Drippy

[rebeccmeister]

It's challenging to try and photograph the aftereffects of freezing rain through the windows.









This is the last Tuesday I'll be able to work from home until the end of May, so I am taking advantage of it.

I still have one more course syllabus and schedule to finalize, and it's the most challenging one, for Animal Physiology. This morning I got the course structure and schedule organized for my freshman honors seminar course, which is always fun to teach. This spring we are going to read papers related to evolutionary endocrinology. I was having a hard time fully grasping what evolutionary endocrinology is, so that made it seem like a worthwhile topic to focus on. It might sound strange to you that I wouldn't be able to grasp what evolutionary endocrinology is, but the number and types of hormones in different kinds of organisms is a little overwhelming to me still. I grew up learning about the classic mammalian ones, like so many of us did, but we've discovered so many other new signaling molecules and pathways in the last 2 decades that I still don't feel like I have a good grasp of even the mammalian ones. And that's not to mention the different suites of hormones found in other organisms like insects. I do have a slightly better sense of the field now and I think the students will enjoy the topic. We'll read papers about a wide range of organisms, using a range of different experimental and descriptive approaches. Good stuff.

Apparently the sinus headache is deciding to show up after the stormy weather this time.

The weather situation in Texas and beyond makes me really sad, because I've seen enough of what life is like for the people who live there with only small means. Extreme cold brings a lot of suffering with it.

Comments

[graydon]

evolutionary endocrinology seems more like several careers than a seminar course. I hope it goes extremely well!

And, yeah, cold kills, and it kills by nibbling which is in a lot of ways worse than the way heat kills.

[rebeccmeister]

Oh, Evolutionary Endocrinology is very much several careers! We are merely going to scratch the surface. For freshmen my goal is more introducing them to a topic rather than giving them extensive training in it, and our real focus is learning how to read and critique primary research articles - y'know, just enough knowledge to make them dangerous. :^)

In the meantime I've also found a couple of promising-looking review and commentary articles on the topic for myself.



I personally would rather not go from cold OR from heat, but it seems to me that many places that experience extreme heat events also think to at least open up cooling centers for people. (although that reminds me of reading about trying to do that shortly after covid got going last summer, and that sure put a lot of people between a rock and a hard place). I guess maybe I'm slightly too familiar with the fire and apocalypse weather of the southwestern U.S..

A month or two ago, I started following someone on the Tweet-machine who started doing running commentaries on participants in a TV show called Doomsday Preppers. (I don't watch much TV myself and so the commentary is perfect for me). What amazes me is how rarely the show participants prepare for extreme heat, drought, or extreme cold events. More often than not their Prepping is about firearms, freeze-dried food powder, and booby traps.

I also have to wonder what the best sort of house design would be for resisting the changing climate in Texas - both heat and cold extremes. Definitely not how the vast majority of Texas houses have been designed and built.

[graydon]

Well, you first decide if you're after 40/40, 50/50, 60/60, or just what as the temperature swing range (plus or minus, in Centigrade; maybe 40/60 in Texas.)

Then you consider drainage; it seems pretty obvious that at least in coastal Texas you have to allow for a metre of rain in an hour and five metres in a week. (Not every week, but you only need to get washed into the sea once.)

Then it's wind.

The simplest approach to this is a big pile of dirt; you put in a bunch of culverts, then another bunch of culverts going the other way, at an elevation where you're relatively sure the metre of rain will have somewhere to go, and then put living space on top of that, and then you put the whole works under several metres of dirt. Gooseneck the entrances so that cold falls, heat rises works for you; maybe light pipe some daylight in. Be sure to put the battery bunker/generator shed/heat pump/etc. in a different structure, but just as buried.

That way, you're OK even if the power fails completely; you've got sufficient passive thermal management that you have to worry about water and food, rather than dying of exposure.

Just about everyone needs this, and just about all existing housing stock is nigh-worthless for the time of angry weather, and middle class -- most voters! -- means owning your own house, that's the current functional definition, so saying "housing stock worthless" is something of a political challenge.

[rebeccmeister]

Okay, I just have to share one of my favorite parts of the commentary from the Doomsday Preppers commentator. The commentary tends to go something like:

Tweet 1: "Prepper ____ has bought an old missile silo to use as his bunker, and $40,000 worth of food and ammunition."

Tweet 2: "Raise his taxes."

I wonder what the building expenses would look like if aforementioned dwelling spaces were built on a community scale rather than single-family scale. IIRC there are a wide range of really cool potential working examples if one looks more globally well beyond the US. Although it had some hippie-dippy moments, Gary Nabhan's book Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land did highlight some great related cultural practices.

[graydon]

I'm familiar with those commentaries. (I think the commentator's heart is in the right place but their systems theory isn't.)

Old missile silos didn't care much about the three great gods of civil engineering -- drainage, drainage, and drainage -- and, well, lack certain thermal features.

It works much better if you do it at collective scales; one battery bunker, one well, one cistern (well, two battery bunkers, two or three wells, two or three cisterns, maybe one big heat sink in the gravel round those culverts but two or more points of heat exchange) shared among a multi-family/multi-household group), one greenhouse (buried greenhouses are effective but you only have so much south slope), fewer than one complex entrances per household, common surface patio spaces, and so on. It's not that hard as civil engineering; it's razing the suburbs and putting in locally dense villages as a political challenge, creating the will for the Great Unpaving, that's the hard part.

The problem with food is that food growing depends utterly on predictable weather. People have figured out how to handle an astonishing range of weathers, but it does need to be predictable. When the annual rainfall is swinging between twenty five centimetres and two hundred and fifty centimetres agriculture gets impossible. which is, alas, just where we're going.

[graydon]

May making them dangerous be a wonder and a glory!

[cmcmck]

Love the icicles!

[rainswolf]

Nice pics!