Hours of daylight – 10:03

It’s getting colder down here in the banana belt of Idaho. There’s snow up in the higher elevations and we had a bit of wet snow one morning a few days back. I’m looking forward to experiencing a full-on temperature inversion which i’m told will be coming soon.

What’s an inversion? Well, a temperature inversion occurs when the air temperature actually get warmer as you gain elevation. It’s a phenomenon that is usually limited to valleys. Cool air is heavier than warm air so as the air cools over night it tends to spill down into the lowest part of the valley. The next morning as the sun rises, the mountains block the sun from warming the valley air so it warms the air above the valleys first. This causes an effect like a pool of liquid nitrogen… the liquid bubbles and boils off gaseous nitrogen, but it can take a bit of time for the liquid to boil away and the temperature to equalize. Another factor that plays into inversions is a lack of wind. In the winter the valley air is cool, the moutain air ofter warmer despite the increased elevation, so winds are frequently very mild or nonexistant. This is because cold air tends to sink, but it’s already down in the valleys so it can’t sink any further. Inversions trap water vapor and all sorts of particulate matter (wood smoke, oxides of nitrogen and carbon dioxide from car and diesel exhaust, etc.) down in the valleys. The bottom line is you get a brown haze layer that can be remarkably icky and unhealthy. Inversions can exist for days until winds pick up or temperatures equalize and the trapped particulates can diffuse. A local here told me he likes to ride up the Bogus Basin road during really bad inversions, “city will be swimming in icy brown air, but you drive up a few thousand feet and suddenly you’re in 70 degree sunshine looking across a pillowy see of fog.”

Here it’s inversions. In Minneapolis the phenomenon was “ice fog.” Ice fog is what happens when there’s no wind and the temp drops down around -20. Teeny teeny bits of water vapor freeze and form a fog made out of ice crystals. It can be really freaky to look through ice fog as it seems like you’re looking through water; everything is distorted. Plus ice fog has a very odd density. For example you might be driving towards downtown Minnepolis, but the city is completely occluded by fog. You continue to drive when all of sudden out of nowhere you can suddenly see the towers of downtown. But they look unreal, they shimmer and waver. It’s kind of freaky.

So, Kansas has adopted “Intelligent Design” as a new part of the curriculum. What’s even worse is they have changed the definition of science. The board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena. Can you believe that? A school board in Kansas has re-written what constitutes science. So now, rather than *use* the brain we have either evolved or been given, we can simply attribute everything to an unseen force. Since we no longer need to seek natural explanation we can now rely on super natural explanation.

So do you think students in Kansas science classes will be learning of the Hindu oscilating universe belief? Or how about various Buddhist creation stories? Surely they’ll have to learn all the myriad Native American explanations for why things as they are. And let’s not forget the Greeks and Romans! See, the Kansas school board is trying to broaden the search for knowledge by redefining science and rejecting Darwin’s writing. They’re not trying to restrict what is taught, they’re trying to expand what is taught.

Right?

Right??