Nov 9 2020 - The Exception

 

Our weather in November has been the exception this year.  Yesterday was a summer's day.  Today it will again  be summer in November.  And the forecast is the same for Tuesday.  That is 20 degrees compared to the daily average of 9 degrees.   In the world of averages, November turns out to be an indistinct month in Grimsby's weather.  The coldest month is January, the driest month is January, the snowiest month is January.  We've passed the rainiest month - that's September.  November does have the distinction of lake effects snow possibilities.  That's how Snowvember came about in 2014.  There's a Youtube video of the snow engulfing Buffalo.   In the water temperature information, it says that March has the coldest water temperature at 2.7 degrees Celsius and August the highest at 21.7 degrees.   In the information for travel to Grimsby, it lists all the cities that can reach Grimsby by plane.  What an interesting array of cities - London, Athens, Glasgow, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Lahore, Paris, Ottawa, and so on.  Maybe the ads for travel are the reason for this unusual 'mix'.  I can't imagine taking them up on the offer to work from home at an exotic location or retire to an exotic location.  We're looking at the bark of a Scotch Pine at Gage Park.  So many colours and textures.

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Oct 8 2020 - How Deep?

 

How deep is the deepest hole drilled into the Earth? It is 7.5 miles or 12,262 kilometres.  Where is it?  It is in Murmansk, Russia.  The Kola Superdeep Borehole, as it is known, did not get through the Earth's crust - it is 25 miles thick below the land. They wanted to drill 9 miles but discovered such intense heat, they stopped.  This was in 1992.  It took 20 years to accomplish this - to get about a third of the way through the continental crust.   The American effort started in 1958 off the coast of Mexico and was discontinued in 1966.  They had reached only 183 metres.  German scientists reached about 6 miles below the surface of Bavaria in the 1990s. They discontinued when they hit seismic plates and found temperatures of 600 degrees Fahrenheit.  The Japanese drilled almost 2 miles into the ocean floor.   Below the crust is the mantle, and it holds the imprint of the geological record of the Earth's history.  There were two-billion-year-old fossils from single-celled marine organisms at 4.4 miles down.  The Cold War competition between the US and Soviet Russia ran its course.  No single country could take on the activity as costs spiralled with the need to invent technology to accomplish the task.   The effort now underway to reach the mantle is being led by the Center for Deep Earth Exploration, owners of the drilling vessel Chikyu. They expect the project to take dozens of years and one-billion dollars. The effort and funding is collaborative with Japan, US, European, China, Australia, India, New Zealand and Brazil participating.  What is the scientific prize they are seeking? “The ultimate goal of the [new] project is to get actual living samples of the mantle as it exists right now,” says Sean Toczko, programme manager for the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science. “It’s the difference between having a live dinosaur and a fossilised dinosaur bone.” The bbc article is HERE. Our picture today is an abstract taken of the bottom of a boat in Florida.

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The Restless Sun

The sun comes up every day - something  ordinary we don't think about much.  In the top stories today is a picture of the sun's surface - it looks like gold crackle paint.  Like something I'd find on an old rail car.   "The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawaii has released pictures that show features as small as 30km across. This is remarkable when set against the scale of our star, which has a diameter of about 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) and is 149 million km from Earth. The cell-like structures are roughly the size of the US state of Texas. They are convecting masses of hot, excited gas, or plasma. The bright centres are where this solar material is rising; the surrounding dark lanes are where plasma is cooling and sinking." See the convulsing sun picture HERE.  It made me think of California - land of sunshine inside the mountains on the coast. My father told me that you can plan a picnic for any day in the summer months in Fresno far in advance and always know it would be a sunny day.  He experienced the summer sun as unrelenting and he was happy to come back to Niagara. This is Filoli, south of San Francisco just inside the mountain range at Half Moon Bay.

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Twitter Presents Mutiny on the Bounty

There was a cruise ship Mutiny on the Bounty via Twitter reported on the Weather Network on the weekend.  The ship had missed its fifth scheduled port of call in a two-week vacation to Iceland, Amsterdam, Norway and Ireland due to bad weather. This would be a scenario from hell.  Passengers board the cruise ship with the expectation of luxury and pampering that they consider they've paid for, and end up roughing it with the toilets out of order and confined to a floating hotel with few or no stops.  The staged protests with signs that said "Refund! Refund! Refund!" There have been far worse cruise ship experiences.  Perhaps the passenger twitter reports made this one distinct, along with the organized protests and angry confrontations sent out via twitter regularly. Guinness Book of Records doesn't have records for the worst vacations or cruise ship incidents.  It has the worst roads, longest journey by car, barefoot, wheelchair, all the continents, skateboard journeys, and so on. The usual strange variations on travel. To find out the worst cruise ship experiences/incidents, we go to one of the sensationalist articles - a good example is HERE. Today's picture is a close-up of a carved wooden sculpture in the RBG gardens.

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Hobby On!

A prelude to my post today is to ask you to contact me if you experienced a gap in receiving the Photo of the Day.  At the  beginning of October, the percentage of opens dropped significantly.  In the last day or two, I've received emails from recipients welcoming me back to Photo of the Day.  I have sent out posts every day, so I've concluded that some of the email systems such as sympatico had problems which have now been fixed. If you find yourself in this situation in the future, the photo of the day is posted on my blogs - blog.marilyncornwell.com and opengardensniagara.blogspot.com Today I decided to explore our interests and past-times.  I didn't need to do much work at all.  Did you know that the following are actually identified as hobbies: Tatooing vehicles - self-evident but still strange Mooing - competition in Wisconsin, recently won by a ten-year-old boy Faking your own death  - known as pseudocide - variations exist and the most famous one is one man whose hobby is acting out murder scenes - calls himself Dead Body Guy Competitive dog grooming - dogs dyed various colours and trimmed weirdly to look like flamingoes, clowns, leopards, parrots, etc making them look like freaks - particularly since the groomers dress the same  Tape art - using old cassette tape, adhesive tape, duct tape, etc to make  to make pictures, particularly street art - has a society and website - this one is worth looking at  Trainspotting - an ordinary hobby - but Train Surfing is extraordinary - jumping on the outside of a passenger train and hitching a ride Navel fluff collecting -the yuk one in the list - again one strange man who has done this for more than 20 years so has evidence of his interest  Extreme ironing - ironing things in strange places - mountains, rivers, skydiving...a yearly competition to prove it exists Hikaru Dorodango - this is polishing dirt - take a ball of mud, draw the moisture out of it while coating it with finer and finer layers of soil after which you start to work the dirt by polishing it by hand into a sphere.  This is a Japanese art and the word means 'mud dumpling'. You can read about it at Wikipedia HERE.  News-Bombing - there is only one person doing this - he is an ugly man in the UK who goes to live news broadcast locations to stand in the background behind the journalist - making a point about allowing ugly people on-screen There are new and amazing things to discover about us humans that I could not have imagined possible. We are both funny and bizarre I found these exposed tree roots with their complex swirling shapes and textures in Minneapolis.

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Blue is Beloved

Humanity's favourite colours? It turns out that blue is the most popular colour across the board, followed by green for men and purple for women.  I expect you know the most popular colours for a car - black and white.  White is most popular for new cars.  Black, silver, gray and red 'round out the top five'. The "Crazy Christmas" stuff that people do seems remarkable.   I say crazy because the first Guinness record that displays is Canada's Jean-Guy Lacquerer who has a Santa Claus memorabilia collection of 25,104 items.  There is the largest gathering of Santa Clauses:  13,000 participants in the Guildhall Square in Derry City, Northern Ireland, in 2007. And what about the oldest Christmas tree?  Janet Parker of Chippenham, Wiltshire, UK puts 'out' the Christmas tree of her Great Aunt, purchased around 1886. It is 12 inches high so not as creepy as it first seems. There are lots of records - tallest Christmas tree, tallest floating Christmas tree, most number of lights on a tree, tallest Santa, most expensively ornamented tree, the most Christmas sweaters worn simultaneously.  It seems many people want in on Christmas fame. In terms of colour fame, there is the Guinness record for the largest human rainbow - 31,000 students and faculty in the Philippines.

The Universality of Curves

It is Ukrainian Christmas today.  With many Ukrainians in Niagara and Ontario, there's a tradition for the rest of us to leave our Christmas trees up for this date.  Ours came down earlier, due to the activities of Baxter the cat.  He started to consider the tree something to take down himself, perhaps a desire to get into the cat Christmas videos.   Our pictures today focus on curves.  As I take pictures of urban decay, I find that the shapes, patterns and lines of wear and tear are the same as those in nature's own processes.  The first picture is wear and tear  on a billboard sign.  The plastic material wears away in arcs and curves.  The second picture is ice, with some abstract filters applied to create the extreme colours.  It too has formed in arcs and curves. I found this explanation for the puddle freezing into ice: "The shallowness of this puddle suggests that it rapidly froze; only a thin water layer remained below the puddle. Then the fast-falling temperatures likely caused the ice to contract, which produced the cracking. Continued cooling widened the cracks. The ring pattern shows that the main direction of the stress force was radial, but the scalloped pattern along the rings shows that some stress varied with angle around the center. The small amount of water that didn't freeze rose into the cracks due to the hydrostatic pressure of the ice above and capillary action. Water in the rings then froze and expanded, and as it did it widened the rings and also directed the remaining small amount of liquid to the top of the ice. The slight bulges on the bottom of the rings were remnants of its last contact with the deepest water. In other words, the unfrozen water at the bottom of the puddle was, in essence, pushed and suctioned into the cracks." from Douglas Stith's website

Garden Etiquette # 4 - Playing with Henry Moore Sculpture

This might appear to be Garden Etiquette # 4 - don't play on the sculptures by famous artists.  The Henry Moore sculpture in front of the Art Gallery of Ontario gets a lot of wear and tear, and takes it well. Children were playing on it last week when I was there. A close-up view of the sculpture reveals the detailed textures that form the skin of what seems to be such a smooth surface.  And with some processing, the variation of colour really shows.  It is the reflections of the signs on Dundas street along with the sky.