Tag Archives: science

Unforseen Consequences

Posted on January 11, 2012 by | 10 comments

That vertical rift you see on Old Sol this morning is a consequence of neglect.  While the Reiki cats and I were praying him up this morning Shiva the Cow Cat got distracted looking at the full moon still high on the other side of the sky.  She got out of harmony with the rest of us and the result speaks for itself.

Life’s full of that sort of thing here on this planet.  You can’t have any confidence you can get by with anything.  A couple of titanosaurs in Bolivia a few million years ago have themselves a secret rendezvous and next thing you know it surfaces and human beings are poking around nosing into their business.

Some Ichnogenus Gigandipus in Utah puts his foot off the designated pathway and a few million years later you’ve got the authorities swarming his footprints catching him out.

A lot of people think it’s just cameras, but that’s not right.  Do you think this guy in Kenya a million and a half years ago would have done anything different if he’d known it was going to come out someday?  He’d probably feel he pushed a stale yellow light that turned red before he got through the intersection and the camera got him.  He’s sitting out there somewhere fossilized waiting to get the ticket in the mail.

The planet and the Universe have us brainwashed into thinking we don’t leave any tracks.  But it’s a trick, and if we wake up to what we’re doing, say with our tracks of one sort, it sneaks in and preserves some other sort without our noticing it.

For instance, back when they started replacing real audience laughter and applause on television shows in the 1960s.  Who’d have dreamed they were teaching all the coming generations to be Pavlov’s dog with their emotions responses to what went on around them fed directly off a cathode ray tube?

That Santa Fe Trail on the image above is where the routes for land traffic from Saint Louis to Santa Fe converged before choo choo trains got into the act.  It’s the tracks of thousands of wagons, horses, mules and oxen branded into the landscape.

On the ground it’s abraded vertical walled arroyos a hundred yards wide.  You can follow it all the way from Santa Fe to Saint Louis if you know what you’re looking for.  And you’ll be able to do it again a thousand years from now if the mood strikes you and you have the time.

I’m just wondering what the consequences will be for Shiva the Cow Cat letting her attention drift over to the full moon.

Old Jules

 

10 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Animals, Astronomy, Human Behavior, New Mexico, NM, Science

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Time Travel

Posted on January 6, 2012 by | 13 comments

Good morning readers. I’m obliged you came by. 

If you went outdoors with a clear sky last night early evening and craned your neck to look directly overhead you might have seen Altair.   Around the time the light that met your eye was leaving Altair I was a young man approaching the age of 50. 

I was beginning a new career, male hormones raging, severely involved in a tempestuous relationship with the lady described if you clicked the ROMANCE [https://sofarfromheaven.com/romance/ ] tab above.  [When the light reaching your eye from Cassiopia is as old as the light last night from Altair]

When that last night Altair light was leaving home on the way to a rendezvous with your eye my old friend Keith and I were doing a different kind of time travel.  We were stomping up and down mountains exploring the country around Santa Fe,  discovering the ruins of numerous hippie communes begun and abandoned around the time the Altair-light was leaving on the journey to meet our then-eyes.

We were also searching the Zuni Mountains for a lost gold mine from a time when the orange giant in Scorpio was headed on its voyage to our eyes as we sat around our night camps gazing at the sky.

I was going to do a lot longer post about this, but I’m having a connection problem slowing things down.  Probably moisture getting into the repaired phone line:

Artful Communications – White Trash Repairs 3

.

http://spaceweather.com/

The light leaving Old Sol at the time I hit SAVE DRAFT will reach the earth about the time this furshlugginer computer finishes doing it.  Roughly 8.5 minutes.  I’m going to have to do more on this sometime when the connection’s not taking much longer than the light from moon-to-earth, start to finish.

Old Jules

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Posted in America, Astronomy, Current Issues, History, Nature, Solitude

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2011 Red Oak Wilt Movement and Behavior

Posted on December 31, 2011 by | 10 comments

The disease evidently arrived when the powerline went in running north to south at the top of the ridge on the far left side of the pic.  Or possibly when that gravel pit was scooped out just to the right of the earliest attack.  Those earliest trees have been dead at least five years.

In 2010 it moved abruptly downgrade attacking the trees surrounding the cabin and in the vicinity of the chickenhouse.  But I hadn’t noticed until I viewed the sat-image that it’s also moving west beyond the ridgeline [far left].   Beyond that ridge and to the west it’s heavily treed with oaks all the way to the western property line. 

Judging from what’s happening to the west of the ridge there mightn’t be a red oak left on that side of the property within a couple of years.

But downgrade to the east there doesn’t appear to be any infestation at all, yet.

Truly a mystery.

Old Jules

My 2011 posts about this:

Oak Wilt, Firewood and Sawmilling, For Want of a Nail – Something Worth Knowing Chainsaw-wise, A Poem as Lovely as a Tree – An Oak Ponders Oak-Wilt, Outsmarted by a Dead Tree.

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Posted in 2011, Country Life, Homesteading, Nature, Texas

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Vesta’s 13 Mile-High Mountain et al

Posted on December 31, 2011 by | 6 comments

About this time in 2009 I could have been rightfully accused of spending a lot of the year tracking the positions of all the larger asteroids including Vesta as part of an ongoing project.  And at that point I could accurately be accused of having learned a lot without having learned anything I could understand.

NASA – Oblique View of Vesta’s South Polar Region .

But one of the big news items of 2011 involves Vesta, or more specifically, the discovery it has a 13 mile high  mountain.

Space Mountain Produces Terrestrial Meteorites

Dec. 30, 2011: When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around giant asteroid Vesta in July, scientists fully expected the probe to reveal some surprising sights. But no one expected a 13-mile high mountain, two and a half times higher than Mount Everest, to be one of them.

The existence of this towering peak could solve a longstanding mystery: How did so many pieces of Vesta end up right here on our own planet?

Space Mountain (side view, 558px)

A side view of Vesta’s great south polar mountain. [more]

For many years, researchers have been collecting Vesta meteorites from “fall sites” around the world. The rocks’ chemical fingerprints leave little doubt that they came from the giant asteroid. Earth has been peppered by so many fragments of Vesta, that people have actually witnessed fireballs caused by the meteoroids tearing through our atmosphere. Recent examples include falls near the African village of Bilanga Yanga in October 1999 and outside Millbillillie, Australia, in October 1960.

“Those meteorites just might be pieces of the basin excavated when Vesta’s giant mountain formed,” says Dawn PI Chris Russell of UCLA.

Curiosity and the Solar Storm (signup)

Russell believes the mountain was created by a ‘big bad impact’ with a smaller body; material displaced in the smashup rebounded and expanded upward to form a towering peak. The same tremendous collision that created the mountain might have hurled splinters of Vesta toward Earth.

“Some of the meteorites in our museums and labs,” he says, “could be fragments of Vesta formed in the impact — pieces of the same stuff the mountain itself is made of.”

To confirm the theory, Dawn’s science team will try to prove that Vesta’s meteorites came from the mountain’s vicinity. It’s a “match game” involving both age and chemistry.

“Vesta formed at the dawn of the solar system,” says Russell. “Billions of years of collisions with other space rocks have given it a densely cratered surface.”

The surface around the mountain, however, is tellingly smooth. Russell believes the impact wiped out the entire history of cratering in the vicinity. By counting craters that have accumulated since then, researchers can estimate the age of the landscape.

Space Mountain (cross sections, 558px)

Cross-section of the south polar mountain on Vesta with the cross sections of Olympus Mons on Mars, the largest mountain in the solar system, and the Big lsland of Hawaii as measured from the floor of the Pacific, the largest mountain on Earth. These latter two mountains are both shield volcanoes.Credit: Russell et. al. (2011), EPSC

“In this way we can figure out the approximate age of the mountain’s surface. Using radioactive dating, we can also tell when the meteorites were ‘liberated’ from Vesta. A match between those dates would be compelling evidence of a meteorite-mountain connection.”

For more proof, the scientists will compare the meteorites’ chemical makeup to that of the mountain area.

“Vesta is intrinsically but subtly colorful. Dawn’s sensors can detect slight color variations in Vesta’s minerals, so we can map regions of chemicals and minerals that have emerged on the surface. Then we’ll compare these colors to those of the meteorites.”

Could an impact on Vesta really fill so many museum display cases on Earth? Stay tuned for answers..
Author: Dauna Coulter | Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

By early-to-mid 2010 the message was plain enough to me that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for by spending anymore time and effort with asteroids.  But seeing this story at the NASA site was a bit like having an old acquaintance but-not-quite-not-quite-friend stop in for a cup of coffee without any ulterior motives other than to pass the time of day.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, Astronomy

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Talking Our Way Into Oblivion – Hydrogen and Hot Air

Posted on December 30, 2011 by | 20 comments

A few years ago my friend Rich asked me if I’d be interested in talking with an older guy in his late 70s who was experimenting with hydrogen generators for retrofitting onto his vehicle.   I wasn’t looking into hydrogen generating, but I’m a curious sort of fellow.  I didn’t require any persuading.  I just told Rich to give Bryce my phone number.  About a week later he called me.

Turned out Bryce had spent his career as chief mechanic for the Ford and General Motors Speed Teams, or Racing Teams, some such thing.  He was part of the group that put together the hydrogen powered vehicle that established a record for the highest speed ever recorded for an internal combustion engine driven automobile.

Using what he learned from all that, Bryce had created a series of hydrogen generators for his own vehicle, trying to maximize efficiency and deal with other shortcomings with the system.  He did it all from salvaged materials.  Heck of an interesting guy the first few times we talked.  I wish I’d taken notes and drawn sketches of what he told me.

At first during our acquaintance Bryce and I had conversations.  Two people brainstorming things he was doing, and I was doing.  But gradually the hydrogen generating conversational possibilities ran down.  Bryce was calling me every day or so, telling me all manner of things I didn’t want to hear, such as what the waitress in the cafe where he took coffee and meals said to him, what he said back, what she said back.  Or what other customers said to him and what he said back.  Or his brother.

Bryce would call, ask how I was, not wait for an answer, and talk non-stop for an hour, two hours.  I could put the phone down, go feed the chickens or make a cup of coffee and come back to the phone without him noticing.  Sometimes I’d tie a bandanna around my head attaching the phone to my ear and read a book waiting for him to wind down.

This went on for months.  I didn’t know what to do about it, except straight-on explaining to him that this wasn’t conversation and wasn’t a source of joy to me.  I mentioned it to Rich, and it turned out Bryce was doing the same thing to him.

Finally, as gently as I could manage, I interrupted one of his monologues and explained the problem, as I viewed it.  I told him I liked him, that I’d enjoy conversations with him, but that I didn’t want to hear the same stories over and over about people at the restaurant, his brother, etc.  That if we were going to continue having communications there’d need to be exchanges and some level of concern as to the amount of interest the other person had in hearing it.

Despite my attempt to soften the words, Bryce got his feelers hurt badly by this.  He never called again, which I preferred to the alternative of things continuing as they were.

Sometime a few months later Rich finally got his fill of it and tried the same tactic on Bryce, with the same result.  He was more reluctant to do it than I’d been, because he felt sorrier for Bryce than I was willing to allow myself to indulge.

Bryce came up in conversation between us a couple of days ago.  Turns out it’s been almost exactly a year since Rich has heard from him, and a few months more than that for me.  We wondered aloud how he was doing.

But neither of us is willing to bite the bullet and call him to find out, on pain of maybe starting the whole mess again.

I began this post figuring on saying some things about hydrogen generators but drifted off into Bryce and his problems.  Maybe some other time, the hydrogen generators.

Old Jules

20 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Communication, Human Behavior, Relationships, Trucks

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Order Out of Chaos

Posted on December 29, 2011 by | 18 comments

Morning readers.  I’m obliged you came by for a read. 

This drawing of Jeanne’s was on an otherwise blank draft post page in the whatchallit, dashboard, with the title Order Out of Chaos.  It’s evidently a Photoshop manipulation of another work and until I messed up re-sizing it and lost her explanation it also said (sold).  Hopefully if she wants to she’ll add an addendum saying whatever else she wants to say about it.

But I was mulling over things that aren’t mainly on my mind deciding which of them to write about this morning, carefully avoiding the one thing that mainly is, when I saw the title in the drafts.  It brought to focus what actually is swirling around in my brain.  I suppose I might as well write a bit about that.

A project I’ve been working on almost a decade appears to be coming to a climax.  Surprising progress began falling into place during the past few days, and preliminary results provide a reason to hope I’m finally examining datasets that will allow testing and formulating a theory.    If the tests indicate it’s worth it, there’ll be revisions, more testing, more revisions, until something cohesive emerges, or doesn’t emerge.

I don’t dare speculate on where it will head because expectations have a way of working themselves into outcomes, and I’m doing my best to avoid that. 

But the fact is, it’s taken a decade almost, and countless hours and days of research, calculations, accumulation of data, wrong directions untaken, other wrong directions taken and backed out of in getting here.

One way or another I think this simultaneity and time thing is finally going to be allowed to absent my life over the next few months.  Order out of chaos finally, either by discovering my fundamental premises were wrong and I don’t have to do this anymore, or they were correct and sense can be made of this.

Either way, it’s a strange place to find myself, a hollow looming up in my life I wonder how I’m going to fill with what must inevitably be another pesky reincarnation.

Old Jules

18 Comments

Posted in 2011, Human Behavior, Nature, Senior Citizens, Solitude

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Old Sol Rejects A Christmas Gift

Posted on December 25, 2011 by | 5 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

I don’t know what Old Sol got for Chrismas, but he was pretty hot about it.

Or maybe it was something he ate.

CHRISTMAS EVE ERUPTION: A filament of magnetism connected to sunspot AR1386 erupted during the early hours of Dec. 24th. Extreme UV-wavelength cameras onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the picturesque blast:  http://spaceweather.com/images2011/24dec11/christmaseve_strip2.jpg

The C5-class eruption hurled a billion-ton coronal mass ejection (CME) into space, but not toward Earth. With the cloud sailing wide-left of our planet, Christmas geomagnetic storms are unlikely. Nevertheless, this active region merits watching as it turns toward Earth in the days ahead, possibly positioning itself for the first storms of 2012.

On the other hand, a minority of physicists and astrophysicists theorize Old Sol’s just hurling back all those marching orders he got from Alpha Centauri and other nearby stars telling him what kind of Christmas to have.  They support their premise on the evidence hasn’t eaten anything lately and the instruments haven’t recorded him getting anything for Christmas worth getting upset about.   Unless he objects to Chinese manufactured products.

I’d suggest we all try to stay calm until we have a clearer idea what’s on his mind.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy

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Old Sol’s Christmas Tortilla -Second Harvest – 4th Movement

Posted on December 24, 2011 by | 8 comments

http://spaceweather.com/

Amusing himself as only he can do.  Strutting his stuff for Alpha Centauri, most likely.

I saw something that rhymed with this on a tortilla in New Mexico once, but they charged money to see it.  This one’s gratis.

Off to the right there’s this, for the eclectic tastes in the audience.

Perspective.

Old Jules

 

8 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy, Nature, Science

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When Pigs Fly – US Drone or Chinese Space Launch?

Posted on December 23, 2011 by | 20 comments

“Space ball” drops on Namibia

http://tinyurl.com/7s3ovud

A large metallic ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting baffled authorities to contact NASA and the European space agency.

The hollow ball with a circumference of 1.1 metres (43 inches) was found near a village in the north of the country some 750 kilometres (480 miles) from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik.

Unnamed Pentagon sources were adamant this is not a US drone.  “We’ve made a list of all our drones and checked it twice.  We are not missing any drones.”  He went on to observe, “The workmanship and metal quality appear to be Chinese in origin.  Unless we discover we’ve miscounted our drones we’ll continue to operate on the premise this object is a Chinese Space Program launch intended for Harbor Freight.”

Some skeptics are less certain.  A news release from a popular UFO debunking site offered the following analysis:  “It’s obviously the planet Venus or a weather balloon.  People who aren’t trained to carefully observe and think clearly are always making these kinds of mistakes.”

Old Jules 

 

20 Comments

Posted in 2011, Adventure, Astronomy, Science, UFOs

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Wobblehead Extensions, Crowfoots and Mayan Ruins in Georgia

Posted on December 23, 2011 by | 22 comments

Good morning readers. I’m grateful you’re here reading this cold morning.

Every time we think we’ve got things figured out and can make pronouncements to one another without fear of someone making a counter-pronouncement back at us with any danger of validity this seems to happen.  Some smarty-pants academian digs around where he’s got no business being and spang finds something to cut us off at the knees.

In this instance it’s fairly solid physical evidence a Mayan city once thrived in the otherwise non-Mayan and feet-implanted-in-the-ground US state of Georgia.  The offending pointee-headed guy with the cheek to find it doesn’t even have the courtesy to be a US academian who can be bludgeoned by grant money and sneers from his peers to shut the hell up about it and not go around shaking and rattling previous pronouncements.

1,100-year-old Mayan ruins found in North Georgia http://tinyurl.com/d5gwjpq

When evidence began to turn up of Mayan connections to the Georgia site, South African archeologist Johannes Loubser brought teams to the site who took soil samples and analyzed pottery shards which dated the site and indicated that it had been inhabited for many decades approximately 1000 years ago. The people who settled there were known as Itza Maya, a word that carried over into the Cherokee language of the region.

The city that is being uncovered there is believed to have been called Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto searched for unsuccessfully in 1540. So far, archeologists have unearthed “at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures.” Much more may still be hidden underground.

A good level-headed other good US scholar took a more level-headed approach to the finds:

UPDATE: Raw Story contacted another UGA Scientist, Dr. B. T. Thomas of the Department of Environmental Science, who indicated that, while it is unlikely that the Mayan people migrated en masse from Central America to settle in what is now the United States, he refused to characterize Thornton’s conclusions as “wrong,” stating that it is entirely possible that some Mayans and their descendants migrated north, bringing Mayan building and agricultural techniques to the Southeastern U.S. as they integrated with the existing indigenous people there.

He didn’t go on to say what needs saying.  Namely that the South African guy needs to go home and  tend his own affairs.  There’s plenty of digging to be done in Africa and plenty of good US academians capable of handling any digging needs doing here.  And most especially the South African guy needs to be kept away from the copper artifacts found in Florida and Georgia in other mounds that bear a strong similarity to Aztec artifacts in Mexico.

We don’t need any guys running around in pickup trucks drinking beer and talking about Mayan calendars.  Things are already complicated enough.

Which brings me to crowfoots and wobblehead extensions.  I borrowed Little Red yesterday and went into Kerrville.  I spent a goodly while hanging around in the AutoZone store picking the brains of guys in bib overalls with grease under their fingernails.

Those wobblehead extensions offer a new lease on life for the hope of getting the starter off the Communist Toyota.  The crowfoots might be helpful getting the new one back on.  Not pictured here, but also new to  the anti-Japanese engineering arsenal is a mirror that swivels at the end of a telescoping handle for looking into places nobody ever intended them to be looked into.

Old Jules

22 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Country Life, Current Issues, History, Kerrville, Native American, Native Americans, Solitude, Survival, Texas

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