December 21: TV Radar Background Maps may range from 51% fake to 100% fake, North of the Equator

Today’s Earth position in space. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4d/Earth-lighting-winter-solstice_EN.png/800px-Earth-lighting-winter-solstice_EN.png

Radar is an active remote sensing system, so it shows clouds at night.
Radar sends a blip down and reads the echo, or return blip.
(Passive remote sensors just read wavelengths without emitting a signal.)
Our TV remotes are active.

On TV and Internet meteorology maps, when stations are showing radar, they are showing a daytime (lit) map image underneath for orientation, but often it’s a night radar, as the National Weather Service images show, a dark Earth.

The lit TV radar maps are thus half fake.

On this Winter Solstice, it varies by latitude, and may range from 51% fake just North of the equator, to 100% fake North of the Arctic Circle, like in Fairbanks and Lappland. Someone should be notified.

(I am not making this up.)

In the Southern hemisphere, those in formerly British empire countries (Aust/NZ, So. Af.) which drive on the left, think backwards, so they see it correctly. In cultures which read from right to left, like Arabic and Chinese speakers, they understand because they’re smarter than the U.S. about Geography.

Dr. Melanie Renfrew, 12/21/09

I was never very good at backpacking, but deserts I can do

Being acclimated to sea level is a hindrance to backpacking success, unless you just hike on a beach sand dune park. Death Valley has sand dunes, but I wouldn’t recommend it. I tried to find the turnoff for these once after an SMC.edu field trip left me behind at Salt Creek because I felt dizzy. My thermometer said 108° F on the interpretive trail, site of the hiding endangered pupfish, but my colleague announced to his students, asserting male dominance, “Melanie’s thermometer is wrong!” I knew from my inner thermometer from having worked in Turkana, that “feels” 100°s as different from 90°s, that my keychain thermometer was right. He offered to carry me piggyback back to the car (true), but I felt too self-conscious in front of his students, my head was light and “swimming,” and I hurried.

Back in the parking lot, we compared our two thermometers by swinging them around in the shade of a sign, and when they both showed 98° F (it was slightly higher and had more wind), he felt shown up in front of his students. He drove the SMC van off in a huff, “We’re going to the sand dunes,” and the other 2 cars in the lot drove off at the same time.

So there I was by myself, at the end of a 2-mile long gravel road, impossibly tight lugnuts on my wheels, feeling dizzy in Death Valley. Having a Ph.D. and having worked in rural Africa, guy colleagues think, “Melanie will never get hurt.” Do not go on earth science field trips (with male leaders) if you have rejection and abandonment issues, unless, like our December 15th Festival for the Faint, you want to work through them by experiencing them. Earth science field trips led by women, well, I bring cookie dough for all (sans eggs and E. coli), and students ask for it the rest of the semester.

I’d worn my swimsuit under loose cotton (which trapped body heat, and I needed to re-wet), because I was hoping we’d hike into Darwin Falls. It has a swimming hole if you disregard the “No swimming” sign. Dipping water and pouring is allowed.

My theology is, “Why would God create an oasis in the desert, and forbid you from feeling the pleasure of cool water all over your skin?”
(They’re worried about contamination and need it for drinking, but I don’t wear gooey hair gel, and I lack the Y-chromosome urge to “mark” it as turf.)

Death Valley National Park Service map: http://www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/upload/DEVAmap1a.pdf
Salt Creek Interpretative Trail: http://www.trails.com/tcatalog_trail.aspx?trailid=HGS502-035
Darwin Falls: http://www.nps.gov/deva/planyourvisit/panamintspringsarea.htm

Turkana, Northwestern Kenya (down in the Rift Valley, so is akin geologically and climatically to Death Valley, but is hotter because of proximity to the equator): http://picasaweb.google.com/Dr.MelanieRenfrew/TurkanaNomadicPastoralistsInNWKenya#, http://picasaweb.google.com/Dr.MelanieRenfrew/MyTurkanaFriends#

Dr. Melanie Renfrew
12/21/09 After today, the days in the Northern hemisphere start getting longer!

(Maybe he was hurt I wouldn’t ride piggyback, but I’m a little hippy and didn’t want students to have that view, shucks.)

Offshore winds are at night

I’m not sure how long current readers have been reading, or where you live, but at 2 a.m. in L.A. there are NE 5 mph winds, “offshore,” so the term is definitely legitimate for nocturnal people. Tomorrow, the West winds will be stronger, I promise.

All is Calm

A mom’s release: Ben is going backpacking tomorrow, the shortest day of the year with a long cold night, and a front is going through with possible showers and snow. My angst is from my own memories of rainy and snowy camping; his angst is anticipating a 6+-mile hike at 7000′. In church, I realized I shouldn’t try to protect him from what I learned by experience, and he has to learn whether he likes rain or not as a long-term career move decision.

I really like making decorations and giving them away. If you give women feminine things in their favorite colors, they get really happy, as men in their lives are clueless about such things.

Bush babies are nocturnal so have big eyes to see.

It Wasn’t a Woman

Yesterday I posted a letter from November 2008 where I was pleading NBC to see that their LOCALS ONLY campaign would scare viewers away, because it is like a “KEEP OUT!” sign on a gang’s hideaway or kids’ clubhouse, or the turf attitude of local surfers who pommel adventurous newcomers. It is a territorial expression that says,
“You are not welcome here: GET OUT;” and this is in all the NBC stations in the country and their websites, which I hadn’t known when I wrote this, floating around the news videos.

At the emotional level, it jeers at viewers.

This is why I was saying former NBC Co-Chair Ben Silverman’s new shows during 2008-9 did not have a chance: the overall attitude of the station and websites around the country was insulting and provoked fear and ridicule for liking them. People want to travel, not be “LOCALS ONLY.” Temperament studies show about 75% of Americans are extroverts, not introverts, which means we want to “go out,” not stay in. Would you want to live in hemmed-in Burbank the rest of your life? They don’t even know directions there because not all streets are aligned North-South-East-West: that’s why no one at NBC Universal in Universal City ever notices their own station’s weather report is completely twisted around.* It’s symbolic: they can’t see, and aren’t looking.

What the “LOCALS ONLY” campaign demonstrates is a complete absence by NBC CEO Jeff Zucker and their marketing team, of awareness of how people feel. Zero intuition.

This is exactly, exactly what NBC Burbank’s emphasis of the word “offshore” (people in L.A. know the winds are onshore), and their showing of countless needle injections in the Medsource news videos, as if health was about drug injections, communicate.

Whoever designed this A.V. system cared zero about how passengers would feel getting their headrests tapped hard on for 5-6 hour flights, or longer.

It wasn’t a woman.

* The NBC L.A. weatherman is still getting it wrong because he’s not down-to-earth, and winds reverse direction by altitude because of topographic friction, water’s high heat capacity which means its temperature does not fluctuate as air over land does, convection over the city creating lower air pressure, so the pressure gradient at sea level becomes stronger so that ocean winds are stronger in L.A. Basin and the Orange County coastal plain. NBC L.A. and NBC Universal never check, so they never noticed winds are from the West when their station is saying there is “offshore flow” (East-to-West).

It’s multiple complications from ODD, CDD, and IID, all spatial, contagious diffusion diseases (Offshore Dyslexic Dysfunction, Corporate Dyslexic Dysfunction, and In-house Ignorance Diffusion).
It’s an epidemic over the hill there, so Comcast is inheriting a mess!

So, Ben S., you did good to get out.

Dyslexics see it opposite
(the B-S Disorder, for Brain-Switching), and
they charged me with harassment and misdemeanors for loving them enough to tell them all this!
If I wrote to NBC now to encourage someone what a good job he/she was doing on air, which I often did before their “RESTRAINING ORDER,” based on hallucinatory delusions of stalking and violence, their weatherman (with an Archie Bunker-Scrooge-Grinch mentality) would make sure I’m sent to jail for the holidays!

Dr. Melanie Renfrew, 12/18/09

If they turn this into a scripted reality series, I don’t want to play myself.
Been there, done that.

I found the “LOCALS ONLY” letter, warning NBC that campaign would be ratings suicide

I searched my “Sent” e-mail file and found the letter from November 2008 where I tried to convince NBC that their new marketing slogan would send viewers away: in 2008-9, they destroyed affection people had for the station. If NBC had listened to me rather than pretend their weatherman wasn’t lying, they could have prevented the ratings slide that led to the Comcast buyout. “LOCALS ONLY” has been on NBC stations and websites around the U.S.

This is copied and pasted, and I only left some repetitive stuff out:

Mr. John Wallace, NBC Local Media
Mr. Brian Buchwald, Senior VP of NBC Local Integrated Media

cc: Robert Long, Dr. Bruce Hensel, Paul Moyer, Chuck Henry, Ana Garcia

Dear Mr. Wallace and Mr. Buchwald,
…You are asking for Ratings Suicide because this “LOCALS ONLY” mentality is as racially and ethnically exclusive as you could get. You might as well say,

“NBC L.A. is the white, shallow, narrow, yuppie-wannabe station, and we’re trying to attract as many insecure, uneducated people as possible to join our cult bandwagon, members only after a hazing”…(It’s a) “cult of fear” you’re trying to suck other gullible people into following. It’s asinine, and that’s whom you’ll get, donkeys without brains who want some fake, exclusive illusion of “membership,” but “LOCALS ONLY” can only promise them more feelings of emotional insecurity, and being left out of your delusion. It’s not “4 your Health” at all!

It’s like Nazis, who wanted to kill everyone who was non-Aryan.
…
(This section was from a blog I’d written that day, and included as part of the letter):
NBC advertises “It’s about the truth,” and “The only thing we leave out is the fiction,” but if they say several coastal areas are getting E winds when we are really getting W winds, several hundred times in my hearing over the years (as sadly, it’s my favorite station), then it’s not really “the truth,” is it? They ask for viewer input, but last week changed their website slogan to “LOCALS ONLY,” which clearly means,
“We choose which viewers will confirm our local Burbank myopia.”

It’s a “white trash” mentality, and I’ve been switching to see which other channels have a global outlook, not a local, restrictive one. It has to do with eyesight, like taking your glasses off and living with a blur. No wonder they can’t understand how multi-racial, international people perceive the word “offshore.”

They don’t want to know what Ph.D.’s in Geography think…
It’s a lie of the station to say, “We want to hear from you.”

Melanie Patton Renfrew, Ph.D.
Professor of Geography
Los Angeles Harbor College
1111 Figueroa Place
Wilmington, CA 90744
www.lahc.edu/earthscience/geography/

Note: part of my anger here is how I’d been lied about by the weatherman. You’d be angry, too.
Dr. Melanie Renfrew, 12/19/09

Temperament Differences and Mating

I co-taught a course once on temperament, and think it helps you understand people. I’m not an expert, but have a cross-cultural view, and feel close to a lot of people. I wanted to offer a comment about online matches because I was saying I like romance in movies.

There are different types of matches, and when e-harmony couples spout success, it’s because both people really want it to work. They may or may not have complementary temperaments, but the desire and will are there to succeed.

Many arranged marriages have worked in human history because the couple expects it to. “Soul mates” are not pre-determined at all: people have to make an effort to give and be known.

The “opposites attract” chemistry happens when a couple meets, which is why “love at first sight” marriages are not uncommon. It’s visceral.

Sometimes a man and woman become best friends and they’re alike, but find comfort in being together, more than a chemical opposites match.

The reason I write about this is I see students and people in all age groups who won’t listen to their own biology or common sense, and think some power is going to come on them and “make it happen.”
“Everything happens for a reason,” and
“Maybe it was meant to be”
are 2 mindsets that rob people of choice and “will” to act. I’m so tired of hearing these 2 explanations, they make me want to barf.

Intuitive and cerebral are not opposite terms

Intuition is not an emotional thing. Scientists use intuition to frame hypotheses and think of solutions, and doctors use it in diagnoses.

I use the term “cerebral” to refer to thinking that is more intellectual and devoid of emotion. I’m an emotional person and like being this way, with freedom.

The smartest people on Earth are full of feeling, and don’t hesitate to express it.

L.A. Microclimates

For those of you interested in the weather, here are some links to demonstrate the actual science, not myth of it. L.A. has mountains and valleys, and some of the onshore-offshore confusion is not just up in the satellite view and elevation changes as I’ve discussed, but differences in how topography affects air flow.

Today’s weather is another good example of how L.A. Basin and coastal plain weather are much different from San Fernando Valley and Malibu, which have mountain winds and gusts from sinking High pressure. The air needs to go somewhere, so flows down and out; but near the ocean in L.A., ocean/onshore winds are stronger.

Here are some links from National Weather Service:
Los Angeles center (USC/”downtown”) usually has Calm readings, as Ladera Heights/Baldwin Hills blocks some of the sea breezes. The center of L.A. is where some of the air flow from different directions meets and “settles” (gusts are usually in mountains and valleys).

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=KCQT&num=48&raw=0&dbn=m

San Fernando Valley center (Van Nuys): http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=KVNY&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m

LAX almost always has stronger West winds during the day, and sometimes East winds at night. It’s rare for the planes to reverse their flight pattern, usually during strong East winds or rain, they’ll take off going East. http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=KLAX&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m

San Pedro shows the eddy circulation: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=C5520&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m

Malibu (note population is rich but not densely settled here): http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=MBUC1&num=72

Thousand Oaks has a lot of NE winds and gusts, but has no “shore”: These are mountain winds, not offshore winds, and this should not dominate L.A.’s forecasts. http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobext.php?wfo=lox&sid=THDC1&num=168&raw=0&dbn=m

I like to teach outdoors because it’s so obvious what’s happening, when you see trees and clouds moving, and what times of day the West winds pick up. I write from the perspective of L.A. Basin and coastal plain, and Orange County, but I know L.A.’s mountains from > 100 field trips, working in Burbank and Malibu (at Pepperdine and in SMM’s).

If you live in L.A. and drive through the city, watch your car’s thermometer change in proximity to the ocean. Inland sites have “higher highs, lower lows” of temperature. You can become smart if you watch the patterns, and can lead a more comfortable life if you adapt to them. Science is about prediction.

Dr. Melanie Renfrew, 12/17/09

Another song for the musical

Here’s a weatherman soliloquy:

Up in the clouds, I remain
I really prefer it up here
No one to correct me
No one to see me
Up in the clouds, I remain.

The satellite view is so great
I can stay inside wthout hate
No one to annoy me
No one to see me
The satellite view is so great.

It gets rather lonely up here
Oh, how I wish for a beer
I can’t go to a store
Without hearing, “ONSHORE!”
The clouds are my safety from fear.