Radio Silence

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Amateur Radio. Mr. Big Food is on board, too. We are going to get out amateur radio licenses and some equipment. Blog silence is thus explained.

It’s all quite interesting. I’m taking notes. SueK– I found this to be the best bird’s eye view introduction to ham radio. Almost jargon free and very accessible for someone who wants to enter ham world. Comes at it from the perspective of a prepper but not a bat-sh*t crazy TEOTWAWKI SHTF OMG THE WORLD IS ENDING prepper, which is nice.

Amateur radio is, for Mr. Big Food and I, a compromise. As you are know, I am a Full Professor in The Department of Redundancy Department and as such am leery of having only one means of connecting to the world beyond the gate. As you may also know, Mr. Big Food is a Full Professor in The Department of Don’t Waste Money Department and as such is none too happy about spending hard earned money– to the tune of about $1200 a year– on a landline phone that rings off the hook all day.

Enter ham radio. We will begin with handheld devises and once we’ve familiarized ourselves, we’ll move on to a base unit.

This could keep my little brain occupied for months!

New tag: ham radio

Human-ities

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Any talk of saving culture, or restoring culture, begins with a defense of the humanities. Any hope of cultural revival equally begins with a re-emergence of the humanities. Any hope to truly celebrate—though not uncritically—the human person rests with being drenched in the dewfall of the humanities. The death of the humanities really does mean the death of the human. It represents the final destruction of the Lebenswelt, the great cultural inheritance that has moved man and earth. Our current metaphysical and ontological impoverishment is very much the result of our cultural impoverishment. Any revival of the human being, of culture, and of tradition, is tied to the resurrection of the humanities.

“In Defense of the Humanities”

The Humanities are alive and well here at Farther Along Farm.

M-i-s-s-i-s

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NOAA weather radio is beeping at us. Flash flood warning. Up to three inches of rain has already fallen.

Mr. Big Food remarks that he will not be cutting today.

I need coffee.

Radar, Satellite, and Eyes

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  • Lake Charles, LA
  • New Orleans, LA
  • Mobile, AL
  • Ft. Polk, LA
  • Jackson, MS
  • Shreveport, LA
  • Columbus, MS
  • Ft. Smith, AR
  • Little Rock, AR
  • Memphis, TN
  • Birmingham, AL

These are RadarScope (RS) screen shots captured between 10:04 and 10:05 this morning. To orient you, we’re going west to east beginning with the southern most states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, then again west to east one notch further north.

While is is true that the center of the low pressure system that is/was Barry is over the western edge of Louisiana, it is not true that central and northern Louisiana and almost all of Arkansas are getting inches and inches of rain.

I will not bore you with more images, but looking at “storm total accumulation” on RS, I just want to bang my head on the desk.

Shreveport twitter is reporting trace to over an inch of rain today. How is that 10-20″ of rain? It’s not even 6-10″. In fact, looking at accumulation totals, no one except those in the south east corner of Mississippi got anywhere near 8″– the most I’m seeing is about 4″

I swear. It’s enough to make you want to tuck your head under your wing and make it all go away. Keep in mind that I did not want to scare you away with the satellite images. But you should have seen them– or maybe you did.

Just FYI– I think I’ve found something new on which to obsess.

Sunday Travels: Back Roads

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We went to Jackson last week. Stopped for gas on the way home about 10 miles from the exit we normally take. Mr. Big Food suggested rather than getting back on the interstate, we cut the hypotenuse on the back roads. Very pleasant.

  • Crossroads; there’s an election coming up
  • A very nice house in Vaiden, Mississippi
  • Well-kept
  • Straight & narrow
  • Turn right
  • There are churches everywhere
  • Keep going
  • Abandoned school?
  • Looked positively terrible
  • Dollar General

A Little Exercise

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In reply to SueK, who commented that she could not fathom 20″ of rain– what’s forecast for NOLA.

20″ is indeed a lot of rain. We could get up to 10″. Here’s something I once had my students do– a very long time ago– when teaching both metric system, and some environmental biology.

Take some paved outdoor space of reasonable dimension– driveway, small parking lot. Measure length & width in feet or yards. Set aside.

1 inch of rain is a volume of water– 1 cubic inch.

1 inch = 2.54 cm. 2.54 * 2.54 * 2.54 = 16.39 cubic cm. Round down (so as not to over inflate the eventual stat) and once inch of rain is 16.3 cubic centimeters of rain.

By definition, 1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 ml (and has a mass of 1 gram but that’s irrelevant here) [and I can’t remember but there’s a pressure component to this too]

1″ rain = 16.3ml.

Convert your measurement of the driveway to cm. Let’s say 10′ x 20′ … 304.8cm & 609.6cm, respectively.

Now, drop an inch of water on that surface.

304.8 * 609.6 * 16.3 = 3,028,639.1 cubic centimeters or ml of water.

How many liters is 3 MILLION milliliters? 3028.6391 call it 3028.

Divide by 2 b/c everyone knows how much is in a 2-liter bottle.

One inch of rain falling on a paved surface measuring 10′ x 20′ is more than 1500 2-liter bottles of water. It can’t go down, so it runs off.

Burn ban head scratcher

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I swear to God, those folks in Louisiana make us Mississippians look down right intelligent some days. Let’s go look and see if the iPad has a therefore sign. It does not. But you know what I’m talking about. That little triangle of dots that indicates, e.g.,

Hurricane therefore burn ban

WTH?

What’s happening @5:30am?

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One day last winter, when the dogs and I were walking around the edge of the water shed in the Piney Woods, I looked up and saw the trail cam! Right where Daughter C and the J-Man had left it. Took it down and brought it inside.

Earlier this spring, when I set up the personal weather station, I grew annoyed that it only saved four days’ worth of data, so I took the SD card out of the trail cam and put it in the PWS monitor.

Tuesday, when I discovered that there were no tomatoes in the tomato garden, I put batteries in the camera and lamented the fact that Fred’s probably did not have SD cards. I was correct– there are no SD cards in town and I was not going to go to Starkvegas to get an SD card. How was I going to transfer the images of the tomato thief from the trail cam to the computer? Well, it just so happens that the camera has a crappy old fashioned USB port. And by old fashioned, I mean USB 1 or there abouts– the sort of thing you’d throw away because nothing has USB 1 anymore.

Well. You might have thrown your USB 1 cables away but I certainly did not because in the past I reasoned there may come a time in the future when I would need a USB 1 cable. I reasoned correctly in the past and so now in the present (perfect) future I was able to go to the little tub in the Bunkhouse store room labeled “USB cords, etc.” and get a USB 1 cable.

In other news, the feed store’s selection of nasty stinky deer repellants is not what it once was. I had to settle for Liquid Fence. Yesterday there were no images on the camera– no deer came close enough to the fence– liquid or otherwise– to activate the camera. But as you can plainly see, such was not the case at 5:30am this morning. So I guess I’ll have to… think of what else I can do.

At least I know now what direction they’re coming from. That should help in the defense department.

ROS | Updated w/comment

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Run on sentence.

I am confused about the context. Must be Drudge related.

UPDATE. This is such typical hyper-BS. It’s New Orleans. It has more water than land, and a significant portion of the land is below sea level. And it rained! Oh boy!

Why are they out walking around hamming it up for the camera? Good lord. Just think– we have probably four days of this to look forward to.

Nameless Bore

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Potential Tropical Cyclone Two

…DISTURBANCE IS NOT A DEPRESSION YET BUT EXPECTED TO BE ONE SOON… …STORM SURGE, HEAVY RAINS, AND HURRICANE CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE ACROSS THE NORTH-CENTRAL GULF COAST IN A COUPLE OF DAYS…

Citations after I’ve had coffee. Mr. Big Food tells me Drudge is on it.

Hurricane Watch Issued

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Visible satellite; new feature at Windy

Just a few minutes ago. Right now we’re forecast to get some wind and rain.

Here’s the thing that occurred to me. They have issued a hurricane watch. But it is still “POTENTIAL TROPICAL CYCLONE TWO.” They are bored or super confident in the models.

Rest assured I will monitor this and provide commentary.