Fluid Flow

The Big One is inevitable. Catastrophe is not.: “The message for Southern California from the horror in Haiti should be — but probably won’t be — to prepare for disaster.

(Via L.A. Times - California | Local News.)

I actually started this post before this LA Times article came out. But it is an easy post to work off of. While we don’t expect a natural disaster will turn our cities into third world countries, we must expect it.

There is a difference between a natural disaster and a man-made one. We make man-made disasters by being unprepared.

I pulled out the ten photos that I like best of the thousands that I took this last year. At current count, I have over 78 gigs of photos from the year. I am having to clear disk space to add new photos. Tomorrow, I start a new year and new photo library. But today we look back into last years library.

There is no implied order:

I never really considered this one until an artist asked for permission to use it as a reference photo for a painting.

The Tour of California arrives in Paso Robles. Mark Cavendish is set to win the stage.

My miniatures entry. Two sibs separated by pane of glass. There but for the grace of the angels…

Great White Shark at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

Snowy Plover at Moss Landing State Beach.

Swell reflections at Point Lobos.

Carol hiding.

Snow on Fremont Peak. It was very short lived, but I got the shot.

David Quinowski, one of the few baseball photos I got this year. This was David’s first game after missing a season.

Wondering why?

You can view the rest of my Best of 2009 shots here.

Should Earth Scientists Take a ‘Hippocratic Oath’?: “Earth scientists should take a do-no-harm oath like doctors do, suggest two researchers, in light of climate change and proposed massive geoengineering projects.

(Via Wired News.)

Wow, what a brilliantly stupid idea. After hundreds of years of helping plunder the planet for monetary gain, we all should step back and say “my bad! I’ll go climb under a rock now”.

To get to the position of where you can say to others “You will do no harm”, you have already done harm.

UserLand Software appears to have gone off-line without a word. There is no response at most of the UserLand websites including www.userland.com, manila.userland.com, docserver.userland.com. Interestingly radio.userland.com is still running.

I guess this means that most of the servers were taken down, but the dns records are still pointing to them.

I was alerted to this situation by a potential client who had a couple of manila sites hosted by Userland. Their sites went down last week and they are scrambling to find a new manila hosting service. They would also like to get their Manila sites from UserLand.

I would like to help out by providing Manila hosting to these folks. If anyone knows anything about the situation, please drop me a line.

Thanks.

Lab worms are stunned by ‘phaser’: “Scientists show off an effect not unlike that of ‘phasers’ in Star Trek - but it only works on tiny worms called nematodes.”

(Via BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition.)

I really think I should have gotten a job writing headlines.

One night only: Leonid meteor shower: Thanks to a new moon, chances of being able to see this annual celestial show tonight are good.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will make its one-night appearance over North America tonight. Viewing conditions should be excellent because the peak will occur after midnight, when the lights of metropolitan areas will be at their dimmest.

(Via Los Angeles Times - Top News.)

Sounds like a reason to step outside if you wake up in the middle of the night. I have been disappointed with the last few in Monterey, when there was either a near fullmoon or fog.

Update:

I went out at about 1:30 and while the stars were nice and clear the meteors were a little  sparse. I saw two in about 10 minutes of watching.

Brown Pelican Flies Off The Endangered List:

After nearly 40 years on the brink of extinction, the brown pelican has made a substantial enough comeback that it will be removed Wednesday from the endangered species list, The Associated Press reports.

(Via NPR News: Top Stories.)

I have lived long enough to remember when it was rare to see these birds. Now I see them every time I go to the coast. Banning DDT was probably the key to their survival. Score one for the humans.

Welcome back pelicans.

Now let’s save the red-legged frog, checker-spot butterfly, and a myriad of others on the list.

See the Wildebeest Migration in the Mara Triangle… on Google Earth!: “

We’re in the process of installing tracking devices into our vehicles here at the Conservancy, and as our Land Cruiser arrived at Oloololo Gate I had a quick peek at its progress over on Google Earth.

Since I’ve last been on it seems that Google have updated the satellite image for the top of the Mara Triangle, and you can even see the new toilets that we’ve constructed over at Oloololo (in the top left hand corner).

I also noticed that our grader is parked outside of the rangers quarters, which means that it’s just after we had completed grading the roads inside the Triangle and were about to grade the roads towards all the camps and lodges that are on the outside, just at the beginning of August when the migration was in full swing.

You must at least be able to see some wildebeest, I thought.

Well, you can.

That’s quite a few thousand of the chaps swarming their way up towards the north of the Triangle.

I’m sure you’d quite like a look around yourself, and if you don’t have Google Earth installed you can have a look with Google Maps below:’

View Larger Map

(Via Mara Triangle.)

This is pretty cool. The updates don’t extend to the area of Ken’s Mara camp yet, but the coverage is getting better.

If you don’t know of William Brewer’s journal, “Up and Down California in 1860-1864″ you need to find it and read it.

As part of the Geologic Survey of California, Brewer covered much of the same ground that we do today and provides wonderful details of California at that time.

The book is available online, but you really should buy and carry it with you to read before you drift off to sleep in your tent.

Here is one of my favorite passages:

Monday, June 23, I visited some hills alone, and sent Gabb and Hoffmann on a longer excursion back, with the mules. The event of the day was their meeting, in a narrow ravine, a large she-grizzly with a cub. Now this is the worst kind of a customer to meet, and as they came upon her very suddenly, matters did not look well. She faced them at first, scarcely thirty feet distant, then slowly retreated. They took the hint, and both parties escaped unharmed; the two bears leisurely climbing the steep bank of the ravine on one side, the geologists climbing, less leisurely by far, the steep bank on the other side.

And another:

At Tomales there are several houses, but the only one where we could get “accommodations” was a very low Irish groggery, kept by a “lady.” The place was filled with the Irish potato diggers, all as lively as the poorest whiskey could make them. One Irishman had just made some two hundred dollars by a contract for digging, and was celebrating the event, freely treating—in fact, he was just at the culmination of a three days’ spree. The “rooms” of the house were far from private, the beds not highly inviting, and the customers twice as many as the accomodations. Drunkenness, singing, fighting, and the usual noise of Irish sprees were kept up through the night. Much to my disgust I had neither “bowie” nor “Colt” along, so could not command the exemption from meddling which those companions would have insured. Now, I don’t mind the discomforts of the field, of sleeping on the ground, of diet, dust, lizards, snakes, ants, tarantulas, etc., but from drunken Irishmen, from Irish groggeries, from “ladies” of that description, “Good Lord, deliver us!”

It is a good read.

Peace, love, and understanding have a place in this world, but so does physics. It fact, you can’t have understanding without physics.

I just read that it is easier for parents to talk about sex and drugs to their kids than it is to talk about math and science.

That is just scary.

I am trying to understand how you can cope in this world without understanding basic physics. It really isn’t possible.

Physics is the science of how things moves. It is the basis for everything that we understand in the world. Don’t ask me why it isn’t the first science course that we teach. It should be.

Lets start with the basics. Newton’s first law of motion.

“Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.”

A simple translation is that something that’s moving will continue to move until it gets whacked by something else. If we roll a marble across the floor it will continue to roll across the floor until the cat comes up and bats it off course.

This is the simplest statement of physics. Things don’t move unless you whack them. Once you whack them, they will move and continue to move unless you whack them again.

Now is the time to test this idea. Find something on the floor, a shoe perhaps and look at it. It is sitting there. Newton would say that it is “in a state of uniform motion”, in that it isn’t moving. Motion can have a value of zero.

What would it take to move that shoe? You could kick it, the cat could come over and whack it, an earthquake could shake it.

In all three cases, a force outside of the shoe moved it. It would not move on it’s own, an external force is required to move it.

At this point, you might want to tell me that this is common sense. And you are right.

But it is the framework of science that lets us understand this common sense.

We make observations, A shoe is sitting on the floor, it is not moving. We make a prediction, that shoe is not going to move. We test the prediction by watching the shoe. The cat comes along and takes a whack at the shoe and it moves.

Our prediction was wrong, the shoe moved. Why did it move? Well, the cat whacked it.

So now we go back to our prediction and modify it. The shoe will not move unless a cat whacks it.

We test this new prediction by watching the shoe and the cat. There is an earthquake. The shoe moves and the cat runs for cover.

Again our prediction was wrong, the shoe moved and cat had nothing to do with it.

So we rewrite our prediction so the shoe will not move unless some outside action causes it to move. It could be a cat, it could be an earthquake. And we test that prediction by watching the shoe.

Guess what, we have been watching that shoe for over 300 years. It hasn’t moved except when influenced by a cat, earthquake or other external force.

As a result, we feel pretty good about Newton’s first law of motion.

This is science. We observe something, make predictions based on those observations. We test our predictions in the real world. When the predictions don’t work, we rethink the predictions and modify them to include the new information. Ultimately, though refining our predictions in this manner, we come up with statements that always work.

Through this process, we come up with ideas that we know are true. Through the process, we can understand and explain common sense.