Super Shows

I am a big Superhero fan, well not really.  I am was not into e comics.  I was not into the backstories. And I am really only concerned about Superman.  It was the first movie that I had ever seen.  I think I only s that because my parents felt guilty for not taking me to see Star Wars the year previous.  That does not matter, because as first movies go, Superman is one of the best.  Superman is more worth as a role model than any of the Star Wars characters.

So when there was a Superman reboot years ago, I was all over it.  The Smallville that I claim to be from is way smaller than the town in the television show Smallville.  The people in it are smaller too, they have smaller minds and shorter views.  Well truthfully, most people in the world have smaller minds and shorter views.  But the reboot of Superman, Smallville, could not be that way.

And it wasn't.  The plot lines were stretched a bit the believability was extended, the lead actors too pretty and too many little perfections.  But there was a good plot device the meteors.  The kryptonite that was making people Super, well making teenagers Super and teenagers at the same time.  Great says every parent ever.  The plots were mostly about mutants and teenage issues.  The writing took care of itself, because it was not real world issues.  It was pure fantasy and pure fun, because everyone knew how the story ends.  There was the introduction of all the super villains and the audience knew that they were villains, but did they have to be bad?  Did the good guys have to be good?  Was this Super 90201?  And now it was not.  The show knew what it was and what it wasn't.  It was the story of Superman and it was not a crime series.  It did not lie to itself.

There were year between the end of Smallville and the start of the next Superhero television show.  Hollywood writers are bad, there is no other way to put it.  They are not used to writing stories anymore.  The decade and more of Reality TV has dulled their dying trade.  No one is not saying that reality TV is not scripted, but the writing is basic and about creating human conflict.  The only writing is done on the various CSI shows, which I don't watch, ever.  And it shows.  If you are going to write story lines that use the real world as a backdrop, it would be better that the writing be a step above minimum.  It would be good if they have a little scientific accuracy.  That they don't have scientific accuracy shows that they are sloppy and not interested in believability.

Last week I started watching television again.  I had been watching Doctor Who, but I have been increasingly been disgusted in the scientific inaccuracies in it.  Sure, Doctor Who has a perfect excuse of having a sufficiently advanced technology that would appear to be magic, but lately things have been being written that defies the logic of the overall story lines.  Bad Doctor.  So I started branching out.

I started watching the latest iteration of The Flash.  It is fun.  It is like Smallville, a Super hero with Super villains and no attempt to explain it because it IS magic and magic does not exist.  And like the original Flash story, it is fun and uplifting.  No problems yet, I will continue to watch.  Whoa, what is this, he is talking to another Marvel comic hero, the Green Arrow, is there another show?

So I sought it out, it took half a minute to do the google search, green arrow tv, done = Arrow.  And then I binged on the first season.  Apparently the Queens live in Lex Luther's house.  I am fine with that, kudos Vancouver netting another super hero series.  Lots of great settings to film in that fine city and a huge rainforest to work with.  But the writing, it sucks.  The casting sucks too. Smallville standard here.  The teenagers looked like teenagers.  Quick check here, thank you Google and IMDB, three of the four friends who were supposed to be teenagers, were in fact teenagers and they looked like teenagers too.  None of the cast of arrow was.  Thea Queen was supposed to be a teenager, but she did not look the part.  Fine that is minor, I can live with it.  

Then the writers started going all CSI and throwing jargon into the stories, jargon that means something, but the writers just through it in because they had a thesaurus and it sounded scientific.  How long does it take to do a Google search?  Less time than it takes to open a thesaurus and look up a synonym for Longshoreman.  Perhaps, they did use the Internet thesaurus, but they did not look further than stevedore.  If they had they would know that it is a word that not used in North America.  Settings people, why complicate plots by confusing your audience.

Science.  There was a fire and someone was murdering firefighters by spraying accelerants on them and burning them to death, cool story idea, but then the writers wrote that the fire was burning at 200° and the fire fighters burned at 700°.  Am I pedantic, probably, but would not a quick google search have been in order to find out how hot fires get?  A small merry crackling fire in your fireplace, or in your campfire reaches temperatures in excess of 800°F.  This is an American show so I assume that the quoted temperatures were in Fahrenheit, so most watchers would understand it.  I learned that little factoid in grade nine science, the minimum level of science you need in Ontario.  

So I am saying that the writers like using scientific words to make things appear realistic, but can't do the minimum research to make their plots accurate.  Poor casting, poor acting, lousy scripts; I watched the season because I am OCD.  Acting, I did not mention that.  The lead, Oliver Queen was cast because he looks good without his shirt on, we know this because he does not wear his shirt a lot every episode.  The feats of strength that were shown were just that, feats.  I am not jealous, the thing he did with the chain looped over a pulley attached to four cinder blocks that he used as a weight to lift - I could do that.  A pulley doubles the amount of weight you can lift, the chain which was heavier than the blocks was not being lifted per se, it was counter balanced by the chain on the other side of the pulley.  And since there was more chain on his side, it may have been countering some of the weight of the blocks.  So lifting four blocks on a pulley is like lifting two with your bare hands, and that is not a real feat of strength.  It is just theatrics.  Hey it is good theatrics, but it is the type of theatrics he needs to do to avoid acting, which he can't do.  He is not believable.

John Barrowman, now how can you forget him. He dose not make a good villain because, well he does bad well.  It is the writing.  It says that he is still in the series, so I have to watch more to see how he comes back.  Captain Jack.

Gotham, is a crime story.  It is about the players before they become who they were in all the movies centered around Jim Gordon, rookie detective and War Hero.  The corruption in Gotham is rife and the criminals are, the good guys are… well there it is complicated.  Gotham is Metropolis's darker brother, and the childhood of the Dark Knight is a counter to Clark Kent's sunny childhood.  Much like Smallville the children in it are in fact children.  Bruce Wayne is played by a 13 year old, not an 11 year old, but who can tell.  Selina Kyle is played by a 15 year old.  My point is, these characters are children. They do the job well.  And the story, centering around the cop who plays second fiddle in all the stories to Batman and the numerous murderous villains is fresh.

Four Hero stories to follow for my Superman OCD.  Though I don't recommend  Arrow, I will continue to watch.

Did I forget Agents of Shield?  Yes I did.  This is a really cool novel approach to TV.  It is just a skin to a larger story.  There are the Avenger Movies and the movies that contain Avengers, like Thor, Ironman, the Hulk, and many more.  Agents of Shield is the background and the tie in.  There are characters that bridge the gap and there are back stories in the television experience that are missing from the movies.  There are cross genera complications.  And this makes this show better than any other super hero show out there, because you are going to get more out of it than the others shows.  If you watch the big screen you will get the story, if you watch the small screen you will get the story.  If you watch both you will see the whole story.  When the Thor movie came out, Shield was unprepared, because they WERE unprepared and the TV show was playing clean up.  When Captain America movie came out, the lead up to the betrayal was the theme of the shows and when Fury went missing it had to pick up the pieces.  The plots are connected, and there will be more story bridges.

Five Super Hero shows.

We need Wonder Woman next . . ..  Wait is there a young X-Men out there?

Race and Genetics

I  recently listened to a criticism of a book called "Troublesome Inheritance."  the podcast that I heard this criticism was called "Science for the People."  it brought up a number of interesting problems with today's statute of scientific literacy of its people and its journalists.  Most people's science knowledge ends with the minimal requirement that they had in high school, or at best that degree that science infringes on their chosen career, which is very small.  Indeed in my current career, working in a Garden Centre, most workers know next to nothing of the biological science that they deal with on any given day; many of them actually express things that contradict the current science of plants with great authority.

People with this token understanding of scientific words and jargon often seek others to explain the concepts of science to them in words that they understand.  But the problem with this model is that often the people explaining the science to the lay people do not understand the science themselves and just give the scientific headlines a pass.  Another problem with science journalists is that the publications that they work for have policies that necessarily disrupt the communication of the scientific ideas.  How do you express scientific language to readers of publications when the publications are geared to readers with a grade five education.  The answer is that you can't.  You can't use the scientific jargon because it does not translate.  Keys example is the word theory.  At the grade five level of understanding the word theory means an idea that has not been adequately explained or has little proof; a guess at best.  But a Scientific Theory actually means much closer to the opposite, it is an idea that has been rigorously tested and proven to all tests that have been provided.  The Theory of Evolution by example is more ironclad than the Theory of Gravity, yet one is never in doubt and the other is often derided as false.

In the book Troublesome Inheritance the author collates several scientific papers to prove a point and express the authors ideas.  He writes in a very clear and easily understood way that the common lay person can understand and people are easily brought around to his way of thinking because of his writing style.  And he is completely misrepresenting the science and the entire premise of the story he tells is not backed up by the science, at all.  The ideas that he presents are true but the conclusions he reaches are false.   You see the book he writes is another book that claims that there are Races within humanity and one is superior to the others and that Race is his.  He uses simplistic interpretations of science to prove his points which is a little better than the scientists in the 1950s that used penis size to show that the white race was the better Race.

There are Races.  But they are more cultural and linguistically defined than defined by genetics.  There are appearance markers that people use to suggest that there are racial lines.  Indians live on the Indian subcontinent, have brown skin and straight black hair.  Africans live on Africa and have brown skin and curled black hair.  Caucasians have pale skin and a variety of hair colour and are from Europe.  And all of this is true and a load of crap.  Persians live between India and Arabia, they share many of the same traits as both 'Race'.  Turks are between Arabia and Europe and they share many of the same traits.  A Turk closer to Arabia looks more Arab but is still not Arabic, and a Turk closer to Europe shares more traits with Europeans but is still not European.  The Pure German Aryan was a fiction in Hitler's day as it is today and when there were an Aryan People.  People fuck around and there is no homogeneous group of people any where.  

Okay that is an over simplification.  There are people that have been separated from other people for so long as to have become a separate race, but these are far and few between.  Isolated people will take on similar traits to other people within their isolated area but they have to be separated from the people outside their area for many years for them to be racially divergent.  There are examples all over the world.  The people of Madagascar where thought to be Polynesian and with a few African descendants, separated from the rest of the world for a thousand of more years.  The Australian Aborigines may have been isolated for forty thousand years like some people claim, but this does not hold much water given the Polynesians and Indonesians were both seafaring groups for so long and Australia is really not that far from other cultures.  New Zealand might have a better claim if it were not all the trade routes the Polynesians used.  The Bering Land bridge may have cut off the Natives of North America, but not from each other.  Self sufficient groups within jungles might have more claim to isolation.  Self restricting groups like Jews might claim to be separate racial ness, but given that rape is so common act of invading people's around the world, many of these purity claims are unlikely.

The only way that you can get true Race is through isolation for a long time, but you can get it from insulation for a long time.  Insulation is the way that most of humanity's Races came about.  People for the longest time did not travel far from where they were born, could not travel.  Often they would marry people from within the same village or from one next door and mixing of genetics would only occur very short ranged.  After a hundred generations the people of one village would more closely resemble the people of a neighbouring village than one ten villages away and them mor than one a hundred villages away.  That would be an example of spatial isolation.

There are other types of isolation, language isolation where genes only mix within the same language.  Religious isolation where only the genetics of a particular religion mix together.  Social isolation, where a certain social stratum only mix together, like the European nobility.  There are many ways that humanity has isolated itself that can cause distinct differences between ourselves.  But the variation is really only minor.

There was a genetic study done a few years ago that was used to determine how many races there was in e world. In this case they used Mitochondria DNA to define the parameters.  There were found to be over twenty races.  Most of those races exist only within Africa.  It does make sencse if you think about it. All the peoples whose origins come from outside of Africa left Africa; their ancestors left about five thousand generations ago and the were only a few hundred of them, at most.  We know that those people have Neanderthal DNA and the ones that stayed in Africa do not.  We know that the ones that spread to eastern Asia have other non Homo Sapiens DNA in them and there is some concern that there may be another bit of on non Homo Sapiens DNA in another area where Indonesia exists today.  There may be as many as five to seven different Races outside of Africa, but there are double that many inside of Africa.  Africa had more people, more diversity.  Tropical environments tend to be more fertile for gathering people and Africa is quite firmly tropical.  There is a lot of space with a variety of terrains and many opportunities to form isolated communities.  

When people talk about Race, they most often are talking about appearance only and they are talking about differences and not similarities.  Humans are bipedal, four limbed, primarily naked of hair, without tails and who have language.  There are many more similarities, but we are essentially the same.  There are very slight differences between the Races, that are mostly driven by the environment.  People living in tropical environments did not lose the genetic variation for dark skin pigment.  The dark pigment blocks sunlight better, they live in regions with intense sunlight.  People in more northern environments lost that variation and picked up less pigmentation that allowed more absorption of sunlight.  Sickle cell anemia in African populations allows greater protection to Malaria, which is endemic to the tropics, so is a genetic advantage.  But each variation is only a variation; they are not really huge differences.  

At our core, we are all nearly identical even with our variations and so there is no one model that is superior to another.  The claims of superiority come from cultural superiority and technological superiority, not genetics.  Our cultures are different and they impact on how we view the world and how we seek to exist in it.  Our technology determines how successful we are in doing it.  The idea that White people are superior to all others resulted from the domination of less technologically advanced people.  

The Chinese were the first to develop gunpowder and steel and factories for producing goods, but for most of their history they believed they were the center of the world and thought that people should come to them and that the rest were not worth conquering.  There was one brief period where they reversed this policy and they reached out and touched e rest of the world and sailed the breadth of the Pacific Ocean to North America, but it did not last.  

The European people's sailed out to dominate the world to spread their religion and to strip the conquered of their valuables.  They only did this to lesser technological cultures.  No one European nation could conquer their neighbours because they were just as technologically advanced, as was shown in the World Wars, The Seven Years War, the Great War and World War II, when similar technology goes against each other lots of people die and nothing really changes.  Genetics has nothing to do with it.

Nano Environments

Another delayed post, written 156 days ago and finished today…

People prefer simple rules.  The sun comes up and it gets warm.  The sun goes behind a cloud and it gets cooler.  On a flat surface, in a vacuum this is absolutely true all the time.  I recently posed a question, a statement really, to a podcast that I listen to.  I stated that people think that rain melts the snow and when it rains the snow melts and therefore rain melts the snow.  I suggested that there was something else involved, the condensation of water vapour on the snow was actually a bigger driver of snow melt.  The result of this conversation was a segment on the aforementioned podcast, which I have not mentioned.

I looked on there discussion page and saw the flurry of differing viewpoints.  People suggested the most inane things that were not part of ice melting like the heating caused by the kinetic energy of the raindrop.  The person suggested that kinetic energy converted to heat energy one for one, while ignoring empirical evidence, that moving objects move other objects when they impact each other; the snow moves when the rain hits it, it compacts or the rain bounces, splatters.  Some of this energy must convert to heat energy, but only if the rain does not splatter or compact or move the substance it impacts, the snow.  

The best dissenting response was that the Sun melts the snow, and this is one hundred percent true in the sense that the sun is the only energy input into the Earth's closed system  energy budget.  The problem is how to express the way I see the world so that you see the world as I see it.  I once wrote about wind, how it is similar to light.  Light is both a wave and a particle, everyone has heard that, if they don't understand it.  So is wind: it is a solid force blowing air over the land in one direction for high pressure to low pressure, but it is also packets of air moving at different speeds caused by turbulence; it is of different sizes and you can see them when it hits the water and fields of grass or dusty parking lots.

What causes turbulence?  Physical structures cause it.  I am stretching my memory to remember the diagram that I saw nineteen years ago while researching an essay that I never wrote, that turbulence caused by physical structures is affected by the height and the width of the structure.  Typically five times e height and three times the width of the structure down wind.  Of course wind speed would also have a factor in this.  Other factors that I can think of that would affect turbulence are different air masses with different densities interacting and different air speeds or directions.  Air density can be affected by temperature, warmer air is less dense and humidity, humid air is less dense.  Humidity could be changed into composition differences, that would make it universal.  Because water is so common on the Earth, it is humidity that is most common influence on air, but increase of any substance in the air over the average composition would have a measurable effect.  

As I said because Water is so common on Earth, it is one of the main drivers in the atmosphere. The amount of water that air can hold is defendant on the temperature of that air mass and the abundance of the water in the environment.  And then it gets complicated.  Climate is any region's weather range over the course of a large period of time, macro scale.  Large areas and large times.  Weather is the what is happening at any given moment, but climate is broader and deeper.  Climate is about what extremes of weather you can expect in an environment.  Micro Climate is how the physical environment impacts the greater climate of the region. The scale of a micro climate is human terms, or the effects that things in our personal world.  For example, a mountain affects the general climate, one side may get more sun than the other, one side may get more rain than the other.  Ditto with hills, but generally lesser than mountains.  The composition of the environment affects the micro climate, soil types affect what grows there and what the effects rain has in the area so it affects the micro climate.  Something as little as a house affects the environment all around it and thus alters the micro climate of different sides of the house.  That is about as small scale as people think in, but it actually is more complicated.  What is growing in an area affects the climate too.  So I propose the term Nano-Climate to separate the truly small environmental effects from the human scale effects.

Some people would say that I am splitting hairs, dividing things down to a degree that it has no effect on the world, but I would counter that by saying the micro climate of an area is the sum total of the smaller affects, the smaller interrelations with the environment and changing one of these factors would have a net affect on any area's Micro Climate, just as altering many micro climates would alter the overall climate of a region and then affect the entire world.  I am saying that it is time to realize that tiny changes in the environment have impacts on everything.  I see the tiny environments that we live in.

If this were an essay, all the above would be the introduction and only 5-10% of this post, good thing that this is not an essay, eh?   I wanted to talk about melting snow, so I will try to limit myself to that.  

When the Sun is relatively directly overhead it bombards the surface of the Earth with approximately 1300 watts per square meter per second in visible light.  Surfaces on an angle affect this and when the sun is not directly overhead also would affect this number.  The surface albedo, the scientific word for reflectivity, also affects it.  Only utterly black substances have no albedo and and only pure white or perfect mirrors have total albedo.  Albedo is a value that ranges from these two extremes 1-0 which could be thought of as a percentage.  Snow has a low albedo and oil his a high albedo.  Water actually has a really high albedo that is not affected much by the angle of light much, which is why water almost always appears dark. Wet surfaces almost always appear darker than dry surfaces. I would say always, but there might be an exception.  

Asphalt, for example covered with a splash of water appears darker than surrounding asphalt, the water has lowered the asphalt's albedo and more light is being absorbed by the surface.  I would say that the difference in the albedos is the amount of the light that the water is absorbing over and beyond what the asphalt is absorbing.  This absorption increase is a Nano Climate effect as it could be as small as a raindrop, but in any case will have an unnoticeable affect on any human but be a contributing factor to the whole.  If the asphalt is grey and is reflecting, say 50% of the light and the addition of water decreases the albedo to reflect only 10% of the light, then we could say that that extra 40% is being directly absorbed by the water film on the surface.  For the record I am looking at some dry and wet asphalt right now; the road that passes my window.  

If the sun was directly overhead the water would be absorbing about 520 w/s per square meter, or 520 Joules of energy.  If it were in a vacuum, then we might say that the energy would only go into heating the water.  Assuming that the water was only just covering the asphalt, say 1/10th of a millimeter thick, then the amount of energy needed to raise its temperature on degree Celsius would be about 420 joules.  The water on the road would be boiling in about a minute and a half.  But it is not in a vacuum, there is air and air will allow for two things to occur: heat transfer, the air will get warmer and evaporation or water transfer.  The Latent heat of evaporation of water is 2,270 kJ/kg, so the energy needed to evaporate the square meter of slightly covered asphalt is about 227,000 joules or it would take about seven and a half minutes under ideal conditions, if there was no wind or if the asphalt was pure white.  Why wind?  Why white asphalt?  

The albedo of the asphalt has an effect too.  The energy that the asphalt itself is absorbing can contribute to the heating of the air and the evaporation of water.  On any Summer day people see the heat shimmers ofer asphalt so we know it is heating the air.  The grey asphalt is absorbing about 650 joules of energy per second from the sun this can be added to the water and to the evaporation of the glaze of water to cut the time needed to evaporate the water to about three minutes and a quarter.  If there is a breeze, the moving air from adjacent dry asphalt to the glaze of water, increasing the evaporation again.  We have all seen how quickly roads get dry after a summer thunderstorm. I have just broken it down for you.

Now consider the snowbanks beside the road way.  The road is heating up and the snow is cold, pretty obvious.  The sun beats down on the snow but due to its high albedo, almost all of the light is reflected, but over the road, about half of the light that hits the road is reflected, but half is absorbed and heats the air. The heat air moves the warm air over to the snow and raises the temperature to freezing and begins the process of melting.  The latent heat of melting is 334 kJ/kg, so a lot of air has to be exported to the snowy region to melt the snow.  But there would only have to be a little melting to have an effect.  Snow has different densities depending on its age and air temperature, fresh snow has the lowest density as low as a tenth of the density of water, if only a little bit of snow is melted it would be enough to make a difference because liquid water absorbs most of the light it receives.  

Here is another place that nano climate has an effect.  As school children we are taught about the convection of air over land beside a body of water.  The air over the land heats up faster and rises, while the air from over the water rushes in to replace the rising air.  The rising air cools and then replaces that air that has left the region over the water to complete the cycle.  This is a local effect, but there is also a macro effect that affects the world and a micro effect that is on any border between different surfaces everywhere.  One such location is the road surface and the snow bank.  The road heats up and rises, the air over the snowbanks moves in to replace it and the air above the roadway cools and moves over the snowbanks where it cools more.  An nano scale convection current.

33,400 joules would be enough to melt a little of the snow, if all the air transfers it heat and it would only take a minute of intense light to melt a bit of snow, a millimeter per square meter, but that is not likely to happen.  The ideal example is a simple way to explain it.  Snow reflects light in every direction so it appears white, but it also reflects it into the snow pack too, so water in the snow pack would absorb the light.  Thus wet snow absorbs more energy and the energy would all be used to melt more snow.  What usually happens is that fresh snow falls into a cold environment and the melted snow refreezes and the result is old snow.  Old snow is more granular and has a lower albedo, so it reflects less light and absorbs more.  Old snow makes more melts a bit faster and in cold weather makes older snow with a lower albedo.  

I was talking about snow beside a roadway, because that is where people these days see the snow melt, but snow melts far from roads too, but they do not get the imported heat from hot air and the depend on the light not reflected from the snow to melt it.  That is an oversimplification, because there are trees and tree trunks heat up just like roadways do when the sun hits them and the air heated up from close contact with the tree melts the snow exactly like the roadway.

Additionally, another factor that one must not forget is black body radiation.  Most people know this as heat, but in this case it is the energy that all things emit.  The amount of radiation each object emits is based on their temperature and their insulation.  People emit infrared radiation at about 37°C, but everything emits radiation unless they are at absolute zero.  So even if a tree is  -20°C, it is emitting radiation and the radiation is melting the snow.  This is why if you look at a tree in old snow you will see a gap in the snow around the trunk and why the snow seems to melt faster under trees.  Black body radiation is the balancing portion of the Earth's energy budget: radiation hitting the Earth/Albedo - Black Body Radiation = 0.  This is how carbon-dioxide warms the earth, it reabsorbs the Black Body Radiation and reflects it back, warming the Earth. 

That is snow but what about air?  Besides heat, the air can carry other things, like dust which can darken the snow surface and decreases its albedo.  Air can also absorb water.  Above I mentioned that water on roadways heats up and evaporates into the air.  Air is not something that can hold a standard amount of water, if it were so we would not have weather at all, but it is temperature dependent, the warmer that air the more water it can hold. Since it is temperature dependent there are more and interesting variables.  Air does not absorb water linearly (every increase in temperature it absorbs an equal amount of water), but it absorbs water exponentially (as the air increases in temperature it absorbs an increasing amount of water).  The amount of water that air can hold increases marginally when air is lower than 10°C, but increases  faster when it warms past that temperature.  

Often when you get a weather forecast you will see something called Dew Point Temperature, that is the temperature that air can hold only the water that it is currently holding and no more.  It is the temperature that fog or mist or clouds would form and it is the temperature that would have to be reached for those clouds to rain or snow.  When the water condenses out of the air it heats it up, because the energy that was needed to evaporate the water is expelled to condense it.  

One of the oddities of water is that the energy needed to change its state from gas to liquid and liquid to solid is seven times the other.  Any given amount of condensing water would melt about seven times as much ice.  Because of the temperature difference between road ways and a snow bank, the air over the road may pick up more evaporated water.  When the air cools over the snowbank, the absorbed water may exceed the carrying capacity of the air and condense out.  The released energy would warm the air, but since it would be close to the snow, the snow would heat up and melt; seven times as much snow could potentially melt as the water condenses.  

The effects don't just work with big things like roads and snow banks, they work with tree trunks and buildings and even dirt particles in the snow.  The last creates beautiful ice structures along the edge of the road way all winter long, which everyone can see if they look:  The light hits the dirt particle in the snow and heats up.  The warmer air melts some snow and the dirt becomes wet, which allows it to absorb more light and heat the air more melting more snow.  Soon there is a pocket of air around the particle and the air over the particle absorbs water which condenses and melts snow further away from the particle.  The warmer air around the dirt meets the air outside which is cooler and the water freezes as ice.  If the dirt is close to the surface the nano climate creates peaks and valleys, but if it is deeper in the snowpack, delicate ice structures form with ice walls surrounding a small air pocket.

It is easy just to look out over the landscape and see just the big things.  Stop take a look at edges, and the micro regions and the nano scale of our world, see the beauty.  The little unseen nuisances.

Broken spirit

I have decided to move away from Smallville in Boonieland.  I am not sure where I will end up but I have gotten tired of everything here except for a few people. Very few, my parents and two friends.  I would add WaifGirl except she has flown the coop and we really only ever talk via electronic writing.  The people who live here think people who don't live here are crazy and the people who want to leave crazier, but it is not the place that is so bad; it is the people.

Last year nearly killed me.  I had vowed to never get involved with people I work with years ago as the only thing that happened when I did that was get fired, twice now.  But when you start working with people it always happens and it happened last year big time.  And I almost made it three times.

Politics.

I had aligned myself to the people in the organization that work hard and think logically about how they do things, my friend was an expert in the field and despite my lack of knowledge and experience, my deep well of common sense, transferable skills, knowledge and unrelenting work ethic, I was able to contribute.  Logic, expertise and hard work can be the antithesis of personablity, charisma and toadiness, which was the other faction at my workplace.  These people were personable and outgoing, they were the sales people, but they did not always have the correct information when they spoke, but they spoke with conviction. When I say toadiness, I mean they were Yes men, who listened to what the boss said and then agreed with it, they never challenged and always praised the boss's words.

I am not saying that the other guys were bad, just that they were fawning extraverts doing what Extraverts did.  I am not saying that we, logical people were always right and were exemplary employees, because we weren't; we grumbled a lot to each other and we are introverts who would like to remake the world in our image.  Each political monster had its uses, the extraverts talked to people and did the selling, the architects, as oddly we were both INTP on the Meyers-Briggs, did a lot of the work, most of the work.  My friend did all the ordering, the designing and all the customer technical questions.  I did a lot of the labour and oddly all of the computer and technology work.  Background unglamorous work, which is fine because I am really bad at talking to people, but when I do, I strive for accuracy.  Sales is not really about accuracy though it is about making the customer comfortable and I usually confuse them.

Setting.  

The boss preferred the Extraverts, they stroked his ego and always did what they were told right away, rather than adding his direction to a list and prioritizing the list.  They also regularly informed him what other people where doing or not doing too.  The number one thing that sales type people sell is themselves, and if people interfere with them they sell it as interference to their boss.  Workers tend to be concerned about getting the job done, they can be heartless as the step on toes to do the work, but when they go to the boss it is usually not to complain but to discuss ideas or to get input on a problem, we just trying to get it done and it does not really occur to us to run to the boss to solve our problems unless it is about work.  Extraverts seem to know how to suck, blow and rub the boss to their advantage.  In all honesty, I manipulate the boss too, I drop facts in his lap with reports on how well things sold and trends to suggest future directions.  I use writing and statistics to get my way, which can be manipulated to prove my point.  Can be manipulated, but I try not to as I am too honest.

I am vindictive.  I have a long memory too, so it is double jeopardy to cross me, but I can't ever seem to capitalize on it, because I don't have the social acumen to do it.  Both political sides were at odds and had history of conflicts.  There were crimes caused by both sides against the other, if only in each other's view points and there have been additional players over the years besides the four main players.  Additional players often makes for a volatile playing field, and last year was the most explosive.

The Game.

Last year the boss's growing alcoholism had started to affect the workplace.  Applications for the fifth position was still open a week past the deadline.  He would interview applicants and then decide that they were good enough and then wait half a week and then call them and offer them the job, by which time they were already employed elsewhere.  He became so desperate, that he hired someone of the race that he swore he would never hire: a native person.  Hired on the first busy week of several to come, usually we like to ease new people in by giving them two weeks to adjust, but this year no such luck.  The Loyalist Party began recruiting right away.  They showed her the ropes and how to do things, they showed her how to fill out her time card and told her that if she is a little late every once in a while it is no problem.  She leaned quick and eased into the busy schedule smoothly, but with the extravert people showing how to do things, like taking extended brakes and how free the company was with taking home plants, i.e. showing her a few bad habits that party member picked up over the years. 

When I say she learned fast, I mean she was thrown into the busiest time when it is maddeningly busy and learned the prices for things faster than the party member showing her the ropes and seemed to have a good head on her shoulders.  She was an extravert, a young extravert, which in itself is not a bad thing, but she was a Drama Queen to boot and no one knew.  Funny things happen when you are in high stress environments, little dramas become big dramas and big dramas become problems; the New Girl had a big drama on the horizon.  

When I say the extraverts showed here the ropes, I mean she was told what she had to do and she took their direction as licence to do exactly what they said, because, well they said it.  They told her that she did not have to be vigilant about filling out her time card, most people did it a few times over the pay period, that it was okay to be late because it did not matter much, everyone was and that she could fill out her time sheet with a bit of creative license.  She should have been told that people that people had fallen into lazy habbits because they were trusted and were habitually on time, so did not need to remember when they started, because it was the same day after day.  Some people arrived exactly on time everyday, except when something unforeseen happened and they were a minute or two late.  Some people were nearly always early by a minute and then spent ten minutes fussing around before starting work and still others arrived early and started working right away.  The landscaping crew did not need to start right away as they were given their daily itinerary from the boss in the morning and often it changed from the night before.  New Girl, was only doing as she was told, that she could be late and fill out her time sheet as if she wasn't.  To be clear, her previous jobs she was a waitress and was not expected to be prompt on time any day.

The problem was that her dog was not vaccinated as it is rare for reservation people to do that sort of preventative medicine for animals.  For those out of the loop, Canada has a series of treaties with the native people that gives them benefits if they follow certain different rules, like living on reservations.  It is like Apartied Mellow, it is actually the system that Apartied was modeled on.  I think that is dangerous, racist and a tool to keep Native people marginalized in society; it works and does exactly what I said it does.  Anyways, her dog got Pavo virus and started to die by vomiting and shitting blood at all hours of the day and night on her second week on the job, during the busiest time of year.

I am saying that she had personal reasons to be late and people should have more compassion for her situation, but they didn't.  The Licker, colloquial nickname for the Extravert Party, grew up in the city and had no knowledge or understanding of the native situation and she was a dog lover.  In her mind there is no excuse for not vaccinating your dog and she viewed the problem as an example of irresponsibility and not cultural differences.  Anyways, in her mind it was time for this new girl to go and rather than tell the girl she needs to smarten up and clean up her act, she went to the boss and told him that she was falsifying her time sheet.

It was a serious thing to tell the boss, but she was told by the same person who informed on her, that filling time sheets out was not a priority and that being a little late was not a big thing.  The Boss came to me with these concerns and told me that he had a replacement already lined up to take over.  I was mortified for several reasons: one this new girl showed promise as she was able to memorize all the varied items prices in under a week, which the head cashier had yet to do, and was fast on the cash too.  Two, she had a lot of crap happening in her life and yet she was still turning up.  Three, the quality of trained cashiers in Smallville is suspect, really, on the whole they are not that good at all and our cash system is a hold over from thirty years ago, so nothing is automated.  The current New Girl was the best cashier that we had in years and that after only a week.  Lastly the idea of having to train another cashier as the busy season was only getting busier, was terrifying.  It would mean that I would have to take some of the time that I was using to stock shelves to retrain another person; it was time I did not have.

There was a head cashier, but he himself was barely trained himself.  He does not like technology and refuses to learn the simplest procedures on the debit/credit terminal.  He does not know the products that we sell and the prices.  But he is responsible for training his assistants.  He says to them, you have done cash before? And when they say yes, he says that there is nothing that he has to teach them then.  Like how to issue refunds and the particular way that bosses like things done, which are counter intuitive.  He does not like to teach them about the products that we sell, even though they are on the frontline.  In short there is a lot more to cash than running a cash register.

The Error

The decision was made in the Logic Party that this girl had promise and interference would be necessary to have a smooth running busy season.  To that end I began coaching the New Girl on how she should proceed to keep her job.  The problem was that she was a modern girl and used her phone to text a lot.  So I used my phone to text her.  I told her that someone was trying to get her fired and she needed to clean up her act, vis-a-vee her time sheet and late arrivals.  I texted her that she needs to arrive on time and fill out her time sheet precisely.  I told her that the people that do not do that, are trusted, and she has not been around long enough to be trusted.  I told her that she needs to go to the boss and speak with him about why she was late everyday and to keep him in the loop and that the boss respects people more if they do that in person.  I also told here that there were a couple people informing the boss on everything she did.

She asked who was doing this to her and I told her that who and why.  I told her so she would know to be aware of who she needs to watch out for.  I also let her know that she was the first Native person hired here ever, she was, and they won't hire any other native person if she does not work out, they wouldn't.  Smallville has a large racist streak for native people, it is accepted by everyone so much that they do not think it as racism, only they way things are. To them racism is hating African and Chinese people, Natives are just shit people and drunks.

RBUP

The crisis was averted.  Her dog survived.  Her job survived, she did her job well.  She talked to the boss.  And then we discovered that she belonged to a different Political Party, the Rainbow, Butterflies and Unicorns Party.  this party believes that everyone can be friends and should be friends and if they are not friends, you just are not trying hard enough!  So rather than accept that the Licker did not like her for some reason she went up to her and asked her why she did not like her.  

The qualities of e RBUP include naivety and positive outlook and generally youth.  She had all these and a lot of the first.  So the Licker, took advantage of her and told her that she did like her and where did she get her ideas from?  To which she blabbed and pulled out her phone and quoted me and showed her what I had written her in confidence.

Politics can be lethal and not knowing your rivals and where they stand can be lethal.  Work politics is not about recruiting people to your side or the other, it is about understanding where their loyalties lie and where they will leap given a specific set of actions.  It is about who you can talk to and who can be your friend and who you should not trust.

You can trust your own party members if they are your friends, you can be friends with external party members, but you really can't trust them because their motivations are different from you.  RBUP you can be friends with them, but you can trust them because they will sell you out just to gain a new friend only they won't see it as sell you out, because they are everyone's friend.  The Loyalty Party is confusing to me.  Their loyalty to the boss means that they will rat out fellow party members in a heart beat, but if they are friends there is some latitude if their actions do not hurt the business directly.  There also seems to be some latitude when their own interests are in conflict.  For example if party members feel that they are doing more work than they should have to, they will complain directly to the boss about the inequity, perceived inequity.  

The Logical Party look at the job critically and realize that doing a good job is better for the company and therefore themselves.  They value different outlooks so ask.  They are loyal to themselves and will work against the owner if they feel it is in the best interest of the company.  They see the bond of friendship as something to be preserved; a good team is worth more to the well being of the company than any individuals needs.

Conflict

The principle Licker went to the boss as soon as she discovered my intervention to her previous goal.  She took her accusations to the boss and told him that I thought that he was racist and that I was sowing dissent between herself and the New Girl.  He fired me on the spot.  No actually he did not, bosses tend to be unaware of the true extent to politics beneath them, but he did know who was my friend and who was not.  So he contacted my ally and friend and put the questions to her about what I was doing.  My ally was deep into the decision process on what to say to the New Girl, but because she was behind the scenes she was in this case untouched.  

Luckily The Licker was in the early stages of a major life change that affects all women of a certain age that makes them more emotional and aggressive and weepy all at the same time, and my ally used it against her.  In the end, all that I had to do was appologise to The Licker.

The Apology

I have made three or four appologies at this work place.  The secret to a good appology can be found by googling John Cleese and appology.  It must be heart felt, it must be true and it should go overboard.  The last is essential because the aggrieved party usually feels more than you do and so going overboard usually becomes enough.  I did not use this appology method with her.  I complimented her on the skill at doing her job that I felt she did not have, I complimented her on the skill she did have.  I gave her a reason for my dislike of her.  And I suggested a career path that would suit her skills very well.  Okay I guess I did follow my rules for appologies.

I complimented her by saying that I realized her skill at her job when she pruned back the Japanese Painted Willows a few years ago to make them reblush and sell late of their regular season.  I knew she did not have a clue that that would happen, she was doing it to remove an aphid infestation; I learned that cutting them back would increase sales, she never repeated cutting them back, because she did not need to.  She rebuffed my compliment, because of e reason stated.  I complimented on her people skills the way she talked to customers making them feel like she was part of their family; the way she kissed the bosses butt, most people only used their lips, she used her tongue.  She rebuffed that compliment because she was born into it, she was in sales with her fathers company for years.  I commented on me watching from the sidelines, unobserved, three years before as she trashed my work efforts directly to the boss in an attempt to get me fired so that she could take over my job.  She had no clue about what my job entailed nor how much work was envolved, to do it the way she thought it had to be done would mean three additional people would have to be hired who put in as much time as I did.  She rebuffed that too, because her attempt failed and since it failed, I should never have held it as a grudge, meaning by analogy you should only hold a grudge if someone succeeds in killing you, not for the attempt.  I suggested that she become a landscaper working close to the customer where she could apply her skills, by that I meant deep throating their ass.

I did all I was expected, I appologised.

Fallout

In the end the The Licker decided that she did not want to be a part of a company that did not respond to her type of attention.  There were other reasons for her departure.  There was some suspicion that her licking had the end game of ending in the bedroom of the boss.  She did not understand that he just was not interested in bedroom activities at all.  And her failed bid to get someone fired, anyone fired, was the last straw.  She took her coffee pot home and found another job in an other family run business, then in another landscaping business where she discovered how much work was involved in real gardening, before she found her call in life behind a desk talking to suppliers behind a phone.

The New Girl came back to the greenhouse having learned a lot of lessons, all the wrong lessons.  She learned that you need to suss out all the gossip that other people know and tell the people it is about.  She still wears skin tight clothing with inappropriate mesh in certain locations.  She complains more often and seeks the bosses attention when ever possible.  She has enemies that she created who understand what she is about, who do not trust her words.

I don't care, I am leaving.  Deciding that has lifted a large weight off my shoulders.  There has been more political manoevering this year as fallout to last year, but, I , don't, care.

Politics 2.0

It started again.  One new player, who is not playing the game, the replacement for the other person.  But the lack of one person playing has been replaced by the other two working harder.  The Logic Party was hoping that there would be no politics because both people were sick and tired of it, but no, not to be.  The Lead Loyalist Party member gone, the old guard steps into the gap and the New Girl leaves the RUBP and joins the Loyalist Party.  The new person joins the RUBP.  It is the right move.  The Logical Party gives her the warnings, which she does not believe warns her about the the state of e politics or about the amount of respect that management has for its employees. The warning had been given she is left alone.  By that party.

As the new party member of the Loyalist Party, New Girl begins a campaign of  informing on what everyone says to ever it was said about.  And it is selective informing too.  The words, "He is a really nice guy, but acts like an idiot sometimes," get translated and retold as, "They said that you are a really big idiot!"  meaning that we can't say anything around her.  Which is funny because she expects loyalty from everyone else and throws a temper-tantrum when this is not the case.  The other member of the Loyalty Party expects that everyone should respect him because of his years of service and volunteer time and his age. Except, no one does.  Respect is earned and he has been spending his respect the entire time I have known him.

Really this is just the set up, there is too much going on to make judgements about what may or may not happen, only that I am not coming back, and I am not telling anyone.  New Girl keeps telling people that she is not coming back, but no one believes her.  The new person has had her outsider impression of the Happy Garden Centre wiped out of her head and replaced with the horrible work place that it is.  Truthfully, everything that goes on there is a result of the owner who encourages this politics as it provides him entertainment.  I hate what this place has done to people I like.

I started writing the above three months ago and finished two, but I did not publish it.  There have been mixed emotions around me deciding to leave.  In just this year, people have started warming up to me in this town.  They have started saying hi to me and greeting me.  It might be because I have been hanging out in the local Tim Horton's more.  It might be because people expect me at my work place when they come in and come to me to ask for advice.  This last year, the new bicycle shop hit its steam and had a lot of people out to every group ride, an average of triple the numbers from last year.  People are greeting me by name.  It only took eight years.  People greet me by name and invite me to use their name.  But, I am still single and if I stay here that is something that is not likely to change.  Some people probably know me as that guy that bicycles everywhere rain, shine or three feet of snow.

I am sad here, I have to leave.  I am getting old. 

BO

I once knew a man who said that he broke up with his girlfriend because his natural scent had changed.  Obviously, there were other reasons, but he stated that as one of the reasons.  He said that he could not stand his smell; it had changed with this girlfriend.  It is something that people don't consider anymore, but scent may be an important chemical signal for other people.

Ever since then I have been concious of my smell and how it changes.  Most of the time I wear the appropriate doses of antiperspirant and deodourant, but there are times that I don't.  I don't wear deodourant because it tends to be strongly scented and strong scents bother me.  Antiperspirants stop sweating from occurring and thus stopping the musk from expressing.  

Not wearing protection has allowed me to smell myself.  It is not an unpleasant scent, more like a combination of musk and Doritos and for the record I don't eat that many bags of Doritos, perhaps one bag a month on average.  I have also noticed my scent change too.  Activity does not really change it, I can be working very hard and notice very little scent, but my state of relationship status does alter my scent.  When I have a crush, my scent is more subdued, but when I am mentally single, it becomes much more noticeable, both in strength and amounts of scent.

I wonder what the effect of scent is on other people, subconsciously and consciously?

Chemtrails!!

I have been hit from the left this year and from the right and also from the center by Chemtrails.  And I am sick and tired of it.  I have known about the conspiracy theory for years and dismissed these people as crackpots, because they were.  You see Chemtrails started out as fears that jets were polluting the air with something noxious.  But they were at least still connecting the Chemtrails with jet exhaust.  

When I was a kid, and by that I mean about five years old until high school, I went through a bit of an evolution of my idea of what Chemtrails were, but they were never bad.  When I was five and interested in jets and airplanes I saw Chemtrails as a way to find the jets that made them.  I would be out in the back yard and I would hear the rumble of a jet soaring at ten kilometers overhead and I would look for it, but would have difficulty finding it.  The jet at that height, unless there was some reflected sunlight, is almost impossible to see unless you are looking directly at it, but the Chemtrails would point you directly to them.  So Chemtrails were an easy shortcut to watching jets.  

I would look at the jets and watch the Chemtrails expand out the back.  Sometimes the trail would be thin forever, sometimes it would get thick fast and sometimes it would disappear, or never have one.  This was a mystery.  Some people have an explanation for these variables: people are turning the machine on and off and dumping more or less chemicals in the air at different times of the flight.  Luckily no one told me this when I was a kid and I was allowed to have an open mind on the subject.

I continued watching and I learned that clouds were made of water and I made the assumption that since Chemtrails looked like clouds they were made of weather too, which as it turns out (Spoilers) they are.  I did not believe it until I went on a trip with my parents to Mount Washington when I was nine.  There was a railway that went up the mountain powered by a steam engine burning coal.  We went up the mountain and we went through clouds and they were wet just like fog.  Inside the cloud was exactly like fog: difficult to see, clammy, and wet over everything.  Could this be what Chemtrails were made of?  

Growing up in a northern climate I was blessed with alternate observational perspectives of common phenomenon, or in the common parlance, I could see how things changed in different seasons.  Car exhaust, for example, behaves differently in different weather: it is invisible in Summer, it is visible in Winter and in the other seasons it is visible when it is wet or foggy out.  Could jet contrails (Condensation Trails) as they are correctly called be like this?  Jets after all burn fuel like cars, when it is cold or wet out can you see them and when it is hot and dry can you not?

Not long after that trip my parents discovered my passion for weather, it is was a passing fancy that continues to be useful, but whose depths I have yet to plumb out, and bought me a book about weather.  The book and continued school learning allowed me to understand that the sky was not uniform.  It varied in density and temperature with height, there were low pressure and high pressure regions that caused winds, that the Earth's rotation caused everything to move and the convection of watering heat from the low latitudes to the high latitudes caused all the weather.  

What does that have to do with Chemtrails?  The air in the sky is not the smooth uniform thing that it appears to be.  The sky is blue, but the air could be moisture rich or drier than a desert, the temperature could be warm or colder than the coldest day in Antarctica and there could be no wind or it could be blowing up to a thousand kilometers an hour.  These all affect how contrails act.  In water saturated air contrails last, in unsaturated air they don't even appear and in not quite saturated air they fade away.  In windy air they get big and disappear and in calm air they very slowly expand.  They do this because they are mostly water.

Besides water, jet contrails, are made of the same things that car exhaust is made from, colourless gasses like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, there may be som nitrous oxide too.  Jet fuel, is a better refined gasoline similar to kerosine that you might use in a camping stove.  There is nothing strange in it.  One major difference with jets is the amount of fuel that they use.  It was described to me one that a Trans-Atlantic flight uses as much fuel as driving a SUV for a year per person.  200-300 people flying over the Atlantic uses as much fuel as that many SUVs driving for a year.  That means they produce a lot of exhaust.  So much exhaust that if the air is compliant, it will produce a cloud in the jet's wake.  This cloud is mostly made of water, the fuel when burned combines oxygen to hydrogen and oxygen to carbon, but the carbon oxide is gas even at high altitudes and water turns to ice.

That is what jet contrails are why they exist, but Chemtrails are the same thing, just remove reality and stick in the fiction you want to promote.  The fiction that people promote is varied: solar radiation management, mind control, population control, weather control, biological or chemical warfare.  Many of these can be addressed simply.  Mind control, the drinking water would be faster and require less product.  Population control, well that MUST be working because the population is still climbing out of control.  Biological and Chemical warfare, see population control and mind control — drinking water would be more effective and cheaper and people are living longer and having lots of children, so the biological and chemical weapons must be ineffective.  Solar radiation Management, there is something valid here.  Contrails temporarily increase the Earth's albedo and reflect light away from the earth, but wait, they are temporary and they cover a minuscule amount of the Earth that they are ineffective at best and wait for it, they occur at night too.  The best one is Weather Modification, because the increased Carbon Dioxide from the exhaust is adding to global warming!

But there are more conspiracy theories!  There are the theories that Monsanto is spraying Aluminum on crops to kill them and force farmers to use their GMO aluminum resistant crops.  Pure bunk, most people do not know how common aluminum is on the surface of this planet.  Between 7-9% of the soil is made of aluminum on average, with some areas with a lot more.  A lot of the aluminum comes in clay and areas that have higher clay content exist and aluminum toxicity in crops has been documented for longer than there have been Chemtrails and longer than there have been airplanes.  The real problem is soil acidity which allows the aluminum to be absorbed by the plants and acidity is caused by acid rain, which is in turn caused by the collective human population polluting the world.

Another theory is that Monsanto is loading planes with GMO pollen which then fertilizes all the crops and makes them GMOs.  There are too many problems with this theory really.  Pollen needs to be specific to a plant, wheat pollen will only pollinate wheat plants, corn pollen will only pollinate corn plants, and so on.  So how can Monsanto make pollen to fertilize every crop available, they can't.  And how do they get the right pollen to the right plant?  They also can't do that either.  Also, only some crops are pollinated by wind and those pollen grains are light, but many other crops require another vector, like bees to carry the pollen to the flower.  Those grains are large and heavy and would just drop out of the sky.  Pollen has a colour, if it were true this theory Chemtrails would also have colour.  A lot of the Chemtrails fall over areas without crops, so they are wasted.  Monsanto is in business to make money, why would they spend money so frivolously just to get a slightly higher market share, when they could just roll in the billions that they would save and get a slightly smaller market share. 

Chemtrails are starting to not look like contrails now.  There are videos with people pointing to clouds that they identify as Chemtrails which are clearly not.  Contrails are made at altitudes where the clouds are made of ice, 8-16 kilometers above the ground and they are therefore white and wispy cirrus clouds.  Some videos point to cumuli clouds and alto clouds which are made from water vapour and are much lower in altitude.  Other people are pointing to   weather that contradicts what they were told by the weather forecaster.  They were told that the day was going to be cloudless and it is now cloudy, therefore Chemtrails.  Still other people are using Chemtrails as a crutch, I just heard the other day someone say that she did not have a good growing season in her garden because of them, not because there was hardly any sun this summer, it was the Chemtrails.  

I could go on and on and on, there is just so many different things that Chemtrails do.  In the future when I get sad, I will say the Chemtrails are making me sad.