Crape Myrtle

  

It didn't start blooming until the first of July.

 

Now it's the end of July.

 

Still blooming!

 

I love the fragrance every time I walk past.

 

 

 

It was all a lie!

  

They said as we got older, we would require less sleep.  Well, we think we qualify as "older" now, and eight isn't enough.  If we don't get our nine hours, we feel cheated!

 

 

 

 

Another critter

  

 

Looks like a grasshopper, but we couldn't match it up with any grasshopper pictures.  It's different.  Consulted a friend who knows these things.

 

It's called an Arid-land Katydid.  It's a badass.  Praying Mantis eat grasshoppers, but not this one.  This one will eat a praying mantis!

 

 

 

Do you ever think about hotel hot water?

  

If we take a long hot shower in our hotel room, is the person in the next room going run out of hot water if they shower next?  How does that work?  Is there a hot water heater for every room?  Every two rooms?  Every floor?  One giant heater for the entire building?  If I run out the hot water, did I just spoil it for the entire hotel?

 

I remember running out of hot water in hotel rooms, but that hasn't happened for a lot of years.

 

 

 

 

 

Check this out

  

On the end of the tie that holds the cushion onto the chair frame.

 

A little yellow dot.

 

That little yellow dot is called a crab spider.

 

It took a sharp-eyed kid on our deck to spot that critter.  Thank you, Emily!

 

 

 

 

The television program “Alone”

  

I forgot to mention the part about the participants carrying cameras.  They carry several each.  Part of the deal is they have to film everything they’re doing.  It never shows on screen, but I think support crews come to exchange camera data cards and batteries regularly.  As the weeks go by, the survivors get regular medical checkups as well.  Finding adequate food seems to be the biggest hurdle for most in this adventure.  It’s not uncommon for people to get pulled from the game by the medical team before they’re ready to go because they’ve lost too much weight to continue safely.  I also forgot to mention that all episodes of the show are available streaming on HULU.  The first season is a little patchy, but it gets better after that, as the participants get better.

 

Watching this show takes me first back to the boy scouts (in the 1950s, learning to live off the land), then to the later backpacking days.  I never tried to live off the land like these people (leave-no-trace camping is generally more appropriate now), but I did carry everything I needed into the wilderness to live alone for a few days at a time in the Colorado high country and be completely self-sufficient hiking back and forth over the Continental Divide.  Now I suddenly miss that and feel the pull.  Matt is storing my old backpack.  Maybe I need to pick that up from him, assemble the rest of my gear, and make another hike over Pawnee Pass.

 

But back to food.  A lot of small animals, and occasionally big ones, are harmed in the production of this show.  I’m a little squeamish about that part.  I know this is where our food comes from, most of us eat animals, but killing animals for entertainment is a little off-putting.  Killing animals as a food source for people that are otherwise starving; completely understandable.  So where does this leave me?  It leaves me enthralled with the concept of being left alone and having to find my own way to fire, water, and shelter; but I think I want to be the survivor who brings their own freeze-dried meals and lives as one with the bunny rabbits and squirrels.  :)

 

 

 

Port Mansfield

  

Lazy dog days of summer.  A driveabout to Port Mansfield.  It's only an hour away.

 

Route to Port Mansfield

 

There isn't really any reason to be in Port Mansfield unless you're going fishing (which we weren't). 

 

Port Mansfield

 

It's right on the Laguna Madre for shallow water fishing.  It's also directly in line with the dredged channel, Mansfield Pass through Padre Island.

 

Mansfield Pass

 

Going through Mansfield Pass opens up the entire Gulf of Mexico for deep water fishing.

 

Pelican Cove Bar and Grill for Black Drum at lunch.

 

OMG good.

 

A stop at the new fishing pier

 

…and waterside trails.

 

 

A drive through town to locate the white-tailed deer that are always here somewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

And that pretty much wraps it up!

 

An excellent day.

 

 

 

Alone

  

I wished out loud that we could watch a program like Survivor, but with a little more focus on survival than game play.  Our wish came true.  Actually, it was already true, but we just found out about it.  Survivor gets network television.  The program "Alone" gets the History Channel.  Alone doesn't use teams so much, only once so far, so we don't get the team dynamic, but no problem.  It does put capable survivalists out in the wilderness to get by with no outside assistance.  Ten people.  Each gets to bring a few basic survival tools and a tarp.  Each one is left alone with a satellite phone to tap-out when they've had enough.  No contact with the outside world.  No contact with each other.  The one that lasts the longest wins.  The only way you know when you win is when they come out to tell you.

 

It's great to see how these wilderness-capable people do.  They build things.  They invent things.  Some fight the wilderness to survive.  Some embrace the wilderness to survive.  Some figure out fire, water, shelter, and food, but not all do.  You might think the ones with the best wilderness skills would automatically win by lasting longest; they might, but not necessarily.   "If you don't have air, you don't care that you don't have water.  If you don't have water, you don't care that you don't have food."  Once you get all the basics though, then what?  Then the head games really start.  When you're not worried about surviving another day, you can start to wonder how long to you really want to live a survival existence indefinitely alone.

 

Certainly bingeworthy.  A big "thank you" to the several people who suggested it to us.

 

 

 

Perspective

  

Climate change is accelerating.  We're so slow to deal with it, and it has so much momentum, it could pass a tipping point while we're still procrastinating and go into a spiral we can't stop.  What if we screw the planet up so much it becomes uninhabitable?  It's game over.  End of story.  Right?

 

Well, it depends.  It depends on how important we think human beings are.  The earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago.  Life on earth started maybe 3.5 billion years ago.  The first animals, 800 million years ago.  The first mammals, 178 million years ago.  First primates, 60 million years.  Early humans 2.5 million years.  Modern humans, maybe 350,000 years ago.

 

If we compress the history of life on earth, and express it as one calendar year, the earth took shape on January 1^st.  Life appeared on March 22^nd.  The first animals October 27^th.  the first mammals December 16^th.  First primates December 26^th.  Early humans on December 31^st at about 7pm.  Modern humans at 11:30 on the last day of the year.  That's how significant we are to life on earth or life in general.

 

Sure, from our perspective, we matter, but that's a human-centric look.  From an earth-centric perspective, we're just a minor blip.  An annoyance.  If the planet has to endure a temporary fever to rid itself of an infection, it's seen a lot worse than that.  Then, it's got another 7.5 billion years or so before it gets engulfed by the sun.  For the earth, the game has just begun.

 

 

 

 

65 degrees

  

A cool misty morning.  At 4900 feet, Fort Davis is about the highest city in Texas.  Marfa, a smaller town, might also be the highest city in Texas.  From here, I can't tell the difference.  South on Highway 118 to Alpine.  Passed an RV Park named the Lost Alaskan.  Funny.  Way lost.  Stopped in Alpine for a sip of fuel and a bag of ice.  This is a car/hotel trip.  That includes an ice chest so I can have all the home cooking leftovers.  The ice chest is high efficiency.  In this heat it can turn a bag of ice into a puddle in mere hours.  That creates a lot of water in the ice chest that has to be dumped out.  I however, healing a broken bone in my elbow, am not supposed to lift anything heavy.  The solution:

 

I grabbed a piece of dripper hose from the house before I left.  Anytime I stop, I use it to siphon the extra water out of the ice chest.  It's not hard to start the siphon, the ice chest never moves, and problem solved.  Dare I say, brilliant!

 

100 miles until the next services.  Big Bend is a long way from anything.  The dashboard display says I have a 500 mile range remaining.  I have the road to myself; myself except for the turkey vultures and ravens.  There are no speed limit signs.  The temperature graduates from the 60s to the 70s, then 80s as I drive further into the day.

 

Passed the turn for Christmas Mountains Oasis.  Passed the RV Park in Terlingua where Judy and I stayed earlier this year.  It was full then.  It's a dusty ghost town now.  The national park entrance is not staffed; I drive right through.  A right turn inside the park for the Sam Nail Ranch pullout.  I'm not ready to stop already, but I do.  Now it's in the 90s.  A secluded shady respite.

 

 

 

I spend an hour there.  Two target birds, the varied bunting and the plumbeous vireo.  The plumbeous vireo is unusual there; I whiffed on it.  I heard the bunting but couldn't get it to come out into the open.  Hearing counts.  391.  Drove farther down the side road to Santa Elena Canyon.

 

That canyon is carved by Rio Grande, dividing Mexico and the U.S.  Now the temperature is in the 100s down here on the river.  Time to retreat to Chisos Basin for the night.  It's cooler up there at 5400 feet.

 

Fort Davis to Big Bend

 

 

 

Street tacos

  

Love those little street tacos.  A bit of beef with shredded cabbage, tomatoes, sauteed onions, a squirt of hot sauce and a squeeze of lime, wrapped up in a tiny soft corn tortilla.  We get them in Mexico; six for five dollars.  Mouth is watering again as I describe them.

 

Makes a filling lunch.  All fresh ingredients.  Why would these little things make me sleepy?  It never fails.  It takes about an hour to walk back across the bridge, clear the border, and drive home; just in time for my involuntary nap.  No coke.  No beer.  Just tacos.  There is nothing unusual in them.  Why would this combination of ingredients put me to sleep?

 

 

 

 

 

Outrage

  

We're surrounded by it.  Politicians generate outrage to get attention and motivate people to vote.  It's a political strategy.  If cable news can get people outraged enough, then their channel will get a larger audience share.  It's a business strategy.

 

Me, I'm outraged by the intentional stoking of outrage; the concomitant disrespect of the truth.

 

 

 

 

Nerdfest

  

While making sure I was using a word properly, I came across an article by Columbia Journalism Review on homophones; words that sound alike but are spelled differently or mean different things. 

 

https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/callus-callous.php

 

They were writing a mea culpa:

 

A FEW WEEKS AGO, when we wrote about the confusion over the homophones "poor," "pour," and "pore," we said that another anatomical use of "pore" was "a type of callous that forms at the site of a healing fracture."

 

More than one hardened reader called us out. We were careless to use "callous" and not "callus." We made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors. How embarrassing, and ironic.

It's an easy mistake to make, though we should have caught it before readers did. After all, the adjective "callous" means "being hardened and thickened," as Merriam-Webster says. But "callus" is a noun, meaning "a thickening of or a hard thickened area on skin or bark."

 

How great is that?  They made a homophone error in an article about homophone errors!

 

 

 

 

Surprise!

  

I got a call this afternoon that there was an unusual hummingbird half an hour from our house.  (Thank you Jon.)  A drive there and:

 

Mexican Violetear.

 

That's not a normal bird for us.  It lives in Mexico and Central America.

 

Texas bird number 403 for the year.  A nice surprise!

 

 

 

 

Coronavirus

 

The Coronavirus is still a thing.  It's still killing people.  Coronavirus vaccine is widely available in the U.S., and it's free.  Side effects of the vaccine include temporary discomfort.  Side effects of the virus include death.  There are still unvaccinated people.

 

Go figure…

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes

  

Sometimes, we just eat pretty.

 

 

 

Hiking

  

On the Laguna Meadow trail in Big Bend, on the way back down to the basin, something occurred to me.  I got a hiking merit badge for doing a 10-mile hike in the mountains when I was in the Boy Scouts.  I should get a badge for doing it again 60 years later!  (Yes, a mind can wander anywhere while hiking for hours, right?)

 

Next challenge:  Imagine up a governing body to award me this honor.  Man Scouts???  Maybe I need to take another hike and find where my mind wanders to next…

 

 

 

 

Best idea ever?

  

How to electrify the trucking industry.  Surely the size and weight of the batteries required to power an electric semi-truck are a huge obstacle.  Current technology probably allows for building a truck capable of driving a few hundred miles if it weren't for the fact that it also has to pull a load.

 

So here is my solution:  Distributed storage.  (Like distributed power on a long freight train.)  Build an electric semi-tractor with a two-hundred-mile range unloaded.  (Because that's about the range we can get with current technology.)  Then, in each trailer the truck might be pulling, build in a battery big enough to provide the additional power needed to pull just that loaded unit the same distance.  Plug the units together with a big electric cord.  It wouldn't matter how many trailers you hooked up, or what you hooked them up to, the incremental power would always be there!  Brilliant?

 

These trucks could be deployed for local fleets that get to return to home base every night.  As battery technology improves, the range improves, until electric trucks can be used for long hauls.  Of course we recharge these imaginary vehicles with wind, solar, or tidal power, and the whole system is clean.

 

I suppose others might have stolen my idea already by having it first, but no matter.  Whatever it takes to make progress preserving this delicate planet we all rely on.

 

 

 

Physics Talk Online 5:30 MDT Thursday

  

Who knows what those crazy electrons are going do?  One or two at a time and they act just fine.  Once they start to run in packs though, look out, anything could happen.

 

Are there enough electrons that we need to worry about them?  This guy says there are more electrons in the atoms of a paper clip than there are stars in the universe, so yeah, I guess it matters what electrons do.  We’re all invited to attend tomorrow night as he explains what we think we know about when “many electrons” get together.

 

 

Heinz R Pagels Public Lecture   Please join us LIVE ONLINE TOMORROW   Thursday, July 15, 5:30 pm MDT/23:30 UTC   followed by an interactive Q&A           Cyrus Dreyer Stony Brook University     Understanding Solids with Supercomputers   Many Electrons at a Time       According to visionary American physicist Richard Feynman, the most important concept in all of science is "the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” The properties of the materials that make up the world around us are governed by how these atoms attract and repel each other, which is determined by interactions between the electrons most loosely-bound to those atoms. For example, whether a solid is hard and translucent like diamond, or soft and opaque like graphite; whether a material conducts electricity and heat like copper, or prevents the flow of electricity and heat like rubber; whether a material can be used in computer chips, like silicon; or whether a drug like aspirin will mitigate a fever.    Understanding these interactions turns out to be a very difficult problem, one that has challenged physicists for a century. For one thing, electrons are small, and thus governed by the weird properties of quantum mechanics. Also, there are a lot of them in a given material: there are more electrons in the atoms that make up a paper clip than there are stars in the universe. In this talk I will describe a particular approach to tackling the “many electron problem”, known as Density Functional Theory, which, combined with the most powerful supercomputers in the world, has revolutionized our ability to describe and predict the properties of materials. I will give a variety of examples of how this knowledge of materials can be used to develop novel electronic devices for modern technology.   Cyrus Dreyer earned a Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and then was a postdoctoral associate at Rutgers University. He is currently an assistant professor at Stony Brook University in the department of Physics and Astronomy, and an affiliate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute,  Center for Computational Quantum Physics. His research interests involve developing and implementing computational techniques based on density functional theory to explore the properties of electronic materials.     Introducer and Co-host:   Ali Yazdani, Princeton University               Please join using the Zoom link below. You'll be able to ask questions during the Q&A by clicking on the hand at the bottom of your screen. The co-host will call on you.       Zoom Link       Heinz R Pagels Public Lectures continue next Thursday at 5:30 pm Aspen time with Mark Alford, Washington University in St Louis "Faster than Light: Spooky Action at a Distance in Nature"   Lectures are added to our YouTube channel, AspenPhysics. Descriptions are on our website:       Public Lectures       Aspen Center for Physics | 970-925-2585 | patty@aspenphys.org       Donate           Connect with us       ‌ ‌ ‌

 

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Quick work of it

  

Some rain and a lake.

 

The rain stopped.  A few 4" pumps across the way sucking water out of the field and putting it into a nearby irrigation canal for a few days…

 

And problem solved!

 

Oops.  It just rained another inch tonight.  No matter.  I can hear the pumps running again.

 

 

 

402

  

We drove to Choke Canyon State Park.  There, by 75 Acre Lake, we scoured the little forest from the parking lot.  Judy was first to spot it, an orange bird with black trim, black eyeline on an orange face, robin sized.  I saw it too.  Bullocks Oriole!  Number 402!

 

Didn't get a photo, but if I'd gotten a close-up, it would have looked like this.

(Not my photo.)

 

I did get this photo of a nice crested caracara though.

 

 

 

I have his shoes

  

 

It seems I always have something of Johnny's.

 

The first time he visited us in Colorado he hitchhiked out from California and brought some ski gear along and we all went skiing together.  When it was time to go, he didn't want to mess with the ski poles on the return hitchhiking trip, so he gave them to me, each carefully labelled with the name "Seethaler" with scotch tape well wrapped over the label to protect it.  I skied with those poles for decades.  Skis, boots, bindings; all changed over the years, but the poles never did.

 

Last time we visited with John in Colorado he had a pair of Xero Shoes he had bought that were just a little too small for him.  Just right for me though.

 

I'll have these shoes the rest of my life.

 

 

 

Mirage

  

Way out at the end, it looks like the road turns to water.

 

It's not really water though.  It's just an optical illusion; perception being distorted by a thin layer of hot air just above the road surface.

 

When we get closer.  It becomes obvious that….. 

 

 

It's all water!