Life, The Universe, and Everything

[Bob Reite]

The winter of 2019-2020 was very mild in my area. I usually blow through all 5 cords of wood. This time only about one cord. But the "mild" kind of stopped at the end of March, April has been colder than normal. We usually don't get any snow that "sticks" after April 15. But on the 17th we got snow that stuck to the grass and cars. It just now melted off.

The trend I've noticed is that Spring is a bit warmer and a lot wetter than it used to be, compared to 20 years ago.

[Doug Coulter]

Thanks, Bob.
Here, it's still pretty cold. 40f or so this am, made it almost to 50 in full sun by 5 pm.
I had noticed the past couple of years, that we seemed to go from super cold to summer with not much gap in there. Here, the transistion to warm is yet to occur, other than one day I could go out without "suiting up" - I don't do cold well, but if it's 65 or so, I'm fine.
Most of the extreme events (Well, they're fairly normal for here, but would seem extreme to some) this year have been high winds. We don't usually get hail, but the example here wasn't much, just a little bit of surprise.
https://youtu.be/NfbLGQfDcIo


Edit - looks like I misspoke somewhat.
I decided to go look at some fairly real data I have to compare with my impressions, which were somewhat off. I don't know about you, but when it's a bit too mild to run a woodstove, I run propane, and I'd been at least partly reacting to the sheer size of the propane bill. This of course results in less wood consumption...a fire in a 10'x24' room - where I'm sitting, going enough to heat the whole place, will run you out of here, and as you probably know, can't be turned off as the day warms up - which happens fast here, and not always according to the attempts at weather prediction. Not their fault, really, the weather in the mountains is plain old twitchy, and tends to be different across fairly short distances, so anyone trying to predict can only be right for part of their coverage area at a time...

In these plots, the green traces are the outdoor at the living quarters, and not as subject to direct sunshine as the black ones outside the shop.
I note that it was mild more than I recall - and looking at the RH plot says why - when it's raining hard I don't even try to go outside!
And yes, it's been a very good winter and spring for the water collection system, which, with other improvements has for once, worked well without a hitch for a good while. One outside filter froze and broke...which is low maintenance if that's all there is for a year.

Nothing like actual data (I'm sure it's not perfect...) to counter one's subjective impressions...
But still, in other years, it's been nice out temperature-wise without drowning level rain coming along almost every time.

Temperatures - 60 day

If RH > 90, it's raining.

No two sensors ever agree, so I have 3

Baro.png (11.67 KiB) Viewed 33460 times

Some weird setting on the board made two small previews and one expanded display? These are all the same size!

[johnf]

Yep everything is getting warmer
for you guys the artic oscillation is your most important weather influencer
as we heat the planet this oscillation is getting larger less oscillations but much deeper into the southern states area.
So in the short term things are warmer
be warned though that rogue weather will get more intense as the planet puts more heat into the atmosphere
so colder cold snaps and high wind speeds in storms
mre her on the AO
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/ ... cillation/

[Doug Coulter]

Interesting, but my data over 1 year shows milder and cooler -see plot. The black line is outdoors on the west wall of my shop, where sun hits it, so the highs are way higher than the green line (which is hidden here...). Shows it's cooler here this year than last year at the same time. My two year plot has "issues" due to my program not handling some missing data correctly, so it gets offset on the time axis from where it should - glad I looked, fixing that goes on the list as I rewrite all this.
For the first 3 decades or so living here, we didn't miss a year of both - at least a week of over 100f temperatures in the shade in August - those "dog days" of popular speech.
Last 5 or so of the last 10 - no dog days. Never even hit 100 once - those excursions on this plot are from a black sensor in the sun after noon. Ditto a week or so of <10f, most often with winds > 10mph in winter. Those spells got later and later in the years, then just stopped happening. We might have had one night where it got down to 12f for an hour before dawn. here - and all this could be local swirls and effects - for the last few years, the trend seems to have been to sort of skip fall and spring, just stay hot till it gets cold, or the opposite.
The weather here has always been a bit crazy. We're not having more extreme events than I've ever seen over 40 years, the trend there seems flat, and we haven't had sideways 3/4 inch hail but once in those decades. Plenty of high winds, hurricanes that cam onshore and made trees fall down via mud and wind, ice storms, all that stuff is normal and if anything is a little less - but any change there is subjectively in the noise.

Here's a year - my plotting software needs work, this is from a web server on a raspberry pi...

So I dig the trends by the modelers, but models....well we know how hard that can be to get right in detail - they could be right in the main, but neglect some odd eddies around my mountains, would be the first time. And observations are what they are. So that's what I'm interested in, real data.
It does seem like the jet stream pushes further south in summer than it used to, and crosses my location quicker than it used to - on average. Those crossings in either direction have been our rainy seasons - and this past while we've had tons and tons of rain....so those effects seem to cancel for where I am? It's why I'm data gathering, it doesn't all add up in the simple ways we are told to interpret all this.

[Doug Coulter]

It's great to be able to work in the shop again without suiting up and going over there few times a couple hours apart to feed a woodstove first. Else one experiences the "I licked that fire hydrant in a blizzard" thing. Mebbie some physics will start happenin again now.

No, I'm not going to make Olympic symbols...I'd be a few rings short of a good game anyway. I'm working out how to make the cage-grid electrode for the ion trap experiments, of course not in the usual quadrupole geometry, but one in which collisions can be encouraged. These are 2" diameter and will be the ends for a 5" or so long grid. SS, from TIG rod material - I don't plan on just frying this with DC and getting it real hot, so using an easier to form material, and one that works nicely for lower potential electrodes in vacuum is being used.

Tries and the jig rev 3 .. maybe not the last rev

I need a little more jigging - the transition from "just barely welding" to "melted into pieces" is too swift here, and putting a variac in the spot welder supply isn't good enough. Next to add is something that lets the spot welder close on 2 wires stacked, but only close to the thickness of one when things melt (instead of going on through). Not that this is all tha picky (a guess) - but I like to get processes working right.

In regard to the apparent conflict between the above year long temperature plot and my statement that we've not had hot Augusts for quite awhile...In that plotting software, which currently isn't very flexible, the black line (from the west wall of the shop, over the water barrel) hides the green line (the accurate in the shade one) so it looks like I was misspeaking.
Nope...here's one of a shorter time - look at what happens after noon when the sun hits the sensor plotted in black. Of course it's hot there next to a white wall reflecting the heat back into the temperature sensor....

This week - can you tell which days were sunny?

Temp (3).png (9.64 KiB) Viewed 33368 times

[Doug Coulter]

Definitely neither the most accurate or prettiest I've made, but this should be good enough to see if I'm in the right book...maybe even the right page.
Lots more to do to put together the rest (and refresh myself on the math) for the basic ion trap and measuring stuff - this should be able to push around enough ions that I should be
able to see the load on the signal as a complex impedance variation. A start, and now I know what fab technique works, and what doesn't...that last sloppy hand alignment can be improved a lot.

In a mess of tools

In the tank

The idea is to get a bunch of ions to move in and out radially with DC+RF drive, same kind of thing as any other ion trap - then increase the density and watch the effects, finally increasing enough that we don't have just ions, but also electrons, and watching that smear things. Could be there's a place where we could get enough velocity and enough recirculation to be interesting here...
Nothing beats a guess like a test, so....I'm building up the rest in between the important spring work with the land that's easy and good to do now, but later in summer...not so much.

[Doug Coulter]

A little sawing, drilling, and welding to make the new front attachment for the Cub, and now I have a dee-lux tow-behind mower with a tool cart....
I do have a deck for the bigger one, but the maintenance is eye-watering - a few years worth buys the Cub - and you need a skyhook over a paved spot to R&R it anyway (which I don't have).
Now I can do the 2/3 mile drive to my back yard in comfort, and have brute torque pulling as well as mow and tools in one trip. I can't drive straight there, as there's this near-cliff and creek in the way, so I have to go around. The side issue is recovering more health via exercise. Programming, making, (at least what I do) and physic-ing don't do much for that. I'm learning even more respect for those who cleared this land to begin with, and some sorrow I let it go so long. Trees are hard to convert back to meadow.

Making of the day

The fusors are both outgassing. I'll be able to do some things soon.

[Rex Allers]

I was just checking this weeks posts. No one has yet asked about this so I'll jump in.

So Tuesday there's the first image of making 3 rings for your new cage-grid. OK, but what in the world is to the right side of that image? Looks to be the butt end of some mangy animal, coyote?

My, possibly deranged, curiosity wants to know what I'm seeing.

[Doug Coulter]

Ah, the stuff was sitting on my Camel book (programming perl). My toys were hiding the head of that mangy animal...Even the book is dog-eared. Every now and then I need to look something up...or make a flatish place on the couch arm to hold a tea cup or ...

Note, since it's a camel, mistaking which end is permissible and expected. Both ends are ugly and stink.

[Rex Allers]

Ha ha. I see now. Thanks.