The Un-muddled Mathematician
Chris S. Coray
Cold doesn’t bother me. Having to shovel snow doesn’t bother me
either, and my wife, unlike Ann, the wife of the Muddled Male, never helps with
a snow shovel so I don’t have to sneak around trying to regain my breath after a
nearly fatal exertion. That isn’t to say
I don’t occasionally lean on the shovel and ponder the beauty of this place,
which coincidentally allows me to suck in enough air to continue. But I confess the nearly relentless hard wind
of the past two months has made me cranky.
Besides undoing all the snow clearing with deep and hard drifts, the
long night time howling keeps me from sleeping.
It has even gotten to Bobbie. The
audio signal of the wind makes it impossible to get enough rest. I was even talking today to a neighbor who
told me that instead of a panic room in their house they have designed a “quiet
room” in which most of the wind noise it muffled. It is the only way they get by.
I wrote that the wind has made me
cranky and that attitude needs an outlet.
It is an easy hunt. I have come
to the unremarkable conclusion that the strength of a storm has nothing to do
with actual meteorology. For
earthquakes, we have the Richter scale, a well-defined physical
quantifier. On the other hand for the
weather we have the IBS, or the “idiot in boots scale”. National news sources, especially the visual
ones, measure the strength of a storm by the number of people over whom the
storm travels, not any intrinsic quantifiable storm physics. So as we watch the storms in the east they
are disproportionately exaggerated compared to even bigger ones out west because
there are lots of people living in the east.
So the talking head on TV cuts to a camera trained on their local idiot,
who is wearing rubber boots of some length and colorful jacket (with logo),
standing in water or in snow, and we get a great but local video of a dummy who
is too stupid to come in out of the storm (I suspect only for two minutes). I have reached the point where I hope for a
giant wave sweeping the guy out to sea or a snowplow going by and just burying
the guy in a really big splash. “You
stay warm out there, Sid” come the words of comfort and warning from the
anchor. Meanwhile, I am chanting, “Big
wave, giant wave, please”. It hasn’t worked yet.
To be fair, this inequity in
storm reporting is not confined to faraway places. For example, the Salt Lake channels pretend
that they are covering the weather statewide instead of what they are really
doing, observing just outside their studio.
An occasional reference is made to “small disturbances” along the Idaho
border, not even noting that the laminar cyclone is living at Bear Lake, Utah. For these folks I’ve often dreamed of a
yet-to-be-developed technology. This device would allow me to hurl a banana
cream pie through my television set, magically striking the local weather
person in the face, with the words, “Bear Lake says Hi” on the crust and
visible on the screen. I’ll pay big
money to the developer of this technology.
And I’ll buy the pies.
Now I’m going to work on my plans
for the safe room in my house from which I cannot hear the wind.
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