Crossing the Icefall

About 3am, Sue notice water dripping down the wall by the door of our back porch. We have had no real ice melting thaws since late Decemember, so water was coming in due to ice build up in the divide where the east/west roof, merges with the north/south roof. While removing snow with a roof rake and salting the ice, I was entranced by the how similar the ice on the roof was to photos I have seen of the Klumbu icefall that Mt. Everest climbers must cross in order to reach the summit. So out came the camera and below are two photos. One is a googled, pirated image of the Kkumbu icefall and the other is of my roof with penciled in figures.

Interesting Book ... check it out.

Just finished reading 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks' by Rebecca Skloot - a N.Y. Times best seller. I first heard about the book in an interview with the author on one of NPR's 'talking head' shows. I was interested in the interview and made a note of the book because during my teaching career days, I had introduced my students to karyotyping (...examining chromosomes) by ordering "HeLa" cells from Cellserv, a biotech company in the D.C. area. Students would prep microscope slides; drop fixed "HeLa" cells from various heights to 'splat' onto microscope slides; followed by staining in an assembly line process; then zooming to 1000X under a microscope to observe and count chromosomes. They could see banding on the various shaped and sized human chromosomes; as well as count the number of chromosomes in cells.

The "Hela" cells we used in lab, were cultured from the original cells removed from Henrietta Lack when she was being treated for cervical cancer in the 'colored only' section at John Hopkins in Baltimore. She died from the cancer a few weeks later in 1951. Her cells were prolific growers under laboratory conditions and have been used in cancer research & teaching for many years. The extended Lack's family recieved virtually no explaination or recognition of the significants of this cell line that has and continues to contribute so much to our understanding of cancer, genetics, tissue culture, etc today.

After reading the story of the Lack's family, I personally was struck by the importances of good education and racial equality; two comodities readily denied the Lack's family over the decades.

It's a good, fast read and available in the Pioneer Library system.

Low Budget Good Deeds

Yesterday while finishing a 12.4 mile walking loop, I noticed a letter in the snow along side of Blue Cut road. I stopped, picked it up and found it was from a local resident, stamped and addressed to someone at a correctional facility in NYS. I have no idea who the individuals whose names were on the letter are and tucked the letter into my wind breaker pocket, then proceeding on towards home. While starting up the hill on Marbletown road out of Newark, I stopped to visit with an elderly man trying to reattach his mailbox with bare, white fingers in the 20F temperatures. He was having a difficult time threading the nut & washer through the mailbox mounting frame to the stove bolt with numb fingers. I helpped him complete the job, but not before my fingers became very numb too. He thanked me before I finished walking the remaining 1.5 miles home to dry out the letter and get it into Monday's mail pickup.

PS - "Who was that masked man? ...Hi! Ho! Silver!"

Looking Back at 2010

Another year has come and gone. While out walking today I thought about the year past and made the following estimates about the occupation of my time over the last 365 days. I would like to think that my preoccupations around the home and our travels were environmentally friendly. With the completion of yesterdays' walk into town to pick up a few non-domestically produced items for our New Year dinner today; I completed my goal of walking/backpacking 1500 miles in 2010. [I also cashed in $37.50 worth of returnable cans/bottles picked up along the road side in and around Marbletown.] Checking the odometers of my rusty truck (... missed 'cash for clunkers') and our car, I noted that we drove a combined total of 14,039 miles; less than the USA average for a couple in our age group*.

* http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm

NEW YEAR...we are here!

Winter Solstice Measurements - very cool!

December was a record setting cloudy, snowy month here in the central western part of upstate New York; not idyllic for generating solar electric power! Yesterday after 16 overcaste days, the sun was out and the photovoltaic (P.V.) towers were generating electrical power!
Since the winter solstice was ten days ago and Sue & I had adjusted the angle of the solar panels to recieve the lower angle of winter sunlight more directly earlier in December; I wanted some empiral evidence that the 'angles' were worth the effort.

Below is a photo I took showing the angle of insolation near "solar noon". I printed, then scanned the photo with the protractor to measure the angle of insolation - Results: 24 degree angle. Next I took a profile photo of the P.V. towers (below right); scanned the photo and protractor to measure the angular position of the solar collecting panels - results: 64 degrees. If you look closely in the lower right hand corner, you can just barely see the sting which parallels the angle of the sun's rays ... it is visibly & very close to 90 degrees with the flat solar panel surface. This is not an official geometry proof ...but you can see that there is an advantage to adjusting the collecting panel angle as the seasons (angle of insolation) change.

(summer angle with higher solar noon sun angle) (winter angle with lower solar noon sun angle)

Below is a copy of our on line electrical energy production for the month of December, minus today - 12/31/10. Can you tell that the month was cloudy? You can see that the our P.V. system automatically shut down for a grid power outage on December 14th (See earlier blog post on 12/15).
The video clip is of the inverter display in our basement. The inverter converts the direct current (D.C) power from the P.V. system into alternating current (A.C), before going to the grid. As the display cycles through, you can see the amount of CO 2 kept out of the atmosphere; the number of Kilowatts of power currently being produced ('speed'); the total number of Kilowatts hours produced by our system('how far we've traveled'); the number of Kilowatt hours currently produced for this day ('how far we've traveled today'); and acknowedgement that the two towers ('system is working').

* (italics = analogy of energy display)

Below is our meter which indicates that electrical power is being produced for our use and the extra is being metered back into the grid.

Seasonal Analysis

Below is my attempt to graphically plot seasonal expectations.

I hope it is good for a laugh!

(click on the drawing to enlarge the drawing.)