Driving on the Dividing Line

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Location Taken: Wyoming, to the southeast of Yellowstone
Time Taken: June 2010

The land looks a bit different at the continental divides. Especially the major ones.

Continental divides, in case you didn’t know, are lines where water that falls on one side of the line flows one direction, say to the Mississippi River, and a different direction on the other side, like the Atlantic ocean. They’re the local high spots, running along the top of a lot of ridges. Sometimes these are subtle. Where Interstate 80 goes through southern Wyoming, the land is flat enough that the divide is barely noticeable. In fact, there’s two divides right there, with a basin in between where the water that falls in it stays in it.

This particular one’s more noticeable. It’s high enough to still have snow in June, after all. The snow melt feeds the small streams that pop up just a little downhill. Here, though, the water flow looks very minor. Just a trickle as the snow melts in the sunlight.

On the western side of this divide, the melted snow heads down to the Snake River as it winds its way through Grand Tetons National Park. The water goes through the large flat Snake River Plain (I’ll give you zero guesses as to why it’s named that), in Idaho. It was carved out by the Yellowstone hot spot, as supervolcano after supervolcano blasted away the mountains over millions of years. On the other side of Idaho, the plains peter out, and the river wiggles its way through the mountains, heading north. It forms the border between Idaho and Oregon for a long ways, then heads up into Washington. After swinging back towards the south, it meets up with the Columbia River, which flows out into the Pacific ocean near Portland, Oregon.

On the eastern side, a different melted snowflake heads into the Wind River, and passes through glorious canyons while seeking a path through the uplifted Wyoming mountains. It actually cuts right through a few mountain ridges. When the river first formed, the land had been flat. Then geologic forces started pushing the land upwards, and the softer stones that were in the valleys eroded away faster than the hard stones of today’s mountains. But it was a slow process, and the river could cut through the hard stone faster than it was rising above the valleys around it, and it just stuck to its old path. Time and the forces of water literally chopped a few mountain ridges in half.

But that’s a bit of a tangent. The Wind River becomes the Bighorn, which flows into Yellowstone River, flowing from the large lake in Yellowstone National Park. The river is already large as it flows into the Missouri River on the border of North Dakota and Montana. The Missouri flows into the Mississippi and out at New Orleans, forming the longest river in North America.

Two snowflakes, formed in the same cloud, falling on two sides of the same mountain, have very different journeys. One ends up in the Pacific, the other in the Atlantic. They flow into the oceans at spots over 2000 miles from each other. They flow over 4000 miles across the continent. One sees mainly mountains, the other vast plains and great cities. Both become part of mighty rivers.

The two snowflakes, siblings from the storm, will never meet again. The oceans are too vast for that to happen.

  

A Long Quest, Now Going at the Speed of the Wind. (or my bike)

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2012

Today, for the first time in my life, I felt the need to exercise. I even woke up with it.

So I got up, fed the dogs, started an artichoke roasting for breakfast, then got out my bike.

I only went up and down the street, but there’s enough of a slope to make it a challenge on the way up (and a really fun, if fast, ride down). I can usually do two laps before my knees start complaining too much, but today I managed three! It takes me about 5 minutes per lap, so that was 15 minutes of fairly intense exercise.

I’ve long had a problem with exercising. It wasn’t always the case. I was an active kid, spending long hours in the woods making forts, or going biking. Or even making a makeshift quarterstaff and waving it around the yard pretending to fight monsters.

It was doing that last thing that I first dislocated my knee.

I inherited weak knees from both sides of the family. At least I also inherited the tendency for them to promptly relocate after the tension that caused the kneecap to pop out eased, but it still causes a lot of damage in a brief moment.

I’ve dislocated both my knees at least 5 times each. It doesn’t take much, as even a simple pivoting motion, such as turning a corner, can do it. I tend to walk a bit carefully to avoid it, since being unable to walk for 10 or more minutes and having noticeable pain for days afterwards can put a bit of a kink in any plans I had.

I also had Childhood Exercise-Induced Asthma, which would mean when I exercised enough to start breathing heavily, I wouldn’t be able to stop, and the more I exercised, the worse my breathing got.  It didn’t fade until I was 22 or so.

Between those, genetics that favor plumpness, and stress from going to public school while being both social phobic and weird enough to be in the “outcast” social level, it’s no wonder I’m fat. At least that genetic tendency towards plumpness also includes an ability to be both fat and healthy, so it’s not had much impact on my lifestyle. Especially since just about all of my preferred activities are those that require you to be sitting.

Which, admittedly, did not help my knees any. Sitting weakens knees, and the weight doesn’t help them much either. At my worst, walking up stairs would cause sharp jolts of pain to echo from my knees with every step. Which really didn’t encourage me to exercise either, since it hurt too much.

After college, though, I entered a period of my life where I’m rebuilding and re-imagining myself. (I should talk more about the social phobia based nervous breakdown that lead to that. Perhaps next week.) While the emotional stuff had highest priority, and has taken years to go through (and I’m still not done), I did eventually realize that while I was changing the habits that lead to the breakdown in the first place, I could change other habits.

I started by eating healthier. I’ve never ate particularly unhealthily, since I actually really like vegetables, but I started cooking from scratch and figuring out more ways to cook delicious filling meals that didn’t rely on filler like pasta or rice. That’s why I ended up eating a roasted artichoke for breakfast this morning. And it was very tasty, too, better than many restaurant meals I’ve had.

I also managed to get my knees to cooperate better, thanks to the long hours of standing at my job at the Renn Fest. It strengthened them up, and I haven’t fully dislocated them for years thanks to that. I still don’t have the full range of motion other people have, but at least I don’t have any pain anymore.

And I also started hunting for exercise that I could keep up with. Just about every form of exercise is either too boring for me to actually make into a habit (repetition just doesn’t cut it for me), too social for me (team sports), or too rough on the knees. For instance, the very first time I tried the standard Karate kick in my one session I tried, I dislocated my knee. Plus many exercises are a bit outside my budget, which is why I’ve never tried rock climbing, despite being interested in it.

That last factor is why it took me so long to start biking. I’d really enjoyed biking as a kid, but stopped after I took a bad fall and cracked my helmet. It wasn’t from any fear, just that I certainly wasn’t going biking without a helmet after that, and well, school started up less than a week after that, and I got too busy to bike anyway. Plus, the position most adult bikes put you in, hunched over the handlebars, is both painful on my back and doesn’t let me watch the world around me that easily.

Which is why I couldn’t just buy a $30 beater off of Craigslist or something. I needed a different sort of bike. And I found one. The Electra Townie has shifted positions for its pedals and seat that let the rider sit upright and even have her feet on the ground while sitting in the seat. I might have to put the seat almost all the way down to fit my 5’3″ frame, but at least I CAN still use it at my height, which is more than I can say about far too many bikes. It took a while (and help from my parents)(and a serious sale) to afford the $400 price, but at the end of last May, I finally got it.

I’m not biking every day yet, though I hope to get to that someday, and my endurance still has a long way to go. I have trouble with hills for the very simple reason that it takes a lot of energy to haul my nearly 300 lbs weight uphill. Actually, that weight may have gone down. I haven’t weighed myself since before I got the bike, after all. It’s actually not a high priority. I’m much more interested in gaining strength than losing weight. And I’m not willing to go biking when the temperature’s above 90, which it has been for far too much of the past few months. It’s too unpleasant to deal with that heat even with how much I like biking

And I love biking. It’s the first form of exercise I’ve found that actually lets me get that post-exercise euphoria that the fitness buffs talk about. Plus it lets me go exploring a lot easier than walking can. I can watch the world go by easily with the upright position the Townie lets me sit in, so I stay entertained. And I love feeling the wind and speed when I go downhill. I’ve finally found an exercise I actually want to do, and it’s a glorious thing.

  

Yup, that’s a Chair.

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Time Created: February 2009

I’m feeling solidly uninspired today.

So here, have a chair.

I made it in a 3D program. I don’t recall which one. It’s been far too long since I made it. But it was one that let me flatten out areas and apply outlines.

There’s actually a bunch of filters for 3D programs that let you make their output look more 2D. That might seem odd, given how much marketers push the power of 3D, but there is power in two dimensionality.

Mainly that such images are much clearer. 3D images often lose a bit of that clarity just because the image isn’t focused on how the viewer is seeing it. We still look at most images as 2D images, whether printed on paper or showing on a computer monitor. Even 3D movies are actually 2D images. They just use two images and polarized glasses to trick your brain into seeing it as 3D.

Heck, even what your actual eyes are seeing is 2D. The reason that trick 3D movies use works is because it’s what your own eyes and brain do. Each eye sees one flat image. Since the two eyes are separated, their images are slightly different, and the brain composites them together to figure out depth. It’s a really nifty mental trick if you think about it.

So making images that look good when flat actually really helps make them look good when not flat as well.

  

Fading into the fog, like a shadow in the night.

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Location Taken: Mount St. Helens, Washington
Time Taken: June 2010

Fog is naturally beautiful. It softens the world and makes you focus on things that normally would get lost in the background. Like rain, it brightens the colors of the world by washing away the dust, in a way that makes things look truly alive. But it also equalizes the colors by blocking the harsh sunlight. It may lose the dynamics of light, but gains the much rarer dynamics of focus.

And yet, it is also naturally scary. We humans react poorly to limited sight. The caveman inside all of us is convinced there could be a lion just lurking out there, ready to make a meal of us. Night is worse, but is more expected. Fog brings this fear into the day, where you may need to be out gathering your own food and can’t just hide away. Even in the modern day, fog is dangerous. There have been many pile-ups on highways from sudden fog, when visibility instantly drops to less than the distance to the car in front of you. It’s truly terrifying to suddenly see nothing and then, the sounds of crunching metal come from all around you and all you can do is pray you’re not about to join the piles of death…

It does take a combination of landscape and fog to make both the danger and the beauty apparent. Something like the blasted land around Mount St. Helens. It may have been several decades since the volcano erupted, but the land is still not recovered. And it shows. There’s few trees and the land is covered with weeds, which prefer this sort of disturbed land. It may be a natural scene with healthy plants, but if you know anything about how wild lands usually look, it looks wrong. And the fog just adds to that by making you focus on the weeds. Normally you wouldn’t even notice them, for the area is full of fascinating landscape, most notably the volcano.

It’s no wonder fog is used so often in horror games like Silent Hill or Slender. It makes it far easier to get lost and far easier to hide enemies, which ramps up the fear level immensely.

Still, I do love foggy days.

  

Venus – The Goddess of Love, The Planet of Thick Hot Clouds

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Location Taken: Agewa Bay, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010

Did you know the Evening Star is the planet Venus?

I know, it’s pretty common knowledge these days. Still, it’s rather nifty to look at a dot in the sky and realize that it’s another orb of rock similar to the one you’re standing on, close enough that we’ve sent devices to land on it.

And land on it is about all they did. The Russian probes I’m thinking of, the Venera missions didn’t exactly last long after hitting ground, since the heat and pressures of the surface of Venus do nasty things to delicate instruments and radios and cameras. Still, we do have a few photos of Venus’s surface, even if they’re grainy, low resolution, and all the other things you’d expect from mid-1900’s camera tech. The last lander launched in 1984, a few years before I was born, and decades before digital photography got good enough to supplant film.

They seem to have had a lot of problems with lens caps in these missions. Most of the landers didn’t carry cameras, and of the ones that did, well… Venera 9 and 10 both had one of their two cameras fail to release the lens cap on landing as it was supposed to do, so they literally took half the photos they should have. That’s still better than 11 or 12, which didn’t get any photos at all because all the lens caps stayed firmly in place on landing. Venera 13 and 14 actually managed to get the full panoramic, but 14 had a different issue. It had a special device on one of its arms to study the surface compressibility – but one of the lens caps fell directly under the arm and well, they got nice data on how compressible the lens cap was…

It does seem odd comparing the very few photos we have of Venus to the high quality photos we’re getting from the newest Mars Rover, Curiosity. It makes you wonder how much better we’d be able to do if we sent a new camera-equiped lander to Venus. We’ve probably got the tech to build one that can resist the heat and pressure these days.

Although you can see why they haven’t bothered yet. The Venusian surface is a little… boring. Lots of flat rocks, and a few hills. And its thick hot atmosphere makes it even less likely to harbor life than bone-dry Mars, and far less likely to be able to terraform for human life.

Still, it is a bit odd that we’ve got less photos of the surface of one of the closest planets to us than we do intentionally grainy photos of random people’s lunch. Ah, the priorities of modern life.