Monthly Archives: February 2016

Aging, Third Phase

65-79 Happy

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People aged 65 to 79 ‘happiest of all’, study suggests  BBC news

Here’s another argument for being clear about how we feel as seniors. It’s fun. Setting aside the workaday world (if you have), seeing the kids well launched or at least responsible for their own lives, aware of your Self, not yet suffering from debilitating illness (if you’re not), what’s not to enjoy?

Getting old is not a trial, it’s a release into full humanity. Think of what this says about work and even raising a family. The unhappiest group, according to the same article, are those 45-59. And, no, I don’t know what happened to the 60-64 group. Just dithering in between I suppose.

We need to get the word out that aging has substantial personal rewards. That it’s not all anguish, wrinkles and hospital corridors. Hardly. It’s a time when that person you’ve been waiting to become can finally emerge. Now, if you can pull off that chrysalis snapping change before 65, far out, as we used to say. But if not, getting that medicare card may be just the moment to do it.

Science

Tokamak vs. the Stellarator

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Friend Bill Schmidt found this follow-up to an earlier post about the stellarator. You may not recall it, but this is the next step toward a possible source of power generated by nuclear fusion. May it be successful.

Tokamak and stellarator are designs for fusion devices.

from earthlink.net.

GREIFSWALD, Germany (AP) — Scientists in Germany flipped the switch Wednesday on an experiment they hope will advance the quest for nuclear fusion, considered a clean and safe form of nuclear power.

Following nine years of construction and testing, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald injected a tiny amount of hydrogen into a doughnut-shaped device — then zapped it with the equivalent of 6,000 microwave ovens.

The resulting super-hot gas, known as plasma, lasted just a fraction of a second before cooling down again, long enough for scientists to confidently declare the start of their experiment a success…

Although there are about a dozen stellarator experiments around the world, including in the U.S., Japan, Australia and Europe, scientists say the Greifswald device is the first to match the performance of tokamaks.

Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

The Beauty Way

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Go now, the snow has ended. This paraphrase of the last words of the Catholic mass sums up life after 18 inches of snow. Things get moving again after the last snow falls and the plows get roads opened and sanded. That last being especially important for those of us who live in the mountains.

Snow storms bring beauty in their wake unlike their wilder cousins tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos. Here are a couple of photographs from this morning.

Feb 3 500 Feb 3 2500

Park County, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

Snow Dominant

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mountain lion 1.16.16 near Mt. Bailey
mountain lion 2.1.16 near Mt. Bailey

The snow. A lot more overnight. Beautiful, foggy on Black Mountain. Lodgepole branches white and bowing toward the earth awaiting a wind to slough off the snow. We become snow hermits, watching the flakes fall in our forested backyard, feeling a part of the mountain in a way not possible under other weather conditions.

It’s funny, but the snow, which dominates life when it comes in this quantity, is more important than Cruz beating Trump or Bernie tieing Hillary. We are apart from the lower, literally lower, 48 states, sitting up here on Shadow Mountain surrounded by other peaks and covered in white. The dominant note here is silence. Politics are too noisy, too bright and colorful to matter. And faraway.

This will change of course. In the way of Colorado the roads will be clear soon. The driveway, after I blow it, will also clear. The quiet will last a while though, as will the snow in the yard. Even warmer temperatures won’t touch that in the near term.

Right now our solar panels have a snowy cap maybe a foot deep, so no electricity from them until a melt. I’m going to investigate deep cycle batteries and see if there’s a combination of deep cycle batteries and our generator that might carry us off the grid entirely. That is not yet, however. For now we’re relying on IREA to pump electricity into our system.