Category Archives: General

Mmmm.

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Leah and I don’t talk about politics to other people. We pretty much agree with each other about that kind of thing, so we talk to each other, and sometimes we talk to the TV, but not to other people. So why do so many other people talk about politics to us, thinking that we must agree with what they say?

Leah’s 92-year old uncle wants to complain about getting Obama out of office. A store owner tells us the real estate market is not going to improve until Obama is out of office. A Walmart worker tells us he wants to burn all the cardboard boxes he’s breaking down and to heck with global warming; he doesn’t believe in global warming anyway. A neighbor blames Obama for health insurance increases and says Obamacare keeps poor people from getting health insurance.

I don’t think we actually invite any of the comments we keep hearing. We don’t encourage them, but they keep coming anyway. We don’t argue. We don’t engage them in conversation. We just say something like, “Mmmm,” and keep on going. We may talk about later it between ourselves, but not with them.

I don’t point out that Obama was elected for a second term and he’ll be out as soon as he completes it. I don’t point out that the real estate market is actually improving after a precipitous decline that started before Obama was elected. I don’t point out that burning cardboard boxes doesn’t add any carbon to the global carbon cycle like burning gasoline does, or that climatologists have spent their lives working on climatology and probably know about global warming better than nonscientists. I don’t point out that poor people can get assistance to help pay their health insurance premiums.

I suppose they assume that everyone in town agrees with them. After all, Georgia is every bit as solidly Republican today as it was Democratic 40 or 50 years ago. And I’m an old, white guy from Georgia, so I must be a Republican, too.

But you know what they say about assuming things.

Fat lighter

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My first experience with fat lighter was during spring break in 1972. My friends Tom and John and I decided to ride our bicycles from Atlanta down to Callaway Gardens, which was probably 70 or 80 miles from where we lived. We were pretty much completely unprepared for anything about the trip. We didn’t have fancy bicycle gear. We wore blue jeans and I probably had some kind of sneakers. Tom wore his old Army boots. We didn’t have warm sleeping bags, or any kind of sleeping gear that I can remember. And, of course, it got cold.

We didn’t make it all the way the first night. We went some way down a powerline right of way out of sight of the highway and made camp. When it got dark, it got too cold to sleep, so we built a fire. I have no idea how we managed to find wood or start it. At some point, one of us found a big chunk of wood and put it on the fire. It caught immediately and burned with a bright, hot flame. It was fat lighter. It was like a gift to us from the patron saint of idiots. We all gathered around and spent the night warming our hands.

I didn’t have much reason to think about fat lighter for the next 40 years, but now I find that we have lots of fat lighter on our property.

When I bought the property where I built out house, it was covered with a very thick growth of mostly young, shortleaf pines. There are a few mature pines, both shortleaf and loblolly. There are many, many tall, thin dead pines lying on the ground or leaning against other pines in the woods. Those are probably all the result of failing in the competition for sunlight. Some might be victims of Hurricane Andrew, which nicked the northwest corner of Georgia in 1992. Among those small dead trees, though, are a few large dead pines that have clearly been on the ground for a long time. In some cases their limbs have held them off the ground, but in other cases they are nearly buried in pine needles and moss. But they are not rotten like the rest of the smaller dead pines.

example dead tree

A few years ago I cut off some limbs and found that in most cases the joint at the main trunk was fat lighter. Fat lighter (also known as fatwood, lighter wood and other names), is part of a dead pine tree where a lot of resin has accumulated, resulting in a dense, very aromatic and flammable piece of wood.

On Saturday, I cut up one of those dead, gray trees and found that almost the entire tree is fat lighter. The tree trunk I cut was about a foot in diameter, and it had the heft of a section of green tree. The wood is aromatic, and it burns well. Under the weathered gray exterior, the wood is a clear yellow.

This branch is clearly fat lighter. The dark wood is dark with a very strong odor of pine resin.

real fat lighter

I have been trying to figure out what kind of pines these are. The Wikipedia entry on fatwood says that fat lighter is commonly associated with the longleaf pine, and there are living longleaf pines not far away from our property. At one time I thought these old dead trees were victims of the same fire that blackened the trunks of the few mature pines on the property, but the longleaf is fire resistant, and if loblollies and short leaf pines survived, I feel sure that longleaf pines would have, too. The gray wood shows no sign of burning, while the existing, mature pines do. The bark is long gone on these gray trees, so there’s no help there. The state of the exterior indicates that the bark has been gone for a long time, certainly many years. Based on the size of the living mature short leaf and loblolly pines, I doubt that they are even as old as 30 years. The dead trees were in basically the same condition back in 1998-99 when I bought the land, so they had been dead for some time before that date. The dead trees are larger than most of the living, mature trees, which  I think means they died either before the mature trees started growing, or not long after. That argues that they were on the ground when the fire burned the bark on the living, mature trees. But where is the evidence of the fire on the gray, dead trees? There seems to be some ambiguity in the evidence.

I can’t explain the evidence, but I think the old, dead trees may have been lying on the ground for many, many years, possibly even many decades.

So I can’t tell exactly how long the trees have been down. What about the species?

It’s hard to tell how much of the original trees are left. In some cases I think a root ball is still detectable near the end of the trees. There are thick branches close to the end of the tree, but generally pines the size of these have a fairly tall truck before there are large limbs, especially in a forest as opposed to a solitary tree. On the mature longleaf pines near us the first branches are quite high off the ground. But that’s also true of the large loblolly and short leaf pines, so that doesn’t help. The only real possible evidence of the species is the statement that fat lighter is associated with longleaf pines. Unfortunately, that’s not definitive.

Another question is how these dead trees ended up in an almost entirely new growth of pines. The top of the mountain has the remains of many old roads. These may be old logging roads. But the original developer of the little neighborhood where we live said that many years ago there was an orchard on top of the mountain. Either case would explain why there are large areas with young pines and few mature trees. But neither case explains how these relatively large pines ended up on the ground surrounded by cleared land that was later covered by short leaf pines.

So we have questions but not many answers. At least we have some firewood.

Wheelbarrow full of fat lighter

Wheelbarrow full of fat lighter

 

Good day sunshine

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Is there a better feeling than lying in the sun on a clear, cold, windy day? No, at least if you ask the dogs.

dogs in the sun

We wait until the sun is high enough to give some warmth before we open the curtains, so sometimes there’s very little sunlight when Lucy comes into our bedroom.

a little sun

There’s a little sliver from the window. A little sun is better than none.

Zoe likes to lie in the sun, but sometimes he mistakes the location of his head for the location of his entire body.

cat on a hot carpet floor

But perhaps I do him a disservice; perhaps he simply wants to adjust his solar gain and thermal emission to maintain a constant, comfortable internal temperature. Yes, that must be it.

It’s no accident that the rear of our house faces south. When I was laying out the foundation lines for the house, I wanted the rear of the house to face as close to due south as I could manage, because I planned to have lots of windows in the south-facing side. One day I put a stake vertically in the ground, calculated the exact time of local solar noon, and waited. When it was solar noon, I made a line along the shadow of the stake. I used that line to define the direction that the house’s rear would face.

I could have simply used a compass, or waited until my watch said it was noon, but I wanted to be as accurate as possible, and both of those methods have problems. The compass would have shown me magnetic north, which, where we live, it is about four degrees away from true north. And, since each time zone is 15 degrees wide in longitude, the sun’s position at civil noon varies depending on where you are in the time zone. We are close to the western border of the Eastern Time Zone, so there would have been several degrees error from that.

Using a compass would have worked pretty well, all things considered, but since I knew the longitude of my house from a GPS receiver, I could calculate how far solar time is away from civil time, and, theoretically, get closer to true north.

Unfortunately, the sun’s azimuth (the compass direction from which the sunlight is coming) at noon at a given location varies through the year, so unless you put the stake in the ground on exactly the right date, your stake’s shadow will not point in a true north-south direction. Depending on the date, the sun’s azimuth can be a few degrees away from true south (in the northern hemisphere) at solar noon. However, a true north-south line would be the best orientation. Since the sun’s azimuth varies on both sides of the north-south line, that line would be closest on average to the sun’s azimuth.

My line was only a few degrees at most from a true north-south line, close enough that it makes very little difference in how much sun we get on a cold winter day. I could and maybe should have calculated the optimum roof overhang to provide shade in the summer and minimum interference with solar gain in the winter, but what we have is just about right.

We have six-foot sliding glass doors in the bedrooms and an eight-foot sliding glass door in the living room. We keep one side of the door in our bedroom covered with an insulation panel, so we only get half the possible solar gain in the bedroom, but that’s plenty on a sunny day. Even on sunny days when the outside temperature is below freezing, the bedroom temperature will exceed 70 degrees without running the heat. The living room will do the same.

I didn’t really maximize the house design for passive solar heating. There is no provision for increased thermal mass, so the temperature goes up quickly and then tends to go down fairly quickly when the sun dips below the pines in the back. But that’s what wood-burning stoves are for. Burning wood is just another way to get solar energy, although not as cleanly as absorbing it directly.

If I had it to do over again, I would probably change the house plan and construction a little. But I’m happy with what we have. The dogs, too.

Winter came knocking

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It was 23 F when we got up Monday morning. It’s already been colder this winter, but this is the first time the Atlanta TV weather forecasters have been so excited (“The polar vortex is coming! Run! Run!”). The temperature slowly dropped all day.

Leah was worried about the cats Sunday night, so we let Zoe, Smokey and Sylvester stay inside in addition to Chloe, who has been staying in since it got cold. But nature calls, so we put them out for a while in the morning.

Smokey did not like it.

Let me in

Let me in

With the wind, it felt much colder than 23, so I thought Monday morning when I walked the dogs around the house it would be a good time to wear my LL Bean fur cap. My brother gave it to me a long time ago when he lived near Pittsburgh, but I haven’t had a good excuse to wear it until now. Plus I lost it for a while.

I was not as unhappy as I look here

I was not as unhappy as I look here

If you look closely you can see the red star from the Russian pin I got at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. I think it fits the cap.

Russian star

Russian star

The dogs wore their winter coats when I took them out Monday morning. I didn’t take either of them for their usual long walk, but I did take Zeke for a shorter one. I left Lucy inside; small dogs lose heat faster than big dogs. We had a little snow overnight, and there were still a few flakes floating around when we walked. They were small and glittering, and they seemed to float more than fall. When a little breeze stirred them, they all took off in the same direction like a flock of birds.

Monday night was even colder. It was 6 F when we got up this morning (Tuesday). The dogs got two short walks around the house for purposes of nature calls, but only Zeke will get a longer walk, and he’ll have to wait till this afternoon when the temperature is supposed to reach 26. The cats, of course, stayed in Monday night, too. Unfortunately, Rusty and Dusty won’t come in, so they had to rough it in the cathouse or somewhere in the garage. I hope Dusty didn’t spend the night in a culvert.

The very low (for us) temperatures are an opportunity to see heat transfer at work. As you all know, wind chill is a great favorite of weather forecasters. One of the Atlanta guys said that it only refers to effects on humans, and that is partially correct. If the temperature is 35 with a wind chill of 20, a human will feel very cold without a coat, but a glass of water still won’t freeze. On the other hand, if it’s 6 F with a wind chill of -20 F, a house will lose heat much more quickly than it would in still air. We saw that last night. We (and by “we” I mean “I”) kept a fire going in our wood-burning stove all night, getting up twice to feed it. The stove kept the basement at around 77, but our bedroom dropped to 68 and the bathroom dropped to 66. Ice formed on the sliding glass doors with aluminum frames. And even with the stove going, our heat pump came on several times Monday night. Under more normal conditions, the stove alone will keep the house warm enough that the heating system doesn’t come on. Six degrees and wind removes too much heat from the house for the stove to keep up with it. At these temperatures a heat pump relies almost entirely on resistance heating, which is going to show up in our power bill.

The house complained about the temperature. The deck on the back and the front walk popped and banged all night as the wood shrank and rearranged itself.

This morning dawned clear. The sun is struggling to warm our bedroom and the living room, but I expect by afternoon the combination of the sun and the stove will have warmed the house enough that Leah can take off her anorak and mukluks.

These temperatures are not especially low for many places in the US, but they are for Georgia. Significant winter weather events are rare in Georgia. I remember them by their stories.

The first winter storm I remember was an ice storm in 1959 or 1960, when I was in elementary school. Rain fell onto cold surfaces and froze into a solid, glass-like coat. All night long we listened to the pine branches snapping off. They sounded like gunshots. The limbs fell onto power lines that were already sagging from their own ice coating, and the lines broke. We lost power for a long time. Our house was heated with a floor furnace, and, of course, the thermostat didn’t work without electricity. But my father went under the house and managed to get the furnace to run steadily without electrical power. I think we were the only ones on our street with heat.

The next I remember was a cold snap a few years later that happened after a lot of rain had caused the streams and rivers to flood. Ice formed on the on the flooded creek where my father took my brother and me and our dog Mike for a walk. Mike went out on the ice and fell through. We heard him barking. We went down to the edge of the ice and called and called. He struggled, putting his front feet on the ice and trying to haul himself out, but every time he got up, the ice broke under him. He finally pulled himself out. I don’t know what would have happened if he had not been able to get out. My father would not have gone after him and left us there, and he certainly never would have let us go after him. I know what I would do today if it happened with Zeke or even Lucy.

The next one was the winter of 1984-1985, when I was in graduate school at Georgia Tech. I lived in a small apartment at the back of a house two blocks from Northside Drive and about two miles from school. When I drove back to my apartment after school, the snow was coming down in hard little balls, but the streets were clear. As I always did, I took my dog Jesse to a field across Northside, where I let her run for a half hour or so. By the time I had changed my clothes and walked the two blocks to Northside, cars were sliding sideways down the hill. The storm hit so quickly that some of the faculty in the Atmospheric Sciences Department were caught by surprise and had to spend the night at school.

Later that evening I was watching TV when my roommate, an undergrad, came in with a young female student. The girl stayed a few minutes and then said she was going to her apartment. I thought she had driven my roommate home, but I finally put two and two together and asked him if they had walked from campus. When he said they had, I said we couldn’t let her try to walk home. She was planning to walk about 10 miles out beyond the perimeter road through the snow in a dress and open shoes. That’s when I came up with my first rule of life: Never wear shoes you can’t walk home in.

We got into my little Honda station wagon and started out. By that time the roads were nearly impassible, and what was passable was usually blocked by cars driven by idiots. We spent about two hours finding a way out to the girl’s apartment, going first one way, and then another. The snow was already so deep that at one traffic jam I turned around in a parking lot and drove over the curb without realizing it.

When we let the girl out at her apartment, I think she said thanks.

This weather is severe, but I don’t think I’ll have a story for it. It’s just cold, and the stove is warm.

stove

Good luck with that

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Here in Georgia, it’s almost impossible to avoid regular news reports of how much money the MegaMillions lottery is worth, and with the jackpot at over a half a billion dollars, it’s even worse than usual. It’s like they’re conspirators with the lottery organization, trying to drum up more business. If that’s not bad enough, most of the reports have been full of stupid probability comparisons.

According to the back of the play ticket, the current probability of winning the MegaMillions jackpot is one in 258,890,850, usually shortened to one in 259 million. (You can calculate it yourself. Here it is: 75*74*73*72*71*15/(5*4*3*2). If you want, you can express it this way: 75!*15/(5!*70!) where “!” is the factorial notation.) Lately the news reports have been adding that you are more likely to be hit by an asteroid than win the lottery.

Is that true? I decided to look into it. There are a number of Web sites that indicate that it’s true. For example, Wired says the odds of being hit by an asteroid are one in 250,000 (They should really express odds as 1:249,999, which is one chance in 250,000, but that’s way too abstruse.) But Wired provides nothing to back up that probability.

The Economist quotes the chance of an asteroid impact of 78,817,414/1 (the apparent source is the National Safety Council; National Academies in Britain, presumably, and also presumably an impact that results in one’s death). So maybe that’s a good number.

On the other hand, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab should have a pretty decent idea about the probabilities of an asteroid hitting the Earth. According to their Web site, although the Earth has been hit by quite a few large asteroids (Apparently a body smaller than one kilometer would be a meteorite if it hit the Earth. A larger one would be considered an asteroid. But that’s way too abstruse.), “no human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite or the effects of one impacting.” They note that there are ancient Chinese records of such a death. The say that as best they can tell, there is no large asteroid (the kind that causes widespread destruction and mass deaths) that is likely to strike the Earth in the next several hundred years. That seems to imply probabilities far, far lower than winning the jackpot, at least when calculated over reasonable time spans, like a human lifetime.

The requirement for calculating over a reasonable period brings up another point. I’ve been trying to decide whether the comparison between the probabilities is right or wrong, but I think the asteroid comparison is not just wrong, it’s worse than wrong. It’s actually meaningless. The lottery is a single event, one that takes place once at a specific time, and so the probability applies only for the event. The probability that I will win the lottery before the drawing is zero. So is the probability that I will win after the drawing. But the probability of being hit by an asteroid can only be specified over a period of time. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next second is vanishingly small. The probability that I will be hit by an asteroid within the next 20 years is also small, but different. So saying that the probability of being hit by an asteroid is larger than the probability of winning the lottery is meaningless unless a time period is specified. But, for the news media, that’s way too abstruse.

Even if you grant that they actually mean that the probability of being hit by an asteroid over the remainder of your lifetime is greater than winning the next lottery, they’re still wrong. I think you can get a pretty good idea of that from a purely intuitive sense. Consider that the population of the United States is about 314 million. To my knowledge, no one has been killed by a meteorite this year, or last, or the one previous to that, for as long as I can remember. The population of the Earth is about 7 billion, and still, according to the JPL, no one has been reported to have been killed by an asteroid within the last 1000 years. If the probability is greater than the lottery probability, I am pretty sure there would have been reliable reports by now. And since there have been none, I am pretty sure the probabilities are not as great as the news reports are saying.

But still, the probability of winning the lottery is very small. It’s so small that it’s hard to come up with a comparison that has makes any intuitive sense. I always say that your chance of winning the lottery is essentially the same whether you buy a lottery ticket or not. Of course, that’s not really true. But it might as well be.

Admission:

Despite the irrationality of playing a gambling game with odds so absurdly skewed towards the house, Leah and I do buy lottery tickets, and have since we started dating. My mother played the lottery even before that and for a long time I refused to buy her tickets for her. I thought it was just a waste of money. We recognize that it’s basically a tax on the mathematically illiterate, but we explain it on the same basis as a lot of people – it lets us fantasize for a while about what we would do if we won. I’ll let you know how it turns out.