Author: Matt

Snow-eating winds of the Rockies

For those who live in wintry climates, it can sometimes seem like spring will never arrive. Around the beginning of March in the upper Northern Hemisphere there is a palpable restlessness, an eagerness to shed winter clothing and begin planting spring gardens. At the northern latitude in which I grew up, winter would often linger into April, if not longer, and the sight of snow, which once seemed so novel in the fall, became unbearable.

Amongst these wintry places, however, there are regions where spring can arrive suddenly in the middle of January, but retreat just as suddenly. One such region, an area encompassing the southern half of the Canadian province of Alberta, along with parts of Montana and the Dakotas, is subject to a unique meteorological process that can cause this type of extreme variation in temperature. Known as the Chinook wind, or simply chinooks, this phenomenon is responsible for record-breaking fluctuations of temperature and humidity, as well as bringing relief to a winter-weary population.

Chinook of the North

Named for the Chinookan people of Oregon and Washington, where the wind was believed to originate, there are actually two species of chinooks. The term is used to describe both a warm, wet southwesterly wind that blows into Puget Sound and the coastal areas of British Columbia, and also the dry, warm wind that crosses the Rockies into Alberta and the northern states. In actuality, it is the same wind, but with very different effects. Chinooks in the west (usually pronounced “chin-ook”) bring heavy precipitation into coastal areas, and then move over the mountains, losing moisture as they go, before descending to the plains as the warm, dry Chinook (“shin-ook”).

This transformation takes place when the moisture-laden wind, driven up the western slopes of the Rockies, cools and expands, releasing water vapor as rain or snow. This drier wind then flows down the eastern side of the range, gaining heat as it loses elevation at a greater rate than it would have with the extra moisture. This phenomenon, called a Föhn wind, occurs in other parts of the world where wind moves over mountain ranges, such as in the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Andes (for examples of Föhn winds, go to 11 Famous Winds at SenseList).

Blowin’ in the Wind

The effects of the eastern chinooks can be truly startling, as in the case of a chinook that blew into Loma, Montana, on January 15, 1972. The temperature in Loma before the wind arrived was –54°F (–48°C), and eventually rose to 49°F (9°C), a change of 103°F (57°C), making it the most extreme change in temperature ever recorded in a 24-hour period. Another record-setting chinook, this time affecting the Black Hills city of Spearfish, South Dakota on January 22, 1943, raised the local temperature 49° F (27° C) in two minutes (from –4°F/–20°C to 45°F/7°C), the fastest rise ever recorded. The city of Calgary, Alberta has also seen record-breaking changes in temperature and humidity caused by chinooks, and experiences chinook-influenced weather for about 30 to 35 days every year.

Besides creating warmer weather (and often leading to rapid snow melt), chinooks have other effects that are not so welcome. The swift change in temperature and moisture can wreak havoc with soil conditions and the health of trees, plants, livestock, and humans. Some people report increased headaches, anxiety, and irritability when chinooks arrive, although there are many whose moods are elevated by the unseasonably warm weather. Unfortunately, this respite is usually only temporary, and winter conditions can set in once again, leaving locals to resume their restless pining for spring.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on March 7, 2007.

Image credit: Surrealplaces at the English language Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

In the United States, it’s currently Girl Scout Cookie season. This is the time of year when we’re all helpless—helpless, I tell you—to refuse the endless requests to buy delicious cookies and support a worthy cause. Just $5 a box, and think of all the space that will free up in your wallet! My family has already made a couple of purchases. The kids like Samoas, but for me, the One True Girl Scout Cookie will always be Thin Mint. I’ve stocked up—maybe not enough to last me until next year, but I’ll do my best to ration them. And it’s convenient, because today is also National Chocolate Mint Day, and although you are of course free to use any combination of mint and chocolate (Andes Mints? After Eight? York Peppermint Patties?), there’s just no beating the perfect balance of Thin Mint cookies. The only thing is, and I don’t mean this as a criticism, they’re pretty small. So you should certainly eat several at a time, and that’s going to mean working your way through your stash faster, so…maybe pick up a few extra boxes?

Image credit: carol [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons

Painting by the numbers

When it comes to art, I have very particular (and, often, unpopular) tastes. I’ve been to many of the world’s largest and most famous art museums, and I’ve seen and read enough to be able to talk fairly intelligently about what I’m looking at. But I must be brutally honest: of the many thousands of paintings, sculptures, photographs, multimedia installations, and other sorts of art I’ve seen in my lifetime, I have only actually enjoyed a tiny handful of pieces. My criteria for art enjoyment are quite narrow, having nothing to do with the time period in which something was made, the nationality of the artist, or the piece’s genre. If I had to deconstruct my art evaluation mechanism, I’d probably say I care about just three things: Is it visually appealing? Is it skillfully done? And is it interesting?

Needless to say, evaluating these three questions is a completely subjective matter, but in any case my answers tend to be “no” to all three more often than for most people. I don’t need art to be beautiful or evocative or metaphysically meaningful, but I do need it to flip those ineffable emotional switches in my brain that mean “this works for me.” Whatever else can be said about a piece of art, if I can’t grasp it in some basic way without reading a detailed treatise by the artist or some art expert on what it supposedly means, I don’t like it. In my book, the appreciation of a piece of art should be automatic, spontaneous, and immediate—not dependent on the knowledge of external facts.

Writing on the Wall

I say all of this to put today’s topic in perspective. Improbable though it may be, some of my favorite works of art are painted on the sides of buildings in unlikely places all over San Francisco. I’m not talking about graffiti, though. San Francisco is the proud home of a number of strange, gigantic paintings, many of which resemble traffic signs. These huge murals are just a sampling of the work of an artist who went by the name Rigo 82 in 1982, Rigo 83 in 1983, and so on up through Rigo 02 in 2002, after which he settled on Rigo 23 as a (presumably) permanent moniker. Others of his works appear in respectable museums in this city and around the world. But as you might infer from Rigo’s unusual surname(s), it’s hard to say whether the art or the artist is the more interesting subject.

The artist with the given name Ricardo Gouveia was born in Portugal in the late 1960s, making him about my age. In high school he was involved in a controversial underground magazine, and to disguise his identity he combined the first two letters of his first and last names to make the alias “Rigo.” He then went a step further and adopted the surname 82, reflecting the year at the time. Every year thereafter for 20 years he changed his name accordingly; he also said that his reasons for changing his name changed over time. Rigo came to the United States at age 19, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991 and a Master of Fine Arts at Stanford in 1997. He has been creating his large-scale outdoor paintings since the mid-1980s.

Sign Me Up

The first of his paintings I recall seeing is also my favorite: One Tree, by Rigo 95. Right next to a freeway on-ramp, the painting, which looked just like a giant One Way sign, pointed directly at the single tree that just happened to occupy the tiny wedge of undeveloped ground between the building and the highway. It was simple, elegant, funny, and so obvious it was profound. (A couple of years ago, sadly, the painting was removed when the building changed ownership and then replaced—inexplicably, behind the tree it was supposed to be pointing at.) Rigo has used the One Way template in several other places. On one building is a large pair of arrows, one pointing upward that says “Birds” and the other pointing down that says “Cars” (Rigo 97); similarly, an abandoned building near downtown had a huge upward arrow that said “Sky” on one side and a downward arrow on the other side that said “Ground” (Rigo 98). Among his other works have been a painting in the shape of an interstate road sign on the side of a public housing building that says “Innercity Home” and the word “Extinct” superimposed on a black-and-yellow warning pattern behind a Shell gasoline station. Some of his works have been lost due to construction that blocks the view (or eliminates the building entirely), but for Rigo, this sort of impermanence is just an intrinsic feature of the urban landscape.

Not all of Rigo’s artwork is based on street signs. His work ranges from the decidedly representational to the utterly conceptual, and he works in media ranging from paints to pushpins to ceramic tiles. Some of his pieces are strictly intended for (the insides of) galleries and museums; others are made for a variety of public places. But all of them are bold, unusual, and accessible to ordinary people—even those with fairly picky (or rudimentary) ideas about what constitutes meaningful art. That’s what I enjoy about it so much: it’s art anyone can appreciate without having to be told why you should.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 6, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on October 25, 2004.

As I’ve said numerous times, devoting a special day of the year to activities that ought to be performed every day seems odd, but then, the world is full of odd people. Today is National Drink Wine Day, so just a normal Monday here, but I suppose there are some people whose beverage of choice is, I don’t know, beer or grain alcohol or something, who should be encouraged to branch out a bit today and drink some fermented grape juice. It’s good stuff, and has numerous health benefits (as usual, when consumed in moderation). Bonus points if you can multitask while consuming your wine.

Image credit: Davide Restivo from Lenzburg, Aarau, Switzerland [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Complex solutions to a simple problem

When I got married, my wife gave me a wonderful wedding present: a pair of binoculars. I don’t recall ever having said, “I sure wish I had binoculars,” but I couldn’t have been more delighted at her choice. I remember having two distinct thoughts about the gift: first, that this woman must know me awfully well to discern that this is the kind of thing I’d think is not merely cool, but perfectly appropriate as a wedding present; and second, that I now had the ability to see things at a distance. This latter point is not as trivial as it sounds. I have pretty good eyesight, but whether I’m at a concert or play, or on a street corner in a strange city trying to get my bearings, it seems that I’m always about 20 meters too far away to make out the significant details of whatever I’m looking at. For some reason, it had never seriously occurred to me to solve this problem by investing in a pair of binoculars, but now that I unexpectedly had the ability to see things farther away than normal, I found myself excited by the possibilities it would open up.

I am not exactly the target audience for most binoculars—which is to say, I’m not into hunting, boating, bird watching, professional sports, amateur astronomy, or voyeurism. That said, I do find it quite handy to be able to get a closer look at a variety of things on occasion, and looking through binoculars has the curious effect of always making me wish I could see just a little closer still. In other words, if the binoculars reveal that the blur in the distance is in fact a bus, I inevitably wish they magnified the image slightly more so that I could read the number that would tell me if it’s the bus I’m waiting for. Unfortunately, if my wife had bought me binoculars with higher magnification, it actually would have worked against me. The facts of geometry being what they are, small hand movements are amplified dramatically when you’re looking at something far away, so that in most cases, magnifications of greater than about 8x require a tripod to steady the binoculars if they’re going to be useful.

Holding Steady

This problem did not go unnoticed by the military and the space program, both of which had excellent reasons for needing high magnification, and both of which tended to use binoculars in intrinsically unstable locations where a tripod wouldn’t have done much good—on a rocking boat, a moving truck, or a spacecraft, for instance. And so a solution was developed, in typical military style: robust, but heavy, expensive, and awkward. The solution was basically to outfit the binoculars with a gyroscope, whose centrifugal force kept the entire unit relatively steady. Although this did in fact provide a more stable image at greater magnifications, it added significant bulk and weight, used a lot of power, and also required a bit of time for the gyroscope to spin up before the image steadied.

Meanwhile, an entirely different industry was working on a solution to a similar problem. As consumer video cameras became smaller and lighter and turned into camcorders, and as camcorders acquired ever-longer zoom lenses, it became increasingly difficult to create quality home movies of things far away using a handheld device. Clearly, consumers who want a lightweight, pocket-sized device are not going to accept a gyroscope any more than bouncy images, so a different tactic was needed.

You might be thinking: big deal; my smartphone has been able to do this for a long time. Sure, but between your smartphone’s camera and digital display is a fancy microprocessor, along with software that can digitally compensate for shaking in real time. Since binoculars are (generally) optical, not digital, those tricks can’t be used. So how do they do it in purely optical devices?

Let’s Do the Twist

The innovation camcorder makers came up with was this: instead of stabilizing the entire device, simply stabilize the portion of the optical system inside that actually mattered. A number of different and clever solutions to this problem were developed and later modified further so they could be applied to binoculars as well. The result is that several different manufacturers now make high-power binoculars that will give you, at the touch of a button, a frighteningly rock-solid image.

One approach was simply to shrink down the gyroscopes that had been used to steady the entire binoculars of early designs, and use them just to steady the prisms (the parts of the optical path that flip over the image so that it’s right-side-up). This is reasonably effective, but still requires a fair amount of power and adds considerable bulk and weight. This method is used by Russian brands Peleng and SIB. Fujinon uses a variation on this approach, which instead of stabilizing the prisms directly with gyroscopes, incorporates much smaller gyros along with solid-state vibration sensors to feed data to a microprocessor, which then directs tiny motors to reposition the prisms.

An even higher-tech approach by Canon does away with gyroscopes altogether. Early Canon models used a set of motion-sensing devices called accelerometers to measure the unit’s movement, and then handed the data to a microprocessor that determines whether it was intentional movement or not; based on the processor’s decision, it adjusted the angle of the glass faces on a unique, water-filled flexible prism. Later Canon designs instead adjust the angle of a single element within the lens barrel on each side, which has the same effect but requires less power, size, and weight.

All of these approaches, while roughly equal in effectiveness, still require batteries, which may last as little as two to six hours in constant use. An alternative design is all-mechanical. It basically mounts weighted prisms in a special gimbal—a mechanical assembly that allows them to tilt freely in any direction—without any help from gyroscopes, motors, or microprocessors. Carl Zeiss stabilizing binoculars use this approach.

The Cost of Stability

Image-stabilizing binoculars (also known as “image stabilization” or “image stabilized” binoculars) can give you a steadier image at up to 20x magnification than ordinary binoculars will give you at 7 or 8x. But this marvelous technology doesn’t come cheap. A quick survey of a number of different models showed prices ranging from as little as US$300 for an 8x Canon model to $9,000 for a top-of-the-line 20x Zeiss. They are also, without exception, quite a bit heavier than their conventional counterparts—regardless of which technology they use. But apart from their obvious utility to lovers of nature, sports, or live music, they are just plain cool. When I tried a couple of models out in a store, I was simply amazed at the nearly magical effect. Alas, my gadget budget cannot currently accommodate such a luxury, but give me a nice solid 16x model with a built-in compass, rangefinder, night vision, and hi-res digital camera for about $500 and I’ll be happy to hand over the plastic. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on June 6, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on November 9, 2004.

Image credit: Program Executive Office Soldier [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

This is what the world has come to: the best we can seem to manage is a hope, a wish, a plea that just one day a year some small percentage of us will be nice to other people without expecting anything in return. Well, I guess it’s a start. Be kind to someone, or better yet, several someones today. See how it goes. Remember how it feels. And you know what, you are totally allowed to do the same thing again tomorrow. Honest! The kindness police will not cite you for being nice on other days of the year. And if it turns into a habit, well, there are much worse habits.

Image credit: Heath Brandon [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr

Mining salt in Bavaria

Nowadays, we take salt for granted. Sold for a pittance, the most common of spices, we think of it as an everyday thing, when we think of it at all. It wasn’t always so. In fact, great empires and fortunes rose and fell according to its supply. It is hard to imagine a modern war being fought over salt. But consider these historical events, as recounted in Margaret Visser’s Much Depends on Dinner:

Morocco fought Mali in the sixteenth century for the mines of Taoudeni; the Venetians, whose salt interests are an historical study in themselves, destroyed Comacchio in the tenth century and the salt gardens of Cervia in the fourteenth; pirates throughout the centuries ambushed and raided the slow heavy convoys of salt ships.

There are plenty of other examples—all of which seem outlandish to us today, considering that the biggest battles fought over salt have to do with whether it should be spread over icy roads in winter. Salt has lost its nobility, its historical power—but from the salt-starved Vikings to the salt-greedy Romans, salt has played an important role in human history.

The Saltman Cometh

Nowhere does this seem more obvious than in the salt-rich environs of eastern Bavaria and western Austria. The de facto capital of the region, Salzburg (or “salt town”) was built by its first archbishop in the eighth century with profits from salt mining, but the practice of salt mining goes back even further, to the civilization of the early Celts. In his book Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky describes the discovery by local salt miners in the 1600s of a “perfectly preserved body, dried and salted ‘like codfish,’” believed now to date to 400 BCE. Dressed in colorful fabrics, this “saltman” and two others like him were found with the tools of their trade near them, proof of an ancient salt mining culture.

Salt of the Earth

This salt mining tradition continues in the modern salt works along the German/Austrian border, and it’s possible to experience some of what those ancient miners might have felt, deep in the mountains of salt. Founded in 1517, the Salzbergwerk Berchtesgaden (“Berchtesgaden salt mine”)—located near Salzburg but on the German side of the border—once entertained only aristocratic visitors, but now welcomes the public to its underground facilities and caves. Berchtesgaden, linked in the public imagination with Hitler’s southern headquarters (although they were actually located at Obersalzberg, a small settlement further up in the mountains) is a town that developed in proximity to the Augustinian monastery that owned the Salzbergwerk. In the early 1800s the monastery was converted into a palace for the Wittelsbachs, rulers of Bavaria at the time, and the entire area became associated with this colorful family.

Mine Games

Still operational, the Salzbergwerk is a fascinating place to visit. When I was there years ago, we were given the traditional leather vests and helmets of the miners to wear (now visitors sport sturdy coveralls), making you feel as if you are a miner yourself. This sensation is heightened when, after a short train ride, you are asked to slide down a wooden chute into the mine itself, just as the miners would do.

The most memorable part of the tour for me was gliding across a large underground lake on a wooden platform boat, an experience that was both beautiful and eerie. I was wowed by the size of the lake, and also slightly disconcerted by the oppressive nearness of the stone “ceiling.” It was definitely not something you see everyday, unless you happen to be a Bavarian salt miner.

Worth Its Salt

Returning from the depths of the mine, it was hard to think of salt the same way again. It is, after all, the only rock that we eat, and with thousands of tons of it looming above your head, you don’t immediately think, “pass the salt.” Vital to the functioning of our vital organs, we would die without salt, yet we live in a salt-glutted world, so much so that we are told to reduce our intake, for the sake of our health.

In their song “NaCl (Sodium Chloride),” folk singers Kate and Anna McGarrigle make a case for the worthiness of salt. Describing the meeting, mating and melding of a sodium atom and a chlorine atom in the primordial sea, they ask us to “Think of the love that you eat, when you salt your meat.” Silly, meant to be taken with a “grain of salt,” yet it expresses the mystery of salt, the serendipitous compound that protects our cells, and fills the ocean.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on August 28, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on November 28, 2004.