Shall We Talk, to the Land across the Ocean?

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Location Taken: St. John’s, Newfoundland
Time Taken: July 2012

Next stop, Ireland!

The ocean is a mind-boggling thing. It’s very easy to forget that the water stretching to the horizon continues for hundreds or thousands of miles beyond that line. And tougher to remember that on the other side is other lands, very different from your own.

In this case, it’s not as far as in other places. This is the closest point on North America to Europe, going across the Atlantic Ocean. St. John’s is on the furthest east shore of Newfoundland, the furthest east island considered part of North America (Greenland is closer, but like Iceland, it’s not really affiliated with either continent that strongly).

It was here that the first trans-ocean telegraph cable came to land, the other end thousands of miles away in Ireland. It was an amazingly bold undertaking, laying cable along the ocean bottom for that many miles, but for the first time, the two continents were connected. Travel time for news dropped from months to hours.

It is rather impressive to stand at the spot where that happened and try to imagine how that must have felt. These days we’re used to talking to people on the other side of the world in near real-time, limited only by the speed of light as the signals travel between devices. Then, you would only hear of a child’s birth by the time they were teething. As soon as that first signal made it across, it must have seen like the birth of a new world, connected beyond all previous imagining. In other worlds, the world we live in now.

  

Deep Green Pool of Blessed Warmth

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Location Taken: Thermopolis, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

Continuing from yesterday’s post, here’s the mother spring at Thermopolis. There’s a large set of natural travertine terraces nearby, a natural set of pools and gentle waterfalls. There’s also a bunch of human-built pools and spas, but all that water is fed from this small green pool and the water source feeding it.

This pool is rather hot, 135 degrees. But the pipes and pools all cool it down some in the transit. The hotel spa I relaxed in the other day was a nicely pleasant 102 degrees. Just the right temperature range to soak away sore muscles without boiling yourself.

Natural hot springs all seem to have beautiful colors. The combination of heat and minerals and all brings a rich blue color to any water deeper than a foot or so, with varying colors along the edge. Here, it’s more of a yellowish color, which also tints the center color to that lovely blue-green.

I wouldn’t recommend just jumping into any steaming pool you find. A lot of them are solidly in boiling temperatures. But if you do find a well-established hot springs-fed pool or spa, go for it. Your muscles will thank you.

  

Melted in a Pool of Hot Water

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Location Taken: Thermopolis, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010

I’m zoning out as I write this, so I have no idea if this post will even make sense.

It’s the hot springs’ fault.

At the second, I’m in Thermopolis, Wyoming, home of a really fantastic therapeutic hot spring. Heck, it’s in the name, “thermo” means heat and “polis” means city. And this city of heat is a marvelous one. There’s a state park related to the natural springs, and a bunch of spas and pools related to it.

We visited the town on our cross-country trip two years ago, and loved it enough to include it in our current trip. The water is touted as “healing” and well, if what needs healing is congested sinuses or sore muscles, it certainly lives up to it.

And my muscles are certainly sore. Or at least they were before I spent an hour in the small hot tub fed directly from the natural hot spring. There’s two hotels that have been here so long they have a special permit to tap that water, if only because the pipes were laid long before such things as “environmentalism” and “preservation of natural features” even existed. It’s nicely warm (at least in the carefully regulated swimming pools) and smells slightly of minerals.

There’s not even that much sulfur in the scent, so it’s more unusual than unpleasant.

And I certainly smelled enough sulfur today, since we visited Yellowstone and checked out a bunch of the hydrothermal features there, many of which put so much sulfur in the air that it was a bit tough to breathe. Not that the high altitude and low oxygen helped much for that…

  

Under the Light of Two Moons

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Location Taken: Hagerstown, Maryland
Time Taken: June 2012

Ah, such a lovely photo, fabulous colors, hint of silhouetted trees, two moons…

I wish my camera could handle low-light conditions better. It’s a good camera overall, but it has severe limitations when it’s not working off of sunlight. Most modern digital cameras, heck, even the ones in modern smartphones, can handle more lighting conditions than my camera can.

If I had a reliable income, I’d upgrade my camera. Perhaps not to the cutting edge pieces, but certainly to something better than my five-year-old Panasonic Lumix. Well, six or seven if you count the time since the model was released.

And six or seven years is a long time for digital cameras. It’s a technology that’s improving incredibly fast, after all. It won’t be long before all the cameras in modern phones are better than my dedicated camera.

So maybe my next camera upgrade will be to a smartphone. Though I do like keeping my gadgets a bit more separate than that, so maybe not.

  

I Prefer Echinacea as a Flower, not a Health Supplement. Plants are Prettier than Pills.

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Location Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012

I vaguely recall when taking echinacea for colds became a thing. I was rather young, though, so it’s quite vague. It’s one of the few health crazes that have stuck around for a long time.

Not that there’s any documented advantages to it, despite multiple studies.

Now mind you, if you take it and feel noticeably better, you’re not just imagining things. Well, maybe you are, or – ok, it’s complicated, thanks to the placebo effect.

Human bodies have a lot of systems in place to help keep it running well, including some rather puzzling ones. And the placebo effect is one of the most puzzling.

Essentially, when you take something that you believe will help, whether or not it has any actual effects on your body, you have a good chance of feeling better. The body sees the belief and converts it into actual results.

Which is why any new drug has to go through thorough testing to make sure any effects are actually real and not just the placebo effect. Usual method is to find a few thousand people with the condition the drug is supposed to help and give half of them the drug and the other half an inert version of the capsule that looks identical, usually a sugar pill. Most people will have some change, others none, but that’s in both groups. And the drug will only be approved if it produces noticeably better results than the placebo grants, without too many negative side effects.

And what’s worse is, as human society gets more and more attached to the idea of pills curing all their ills, the placebo effect is getting stronger. It’s getting tougher and tougher (and thus far more expensive) for a pill in testing to beat the sugar pill. And old drugs that had major effects in the past, like Prozac, are failing to beat the sugar pills in new tests.

So all told, I suppose taking echinacea won’t hurt, and it might just help. It just won’t be doing it on it’s own, but through the tricky paths of the placebo effect. So if you want to spend your money on it, go ahead. It’s your money.