Category Archives: General

Roaring falls

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We had a little over three inches of rain from Tuesday morning through sometime before dawn on Wednesday, December 2. When I took the dogs for their walk Wednesday morning, runoff was still sheeting across the road at our neighbor’s driveway. As I went further, I could hear the wet-weather stream formed from the ditch on Lavender Trail. A little further and the sound was everywhere. It was so loud as I walked down the mountain that it drowned out the noise of approaching cars. It made me wonder what the Little River Falls over in Alabama looked like. So Wednesday afternoon Leah and I drover the 30 miles over have a look.

Here’s what we saw. Click for a bigger image.

LRCpano2dec2015

Here’s what it looked like from the bridge just upstream.

upfallsLRC_2dec2015

The sound is necessary to appreciate the falls. Here’s a video I shot with our little Nikon point and shoot.

If you can’t view that one, try this one.

I have posted images of these falls before, once here and another time here. I thought I had seen the river high, but I was mistaken. This was really high. If I’m reading the USGS data correctly, this may be a new recorded instantaneous high flow.

You may already be a wiener

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If you watch television or get mail, you have probably seen the commericals or received the letter from Publishers Clearing House. This time it’s for a contest to win $10,000 a week for life. All you have to do is return the envelope with a completely and correctly filled-out entry form. My parents and Leah’s parents sometimes returned those forms. And why not? After all, it just costs a First Class stamp.

When we received our entry in the mail, I looked through its contents. Making sure the entry is complete is not as easy as it seems. You have to make sure every sticker is put in the right place on the entry form. Those stickers seem to be distributed throughout the contents of the envelope, and I counted more than 30 separate pieces of paper in the envelope.

Hidden in the depths of those papers was one titled “Sweeepstakes Facts.” Does anyone read that? I did. It says that the estimated odds of winning the “Up to $10,000 A-Week-For-Life” is 1 in 1,700,000,000. That’s one in 1.7 billion. Back not quite two years ago I wrote a post about the Megamillions lottery and scoffed at the idea that any individual player could expect to win at the absurdly overwhelming odds of one in 259 million. And here, this contest has odds of one in 1.7 billion.

It’s very hard to get any kind of intuitive understanding of just how ridiculously bad the Publishers Clearninghouse odds are. These odds are so high that it’s pretty clear to me that Publishers Clearinghouse has absolutely no intention of ever awarding the grand prize. There is not even a guarantee that the prize will be awarded, which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. They almost certainly don’t print and distribute 1.7 billion entry forms, so they might not even print the winning number on any form. Of course,  they do offer a $1,000,000 prize to be awarded from a random drawing of all eligible entries if (when) no one wins the grand prize. It appears that at least that prize will be awarded.

Still, should you enter the contest? As I said, all it will cost to enter, other than a few minutes of your time, is a First Class stamp worth 49 cents.

Well, let’s answer that question. In the gambling world there is a concept called expected return. It is calculated by multiplying the prize amount by the probability of winning that prize. So, if a prize is $100 and the odds of winning are one in a thousand, the expected return is $100 multipled by 0.001 (or divided by 1000). That’s 10 cents. So, if the entry costs more than 10 cents, you should expect to lose money on the entry. Sometimes the Megamillions jackpot is high enough that the expected return on a one-dollar entry approaches, or in some cases exceeds, a dollar. That might seem like a reasonable contest to enter. Most of the time the expected return is more like 10 cents.

How does the Publishers Clearinghouse prize stack up in terms of expected return? Well, someone who is 65 today will on average live about another 20 years. (What! You mean I only have 20 more years to live? Damn! I’d better get busy living!) So, at $10,000 a week, that would mean $520,000 a year, or $10,400,000 over a lifetime. Take that sum and divide by 1.7 billion and you get about 0.6 cents. That six-tenths of a penny expected return on a 49-cent entry cost — not counting the waste of extremely valuable and limited time spent filling out the form.

So, is the Publishers Clearinghouse contest worth entering? No. It’s barely worth even the time it takes to throw the entry form into the trash can.

Happy Thanksgiving

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We hope everyone who reads this blog, and even those who don’t, has a good Thanksgiving.

Leah and I are pretty much alone here in Rome. Neither of us has much family left, and those who are left don’t live around here. So we’ll probably end up having the Thanksgiving buffet at Ryan’s, otherwise known as a steak place.

If Thanksgiving is here, you know Christmas is sneaking up, too. Our Christmas cactus is starting to bloom.

xmas cactus overall

Here’s a closer shot.

xmas cactus upclose

It seems pretty happy there, sitting by the sliding glass door in the living room. We’re happy that it’s happy.

Dangerous shiny metal

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Of all the things my brother and I had to clear out of our parents’ house after my mother died, probably the most dangerous was a dark, scabby-looking lump almost covered with a clear liquid in a pint Mason jar. The dark lump was around one and a half times the volume of a golf ball. The lump was solid, metallic sodium. The clear liquid was mineral oil, which is intended to prevent exposure of the sodium to the air.

Despite the fact that sodium is the sixth most common element on Earth, it is never found as a pure element (metallic sodium) in nature because it is very reactive with water. It’s so reactive that it will strip off a hydrogen atom from a water molecule and attach itself to the remaining oxygen and hydrogen, forming sodium hydroxide. In the process it releases heat and a free hydrogen atom. Hydrogen can react in the presence of oxygen and heat, so the sodium-water reaction can be dangerous.

My father got this lump of sodium sometime in the distant past, maybe even before I was born. He stored it and other odd chemicals under the house we lived in. When my brother and I were kids, he would occasionally take the sodium out, cut off a small piece, toss it into the grass and sprinkle water over it. The sodium would hiss, smoke, burn, and sometimes pop as the hydrogen ignited. After we moved from our original house, my father stored it in a metal Post Office storage box. I don’t think he even touched it after he put it in that box, so it was left for us to dispose of.

I had kept the jar in a cooler cushioned with a pillow for the last couple of years. The chemistry department at Berry College in Rome offered to have their hazardous waste disposal company remove it, but the cost would be $275. I looked into the recommended methods for disposal, which involve a vent hood and repeated exposure of the sodium to various alcohols until the sodium has fully reacted. At that point, the remaining solution can be dumped down a sanitary drain. However, even chemists can make mistakes.

The recommended procedure seemed to be beyond my capability, so I decided to take the simple and crude way out. I took a wheelbarrow, five gallons of water and a Mason jar of sodium up to the site of our new house. This process can be dramatic, not to mention dangerous.

I was a little surprised that the jar opened so easily, but I guess I should have expected it, since it was well lubricated with mineral oil. I dumped the sodium and mineral oil into a plastic bowl.

na_inbowl

Excuse the poor focus. I was using one hand for my phone and the other to manipulate the sodium.

The dark look of the lump is a coating of partially reacted sodium on the surface. Even though the lump had been partially submerged in mineral oil, there was enough water vapor that was either in the jar or that leaked slowly in that the surface reacted.

Metallic sodium is a soft metal that is easily cut with a knife. The unreacted metal is a bright silver. Here is what it looked like when I cut it. It’s actually quite pretty.

cuttingthena2

I was using a regular Swiss Army knife and wearing thick household gloves. It’s not a smart idea to touch metallic sodium with your bare hands because of the moisture on the surface of the skin. I cut the sodium into pieces a little smaller than a grain of rice. When I was careful to manage the size and number of pieces I put into the water, the sodium formed a small, smoke-filled bubble that zoomed around the surface of the water.

inthewheelbarrow

You can see a few smallish bubbles here. Perhaps surprisingly, sodium, although a metal, is actually lighter than water, so it floats.

If I cut a piece a little too large or got too many pieces together, they produced a flame. A few times they exploded and sent pieces of molten sodium through the air followed by trails of smoke. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do my work and take pictures of sodium explosions at the same time.

The sodium hydroxide that the reaction produces is known as lye or caustic soda, so after I finished reacting the sodium I was left with lye solution and maybe a few small pieces of sodium on the ground. I dumped the lye solution; I’m not worried about that since rain will dilute it and it will end up buried under our driveway anyway.

I’m also not worried about the small pieces of sodium that popped out of the wheelbarrow. Sodium is so reactive with water that even the water vapor in the atmosphere is sufficient to take care of that. When I initially cut the sodium, it had a shiny surface, but that shiny surface began to turn dull within a few minutes of exposure to the air. The small pieces that I cut also began to react immediately. I felt the heat of the reaction in the palm of my hand through my glove as I carried the pieces the few steps from my cutting board to the water. At one point I noticed a small mass of bubbles, maybe the size of the tip of your little finger, next to the cutting board. I apparently had brushed a very small piece of sodium off the board and onto the bed of the Mule I was using to hold the cutting board. That little piece of sodium was reacting to atmospheric water vapor and was busy fizzing away. I’m confident that any small pieces of sodium that I left around the site had fully reacted within hours at the most after I left. In fact, they were probably all gone by the time I left.

I had no idea that metallic sodium is still available, but I found a vendor on Amazon. You can buy one pound for $185. I recommend that you not do so.

This is one reason we’re moving

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We have been working on routine maintenance finishing our downstairs for some time now. I finally got around to painting the roof overhang. “Got around to” is not really right. Faced up to is more accurate. Some of it is not hard to reach, but some of it is. This is where I was on Saturday afternoon.

ladder

When I built the house, I wanted the farmhouse look, so instead of soffits, I kept the rafter tails exposed. I still like the look, but I would never do it again. It was more work to finish than soffits, and now it’s more work to repaint. I painted two rafter bays at a time and then had to move the ladder. When I got to the last pair of rafters, I painted some and then saw some debris inside the vent. The attic vents are just holes drilled into a two-by-six that spans the rafters. I stapled screening to keep insects out of the holes, but spiders and other things sometimes get in. I assumed what I saw was old spider webs, so I stuck my finger in and dragged some out.

That’s when I saw the wasp I had almost touched.

I climbed down the ladder with all due haste and gave up on painting that part of the roof overhang for the day. I planned to paint it later at night, when the wasps would be dormant. Unfortunately, I found them at still active, possibly because of the floodlights right outside their nest. So I climbed up with some wasp spray and gave the vent hole a good dousing. Wasps kept coming out, so, once again I retreated.

I found another wasp nest just under the outside of the handrail on the front walk. At the time I was propping a ladder on the edge of the walk, on the outside of the railing, and painting the garage overhang. I saw that nest just as I was preparing to move the ladder right next to the nest. That meant another delay in painting. Later Saturday night I sprayed that nest. It was easily accessible, so I eliminated it.

I did not, however, eliminate the nest in the attic vent. This is what that looked like Sunday afternoon.

wasps on the overhang

You can see how far I got with the painting, and you can also see two wasps, one at each rafter vent. You can also see something else that is going to force me to climb up again — I knocked one of the floodlights out of alignment. That means another climb up. I’m going to be as stealthy as I can. I’ll adjust the light and then give the vent hole another good spray. I haven’t been stung so far. Maybe my luck will hold.

I think I’ll wait to paint that part of the overhang until cooler weather.