Travel is not only broadening, it's thickening

The licensed engineer, former scientist and language fanatic, tends to look at physical objects as having length, width and perhaps, thickness. Speaking of the human body, its length is called the height, width is largely dependent on bone structure, but if one thinks of the German excuse for not having dessert, "Er macht dicke", we see that a trip to Vienna may indeed make the torso thick. Thus, travel may greatly improve ones knowledge and broaden perspective, but one is well-advised to limit exposure to cream sauces, Belgian waffles and "Das Beste von der wurst"

The name is NOT the thing

I understand that General Motors is seriously requesting that their lowest price full-size car not be called a "Chevy any more, but the whole word, with adopted French pronunciation "Shev-ro-lay". One can somewhat sympathize or understand the thrust of this plea. Calling a boy who named James "Jimmy" is a well-known diminutive, emphasizing the boy's immaturity or lack of importance. GM shoould grow up and acknowledge Chevy's history; in 1955, they put a gasoline-hungry V-8 into some Chevrolet's and sent a shudder into the souls of Ford-lovers who began to lose drag-races. "My Chevy can take your old (Whatever) and day of the week gave no hint of minimizing the power of the GM product.

It is in the area of politics where the art of sloganeering achieves its most pernicious use to disguise real consequences. It is commonplace for Republicans to characterize Democrats as "Tax-and-Spend Liberals"; this implies that spending on highway buildup, the military or public education wii continue, financed by mortgaging more of the national treasure to China.

I guess I find that the deception of many without consequence which saddens me most is the practice of pregnant women who wear T-shirts with the abdomen emblazened, "It's a baby, not a choice." This implies that the choice to have unprotected sex has been sanctified by t rumping the entire gamut of unanswered questions: how will the unborn child be fed and otherwise cared for, educated in the human necessities to speak, bcome part of society, become part of society, work to continued feeding and growth to eventually pay taxes. Americans, like too many people of the world, need to be more aware of the consequences of their acts.

Late Mother’s Day thoughts

How do you celebrate Mother’s Day? Would your mother be proud to see you in a motorcycle caravan of 50-100 machines on I 80 just west of Lincoln NE on Mother’s Day Eve; the oncoming lane had more headlights than many funeral processions. I know the mother to whom I an (still) married would not be very thrilled to know our son was so involved. I am confident that outside of our observation he has been involved in many activities that would take us aback if we had timely knowledge. He has only admitted about two things that have caused us to shake our heads in retrospect. After an Ultimate (Frisbee) competition in Boulder, CO, a carload of athletes had 20 hours to get back to Santa Barbara via Santo Cruz. They needed to do a lot of 100 mph, so they agreed they would share the speeding fines. They got nailed once (not our son) in barren Nevada,of all places.

The other alarming incident (that got reported) came when he and buddies went surfing in the Sea of Japan with the waves whipped up by a distant typhoon. His board came floating in without him and the current girlfriend pleaded with his friends to paddle back out and look for him. Before she could convince them to go, he came swimming in. Later inspection of the board, which clobbered his head smartly enough to crack the board, showed hairs of his head imbedded in the crack.

` As those of you with daughters know, their exploits are less alarming. Ours is wanting to hear from us daily from the highway, lest she call out the Parent Police to check on our progress from our trek from San Francisco to the little finger of lower Michigan. We just found out this morning that the vaunted AT&T 3G network lacks coverage for most .of the state on Nebraska. Hope you had a happy Mother’s Day.

Rampant Immorelity!!

It's been a funny year, the locals say, but aren't they all? Cherry blossoms were pretty much gone

before our (the Californians) arrival a week or so into May. For this blogger, the harvesting of the local mushroom with French name "morels" has always been an existential thing. Many people are better at it than he. Still, neither he nor his helpmate have found one in two weeks. There may be fungus among us but they seem to be staying underground. However, those of us who would be standup comedians find some punchlines too good to pass up. Hence, our tital. Enjoy. Bon appetit even, if you find some.

To everything, there is a season

"Local conditions may vary". On Norwegian Independence Day. the Asparagus Goddess of Leelanau Township ventured into the field which could once have provided 20 pounds of produce at this stage of the year. A determined reconnaissance yielded 21 stalks total. "Another proof of global warming, we say". The simple-minded response is certainly satisfying. to wit: "If, as you say, the earth is warming up, why is the wather so cold, with several feet of new snow in the Rockies and floods other places?"
Nothing is simple, folks. Green-house gases in the atmosphere cause it to absorb a higher percentage of the sun's radiation. Averaging over the whole earth, including many acres of ocean without weather stations, it is warming up, providing the energy to produce violent results, such as tornadoes, typhoons and hailing taxicabs. (Beg pardon. the blogger could not resist a third grade joke) Thus, although an asparagus festival was held Sunday some 25 miles to the southwest, perhaps they shipped produce in from semitropical Southern Michigan.
A somewhat more enlightening expression than global warning might be "climate change". Unless we make substantial changes in the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the air. we may not see what we expect as an asparagus season, or smelt runs or the alewife plague. And unless we quit mortgaging our land to the Chinese, our grandchildren may curse the day we resolved to ignore the warning signs

Do you mean power or energy??

Now and then a person who can speak with authority should do it. This blog has entertained you(we hope) with chit-chat for more than half a year. It is time for the emeritus professor to say something worthwhile. It is also hoped that someone knowledgeable can clear one of his nagging doubts.

Setting the stage, consider the following: all night we leave on a CFE (compact fluorescent emitter) rated at 11 watts to help yours truly to find the bathroom without his glasses. Suppose he gets the recommended eight hours of rest; thus, the energy expenditure for the night light is 11 watts times 8 hours, or 88 watt-hours of electrical energy. It turns out that watt-hours are impractically small; we are charged for kilowatt hours, so we move the decimal point left three places and say we used 0.088 kwh. If we are billed 10 cents per kwh, our cost for the night light is less than a penny.

People who newly f ind out you are from California very quickly ask "What about all those earthquakes?" Okay, I have lived in Northern California for more than fifty years. In that time, I have felt about three shakes. About 1960, I was seated at my desk in the Hansen Labs and the floor felt like it was bucking up and down. I heard no more about it, so I guess it was not newsworthy. In the past year, I felt one jolt and the pendant hanging on the mirror was going click-click. I googled geological survey and they said it was near where my sister-in-law lives, 50 miles away. They had not felt anything. During the 1989 World Series, I was at my desk in Sacramento, preparing for my graduate lecture, and my tummy felt a little funny. It broke the Oakland Bay Bridge and postponed the A's humiliation of the Giants for a week. The quake epicenter was over 100 miles away but a number of my neighbors had tsunami's in their swimming pools that sloshed out half the water.

Now, a Cal Tech geophysicist named Richter invented "seismographs", which I understood to measure "intensity" of the quake. Newscasters try to speak of the "energy" using the Richter scale. If it is indeed "energy" that is quoted, there must be some way of factoring in the duration of the shaking. Somebody who knows, clue me in, that I may popularize it to my five readers.

Is God really jealous?

I remember that suggested in the Old Testament report of the gift of the Ten(15, if you are a Mel Brooks fan) Commandments. One result was the military campaign of Joshua, where the Israelites understood they were to slaughter every man,woman, child and cow in the "Promised Land". The result has been a thousands of years of bitterness we still see in the Mideast. Are we to believe that God does not love his whole creation and want us to live in his respect and peace our cocreatees? Maybe the idea of a Triune God, with the promise of the Holy Spirit, who communicates to all, including Buddhists, Muslims, common to many faiths, should be explored, respectfully of course. See, I am not being a deliberate heretic here, but if we loved all our neighbors, might there not be the new millenia of peasce on earth, good will to all? Anyway, this was not a revelation received on top of a mountain, but at about 15 feet abovote sea level on the wrong side of the San Andreas fault. Thus part of my faith is that I will not be aboard to fulfill Curt Gentry's prophecy that land to the west of the fault will slide into the Pacific. See, my love, not all Norwegian thoughts are dark!