The physics of curling

 

With nothing else to do in Huntsville with the 10 ft snow, we watched curling.  The two men pretended to be experts on what the heck 'hammer' meant.  We saw the Evil Swedes going all trumpy and destroying the 'unwritten rules' of the game.  

Pre-summary - the physics is such that you can't 'second touch' the stone without it being totally obvious.  The unwritten law is that you cannot tell by looking or pictures, whether an 'air kiss' actually touched.  Thus, everybody goes nuts without physics.

Curling lives on the non-linear response of the stone on ice.  They make it extra fun by 'pebbling' the ice with tiny bumps.  A good ice-maker is worth his weight in gold.  The launcher guy gives forward momentum and then uses the handle to give it angular momentum.  The stone is very heavy and smooth, so only the handle can give it torque.

The stone slides down the runway, and the rotation makes one side faster over the ice than the other.  Many sports use this, like baseball, and bowling.  With ice, there is a zone of a few molecules, where the water behaves weirdly.  The fast side can have less friction than the slow side.  You can see this near the end of motion where the slow side sticks fast, and the moving side keeps going.

That is fine 'stick slip' friction which causes all earthquakes.  However, there is endless non-linearity during the motion where the fast side may run into liquid viscosity.  Who knows?  Point is, there is a lot of noise.

A 'touch' needs a good whack to change anything over noise.  This is easy to run some experiments.  A rule that says 'no touch' is stupid, since you can go down to lefty low probabilities.  Does a butterfly cause a storm?  Is a thread from the glove a touch?   A sport without the Scientific Method is like storybook weather forecasting.  They deserve their trouble.

In summary, we should boycott Volvos, and forget about those dang Grippies.

Small heating event just hits mid-band North

 We have had a very tiny heating event.  It was confined to the West Pacific, and, once again, the weather people missed it.  They are expecting an El Nino, which will never happen.

There it is, in all its glory.  It is starting to cut across lines, and may be dead.

It is strong in the N-hemi, but not in the Arctic.

The Arctic is plunging like a rock.  And nothing in the S-hemi.

The water temperatures are limited to a few oceans, and there is no sign of the heating event.  For us, the warmth came in the form of a few Pacific plumes, and this looks to be over.

Again, if we rated everything in terms of energy, this event would be a few notches down in magnitude from the last big one.

In summary, look to a long winter, with a few more major events.  The heating event saved US natgas, but wait until next year.

Cold descends at a snail pace

 

Earlier in the season, this would mean that a very high blob of Arctic air would be zooming down.  Now, it is very low and thin air.

When you see the wind whiddling around every island, then it is low and thin.  Does it have any staying power?  However, the UK looks interesting.

ps and carbon warming will go on forever.

ps. 

What do I have against the UK?  Can't answer that.