Questions for the Day

1. Why is there a jet stream? Why does it blow from west to east?

2. Why is it so much colder on the poles than around the equator? Can more direct vs. more indirect exposure to solar radiation really explain such large temperature differences? Does stored heat transfer explain much of the rest (stored in ground/water/atmosphere)?

edit: so here's what I've read. 1 and 2 are related, so I'll start with #2 as it feeds into #1.

#2. There are several reasons for temperature differences in equator and poles, but the primary seems to be an effect of the curvature of the earth and solar energy incoming. While the amount of sun hitting the earth at the equator and poles is almost the same (we're so far away from the sun the difference in distance and slight incoming angle is negligible - like a lighthouse far away), but the amount of solar radiation at the poles is spread out over a larger surface area due to the curvature of the earth.

Here's the best link I could find that shows the difference and how the earth's curvature is the defining factor. According to the slides here it says at the equator each square meter of earth gets about 400 Watts / second of energy, while the same square meter angled at the poles gets about 180 Watts / second.

Here's another link that was good in this regard.

That said, there are considerable other factors in play. One good example is that the south pole tends to be 30-40 degrees F colder than the north pole - due in part to the south pole being on land and at higher elevation, while the north pole is ice on top of an ocean.

Now for #1. Why the jet stream and why does it blow west to east? This in part apparently is due to the rotation of the earth - but counter-intuitively the jet stream blows in the direction of the rotation of the earth. (The earth also spins west to east.). The answer here seems to tie into the fact that things at the equator are moving faster than things at the poles. (If you think about it like a record player, you could sit on the north pole/center of the record player and you'd spin, but you'd not go anywhere. As you move out from the center of the record player/toward the equator you begin picking up rotational speed).

Now where this gets counter intuitive to me the air at the equator is also moving faster right along with the earth spinning. As it gets hotter that air naturally seeks to mix with cooler air, so the only direction it can go is north or south. As it moves north or south that air also takes its faster relative speed with it - so as it moves north/south it also moves eastward through conservation of momentum. Scientists call this the Coriolis effect.

The jet stream itself seems more of a complicated interaction between different air fronts (I still don't really understand why distinct warm and cold air fronts exist in the first place as discussed in an earlier post), but the general direction is related to the spinning of the earth and the higher momentum of equatorial air as it moves away from equator.

I found this not intuitive at all, and difficult to get my head around how the wind advances in front of the spin of the earth, but here's a link

Now the most interesting post I came across was this: How would you make a planet similar to earth, but have more extreme weather? Very interesting discussion of impact of water, location of water, land masses, and length of day impacts on climate.

Funny (sad?) comment on budget issues

Army says it doesn't need any more tanks - "we need to use the money elsewhere." Congress says, "nope, you get more tanks." It's an interesting read as to "why" - but essentially it sounds like it's difficult to kill an un-needed program if you spread the money around to enough districts. Kindof hard to rail about budget deficits when this goes on.

Tocqueville quote

I saw this quote of Tocqueville today

"our only options have long been co-thriving or no thriving."

I'd never seen it before, but it a keen observation on humanity and development of individualism. It seems a catchy way of saying "a rising tide lifts all ships" whether we see ourselves helped by the rising water or not. Here's where I saw it.

Jammin on a Dean Z Select guitar

I had this guitar out the other day and had Trish take some pictures. I thought it was just a cool looking guitar and got it "for the video". I think it's called a Dean Z Select.

Why does hot air rise / why does a hot (hotter) molecule rise?

I was opening the freezer earlier thinking about all the cold air that rushes out when I open the door. I got to wondering if it came out so quickly because of the "suction action" of pulling on the freezer door (would opening the door slowly make a difference?) and I was wondering if the cold air just came falling out because of gravity (kindof like if the freezer was full of sand and I opened the door I'd expect the sand to fall out). But that got me to thinking that there's already air at a lower level than the freezer (warmer air, but still air none-the-less). So why should the cold air want to trade places with the warm air.

In my mind the mental model was similar to the trick of taking a can of mixed nuts and shaking it. The big brazil nuts tend to shake to the top of the can, and the little peanuts tend to shake to the bottom. If the big nuts could move to the bottom of the can they would, but they can't - there are too many little nuts in the way. This by itself doesn't explain anything other than in a statistical way saying it's easier for the big nuts to move upwards.

Anybody shaking a jar of sand with a rock in it sees the same thing - put the rock in the bottom of the jar - fill the jar with sand - shake it - and gradually the big rock moves to the top. It's not that gravity acts any differently on the big rock or on the grains of sand, but the big rock just has less opportunity to move downward because every time it moves - a smaller grain moves in under the big rock preventing downward movement. The only direction the big rock _can_ move is up. Similarly in my mind gravity should work on a hot and cold air molecule similarly - so it seems gravitational force should cancel. (put a hot and cold molecule in a vacuum and is there any tendency for one to move upward and the other downward? so it seems like this is more of an emergent statistical system dynamic at work where the "hot air rises/cool air sinks" tendency may come from.)

So in this model the big brazil nuts or the big rock represent the warmer air molecules, and the little nuts or the grains of sand represent the cooler air molecules. The warmer molecules have more energy and bounce around more - so they're creating more space around themselves - which when the opportunity presents itself - the cooler air from the freezer is perfectly happy to fill if given the chance. The warm air molecule might certainly try to bounce downward but is more likely to run into resistance that prevents it. The cooler molecules are less bouncy and have less energy - so its tougher for them to rise vs. gravity, and being less bouncy can also be closer together (like the sand or peanuts).

Ehhh. Anyway, that's how I was thinking of it. I looked up a google search and this discussion came up as the first search result.

It's a pretty interesting read. Discussion of bouyancy, gas densities, behaviors of gases in magnetic fields, and some other things. It still has the feel of "here's what happens and it can be explained what will happen," but the underlying why it happens as it does seems a little more amorphous to me. There's one post that actually says something along the lines of: "why aren't the energetic warmer particles as likely to move downward as upward?" I think maybe they do try to move downward, but they're less successful because that's where more cool particles are likely to be - because the cooler particles have less of a choice - the cooler air can't overcome gravity as well and is more statistically likely to be in the way.

If you take this scenario into space without gravity, and have 2 equal cannisters of same #molecules of a gas - and released it - I'd think youd end up with with an expanding sphere, with more warm particles farther from the center, and more cool air particles toward the center of the sphere.

I wonder if you tried the same experiment in space with mixed nuts or sand/rock, would the bigger nuts and bigger rocks end up farther out from the sphere with more smaller nuts/grain sands staying toward the inside of the sphere?

Food Pics

I was cleaning off my camera and wanted to post a couple food pics I thought were cool.

I call this one celery:

And I call this one chili:

More Placebo effect

The Placebo effect is fairly interesting to me. I've probably blogged about it some before - but as most know it's a name given to the effect produced simply by giving people a "fake" treatment. It could be sugar pills. It could be a suggestion - like if you're told boys are expected to do better in math - they might. It could be the idea that you heard there's something in the water - and more people get sick - or even ideas of mass hysteria in cases. We seem to have a propensity to be able to "worry ourselves sick" as much as we can "expect ourselves to health." If given a placebo (fake treatment) - if the patient is told both of benefits and negative side effects - the patient will likely experience _both_ increased benefits and negative side effects of the fake treatment. Anyhow, the idea that our mental expectations influence outcomes and reality is quite interesting. And there's some data that the placebo effect is increasing over time. To the point that apparently it's becoming a problem for pharmaceutical companies when trying to show drug efficacy. Well, here's an interesting article discussion about a methodology pharmaceutical companies may start using to try to minimize the placebo effect. It sounds fishy to me, but is premised on the idea that some people may be more prone to placebos than others, and that perhaps placebo responders can be weeded out of clinical trials.

Massively Incomplete Markets

This blog post is thought provoking in an economics-sort-of-way. Why we do what we do when it's not our job. "We live in a world of Massively Incomplete Markets."

Sounds like me - wide awake at night

I've always tended to be what is called a night owl - functioning best at night rather than in the mornings. When I should be going to bed I find myself most alert and engaged. Even when dog tired during the day I'd often find myself that same night forcing myself to go to bed just because I had to get up soon. Sometimes I'd find myself staying up to 2-3 even 4 in the morning even though I knew I had to get up in 3 or 4 hours. It wasn't insomnia - I could sleep easily - just not when I wanted to. But at night I was simply wide awake, not sleepy, and wanting to do things. If I tried to go to bed earlier I'd often just roll around until later in the morning.

Left to my own devices without a set schedule I find I'm very capable of getting completely off kilter with the normal day/night schedule. From a young age I often felt like my clock was set to 25 or 26 hour days - it's always been easy to stay up late - and generally a struggle to get going in the morning. I kind of felt like something was wrong with me because of Ben Franklin's quote about "early to bed, early to rise..."

Anyhow, I noticed this effect drastically the other day when I was draggy much of the day after about 3-4 hours of sleep. I found myself wanting to take a nap even about 12 hours after I woke up. But then I hit a certain point and it's like everything in me lights up at full go and I'm easily good for another 6-8 hours - very clear headed and motivated - and I have to force myself to go to bed just because I know I need to remembering how draggy I was during the day.

So I did a web search to investigate what may be going on. This interesting article popped up: Tired in the Morning and Awake at Night?

It says there's a thing called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome that is characteristic of this - and it's essentially due to biological clocks being out of whack. The fancy term is Circadian rhythm sleep disorder. Now I don't think what I have is very severe, because I can still force myself to wake up whenever I need to - but again - left to my own devices I do think my body may run on abnormally long days - and I've always had groggy mornings for as long as I can remember. Apparently there's a thing called light therapy that I could try if I wanted to test things - it'd involve sitting in front of very bright lights right after waking up each day to shock my clock back into time. (I think this idea has been shown to work for overcoming jet lag also). Maybe put a flood light staring me in the face while I ride my exercise bike?

Pump and Dump

More on Wall Street gaming the system. Rotten to the core. This story suggests that investment bank practice might involve underpricing IPOs initially - and then given allocation to the IPO to preferred specific firms, who immediately flip the stock for profits when price moves upward to match market demand. Instead of the IPO company getting the cash, it's skimmed instead by these preferred clients. In return investment banks require the preferred clients to find some way to return the favor, completing the virtuous cycle. I guess the bottom line here - is firms going to Wall Street to help them raise cash for an IPO shouldn't expect the investment bank to be in their corner, even when they're paying fees to the investment bank to do the job.

Bees like caffeine too

Just like people like caffeine in our drinks, bees seem to like caffeine in their nectar too and go back to flowers whose nectar has more caffeine. I didn't know this, but caffeine occurs naturally in plants as a poison to predators that eat them, but caffeine in smaller doses that is present in nectar seems to attract pollinators. So my question is: Are we built so that caffeine is good for us, or are we just addicted - or is a little bit of both?

Rand Paul filibuster

I normally try to stay away from political-type posts, but I was riding my exercise bike today I came across Rand Paul's filibuster over the CIA director nomination on C-Span. While I'm normally not a fan of actions like this that add to gridlock - I appreciate what Paul was doing, and hope the focus he puts on privacy and rights gains some traction. His particular focus was on the usage of drones, but the bigger argument he stressed was about privacy, rights to privacy, and the scope of personal freedom and governmental security concerns.

I'd thought about this for a while - especially as it regards to terrorism and post 9-11 realities. I was particularly concerned about things like wire-taping, holding suspects indefinitely without charges, enhanced interrogation techniques / torture, and just the general framework of how you adapt to real and dangerous asymmetrical threats while still maintaining a free and open society.

I believe it was Newt Gingrich who I saw speaking about this quite a while back - and he proposed a dual law enforcement system with a "wall" between it and the normal law enforcement system. I could be misattributing to Gingrich, but I liked the model proposed where certain asymmetric threats like terrorism are prosecuted under a different set of laws - outside of the normal judicial system. Additionally, if increased surveilence is needed - it should be very clearly and restrictively defined as to how any data collected can be used so that this type of surveilance does not turn into "fishing" expeditions for other agendas. For example: with drones it would probably be easy for law enforcement to track any of us 24 hours a day for our entire lives, and use NSA data to sneak into all of our phone conversations, and probably eventually at some point have so many microphones set up that even just basic conversations we have everyday are captured somewhere. Facial recognition technology is being employed in places already to identify people, and as technology gets better anonymity in public is going to be greatly reduced.

When I've talked to friends about this, worrying about computerized monitoring of phone calls (is it so crazy to be concerned given the ability of computers to mass translate speech now?), they say "well, if you're not doing anything wrong what are you worried about?". The thing is that the people in power running those systems don't always use them the way they're supposed to. For example, Martin Luther King had has reportedly had a 17,000 page FBI file and had running wiretaps on him from 1958 until his death. Any chance info uncovered was used improperly to intimidate and put leverage on him? Or, Richard Nixon and staff utilized wiretaps to find information on political enemies and this ultimately led to his resignation. So the question to me isn't whether we should be concerned about privacy - I think it's pretty clear we should assume that those in power have a tough time respecting privacy when it's inconvenient to do so. As a result it makes sense to me to say that if this power to invade privacy is going to exist, very clear rules about how this power is used need to be designed.

If this requires a constitutional amendment, the so be it (it'd probably be a good national debate to have) but we've seen cases such as the Rico statute where the law is modified to see a pattern of behavior as constitution a criminal enterprise - and this in particular was used to target mafia crime families. It addressed how do you prosecute an enterprise that exists, but those running the enterprise only give orders - but never carry out the crime themselves? This sounds alot like the the asymmetrical aspects of terrorism where you have certain leaders who incite or command dangerous activity, but don't carry out the activity themselves. To me it would seem cleaner if we would have a constitutional amendment clarifying how we deal with these types of situations where it seems some basic rights like Rand Paul mentions are potentially being infringed - especially the right to privacy. I don't think there's any way to stop what technology is going to be able to do in the future, but we can carve out how that technology can and cannot be used and how it relates to civil rights.

edit: Gail Collins had a good op-ed in the NYTimes about this filibuster also.

Superbugs and Antibiotic resistance

Scientific American has been running a series of articles on antibiotic resistance recently. Here's a good Here's a good blog post building on that conversation.. quote: "Until there are restrictions on antibiotic use—saving them as a national security treasure—and requirements to use them judiciously, we will never control antibiotic resistance."

Harmonic Series Guitar

I was reading some stuff about the derivation of musical scales - the math behind why things sound the way they do - and came upon the harmonic series.

The harmonic series mathematically is the series (a sum) like this:   1+1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4+1/5 +.... +1/n up to infinity.  In nature there are natural resonances in vibrating objects (like a guitar string, or organ pipe) that are these ratios of the string or pipe's length, so there's thinking these resonances may be related to why musical scales sound good to us.

From the "A Mind For Madness" Blog, this blogger (that ties the harmonic series to musical overtones and discusses the idea that perhaps the musical scales used have their "musical-ness" due to their relationship to this natural resonant properties that's expressed in the harmonic series. I first read about this idea on his blog, so I'll give credit there, although it's entirely possible this idea may be out there elsewhere.

 Vocalist showing the harmonic overtone capabilities in his voice - kindof freaky right?

Now obviously, from the above video you can tell that the resonances don't tie directly the current dominant equal tempered musical scale that we have, but there are many resonances that happen right on the musical scale where we have musical notes.  The 7 note in this video (click link) really stands out as being foreign to our current musical scale, but most of other note positions are familiar.

Hear the harmonic scale in action. Here's guitarist Dante Rosati who's composed a piece of music using the harmonic scale.  It's definitely different, but something foreign it's still quite cohesive and even a bit hypnotic if you ask me.  Pretty cool stuff.