 1204, that wouldn't necessarily have been the same date in (say) Denmark; there it might be December 29, 1203. One of the big challenges to understanding those differences was that the whole concept of a country was quite fluid back then :) Even worse, in some places the researchers cared about, the calendars they used were completely different – not the Julian calendars invented by the Romans, but totally different calendars generally controlled in quite an arbitrary and capricious manner by religious authorities.
That was a really challenging programming problem. Coming up with a model that could handle all these things wasn't too hard, but gathering the information required to fully implement that model was. I ended up getting a grad student assigned to me as my helper, and her only job was to go get answers for me. I'd ask her a question like “When did Amsterdam switch over to the Gregorian calendar?”, and she'd go off to get the answer. In the end, the solution was more a database and less a bunch of code.
I remember one problem the researchers were wrestling with that they never did come up with a satisfactory answer for. The problem arose when interpreting the writings of someone in the past who was writing about events in an area not local to them. For example, an Englishman might write about the purchase of a ship from Amsterdam, saying something like “I bought this ship for 4,000 guineas, and it was delivered on March 17, 1366.” The problem is which March 17, 1366 was he talking about: London's or Amsterdam's? Because they weren't the same. Most likely they'll never figure that one out :)
Anyway, I've spent a lot more programming time dealing with issues like this than I ever thought I would. The problem of dates and times keeps recurring, and I'm not sure that will ever end. For instance, there's a debate currently underway about leap-seconds, and whatever the answer turns out to be, software will have to be written to deal with it...
Laser beam space rock deflection?
Laser beam space rock deflection? That's what this article is talking about. They propose two versions: one that would orbit the rock being deflected, the other in Earth orbit.
The version with the laser flying nearby the space rock makes sense to me: the laser is basically collecting sunlight (with a solar panel array) and turning it into a high energy beam of light that vaporizes parts of the rock's surface, acting like a small (and terribly designed!) rocket to “push” the rock the other way.
The version with the laser flying in Earth orbit sounds like fantasy to me, mainly because of the implausibly “tight” beam divergence that would be required. “Beam divergence” is one of the measures of the quality of a laser. It's a function of both the laser itself and the optics the beam is passed through. The “optics” part gets very tricky with high power laser beams, as the optics inevitably absorb some of the energy from the laser. Even if the absorbed fraction is very small, the optics get very hot – and that heat can only be gotten rid of in space by re-radiating it. That's hard. But even if you ignore the heat problem, the quality of the laser and optics required is almost unimaginably high. I think the people proposing this are smoking something they shouldn't oughtta be...
The version with the laser flying nearby the space rock makes sense to me: the laser is basically collecting sunlight (with a solar panel array) and turning it into a high energy beam of light that vaporizes parts of the rock's surface, acting like a small (and terribly designed!) rocket to “push” the rock the other way.
The version with the laser flying in Earth orbit sounds like fantasy to me, mainly because of the implausibly “tight” beam divergence that would be required. “Beam divergence” is one of the measures of the quality of a laser. It's a function of both the laser itself and the optics the beam is passed through. The “optics” part gets very tricky with high power laser beams, as the optics inevitably absorb some of the energy from the laser. Even if the absorbed fraction is very small, the optics get very hot – and that heat can only be gotten rid of in space by re-radiating it. That's hard. But even if you ignore the heat problem, the quality of the laser and optics required is almost unimaginably high. I think the people proposing this are smoking something they shouldn't oughtta be...
A new skiing operation...
A new skiing operation ... uses a Snow-Cat that runs up a trail starting just 2.5 miles southeast of our home. We've seen the Snow-Cat parked there, but didn't know why...
The weatherman said snow...
The image at right show the weather radar picture as of about 4 am this morning. The winds are blowing almost directly from the west, so most of that “blue blob” (the snow storm) has yet to hit us. The forecast for today has been revised; they're now saying 3 to 5 inches of snow today, with the snow lasting into this evening. That means a storm total of 5 to 7 inches.
Looks like my Sunday morning chores will include plowing the driveway and clearing the sidewalk!
Whenever someone whines to me...
So after I show them this chart, I tell the whiners that if they are going to have an emotional reaction when they watch the indices every day, then they shouldn't be investing in the stock market at all. They should instead invest in something less visibly volatile, with a risk/return trade-off they can live with. If they can find such a thing – these days the stock market is hard to beat on that score...
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