From Water Leaks to Barred Owls

This morning I made a quick trip to the store to buy fixins for breakfast burritos. When I got back home and started to set the grocery sacks on the kitchen table I noticed that it was very wet. I looked up and saw that the water was coming from the ceiling. The water pipes for the upstairs run between the upstairs floor joists. What a way to start the day.

After such a unsettling start to the day, we decided to take a drive. We drove up the Talimena Drive to Queen Wilhelmina State Park on Rich Mountain.  As we drove up the mountain we saw that the trees were iced over at the higher elevations.  The ice made the scenery even more beautiful than usual.

We turned off of Talimena Drive onto Polk County Road 100, a rough dirt road that goes down the back side of Rich Mountain and connects with Highway 8.  Polk County Road 100 is a seldom traveled road through uninhabited land.

As we were slowly making our way down the road , my wife pointed out an owl .  We watched as the owl landed on a dead tree.  I drove the car carefully until we were right beside the tree.  The owl's head was turned away from us.  My wife called to the owl and I snapped the photo just as he turned his head.

Getting to see and photograph a Barred Owl today made me forget for awhile the problems that I had to face back home. It was a very special moment.

P.S.  The plumber is supposed to be here in the morning.

Quadrillion

Q is for Quadrillion.  In the U.S.A. and in most English-speaking countries and Arabic-speaking countries a quadrillion refers to one thousand million million, or 1,000,000,000,000,000.  Some countries use number designations based on the long scale system where every new term greater than million is a million times the previous term.  In the long scale system a quadrillion refers to one million million million million or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  How can we understand the concept of such large numbers.

To try and get an idea of what a quadrillion is take a look at this cube.  It represents 1,000,067,088,384,000; or just over one quadrillion pennies stacked in a cube. To get an idea of the scale we have from right to left, a football field, then the Lincoln Memorial, then the Washington Monument (555 feet tall), then a cube of one trillion pennies, then the Empire State Building (1,250 feet tall), then the Sears Tower (1,450 feet tall).  The cube is roughly a half-mile wide, (2,730 feet) and would weigh an astonishing three billion tons. That's a lot of pennies.

When people think of big numbers it is interesting the things that are used as symbols of big numbers.  Matthew 10:30 in the Bible says, “but the very hairs of your head are all numbered”.  So how big a number is the very hairs of your head.  According to the Harvard university website Bionumbers, the number of hairs on a human head range from 90,000 to 150,000.  Interestingly the number of hairs is different for different hair colors.  Blondes have 150,000 hairs, people with brown hair have 110,000 hairs, those with black hair have 100,000 hairs and redheads have just 90,000 hairs.

Other symbols of a big number in the Bible are found in Genesis 22:17, “I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore”.  First let’s look at sand which is on the seashore.  Science writer David Blatner, in his new book Spectrums, says,  "a group of researchers at the University of Hawaii, being well-versed in all things beachy, tried to calculate the number of grains of sand.  They said, if you assume a grain of sand has an average size and you calculate how many grains are in a teaspoon and then multiply by all the beaches and deserts in the world, the Earth has roughly, and we're speaking very roughly here, 7.5 x 10 to the 18th  grains of sand, or seven thousand five hundred quadrillion grains". That's a lot of grains of sand.

What about the stars of the heavens?  To get an idea of how many stars are in the universe, let’s look at a photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope called The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Astronomers picked a seemingly empty spot in the sky. Staring at the spot in the sky for ten days, The Hubble Telescope kept taking pictures one after another for the entire exposure time, accumulating data. Astronomers put the exposures together into one final picture. Each time they added an exposure, the view got deeper, revealing fainter objects. When they were done they had the deepest picture ever taken of the heavens.

The image is of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major. It covers an area 2.5 arc minutes across, one part in a million of the whole sky. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. That would mean that the whole universe contains a million times 10,000 galaxies. Astronomers estimate that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains around 400 billion stars. How many stars are in the universe?  10,000 million times 400 billion or 4 times 10 to the 21st.  That is 4 million quadrillion.  So that makes stars the champion of big numbers, right?  Yes, the number of stars in the heavens is "an unbelievably large number, but you will find the same number of molecules in just ten drops of water.   If you took 10 drops of water (not extra-big drops, just regular drops) and counted the number of H2O molecules in those drops, you'd get a number equal to all the stars in the universe.  I can't imagine how big the number is that describes the number of molecules of water that are in the earth's oceans.

This is amazing to me. For some reason, when someone says million, billion or trillion, quadrillion, I see an enormous pile of something, great sweeps of desert sand, twirling masses of stars. Big things come from lots of stuff; little things from less stuff. That seems intuitive.  But that's wrong. Little things, if they're really little, can pile up just like big things.  So next time I look up at the sky at all those stars, I will be impressed, of course, by the great numbers that are out there. But I will remind myself that at the other end of the scale, in the nooks and crannies of the physical world, in the teeniest of places, there are equally vast numbers of teenier things.

The ABC Wednesday Meme is a fun way to see some great blogs.

Water

W is for Water.  As in too much water.  In our area on May 30th there were severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and heavy rain.  My wife and I were on our way home from Little Rock when we encountered the storms. We stopped in Hot Springs and waited in a Walgreens store for about an hour until the Tornado Watch expired. As we traveled home we saw where a tornado had crossed Hwy 270. Crews had cut trees so that traffic could pass but power lines were still down.  We listened to the scanner and heard about tornadoes in our county. When we reached Mt. Ida we were under another tornado watch, so we stopped at the Dairyette to wait out the storm. I took this video of the heavy rain from the front door.

We arrived home safely, but not before seeing tornado damage near Oden.  The next day we learned that the heavy rains had caused flooding in the Y-city area and that there had been loss of life. In the early morning hours, Scott County Sheriff Cody Carpenter and Arkansas Game and Fish Officer Joel Campora lost their lives in the line of duty. Both men died attempting to save the lives of helpless people trapped in a flooded home.

Last weekend we drove up to Y-city and saw some of the damage that the flood caused.  A gas station was damaged and a church had floated off of it's foundation.

The May 30th flood was not the first time that I have been in close proximity to a flood that caused loss of life.


Thursday evening, June 10, 2010, I traveled to Glenwood to pick up a load of windshields. As I traveled I was watching the weather because there were supposed to be storms on the way. It was raining lightly but I had returned home before the it started raining harder. After I had made it home, the sky turned a green color and we were a bit nervous, but when we checked the TV and internet we found that we were not under any watches or warnings. Soon after I got to work Friday morning, My wife called me and told me that there had been terrible flooding at the Albert Pike Campground with many dead and many missing. The Caddo and Little Missouri Rivers had flooded during the night.


The Albert Pike Campground is located about 45 minutes from Mena over gravel roads deep in the heart of the Ouachita Mountains. Twenty people including eight children lost their lives in the flood caused by up to nine inches of rain that fell in the early morning hours, catching many campers at Albert Pike Campground off-guard.



The park is situated in a valley between two heavily forested hills, near the Little Missouri River. The "Little Missouri" usually has a water level that is so low, it looks more like a creek. People can easily wade across the river. That fateful night the Little Missouri got hit with 8 to 9" of rain within a very short period of time. The water level went from 3 feet to 23 feet from midnight to around 3:00am.





A U.S. Forest Service spokesman stated that it would have been impossible to warn everyone at a the Albert Pike campground that a flood was coming because cell phone service is spotty and there are no sirens in the sparsely populated area. Some parts of the valley are so steep and craggy that the only way out is to hike downstream. Any hikers who had taken cars to the campsites would have been blocked at low-water bridge crossings that are inundated when the rivers rise.


The raging torrent poured through the valley with such force that it peeled asphalt off roads and bark off trees. Cabins dotting the river banks were severely damaged. Mobile homes lay on their sides.


The first time that I was close to a tragic flash flood was on July 31, 1976, while we were living in Loveland, Colorado. A violent rainstorm sent a rampaging wall of water through Big Thompson Canyon. The massive flood killed 144 people. My wife and I along with my family had been picnicking along the banks of the Big Thompson River that afternoon. When it started to rain we packed up and drove home through heavy rain. We didn't know there had been a flood until the next morning.


Events such as these floods always bring questions to my mind. Why do these terrible things happen and why have I been spared? I don't have the answers as to why so many tragedies happen. I do know that ever since sin came into this world through Satan there have been terrible tragedies. I suppose that Adam and Eve asked "why" when Cain killed his brother Abel.

The only promise that a Christian has in this life is that there will be trouble. Our trouble free existence will be in Heaven where God will wipe away all tears.

Why do bad things happen? Because we live in a sinful world. I know that's not the kind of answer we like, but there is no better answer available.

I am eagerly looking forward to the day when "God will wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away".


The ABC Wednesday Meme is a fun way to see some great blogs.

World Water Day

International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a way of focusing on how important freshwater is to humanity. We all need water. For most people in the world, it's not as easy as turning a tap. It takes 5 gallons of water for all of our daily needs—basic hygiene, household chores, and what we consume! Most people around the world do not have access to 5 gallons of freshwater a day, yet the average American uses over 70 gallons per day. I looked at my last water bill, and with the two of us we each used 90 gallons per day.

I never think very much about our water except when I pay the bill.  I found some statistics that made me realize how fortunate I am.  Over one billion people do not have access to clean water and almost 2.5 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation. 85% of the world population lives in the driest half of the planet. I need to be reminded how lucky I am.

Even in places that have clean water, a lot of peoples time is spent in carrying water.  I'm sure that I wouldn't be using nearly 100 gallons of water a day if I had to carry it several miles. Look at the photos below, and then remember how lucky you are the next time you get a drink of water, use the toilet, wash your hands, or take a shower.

Spend a few moments to watch this short video, and then think about what much of the world has to go through just to have water.