College admission essay questions as a Rorschach test and career predictor

Premise:  A white man and a black man are in a cop car.
Question: Who is driving?

Thesis of Answer One: "A cop."
This student enrolled as a Criminal Justice student at a State University and became a State Cop.

Thesis of Answer Two: "The question is racist."
This student enrolled as a Criminal Justice student and became a lawyer.

Thesis of Answer Three: "The question is sexist."
This student enrolled in Romance Languages and became a worker in the food services industry.

Thesis of Answer Four: "This question reinforces the hegemony of the binary, cis-male, white, toxic masculine, Euro-centric culture."
This student became a Associate Professor in Gender Studies and dates people who do not bathe.

Thesis of Answer Five: "The German Shepherd."
This student became a Vet.

Thesis of Answer Six: "Not enough information.  The premise does not state that the car is moving."
This student became an engineer and designed processes that made lawyers and professors in Gender Studies obsolete.

A few more pictures from the Hobo camp walk

Looking south into the 90 acre woods.  Soft maple of the 16"-to-20" DBH class

Looking west

A Yellow Birch

East side of the large, split apple tree at the hobo camp.

West side of split apple tree.  The Captain standing in the background on right side of the frame.

An old road bed.  Fill from the ditch on either side was heaped in the middle to create the road bed.

Another shot of the gravel stream bed in a different place.  This stretch of the stream is about 3000 feet long.

Do you remember when magazines used to run serialized stories?

How many of you remember when magazines ran "serial" stories.  They were quite the fad during the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were like soap operas and some of those stories were quite good while some were no better than abysmal.  The practiced petered out as televisions became common.

Many of the serialized stories were written specifically to be published that way.  They were soap operas with a hanger at the end of every segment.  Over the weeks or months the reader's imagination would fill in many of the details that the author left out.

The TV series MASH did an episode where a paperback book was torn into segments and passed from one bored reader to the next as each person finished their piece.  The dramatic tension occurred when the last piece of the book was lost before anybody had read it and the readers had to figure out who dunnit on their own.

The reason I bring this up is because the characters that were in the story Old NFO graciously included in his Calexit anthology kept talking to me.  There is more to their story.  Lacking a venue for the odd length and wandering story-line I am considering dribbling it out in serialized format on my blog.

My question to you, the readers, is...what length of story is most convenient for you?  I don't know your schedules or the visual limitations of your reading devices.  I suspect that shorter is better than longer.  The material does not have regularly spaced "hangers" since it was not originally written for serialization so the length of each installment can be fairly arbitrary.

What do you guys think?  Start with 1000-to-1500 words a day, Monday-through-Friday and see how it goes?

Be Prepared: Bring a Girl Scout

Purses are for lipstick.

Junk Science and climate change

It is a foregone conclusion of the author that the only variable is "global climate change."

Urban Heat Islands

From Wikipedia:

An urban heat island (UHI) is an urban area or metropolitan area that is significantly warmer than its surrounding rural areas due to human activities. The temperature difference usually is larger at night than during the day, and is most apparent when winds are weak. UHI is most noticeable during the summer and winter. The main cause of the urban heat island effect is from the modification of land surfaces...As a population center grows, it tends to expand its area and increase its average temperature.

How much heat?
A lot!

Most people can visualize the size of a two car garage.  They have roofs that  typically measure 25' by 25'.

Washington DC averages 3.6 inches of rain each month May-through-August, inclusive.  That means that 187 cubic feet of water falls on that 25' by 25' patch each month.  If paved, that water runs into a storm drain rather than being available for trees and grass to transpire.

That rain lost to run-off denies that 25' by 25' footprint of 11 million BTUs of heat sink due to transpiration for each month of the summer.  11 million BTUs is the equivalent of burning one hundred gallons of gasoline.  Every month of the summer.  For each 25' by 25' patch of pavement in the DC metro area.

(The math: The latent heat of evaporation for water is 970 BTU/lb X 64 pounds per cubic foot for 62K BTU per foot of water.  62K * 187 ft^3 = 11.6 million BTU.  A gallon of gas has 114,000 BTU per gallon.  1.16e+6/1.14e+4= about 1e2 or one hundred.)

Another factor involves convective heat transfer.  Sunlight that is converted to heat in the top of a tree's canopy is not heating up the air at ground level.  The wind velocity is higher 40' above ground and there is more mixing and churning as the wind whistles through the tree tops.  The temperature rise impacts a much deeper blanket of air than the heat coming off a blacktopped parking lot and consequently the maximum air temperature is much lower.

The Soul Food, Boone's Farm and Kimchee diet

I went in for my annual physical in the middle of January.  My Low Density Cholesterol and Triglycerides were high.

My doctor put me on a diet and will recheck the blood chemistry near the end of March.

He looked me in the eye and said, "This diet is real simple.  Stop eating white food!"

My blood chemistry might not be any better but I am very happy with this diet.

Homestead or Hobo Camp?

The homestead/hobo site is above the elbow of the horizontal track.

The Captain gave me a guided tour of some of the woods back behind his place.  One woods is about 90 acres and the other is 70.

The larger woods is primarily swamp and is 90% soft maple with a smattering of cottonwood, hackberry, burr and swamp white oak.  The primary trees were mostly 16" to 18" diameter with a few up to 20" diameter.

On the west end of the larger woods is a site that The Captain thinks might be an old homestead.  He bases that guess on the orchard of old fruit trees.

This is half of an enormous apple tree that split and each half continued to grow.  A scion from this tree fell into my pocket.

Another apple tree

Some of them are falling over.  The tree that is deepest in the frame is a pear tree.  The existence of multiple tree species and the fairly even spacing suggests human intervention.  I also took a scion from the pear tree.

An apple tree with good anchorage.  Based on this tree's size it could have grown from a seed planted circa 1960.

Plum pits at the site.  So one more species to add to the list.

The case for it being a hobo camp site is the distance the  site is from tillable land and the near proximity of a swamp.  The mosquitoes would be merciless in the summer but quite tolerable during fruit picking season when itinerant workers would pick fruit and possibly bring some back to camp.

Another factor suggesting a hobo camp is the complete lack of stone on the site.  Nothing.  No smokehouse, not chimney, no square foundation or root cellar pit.

A coyote skull.

Three drains coming together in the smaller woods and flowing from right-to-left.  Three drains, three different colors of water.  The tea colored water coming from the middle drain is interesting.

Portions of the drain have a gravel bottom and looks like it could support trout.

A prime squirrel woods.  Red oak, hickory and burr oak in about that order.