2020 Hindsight

June Gloom due to last through July

Chalk it up to something in the ocean called "Pacific Decadal Oscillation." And since this is Love JPL Day here at 2020Hindsight, there IS a JPL connection. Those smart boys n girls on the hill study the ocean, they do.

"We're going back to the phase where the ocean is cooler, so we're getting less rain, cooler weather and more fog,' said JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert.

"On average we're going to be one to three degrees below normal in terms of temperature (this summer), and if it's true to form, the 'June gloom' will linger into July and maybe even some days in August,' Patzert said.

Well, I'll save some bucks during air-conditioner season.

It's about damn time!

I'm reading Dava Sobel's book, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. The Lone Genius is John Harrison. The time was the 1700s. Navigation at sea was a problem, since there was no reliable way to know how far east or west you were. Harrison invented the Chronometer, an extremely accurate clock that kept Home time, which would be compared to local time. Knowing the two times allowed a ship to know its east-west location.

Harrison's four Chronometers, (L-R) H1, H2, H3, H4 (images from the National Maritime Museum )

A pertient quote:

One would imagine that Harrison grew up well aware of the longitude problem--just as any alert schoolchild nowadays knows that cancer cries out for a cure and that there's no good way to get rid of nuclear waste

(Somehow that quote gives me hope for the seemingly-impossible problems of our day. Longitude was once impossible, now it's so obvious.)

I'm still on the early parts of the book, and am web-surfing to augment what I'm reading. Harrison began as a carpenter, and built his first clocks from wood. He used certain woods that would grease themselves. Here's some background info on Lignum Vitae and how to cut it across the grain so that it will naturally supply its own lubrication.

The Brocklesby tower clock built from wood has been running continuously for nearly 300 years (with a brief break for refurbishing). I'm trying to find a picture of it. Maybe this page has one (I can't tell).

Other web resources:

The Harrison Initiative, a site devoted to promoting tourism to Harrison's hometown area by re-creating his workshop and an exhibition.

The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, London. The name of the craft guild of clockmakers in London. What a fabulous name! Don't know who's worshipping whom, but I may appropriate parts of it (The Worshipful Company of Writers, The Worshipful Company of Swing Dancers, The Worshipful Company of Latin Jazz. Applicable in many situations.)

Evidence for dinosaur extinction by massive meteor

In checking out the JPL site for the previous post, I noticed this: The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission earth maps reveal smoking gun evidence of a meteor crater on the Yucatan peninsula.

[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "pictureRef" hasn't been defined.]

Most scientists now agree it's the "smoking gun" -- evidence that a huge asteroid or comet indeed crashed into Earth's surface 65 million years ago causing the extinction of more than 70 percent of the living species on the planet, including the dinosaurs.

...Now researchers are getting their first look at detailed, three-dimensional topographical data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. "This new image gives us both corroboration of what we expected and also shows up things we haven't seen before," says Kinsland. "We'll be working to get as much out of the data as possible. Anything we learn at the surface tells us more about the buried crater."

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission mapped the world in 11 days (Feb. 2000) from the Space Shuttle Endeavor using a kind of stereo radar. It's the first time that realiable elevation maps have been made of tropical areas (such as Central America) since cloud cover's pretty constant and previous mapping methods have relied on visual access. Radar can "see" through clouds.

Having a cow

Do you think Dr. Pepper will be interested in the cow genome project? In the spirit of raging hormones: raging cow genomes. Or something like that.

NPR goes to Ground Ze--- uh, Trinity Site

Yesterday NPR's Morning Edition had a report about the Trinity Test Site at White Sands Missile Range. Here's NPR's report and additional links of a visit to the first Ground Zero last October.

I went two years previous, October 7 2000, precisely one month before the presidential election. In addition to wondering about what the people there saw, and shooting lots of pictures of the site, and overall curiosity about the entrance of the human race into the atomic age, I had a sense of foreboding: In one month the nation will elect someone who has the authority to 'push the button.'

And on election day, I was reading from Rhode's book The Making of the Atomic Bomb and shared a particularly salient quote on this blog. Strange to look back on it that way.

It was cool listening to Alex Chadwick describe the site, and being able to picture it from memory rather than conjuring up the images. One person he interviewed talked of coming to see the Trinity Test Site as a way to understand something about the "weapons of mass destruction" that are so much a part of the news.

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