Cop Car's Beat

Stateside Travelogues

Although Dan Kalal's travelogues include some stateside travel; mostly, I go to his website to see his photos of his foreign travels. Not so for Bogie's (and her Wonderful Spouse's) travelogues. Their travels are always stateside (if one includes Canadian provinces as being stateside, that is!)

As the whole world (well...the little world that comprises my readers) should know by now, Bogie is the younger of Hunky Husband's and my two daughters, and she lives in New Hampshire. Having been the proud owner of various bikes (ummm...motorcycles), Bogie and/or her Wonderful Spouse have made various trips from which they return with photos to entertain those of us who stay at home. Even when they go by air/train/bus/car, they are apt to return with photos. Thus, if you have a hankering to see stateside travelogues, I encourage you to click on the Travel link on Bogieblog to access some really neat ones.

Later: I should also have included Bogie's Motorcycle category link, by which (she has reminded me) some of her travels may be accessed.

I cannot resist

I cannot resist posting a few more of Dan's photos from the same trip as in the previous posting.

I've been on a Moto Guzzi Stelvio on three of my previous four European trips, but there was a really nice improvement with this one. The fuel capacity has been increased to ~32 liters, which would make the trip all the easier for not having to worry about where the next petrol station would be. This model comes with some rugged looking saddle bags, but I wouldn't need them, so they were removed. I wouldn't be using a rear trunk, either. A single waterproof duffle bag works well for me.

Mandello del Lario. That's Nicola Arnaudo getting the Stelvio ready.

B165 is a toll road.

Krimml Falls, Austria. I believe this is the largest waterfall in Europe. In the photograph (below), the road is in the middle, but you can see the extent of the waterfall on the left. The cool mist was nice. This was a warm day for riding.

[BTW: I just realized that Dan's first posting was of a trip in December 1976; so, I'm thinking that Dan came to work at The Little Airplane Factory earlier that year. I'll ask him when I see him. CC]

Motorcycle Trip Reports

Since I have at least one or two readers who are motorcyclists, I've decided to add a friend's travelog website to a TypeList - For Fun & Enlightenment. (Having removed most of the links from that list, there is plenty of room.) The website is Motorcycle Trip Reports.

Back in the late 1970s or 1980, a fuzzy-faced "kid", straight out of college, joined the Structures Engineering unit of The Little Airplane Company, Single-Engine Division. Tall, thin, blond, and blue-eyed, he looked about 15 years old. Obviously, by now he looks 45 years old - for which I can vouch. What we didn't know at the time was that this bright young engineer had wanderlust. Now we know.

Many of us follow his (Dan Kalal's) travels. Until recently, I've followed only slightly. Now, with high-speed internet, I can follow religiously. Below is a sample from his latest trip - another trip to Europe - in which he visits his family's ancestral home in what is now the Czech Republic. Perhaps the sample will entice you to review some of Dan's travels. Although I won't show them, Dan includes a calendar with his travel itinerary and a map with his route marked. Altogether, he gives a delightful tour.

Czech Republic

 

I entered Bohemia at Strážný and then wandered around for more than I was planning. Pointing the bike along whatever roads happen to be going where you want works sometimes, but not so well this time.

Bedřich Smetana was from here? I hummed his tunes while walking.

 

 

 

 

Not sure what the words mean; I only hope I didn't do it. The Czech sign system is a good one. The number on the left is the road number (which you might be able to track), and the number on the right is the distance (in kilometers). The pointy end of the sign might be on the left, the right or even straight up.

 

[I'm betting that the sign with the large red circle, above, is announcing that a round-about is ahead. Anyone who knows? CC]

 

A Trabant! I did not see too many of these on the trip, but, in every case, they were slow. Cute car in a homely sort of way.

 

TypeList Cleanup

This morning, while awaiting the arrival of an electrician who is to install a new range hood, a new doorbell system, and new backyard floodlights, I have cleaned up one of my TypeLists - For Fun & Enlightenment. In doing so, I have checked out each of the links to items that remain. One of my favorites is The Particle Adventure. One page from that website follows. Perhaps the sample will entice you to follow the link.

Unsolved Mysteries - Extra dimensions

String theory and other new proposals require more than three space dimensions. These extra dimensions could be very small, which is why we don't see them. How can there be extra, smaller dimensions? Think about an acrobat and a flea on a tight rope. The acrobat can move forward and backward along the rope. But the flea can move forward and backward as well as side to side. If the flea keeps walking to one side, it goes around the rope and winds up where it started. So the acrobat has one dimension, and the flea has two dimensions, but one of these dimensions is a small closed loop. So the acrobat cannot detect any more than the one dimension of the rope, just as we can only see the world in three dimensions, even though it might well have many more. This is impossible to visualize, precisely because we can only visualize things in three dimensions!

More pavers and mulch

A bit over one year ago, after having the house painted, I took a photo of the house (below). If one looks at the corner of the driveway and street curb, it really looks untidy. That is because, the exposed aggragate edging that I had used in that area had been crumbled by our freeze/thaw cycles. Rain scattered the aggragate into the street, and people (never caught anyone at it, but I would surely have loved to) put out several cigarette butts per week in that area.

 
 
I finally figured out an approach to solving the problem and, in the last couple of weeks, have dug up the clay/sand/aggragate from the edge, replacing it with a fresh layer of sand and thick concrete pavers. We shall see how well my "solution" (below) works.

 
Note the bags of mulch that lay in front of the garage doors in this photo. I did get it all laid out yesterday - including fresh mulch around the "carpet-style" junipers in the foreground. Today, I must go buy eight more bags to complete refreshing the layer of mulch in the planting areas that line either side of our yard. Our landscaper is a company that is owned by Elegant Friend's son. One of his managers tried to get me to let them do the refreshing. I really would rather do that; but, they would have at least two guys spreading mulch and I would have an impossible task assuring that they pulled weeds, not flowers, before mulching. Doing it myself, I know what's being pulled. (Besides, I need the exercise. The mulch that they carry is an excellent grade of shredded cedar - that comes in 3-cubic-foot bags, rather than the 2-cubic-foot bags that the retail stores carry.)

I'm sad to report that the bluebirds seem to have abandoned the nest in the nesting box. When I checked it a couple of days ago, the five eggs were cool and wet. Had Mama Bluebird been brooding, the rain would have blown in on her and not wetted the eggs.

P.S. In the top photo, to the left of the orchid-colored iris, one may see a "weed" that is silhouetted against the driveway. That is a walnut tree, planted by a squirrel no doubt (we have big, old walnut trees in our woods.) That photo was taken 13 months ago. About one month ago, I potted up that walnut tree - plus two others that were similarly squirrel-planted in my planting beds. Dudette got one of the trees (HH and I took it up to her when we attended NG1's birthday party) and I plan to plant one back in the woods. When I offered the third tree to Elegant Friend, she declined.

One day later, I received an email from EF saying that her son would like to have the tree, if it was still available. I took the tree to the landscape company with me when I picked up the mulch, last week. Of course, I had to give EF's son (and his wife) a hard time about their owning a landscaping company but having a hard time coming by trees. The tree that they got is the one in the above photo. It would be the one, of the three trees, that would need the most TLC - and I knew that they knew how to give it! (The name of their company is Tendercare!)

Iconic

I'm writing this note, having composed the rest of this posting, to acknowledge that I have Joy's disease.

The other day, I heard a snippit of a radio program that implied that Facebook ® would be using facial recognition software to identify people who appeared in posted photos. (I don't recall - if I heard - to what use these identifications were to be put.) Almost immediately, I decided to replace the photo that I had been using on FB (the same as the one in the upper left corner of this blog) with an icon.

This is the icon that I chose to use - a caricature of me drawn by a friend at the Little Airplane Company.

 

A photo from the era proves that my friend caught the salient features in his caricature. Well...my jump boots are not fur lined, nor do they sport spurs...but, he got most of it right!

 

The certificate, from which the detail/icon was taken was presented to me by the Experimental Flight Test group when I left the Little Airplane Company in April of 1981.

 

An "Aha!" moment

You've probably all figured out by now that I am, to a degree, a word nut. Thus, it won't surprise you that a minor annoyance in life is when my well-educated friends write "choose" when they mean "chose" and "chose" when they mean "choose". A day or so ago, I had an "Aha!" moment in which it became clear to me that such friends have a really good reason for making the mental switch when they are writing (they never choose the wrong form of the verb when they are speaking!) It is due to one more irregularity in the English language.

From The New Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press 2005:

choose /chōōz/ >v. (past chose /chōz/; past part. chosen /chōzen/) [trans.]

But...from the same source:

lose /lōōz/ >v. (past and past part. lost /lôst; läst/) [trans.]

Suddenly I understand.

If lose is pronounced lōōz, why isn't chose pronounced chōōz? Since many of us think the words as we write/type them, it is easy to see how one would mentally confuse choose and chose.

Unfortunately, the dictionary insists that I choose to do a deed, today, just as I chose to do it, yesterday, and just as I may also have chosen to have done it the day before.

I feel better now...now that I have an explanation for the phenomenon. Why can we not have a regular language?

P.S. Were our language really regular, we wouldn't have people being tempted to use dove as the past tense of dive. They would, as we were taught in grade school, use dived, instead. (A dove is, after all, a bird!) Nor would we have people using hung instead of hanged when describing an execution. Ah, me. It must be time for me to get back to my yard work!

Some people!

Some people are slightly anal retentive. First, I want you to see a listing:

Electrician - Stove hood, door bell, back floodlights

HVAC - Service heat pump

Cable Provider - Work out details of high-speed internet

Garage door - Have gears replaced in CC's garage door opener

Mail - June 2011 estimated Federal & State Taxes

Want to know where it came from? Well, the evening before Hunky Husband left for Joplin, he handed me that list. Really! Now, I always make myself a list of things to get done while HH is out from under foot; but, he thinks I need help with the list?! (There are several things on my list that are not on HH's, but only two things on HH's, door bell and high-speed internet, were not on mine.) Adding insult to injury, the list was accompanied by a calendar sheet for June 2011 with every fourth day marked "cut grass" and every Thursday marked "trash" or "trash+recycle". My chin still hurts from hitting the floor when my jaw dropped at being handed the two pieces of paper. Seriously!

Oh...I nearly forgot. At the bottom of the calendar sheet are the instructions, "If going out of town - stop mail, stop papers, ask neighbor to get in weird Wednesday paper." Wait'll I hand him my bill when he gets back!

Oh, well. I am, as always, getting a lot done while HH is out of town. Today's sigh of relief is for having cleaned out the refrigerator. This is what our refrigerator looks like when it has been freshly cleaned.

 
Actually, I won't say a word to HH about his lists and schedules when he gets home. I have something really evil in mind. In payment, he will be subjected to a mind game about which I won't even feel guilty.

A couple of days ago, I reversed the swing on a couple of the lower cabinet doors in the kitchen. When/if he says anything I will merely say, "That's the way the cabinet people hung those doors!" What I won't remind him is that I had had the cabinet people re-hang the doors to open the opposite way. Now that I've used them for 11.5 years, I've decided to try the doors their way!

P.S. I wish that our refrigerator looked as my refrigerator did when I lived in Albuquerque. I always had apples and cheddar cheese in that refrigerator; but, usually, not much else. That was great!

Thoughts on global population

In 2000, Matthew Simmons did a white paper revisiting The Limits to Growth. Simmons wrote:

In the early 1970's, a book was published entitled, The Limits To Growth, a report of the Club of Rome's project on the predicament of mankind. Its conclusions were stunning. It was ultimately published in 30 languages and sold over 30 million copies. According to a sophisticated MIT computer model, the world would ultimately run out of many key resources. These limits would become the "ultimate" predicament to mankind.

The website by Simmons provides a fascinating overview of the subject, even if it is 11 years old! I recommend that you read it.

Nearly 40 years ago, while in graduate school, one of the undergraduate courses that I took to give me a better background in engineering was system dynamics. As my project for the course, I took on a study of global population as a function of five variables (food supply and air pollution, for instance). The computer program (run on a mainframe, of course) had been designed by a bunch of MIT folks (reputedly not the least intelligent folks in the world) and had been used in the study reported in The Limits to Growth. I used the MIT computer program, making tweaks of my own.

My study "confirmed" (a rather cheeky claim!) that global population will peak in approximately the year 2020 and will rapidly collapse to near-zero. One thing that was not included in the model, as I recall, was technological progress. I assume it was omitted because the MIT group had no better luck than did I in figuring out how to model it. Perhaps someone has been able to do that in the past 40 years.

What brings the subject up at all is that I found the information, below, at SlashDot.

Have We Reached Maximum Sustainable Population Size? 798

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 08, @06:18PM
from the a-little-elbow-room dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Pulitzer prize winning writer Thomas Friedman writes that in few years we may be looking back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? 'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability.' According to the Global Footprint Network we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth's resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. 'Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,' says Paul Gilding. 'We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we're not stupid.'"

The highs of life

Yesterday afternoon was spent in the company of eight children under age 6 and 13 adults ages 25-80, attending a party to celebrate our elder great-grandson's (NG1's) having reached age one and to show off our younger great grandson (NG2). We had a wonderful time. By the end of lunch, NG1 was copiously smeared from head to toe with chocolate frosting from his cupcake. Of course, with those icky hands he reached out to pat his little brother's head. As custodian, for the moment, of NG2, I let the patting take place. Kids are washable after all!