Doctor HP Flowers

Crazy Bars

     Just finished fillin' out the log book for my 24th annual extended extravagant backroads expedition beginning Tomorrow morning at 4:30 am.  Formless spontaneous shunpiking thru the hinterlands of Va., Wva., Ky, Tenn, and NC.  Following the next impulse.  As the marching bars show, long gone are the heady days when out-of-pocket expenses could be kept below $28-$30 per day - food, gas, shelter and incidentals like ice, an occasional spray wash to knock the dust and mud off the truck,  scotch tape for map repair and, of course, essentials like my daily course of chocolate crème filled cup cakes.
     For the first 3 or 4 days I'll retrace old familiar tracks while performing all adjustments needed to shift from living in the burbs to living in my truck.  Sixty five year old joints and ligaments need a bit of coaxing, you know, this trip eased by my new thermarest plus foam cushion combo called "Dreamland". 
     On Day 01 I'll find State Road 215 in Transylvania Co. NC heading north up thru the headwaters of the North Fork French Broad River, then north along the Blue Ridge Parkway to a favorite Inn in Burnsville.  On Day 02 I'll follow familiar backroads north thru the mountains of western North Carolina ending at Raccoon Branch campground in Smyth County Va.  Early the next morning Day 03 I'll stop at the Sugar Grove Diner for pork tenderloin and eggs and my annual visit with Peggy Sexton to catch up on local news from the last 12 months.  After replenishing gas and ice it's north via the off-track thru Bland, Giles, Craig, and Alleghany Cos. Virginia stopping when the light fails.  With a long hard Day 03 drive I might make it to the Pocahontas Campground in Pocahontas County, Wva - Greenbrier River headwaters.  Back in three weeks.  Play those crazy bars.






© 0639-07  Campground Sign
  Pocahontas County, West Virginia
  Friday 27 May 1994



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Divulging Climatic Secrets

     This is a tell-all expose - a rigorous attempt to plumb the depths of meteorological science to lay bare the inscrutable secrets behind the annual progression of daily air temperatures across the greater Atlanta metropolitan area.  A major heat island.
     The graph above plots 8500 daily air temperatures recorded by the National Weather Service at the Atlanta Airport from 1980 thru 2003.  These are daily average temperatures, mind you, averaged over a full 24-hour day, not the detested afternoon maximums experienced by thousands during their commutations over hot asphalt.
     Applying non-linear least squares, the following harmonic regression model was fitted to these data to isolate the fundamental forcing functions:

          Predicted daily temperature = M + A*(sin(2*Pi*T)/365 + C)

     M = long-term average temperature was found to be 62.95 deg F;
     A = the maximum degrees above this average equals 18.51 F; and,
     C = the seasonal phase shift becomes 4.48.

     Apparently, in Atlanta the prevailing summer temperatures are much higher than those in winter reaching a maximum in July.  However, during any particular year daily maximums can occur just about any time, with winter temperatures up-and-down all over the place.

Title:           © Atlanta Air Temperatures.
Series:         None of the Above
Location:      Atlanta, Georgia
Date:           February 2005

Infinity Cures Acid Reflux

    When you slice off and eat half a pizza, then slice off and eat half of the remaining half, then slice off and eat half of the remaining portion, and continue slicing and eating 'till infinity arrives, we say the amount of pizza remaining at any time decreases according to the rules of a first order process. Your acid reflux will also follow a first order process increasing gurgitation in response to the disappearing pizza.  Pizza reflux is a 'fast' first order reaching finality in minutes.  At a different pace, radioactive plutonium-239 decays with a half life of 24,000 years, losing its potency at an incredibly 'slow' rate.

Outside, pollutants in our rivers often decay by first order rules extending over days and sometimes weeks.  Dump waste water in the river at point A.  By the time it reaches point B indigenous bacteria will consume it as food, maybe not by halves, but as a first order process nonetheless. Unfortunately, feeding bacteria also remove dissolved oxygen, again as a first order process, suffocating innocent aquatic life in the way.  (Aquatic life can also suffocate rather suddenly; we call that a 'delta function').  Rivers can get reflux too.

Folks like me spend our working days (and sleepless nights) trying to understand and quantify the multitude of first order reactions at play in the river at any place, at all times.  For the health of the river we must calculate the precise amount of waste water control needed to neutralize any reflux, and regulate unruly first order processes to within very tight limits, for the foreseeable future.  No runaway first order processes allowed, in my town!

Let's hear it for the Water Scientist.