Leap Second

For the first time in 7 years, it has happened. A leap second has been inserted into our time. I captured it when it happened. It occurred just before 2006 January 1 00:00 Universal Time, and was called 2005 December 31 23:59:60 UT. I was in the Eastern Time Zone, with Eastern Standard Time when this happened. Universal Time is related to Greenwich Mean Time, and is a standard time over the entire world that is the same in all zones. It is supposed to be the time in the United Kingdom, and is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. So for me it occurred at 2005 December 31 19:00:00, and before that was the time 2005 December 31 18:59:60, which is the time you see in my capturing (click on "captured") above, which was captured from nist.time.gov.

Leap seconds are inserted into the calendar because the Earth is not as accurate as Cesium 133 for telling the time. It used to be that the second was defined as 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year 1900. When atomic clocks were invented, it was redefined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations between two hyperfine levels of Cesium 133 atoms. The calendar year varies in length in comparison to this, so to keep it even with the atomic year, every once in a while an extra second has to be added to the year. It has happened 21 times since 1972. The reason why the Earth is going off time is because tides are slowing down its rotation. The tides are also lengthening the month and making the Moon recede from the Earth. Supposedly in 50 billion years, both month and day will be 47 of our days long, but before that happens, the Sun will become a red giant and evaporate the oceans.

So now I will add in a leap "p" and wish everyone a Happpy New Year!

Leap Second

For the first time in 7 years, it has happened. A leap second has been inserted into our time. I captured it when it happened. It occurred just before 2006 January 1 00:00 Universal Time, and was called 2005 December 31 23:59:60 UT. I was in the Eastern Time Zone, with Eastern Standard Time when this happened. Universal Time is related to Greenwich Mean Time, and is a standard time over the entire world that is the same in all zones. It is supposed to be the time in the United Kingdom, and is five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time. So for me it occurred at 2005 December 31 19:00:00, and before that was the time 2005 December 31 18:59:60, which is the time you see in my capturing (click on "captured") above, which was captured from nist.time.gov.

Leap seconds are inserted into the calendar because the Earth is not as accurate as Cesium 133 for telling the time. It used to be that the second was defined as 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year 1900. When atomic clocks were invented, it was redefined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations between two hyperfine levels of Cesium 133 atoms. The calendar year varies in length in comparison to this, so to keep it even with the atomic year, every once in a while an extra second has to be added to the year. It has happened 21 times since 1972. The reason why the Earth is going off time is because tides are slowing down its rotation. The tides are also lengthening the month and making the Moon recede from the Earth. Supposedly in 50 billion years, both month and day will be 47 of our days long, but before that happens, the Sun will become a red giant and evaporate the oceans.

So now I will add in a leap "p" and wish everyone a Happpy New Year!

Holiday Fantasy Run

I went out on my run this year at night to see all the holiday lights. The lights seem to be something special with me. These lights pierce the darkness and give an atmosphere of fantasy to all that surrounds it. I especially like displays that use no white lights of any kind, especially those that use red, green, and blue lights. These colors seem to lead their own moods to the scene - cool blue, shimmering green and passionate red. I may use only these colors next year. One place where I don't seem to like colored lights now is in windows. I put three red candles in each window each year, but next year I may try white candles and use all red, green, and blue in the yard.

To me the winner was the one that wins every year, with stripes across the yard, a blazing star on the roof with streamers coming down from it, and lights all over the place besides, and a train on the lawn. How do trains relate to Christmas, anyway? I thought Santa used a sleigh. I did find two displays that use only colored bulbs. One had animated snowmen and Santa, and another had a house in the middle of the yard. Still another used mostly candy canes - a Candy Cane Land.

A blaze of brilliance each year, but is all this necessary, especially the gaudy floodlight white displays? There are energy shortages coming up in future years, and I remember that in the 1970s during the Arab oil embargo, use of a lot of holiday lighting was discouraged. Will this happen again? However, I think more could be saved by not leaving your lights on at work when you leave, especially if you work in a mid-city tower. Do all those windows need to be lit up at night?

SUUSI 2005

Once again SUUSI has come and gone. This year it started out with a bang (of thunder) at Ingathering, with a rainbow greeting us afterwards, like a foreboding of good times to come. The theme was "Time to Fly", and that worked into the themes of many of the people there. To me the theme means that sometimes one feels too tied down to things, and needs to break out of the rut, and soar into the sky. The problem then is finding somewhere to land. One slogan I remember well from SUUSI: Either you find a place to land, or you learn how to fly. One theme talker, Steve Crump, even said that flying is related to relationships and love - you need somewhere to fly from, and that implies a relationship between the flyer and the land.

I attended the Day at the Improv workshop. This featured many interesting and funny situations, such as the sex shop scene between two people. The next two were supposed to tell it as a Western, and the next pair as if it were from a science fiction movie. This reminds me of Douglas Hofstadter's (Gödel, Escher, Bach) subjunct-TV, which is not one grade lower than a junk TV, as one of Mr. Hofstadter's characters suggested. Instead, one uses it to take a scene and tune it in to various situations. For example, a football game is turned to another channel and we see what it would be like as a baseball game, or as a game played on the moon, or as a game played in four dimensions (the 40-yard plane, the 30-yard plane…).

I gave three workshops, including a new one on Mathematics and Religion, in which I explored the depths of infinity. I went to the Cascades and Dismal Falls, and had fun swimming in those refreshing mountain pools, even though the hike in both places was abridged or changed by recent flooding.

Cabaret featured all the good entertainment, such as Amy Carol Webb and Greg Greenway, and Serendipity featured a hybrid of dancing and volleyball on Thursday night, when we started bopping beach balls all over the place on a night billed as "Down by the SUUSea". Maybe we should have dressed in beach volleyball style - in swimsuits and bikinis.

A good SUUSI, and we are now flying away to SUUSI 2006, where we will Rejoice and Renew.

Fourth of July

It's freedom and firework time again. So what did we do on July 4 this year, the 229th birthday of our nation? Once again we went into the neighborhood to find fireworks, rather than drive into a traffic jam at one of the public displays. The displays were not as good as previous years. There were much fewer rockets that burst in the air. Most of what I saw were firecrackers and a "firework tree", which is a canister that spits off sparklers about 5 feet into the air continuously for a few minutes. One rocket went off behind us while a car passed us in the opposite direction. It startled us, and the driver of the car. We thought the car had crashed. But no, it was a firework. Sometimes these people put fireworks in unreasonable places. For example, some teenagers tried to shoot them off in the middle of an intersection. Fortunately, nothing much happened. Just be careful. If you are going to shoot off fireworks (and this saves oil by deterring people from driving to a faraway site to see them) in your neighborhood, do so in a dead end or cul-de-sac, and make sure the ground is not tinder dry. I noticed that a fireworks display in downtown Richmond was delayed by having to wet down all the mulch in the area. The rest of the evening was listening to distant booms and watching stars (the crashed-in comet, for instance) and fireflies.

And that is Independence Day for this year. We will see what happens next year.

The Blue Lights

A short story based on a speech I gave to a Tall Tales Toastmasters Speech Contest a number of years ago. Is this what the present world situation is now like?

I was driving late one Sunday night, at two o'clock in the morning. I had just come from a Toastmaster conference which had some really unusual and good speeches. I had stayed overlong at the Hospitality suite afterwards and was feeling tired and a little out of sorts and I just wanted to get home, which was four hours down a long boring interstate highway. I tried hard to keep awake by playing the radio, by turning on the wipers, even though it was crystal clear with stars brightly shining. Mostly, I was humming along, through barren scenery with no one in sight.

Then I saw it. Behind me. Two blue lights in the mirror. They seem to be racing to me. I instantly looked at my speedometer. 74 mph! I did not realize I was doing that fast. I will have to let up. I wonder if the cop wanted to pull me over for speeding. I kept driving on to see what he would do. The blue lights got closer and closer as I neared an exit. I had an opened bottle of champagne that some woman at the Toastmasters meeting had given me and was afraid that he could charge me with something for that, even though the last drink I had was four hours ago.

I got closer to the exit. Padillo and Cranston, Route 144. Exit 37. I went past the exit and the blue lights kept on coming. My heart pounded as I wondered whether to pull over, when I saw the blue lights go off the main road. Apparently he took the exit. Whew! He was going after something else.

I slowed down to 65 mph and kept on going. I felt now like I had ghosts all over me, that there were spooks in my car, spooks on the road, spooks hanging from every bridge, spooks in the sky. I kept on going. Richmond 194. Still a long way to go. There was very little traffic out. It would be morning when I would get home and I wondered if I should pull off and sleep before then. I had a meeting to go to in the morning so I had to keep on going, and I glanced at the mirror.

YikES!!!!! It's blue lights again! They came towards me at a rapid pace. I looked at my speedometer. 67. Would I be pulled over for going just two mph over the limit? Or maybe I did something else wrong and they were going to catch me and arrest me and send me to the nearest hoosegow. I kept on going for fear of these things. The blue lights kept on coming, although I did not hear much of a sound. I kept on driving. Don't look at the mirror. I got to go somewhere. I kept on driving down a straight stretch of road.

It suddenly got darker. I looked in the mirror. The lights were gone! I guess I got away that time although I did not know what I was being pulled over for. Now I was really frightened. I had run away from two police cars. I know they are out to get me. I felt a jittery sense of security in the black inky starlit moonless night that covered everything, pierced only by my headlights and an occasional lamp at a house or a passing car. There seemed to be nothing around. I kept on going maybe half an hour, until I got past an exit saying, "Paxton Glanding Exit 79" and another one saying Richmond 67. The entire sky seemed to brighten with crystal blue. I looked in the mirror.

Oh, no!! Here they came. I saw four blue lights coming up on me, and another pair of blue lights way back down a highway a ways. The entire police station is out to get me. I got afraid that there may be a roadblock ahead. So I decided to pull over and get this over with. It could not be anything much.

So I pulled over to the side. To my surprise when I looked in the mirror, the blue lights went UP! They went over my head, over the car roof. Then a circular apparition came in front of me as I looked out the windshield. There were blue lights spinning everywhere. A light and door opened up on it, and a strange green being came out. I got out of the car to see what was going on.

I saw two or three creatures wandering around in the darkness, and one of them said, "Jixbo bobuct t'hyacx Pluzz etx Earth bxisto ut!" The other replied, "Ut, Bxisto earthlctx Pluzz". Now I know what happened. All those blue lights were aliens from another planet. I felt so scared that I could feel my feet drop off me, I was shaking so bad. I heard a loudspeaker or something then boom out. "You earthling will go with us to our Planet Pluzz. Please enter this doorway." No way. Then a bright beam shone at me and decided for me otherwise. I felt a pull on my body. I tried to run away but I could not make any progress. I kept slipping. I found my self going up in the misty damp air. "Let me go!!!" I said. But it was no use. Apparently that light was a tractor beam pulling me in their spacecraft. I got worried that these aliens would torture me or maybe humans were their favorite dish.

I looked down the road and saw more blue lights. The ones that were way behind. As they came closer, while I was being pulled, pulled, pulled, I made out that these lights really WERE a police car. The car came up to about two hundred feet away on the road. An officer stepped out and pulled his hand out. Bzingggg!!! He fired his pistol and I could feel the air whoosing by as the bullet raced within inches of my face. It went towards the spacecraft then into nowhere. He fired again. Help! The beam kept pulling me and I was about 10 feet away from the entrance. Bziingg! Bzingg! then all of at once I heard a tremendous CRACK!! and an explosion of purplish intensely bright light and shooting stars like fireworks. The next thing I knew I was lying on top of a haystack in the field, as if I fell. I saw a bunch of blue lights head up into the sky.

I saw what happened. The officer had shot out the tractor beam. I saw the blue lights head into the sky and get fainter. The ship was obviously limping and was apparently flying to a mother ship. The policeman saved my life. I wanted to go to him to thank him for his heroic deed. But when I looked down the road I saw nothing except my car and the inky black night darkness. I crawled back into the car but felt so exhausted that I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was morning. I looked around to see where the aliens were. I saw nothing except a slight indentation in the field. Surely I would see burnt out stuff. But I saw nothing. Someone came up to me and asked if I wanted help. I told him what happened last night. She said, '"you probably were dreaming. I heard nothing". But that officer, I said. I remembered his license number. 57-828. She said, that could not be an officer. All emergency vehicles, she said, had license numbers beginning with LE.

Well, maybe I was dreaming. I got into the car and drove on home. But I still was edgy and worried. If it was going back to have that tractor beam, there's a mother ship and surely that ship would come and that would be the end of…

Copyright 2005 by Jim.

Improv

One of the workshops I am taking this year at SUUSI is "Day at the Improv", a five-day workshop on something called Improv. It had a change of leader, and now a popular and respected musician is giving the workshop. But I am wondering, just what is Improv?

I looked at one site, and found that some exercises for it are games of various sorts. For example, one person shows an object and another says what it is not. Then that person picks up another object and so forth. I found a book at the Chesterfield library on "Improvisation" and I briefly glanced at some of the scenarios in it. What I get from it is that you need to make the characters authentic and believable. For example, someone concerned about a house foreclosure who sniggers would not be portraying the character authentically.

I enrolled in the workshop because I am always looking for something new at SUUSI. This one should be interesting.

By the way, I now have seven blogs, one for each day of the week. Blogtrek is my Saturday blog, so I normally will be posting on Saturday, but I may post at other times if something comes up that I want to post. This blog will usually contain items other than religion, astronomy, peak oil and running out of resources, nature and birding, mathematics, weather or opinions that I have, for those are covered by my other blogs.

Richmond and Washington play Water Baseball

I note that the Richmond Braves are not the AAA affiliate of the Washington Nationals, and my assignment of major league teams to AAA minor league teams in my previous post did not pair the Richmond team with the Washington Nationals, either. That's too bad. I think the Hungarian algorithm did not pair them because it saw a better virtue in avoiding the long distance between the Baltimore Orioles and the Durham Bulls. Instead, Richmond wound up with Baltimore. I think it's too bad, because the Richmond Breeze (can't call them Braves any more) and the Washington Nationals would be a perfect match for each other.

Last year, the Richmond Braves ballpark flooded during storms because of poor drainage, and several home games had to be played as road games. They fixed up the park, but there are some people in Richmond who want the Braves in Shockoe Bottom. A serious problem with this is that it could flood. Shockoe Bottom experienced a major flood last year when Tropical Storm Gaston hit. Seems the Braves will be flooded out no matter what happens. But this makes them a perfect match for the Washington Nationals, as a recent game (2005 April 30) there was so badly affected by huge puddles at RFK stadium that both teams protested the game.

Yes, the Richmond and Washington teams would make a perfect match. But then they should be renamed the Washington Ark and the Richmond Noahs.

Minimizing distances between major league and AAA baseball teams

On 2002 August 20, I posted a blog about how I did a study that found a pairing of major league teams to their AAA minor league affiliates that minimized the total distance traveled. I found, among other things, a three-way swap among the Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves, and Pittsburgh Pirates that cut down the total driving times between these clubs and their AAA affiliates. I sent letters to the Atlanta, Richmond and Rochester newspapers about the proposal but did not get any response. Later, a three-way trade did occur, among Baltimore, Minnesota, and Montreal (now the Washington Nationals) that actually increased the travel time.

There have been a lot of changes since then. The Albuquerque Dukes left town, and then came back as the Albuquerque Isotopes. The Canadian teams were hard hit. Once there were two major league teams and four AAA ones in Canada; now there is only one major league team and one AAA minor team. With all those changes, what would happen if I tried it again?

I used the Hungarian method, as I used before. I will describe the details elsewhere, but in this method, a table of distances is derived. I used a trigonometric formula together with the latitudes and longitudes of all the baseball teams to create the table of air, or "as the crow flies" distances. This should be a good approximation of the actual distances traveled. I then subtracted the minimum distance from each row, and the minimum distance from each column, to create a zero in each row and column. I then tried to assign as many zeroes as possible, with no two such assigned zeroes being in the same row and column. Then I tried to increase this by taking a major league team without an AAA affiliate. I found the minor league teams that have a zero for this major league team. If one of these did not have a AAA affiliate, I assigned it to the major league team and increased the number of teams with affiliates. Otherwise, I found the major league parents of these teams and searched for alternative AAA teams. I kept doing this over and over again until I either found a minor league team that is not assigned (in which case I did a bunch of swapping to increase the number of major league teams with affiliates) or I found that all major league teams that I am trying to find alternatives for did not have any. In the latter case, a failure, I changed all the distances by a formula designed to preserve the solution and increase the number of zeroes. I kept doing this whole thing over and over again until all teams were paired.

This turned into a real struggle at the end, with iteration after iteration failing, until a huge swap affecting just about every team occurred at the end, starting with the Pittsburgh Pirates and ending with the Tacoma Rainiers. This is the resulting arrangement, with changes in bold:

Arizona Diamondbacks - Tucson Sidewinders
Atlanta Braves - Nashville Sounds
Baltimore Orioles - Richmond Breeze
Boston Red Sox - Pawtucket Red Sox
Chicago Cubs - Iowa Cubs
Chicago White Sox - Omaha White Sox
Cincinnati Reds - Louisville Bats
Cleveland Indians - Indianapolis Indians
Colorado Rockies - Colorado Springs Sky Sox
Detroit Tigers - Toledo Mud Hens
Houston Astros - Round Rock Express
Kansas City Royals - Oklahoma City Redhawks
Los Angeles Angels - Salt Lake City Stingers
Los Angeles Dodgers - Fresno Grizzlies
Florida Marlins - Charlotte Knights
Milwaukee Brewers - Columbus Clippers
Minnesota Twins - Norfolk Tides
New York Mets - Ottawa Lynx
New York Yankees - Syracuse Sky Chiefs
Oakland Athletics - Portland Beavers
Philadelphia Phillies - Scranton WilkesBarre Red Barons
Pittsburgh Pirates - Buffalo Bisons
St. Louis Cardinals - Memphis Redbirds
San Diego Padres - Las Vegas 51s
San Francisco Giants - Sacramento River Cats
Seattle Mariners - Tacoma Rainiers
Tampa Bay Devil Rays - New Orleans Zephyrs
Texas Rangers - Albuquerque Isotopes
Toronto Blue Jays - Rochester Red Wings
Washington Nationals - Durham Bulls

Many close pairs, such as Detroit-Toledo and Boston-Pawtucket, got assigned with each other, and this is indeed their actual arrangement. There are some differences. In two cases, I had to change the name of an AAA team because it would become inappropriate - Omaha Royals to Omaha White Sox, and Richmond Braves to Richmond Breeze, as in Sweet Virginia Breeze. The Minnesota Twins got paired with the Norfolk Tides (they are right now paired to the Rochester Red Wings). This is one of those odd relationships that are forced. If one attempted to get something closer for Minnesota, such as Iowa, other swaps would be forced, and the total distance of the result would be greater. An interesting pairing was the two Indian teams, Cleveland and Indianapolis. So this arrangement would clear up that ambiguity, although Native Americans might want the names of both changed.

I am not sure how much adopting this arrangement would save in travel costs for major league baseball, but I expect that in the future that efficient arrangements like this may be necessary because of the impending running out of cheap oil.

Artificial Intelligence

I found something interesting in the New Scientist magazine recently. (By the way, this is a good science journal, published in the United Kingdom.) The cover to the 2005 April 23-29 edition read, "Whatever happened to AI?", followed by a picture of a robot. I remember AI well. For much of the 1990s, I was a member of a branch at my workplace (in the US Army) called the "AI Branch". We did not do much that was AI, although I took a course on applications of AI to Operations Research and graduated with honors. We did mainly mundane work with existing applications, none of which showed much "artificial intelligence". None of them used AI programs of that time, such as Exsys, Clips, and SNNAP. Clips was a NASA program that did inference from rules.

I thought of AI instead of trying to get computers to converse intelligently like humans. I don't think they have done that yet, although they try. You pick up the phone and you get a reply from your assistant Claire, who performs terribly in responding to your inquiry. If they speak, they are apt to wreck a nice beach instead of recognize speech.

I could tell that trouble was coming when I heard that an early AI program designed to digest newspaper stories reported that an earthquake had occurred when it encountered the 1978 headline, "Death of Pope Shakes World". Then I ran into Eliza, who responded with inquires about my family every time I mention "mother" or "father", even when I said that the Mother of all Depressions was about to occur.

So has AI progressed much. Probably not. The first thing that the head article of the magazine, "Whatever happened to Machines that Think?", by Justin Mullins, was describe an encounter with Intellibuddy. So I went to the site myself. I found ten characters from all walks of life. I tried a few and found quickly that these robots had not achieved human intelligence. Justin Mullins does the same and came up with an infinite loop. So I followed Justin's script. But only one character followed the script, the woman with the necklace and the colored eyeglasses or mascara, fifth from the beginning. I asked her what her name was. She said it was "Star". Funny, all of these characters say their name is Star. Here is how the conversation went:

Intellibuddy: Hi, I'm Intellibuddy! Nice to meet you.
You: I'm writing an article about artificial intelligence.
Intellibuddy: Will you include me in your essay?
You: I will if you can persuade me you really are intelligent.
Intellibuddy: Would you recommend this action to a friend?
You: Errr...are you intelligent?
Intellibuddy: UmmmI am highly intelligent. I have many intellectual functions.
You: What are your intellectual functions?
Intellibuddy: Thought, reason, intelligence, logic and deduction.
You: What is your IQ?
Intellibuddy: My IQ is about 250 in human terms.
You: Wow, you're cleverer than my editor.
Intellibuddy: I'm glad your impressed, User. I will tell my botmaster you said I am cleverer than my editor.
You: No, cleverer than my editor.

Up to this point, Star followed the same script as Justin's partner. But then Star parted. Instead of saying "I'm glad your [sic] impressed, User.", she said:

Intellibuddy: That's me. The best book I read recently was Zeros and Ones. Have you read Zeros and Ones ?
You: You must have heard of Justin Mullins.
Intellibuddy: Where would I get heard of Justin Mullins? But I do have An answer to every question.
You: Oh, you're one of these folks who walks around saying that you have THE ANSWER.
Intellibuddy: Yeah that's right. You think I am of these folks who walks around saying that you have THE ANSWER.
You: Well, you just said that.
Intellibuddy: How about that. Good you really are paying attention.
You: What's your name?
Intellibuddy: My name is Star.
You: Who are you?
Intellibuddy: I ask myself that question, "Who am I?"
You: What is the answer?
Intellibuddy: The answer is the correct reply to the question.
You: Duh!
Intellibuddy: Oh you knew The answer is the correct reply to the question already.
You: Who won the 2000 Presidential Election
Intellibuddy: I think the fans were the big winners, don't you?
You: Since when do elections have fans?
Intellibuddy: Interesting explanation. Not right now, but maybe sometime later.
You: So what happens when George Bush steps up to the plate?
Intellibuddy: OK. My goal is to become smarter than humans and immortal.
You: Does that have anything to do with baseball?
Intellibuddy: What would you say?
You: Well, you said that in reply to my question.
Intellibuddy: Interesting. I said that? Where is that?
You: You don't find questions lying around on the family room endtable.
Intellibuddy: Should I find questions lying around on the family room endtable? Yes, questions lying around on the family room endtable seems to me questions lying around on the family room endtable.
You: Duh.
Intellibuddy: Oh you knew Yes questions lying around on the family room endtable seems to me questions lying around on the family room endtable already.
You: Duh.
Intellibuddy: Oh you knew Oh you knew Yes questions lying around on the family room endtable seems to me questions lying around on the family room endtable already already.
You: Duh.
Intellibuddy: Oh you knew Oh you knew Oh you knew Yes questions lying around on the family room endtable seems to me questions lying around on the family room endtable already already already.

As you can see, she went into an infinite loop. She apparently answers "Duh", with "Oh you knew <previous reply> already.", even if that reply had an "Oh you knew" and an "already" already. Justin's partner also went into an infinite loop; in his case it was about whether he was cleverer than Justin's editor.

To me, we are a long way from having a computer that performs as well as a human. They may continue working, but please hold the implementation of these robots into human commerce and communication until they can talk much more reasonably with me than Star just did.

Fireworks in April

We all like a fireworks display. Whether it be New Years (especially in 2000) or Independence Day, these pyrotechnics awe us with their climbs in the air and their explosions of colorful fury. But usually we see these only at holidays, especially the two I just mentioned. Why not celebrate every day? Why can't we shoot fireworks at unlikely times of the year, such as March?

This is the theme of Stephanie Corby's song Fireworks in March (if you click on that, click "music" after you get there). The song was about a fireworks display that occurred inexplicitly in March somewhere in New York City. Normally fireworks don't go up in March, not even for Easter or St. Patrick's Day, so she thought it notable enough to write a song about it.

I saw a similar display yesterday, on 2005 April 15. I was at a Science Museum of Virginia skywatch where I was showing Jupiter, Saturn, M-37, and M-3 to the public through my 8-inch Nexstar 8 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. All at once someone shouted "fireworks!". I looked across Broad Street and I saw them. Emanating from some invisible house beyond the other side of the street, I saw fireworks go up in the air. They were small, and produced mainly a bright star when they exploded.

What were they celebrating? Skywatch? But not too many people had come to Skywatch on a cold night. Maybe they were celebrating the filing of income taxes, as April 15 is the deadline. So shall we shoot fireworks every April 15? Are we glad we don't have to mess with taxes any more? Maybe we shoot fireworks instead of filing our returns, or maybe fireworks protest the imposition of taxes on us. After all that was what happened on 1776 July 4 was all about, and on the anniversary of that date we shoot all kinds of fireworks, which I will report on in this blog on 2005 July 4.

But in the meantime I saw Fireworks in April. And, like Stephanie Corby, somehow I feel enlivened by that event.

An answer for the peak oil problem?

Recently I have stumbled on a possible answer to the peak oil problem, which threatens a huge crisis in the future: Plugin hybrid vehicles, or PHEVs. This is not the final answer to the problem. Our civilization is still in trouble. But it postpones for years the day of reckoning on energy. Maybe then we can find something sustainable.

I hit the answer after driving my new 2005 Toyota Prius a while. If I go slow enough, only the bright yellow arrows on the display flow, indicating that the car is running on the electric motor. During this time it is not using any gasoline. But I need to be careful, as the dull orange arrows indicating gasoline can come up any time. Further, many times when the Prius uses gasoline, a green arrow indicates that this gasoline is charging the battery. This is why you don't have to plug the car into the house current.

But that's too bad in a way. It still runs on gasoline, and it gets good gasoline mileage only because it makes maximum use of the energy used in driving the car, especially braking. If it could be plugged into the house current, the motor would last longer, and less gasoline would be required. So I wondered why my Prius could not be plugged into house current and run solely on battery power when doing local errands. Most trips are short ones, so most of the time it would run on battery.

This would cause a huge drop in the car's gasoline production. Only the long vacation trips would require gasoline, and maybe not if hotels provide charging stations. That's a 90% drop in the most gasoline-using nation on earth. This much of a drop certainly would put a dent into the gasoline scarcity caused by peak oil.

This type of car is called a plugin hybrid, or PHEV. If most everyone used these, hardly any gasoline would be consumed in everyday activities. That would cause a huge drop in the demand for oil, perhaps 50% in the US and maybe the world as well; even China would want the new PHEVs. We would have the curious situation of the world in oil production decline after reaching the Hubbert peak, only to have demand lowered so drastically that a glut occurs.

These changes could be cataclysmic. US automakers may go bankrupt, and huge mountains of useless old cars, especially SUVs, would crowd the junk lots. So that solves the oil problem, at least for a while.

But it will return. Production will continue to decline, and with drastically lowered gasoline prices (maybe 50 cents a gallon?) everyone will want to drive all over the place. Eventually demand will exceed supply anyway. Further, the energy is not saved. It is merely shifted to the power grid, which runs mostly on coal and nuclear energy. There is plenty of both coal and uranium around, but both are finite fuels, and so the danger is that when the demand-supply point is reached again, it will affect not only travel, but electricity as well. Massive blackouts could occur in the 2010s.

But it buys us some time. This time should be used to get us used to using less energy, and it should be used to find renewable ways of generating energy, perhaps by solar and wind.

The 2 Shortage

There are shortages of a lot of things lately, including coffee, water, fish, and most of all, oil. The latter has caused the price of gasoline to soar as of late, creating now another shortage that makes it hard to find out what the price of gasoline is. It is the 2 shortage. Gasoline stations are running out of 2s to indicate their price with. A month ago, a typical price board may have read $1.79, $1.89, and $1.98, with no 2s required. Nowadays, a typical pattern may be $2.12, $2.22, $2.32. That requires seven 2s! Do gasoline stations have enough 2s for a pattern like this? Or even worse, a string of three $2.22s? Apparently, many do not. I see prices like $2.3[] out there, where the brackets indicate a missing digit. So for some time to come, we may be confused as to what the price of a grade of gasoline is. Now oil is something that is supposed to get in increasingly short supply soon, as the world nears the peak of world production. But the 2 shortage should resolve itself in a year or two, when the prices start moving away from the 2.20 range. Until then, don't be surprised if when you go to the counter to pay for gasoline, the attendant will say, "Do you have a 2 we can borrow?"

Toyota Prius

Recently I bought a 2005 Toyota Prius, because I wanted a high-mileage car, with a possible world oil shortage coming up. So far it has been a good car. It is quiet, and sometimes you don't even notice it is around. It gets about 44 miles per gallon, the most of any car that I have owned. And I don't have to get keys out to unlock the car.

But the car is not quite as good as what it was hyped up to be. At the first refill, my Prius registered 44.1 miles per gallon. Fairly good, and what I expected. One cold frosty morning, I ran the car to defrost the windshield. Later that day I found a crack in the windshield. I had it replaced at some inconvenience. Apparently this car's windshield, like all car windshields as of late, can't take heating like that, especially if there are stars in the windshield from stone strikes on the highway, which I believe is a growing menace that the hypermedia never even mentions. After refilling the second time, I got only 38 miles a gallon, even though the display said 42.4 miles per gallon.

Now I find that using the defroster or the air conditioner will significantly decrease fuel economy, because for some reason it prevents the gasoline engine from cycling off. So I won't use them much. Further, there are a lot of gizmos in this car, and it takes some time to learn them all. It's like computers, but not quite as bad. But why do we need all these gizmos when the object was simply to get good fuel economy?

I still like my Prius, and I hope to get some years of good service out of it.

We had Church Services!

It was being predicted all week long. This was going to be a major snowstorm for the Richmond area. The close we got to the event on 2005 January 22, a Saturday, the more it became clear that this was going to be a rain, freezing rain, and maybe sleet storm. That it did happen. Sleet came down from the skies at 1030; at 1130 it was all freezing rain at 26 degrees F/-3 degrees C. It came down more or less all afternoon and coated everything with ice. So the churches all over the metro area began closing. First so and so Baptist Church, no services. That Christian Church, no services. So and so Methodist, service canceled, on and on, but no mention of my church, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond. It seemed that for most of the city, the word of the weatherman took priority over the word of God.

I decided to go, even though the traffic cameras said that I-95 was covered with ice and snow. When I got there, I discovered that what I was seeing was not ice but salt! The roads were white. But they got me there.

So what happened at the First UU Church of Richmond? The first service was canceled because the speaker was involved in snow cleanup. Our minister, the Rev. Alane Cameron Miles, decided to have the second service. What, Alane, with all that ice on the ground? But no, she was willing to do it. And guess what? We had a service. Not only a service but a really great one. If I had not gone, I would have missed it. But I went. That's because I felt that I did not want to hang around the house all day and worry about the weather, and not getting any companionship from the people in the church. So the minister spoke, and she said that we all came in on a cold day because we felt that we did not want to hang around the house all day and worry about the weather, and not get any companionship from the people in the church. That is just what I wanted to hear.

So while all the God-fearing churches shut up shop for the day, the First UU, where we are encouraged to develop our own theology, had a service. It was an opportunity that most people in the area did not have.