Or perhaps that should be ‘quo vado’?, since I’m not sure whether I’ll be traveling alone.
This format is a little better than the ‘post’ format, though it still leaves a lot to be desired. I’ll have to save after every paragraph, evidently, or lose all my edits.
Anyway, having learned how to post and save, now I should probably block out why I’m here. So I should define my primary area of expertise. Though I write fiction, poetry, etc, my primary skill is along the lines Vannevar Bush designated as the role of a scholar of the future in his 1945 Atlantic article “As We May Think”.
Bush, writing in a time when the databases were mostly vast archives of microform (mostly microfilm, but also microfiche and opaque microform pages), argued that the primary role of future scholars would not be generating new information. This would still be done, of course, but the main function of the scholar would be to act as pathfinder and trail marker through the vast museums and libraries that were already being erected at the time,
What I’ll mostly be doing is not answering ‘frequently asked questions’: there are plenty of sources for that sort of thing. I’ll be trying to answer infrequently asked questions. Which being so, whatever my level of skill (which varies depending on the subject) and luck, very likely I’ll fail most of the time. But that’s not of paramount importance. The important part is raising the questions, I’d say,
A few examples might help clarify. So, for example, when I’m watching weather reporting, I often note what seem to be unwarranted assumptions. One such is the repeated argument that tropical storms that never make landfall have no impacts. This seemed absurd to me, so I did a little digging, and found that such storms do have at least one large-scale effect; they serve as heat transfer engines, cooling the tropics and warming other climatological zones. Which is worth knowing: but I would’t have known it if I hadn’t thought of it and checked it out.
A less fruitful search came about when I was watching reports of hailstorms, and began to wonder what affect hailstones might have on the water budget in an area. Heavy rainfall runs off, and little of the water gets into subsurface reservoirs. And large amounts of snow and ice have a tendency to sublimate and/or melt rapidly, and also often run off. But hailstones are generally small, but layered, so they melt slowly, and sometimes over a large area. So do they contribute largely to groundwater, or is the amount of water overall just too small? I would think it would vary between climate zones, among other things. But I haven’t been able to find out. There doesn’t seem to be research on the subject, or if there is, I can’t find it.
I’ll be adding new entries as I think of them, but the examples above should help frame the tenor of my intents.
treraia 