A little over two years ago I reported on some small but highly dramatic progress in dismantling the dam infrastructure of the United States. The Army Corps of Engineers, The Tennessee Valley Authority,The Department of Forestry, local electricity entrepreneurs and many others had thrown rock and concrete across the wilder rivers of the country often without adhering to existing laws and regulations to protect wild-life. A pulse-stopping 75,000 such projects have been carried out. On the Blob we've had a few examples of where man's hubris and/or chicanery in material quality have bought a disastrous bargain for people who were sleeping down-river of these engineering projects: Lynn Eigiau - Vajont - not to mention inconveniencing my Portuguese perambulations. At he end of that Dec 2014 piece, I urged you to check out the videos on "Elwha"; but I doubt if anyone obeyed orders so I'll give you a summary here because the river has spilled into Metafilter in the last tuthree days.
The Olympic Pensinsula is a squarish chunk of land about 100km x 100km across Puget Sound from Seattle, WA. It is a sparsely populated wilderness region that was once covered in temperate forest with a light sprinkling of Native North Americans. A little over 100 years ago in 1913, one of several salmon-spawning rivers called the Elwha was damned to provide hydro-electricity for a small town called Port Angeles, paper-pulp mills and a Navy Yard. The competing interests of the fish were 'sorted' by a promise to create a hatchery upriver, so that entrepreneurs didn't have to incorporate a fish-ladder into the dam design. By the time the hatchery conclusively failed to produce any fish, the dam was built and that battle was lost. The demand for electricity is insatiable once the stuff is available and tupenny-ha'penny hydro-plants rapidly get to look small and quaint and wholly inadequate to meet requirements. In 1978, after 65 years of diminishing effective returns, the aging Elwha dam failed a safety inspection. Failing a safety inspection implies the possibility of a catastrophic failure at some thoroughly inconvenient time - Teton Dam - Lynn Eigiau - Vajont anyone?. So something had to be done. Local interests wrestled with the problem all through the 1980s but in 1992 it was decided that the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam on the same river should be removed. It took 20 further years to actually start the process ! and a further couple to complete it.
The transition is the most worrying time. The rocks and soil across the river catchment had endured 100 years of rainfall - it rains a lot in the Pacific North-West - frost-heave, glacier-grind, snow-melt and the occasional earthquake. The displaced matter used to wash out to sea, building coastal sand-bars and shoals which supported a particular set of marine wildlife - algae, plants, molluscs, worms and fish. With the fall of the river curtailed, this material had built up into 20 million cu.m. of sediment locked up behind the two dams. The nature of that sediment - % rocks, gravel, sand, mud % organic/inorganic - dictates the method and timescale for the removal of the artificial obstruction. Time-lapse of Glines Canyon piecemeal removal by back-hoe working from topside on a pontoon floating over the abyss <don't look down!>. A rather different more elaborate back-and-forth was deemed to be necessary for the Elwha Dam.
The Elwha restoration project cost a staggering $325million but now it's done and ecologists and fisheries people are documenting the change: counting spawning fish in the head-waters and the build up of beaches at the mouth are only the biggest and most obvious data. I hope humbler scientists are checking on the aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, the nitrogen fixers and the phosphate solublisers: the foundation on which the whole living ecosystem teeters upwards. There's a very nice colour supplement view of the current state of the river by Lynda V Mapes of the Seattle Times. One elegant bit of leverage was to shift the logs that had washed up along the reservoir shores and were now high and drying. Judiciously moving these into the middle of the old lake bed helped to re-create a diverse braided river ecosystem: limiting erosion, sheltering willows and other pioneer plants, shading the fish in the shallows. Tilting the conditions means that you never have to plant anything: create the habitat and the seeds will sprout. For me, it reads like a story of redemption, and I feel a little less ashamed to be a gallumphing human tromping through the world in enormous toxic wellington boots
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Tuesday, 16 February 2016
Pretty good day
We've had a miserable wet winter here in Ireland. The rainiest December since records began caused floods all around the country. Storm Desmond came at the beginning of December and was followed by Eva Frank Gertrude Henry Imogen. We live in the sunny south-east and Desmond-to-Henry veered left as they approached Europe and made Northern Ireland, Scotland and North England very wet and windy. Imogen took a more Southerly route and she brought down some more branches from our big cypress trees down on the Waterford Coast. These trees had been more or less intact since the DarwinDay storm of 2014. Annoyingly, these recent branches broke off 10m above the lawn but were long enough to reach the ground and so were held by twisted ligaments to the trees. I didn't feel confident to trim away at the wispy part of half a ton of timber while the lumpier bits hung by a thread above me. Wearing a hard hat is only part of the solution if something that big falls on your head. Accordingly, I called up "Rissoles" Hayes the tree-surgeon and got him to promise me a day's work bringing these monsters down safely. Der Tag was set for Monday 15th February when I had very light classes at The Institute.
I spent the previous night with my ancient, recently widowed, father-in-law Pat the Salt. That's become a regular fixture in our lives; pretty much every Sunday now we have a boy's night in. We're allowed to eat a tasty scratch supper made from what I find in, or indeed behind, the fridge: often green vegetables don't feature. I got up in the dark, had tea and toast, did a little light bloggin' then brought Pat his cup of coffee and sat on the side of his bed, watching the green-and-pink dawn creep across the bay and chatting about blackbirds, frost and the day ahead. I hung out some laundry and headed along the coast road to work. It was just gorgeous; crisp with a Winter sun over my shoulder; still icy in the sheltered corners; with the long familiar views of calm sea and receding headlands appearing in succession round each bend in the road. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
Well before I would normally be parking my car in The Institute, we had shattered the quiet morning with the shriek of chain-saws as the working day began. Lumps of tree rained down from above, I trimmed and hauled and stacked: sorting the wood into long dead, green brash and clean logs. On several occasions I was glad of my visored helmet as small branches whipped back at my face with a thwack. The sun shone all day for the first time since October, the work was hard, I'm glad I was there.
I spent the previous night with my ancient, recently widowed, father-in-law Pat the Salt. That's become a regular fixture in our lives; pretty much every Sunday now we have a boy's night in. We're allowed to eat a tasty scratch supper made from what I find in, or indeed behind, the fridge: often green vegetables don't feature. I got up in the dark, had tea and toast, did a little light bloggin' then brought Pat his cup of coffee and sat on the side of his bed, watching the green-and-pink dawn creep across the bay and chatting about blackbirds, frost and the day ahead. I hung out some laundry and headed along the coast road to work. It was just gorgeous; crisp with a Winter sun over my shoulder; still icy in the sheltered corners; with the long familiar views of calm sea and receding headlands appearing in succession round each bend in the road. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
Well before I would normally be parking my car in The Institute, we had shattered the quiet morning with the shriek of chain-saws as the working day began. Lumps of tree rained down from above, I trimmed and hauled and stacked: sorting the wood into long dead, green brash and clean logs. On several occasions I was glad of my visored helmet as small branches whipped back at my face with a thwack. The sun shone all day for the first time since October, the work was hard, I'm glad I was there.
Monday, 15 February 2016
bug out bag
At the beginning of January we voyaged across the sea to England to visit the rellies. I made a quick trip down to visit my mother, who is living in her own home in Dorset with all her marbles present and correct. She's 95. Her mother was still living at home up to her 107th birthday, so I'm guessing my Mum will be still be in place when I get the pension in a few years time. Under the stairs, she has a small bag packed and ready which she calls her hospital bag. If an accident or emergency happens, she doesn't want to be looking for a toothbrush, clean knicks and a nightie. Note to self: must remember to do something similar . . . especially the underwear . . . better make it a ruck-sack my boxers are capacious from years of sofa-pilotting.. But I can't be bothered to put in a tube of water-purifying tablets . . . that would make me a prepper.
Preppers are those who like to imagine that they can imagine what Armageddon will look like and can take appropriate steps to survive with their families. Naaah: I'm with English 20thC boffins Sir Arthur Eddington "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine" and JBS Haldane [prev] "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose". Preppers talk about Katrina and tsunami and zombies and electromagnetic pulses EMP without really doing the math to decide which of these is most/more likely and pack their bug-out bags [technical term] accordingly. The civilisation melting EMP could be triggered by the atmospheric detonation of a thermonuclear "device" but also by an exceptional solar flare that happened to be pointing in out direction. The last one of these was the Carrington Event of 1st September 1859. Unusually active sunspot activity was followed by a flare that took 18 hours to reach us: that's not a fast as light (which takes 8 minutes to make the 150,000,000km journey) but definitely faster than a jet-plane. When the storm whacked the stratosphere it generated a spectacular show of the Aurora Borealis which was visible as far South as the Caribbean. More to the point, it blew out the telegraph network.
I've been reading - so you don't have to - a rather woolly piece about how to prepare for The Collapse. I call it woolly because it doesn't include a bullet-point check-list of things to put in your evacuation bag or how to build sufficiently robust shelving in your bunker. You'll have to do your own research for that. If you have enough food in that bunker to support your family for several years, then that food is either going to be sacks of wheat or proprietary freeze-dried nonsense: Thrive freeze-dried cranberries etc. And you'll need a mill for the wheat if you want chapattis. My [Thrive freeze-dried] beef with the whole freeze-dried supplies idea is that you must rotate your stock; which means you have commit to eating this crap on a regular basis until Armageddon actually comes. Expensive as well: a #10 can /22 servings of beef chunks is $65, while #10 can / 48 servings of navy beans is only $15.
What else: paracord done up as a friendship bracelet: shoe-lace, rabbit-snare, garotte for zombies . . .
Preppers are those who like to imagine that they can imagine what Armageddon will look like and can take appropriate steps to survive with their families. Naaah: I'm with English 20thC boffins Sir Arthur Eddington "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine" and JBS Haldane [prev] "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose". Preppers talk about Katrina and tsunami and zombies and electromagnetic pulses EMP without really doing the math to decide which of these is most/more likely and pack their bug-out bags [technical term] accordingly. The civilisation melting EMP could be triggered by the atmospheric detonation of a thermonuclear "device" but also by an exceptional solar flare that happened to be pointing in out direction. The last one of these was the Carrington Event of 1st September 1859. Unusually active sunspot activity was followed by a flare that took 18 hours to reach us: that's not a fast as light (which takes 8 minutes to make the 150,000,000km journey) but definitely faster than a jet-plane. When the storm whacked the stratosphere it generated a spectacular show of the Aurora Borealis which was visible as far South as the Caribbean. More to the point, it blew out the telegraph network.
I've been reading - so you don't have to - a rather woolly piece about how to prepare for The Collapse. I call it woolly because it doesn't include a bullet-point check-list of things to put in your evacuation bag or how to build sufficiently robust shelving in your bunker. You'll have to do your own research for that. If you have enough food in that bunker to support your family for several years, then that food is either going to be sacks of wheat or proprietary freeze-dried nonsense: Thrive freeze-dried cranberries etc. And you'll need a mill for the wheat if you want chapattis. My [Thrive freeze-dried] beef with the whole freeze-dried supplies idea is that you must rotate your stock; which means you have commit to eating this crap on a regular basis until Armageddon actually comes. Expensive as well: a #10 can /22 servings of beef chunks is $65, while #10 can / 48 servings of navy beans is only $15.
What else: paracord done up as a friendship bracelet: shoe-lace, rabbit-snare, garotte for zombies . . .
Sunday, 14 February 2016
Sunday Surf 140216
- Drone footage of surfing off the coast of Tahiti with super-sexy sound-track by Brigitte Fontaine doing "Le Goudron".
- Dick Proenneke built a cabin in the Alaskan outback and lived there for 30 years.
- One from hotukdeals via The Boy: power-napping tool: The Ostrich Pillow: check comments.
- Benedictus with added Cosmos by Karl Jenkins: for me Mum, she likes Karl Jenkins.
- Ceiliúradh at the Albert Hall: Fiona Shaw reads Seamus Heaney's Postscript and Everyone sings The Parting Glass.
Hats off - and away
I have been in the habit of handing out Blobby tributes with the phrases: Hats off! <generic> Bonnets off! <facetious in the case of accolades for women [in science]> Chapeau bas! <when it seems appropriate to salute a French>. English is easy for English speakers because it has neither accents nor gender to trip up the unwary. It's the divil-itself for non-natives because of the idiosyncratic spelling and/or pronunciation. I don't think it has more than its fair share of irregular plurals or verb conjugations although these regularly trip up small children when their apprehension the rules of grammar collides with what they hear about them: "I wented to the sweet-shop". In Latin it is customary to conjugate [ie rote-learn] verbs as a string like amo amare amavi amatum each word of which informs the user about the wide variety of endings that will be employed to express various states and tenses of loving. If amo is I love, the rest of the present tense rattles off: amas = you love; amat = he she or it loves; amamus = we love; amatis = youall love; amant = they love. Amo is a regular verb:
- amo 1st person singular present indicative: I love
- amare present indicative: to love
- amavi 1st person singular perfect [past] indicative: I loved
- amatum past participle: having been loved
- fero 1st person singular present indicative: I carry
- ferre present indicative: to tote
- tuli 1st person singular perfect [past] indicative: I schlepped
- latum past participle: having been borne (irregular in English too!)
The maddening spelling in English often retains etymological clues: know and gnat used to start off with a stop: k-now, g-nat which we've lazily left behind. Some of the wonk-spells are probably misconstrued faux-intellectual: the Latin for salmon is Salmo, the Latin for debt is debitum and so the l and the b were added in Shagsper's [dude couldn't even spell his own name] time to supplant OE dett and saumon or samon. English is a living language and there is no Academy to hold us back from changing it to suit our needs - there are just a bunch of sad-sack apostrophe Nazis and we'll soon see them off.
L'Académie française, OTOH has been throwing its weight about in its latest diktats about spelling and orthography. The Beeb reports that the sky has fallen in France, which is going to be an enormous exaggeration. There are some new spellings to fit with how received french is pronounced: oignon is now ognon, for example. A cogent essay on the topic via 3quarksdaily. The other two classes of change are
a) the loss, as in English over the last decades, of a lot of hyphens: le week-end becomes le weekend; une porte-monnaie become portemonnaie and
L'Académie française, OTOH has been throwing its weight about in its latest diktats about spelling and orthography. The Beeb reports that the sky has fallen in France, which is going to be an enormous exaggeration. There are some new spellings to fit with how received french is pronounced: oignon is now ognon, for example. A cogent essay on the topic via 3quarksdaily. The other two classes of change are
a) the loss, as in English over the last decades, of a lot of hyphens: le week-end becomes le weekend; une porte-monnaie become portemonnaie and
b) the loss of most examples of the circumflex; l'accent circonflexe. As kids, we used to call this diacritic 'hat' for obvious reasons.
Like the apostrophe and the tilde ~ in eSpanish, the ^ circonflex accent is used to indicate loss, usually of a now silent 's': what used to be maître, from Latin magister via medieval maistre is now plain unhatted maitre. We've discussed before how French tête and Italian testa [=head] come from soldier's slang meaning box. But it is also used to differentiate homonyms "le dû du travailleur" = the duty of the worker. I guess that L'Académie has realised that there are only a tiny number of cases where the context fails to make clear which meaning is meant. Not au revoir to the the circumflex then, but definitely adieu.
Saturday, 13 February 2016
Coso
It's a sort of anniversary today - the discovery, on Feb 13th 1961, by three professional rock-hunters of the Coso Artifact in a range of hills outside Olancha California where they owned the enterprise "LM & V Rockhounds Gem and Gift Shop". They were out trying to augment their stock and threw a number of lumps into their rock-bag for processing back in their workshop. They were particularly interested in geodes [nice examples L] which are hollow geological concretions often crappy on the outside but with nice bright colourful crystal interiors: they make pretty, useless, ornaments and formed the backbone of LM&V's business. When this potential geode was cut in half with a diamond saw it turned out not to be hollow and "dang near busted the diamond saw" [I paraphrase]. In the middle of the concretion, which included sea-shells estimated to be half-a-million years old, was something that looked like a spark-plug. It had a magnetic core surrounded by white ceramic and bits of copper, was roughly hexagonal in shape and was the size of a spark-plug. It caused a bit of stir when the Coso Three wrote up a report in the local Outdoors magazine. I can't show you a picture, however, because the Coso Artifact has disappeared in the intervening 55 years. I could show you pictures, including X-rays, that were supposed to be taken in the 60s, but I decline to do so. The Antikythera Mechanism is still there for our investigation.
If you take an assertion by an unnamed geologist that the exterior is 500,000 years old and believe that the object inside is a spark-plug then we have a problem. It implies that someone was dropping spark-plugs in the wilderness at a time when all the other surviving man-made artefacts are chipped stone tools. That seems unlikely, so that leaves Christopher Lloyd doing some repairs in Back To The Future XV or gasoline-powered space-ships driven by Little Green Men. Both of these explanations have been proposed and supported by people who have difficulty integrating and evaluating evidence. I think we can take a cue from Tony Kavanagh's considered dismissal of a nonsense story published in Nature: "Extraordinary findings require extraordinary levels of proof". Here we don't even have the primary evidence any more. But that hasn't stopped the The Spark Plug Collectors of America asserting the age and brand (Champion) of the said spark-plug. Only in America: who would consume their leisure hours collecting spark-plugs when they could be buying a nice geode to put in the middle of their coffee table? But don't take my assessment: 400,000 people have watched this youtube clip.
If you take an assertion by an unnamed geologist that the exterior is 500,000 years old and believe that the object inside is a spark-plug then we have a problem. It implies that someone was dropping spark-plugs in the wilderness at a time when all the other surviving man-made artefacts are chipped stone tools. That seems unlikely, so that leaves Christopher Lloyd doing some repairs in Back To The Future XV or gasoline-powered space-ships driven by Little Green Men. Both of these explanations have been proposed and supported by people who have difficulty integrating and evaluating evidence. I think we can take a cue from Tony Kavanagh's considered dismissal of a nonsense story published in Nature: "Extraordinary findings require extraordinary levels of proof". Here we don't even have the primary evidence any more. But that hasn't stopped the The Spark Plug Collectors of America asserting the age and brand (Champion) of the said spark-plug. Only in America: who would consume their leisure hours collecting spark-plugs when they could be buying a nice geode to put in the middle of their coffee table? But don't take my assessment: 400,000 people have watched this youtube clip.
Friday, 12 February 2016
DarwinDay 2016
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