Gulf Stream Underwater Turbine Power

This post is short. As long as I'm on the alternative power concept, check out the potential for extracting power from the Gulf Stream. Remember, this is different from wave power, and offshore wind farms, which anyone can research online. Here's a good link to the Gulf Stream power research. And here's a neat article on Benjamin Franklin and the Gulf Stream.

Borehole Nuclear Reactor

After some research on geothermal heat pumps, I realized that if you extract heat faster than the heat-conducting rate of the soil or rock allows the heat to move into the volume you have exhausted, the system will be tapped out. Heat can't radiate back towards your collectors fast enough. Now, this doesn't mean geothermal is unviable, it means each system has a maximum and if that is exceeded, it will not work as well. Also, in areas where summer air-conditioning needs equal winter heating needs, all is well. And in areas where air conditioning needs exceed heating needs, there is a similar problem: you are pumping heat into the ground faster than it can dissipate.

But in the American North, heat is the more precious commodity. This led me to ponder "recharging" heat in the earth with nuclear power. And my familiarity with deep holes in the petroleum industry led to my next idea:

After you run a nuclear power plant for a while, radiation will erode the reactor liners and concrete containment vessels. Eventual disposal or abandonment of all this material is expensive.

I propose lowering working fuel and control rods into the boreholes of either abandoned oil and gas wells, or drilling deep holes specifically for this proposed technology. Steam heat exchangers would be at the surface for electrical power generation. Or, for facilities such as government installations, colleges and universities, etc., the heat alone could be used to warm the buildings.

Eventually each reactor hole will be abandoned, using standard well-abandonment techniques. This involves heavy rubber and iron plugs topped with cement and should guarantee no contamination of groundwater. The heaviest-irradiated zones will be deep in the earth, in effect being "pre-disposed of." No further transportation of these deep abandoned materials will be required.

One advantage to this is it keeps operating core and waste nuclear materials far away from any terrorists. 10,000 feet of rock is a good deterrent to this sort of mischief.

UPDATE 5/1/09
A nuclear technician has pointed out to me that there's too much radioactive water in that l-o-n-g heat exchanger. I need a secondary heat exchanger. Or a liquid sodium design.

Mobile CO2-Sequestering Coal Electrical Plant

My latest idea is the mobile coal-burning electrical generator. It's used in older oilfields, where CO2 is either desired to assist in oil production, or where it's merely acceptable to dispose of the CO2 exhaust in played-out oil or gas sands far below the surface. The requirements are only that a rail line be nearby and transmission towers for the power generated be nearby. Short temporary pipelines and power lines are acceptable. When each subsurface formation is optimally full of CO2, the mobile plant is moved to its next location.

This is for areas where CO2 pipelines are not available. See "green pipelines."

Coal cars are delivered to the generator during its period of sequestration / generation at each location. Some sulfur gases may also be sequestered underground.

The plants are not as efficient as other coal burning power plants because some power is used to deposit the CO2 into the deep formations.

The ridiculous illustration I cobbled together merely shows the equipment needed: a power plant, a generator, a transformer, and a pump for the burned exhaust gases. Ash will also need disposal. There will be empty rail cars after they deliver coal. It is possible ash could also be pumped into the same formations and could possibly neutralize the low pH of the sulfur, if any. As always, groundwater must be protected; these techniques already exists.

Cooling water for the turbine is the biggest problem. To generate electricity with a turbine efficiently, cooling is mandatory. Brine water present in many oil-bearing formations could possibly be used. Engines need a heat difference.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations (done mentally- can you scribble mentally on the back of an imaginary envelope?) tell me this would never amount to over a few hundred megawatts nationally. I can't say with certainty however that this a completely worthless idea. It might contain the germ of something worthwhile.

UPDATE 4-14-09 Scientific American has several articles on one page dealing with carbon sequestration.

Solar Border

artist's representation

Perhaps if we are going to militarize the border with Mexico, we ought to go ahead and place as many solar photovoltaic panels as we can squeeze into that location. This positive use of a manufactured no-man's-land makes as much sense as any other proposal I've heard.

No There There

People have started bugging me to join Facebook. I'm not going to do it. Here's why:

There is nothing I want to do on Facebook that I can't already do with other long-established, very available familiar programs. I have email, and although I don't instant message (for several reasons, which are similar to why I don't join Facebook) I could hook that up in a heartbeat. I can send emails and include funny pictures or links to other interesting stuff as fast as I can write them and click on attachments. Likewise my friends can send me emails with stuff in them as fast as they can write them. It's just a few clicks, and the messages themselves. Even if they only want to grunt at me like a caveman, they can put those grunts on handy MP3 files, and attach them to emails. God help us all if they actually start doing this, however. But it is easy to do.

I have a website, and my friends can put it on their favorites list if they want to. It's just a click away. They can, in fact, open many internet windows at once, and keep a bunch of their friends' blogs open all the time. I do a bit of this myself. I have a couple of websites open right now in other windows. I click to look at what's happening on them. Easy.

Not only that, I could download music directly to my friends without using a website. I can do all sorts of things that appear to be "magic" to many people.

I have a series of specially programmed "radio" stations on Pandora I could share with people if they were interested. I could listen to my friends' special programmed radio stations. But they won't do it. God knows why. I guess because it's not on Facebook.

I can link my friends in an instant to cool Youtube videos. Everyone does this. I don't need Facebook to do this.

There are about 5 million interesting puzzles, quizzes and such things on the internet already. There have been for years. Not to mention articles. To read. There is a lot of stuff out there that is damn interesting.

What I think is weird is people who join Facebook - or MySpace - and then disappear from the rest of the wired world. It's like a cult, worse than Scientology, worse even than AOL. AOL people quit writing altogether, they just send monstrously recursive emails with attached emails with attached emails with attached emails and 12 to 15 layers down you find a LOLcat or some misinformation disproved five years ago on Snopes.


Someone once talked me into joining MySpace. (And yes, I understand that MySpace is no longer considered cool.) Every time I clicked on their page, their music started blaring at me. It didn't ask if I was already listening to music, which I usually am. But it was a dead zone. A lot of hookers wanted to be my friend...

I opted out of MySpace. They used to send me a lot of spam. Just what I needed.

"What I'm trying to explain, is that it's useless crap," Jumper explained. And then he was gone.

UpdateFriday 27
I decided to renew the war on the word "blog." It is time. It's going to be an uphill struggle. This is, after all, hosted by Blogger. The software itself refers to "the blog."

This is a website. See here or here

Wolf Blitzer

Sqirlz morph Stephen Colbert sort of suggested this yesterday, so I did it. Sometimes these things don't work. I think this one does.

Check out some impressive things you can do with a good computer and time & money:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nice6NYb_WA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuoljANz4EA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtv4bsLWvw&feature=related

Not Write Now

Sqirlz morph Another Sqirlz morph effort. I took an image of a gorilla I found online and had my next-door-neighbor shoot a picture of me in a similar pose. Then I morphed the two photos.
The angles of the two photos were a hair off. In particular, the subjects' right cheekbones (on your left) were wrapped around the heads differently. I had to do too much touch-up. I ought to reshoot the Jumper original and start over. I might.

Update. And so I did. This time the photo of me was taken from a little bit too high. Darn contract photographers! Why can't they read my mind? Perhaps I will do this until I get it right. At least I was smiling this time around.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

A revised version of New York Post cartoon by Sean Delonas. I call it fair use, and anyone can use it if they like, as far as I'm concerned.

The Myth of Global Cooling

Source: Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux: Being the Narrative of an Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin in the Years 1860, 1861, and 1862 by Charles Francis Hall (1865), New York: Harper and Brothers.
Having not sufficiently refuted George Will's recent and recycled pundacity, "Dark Green Doomsayers" I tracked down a writer, climate modeler, and mathematician William M. Connolley, who has done great work in documenting, beginning in the '90s, the myth that "70s scientists predicted global cooling".

And it is essentially a myth. Only several articles were written, and these in popular publications, with sensationalistic headlines but much tamer and even-handed texts. At the time, no peer reviewed climatological journals predicted a "new ice age."

He started out here with an (excellent, not well organized, yet massively documented) website. This is what I stumbled upon when, in the early 2000s I attempted to debunk this persistent falsity.

BUT the dogged Mr. Connolley has a more up-to-date blog named Stoat. I have put it on my favorites list.

Also see an article about "global cooling." Also, one on climate change denial. And there was also talk of nuclear winter, (a continuing topic with more recent research and calculations). As well as examining nuclear winter, popular scientist Carl Sagan also once noted that massive burning of forests around the globe might cause cooling. And there was speculation that the massive amount of dust, smoke, explosive residue, and diesel exhaust during WWII may have cooled the globe somewhat. Perhaps masking the earliest effects of anthropogenic warming.

Sulfur and particulates from smokestacks have been reduced over the decades as well. The price for neglecting to do this would have been continuing worsening acid rain problems, accelerated forest die-offs, and seriously heightened health effects.

UPDATE: Feb. 23 2009 Here's an excellent summation -
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck

The Miracle of Wikipedia

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page is a modern miracle. And it keeps on getting better.

Years ago I pondered the future. One day, I thought, we will have gadgets in our heads that will simply answer any question we have, instantaneously.

Well, that day is here, and I didn't even need a gadget put in my head.

Like anything, Wikipedia is flawed, but recent research found it as reliable as Encyclopedia Brittanica. It is also much larger.

Click on the picture with a mouse click to view it full screen.
Click on this link with a mouse click to visit the site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mindwalk

Horned Goat Monkey

Sqirlz morph

The Curious Case of the Missing Hat

'Twas back in around '72, I think, that I came up with an idea for an ultimate go-to-hell hat. I wanted a hat like Dr. Seuss's character the Cat in the Hat. Keep in mind this was years before the popularity or even the idea of making or wearing such hats outside the storybooks was known.

I was a problematical seventeen-year-old in those days, getting into all sorts of devilment, so it came as somewhat of a pleasant surprise when my mother agreed to whip up such a hat on her sewing machine. And so she did.

It flopped around too much until I just stuffed some newspaper in the top, and after that it rode on my pate half-falling over and half jauntily upright, just like the Geisel character. So I started wearing the crazy thing, and my goofy friends liked it.

One day I forgot it over at a friend's house. Well, out of sight, out of mind, and I didn't think about until about a week later. So I went over there to retrieve it but the door was locked and no one home. Every time I went by. And no one knew where my friend had gotten off to. He had vanished. I figured I'd get it back sooner or later.

I don't remember how much time went by. It could have been a whole year, or only a month or so. I finally ran into Mike and he told me the bad news: his landlord had kicked him out for nonpayment, and had held his clothes for ransom, including my hat.

So I never saw my hat again.

Years later I became aware that this same sort of hat became popular among a neo-hippie set particularly tied to the Grateful Dead traveling roadshows. Also known as Deadheads.

I still wonder what happened to that hat. Did it find its way to someone who appreciated it? A second-hand store? Or did it go pretty much to the trash when the Evil Landlord decided at some point to dispose of Mike's things? I like to think it found its way to some Deadhead, who started the whole trend. And for this, some say I owe the world an apology. But I'm not sorry at all.

Fractured Funnies

Click the strip to view larger.

Doodle Do

Why, yes, I do know how to spell "further."

Experimental Thursday

I want to try a sort of open-ended experiment. The rules go like this: grab the closest book to where you now are, open it to a random page, start at the top left page, and write the first complete sentence, in the comments section. No cheating.

(No complicated log-in is needed)

Yes

Fractured Funnies

( click strip for bigger view)

¡ǝuo ʇsɐɟ ɐ sןןnd ɹǝdɯnɾ

/ɯoɔ˙ʇxǝʇʎɯdıןɟ˙ʍʍʍ//:dʇʇɥ
oʇ oƃ ʇsnɾ 'op oʇ ʎsɐǝ s,ʇı ˙ʇǝʎ uǝǝs ʇ,uǝʌɐɥ ǝɯos ʞɔıɹʇ ɐ s,ʇı ˙sı ʇsnɾ ʇı 'ʇı ɹoɟ uosɐǝɹ ou s,ǝɹǝɥʇ ˙uʍop ǝpısdn sı ʇsod sıɥʇ

Yessireebob

The Measure

I was in a discussion some years back about the percentage of people who were rotten thieving low-life bastards. I said I believed about 60% of everybody was decent for the most part; basically honest and well-meaning. The fellow I was talking to raised his eyebrows. "That many?" Some people, it seems, are convinced that a higher number are corrupt no-good-niks.

So, having formulated this in my mind, over the years I have felt some pride at my liberal allowance. Surely this means I am a spreader of hope, an optimist whose willingness to cede trust and faith to such a good number of my fellow humans contributes a positive force to our civility. Is it not also true that "the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him"? (Henry Stimson)

After all, even if I'm sometimes wrong, it's unlikely that someone is a "confidence man." And if the number of liars is squishy, lots of those are "white lies." And not out-and-out predatory amoralism.

But the other day I had a horrible realization that threw doubt on my carefully nurtured self-image: What if this really means I am only more moral than the low 40%? Suddenly I'm not looking so good. By this logic, if I was a worse scoundrel than 90% of everybody else, I would of course place myself in the "good" group, and claim that 10% of people were really evil . And conversely, if I was in the top 10%, I would undoubtedly again place myself among the winners, and rightfully claim that 90% of people are just scum.

Not only that, but this lends some credence to the most horrible idea of all: that the most misanthropic, morally conceited blue-stockings are perhaps the most moral of us all. They, the top 1%, rightly see themselves as good, and not only good, but better than 99% of everyone!

Well, I'll have none of it. It's obvious I was roughly correct in the first place. About 60% of people are basically good, and anyone who thinks they are in a more extreme moral elite are just fooling themselves. They have unforgiving natures. They are, in fact, dishonest to themselves, a moral failing of critical import. They are, in a deep sense, untrustworthy.

In short, I feel I am actually much better than such people.

Most Delicious

Here I'm making some homemade paprika from Mexican chiles. (To me, chili powder is an altogether different thing, with other spices mixed in.) This is something else I make from 100% dried, relatively mild red Mexican-type peppers.

I have mastered the hot varieties, but the mild ones are the secret to lots of great recipes. And when I cook, I'm going to bring up the heat level with some other, hotter peppers. This, however, is a savory blend. The flavor is phenomenal.

Some of the upscale markets don't sell these at all. But if you shop where the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans shop, they should have the dried varieties sold in cellophane bags. Where I live, the upscale markets have them sometimes, in bulk in the produce section. But not always. There are several varieties most non-Hispanics aren't familiar with, except in the Southwestern states.

The poblano pepper, resembling the green bell pepper, is so versatile and ubiquitous it has two names; one for the green, poblano, and another name for the red ripe version, known as ancho. Traditionally dried over wood fires, as are the other varieties discussed here, it nevertheless will develop a savory "smoky" flavor even dried using more modern methods. (Some peppers such as chipotle, which are smoked red jalapeños, need the smoke to be what they are.)

One of the best dried red peppers I've found so far is one with the bland or boring name of "New Mexico chile." It's only bland or boring if one mistakenly supposes that other peppers are "more authentic" somehow. Never underestimate the results of the fine, multi-decade efforts of our U.S. agronomists, however. These are some tasty peppers. I rank them #1. Previously I have had some peppers known as "negros" (black - they dry quite dark) and "mulato." Also "guajillos" I remember as very tasty, too.

This time, I used something labeled as "pasilla," and some anchos and the New Mexico chiles. I process a fairly large batch, about 18 oz. at a time. I store the finely ground result in a glass jar with a metal lid in my freezer, and thaw out only what I need for each recipe. First I removed all the stems, then cut open the peppers with my kitchen scissors and remove the seeds. Some heat, i.e., capsaicin, remains in the whitish membranes inside, so I save those too, if convenient. After I have all the seeds removed I cut them all up into little pieces with the scissors. After that, they go into the food processor. And after that, they can go into the freezer, or you could go ahead and do the last processing, or wait until you are going to cook with your red pepper / paprika: I fine grind them in my electric coffee mill.

The resultant powders are fantastically rich with aroma; a sweet and earthy scent and flavor that's indescribable. As complex as wine or chocolate or good coffee.

When I make chili con carne, I start with this paprika powder and add cumin (which I also grind from cumin seed) and the other spices. And other peppers for heat, because I like it fiery. But many other dishes do not use cumin, and for Hungarian goulashes and chicken or veal paprika recipes, which also aren't fiery hot, the pure undiluted chile product I am dealing with here is what you want.

The Ghost in My Machine

I just completed my neural network program a few weeks ago and it's starting to show some interesting results. It's a self-learning device. As the number of nodes in my program is exactly 500 billion, the time required for me to figure out what each layer of neural structure does would be quite high. So I don't really know how the damned thing works. I set up the network to "learn" by being prompted by me each time it produces a paranormal or PSI event that I observe.

It doesn't use random-number mutations. The code recombines much as male and female genes. I simply type in "yes" after each paranormal event, and the program moves towards increasing sophistication and power. I now have several "ghosts" in the house and attic, most of my friends have exhibited precognition (although they do not seem aware of it), and my computer, especially, seems to be reading my mind, putting long-unused files on my "most used document" list right before I need them.

Often when television is on, stray bits of dialogue repeat my exact thoughts a few seconds after I think them. I can now type in the words "pan" or "money," for example, on the computer and a frying pan will fall off a shelf in the kitchen, or I will find a dollar blowing through my back yard.

I consider my program a success, and I believe it will continue to improve as I continue to run it.

John Barleycorn Must Not Make Corned Beef

Recently I saw a corned beef in the grocery; one of those already-brined and flavored things sealed in plastic, refrigerated, ready to cook.

So I had a yen for some sandwiches and bought it. The instructions of course say to boil it. So I did. Novice, I decided not to use as much water as it said, so it was a bit salty, but not too much so. I crockpotted it for 6 or 7 hrs. That turned out well; the sandwiches were very good. A few weeks went by, so after several days of not enough veggies, I spotted a deal on cabbage and immediately knew I was gonna have some corned beef and cabbage. (I chopped and rinsed half the cabbage, added a tbs. or two chopped onion, got it mostly cooked by simmering in butter and a little water, and then, nearing doneness, I added a can of corned beef. Brought it to a simmer again for a while, and it was ready. Yum.)

A week went by. Deciding to go ahead and cook the other half of the cabbage, I looked for a can of corned beef at my local low-end grocery store. It was pretty much on my "must have" list for the visit. No canned corned beef! Corned beef hash, yes. But no corned beef. So I found a small brisket and knew I could use the internet to learn how to "corn" that beef. I already knew I would brine it, so I used the net to devise a recipe to spice it. It said use some "pickling spice." Doh! No dill in the house! But, oddly, there is no dill in many pickling spice recipes. I had most of the necessary spices.

It's soaking now. In fact, it's day three and I'm going to add some garlic and maybe a few cumin seeds to finish up another 24-48 hrs. I'll let you know how it turns out. Okay, here's where I get speculative. I told you that so I could tell you this: All the recipes call for sugar as well as salt. I used white sugar and added a couple squirts molasses. In other words, followed the recipe. And you're smart, I think it just dawned on you, too. What did they use for sugar before sugar cane?

Now all the anecdotal wisdom on the net, including a kosher website, claim that it's known as "corned beef" (which obviously has no corn in it) because "coarse salt grains are about the size of corn, so they referred to the salt as 'corn.'" Well my B.S. meter started ringing pretty loudly. Despite the fact that we say "a grain of salt." In fact, almost every reference to salt grains being known as "corns" is located in a reference to corned beef. So here's the obvious proposal or hypothesis I made: nobody ever called salt "corn." Then I thought: "originally corned beef used malted barley corn, or more likely oats."

But this idea does not seem to be true.

Malting barley is a simple process wherein the barley is soaked; the starches turn to sugars in preparation for sprouting; and then the barley is dry roasted. Added to the brine, a brief boiling of the the salt / malt combination would provide the needed sugar. As well, it could be middle eastern in concept. It could in fact be very old.

The online recipes stress that saltpeter, otherwise known as potasssium nitrate, be used in the brine. Indeed, some recipes hint that one needs less salt if saltpeter is used. It keeps the meat from losing the red color while it's brining. I also discovered that barley can contain a fair amount of this nitrate in it. I do not know how much. I doubt as much as the recipes call for. I was starting to think that the higher protein barleys may in fact be higher in nitrates. Some barley has too much protein for beermaking. It clouds the brew. Some plants used as silage, especially oats, develop a fair amount of nitrates. Barley grown in drought apparently does. Thistles can accumulate so much nitrate they tend to burn explosively, according to the internet.

But to throw a curve into all this, I found an old terminology: gunpowder is indeed "corned." Different grain sizes make for different ignition properties. And gunpowder is 75% potassium nitrate. Did, out of desperation, someone store some beef in gunpowder and find it preserved the beef wonderfully? People used to do weird things, and hungry people might turn an oddity into a regular practice. Did a sneaky sailor hide a purloined cut of beef in a load of saltpetre? Did a ship's cook try to save some spoiling beef by rolling it in salt and saltpetre? This sounds ominous. A huge source of saltpetre was found in South America, in the form of guano and its concentrated leachates deposited in nearby soil. The precious stuff even caused the Saltpeter War. (Abraham Lincoln's grandfather also mined saltpeter in Tennessee.) Upon recovering the beef, the sailor might have, upon rinsing it off and boiling it, discovered it tender, red, and delicious. Or was this technology borrowed from elsewhere?

Now saltpeter has been used to preserve meat for quite some time, but tracing it back before gunpowder was known in the West is difficult. Everyone knows gunpowder originated in China. Saltpeter's use in China in food is only hinted at, and I read a report that vaguely suggested eggs were preserved in saltpeter there.

Here's an 1860 recipe for corned beef:

"To one gallon of water, take 1½ pounds of salt, half pound of brown sugar, half ounce of saltpetre; in this ration, the pickle to be increased to any quantity desired. Let these be boiled until all the dirt from the salt and sugar rises to the top and is skimmed off. Then throw the pickle into a large, clean tub to cool, and when *perfectly cold*; pour it over the meat, which must be in a tight barrel or box, which will not leak. After three or four weeks it is cured. The meat must be kept well covered with the brine by putting something heavy on it. The meat must not be put in the brine until it has been killed at least two days, during which time it must be spread out and lightly sprinkled with saltpetre. Twenty gallons of water, 30 pounds of salt, 10 pounds of sugar and 10 ounces of saltpetre will fill a barrel. The same brine can be used a second time by boiling and skimming it well. " - from the Albany Patriot

I will leave for another day the topic of all more modern hot dogs, preserved meats, and nitrate / nitrite health related issues.

I had no saltpeter in the house, (in the name of all that's holy, who does??) but I did have a half oz. of malted barley corns. After a simmer, in they went into the brine. We will see, Mr. Barleycorn, we will see.

Here's something claiming salt is known as "corns:"

"While the process of preserving meat with salt is ancient, food historians tell us corned beef (preserving beef with "corns" or large grains of salt) originated in Medieval Europe. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word corn, meaning "small hard particle, a grain, as of sand or salt," in print to 888. The term "corned beef" dates to 1621-"Source. Also, see

Of Cabbages and Celts.

The words grain, grind, grown, ground, grist, coin, corn, kernel, granule, groats, grange, garner, granary and garnish all come from a very ancient Indo-European word. Perhaps all this speculation is wrong, and corned beef means "grained" in the sense of "wood grain."

Morton has some products for modern home meat preserving.

This post links to articles on corned beef, saltpeter, Saltpeter War, gunpowder, barley, oats, silage, cabbages, pickling spices, and salt. And a few other things.

Trick or treat!

You really not like me when I'm angry! Give me chocolates! Hulk like chocolate! In fact, Hulk revert to Jumper when eat chocolate.

For fun I'm going to try to influence the Google ads at the top. Since I love chocolate, that's what I will go for. I want delicious French chocolates, with caramel nougat centers, or chocolate-covered brandy-soaked cherries. I'd even take some chocolates just faintly seasoned with habañero peppers. Yes, I am that weird. For some reason I don't like chocolate mints. They're okay, but I just don't. I like chocolate, and I like mint. Just not together.

I like milk chocolate. I prefer the European style, with non-sour milk. I would love some Pyrenees chocolates. If I ever go to France, that will be why.

Update: Google Ads about chocolate show up when this article is opened in a separate window. For the unsure, this is accomplished by clicking on the article title. That url will serve as the permalink also. Sqirlz morph

Jumper's Geographic Dream

After having an oft-recurring dream several years ago, I made a point to remember it and puzzle over it.

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In the dream, I visit continents number 8 and 9. In the dream, I always visualize a globe and zoom in on one or the other; usually both, and spend some time there. As usual in dreams, all is hazy, including the names and exact locations. (I sort of feel they belong in the Indian Ocean or even the South Atlantic, but I assembled this illustration by another feeling: remoteness.) And today I'll call them Yelliria and Xillmiu.

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In the dream, I am always sort of amazed, but then I recall that these are the "continents everybody always forgets." We all learned about them in elementary school, but no one has really thought about them since. As always, in dreams, this makes perfect sense.

.

One of them is quite wild and relatively unpopulated. The other has a larger colonized population of modern sorts, with a feel of '50s Australia or New Zealand, only wilder, and without any particular negative attributes. I visit and have entertaining dream adventures. It's all new and bizarre and exciting..

I keep a globe in my living room, and one day while pondering another matter, I recalled my dream. And that's when I realized I had known about continents 8 and 9 all along. It was an "aha!" moment.

Links, Letters, Art and Life

click each example for close-up views

I was lamenting the other day the death of chain letters. The internet has many chains, and seems to have absorbed nearly all of the phenomenon. I haven't gotten a chain letter, that is, written on paper and sent through the mail, since 1992. And just when I decided to begin collecting them as artifacts. (I actually incorporated a chain letter into a painting then). And I hadn't thought too much about actual chain letters since then.

Back then, they were well-crafted in the sense that Nature "crafts" species: those with compelling memes survived, and those without perished. By compelling, I mean a meme that, by whatever magic, actually got the receiver to go through the trouble of making handwritten copies and sealing and stamping envelopes. Quite a lot of effort, really. Of course their internet descendents are far easier to transmit, but far less robust, in my view.

Back then I classed the best-surviving chain-mail memes into two classes: those that promised luck and good fortune, and those that used fear: "Do not break the chain, or horrible harm will come to you!" It's easy to tag and rate each strong memic fragment. I found it life-affirming that most chain-letters I received were richer in good-luck memes than fear-memes.
There does not seem to be a clear path of descent from the paper and stamp variety into their internet analogs. There are a few documented "jumps" from paper to internet, but in most modern cases I presume the email things evolved independently. Life was created twice! The "meta-meme" of chain letters made the hop, actually.

The exhaustive scholarly examination is fascinating reading.

I will propose that a chain letter requiring 100 copies be sent might die out as fast as one requiring only two copies. Too much work involved in the former case, too much chance of stalling out with non-superstitious folks in the latter.

A fragment of yet another article: "The chain letter reproduces asexually. After all, the odds are pretty slim that someone would get two chain letters on the same day, and somehow merge them. If you like to daydream, though, you might imagine chain letters mating this way, with the recipient randomly taking a sentence from one or the other to build an 'offspring'... After reproducing, the chain letter, like a salmon, dies. Unless someone is really cheap, and makes 19 copies and then mails out the original!"

My investigation started with a "trollstorm" on a blog that normally has maybe a hundred comments show up under each article. I was thinking about optimal size of a comments section for the transmission of ideas (and also anecdotal disinformation!), and how the "six degrees of separation" work. Too many comments means people may post comments, but they won't read them all. (The section becomes what my friend Stevie Toledo sardonically calls "write-only memory.") Communication becomes one-way. In contrast, too few comments may mean too few readers (of the comments) and thus too high a bar - insufficient critical mass for an idea to take off. Optimal is a popular writer with a reasonable number of comments which can be followed by a casual reader, and in which a theme might be established; a dialog which takes the readers' fancy.

All of which in turn, I thought, has something to do with transmissibility - survivability / population increase - of memes in general. It's been fruitful. I was reminded that there are several distinct historical environments for chain letters. Pre-copy machine is one, and then fax machines, and now the internet. Other old environments were the mimeograph, "no typewriter in the house" and probably "a typewriter, but no carbon paper." Plus pen and paper only: The "teenage girl" letter, seen at the top.

Some images of chain letters.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's archive/article

From Paris to Texas to Timbuktu

Once, in Texas, I met a man from Timbuktu, and mentioned that I had been discussing his native country a few days prior. I explained that at least here in the USA, "Timbuktu" is a sort of a symbol of a place that is very faraway - a place difficult to get to. "The 'ends of the earth'" a mutual friend paraphrased. "And very exotic." Timbuktu guy seemed shocked to find this out.

I had conversed about this very subject with Henry, a Texan, and Frederic, from France, who said that Timbuktu was no big deal; he traveled near there a lot and had once driven through it on a motorcycle. So we had asked him, well, Fred, what do they say in France to generically represent the faraway place? "Texas. We say it is as far away as Texas."

I got the idea he sort of thought we should have known this! After all, this all occurred IN Texas. But just like the African I was to meet, we Americans in Texas had not known this, and were all greatly amused. And so when the subject arose with Timbuktu guy, I added this nugget of recently acquired knowledge: Texas is France's Timbuktu.

In answer to my recent queries about this idea, a friend from Brunei has stated the following: "Some people, especially the literary types, borrow 'Timbuktu.' In the local context, our 'Timbuktu' is a place called 'Temburong' which is a Brunei county. The place is actually not that far away. It feels far because one has to take a long windy road, cross into a neighbouring country, and then ride on a ferry to get there. The ferry ride is very short. It takes maybe 2 minutes to walk across the river if you could walk on water. It takes a couple of hours to get there by land and by boat it's probably 1.5 hrs."

Another friend from Venezuela just shrugged when I asked him, and said Timbuktu as a metaphor was used the same way there. By the way, the man from Timbuktu could think of no comparable expression from his native locale, so we came to a dead end. I guess we were hoping he would say something on the order of, "Siberia is Timbuktu's Timbuktu!"

(A story of Timbuktu)

The Curious Case of the Chronosynclasticly Infundibulized Engine

I am writing to you Gentlemen (and Ladies) regarding your ambitious yet, in my humble view, completely attainable, goal of constructing a sub-surfacial-traveling powered ship, rumours of which have been circulating in the pubs back of J. street since Thursday last.

Mr. Fulton of the Colonies in particular is seen to remain in good spirits and has been noted to enthuse over your plans quite openly, although I have reproached him privately as I have some reason to believe your Party has taken some pains to keep this matter privy. Be that as it may, I found myself unable to stop thinking about your astounding Conceptions, and in a moment of great lucidity last evening a great Idea struck me with great forcefulness, relating both to your works and those to which I have been lately dedicated, since devouring both the writings of Mr. Franklin and certain sensational and lurid chapbooks of unknown author but rumoured to be of Maltese origin, (which I hastily sought out at the home of a certain Gentleman, B. of the Royal Society , and read last week), and experiencing the events I shall recount to you below.

As I am sure you have been involved in the tale of Mr. Fulton's ruination and the splintering of the hull timbers and consequent sinking of his experimental Vessel due to the Unsustainable Weight of the Watt engine, you should know I find it a great Disaster, (although I cannot help but note that I have been recorded as warning him of this very hazard) and that it will ever be an Impossibility for the Watt device ever being of use at Sea, needing a Stone foundation for anchorage on Land.

For I have of late found what I reckon to be, (and I hurry to assure you I have been performing the most controlled experiments in my laboratory, outfitted by B. who wishes to remain uninvolved at this time, for reasons I will make clear forthwith,) a great source of rotary Power.

If you follow the proceedings of the Society I am sure you recall the mention of the Device to Alert the Living of the Revivification of the Thought-to-have Passed. Humility indicates you might not have connected this modest invention with myself, but I am indeed its Inventor. In any case, it is but a simple thing to affix a strike bar in the coffin and a bell and ringer above ground. I was observing the Groundkeepers at Alderney Road Cemetery the Monday evening a fortnight ago, ensuring their proper training, and whilst lecturing the two heard an unusual whirring noise emerging from one of the coffins awaiting burial the following morning. (To my chagrin, the actual bell-alarum was not activated), but in our excitement, we flung open the coffin and stood stupified as we witnessed the recently departed, identified by a small plaque affixed to the coffin, as a Mr. Barry Morris Goldwater, spinning rapidly an inch above the bottom of it!

While I have yet to account for this phenomenon, for he is undeniably dead, I transported the fellow's remains (amidst yet another mystery, for the whereabouts of his family nor even the circumstances of his appearance have been determined) to my laboratory, and with a series of leather belts and sheaves have driven an Archimedes pump uninterrupted for the last 12 days, producing the amount of 17.2 Horse Power. Requiring only the proper amount of formalin to be kept on hand and a small Leyden Jar, and with the weight of both the poor deceased Mr. Goldwater plus the attached apparatus, not exceeding the weight of just over twenty stone, I think I have found The Engine which your Company seeks.

Yr. Humble Servant,
Dr. Prichard Mitford
Jumper ST. LONDON

(Epilog)
Alas, a great calamity has ensued since I penned my missive. Last night I hastily entered my laboratory, hearing a "pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep! Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep!!" The poor fellow had begun emitting a faint vapor. I began fingering delicately my row of glistening valves. “Give me a dram of whale oil!” I snapped to my assistant, Igor. But it was too late. The leathern belts alike began to ignite, and the Archimedes pump, off centered, began to moan as well in mechanical distress.

Suffice it to say the ensuing fire engulfed my laboratory, I am ruined, Igor has left my employ, and the entire affair has come off disastrously. And worst, not even the smallest remaining shards of burnt ossia from the unfortunate Goldwater have been recovered. Even any impulse towards some remaining curiosity over these matters is tapped out. As is my erstwhile benefactor B.

I have repaired to the Sloth and Pennywhistle to lick my wounds, and have acquired passage to Alyaska (Beringia). My ship is to sail at dawn.
Regretfully,
and respectfully,
Mitford

Lying Eyes

When I decided to adopt my dog, Trouble, I knew there was a big age-difference problem. After all, she was barely past adolescence. She wanted to do young things, and I wanted to mostly sit and read and drink old tawny port, and smoke my pipe, and think about Spinoza. And occasionally go down to the Old Boys' Club and sit in the dark mahogany library, and talk to the other gentlemen about the shipping stocks, and the lost glory of the Empire. And she's usually glad to see me when I arrive home. Most nights she sleeps by my bedside.

Trouble, however, wanted to run free, and go jogging, and had dreams of being an Iditerod sled dog. God knows we live too far from Alaska, but I have never had the heart to destroy the hopes and dreams of such a young and beautiful animal. So even though she's not supposed to, every so often Trouble goes out on me, late at night, and sometimes doesn't come home until dawn. I see the evidence: the KFC wrapping paper in the yard; and sometimes I can even tell another dog has been with her. I just don't let on.

Those nights, this old house sure gets lonely. I guess I'm her rich old Man, and she won't ever have to worry. But she still can't hide her lying eyes.

A Nice Pair

The ocher one took seven years. I sure learned a lot about Jackson Pollock while doing that one. I could have called it "Another Punk Throws Paint" because it's pretty common a thing to do among beginners. (Do you throw paint? I throw paint! Don't tell!) I never could figure out a good name for it. I tried to call it "The Gnostic Revelations of Jack Black" (Old #7, of course) but the actor was just becoming well known about a week after I finished. What the heck. I hereby rename it "Old #7."

The other one, Corridor Head, I started at the same time and finished in about 2 months.

I mixed Varathane Diamond floor finish (extremely tough, completely clear, never yellows) in with my acrylic paints as I painted to give the lustrous translucence of oils. It's similar to generic water-based acrylic gloss medium sold in stores, but cheaper by the gallon. I'm such a chemist. I balled up the photography, too. I ought to re-shoot with my tripod, like I knew I should in the first place.

From the early to mid '90s. Each about 2' x 3½'

Yes, they ARE for sale. Glad you asked!

Bizarre Argots, Ceazarny, and Bithageer

Secret languages, whether spoken by children, gypsies, con men, dissidents, criminals and even solely by one gender (the language of women, known as Nushu in China), have been around for a long time. After all, Pig Latin is known to almost every kid born in the U.S., and if you meet people who aren't native English speakers, and explain the concept, you'll probably get some stories about something similar in another language, from childhood. And likely each will smile as he or she remembers.

Long ago I encountered a variety of secret language known as "Carny talk," the secret language of carnival workers, among some Miami, Florida youths. It's lately mutated into a Rap-related sort of thing known as "izzle." But back then, the rules were simple, if slightly varied: after each initial consonant "ee-ah-z" was inserted. Shoes became "shee-ah-zoes." A fine car was a feeazine ceeazar, and police were either peeazolice or peeazoleeazice, depending, I guess, on whether you were in a hurry.

Into this group had alit one fellow who had learned a variant of this lingo or argot, which he constructed by a similar rule. The add-in was "ih-thug" with a voiced "th" as in "the." Beer became bithageer. Eagerly they all taught each other all their variations.

And began mixing the two variant constructs in their language. "Theazats a fithagine weazomithagon" was not unusual to hear. ("That's a fine woman.") I was usually, but not always, lost. I deciphered some of it.

It took me a long time to reconstruct all that, because when I learned later the "formal" rules of Carny, there was no ih-thug, it was all eaz-uh. This was the form popularized by Murray the K, I later learned.

Once I was in a car with a Frenchman and a Belgian, and with no warning, just for kicks, I began speaking Carny. "Wheahzen weaze geazet teazo theaze beazar, eazi'm dreazinking a beazeer." Silence. They both turned and looked at me with great horror on their faces. I couldn't keep a straight face and started laughing, looking at their expressions. They thought they had lost their command of English!

A few years later I recalled all that, and tried the same thing with my sister-in-law. To my utmost shock, she began rattling off Carny talk so fast I couldn't keep up! I had no idea she would ever have learned this! I guess she then enjoyed the look on my face. As it turned out, she had been in range of Murray the K's radio shows where she grew up; I never had been.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

A few years ago, I did some research on "Carny talk," and at that time came up with a few web pages, which was the best I could find on the internet:
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/5/5-764.html#1
http://lloyd.emich.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9710e&L=linguist&P=3270
(those are pretty good, and with bibliography)

So I decided to revisit this fascinating topic, and checked around on the internet using Google and Wikipedia. Google mostly returned the same seven year old links, above. Wikipedia is a mess. The best they have is this article on Argot.
I occasionally contribute to Wikipedia. I spent some time adding judiciously to this one, crosslinking some other articles, and calling attention to the information in the linguistlist.org link mentioned above. In my view, all the various Pig Latins, Carnys, and such should be connected with one article. They properly distinguish between argot and jargon.

In the meantime, I found the original author of one of the 1994 summary pages has gone on to editing The SpecGram.

Nushu - Women's language Language Games - Wikipedia
The end of Nushu

(A tip o' the hat will be given to any who identify the mystery carny in the illustration!)

Turn Backwards, Oh Time

Why does the arrow of time move forwards and not backwards?

For some reason I began rethinking this ever-present conundrum recently and achieved some, for me, new thoughts.

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe we just see it wrong. Backwards. The refusal to see the arrow of time moving backwards is equal to atheism. The failure to accept the mind-boggling notion that time, flowing backwards, violates entropy and displays the universe moving to a more ordered state is a failure to accept Creation right under one's gaze. The bones of the antelope gain flesh, bacteria contribute mass, and the flesh warms, and an arrow is suddenly ripped from the form and flies returning to a bow, and life is created from dust. To reverse the arrow of time is merely to embrace God. All things flow towards God, and will meet in a faraway but explicitly knowable time. The inevitability of our return to the Creator has been made achingly, beautifully, obvious since we began to think. We just see it all backwards. We flee to the unformed Future, and perversely imagine we have the blessing of the Creator, while we flee; while we break the heart, in our backwards flight, of the only organizing Principle of which we have evidence. We invent the future to console ourselves in our sad, dishonest loneliness. We yet imagine in our flight we are not ignoring the wisdom of our parent, and we make promises we know we may not be able to keep. By reversing the arrow, we are runaways, and perhaps pawns, on our wooden ships, prodigal children casting occasional breadcrumbs behind us into the sea, but with no conscious intention, and no other way, to return, and yet reaping from our lonely sea of unformed unknown, and so curiously binding all the things we glean to the far hand of the beginning from which we flee.

Double Double Trouble Trouble

A Year Without Cheese - Redux

It's over. Readers who kept up with my comments at the original post (A Year Without Cheese) know it was over a while ago. But I mostly kept going even in the face of some admitted failures.

And the results are in!

Last year:............................. This year:
Total cholesterol ..230........... 197
Triglycerides ..........95............. 94
HDL (good) .............47............. 40
LDL (bad) ..............164........... 138

Weight loss: 10 lbs.