Cottage Report - July 29, 2020

Perfect weather, and no bugs.  I'm sitting before an empty lake.  Apparently you can rent your cottage out for a huge amount, but nobody is doing.  Who wants your cottage filled with covid?

ps.  from the neighbour

ps.  the fish was good, but Sunday we are all stuck in the tiny tin shack waiting for the rain to stop.

pps.  had to come home Monday.  No traffic.  Cold at home, and we got 8 inches of rain.  The bean supports fell over in the soup of our garden.

Banks apparently hiring debt counselors

This is a report of scurrilous gossip from unnamed sources.  

Housing prices have gone underwater.  We have a full crash, and monster houses are being cut in half.  Yet, we have no word of anything.  In last crash, banks seized everything, but now it's nothing.

Physics demands an answer.  What goes up, must crash down.  Nobody has put in their mortgage payments for the last six months.  What are banks doing this time?

They are in full-scale debt counselling mode.  Somebody has a $2k per month payment, and they've stopped paying.  Could you go down to $1K and stay in the house?  Banks need more people for that, and they used to hire ruthless mortgage stern faces.  Now it's touchy-feely people.  

Not that any of this is actually happening.  It's not at all like the Japan 'bad loan' scandal, where the banks hid all their bad real estate loans.  No, not at all.  

So, if you are a warmie English major, get in touch with your local bank.  If you are expecting the housing crash to be identified by bank sales, keep dreaming.  The first foreclosure, and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

ps.  this is exciting for me.  Two years ago I called a housing crash when the frothy Chinese money-laundering stopped.  There was no money in the market.  Yet housing staggered on like the living dead.  This is impossible physics for a speculative commodity.  You can't go from 'zooming' to flat, because too many people are stuck with 2 houses, equivalent to margin calls.  People were sucked in to buy, and covid was the final blow.  Now, it will be fun  interesting to watch physics assert itself, which is sad and depressing.  These days nobody does physics, and the only result is disaster.  I'm in a depressing business, time to take my happy pills.  :)

pps.  Do not do this!  If you are strung out, only put down 5% down, or whatever, don't stop paying your bank. Don't wait 6 months.  Don't go to your friendly bank and say that since Global Warming will kill us all in 2 years, you are not having children and you don't 'feel' like paying anything.  The new English-Major hire will say that, yes, global warming will kill us all tomorrow, and have a nice day, we don't want you to pay.  :)

more:  This just in.  Press conference with a bank press president:  "Is it true that nobody in Ontario is paying their mortgages? "  Response:  "That is fake news!  I'm sure we can find somebody who is still paying."  He walks out.

Mittie goes with magic Snowball Earth solution

Reference

The cheesiest resolution to a conflict in a play is 'Deus Ex Machina', which is a magic solution from the gods.

Thus, mittie has gone for that.  The past ice ages of the earth have the exact timing of plate tectonic cycles, yet we can't use real physics, because that would set a bad precedent.  So we conjure up a great masking of sunlight. 

Perhaps the Sun can go whammy-whammy, or a great volcano produces blackout curtains.  It's all wonderful, and new students will flock to a school that invokes magic. 

No boring physics for us!  Kiss on the jammed beaches!  

Arctic Heat Wave

This is a joy to anybody living in the Arctic.  This year, the barges will be able to make it to many northern communities.

But there is no joy in warmie Mudville.  This is total doom, making the worst projections absolutely true, even though it is localized.

Starting low, because of weird Pacific currents, the ice volume curve is set to set a new record in lowness.  It will dive because the tropical plumes love touring the Arctic this year.

Who da thunk it?  We'll soon see the washpost get all over this.  Unfortunately, if the Arctic is enjoying all this heat-energy largess, other places get shortchanged.

Sucks to b u, UK.

ps.  in a physics world there is only so much heat energy to go around.  It's all from the tropics and it goes up or it goes down, or gets stored in the oceans.  In a storybook world, there are no energy constraints.  Fantasy novels are all I read, because physics is so depressing.  :)

Cottage Report - July 25, 2020

Yeah, we are in a very small heat lock, with heavy weather swirling all around us.  A two-day heat wave!  Nothing happening at all.

ps.  although it is hot, the humidity is down, and there is a breeze.  Paradise.  No fish.

pps.  Sunday very hot and humid with high winds.  A swim cools you off for 10 minutes.

more:  sweat pouring off you when you are trying to sleep.  Life of the cottage.

Loser full face shields

Whatever you do, don't buy the Costco face shields.  They have a solid foam on the top that gives no upper ventilation.  Everybody in the store was taking the shield off because they instantly fogged up.  This is a major scandal.  Maybe.

We are using a face shield made by ABC plastics.  It has a space at the top of the head.  The plastic never fogs up.  Just a world to the wise.

Warmies Salivating

Get ready for the next big warmie push.  This should get them over the covid slump, and the winter-summer of the UK.

Because of the Halvsie El Nino, the Arctic ice volume started low, but followed the standard melting curve.  These warmies are anticipating that the curve will dive below all the other years, and then there will be great headlines!  It doesn't matter that the ice volume goes up and down, and the fact that they have never used this curve before.

There is good reason to expect a low dip.  The tropical plumes are having a hay-day over Siberia right now.

They go under the UK and heat Europe, and then go to Siberia.  Just another pattern that might be stable for a couple of months, and then we have something else.

ps.  the newest thing is this.  They still believe that the oceans act as a sop to heat energy, and are giving a false impression of cooling.  They then go on to say that these oceans will become 'full' and we are back to full heating.  Who can argue against this?  Not me.

Royal York Wine and Water

Reference

I am following the new federal gov't subsidy to get stores online.  This is in the form of a 90 day free trial for all the Shopify tools, instead of the regular 14 days.

Wine ordering and shipping will be a challenge, so I'm stumbling along.  Take a look at the home page and we'll see what you think.  So far nobody will looking at it, since their no search optimization, or other links.

I bought a .ca domain which is about $20 a year. 

Trumpypants brings out the black helicopters

This is funny.  For years the trumpy conspiracy idjits talked about fed black helicopters, and fed secret soldiers.  Now they are coming out!

You can't make this stuff up.  I hope they all get covid....  :)

ps.  I can't wait for his private army to beat up people at the ballot box.  Neat.

Ocean current report - July 20, 2020

The Pacific Current is at full charge, going West.  It is the most 'unreversed' that I have seen it.

I was totally wrong in predicting last year that our winter would give Siberia a run for its money.  The Halvsie El Nino popped up out of nowhere and gave us a mild winter, but it was a long one.  I am assuming that those weird conditions won't be out to play this winter.  Thus, prepare for a record winter, starting with snow from November to May, and cold enough to freeze the pipes.

They are making a big deal about El Nina, which doesn't bother us in the north.

On the temp anomaly map, the water is running much cooler on the west side of South America, but hot on the east side.

The ocean currents support this.

The hot side is showing lots of current from the equatorial belt, and on the cold side, we have water from Antarctica.  It is caused by the Pacific belt sucking in a lot of water to feed the westerly motion (mass must be conserved).

To have a really good ice age, I am expecting a greater flow of heat to the south.  The picture now is still a bit mucky, but I always go boldly forth, with a good chance for error.

What I have still going for me is the death of the Gulf Stream and North Pacific current.  Without these bad boys, we will just get colder and colder.  Look at the horrible UK weather, the tabloids are now calling 20C as a 'heat wave'.  :)  But they aren't even getting that.

Don't forget that the UK is the 'heart of darkness' with the English Majors takeover of the world.  :)  I'm so happy when they freeze and never mention the Gulf Stream.

ps.  the low level of Arctic ice volume during the winter means that we'll get the lowest volume yet in the Summer.  The warmies are happy. 

Cottage Report -- July 18, 2020

Heatwaves continue around the world in July, proof positive that climate change will kill us all, as opposed to all the other things that will kill us.

In Cottage Country everything is beautiful.  We have really hot weather, and the cottage got 4 inches of rain while we were away.  The drought is over and all the trees won't die.

The fish are active.  I got lots of nibbles on my 10 minute dog-fishing trip.  Right now, a lot of fish are jumping off the point, and the neighbour is out fishing.  Maybe I'll get a 'magic fish'.

Yesterday we were drowning in tent caterpillar moths.  The fish will eat well, but next year might be one of those 'no leaves' years when the tenties go nuts and eat everything.

ps.  Sunday's storm had some strong wind gusts.  The cottage was sheltered but the wind lifted my paddleboat right off the dock, the neighbour had a main cable snap on his dock, and we see the famous lake slide floating in the middle of the lake.

Mountains of Paper - Part 3

It's amazing that in 1980, the business was run exactly the same as in 1900.  We had typewriters and carbon paper.  I wrote my reports by hand and it went to the typing pool.  It would come back and I would correct on the paper.  Just by then they had machines and big floppy disks.

Later years would see the rise of the PC and word processing.  The business was destroyed by spread sheets, stupid presentation software, etc.  All downhill.  Very sad.

ps.  the big destruction of all the pc apps was to allow the upper bureaucracy to exert total control down to the very bottom.  Before, we were protected by walls of paper.  The company became self-similar throughout.

Mountains of Paper - Part 2

The new building had room for 5,000 and I was one of the last ones hired to fill it.  Hydro was going full-hog to build Darlington on their own.  The previous plants had been built by aecl.

It was amazing that more than half the building was filled with support people to the engineers and scientists.  I met one girl I knew in high school.  She was an environmental scientist and the irony was that the horrible air was killing her.  She was having a nasty cold almost every month.  The building filtered out the weak, and I never saw her again.  I think the place had a higher percentage than covid.

In an homage to paper, the building had a brand new dumb-waiter system.  It would grab plastic baskets from Central Mailing, and dump them on the right floor.  It handled tons of paper a day, the floors groaned from all storage cabinets.  It was always breaking down and spewing paper everywhere.

You can't understand how horrible we engineers were with women.  We had no hormones and didn't react to hormones.  The very few women in engineering were awesome, as they had to be 10 times brighter than the average.  I talked to them, but it was like they had x-ray superman glasses, and looked right through me.

Yet the building of paper needed endless amounts of female clerical staff.  They were all English Majors who were happy to get a job that paid twice as much as average.  Although I would never say it, they had an eye on marrying an engineer, they all did, eventually.

OMG, being surrounded by wonderful girls was paradise!  They all started out being a mail-girl for a few months, and then were promoted to handle the tons of paper.  A bunch of us young ones would go out with a group of them.  We even went to a cottage together.  None of us knew what girls wanted, but they were patient.  I didn't realize it at the time but 1980 was peak paper, peak electricity demand, and peak bureaucratic employment.  It was also peak purchasing power for engineers.  I had a lovely apartment looking over the city, and a k-car in the garage.

-to be continued.

La Nina

Reference

This is interesting.  In the article, there is no mention of ocean currents.  With El Nino, there is a strong reversal of current.  I've watched a couple of them on the ocean current maps.

La Nina has no appearance in ocean currents.  I can never see it.  I think it may be a stronger west current, as a rebound to El Nino.  It has never had any effect on northern temperatures.  But for the next year, when we get cold, they can always blame La Nina.  :)

Mountains of Paper - Part 1

This is a story that was fascinating to the new girl.

I started work at Ontario Hydro in 1980.  I was writing reports and doing analysis for nuclear waste disposal and an underground nuclear plant.  I was a professional engineer with my Masters in Rock Mechanics.  

At the time we did all our computer work on a Unisys mainframe.  Our programs and input records were on punch cards and we carried them around in boxes.  The size of the program was limited by what we could carry upstairs.  For each run, we would trudge upstairs and load the punch cards in a reader.  For any changes, we went to a punch card typewriter.  We marked our decks with lines in case of the horrible situation of 'dropping the cards'.  Never happened to me.

We got our output from the line printer, which was an inch thick, and we were only looking for one line.  We stacked the paper in giant walls around our desk.  In the new building they were very generous with space, with 10x12 cubicles and lots of lounges.

The smokers smoked at their desk, and we had a lot of garbage can fires.  For the building, they had discovered the advantage of recirculated air, and everybody was sick all the time.  Such fun.  I was a wild bachelor and had an apartment quite close, where I went for my lunch and snooze every day.  

The place was packed with paper.  We were building Darlington at the time, and there were whole floors dedicated to drafts-people making huge drawings.  

I was the bright young computer person for the section, and I wanted a terminal, a fabulous green-screen vt-100.  I could run programs without a deck!  Some of the older guys gave up running programs since they couldn't handle the new technology.  :)

--to be continued.

Toronto garden tips

Yeah, the big drought is over, and the grass can pop up again.  However, during the dry spell, lots of grubs are making pretty patterns.  In this day and age, you can't just juice it up with horrible poisons.  Pooey.

So I spray the grub areas with Roundup, now that California has cleared it for only $10B.  Those poor Germans!  They got hosed with Chrysler, as well.  Well, I spray a fire-break with the roundup around the grubs, then I spray the pretty patterns, so they become a nice bright dead spot.

By the time everything is dead, the roundup has broken down.  It's a big fluffy molecule that doesn't go anywhere, and the soil bacteria eat it up.  They grubs can't eat their way past the dead zone, they are like a forest fire.

When it looks like rain, I reseed those areas.  Patches of dead grass compact like concrete because the worms have left.  You need to take a pitchfork and fluff it all up before you seed.

In the garden, I make up my famous spray.  It works moderately well on the broccoli and brussels.  It doesn't do much for the apple worms, and it looks like a bad year.  Does nothing for fungus in the cherry tree.  blah.

I also spray once a week with miracle-grow.  Costco had this nice bucket with a sprayer.  The tomatoes love it.

All my tomatoes have reached the top of the poles and are still setting.  Amazing.  I always trim off all the suckers, and then clip the top when they go over the poles.  

Stare into the red light

This is my latest thing.

Reference

Now, based on physics, I thought this was useless.  Sunlight has all the colours and it is strong these days.  So, I tried with our 'face light' from ammie.  I realized that red light doesn't close the iris, so sunlight won't work, as the iris clamps down to a pinpoint.

I used blue light in the morning for happiness.  It's the greatest!  Before that I'll do the red light, while my eyes are open.

Next week it'll be another colour.  :)

Another Arctic Push on the Toronto Heat Lock

One thing I have found with the big tropical plumes is that both hot and cold bubbles are powerful in deflecting them.  Right now, the ice sheets on Greenland push them away, and for a while, Australia had a total heat lock when they had all those fires.

But we are getting some big rain (maybe) as we have the 'Clash of the Titans'.  Big tropical storm vs. the Arctic blast.  Let the bout begin!

In the UK, we have a hilarious situation.

While the reality is that London is freezing.

All because the plumes are missing the UK, and hitting Europe and Siberia.

The revenge of the Gulf Stream! 

Current sea surface temperature anomaly

This is the toughest thing to explain, especially to heyhoes.  You won't see any facebook-banned warmies trotting this out.

So, basically you take 40 years of temperature measurements (satellite), and you average every single point, or grid square.  Then  you look at today's temperature, and subtract the average.  It's only plus or minus a few degrees C.

In general, you can see how the Gulf Stream has gone, and that's why the UK freezes.  The Southern Hemisphere is cooler, and I think that's because the average includes warmer times during the 80's and 90's.  It supports my hypothesis that temperatures oscillate north and south over a 20 year cycle. 

For the next 20 years we will see heat energy going south.  We will freeze in the North.  But who knows what happens in the 300 year cycle?

Bureaucracy to be destroyed

All companies have a dysfunctional bureaucracy at some level.  For xspace it's just one crazy guy, but the lady president ignores him for the most part.  He did get the tin-tin spacecraft built, but it blew up.  Successive generations look less like a comic book.  But he has billions to waste.

My old company wants everybody back to work.  That Stalinist place needs to yell at people in the privacy of an office.  Psychological torture can't take place over zoomer.  None of these places can pretend to work with remote workers.

I don't think that masks work in a typical downtown elevator at lunch time.  You are jammed and the virus spreads by contact.  The air in those places is terrible.

This will be an exciting time to watch.  I know one company that will off the mark right away with remote workers.  My son's California start-up never left and will boom.  The old company will now have to admit that the 17 billion dollar job won't work for another 10 years.  Sad.

China will continue to send us more pandemics.  It's just that all pandemics start in the most crowded place.  Maybe India will contribute something.  Africa gave us AIDS, but most viruses there just kill everybody instantly.  No 'Typhoid Mary's'.  

The best time to start a business is now.  Be a service company to the big boys.  Our power line problem was all handled by contractors.  Don't invest in any company that has a union.  It's not the union that's the problem, but it is the sign of a horrible bureaucracy.  Many horrible companies have no unions, but is there a good company with a union?

Cold air deflected

The cold air just came down and gave Toronto a kiss.  That resulted in 4 inches of rain, and lots of broken branches.  Doesn't look like there is anything else for a while, just heat.

Huge storm hits us

This is a warmie story!  A huge thunderstorm formed instantaneously over us and dumped 4 inches of rain, with a big blowdown. 

This is the sizzling power line.  Toronto Hydro has a zillion of these, and can't do anything.  We have power because our transformer is energized, but the line is smoking.  The fire dept came and roped it off.

When they fix the line, the whole street will be off again.

If you have a good imagination, you can see the smoke in the upper right.

My favourite house that breached the underground river got flooded again.

ps.  once the contractors showed up, the power was off for hours, since it looked like a lot of insulators were cracked.

Arctic ice volume is low

Here's where the warmies can beat me up.  All winter we had a ridiculous amount of Pacific water going under the North Pole.  You can still see the channel.  Now, the melting is following the standard slope.  The northern islands that hope for a barge delivery may be disappointed because the ice is so thick at the shore.  Without the Pacific current, all the ice would be that thick.

So, I was wrong, because random uncertainty killed me.  The warmies avoid that by avoiding anything they don't like. 

To get my mojo back, the little black line has to start a big curve.  I am expecting that, since there are no El Ninos hanging around, and this would fit the general trend of an ice age.  If you believe in ice fairies, clap your hands!

I'll report this when the curve starts it's cut into history.  If it doesn't, I'll just ignore it.  :)

Toronto real estate takes a dead-cat bounce, again

That poor dead cat is bouncing up and down.  Condos are apparently crashing, but general sales are up.  Around the neighbourhood, it seems that 'original' houses are being sold, and not the monster houses.

The media must tout that the market is 'hot'.  They make a lot of money on condo ads.  I was just reading that some people are buying because they had to cancel their expensive wedding.  Neat.

End of our heatwave coming

It's been a glorious heatwave, with just a sprinkle of rain at the cottage.  In Toronto, everything is straw-dry, so some rain is welcome.  We'll have lots of that when the Arctic cold comes through.  I'm hoping the heat bubble will establish again.

On the 'science' front, FB has doubled down on hate, and is excluding warmie rebuttals.  Ha.

The UK is still freezing, but all the tabloids say a big heatwave is coming 'any day now'.  Ha.

On the lake, a big bass jumped right out of the water to snag a dragonfly.  I didn't get any nibbles. blah.

Also on the lake the falcons have 4 babies, all squawking.  Caw.

I'm home now, enjoying the monstrous garden and air conditioning.  Jeez that was hot at night in the tin shack, but I enjoy swimming now.  We haven't had these conditions for years.  (Could be another big warmie story.)

ps.  the Indian Ocean reversal is continuing, who knows what that means.

pps. looks like the heat is deflecting it again.

Continental US temperatures down

The global temps are static and well down from the peak.  The Arctic is up, which is good for the summer, and we'll have the usual stories of Greenland melting.  It is surprising that the continental is down for the summer, given that I am dying of heat, but we are in a small bubble.

This confirms the natural gas situation for air conditioning power.  The demand is way down.  I predict standard August temps, which go cold the second week.  Take your vacation early.

The UK is really cold.  Too bad.  The warmie guard should say something.  :)

We are in a stagnant heat bubble

We are in this clear, stagnant bubble.  It's so small that the warmies aren't trumpeting it.  A big cold front is trying to kill it, so we may have a cold day in July.  When the front comes through, I'll be catching fish again, maybe.

The UK is freezing and they want another heat wave.  The guardian is still on the Siberian heat wave thing.  

ps.  the heat bubble is strong.  That cold air was deflected to the east.  I now lie in a pool of sweat at the cottage every night.