Friday 3 March 2000

Pic of the day: Tonight I am pretty tired. It has been a long work week and I don't really feel like partying. Which is really good, since I'm not partying...

"You cannot believe how it blows outside!" said my coworker. I glanced out at the sunny cityscape. "That can't be right!" "Why not?" And indeed it was true. I went home in a wind that was well short of storm, but still making quite a lot of noise in the forest. It all felt wrong. And to top it all, there were a few small, dark grey clouds lazily drifting above me in the almost clear sky. It felt uncanny.

I am not a metereologist, and I do not play one on TV. (I just had to say that!) But there are some things that follow from simple natural laws. One of these things is that there shouldn't be this much wind on such a clear day.

Clear weather usually comes with high atmospheric pressure. Actually the differences in pressure are too tiny to be felt ... they are measured in millibar, or 0.001 atmospheres pressure. But high pressure means simply that air is moving down towards the earth's surface, while low pressure means that air is rising upwards. As the air is colder at great heights, there is little water vapor left in it. And as it sinks, it also heats slightly, making the remnants of water even more sparse and the air even more crystalline clear. This is why high air pressure almost always goes with sunny/starry weather.

In a similar way, low pressure comes when relatively warm air is rising, breaking through the colder air above it. In the process the rising air is cooled, but now something happens if it contains water (as it does here near the coast). The water will condense, or even freeze directly if the temperatures allow. The condensation, and especially freezing, release energy. This energy heats the air that was just cooling, and drives it to new heights. In the process, it sucks in new air from below. We have a self-perpetuating area of low pressure, a cyclone. Most cyclones are wide and diffuse and people don't think of them as a cyclone, just another windy, rainy day.

The high pressure area however has no reason for such strong winds. The sinking of air towards the ground is not a particularly energetic process. In the higher levels where it originates, there are no terrain formations that hinder the flow of air, and so any strong local differences in pressure are re-aligned and diluted. (There are however some very strong winds at high altitudes, the so called jet winds or jet streams, long and large belts of strong wind that can significantly affect the time your airplane uses on a long flight. These do not extend nearly to the ground, though.)

The final blow was the small gray clouds. They were uniformly dark grey, meaning that they must be low. If they had been higher, they would have been whiter, as the sun was just recently set. And yet they seemed to move slower than the wind near the ground. I was puzzled, and remain so even now. I have read in the Bible how the Dark One is called "chief of the powers of the air", but I doubt that it is meant in a literal way. To my experience, the atmosphere has obeyed the natural laws as readily as any creation. Until today, at least...

In other news, it happened again this morning: Woke up before the alarm clock, even though I was terribly tired. Again from a vivid dream. In the dream, my grandfather was still alive, but 95 years old. He had moved to the city and lived in an apartment there. It was a nice enough apartment, but not too tidy. (Who am I to speak...) My grandfather was only slightly senile demented in the dream, but for some reason he seemed to be ashamed over the fact that a part of his bed was broken. It was not a very sturdy bed, but even so I briefly wondered how he had managed to break that wooden board.

I woke up and went to work, which was a good thing, since the two other staffers were absent. There are always staff things to do: Change standard letters, download valuta exchange rates and put them into spreadsheets ... stuff that nobody else could do. Today I also turned on the PC at Boss' office. It had been turned off some weeks before. Luckily there is a power switch on the keyboard, so it did not take all that much time.

Late in the workday I was almost falling asleep. I could not remember the beginning of a sentence when I came to the end. I felt like a normal. It must be terrible to live all one's life in such a state of confusion, unable to think clearly. There is no reason for hubris, either: A small stroke or even slipping on a banana peel, and I might live out the rest of my life as a normal or something even worse. I have thought of it sometimes in the past, when I have met clients who reacted irrationally and emotionally, behaving unintelligently and running down false trails. There, but for the grace of God, go I. It is not like I chose my parents or anything.

And of course, in the end it won't matter much. Heritage, be it in the form of money or genes, will not keep us alive more than a few hasty years. And many who have started with less luggage may finish with more. For as a wiser man than I once said: "He who observes the wind will not sow; and he who regards the clouds will not reap."