word of the day: salubrious

salubrious: adj. having or promoting good health.

Oceanic Segment III: The Eckman Spiral

Isn’t that the coolest name you ever heard??

The Eckman Spiral flows on logically from the Coriolis Effect. In the Southern Hemisphere, Coriolis dictates that things kinda want to go left. Vice versa in the north.

So if you are a volume of water, just kicking it on the surface of the ocean in the sunny northern tropics and a wind comes along and moves you, you go with the wind, but also go a little to the right, in accord with Coriolis. So if a wind comes along from the south (so pushing everything northish), you will end up going something like 45degress east of north (45degrees to the right of north) once Coriolis and the wind direction are both accounted for.

So much for the surface waters.

Now the waters just below the surface never see the wind themselves. But they feel it indirectly through the motion of the surface waters. The surface waters move the deeper waters as they themselves move. But instead of being a force moving north like the wind was, they are moving east-of-north. So the deeper waters have forces urging them east-of-north (the surface waters) and slightly to the right (Coriolis), so they move a little more easterly again than the surface waters.

This effect continues down the water column, with each consecutively deeper volume of water moving more easterly than the volume above it.

A picture:

And once all the levels are added up and accounted for, the whole water body moves 90degrees to the right of the direction of the wind. So, because of the Eckman Spiral, a wind from the south makes water masses move straight east.

This has major consequences for other processes such as upwelling, that we shall discuss in the next oceanic concept.

word of the day: lascivious

lascivious: adj. inclined toward lustfulness,  expressing or inducing sexual desire.

word of the day: penultimate

this is one I had misunderstood for ever!

penultimate: adj. next to last

rainbows!

I have been wanting to post this one for a while.

I am yet to figure out what it really means. Especially once you read the blog that my buddy Andy forwarded to me (it is funny!) : http://shirt.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=8113

Enjoy!

(Thanksgiving) vegetable of the week: Ipomoea batatas

The deliscious sweet potato. AKA kumara around the Pacific and yams in North America for some unknown reason, just as theft and murder are known here as manifest destiny, particularly appropriate to think on this Thanksgiving day.

Sweet potatoes only distantly have anything to do with real potatoes. Sweet potatoes belong to a whole ‘nother fambily (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato), and are not nightshades at all. They come in a whole rainbow of colors; let’s embrace them!

They hail from South America, that sweet succulent source of all tuberous wonderstuffs. But they been around a time or two. Seems they were all over the Pacific before Pizarro and the gang came on over and killed everybody (busy little bees that they were!), kinda supporting the idea that the Polynesian folks were cruising the Pacific all over for millenia before now!

Which is to say that the sweet potato was domesticated somewhere between the Yucatan and northern South America something like 5000 yrs ago, and was found in the Cook Islands 1000yrs ago, and was in New Zealand, Hawaii etc! Think about that for a second, it is awesome!!

So I must admit I have only ever eaten the tuber of this succulent little lamb, but apparently people eat the leaves too! And it’s got bee-utiful flowers to boot!!

Nutritionally (http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products/2666/2), if you wants Manganese, Copper or Potassium, you are in luck! It has high quality protein but not much of it. It got tons of Vitamin A and B6, so party on!

You can boil, fry, grate, mash, or roast this sukka just like it seems we do to every poor tuber. But this bad boy gives a more rounded and sweet flavor than straight up potato could ever dream. Potato is the 9 to 5 boring middle aged man of the tuber world; sweet potato is the beautiful hippy woman with grey green eyes made of soul- she has generousity and depth. Let her into your soul!

 

 

 

word of the day: degenerate

degenerate: noun. one who has lost moral, physical or mental authority or consciousness.

verb. to decline mentally, physically or morally.

I am being told right now that in Physics, vibrational modes are degenerate if they have the same frequencies/energies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_energy_level).

word of the day: iconoclast

iconoclast: noun. a person who attacks or destroys religious and other symbols, conventions and dogmas.

sourcemap

Hello Everybody!

Today I came across this little gem of a site from one of the random environmental new services I seem to be subscribed to:

http://www.sourcemap.org/

It may be old news to y’all, but it is blowing my mind!

It consists of maps (yay!) tracking the sources and stages in the manufacture of all those little things were consume: bananas, ipods etc, with carbon footprints, total distance the components have travelled etc.

When I used to work at Trader Joe’s I would ask people how they felt about their bananas being better traveled than themselves, and they really didn’t seem to care. But here and now they could track it!!

Speaking on bananas: nobody seemed to worry too much about the fact that most people, who shop weekly, buy even numbers of things like bananas (juice packs, salads, Gone Bananas! etc) while their lives are circumscribed by weeks with odd numbers of days. I wonder when those last bananas get consumed, is there a day of juice pack sugar powered mayhem on Saturday, or maybe a weekly panic on Friday when those who bought only four are facing a Gone Banana famine?

Anyways, sourcemap rules!

word of the day: platitude

platitude: noun. meaningless, trite or banal  statement presented as profound, original or meaningful. I have also heard it used more often to suggest that people are saying whatever is necessary to smooth the passage of their point by disarming your ability to critique.