Aftermath

The sudden fury of a summer thunderstorm; then stillness.

Thunder and Lightning

While much of the rest of the country is getting severe weather in one form or another, the weather here in Ohio has been especially pleasant for much of the month.  For the past couple of years we have not had very many thunderstorms.  We had one last night.

Back in 1975 Scientific American published an article by Arthur A. Few entitled “Thunder”.  I still have a copy of it that I pull out and review every so often.  In it, Few describes the mechanism by which thunder is created but also describes features in the acoustic signature related to the path the lightning takes from charge source to ground.  While he used arrays of microphones, recordings, and computer analysis to study these things, at the end of the article he describes several things you can pick out by ear.

During last night’s storm the thunder consisted mostly of individual loud booms, with very little prolonged rumbling, that is associated with cloud to ground lightning far away or with cloud to cloud discharges at high altitudes; I suspect the former in last night’s storm.  There is a higher frequency ripping noise that is associated with lightning passing directly overhead.  I heard one of those last night; it came tearing in from the north-northwest and stuck somewhere south of here.

Some of these lightning bolts are several kilometers long, composed of segments on the order of 100 meters long which radiate the sound, generally in a direction perpendicular to the segment path.  The sound of the closest segments reach the ear first and carry higher frequency components than the later arrivals from farther away.  The familiar long series of rumbles of decreasing amplitude and frequency is the result.

This photograph is a scan from a black and white print that I made back in the mid-1970’s.  I have always been fascinated by the branches of this bolt of lighting, their twists and turns, some dead ends, and the final huge main channel.  If you look closely you can see a couple of the leaders coming straight at the camera.  This is just the visible part of this bolt of lightning; a much larger part might have traveled several miles through the clouds before making its appearance.

Mutations?

I have noticed an increased occurrence of an oddly shaped skin mutation growing on people.  It often appears to grow out of an ear, sometimes it is attached to their hand.  It seems to be quite bothersome when it is on their hand as they are always picking at it.

We periodically hear news reports telling us that cell phones might cause cancer.  Maybe cell phones are cancer.

An Odd Restriction

One man’s wealth is another’s nuisance

A week ago as I was leaving for Cleveland to pick up my wife at the airport, I had to stop on our road because a goat was standing in the middle of it, obviously lost.  It had a purple collar with a little bell on it.  I didn’t have time to do anything about it; I was after all going to the airport.  I did ask the neighbor boys if they had lost a goat as I went past their place.

This morning we were outside working in the yard when my wife called to me…”Is that the goat?”  Sure enough there stood the little goat up in the paddock behind the barn.  Then I looked again and he was up the hill in the field.  Then all of the sheep came running into the barn; wait!, the goat was mixed in with them.  The little goat had found some potential friends but the sentiment was not mutual…the sheep wanted nothing to do with this little nuisance.  They were all running around in the barn or standing and stomping their feet; everyone was quite agitated.  One young ewe decided she had had enough and jumped over the gate at the south end of the barn and was gone.

My wife crawled over the gate and entered the fray eventually catching the goat.

Now in some societies a man’s wealth is determined by how many goats he owns.  That is apparently not the case in ours.  I called the sheriff’s department to see if anyone had reported a missing goat; no they didn’t have any record of a missing goat during the last week.  No one had come to the house looking for a lost goat.  This goat had a collar on it, apparently it had been special to someone.  But it had been running free for a week.

I called some Amish friends…no answer.  Another family.  After a little hesitation the woman said that maybe the children would enjoy a little goat.  Yes, we could bring it to their place.  We tied its feet together as best we could and put the struggling goat in the back of the truck.  My wife sat in the back of the truck and held on to the goat while I drove to the farm where we were to drop the goat off.  We went the back way.

When we got there no one was around outside.  I opened the tailgate and my wife jumped out with the goat which was now making loud goat noises.  I started toward the house to see if anyone was home when the woman I had talked to on the phone came out.

“Did you hear your new goat calling to you?” I asked.  Yes, she had.  She and my wife threw it over the fence into a paddock where they kept their young calves.  The calves were in the barn.  The goat hobbled around the paddock until it found the barn door.  Ah! More potential friends.  We left at that point.  As we drove down the lane we looked back to see the calves all in a group, running from the little goat.

 

Leaving Our Mark

Last winter while I was walking in the woods south of the house I came across this tree again.  I had seen it before, I think the first time after I tripped over the old woven wire fence that runs out from it, half buried in the leaf litter on the floor of the woods.  How old is that fence?  Our house was built in 1969.  There were no domesticated animals on the farm since then until we got here and I doubt if there had been for years prior to that.  The fence could have been put up in the 1950s, possibly even before that.  The farmer left his mark.

We all do.  We have four buildings on our farm.  The house and the old milk house were here.  We built a small barn.  A couple of years later we tore down the old tractor shed and corn crib, the tops of both of which were slowly heading west without their respective foundations…they were in the process of slowly falling over.  The old buildings were hauled off to a construction landfill.  In their place we built a garage.  We have fencing stretched out all over the place, although ours is attached only to fence posts, not to trees.  We try to at least be aware of how much detritus we leave behind.  We cannot be…

Think of the amount of trash a person generates in 58 years of living in America.  The old toy riding tractor I got when I was five.  All the plastic toys, my first microscope, the chemistry set, my Hallicrafters short-wave radio, three guitars, two stereos from college, countless cars, tons of fossil carbon, garbage trucks full of candy wrappers, pop bottles, and other trash, my first computer and all of the others since then that I have disposed of somewhere, a small number of televisions, sewage, and several bicycles.  That doesn’t cover it.  All of that times the millions of other human beings producing just as much or more.  And millions more who want to.

Where did/does it all go?  We are leaving our mark.  By comparison, maybe the fence buried deep in the trunk of the old beech tree is pretty insignificant.

Environmental Sounds

In my new work, I am building a small cluster of autonomous recording platforms to record environmental sounds.  This past week I have been working at home to set up the first prototype of the new recording system.  One hardware component failed midweek but I got the recording portion working without throwing any errors.  Yesterday afternoon I set the device out on the deck and sampled the sound here on the farm.  We have a nice chorus of birds singing to us most of the time so I thought it would be a good indicator of the recording sensitivity of the device.  The real thing will be away from houses so if this was satisfactory it will be even better out in field and forest.

We sample regularly but infrequently and only for a short period of time due to the size of the data files.  Yesterday I was recording for 30 seconds twice an hour.  I waited (im)patiently while the recordings were being made.  Finally, at nine o’clock in the evening I pulled the plug.  I shut down the little computer and brought everything in off the deck.  I removed the memory card and plugged it into the desktop to listen.

I had sixteen files, 30 seconds each.  Eight minutes of sound from seven and a half hours of real time.   It was a windy day but the microphone was protected from much of that by the screens on the deck.  I could hear the wind in the trees.  I could hear lots of birds.  I was pretty happy with the first performance.

But what really struck me about the recordings was that all of them had the sounds of internal combustion engines in them.  Our house is off the road although not more than a couple of hundred feet away from it.  The state highway is perhaps only a quarter of a mile away.  The analysis shown in the illustration is of the sound of the neighbor’s lawn mower.  You don’t think about it but it is always there, the constant background hum of engines.  Even as I am writing now five big helicopters from Akron-Canton are flying over, shaking the house…we do notice that.

We are part of the environment.  The sounds we make will be part of our study.  It will be interesting to see, as we deploy our recorders and start recording how that background will change in the coming years as the cost of gasoline continues to rise…

 

Bike Route

Last fall I bought a used ( recycled ) bicycle and started riding it on the Holmes County Trail.  I have never been big on sports or exercise but I have gotten hooked on bicycling.  I started riding last fall by myself but soon my wife got interested too so I fixed up an old three speed bike we had for her to ride. 

We rode during the winter months when is was warm enough, generally above freezing, and when the trail was free of ice and snow.  We rode more and more as the days warmed until we were riding ten miles or more every evening that the weather permitted.  My wife’s bike was not good; we started talking about trying to find a better one for her.  Then we started talking about getting better ones for both of us which led to talking about getting new ones for both of us.

One morning we drove over the hill to a bicycle shop owned by a young Amish man.  We told him what we were interested in and he showed us the models he had.  We each picked one out and rode them up and down the road a few times.  We told him we would take them and that we would pick them up in a week to give him time to install fenders and an odometer.

That was a little over three weeks ago.  The odometer shows 238 miles…about 10 miles a day on average.  This new 21 speed bike doesn’t fit my personality the way the old Schwinn Collegiate 3 did but it sure fits my body a lot better and is a pleasure to ride…