Category Archives: natural-world

Cold Pack

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Mark Twain provides a disclaimer in the introduction to “The American Claimant”

No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather. It being the first attempt of the kind in fictitious literature, it may prove a failure, but it seemed worth the while of some dare-devil person to try it, and the author was in just the mood.

Many a reader who wanted to read a tale through was not able to do it because of delays on account of the weather. Nothing breaks up an author’s progress like having to stop every few pages to fuss-up the weather. Thus it is plain that persistent intrusions of weather are bad for both reader and author.

Of course weather is necessary to a narrative of human experience. That is conceded. But it ought to be put where it will not be in the way; where it will not interrupt the flow of the narrative. And it ought to be the ablest weather that can be had, not ignorant, poor-quality, amateur weather. Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article of it. The present author can do only a few trifling ordinary kinds of weather, and he cannot do those very good. So it has seemed wisest to borrow such weather as is necessary for the book from qualified and recognized experts-giving credit, of course. This weather will be found over in the back part of the book, out of the way. See Appendix. The reader is requested to turn over and help himself from time to time as he goes along.

I, on other hands, will get right to the weather.  It is a damn sight too hot here.  They plan for tomorrow to be worse.  On Sunday I had to sit in the 95F degree sun for a few hours in celebration of one of my off spring’s graduation.  The heat was compounded by numerous cliche sightings: “the best years of your life”, “life’s journey”,  and uncountable mentions of dreams, and potential.

The police department provided an honor guard at one point in full dress dark heavy uniforms.  This got me wondering if they have those magical cooling vests used by  athletic  mascots.  I like the idea of extremely local heating/cooling; and I got to wondering if they make an  analogous  vest for motorcycle riders based on the principle of a swamp cooler.  This is a step in that direction.  We had brought along some blocks of ices, frozen into 2 litter bottles, which we kept on our laps.  It’s amazing how much you can cool the body if you can get your hands cold.

This morning my laptop decided it was hot and it disabled one of the processors.  I have this cute little MacBook Air now, and it transmits more heat to front of than the old machine.  So I broke out the ice pack.  I love this trick.  I keep these ice packs in the freezer, and when the machine get too hot, or the fan starts to bug me, I slip one under the machine.  The best part, I discover, that with this new machine the chill runs thru the machine and keeps my hand cooled.  That’s great.

Oh, and note that this trick demands a lap desk.  We have two schemes.  One is to make the lap desk out of foam core board.  The other is to use this amazing stiff 1 inch think  corrugated  cardboard I picked out of a dumpster at MIT.

Stay cool!

Dujiangyan Earthquake

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This posting is a place for me to collect stuff about the horrible earthquake in China.

Nearly a million people live in Dujiangyan, which is inside the severe shaking zone. The irrigation system that starts there dates back to 250BC. I wonder about the dams.
Good, professional material about landslides, he estimates 50K square kilometers affected by landslides! This area appears to have a thousand people per kilometer.

Events like (and the cyclone in Burma) create a media vaccum – who get’s the blame. In Burma the dicators seem to be getting the blame, rather than say global warming. But for now it’s unclear what will step into the void, if anything.

While it is interesting to contrast the richer telecommunications in China to that in Burma I just want to say I found this pretty tasteless.

Update: ‘”extremely dangerous” cracks in the Zipingpu Dam upriver from the earthquake-hit city of Dujiangyan…’  Photo’s of this dam are here, and here.  It is 50 stories high.  This is really frightening, a million people?  The province’s irrigation system?

Four Million

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Four to six million people live in Yangon, aka Rangoon.  The recent cyclone swept away a lot of land, the photos below show that the city is now surrounded by water.  Of course lots of people lived on all the rest of that land.  Meanwhile scientists are a lot more confident that global warming is increasing the intensity and number of hurricanes/cyclones/et. al.

myanmar_tmo_2008126l.jpg

Via NASA

Power Spikes

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072502triglight2.jpgEnergy Storage is a means to smooth out intermittent power supplies or demands. It lets you shift the power from one time period to another. It lets you create a distribution system which sized for average load rather than peak load. The more isolated your power system the more you need all these. The electric power industry calls isolated systems island grids.

The book I’m reading describes an island with abundant power, via hydro, but lousy power due to local industry’s intermittent and high power requirements. So lousy that they were importing fuel to run generators just to raise that quality. In that case fly wheels were the solution. There are a few subway systems that take the power spikes from breaking trains and store them into flywheels to put back into the system when the next train starts up. There’s a huge flywheel at a mine in Alaska that buffers 5 megawatts of power every few minutes as a drag line they have jerks about.

Thinking about power spikes got be thinking about extreme cases. That’s natural for me since I presume that most sources of supply and demand have a very skewed distribution. For example the book includes an example of capturing power spikes from high wind gusts (which are quite skewed) by using fly wheels on an island off the coast of Japan. I wonder how large a spike that system can grab before it let’s it pass. Presumably it isn’t designed to absorb abundant energy from the few huge storms the island probably experiences every year. So there are power spikes the system is designed to survive rather than harvest. Which given the nature of highly skewed distributions means that a lot of the power goes untapped. Your typical wind power system harvests only the long tail of the wind, but not the elite wind.

So I got to wondering about lightning strikes. There is some great nutter material on the web about that. For example at the always amusing site “half bakery” there is a suggestion to running the lightning into an underground cavern and using it to melt tungsten. I love all these crazy ideas; particularly one that mix together other enthusiasms: kites, space elevators, or super conductors.

Poking around looking at these amusing ideas led me to this outrageous gimmick: a solution to an age old problem, the tendency for lightning to never strike twice in the same place.  Lightning rockets! You shoot a rocket into the storm trailing behind it either a wire or a conductive smoke trail. That’s fun to think about, but it’s much more fun to watch the short video!.

Sidr v.s. Bangladesh

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hurricanesidrtrack.pngThis is horrible. Tropical Cyclone Sidr is forecast to hit the low lying and extremely densely populated regions of Bangladesh. The track shown at right will bring the worst, right side, of the storm over the area. The storm is currently a category 4, and is forecast to weaken a bit before striking.

This is an amazingly densely populated region. The next map shows the low lying areas in reds, and those over 10 meters above sea level in green. The deepest colored areas have over a thousand people per square kilometer. Dhaka, the urban center here, holds 12 million people.
This next chart shows the forecasted storm surge, i.e. the water pushed in front of the storm. It’s small but the only comfort to be had is the storm surge isn’t 10 meters, but only 4-5.populationdensitybanglidesh.png

stormsurge.png

This is extremely similar to the cyclone in 1970 that killed a half a million people, lead to a civil war, and the founding of Bangladesh (formerly part of Pakistan).

Finally this next map shows the population of West Bengal, the area of India that borders Bangladesh. This area includes Kolkata, the planet’s eight largest urban area (14 Million people).  The next map is like the the one above, but for West Bengal, with the outlined area showing Kolkata.
populationwestbengal.png

populationdensitywestbengal.png

DTR

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I think I’ve found the most evil journal in the university library. The Journal of Consumer Research is marketing’s DARPA, the place where new weapons in are developed for sales and marketing. There are plenty of self help airplane books for salesmen, like Sales Closing for Dummies, or Sig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale. What you get over in the Journal of Consumer Research is guys in white coats throwing around psychology jargon like mad scientists. For example: “Disruption should impede closure and motivate consumers high in NFCC to seek clarifying information that facilitates the ablity to reach closure quickly.”

The article that drew me in was on a little trick of the trade known as DTR, or Disrupt and Reframe. This gimmick works by first confusing the buyer and then re framing it to be less confusing. For example:

“The price of these note cards is 300 pennies.” This disruption was followed by the reframing: “That’s $3. It’s a bargain.” .. compliance rates ranged from 65% to 90% … compared to only 25% to 50% …”

While I love the use of the word “compliance” the take away is that 2-3 times more junk get’s sold if you bewilder your customers.

That mnemonic above NFCC refers to a trait known as need for cognitive closure. People with very high or very low NFCC are a bit rash. Folks with very high NFCC will rush to pin an explanation to a mystery; and then cling tightly to it going forward. Folks with very low NFCC leave everything open to further assessment.

It is but one of a slew of traits that psychologists have tests to measure, IQ probably being the most famous. The traits give rise to metrics, and the metrics can then be used to forecast patterns of behavior. It’s usually less accurate than predicting the weather with a barometer, but certainly more accurate than throwing dice. Puzzling out new metrics like this is one of the ways the field of psychology moves forward. It’s good if the metrics are independent much the way wind and temperature are better than wind and wind-chill. So it is standard practice to see if metric A is correlated with metric B. For example NFCC is not highly correlated with intelligence.

The psychologist, not a marketing guy, that invented NFCC has two other metrics that I found thought provoking. He points out that when solving a problem you can assess your options or you can get down to work. Presumably for a high stakes problem you’d be well advised do lots of both, but he suspects that people don’t. So he sought out a metric that would score people’s tendency to assess; and a second metric that would score their tendency to act.

One of the reasons that DTR works is that it exhausts the buyer’s willingness to assess the purchases, and that helps to move him into the acting phase.

To me the interesting thing about all this is that is suggests that many other persuasion techniques might be better framed into these terms. For example the usual explanation for why vendors like prices like $1.97 is that innumerate buyers think ‘Ah, a dollar” rather than “Ah, two dollars,” discussed here (pdf). I, now, think that’s wrong. The functional purpose of that pricing technique is to inflict a DTR attack on the buyer.