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wind and rain and warmth and mergansers this morning. tomorrow is a "work day" at the vélodrome: we do miscellaneous tasks in preparation for next month's opening, then WE RIDE! i'm hoping the rain clears up in time so i can get a little riding in before i have to split, which will be early because of family needs. but i really want to get more riding in this year, i mean a lot more.

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parents' corner:
should an eleven-year-old boy be allowed to keep a song entitled "bitches aint shit" on his iPod? discuss among yourselves.

backstory: we all heard ben folds sing it at the michigan theater the other night. the boy's older brother downloaded it, his english teacher mom listened for research purposes (preliminary verdict: dr. dre gets his propers, but redeeming qualities are scarce here; perhaps it works as hyperbole). we believe that setting limits is a good thing, when done consistently. the line that has "bitches aint shit" on one side of it doesn't have to be drawn thin, or follow a particularly tortuous path. that's our opinion, anyway.

circle with the hole in the middle

oh it's a-gonna be warm today, well on its way to 60 °F or more. unseasonable, i know: there will be plenty of cold and damp, and even ice at times, through april. but i'm digging on today, thank you.

this morning while waiting in a long line of cars on miller, backed up from the light at first street, i had the somewhat mixed pleasure of being passed by a fellow on a fixed gear bike, bullhorns pointed to the sky, slipping to the front of the line like he was a courier carrying the critical revisions to the master plan. once the light turned green, and traffic (by "traffic" i mean cars and bicycles) started moving again, i gained steadily on him, strictly legal, until we reached the red light at fifth and ann, on opposite sides of the one-way street. whereupon he veered left onto ann, through the red. it wasn't really a race; i mostly wanted to get a look at his bike. that and demonstrate that the jesse james act doesn't get you where you going substantially sooner. it is just one of those things, that those of us who give a fuck have to deal with those who don't.

so it looks like those hooded mergansers that were hanging out in the front pond have moved on; i haven't seen them all week, or at least not since monday. i have a shitty zoom picture i took one morning, that almost provides proof that i wasn't hallucinating, and i might upload it, but really, who cares? i don't have anything to prove. the mergansers have come and gone again for the year. what i should do is go around the back, to the big pond, and see if there are any buffleheads, because they usually show up around now. anyway it is the tall waders i'm really waiting for, the herons and egrets. the red-wings serenade me every day now with their ok-a-leee song, and that's a pleasure.

last night i sat and read stage band charts with a rehearsal band, on a borrowed and unfamiliar alto saxophone, but the trip was that my older son was reading the second tenor book, including a chart i had played when i was in high school, although i was a year or (more likely) two older at the time. talk about your full circles. i don't know if that means i haven't accomplished enough (because i am still here doing the same things after thirty years) or if i have instead accomplished exactly enough, having brought things around to where they belong, so they can keep going like that, because damn it is all about making circles, isn't it? squaring the circle bedeviled mathematicians for years, but maybe their problem was they shouldn't have messed with the circle in the first place. because the circle is about as perfect as it gets.

round goes the wheel

sometimes the simplest things can make the greatest difference. you know we had been struggling for a while, getting a version of the upper mississippi model up and running in ecomsed, that would reproduce the work done by those "other consultants" back in the day. and there were instabilities during low flow years, particularly 1988, that we just couldn't get rid of. pool 4 was okay, fortunately, as water quality in lake pepin is what everybody cares about the most anyway, so we can run the sensitivity analyses as required. but we had to get pool2 and pool 3 right, eventually.

i tried a bunch of things, including combing the old ecomsed code for hardwire fixes, which turned up a number of clues (like arbitrarily reducing wind stress by 50%). it seemed to behave better with no weather forcings at all, and although heat flux plays a role, really the problem had something to do with wind effects, especially at low flows. we became suspicious of the clamped boundary condition at the downstream (lock and dam) ends, and the possibility of wave reflection problems.

so yesterday i became convinced that it would be worth trying one of the radiation-type boundary condition options in ecomsed. to make a long story short, what worked was a reid & bodine type of open boundary condition, which uses a lagrange multiplier to allow the boundary level to change a little from the specified value, so that longwave radiation energy can get the hell out of there instead of being reflected back into the model domain and causing all sorts of havoc. that was most likely what was happening before. interestingly, when i look at animations of water surface elevation there are now some furious oscillations near the dam, but the scale is exaggerated; the fluctuations are of order 5 cm, which is probably close enough to true wave height, so one could argue that the model is actually simulating what is actually happening. i like that argument.

i can't tell you the deep feeling of relief when i looked at this output, and saw the way the green line (our new result) fell right on top of the pink line (their old result), instead of wagging up and down and all around like our previous results. it's enough to make you feel like you did something right, or that you know what you're doing. or can learn from your mistakes, or some other clichéd observation about life.




on the bike front, i'm delirious about my soon-to-be-built track wheels: sew-ups at last! right now i have only the rims, but a pair of record pista 36-hole hubs are on their way from germany, of all places. i splurged a little on the hubs, after getting a good deal on the rims, because i figured that 1) a good pair of track hubs would not be cheap under any circumstances, b) i've been good, and iii) i've got a birthday coming up. so happy birthday, crunchy! the rims are pictured here; after the hubs arrive, and steve at great lakes builds them up for me (whaddaya think, 4-cross on the back, 3-cross on the front?), i'll post them here. and then: to the vélodrome!!

my president is lester young

hello again. i could be back.

well dadburn it what's with this dadburn cold and wind anyway? i mean it was 23 °F this morning, and the wind was a good 15 mph, gusting to 25, and out of the northeast of all the unlikely dadburn places. heckfire! a man could get tired a this, waitin for spring. dadburn.

it's all a 33 °F now, and the wind done turned to straight north, so it'll be a-blowin right in my face the whole way home, or at least most a it. heckfire. a man could get tired a this.

let 'em blow

well hi. what did i do this morning? well i rode to work. today it is a good 35 or so fahrenheit degrees cooler than yesterday. some folks will say "oh that's typical weather for michigan" but in fact it is typical weather for anywhere temperate, as an equinox approaches. to be sure, in mountainous regions you could get those (or greater) temperature swings virtually any time of the year. but hey. i like it here.

and the equinox really is on its way. last week i began hearing red-winged blackbirds, and a co-worker reports seeing sandhills in the fields near her home. it is not at all dark at 6:00 p.m., so let the four winds blow i say. although they were a bit of a problem this morning, 20 mph and gusting from the northwest. that will be a bigger problem on the way home.