Still Afternoon

It is amusing the way words twist, no more than vapors, while in the neighborhood a buzz saw gets down to business. It is an afternoon with no where to go but home, away from the street, closed doors and sadness. An afternoon to sit and watch images of things that never were, happen in places that don't exist...happen in my mind with such detail, so quickly they are instant memories among memories of things that did happen, once, perhaps. Then a different fly starts and stops on the warm window sill. And the little, black dog, asleep on a penny, twitches and sighs with a dream, wakes to bark then, convinced, curls again to sleep. And still it is afternoon.

The big dog hears a couple of small explosions in the muted distance, rushes to the screen door, presses her nose to it, goes back under the table where she licks a crumb then, satisfied, disappears down the hall. I hear her flop and sigh in the dark innards of the house. The afternoon is finally quiet. I list in the silence like an unsinkable, wrecked ship. I will never cry. When everything else is gone, there will be one small hurling drop of water grooved in its orbit in black space.

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* This may seem like a confessional poem, but it's not.

Science Update

I got this email from my brother today. It's a correction for the Mt. Saint Helen Math equation he did for me yesterday.

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Mad Scientist Convention

"Oops! I added a few extra zeros. There its 5E+9 = 5,000,000,000 not 5,000,000,000,000, that number is 5 trillion. Better make changes on your blog or some scientist will roast us. You see why we use short hand notation."   J.

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So, now that we've got that straightened out, we can all go back to enjoying our infinitesimal fraction *(in geologic time) of this human day.


Logic vs. Superstition Debate


* added 2017.02.17

Mt. Saint Helen Math

Mt. Saint Helen Web Cam
Someone at Bluesky was wondering about how Mt. Saint Helen's latest eruption fits into the passage of geologic time. So I asked my brother. I always ask my brother when I need an equation. Several years ago I asked him what my total life earnings as a poet figured out to be as an hourly wage. The answer was 8 cents an hour. Yes. Anyway, on to Mt. Saint Helen.


Mt. Saint Helen and Mt. Rainier

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"Here are my calculations:

We actually don’t need to bring humans into the process, unless one thinks that our evil ways with the body politic have upset the mountain again.


Mt. Saint Helen's new dome peeking up over crater edge

Contrary to the early century Christian scholars who thought the earth was 144,000 years old, the scientist think its more like 5 billion years old. Putting in the zeros the number looks like this 5,000,000,000,000. Of course we scientist don’t like to waste things much even if they are zeros, either do Norwegians, so we use a short notation and write 5E+9, which means a five followed by nine zeros after it. The E stands for exponent, what ever that is. So if there is a 70% change of Mt. Saint Helens getting pissed off this year and we assume that she only get pissed on very occasionally, for you see she is a cool mountain, lots of snow, and so the chance of it getting pissed off over the age of the earth is this…

Let’s just first figure out what percent one year is compared to the age of the earth. That is easy..

1 year/ age of earth = 1/5,000,000,000,000

Now we are wasting zeros again, so we write this the stingy Norwegian math way 1/5E+9 was is approximately 0.5E-9. We use the minus sign after the E to denote how many zeros in front of the nine. So one year equals 50E-9 % of the earth life. Notice we moved the zeros around converting from fraction of 0.5 to percent 50%.

So then multiple that by 70%, which reduces it to a chance of say about 35E-9% which is a very small number by our normal measures


Satellite image of Mt. Saint Helen crater and new dome

But this calculation has a flaw because the mountain has not been around since the beginning of the earth. Mt. Saint Helens is more like a zit on the nose of the earth. When it gets squeezed, out comes earth blood and puss, which for the earth is red lave and white ash.

So what do humans have to do with all this? Humans have been waking around the zit for about 5E+3 years which is about 30 seconds of the history of the entire earth.

On a related subject I thought I might write a book for kids. Here is the title:

"Mathematical Ecology For 9 Year Olds or How I Learned To Get Even With My Big Sister"

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Little brothers! They never really do grow up. I can count change.