Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Ruh-roh...change of air-mass coming

Climate Science you can take to the bank:

We don't get too many severe Arctic outbreaks here in Western Oregon. Our typical weather in the Winter is influenced by the Pacific Ocean, so it is cool and wet most of the time. We've been in a major Arctic Outbreak for almost a week though, and everything is frozen solid, although the thermometer just topped 32 degrees for the first time in days.

It's almost the rule though, that when the air-mass changes from Continental Polar to Maritime Pacific, that a transition period of winter precipitation occurs from the overrunning of the Polar air by the wetter, milder Maritime air.

That winter precipitation is made worse in the Portland area by the micro-climate caused by a feed of cold air down the Columbia River Gorge. My house sits within 4 miles of that gorge mouth.

The basin between the Cascade Mountains immediately to my East, and the Rocky Mountains about 350 miles to my East forms a reservoir of cold air, and the major outlet of that cold air, which behaves like any fluid and drains to lower places (to Portland, through the sea-level gap caused by the Gorge), causes a constant supply of below-freezing air to cause frozen precipitation of either freezing rain, sleet, snow pellets or snow. Depending on air mass pressure differences, this cold outflow through the Gorge can take a week to modify, and if there is constant precipitation coming in from the West, that's a week of misery for us dwellers in the mouth of the Gorge.

The conditions are prime for a major mess in the Gorge. The last time this happened, about 10 years ago, there was a week of snow pellets, and they flow like tons of ball bearings, always seeking the lowest ground. I-84, the major East-West route out of Oregon, and the BNSF & UP-SP railroads were halted by 30-foot drifts of the heavy pellets. Clearing the drifts takes days, not just one pass with a rotary snow-blower, because more pellets fall down to fill in where the tracks/roads were just cleared. Blizzard conditions can prevail for days in this micro-climate. It's probably a bigger weather challenge to transportation than the Donner Pass.

I go out in a few minutes to top off provisions, and will be prepared to winter in, albeit with some hardship, since I had to shop my Plasma big-screen today (waaaaah!).

Aviation Physiology 101

This is an interesting story, not for what it says, but what it left out.

Most folks who fly regularly know that just two or three people on the plane with an active cold or flu virus can, and DO, infect many other fellow passengers. The reason for this is that the airlines recycle the cabin air after the plane is pressurized (strictly to save a few dollars), and any airborne droplets containing the virus just keep circulating and the un-infected traveler breathes them in.

The solution to that is, do not fly. If you have to fly, some (I'm one) take a nostrum called "Airborne" or it's clones. I think it works, and there might be a study or two saying it helps. It's not a panacea (infallible).

There's another reason the valuable quarterback Tebow got a separate plane to ride in. It has to do with pressure changes. While the usual airliner flight plan is Point A to Point B, direct, the usual altitude plan is to fly at the most efficient altitude, usually at least 28,000 feet. The cabin would be pressurized to 7,700 feet, and the re-pressurizing of the cabin can cause a sinus block, PLUS it exacerbates any infected sinus, spreading the infection to ALL your sinus cavities and your inner ear cavities as well.

It's possible to fly an aircraft from Florida to Kentucky, by a roundabout route, never getting over about 2,500 feet, and thereby not having the major insult to the sinuses.

THAT'S why Tim Tebow got his own airplane.

Kudos to the Florida Gator football staff for having the smarts to use the talents of a trained Aviation Physiologist. Not many programs would think that deeply.

Chevy Volt pressalanche

Big press offensive for the Chevy Volt today. Even on Fox News, which showed that it is just as in-the-tank for Government Motors as any other network.

Some facts about the Volt which you won't read in these pressers (which I am NOT going to link because they are BeeEss).

• The Chevy Volt does not now, and will never get 230 miles per gallon. That figure was pulled out of some marketer's ass. The marketer did it by assuming that: (1) Electric miles driven count at some near-infinite number, say 2500 mpg, (2) The Volt will NOT actually go as far on it's battery as the concept engineers proposed (40 miles range) before they ever built the battery, which in real testing, has given the car a 20-mile battery-range. The car has a 1400cc 4-banger gas engine which the marketers (again, the marketers, not the test engineers) say the gasser will give 50 mpg.
• The Chevy Volt is priced WAY out of Joe Six-Pack's wallet range at $40,000 (and that's probably for a base model). The car's public acceptance will be like the previous GM electric, of which fewer than 800 were ever made, and which was leased by mostly Hollywood types seeking to prove their "green" creds. The only way GM fulfills any sort of extended production run with this car is if the dot.gov buys a huge fleet of them, which we will probably see in the "Second Stimulus" vote-buying package.
• The Chevy Volt is WAY behind it's pre-production testing schedule, but GM Marketing Div types are hyping it as if it is the complete Everyman's car, the "Voltswagen" of the age, which it will never be. I smell the stink of ObamaMania about all of this hype.

Not coincidentally, just last week, Nissan released some tantalizing stats on it's electric vehicle for 2010, the Leaf. It will be battery-only, it has been TESTED to go 100 miles on a charge (realistic use will be closer to 80 when driven in real traffic), and it will cost $30,000 (and will probably be fully-equipped at that price).

A just-formed US company, Coda, intends to market a battery-electric vehicle made in China next fall also, and also for $40,000+.

As a popular car, the Chevy Volt is DBA (Dead Before Arrival). The Coda will be overpriced and not likely to make the safety grade soon enough. Also DBA.

The Nissan will take whatever market there is to take. The Prius will continue to sell well.

Shit will always stink.

You heard it here first.

You need this page

Most of us geeks have some sort of a one-page weather setup we can refer to with a single keystroke.

I pay taxes, so I use the NOAA page.

Just as in most things, there's a better way than what the dot.gov gives us.

Presenting Weather Underground!

When you get it set up to present your city, it will present the official info by default, but it will also let you into a grid of amateur weather stations, dozens of them, all over your city. With a little practice, you will be able to figure out the ones which have been set up properly to give accurate information.

The same page will also present sports schedules and more.

Uber-useful.

You need this!

Et Tu, Cannabis Sativa?

...why did it take so long for this judgment to be published? I'm SURE that modern science has known that smoking ANYTHING creates tars, etc which coat the lungs and promote lung cancer.

The "Medical" Mary Jane crowd has politicians so unable to accept reality, that it took at least 20 years longer than it should have (I seem to recall that the start of the "medical" MJ movement was about 20 years ago) to point out the obvious: Marijuana smokers MIGHT be getting some kinds of therapy (although many docs say what they are getting is placebo effect), but they are DEFINITELY degrading their health by deliberately inhaling carcinogens.

Hey, I degrade my body by imbibing alcohol, and it's a free country, so let them continue to ruin their lungs.

I DO suggest, however, that Kali might sweeten the pot a bit here by ALSO passing a law stating that "legal" MJ smokers acknowledge the fact that they are making themselves much more likely to get lung cancer, and thereby put themselves on a list permanently banning them from ever suing ANYONE for ANY type of lung cancer if they develop it later, or are scared by it (like the mesothelioma shysters are doing).

Very libertarian of me, don't you think? Choices AND consequences.

Another ha-ha on the Obama Geek corps

You remember Obama's geek corps, featured here a few weeks ago when they said that LORAN navigation systems as currently maintained by the USCG were totally superfluous in the GPS era?

Well, it seems that maybe the LORAN isn't so superfluous after all, as the USAF Space Command, responsible for the GPS network, today says that it may have a satellite or two fail next year, maybe more afterwards.

The irresponsible Fox news network said that this would result in GPS "going dark", but that's wrong, it would continue, just with degraded accuracy. If the few satellites affected had a conjunction (and they eventually would), the result could be temporary loss of coverage for up to 20 minutes, but the overall result would be degraded accuracy whenever one of the affected satellites is in the "canopy" of satellites overhead.

Modern GPS receivers watch up to 12 satellites at a time, and use at least three of the best-positioned-at-the-time birds to fix on. If one of those three satellites is out of calibration (or silent), the fix degrades to the two best, etc. The whole question of which satellites to watch is based on the assumption that all are putting out good signal, then spherical geometry calculates the optimum receiving angle for the best three to five among the 12 in view, and it listens to the signals from them. It is theoretically possible to re-flash the GPS receivers to NOT follow the dead satellites, but that would be an expensive and very time-consuming procedure which would take years to complete.

The bottom line here is that LORAN is still a viable system with accuracy good enough for ships to make port and aircraft to find landing fields with, so it should not be abandoned. That was true several decades ago, and it is still true to this day. The USAF lacks the money in it's obamanated budget to launch enough replacement birds quickly enough, so the general in charge of Space Command has laid his career on the line and challenged the leftist President to put up more dollars to save the GPS system.

I'm betting that the General will retire, very soon, and be replaced by one who is more Obama-friendly, but now the cat is out of the bag with the GPS budget problems, and the Obama geek corps is shown, once again, to have feet of clay. Here's a lesson for them: when dealing with broadband satellite networks, children, politics don't count, only electrical engineering counts, with a nod towards the bean counter who buys the gadgets.

The world depends on the US GPS system. It needs to have a viable replacement program going BEFORE it's worn-out satellites fail.

Or, we could wait for the Europeans and Russians to finish THEIR systems and pay huge royalties to use it, scrapping our now-useless receivers and buying spendy new ones from them. The one thing that will NEVER happen is receivers made to receive all the different navigation networks.

Reminder # 3,456,962

....that physics can't be ignored.

The tested car, the Smart Fortwo, has become the darling of the "green hypocrite" set in the Northwest. You know those folks, they are the ones who drive the Smart, but live in a McMansion by the Lake and their electric bills would pay for a fleet of efficient cars. Al Gore types. The Smart is made by either Mercedes or BMW, I don't remember which at the moment, but it is anything but Green. First of all, it barely gets 30 mpg, and secondly, it has this problem of physics: it weighs less than a ton, so it will come out badly in crashes with heavier vehicles (most are heavier than that) EVERY TIME.

I'm old enough to remember some decent economy cars of old, such as the Mercedes 180D, it's follow-on the 240D, the Peugeot 504 D (I had one). These were semi-luxury cars which actually did very well in the fuel mileage dept.

They had weak first-generation automotive diesel engines, and with those, couldn't get out of the way of their own shadows, but they SIPPED diesel fuel, and were VERY comfortable to ride in. I used to put 1700-mile marathons on in my Peugeot, driving from March AFB in Riverside, CA to Portland, OR in 18 hours or so, one time made it in 14 hours, get out of the car at the end fresh as a daisy. That was with two younger drivers, don't try that at home!

All the mentioned old diesel sedans were made with "crush boxes" except the Benz 180-D, and we tested ours. My wife, stopped for traffic, was rear-ended by a pickup going at least 35 mph. She was uninjured. The car was repaired and we drove it another 6 years. The pickup driver wound up with his engine in his lap. His vehicle was junked. Try that crash in your Smart Car, and neither you OR the car will drive again.

I've known Benz 240D owners who got in the mid-40mpg range, and we never got below 30 mpg in the luxo Peugeot, and topped 44 mpg on a highway trip once (the car was governed to no more than 84 mph, but on this trip, speeds did not exceed 65, since she was following me from Utah to Upper Michigan, and I was driving a '74 Toyota Hilux towing a 1600# travel trailer).

Larger, heavier cars CAN be made with economical engines. They've been made before, and could be made again if we got off our high horse about diesel power, and accepted slower acceleration as a way of life.

The EU allows a 3G diesel engine in it's stringent emissions control scheme. The Honda Accord has been built there for years with such an engine that gets the car over 40 mpg, AND it can hit 60mph from a standing start in under 8 seconds.

We've missed the boat in the USA.

Easter PITA

While my Easter was certainly made more memorable by the Navy's SEALs sending three Somali pirates to get their 72 raisins, and the freeing of the doughty Captain Phillips, it had a certain downside, thanks to Microsoft.

I have a PDA-phone, a (Verizon) Samsung SCH-i760 to be exact. It came with Windows Mobile 6.0, at that time, the latest Windows product for PDAs. The phone has about 115mb of total memory, beside the SD card, which has another 2 gigs (but is only useful for file storage, you can't run apps from it).

I had been @ about 50% on both the programs volume and the storage volume of the RAM, but the WM 6.0 was farked, and I was having to perform soft reset (close and reboot) a couple to three times a day.

I got Tech Support on the line and asked them if they had any solutions.

They did: upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.1, which they claimed handled file management better, among other improvements.

So, I fish my trusty data cable out of the go-bag and we start in. First, VZW wants to examine the volume layout. That takes about 1/2 hour, because they can't control my phone themselves, they have to give me the commands. Then we have to save things, such as my phone book, but first we have to sort out some minor details, such as I have too old a version of ActiveSync, etc. Another hour. In fact, we used up two hours, at which point I had to go off to Easter dinner. The Easter dinner turned out to be an abort, since Mom-in-law had a major plumbing problem and couldn't have guests, so I watch the Mariner's game and then get back to the phone, which I now do "unsupported", having downloaded all the necessary files under guidance in the morning.

It goes swimmingly, with the phone doing everything properly under the guidance of the excellent upgrade program, until I realize that I hadn't finished the actual job of backing up the phone book contacts before I started.

FUBAR.

But, no worries, I have a fairly parallel contacts list in my main computer's Outlook, so I install that. Works fine.

A little more fussing to get the Today Screen sorted out (who dreamed up that bilious purple-haze color for the default screen?), the ringtones, etc.

Then I realize that I haven't set up the "push" email-retrieving system. By now, all my Wizard engrams are fried, so I get Tech Support on the line again, and the VZW wizard and I sort it out (she was a newbie, unlike the am guy who was a true wizard) but it takes another hour (two different types of email servers to address with Push).

I finished way past supper time, and hadn't eaten any Easter goodies, so I sprung for Popeye's Louisiana-style fried chicken, biscuits and cole slaw, and we feasted blue-collar style.

I note that the PDA is very fast now, lightning-speed, in fact, and the only thing I can note to account for it is about 20mb less Storage volume used. Two thirds of the previous Storage Volume must have gotten flushed out with the upgrade. It sounds like I need an app to keep things clean in there, which I had in my old WM 5.0 PDA, but lack in this one. I used to use Pocket Mechanic, and it did a fair job.

Can any readers recommend a better app to use to keep the trash cleaned out of a WM 6.1 PDA?

"Science" with no Science in it

...is well-illustrated by this article.

Although this discovery of the previously-declared "rare" species of fresh-water dolphins puts the number of them at between ten and twenty times their previously-posted numbers, the article never even begins to question the scientific methods which put them on an endangered list in the first place.

It is a scientific fact that there are freshwater dolphins widely dispersed in various parts of the globe (Amazon river in addition to South and Southeast Asian rivers).

It is a scientific fact that in ALL of their locations, these dolphins display behavior demonstrating their innate ability to find the margins of fresh and salt water as it comes and goes with tidal changes, river flooding, etc.

There are two major mistakes in this "science" article that a sixth-grade schoolboy of 55 years ago could have found: First, most of the various dolphin populations in the different South and Southeast Asian rivers are probably closely related, and are not sub-species at all, but are the same species (declaring things to be different sub-species is one of the favorite ways that species are declared as "threatened" or "endangered" in the ongoing process to control humans by lying about animal populations).

Second, of all the andromadous animals (species that live in the sea and migrate up rivers), the dolphin is supremely adapted to survive differing sea levels and moving fresh/salt water borders, so they are supremely resistant to sea level rises "threatened by climate change". Ignore for a moment, if you can, that said sea level rises haven't been demonstrated to have occurred with any current climate change, and predictions of same appear to be nothing more than desperate attempts by politicians bent on killing off all but socialist politics, and have nothing whatsoever to do with actual climate change. Climate cooling is now in progress and sea levels will likely drop, not rise, from the current change (not that it matters, because the few centimeters of water level change isn't going to affect andromadous species at all).

God save me from these "scientists"! They need to all have their "credentials" revoked and be sent back to school to learn what application of the "scientific method" really means.

Will Obama use "Scientific Integrity" on AGW?

So, Obama gets in a dig at Bush43 for his religion-based decision not to allow the use of embryonic stem cells for medical research. Good. Obama, of course, promised us during the campaign that he would reverse this policy.

Interestingly enough, though, Mr. Obama's people couch the reversal in even broader terms:

"President Barack Obama will reverse the U.S. government’s ban on funding stem-cell research today and pledge to use sound, scientific practice and evidence, instead of dogma to guide federal policy, an adviser said."

Very interesting. "Sound, scientific practice and evidence", yes, we definitely need that.

We need it in stem cell research and above all, we need it in climate science, the political adulteration of which has been and still is being used to change the world's economies and redistribute income.

This snippet from the article sounds fairly promising towards cleaning up other science as well:

"Harold Varmus, co-chair of a science advisory group to the President, said Obama will ask the White House Office of Science and Technology to create guidelines to incorporate ‘scientific integrity’ into decision-making by U.S. agencies."

OK, Mr. Obama, your Science Advisor has set the tone, and even appears to have made a promise on behalf of your Administration. Most of us on the Right are going to congratulate you now, and continue to congratulate you as "Scientific Integrity" is restored to Federal Policy.

We certainly encourage your Office of Science and Technology to investigate abuses of "Scientific Integrity". There are plenty of them to investigate. It would seem that you are the first politician of any stripe to value "Scientific Integrity" in a long while, and the clean-up job will be daunting.

Of course, we will assist you by reminding you in our pages just where that lack of integrity currently exists. There are several outstanding sites already out there for that purpose, Mr. Obama, and perusing a Google Search on "debunking global warming" will offer a good start.

I just did such a search, and up popped MY favorite site, run by the renowned de-bunker of "junk science", Steven Milloy. It will be as good a place to start on cleaning up the Federal applications of science as any, Mr. President. If you're really keen on cleaning up abused science, Mr. President, perhaps Mr. Varmus might even offer a position to Mr. Milloy.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of "Scientific Integrity", Mr. President, can we have your Integrity Monitors run down the hall and talk to Rahm Emanuel? There have been reports that he will be running the upcoming US Census from his office, and those reports have suggested that he might involve a Community Organizing Organization, "ACORN", in "helping out" the Census-takers. Your people will probably not tell you this, Mr. President, so I will: ACORN has been known to use unscientific methods, such as registering dead people to vote and registering live people twice.

Surely such a loss of integrity in the scientific counting of the US population would damage your efforts to clean up science as it is used in Federal Policy, don't you think, Mr. President? Perhaps you might issue an instruction to Rahm Emanuel to reject ACORN's offer of help on the Census, and just use the Census Bureau, which is presently set up under a charter which requires it to use an Advisory Committee which oversees the use of the most scientific counting methods ONLY.

Well, Mr. President, I didn't want to put too much on your plate, but these two simple ideas of using Scientific Integrity in processes the whole country knows and understands will help you continue to be known as an effective Bringer of Change.

Good-bye, Sir, and thanks for stopping by my humble blog. I hope the rest of your day will be as productive as mine.