Why All States Need “Stand Your Ground” Laws

I think all states desperately need laws like Florida’s Stand Your Ground Act where anyone who feels threatened can blast away at the perp. If the law is as permissive as Florida’s, think of all the perks it would provide. It would escalate road rage into a marvelous sport where the most coordinated driver and shooter would triumph over his assailant. Not to mention the sudden population decrease as creeps bit the dust.

As soon as someone gives you a dirty look, blast that sucker. As soon as someone blows his horn at you, pull out the .357 mag. and let fly. And what about the jerk who gives you the finger and yells unkind things about your mother? Whip out your .45 ACP and he’s history. And just imagine what armed to the teeth Tea Party loyalists and commie-pinko-leftist union supporters would do to each other when their competing campaign celebrations collided in the street. Hey, asshole, don’t tread on me. I can hear the rolling barrage now; it would sound like a righteous Fourth of July and smell like napalm in the morning.

But the best reason is passing that law would finally get conservatives to accept Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest concept. Mayhaps believing in evolution would be the next step in their conversion. But that might be going a bit far.

After the law passes it’ll be open season on creeps. Membership in the NRA will triple when the first perp is nailed. Bullet and gun sales will skyrocket so much we’ll soon have gun stores at every major intersection. The rapidly rising growth in local economies will finally do what Obama and his vaunted stimulus program haven’t been able to and propel states into financial solvency. Who was it that said economic development grows out of the barrel of a gun?

The truth is, passing that law would only have a great upside and no downside whatsoever. Well, you would have to ignore a little collateral damage — as long as it’s black kids wearing hoodies who’s counting? But it’s been easy for us to ignore collateral damage like that in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades so what’s new?

Remember, vote for the Stand Your Ground proposition this coming April.

Sponsored by Citizens for Well-Armed Civility.

Water and Global Development

Overuse of water resources on global, regional, and local scales is causing rivers, wetlands, lakes, and aquifers to lose volume and even in many cases to dry up. Based on data from NASA, the World Health Organization, and other international agencies, the United Nations Environment Programme has determined that by 2050 severe water shortages currently affecting at least 400 million people will affect as many as four billion people.[1]

While the world's population tripled in the 20th Century, the use of renewable water resources grew six-fold. By 2050, world population is projected to increase by 40 to 50 percent. That growth, coupled with industrialization and urbanization, is likely to result in increasing demand for potable water.

If that population growth occurs as predicted, within less than 40 years more than half of the Earth’s population will be living with inadequate water supplies, depleted fisheries, and polluted aquifers, streams, and coastlines because of water mismanagement on a global scale. The World Bank recently reported that 80 countries now have water shortages that threaten health and economies and that 40 percent of the world’s population — more than two billion people — have no access to clean water or sanitation. One of the most important causes of global water problems is increasing world population, which places difficult to meet demands for increasing water supplies for industrial/commercial, agricultural, and individual uses.

But population growth is far from the only challenge with respect to water shortages. According to the World Bank, world-wide demand for potable water is doubling every 21 years. Since 1900, a two-fold increase in world population was accompanied by a six-fold increase in water use, reflecting the effects of rising standards of living on greater water use; e.g., diets containing less unprocessed foods such as grains, fruits, and vegetables and more processed food products, especially meat. That dramatic increase in population and transition to more “modern” lifestyles has been accompanied by depletion of groundwater supplies (the mining of “fossil” water that was deposited millions of years ago); inadequate surface water supplies; land salinization; eutrophication and algal blooms in lakes, inland seas, and even the open ocean (see 6-21-11 post on Dead Zones) from agricultural chemicals; irrigation of crops already in surplus; and conversion of agricultural land to other uses, especially in hard surfaced urban areas. Land use change and habitat modification have also led to widespread negative effects on lakes and rivers.

Those changes include removal of native vegetation, including forested areas and wetlands (see 6-21-11 post on Deforestation), to permit agriculture and grazing, conversion of mangroves and other tidal habitats to aquaculture and recreation-oriented development (resorts as well as permanent and vacation homes), large-scale irrigation schemes that are poorly designed and managed, water diversion projects that dry up wetlands and lakes, and dams that decrease stream load and cause the erosion of estuaries and other coastal areas. And we can’t ignore the reality that about 95 percent of the world’s cities still dump raw sewage and industrial effluents into their rivers and lakes, adding microbial and chemical pollutants to the waters.

Other serious problems include accelerating pollution, desertification, salinization, and human-induced climate changes that cause rapid melting of winter snow pack and glaciers and fewer water supplies for agriculture and urban uses during summer months when demand is the highest. Many climatologists expect temperatures to rise by 5-7° C by the end of the century and rainfall to decrease between ten to twenty percent, which will greatly increase evaporation, vegetation loss, wind erosion, and dust storms. Global warming is expected to cause glaciers in the mountains of south Asia are to decline by 40 percent to 80 percent in the next hundred years with profound effects on large populations in countries that depend on the water for agriculture, human and animal consumption, and sanitation, especially Nepal, India, Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam.

However, many water resource experts believe that the main problem associated with fresh water is poverty, not supply or the lack of it. Their view is influenced at least in part by the inescapable reality that the far greater majority of severe water shortage problems are in developing nations, where poor irrigation management and water supply practices result in wasting vast quantities of water and the lack of proper sanitation results in heavily polluted water sources. Added to that, developed nations such as the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe have a much different water problem: government welfare given to large agri-businesses in the form of enormous water subsidies and protections accounts for 85 percent of fresh water consumption.

Real World Examples: In the past several decades, the Aral Sea has lost about 60 percent of its volume. For almost 40 years, water has been diverted from the rivers supplying the Aral Sea (Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya) to irrigate millions of acres for cotton and rice production, resulting in the Sea shrinking from over 65,000 km² to far less than half that size, exposing large areas of the lake bed to wind erosion, increasing the salt concentration from ten percent to more than 23 percent, and changing the regional climate to hotter, drier summers and colder, longer winters. Lake Chad presents another powerful example of the effects of human agency on the environment. In the 1960s, with an area of more than 26,000 km², the Lake was the fourth largest in Africa; it is now one-twentieth the size it was 35 years ago. Overgrazing in the surrounding savannas and large-scale irrigation projects along the Chari and Logone Rivers, which originate in the mountains of the Central African Republic, combined to divert water from the two main rivers that empty into the Lake.[2] Given the unsettled political situation that currently exists in the nations that border the Lake, it is possible that the Lake will disappear before the end of the 21st Century. Lastly, in Jaipur State south and west of New Delhi in central India, nearly 80 percent of the groundwater supply is overexploited and has fallen some 65 feet in less than ten years owing to drawdown practices that are unregulated by any level of government. Approximately one-fifth of all groundwater in India is similarly over-stressed. In a nation of small farmers whose only livelihood is agriculture, the situation borders on disastrous.

Author’s Note: Solutions to the growing water shortage are many and varied and include such technological and political fixes as government imposed water conservation regulations, slowing population growth in critical areas, more efficient irrigation management, elimination of government subsidies (a form of welfare to the well-off) to agricultural users (especially those in arid or semi-arid regions such as California and the American Southwest), a push for more government-sponsored desalination research, adoption of regional water management regulations, pollution reduction, and better management of present supply and distribution systems (in some large, older European cities as much water is lost every day from leaky pipes as is consumed). Another approach much beloved by conservatives is to make water supply a function of the market by assigning monetary values to fresh water. Imagine the results of that free market environmentalism in places where a centuries-old landed gentry controls the land and water and the far greater majority of the resident population are tenants who historically have had no rights whatsoever. That should work just fine.

---

[1] United Nations Environment Programme, Challenges to International Waters; Regional Assessments in a Global Perspective. February, 2006; ISBN 91-89584-47-3; available online at http://www.giwa.net/publications/finalreport/.

[2] Michael T. Coe and Jonathan A.Foley. “Human and natural impacts on the water resources of the Lake Chad Basin.” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 106, 2001, pp. 3349-3356.

Soliton

Basically a solitary, self-reinforcing, nonlinear wave (pulse) that propagates in an undistorted manner over substantial distances. It was discovered by Scottish ship architect and engineer John Scott Russell (1808-1882) in 1834 while he was conducting experiments on the Union Canal near Edinburgh, Scotland, to determine the most efficient hull design for canal boats. The following quote describes his first observations of what he called a “Wave of Translation.”

I was observing the motion of a boat which was rapidly drawn along a narrow channel by a pair of horses, when the boat suddenly stopped — not so the mass of water in the channel which it had put in motion; it accumulated round the prow of the vessel in a state of violent agitation, then suddenly leaving it behind, rolled forward with great velocity, assuming the form of a large solitary elevation, a rounded, smooth and well-defined heap of water, which continued its course along the channel apparently without change of form or diminution of speed. I followed it on horseback, and overtook it still rolling on at a rate of some eight or nine miles an hour, preserving its original figure some thirty feet long and a foot to a foot and a half in height. Its height gradually diminished, and after a chase of one or two miles I lost it in the windings of the channel. Such, in the month of August 1834, was my first chance interview with that singular and beautiful phenomenon which I have called the Wave of Translation.

J. Scott Russell. “Report on Waves,” Fourteenth meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1844.

Solitary waves were not fully appreciated and were largely ignored by Russell’s contemporaries and later scientists, or were regarded merely as an interesting curiosity. It wasn’t until 1895 that Dutch mathematician Diederik J. Korteweg and his student Gustav de Vries provided the theoretical explanation in “On the Change of Form of Long Waves advancing in a Rectangular Canal and on a New Type of Long Stationary Waves; Philosophical Magazine, 5th series, vol. 36, pp. 422-443, 1895. But the real significance of Russell’s discovery in physics, electronics, biology, and especially fiber optics had to wait until the 1960s and the advent of modern digital computers that their characteristics were more thoroughly investigated and used to study non-linear wave propagation and to model various physical conditions leading to the modern general theory of solitons.

solitons (that they are localized and preserved under collisions) leads to a large number of applications for solitons.

Today, largely because of their particle-like behavior, solitons are used as a constructive element to formulate the complex dynamic behavior of wave systems in almost all facets of science, including hydrodynamics, nonlinear optics, plasmas, shock waves, and tornados. Solitons are also used to model high temperature superconductors and energy transport in DNA, as well as to assist in the development of new mathematical techniques and concepts underpinning further non-linear, wave-like developments, such as the application of solitary waves in fiber-optic communications networks.

For a practical guide to the fascinating world of solitons that appeals to an interdisciplinary readership of chemists, engineers, and physicists, see: Michel Remoissenet. Waves Called Solitons: Concepts and Experiments. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1994. And for a detailed review of nonlinear science including solitons and Chaos Theory, see: Alwyn C. Scott. Nonlinear Science: Emergence and Dynamics of Coherent Structures. Oxford University Press, 2003. For a shorter but not too much less detailed treatment perfect for those trained in mathematics that deals directly with the significance of Russell’s contributions to science, see Scott’s paper: “The Development of Nonlinear Science,” given at the University of New Mexico, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Consortium of the Americas Seminars, October 10, 2005, published in Rivista del Nuovo Cimento, Vol, 27, No. 10-11, pp. 1-115, DOI:  10.1393/ncr/i2005-10001-3. If you enjoy high level mathematics, you may want to take a look at Alex Kasman’s very interesting and instructive soliton web page: http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/SOLITONPICS/.

Author’s Note: Until recently, Russell was best remembered in the scientific community for his considerable successes in ship hull design and for conducting the first experimental study of the Doppler shift of sound frequency as a train passes. It is entirely appropriate that a fiber-optic cable connecting Edinburgh and Glasgow now runs beneath the very canal tow-path along which John Scott Russell made his initial observations of the soliton.

Extreme (Rogue) Waves

Waves that are more than twice the size of the significant wave height, which itself is defined as being approximately equal to the average of the highest one-third of the waves in a wave record. Those waves are also popularly known as rogue, monster, or freak waves. For decades, and even hundreds of years, extreme waves have been thought of as large-scale fisherman’s tales on the part of mariners, in other words, tall tales that wouldn’t bear too much scrutiny. However, the first serious questions were raised in 1978 when the newly constructed, state-of-the-art cargo ship München went down in the mid-Atlantic Ocean with only a garbled SOS message. An extensive search and rescue effort found limited debris and a single lifeboat that had obviously sustained severe structural damage while still attached to the München some 65 feet above the water line. However, despite rampant speculation, no definitive answers were found and scientific fingers continued to be pointed in the direction of more tall tales on the part of mariners.

But on January 1, 1995, all that changed when the height of a monster wave was measured at 80 feet by a precise laser instrument at the securely stationed Draupner oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Norway in a background of waves averaging 35 feet in height. That wave has since become known as the “New Year Wave” and had a maximal wave height that was much more than twice the significant wave height. Almost as important to a sea captain, located at the base of the extreme wave crest was an almost equally dramatic wave trough. So a ship’s captain approaching such a wave would be confronted not only with a massive wall of foaming, boiling water towering about two or three times higher than all other waves in the area but also a huge trough or “hole in the sea” below it where the ocean should be, a truly terrifying situation.

Immediately after the 1995 “New Year Wave” scientists started paying a lot more attention to the nature and propagation of ocean waves since reliable calculation of high return period wave heights is of critical importance in the design and construction of offshore structures as well as of large ships. The largest wave naval engineers and architects were required to accommodate in the design strength calculations was 15 meters from trough to crest. If that design parameter was determined to be incorrect, especially in light of the Draupner platform reading, the world’s shipping and oil platform industries would be confronted with grave difficulties.

Mid-ocean storm waves commonly reach seven meters (23 feet) in height and in severe storm conditions can attain 15 meters (50 feet). But if extreme waves up to 30 meters (100 feet) in height could appear without warning in mid-ocean, against the prevailing current and wave direction, and often in perfectly clear weather those waves could break over the bow of a ship, generating tremendous pressures of up to 100 tons per square meter and could easily inflect severe structural and equipment damage or even sink the vessel instantaneously or in a matter of minutes. Ship design standards anticipated rounded storm waves of up to 15 meters (trough to crest) and pressures around 15 tons per square meter without the ship sustaining damage and up to twice that pressure if the design allowed for some structural deformation, which would indicate a wave height of about 20 meters.

A linear mathematical model had long been used by oceanographers, meteorologists, naval engineers/architects, and the shipping industry to predict the height of ocean waves. That model assumed that storm waves were smooth and gently sloping. Consequently, ships of all sizes were designed to deal with undulating waves. The model also assumed that waves varied in a normal distribution around the significant (average) wave height. As a result, in an ocean storm with a significant wave height of 12 meters, the model suggested a wave higher than 15 meters would be very rare and one of 30 meters had an extremely slight statistical probability of occurrence, about once every 10,000 years. But the model failed to correspond with the reality of 20 vessels having been struck by larger than normal waves off the South African coast since 1990 or with the Draupner platform data.

A number of oceanographers, especially Marten Grundlingh of the Southern African Data Centre for Oceanography (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), who were interested in the high number of South African incidents determined that all the ships damaged by the large waves had been located at the edge of the Agulhas Current, where the warm Indian Ocean water mixed with colder Atlantic flow. Satellite radar imagery confirmed that wave heights at the edge of that Current could grow well beyond the linear model’s predictions, especially if the dominant wind was blowing in the opposite direction of current flow. The obvious solution to the problem required ship captains to avoid certain ocean currents in specific weather conditions.

However, research performed in 2001 by the German Aerospace Center (known as MaxWave, a three-week project in August and September 2001) using global satellite radar imagery collected by the European Space Agency verified the existence of these waves in other parts of the world ocean by analyzing 30,000 radar images of the ocean surface and finding three waves of enormous size (100-foot, 90-foot, and 85-foot waves) and at least ten others with crests and troughs measuring more than 81 feet in height but less than 85 feet. In other words, more extreme waves were found than anyone had expected, taking the entire scientific community by surprise. Although definitive conclusions have yet to be reached, three types of extreme waves may be cruising the oceans: 1) walls of water traveling at speeds of up to six miles per hour; 2) groupings that mariners call Three Sisters; and 3) short-lived, single giant waves building up to four times the storm’s normal wave height and collapsing soon thereafter.

Over the past ten years, extreme waves have gradually been recognized as normal ocean phenomena that have several possible causes.

Constructive Interference (superposition): Several wave trains meet that are characterized by differing speeds and directions. Their crest heights combine so that when high waves are included in the wave trains an extreme wave can result. Since the wave trains continue to separate and move apart this wave effect is normally of short duration.

Focusing of Wave Energy by Strong Currents: When storm-forced waves are driven into an opposing ocean current an interaction can take place that results in a shortening of wave frequency, causing oncoming wave trains to compress together into an extreme wave that tends to have a long duration. The Gulf Stream and Agulhas Current are examples of locations where those multidirectional and multidimensional conditions are found with some regularity.

Normal Wave Generation Process: Water wave generation results in a spectrum of wave heights distributed from the smallest capillary waves to very large waves. Within that spectrum is a possibility of wave heights occurring from the most common (small waves) to the least likely (extreme waves). The random, nonlinear nature of waves implies that individual waves can be substantially higher than the significant wave height, thus, forming extreme waves.

Nonlinear Effects Similar to Solitons: According to research in Chaos Theory and quantum physics (especially by physicist Alfred R. Osborne, University of Turin; Efim Pelinovsky of the Institute of Applied Physics in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia; and mathematician Krystian Dysthe of the University of Bergen in Norway) it is feasible to have extreme waves occurring by natural, nonlinear processes from a random background of smaller waves.

Frequency Modulation and Resonance: Other research seeks to determine whether frequency or amplitude modulation and resonance may create extreme waves. An analogy is easily demonstrated in a bathtub by using your hand to slosh water back and forth. If you’re lucky, at just the right period a larger than normal wave will be produced.

Real World Examples include the first recorded evidence provided in 1995 by the Draupner platform wave in the North Sea; also in 1995 an extreme wave that was part of Hurricane Luis in the North Atlantic Ocean and estimated at 29-30 meters (by the ship’s officers who observed it as 95 feet in height) struck the RMS Queen Elizabeth II in the North Atlantic causing structural damage as high as the 10^th floor; the cruise ship Caledonian Star was hit by a wave in the South Atlantic in 2001 that was estimated by the captain as being 30 meters or more in height that struck “without any prediction, any expectations,” destroying much of the ship’s bridge, including the radar, gyro compasses, echo sounders, sonar, and parts of the radio communication system; in 2001 the German cruise liner Bremen was hit by an extreme wave in the South Atlantic in the same storm that had devastated the Caledonian Star only two days earlier, destroying the radar equipment, weather faxes, ventilator, alarms, and engines with the steering gear failing completely — for almost two hours the ship was not maneuverable and was dead in the water, a condition of extraordinarily high hazard in a storm; and in April 2005 the cruise ship Norwegian Dawn was hit by an 80- to 90-foot-high wave off the coast of Georgia, sustaining damage as high as its 10^th floor. And let’s not forget the famous upside down Hollywood example, Poseidon Adventure, or its remake, Poseidon.