Worth Too Much

It was only a week ago that I was reminiscing about my adventures as a Boy Scout at Camp Strake.  Today, the Houston Chronicle reports that the Boy Scouts have the property Up for Sale!

I suppose I should not be surprised.  Whatever reason the Scouts may give for the decision, the bottom line is that - located in a rapidly expanding area between Conroe and the Woodlands - the land has simply become too valuable.

The move is not unprecedented.  Camp Hudson, where I learned to swim, was a Boy Scout camp on the banks of Buffalo Bayou.  When it became surrounded by the high-end homes of the Memorial Area,  the Scouts sold the 125 acres. 

That sale brought the Sam Houston Area Council over eight million dollars in 1973.  I can only imagine what 2,200 acres of prime real estate might sell for today.

Latest Gadget

Here’s a picture of the DirecTV guide screen on our TV this morning.  Notice anything different?

We now have not only the local stations offered via satellite by DirecTV, we have all of the local off-air alternative stations – the dash one, dash two, etc. – stations listed as well.

Not quite a year ago, we upgraded our system to an HD-DVR, and we love the flexibility (NFL meets DVR) but it has its drawbacks. 

As much as we have gotten spoiled to prerecording, or just putting our favorite shows on pause while we finish the dinner dishes or simply take a break – then fast-forwarding through all the annoying commercials, we soon found that the high definition satellite signal is much more susceptible to atmospheric interference.  We have totally lost the HD signal in the den on several occasions while the old SD receiver in the bedroom kept  receiving without a single glitch.

The solution?  A DirecTV model AM21N off-air tuner that connects via the USB input on the DVR.  This allows us to receive (and record) all the local stations – including the dash-N stations not normally seen – and to switch seamlessly to the local off-air station if the satellite signal is lost.  I believe this unit is available from DirecTV, but we got ours from Solid Signal for under 50 bucks.

We haven’t had a chance to check that seamless switching thing out yet, but there is a 90% chance of rain all day today, so we should be trying it out any time now.

Vegan Garbage

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to buy advertizing space on the side of Houston Garbage Trucks. 

A press release from the group says that they sent a letter to Harry J. Hayes, director of Houston's Solid Waste Management Department, with an offer to buy ads on the city trucks but, so far, the city has not replied.

According to PETA, the ads would feature “Lettuce Lady” in her edible bikini and the slogan "Meat Trashes the Planet. Go Vegan."

A can full of rotting vegetables might smell somewhat better than one containing rancid meat, and it would be less likely to be overturned by a stray dog, or cat - or the neighborhood raccoon.  Still, that seems to say something about where the animals stand on the whole vegan lifestyle.

More Earthquake Stuff

Would have been nice to have this yesterday when I was reporting on my earthquake prediction, but a story this morning tells us ….

An 8.7 earthquake that struck west of Indonesia on April 11 was the biggest of its kind ever recorded and confirms suspicions that a giant tectonic plate is breaking up, scientists said.

The quake, caused by an unprecedented quadruple-fault rupture, gave Earth's crustal mosaic such a shock that it unleashed quakes around the world nearly a week later, they said yesterday.

"We've never seen an earthquake like this," said Keith Koper, a geophysicist at the University of Utah in the western United States.

"Nobody was anticipating an earthquake of this size and type, and the complexity of the faulting surprised everybody I've spoken to about this," said Thorne Lay, a planetary sciences professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The quake occurred around 500 kilometers west of Sumatra in the middle of the Indo-Australian plate, a piece of Earth's crust that spans Australia, the eastern Indian Ocean and the Indian sub-continent.

It was initially reported as measuring 8.6 on the "Moment magnitude" scale, but a new calculation places it at 8.7, which under this logarithmic scale means the energy release is 40 percent greater than thought, according to investigations published in Nature.

It was the biggest "strike-slip" earthquake ever recorded, meaning a fault which opens laterally rather than up or down, and the 10th biggest quake of any kind in the last century.

It was followed two hours later by an 8.2 event on another fault a little farther to the south, and both were felt from India to Australia.

Earthquakes of such intensity are typically "subduction" quakes, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another at a plate boundary, causing vertical movement that can displace the sea and unleash a tsunami. The December 26 2004 9.1 quake off Sumatra, whose waves killed a quarter of a million people around the Indian Ocean, is one such example.

But the April 11 event caused no tsunamis because the movement was sideways. Fatalities, too, were few – only 10, according to the Indonesian authorities.

How I Saved California

It has been just over a year since I predicted that a major earthquake would hit California in the near future. 

Since that time, there have been numerous quakes throughout the world from Indonesia to Oklahoma – including several at other spots along the Pacific coast of North or Central America – but California has been as quiet as can be.  Sure, there have been several temblors in the 4.0 range, but native Californians don’t even seem to notice those.

We continue to get teased by near-miss events, like this morning’s 6.2 quake in Baja California.  That quake's epicenter was located 46 miles north of La Paz, Mexico, and was centered in the Gulf of California, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Still, in spite of, or maybe because of my predictions, California remains firmly attached to the Continent. 

Animations

I have mentioned in the past that my all-time favorite novel is Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. 

There is a conversation in the book that takes place between a couple of mathematicians in World War II.  One mentions that (radial) airplane engines always have an uneven number of cylinders.  The other questions this and the first relies (paraphrasing) “I don’t know.  Something to do with harmonics, I guess.  That wasn’t my point, anyway.  Can we just accept it as a given?”

Obviously, this is not a pivotal passage in the book, but I have thought about it.  In fact, I was thinking about it again yesterday afternoon. 

It occurred to me that – unlike an in-line six or a V-8 engine - all of the pistons in a radial engine had to attach at the same point on the crankshaft,  and I wondered how that was done. 

I had not yet begun to research this when I accidently came across a website devoted to Animations.  The first of these features a radial engine.

Boy Scouts and Catfish Revisited

Yesterday I mentioned the fish kill in the lake at Camp Strake in 1956.  A few years later, and a couple of counties away, I was involved in another incident involving catfish and a Boy Scout camp.

Camp Mohawk was west of Alvin, Texas, off Highway 35 along the banks of Chocolate Bayou.  It served, at various times, as a church camp, a Boy Scout camp, and sometimes both.  For part of the summer of 1959, I worked at the swimming pool there as a lifeguard.

A break in the dam along with a particularly dry spring and summer had caused the fishing pond on the property to go completely dry.  One morning, I was taking a short cut across the dry lakebed when I felt something move beneath my feet.  I kicked about two inches of hard crust off the area, and  I found a  live catfish there in the mud! It was a channel cat that weighed between two and three pounds. 

Catfish are particularly hardy creatures, and there is quite a bit of controversy about whether they hibernate in freezing temperatures or conditions of extreme drought.  I don’t know if hibernation is the correct term, so I won’t get into that argument. 

What I do know is that this fish (and several others) had managed to survive for several months without eating anything and getting what little oxygen could be drawn from the moisture in the mud.  I think this would require a state of suspended animation very similar to hibernation.

I showed the camp caretaker what I had “caught.” We went back with hoes and rakes, and found several more – all between one and three pounds.

It would make a good story if we had found enough for a big fish-fry, but we did not.  We did find enough to provide a good meal for his family and for mine.