Dry Slot

Well, that's it. The 2012 Tour de France is history. Bradley Wiggins won. The UK and team Sky shared the two top spots on the podium.

Peter Sagan won the green sprinter's jersey. Thomas Voeckler won king of the mountain polkadots. American Teejay Van Garderen won the white jersey, which is for best young rider, and finished fifth overall. Radioshack-Nissan won the team competition.

The weather station at the local airport recorded another ⅔ inch of rain last night. Here at the house we had hard rain and plenty of fireworks as a series of storms passed during the night. Spooky Margaret the cat was hiding under the bed. Tybo stuck close to me on the couch. I would have guessed more rain than that. Wife and I could hear it drumming on the roof.

Clouds blocked the sun again this morning, but the forecast gives only 20% chance for more rain today. The overcast is holding temperatures in the seventies through 2:00 PM. That's twenty degrees below our recent highs.

SBKaren, I remain convinced that drugs are not the main story in the world of bike racing. The epic tale of this year's Tour stands on its own merits. A lot of those riders will be moving on to the Olympics now.

I wonder whether some of the furor over drug use originates in the French psyche. The French people seem more conservative than I am about a number of things. They have instituted an Academy to preserve the purity of the French language. The rules of the Tour limit what riders can do with their bodies and with their equipment. Only male riders can compete, and they must compete as equals in a single class.

Purity and simplicity are laudable goals. And who am I to tell the French people how to organize the most famous race in cycling? Still I have to wonder. There is much to be gained by loosening up a little. Many kinds of racing events allow competition in multiple classes. You could have, for example, a prize for best female rider; for best unlimited rider, which would allow open drug use, cyborg attachments or whatever; or for unlimited bicycle design.

We don't see a lot of cyborg sports -- yet, but I think that answers your question about what happens when our natural bodies top out. We already see progress in artificial limbs and sensory organs for people who suffer crippling injuries. I've seen frequent ads for Paralympics airing alongside announcements for the summer Olympics. How long will it be until some of this technology becomes irresistable to healthy athletes?

And the rather staid upright bicycles used in the Tour de France are defined and limited by the rules of the race. If you want to design a human-powered two-wheeled machine to go fast, you don't build it like that. You want a very light weight low slung vehicle with a fairing to cheat the wind. Such a design would not only be faster, it could be made safer as well. The rider would not have as far to fall to the ground, and the vehicle could offer more protection in a crash. On a recumbent bike the rider sits between the wheels with his strongest, best protected limbs forward.

You're right about schools. The emphasis in testing and grading is on academic performance. Is that the best way to run a school? Wouldn't our society be a better place to live if schools were about assessing individual talents and finding a niche for each student within which he could live well and be happy? Might schools not do better to encourage cooperation rather than competition? The common mantra for sports might work as well for education: it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

Hi, sp. Thanks for bringing so much food for thought to this potluck dinner.

I wish I had thought of Bradbury. I have a copy of Martian Chronicles on the shelf. I didn't list Douglas Adams, either. I suppose I think of him more as a humorist than as a sci-fi guy.

It's hard to think of Asimov as a writer who might be taught in high school. I surely read some of his stories in high school, but it was voluntary. ;o) I might choose one of his other works, such as I, Robot over Foundation. Shucks, I don't know; I've never tried teaching school, and it's been a long time since I read either book.

Thanks for mentioning Kim Stanley Robinson. Those colorful Mars books are amazing in their scope and vision.

My preference for Niven may be age-related in the sense I was discussing with ycd. When I was young his writing suited me perfectly. His later work... not so much. I don't know if that's his fault or mine. I still get a kick out of Man-Kzin Wars, which is an ongoing collection of novelettes and short stories edited by Niven and set in his Known Universe.

You mention fantasy. I must admit I'm reading more fantasy lately. I suppose Tolkien gets a lot of the credit for that. I read Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz as a child, and those made a big impression. I've mentioned Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series in this blog before. I've started a trilogy by Patrick Rothfuss, the first volume of which is called The Name of the Wind. I'm still waiting on (what is supposed to be) the last volume, so I can't make a final appraisal, other than to say that the first two books are very well written.

Talk about cyborg athletes reminds me of the turbine car that showed up at Indianapolis one year. Here's a brief retrospective.



The car was superior technology, but it was beaten by bad luck and rules changes. The same sorts of barriers and frustrations await the first artificially amplified athletes. We pay lots of lip service to innovation, "building a better mousetrap" etc. Actually it depends a lot on who is doing the innovation, and in what field of human endeavor.

As the afternoon warms up convection has begun to fire west and north of here. It's moving this way. Looks like we may have fair chances for rain later.

With rain and warm weather the grass in my lawn is going crazy. The ground is rather soggy for mowing. I'm hoping it will dry sometime soon. In the meantime I may take my weedeater in hand and go forth to wreak whackage around the edges.

WU's 12Z model runs agree that a cyclonic impulse moving east along the Canadian border will depress the mid-continent ridge later this week. The "ring of fire" storms will push south into areas that haven't seen rain in a long time.

It's too soon to tell whether this signals a pattern change. The ridge returns after the passage of the low. The model runs end at that point.

As I mentioned earlier, it has been a while since the summer solstice. The sun will be tracking southward. Something has got to give, weather-wise, sooner or later.

Thanks for thinking of me, BriarCraft. I don't feel that I can afford to be too picky about the reason.

Speaking as someone who has considerable experience imbibing from a glass, I can say that a partially filled glass is relatively slosh-proof. So, if you're hanging with a rowdy crowd, figure out how much you want to drink and get a glass twice that size. :o)

Somehow I missed Burroughs. I was a big Tarzan movie fan when I was a kid. And I remember fondly a series of prints by Frank Frazetta, which my favorite pizza place in Austin, Texas, chose to adorn its walls. Most of the pictures were of Conan the Barbarian, but here and there John Carter or Dejah Thoris appeared instead.

Yesterday at this time I was thinking that the time had come to mow the lawn. I was waiting for dew on the grass to dry.

Aye, there's the rub. Daily temperature fluctuations favor mowing early in the morning, when it's cool. Alas, early in the morning the grass is wet. Wet grass is hard to mow. It clogs the mower and leaves clumps in the yard that you have to rake.

It's (somewhat) cooler at the end of the day, but that's when the thunderstorms come. If I wait too long, I run the risk that the yard will get even wetter, the chore will have to be put off another day, the grass will grow even longer, and the task will become that much harder.

Thus I found myself marking time, dreading the necessity of pushing the mower in the heat of the afternoon. In the back of my mind a voice was lecturing, "Summer heat kills more people than freezing in the winter!" Fortunately that voice was effectively drowned out by the tunes playing on YouTube.



Around 2:00 o'clock, as I was polishing off my petit dejeuner, I figured that the time had come. I steeled myself for the arduous chore which lay ahead. Then, "Hark! What was that sound?" The sky had gone cloudy, and thunder was rumbling. "I'm screwed. The storms have come early!"

Breathing a sigh (I was screwed, but I was also off the hook.), I started another YouTube video, an excellent recording of Ten Years After in concert. It was the latter day Ten Years After, minus Alvin Lee, but not too shabby. Probably more like Twenty or Thirty years after. Maybe Forty — I'm not sure when the video was made.

At length I emerged from my funk. It was time to feed the cats, roll the garbage can back inside (It was garbage day.) and fetch the mail. The last two items required a trip out to the street. Imagine my consternation. It was dry. Not only that, it was cool. There was a breeze. It turned out that the thunder was from a gust front. It was the outflow boundary from a derecho that knocked down trees up in Wisconsin or someplace. There was no rain. I was able to mow the lawn in (for July) amazing comfort.

Who knew?

Ylee, rain really makes the grass shoot up this time of year. Makes it more invasive, too. It tries to creep in where I don't want grass to grow.

The grassy part of the lawn works better when it's dry, but then I must water the trees, shrubs, flowers etc. I guess it's a tossup.

Right now the major problem is the heat. I don't want to spend any more time out there than necessary. Working in the yard — mowing, watering, weeding or whatever — is a lot nicer when it's cool.

...And They're Off!

Last night Wife sat through about six hours of opening ceremonies for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. I was going to watch it. I had the best of intentions, but I lacked the stamina. I quickly grew bored listening to a portentous mellotron while watching an endless series of shots of athletes doing flips in the pike position. The pageantry, the fireworks, the hoopla... I missed all that. Yawn.

This morning when I turned on the teevee there was bike racing. There is still bike racing. Flipping through the several channels NBC has fielded for this event, I found soccer (called 'football' in Britain), basketball, swimming, fencing, tennis and some other sports that I don't know the names of.

Wife said she saw a couple of countries she didn't know the names of either. That's the great thing about the Olympics: there are many ways to approach it. You can root for some particular nation. You can follow the fortunes of individual athletes. (There was an American playing for the Russian women's basketball team.) Or you can try to follow the progress of a single sport across all those channels. You'll be obliged to pick and choose somehow, though, because there's WAY too much going on to take it all in. There's just not enough bandwidth in the human sensorium.

Hi, BC. Watched some Olympics last night with book in hand. Wife was changing the channels.

Looks like I'm going to need to requisition another relatively cool and dry interval soon. The grass is growing fast. We got more rain last evening.

There are good things about that. I don't have to water. There's also an esthetic angle. Convection makes for very interesting skies in the evening. There are halls and spires and crenelations of clouds, interpenetrating layers of clouds, clouds that catch the sun and splay it across the firmament, white, blue and gray. As the sun sinks the colors shift and multiply.

Free thrills!

Last night I woke up on the couch to the strains of our national anthem. An American swimmer had won a gold medal. It was a rerun. I floundered around, disturbing the cat camped on my stomach, squinting through bleary eyes until I found the television remote, whereupon I hit the kill switch.

Reviewing that scene in my mind, I think I may have a conditioned reflex associated with that song. Not to stand up and put my hand on my heart, but to wake up and turn off the teevee. When I was much younger, broadcast stations used to play the anthem just before they signed off the air. They figured nobody would be watching through the wee hours of the morning, so they might as well save the hundreds of thousands of watts of electric power required to operate the transmitter. People at home snoozing on the couch learned to get up and turn off the set when the national anthem played. If the music didn't wake them up, a rude blast of white noise upped the ante.

Nowadays big cities run 24/7, so there is always someone ogling the tube. For several years I worked various evening and night shifts myself. I would go grocery shopping at three in the morning, then try to find something to watch on television at four or five AM. Something besides cartoons or the rural farm report. Something besides infomercials.

Fortunately these days we have lots of cable channels. If you search long enough, you can usually find, you know, an old Jimmy Stewart western somewhere. Destry rides yet again.

Kids these days have probably never seen a station sign off the air. A cable channel doesn't need a million watts to upload a signal to a satellite or land line. The economics are different.

It has been a long time since I've seen a station sign off myself. I kind of miss it. Typically the station "proudly displayed" the National Association of Broadcasters Seal of Good Practice, while an announcer solemnly intoned that the station voluntarily complied with the code, which required the station to operate in the public interest. You could learn about the station's ownership, location and technical capability. Then came the anthem along with a sequence of inspirational and patriotic images. Sometimes, instead of switching off the transmitter, the station cut to a test pattern. If the anthem didn't get you off the couch, that piercing one kilohertz audio test tone surely would.



Looks like Alabama's turn for rain this morning. The ring of fire has come to Montgomery.

A tropical wave is raining on Hispañola. Meteorological handicappers are betting that the wave behind that one may become our next hurricane.

We have a cookie cutter forecast to start the month of August. We're looking at a series of near-identical days with daily temperature variation between 70° and 90° and a 20% chance of evening thunderstorms.

That's actually an improvement. Last month daily highs were running in the upper nineties to over a hundred. High temperatures near ninety are seasonal. It's still too hot for comfort, but it's in the tolerable range.

Doc Masters says some place in Oklahoma went over 120° today. That's insane. That's like Death Valley. Sure don't want to see any of that stuff in my neighborhood.

The ring of fire keeps backing away to the south and west. The 'monsoon' is raining on Kansas now, and the storms wrap down through Arkansas into Mississippi. The center of the heat lingers over Oklahoma.

North Carolina is out of the loop. For the last several days impulses drifting southeast out of the Midwest have arrived out of phase. They pass through at night when there is no incentive for convection. It's starting to get dry again.