Randy’s Blog

Nautilus is a bi-monthly magazine featuring science-related articles, interviews, book excerpts, short fiction, and more. It also has really cool artwork to go with the stories. Wendy gave me a gift subscription to it for my birthday last year, and so far, I really dig it.

We took a couple of trips late last year, and the Nautilus issues I brought along made for excellent reading at the airport and on the plane. For example, in the Nov/Dec issue from last year, there's a brief article about events in Japan called Rui-Katsu, which are "tear-seeking" events, where people gather to watch a series of really sad short films designed to make them cry. It's a socially acceptable way to release emotions. But, the article points out, crying events really aren't anything new. That's basically what the movie Godzilla was when it was released in 1954. The Japanese associated Godzilla with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but since it was considered inappropriate to talk about those events, people went to see the movie and cried violently as the monster destroyed Tokyo. Godzilla, basically, was a form of therapy for Japan.

This was such a revelation to me! I had never connected the dots between Godzilla and the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan in WWII. But now it makes so much sense.

Another article from the same issue talked about the explosion of Mount Tambora in 1815. It was the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, and it altered weather patterns around the world. The following year, 1816, was called "The Year Without a Summer", or (my favorite) "Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death". The extreme weather triggered by the explosion led to crop failures and massive starvation. For the 3 years following the explosion, "to be alive, almost anywhere in the world, meant to be hungry."

Parts of Europe were especially hard hit with violent weather. One observer in Switzerland wrote that the tremendous thunder during one storm had a "bodily impact" like that of a heart attack.

Amidst all of this chaos, Frankenstein and Dracula were born. Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and a few friends spent the bizarre summer in Switzerland, staying warm by the fire, having a ghost story competition, and (possibly) smoking opium. Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, and John Polidori, one of their companions, wrote The Vampyre, which later inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The article referenced a movie from the 1980's recreating that summer through the eyes of Mary Shelley, but, annoyingly, it didn't mention the movie's name! After a bit of research, I found there were actually two such movies in the 80's. I was able to get a copy of both through the library system in our area. The movie the article referred to was Gothic, directed by Ken Russell. It's a horror movie and unless you really, really enjoy horror movies, I don't recommend it. Stay away. The other was Haunted Summer, directed by Ivan Passer. It's a drama and was much more enjoyable. Neither movie really addresses the effects of Tambora, though, which was a little disappointing.

Yesterday I finally sat down and created the cherry cordial program that I wrote about here. It will run twice a week and email me if any Little Debbie cherry cordials are in stock nearby. The code itself is rather boring to look at; most of it involves error checking. If anything goes wrong at any point, it has to alert me, otherwise it could break and I would never know. To run the program, I type something like this:

./snackfinder --product='Cherry Cordials' --zip=12345 --radius=10

As of today, there are no cherry cordials near me. I expect that to be the case for the next 8-9 months.

Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was also a programmer. In the book Last Chance to See he says:

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Ha! That's pretty much how I feel about my snack finder. It was 3-4 hours of work, and it's saving me only a few seconds of effort, but I am extremely pleased with it, nonetheless!

College football is over, and has been for a while, so I've had a chance to catch up on TV shows I've missed. That includes resuming my Star Trek: TNG watching duties! I finished up season 6 recently and started season 7. The final season! Only 20+ episodes to go.

I'm also starting to get excited about watching Deep Space Nine after I finish with The Next Generation. I watched very little of it when it aired, so it will be almost all new to me. From what I recall, it's much darker and more plot driven, as opposed to TNG, which is more character driven.

Finally, in other Star Trek news, check out this awesome shirt I got for Christmas from Joy & Cory:

It's Data's poem! About his cat, Spot! It's from the Schisms episode in season 6, which I wrote about here. This was a super-cool gift; I was excited to get it. Now I want to go to a Star Trek convention, so I can wear this and get mad respect from all the Trekkies.

Recently I learned that we get a PBS channel devoted entirely to Native American/Indigenous programming. Cool! It's called First Nations Experience.

I discovered it a couple of weeks ago while flipping through the TV guide. I noticed a show called "Indians + Aliens". That sounded right up my alley, so I took a look. It's a 6 episode series that follows Ernest Webb, a Cree Indian living in northern Quebec, who investigates UFO sightings reported by members of his tribe. In one episode he shows an impressive tattoo on his shoulder of an alien head wearing an Indian headdress. "These are your kind of people!" said Wendy. I've watched 3 of the 6 episodes so far. They're pretty good. I've been really impressed by the special effects used to recreate the UFO sightings.

Also relevant to my interests was an episode of "Indigenous Focus". From what I can tell, the show features short films and interviews with indigenous people. One interview was with Russell Bates, a science fiction writer from Oklahoma, who's written for Star Trek! They showed him writing in his office, which had an OU sticker on the wall near his monitor. He spent much of his career in Los Angeles, where he did some acting, but mostly writing. He wrote an episode for "Star Trek: The Animated Series", which aired in the mid-1970s. The episode was called "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth", and he won an Emmy for it! It was the first Emmy won by any Star Trek series.

I found the episode on Amazon Prime and was able to watch it for free. It's good. The Enterprise encounters a winged-serpent alien who had visited Earth long ago. He was the basis of the Mayan god Kukulkan, and the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl.

All of this got me wondering what other PBS channels we get, so I did some research last night. We get at least 8 different PBS channels from 2 Chicago stations and 1 Milwaukee station:

WTTW: Window to the World (Chicago) has 4 channels

• WTTW
• WTTW Prime
• WTTW World
• WTTW V-me (Spanish programming)

WYCC: We're Your City Colleges (Chicago) has 3 channels

• WYCC
• FNX (First Nations Experience)
• MHz Worldwide (International programming)

MPTV: Milwaukee Public Television has 1 channel

This is such a different world from the 1 PBS channel that existed when I was a kid. But I like it!

Little Debbie makes these cherry cordials, and they're delicious. I love them. 

But they're a seasonal product, only available during Christmas and Valentine's Day. I used to get them at the local Meijer store, but they haven't carried them in years, which is sad. That means I haven't had any in years. I always look at other grocery stores but without any luck. I even used the Little Debbie snack finder on their website to locate stores that carry them, but I could never find them in those stores. Bummer.

Then last night happened. After I got home from work, Wendy lamented that we had no lettuce for our burrito bowls. So I volunteered to go to the store to get lettuce, since it would give me another shot at finding Little Debbie Cherry Cordials. I went to Jewel, a store I'd checked out before, hoping this time they might be in stock. After I got the lettuce, I headed to the snack aisle, found the Little Debbie section, and, as usual, they weren't there. So I walked around the perimeter of the aisles, checking the end caps. Nothing. Then I walked down a middle section that cuts through all the aisles, and I found them! For some crazy reason, the Cherry Cordials were in a special display stand down the frozen food aisle. I have no earthly idea why they put them there. Why wouldn't they put them with all the other Little Debbie snacks? But that does not matter now; what matters is that I found them!

So I bought two boxes, went home, declared victory to Wendy, and ate some cherry cordials (a modest amount). Today I went back and bought another box, just to stock up.

And now that I know I've been looking in the wrong place all these years, a thought occurred to me. I spend my days writing computer programs. I could write a program that checks the Little Debbie snack finder once a week, and notifies me when a nearby store has started carrying them! I think I'm a genius.

About a month ago I read the article "Don't be a Sval (or a Bard)" on The Arctic Journal. It's about a new website which released a series of 10 animated videos educating tourists about the rules and regulations in Svalbard. The videos use stop-motion animation to depict two trolls, named Sval and Bard, who visit the island and have all sorts of misadventures as they manage to break every rule.

I watched the videos as they were released every few days over the past month. The last one was posted on Monday. They're pretty good. And they're short, only 2 or 3 minutes each. These were my favorite:

• Episode 4: "It is prohibited to lure, pursue or otherwise seek out polar bears"
• Episode 8: "For the sake of the environment and yourself, we recommend organized tour arrangements"
  

You can find all the episodes here.

I finished reading North to the Night by Alvah Simon, which I mentioned a few posts ago. With his boat trapped in the ice, the author spent a beautiful and terrifying winter alone in the Arctic. He wasn't completely alone, though: he had a cat to keep him company. At one point during the long and lonely polar night, he penned this poem about his cat, named Halifax:

Halifax, my cat, was furry and fat.

Oh, a finer companion could not be.

I was trapped in the Arctic,

My life was so stark it

Had no other warm company.

And so side by side,

the dark months we did bide,

Huddled as bleak blizzards blew.

And when the food ran out,

At eight pounds thereabout,

she made a fine and filling meat stew.

Ha! The ending is pretty good, but overall I still like Data's poem better. Don't worry, though, he didn't really eat the cat.

The cat, in fact, saved him from being eaten by a polar bear on numerous occasions. Whenever he wanted to leave his boat, Halifax "would sit on the top companionway step for up to a half hour just listening. She would turn her little head steadily like a radar interpreting signals too subtle for my muted human senses. If she returned to the bottom of the sleeping bag, then so would I. The next day I would find signs of the bear's ambush site next to the boat."

I spent a few minutes searching the web for the latest news on the author. I learned that in 2009, nearly 15 years after the Arctic adventure, Halifax the cat passed away. The author wrote a touching good-bye article here.

The book was fascinating. I recommend it.

To stay on top of local weather, I read the WGN Weather blog. I like that it goes into more detail than most other local weather sites. It also has a daily Q&A post, where you can ask Tom Skilling a question (he's the most popular weather guy in Chicago-land). Right before I started writing my last post about Svalbard, I read this Q&A, which I thought was really interesting, and also very timely:

Question:

How does the North Pole temperature compare with the South Pole for comparable seasons?

Answer:

The South Pole is much colder than the North Pole. The average summer temperature at the North Pole is 32 degrees (above zero) and in the winter it’s minus 40 degrees; at the South Pole, it’s –18 degrees, summer, and –76 degrees, winter. There are two reasons for the difference. The first is the difference between land and sea. The North Pole is approximately in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, separated from the “warm” water of the ocean by a few feet of ice. Warmth from the water works through the ice and into the air. The South Pole is in Antarctica, about 800 miles from the nearest ocean. The second reason is elevation. The North Pole sits at sea level; the South Pole is at 9,301 feet. Temperatures decline about 4.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet of elevation increase.

Sometime during the winter of 2007-2008, I was looking at a map of the world when I saw something I had never noticed before. There's an inhabited island north of Norway. North of Norway! And people actually live there! 

I was astounded. The map said the island was called Svalbard, and it had a city called Longyearbyen. Eventually I went online to find out more about Svalbard (which is technically an archipelago), and what life there is like. 

I created an email alert on Google News so I'd be notified about happenings on the islands. I read every story that was emailed to me, and it turned out to be a lot. I even stumbled across stories about Svalbard in unrelated web surfing. It seemed to be everywhere. Eventually, winter turned to spring and I no longer felt like reading about Arctic life, so I deleted my email alert.

Recently, though, I started reading North to the Night, the memoir of a man who spent a year in the Arctic, alone, 100 miles from the nearest town. That got me looking at Arctic maps, where I once again encountered Svalbard, and that got me thinking about the email alert I had years ago. So I recreated that alert a few weeks ago, and started reading the latest news. 

Here are a few things I've learned, both in 2008 and in recent weeks:

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Many countries have a seed bank where they keep backups of seeds in case of disaster. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is where countries can store backups of their backups. It opened in 2008 and is designed to withstand natural and man-made disasters, including nuclear war. It's often referred to as the "doomsday" vault, but the owners don't like that term. The vault's goal is to preserve biodiversity, and they point out we've already lost much of that: a hundred years ago there were over 7,000 varieties of apples grown in the United States, now there are only 300.

Just recently, a delegation from Peru traveled to Svalbard to deposit potato seeds. They said that due to global warming, their farmers have had to plant crops higher and higher up the mountain. Eventually, they couldn't go any higher, so "there was but one place left to go: Svalbard."

School has hands-on learning

An article on school life says:

Nestled between an Arctic fjord and snowy mountains, the world’s northernmost school teaches students avalanche survival, how to fend off a hungry polar bear and how to skin a reindeer.

...

Siren Lindeth, a bubbly 18-year-old girl, was one of those who skinned and dismembered a reindeer in the wild last year.

“You have to puncture its throat, skin the animal and eviscerate it. Preferably barehanded. It’s so nice to plunge your freezing hands into the still warm intestines,” says Lindeth, a hunting fan who at the age of three was already taking part in hunts with her father, bundled up on a sled.

Astronomy Photograph of the Year

This picture of a total solar eclipse was taken in Svalbard, and it just won the award for 2015 Astronomy Photograph of the year. It won the overall category; there were lots of winners in other categories, which you can see here.

The Arctic Journal

A number of the Svalbard stories I've read were published by The Arctic Journal. It seems to be a really good source of news for the entire Arctic region. And fortunately, all of its stories are published in English!

Great Western Trail (late August)

About a month ago I got tired of riding on all the same trails near our house, so I decided to try a new trail that was further away. I picked the Great Western Trail, which is about an hour's drive away. It's 18-miles long, and runs from St. Charles to Sycamore. I'd read that it was flat and rural, which sounded good to me. It turns out it's actually "flat", where "flat" means a long, slow incline in one direction, and a long, slow decline in the other direction.

I wound up doing the incline first. I kept thinking it was surprisingly hard to pedal for a flat trail, and that I must be going ever so slightly uphill. After 9 miles in one direction, I was spent. So I turned around to head back, and it suddenly got much easier to pedal. So yep. I had been going uphill. When I first started the trail I briefly wondered if I could ride the entire 18-mile length, since it was flat. But I wasn't even close.

The first part of the trail is tree covered and was very lush and green. After a while, the trail opened up and ran along a highway which wasn't so picturesque, and was also quite noisy when cars whizzed by. There were a lot of people on the trail, too, especially at the beginning. One thing I didn't like was there were no good places to stop to rest. You just had to pull over to the side of the trail.

Overall it was a fairly disappointing trip. And it didn't help that I had to drive an hour to get home.

Prairie Trail (early September)

A week after the Great Western Trail, I went back to the Prairie Trail, which is the closest one to us, and the one I ride most often. I started just north of McHenry and rode to Wisconsin (about 16 miles, round trip). It turned out to be my most enjoyable ride of the year, by far! I suddenly had new-found appreciation for the trail:

• It only took 10 minutes to get there, instead of an hour. 
• It's a very wide trail, so there's plenty of room to pass (or be passed). 
• The topography is much gentler. There are a couple of false flats, but they're short! And there aren't any big hills.
• There are several convenient rest stops, which also have bathrooms. 
• It's not very crowded, and on this day there was almost no one else there.
• And it was an especially hot day, which I like.

It was so much fun. I enjoyed the heat, the exercise, and the scenery. It was so hot, that for the first time ever I ran out of water in my CamelBak! Thankfully I was close to the end when it happened.

Prairie Trail (late September)

Over the weekend I went back to the Prairie Trail and rode the same section of trail. It looked and felt more like fall this time, with cooler temps and falling leaves. But unfortunately this time was not as enjoyable as the previous one, because I'd let 3 weeks pass without getting on the bike. My legs got tired very quickly, and it was a struggle to keep going. On the way back I was passed by a number of riders, both young and old. But I eventually made it back.

And now my season total stands at 202 miles, which is a new personal record!