Wednesday, November 28, 2012

How Weather Works


First let me introduce you to the jet streams. They are four rivers of air in the sky at high altitude, that flow from the west to the east, two in the northern hemisphere and two in the southern. You cannot feel them blowing at the surface.

Their speed in the center can reach in the range of hundreds of mph and their cross-section can be in the hundreds of miles. There are a couple of pictures in the site framed below showing them.

Their existence it totally conform to the model of an atmosphere on a planet that rotates and is heated by a Sun. The phenomenon is due to the rotation of the Earth and the atmosphere at different rates at the pole and equator and the differences in temperature between poles and equator.

Their speed and direction vary constantly. Sometimes they are interrupted and start further down the stream or they merge into only one per hemisphere. But ideally they divide the atmosphere in 5 regions, two polar, one intertropical and two intermediate.

The intermediate or temperate regions are coincidentally the most livable on the planet.

By changing direction the jet stream create the so called pressure (high and low) fronts.

And yes, airlines sometimes try and save fuel flying inside the jet streams.

The thing is you can pretty much know the weather if you know the positions of the jet streams. It's that simple. It's cold north of the jet stream, warm south and right within if there is enough moisture in the air there are precipitations. Because of Bernoulli's law of course, static pressure is lower where the air flows. Lowering the static pressure of the moist air makes it condensate more and fall to the ground. Rain.

There are very few precipitations outside of the jets streams.

Meteorologists use all kind of mysterious languages trying to trick us into thinking they are true seers of the future. And they continue to keep us ignorant of a simple mechanism. It is an old and known theory and weather model.

But the question is: What if... someone could use some weird technology like very powerful microwave beams (in the GW range) heating the ionosphere above the jet streams in places where they pass most of the time trying to steer them using complicated computer models?

Or use incredible powerful supercomputers to precisely model the weather in vast regions by using various feedback networks of sensors and intervene punctually with a minimal amount of energy and again steering the jet streams?



And here is further proof of the theory on the current weather. You can click on the left in the menu for the different options of the map especially satellite, jet stream and temperature.

Friday, November 23, 2012

Film Rules

And flickr started to hiccup. After a number of pictures in my photostream they reduce the default viewing size of the picture. I also noted a significant slowdown lately. That's why i will try to move some of my better pictures here. Don't know how yet but i'll figure something. Until then here is a series i recently "digitized" from old paper prints pulled from a shoe box using my DSLRA300 from a distance when i can hear the gear in the lens getting stuck from not being able to focus anymore. That is 9 1/2 inches from the first lens element to the paper print. I hope i'm not gone break the gear again, as i did in the past when shooting at seagulls near the ocean with the lens going past the limit trying to focus at infinity. The focusing motor on that camera (which is on the camera body as opposed as being on the lens as in most current models) is a bit too strong for a cheap, stock lens, Sony DT 18-70mm.

Light source was a 50 W halogen bulb and had to move it around until i saw no more reflection in the coating of the prints. For WB on camera i used 2600K.

Each picture is enlargeable by clicking on it, best results with the middle click and opening in a new tab.

Near Mt Hood @2000
Near Jewell, OR, @2000
Sisters Quilt Festival @2000
Sisters Quilt Festival, OR, @2000
Near Mt.Hood, OR, @2000
@2000
The 3 Sisters Mountains, Near Sisters, OR, @2000
Near Tillamook, OR, @2000
Near Canon Beach, OR, @2000
Near Sisters, OR, @2000

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Overlapping Neural Networks

"One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor--with both memory-storage and information-processing elements--than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth" stanford november 2010 neuron imaging synapse processing" https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2010/11/new-imaging-method-developed-at-stanford-reveals-stunning-details-of-brain-connections.html

There could be more than one type of molecular switch in a synapse, each type involving different neurotransmitters. This suggests that the synapse instead of acting as a microprocessor could simply change the path of the information from one neuron to another depending of what neurotransmitters prevail in that moment at the synapse.

Now we can think of the brain more like a dynamically re-configurable hardware with the possibility of multiple different (or even simultaneous) "neural pathways" between the same group of neurons. And if the neurotransmitters are not spread uniformly throughout a region, there goes the "classical neural network" model in favor of some ever changing and overlapping multiple neural networks.

It is obvious that until this discovery described in the article linked above was made, nobody could imagine this model.

However, let's hypothesize that a certain combination of neurotransmitters is distributed uniformly throughout the brain at a certain time. (Although it cannot last very long since these are very dynamic processes, as neurotransmitters are being secreted in different areas of the brain and also metabolized).

Nothing will happen, the brain would freeze in a certain state and thought pattern.

According to this there can be different "brain modes", depending of which type of molecular switches are favored or what mode the brain is in or how many of the overlapping networks are activated at a certain time, and if one is dominant.

It is possible that since memories being "written" when inside a certain area of the brain a certain combination of neurotransmitters is attained, to be retrieved by recreating the same combination of concentrations? Yes, but those conditions are being hard to achieve except by the brain itself, because i think there are gradients of the concentrations of different neurotransmitters that intersect each other creating that combination in very small areas.

Since some neurotransmitters are associated with emotions that means some combination of emotions at a certain time can lead to retrieving those memories?