Soup of Mysteries part III

Previous chapters are found at Soup of Mysteries and Soup of Mysteries II. They might still go through some revision if God (unspecified regligion and duties in polytheistic non-Taoist religions, in the case of Taoist pragmatism, please consider this an attempt at humorous description of the universe and its workings) willing.

As was told in the last story, the entities called HeBeLis observed much diversity to be present in their attempt to create a stable flow of positrons eliminating the difficult electrons. Let us hear the great prophet Tom Lehrer chant of the diversity found. Other prophets have much discussed of the proper order of these, though every type is needed somewhere in the world. Anyway, those that aren't directly involved with unifying positrons with electrons, are currently called stable nuclides and make up much of what we perceive to be in existence outside our immortal souls. From here on the story of Creation shall involve more earthly matters, thus it is vitally important to keep in mind that electrons are a part of this universe where Gods' work isn't always easily percieved, and thus the table of electrons must be presented and memorized.

If we take a deeper look on this fully experimental table we see that the electrons are mischievous and very exitable so they do not follow any exact rule, and accept that all is not gold that glitters, we can begin to marvel the Creation as it is manifested in this rotating ball of fire, wind, earth and water. The fire is usually understood differently, but that is a minor issue here.

Now that we've all memorized the Creation of the Earth and sky let us then hear the preacher Robert Krulwich of how the unliving pieces of rocks came to be. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2010/09/14/129858314/my-grandson-the-rock

Clearly, life is potent. How God created blobs, bacteria, algae, and other forms of life will be the subject of our next evening of the tale of the Creation. Be well and praise the Lord, for he may tax us with curious but all too sensible taxes.

who did it

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some luck needed (1 of 45)

Trafficking

I've spent a while getting acquainted with railroading. Around the web there are calls for renewing and upgrading the US rail infrastructure. There are many projects going on around the world and in the US there are also some initiatives.Some are talking of building a network for HSR (high speed rail) that would be faster or equal to those in Europe or in China (or the one the Japs built). This is clearly impossible due the poor economy (republicans), freight bulk rail (republicans), continued subsidies for inefficient transport (republicans) and the bloody-mindedness of some southerners who shoot curious moving objects on rails (republicans, trains). But there are other reasons too.

1.The competitive nature of US railroad system

2.The vast distances between major traffic areas

3.Difficult terrain on locations (well this applies world-wide)

 4.The differences between freight and passenger traffic

 5.The lack of standards applied on selected routes. (or rather, there are too many of them)

 Now, US is a railroad country. US has plenty railroads (wikipeedia states 226097km, but this would reach over five times round the globe so I doubt the number, possibly this is the total amount of installed tracks (incl. sidings). The routes are also plenty, see for example the route map of seven largest companies. Then there are plenty smaller companies some of which hold important connecting lines and get their revenue partly from trackage fees. Class III railroads do the same if they can, though many of them are more sort of a train assembly lines for larger railroads.

But if one wants to have intercity and long-distance passenger traffic, the distinction here would be that an intercity might travel by night but the long-distance has to, there has to be some common rules on the routes used. One simply cannot do a complete separation of passenger and freigth traffic on a country as big as US. Well maybe on selected corridors. The man on DailyKos (BruceMcF) has diaries that would convince me of his expertise. But all the same, on all locations these two cannot use the same tracks. Passenger rail depends on passengers thus it might be helpful to know where there are people. Wikipedia has a great map on this. The only problem with it, it hasn't got the terrain features such as Appalachians, Mississippi and Rockies (and Sierra) which present some great difficulties for rail transport and travel, if one doesn't mind the scenery.

Well I'm not that interested in getting involved with this (at least what it comes to US) so I just stack the images I made. These are probably nothing new for railroaders but might be interesting for those who don't know about anything of this ecologically pretty friendly way of travel (Click for larger versions).

I made a bit more serious attempt to find out where there might be Intercity passenger traffic in the US, after I found a proper system map of Amtrak. Attempted to connect major cities with relatively straight routes. Some new track should be added at least to Indiana-Ohio southern border. This centers around St.Louis, Atlanta and Dallas, in order to not congest Chicago area more. Upgrading to class 6 track all around this system is of course costly, but it would take US to European standard level of speed. Of course on locations the terrain (thus track geometry) prevents these speeds. True high speed is costlier.

Late addition: One may of course go into details, and find out many things are not quite that simple in practise:

which is near impossible to build without disruption to freight traffic.

Attempt to make some sense in the situation in East St.Louis (Cahokia)

(3.5.2014)It looks like this has become an occasional pasttime to try to figure out how to fit various structures in already built environments. This time some demolition happens in Louisville, Kentucky. In fact, our main station might be good for this location (it's yellow though, and not a trapetzoid), and it's becoming obsolete since the plans of multimodal station may well go ahead in the near future (as has been the last 15 years :-D). However I try, no more than six to seven platforms is possible allowing one to two through-tracks on this location. Not much if this city ever considers commuter trains and many long-distance routes. Maximum length of platforms in this desing is about 350 meters which is good enough, if there is a need for longer passenger trains these can be assembled in two adjacent tracks.

playing with image-processing software and google streetview, the rectory of the church would likely survive though...

yes there's room... this spot might still be in the approach underpass though the station is close to the correct position

envisat down

but where's this data coming from? Smudged albedo (though not containing floating plastic debris) by some silly rules. Very inaccurate, but not containing the date and hour, so meant to represent fair artistic use. Beaufort sea has had pretty fat ice this year so caution on this respect is adviced.

font

found a funny font, sample in this image:

unlikely connection

The question of the family of Barack Obama is finally solved: link (finnish) He's the great-great-great-grandson of a finnish missionary Nestori Opamaa from Savitaipale. Opamaas on the other hand are found in the family history book, their grand estates are only ~60 miles from ours so there may well be a relation here too. Also, the mammoth has been cloned using indian elephant as a surrogate mother: http://www.mtv3.fi/uutiset/kotimaa.shtml/2012/04/1521883/suomalaiset-kloonasivat-mammutin---katso-hammastyttava-video

offline (somewhat)

...well not really, but i'm thinking of abandoning this blog for a while since it seems i'm not making any progress in here. there would be a couple more stories that are not in here yet, but they have to wait. i'll think of this a bit more and accept that the some more children and grandchildren will blame their parents and grandparents for their future difficulties. bye.

review

Deviations, Debuggings, Deficiencies, Deconstructions and Depolitication of Cold War by Captian Ahab.


No, actually this is a highly accurate review of Michael Mann's new book 'The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars'. He's one of the world’s most famous climatologists, whose fame is partly generated by the politically motivated attacks on the truths discovered by climate science. In his novelette, 'Old man and the Sea ‘ ‘Scientist and the mysteries of climate science and the policy suggestions raised by them', Mann delineates the chronology of his career with whale ecology and whaling techniques solving the non-periodicity of the current period of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) without being emotional and ending in jail like Captain Ahab James Hansen for illegal whaling entry. If only CA would have seen a whale weather/single anomalous dataset isn't a fish climate/the statistical truth, this book would have been shorter. I also liked the references to John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (f.e. Mark Twain: ’The truth puts its shoes on and the lie hides behind a non peer-reviewed article full of errors’) of which there are several examples. Especially delicious were the references to the legend of Billy the Kid tale of the two reports, who was a criminal which was an episode of a politically motivated report endorsed by mislead(ing) deniers of the science and was shot in the back by his buddy deputy Garrett and which was denounced by proper scientific inquiry. The rest of the book handles the threats made against Captain Ahab and his fellow boatmen by the International Whaling Commission which regulates the trade of whale oil and the ammunition used by the private militias in whaling areas such as the Gulf of Mexico Horizon Well.

So, this is a highly topical and important book of the politication of climate science, made in the style of a scientist, and it describes some of the ways the scientific inquiry is done, relates the way the scientific inquiry is done to the political inquisitions, and on top of it is an quite dull a read autobiography if your name isn't mentioned there of a scientific career. Those who have followed the falsehoods and exaggerated claims of uncertainties by the so-called skeptics (deniers) of climate science for the last ten years find little new info here, though the presentation of the relevant info is more accurate and thorough than is found elsewhere. A book for true politicians, lawyers and media people, somewhat for scientists, not so much for the ideologues and the supporters of centralized energy production. I'll give this a 4/5 since I prefer to read science fiction over science. Also I would have liked the references would have been in the end of every chapter, but this is a personal preference.

spring?

A graph from cryosphere today.

dreams

FOD enters dreamwolrd at james' empty blog
It's nice to hear others have climate related dreams too. I once dreamt I was beside a field with Tamino and Stoat (too grandiose, I know) planning how to plant some fruit trees since the partly submerged London had acquired the field for permaculture.
Please describe your dreams on the climate in the comment thread. I've had two others too, but that was the funkiest one yet.

in support of wikipedia

n/t