All my childhood, my room had a window overlooking a tin roof (made of sealed together sheets of thin tin sheeting... not the corrugated tin roof you'd find on a shed, or a tropical home). So my memory of rain is associated with the tip-tapping of drops on metal. I'm very fond of the sound. I hope one day to live in a house with a standing-seam roof.
Having grown up in a modern home, I'm used to thinking of roofs as solid, impermeable protection against the elements, but it's only a couple hundred years since the typical home needed to include a place for the smoke from the open central fire to rise up and out. Not that space is necessarily a hole: the "blackhouses" of the Scottish highlands and islands depended on smoke leaking up through the heavy thatching to provide additional waterproofing.
My friend Gary has a tipi, which he has regularly brought out to the Renaissance Festival I've danced at off and on for 20+ years now. I've slept in it a few times, and it was rain that presented the worst problems... not from roof leakage, as there is a rain flap that protects the interior, but from trickles in on the ground.
I seem to be flailing a bit here. What strikes me about most roofs is that while there is a huge variety in form and material, there is one basic principle: slope for drainage. It's so obvious it hardly seems to bear notice, but all our tools for keeping the rain off share this basic principle: water falls, and when provided with a slope, it falls while moving horizontally in the direction.
I wonder how far back the first tool was made that took advantage of this? Although sheltering under trees (which drain under a similar priniciple) has been around as long as animals have wanted to avoid a drenching...
Friday, March 30, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Indian garb - March 23, 2012
It's absolutely gorgeous weather here: spring breezes, dappled sun and cloud, highs around 70°F. Anya does not want to go inside once she's been out, and who can blame her. And it's a pleasure to walk her.
I've gotten a bit deeper into the book I mentioned in the previous post, Native American Clothing. here's what I'm finding:
1. Not directly related to the questions of weatherproofing I bring to the subject: a sense of dynamic shifting of cultures up to and through the European contact. Because there is such a persistent sense of "eternal" constancy before Europeans came, this is a really useful antidote: there was a civilizational shift in the 600-700 years before contact that was just as instability-inducing, if much less destructive: the introduction of corn agriculture and of Mississippian town-based social structure. The author in particular notes the spread of Mississippian villages in the river valleys up into the Plains in this time, creating a network of trade, which radically changed what had been a pretty bleak and isolated pattern of smaller nomadic groups who followed the buffalo year-round.
2. Also not directly related, but something I had never really gotten before: the Iroquois invasion of the southern Great Lakes in the late 17th century. This pushed not just the Huron (I knew about those) but a number of tribes, out of Michigan and the lands around Lakes Erie and Huron, leaving essentially empty land. The refugees piled in with existing groups in Wisconsin and Illinois, creating another major cultural shift: the Indians who fought Pontiac's War and later Tecumseh's war, were the product of a bunch of previously separated (and even competing) tribes, pushed together and forced to make peace among each other. The Calumet peace pipe ceremony originated here (well, it came from similar needs during the contact discussed in (1), actually).
3. As I said yesterday, one of the big surprises is, even in the north, Indians by and large wore a lot less clothing, and a lot looser clothing. The old pictures and movies, though they lie in many many ways, are spot on here: bare or barely-covered torsos were the norm. A robe in winter, maybe, but clothing was put on for need, and for decoration.
This is the thing that has thrown me with this book: I'm looking for practical information on clothing as durable tool, necessary protector from the elements. And what I'm getting instead is essentially a history of fashion: when this kind of decoration became popular, or that embroidery technique came upriver from some other culture. And so I have to ask myself: how much of this outside-weather-protection thing we Euro-Americans have brought with us, is really necessary to survive?
I've gotten a bit deeper into the book I mentioned in the previous post, Native American Clothing. here's what I'm finding:
1. Not directly related to the questions of weatherproofing I bring to the subject: a sense of dynamic shifting of cultures up to and through the European contact. Because there is such a persistent sense of "eternal" constancy before Europeans came, this is a really useful antidote: there was a civilizational shift in the 600-700 years before contact that was just as instability-inducing, if much less destructive: the introduction of corn agriculture and of Mississippian town-based social structure. The author in particular notes the spread of Mississippian villages in the river valleys up into the Plains in this time, creating a network of trade, which radically changed what had been a pretty bleak and isolated pattern of smaller nomadic groups who followed the buffalo year-round.
2. Also not directly related, but something I had never really gotten before: the Iroquois invasion of the southern Great Lakes in the late 17th century. This pushed not just the Huron (I knew about those) but a number of tribes, out of Michigan and the lands around Lakes Erie and Huron, leaving essentially empty land. The refugees piled in with existing groups in Wisconsin and Illinois, creating another major cultural shift: the Indians who fought Pontiac's War and later Tecumseh's war, were the product of a bunch of previously separated (and even competing) tribes, pushed together and forced to make peace among each other. The Calumet peace pipe ceremony originated here (well, it came from similar needs during the contact discussed in (1), actually).
3. As I said yesterday, one of the big surprises is, even in the north, Indians by and large wore a lot less clothing, and a lot looser clothing. The old pictures and movies, though they lie in many many ways, are spot on here: bare or barely-covered torsos were the norm. A robe in winter, maybe, but clothing was put on for need, and for decoration.
This is the thing that has thrown me with this book: I'm looking for practical information on clothing as durable tool, necessary protector from the elements. And what I'm getting instead is essentially a history of fashion: when this kind of decoration became popular, or that embroidery technique came upriver from some other culture. And so I have to ask myself: how much of this outside-weather-protection thing we Euro-Americans have brought with us, is really necessary to survive?
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Nudity as a solution to dampness - March 22, 2012
mixed light shower and humid all day. Decent ground moistening weather (which we badly need), and prefectly OK most of the day to walk about in. Walked Anya around the block this morning... things are greening up and she really likes to sniff things.
I got a book from the library on Native American clothing. In fact that's what it's called, Native American Clothing: an Illustrated History. Lovely pictures, but it's such a massive subject it really can't go into as much detail as I would like.
I did spend a little while looking at the Northwest Coast section a bit, still intrigued by the question: what did the locals do right that Lewis, Clark et al. did wrong?
One answer is pretty straightforward: there was a lot more nudity before European traders began to dominate the economy. Nudity with capes and hats. That could work. Well, some of the year it could work. It doesn't really answer the question of how you survive (hunting and fishing) in January on Vancouver Island or by the mouth of the Columbia River.
Alas, the author is very interested in clothing as status marker, and indeed much of the reall interesting "ethnographic" material we have is from formal, ceremonial life, not everyday working gear. Oh well, I'll have a further read through relevant sections.
I got a book from the library on Native American clothing. In fact that's what it's called, Native American Clothing: an Illustrated History. Lovely pictures, but it's such a massive subject it really can't go into as much detail as I would like.
I did spend a little while looking at the Northwest Coast section a bit, still intrigued by the question: what did the locals do right that Lewis, Clark et al. did wrong?
One answer is pretty straightforward: there was a lot more nudity before European traders began to dominate the economy. Nudity with capes and hats. That could work. Well, some of the year it could work. It doesn't really answer the question of how you survive (hunting and fishing) in January on Vancouver Island or by the mouth of the Columbia River.
Alas, the author is very interested in clothing as status marker, and indeed much of the reall interesting "ethnographic" material we have is from formal, ceremonial life, not everyday working gear. Oh well, I'll have a further read through relevant sections.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Boring rain - March 21, 2012
On Monday, we were going to get a used mattress from our friends Trenne and Dave, at the pub sing. Then it began to rain, and we realized we couldn't actually fit the mattress into our car and then fit the three of us in with it. So we had to make other plans.
It rained pretty hard, and blew away the bags of leaves that had been insulating the foundation at the southwest corner of our house. And we paid it very little mind. Probably I would have minded more if I had actually had to be outside in the downpour, but if there is one thing our urban construct is good at, it's keeping us dry most of the time.
It's been springlike, and now that the lilacs are leafing out and bulbs are popping up here and there, I think we can say it isn't just springlike. It's spring. Today's the equinox, so it's official, and I need to get back in the saddle writing this daily.
April showers, or March showers, are unpleasant more or less in proportion to the air temperature, and how waterproof your clothing is. It's been warm here: t-shirt weather mostly since we got back from out East on Friday. Even the fronts that brought the rain over the last couple days, though they brought snow to Montana, have only moderated what was frankly hot weather over the weekend. Now it's just unseasonably warm.
For all but a very few specialized jobs, winter stops "productive" outdoor activity: lumbering is one big exception. But the rains of spring time, though they can cause "mud season," also are directly productive... we gardeners are happy to see it, especially given the dryness of the winter.
Rain just isn't a big deal, certainly compared to snow. Flash floods in places, and some really exciting driving when a real gully-washer comes through. And the other aspects of summer storms, especially wind, can be downright terrifying. But rain itself is rarely actually dangerous, just uncomfortable.
It rained pretty hard, and blew away the bags of leaves that had been insulating the foundation at the southwest corner of our house. And we paid it very little mind. Probably I would have minded more if I had actually had to be outside in the downpour, but if there is one thing our urban construct is good at, it's keeping us dry most of the time.
It's been springlike, and now that the lilacs are leafing out and bulbs are popping up here and there, I think we can say it isn't just springlike. It's spring. Today's the equinox, so it's official, and I need to get back in the saddle writing this daily.
April showers, or March showers, are unpleasant more or less in proportion to the air temperature, and how waterproof your clothing is. It's been warm here: t-shirt weather mostly since we got back from out East on Friday. Even the fronts that brought the rain over the last couple days, though they brought snow to Montana, have only moderated what was frankly hot weather over the weekend. Now it's just unseasonably warm.
For all but a very few specialized jobs, winter stops "productive" outdoor activity: lumbering is one big exception. But the rains of spring time, though they can cause "mud season," also are directly productive... we gardeners are happy to see it, especially given the dryness of the winter.
Rain just isn't a big deal, certainly compared to snow. Flash floods in places, and some really exciting driving when a real gully-washer comes through. And the other aspects of summer storms, especially wind, can be downright terrifying. But rain itself is rarely actually dangerous, just uncomfortable.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Fort Clatsop - March 14, 2012
Our big adventure today was a visit to a wonderful sculpture garden in Trenton. It's been a beautiiful couple of days here in New Jersey, and apparently it's been similar in Minnesota. Tomorrrow promises more of the same.We've noticed that it's been more humid here than in Minnsota. It generally is. Not that Minnsota doesn't get muggy—it does—but New Jersey summers are worse. Not as bad as Washington DC, or the almost-swimmable humidity of summer in the Deep South.
In regards to wetness (and humidity) I've been thinking of the Lewis and Clark expedition's winter at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. It was a long, miserable inter, not because of cold, but because of the incessant damp. Out of the 106 days they spent at the fort, it rained 94. They could not perserve meat in the ways they knew how. Clothes rotted off their bodies, and bedding off their beds.
At Christmas, "We would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites. Our Diner concisted of pore [lean] Elk, So much Spoiled that we eate it thro' mear necessity. Some Spoiled pounded fish and a fiew roots."
So what were they doing the local native tribes weren't, and vice versa? Is this another of those cases, like Shackleton's refusal to wear parkas and other "native" clohing, of blind cultural obstinacy?
In regards to wetness (and humidity) I've been thinking of the Lewis and Clark expedition's winter at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. It was a long, miserable inter, not because of cold, but because of the incessant damp. Out of the 106 days they spent at the fort, it rained 94. They could not perserve meat in the ways they knew how. Clothes rotted off their bodies, and bedding off their beds.
At Christmas, "We would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites. Our Diner concisted of pore [lean] Elk, So much Spoiled that we eate it thro' mear necessity. Some Spoiled pounded fish and a fiew roots."
So what were they doing the local native tribes weren't, and vice versa? Is this another of those cases, like Shackleton's refusal to wear parkas and other "native" clohing, of blind cultural obstinacy?
Johnstown - Marrch 13, 2012
Another beautiful day in New Jersey, strolling around Princeton. Geocoaching with Daniel... not much budding out on the trees, but high temps in the 60'sF. And Anya is happily at home with Betsy and Ramon who are housesitting.
I read through David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. What I said in an earlier post about survivability still holds: people build for an everyday life with a "usual" regular crisis in mind... the people of Johnstown knew the river would flood in the spring, most likely. It usually did. They were used to the houses nearest the river getting water in the basements. And there had been talk forever about the dam upstream, and how it was unstable and "likely to go at any time." But then it kept not breaking, and people got used to that.
And then there was a storm of the century. And the dam overtopped, and more than 2000 people died, and several towns were effectively wiped from the map.
One of the most terrifying things about any disaster is the randomness of survival. Some entire families (99 according to McCullough) died outright. Many more lost members, and McCullough goes into harrowing detail about how families were split up: one young girl huddled in the third floor of her house, and watched while two other household members literally feet away fell through the floor and were drowned. She floated away on a mattress and survived.
Some disasters simply swallow everything and everyone in sight: volcanoes and firestorms for example. Some mudslides. Some bombs. And it feels as though floods ought to be the same way, especially wall-of-water floods like Johnstown. I've always pictures tsunamis as like that: a literal wall of water slamming into the shore. But water doesn't really work like that: it wants to spread out and seek its lowest point. And so, if you watch films of the recent tsunamis in Japan and Sumatra, you see a surge of water not as a cresting wave but as a sudden rise in the normal rushing flow. The net effect in terms of what gets submerged is the same: areas that were dry are suddenly underwater. And it doesn't really matter that it's a rapidly rising flow and not a "wall of water" that hits structures and pushes them around: water is heavy and rushing water contains a lot of force.
I think this is the thing that seems counterintuitive about flooding to landlubbers like me: we forget just how strong flowing water is. It doesn't take a cresting wave to knock you down. Waist-high water with less-than perfect footing will do just fine.
I read through David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. What I said in an earlier post about survivability still holds: people build for an everyday life with a "usual" regular crisis in mind... the people of Johnstown knew the river would flood in the spring, most likely. It usually did. They were used to the houses nearest the river getting water in the basements. And there had been talk forever about the dam upstream, and how it was unstable and "likely to go at any time." But then it kept not breaking, and people got used to that.
And then there was a storm of the century. And the dam overtopped, and more than 2000 people died, and several towns were effectively wiped from the map.
One of the most terrifying things about any disaster is the randomness of survival. Some entire families (99 according to McCullough) died outright. Many more lost members, and McCullough goes into harrowing detail about how families were split up: one young girl huddled in the third floor of her house, and watched while two other household members literally feet away fell through the floor and were drowned. She floated away on a mattress and survived.
Some disasters simply swallow everything and everyone in sight: volcanoes and firestorms for example. Some mudslides. Some bombs. And it feels as though floods ought to be the same way, especially wall-of-water floods like Johnstown. I've always pictures tsunamis as like that: a literal wall of water slamming into the shore. But water doesn't really work like that: it wants to spread out and seek its lowest point. And so, if you watch films of the recent tsunamis in Japan and Sumatra, you see a surge of water not as a cresting wave but as a sudden rise in the normal rushing flow. The net effect in terms of what gets submerged is the same: areas that were dry are suddenly underwater. And it doesn't really matter that it's a rapidly rising flow and not a "wall of water" that hits structures and pushes them around: water is heavy and rushing water contains a lot of force.
I think this is the thing that seems counterintuitive about flooding to landlubbers like me: we forget just how strong flowing water is. It doesn't take a cresting wave to knock you down. Waist-high water with less-than perfect footing will do just fine.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
floods - March 11, 2012
We walked around Washington today for the third day in a row. Our dog finished her overnight camp experience at the dog boarding place and got picked up by the house sitters, apparently OK. We met lots of dogs and it was in no way, shape or form winter. Maybe I just need to stop pretending, and start writing the spring section of this project.
Keeping the cold out is a big project, but people also mostly want to be dry, in part because wee lose body heat faster when we are wet. Of hypothermia cases, the majority involve people falling into cold water, not getting overexposed on land. Witness that tale of the chechaquo from earlier this blog: He died of cold, but it was the wet foot that really did him in.
So keeping water out. It has a lot of forms: we wrap ourselves in waterproofing, or our legs and feet at any rate; we put a roof over our head and drains around our house to move rain and meltwater; we use umbrellas, sou'westers, ponchos, oilskins, and so on to let us walk out in the rain without getting soaked.
And then there's flooding. From Noah and Gilgamesh, the story of surviving the flood is one of just getting out of the way. Whether the flood is from a tsunami, a broken dam or melted ice dam, a sudden downpour, or a rapid snowmelt, floods are metaphors for unstoppability, washing everything before them. Like other big weather, but unlike snowfall, a flood is only to be danced around and avoided, not tamed.
Well, no. I'm curious about the line between the "tameable flood"— and there are a multitude of flood-control systems out there—dams, levees, diversion canals—and the monsters you can only get up to higher ground and watch.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Rock wool and other curiosities - March 10, 2012
What cvan I say? I've been working long hours and now I'm on vacation. It's been not vvery wintry in Minnesota, and decidedly spring here in DC, where I am now.
There are a few things I wanted to look at beefore the season is over and I offficially look at spring and wetneess. The first one is rock wool. I had never heard of rock wool unil I began looking into home insulation. Rock wool is, well, Wikipedia sums it up:
Mineral wool, mineral fibers or man-made mineral fibers are fibers made from natural or synthetic minerals or metal oxides. The latter term is generally used to refer solely to synthetic materials including fiberglass, ceramic fibers and stone wool. Industrial applications of mineral wool include thermal insulation (as both structural insulation and pipe insulation), filtration, soundproofing, and germination of seedlings.Rock wool, the wikipedia article claims, was first manufactured in 1871 in Germany. The idea of insulating buildings using materials that slowed heat loss, as opposaed to just making the wal draft-proof, seems to have been a late one. It really onlly makes sense with timber-frame housing, which has airspace between the insside and outside walls. With older homes (like ours—1890) it makes the most sense to fill the walls with lose cellulose. These days the cellulose is made of treated (fire retardance and mold resistance) ground-up newspaper. But apparently use of cellulose has a long history: straw, corncobs, sawdust, all were used historically. What's amazing to me is that is took so long to make this kind of thing the norm. Energy costs aside, insulated walls are just warmer and less drafty in winter, and keep the house cooler in summer. Our house anyway. But you don't get the sense that this kind of thing ever even occurred to the Ingalls family almost freezing to death on the South Dakota frontier. Rock wool. I don't know that I'd ever head of the stuff beffore. Fiberglass, yes, but somehow meltiing glass and extruding little wisps of glass fibers seems more commonplace than doing the same with rocks. People blow glass... From the little I've read, Scandinavia seems to have been a hotbbed for both fiberglas and rock wool. Lots of market there for insulation. More reseach required.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Winter themes - March 4, 2012
I took Anya around for a walk this morning, and for a visit to the dog park this afternoon... both happy, uneventful romps. It's not especially warm thermometer-wise, but the ever-higher sun makes a huge difference. I'm realizing there's a much more complicated dance going on than I had realized, amongst air temperature, wind, ground temperature and cover, and solar heating.
This blog is meant to be a kind of notebook in developing a book-length project. Originally I had thought the themes might develop chronologically—I was thinking about the year laid out in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. But it's been a lot more scattershot. So even though I have a couple weeks to go before I switch over to a new season, I want to gather my thoughts.
I see three broad themes:
1. Winter clothing. I want to trace the piecemeal bits I have now into a history of modern winterwear. In particular, the slow adoption of the Inuit anoraaq and parka as standard Western forms.
2. Winter driving. How has our increasing reliance on individual wheeled transport changed how we treat winter roads? Trace the development both of winter vehicles and winter road- and street-clearing. Also work in the increase in home-like features of the car, as people spend more of their lives in them—this latter theme will, I think, carry into later sections.
3. Winter fuel and insulation. I still want to work up those US census stats on changing home heating fuel since 1940, but since similar shifts happened in the UK, I'd love to get a more global perspective on this. How about Russia? Sweden? Central Europe? China (especially northern China)? Related, I would like to know more about home insulation.
I think that about covers things. Probably the piece I've left least covered in my reading so far is the bit about insulation. Maybe I can get some energy into that over the next couple weeks.
This blog is meant to be a kind of notebook in developing a book-length project. Originally I had thought the themes might develop chronologically—I was thinking about the year laid out in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. But it's been a lot more scattershot. So even though I have a couple weeks to go before I switch over to a new season, I want to gather my thoughts.
I see three broad themes:
1. Winter clothing. I want to trace the piecemeal bits I have now into a history of modern winterwear. In particular, the slow adoption of the Inuit anoraaq and parka as standard Western forms.
2. Winter driving. How has our increasing reliance on individual wheeled transport changed how we treat winter roads? Trace the development both of winter vehicles and winter road- and street-clearing. Also work in the increase in home-like features of the car, as people spend more of their lives in them—this latter theme will, I think, carry into later sections.
3. Winter fuel and insulation. I still want to work up those US census stats on changing home heating fuel since 1940, but since similar shifts happened in the UK, I'd love to get a more global perspective on this. How about Russia? Sweden? Central Europe? China (especially northern China)? Related, I would like to know more about home insulation.
I think that about covers things. Probably the piece I've left least covered in my reading so far is the bit about insulation. Maybe I can get some energy into that over the next couple weeks.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
50 Words for Snow - March 3, 2012
It snowed some this morning... enough to make a walk with Anya and a friend around St Anthony Park an adventure in hidden ice. More slippery adventures driving during the day, sliding into parking spaces near Lake Harriet. Funny how some light snowfalls can slick up the road like crazy, while some heavier snows just leave pretty drivable slush. It's a kind of dance, layers of ice and snow, compacted or loose, wet or dry.
It's a myth that Inuit languages have hundreds of words for snow, or really more words for snow than English does (flurry, blizzard, slush, drift, powder... not to mention all the adjectives that can characterize snow: light, heavy, wet, dry, granular, compacted...). The Saami (Lapps), on the other hand...
But why does a variety of words mean we think something is more important to discuss? It doesn't. "Love" and "God" and "war" are all topics of endless discussion, without lots and lots of words for them. Reproductive organs, on the other hand, carry a seemingly infinite number of terms in slang. Which are more important in our culture? Never mind. Don't answer that one.
What a variety of terminology, in the case of weather anyway, is indicative of, is how important it is to characterize it by type. In the case of love and God, the focus tends to be on equating different forms, and on approaching a singular ideal out of a mass of experience. With weather, we want to know the difference in effect between a scirocco and a chinook, or between an F1 and F2 tornado. Why? So we can respond most appropriately and keep ourselves safe and healthy.
In the case of snow, what I in my house and car want to know is: what will driving or walking in it be like, and how hard will it be to shovel. Icy, powdery, or slushy on one hand. Dry or wet in the other. Really, for driving what I want to know is not the nature of the snow, but of the road surface: how slippery is it,and what kind of ice is forming: packed-snow slipperyiness, black ice (formed from frozen water vapor from vehicle exhaust, rutted ice, ice under snow or snow under ice... you don't actually need a lot of different words, you just need to be able to arrange them in order to describe what's going on out there.
Or maybe you just like having lots of words for snow.
50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush with Stephen Fry from John Vallis on Vimeo.
It's a myth that Inuit languages have hundreds of words for snow, or really more words for snow than English does (flurry, blizzard, slush, drift, powder... not to mention all the adjectives that can characterize snow: light, heavy, wet, dry, granular, compacted...). The Saami (Lapps), on the other hand...
But why does a variety of words mean we think something is more important to discuss? It doesn't. "Love" and "God" and "war" are all topics of endless discussion, without lots and lots of words for them. Reproductive organs, on the other hand, carry a seemingly infinite number of terms in slang. Which are more important in our culture? Never mind. Don't answer that one.
What a variety of terminology, in the case of weather anyway, is indicative of, is how important it is to characterize it by type. In the case of love and God, the focus tends to be on equating different forms, and on approaching a singular ideal out of a mass of experience. With weather, we want to know the difference in effect between a scirocco and a chinook, or between an F1 and F2 tornado. Why? So we can respond most appropriately and keep ourselves safe and healthy.
In the case of snow, what I in my house and car want to know is: what will driving or walking in it be like, and how hard will it be to shovel. Icy, powdery, or slushy on one hand. Dry or wet in the other. Really, for driving what I want to know is not the nature of the snow, but of the road surface: how slippery is it,and what kind of ice is forming: packed-snow slipperyiness, black ice (formed from frozen water vapor from vehicle exhaust, rutted ice, ice under snow or snow under ice... you don't actually need a lot of different words, you just need to be able to arrange them in order to describe what's going on out there.
Or maybe you just like having lots of words for snow.
50 Words For Snow - Kate Bush with Stephen Fry from John Vallis on Vimeo.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Back from the dead - March 2, 2012
What can I say? My laptop broke. Then it got fixed. So now I'm back and I only lost 4 days of blogging.
When it comes to the weather though, it was one heck of a four days. The whole middle of the country got walloped: almost 50 dead from tornadoes Tuesday and today; a foot of snow and howling winds along Lake Superior; every imaginable kind of precipitation.
We had some heavy rain, which turned to snow, which mostly melted into big puddles... but not all that big.
I'm not sorry we got missed by the serious drama. People die in that kind of drama. Our kind of drama was a dog who hates to get her feet wet, whining about having to walk.
In terms of the larger picture of this blog, I've done bugger-all. Well, not that little. I've been reading Arctic Clothing. I'm finding myself distracted by the really enormous range of discourse Inuit people for whom it is a personal experience, paired up with someone giving a dry electron microscopy analysis of caribou and seal hair. It's kind of cool in the same way that I really like NACIS: the conversation ends up being about conversation.
But this has little to do directly with my intended subject. Or maybe it does.
I've been approaching the matter of protection from the elements—wintry elements for another few weeks, until the equinox—from a casually historical direction, mostly. But sometimes I think this approach—a search for running themes and patterns, broad cultural movements and so on—distracts us from what is really going on, which is a much messier, scattershot approach to living.
I got a sense of this when, in 1992, I proposed a paper for the History of Cartography conference. It was to be on the design history of the road map. And the closer I looked, the less pattern I saw. People didn't have the kind of Great Stylistic Ideas that art history is so find of. They used a design until it got tired and they were worried about losing their business, and then they freshened it up for another decade or so. They used new technologies as they became available, most of which were generic to printing, not specifically cartographic technologies. They sometimes experimented with a new look or element (how to draw the Allegheny Mountains was popular place for one-time experiments in inserting relief into the road maps). But mostly, they muddled along.
Not much of a paper, is it? I kind of imploded. I was fresh out of college and had no idea that this in itself was an interesting conclusion. Maybe I should propose it again, 20 years later.
Or not.
When it comes to the weather though, it was one heck of a four days. The whole middle of the country got walloped: almost 50 dead from tornadoes Tuesday and today; a foot of snow and howling winds along Lake Superior; every imaginable kind of precipitation.
We had some heavy rain, which turned to snow, which mostly melted into big puddles... but not all that big.
I'm not sorry we got missed by the serious drama. People die in that kind of drama. Our kind of drama was a dog who hates to get her feet wet, whining about having to walk.
In terms of the larger picture of this blog, I've done bugger-all. Well, not that little. I've been reading Arctic Clothing. I'm finding myself distracted by the really enormous range of discourse Inuit people for whom it is a personal experience, paired up with someone giving a dry electron microscopy analysis of caribou and seal hair. It's kind of cool in the same way that I really like NACIS: the conversation ends up being about conversation.
But this has little to do directly with my intended subject. Or maybe it does.
I've been approaching the matter of protection from the elements—wintry elements for another few weeks, until the equinox—from a casually historical direction, mostly. But sometimes I think this approach—a search for running themes and patterns, broad cultural movements and so on—distracts us from what is really going on, which is a much messier, scattershot approach to living.
I got a sense of this when, in 1992, I proposed a paper for the History of Cartography conference. It was to be on the design history of the road map. And the closer I looked, the less pattern I saw. People didn't have the kind of Great Stylistic Ideas that art history is so find of. They used a design until it got tired and they were worried about losing their business, and then they freshened it up for another decade or so. They used new technologies as they became available, most of which were generic to printing, not specifically cartographic technologies. They sometimes experimented with a new look or element (how to draw the Allegheny Mountains was popular place for one-time experiments in inserting relief into the road maps). But mostly, they muddled along.
Not much of a paper, is it? I kind of imploded. I was fresh out of college and had no idea that this in itself was an interesting conclusion. Maybe I should propose it again, 20 years later.
Or not.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Traveling houses - February 27, 2012
A walk around the park—Anya was rambunctious, which is unusual for her first thing in the morning—and then half an hour with her in the dog park before picking up Daniel from school. It was high 20°s F, a little breezy. Pleasant and bright. We're bracing for a pretty decent storm tomorrow which may be mostly slush, or might be a bunch of snow. We won't know for sure until tomorrow.
One of my morris team is leaving for a term in Denmark. We'll see if he can get out of Minneapolis Wednesday morning.
I've talked in general terms about the extension of the indoors into automobiles and the like, and this is a feature of 20th Century America. We talk about the "Road culture" but Americans have been traveling since before they were Americans. And really even the invention of an indoors on wheels is older than the car with heating and a sound system. For a real mobile indoors, consider rail travel in the days of the Pullman Car.
If you go back even further, consider the passengers quarters in the finer ships of the line, going back... how far? We think to day of the grand age of ocean liners, from the late 19th Century on past World War II, but there were finely furnished cabins in the days of regular travel to India. Not luxe like the Titanic, but still comfortably turned out.
Did these sorts of fittings correspond with the more regular passage of well-to-do women? I wonder. Or perhaps with a more general rise in comfort as a marketable value in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: more cushions, less hard wood pews...
One of my morris team is leaving for a term in Denmark. We'll see if he can get out of Minneapolis Wednesday morning.
I've talked in general terms about the extension of the indoors into automobiles and the like, and this is a feature of 20th Century America. We talk about the "Road culture" but Americans have been traveling since before they were Americans. And really even the invention of an indoors on wheels is older than the car with heating and a sound system. For a real mobile indoors, consider rail travel in the days of the Pullman Car.
If you go back even further, consider the passengers quarters in the finer ships of the line, going back... how far? We think to day of the grand age of ocean liners, from the late 19th Century on past World War II, but there were finely furnished cabins in the days of regular travel to India. Not luxe like the Titanic, but still comfortably turned out.
Did these sorts of fittings correspond with the more regular passage of well-to-do women? I wonder. Or perhaps with a more general rise in comfort as a marketable value in the late 18th and early 19th centuries: more cushions, less hard wood pews...
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Arctic clothing... Feburary 26, 2012
It was a bit blustery, but basically comfortable. The higher-up-in-the-sky sun really makes a difference I can feel. I didn't spend all that much time outside, really. And we are supposed to get Serious Weather on Tuesday and Wednesday. Could be freezing rain, could be sleet, could be snow, could be an entertaining mixture of all three. But it will definitely give me more to write about...
I've started into the book Arctic Clothing, and so far interesting. Also interesting that the history of the fur is so focused on the acquisition end and so little on the consumption end. This interesting, if scantily referenced, article from History Today gives some helpful hints, but I'm really curious about the marketing and sales of furs, especially in Europe, when North America was being stripped clean of beavers and other fur-bearers, from the 17th century on. Not to mention Siberia.
One interesting piece so far is that while fur in Euro-American society carries imputations of status, in Arctic societies it is more about connection: the people who hunt the animals are the ones who wear them, and so they develop a more intimate personal and even spiritual relationship with them. I trust this theme will be explored further as we go on to narratives by native Arctic folk.
Why am I so interested in Inuit clothing? Well, a lot of how we dress ourselves for warmth today comes from Inuit models: mukluks, parkas and anoraks are all Inuit terms, even if the forms of modern garments bear only passing resemblance to their hand-sewn animal-skin ancestors. I'm really curious to know more about those original forms, and see if we can find more than formal relationships.
I've started into the book Arctic Clothing, and so far interesting. Also interesting that the history of the fur is so focused on the acquisition end and so little on the consumption end. This interesting, if scantily referenced, article from History Today gives some helpful hints, but I'm really curious about the marketing and sales of furs, especially in Europe, when North America was being stripped clean of beavers and other fur-bearers, from the 17th century on. Not to mention Siberia.
One interesting piece so far is that while fur in Euro-American society carries imputations of status, in Arctic societies it is more about connection: the people who hunt the animals are the ones who wear them, and so they develop a more intimate personal and even spiritual relationship with them. I trust this theme will be explored further as we go on to narratives by native Arctic folk.
Why am I so interested in Inuit clothing? Well, a lot of how we dress ourselves for warmth today comes from Inuit models: mukluks, parkas and anoraks are all Inuit terms, even if the forms of modern garments bear only passing resemblance to their hand-sewn animal-skin ancestors. I'm really curious to know more about those original forms, and see if we can find more than formal relationships.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Other peoples' fur - February 25, 2012
Solar radiation feels good. It wasn't all that warm this morning, but each time I took Anya out for a walk in the sunshine—and she had digestive difficulties today so I took several walks with her. Poor girl.
We went over to the John Rose Oval, the Twin Cities' speed-skating track, which had open skating, which Ingrid and Daniel took advantage of, while our friend Dave and I stood on the sidelines and talked politics.
I've given up on Fur Fortune and Empire. Not that it's a bad book; I was enjoying it muchly, and it does give a pretty fair picture of the fur trade in America, which had a much bigger impact on the trajectory of US territorial history than we give it credit for. History is written by the settlers and their decendants, not by the descendants of traders who exploited a quickly-depleted resource. The book is a welcome remediation this gap.
No, the book's problem for me is that it loses sight of the market for fur. I really wanted to know who was wearing furs, and especially how this changed over time. There are hints of this: beaver hats, for example, which are made from felted beaver fur, not from "furs" as we generally think of them (fur-on hides), were a high-end bourgeouis commodity, rather than a mark of actual aristocracy like ermine. I didn't stick around for the emergence of buffalo robes as a common American warmth-provider, but I do know it was far from a luxury item—Almonzo Wilder has one in his sleigh to keep Laura Ingalls warm as he takes her home from her teaching job through frigid cold and blizzardy winds.
But of course the buffalo herds were exhausted in a matter of decades between the introduction of the railroads through the high plains and the turn of the century. The buffalo robe as an everyday source of warmth probably didn't go out of fashion as much as simply go out of stock.
This is the kind of thing I want to know more about. Maybe a history of fur as fashion.
I have three other books now sitting waiting for me to read them for this blog. Two are social histories of alcohol, and one is a series of papers from a conference ten years ago at the British Museum, on Arctic clothing, especially from the American Arctic. Given how much of our contemporary winter outerwear owes its form to Inuit clothing, this latter should be very interesting stuff.
Finally, I'd like to look a little at the development of modern thinking about building insulation.
We went over to the John Rose Oval, the Twin Cities' speed-skating track, which had open skating, which Ingrid and Daniel took advantage of, while our friend Dave and I stood on the sidelines and talked politics.
I've given up on Fur Fortune and Empire. Not that it's a bad book; I was enjoying it muchly, and it does give a pretty fair picture of the fur trade in America, which had a much bigger impact on the trajectory of US territorial history than we give it credit for. History is written by the settlers and their decendants, not by the descendants of traders who exploited a quickly-depleted resource. The book is a welcome remediation this gap.
No, the book's problem for me is that it loses sight of the market for fur. I really wanted to know who was wearing furs, and especially how this changed over time. There are hints of this: beaver hats, for example, which are made from felted beaver fur, not from "furs" as we generally think of them (fur-on hides), were a high-end bourgeouis commodity, rather than a mark of actual aristocracy like ermine. I didn't stick around for the emergence of buffalo robes as a common American warmth-provider, but I do know it was far from a luxury item—Almonzo Wilder has one in his sleigh to keep Laura Ingalls warm as he takes her home from her teaching job through frigid cold and blizzardy winds.
But of course the buffalo herds were exhausted in a matter of decades between the introduction of the railroads through the high plains and the turn of the century. The buffalo robe as an everyday source of warmth probably didn't go out of fashion as much as simply go out of stock.
This is the kind of thing I want to know more about. Maybe a history of fur as fashion.
I have three other books now sitting waiting for me to read them for this blog. Two are social histories of alcohol, and one is a series of papers from a conference ten years ago at the British Museum, on Arctic clothing, especially from the American Arctic. Given how much of our contemporary winter outerwear owes its form to Inuit clothing, this latter should be very interesting stuff.
Finally, I'd like to look a little at the development of modern thinking about building insulation.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Silent snow, long night - February 23, 2012
No snow this morning, and today it apparently all went south. Well, no new snow. I took Anya for her usual rounds around the park at school, walked to work, and then Ingrid and I took her to the dog park together.
Snow, unilike all other forms of precipitation, is silent. It is not just silent in its fall, It's also silencing when it sits on the ground, especially when it's fresh and full of air pockets. Kevin Pollard has a useful summary of the silent qualities of snow on his blog, and the US Army has investigated the muffling qualities of snow (useful to know if you use acoustics to analyze, for example, gunshot noise). Old packed snow, and snow piled alongside cleared roads and sidewalks, isn't nearly as muffling.
Winter seems like a damper on all the senses. I've long noticed that spring in Minnesota is when you can smell things again... maybe this is why it's seemed so springlike of late. Apparently snow can dampen dogs sense of smell (tell that to Anya). And of course it's darker.
No wonder depression is often exacerbated by wintertime.
One of the points of this blog has been that in making an indoor world, especially in times of heat and cold, we've taken ourselves out of the seasonal cycles. We have lessened their effects on us. I was very interested to see this article this morning, in which researchers discovered it was normal, up until artificial light made "staying up" more normal, to have two stretches of sleep in a night, with a waking period between. I expect that seasonally—in winter—this would have been even more pronounced...
Snow, unilike all other forms of precipitation, is silent. It is not just silent in its fall, It's also silencing when it sits on the ground, especially when it's fresh and full of air pockets. Kevin Pollard has a useful summary of the silent qualities of snow on his blog, and the US Army has investigated the muffling qualities of snow (useful to know if you use acoustics to analyze, for example, gunshot noise). Old packed snow, and snow piled alongside cleared roads and sidewalks, isn't nearly as muffling.
Winter seems like a damper on all the senses. I've long noticed that spring in Minnesota is when you can smell things again... maybe this is why it's seemed so springlike of late. Apparently snow can dampen dogs sense of smell (tell that to Anya). And of course it's darker.
No wonder depression is often exacerbated by wintertime.
One of the points of this blog has been that in making an indoor world, especially in times of heat and cold, we've taken ourselves out of the seasonal cycles. We have lessened their effects on us. I was very interested to see this article this morning, in which researchers discovered it was normal, up until artificial light made "staying up" more normal, to have two stretches of sleep in a night, with a waking period between. I expect that seasonally—in winter—this would have been even more pronounced...
Mama in her kerchief and I in my cap
Had just settled down for a long winter's nap...
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Sleep with the cows - February 22, 2012
Another warm day, started sunny and bright but bands of threatening clouds started gathering in the afternoon, and we had flurries in the evening. I took Anya around the park at school, and to the dog park at 1pm. Still a fair amount of snow on the ground. We may have more by tomorrow morning.
As I write, Anya is curled up on my son's bed. She will wander in and out through the night, and probably spend a part of tomorrow there. This is not the same as, say, sleeping in a stable, but Anya makes a wonderful security blanket. Small wonder that J.M. Barrie picked a St Bernard to be the nanny for the children in Peter Pan.
We tend to think of house and barn as very separate spaces, and even when it is very cold it somehow seems uncivilized to sleep with farm animals (I'm thinking here of the Ingall's family's Long Winter... Why did they persist in keeping the horse in the barn? Why not have them all sleep together? Livestock give off a lot of heat... there's a history of houses somewhere with barn below and human quarters above: fragrant, but warm. Somewhere in Germany... can't put my finger on it now.
Kind of gives one pause, thinking about heating options, doesn't it? If my son can sleep with a St Bernard, why can't we sleep with the cows?
As I write, Anya is curled up on my son's bed. She will wander in and out through the night, and probably spend a part of tomorrow there. This is not the same as, say, sleeping in a stable, but Anya makes a wonderful security blanket. Small wonder that J.M. Barrie picked a St Bernard to be the nanny for the children in Peter Pan.
We tend to think of house and barn as very separate spaces, and even when it is very cold it somehow seems uncivilized to sleep with farm animals (I'm thinking here of the Ingall's family's Long Winter... Why did they persist in keeping the horse in the barn? Why not have them all sleep together? Livestock give off a lot of heat... there's a history of houses somewhere with barn below and human quarters above: fragrant, but warm. Somewhere in Germany... can't put my finger on it now.
Kind of gives one pause, thinking about heating options, doesn't it? If my son can sleep with a St Bernard, why can't we sleep with the cows?
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Survivable norms - February 21. 2012
As predicted, what fell last night (a respectable 1 to 1.5 inches) melted off most streets today. I walked Anya at school this morning (after creeping behind an SUV that was litterally sliding up to the curve), then holed up in the office. I didn't pay that much attention to the weather or road conditions, because I didn't have to.
I've been editing a map of New Orleans this last few days, getting down in detail what restaurants are open and closed. The last time I updated it was still very much in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and when I went down for the initial fieldwork it was only a year after the storm hit. There was still a lot of wreckage and boarded up buildings, including a number of downtown hotels and other buildings that simply weren't open yet.
They don't get hardly any snow in New Orleans. The average low in January is 43°F, and in my lifetime (since 1965), now has fallen three times: 1989, 2004 and 2008. A seriously cold snap there is not quite as bad as the one killing the iguanas and pythons in South Florida, but I'm sure it does put a crimp in things.
We build for comfort in normal times, with a fallback to survival in worst imaginable times. And we base these two standards on what we know from experience (ours or others) or by comparison. This doesn't always work out—I think of the poor Lewis and Clark expedition, direly unprepared for a winter of near-constant rain at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. Of course, they hadn't built up much of a civilizational groundwork under them either. But imagine a really extreme cold aberration in New Orleans, like a month below freezing and a week below zero—a "normal" winter in Minnesota. It would be a disaster with lots of deaths. Not to mention a terrible environmental and agricultural toll.
Which is part of what makes things like nuclear winter or oversize tsunamis or volcanic eruptions so terrifying to consider: they are beyond the survivable limits we have built our civilization on.
I've been editing a map of New Orleans this last few days, getting down in detail what restaurants are open and closed. The last time I updated it was still very much in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and when I went down for the initial fieldwork it was only a year after the storm hit. There was still a lot of wreckage and boarded up buildings, including a number of downtown hotels and other buildings that simply weren't open yet.
They don't get hardly any snow in New Orleans. The average low in January is 43°F, and in my lifetime (since 1965), now has fallen three times: 1989, 2004 and 2008. A seriously cold snap there is not quite as bad as the one killing the iguanas and pythons in South Florida, but I'm sure it does put a crimp in things.
We build for comfort in normal times, with a fallback to survival in worst imaginable times. And we base these two standards on what we know from experience (ours or others) or by comparison. This doesn't always work out—I think of the poor Lewis and Clark expedition, direly unprepared for a winter of near-constant rain at Fort Clatsop in what is now Oregon. Of course, they hadn't built up much of a civilizational groundwork under them either. But imagine a really extreme cold aberration in New Orleans, like a month below freezing and a week below zero—a "normal" winter in Minnesota. It would be a disaster with lots of deaths. Not to mention a terrible environmental and agricultural toll.
Which is part of what makes things like nuclear winter or oversize tsunamis or volcanic eruptions so terrifying to consider: they are beyond the survivable limits we have built our civilization on.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Timing - February 20, 2012
We Have Weather! Finally, a little snow is falling—wet, gloppy snow. Slushy, spring snow. But I'm told that yet another unseasonable week will end with a dash of January as we get down near or below zero... for a moment.
Anya is a little under the weather. She didn't get up until I was gone for the morning, and Ingrid took her out around 10:30 for a stroll. When I took her for a trip to the dog park, she pooped out and looked longingly at the gate after only 15 minutes. I took her home.
What a difference having a warmer road base makes. The roads tonight, driving back home through the snow, were just fine. All slush, even where the plows haven't salted or done anything else. Before tonight, we've had a bunch of light wet snowfalls on cold roads, which result in slipperiness all out of proportion to the modesty of the precipitation.
The winter of 2009-2010, we had a wet snowfall followed by a fast, bitter freeze. Minneapolis got out in front of plowing immediately, while St Paul's plowing began about 12 hours later. The result? St Paul had an inch or more of ice, which itself developed pot holes, and the whole rutted, bumpy mess lasted until the ice finally melted in March. Minneapolis had normal, snowy, not-too-bad streets.
Timing, the secret to comedy and any number of other things... including street plowing. Cities get this, and the big snow cities are not offering online real-time tracking of plows: see Chicago and New York.
Anya is a little under the weather. She didn't get up until I was gone for the morning, and Ingrid took her out around 10:30 for a stroll. When I took her for a trip to the dog park, she pooped out and looked longingly at the gate after only 15 minutes. I took her home.
What a difference having a warmer road base makes. The roads tonight, driving back home through the snow, were just fine. All slush, even where the plows haven't salted or done anything else. Before tonight, we've had a bunch of light wet snowfalls on cold roads, which result in slipperiness all out of proportion to the modesty of the precipitation.
The winter of 2009-2010, we had a wet snowfall followed by a fast, bitter freeze. Minneapolis got out in front of plowing immediately, while St Paul's plowing began about 12 hours later. The result? St Paul had an inch or more of ice, which itself developed pot holes, and the whole rutted, bumpy mess lasted until the ice finally melted in March. Minneapolis had normal, snowy, not-too-bad streets.
Timing, the secret to comedy and any number of other things... including street plowing. Cities get this, and the big snow cities are not offering online real-time tracking of plows: see Chicago and New York.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
More fur - February 19, 2012
Another missed post yesterday. We had a long day, while Anya played at doggie day care: lunch in Northfield, a baby shower, dinner with friends in Farmington, and (for us) a fair amount of driving. We all went to bed pretty early. And Anya had a fine time with her doggy buddies by all accounts.
That was yesterday. Today (which was up in the 40°Fs), I took her for a couple walks and a session at the dog park. It really is early spring. Trees are starting to pre-bud. Woodpeckers are starting to woodpeck. It's an odd year, but likely a presage of things to come...
I've begun reading Fur, Fortune and Empire, a history of the fur trade in North America. It's very well written, and makes a compelling case for the fur trade as a driving force (and sometimes the driving force) behind American political and economic life for the first couple hundred years of English, French and Dutch settlement.
What isn't covered is the use of furs in clothing, except in passing, when it is noted that prior to European exploitation of North American fur resources, furs (especially the warmest furs) were restricted to royalty... presumably this does not apply to those in the coldest reaches of Scandinavia and the Russian north, but it makes the point that fur was often as much for show as it was for practical warmth.
It appears that, for example, Norse Greenlanders did not apparently adopt the fur-based clothing of Inuit they came in contact with (Shackleton and other European arctic explorers made the sad mistake of not doing so, while Amundsen and others did to their profit).
Fur is wonderful stuff for staying warm in the arctic:
And I have one piece of evidence: Ingrid's inside-out-sheepskin (shearling) coat. It is the warmest thing we own. And the mittens we had made when she cut down its length a few years ago were amazing too.
But... This assumes you want ONE warm item. Polar and high-altitude expeditions tend to dress in layer-upon-layer of less warm but cumulatively just-as-warm material: wool, fleece, waterproof, silk, etc. So in the 21st century, when you really are hiking across Baffin Island in January, it may be that fur, even there, has a competitor.
That was yesterday. Today (which was up in the 40°Fs), I took her for a couple walks and a session at the dog park. It really is early spring. Trees are starting to pre-bud. Woodpeckers are starting to woodpeck. It's an odd year, but likely a presage of things to come...
I've begun reading Fur, Fortune and Empire, a history of the fur trade in North America. It's very well written, and makes a compelling case for the fur trade as a driving force (and sometimes the driving force) behind American political and economic life for the first couple hundred years of English, French and Dutch settlement.
What isn't covered is the use of furs in clothing, except in passing, when it is noted that prior to European exploitation of North American fur resources, furs (especially the warmest furs) were restricted to royalty... presumably this does not apply to those in the coldest reaches of Scandinavia and the Russian north, but it makes the point that fur was often as much for show as it was for practical warmth.
It appears that, for example, Norse Greenlanders did not apparently adopt the fur-based clothing of Inuit they came in contact with (Shackleton and other European arctic explorers made the sad mistake of not doing so, while Amundsen and others did to their profit).
Fur is wonderful stuff for staying warm in the arctic:
Whilst fur may lack waterproof properties, sea mammal gut and fish skin are extremely waterproof and were used to make coats, anoraks, parkas and boots. These can be combined with fur to keep the wearer warm and dry. Certain stitches also work well to keep garments waterproof - seams are made without piercing all layers of the material so that water cannot penetrate. Sinew is used for sewing and will swell when wet, closing any holes in the seams. - Scott Polar Research InstituteAnd it's really wonderful stuff for warmth where it is beastly cold. For all that PETA rails against fur as murder—and fur does mean the death of animals, whether you think of that as murder or not—nothing we've come up with in our human-made world of fibers can beat fur for warmth. And why should it? We've been making our own fibers for less than 100 years, and animals have been evolving fur for hundreds of millions of years. See (for example) one dogsledder's advice on dressing for -80°F.
And I have one piece of evidence: Ingrid's inside-out-sheepskin (shearling) coat. It is the warmest thing we own. And the mittens we had made when she cut down its length a few years ago were amazing too.
But... This assumes you want ONE warm item. Polar and high-altitude expeditions tend to dress in layer-upon-layer of less warm but cumulatively just-as-warm material: wool, fleece, waterproof, silk, etc. So in the 21st century, when you really are hiking across Baffin Island in January, it may be that fur, even there, has a competitor.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Shackleton's clothes - February 17, 2012
It really is feeling a lot like spring. I know I keep saying that but when you spend a mid-February day without a hat on, and wearing your less-than-a-parka coat, well... it feels like the early end of spring. I walked Anya this morning and again tonight.
We'll get more snow, I'm sure, but we're getting as much sunlight now as we did a just before Halloween. Now hang on, I thought the "cross quarters" were around the first of the month. Groundhogs Day/Candlemas. And we're 2 weeks past that now. Well, 365 day/4 = 91.25 days in a season, or about 46 in a half-season. 46 days after December 21 is February 4. So we split the difference....
We (Daniel and I) went to see the Omnitheater movie about Ernest Shackleton and his heroic resolution of the disastrous expedition to Antarctica. I won't repeat the story: go read one of the great books about it if you don't know the story. It was a good movie, better than the usual MacGillivray Freeman bombast (and we saw the MacGillivray Freeman cave movie right after, and that was filled with bombast. Whatever).
The story of the Shackleton Expedition tends to be told with a lot of quite true emphasis on morale and the human spirit. It is an amazing story. But as I've been reading and writing about winter clothes, I wondered: did Shackleton dress his expedition better than, for example, Robert Falcon Scott, whose expedition perished only a couple years previously. The comparisons between Scott and the simultaneous (and successful) Amundsen expedition have been examined in detail (nice summary here), and one of the elements is that Scott dressed his party in waterproof outers and wool, while Amundsen dressed his party in furs.
What about Shackleton? a few years later, as he was involved in an operation against newly Bolshevik Russia,
Shackleton's own 1920 book on the expedition, South, doesn't seem to talk about clothing details at all, that I can tell, though it is a good read.
The question remains: what were Shackleton and his men wearing, and how did they all survive in it?
We'll get more snow, I'm sure, but we're getting as much sunlight now as we did a just before Halloween. Now hang on, I thought the "cross quarters" were around the first of the month. Groundhogs Day/Candlemas. And we're 2 weeks past that now. Well, 365 day/4 = 91.25 days in a season, or about 46 in a half-season. 46 days after December 21 is February 4. So we split the difference....
We (Daniel and I) went to see the Omnitheater movie about Ernest Shackleton and his heroic resolution of the disastrous expedition to Antarctica. I won't repeat the story: go read one of the great books about it if you don't know the story. It was a good movie, better than the usual MacGillivray Freeman bombast (and we saw the MacGillivray Freeman cave movie right after, and that was filled with bombast. Whatever).
The story of the Shackleton Expedition tends to be told with a lot of quite true emphasis on morale and the human spirit. It is an amazing story. But as I've been reading and writing about winter clothes, I wondered: did Shackleton dress his expedition better than, for example, Robert Falcon Scott, whose expedition perished only a couple years previously. The comparisons between Scott and the simultaneous (and successful) Amundsen expedition have been examined in detail (nice summary here), and one of the elements is that Scott dressed his party in waterproof outers and wool, while Amundsen dressed his party in furs.
What about Shackleton? a few years later, as he was involved in an operation against newly Bolshevik Russia,
Shackleton's official job description was "Staff officer in charge of Arctic equipment". In all actuality, he was a glorified storekeeper. He had done most of his work in London and the outfits he now provided were doubtful; his own expeditions had been struggles against poorly designed equipment and clothing. The American troops in the region discarded the Shackleton clothing and boots and reverted to their own. -from South-Pole.com, by the American Society of Polar PhilatelistsAnd this article on changing polar-expedition clothing patterns (which is fascinating in itself) says Shackleton had the same bad judgment during the 1900-1904 Antarctic expedition. (really a great reference to stumble across: nice section on Inuit clothing, and even a bibliography).
Shackleton's own 1920 book on the expedition, South, doesn't seem to talk about clothing details at all, that I can tell, though it is a good read.
The question remains: what were Shackleton and his men wearing, and how did they all survive in it?
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Indoor smog - February 16, 2012
More of the same, with sun. I walked Anya in the park at Daniel's school, and again at home. It really is odd, it feels like mid-March, not like mid-February. I expect budding out will be early this year. Anya has so many interesting things to smell in the dirt and piles of dead leaves, she really doesn't want to come back inside when we're done walking.
I spent most of the day at my desk, and sometime around 3, I smelled a whiff of what I at first thought was spray-on adhesive. It kept getting stronger (oddly, I couldn't smell it elsewhere in the office). I checked upstairs, and then I went downstairs, and found some folks spray-painting, at least 50-60 feet away in the big open space under our office. Why it was only really leaking up into my space I don't know, but they opened windows and I put the fan on and opened windows and the chemical dispersed.
So much of our attention on air pollution comes from outdoor sources. As I noted a few days ago, it's really the indoor pollution that has ended up killing more people—and even more so, the direct sucking of tobacco smoke into the lungs. When toxins are in the air and that air can't disperse, that's when things get deadly.
And yet, when air quality is bad, people are "advised to stay indoors." Why is that? Perhaps the ways outdoor air enters most houses, filters out larger particulate. But that wouldn't affect ozone, or CO, or other gaseous pollutants. Maybe its just so less exercise will put less stress on the lungs.
How much indoor air pollution is particulate (smoke) and how much is gaseous (chemicals)? This article ties mostly particulate pollution to COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder), and a variety of other lung health issues. Radon is a known gas pollutant, so are VOCs from drying paint (is that what I smell from the spraypaint downstairs?). There's a decent summary here, which does focus less on particulate pollution.
One of the things The Big Smoke noted was that once the smoky coal-burning was largely eliminated in London, then people began to experience photochemical smog, like ones found in Los Angeles. By blocking sunlight, the cloud of smoke had prevented the sunlight-activated "chemical reaction of sunlight, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which leaves airborne particles and ground-level ozone." That's what wikipedia says about photochemical smog, anyway.
What I'm wondering is, once we got rid of all the smoky fireplaces and ashtrays and obvious particulate pollution sources that used to fill most indoor spaces, were we still essentially setting ourselves up for trouble? Is there the indoor equivalent of photochemical smog?
I spent most of the day at my desk, and sometime around 3, I smelled a whiff of what I at first thought was spray-on adhesive. It kept getting stronger (oddly, I couldn't smell it elsewhere in the office). I checked upstairs, and then I went downstairs, and found some folks spray-painting, at least 50-60 feet away in the big open space under our office. Why it was only really leaking up into my space I don't know, but they opened windows and I put the fan on and opened windows and the chemical dispersed.
So much of our attention on air pollution comes from outdoor sources. As I noted a few days ago, it's really the indoor pollution that has ended up killing more people—and even more so, the direct sucking of tobacco smoke into the lungs. When toxins are in the air and that air can't disperse, that's when things get deadly.
And yet, when air quality is bad, people are "advised to stay indoors." Why is that? Perhaps the ways outdoor air enters most houses, filters out larger particulate. But that wouldn't affect ozone, or CO, or other gaseous pollutants. Maybe its just so less exercise will put less stress on the lungs.
How much indoor air pollution is particulate (smoke) and how much is gaseous (chemicals)? This article ties mostly particulate pollution to COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder), and a variety of other lung health issues. Radon is a known gas pollutant, so are VOCs from drying paint (is that what I smell from the spraypaint downstairs?). There's a decent summary here, which does focus less on particulate pollution.
One of the things The Big Smoke noted was that once the smoky coal-burning was largely eliminated in London, then people began to experience photochemical smog, like ones found in Los Angeles. By blocking sunlight, the cloud of smoke had prevented the sunlight-activated "chemical reaction of sunlight, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds, which leaves airborne particles and ground-level ozone." That's what wikipedia says about photochemical smog, anyway.
What I'm wondering is, once we got rid of all the smoky fireplaces and ashtrays and obvious particulate pollution sources that used to fill most indoor spaces, were we still essentially setting ourselves up for trouble? Is there the indoor equivalent of photochemical smog?
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Extremes - February 15, 2012
Another day, another light sprinkling of snow, another hover right around freezing. Another quick stroll in the park; Ingrid reports there was a spirited romp in the park.
And I spent a chunk of the day editing a map of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Not walking around it, mind you. Just writing about it from afar. Not fair.
I write about living in the weather here in Minnesota, and I know the really long cold winter is not what most of the rest of the country experiences. There's a lot of the country where enclosed malls don't make any sense for either summer or winter: coastal California, and Hawaii, for example. But the deserts as far south as New Mexico can get pretty cold at night, and there's frost in Florida sometimes. And whatever the weather extremes, that's when you really want good shelter.
We don't need to build shelter for the average days. It's the extremes that end up delineating survivability for any species (just ask the iguanas dropping from the trees in a recent Florida freeze). Perhaps this explains the ultimate failure of the Greenland Viking settlement: it was marginal, and then it fell under the margin.
Here's why I think this is an important point: When we talk about climate, we are talking about averages. But when we're talking about survivability, it's the extremes that end up determining the edge of any species' territory, including ours. It's not the average ground-shaking that determines whether a building is built strong enough for an earthquake zone, it's the 60 seconds of shaking in the maximum event that area will experience. It's not whether you can survive an average winter that determines if settlement is viable, it's whether you can survive the worst winter of your life there. Because if you can't, it will also be the last winter of your life.
They make headlines—they feel like hysteria-inducing, exclamation-point-ridden, excessively-hyped events—but weather extremes ultimately determine what and who will survive in any given place.
And I spent a chunk of the day editing a map of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Not walking around it, mind you. Just writing about it from afar. Not fair.
I write about living in the weather here in Minnesota, and I know the really long cold winter is not what most of the rest of the country experiences. There's a lot of the country where enclosed malls don't make any sense for either summer or winter: coastal California, and Hawaii, for example. But the deserts as far south as New Mexico can get pretty cold at night, and there's frost in Florida sometimes. And whatever the weather extremes, that's when you really want good shelter.
We don't need to build shelter for the average days. It's the extremes that end up delineating survivability for any species (just ask the iguanas dropping from the trees in a recent Florida freeze). Perhaps this explains the ultimate failure of the Greenland Viking settlement: it was marginal, and then it fell under the margin.
Here's why I think this is an important point: When we talk about climate, we are talking about averages. But when we're talking about survivability, it's the extremes that end up determining the edge of any species' territory, including ours. It's not the average ground-shaking that determines whether a building is built strong enough for an earthquake zone, it's the 60 seconds of shaking in the maximum event that area will experience. It's not whether you can survive an average winter that determines if settlement is viable, it's whether you can survive the worst winter of your life there. Because if you can't, it will also be the last winter of your life.
They make headlines—they feel like hysteria-inducing, exclamation-point-ridden, excessively-hyped events—but weather extremes ultimately determine what and who will survive in any given place.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The wash - February 14, 2012
There was still snow this morning, but it melted by the time I took Anya to the dog park at 2, and then another dusting came tonight while I was at dance practice. The temperature floated on either side of freezing, and it was overcast.
One of the signal changes in America (and the rest of the industrialized West) over the last 150 years, is the mechanization of basic home processes: laundry and dish washing, bathing, and on a more fundamental level, the heating of water. How many cold-water walkups are there still? What percentage of Americans do not have access to hot water from a tap? There are certainly still a fair number, but a growing proportion of those live intentionally.
The results are phenomenal, especially in the lives of women. Even if you don't have a washing machine, how many people wash their washing by hand, instead of going to the laundromat? Just live everyone should have the experience of doing dishes, everyone just once should try washing a load of laundry using a washboard. It's bloody hard work, and hard on your hands. In winter it's cramped, cold work.
It's kind of funny now to hear folks with environmental concerns trying to get people to give up the use of dryers. I mean, yes, they have a point. But for people who work their bottoms off day in, day out, not having to hang out the laundry every day and then take it in again, is a godsend.
I think, though I have no evidence to prove this, that the presence of washing machines also means we wash things more frequently. It takes less dirt to throw something in the wash, if it takes little of our work to clean it. When I discussed the rise of the hairwash over the last century earlier, I noted what a production early shampoo regimes were. Same holds true for body washing: when a bath involved heating kettles of water, even if you believed in bathing, it was a big production. And the same definitely holds true for clothing.
One of the signal changes in America (and the rest of the industrialized West) over the last 150 years, is the mechanization of basic home processes: laundry and dish washing, bathing, and on a more fundamental level, the heating of water. How many cold-water walkups are there still? What percentage of Americans do not have access to hot water from a tap? There are certainly still a fair number, but a growing proportion of those live intentionally.
The results are phenomenal, especially in the lives of women. Even if you don't have a washing machine, how many people wash their washing by hand, instead of going to the laundromat? Just live everyone should have the experience of doing dishes, everyone just once should try washing a load of laundry using a washboard. It's bloody hard work, and hard on your hands. In winter it's cramped, cold work.
It's kind of funny now to hear folks with environmental concerns trying to get people to give up the use of dryers. I mean, yes, they have a point. But for people who work their bottoms off day in, day out, not having to hang out the laundry every day and then take it in again, is a godsend.
I think, though I have no evidence to prove this, that the presence of washing machines also means we wash things more frequently. It takes less dirt to throw something in the wash, if it takes little of our work to clean it. When I discussed the rise of the hairwash over the last century earlier, I noted what a production early shampoo regimes were. Same holds true for body washing: when a bath involved heating kettles of water, even if you believed in bathing, it was a big production. And the same definitely holds true for clothing.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Suburbs and offices - February 13, 2012
Took Anya out for a walk in the park with Ingrid this morning, then to the dog park in the afternoon. It was more of the same: a little cold, no snow, just drab cold. Then it snowed. Not a lot, but it is nice to have a bit of white on the ground. Anya, I suspect, will be in heaven tomorrow.
I've been working at home a bunch lately, as Ingrid has meetings downtown. She usually works from home, but I've been finding it not entirely to my liking. I like having folks around. It's possible I get more done in an hour at home, but only if it's work that I can do efficiently on my laptop...
"The office" is a pretty new concept in social terms. There have been workshops and workplaces for a long while, but the separation of company work into entirely separate neighborhoods from residential living doesn't date back much further than sometime in the 19th century. The first office workers—clerks in trade, banking and law—worked in offices, but modest ones. Ebenezer Scrooge and his assistant Bob Cratchitt (1830's, I think) were more the norm. The really big banking houses and houses of trade required larger staffs, but the sort of large work force we think of when we think of going to work "at a coporation" didn't really get underway until the railroads and great international shipping syndicates developed between 1830 and 1860.
Well, that's my theory, anyway, based on what I can recall from scraps here and there. But no, there were office clerks, armies of them, in service to 18th century government offices. The admiralty was crawling with them. And the East India Company? The Hudson's Bay Company? Surely they had more than a handful of record-keepers and scribes.
And what of suburbs? I think of suburbs as a byproduct of office culture, though there were plenty of blue-collar suburbs too. It's the suburbs, not the offices, that really drove the separation of work and home—people wanting to live away from the stench and filth of the central city, and so, when they could afford it, making the wage-earner into a longer-distance commuter.
Now that our cities are comparatively clean, we see that situation reversing, because it really is a pain in the neck to have to travel an hour each way to earn your living. And once the film of grime on everything is removed, cities are pretty great places.
I've been working at home a bunch lately, as Ingrid has meetings downtown. She usually works from home, but I've been finding it not entirely to my liking. I like having folks around. It's possible I get more done in an hour at home, but only if it's work that I can do efficiently on my laptop...
"The office" is a pretty new concept in social terms. There have been workshops and workplaces for a long while, but the separation of company work into entirely separate neighborhoods from residential living doesn't date back much further than sometime in the 19th century. The first office workers—clerks in trade, banking and law—worked in offices, but modest ones. Ebenezer Scrooge and his assistant Bob Cratchitt (1830's, I think) were more the norm. The really big banking houses and houses of trade required larger staffs, but the sort of large work force we think of when we think of going to work "at a coporation" didn't really get underway until the railroads and great international shipping syndicates developed between 1830 and 1860.
Well, that's my theory, anyway, based on what I can recall from scraps here and there. But no, there were office clerks, armies of them, in service to 18th century government offices. The admiralty was crawling with them. And the East India Company? The Hudson's Bay Company? Surely they had more than a handful of record-keepers and scribes.
And what of suburbs? I think of suburbs as a byproduct of office culture, though there were plenty of blue-collar suburbs too. It's the suburbs, not the offices, that really drove the separation of work and home—people wanting to live away from the stench and filth of the central city, and so, when they could afford it, making the wage-earner into a longer-distance commuter.
Now that our cities are comparatively clean, we see that situation reversing, because it really is a pain in the neck to have to travel an hour each way to earn your living. And once the film of grime on everything is removed, cities are pretty great places.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Fog (part 2) - February 12, 2012
It was crisp but very still today. A nice day to take a dog to a park. A nice day to walk the girl around the neighborhood a bit, and a nice day to misunderstand the Science Museum schedule and so to end up walking down along the Mississippi with my son for 45 minutes. Bright and clear... all that was missing from this perfect winter day was snow.
I finished The Big Smoke last night. It's essentially a history of English, and especially London, air pollution. Centuries of complaint, and only in the 1950s some real effective action. Well, not strictly true: serious fogs tapered off dramatically beginning around 1900, and were a rarity by the time of the Great Smog of 1952. But was this a result of atmospheric patterns changing, or of some change in smoke emission? Unclear.
What was clear form the narrative was the overwhelming power of inertia, even in the face of disastrous conditions. Most of the 19th century, London toiled under an ever-smokier haze: gardens withered, coughs developed (life expectancy for a city-born English child was in the high 20s in the 1830s). And no-one seemed able to do anything really effective. Part of the problem is, there was no off-the-shelf solution. Where there was, there was action—for example see the Alkili Acts, where there was simple technology which, when everyone was forced to use it, cut down on the release of hydrogen chloride from the alkili industry, around St Helens, Glasgow and Newcastle, by 99%.
Part of the issue with smoke pollution is that while the soot was a visible issue, sulfur dioxide was causing a lot of damage both to people and to the physical plant. And 19th century chemistry just wasn't up to detailed monitoring and analysis needed.
Part of it also was that it wasn't just industry. Everyone heated with coal. So, like those trying to figure out how to deal with the catastrophic effects of internal combustion engines, the solution seems impossible because it's embedded so deeply and granularly in every part of our lives. It will take a new technology, like natural gas replacing coal, to really solve the problem. If such a solution comes. If not, Miami is very wet toast.
I finished The Big Smoke last night. It's essentially a history of English, and especially London, air pollution. Centuries of complaint, and only in the 1950s some real effective action. Well, not strictly true: serious fogs tapered off dramatically beginning around 1900, and were a rarity by the time of the Great Smog of 1952. But was this a result of atmospheric patterns changing, or of some change in smoke emission? Unclear.
What was clear form the narrative was the overwhelming power of inertia, even in the face of disastrous conditions. Most of the 19th century, London toiled under an ever-smokier haze: gardens withered, coughs developed (life expectancy for a city-born English child was in the high 20s in the 1830s). And no-one seemed able to do anything really effective. Part of the problem is, there was no off-the-shelf solution. Where there was, there was action—for example see the Alkili Acts, where there was simple technology which, when everyone was forced to use it, cut down on the release of hydrogen chloride from the alkili industry, around St Helens, Glasgow and Newcastle, by 99%.
Part of the issue with smoke pollution is that while the soot was a visible issue, sulfur dioxide was causing a lot of damage both to people and to the physical plant. And 19th century chemistry just wasn't up to detailed monitoring and analysis needed.
Part of it also was that it wasn't just industry. Everyone heated with coal. So, like those trying to figure out how to deal with the catastrophic effects of internal combustion engines, the solution seems impossible because it's embedded so deeply and granularly in every part of our lives. It will take a new technology, like natural gas replacing coal, to really solve the problem. If such a solution comes. If not, Miami is very wet toast.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Prehistoric curry - February 11, 2012
It was a cold one, and mostly I stayed home. I walked Anya as Ingrid and Daniel went off for a day of skating. Then I walked her in the afternoon, and finally at about 10 pm once the family had come home. In between I walked to a neighborhood restaurant for supper. I was chilly, sitting most of the day catching up on the household books, preparing for 2011 tax preparation season. The curry noodle soup was just the thing.
How long ago did people cook soup or stew? Pottery vessels were invented in east Asia during the last ice age, about 14,000 years ago. Ancient Britons were cooking nettle pudding 8000 years ago. A 4000-year old cooking pot with noodles still inside was found in China.
This is a long time after hominids began cooking food. There is disagreement, but it looks as though homo erectus was cooking food at least half a million years ago. Surely someone in all those millenia thought of heating up food in a gourd.
Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables. The Neanderthal Museum describes how food was cooked without fireproof vessels: a leather-lined depression in the ground is filled with water. Hot stones are placed in the water. It boils. Makes sense. And in ice-age climes, it must have helped keep the chill out of the bones.
I grew up thinking of Paleolithic folks as "cavemen," but really they did not live all that much in caves, and by the late Paleolithic, caves had become (at least in France and Spain) sacred spaces... hence cave drawings. Anyway, you don't want to be cooking very deep at all in most caves, as you can easily use up all the available oxygen.
No, the Paleolithic was dominated by nomadic life: what survives in terms of structures are glorified tents made of mammoth bones and skins. Cooking was probably done mostly outdoors, or maybe around a small middle-of-the-tent fire.
But I can't imagine a real modern soup or stew until hardened pottery vessels were developed, in the Neolithic. And the first curry? Still unknown... Can you imagine how they would have been received on a cold day during one of the ice ages?...
How long ago did people cook soup or stew? Pottery vessels were invented in east Asia during the last ice age, about 14,000 years ago. Ancient Britons were cooking nettle pudding 8000 years ago. A 4000-year old cooking pot with noodles still inside was found in China.
This is a long time after hominids began cooking food. There is disagreement, but it looks as though homo erectus was cooking food at least half a million years ago. Surely someone in all those millenia thought of heating up food in a gourd.
Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables. The Neanderthal Museum describes how food was cooked without fireproof vessels: a leather-lined depression in the ground is filled with water. Hot stones are placed in the water. It boils. Makes sense. And in ice-age climes, it must have helped keep the chill out of the bones.
I grew up thinking of Paleolithic folks as "cavemen," but really they did not live all that much in caves, and by the late Paleolithic, caves had become (at least in France and Spain) sacred spaces... hence cave drawings. Anyway, you don't want to be cooking very deep at all in most caves, as you can easily use up all the available oxygen.
No, the Paleolithic was dominated by nomadic life: what survives in terms of structures are glorified tents made of mammoth bones and skins. Cooking was probably done mostly outdoors, or maybe around a small middle-of-the-tent fire.
But I can't imagine a real modern soup or stew until hardened pottery vessels were developed, in the Neolithic. And the first curry? Still unknown... Can you imagine how they would have been received on a cold day during one of the ice ages?...
Friday, February 10, 2012
Fur - February 10, 2012
It turned markedly colder overnight. I didn't walk the dog myself this morning, but came home from dropping Daniel off at school and an early meeting, to find Ingrid out walking Anya. She also took her to the dog park this afternoon, which was good as she was very cold when she came back.
Anya doesn't seem to feel the cold. I mean, I know she has all that fur and all, but still... It's 9°F with a 12 mile per hour wind, and it's cold. And she just wants to go sniff stuff.
When Almonzo Wilder took Laura Ingalls out in his sleigh to get to her teaching job a few miles away from town, they wrapped up in buffalo robes. Fur is the stuff you need, as Anya will tell you, and if you want to know how to stay warm in a world before central heating and polarfleece, there's your answer. It's also the first great fortune-maker in North America.
The closest I've come to wearing fur (as far as I know) is the shearling (sheepskin with the fleece still attached) mittens I wore and sadly disappeared a couple years ago. Man, were those great mittens. Ingrid has a shearling jacket she got in Australia, and it too is just the thing when it gets to -10°F. Nothing like an inside-out sheep...
As PETA will tell you, though, there's not much you can do to avoid the the fact that most furs are obtained through techniques that do not do well by the animal. Friends are sending me links about a renewed campaign to end sea clubbing, and an awful lot of the links when you google word combinations with "fur" are anti-fur activist sites.
And so I will stomp out in the freezing air tomorrow and walk Anya in my nice goosedown parka, and call it good...
Anya doesn't seem to feel the cold. I mean, I know she has all that fur and all, but still... It's 9°F with a 12 mile per hour wind, and it's cold. And she just wants to go sniff stuff.
When Almonzo Wilder took Laura Ingalls out in his sleigh to get to her teaching job a few miles away from town, they wrapped up in buffalo robes. Fur is the stuff you need, as Anya will tell you, and if you want to know how to stay warm in a world before central heating and polarfleece, there's your answer. It's also the first great fortune-maker in North America.
The closest I've come to wearing fur (as far as I know) is the shearling (sheepskin with the fleece still attached) mittens I wore and sadly disappeared a couple years ago. Man, were those great mittens. Ingrid has a shearling jacket she got in Australia, and it too is just the thing when it gets to -10°F. Nothing like an inside-out sheep...
As PETA will tell you, though, there's not much you can do to avoid the the fact that most furs are obtained through techniques that do not do well by the animal. Friends are sending me links about a renewed campaign to end sea clubbing, and an awful lot of the links when you google word combinations with "fur" are anti-fur activist sites.
And so I will stomp out in the freezing air tomorrow and walk Anya in my nice goosedown parka, and call it good...
Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Great Defugging - February 9, 2012
We woke up this morning to fire engines racing past our house. There was apparently a minor fire two blocks down; the fire chief was still there when I walked Anya half an hour later, and he said everyone was all right.
The day was unremarkable weatherwise, except that it's the beginning of February and things were boringly back in the 40°F's, which is remarkable itself. Anya did not want to go back inside, or leave the dog park when I took her this afternoon.
Fire used to kill a lot of people. Not as many as you may think—the old story that lots of colonial women burned to death is a myth: most died of disease or childbirth. But still, with open hearth fireplaces the norm until sometime in the 19th century. Even the Franklin stove... how many of you picture a potbelly stove, or other free-standing cast-iron affair? Nope, check the link. It's essentially a modified hearth.
It's hard to imagine a world where even heating is done from a hearth, rather than a furnace-style stove (which essentially what a potbelly is: a miniature furnace), and even harder to imagine life before hearths became common, and homes were heated from an open fire in the center of the room, with a hole in the roof above. Being born in 1965, it's hard to imagine a life in smog like existed in 1950's London. I remember friends who smoked—heck, my grandfather smoked a pipe when I was kid. But the kinds of fuggy rooms, filled with incineration of one kind or another, that were the norm for aeons before the de-fugging of the last half-century (that's what it should be called, too, The Great Defugging), are now hard for me to imagine tolerating.
But one of the things we've done as we've switched to gas and electric from wood and coal is, we're burning things which leave less obvious footprints: it's the carbon dioxide, not the soot and sulfur, that we need to worry about. People don't die of their clothes catching on fire, or hack up a blackened lung from the coal smoke. But that doesn't mean we're not still burning our way to a sorry end.
The day was unremarkable weatherwise, except that it's the beginning of February and things were boringly back in the 40°F's, which is remarkable itself. Anya did not want to go back inside, or leave the dog park when I took her this afternoon.
Fire used to kill a lot of people. Not as many as you may think—the old story that lots of colonial women burned to death is a myth: most died of disease or childbirth. But still, with open hearth fireplaces the norm until sometime in the 19th century. Even the Franklin stove... how many of you picture a potbelly stove, or other free-standing cast-iron affair? Nope, check the link. It's essentially a modified hearth.
It's hard to imagine a world where even heating is done from a hearth, rather than a furnace-style stove (which essentially what a potbelly is: a miniature furnace), and even harder to imagine life before hearths became common, and homes were heated from an open fire in the center of the room, with a hole in the roof above. Being born in 1965, it's hard to imagine a life in smog like existed in 1950's London. I remember friends who smoked—heck, my grandfather smoked a pipe when I was kid. But the kinds of fuggy rooms, filled with incineration of one kind or another, that were the norm for aeons before the de-fugging of the last half-century (that's what it should be called, too, The Great Defugging), are now hard for me to imagine tolerating.
But one of the things we've done as we've switched to gas and electric from wood and coal is, we're burning things which leave less obvious footprints: it's the carbon dioxide, not the soot and sulfur, that we need to worry about. People don't die of their clothes catching on fire, or hack up a blackened lung from the coal smoke. But that doesn't mean we're not still burning our way to a sorry end.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Commuting statistics - February 7, 2012
It was colder this morning, taking Anya out for a walk at a little before noon, and even colder with a breeze walking home tonight, though it is nice to have it be light out at 5pm. The breeze had died down when I took her out again at 11 pm for an emergency outing—it is cold but pretty nice. The sky is clear and it's a full moon.
I really like that I can walk to and from work. It's not the same as being on an industrial-style schedule:
1890
Total Employment 23,740,000
Agriculture 9,990,000 (42%)
Manufacturing and hand trades 4,750,000
Construction 1,440,000
Transportation/Utilities 1,530,000
Trade, Finance and Real Estate 1,990,000
Service 1,500,000
Domestic service 1,520,000
Mining, forestry. fisheries 660,000
(Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Census Bureau 1976)
By contrast, in 2012, out of total employment of 139,064,000,
Farming, fishing and forestry were only 987,000 (.7%) of the population
Management, professional and related occupations were 51,743,000
Sales and office jobs were 33,433,000
Service occupatiosn were 24,634,000
Construction and mining were 7,175,000
Manufacturing ("production occupations") were 7,998,000
Transportation was 8,182,000
and "Installation Maintenance and Repair Occupations" were 4,911,000
Most people who are not stay-at-home workers have to "go to work." Nowadays, "working from home" is more likely to mean some sort of piecework or professional service from a home office, than an agricultural job.
Most of us drive to work. About the same number of us work at home as walk to work, and te number who bike is very small indeed. 40% of us commute suburb-to-suburb. All this is such a radical change in how we physically relate home to work, as to make my head hurt.
Statistical overload
I really like that I can walk to and from work. It's not the same as being on an industrial-style schedule:
It's dark when I goes to work, and dark again at nightOur house was built as housing for workers in the railyard behind us. It was an easy commute, just go through the gate beside the house and there you are. When it was built in 1890, somewhere around 42% of working Americans worked on farms, which mostly meant they lived on farms, either as farmers or as hired hands.
On Sundays and in summertime is when I see the light
Yes, on Sundays and in summertime I hear the small bird sing
But when you're two mile underground, you never hears a thing
—"Working on the Coalface," Dave Webber
1890
Total Employment 23,740,000
Agriculture 9,990,000 (42%)
Manufacturing and hand trades 4,750,000
Construction 1,440,000
Transportation/Utilities 1,530,000
Trade, Finance and Real Estate 1,990,000
Service 1,500,000
Domestic service 1,520,000
Mining, forestry. fisheries 660,000
(Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Census Bureau 1976)
By contrast, in 2012, out of total employment of 139,064,000,
Farming, fishing and forestry were only 987,000 (.7%) of the population
Management, professional and related occupations were 51,743,000
Sales and office jobs were 33,433,000
Service occupatiosn were 24,634,000
Construction and mining were 7,175,000
Manufacturing ("production occupations") were 7,998,000
Transportation was 8,182,000
and "Installation Maintenance and Repair Occupations" were 4,911,000
Most people who are not stay-at-home workers have to "go to work." Nowadays, "working from home" is more likely to mean some sort of piecework or professional service from a home office, than an agricultural job.
Most of us drive to work. About the same number of us work at home as walk to work, and te number who bike is very small indeed. 40% of us commute suburb-to-suburb. All this is such a radical change in how we physically relate home to work, as to make my head hurt.
Statistical overload
Bars - February 6, 2012
It was a beautiful warm spring day, highs way up in the 40°s, and I didn' walk outside at all. And now it's too late; temperatures are going to drop today, by 15°, dropping down to 5° tonight. Back to something approximating winter.
Last night was one of two monthly sings I'm heavily involved in, both based in bars. It's funny how people in varying cultures build these spaces for social interaction, and specifically to contain consumption of intoxicants. It makes sense: if you're going to drimk/smoke opium/otherwise get high, it's best to keep it away from small children and heavy machinery. And it's also good to keep it in some sort of controlled environment where there's a gatekeeper. Not that it always works that way: barkeeps are also in the business of selling booze. But especially in social pubs, there's pressure to keep behavior relatively normal.
Hrothgar's mead-hall again comes to mind. But as you enter more moderate climes, you also get beer gardens, and terraces and piazzas where to drink wine.
I wonder how much correlation there is between bars and organized sex. Certainly in the Wild West of legend, there was a lot of overlap between bars and brothels. And Roman and Greek symposia and bacchanales shared wine and availability of women (and young men) for sex. Japanese pleasure houses whose clientele was depicted in ukiyo-e prints mixed entertainment, drink, and beautiful women.
So why bars? How did the American institution of the neighborhood bar emerge? There's an element borrowed from English pubs, of course, and the German Biergarten. There's an element in large cities of saloons erected by individual breweries to promote their own brews (also a common feature of British Isles pubs, and maybe Continental beerhalls?). There's the hotel bar, and the bar/brothel in the opening West. The speakeasy period presumably figures in, as does the continuing influence of social clubs, including ubiquitous American groups like the Elks, American Legion, VFW, etc. In Anglo-America, these spaces are indoors, with outdoor drinking being more of a German thing. What about other ethnic groups? Russians tend to have an indoor drinking culture, but in public spaces? What I've heard of it is mostly in private homes.
Another interesting line of research...
Last night was one of two monthly sings I'm heavily involved in, both based in bars. It's funny how people in varying cultures build these spaces for social interaction, and specifically to contain consumption of intoxicants. It makes sense: if you're going to drimk/smoke opium/otherwise get high, it's best to keep it away from small children and heavy machinery. And it's also good to keep it in some sort of controlled environment where there's a gatekeeper. Not that it always works that way: barkeeps are also in the business of selling booze. But especially in social pubs, there's pressure to keep behavior relatively normal.
Hrothgar's mead-hall again comes to mind. But as you enter more moderate climes, you also get beer gardens, and terraces and piazzas where to drink wine.
I wonder how much correlation there is between bars and organized sex. Certainly in the Wild West of legend, there was a lot of overlap between bars and brothels. And Roman and Greek symposia and bacchanales shared wine and availability of women (and young men) for sex. Japanese pleasure houses whose clientele was depicted in ukiyo-e prints mixed entertainment, drink, and beautiful women.
So why bars? How did the American institution of the neighborhood bar emerge? There's an element borrowed from English pubs, of course, and the German Biergarten. There's an element in large cities of saloons erected by individual breweries to promote their own brews (also a common feature of British Isles pubs, and maybe Continental beerhalls?). There's the hotel bar, and the bar/brothel in the opening West. The speakeasy period presumably figures in, as does the continuing influence of social clubs, including ubiquitous American groups like the Elks, American Legion, VFW, etc. In Anglo-America, these spaces are indoors, with outdoor drinking being more of a German thing. What about other ethnic groups? Russians tend to have an indoor drinking culture, but in public spaces? What I've heard of it is mostly in private homes.
Another interesting line of research...
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Terror Time - February 5, 2012
It was kind of dreary, but reasonably warm day. High somewhere near 40°F. Anya walked with me down the block this morning, and then we went to the dog park for almost an hour this afternoon. There's almost no snow left on the ground, and not much prospect of any. Just February gray. Even the heavy frost is gone.
Some friends came over to sing tonight, and they brought up Ewan Macoll's "Terror Time," part of his cycle about the "traveling people" in Britain: Roma (Gypsies), tinkers, and other itinerant wanderers.
There is a kind of endless bleakness to this time of year, and a sense of winter stores beginning to not seem so endless, which we have utterly lost in our modern world. Mostly. Those who are homeless and living rough... for them this is indeed the depth of the year. I'm guessing for many, they are happy with this freakishly mild winter, and still looking forward to real warmth.The heather will fade
And the bracken will die
Streams will run cold and clear
And the small birds will be going
And it's then you will be knowing
That the terror time is nearWhaur will ye gang
And whaur will ye bide
Nou that the wark's aa dune
An the fairmer disnae need ye
An the council winnae heed ye
An the terror time is hereThe woods give no shelter
And the trees they are bare
Snow's lying all around
And the children they are crying
For the bed on which they're lying
Is frozen to the groundWhen you need the warmth
Of your own human kind
You move near a town
And the sight of you's offending
And the police they soon are sending
An ye're on the road again-Ewan Macoll, © Stormking Music, from Macoll's 1964 Radio Ballad, "The Traveling People."
I don't think there's much more to say. Macoll said it all pretty much.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Sublime - February 4, 2012
This morning the forecast was for "freezing fog," which sounds ominous, but translates into a silvery frost on everything. And there was a light frost. Took Anya for a walk around the neighborhood where Daniel was having his tutoring, then later in the afternoon to the dog park. By then the sun had broken through into a beautiful mid-30°s day. A lovely day at the dog park, and in general.
The beauty of the most stunning winter landscapes, whether sheathed in snow or coated in frost or ice, is one of silence. Once things really begin moving in earnest, there are muddy tracks and bootprints... it's the initial, early-morning hush and the magical coating of frozen water in whatever form it takes, that makes winter landscapes so wonderful.
Maybe because of the physics definition of "sublime" (the change of state from solid directly to gas, as most widely seen in the "evaopration" of snow), I was thinking about the philosophical idea of the the "sublime." The word in common usage is about exaltedness, of a quality "above the lintel" (that's apparently the root of the word) and so out of reach. In aesthetics, it's contrasted with "beauty." The sublime has a note of fear in it's awesomeness, perhaps like the character of Aslan in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books being "not a tame lion." Both beauty and sublimity expand one's sense of the universe, but sublimity evokes a sense of one's smallness.
Severe weather can be sublime when it isn't downright horrifying. Oddly though, I think this is less true of winter weather. Blizzards just wear you down, unlike summer thunderstorms and tornadoes. Think of a Hudson-school painting of a thunderstorm... there's real drama there. In a ice-storm or a blizzard, there is a muffling, numbing silence, or a stead, howling moan.
There is something strange and specifically homo sapiens-y about this. Weather is weather, on the surface. Why should an blizzard have less of a sense of awe about it than a thunderstorm? It's as though our sense of drama is dependent on time. Which of course it is. Even if it's the same change, we react differently to an overnight change and a year-long change.
The beauty of the most stunning winter landscapes, whether sheathed in snow or coated in frost or ice, is one of silence. Once things really begin moving in earnest, there are muddy tracks and bootprints... it's the initial, early-morning hush and the magical coating of frozen water in whatever form it takes, that makes winter landscapes so wonderful.
Maybe because of the physics definition of "sublime" (the change of state from solid directly to gas, as most widely seen in the "evaopration" of snow), I was thinking about the philosophical idea of the the "sublime." The word in common usage is about exaltedness, of a quality "above the lintel" (that's apparently the root of the word) and so out of reach. In aesthetics, it's contrasted with "beauty." The sublime has a note of fear in it's awesomeness, perhaps like the character of Aslan in C.S. Lewis' Narnia books being "not a tame lion." Both beauty and sublimity expand one's sense of the universe, but sublimity evokes a sense of one's smallness.
Severe weather can be sublime when it isn't downright horrifying. Oddly though, I think this is less true of winter weather. Blizzards just wear you down, unlike summer thunderstorms and tornadoes. Think of a Hudson-school painting of a thunderstorm... there's real drama there. In a ice-storm or a blizzard, there is a muffling, numbing silence, or a stead, howling moan.
There is something strange and specifically homo sapiens-y about this. Weather is weather, on the surface. Why should an blizzard have less of a sense of awe about it than a thunderstorm? It's as though our sense of drama is dependent on time. Which of course it is. Even if it's the same change, we react differently to an overnight change and a year-long change.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Dog shampoo - February 3, 2012
They said on the radio this morning it was going to be more heavy fog. I was unimpressed. I drove Daniel to school and then came home, gave Anya a quick, groggy walk down the block. She really wanted to go back to sleep. And to eat the chicken wings someone had chucked onto the grass verge.
Ingrid took her to the groomer down the street because, to put it delicately, she was getting stinky. Now she's stinky in a new way, because there are no scent-free shampoo options here. It'll wear off in a couple days, and her fur will smell once more of corn chips. Fresh corn chips. When they smell like rotten corn chips, we'll take her back over.
Dog grooming for show is nothing new. Long-haired dogs need to be kept brushed to avoid matting, and I assume for as long as dogs have been close working companions, we've been helping them get burrs out of their coat and keep them healthy and functional. But shampoo? Given that humans only started washing their hair with shampoo (in the West anyway) about a hundred years ago, I wonder where the practice of dog-washing started? Was it a thing the nobles did with their fancy dogs who were allowed into the throne room or its equivalent? I can't imagine Beowulf washing the dog to let it into the mead-hall. But the Emperor of China? Sure.
In any case, I can't imagine serious dog grooming taking place (except to remove burrs and such) when the dog basically lives outdoors. It isn't until dogs become actual house pets that how they smell and the dirt they track in really makes much difference.
So when did that happen and where? I'm guessing it's a breed-specific and culture-specific back and forth. Salukis in the court of the Pharaoh? The Pekinese in the court of the Chinese Emperor? See this article from the British Royal Family's web site about dogs and royalty.
Ingrid took her to the groomer down the street because, to put it delicately, she was getting stinky. Now she's stinky in a new way, because there are no scent-free shampoo options here. It'll wear off in a couple days, and her fur will smell once more of corn chips. Fresh corn chips. When they smell like rotten corn chips, we'll take her back over.
Dog grooming for show is nothing new. Long-haired dogs need to be kept brushed to avoid matting, and I assume for as long as dogs have been close working companions, we've been helping them get burrs out of their coat and keep them healthy and functional. But shampoo? Given that humans only started washing their hair with shampoo (in the West anyway) about a hundred years ago, I wonder where the practice of dog-washing started? Was it a thing the nobles did with their fancy dogs who were allowed into the throne room or its equivalent? I can't imagine Beowulf washing the dog to let it into the mead-hall. But the Emperor of China? Sure.
In any case, I can't imagine serious dog grooming taking place (except to remove burrs and such) when the dog basically lives outdoors. It isn't until dogs become actual house pets that how they smell and the dirt they track in really makes much difference.
So when did that happen and where? I'm guessing it's a breed-specific and culture-specific back and forth. Salukis in the court of the Pharaoh? The Pekinese in the court of the Chinese Emperor? See this article from the British Royal Family's web site about dogs and royalty.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Fog (part 1) - February 2, 2012
Woke up this morning to fog. We don't get fog like they do near the ocean, but sometimes, especially when we have warm-ish moist air over ice-covered lakes, it does come on. It was pretty, and not dangerous.
I grew up thinking Sherlock Holmes and Oliver Twist walked through a London shrouded in sea mist. London is on the Thames, after all. But no, I eventually realized. It was a thick blanket of coal-smoke, mostly. Lots and lots of Englishfolk died of respiratory disease. Half of English city kids had rickets in the late 19th century, in large part because they seldom saw the sun (yeah, OK, part of that was child labor in factories, but still).
The book I'm working on, The Big Smoke, by Peter Brimblecombe (and what a great English name that is!), is supposedly centered on the 1952 smog episode that killed thousands of Londoners and was a major impetus to switching away from coal as the fuel for the city. But it is at root a history of the use of coal, and the problems that have come with using coal, since medieval times. The curse of smog came and went multiple times from the Norman Conquest on, and it really did follow the use and replacement of sulphur-heavy coal from Newcastle. People complained about the smell from the get-go; at first it was a back-up fuel for the poor, when firewood costs got too high. It was used for some industry, but not favored for brewing or any other activity where it would flavor the food.
Wonder how folks would have reacted to coal-fired pizza, popular in these parts—and the foundation of the American pizza business. It's a reminder that American cities had the same sorts of pea-soupers London was known for. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis... A lot of cities were just as begrimed.
But because the London fogs have such a literary weight to them, their disappearance—and several decades of cleaning the soot-encrusted buildings they left as a legacy—is all the more dramatic. Really, in the States, the only city transformation that comes close in sheer drama is Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh didn't have Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens.
I grew up thinking Sherlock Holmes and Oliver Twist walked through a London shrouded in sea mist. London is on the Thames, after all. But no, I eventually realized. It was a thick blanket of coal-smoke, mostly. Lots and lots of Englishfolk died of respiratory disease. Half of English city kids had rickets in the late 19th century, in large part because they seldom saw the sun (yeah, OK, part of that was child labor in factories, but still).
The book I'm working on, The Big Smoke, by Peter Brimblecombe (and what a great English name that is!), is supposedly centered on the 1952 smog episode that killed thousands of Londoners and was a major impetus to switching away from coal as the fuel for the city. But it is at root a history of the use of coal, and the problems that have come with using coal, since medieval times. The curse of smog came and went multiple times from the Norman Conquest on, and it really did follow the use and replacement of sulphur-heavy coal from Newcastle. People complained about the smell from the get-go; at first it was a back-up fuel for the poor, when firewood costs got too high. It was used for some industry, but not favored for brewing or any other activity where it would flavor the food.
Wonder how folks would have reacted to coal-fired pizza, popular in these parts—and the foundation of the American pizza business. It's a reminder that American cities had the same sorts of pea-soupers London was known for. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis... A lot of cities were just as begrimed.
But because the London fogs have such a literary weight to them, their disappearance—and several decades of cleaning the soot-encrusted buildings they left as a legacy—is all the more dramatic. Really, in the States, the only city transformation that comes close in sheer drama is Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh didn't have Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Frozen in Florida - February 1, 2012
It was another lovely early-spring day, a couple months early. It was 36°F when I took Anya to the dog park in my green wool jacket and a hat. As I've said before, I kind of rank the weather on what kind of clothing I need. Today was a medium-weight coat day. Anya enjoyed smelling all the smells...
I've gone on and on about life in winter up here in Minnesota, but it gets cold elsewhere. We took a trip to Cedar Key, Florida in January 2008, and it was definitely warm, but it was light windbreaker weather, not walk-around-in-your-skivvies weather. Cedar Key is in the northern part of Florida, but still...
Florida had a cold winter last year, especially in December 2010. Tropical imports like iguanas and pythons began dropping from the trees, which is good if you're trying to maintain local native species. How do you stay warm in a world where it almost never gets this cold? The advice is pretty much the same as anywhere: layer, keep your core temperature up with hot food, stop drafts...
The average annual low temperature (on average, the coldest it gets in winter) is the basis of the USDA's hardiness zones, which have just been revised. Note that almost none of the US avoids a freeze in an average winter: New Orleans, Orlando, Dallas and Palm Springs, CA, are all within the zone that in a typical winter gets down to between 25 and 30°F.
How do people stay warm in Zone 8 or Zone 9, when it really does get cold? How do folks in the desert southwest typically heat? I know there's a lot more dependence on stored radiant heat—this is one of the great advantages of adobe. Wherever you live, is there just a point where normal habits of activity and dress break down, and people just huddle around and survive until the cold breaks? It would make sense in general not to spend too much time building in preparation for an event that might only last a couple nights a year.
I've gone on and on about life in winter up here in Minnesota, but it gets cold elsewhere. We took a trip to Cedar Key, Florida in January 2008, and it was definitely warm, but it was light windbreaker weather, not walk-around-in-your-skivvies weather. Cedar Key is in the northern part of Florida, but still...
Florida had a cold winter last year, especially in December 2010. Tropical imports like iguanas and pythons began dropping from the trees, which is good if you're trying to maintain local native species. How do you stay warm in a world where it almost never gets this cold? The advice is pretty much the same as anywhere: layer, keep your core temperature up with hot food, stop drafts...
The average annual low temperature (on average, the coldest it gets in winter) is the basis of the USDA's hardiness zones, which have just been revised. Note that almost none of the US avoids a freeze in an average winter: New Orleans, Orlando, Dallas and Palm Springs, CA, are all within the zone that in a typical winter gets down to between 25 and 30°F.
How do people stay warm in Zone 8 or Zone 9, when it really does get cold? How do folks in the desert southwest typically heat? I know there's a lot more dependence on stored radiant heat—this is one of the great advantages of adobe. Wherever you live, is there just a point where normal habits of activity and dress break down, and people just huddle around and survive until the cold breaks? It would make sense in general not to spend too much time building in preparation for an event that might only last a couple nights a year.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Climage Change - January 31, 2012
It was another very warm day today. Nice stroll with Anya this morning, followed by a walk to work. Then I was in the office until dark.
What a lousy season for the winter sports world. They cancelled the John Beargrease sled dog race up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Ski areas are struggling to stay ahead of the melt, if they have snow-making equipment. Here's an animation of our snowcover this season. It's not that there's no snow out there; it's just spotty and pathetic.
I think a lot of us, in out daily lives, don't especially miss it. I certainly have plenty of friends who are missing the things they love to do in a winter with sustained deep freeze and deep (or even deep-ish) snow. But our daily lives of commuting on the freeway, and putting out the trash, and walking the dog are frankly simpler when it's 40°F than when it's -10°F. I can comfortably walk to work, which is good for me.
There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend arguing that climate change was still being legitimately debated. This in turn was roundly rebutted in Skeptical Science and by a larger and broader cross-section of science in, well, Science.
What the alarmism, most all of it legitimate, about climate change fails to take into account is that some of us would prefer, for our own selfish concerns, to have a warmer climate. Not the folks in Dallas and Las Vegas and Miami necessarily, but just from an everyday standpoint, there are worse things in the world than warmer Januaries.
But there's a particular kind of short-sightedness to this knee-jerk reaction, which the alarmists have been trying to point us to. It's like the consequences of giving up having a car: it may sound like a noble thing to do, but there are real ramaifications in what you are going to be able to do wtih your life. If we gave up dependence on private motor vehicles, we (an urban couple, even) would have to rethink where our son went to school, where we shop for food, what social and entertainment activities we did, and how much flexibility we have in our schedules.
Likewise, you can joke about enjoying warmer Januaries, but there are real consequences on a local level: less meltwater in the spring for crops, an end to skiing except as an occasional treat, like it is where I grew up in New Jersey, new plant diseases, and (maybe) hotter summers, which in the middle of the continent is not a trivial thing, even this far north.
What a lousy season for the winter sports world. They cancelled the John Beargrease sled dog race up on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Ski areas are struggling to stay ahead of the melt, if they have snow-making equipment. Here's an animation of our snowcover this season. It's not that there's no snow out there; it's just spotty and pathetic.
I think a lot of us, in out daily lives, don't especially miss it. I certainly have plenty of friends who are missing the things they love to do in a winter with sustained deep freeze and deep (or even deep-ish) snow. But our daily lives of commuting on the freeway, and putting out the trash, and walking the dog are frankly simpler when it's 40°F than when it's -10°F. I can comfortably walk to work, which is good for me.
There was an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend arguing that climate change was still being legitimately debated. This in turn was roundly rebutted in Skeptical Science and by a larger and broader cross-section of science in, well, Science.
What the alarmism, most all of it legitimate, about climate change fails to take into account is that some of us would prefer, for our own selfish concerns, to have a warmer climate. Not the folks in Dallas and Las Vegas and Miami necessarily, but just from an everyday standpoint, there are worse things in the world than warmer Januaries.
But there's a particular kind of short-sightedness to this knee-jerk reaction, which the alarmists have been trying to point us to. It's like the consequences of giving up having a car: it may sound like a noble thing to do, but there are real ramaifications in what you are going to be able to do wtih your life. If we gave up dependence on private motor vehicles, we (an urban couple, even) would have to rethink where our son went to school, where we shop for food, what social and entertainment activities we did, and how much flexibility we have in our schedules.
Likewise, you can joke about enjoying warmer Januaries, but there are real consequences on a local level: less meltwater in the spring for crops, an end to skiing except as an occasional treat, like it is where I grew up in New Jersey, new plant diseases, and (maybe) hotter summers, which in the middle of the continent is not a trivial thing, even this far north.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Stinky hair - January 30, 2012
It was a lovely March day in January. I took Anya out for a brief walk this morning, and then a quick lope around the park when I picked up Daniel from school. Things are melting all over the place.
I'm writing this as Daniel is getting ready for bed. He washed his hair, as we have him do every couple of days. Hair-washing is a very modern habit. For centuries, hair was maintained largely through brushing, oiling and perfuming. It was only at the turn of the century that "shampooing" became a regular habit... advised by experts to be performed every few weeks. According to this article, it was the gradual innovations of people like Dr Schwartzkopf of Berlin (whose hygeine products company continues to be a worldwide empire), and John Breck of New England, that made shampoo a regular part of daily life after World War II.
Part of what made washing hair so unusual in earlier times was that harsh soaps were the norm, and they tended to leave dull film behind. In fact, washing as much as is the norm in America now (daily) does tend to dry out the skin and hair... dry shampoos are apparently making a comeback, absorbing oil and dirt using powders like cornstarch or Baking soda and then brushing it out of your hair.
I've always hated having wet hair in winter, and never been a huge fan of blow-dryers. So I was the stinky kid in high school, with the greasy hair (I also hated gang showers, but that's another story).
How much of our idea of cleanliness is shaped by the tools at our disposal? Didn't people 200 years ago notice the stinky hair (and pits) of their friends? Did people just accept that people smell like people? Do we notice people-stink in enclosed places as we've eliminated other indoor smells like smoke from cookfires?
And what about all those perfumes that lace most personal hygiene products? Is this just leftover cultural habit from the days where covering up the smell of people was more common than washing it our? Do we just get used to it, like I became habituated to the smell of Dial soap as a kid? Now I can't walk down the supermarket aisle with all the laundry soaps without getting a little queasy.
What would it have been like to visit this house in January 1911? What would the house and the people in it have smelled like?
I'm writing this as Daniel is getting ready for bed. He washed his hair, as we have him do every couple of days. Hair-washing is a very modern habit. For centuries, hair was maintained largely through brushing, oiling and perfuming. It was only at the turn of the century that "shampooing" became a regular habit... advised by experts to be performed every few weeks. According to this article, it was the gradual innovations of people like Dr Schwartzkopf of Berlin (whose hygeine products company continues to be a worldwide empire), and John Breck of New England, that made shampoo a regular part of daily life after World War II.
Part of what made washing hair so unusual in earlier times was that harsh soaps were the norm, and they tended to leave dull film behind. In fact, washing as much as is the norm in America now (daily) does tend to dry out the skin and hair... dry shampoos are apparently making a comeback, absorbing oil and dirt using powders like cornstarch or Baking soda and then brushing it out of your hair.
I've always hated having wet hair in winter, and never been a huge fan of blow-dryers. So I was the stinky kid in high school, with the greasy hair (I also hated gang showers, but that's another story).
How much of our idea of cleanliness is shaped by the tools at our disposal? Didn't people 200 years ago notice the stinky hair (and pits) of their friends? Did people just accept that people smell like people? Do we notice people-stink in enclosed places as we've eliminated other indoor smells like smoke from cookfires?
And what about all those perfumes that lace most personal hygiene products? Is this just leftover cultural habit from the days where covering up the smell of people was more common than washing it our? Do we just get used to it, like I became habituated to the smell of Dial soap as a kid? Now I can't walk down the supermarket aisle with all the laundry soaps without getting a little queasy.
What would it have been like to visit this house in January 1911? What would the house and the people in it have smelled like?
Outhouses on the Island - January 29, 2012
It was a lovely day at the dog park. We slept in, all of the mammals in the house. I'd been out dancing until 1:30 am, so I at least had an excuse. Anyway, as I said it was picture-perfect at the dog park, and it was crawling with canines.
I talked about plumbing with my dad on Friday. He grew up, from the summer he was eight until the family moved to Dallas in 1942, when he was fifteen, in a house with an outhouse. I think by the time they moved back, two years later, the house was at least on a septic system. I'm not sure when the neighborhood got hooked up to city sewer.
And he said it was just a matter-of-fact part of life. When it was fearsomely cold, there were chamber pots you could do your business in and then take yourself and your goods out to dump them in the outhouse. And of course it smelled. You dumped lime in and it smelled less bad, but still.
One thing I wondered was if it was kind of a mark of class to have an outhouse, and he said he didn't have that sense as a child—everyone had an outhouse. Oddly, his earliest years were spent as the caretaker's family at a church retreat center not far away, and there he is pretty sure they had indoor plumbing with a septic field.
I think maybe at the time (1930's and 1940's) it was more of a city-country thing than the rich/poor thing I think outhouses have come to be. I wonder about the growth of flush septic systems, what the timing was on them, and how they represented a kind of class line out in the countryside.
Island Park, Minnesota, where Dad grew up, was not really out in the country; it was a village, made up of summer homes and all-year residents like my grandparents. Grandpa worked all kinds of jobs in the 1930's, both out in the area and in Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the state, until he got a civil service job in 1942 (that's what took them to Dallas). My dad went to the Spring Park Elementary and then the Mound Public schools by school bus, but this was not farm country. The farm kids were from Minnetrista.
Back to sewers. An interesting teaser in the form of a PowerPoint slide set from North Carolina suggests a couple things: (1) Septic tanks developed in the 1860's, (2) World War I-era efforts to regulate privies, based in part on the fact that hookworms can travel 300 feet from privy to any water supply, (3) some sort of campaign to improve privies as part of the WPA in the 1930's, (4) post-WWII marketing of indoor plumbing to rural families as part of rural electrification.
By contrast, Minneapolis had a city sewer system well in place by the 1890's. Even up on the edges of development like our house in Northeast, I'm pretty sure there was a hookup within a decade of the house's construction in 1890. I'd like to see a history of where the city sewer extended. It would make an interesting time-sequence map.
The dramatic shift I can report was the consolidation of local sewer systems around 1970. Apparently there were a lot of smaller local systems in the Twin Cities suburbs, and many of these were failing, and a lot of untreated or undertreated sewage ended up in the Mississippi. So the current set up where most of the Twin Cities' sewage goes to Pig's Eye Island on the other side of St Paul, dates from that era. This map shows how the regional consolidation of sewage treatment has covered most of the metro area.
I talked about plumbing with my dad on Friday. He grew up, from the summer he was eight until the family moved to Dallas in 1942, when he was fifteen, in a house with an outhouse. I think by the time they moved back, two years later, the house was at least on a septic system. I'm not sure when the neighborhood got hooked up to city sewer.
And he said it was just a matter-of-fact part of life. When it was fearsomely cold, there were chamber pots you could do your business in and then take yourself and your goods out to dump them in the outhouse. And of course it smelled. You dumped lime in and it smelled less bad, but still.
One thing I wondered was if it was kind of a mark of class to have an outhouse, and he said he didn't have that sense as a child—everyone had an outhouse. Oddly, his earliest years were spent as the caretaker's family at a church retreat center not far away, and there he is pretty sure they had indoor plumbing with a septic field.
I think maybe at the time (1930's and 1940's) it was more of a city-country thing than the rich/poor thing I think outhouses have come to be. I wonder about the growth of flush septic systems, what the timing was on them, and how they represented a kind of class line out in the countryside.
Island Park, Minnesota, where Dad grew up, was not really out in the country; it was a village, made up of summer homes and all-year residents like my grandparents. Grandpa worked all kinds of jobs in the 1930's, both out in the area and in Minneapolis, and elsewhere around the state, until he got a civil service job in 1942 (that's what took them to Dallas). My dad went to the Spring Park Elementary and then the Mound Public schools by school bus, but this was not farm country. The farm kids were from Minnetrista.
Back to sewers. An interesting teaser in the form of a PowerPoint slide set from North Carolina suggests a couple things: (1) Septic tanks developed in the 1860's, (2) World War I-era efforts to regulate privies, based in part on the fact that hookworms can travel 300 feet from privy to any water supply, (3) some sort of campaign to improve privies as part of the WPA in the 1930's, (4) post-WWII marketing of indoor plumbing to rural families as part of rural electrification.
By contrast, Minneapolis had a city sewer system well in place by the 1890's. Even up on the edges of development like our house in Northeast, I'm pretty sure there was a hookup within a decade of the house's construction in 1890. I'd like to see a history of where the city sewer extended. It would make an interesting time-sequence map.
The dramatic shift I can report was the consolidation of local sewer systems around 1970. Apparently there were a lot of smaller local systems in the Twin Cities suburbs, and many of these were failing, and a lot of untreated or undertreated sewage ended up in the Mississippi. So the current set up where most of the Twin Cities' sewage goes to Pig's Eye Island on the other side of St Paul, dates from that era. This map shows how the regional consolidation of sewage treatment has covered most of the metro area.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Cathedral - January 28, 2012
I walked Anya around the St Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota this morning, while Daniel was working on math with a friend. It wasn't all that cold, but there was a stiff wind. Anya enjoyed it, and I got the chance to walk around a space which, twenty years ago, I had worked on a proposal for a public art piece. I wasn't able to see whatever the art was they ended up picking.
The proposal was for a mound, shaped like a hand, with a tree (a burr oak in my proposal) growing out of the palm. I still think it's a cool image.
Our idea of public worship, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, involves entering a building set aside for the purpose. It's not that you can't pray outside, and there are certainly deeply important things in the traditions that involve outdoor spaces: processions and pilgrimages, burnt offerings and miraculous appearances. But the core ritual, the weekly religious acts, are indoor affairs.
One of the things that indigenous religious traditions have brought to western consciousness, at least in the Americas and the Australia/Pacific arenas, is the idea of outdoor sacred spaces. Early American environmentalists cottoned on to the idea of sacred outdoors pretty early:
Pagan revivalists, especially Druids with their "groves," have also done a lot to bring the idea of the outdoors as a formal religious space into the public consciousness. Of course, it could be argued that by placing themselves in opposition to Abrahamic churches, and their worship spaces as out of doors, they were making sure more conservative Christians especially would become more opposed to worshiping out of doors as somehow "pagan"...
Last winter I went on some Saturday morning that Daniel had a class or something, and spent about an hour in the Como Park Conservatory, a wonderfully moist, green space in the bleak Minnesota winter. I ended up just sitting and letting the green be around me, closing my eyes. Just being still. It was wonderful. But it was not being outdoors; in fact, it was a highly artificial natural experience. Does this matter? Does "connecting with nature" entail sitting in the out-of-doors regardless of how hospitable those out-of-doors are?
The proposal was for a mound, shaped like a hand, with a tree (a burr oak in my proposal) growing out of the palm. I still think it's a cool image.
Our idea of public worship, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world, involves entering a building set aside for the purpose. It's not that you can't pray outside, and there are certainly deeply important things in the traditions that involve outdoor spaces: processions and pilgrimages, burnt offerings and miraculous appearances. But the core ritual, the weekly religious acts, are indoor affairs.
One of the things that indigenous religious traditions have brought to western consciousness, at least in the Americas and the Australia/Pacific arenas, is the idea of outdoor sacred spaces. Early American environmentalists cottoned on to the idea of sacred outdoors pretty early:
Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.But even here, to make the argument to a Euro-American audience, it had to fall back on analogies to indoor religious spaces.
- John Muir
Pagan revivalists, especially Druids with their "groves," have also done a lot to bring the idea of the outdoors as a formal religious space into the public consciousness. Of course, it could be argued that by placing themselves in opposition to Abrahamic churches, and their worship spaces as out of doors, they were making sure more conservative Christians especially would become more opposed to worshiping out of doors as somehow "pagan"...
Last winter I went on some Saturday morning that Daniel had a class or something, and spent about an hour in the Como Park Conservatory, a wonderfully moist, green space in the bleak Minnesota winter. I ended up just sitting and letting the green be around me, closing my eyes. Just being still. It was wonderful. But it was not being outdoors; in fact, it was a highly artificial natural experience. Does this matter? Does "connecting with nature" entail sitting in the out-of-doors regardless of how hospitable those out-of-doors are?
Friday, January 27, 2012
candles - January 27, 2012
I missed a blog entry about yesterday. Oh well, I figure missing one in over a month isn't too terrible.
Fact is, I haven't been out much. Apparently it was snowing pretty hard for a little while this afternoon, but it took Ingrid calling me in my map cave for me to know anything about it.
I've been putting in a little extra time at work, working on a little bit of a bottleneck of multiple projects all with a certain amount of rush to them. Nothing desperate, and nothing enormous, but every so often the planets align and there we are with a late night or two. Luckily, Ingrid's been able to take some slack this week.
Working late used to be a lot more trouble for desk workers. Candles don't shed nearly as much light— a "standard candle" gives off about 1/120 as much light as a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb (reference). And until the 20-century development of the self-trimming wick, it required nearly-constant work to keep candles trimmed and burning efficiently.
So imagine the extra labor required to do office work in the northern European winter: maintaining the fire for heating, styaing bundled up against the draft, and keeping en eye on the candle wick to keep in trim. Makes Bob Cratcit's clerkly life in A Christmas Carol that much more grim...
Fact is, I haven't been out much. Apparently it was snowing pretty hard for a little while this afternoon, but it took Ingrid calling me in my map cave for me to know anything about it.
I've been putting in a little extra time at work, working on a little bit of a bottleneck of multiple projects all with a certain amount of rush to them. Nothing desperate, and nothing enormous, but every so often the planets align and there we are with a late night or two. Luckily, Ingrid's been able to take some slack this week.
Working late used to be a lot more trouble for desk workers. Candles don't shed nearly as much light— a "standard candle" gives off about 1/120 as much light as a 100-watt incandescent lightbulb (reference). And until the 20-century development of the self-trimming wick, it required nearly-constant work to keep candles trimmed and burning efficiently.
So imagine the extra labor required to do office work in the northern European winter: maintaining the fire for heating, styaing bundled up against the draft, and keeping en eye on the candle wick to keep in trim. Makes Bob Cratcit's clerkly life in A Christmas Carol that much more grim...
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Boots - January 25, 2012
It was warmer yesterday, getting above freezing. Walked Anya in the park at Daniel's school, and my shoes got wet. Hazards of warmer winter days.
That poor novice in the Yukon died in part because he stepped into a hidden spring and got wet. Likewise a lot of those hypothermia victims dies not from "being outside in the cold," but as a result of immersion in water... Getting wet in winter is the hazard that doesn't occur to us necessarily immediately, because after all water is warmer than ice.
When cities began street snow clearing, one of the obvious methods was spreading salt. There was a lot of objection to this, in part from people who got salt stains on clothing and equipment, or whose metal parts were clogged and corroded by salt. But also people objected to having to wade through slush. And they had a point.
How did people waterproof things 100 years ago? There's an interesting recipe here about a soaking method... pretty involved:
The style of calf-high boot known as the "Wellington" was, in fact, popularized by the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo. He was modifying the Hessian boot. These were not shoes for farmers or common laborers, who commonly wore wooden clogs. It was not until Hiram Hutchinson adopted Charles Goodyear's rubber vulcanization process to make footwear that the modern rubber wellies were born in 1853, manufactured by Aigle (which is still one of their prime manufacturers—see a company history)
I wear Sorels when I need warm feet. They've been around since 1962—pipsqueaks by comparison. But their trademark lined boots were designed for tromping around the tundra, and they really do work. My old pair lasted me from 1986 (I think, or maybe 1987) until 2010. Not bad. The only problem is, they are really heavy. All that rubber and insulation weighs you down.
Sorels are predated by the now-100-year-old Bean Boot: the Maine Hunting Shoe. If you read the 1914 flyer, though, you'll notice the boot is recommended as ideal for both "bare ground and snow hunting." Not slush. Because really, who in their right mind would go out hunting in slush?
That poor novice in the Yukon died in part because he stepped into a hidden spring and got wet. Likewise a lot of those hypothermia victims dies not from "being outside in the cold," but as a result of immersion in water... Getting wet in winter is the hazard that doesn't occur to us necessarily immediately, because after all water is warmer than ice.
When cities began street snow clearing, one of the obvious methods was spreading salt. There was a lot of objection to this, in part from people who got salt stains on clothing and equipment, or whose metal parts were clogged and corroded by salt. But also people objected to having to wade through slush. And they had a point.
How did people waterproof things 100 years ago? There's an interesting recipe here about a soaking method... pretty involved:
To Render Leather Boots Waterproof.—Melt over a slow fire, one q jar of boiled linseed oil; one pound of mutton suet; three-quarters of a pound of yellow beeswax; and half a pound of common resin; or smaller quantities, in these proportions. With this mixture saturate the leather of new boots and shoes, having previously made them rather warm.
The style of calf-high boot known as the "Wellington" was, in fact, popularized by the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo. He was modifying the Hessian boot. These were not shoes for farmers or common laborers, who commonly wore wooden clogs. It was not until Hiram Hutchinson adopted Charles Goodyear's rubber vulcanization process to make footwear that the modern rubber wellies were born in 1853, manufactured by Aigle (which is still one of their prime manufacturers—see a company history)
I wear Sorels when I need warm feet. They've been around since 1962—pipsqueaks by comparison. But their trademark lined boots were designed for tromping around the tundra, and they really do work. My old pair lasted me from 1986 (I think, or maybe 1987) until 2010. Not bad. The only problem is, they are really heavy. All that rubber and insulation weighs you down.
Sorels are predated by the now-100-year-old Bean Boot: the Maine Hunting Shoe. If you read the 1914 flyer, though, you'll notice the boot is recommended as ideal for both "bare ground and snow hunting." Not slush. Because really, who in their right mind would go out hunting in slush?
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Matches - January 24, 2012
Quick walks down the block this morning and again this evening, and much to-ing and fro-ing in the interim... it was one of those days where there was a lot scheduled and not much time to sit and breathe.
I remember a lot more written in to Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." It is surprisingly short, actually. In this it works better than some of its more florid peers; Dickens comes to mind. Not that Dickens "doesn't work," but in his over-sentimental mood he gets maudlin.
No, Andersen's story is actually matter-of-fact. Oh, and it's set on New Year's Eve, not Christmas.
The thing is, people do still freeze to death. Not many—I'm looking for statistics; I know someone keeps track of cause of death for accidents, but death from hypothermia is rare enough to be hard to find in national statistics as to be hard to find. A CDC report says 2622 people died from "Exposure to natural cold" from 1999 through 2002. Preumably the rate has historically been higher, but since the time that disease has been tracked scientifically at least, that is what the statisticians have paid attention to (see this data from 19th century Britain, for example).
And yet, the vision of the little match girl haunts us. The implication that we could welcome the poor inside with us, that it is our selfishness that keeps them outside, is an accusation hard to argue against.
I remember a lot more written in to Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Little Match Girl." It is surprisingly short, actually. In this it works better than some of its more florid peers; Dickens comes to mind. Not that Dickens "doesn't work," but in his over-sentimental mood he gets maudlin.
No, Andersen's story is actually matter-of-fact. Oh, and it's set on New Year's Eve, not Christmas.
The thing is, people do still freeze to death. Not many—I'm looking for statistics; I know someone keeps track of cause of death for accidents, but death from hypothermia is rare enough to be hard to find in national statistics as to be hard to find. A CDC report says 2622 people died from "Exposure to natural cold" from 1999 through 2002. Preumably the rate has historically been higher, but since the time that disease has been tracked scientifically at least, that is what the statisticians have paid attention to (see this data from 19th century Britain, for example).
And yet, the vision of the little match girl haunts us. The implication that we could welcome the poor inside with us, that it is our selfishness that keeps them outside, is an accusation hard to argue against.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Bus - January 23, 2012
I took Anya out for a quick walk this morning, then chiseled ice off the car for Ingrid and made the half-hour walk to work in my heavy Sorel boots. It sleeted and then snowed last night... should have put the car in the garage. This evening after a meeting in the North Loop area of Minneapolis, I walked up to Nicollet Mall, another 20 minute trudge, to catch the bus.
When I talk about inside and outside, I'm speaking from a particular kind of privilege: car-ownership. Those who don't drive have to work with the much less flexible public transit system, and so end up spending more time outside: walking from their door to the bus stop, standing waiting for the bus, walking from the bus to the destination. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There's a reason people were so willing to fork out for a car back when they had the chance. It really does increase the number of things you can do in a day, and gives you slack where none existed before. That slack fills up with new to-do lists, but it's a different rhythm of life, living with the bus.
It's a different rhythm and it's a different inside. If the automobile is an extension of the home as a private space, then the bus is an extension of the sidewalk, close-quartered, anonymous public space. That's another reason people switched to cars: In a car, they were, in a sense, master of their own personal mobile space. In a bus, you have to negotiate socially with strangers. It's more work if it's not what your used to.
When I talk about inside and outside, I'm speaking from a particular kind of privilege: car-ownership. Those who don't drive have to work with the much less flexible public transit system, and so end up spending more time outside: walking from their door to the bus stop, standing waiting for the bus, walking from the bus to the destination. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There's a reason people were so willing to fork out for a car back when they had the chance. It really does increase the number of things you can do in a day, and gives you slack where none existed before. That slack fills up with new to-do lists, but it's a different rhythm of life, living with the bus.
It's a different rhythm and it's a different inside. If the automobile is an extension of the home as a private space, then the bus is an extension of the sidewalk, close-quartered, anonymous public space. That's another reason people switched to cars: In a car, they were, in a sense, master of their own personal mobile space. In a bus, you have to negotiate socially with strangers. It's more work if it's not what your used to.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Killing two pigs with one bird - January 22, 2012
A quick walk this morning, in the thin snow over wood chips on the playground. Ingrid took Anya to the dog park, and I spent a bunch of the day doing work... and killing electronic pigs with birds hurled from slingshots.
I'm not what you would call a "gamer." But I do every so often get hooked on a game,usually on the computer. In college, it was Marble Madness on my roommate's Amiga. In Vermont, it was Tetris. I've had two separate rounds of online Scrabble, at least. This winter it's Angry Birds.
Like entertainment, playing games has a long disreputable history—it's frivolous, a waste of time, and prone to be habit forming. I wonder if, like stories, it's grounded in a less-obvious basic human need. Competing with games does seem pretty universal.
There is a clear distinction between "outdoors" and "indoors" games. Outdoors, play generally involves whole-body movement through a controlled physical environment. What makes sport a game is rule-following, the formal structure that controls how one may or may not act in the contest.
Indoors, most games are removed from whole-body competition. People have made large-room competitions that are specifically about playing the room, and more recently arenas have become so large we can play outdoor games in an indoor space. But the oldest indoor games are all variations on card, board, dice and word games.
Outdoor games have little story-telling embedded in them. The narrative is in the physical actions on the playing field. By contrast, indoor board games often parallel some more physical content: chess and checkers are like a formalized battle, cribbage like a horse race. Not all indoor games do this: most word, card and dice games are utterly abstract.
Games, in fact, move fluidly with need, in and outside. Bowling was an outdoor game first, before it came indoors in North American winters. Dice and cards were historically as much the pastime of soldiers and travelers on the road as of casinos and gambling halls, their appeal in large part that they could be played almost anywhere.
I'm not what you would call a "gamer." But I do every so often get hooked on a game,usually on the computer. In college, it was Marble Madness on my roommate's Amiga. In Vermont, it was Tetris. I've had two separate rounds of online Scrabble, at least. This winter it's Angry Birds.
Like entertainment, playing games has a long disreputable history—it's frivolous, a waste of time, and prone to be habit forming. I wonder if, like stories, it's grounded in a less-obvious basic human need. Competing with games does seem pretty universal.
There is a clear distinction between "outdoors" and "indoors" games. Outdoors, play generally involves whole-body movement through a controlled physical environment. What makes sport a game is rule-following, the formal structure that controls how one may or may not act in the contest.
Indoors, most games are removed from whole-body competition. People have made large-room competitions that are specifically about playing the room, and more recently arenas have become so large we can play outdoor games in an indoor space. But the oldest indoor games are all variations on card, board, dice and word games.
Outdoor games have little story-telling embedded in them. The narrative is in the physical actions on the playing field. By contrast, indoor board games often parallel some more physical content: chess and checkers are like a formalized battle, cribbage like a horse race. Not all indoor games do this: most word, card and dice games are utterly abstract.
Games, in fact, move fluidly with need, in and outside. Bowling was an outdoor game first, before it came indoors in North American winters. Dice and cards were historically as much the pastime of soldiers and travelers on the road as of casinos and gambling halls, their appeal in large part that they could be played almost anywhere.
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