Tuesday, December 01, 2009

...don't tell me I've nothing to do

Eric Heatherly - Flowers On The Wall

Rockers' will like this better than Stadler Bros version.

Ya gotta love the bass and drums!

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Yesterday's posts were the spin off of a cross-word puzzle that had been nagging at me for a day or so.

Clue: Carina
Four letters
Answer: KEEL
Reaction: WTF?

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Carina was also a Liberty Ship, if my memory is working. When I went to check the daily rate of ship production, I stubbed my toe on whether one of the years between '42 and '45 was a leap year, hence the trivia regarding the Ko Ran.

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Leap Year is also affected by Al Gore's myth, another argument for the importance of refining AGW models to more accurately predict "climate change":

From wiki:

...However, there is little point in planning a calendar so far ahead because over a timescale of tens of thousands of years the number of days in a year will change for a number of reasons, most notably:

1. Precession of the equinoxes moves the position of the vernal equinox with respect to perihelion and so changes the length of the vernal equinoctial year.
2. Tidal acceleration from the sun and moon slows the rotation of the earth, making the day longer.

In particular, the second component of change depends on such things as post-glacial rebound and sea level rise due to climate change. We can't predict these changes accurately enough to be able to make a calendar that will be accurate to a day in tens of thousands of years
.

I suggest the ability to forecast the impact of tidal acceleration on the calculation of leap day will rank among the highest benefits derived from current climate research. Some will disagree.

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For old western fans:

Randolph Scott's Ride Lonesome Capture Location

Looks a lot like the Dragoons in the Cochise Stronghold neck-o'-the-woods, about an hour SE of Tucson and several miles off I-10.



Nice country for old men, a bit more hospitable than West Texas. Popular among Snowbirds, judging by the license plates. You want to watch out for nighttime hikers coming up from Ol' Mexico, though. Border lands are just a bit to the south. A couple of troops of Boy Scouts, a few 4H Clubs, and some adult supervision by the local ranchers could'a had that fuckin' fence built by the 4th of July of 2006, if Bush hadn't got in the way. The A-10's out of Davis-Monthan could keep the no-go zone cleared with a napalm pass every week or so. Border Patrol could handle the rest.

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TE ATREVES?

Translation?
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The simplified equations of motion have been occupying my time recently. I had a devil of a time remembering that

x(t) = 1/2at^2 + v(o)t + x(o).

Trying to figure if the red flashing light went off and an airplane hit the tower in the dark, would the debris land on mom's house? Or not? Requisite assumptions are fairly easy to arrive at. Probability is vanishingly small. I think. We're not on the flight path for approach/departure from Rogers Airport. Helicopters do zoom around occasionally. The tower lights did go out one stormy night a few years ago. The attempt to report the problem to the authorities was interesting. No number was available for local FAA or airport flight control, there's no tower. The Po-leece Dispatcher was confused. The problem didn't seem to fit her job description. I think I finally told her I'd just keep an eye on it and call 911 when an aircraft went down. It was a while back, and my memory is hazy. There's probably about as much chance of that accident as there would be for a Northwest airliner to miss Minneapolis by a couple of hundred miles...

Here's another math problem from my student days:



The outcome:



2:11 PM 12/1/2009

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1 comment:

Blackbird said...

From your student days:

That last line: Did your teacher draw that? :-))