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!

 

 

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.