21,483 calls in 36 years

It’s been more than a week, and I still am saddened when I think of the loss of Phil Rounds. Ben Fleagle already did a better job than I did talking about it, and was closer to the loss. Right now, I feel pretty close, though. My thoughts go out to all in the Great White North.

And there are many who also appreciate the efforts of those who show how he was missed. Staff at the News-Miner did an excellent job with a several articles and an obituary. While I’m at it, I’d like to thank Todd Shechter for several email forwards, Josh Zwart for the thirty second version of A-shift history and pumpkin pie, and my wife for her diligence on Facebook.

But I think the most impressive is this video. Taken by Carol Falcetta, it shows the procession down University Avenue in Fairbanks towards Phil’s memorial service. The music is very nice, and the video itself shows some small measure of the respect this man held. First of all, remember that every engine pictured represents an entire department that committed to sending a crew for this. Also, for those of you fire service folks out there, wait until the end and count the number of law enforcement. Try to imagine another firefighter getting that kind of help from cops.

We’ll miss you, Phil.

The Parting Glass

I was always the awkward kid. The one who read too much and played too little; not strong, not brave, not confident. I was that kid well into my teens and if you watch me now, you’ll still see it occasionally. I don’t quite know how, therefore, I decided to be a firefighter: full-time for a few years, a volly for a few more, and now getting lost in the woods on a regular basis.

Maybe blame my roommate Myles, who talked me into taking an EMT class, or the instructor of that class, the incomparable Deena Thomas (nee Stout). Maybe blame Bud Rotroff, who made clear from the first Fire Science class I took with him that this was where serious people lived. But certainly, a great share of the blame can be laid on Battalion Chief Phil Rounds, who commanded respect for the University Fire Department from the first moment he entered a room. Ben Fleagle has written it already, all I want to do is lend my own voice to talking about a great guy I knew, who passed away a few days ago.

Numbers in context

I am well accustomed to having difficulty finding a sense of scale for certain things (e.g., low temperatures, travel distances, the price of gasoline) as a result of living in The Other Two for twelve years. I was surprised to hear this morning, however, that I-5 is closed in Southern Washington today due to flooding. My surprise originates not from the closure itself, but from the descriptions of the storm that caused it:

“A severe storm smacked the region Monday with hurricane-force winds and several inches of rain, and was blamed for four deaths.“ (Yahoo News),

“Rescue boats were used to grab flood-stranded residents, and GPS-equipped helicopters were used at night. “ (CNN, but from later in the same AP story)

The National Weather Service was certainly more sober: FLOOD WATERS WILL CONTINUE TO DRAIN OVER THE NEXT 12 HOURS BUT MANY PROBLEM AREAS STILL EXIST. THE FLOOD WARNING HAS BEEN EXTENDED INTO TUESDAY AFTERNOON.

My point in all of this was that the total amount of rainfall was somewhere between four and ten inches in something like twenty-four hours. Hilo barely even opens its collective umbrellas when that happens. I guess I’ll be adding ‘twenty-four hour rainfall’ to my list of ungrounded comparisons.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Well, no tsunami yesterday, completing the trifecta of non-disasters. The potential here was anulled rather quickly, but it took a while longer to clear things in Chile. We did, however, have another earthquake last night. This one was centered, as nearly as I can tell, just a few miles northwest of our house. Also, again last night the clouds were at just the right elevation to be spectactularly illuminated by the 21 July fissure.

And another thing. . .

Oddly enough, while I was writing the last post about earthquakes, a m7.5 occurred off the coast of Peru, prompting a potential tsunami message. Then two more near-m6 earthquakes in Peru.

Here we go again.

Fire behavior

One of those things that you can learn a lot about and still not know all you need to. And now, according to a New Scientist article (behind the paywall), added to the list of ‘phenomena long classed as scientifically impossible despite robust observations by roughnecks.‘ Since I didn’t pay either, I don’t know how the rest of the article describes these incidents, but any experience involving a fully involved safety zone certainly sounds like something important to find out about.

Given the number of firefighters prone to confusing flashover and rollover, though, it is safe to say that there could be better study and education on the whole kit and kaboodle. I guess spending about twelve hours in the last two days inside a forty foot shipping container in high heat made me nostalgic for the times when finding myself in that environment meant there was live fire training going on.

Where I want to be

I can only handle so much coolness at once. I ran across these conference proceedings about the confluence of chaos theory and disaster response a while ago, but didn’t have time to read. Nor do I now, and not least of all because I just found these conference proceedings about the uses of digital globe applications in environmental (and other) science outreach.

That’s a lot of reading.

Our outreach should exceed our grasp, else what’s a teacher for?

And such is the guilt of both the Jewish student and the Jewish teacher: The secret knowledge that no matter how much we learn, or how much we teach, it will never, ever be enough–that our parents, our teachers, our children, and our students are watching us, and so is everyone else, that eternity is breathing over our shoulders, waiting to see if we will notice.

A student facing these expectations needs to be constantly humbled, to be reminded again and again that everything she already knows is nothing more than a tiny spark in a night full of stars.

[snip]

The great secret of education is that one doesn’t learn by being smart, but by being aware of the limits of one’s own knowledge–by finding those limits and then plunging over them, as if jumping off the edge of the world. The student has to know that the edge is there, and the teacher who coaxes the student over the precipice has to catch the student when she falls. It’s a sacred trust.

-Dana Horn, “The Last Jewish American Nerd”

We in the science outreach business can be pretty self-congratulatory sometimes. I think that very often we’re doing good stuff, as any kid excited about their look through a telescope or recent tidepooling trip can tell you. But that doesn’t mean that we’re trying hard enough, or thinking critically about how and why we go about this stuff. A good friend of mine is giving an astronomy talk in a couple of weeks, and his hook is brilliant. I bet a dollar that he’s going to talk about Olber’s Paradox, a seemingly simple statement that has pretty profound implications for how we frame our questions. And that’s the part we’re not talking about.

I have a theory about this: my thoughts are not disorderly . . .

. . . the linear construction of time is just faulty. Thus, when I wrote about the Weingarten article as a gedankenexperiment, I was referring to it as an excellent way to frame an argument about the inability to differentiate between high quality and low quality performances in lots of cases.

As an aside, Googling ‘nonlinear perception of time,’ returned what looks like an interesting article from a fascinating tome of conference proceedings.

I have a theory: we often don’t know what good response looks like

Case study 1: I look forward to a cold day at work. Living in 80 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 percent humidity all day, I find frost on the car after a night of stargazing, or to dropping in to the upper left hand corner of the windchill chart something of a relief. I get a lot of guff from co-workers for bringing a large duffel bag of winter clothes with me every time I go up to work, and when I offer them some, they usually reply that they’ll be okay, even though the worst chill they look dressed for is eating ice cream. The dichotomy continues as I add layers and lurk outside while they begin to shiver and stay inside longer and longer