Polar Vortex

Stratospheric Polar Vortex
The stratospheric polar vortex splitting apart, bringing freezing weather to mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere for the next month. That dates on the video cover the month of February of this year.

Sign of the Times

Say What?

Yes, indeedy, that's what it says.

Grecian Formula Leads to Gray Hair

Showed up in True Detective on the back of the WSJ.

Exercise Arctic Tiger

Aircraft painters are getting wild these days.

Crazy Italians

Ducati makes high performance motorcycles. They are to bikes like Ferrari is to cars. They do things no one else would dream of doing, like using a whole bunch of bevel gears to drive the valves in their engine (picture). Note that the pair of gears in the center are your normal 45 degree bevel, but the angle of the three gears around the upper and right sides are more like half that, and helical cut to boot. Not something you are going to make in your high school shop class, if your high school had a shop class.

Hat tip to Stu, who posted a story about Tornax motorcycles, which switched from English JAP engines to German ILO engines after the Nazi's came to power. JAP I had heard of, but not ILO, so I had to go look it up, whereupon I stumbled across an ad for Phil Aynseley Photography, which led to this photo of the timing gears of a 1973 Ducati 750 Sport.

Seamount

A seamount if basically an underwater mountain. If it is tall enough to break the surface of the ocean we call it an island.

Tam got me started on this one. She's talking about geology and islands, which leads to the Great Meteor Seamount, which make me wonder how it got it's name. Did a meteor fall into sea nearby? Did someone see a meteor about the same time as they discovered this lump in the ocean floor? No, it was named after the ship that discovered it in the early 20th Century: the Meteor. More poking around leads to this really cool sonar recording of the Nashville Seamount, which is about 1700 miles to the WNW.

Note that the scales along both the X and Y axis are not in distance as you might expect, but in time. The horizontal axis is marked in hours of the ship's travel time. Each division of the horizontal scale is about 12 miles. The vertical axis is marked in the number of seconds it takes sound to make a round trip to that depth.

The speed of sound in seawater is about 1560 m/s (meters per second) which is not quite one mile per second. That is about four times as fast as it is in air. Since each division of the vertical scale represents one second, and we are talking about round trip time, this means the distance between index marks on the vertical scale is about one-half mile. The vertical scale is expanded relative to the horizontal scale by a factor of about 24 to one.

The difference between the top of the seamount and the base is a little over 4 intervals. At one-half mile per interval means this seamount is sticking up something more than two miles (or 10,000 feet) from the bottom of the ocean floor. I guesstimate the length of the rise is about one hour, or 20 kilometers, or about 12 miles. Which means the average slope of this underwater mountain is about one foot of rise for every six feet of travel.

Techron

I've been hearing about "Chevron with Techron" for like forever. I figured Techron was just a name they came up with for their own particular flavor of jungle joy juice. But today I'm driving down to Eugene and I see a billboard advertising "Texaco with Techron", which really surprised me. Why would Texaco use a Chevron brand name? Could it be that they are actually the same company? Oh. They are. That's why.

Boat Ride

While I was in Fort Madison (Iowa) Andy & I took his boat out for a cruise on the Mississippi. They have a really big pivot bridge there. Fortunately, if we take the antennae down we are low enough to slide under it without them having to open it up.

We went up the river about five or six miles and found a little inlet to hide out it. We turned off the motor and I took a nap. When I woke up we were up against the shore. Andy told me we had drifted up and down the river a couple of hundred yards in each direction. The current wasn't very strong where we were, and the breeze was blowing upstream, so the current would carry us down, and then the breeze would blow us back up.

Andy's New Boat

My brother Andy got himself a new boat. New to him anyway. Since he lives about 3 blocks from the Mississippi River, it kind of makes sense to have a boat. The boat is operational, but like all boats, there are a bunch of little things that need to be fixed. He's going to be busy. 1970 SeaGoing Houseboat. 32 feet long, Hardwood floors, stainless steel fridge, air conditioner/heater, sleeps 6, Chrysler Inline 6 engine, new plastic gas tank. The guy who was selling it put up a very fancy website using Adobe Flash and something called Slideshow Pro. I tried to extract the photos from this, but after a couple of hours wandering around on the net, downloading flash decompilers and playing with them, I gave up. Slideshow Pro added another layer of obfuscation that was just too much trouble, so I used my good old stand-bys, Print Screen and MS-Paint to capture the photos. It was a bit tedious cutting the images I wanted from the print screen image, but it got the job done in a predictable manner.

Preikestolen, Norway

Stolen from Marty North & Greenfield Park. Funny, I don't remember going to Norway. I swear the guy in the blue jacket sitting on the edge looks like me.