About the Weather

(video of cut trails after the 12/18/2020 snowstorm)

I live in New England-- Massachusetts, to be precise. We can expect comparatively short summers that usually span from some time in May to some time in September. We're known for picturesque falls that last into October. There's an odd period between fall and winter that I've been told is called "locking time"-- something I read about in John Gardner's fine novel, October Light. I've lived here for over forty years and have never heard anyone use that term. But it is true thing up here: a period where autumn is gone but winter hasn't quite come. Then, usually in November, the cold rains come and in December comes the snow. 

Winter stays until late March or early April. Then, there's a tug of war between the seasons until May. It's not a spring like I used to have back in Missouri-- some friends of mind have suggested it be called flush or something similar. In Vermont and New Hampshire I've heard it called "mud season" when the top of the ground thaws but the earth below it remains frozen. The result is a mobile slop. 

This climate has been my norm for the majority of my life. It's not completely constant. One December we had Christmas dinner on picnic tables in the back yard. But there are predictable occurrences. There will be at least one-- and probably more than one-- snow storm where the snowfall will exceed a foot. There will be a few days well below zero. There's usually a mid-winter thaw to give people hope, followed by a sudden freeze to take that hope away.

My sister still lives in Missouri. Her weather is quite different. Missouri summers start in May with the days going well above 90 and the nights giving partial relief. But the earth warms until there's not all that much difference between day and night, just a long, sweltering steam bath punctuated by light and dark. Missouri winters don't really get going until near Christmas-- by my reckoning, anyway. And are often gone by mid April. She doesn't understand why I remain up here. I can't explain it to her. 

My point is that the weather, as an expression of the climate, drives the local behavior. Over time, I think, it influences the culture. Jared Diamond says geography is destiny. As long as we include climate and weather, I think he may be right. It influences my world building when I write science fiction. 

Up here, there are always stories of the Blizzard of 1978. Boston was completely shut down-- there was not a road or a bridge passable for days. A man tried to walk across bridges to shelter down on the south shore and fell into the harbor and died because he couldn't see where the snow was covering the water. Power was intermittent at best and out for weeks at worst. There was so much snow to be cleared that municipalities couldn't figure out where to put it.

Since that storm, there have been as much or greater snowfall stretched over somewhat longer intervals. In 1993, Wendy and I bought our house. That winter it snowed every week or sometimes multiple times a week. At one point there was about five feet of standing snow around us. The banks on either side of the driveway were taller than I was. I had to aim the snow blower properly to shoot over the banks so they didn't fall on me. We had to pull snow off the roof-- the roofs of some houses and buildings were collapsing. We had melted snow running on our inside walls. There were so many claims the following summer the insurance companies didn't bother sending investigators. They just told us who to call to get things fixed. The ski resorts ran all through June.

BO78 was a big event but it stood out in a climate of similar events.

There's a difference between climate weather and catastrophic events. If you live on the Gulf Coast, you can pretty much bet a hurricane will strike somewhere. But it's unlikely to strike everywhere. The storm that strikes Houston will probably not hit Miami. 

But climate weather-- the weather I'm attempting to describe here-- is dependable and it hits everybody. I might get eighteen inches of snow and a town in Maine might get a foot but we're both going to be clearing snow out. We both have to keep a working snow blower in the garage. We both have to plan for power outages and icy roads. It's not an event; it's a feature. Like hot summers in Missouri, winter in New England must be planned for.

Preparing for a climate conditions influences behavior. Behavior, over time, influences culture. Geography is destiny.

This was brought home to me as I watched news out of Los Angeles. 

I have a mild fondness for Southern California. I was born there and because of that, I need never live there. That weather is completely different. Those residents have to worry about water and wildfires. Something that touches us up here not at all. On average, L. A. gets 284 days of sunshine a year and 34 days of precipitation. Boston gets 200 days of sunshine and 130 days of precipitation. L. A.'s hottest days average around 85 and the coldest days average around 48. Boston's hottest days average 82 and coldest days 23. The coldest day in Boston in the last ten years was -9. (We hit -15 that day.) The coldest recorded day in Los Angeles ever was 28F, January 4, 1949. (See here.)

Is it a surprise New England and Los Angeles might have somewhat different characters?

I've lived in Alabama, Missouri, California, New Mexico, Seattle, and Massachusetts. The character of each is substantially different. I can't speak to the source for those differences since I haven't lived there in so long. But I can contrast my experience. 

It seems to me that weather, and specifically winter, drives much of the character in New England. People prepare for the coming winter up here more than I've seen anywhere else. When I lived in Seattle I saw an inch or two of snow or sleet that would melt in the subsequent rain. In L.A., it didn't happen. In Alabama, cold weather could always be depended on to be temporary.

But here, people think about what could happen if they run out of heating oil. They think what might happen if/when the power gives out. Come fall they make sure the snow blower is working and get it fixed if it isn't. They get fresh gasoline for it. They check the furnace and get more wood for the stove if necessary. They make sure the back up generator goes on if they have one. Not everybody does the same things. People in apartment buildings of course do things differently. 

But the first topic of conversation after a snow storm is always how much snow did you get? And people know how much they got. 

There's nothing special about New England in this. It's just that winter is the center around which the region turns. Other things happen: drought, tornadoes (not many), floods. But winter drives the regional thinking.

Other places have different climate considerations. Out west, it's water. In the summer you can't turn on television news without some mention of the water supply. In the mid-west, it's farming weather. In the southern mid-west and deep south, it might be floods-- there's a reason all those Depression dams were built down there. Or it might be the heat.

Each of these climate features torque the culture of the area. I had a friend who worked in politics in Chicago. He told me that anyone, city councilor or mayor, who didn't handle the snow properly was bounced out soundly next election. 

Geographical variation drives local behavior. People think about the weather. They talk about it. Boring conversations about the weather only happen in places where there isn't any. And there are not many places like that.

That said, I'll end with a note about New England.

People up here have a reputation of being unfriendly. I don't find them that way but I can see how some might. There is a strong belief that you can mind your own damn business. Atheist? Don't care. Republican? Don't care. Dump your snow in my driveway? I'll come for you in your sleep. 

At the same time, I've cleared the snow from my neighbor's driveway and they've done the same for me.

 

You don't always get who you want up here. But you do get who you need.

Good Things from 2020

 

(Picture from here.)

I had a different entry primed for this day but, since it is the first of the year, it seemed to me I’d look at some interesting science that has happened in the last year.

 

I set myself some ground rules. I’m not going to talk about COVID. Certainly, there have been many, many scientific breakthroughs coming from trying to handle COVID-19. But talking about COVID means talking about the pandemic and I don’t want to. I’m also not going to talk about SPACEX. That company has done some pretty exciting things this year but Musk gets enough press. I don’t need to help him.

 

So I’m going to talk about things that I found particularly exciting.

 

Particle Physics

Quantum entanglement is one of the most interesting of quantum phenomenon. Entanglement between individual atoms is nothing new—in fact, such entanglement is the base for quantum computation. However, in recent years quantum entanglement between objects larger than individual atoms has been created.

 

This year, researches at the Niels Bohr Institute have entangled a mechanical oscillator and a cloud of atoms. They were entangled by photons. We’ve now seen that atomic size is no barrier to entanglement nor is there any barrier entangling groups of objects. Now, we can entangle objects that are different in kind as well as size and number. I’d say the sky was the limit but no doubt they’ll be able to entangle that as well, with time.

 

Going further with entanglement, one form is called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a collection of atoms entangled to act as a single unit. BECs have been made in the lab for years but their properties are still mysterious. No one expected them to exhibit superconductivity. Until now. There are a lot of theories on how superconductivity arises, many of them reflecting the material studied. With the addition of BECs to the mix, there are now tantalizing hints of an overarching theoretical basis for it.

 

 

Space

One of the exoplanets that seems close to being earth-like was “discovered” this year. Kepler-1659c came out of examining the volumes of information that came from the Kepler spacecraft.

 

Kepler-1659c orbits a red dwarf, is about 1.06 the mass of earth, gets about 75% of the light that earth does and is smack dab in the habitable zone. Its orbit is 19.5 earth days and could easily be tidally locked. Red dwarves have a tendency towards solar flares but no flares have been seen in observation. There’s some suggestion from other studies that as red dwarves age, they tend to flare less. Since they can live much longer than our sun, that gives life that much longer to evolve. The Kepler-1659 system is about 300 light years from earth.

 

The South Pole Wall is an enormous wall of galaxies about .5 billion light years away. It is dense over the celestial South Pole, giving the name. It was discovered in July by the University of Hawaii and resulted from starting to seriously survey that portion of the sky.

 

Betelgeuse became a celebrity this year. It’s getting bigger, no longer spherical, and, according to new measurements, is now smaller and closer than we thought.

 

Betelgeuse started dimming last year starting speculation whether it was going to go supernova. It’s a red giant. That’s what red giants do. UV observation showed Big B ejecting a mass of material away. The resulting ejecta cooled into a dust cloud that then came over its face, dimming its output.

 

This fall, a new study suggested that B is much smaller than previous thought. B was originally thought to be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. This new study indicates it’s only about two thirds of that. Instead of being 650 light years away, it’s now considered more like 530 light years away. Far enough away it won’t kill us all when it goes off but close enough to put on a show.

 

And, of course, we can’t leave 2020 without talking about Chang’e 5, China’s lander that sent us back lunar samples for the first time in fifty years.

 

Biology

The concept of microbes living on air content is not a new one. Some have suggested that there just isn’t enough nutrition in the air to sustain life. Others have suggested there was. This was finally decided in 2017 by researchers in the University of New South Wales with their discovery of Antarctic microbes that live on air content. This year, the same group has discovered these or similar microbes in Antarctic, Arctic and Tibetan Plateau soils. This has some interesting implications. For one, though these microbes are not air borne, the fact they can live on nutrients in the air opens up exo-planetary niches for possible life forms. For another, there are very interesting potentially “habitable” zones in the upper atmosphere of Venus.

 

In fossil news, a five eyed missing link has shown us a possible origin of arthropods. Kylinxia was discovered in China in a layer of Cambrian fossils. It combines features from both arthropods (insects, crustacea, etc.) and features of Anomalocaris, a Cambrian predator thought to be one of the arthropod ancestors. The difference between Anomalocaris and modern arthropods is great suggesting that there was a missing link between them. Enter Kylinxia.

 

Going even further back, we have abiogenesis: life arising from non-life.

 

There have been experiments on this sort of thing going back to the fifties. A new software tool developed in Poland and South Korea models synthesis routes that could have taken place back in the pre-life days. This software product is called Allchemy.

 

There are a number of chemical processes that have to be encapsulated for a living organism to exist. These scientists took them one at a time and fed the data and environment to Allchemy to see what chemical synthetic pathways could have occurred. With this they were able to model the synthesis of nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins, among others. After two hours of operation, Alchemy showed possible pathways to the synthesis of 82 biotic molecules and 36k+ abiotic molecules.  

 

There are three major chemical pathways that need to be demonstrated for a living system: new pathways of chemical reactions resulting from the combination of previous compounds. This allows chemical selection to occur. Second, self-regenerating cycles so chemical system can be perpetuated. Finally, surfactant production. Surfactants are required for a lot of things but one is cell membranes.

 

Coming forward in time from no life to actual life, another great change is the emergence of eukaryotes from prokaryotes—i.e., our kind of life from the rest of them.

 

Eukaryotes are cells with internal organelles: nuclei, mitochondria, and the like. Prokaryotes—Bacteria and Archaea—don’t have those. It’s long been thought that a prokaryote cell captured another prokaryote cell and the two hit it off. One of the candidates for this are the Asgard archaea. These have been proposed as the closest relative of eukaryotes. This new study discusses the isolation and culture of such an organism and describes it. It took twelve years.

 

With the organism now fully studied, they found significant relationships between their target organism and eurkaryotes and proposed a mechanism by which an Asgard archaea could transform into a eukaryotic cell as a adaptation to the rising oxygen levels of the time.

 

There’s a lot more out there. Google’s DeepMind outperformed human radiologists in detecting breast cancer. The LHC discovered a new particle composed of four quarks. Perseverance, a new Plutonium powered rover, was launched. Archeologists pushed back human colonization of the Americas back to thirty thousand years ago.

 

We see destruction and despair every day. So much that we think that it’s all there is.

 

It’s not. The world is moving forward. The things that I described here will remain long after the current round of petty recriminations and lies are gone.