Author: Steve

With a freeloader.

A little toad, living on and around our deck…

…and in the little fountain pool.  We think it’s a Gulf Coast Toad.

It’s totally charming.

The governing body of Formula One racing sets standards for how Formula One cars have to be designed.  Within these standards every team does the best they can to create the fastest car on the track.  The standards don’t stay the same forever.  Once every few years, the standards are updated, upgraded, to take advantage of newer technology, and all the teams have to design and perfect new cars.  Here is what the 2022 Ferrari looks like.

The revisions that took effect this season incorporate more “ground effects”.  That means the underside of the car is designed to reduce air pressure underneath the car, pulling it down to provide more traction, allowing it to corner at higher speeds.  The underbody of the car kind of acts like an airplane wing, but instead of providing lift, it works in reverse to pull the car down tighter to the track.  An unintended consequence of this design revision resulted in “porpoising” at high speeds however.  Porpoising is when the car is pulled down so hard it touches the track, or bottoms out the suspension, breaking the suction underneath so that the car bounces back up on the suspension before being pulled back down by the ground effects, until the process repeats, and so on.  At two hundred miles per hour, that can be a problem.

Now, halfway through the season, with the constructors unable to solve the problem, drivers of these newly designed cars are claiming that this bouncing is so hard on their bodies that it is a health risk, and a safety risk.  They may suffer physical damage from the pounding, and they may become unable to control a “porpoising” car at high speed and crash.  “Change the design parameters.  You have to protect the drivers from injury.  It’s not fair.”

Hard to argue that.  We can all tell the problem is real just by watching this all unfold in front of us on the television screen.  But wait.  There is another perspective.  Of the ten teams trying to deal with this inherent design issue, a couple of the teams have done better than the others at minimizing the porpoising of their cars.  They say, “Not so fast.  We’re not having a problem.  You’re going to change the rules so the people who can’t figure out the solution can catch up to us?  That’s not fair!”

Uh oh.  Competing truths!  Porpoising cars are unsafe to drive.  True.  Change the rules.  But some of the teams have figured out the problem, now have the advantage, and changing the rules in the middle of the season would award an unfair benefit to their competitors.  Also true!

The governing body of Formula One is called the FIA.  They created this mess.  They’re going to have to figure it out.

This abundance chart is accurate.

For Red-winged Blackbirds, in this area, at any time of year, the chance is high that if you’re looking in the appropriate habitat, you are highly likely to see a red-winged blackbird.  Our experience suggests that is absolutely true, but there is more to it than that.

Earlier this year, we stopped feeding birds for a few weeks because the feeders were being overwhelmed by hundreds of red-winged blackbirds.  Now, almost all of them have moved on.  We’re seeing one red-winged blackbird each day.

It might seem like we would see some change on the abundance chart between hundreds of birds a day and just one, but the number of birds isn’t taken into account on the chart, just the likelihood of seeing a particular bird, any particular day, in appropriate habitat.

Haven’t seen him for weeks!  Suddenly, there amongst the white-winged doves.

In search of the perfect peanut.

Our neighborhood green jay.

The results are in!

For brother Tom in the Pacific Northwest, we have a 4 foot shadow.

Followed by Christie.  Her shadow was only a little over 3 feet.

Farther south, Brian checks in with a 23 inch shadow.

And my shadow, it’s barely measurable.   It’s only 3 inches from my toes!

It’s all about latitude.  The equator is at zero degrees.  The tropics are defined by the Tropic of Cancer to the North and the Tropic of Capricorn to the south.  These are the farthest points north and south that the sun can ever be directly overhead.  The Tropic of Cancer is at 24 degrees north of the equator.  If I were standing on that line, my shadow would be straight down at high noon on the summer solstice.  (If I were on the equator looking north on the summer solstice, my shadow would be behind me.)  Where we live in Edinburg, TX, we’re less than 3 degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer, so hardly any shadow at all.  At Becky’s house in Erie, CO, they’re 16 degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer.  And in Edmonds, they’re 24 degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer.  At 48 degrees north on the globe, they’re closer to the north pole than they are the equator!