Blog

Google Noodling and other Technological Pleasures

I am easily bored.

Fortunately, I’m also easily entertained. In fact I have no trouble at all entertaining myself, especially if it’s at the expense of new technology. Especially if the technology has big names attached to it like Facebook and Google.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I love and use both Facebook and Google, a lot. But sometimes they just crack me up.

For example, there is a new Facebook app allowing you to leave a message behind after you die.

What a clever idea! No need for séances, or readings by psychic mediums. All you have to do is plan ahead for what you want to say, write it down, then tell your family and trusted friends to inform FB that you are indeed deceased. Voila, you get to have the final words, the last laugh, to have your say without being interrupted.

Of course, if your final thoughts as your life ebbs away are about changing your mind, or regretting what is about to be said, well, there’s simply nothing to be done. The cat will be out of the bag.

And you better not wake up in the morgue chiller if you’ve finally told the world what you think about your in-laws, or the wife, or your boss. You may not be technically dead anymore, but for all practical purposes, you are. Or you’ll wish you were.

But I can’t help thinking how much fun it would be to plan an after-life revenge on someone I consider despicable, but don’t wish physical harm on them. Let’s say their collected body of lies, fabrications and falsehoods have earned them a stint in Hell, but you’re not sure Hell really exists. Or perhaps you’re impatient.

Imagine then a Facebook farce where you reveal that you buried a  small fortune in gold, which is now worth a large fortune, at a vacant lot at some particular GPS coordinates. Of course, you’d not mention that the vacant  lot now had a McMansion built on it, by the very person from whom you seek after-life revenge.

Photo credit: hercules-online.com

Imagine the look on your archenemy’s face when people start gathering in front of his  home with GPS units, and backhoes. Do you think that would make him nervous?

I realize there are some logical inconsistencies with such a fabricated story, but I think you can count on the  ability of most people to dismiss logic if there is believed to be a fortune to  gain.

So thank-you Facebook; no more need for haunting and ectoplasm. Isn’t technology great?

The next technology that really is fun is Google’s screening of  any and all words in your Gmail. There is a way to play games with it —  I call it Google Noodling.

Photo credit http://www.catfishingtipstoday.com/catfish-noodling/

If you’re from the south you should know what noodling is. But if  you’re not, I’ll explain. Noodling is the reaching of bare hands into a catfish hole and hauling out a feisty catfish. It’s rough and tough fishing without a  pole, line, or hook. Your hand is the hook, and you hook the fish by feel through their mouth or gills. It’s a blood sport that Roman gladiators would  have enjoyed.

So, where does Google come in?

Both my wife and I have Gmail accounts, and I noticed when my wife  sent an email to me that there were certain subject relevant advertisements that accompanied that email. We all know by now, or should, that Google  computers read every word of our messages, and uses its proprietary algorithms to select ads that might be of interest to both sender and recipient. When one of those ads are clicked on, money goes into Google’s pocket. So much for privacy.

Enter into the mix my somewhat contrarian mind. I concocted an email from my wife to me, where the scenario is that I’m on travel and she is  complaining about certain female maladies that are irritating her. Well, faster than you can say itch, an ad popped up on the email after it was sent that offered over-the-counter antifungal remedies.

Well, since the ersatz wife had started a supposedly discrete discussion with her husband, I responded in a like manner, but of course with gender-appropriate words thrown in.

Bingo! Ads for things we commonly see on TV appeared in a flash.

Are we sure there is no panel of underpaid girls in Hong Kong intercepting our emails, laughing their butts off while pushing the Cialis ad button? I don’t know; I’m not convinced.

So I decided to run a test. Posing as my wife again, I concocted a fantastic email that combined a set of mixed-gender complaints, as if the person sending the email were a fully developed and functioning hermaphrodite. Then I hit the send button and waited for the first ads to show up. I checked my account — message received, but no ads. I checked her sent mail — message  sent, but no ads showing on the sent mail.

I had my hands in Google’s gills. Their snooping computers were mystified! How delicious, I thought; Google was stumped.

And then it happened. A few minutes later when I rechecked the sent mail it had an ad for a treatment for, of all things, constipation.

Google had the last laugh. Sure, their algorithms were getting ambiguous messages about gender, so the previously targeted ads could not be sent. But I hadn’t thought about the lowest common denominator among the sexes. And after spinning a few million compute cycles thinking, the Google computers decided on a sure course of action.

Those clever devils!

I suppose the message is, new technology is being spawned at a dizzying rate, designed to provide us “features” we never thought we needed, and to keep its inventors in the black, financially. But at the same time these innovations are fodder for the imaginative mind who sees the value in a good laugh. Count me in as one of those minds.

 

 

The Green Flash and Inspiration

Some say it is serendipity. In reality, maybe it is just the human ability to increase awareness once your attention has been attracted. For example, you’re thinking about buying a black Subaru when you suddenly notice how many black Subarus are on the road.

Photo credit, Mila Zinkova.

I had been thinking of late about the Green Flash, a rare optical phenomenon that I experienced once, years ago, on the Pacific shore at Monterey California. It was memorable not only because of its surprising appearance, and its brevity, but because it was one of the most monochromatically pure and intense visions I’ve experienced.

I have since watched many sunsets over the water, trying to witness again what I saw in Monterrey. I recently watched for it from the air, flying towards the Gulf of Mexico as the sun set. I have watched from an elevated pavilion at St. Andrews State Park in Panama City, Florida.

So far, nothing has come even close to matching what I once saw. That is one of the givens for the Green Flash; witnessing it is oftentimes considered a once-in-a-lifetime event.

The closest I’ve come recently was seeing a greenish tint on the top part of the sun as it appeared to be half way below the horizon. My wife confirmed what I was seeing, but the brilliant flash of emerald green I saw in Monterey has eluded me.

And then like the black Subaru, I saw the Green Flash again recently in a rented 2007 movie, “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

But it was not the same. The Green Flash appeared in the movie like the flash from a nuclear explosion, stretching from one side of the screen to the other. There were even sound effects.

That was not the Green Flash I know.

I don’t blame Hollywood for its hyperbole. After all, I don’t think the beauty of what I once saw would convey well on the silver screen, or the TV screen. In fact photographs, such as the ones above or on the Internet fail to capture the essence of it. The brilliance of color from the flash is otherworldly — it cannot be easily reproduced.

I chuckled at the point in the Pirates of the Caribbean script when the statement is made that the Green Flash means a soul is coming back from the dead.

Master Gibbs

“Ever  gazed upon the green flash, Master Gibbs?”

“I reckon I’ve seen my fair share. Happens on rare occasion; the last
glimpse of sunset, a green flash shoots up into the sky. Some go their whole lives without ever seeing it. Some claim to have seen it who ain’t. And some say—”

“It signals when a soul comes back to this world, from the dead!”

I’m as intrigued with the paranormal as the next person, but I know what 18th century pirates could not know; the green flash is a physical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one.

According to some bloggers, and Wikipedia, the purported association between souls and the Green Flash was promulgated  by Jules Verne through his fiction. Supposedly Verne claimed it to be an old Scottish legend in his 1882 novel Le Rayon-Vert, according to which, one who has seen the Green Ray is incapable of being “deceived in matters of sentiment,” so that “he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and to read the thoughts of others.”

Others have misquoted the passage to say that “if one were to peer in the light of the green flash they would gain the power to read the very souls of other people they met.” But that quotation is a no truer translation from the French.

As I said, Verne’s passage is a fictional myth. So, one good fiction leads to another. And of course a little Hollywood computer graphics and sound effects makes it that much better.

But what inspired me to write about the Green Flash is the resemblance, in my mind at least, between the Green Flash and inspiration.

Inspiration comes to me, and you as well I suspect, in a flash. It may be rare, but like the Green Flash it is all so clear, like a lucid dream; an “aha” moment. It is a revelation, perhaps.

Flashes of inspiration have power; they cause things to happen.  Flashes of inspiration have led me to write poetry, science fiction, and non-fiction. Some would call it the writer’s Muse: I just call it that flash of inspiration that seemingly comes from outside me.

Through a flash of lucidity, inspiration caused me to invent a new type of rebreather underwater breathing apparatus. It also caused me, at a young age, to hop on a tiny 50 cc Honda motor-scooter and ride from Atlanta to almost my destination, Kansas City. (50 cc Honda scooters are not really built for long distance cruising, but that didn’t stop me from trying and almost succeeding.)

Inspiration has caused me to raise my hands to the heavens and feel the very presence of God.

Inspiration has propelled me to pull a union thug out of a courtroom and tell him I forgave him for the assault that broke my jaw. Like the cross-country motor scooter ride, not all inspired events would be considered sane except by the person inspired. But they can be life-changing.

Unlike the Green Flash, inspiration can come anytime, anywhere. But like the emerald flash of the setting sun, inspiration can occur when you least expect it.

Both are gifts to be treasured for a lifetime.

Killer Optical Illusions — Size Does Matter

A discrepancy between what you see and what you expect to see can prove fatal.

In graduate school at Florida State University I drove a motorcycle between Tallahassee, FL and my home in Thomasville, GA almost every day of the week, an 80-mile roundtrip. I seldom took the heavily traveled direct route. One alternative route took me through the boonies along a road that apparently rarely saw a motorcycle. One summer day, somewhere between Miccosukee and Metcalf I approached a ramshackle, rusting tin-roofed house, and out of the yard came bounding a dog which apparently lived for the excitement of chasing cars.

As bikes go, a Honda CL 350 was not a large bike. It was a combination road/trail bike called a Scrambler. It was smaller than even a 500 cc Honda, and much smaller than a car. That disparity in size caused the charging dog to misjudge his distance from me. He was falling prey to an optical illusion: objects that are smaller than you anticipate seem farther away than they actually are.

As a pilot, and knowing something about firearm marksmanship, I can admire in retrospect the animal’s uncanny ability to properly lead and zero in on a fast moving target. He was on a collision course with my 346 lb bike traveling at highway speed. Of course, when intercepting hard steel with something as fragile as a skull, it is not a good idea to complete the interception.

I well remember the image of that dog, mouth open, tongue lolling happily to the side of his maw, seeming to relish the chase of a moving vehicle. And then in an instant his expression changed when he realized that he was actually going to catch a moving vehicle.

I don’t think he had thought through the consequences of completing his intended attack.

He applied his brakes —- front legs fully and stiffly extended, toes digging into the asphalt. But he was too late; his momentum carried him headfirst into the mid-section of the bike as our paths crossed.

His car chasing days were over.

We humans might smugly think we are not so easily confused by an optical illusion based on expected sizes and shapes. After all, we are highly intelligent creatures. But we would be wrong in our smugness.

There is a new airport in the Florida Panhandle built in the middle of millions of slash pine acres. It was a land donation designed to assist the land owners with developing sylvan land into valuable real estate. Unfortunately the real estate crash has stymied development around the airport, so an aircraft flying at night into the field which boasts a long 10,000 foot runway, sees only blackness around the airport. What results is the so-called black-hole illusion.

The black-hole illusion applies to unusually long runways lit up at night and surrounded by impenetrable blackness. The runway at ECP (Panama City) is about twice as long as the usual runways used by general aviation aircraft, and at 10,000 feet is far longer than the runway at the previous Panama City airport (PFN). The almost overpowering visual illusion is that you are closer to the runway than you actually are, and that you are considerably higher than you are in reality. On final approach the unwary pilot gets the impression that he is too high, and must push the nose of the aircraft down. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. A pilot has to be on his game to resist the potentially deadly optical illusion.

In a black-hole situation, it is critical to fly by the aircraft instruments, with the altimeter being one of the most important. When in the grips of the black-hole illusion I find it very easy to fly the “pattern”, the rectangular visual approach that eventually leads you to the runway, at too low of an altitude. Now I am aware of the trap, but I still have to concentrate on the instruments and ignore the visual cues from the humongous runway. I also find new pilots flying my aircraft into the field for the first time falling into the same trap. Looks can be very deceiving.

A simulated black hole approach to a runway. Orbiter imagery from Guleit.com

Boeing engineers found through their night approach research that during a black hole approach flown solely by reference to the view out the windscreen, pilots will have an almost overwhelming urge to fly too low as they approach the airport. The result of such action is likely to be impact with the ground two to three miles from the runway. Details of that discussion, relying heavily on geometry, are aptly given in the following aviation news item from 2000. http://www.avweb.com/news/airman/182402-1.html.

Airline transport pilots using autopilots to fly an Instrument Landing System guided approach to the runway seldom have to worry about visual illusions. But even they can be fatally fooled when going visual. There have been at least two commercial crashes caused by the black-hole optical illusion; Alitalia Flight 4128and VASP Flight 168. (For more details, click on the Alitalia and VASP links.)

A depiction of a black hole feeding on stars and gas.

As we learn about astronomical black holes, we realize they destroy all things in their grip. However, much closer to home are personally destructive phenomena that result from nothing more than visual trickery, a vicious mental confusion between actual and perceived sizes of airport runways, and as it turns out, even between motorcycles and cars.

 

The Fashionista Mum and its New Winter Colors

This Christmas there is a fashion war going on in my front yard. It is a war of colors.

The harsh grays and whites of winter are invariably followed by a vernal bloom of pastel colors which ease our eyes away from bleakness, preparing us slowly for the cacophony of intense color we know as summer in the garden.

Fall, even in Florida, gives us one last chance at vibrant colors shortly before those Chrysanthemum blooms darken to become lifeless cocoons settling in for the cold winter.

At least that’s how it is in most parts of the world.

December in the Florida Panhandle gives us a reprieve from an immediate garden death sentence. Bouts of warm weather, following spells of cold, entice Azaleas to bloom, haltingly perhaps, not with abandon as in the spring, but celebrating in a measured sense the pleasure of 70° degree Florida sunshine.

Locals tend to say the flowers and shrubs are confused, but I don’t think Florida plants are as mindless as many gardeners think. I feel they are simply taking advantage of another opportunity to re-experience their glorious youthful days of summer. Don’t we humans do the same thing when the chance presents itself?

Gaillardia

This fall we planted both Mums and Gaillardia, and when both were in full bloom in October we noticed we seemed to have a bit too much yellow. The yellow Gaillardia were scarcely ten feet away from the yellow Mums. Both flowers had yellow petals and maroon centers. Whereas true gardeners would consider that a travesty, we, being somewhat more tolerant of our foibles, simply decided the flower colors complemented each other. And that is how it would have to stay until next year.

I have always been one to give flowers a chance to bloom again, and so as any caring husband would do, I asked my wife to prune off all the dead blossoms from the yellow mums, just to see if they would bloom again. There appeared to be nascent buds hiding beneath the green foliage.

It did not take long for us to realize that the trio of Mums appreciated the deadheading and repaid us with December blossoms. But much to our surprise, all three plants decided, in unison, to change their colors.

Now, true Fashionistas would proclaim underneath their breath that they would not be caught dead wearing the same wardrobe as the gaudy Gaillardia next door. And so they didn’t.  They reversed their colors, wearing a winter coat of maroon  accented by yellow centers.

When a Christmas visitor comes up our walkway, they are no doubt inspired by the clever combination of fall colors that still adorns our flower beds.

But I am confessing to you that we, the flower guardians, had absolutely nothing to do with it.  The Mums managed a magical switch in color that we were powerless to even conceive, never-mind enact.

And I must profess, there is a certain aesthetic logic that the Mums demonstrated. After all, dark colors are more in keeping with the relentless slide into winter that will, sooner or later, catch up with northern Florida.

The Gaillardia blooms, on the other-hand, are optimistically  unchanging, blithely unaware of what is coming. The first killing frost will, I fear, catch them quite by surprise.

Once the Gaillardia and Mums finally decide to rest for the winter, I wonder what color schemes they will be dreaminbg about. Will next year include even more surprises in the fashion competition between showy species, each trying to out-compete the other?

I can hardly wait to see.

 

 

 

 

Six-Degrees of Freedom

Photo credit Paul Burger, Houston

I’ve had an epiphany of sorts.

I was flying with friends as night was falling. We were over a mile up, the air was clear and still, not a bump to be found. City lights and major roads could be seen from over 45 miles away. We seemed to be suspended in space, with only the movement of lights sliding below our wings betraying the fact that we were traveling at 145 knots over the ground.

The fellow sitting in the seat to my right seemed interested in taking the controls, something he had never done before. I first let him handle the yoke. With the autopilot holding track so we wouldn’t get too far off course I let him see how the elevator worked to raise and lower the nose, controlling pitch. Then as I turned the autopilot off completely, I had him experiment with the rudder pedals to see how that affected the aircraft. They made the plane yaw to the left and right. Next I showed him how the ailerons on the wings work with the rudder on the tail to smooth out turns by applying roll simultaneously with yaw. That created a coordinated turn which is the most efficient and comfortable way to change direction in the air.

He was getting a mini-lesson in flying, and doing quite well for a novice.

Then I told him to point the nose of our bird towards a light on the horizon that would keep us headed in the right direction, towards our home base some 90 nm away.

He had the plane swaying slightly from side to side, but I did not interfere or correct him. Now that I think about it, he may have been doing it deliberately as he learned how the ailerons and rudders work in unison. And then he said something interesting: “It’s six-degrees of freedom.”

Granted, my friend is a mechanical engineer, and in his student days he had done a project with wind tunnels and model airplanes. That was where he gained both academic and practical experience about the six-degrees of freedom in aviation.

Image credit: Horia Ionescu, Wikipedia Commons

The six degrees involve three degrees of translation, and three of rotation. In the following illustrations, aside from the three rotational axes commonly applied to aircraft, roll, pitch and yaw, the other three axes are also shown. In a ship, motion in those translational axes are called heave, sway, and surge. In an aircraft they have less colorful terms; motion fore and aft, left and right (port and starboard), and up and down. The figure to the right shows all six degrees of freedom irrespective of the craft or method of motion.

Illustration by S. W. Halpern

 

For me, the  epiphany was the realization that my favorite things on earth (or slightly above it) involve six-degrees of freedom. Physically, there can be no greater freedom, and that freedom is found in flying and diving. No wonder I love them.

Birds live in that six-degree of freedom world, and perhaps that’s why we envy them. While we may not envy fish, per se, perhaps it is the six-degrees of freedom that lures so many of us to diving underwater. I well remember the first time I glided over a vertical precipice in crystal-clear water and realized with supreme pleasure that the laws of physics no longer compelled me to tumble over that precipice. Even now, quite a few years later, I still enjoy diving in the Florida Panhandle Springs, and finning directly over a rock face that drops vertically towards a sand bottom some 25 or so feet below. I’ll float over it, looking down, then bend at the waist and glide effortlessly to the bottom.

This is the stuff of flying dreams, of which I am also enamored.

A soul floating in space prior to incarnation, an embryo floating in utero prior to implantation; these are ways we might have once had the same freedom of motion. But soon after becoming a fetus we lose that freedom. There is no where else that freedom of motion can be experienced in a sustained manner than by  flying and diving.

Photo credit: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric

 

The following video is the best example I’ve found to demonstrate the true meaning of six degrees of freedom. Go to full screen, high def, volume up, and enjoy! (Disclaimer: I have no connection to the featured company or equipment used in the making of this video.)

Children of the Middle Waters

Children of the Middle Waters (working title) is a science fiction/thriller that has been completed and is being submitted today for consideration by Tom Doherty Associates, New York. My friend and mentor, the writer Max McCoy, has provided literary criticism and encouragement for the manuscript. Max, who works primarily in the Western genre, wrote a diving-related thriller called The Moon Pool, which happens to involve in its closing chapter the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, and someone a lot like me.

Below is a blurb briefly describing Children of the Middle Waters.

In the deep-sea canyons and trenches of the Earth lie thousands of alien spacecraft and millions of their inhabitants who have to leave soon or risk being stranded forever, or being destroyed. Due to their physiology they have been unable to directly contact humans, but they are adroit at mental contact and remote viewing, when it suits them.

They need the help of two humans to assure their safe escape, an experienced Navy scientist and a beguiling graduate student.  But introductions through mental means are slow and suspect, as you might imagine.

The U.S. government is well aware of this deep sea civilization, and is desirous of the weapons the visitors possess, which puts the two unsuspecting scientists in the middle of a conflict between powerful
military forces and powerful intergalactic forces. Things could get messy.

Even worse, jealous friends turn on the unlikely duo and put their lives at risk.

Children combines two separate Native American beliefs and legends with current events. It is a complex thriller with science fact and science fiction mixed in with military action and government intrigue. Also revealed are romantic possibilities that far exceed the capabilities of the mundane, everyday world.

Early American Indian beliefs create an ending for this story that no one could anticipate. It is an ending that causes the protagonist to realize everything he has held dear is wrong, in one way or another. At the same time he discovers a reality that is the greatest blessing that man can receive.

 

Red Star Over Jacksonville

Chinese aircraft are invading — sort of.

Russian made YAKS and the Chinese variant, the Nanchang CJ-6, are growing in popularity for U.S. pilots on a budget who want to own a former military aircraft, a “war bird”.

The CJ-6 was built in China as a piston aircraft trainer. It has a radial engine, which of course adds a shot of testosterone to any pilot flying it. Radial engines just sound so much better than modern aircraft engines. When those round engines start they belch smoke and fire like the growling of a dragon clearing its throat; which in this case of a Chinese airplane is an apt analogy.

When nicely restored, it is a thing of beauty.

I was recently privileged to fly the Chinese made aircraft registered as N82792, a 1976 CJ-6A with a 285 hp Huosai-6A HS6A 9 cylinder, air cooled, radial piston engine made in Russia. Its owner and pilot is Hank (Hoot) Gibson, a former Navy Aviator. Hank handled the takeoff and landing, and graciously let me fly all parts of the flight, except for the aerobatics. The CJ-6A is a nimble craft and a joy to fly.

The specifications of the CJ-6 are similar to the Cessna Centurion 210D; they are similar in size, maximum weight, and horse power. But having flown both, I can attest  that they are very different birds. The Centurion is a high speed cross country hauler, and the CJ-6 is a two seat, twisting, turning, go-to-guns combat aerobatics trainer for fighters.

The blades just behind the propeller that look like jet engine turbine blades are called gills, and open and close for temperature control of the engine during start-up, taxi and flight. The hotter the engine, the more open the gills. They are equivalent in function to cowl flaps in western aircraft.

Radial engines require a lot of care to move oil around the cylinders before start. Otherwise, oil settles in the lower cylinders leading to a hydraulic lock which bends engine parts when the engine tries to start.

The aircraft panel was confusing to me, a strange mixture of Chinese aircraft gauges placed in seemingly random pattern before the pilot. Among the instruments was the occasional English instrument, such as the airspeed indicator that read in knots instead of kilometers per hour. The artificial horizon, otherwise known as an attitude indicator was especially strange, with the normal western blue (for sky) and brown (for earth) being oriented upside down. Why it is completely the inverse of western indicators I don’t know.

Aerobatics are a lot of fun when you’re controlling the airplane. When you’re a passenger not in control, well speaking for myself, I’d say not so much.

On the first sequence of G-pulls, I became acutely aware that my stomach fat protruded a bit too far outward of my belt, and that that excess mass was trying to push itself down to my knees. Not a comfortable feeling.

I’ve pulled G’s before, but at a time when I was slimmer, and had my guts held in by a G-suit. Although I had primed myself with two Dramamine tablets, I could tell that after two sequences of various maneuvers; barrel rolls and such, that if we did anymore I’d be getting very uncomfortable indeed. I called off the aerobatics after that point, disappointing the pilot but at least sparing his aircraft.

Now, if I’d actually been performing the maneuvers myself, that would have been an entirely different matter. At least I like to think so.

Below is a video of the smoky start-up of that radial engine.

In the last video, our CJ-6 takes off. You can’t see much, but the point of the video is the sound a radial engine makes as it takes off at a relatively low RPM. Nothing else sounds like it.

 

Saving Poncho Villa

I called him Poncho Villa. He was an animal baby who stole my heart.

Our time together began as I was walking past the eaves to our Florida home and I heard an unusual scratching and distinctly animal sound. It didn’t sound like a rat or a squirrel, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem happy where it was. And I of course didn’t want it there either. I followed the sound around a corner, and saw that whatever it was, was trying to enlarge a small break in the eaves so it could get out.

It didn’t take me long to get a ladder and rip out a section of the eaves, and when I did, I saw the face of a baby raccoon. But as soon as I saw it, it disappeared around the corner again.

I would have to be patient.

Thinking that perhaps it could climb down the ladder, I decided to leave the ladder in place through the night. Hours later as I was pulling a car out of the driveway, my headlights shown on a nondescript little furry thing in the yard, several feet away from the ladder. I put the car in park, and leaving the lights shining on whatever it was, walked over to investigate. It was a baby raccoon, lying fairly motionless even as I approached. I assumed it was the one I had briefly spied earlier.  When I saw how small it was I knew he must have fallen, hitting the ladder on the way down, for he was much too small to climb down the ladder.

His fall must have just happened because he had not moved far, and none of the local dogs and cats had found him yet. He was completely defenseless, and did not resist when I picked him up by the scruff of his neck, as I assumed his mother must have.

Fortunately I had a large metal cage we’d once used to house guinea pigs, and it made a secure place for him to spend the night while I researched what to do with him. As shown by one of the first photos I took of him, stretched out on a pool skimmer net, he was small.

I learned two things right away — he was far from being weaned, and he could barely see. One eye was covered in pus, and the other was barely open. I think that contributed to the fact that he did not scamper away from the base of the ladder; he was essentially blind.

I thought I was in luck because a veterinarian lived next door, and I quickly told him what I’d found. Surprisingly, he seemed very disinterested. I later learned he felt the baby had no chance of survival. But I was determined to give it a go, in spite of the odds.

The Internet taught me that he could be sustained by artificial puppy milk (Esbilac) given to him from a dropper. Sure enough, he avidly drank as I squeezed it out of the dropper. At that point I committed myself to raising him till he was weaned.

Like any baby, he fed frequently, and seemed to be thriving on the ersatz mother’s milk. I started taking him outside as often as I could just to give him a break from the cage, but he never wanted to stray more than a foot away from me. He had fully accepted me as his caregiver and protector.

He’d only been home a couple of days when it occurred to me to get a can of pressurized saline from a drugstore and wash his eyes, which had been undoubtedly damaged and infected by fiber glass in the attic. A gentle pulse or two of saline was all it took to wash away the pus from one eye and cleanse the matted goopiness from the other eye. He now seemed to be able to see.

But when I took him back outside, he looked up and froze. Instinctively he seemed to realize that he was exposed to predatory birds  — he seemed the most afraid of any time I’d had him, which made him stick even closer to me when outside. So we spent more time inside than out.

It helped that my wife was out of state so she didn’t seem to mind the thought of a baby raccoon housed in the bathroom of our now grown children. But she explained he would have to be gone by the time she got back. That didn’t leave me much time to get him weaned.

We developed a routine; I’d feed him at midnight and morning, and go home at lunch to feed him again. He’d get more feedings in the afternoon and evening. Whenever I got home I’d find him hanging upside down on the top of the cage, making baby raccoon sounds, eager to be fed again. He was gaining strength.  I’m sure he’d nurse much more frequently from his mother, but somehow my work schedule and his feeding schedule just had to work out. And it did.

I started trying him on grapes, with only very limited success. Other solids didn’t really interest him, but he loved simulated puppy milk. He was a messy drinker, just like a human baby, and much of what came out of the dropper went down his chin and neck. So sooner or later it was bath time, in the bathroom sink.  Although he was not happy about it, he did not resist. After all, his body was the size of the palm of my hand, so he accepted the frustration of being washed with the same confusion and passivity as a newborn human baby.

Now that he could see, he became interested in new toys, although he was not up to playing with them like a puppy or kitten. I suppose that was too much to expect. He also was reluctant to leave his cage, and only with some trepidation did he sniff around when I pulled him out of it. To him the cage was security, where he slept and was fed.

It wasn’t long before I saw the mother raccoon, sticking her head up through a hole in the roof. A 100-foot tall pine tree had dropped limbs on a portion of the roof, breaking the plywood, and allowing water to enter enough to begin softening the wood. The pregnant mother coon had been looking for a roof weakness to exploit, and finding it, she literally ripped a hole in the plywood enough for her to enter and raise her offspring.

Apparently Poncho Villa, being mostly blind from infection, had strayed far from the nest in the attic and became trapped in the eaves. The access to the eaves was too small for his mother to squeeze in to return him to the nest. Had I not found him, he would have perished.

It was summer, and when my wife returned I had to move Poncho outside into the heat. As much as I hated it, at least his cage was in a shaded, covered porch, which had to be much cooler than the attic where he had begun life.

During one of my visits during lunch on a hot day, he taught me a lesson in regulating body heat. I found him sleeping soundly on his back with his almost bald stomach exposed to the air, and with all four limbs outstretched stiffly and all fingers and toes splayed widely. It looked like he was using his stomach and non-furred paws to act as radiators, transferring heat out of his body. Clever little baby coon.

Eventually he was very close to being weaned, and it was time to find him a more accommodating home. Fortunately, our local zoo had received a rescued raccoon baby the year before, and was excited to see Poncho. As shown in the final photo, Poncho was as uncertain about leaving his human mother, me, as I was at leaving him with the zoo.

I had grown fond of the way he would cling to my chest and stomach with his baby claws as I carried him around the house, and eventually the zoo. I would soon miss the chittering sounds he made, evident in the video at the bottom of this posting. I felt like a parent to him, and he responded as I suspect a raccoon kit (baby raccoon) would to its mother. Except for the nursing of course.

But at least the zoo gave him a physical checkup, vaccinated him, and groomed him for a role in fund raising for the zoo, a noble cause I believed. In fact, he quickly became a radio station celebrity. He never had much to say, of course, but the local radio personalities carried on about him as the zoo used him for promotion.

After a brief stint as a celebrity, he was taken to the farm of his zoo caretaker and was slowly transitioned for release into the wild, a wilderness that, unlike most raccoons, he’d never known.

Ironically, right after I saw the mother raccoon, and made a futile attempt to locate the nest, the raccoons left. The playfulness of his siblings led to their eventual undoing. I woke one night hearing chittering and scampering sounds in the walls of the house where I believed the nest to be, far out of my reach. As I stood in the room trying to localize exactly where the sound was coming from, one of the kits broke a wire in the wall that triggered  the whole house alarm. The horn was situated in the attic near where the nest was, and as loud as it was to me in the room below, it must have been deafening to the raccoons.  After that night, I never saw or heard from the family of coons again. I’m sure the mother moved them to a quieter neighborhood.

The video below is a fair representation of the sounds Poncho Villa made when I would come to feed him.  The raccoon kit in the video appears to be a little older than Poncho was when he graduated from puppy formula to, of all things, animal crackers!

 

Diving with Hydrogen – It’s a Gas

When most people think of hydrogen, they think of the fuel that stars burn in their nuclear fires, the hydrogen bomb, or the Hindenburg disaster. Hydrogen is known for its combustibility and explosiveness. Not many people would think of diving underwater with it.

Technical divers breathe various gas blends, using mixtures of nitrogen, oxygen and even helium. But leave it to the ever inventive Swedes, makers of some of the best diving equipment in the world, to use hydrogen as an experimental diving gas as early as the 1940s.

Hydrogen will not burn under two conditions; if there is too little hydrogen, or too much hydrogen and not enough oxygen. A gas mixture (air or oxygen) with less than 4% hydrogen will not burn, and with more than 94% hydrogen in oxygen (or 75% hydrogen in air), the gas mixture will also not burn. So 100% hydrogen will not burn, unless it leaks out of its container and gets diluted in air. And then if there is an ignition source, woosh, a la Hindenburg.

 

A diver with supposed nitrogen narcosis. Photo credit, Daniel Kwok on flickr.

So why would anyone consider breathing hydrogen? When diving deeper than a few meters, you need a so-called diluent gas to mix with oxygen. Air is a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen, and when compressed, that nitrogen becomes narcotic, leading to nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deep”. When air is compressed it also becomes dense, making it more difficult to breathe than air is at the surface.

Helium, often used by deep diving Navy and technical divers, is less dense than nitrogen and therefore is easier to breathe at depth. Furthermore, it is not narcotic, so no more “rapture of the deep”.

But for seriously deep diving, greater than about 450 msw (~1500 fsw), even a mixture of helium and oxygen becomes dense enough to impede breathing. One solution is to use an even lighter gas, hydrogen.

Experimental hydrogen-helium-oxygen gas mixtures have been used by COMEX in France to slightly exceed, at 2290 fsw (701 msw), the U.S. deep diving record (2250 fsw, 686 msw) set using a mixture of helium, nitrogen and oxygen.

Hydrogen has one annoying property — it is narcotic. It is far less narcotic than hyperbaric nitrogen, and some narcosis seems to be necessary to counteract the deleterious effects of the High Pressure Nervous Syndrome (HPNS). However, unlike nitrogen narcosis, which is akin to mild alcohol intoxication, hydrogen narcosis is reported to be psychotropic, inducing at great depth altered realities akin to those produced by LSD.

I once was conducting medical research on a 450 msw dive at the German GUSI deep diving chamber, and one of the divers was a French diver who had been a subject on the French hydrogen dives. He reported, without going into detail, that he did not like the effects of hydrogen at all. It was strange, he said. On the other hand, the same diver did very well on the helium-nitrogen-oxygen gas mixture used at GUSI and Duke University.

That some exotic gases on deep experimental dives would be considered strange is an understatement. Deep hydrogen has been reported to produce out of body experiences, something that a person as well grounded as a professional diver would consider frighteningly bizarre.

Swedish diver Arne Zetterström

The Swedes, and Arne Zetterström in particular, were interested in hydrogen diving during World War II for a simple reason; they wanted to dive deep, without the effects of nitrogen narcosis, but did not have access to helium. Most helium comes from gas wells in the United States and Russia. So, looking for another diluent gas other than helium, Zetterström briefly considered two constituents of intestinal gas (flatus), namely methane and hydrogen. Arguably, it was easy for the Swedes to produce plenty of methane and hydrogen. Just how they planned to do that is something I never asked.

Eventually, hydrogen was chosen for the Swedish dives simply because hydrogen was less dense than methane.

In principle, hydrogen could be used by a deep technical diver, but only at depths deeper than 132 fsw (5 atmospheres), a depth which would turn the noncombustible 4% oxygen in hydrogen gas mix into a so-called normoxic gas mixture, meaning it would have about as many oxygen molecules per breath as air at the surface. If the diver attempted to come shallower on that same gas mixture, he would lose consciousness due to hypoxia.

Since helium is not a combustible gas it does not have gas mixture restrictions. As long as  a helium-oxygen gas mixture contains the right amount of oxygen (not too much and not too little), then it will be safe. Both nitrogen and helium are therefore far preferred over either of the flammable gases methane and hydrogen  for use in breathing gas mixtures for diving.

Nevertheless, as divers continue to explore ways of diving deeper, it is certainly possible that hydrogen and other exotic gases may eventually play a role in deep life-support. Who knows, perhaps a perfect gas mixture will involve a blend of hydrogen and methane along with oxygen. If so, perhaps we could call it, oh I don’t know, maybe … Flatogen!

 

 

 

 

 

What I Would Miss on Mars

When I first saw images from NASA’s various Mars rovers, I was almost crawling out of my skin with excitement. As I spoke at a NASA sponsored conference where scientists and engineers were discussing plans for a Mars mission and colonization, I was enthralled with the thought that humans are actually planning for mankind to leave our planet for a foreign world.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I would miss if I were a colonist on Mars. I’ve decided, what I would miss the most is something we take for granted in most places of the world; water.

Of course, Martian pioneers would have to have abundant stockpiles of drinking water. But I sure would miss Earth’s oceans; their awe inspiring breadth and depth, their multitudes of sea life, and the gentle shades of blue-green in clear water along sandy coasts.

I would miss the sound of the surf, the laughter of children chasing and being chased by harmless but persistent waves.

I would miss the sound of clicking shrimp, and the clicking of dolphins corralling schools of fish.

I would miss being able to open the windows on a perfect day. I would miss feeling a breeze on my bare face.

I would miss never having to wonder if I had enough oxygen to breathe. I’d miss not worrying that toxic carbon dioxide would seep into my tiny house and suffocate me and my family in our sleep, or that my home’s pressure barrier would fail and our blood would essentially boil, releasing a flood of deadly bubbles stopping our hearts.

I am concerned that those attempting to colonize Mars woud sink into a chronic melancholy simply because the water that pleases and sustains so many of us is absent on Mars. Could these homesick astronauts survive, and even thrive?

If the first wave of colonizers did survive, procreate, and nurture the next generation, the first generation of true Martians, then I suspect that generation would fare much better psychologically than the first. After all, they would never have known the verdant forests and splendorous seas of Earth.

As I pondered what it would be like to be a third and fourth generation colonist on Mars, growing up knowing nothing else, I realized that rather than space exploration being a guaranteed and common place activity at that time in the not too distant future, a bleaker possibility exists.

It is entirely possible that war, disease, asteroid and comet collisions, or even the failure of mismanaged banking systems could so impoverish the Earth that space travel to the Martian colony might not remain economically sustainable. Eventually, to the stranded Martians our Earth could be little more than a distant memory, perhaps even a legend. Martian children might grow up on the red planet hearing tales of Sky People who came to Mars from a far away place, a world of indescribable beauty, with colors of blue and green that are not even imaginable on Mars.

Some native Americans have in the past recounted tales of Sky People coming to Earth. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the next generation of Earthlings becomes the fabled Sky People that populate the planet Mars?

If offered the chance to be one of those Sky People on a one-way trip to Mars, would I sign up for the mission? Frankly I don’t think I could leave the most beautiful planet in the solar system, perhaps in the galaxy, even for something as exotic as a trip to Mars.