The Volcano Whisperer

As a kid born and raised in Chester California it was our civic duty to know all about the “Only Active Volcano in the Lower 48 United States” which was Mt. Lassen, just a few miles away. It was an easy day trip for the class to see the bubbling mudpots and smell the sulfur in the air. I took a personal liking to that mountain and it seemed tame in spite of the recent eruption in 1910. Hiking to the top only takes a few minutes on an easy trail and the view from the summit is convincing proof there is still fire down below. With clouds rising from the steam vents and the walls of the crater flashing electric yellow from the pure sulfur made it truly feel like the volcano was still alive.

Mt. Lassen’s glory only lasted until 1980 when Mt. St. Helens took over the crown as the Most Active Volcano on the entire North American Continent. Again it felt like it was happening in my own back yard with the ash in the air and all the commotion on the news. Seems like everywhere I go there is another mountain mouthing off. That was when I first got the notion that somehow it was my fault and I had better stop making the mountains mad. I spent years living at the base of Mt. Shasta always looking over my shoulder to see if the mountain was looking back.

Now anyone who has watched the science channels on TV knows that the most active volcano in the USA and maybe the whole world is the one that made the islands of Hawaii. That is one super volcano that has been going on for a long time and I have never been anywhere near the place so at least I am off the hook for that one. But I still wonder whenever I see a volcano spouting off on the news, I can’t help but think that somebody must have done something.

I don’t know why I like all the Natural Disasters so much but you must admit they are exciting. Earthquakes are the worst but unpredictable even when their location is known in advance. Ice Ages are impressive but who can wait that long. Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Cyclones, they are all impressive but so temporary you can’t plan a party. But not the good old volcano. They are always there where you left them ready to provide entertainment at any time.

Education in the 1960’s

Way back then schools were simple compared to all the options available today. There was no home schooling, no alternative school, no church school, there was just the one public school and we still learned enough to get by. Now days hardly any kids go to the public schools with all the virtual classrooms out there we will soon end up with virtual teachers and finally virtual students.

The most import class when I was recess because there were so many. We had an Early Morning recess before class started and then the regular morning recess right after show and tell. Next came Lunch recess which was followed by the afternoon recess and then finally we had the after school recess while waiting for the bus. With all those recesses we needed some down time to catch our wits but first we had to spend an hour each on Art, Music and PE which left precious little time for the reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.

The favorite high tech device at school was the Projector. There were two variety of projector, the common overhead projector and the motorized movie projector. Even though there was an overhead projector in every room they were still only used on irregular occasions for special material and the one shared movie projector was only dragged out for super special occasions such as holidays or snow days when we couldn’t go outside for the many recesses.

In between projector use the next most high tech tool in our classrooms was the mimeograph machine. It took a simple piece of carbon paper and turned it into a real printer with a simple cranking motion, no electricity required. They should have kept it around just for the exercise.

The real work horse back then was the chalk board. This ever present wall of green (sometimes brown or black, later replaced by white) was used by every teacher without exception. How else was the substitute going to communicate their name. The chalk board was a combination bulletin board and shared display. Every student took their turn at the board just for the fun of it. For us there was nothing more educational than that clicking and scraping sound of a teacher conveying knowledge on a chalkboard.

Cleaning the chalkboard was a privilege that all the wannabe students would fight for. You could tell how productive a class was by the size of the chalk dust cloud produced when the chosen kids would clap the erasers every afternoon. The gym class had no cloud at all while the science classes consistently put out a veritable fog and in between were various clouds of a size in direct proportion to the quantity of the learning achieved in that room.

The sound of chalk scratching on the chalkboard has been replaced with the squeaking of magic markers on whiteboards and now there is no way to measure the teachers productivity.

Sweet Spots

Life is a series of long boring stretches with brief moments of extreme along the way to help us remember anything at all. In between the sour spots are occasional sweet spots where everything works out right for once. October is the sweet spot in time for yellow leaves on trees. That is also the month when the tarantulas migrate.

The planet Earth certainly sits within the sweet spot zone in the sun’s warmth. Alongside Mother Earth is the Moon which also represents the perfect balance between living too close together and someday collide or too far away so they eventually wander apart. If the moon were too big it would take over more than our tides and if it were too small it would only be a token.

The sweet spot is not always at the middle. Being wealthy or powerful is best savored at the top just as the sweetest golf score is down at the bottom. Like the old joke that goes; “When they called for brains I thought they said pains and I didn’t want any”. When we line up for brains you want to be first and for pains the best place is last.

Carbon owns the sweet spot on the Periodic Table of elements by virtue of being flexible enough to bond with more neighbors than anyone else and in more ways too. All the good stuff is made with carbon and not just living matter. The hydro-carbon bonds cover everything from gasoline to plastic. On our planet in this galaxy with this set of universal physics, there is no better building block than carbon.

The color green sits on the sweet spot of our visual spectrum. There are good arguments that we specialize in green because plant life did it first but in any case there are more shades of green than any other color and it sits right in the middle of visible light between the extremes of infra-red and ultra-violet.

Goldilocks can be the cheerleading mascot of the sweet spot philosophy; finding that best of all worlds, the middle ground between too much and not enough of whatever is under discussion at any given moment. The banana belt is a kind of sweet spot, geographically speaking. Sweet spots are out there, everywhere and anywhere but it’s up to us to find them and I am hoping to find mine on vacation next week.

Server Room Series – Chapter 5: Quarterly Outages

I had a friend who was a Millwright and every summer they had a two-week “Shutdown” at the mill so they could rebuild all the machinery that had to run 24\7 the rest of the year. My friend was mad that he had to work double-time for two weeks while everyone else had the time off, so he eventually switched from millwright to truck driver even though the pay was less and the job was not as interesting. No one wants to do the dirty work.

In the hi-tech world the shutdowns are more frequent and our company has settled on once every three months around the second week of February, May, August and November. We have two basic types; minor and major Quarterly Outages. A minor outage has to have basic services up so people can keep working on projects while the major outages require every device be turned off for a complete fresh start.

The timing of the shutdown is critical so the last one down has to be the first one up or every other machine will sit there on boot up waiting for the other guy to start the handshake. The network has to be first, the DNS name resolvers are second, and then come all the secondary service providers so that none are left hanging. Each type of server has further dependencies to get the desired clean start and it is not uncommon to have to go back and start over.

There is that one brief moment in the middle of the major Outages when everything is turned off and the server room is almost silent for once, except for the background hum of the AC and UPS units. The place is almost dark with all the racks silent and missing their blinking lights it is as spooky and feels as bad as having the power go out completely. It is almost a peaceful moment except for the anticipation of something going wrong on reboot and we are always anxious to get it over.

Even though we have test machines that we practice on before each outage and we try to anticipate every contingency there is still always some fallout after the Outage is over. Every outage is good for a few panic attacks and there is almost always that one server or service that does not come back up and some patch has to be removed or the whole machine rolled back to a previous version. Finally we declare the Outage is over and take a comp day off to recover from the all 24 hour marathon but right after that we immediately start planning for the next Quarterly Outage.

Chapter 5: Maintenance of Way Cars

When it comes to railroad cars there are those famous train cars, the flatcar, the boxcar, the tanker, the refrigerator (or reefer) but there is another class for the maintenance department. The Maintenance of Way Department gets its name from the old “right of way” concept that was leftover from the “Eminent Domain” loop hole that all railroads used to make a land grab back when that was still legal.

In all my years working on the railroad I was always on the lookout for one of those hand cars where two people would push the handle up and down in a teeter-totter motion to drive along the tracks like the ones used by Charlie Chaplin in the old movies. I never did find one of those hand powered cars even though I made a thorough search through all the scrap heaps in all the train yards and camps up and down the line. But I did find a heap of other kinds of track cars such as these.

Gravity Car:

No more than six inches tall it folds into two pieces and can be removed by one man in a single move. Weighing no more than 45 pounds the gravity car may sound light weight but in fact is a heavyweight contender being capable of carrying over 2 tons. It is composed of heavy metal diamond shaped wire mesh of hollow pipe frames for an incredibly strong yet light little piece of equipment. These are loaded with everything from spikes, creepers, plates, ties rails and even workers though not recommended. This car was responsible for a number of ankle and foot injuries beyond the protection offered by the mandatory steel toe boots.

Track Car:

This small square box was nothing more than a frame with a lawn mower motor in between the two passenger seats and barely room for any equipment. These were light enough for one person to take them off at a crossing though two people was the minimum under the book of rules, though we often went out alone. These small cars were only meant for inspection purposes and light weight tools though they invariably were overloaded with tools and extra workers.

Motor Car:

This is the four cylinder version of track car with room for 6 workers sitting on ¾ inch plywood top over the engine and it was so heavy it could only be taken off the tracks using a pair of runner rails that pivot on a center allowing the car to be turned out into a tool house or take-off ramps conveniently located at regular intervals between stations.

The minimum crew for a motor car was 4 men but 2 experienced employees were generally allowed to skip that rule. Yes, I have done it alone several time but only using the best take off rails and pivot that were supposed to never leave the local tool house.

We used to have a morning ritual to fill the gas tank without a funnel and not spill a drop. It may sound droll if not dangerous but I remember practicing and finally getting good enough to volunteer for the morning fill up without a funnel.

Crew Car:

These Diesel powered trolleys were up to 10 feet long and could carry as many as 40 men and equipment by attaching push cars. Crew cars did have take off rails but they were rarely used and crew cars were always used in conjunction with work trains and would simply stay on the sidings with the trains.

Push Car:

These are low flat cars that can be attached to any of the motorized cars but are just as frequently found to be pushed by hand. With two push cars you can accommodate even the longest rail using one at each end. Railroad rails will easily turn from side to side but not very much in the up and down direction. You can load ties and even loose gravel on a push car and then move it an dump like a wheel barrow. It still takes two strong men to take a push car off.

The first fatality after I started was a runaway push car that went 17 miles down the hill to hit an unsuspecting welder sitting on the rail. His helper never heard or saw anything because the push car is so low to the ground and runs silently. We all had a different view of push cars after that.

Hi-Rail Car:

This is any motorized vehicle with the necessary attachments to allow it to drive down the rails. It is mostly heavy trucks for work but can be more suburban looking passenger vehicles for the big shots to have a special close look. The bigger the shot the fancier the hi-rail car all the way up to actual Cadillacs just so they could remain comfortable during their track inspection while we had to poke along in our motor cars.

I never did find one of those hand powered push cars like Charlie Chaplin used but I did find out that they were outlawed in the 1940’s for causing too many injuries and were thereafter banned for life nationwide. I am sure they still exist somewhere and I would even pay money to ride one despite the risk if they ever put one in at Six Flags.

Molecule Missed

Whatever happened to the lowly molecule. When I was a kid there was plenty of news about molecular studies but then everything moved on to Atomic science and we never looked back. It’s not that we should stop working on the atom but by now we should have completely mapped out the molecule when it turns out that no one knows a thing because they stopped working on it anymore. They all moved on to the more sexy stuff in bigger or smaller fields of study.

Somewhere between the elements and the atom is the Rodney Dangerfield of all Scientific subjects; the molecule. When the scientists who study physics first went in search of how things work, the molecule was their first theory as the chunk of matter that could not be seen but must exist to keep things together. The molecule was soon found boring and they next invented an even smaller bit called the atom which also cannot be seen but must exist in order for molecules to exist. They are driving so fast they have not time to look in the rear view mirror to see what they missed in their blind spot.

And that was the last time anyone gave a darn about the poor maligned molecule. Those scientists were on a mad dash to find even smaller stuff they called sub-atomic and they would be happy if they turn up sub-sub-atomic dinkies but what about the molecule? Does anyone know how it works? No, they are too busy going the other way.

That same thing happens everywhere we look. The computer engineers are trying to make the smallest transistor possible but they still don’t understand the potential of a big one. The Doctors only want to cure obscure corner cases but no one works on the common cold. The weatherman wants to talk about a hundred year flood but can only predict the rain a few days in the future.

It’s like trying to fly to Jupiter without stopping at Mars first. It’s the least we can do on the way out there, for practice at least. And if we ever do get to Mars we would soon lose interest in the moon no doubt as we work our way out to Jupiter and beyond. So we should also find our way around the molecule before we go any further in, as it were.

There is definitely a missing link between what we want to know and what we need to know let alone what we should know. If we are all that smart then we should know more by now.

Get Out of My Road

There is a well worn analogy in general use lately that states that any given amount of energy can be translated into the “Equivalent of taking thousands of cars off the road”. The favorite number for the amount of cars is 280,000 but it can be as much as millions and as little as a few thousand depending on the subject in question, but in all cases the formula is clearly meant get an emotional response. We are either scared of all that pollution if we don’t do something or delighted at the idea of taking all those cars off our road. Who hasn’t been stuck in traffic and wished all the other cars would just go away.

This verbal sleight of hand is an equal opportunity deception used by any speaker from any political party and can be tailor made to fit any scenario. Of course it can be used by the Green Team to make a case for turning off the lights or recycling paper but the other side can use the same logic to prove that we need to drill for more oil or add another nuclear plant. The problem with this line of thinking is that none of those things will actually reduce the number of cars on the road. We can turn off all the lights and build a big new power plant but it won’t take any cars off the road.

The theory states that if everyone would just start to do the right things it will be like taking so many cars off the road, but no one ever bothers to mention what year, make and model of car. Are those Hummers or Fiats? Eight Cylinders or 4? Do all those cars have good tires and a tune-up? What will happen to those cars? The whole idea is based on a ridiculous assumption to begin with and if we try to analyze it logically it only gets more meaningless.

Some of the blame goes to the word “equivalent” because it is so close to the word “equivocate” which means to “ deliberately mislead with the intent to deceive.” That sounds exactly like what is happening when we start out by assuming the positive outcome (fewer cars on the road) but end up with a negative result (fewer lights and more nuclear power plants). Whenever an argument uses an equivalent statement you can start to worry about equivocation.

Why can't paper reduction be compared to trees, lights compared to electricity and plastic bottles compared to…: Plastic. But instead we keep dragging the image of those cars being taken off the road like a tired old movie plot twist that is guaranteed to satisfy the viewing public. Why can't we just take cars off the road if that is the result we crave so much? Because we only want to remove the other cars, not ours.