Global Warming Isn't Happening?

I have a acquaintances who argue that global warming isn't happening, but just have a look at these figures for my home town, Armidale. For the record, my home is at roughly 1000 m above sea level (or 3250 feet). And, because of our relatively low latitude (roughly 30 degrees South or similar to Cairo, which is 30 N!, our average January daily maximum is about 26.8 C (>80 F).

That's nice, but have a look at 2017's figures. This year we've averaged so far 29.2 (or nearly 85 F) and the forecast for the next 7 days is impressive: 27-28-30-31-32-33-34. This will raise the average figure for this month to 29.3! That's way above average and the hottest on record, with that being 28.7 C in 2003.

But what's happening during the day is mirrored at night. Our long term average minimum is 12.7 (55 F), but that has soared in 2017 to 15.9 (60.6 F). No wonder I've taken to riding my bike at c. 6.30 am when it's nice and cool, but not cold. And I've therefore upped my daily daily distance to an average of 15 km a day or about 105 km a week (or 65 miles). Hey, that's an interesting number! That's rather further than riding from Poole (Dorset) to Seaton (Devon) or about the same as going from (Plympton (Devon) to Falmouth (Cornwall) or a little less than pedalling from Kirkland to Olympia (for my US readers in the Pacific NW)

And while I'm on our weather, I might mention that our monthly total rain is about 85.4 mm (3.4 inches), but this year so far we've only received 45.2 mm (1.8 inches) with only 6 days to go. So, the combination of heat and lack of rain has browned off patches of our lawn. I tried to remedy that with watering from sprinklers, but fortunately the last two days have seen some heavy thunderstorms dump about 25 mm of that 45+ mm over that period. And more is forecast for today - likely given the heavy cloud hanging around. Welcome though the rain is, the last two days have been a bit like living in a sauna!

Sorry, I can't take a selfie of me riding my bike!

AS

Susannah

You might wonder while I'm writing about a specific person, but in fact I'm not. I don't anyone called Susannah, although I've come across a few Susans in my time. Dot and I went to the opera last night - a live performance of Carlisle Floyd's opera 'Susannah' in the Michael Hoskins Creative Arts Centre at 'The Armidale School' (or TAS for short). I bet that not many schools in the world have a theatre with tiered seating and side balconies accommodating maybe a few hundred people, a large stage capable of hosting just about any opera ever written, an orchestra pit and superb lighting.

I might have to retract the bit about hosting any opera because it occurs to me that the final scene of Wagner's Gotterdammerung (excuse the absence of umlauts on my keyboard) would be difficult. At this point Brunnhilde lights a funeral pyre for the dead Siegfried, mounts her horse, leaps on it into the flames and is consumed by the fire, at which point the Rhine floods its banks and the opera's villain, Hagen, is drowned, the assembled gods in Valhalla are consumed by fire, and the naked Rhinemaidens reclaim their ring. Some conclusion for a series of 4 end-on operas lasting about 16 hours.

Written in the early 50s - in America's McCarthy era - Susannah is about life and religion in a small southern community and how an attractive young girl, Susannah, finds difficulty in adapting to the conservative norms of her surroundings. It ends when an itinerant pastor is shot and, in effect, she cuts her ties with her community. The pastor, by the way, had just raped her! These themes might not be everyone's cup of tea, but the singing was good, the staging was first class - even down to pouring rain from a thunderstorm on stage (yes, the stage got wet), the sense of occasion, and meeting up with quite a lot of friends made it a memorable evening.

More amazing was that, apart from a few lead singers, all the cast on stage, the orchestra and conductor, the production team, and the caterers (we had nice canapes and wine) were locals. There can't be many towns of 25,000 people who could stage such an offering. And fortunately, unlike Europe and other places, we didn't have to dress up. I arrived in my usual shorts and T-shirt, albeit having the confederate flag printed on the front. This possibly made me the most appropriately dressed person in the audience!

Alas, I have no pictures. Photography was banned. But Google 'Carlisle Floyd Susannah' and you'll find more about the plot, be able to listen to selected arias, and so on.

AS

Drone Display

I had an interesting experience today when university staff were invited to the University's SMART farm on the edge of campus to watch a Queensland company demonstrate the use of drones in agriculture. Here's the paddock where the display was held and it contained just one sheep and a plot of grass where a particular species had been planted and I gathered that experiments were under way to see how this grass variety impacted on the animal's growth rate and wool production. Incidentally, this view was taken only about half a km from my office!

Anyway, the team members producing the display used their drones (plural) to map grass growth / supply in this and surrounding fields, and they claimed to be able to assess the volume of wool on sheep in such a paddock - and much other information potentially useful in farm management like the incidence of weeds, water supply and so on.

One of the drones was quite large and could be controlled over vast distances, with its range over 40 km (25 miles) from base. Here it is in the air above us:

It actually had 8 motors to give it great manoeuvrability and precision location, and the motors / blades were clustered in four pairs as shown here:

You can just make out the four arms at the end of which is a pair of rotating blades. One can see via the lap-top the data being gathered and images of where the drone is located. The little dome on top hides a lot of electronics one wouldn't want to get wet and the 'vehicle' if that is what it is can be held relatively stable even in strong wind.

Max might like to see the control panel, which has some similarities with the drone he received for Christmas but has rather more gizmos / levers, as one would expect for a multi-thousand dollar model compared with Max's sub-100 AUD version.

And here's the second, smaller, drone being explained by one of the team.

Towards the end the team fielded many questions from the audience, ranging over licenses to fly these things, knowledge bases, controlling drones in areas frequented by civil aviation, legal responsibilities should things go wrong, uses of drones - for example locating lost bush-walkers, geological surveying, taking videos of prominent tourist spots, looking for illegal logging / clearing of bush-land and so on. It was an interesting experience for all these reasons.

AS

Spectacular Crash

I cannot remember ever having witnessed a serious crash, but in a way I did yesterday. I was waving to a couple of guys  who had just come to remove a whole lot of 'junk' from the apartment where Dot's late brother, Dick, used to live. We, Dot and I, were clearing out the apartment so that it could be put on the market to be sold and I was outside in the street waiting for the guys from 1800gotjunk.com.au to reverse their truck into a parking space near the entrance to the apartment block to collect various items, some saleable and some just rubbish.

As the duo were doing that I heard a massive thud on 'Harrow Road' which runs close the apartment block and that was followed by second thud as a car that appeared to have been tossed into the air hit the ground. I rushed around the corner to find absolute chaos and the driver of mangled vehicle amazingly climbing out unscathed and he then dragging his injured wife (or girlfriend) out of what was left of the vehicle and placing her on the pavement. After witnessing this, I look a few metres up the street and then saw a whitish van lying on its side and a guy climbing vertically out of the passenger side of that vehicle seemingly unscathed.

Just have a look at the debris of the first car I mentioned! How on earth did the two occupants get out alive!?

The second vehicle appears to have been less damaged by the event and may have been the result of collateral damage - see below.

Soon three things happened. First, Harrow Road is a very busy thoroughfare, and suddenly a mass of traffic became stranded until a member of the public stepped in and sensibly redirected traffic around the accident. Later the police took up this role. Secondly, a large crowd rapidly appeared from surrounding apartment blocks, ordinary housing and an old folks home. And then, of course, the fire service, ambulance, police and tow trucks all turned up to clear away the mess. And it transpired that members of one of Australia's TV stations (Channel 7) were filming nearby and they rushed to fim the mess. I personally talked to one of the policemen and pointed out that further down the street a large truck was parked and I said that, at the time of the crash, I saw that truck adjacent to the destroyed vehicles, but travelling east down 'Harrow Road'. I merely comment that the truck driver, who at the time was still in his vehicle, might have seen what happened. From later news, I gathered that the truck might have been the instigator in some way of the serious collision.

What did surprise me was the speed at which the busy road was reopened for traffic. The fire people cleared away the debris, some of which littered the roadway:

That was after a police photographer captured all of the scene. The tow trucks pulled the damaged cars / van off the street.

The police interviewed witnesses and the ambulance staff helped put the injured woman on a stretcher and loaded her into their vehicle. And of course I snapped all the images I've added to this post. After all this frantic activity, the blokes from 1800gotjunk.com.au backed their vehicle out into the street and took off. And Dot and I got in our Rav4, which was filled with a large quantity of salvageable, went to see her elderly cousin at Brighton-le-sands on Botany Bay for a short meeting after which we set off to return home in Armidale. Since we departed at 4pm and the journey home usually takes 6-7 hours we didn't get all way on Friday, but reached a motel in Scone at dusk after a mostly pleasant journey north once we escaped Sydney's chronic traffic at peak hour. 

That may be the last time that either of us visit that apartment, which has been valued at c. 360,000 GBP (or 600,000 AUD). Cash in hand is a lot more useful to us than getting a rental income stream!

Going Underground

Towards the end of our visit to Seattle we undertook an amazing journey through the city's underground. Don't get the wrong idea and think that we took a railway journey. No, this escorted tour with expert commentary by a knowledgeable guide took about 90 minutes and we walked the whole way. The underground city came into being in an odd way. Seattle was originally settled on the marshy shores of Puget Sound, but this proved problematic for several reasons, not least the ground being flooded on occasions by king tides or by storms or water running downhill from the high ground behind. So, in parts of the city centre streets and entrances were raised to first floor level, but some of the old infrastructure remained at ground level. In addition, Seattle was host to the original skid row - literally. Felled logs were send down the slope to the town centre for loading on to ships for export to other parts of the counttry and to help this process, the slope was evened out by sluicing large amounts of water down the route so that land towards the wharf was slowly built up - also aiding the raising of streets and buildings in central areas.

The outcome of all this, not to forget a major fire that did for Seattle what the great fires of London and San Francisco did for those cities, was to create a 'submerged' part of the city, which still had uses and various bits of infrastructure like connecting corridors. Let's have a look first at some of the buildings - historical, present, and schematic - as in the case of the second image that shows the street and access raising that went on.

The street-scape is not quite how one envisages an American city. But underground is something else again - quite unusual:

A sky-light to the street above.

Part of the fairly shonky water-pipe system that was unable to generate enough flow to put the big fire out.

The tour was fascinating and well-done. We received great insight into the city's 19th century role, including a starting point for miners travelling to the Klondike. The city did well out of receiving the gold, helping to supply the necessities of life to the miners, and providing entertainment for them. Underground Seattle is adjacent to what was ... rather than what I presume still is ... a very large red-light district that was home to some classy madams. We were shown the next picture of one of the most wealthy business-persons in 19th century Seattle and some of her helpers.

AS

Snoqualmie Falls

Our journey to Seattle remained high-powered until the very end when Emily guided us to Snoqualmie Falls and Underground Seattle in the last couple of days. Both were fascinating and this post focuses on the first, while the next will deal with an extraordinary tour that was literally underground.

The web-site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snoqualmie_Falls gives a good account of the history and significance of the falls which makes my job easier. I'll just provide a few photos taken on a sunny day in mid-winter. Our timing was not the best because very cold weather led to the closure of some icy paths, but we enjoyed the splendid views of the falls and surrounds. On our day there was quite an impressive flow of water over the falls despite the redirection of much of the Snoqualmie's stream flow through two hydro-electric stations. Alas we were looking straight into the sun while photographing the falls and this turned out to be the only worthwhile picture I took. Note the snow on the rocks.

The falls produced some impressive spray that quickly froze on plants and rocky outcrops to provide the rather attractive images shown here of both the top and bottom of the falls.

Downstream, the view was also attractive and all of these images help explain why the falls are now on the US National Register of Historic Places. 

Another reason lies in the two hydro power plants, among the first developed in the world. As was explained in some very good signage, the first plant - completely underground - was opened in 1899, while the second became operative in 1910.

At the nearby hotel / resort we saw a lovely fountain in winter's embrace with snow and ice adding to the fountains gracefully.

 
All in all a great trip - but quite the best weather to view the scenery.

AS

Boeing Boeing

I'm going to fool you on this one. My first interesting visit in 2017 wasn't to see a performance of this French play for theatre. Rather it is to report on a marvellous visit to the Boeing aircraft factory at Everett just north of Seattle which 5 members of our party took today. Yes, we entered the biggest factory building in the world to see the construction of 747s, 777s, and 787s and their variants in the form of cargo rather than passenger planes. And it was riveting. That's also a pun because the experience was fascinating on the one hand and we learned about the millions of actual rivets used in piecing together a plane! See https://www.futureofflight.org/ to get a feeling for the experience we had.

Alas, no photography was allowed ... for obvious reasons. So the pictures below just give an impression of the site and its surroundings - the latter being beautiful. Here's the Future of Flight HQ and museum

And it's in the shadow of the Volcano, Mt Baker, lying to the north - covered in winter snow.

Inside the museum, I was taken with this flag display - presumably being the flags of nations purchasing Boeing aircraft.

Here's what appears to be an experimental plane - and views of the museum interior.

Up on the roof, we could see the aircraft construction factory we were about to visit and, in the building opposite that the place where planes are painted to customer specifications.

Aircraft awaiting collection by purchasers.

The snow-covered Cascade mountain range to the east ... and the 4400 m Mt Rainier in the second picture.

Examining various types of jet airliner propulsion.

Max posing with a Lamborghini that uses carbon fibre technology to reduce weight just like the new Boeing Dreamliner (787).

I was able to sit in a pilot's seat and twiddle with the controls!

A mock-up of a first class cabin.

Picture of Bec and Max encaged in a flight simulator that, at this stage, was banking an aircraft (a fighter jet) steeply.

Again, a very worthwhile trip well organised by Emily. I can see a career opening up here!

AS