April 2009 Archives

What is up with the poetry, you may be asking? That was weird!

Well, I love poetry, and although I have produced a great deal of it which ought never to see the light of day, some pieces seem sufficiently amusing to share. So instead of your regularly scheduled geekiness, there will occasionally appear here a poem, which is . . . I guess just differently flavored geekiness.

Particularly true of today's poem, which I would very much like to illustrate someday as though it were a children's book.

Pet Peeve

My pet peeve up and ran away.

It’s been gone since yesterday.

I’m worried that it may run wild—

Nip the neighbors, savage a child.

The police could help if it were under

Some official license number.

This works for dog or cat or bird

But my pet peeve’s not registered.

What if it finds a wild peeve mate?

And what if those two procreate?

They’ll grow with every generation,

Establishing a population.

What if the whole herd turns feral?

They might terrorize some rural

Village, or become invasive

In places where peeves are not native.

The ecologists will come back to me.

And so will the village authorities.

They’ll hunt me down and lock me up

For failing to keep my peeve chained up.

And that will be a lesson to me:

Never to let a peeve run free.

So keep your pet peeves locked away,

And always, always neuter or spay.

If you were asked to identify the heart of the world, what would you say?

The Earth's inner core?
An indy flick?
Tibetan beyul?

The anatomical heart of an organism is a muscular pump driving the circulation of oxygen and nutrients. In a physiological sense, then, I contend that Earth has two hearts: Antarctica and the Arctic.

Here's the story. The Earth is tilted. So it has seasons. Earth's seasonality is most pronounced at the poles, which oscillate annually between all day, all the time, and all night, all the time. During the light, warm summer, the massive ice shelves floating in the polar seas melt and retreat. During the dark, cold winter, the Arctic, Ross, and Weddell seas hunker down to hibernate under blankets of sea ice.

Freezing saltwater actually creates two products: nearly-fresh sea ice, and hypersaline, supercooled seawater. You may remember (and if not, take my word for it) that the colder and saltier water gets, the denser it becomes. Dense water is heavy water. It sinks. So every winter at the poles (and it's always winter at one of the poles!) a continuous stream of very cold, very salty, and incidentally very well-oxygenated (cold water can hold more oxygen) water pours down into the deep basins of the polar seas. These basins fill up, and then the cold salty water spills over the edges into other ocean basins. From the Arctic, it all flows into the Atlantic, since the shallow Bering Strait won't let it into the Pacific. From the Antarctic, it flows everywhere.

This sinking, flowing water leaves behind it an aching emptiness in the hearts of the poles. They try to fill the hole with warm water from the tropics. And as the warm tropical water rushes eagerly into lonely polar arms, the abandoned equator replaces it with cold water from the depths, an emotional rebound called upwelling. (If you don't like the anthropomorphic perspective, just think of the whole thing as some kind of boring convection current.)

Thus, formation of sea ice is the muscular pump for the world's thermohaline circulatory system, which provides oxygen and nutrients to the ocean ecosystem and also happens to regulate the entire Earth's climate, thereby allowing it to support life as we know it. All thanks to the world's two polar hearts, each beating steadily once per year. Q.E.D.

What's that? Organisms have only one heart? Look, okay, it's not the Earth's fault she's bipolar! Furthermore, cephalopods have three hearts, and nobody gives them a hard time about it.