Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
With the snow clouds gone, the snowscape was very bright last night from the nearly full moon. Here the moon sets during a very cold sunrise — 13 degrees. The photo was taken from the window of my radio room.
The same photo, converted to grayscale, with contrast increased.
It’s been snowing for about 20 hours. Here in Stokes County we have about 10 inches or more on the ground. On my deck, where the snow and rain pour down from the valley on my roof, the yardstick is showing a pile of snow 31 inches deep and growing.
Lily does not like the snow. She’ll go as far as the front porch, tiptoe around for a few minutes with a look of wonder and disgust on her face, and then demand to be let back in the house.
This has been a pretty good winter for replenishing the underground water aquifers. The nearest USGS measuring wells are in East Bend and Mocksville.
The moon will be full tonight. It will be the biggest full moon of the year. That’s because the moon’s orbit is elliptical, and the moon will be at the apogee of its orbit, about 30,000 miles closer to earth than at its perigee. According to Spaceweather.com, that’s makes the moon 14 percent wider and 30 percent brighter than lesser full moons.
Unfortunately the moon probably won’t be visible here. The sky is cloudy, and up to 16 inches of snow is forecast between now and Saturday night.
Today’s two sunspots: spaceweather.com
Much has been written in the last couple of years about how quiet the sun has been. We are just starting to emerge from the low part of the 11-year sunspot cycle. For months, there were no sunspots at all. Today there are two active sunspots. In another five years, this cycle will peak, and it’s during that peak period when, because the sun’s surface is heavily riled, the earth is particularly subject to big geomagnetic storms of the type that disrupt communications and even affect the power grid.
Just how much solar variance affects the earth’s climate is hotly disputed, but we do know that the 11-year sunspot cycles dramatically affect the amount of ionizing radiation (that is, high frequency radiation such as X-rays) that hits the earth’s ionosphere. It’s this process that causes the Northern Lights. The process also causes radio waves of certain frequencies to travel much farther.
Since we had two good sunspots today, I thought it would be a good time to fire up a ham radio and see who can hear me. I made quick and easy contact with EA1ABT in Spain (at 14.19175 Mhz) and CU2CR in the Azores Islands (at 14.198 Mhz).
All it takes is a 100-watt transmitter and a modest wire antenna hidden in the attic.
A recent experiment, which involved putting cat cams on 50 cats, found that indoor cats spend 22 percent of their time looking out windows and only 6 percent of their time sleeping.
That’s consistent with what my cat, Lily, does during the day if the weather is rainy and she wants to stay in. However, though she has a favorite window (my bed upstairs, where she can either sleep or look out the window), she moves from window to window, all around the house. I call this “patrolling.”
During the summer when the foliage is high, I rarely see her when she’s outside, and it’s not at all clear what she does. But, during the winter, I can see into the woods, and there are fewer hiding places, so I can watch from the windows and often see where she is and what she’s doing. Guess what. She patrols. Roughly, she makes big loops around the house, moving from point of interest to point of interest. Favorite places include the woodpiles (where she finds mice), the rock pile (where she also finds mice), the stream below the house (where I am pretty sure she fishes), and the woods (where she often climbs trees, just for fun).
I believe she seldom goes more than 100 yards from the house in any direction. She sometimes digs (for voles?) because she sometimes smells like fresh soil and moss when she comes indoors. All these are hunting behaviors, I think. Lily is a lucky cat, because she has a safe place for what cats instinctively do: solitary hunting. I have seen her with mice many times, but fortunately I’ve never seen her with a bird, though she has climbed on top of the bluebird houses a few times.
Wikipedia photos
Once upon a time many years ago, while looking up a word in an unabridged dictionary, I came across a word on a nearby page that jumped out at me, because it was a beautiful word that described a picturesque phenomenon. I resolved to remember the word, and I promptly forgot it. I do recall the definition. It was a word (or words?) describing something very particular: a beam of light, through an aperture, falling on mist.
For years and year I tried to refind this word, and I failed. Once upon a time, research tools were incredibly primitive — things such as Thesauruses and indexes in the backs of books. Now we have the Internet.
My frustrated attempts to photograph my gothic window, using only a camera with a bad lens that refuses to let its exposure be manually adjusted, made me realize that I’d never gone looking for this word on the Internet.
It was a quick and easy search. There is a scientific name for the phenomenon, the Tyndall Effect, used to describe the scattering of light when it falls on colloidal particles in suspension. A more common description is the two-word term “crepuscular rays,” which even has a Wikipedia entry.
It is possible that, at that early age, I had never encountered the word “crepuscular” before and so was impressed by the word. It is, certainly, a beautiful word. It comes from the Latin word for twilight, crepusculum.
People generally say that cats are nocturnal. I think it is more accurate to say that cats are crepuscular. My cat sleeps at night. But she goes wild at crepusculum, both morning and evening.
What would we do without the Internet? I plan a post soon on yet another unbelievable Internet resource: Google Books.
If “crepuscular ray” is the lost word(s), then here is what I would have seen that day long ago in the Miriam-Webster unabridged dictionary:
My previous post about the death of Fred Fragler, who hired me for my first job, got me all sentimental about analog communications technology. I mentioned the Associated Press Teletype machines and how it was the job of a newspaper copy boy to look after them. The Winston-Salem Journal had about, oh, eight of them. They made a lot of noise and were kept in their own room adjoining the newsroom.
Here’s a Google video that shows one running, and you can hear how it sounds.
The old Associated Press teletype network used a nationwide network of telephone lines leased from AT&T. Since this technology used telephone lines, it follows that its signal was something that could be carried over the telephone — sound. Sound, of course, can also be carried by radio. Ham radio operators still use this type of signal for communication. It’s radio teletype, which hams call RTTY. It, too, is sound. It sounds like this on the radio. Hams now use computers and computer sound cards to generate and decode this sound.
I’m still working on setting up my radio room here in the new house, and I don’t yet have a radio teletype system set up. When I was in San Francisco, though, I had confirmed (meaning the other side of the communication later sent an acknowledgement) radio teletype contacts with other RTTY operators New Zealand, Japan, the Galapagos, Spain, and Hawaii. Radio teletype actually is a very efficient mode of radio communications, almost as efficient as Morse code.
I’m amused by young’uns these days with their iPhones. “I can call New Zealand with my iPhone,” they might say. Sure they can. But the signal from their iPhone can carry at most for a few miles, then a corporate communication system picks up the data and hauls it to New Zealand. Whereas, in a radio teletype message from San Francisco to New Zealand, there is nothing between the two radios but the ionosphere.
Pieter Bruegel, 1565, during the Little Ice Age
Turf houses in Iceland
It is not commonly understood that the output of the sun goes through cycles. I, nerd that I am, didn’t appreciate this until I got my ham radio license and learned about the 11-year solar cycles that affect the propagation of high-frequency (1.8 Mhz – 30 Mhz) radio signals around the planet. But there are other cycles of the sun, maybe periodic, maybe more random, that have had a huge effect on human history.
The history of northern Europe, not to mention Iceland and Greenland, was greatly affected by climate changes thought to be related to changes in the sun’s output.
A new 11-year solar cycle should have begun by now, but it’s late. There have been 670 days without sunspots through June 2009.
A recent paper by scientists from the National Solar Observatory observes that there have been changes in the sun’s behavior that go back farther than the 11 years of the solar sunspot cycle, at least back to 1992. This is troubling, because if the trend continues, the solar situation would look more and more like the Maunder Minimum, which is blamed for the Little Ice Age in Europe, which lasted for hundreds of years, starting as early as the 13th century.
This is all very complicated, and the data is sketchy, but if you’re a weather watcher, and a climate watcher, as I am, then this is something you’ll want to read up on and keep an eye on.
If you do a Google search for “Virginia Foxx,” you’ll see that every time she has spoken on the House floor recently, she has embarrassed North Carolina’s Fifth District. It’s not just that she is ignorant and therefore almost always wrong. Or even that she repeats the vilest and most thoroughly debunked right-wing propaganda. It’s that she’s mean.
While GOP operatives and hate-radio hosts are dispatching mobs to shout down home-district town halls by Democratic representatives, Rep. Virginia Foxx isn’t even having a town hall. I called her Clemmons office to check her schedule. Sorry, nothing but a “telephone town hall,” which is of course a one-way affair. She talks, we listen. Watauga Watch reports that she’s only got fund-raisers on her summer schedule.
Lily, who is about nine months old now, has played outside and practiced her tree-climbing since she was a kitten. Her practice paid off this morning. A dog got her up a tree. I heard barking and ran outside with the broom. A nondescript dog I’d never seen before was bouncing around the tree, and Lily was about 20 feet up a slender, bent pine tree, holding on for dear life. I chased the dog off and made poor Lily wait while I got the camera to record her humiliation. I was afraid she’d be afraid to climb down, but she made a very well-controlled descent, first head-first, then tail first, and came to me with her fur ruffled to be petted.
I’ve always told her that there are boogers in the woods, but she doesn’t need to be told. She hears the boogers all the time, though this is the first time one ever came to get her.
Now I’m rethinking letting my chickens roam free. My new chicken house will be ready as early as next week, and I was hoping to get biddies in early April.
Safely down
