The air has changed today. This view of downtown Roanoke from our hillside is about as clear as it gets on an August day. Just maybe we'll have a real sunrise tomorrow morning instead of the fog and haze that have been around most of the summer.
In case you wonder about my view of the Roanoke Valley, here's a google hybrid map to orient you. The road to the west of us which connects 460 and 221 is Twelve O'Clock Knob Road which is one of the most scenic around while fall gets here and a few leafs fall.
I'm a little at loose ends up here on the mountain. I've watered the tomato plants, played with the dog, printed some more landscapes, and I'm now waiting for the ladies to get home from shopping so we can start frying chicken. I'm not hungry enough to start it on my on since the decision was made not to skip lunch so their afternoon out and about wouldn't be cut short.
It's good to see the potential of a change in the weather. I think we're all ready for a change from the heat and humidity. Of course, there are other changes in the air. Being veterans of the sixties, Glenda and I both agreed last night that it is good to hear about war protests once again. Opinions seem to be changing on the Iraqi war. No longer is it treasonous to question the war. The Toronto Star has a reprint of an article, "When the Iraq war won't stay at bay", by Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic.
But if Sheehan's vigil says something important about Iraq, it also says something important about Bush. Sheehan, after all, had only one demand: She wanted to confront the president face to face. The demand was so provocative because one of Bush's defining qualities is his aversion to exactly this sort of challenge.
Former administration officials portray a president carefully shielded from unpleasant or dissonant information.
It's pretty hard not to hear some unpleasant information these days, especially if you happen to drop by the gasoline pump. Then there's the whole economy issue. There are jobs, but the quality of the jobs available aren't as good as the old fashioned manufacturing jobs that have disappeared. Then if you're still hanging on to your optimism, there's health care to really confound you, or perhaps if you want a serious headache, you can worry about the trade deficit, the non-existent US savings rate, or the housing bubble.
I think I'll pass on those topics today.
Yet there is good news, I enjoyed Andrew Kantor's article,"WIRED," in the Roanoke Times today. It's about the vast array of services that an innovative cooperative, Citizens, is bringing to Floyd, VA. It hard to believe all that bandwidth up on the mountain.
I'm a huge believer in the theory that we need to move the jobs to the people instead of the people to the jobs. How many more roads can we build in Northern Virginia before it is all paved over? Super high speed Internet connectivity is much more important for a community than spending millions to attract a high end grocery store. It's going to a whole lot easier to create the future, if you build the infrastructure for it.
The other good news is that a lot of kids are choosing to head back to school instead of being forced to go to Iraq. That's a callous way of thinking about it, but if you are male and lived through the sixties, that choice looks pretty good. Serious discipline is required to finish four years in college, especially if you're doing part time work as many students do today. I may shake my head in wonder at the dorm rooms of today, but I'm still glad there are lots of kids willing to take the challenge.
While thinking about all these serious things, and dreaming about when I'm going to get the chance to taste my fried chicken, I ran across an article,"Breaking the pasta code," about breaking uncooked spaghetti. I've never thought about it very much, so I sneaked a few pieces out of our box of Barilla spaghetti and tried to see if I could break them evenly. A couple did okay, but when I broke half a dozen, I ended up with fractured uncooked spaghetti. It seems some French scientists have figured out why this happens.
Audoly and Neukirch believe the secret lies in a burst of destructive waves.
To the human eye, a bent piece of pasta appears to break into several pieces simultaneously.
The researchers found that's not the case. According to their experiments, when the first break occurs, it sends waves of stress down the noodle, causing other breaks.
"It took us two months to understand, compute and experiment. Quite a quick work on our time scale," Neukirch said.
Unfortunately, while I was hoping for just a way to end up with longer spaghetti, I guess the research is typical of a lot of research these days.
Neukirch said his work might also be of interest to the military, as it suggests that fragmentation produces smaller pieces than previously predicted. This could be valuable information, he said, to those studying the impact of a military shell against armour or a wall.
There's nothing like spending time figuring out better ways to destroy things. Now I know the research has other benefits, but I think the Floyd folks have the right idea, building an infrastructure for the future.
It is, however, a small world. The French research scientists used Barilla pasta for their experiments. That just happened to be what was in our cupboard. Perhaps our pantry isn't very standard since it also has Weetabix and Marmite, but I'm still amazed at how brands encircle the world.
Now if we could just get a change in the focus of research as easily as the air changes over Roanoke.
