Category Archives: Weather +Climate

Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate, World History

Flood Narratives

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Winter                                                          Seed Catalog Moon

Hmmm.  I do like it when I’m scratching my head and I turn to the commentary to find, “Medieval and modern Latinists could make nothing of this.”  Ah. At least I’m not alone.

Today I’ve started in the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha.  This is an ancient flood narrative with parallels in Greek authors.  In Ovid Deucalion and Pyrrha end up on the top of Mt. Parnassus and have to rebuild the human race after the flood.  Right now Ovid is still describing the earth as the sea and extensive plains suddenly become water.

I don’t remember if I mentioned yesterday the image of dolphins swimming among the trees.  Nice.  Ships scrape their keels along the tops of hardy oak and mountain peaks.

There is controversial, but not crazy geological evidence for a flood in ancient, ancient times involving the Black Sea, sometime around 5,600 b.c.e.  That’s this corner of the world and, of course, the Middle East is nearby, too.

Interestingly, in earlier translation work I ran across the Latin word, ararat.  This is the pluperfect singular of a verb which means to plough or to till.  It can also mean to cultivate land.  Could the “flood” have been a period of wandering due to some natural disaster, maybe a flood, that resulted in Jews ending up on new land to farm?  Don’t recall enough of my studies in Genesis to know if this is probable or not, but the Latin is suggestive.

I don’t know enough about the hebrew word or the Latin translation of it either.  This is probably a coincidence, but it’s a weird one if it is.

GeekWorld, Great Work, MOOCS, Politics, Science, Weather +Climate, Writing

Back on Tailte, Peering Into the Climate Future

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Winter                                                        Seed Catalog Moon

After a frustrating morning with a balky computer, I got into Robert Klein’s work on Missing.  He’s good.  Careful, detailed.  I’ve only rejected one of his edits so far and that one I understood what he did, but chose my construction over his.  I didn’t get far, but I’ll keep at it.

I wrote a private post earlier about my anxiety as I approached this stage.  It’s still there, but the anxiety decreased as I worked.  I hope that continues to be the case.

As I mentioned on Great Wheel, my computer is running a climate model with its unused processing power.  This is part of an Oxford Study to determine the results in a particular model if it is run many times with slight variations.  These slight variation can be very significant (think butterfly flapping wings), but without running these complex models over and over, tweaking them in slightly different ways each time, it’s impossible to know for sure what a particular adjustment will do.

Climate and weather modeling are big users of super computer resources and the work on my computer is part of a massively parallel processing strategy to, in effect, mimic super computers without having to buy them.  The concept is simple.  Each home computer has many times the computing power necessary for almost, if not all, the tasks it performs and, in addition to that, most of them sit idle most of the time.  By downloading parts of larger task onto many, many home computers use can be made of both the idle and under-utilized processing power.  The first one of these projects was SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence, and I was part of that one, too.

They are resource intensive, however, so some of my computer frustrations might have come from it modeling global climate in the background.  I’m 95% with the task the Oxford folks assigned to me (well, my trusty Gateway is 95% done) and it may be a while before I take on another one.  This run takes approximately 350 hours of processing time.

I can and do shut it off at times.

 

Family, Great Work, Science, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Accentuating the Negative

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

Again the even heat is so fine.  Makes this feel like a work space instead of a commandeered backroom.

Most of the time today reading materials for the Climate Change MOOC and then listening a set of lectures by Richard Somerville.  He’s a theoretical meteorologist which means that his work includes creating and running weather prediction and climate models.  He is understandable and dispassionate.  And all the more troubling for it.

(this “ski slope” graph shows the rates at which emissions have to reduce when peak CO2 emissions happen on three different dates, one already past.  And we’re currently accelerating. again, see Great Wheel for particulars.)

It’s bugging me right now that I’m putting up all this negative information on Great Wheel, but the terrain ahead of us has become clearer and clearer the further I go in this course. The world needs to act soon and the developed world needs to show leadership.  The EU has committed to emission goals that will meet the challenges and they have more people and a larger economy than we have.  We need to act.

Then, we have to figure out the issue of sustainable development in the developing world, especially China and India, but in Brazil and Russia, too, the BRIC countries.  And we really don’t have much time.  In order to avert literal disaster (see Great Wheel for particulars) emissions worldwide have to peak no later than 2020 and begin then a very sharp reduction.  By very sharp reduction I mean getting to a world with 80% less carbon emissions before 2050.  80%!!!!!!!!!!!

This, the Great Work of Thomas Berry’s work of the same name, is one on which we cannot fail.  If we do, we consign our grandchildren (Ruth and Gabe) and their children to a world of currently unimaginable extremes in sea level rise, temperature, significant rainfall events, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and probably an increased severity of hurricanes and typhoons.  You wouldn’t want to live in this world and your children’s children won’t want to either.

Cinema and Television, Travel, Weather +Climate, Writing

Oh. My.

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Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

Discovered, thanks to my copy editor, Robert Klein, that I had named one of my characters in an unintentionally humorous way.  Two-arcas Merkin is a character who kills two arcas (bear-like creatures) and becomes known for it.  Turns out, you may know this but I didn’t, a merkin is a pubic wig.  First, I didn’t know there were such things.  Second, as a result, I didn’t know they had a name.  It’s the kind of thing I’m glad somebody caught.  Geez.

(Russian ambassador and President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove)

The weather outlook in Denver is consistent with what I’ve experienced several times over the Stock Show trips:  50’s, high 50’s.  Always seems weird, but northern moving Gulf air pressed east by the Rocky Mountains brings spring like temperatures to winter Denver often.  Jon likes it.  I don’t.  I like my seasons true to themselves.  Cold winters.  Warm, wet spring.  Hot summers.  Cool falls.

 

 

Cinema and Television, Weather +Climate

Flying High

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

Cool again, heading toward zero and minus land.

Just watched Aviator.  Maybe a bit late since it was 2004, but, hey.  It was still good.  Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburne.  Amazing.  Worth watching the whole movie just to see her.  She’s one of my favorite actresses and she was at top form in this role.

Leonardo DiCaprio, whom Kate and I saw in Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas Day, portrayed the enigmatic and chaotic brilliance of Howard Hughes, his obsessive-compulsive disorder eating into his effectiveness.  In fact, he ended up so secretive that when he died aboard a plane in 1976, the Federal Government had to use fingerprints to discern that it was actually Hughes who had died.

 

Great Wheel, Great Work, MOOCS, Weather +Climate, Writing

And Things Were New

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Winter                                                                  Seed Catalog Moon

So much new.  There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more.  Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.

There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting.  That’s when past experience helps.

Learning new tools for the Great Wheel.  Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way.  Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.

In it now and glad of it.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Weather +Climate, Writing

The Inner Journey

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Winter                                                            Seed Catalog Moon

At Michaelmas the soul turns inward, following the darker path occasioned by the rising length of the night and the dwindling of the day.  By Samhain that turn is well underway and the work of the study gains dominance as the outdoor work diminishes like the sunlight.  At the Winter Solstice the deep center of the interior work has been reached. The work of the interior fully alive.

Now in the New Year that darkness nourishes writing, translating, creation of new projects.  And, too, a portion of the soul begins to move outward, gathering in the seed catalogs, plotting the garden yet to be.

These two movements, inward and outward, reinforce or provoke our natural tendencies. Those of us on the introverted side welcome the coming of the dark, the movement down the corridors leading away from the light.  The extroverts gladly follow the sun up those same corridors, headed toward the day.

The turning of the Great Wheel does not allow us to become too comfortable in either spot, reminding us throughout the year that both the interior and the exterior are important; that both have their nuances and richness.

Some of us will continue to wander those labyrinths within even as the Summer Solstice dawns, while others even now see the rays of sun bouncing off the labyrinth’s walls.

(hades and persephone)

Great Wheel, Great Work, Weather +Climate, Writing

In the Zone

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Winter                                                                Seed Catalog Moon

We skated through the day never getting warmer than -14 by my weather station.  That’s a chilly day by any standard.

Got some news on Missing.  It will be back in a bit.  Bob said it had a lot of capitalization and formatting errors.  Oops.  Plus a lot of pesky 1st person remainders from an early experiment in first person story telling.  Sorta makes me chagrined, but, hey, that’s why I hired the guy in the first place.  Better him finding them than an agent reading my manuscript cold.

Also got a ways into Loki’s Children today.  I have a pretty clear idea about the way forward with it and I’m excited.  Decided to just get at it, write away so to speak.  It was fun to get in that space.  Lost track of time.

So, with the work on Great Wheel and Loki’s Children, I’ve been in a creative space most of this very cold, good to be inside, day.  Feels good.

Then a good workout.  Plus news that my PSA was normal.  All in all, a good day.

Great Wheel, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A New Site Begins

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Winter                                                             Seed Catalog Moon

If you want to take a peak, www.ancientrailsgreatwheel.com is live.  I’m still pondering the look, the content and I don’t plan to get at it methodically until late January, so it’s very early days.

It’s easy to get obsessed with a project like this and do nothing else for a good while, but I want to let this percolate before I decide on a look and while I get the idea of content refined.  I’m very open to input right now about either look or content.  What’s up right now will change as the year goes on, as it does here on Ancientrails.

In other news it’s -14 now at almost 3:00 o’clock.  We’ve probably hit our high for the day.

Time feels oddly, well, frozen.  As if life goes on here, but has come to a stop outside.  That may not be too far from the truth.

Weather +Climate

Yes, Virginia. There Is A North Pole and The Next Few Days Will Prove It.

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Winter                                                                 Seed Catalog Moon

OK.  It’s gonna be cold.  I get it.  The weather folks and the news folks, even me, have been breathlessly anticipating this onrushing arctic air.  We do live here.  This is a state which borders Canada and has no mountains to break the winds from the north pole.  It’s gonna be cold.

Not always, not with global warming, but at times it is going to get chilly.  This is one of those times.  It feels oversold to me, too much huffing and puffing.  Yes, it’s important that every one know the life threatening nature of the weather, I agree with that.

But. Hey, we’re all mammals here, right?  Which means warm-blooded.  And we’re essentially hairless mammals.  Right?  So. When it’s really cold, don’t go outside naked. We know cold for too long, with too little clothing is bad for us.  Our bodies let us know. Pay attention to your body.