How Many Farts Does It Take To Make A Tornado?

Apparently, not many. That is, if you do it at just the right time and place.

This week, Edward Norton Lorenz died:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/18/db1801.xml

Why is this notable? Because Dr. Lorenz is an early researcher in Chaos Theory who came up with a mathematical principle called the Butterfly Effect.

What is The Butterfly Effect? No, I'm not talking about that singularly horrible B sci-fi movie made a few years ago, or its even worse sequel. I'm talking about the mathematical theory that very small changes early on in a system, such as "the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil" could lead to extreme repercussions later in that system, such as "a tornado in Texas."

Lorenz was a meteorologist (and previously an Army Air Corps weather forecaster during WWII) who was trying to use mathematical models to make long-range forecasts of wind currents. One day back in 1961, Lorenz ran a computer simulation that he had run before (using one of those early, building-sized computers) and got a completely different result than he had the first time. Very surprising, since he had thought everything had been entered exactly the same. It turns out that this time he had rounded the number 0.506127 to 0.506, a 0.1% difference.

Some people would shrug that off, re-enter the correct number, and continue on with their work. I've known lab rats like that. But Lorenz was among the few who could see this result and realize the great significance of it. What he had stumbled upon was proof that very small changes, like a seemingly minor increase in temperature or wind speed and direction, could cause profound weather deviations down the line, perhaps in a totally different part of the world. This factor was dubbed the "Lorenz Attractor."

For example, if you start a ball rolling at the top of a hill, but it is at only a very slightly different position, it will likely wind up at a very different position at the bottom. Or if a seagull flapped its wings at just the right time and place in Brazil, the change it created in the wind could lead to a tornado in Texas (to use his examples). These sorts of things have been demonstrated in simulations again and again, including with the newest supercomputers. The movie "It's A Wonderful Life" illustrates this principle, in a more sappy, cultural manner (I cry everytime when George Bailey's brother makes that toast at the end!).

So, let me see if I understand: if a plaza full of Germans eating Octoberfest sauerkraut, brautworst, and beer suddenly let loose with a cloud of warm gas (from whichever end you choose), the sudden change in heat and wind could cause a cascade of events that leads to winds that rip across the Atlantic and belch up a hurricane that ravages America?

Damned Germans. I knew it! They caused Hurricane Katrina!

That's it! I'm throwing out my laderhosen.

Of course, those "Lorenz Attractors" can prevent devient weather, too.

And as for Dr. Lorenz, he led a very active life, with many awards, scholarly papers, and academic achievements, most of which seem to revolve around the later refinements of his initial discovery. You could say his personal "Butterfly Effect" was his own discovery of the Butterfly Effect, if that makes any sense. His Butterfly Effect theory has led to a better understanding of seemingly random events that can drastically change our weather – more important now than ever with global warming – and has been used in science fields far beyond meteorology.

He was an avid sportsman, even into old age. But cancer finally claimed him a few days ago, on April 16. He died at home in Cambridge, with family, having finished yet another paper only a week before. He was 90 years old.

Thank you for your contributions, Dr. Lorenz. And I'm glad to hear that your death wasn't a chaotic one. I just wonder what that last breath of yours did to the weather.


Images taken from HERE and HERE.

Eat A Cow, Kill The Earth

I never liked cows. I grew up next to a cow pasture, and just down the road from a large dairy farm. They’re nasty, smelly, sluggish beasts. Sure, they’re docile animals, they give us milk, they get carved up to give us all sorts of interesting edible meaty bits. That’s cool. I don’t mind a nice thick burger once in a while, dripping with potentially E. coli-infected juice and swarming with mad cow prions. It’s, you know, yummy. You can’t taste the mad cow if you douse the cooked flesh with plenty of A1 sauce.

But then there are all the studies of cow farts.

Yes, you’ve probably heard about it, those jokes made about silly scientific studies, lab rats like myself shoving pipes up a cow’s derrière to measure the methane output from eating a bucket of feed. All those studies about the contribution of cattle fart methane to the ever-alarming global warming problem (like THIS study). Yes, global warming is real. Every scientist knows it. And every politician knows it, at least those whose political party name doesn’t begin with “R” and end with “epublican.” What is a self-respecting carnivore like me to do? Where’s the beef? I needs my cow flesh, thank you. Get in my belly!

A soon-to-be-published paper in Animal Science Journal sheds a little more light on the problem:

Story: http://www.physorg.com/news103983167.html

As the article says, “A kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef causes more greenhouse-gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home, according to a Japanese study.”

Yes, feeding your favorite bovine creates a noxious cloud of methane that winds up wafting up into the atmosphere and trapping solar heat in our world, causing accelerated polar ice melts, entire ice shelves to break off of polar ice caps, the destruction of high mountain glaciers, and alarming ice dams cracking, just to name a few outcomes. Think of it this way: every time a cow “gets the flutters” another few inches of coral bleaches, another chunk of glacier melts, and some poor tropical frog kicks the bucket. And it’s all because you and I had to have beef meatballs on our spaghetti.

Additionally, the process of producing and transporting all that feed and meat adds up too, in emissions due to gasoline and other power sources. From the article: “That one kilo (2.2 pounds) of beef also requires energy equivalent to lighting a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days. The energy is needed to produce and transport the animals' feed.”

There are all sorts of other crazy global warming solutions, but most aren’t very realistic beyond having our industry-happy government actually put more restrictions on gas-belching factories and trying to change the sorts of fuels we put in our cars away from the extremely-profitable market of war-ravaged crude oil. These things aren’t likely to happen in a speedy way, either. You don’t like paying a day’s take-home wages for a full tank of gas? Tough. Oil industry execs are laughing at you. So what can we do about the cow fart issue? Short of lighting the farts of every bull and heifer in the world, the best solution would be to stop eating meat entirely. That doesn’t sit well with people like, well, ME, who choose to use our canine teeth.

But there’s a solution for people like me. We don’t have to buy our beef or burgers from mass-market outlets like Safeway or McDonald’s, where the beef comes from cows that had been penned up by the hundreds in horrible conditions, fed cheap, “gassy” foods, slaughtered, frozen, and shipped from as far away as Brazil. You can, instead, invest a little bit of your time to find local stores and organic stores that sell meat produced locally, fed on grass and healthy feed, and most likely leaner and better for you anyhow, with no hormones or antibiotics.

As the PhysOrg.com article says, “A Swedish study in 2003 suggested that organic beef emits 40 percent less greenhouse gases and consumes 85 percent less energy because the animal is raised on grass rather than concentrated feed.”

So, to celebrate this, I’m going to consume some Kosher, non-hormone-injected beef hotdogs tonight. I’m not going to ask what parts of the cow went into them, but I can rest assured that the intestines that are now mashed up with other parts and wrapped in a conveniently-edible tube and put on my bun had 40% less cow farts flowing through them than their mass-raised cousins in Texas.

And when I’m done eating, I’ll be sure to hold my farts in.


Addendum (7/24/07): I just realized my last paragraph was inaccurate. Seems “kosher” hot dogs do not include any of the hind parts of a cow, including the intestines, and thus no natural casings, either. HERE is more info on the Hebrew National hot dogs I ate.


Image taken from HERE.

Go Hug Mother Earth Today

Yes, fellow Earthlings, today is Earth Day, around the world. Have you hugged Mother Earth today? No? For shame! Love your momma! Go outside and lay on the ground, arms spread out, and hug your planet. Go on, I'll wait . . . .

This year's Earth Day topic is, of course, Global Warming. Every week there are dozens of new research reports, papers, and science organization statements about climate changes and the resultant effects: bleaching of corals, increasing storms and hurricanes, decline of species, rise in sea level, change in the atmosphere and weather, and effects on economy of all these things. Even the Bush administration can no longer ignore the validity and pretend the problem doesn't exist. After 7 years of blatant disregard for the scientific data and a coordinated disinformation campaign, suddenly Bush is an advocate for global warming (though not enough to join the Kyoto Treaty, of course). Consider this article, released today, saying that Bush will be meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan to cooperate in building a zero-emissions coal plant. While I applaud the change in stance, I still have to shake my head, along with every other scientist in the world, and mutter, "What the hell took you so long? Too little too late, Mr. 'Junk Science.'"

Perhaps the most obvious effects of global warming can be seen anywhere there is "permanent" ice. Glaciers are melting and disappearing all over the world. Giant icebergs are breaking off both in the Arctic and Antarctic. And huge changes are happening to the ecology at both poles. Consider a report released last week:

http://www.physorg.com/news95869506.html

According to the report, the sea ice is forming later, freezing thinner, and thawing sooner in the arctic. As a result, more and more Inuit hunters are falling through thin ice and drowning; animals never before seen in those cold waters are now migrating to the region, including finches, robins, and even dolphins, which the Inuit have no words for; cold-climate mammals such as polar bears are migrating further north; and, interestingly, the Inuit in certain regions are unable to build igloos anymore.

Polar bears are starving or drowning from exhaustion. Sea ice is growing thinner and melting away, revealing new islands. What are we to do?

There are many, many things you can do. A simple search on the web will produce action lists - everything from being energy-conscious, taking part in political action, or simply planting a tree. HERE, HERE, and HERE are some sample pages. But the main thing, of course, is to educate yourself, dummy, and pay attention, unless, of course, you don't mind increasing heat waves, hurricanes, and the loss of many species all over the world. Those species were WEAK, anyway! Who needs 'em? Buck up, polar bears! Learn to fish.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You've heard it all, already. Every frickin' day there's some report on Headline News about this stuff. Frickin' "liberal media"! It's becoming wallpaper. But let's not get too used to this wallpaper. It gets an uglier shade every week, and before long you won't be able to ignore it anymore.

You didn't actually go out and hug the ground, did you? I see you, sitting there at your computer. I can read your mind, too. You're thinking about playing computer solitaire, aren't you? Typical. Now go out and hug the planet. Momma Earth loves you.

Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Fire!

When I was a boy I would spend a couple weeks each summer with my paternal grandmother, who lived in another state. By "another state", I mean she lived in another state of the union (Louisiana), but she also lived in another "state of being." She had some very strange perceptions of reality which were sometimes funny, in an insane way (she believed she once had a bug fly in one ear, buzz around in her head for a few days, then fly out the other ear) and sometimes not so funny (though she was in her late 70's and horribly anorexic, she was deathly afraid of being raped if she went out in public).

One of her fears was that she would be electrocuted by lightning storms. Most people would reasonably fear being outdoors in a lightning storm and getting struck by lightning. She feared talking on the phone during lightning (also reasonable, perhaps), but also taking baths, being near a window, or standing too close to her metal bedframe. Why those last three? Two words: ball lightning. That is, exceedingly rare, brilliantly-lit balls of energy with a life of several seconds, usually about the size of grapefruit, which are formed during intense lightning storms. They hover and fly through the air and have even been seen to bounce along the ground. Any time there was a lightning storm my grandmother would relate the same story to me about how, when she was young, a boy in a neighboring town had been killed when ball lightning came through his window and struck a metal bedframe that he was touching, killing him instantly. I never learned if the story was true, but even though I already figured my grandmother wasn't "all there" I figured I'd give her the benefit of the doubt and stayed near the center of her little house during storms.

Ball lightning has been witnessed and even documented, but it isn't fully understood. Recently some researchers in Brazil managed to recreate it in the lab, as reported in a soon-to-be-released article. If you want the nitty-gritty science details, HERE is another hypothesis for ball lightning.

But what I find more interesting is those amateur science enthusiasts who enjoy playing with high voltage and trying to create ball lightning in their home, shop, or even their microwave oven (and they have step-by-step instructions on the web, though I wouldn't combine the effort with cooking your frozen burritos). I've been known to experiment with high voltage in my own shop (leaving a burn mark or two). Maybe I'll try it some time!

Click HERE for one of those enthusiasts' pages, well worth reading about, which includes some pretty cool video of creating ball lightning and watching it bounce along the ground, leaving burn marks. HERE is another site with similar links.

So my crazy grandma wasn't completely out of her gourd. Maybe I shouldn't be as alarmed that the older I get, the more I seem to be like her. Heaven help me (and my wife), though, if I manage to live to my 70's!

Is that a bug in my ear?

Inclement Weather? Get To Work!

Today it is snowy and icy here, in Oregon. All the schools, and most of the community colleges and universities, are closed for business. But I went to work anyhow, even though I have to commute from a little way's out of town. I had to go, since my evil global biotech company is open for business and I have no vacation time left after the Christmas holiday.

My company doesn't believe in such a thing as "inclement weather." They have a "weather hotline" phone number that employees can call to find out if the company is closed for business due to bad roads or whatever, but in eight years of working here, I've never known them to use it. I don't even call it anymore.

A new employee named Dan (who is also a regular reader of this blog – Hi, Dan!) was talking to me and another lab rat about this a month ago. Being new and perhaps a touch naïve about the company, he asked when the company had used the hotline in the past. I and the other employee immediately burst out laughing. In my time here, there have been incidents of seriously icy and snowy road emergencies, major floods, massive power failures, a major gas leak a stone's throw down the road, tornado-strength winds, and even a minor earthquake, and the company has never closed or sent its employees home early.

A couple years ago there was so much ice and snow that the roads department declared a state of emergency and broadcast a warning to the public to stay off the roads unless it was a life or death situation. My company was still open, though. I have an SUV and was able to make it to work in four-wheel drive. I think a horse-drawn sleigh would have been a better choice. Cars were stranded all along the way. Many folks simply had to take what leave time they could because they couldn't get there. The parking lot out back of my building has a slight incline. The asphalt was so icy that the cars parked there were sliding down the incline and bumping into each other. The management caught a lot of flak from the employees for that day. Management's excuse was that the top two people in the company, whose job it was to make the call to close, were traveling abroad and the folks delegated to make the decision didn't know they were supposed to do anything. We all rolled our eyes at that one.

You know the motto usually associated with the post office, right? "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." (HERE is a link to the interesting story on that, by the way). Well, perhaps my evil global biotech company should have a similar motto:

"Neither ice, nor flood, nor earthquake, nor lava rolling in the streets, nor a nuclear explosion stays these lab rats from swift completion of their experiments – or else!"

If I just lived at work it would solve the whole dilemma, don't you think?

UPDATE (1/12/07): At the end of the day yesterday, presumedly in response to complaints from employees, management sent out an email saying that the weather hotline had been discontinued. Instead, we are to base our weather policy on what the nearby university does. However, I found out that the university hasn't closed due to weather in 20 years. In other words, no real change in policy, and Management has only "passed the buck."

Clueless Conservatives and Global Warming

I'm always amazed at the depth of scientific ignorance exuded by the conservative Republicans in Washington. Take, for instance, recent comments by the outgoing chairperson of the Senate Environment Committee, James Inhofe. Here's a link to an article heard on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6591614

The not-so-honorable senator from Oklahoma has been a stalwart warrior against science and reason, especially on the issue of global warming. According to Inhofe, the issue of global warming has been "the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people," echoing views expressed by his leader, President Bush. He then went on to say that the media was at fault for keeping the hoax alive, naming all the great news networks and services (except Fox, of course). The media wasn't given a chance to reply. Go ahead and blame the messenger, James, it's a sign of desperation.

Inhofe dredged up a couple of unknowns to back up his statements, one of whom actually said that, instead of stopping the release of greenhouse gases, we should instead emit as much as possible, to "stop another ice age." Come again!? Never mind that all the great minds of science agree that mankind has been the leading cause of greenhouse gases and that the effects of global warming are being felt everywhere in the environment, including the destruction of Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves and the resulting rise in ocean levels, the death of coral and other sensitive animals, and even the greater strength of hurricanes due to warmer waters, such as was seen with hurricane Katrina. Adversaries of scientific reason used to say global warming was a hoax because there wasn't firm data. When scientists showed firm data, those people claimed it was a natural phenomenon, as seen in eons past. When scientists showed data that current temperature increases and carbon dioxide concentrations were far, far higher than anything in the past, those people now claim it is somehow good for us. Maybe next they'll say it'll be nice to go outside and enjoy a pleasant sauna in the wintertime.

It boggles my mind how conservative Republicans can think this way. We're talking here about nothing less than saving the world. Wouldn't you rather trust the word of thousands of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying global warming, or would you instead focus on the opinions of a few outside dissenters and help corrupt industries and their lobbyists avoid anti-pollution legislation? Seems like a no-brainer if your goal is safeguarding our people, eh?

For a good treatise on the global warming, see Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth." Here's a link evaluating the movie: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/060524-global-warming.html

Lucky for us, Democrats now control both houses, and liberal senator Barbara Boxer (who agrees with scientists) will control the committee. Though Inhofe will still sit on the committee, he won't be able to call meetings or block legislation. Go, Barbara!