Albedo Libido

Spring is in the air. We’ve had several nice days here. Snow is melting. It won’t be long and things will be getting green. Life renews.

It’s not exactly a Phoenix though. The bird doesn’t rise from the flames out of a snowbank. Nature isn’t giving us the bird. It’s not Peter Cottontail either. But the hare is a symbol of renewal associated with the end of winter. Splitting hares yields cottontails {AKA Bunnies}, Jack Rabbits, and European hares. There are more varieties I’m sure. The European hare is tied into the Easter Rabbit myth. Eggs are a sign of renewal. Hare populations appear to explode in spring. They breed like rabbits you know. And therein lies the libido. You have a bunch of girls dance around a Maypole. Probably supposed to be virgins, but they really seem enamored of that pole. Customs and rituals evolve over time. You still hear about egg hunts. Eggs that a bunny has. Playboy Bunnies almost seem quaint nowadays. I’m sure they still inspire Jack rabbits. Gotta find those eggs!

They added captions. I hadn’t seen those on the version I watched earlier.

Al be dough. He must be made of money because he shines like gold. Actually more like ice, clouds, and water. The ground tends to be less shiny. So many aspects of nature are a balancing act. Are they a stable equilibrium or an unstable equilibrium? In dieting plateaus are those equilibrium points. They can be a pain to get by. In terms of the planet’s albedo, let’s hope we don’t go past a plateau. You ever notice that weather systems tend to follow roads and rivers? You think that might have something to do with temperature differences on the surface? Albedo is the reflectivity of the planet. There are lots of variables. All else being equal is a phrase we can’t use when we talk about environmental systems. It’s like doing physics problems with massless strings and frictionless pulleys. It is useful for teaching the concepts, but engineering problems have to actually consider those things.

Wild

No Payne, No Gaines

I’m not as fit and healthy as I used to be. I don’t know if I have the constitution to discuss Paine. Payne was a publisher. I can’t say if anyone named Gaines authored any soaps or wrote for any television shows. There was a fellow named Jerome that wrote about his adventures George and Harris, to say nothing of Montmorency.

Personality types haven’t really changed probably for all of recorded time. People are people. They talk differently though. Even within one language the usage changes, idioms change, so do idiots occasionally. Three Men In A Boat is quite readable to modern readers. In fact modern readers are less critical of it than the intellectuals of his time. I became a fan of Robert Graves after seeing the Masterpiece Theatre production of “I,Claudius”. So I read his other stuff. In his book “The Antigua Stamp” a sibling rivalry escalates to a war between a very smart malicious person and a stupid malicious person. Who do you sympathize with? They’re both bad people, is a stupid bad person worse than an intelligent bad person? No, their intelligence makes them worse. To quote a southerner “Bless their heart, they just don’t know any better.” Yes, an evil genius is worse than an evil idiot. Graves had his evil idiot be a fan of Jerome K Jerome’s book “Three Men In A Boat.” After reading it I became a fan too. He reminds me of James Thurber. Modern readers certainly like the book. Of course, I considered “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” as adventure stories with some mythology thrown in. The popularity of movies about Troy and The 300 show that the stories can be entertaining. I didn’t read the “Divine Comedy” quite that way, but when Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote “Inferno” it did read like an adventure novel. Who do you root for Benny?

In Dante’s version he had a number of politicians there. Larry and Jerry have at least one science fiction writer there.

Time for me to retire this night.
Untamed