By request, here's a wide-angle view of the highbay where I'm spending my days. More in-depth blogging will resume when I have a network connection from elsewhere than the lab.

The Ft. Nevis highbay, framed by the gantry crane, with our partially assembled gondola in centerstage.

If you're interested in a more voluminous photostream, our postdoc Asad has been updating his Picasa galleries daily. Sadly, his camera is nicer than mine.

Panorama of the wind farm lining a ridge several miles east of Ft. Sumner, the New Mexico Wind Energy Center, located here. Click to get the huge version.

You can easily imagine a wind like this picking up enough topsoil to produce the epic dust storms of the Great Depression. Which leads me into today's links. A team of climate modelers at Goddard has published simulations of the climate during the Great Depression and demonstrated what I think was common knowledge to people that lived through it, that land use patterns were partially responsible for the dust storms. (via ars technica) Growing up I was always told that the dust storms came about because of all the dried-up farmland that had replaced the prairie grass of the great plains. What is interesting, though, is that the simulations suggest that the conversion to farmland actually amplified the drought itself. But again, that pretty much squares with experience.

Another nifty trick you can do with wide open agricultural spaces is tell directions. If you're sufficiently motivated, start recording what direction the cattle face as they stand around chewing their cud. The result turns out not to be random -- on average, cattle (and some types of deer as well) will tend to align with the magnetic north-south axis. It's long been wondered whether this is coincidence (due to some bovine preference regarding wind direction, sunlight, or what have you) or if herds of cattle can actually be used as large smelly compasses. Again from the PNAS, a group of European wildlife researchers suggest that the latter is true. The proof is quite elegant: when grazing near power lines the cattle will align themselves with the magnetic fields emanating from the lines, but with increasing distance will gradually revert to geomagnetic alignment. No indication is given as to why Angus like to imitate iron filings.

And while we're on environmental topics, you all knew that there is mercury in high fructose corn syrup now, right? HFCS is in essentially all processed foods, of course, at least in the United States, since it allows the massive amounts of corn we overproduce to be converted into sweets and preservatives. Making it is a somewhat proprietary (read: secretive) process, but it involves processing corn starch with, among other things, caustic soda and hydrochloric acid. One way to make those substances in industrial quantities is the mercury cell process, an electrochemical process in which salt is dissolved in mercury. While the process is designed to recover and recycle the mercury, several tons per year cannot be accounted for, presumably some of which is dissolved in the output products. There is no regulation restricting the use of chemicals made this way from being incorporated into food, and as it happens the FDA mostly does not include HFCS-containing processed foods in its mercury testing program. Awesome.

The NASA highbay at Ft. Sumner after a light dusting of snow. 27 March 2009

For the time being we're staying in the local Super8, but we spent part of the afternoon looking at houses and apartments to rent for the couple of months we'll be here. The two houses were both depressing and in serious need of a remodel -- while some of us have low enough standards that we could imagine sleeping in them, half the point was to acquire kitchen facilities so we don't have to eat out all the time, and in that department the houses were seriously delinquent. On the other hand, we found an apartment in town that was just remodelled, and is apparently spacious and clean. The current thinking is to stash a couple of the more fragile types there and make lots of keys so we can all cook. We'll see how that pans out.

Despite being a mite busy, I do still try to keep up with things. Via Baseline Scenario I find a longish article in the Atlantic (by that blog's author and former IMF economist) observing that the present United States economic implosion displays a disturbing similarity to the failed emerging economies that the IMF spent most of the 80s and 90s brutally repairing. Here, as then, the long-term solution is to break the power of the oligarchs running the country in question into the ground. Nice to see that sort of rhetoric is back in fashion -- until recently, only labor activists and other officially disreputable types were talking up our "second gilded age".

Taking a longer view, here is a comparison between the present mess and the Roman financial crisis of 33 CE. That one was solved in part by throwing the richest guy around off a cliff and seizing his gold mines for the emperor.

It'll probably be a solid 12-hour day here, but it's not too bad. Playing rock music in a NASA hanger in the middle of nowhere with a windstorm howling outside in the pitch black. I've missed this part of the country.

Mostly, two things. The first, about which I probably shouldn't get much into specifics on the ever-googlin' internet, consisted of fun with immigration lawyers, weeks of collating and collecting various sorts of documents, and a fairly nerve-wracking (in anticipation, mostly) interview with the DHS-based successor to the INS. Very provisionally, we are in the clear now, but for the next ninety days or so keep your fingers crossed for Elena nonetheless.

The second, about which I will happily get into specifics, is that here I am, barely a week after putting Item #1 to bed, getting ready for a one-way flight to New Mexico. It's finally time to give EBEX a test flight, so I'm off to the tiny hamlet of Ft. Sumner for a couple of months to get it into the air. Or rather, since that part isn't really in my bailiwick, I'll be making sure it knows what to do once we unplug the cords, and that we can still talk to it up there. I'll be sure to post photos, as this run should be more visually interesting than last year's trip to New York.

Exciting, to be sure, but this means that come June, in the first nine months of our marriage I will have been away on various sorts of field campaigns for almost exactly half that time. Fear my powers of awesome timing. Those of you who know her, try to keep Elena company for me?

In that spirit, here's a behavioral quirk of mine that I was thinking about the other day: I always touch the outside of an airplane just before boarding.

There is a rationale for that, in a sense. If I'm about to trust my life to a machine or tool, I'd want to give it at least a cursory inspection first. Boarding an airplane certainly qualifies, unless you're just planning to take it for a spin around the tarmac. But you and I have neither the ability nor the opportunity to gauge the flight worthiness of a commercial jet beyond observing that the correct number of wings and engines are present. So somewhere along the line I picked up this habit of touching the fuselage on my way through the hatch. Is that a "I'm trusting you, so don't let me down" pat like you'd give a horse? Just making the only hands-on inspection I'm allowed? Couldn't say.

So what's your quasi-rational quirk?

Here's what the system was doing earlier today, though:

Radar map from Wunderground.com for 10:35 CST, several hours after the snow storm was supposed to have reached us.

This sort of thing happens in the summer with rain storms too, though to a lesser extent. That hole developed pretty much right at the edge of the Twin Cities suburbs as the system moved in from the west, and stuck around for five or six hours, meaning that while it was snowing both east and west of us by 7 am, it didn't start here (in the urban core) until almost 1 pm. I don't think it's a heat island thing, exactly, since it was well below freezing here all day. Rather, my theory is that the metropolis has its own associated convection system that may disrupt the convective processes of incident weather systems and thus delay the onset of precipitation. However, this is a pretty obvious phenomenon and plenty of other non-experts have observed the same thing, but local meteorologists have been asked about this on several occasions, and they never seem to know much about it.

Thoughts?

Heads up, comet fans: Comet 2007 N3 (Lulin) makes its closest approach to Earth today. It's been quite photogenic, and currently at sixth magnitude and skirting past Saturn should be an easy target. Keep an eye on Spaceweather.com for the latest.

An addendum to last week's thoughts on digital signals: an in-depth introduction to the MP3 format. While only the extremely bored or those trying to write an MP3 player from scratch will want to read the whole thing, it's quite interesting to skim if you want an idea of how those ubiquitous MP3 files manage to cram hundreds of CDs worth of music onto your hard drive, and the compromises that make them sufficiently annoying to work with that people keep inventing alternatives.

An endlessly fascinating online museum exhibit: Visible Embryos is a project of the University of Cambridge. Today, the image of the human embryo and fetus is common, widely used in scientific, political, and cultural contexts, but the first reasonably accurate images of the pre-natal human were only drawn about 200 years ago. The exhibit charts the developing human image of the developing human from late medieval monsters to test tube babies and abortion propaganda.

And speaking of images (and the corresponding weight of words) GOOD Magazine collects a great deal of vehicle fuel consumption data into one flawed but educational plot. A pity that they left out airships and pirate schooners, but appreciate how well this chart emphasizes a key point: by any reasonable standard, the bicycle is the most energy efficient form of transportation in existence. (No fair pointing to downhill skiing, either -- you have to count the energy used by the lift too.)

A couple of notes on local politics. Norm Coleman continues to refuse to leave the spotlight despite having essentially no chance of being declared the winner here -- he's being generously funded by the national Republican party as a cheap trick to keep Al Franken's presumptive seat vacant. I recently ran across an essay on Norm written by Garrison Keillor back in 2002 when he beat Walter Mondale for the seat. A good read and somewhat prescient: "...Norm is a slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history... Was elected mayor of St. Paul as a moderate Democrat, then swung comfortably over to the Republican side. There was no dazzling light on the road to Damascus, no soul-searching: Norm switched parties as you'd change sport coats. ...To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don't envy someone who's sold his soul. He's condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man."

On a more encouraging note, just the other day my representative, Keith Ellison, became the first U.S. legislator to enter the Gaza strip in over two years; no congressional delegations have visited that fraught patch of land since Hamas took power and Israel placed it under siege. Given how much is tied up in or connected to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Gaza seems like the sort of place we ignore at our considerable peril.

Finally: Russian schoolgirl asks Vladimir Putin for guinea pig, embarrasses local officials over ensuing Kafka-esque ordeal, gets guinea pigs for her trouble.

And a photo for getting this far.

The Denver International Airport is rather a curious sight at night.

So the infinite monkeys that have been working on the next version of Windows walk into a bar. The first one in line says, "Hey, give me a banana martini," and the barkeep goes to make one. Before he's even finished making that one, the second one says, "I'm watching my intake, I'll have half what he's having." Right behind that monkey, the next one says, "Same here, I'll have half what the second fellow is having." The bartender pauses to take in the infinite line stretching out the door, says "To heck with this," and puts two martinis on the bar.

I spent a chunk of this week re-learning various interesting things about digital signal processing, which (naturally) can be done quite conveniently in python these days. (Don't worry, I'll resist the urge to write import skynet in any programs.) In theory, if you type import scipy you can make python do anything Matlab can. While I'm still fundamentally suspicious of syntactically significant whitespace -- although I'm not about to revive that particular Great Internet Debate -- python has actually edged out perl as my go-to high level language of choice these days. The only excuse I have left to muck around in perl these days is maintaining PageCaptain, and to be honest, I've been severely delinquent on that front this year anyway.

Speaking of things digital, now that February 18th has passed, the great digital TV transition is underway. As one of the 15% or so of households still using over-the-air broadcast television, this has been of great interest to the roomies. While our rabbit ears pull in all but the two weakest stations reasonably well, the more couch-spud inclined of them have been agitating for an antenna upgrade. I might build one of these in that case. The Gray-Hoverman antenna is a nice example of Moore's Law enabling ever larger groups of people to do stuff that was the province of professionals until quite recently, in this case, design and optimize high-gain antennas. Back when the ham radio operators did this sort of thing on a regular basis, antenna tuning was considered among the highest of black arts.

Okay, that's enough of that. I'll leave you with a video that Elena showed me recently:

I think tristero nicely captures Darwin's spirit with this passage from his autobiography:

[O]ne day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as was the third one.

...I was introduced to entomology by my second cousin, W. Darwin Fox, a clever and most pleasant man, who was then at Christ's College, and with whom I became extremely intimate. Afterwards I became well acquainted, and went out collecting, with Albert Way of Trinity, who in after years became a well-known archæologist; also with H. Thompson of the same College, afterwards a leading agriculturist, chairman of a great railway, and Member of Parliament. It seems therefore that a taste for collecting beetles is some indication of future success in life!

The Origin of Species, incidentally, is a pretty good read; almost all of Darwin's works are available online as text and scanned pages (so you can see the pictures).

Lincoln was a gifted orator and made a great many excellent speeches, but the one most relevant to today isn't his most famous: his words in the Cooper Union Address could be delivered today, with just a few words replaced, when speaking of the unreasoning right wing of today's politics as well:

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Also, today is my roommate Adele's birthday. But to the best of my knowledge, her great speeches and world-changing books are still in the planning stages.

After the end of the Civil War there were, for a time, various African-American members of congress elected from the Reconstruction-era South. But then came the "redeemer" governments using a combination of a terrorist violence and state coercion to institute an apartheid system and for a while black elected officials departed from the federal government. On January 21, 1901 George Henry White, the last of these Reconstruction-era members of congress, said:

This, Mr. Chairman, is perhaps the Negroes’ temporary farewell to the American Congress but let me say Phoenix-like he will rise up some day and come again. These parting words are on behalf of an outraged, heart-broken, bruised and bleeding, but God-fearing people. . . . The only apology I have for the earnestness with which I have spoken is that I am pleading for the life, the liberty, the future happiness, and manhood suffrage for one-eighth of the entire population of the United States.

No African-Americans served in the United States Congress for the next 28 years, until the Chicago South Side elected Oscar Stanton DePriest in 1928 (the Illinois 1st Congressional District has been represented by African-Americans ever since, and happens to be President Obama's home district as well. Incidentally, it was my home district for five years, too.) By contrast, no Southern state would elect an African-American to federal office until 1973.

Obviously we've now seen many African-Americans in the highest offices: many Congressional Representatives, a handful of Senators, and for one day now, President Obama.

To close the inauguration, civil rights leader and Reverend Joseph Lowery gave a moving benediction. Here's a transcript. The ending drew a few laughs from the crowd:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.

But it also generated some confused and startled reactions, too, especially from younger and white listeners. Naturally, some of the usual conservative suspects have been clutching their pearls in outrage over the presence of such "inappropriate" and "divisive" language, but you can safely ignore them. More commonly there seems to have been a somewhat widespread "that was cool, that was weird, where in the world did that come from?" type of response. And actually, I didn't know offhand -- I'd definitely heard something similar before, probably in a civil rights context, but darned if I could remember where!

The internets settled pretty quickly on what was I guess the most readily Google-friendly answer, and it's not a bad one (see e.g. this Kos diary). They claim it derives from great Chicago Blues artist Big Bill Broonzy's Black, Brown, and White:

they says, "If you was white, should be all right,
if you was brown, stick around,
but as you's black, hmm brother, get back, get back, get back"

It's a deep little song, and while this was undoubtedly unpopular in the late 40s, it doesn't quite scan as the source Lowery is working from, though. Two extra colors, for one thing, and I feel like I remember hearing something close to those lines about red and yellow before. With a bit more digging, I turned up this mention of a much older rhyme, which led me to this blog post's links. Quoting from Lalita Amos:

Reverend Lowery deftly reworded a very old and very terrible rhyme that is widely-known in the Black community, which went:

“If you’re white, you’re alright
If you’re brown, stick around
If you’re yellow (a reference to light-complexioned Black people, generally of mixed race, who were percieved more favorably), you’re mellow
But if you’re black, get back."

One source even claims this goes all the way back to the plantation era, which sounds plausible. The rhyme alludes to the social heirarchy in many black communities, in some cases persisting to the present day, which assigns higher rank to fairer skinned families, privileging in effect those with white ancestors -- in practice, historically, the result of sexual abuse of slaves or native blacks respectively by slaveowners or colonial masters -- but also relevant to the larger world as lighter skinned blacks were nominally closer to being able to pass for white and join the social stratum of the masters. This particular stratification has broken down considerably or even reversed in some cases in America, as by now a couple of generations have grown up with no memory of Jim Crow, while legal and social bans on interracial families have steadily eroded. However, Lowery remembers this very well, and given the consternation from some quarters during the campaign about whether Obama is too African or maybe not black enough, it's actually quite relevant, and worthwhile to subtly reject that.

But that's only half of what he was talking about, I think. Because in his repurposing -- and I still could swear I've heard it used this way before -- much of his audience took yellow not to mean blacks who can almost pass for white, but to mean East Asians. (Which was the source of some of the cognitive dissonance; since nobody actually calls them "yellow" anymore, it sounds both offensive and anachronistic.) And so forth. Given the demographics of that crowd on the Mall, plenty of people there knew the old rhyme and class system it represented, but to a large segment listening it sounds instead like an oddly phrased but broadly inclusive call for justice among all the ethnicities in America, which aligns nicely with the post-racial rhetoric that has featured prominently this past year, and the big-tent tendencies of the Democratic party in general. I don't imagine that was unintentional, either.