Sidetracked Charley

I find it hard to believe the year is almost over. Been a relative good year. Especially in relationship to 2010. I suppose I should be thinking about a year in review blog but my focus at the moment is on the gathering storm. Storm reports are fodder for us locals. We all have our opinions. The tourist center and the ski resort are currently picking up on the weather report with the greatest snow depth forecast - 12 inches. But then this storm was suppose to actively begin at midnight and when I looked out the window at 5 a.m. there was not a flake. As I write this (9 a.m.) there is only two to three inches. I think I am being really generous with the three. But the ravens are celebrating over the trees. They generally go into this party dance when they know they might have to roost for a while. We all have our little signs we look for to bolster our opinion. I think maybe only about 6 to 8 inches at my house. It is wise to remember I live in the mountains. And weather and snow d...

Lorenz Attractor Thought I would talk a walk on the wild side this morning: Science's attempt to explain the unexplainable - Chaos Theory. Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, with applications in several disciplines including physics, economics, biology, and philosophy. Chaos theory studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions; an effect which is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect . Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simp...

I was sure that December was the coldest month. It is the darkest because of the Winter Solstice falling this year on the morning of December 21st. But when I went to Google and confirm my facts before posting I found the following information: January is the coldest month... Because water retains heat. Between 70 percent and 75 percent of the Earth's surface is covered in oceans, rivers, and lakes. (There's even more water vaporized in the air or stored in the ground.) During seasons of longer days and more sunlight, these geographical features are able to store up and retain heat over long periods of time, before emitting it as the days get shorter. A body of water is far more effective as a space heater than, say, a big field of rocks: The water holds on to five times as much heat per gram . Since I have lived in the mountains of northern New Mexico my feelings run counter to this information. In my memory we often get about ten days every January where night temperature...