Tricotomania and more

I’ve complained enough, so there will be no mention of what was falling out of the sky yesterday except to say that I can no longer restrain the bad language. It melted when it hit the ground and later turned to rain.

The good news is that the snow on the ground is melting and receding to reveal:

Snowdrops!!!

The shoots of crocuses, daffodils and tulips are also visible in parts of the front garden.

That said, the pile of snow you see in the background there is still this high.

We are all in that spring shovelling mode where we go out and shovel snow ONTO the driveway so it melts more quickly. Our short term objective is to be able to get to the shed so we can liberate the bikes. They have been booked in for a service on Wednesday.

Note: you do know that sometimes I post 2 or 3 things in one day, right? And that you can click on the photos and see them bigger?

KC has a great idea — photographs of plants at regular intervals throughout the season (go read her whole post there are pretty pictures). She’s doing it for her own gardening purposes (though I bet the kids are learning, too) but it would fit really well with botany studies like those Rebecca is doing. I’m thinking about studying botany with Tigger as soon as we can see some plants. I have the Elpel books on the shelf.

That might be some time. The following photos were taken on Sunday from the kitchen window. (click for bigger) That’s a bird feeder. It’s on a post, believe it or not.

I took another one later (not knowing Mat had taken that one) after the “hat” had fallen off.

You can sort of see the remains of our WWI trench (ha ha). Mat had been maintaining a path to the shed so he could get his bike out. It is now chained to the railing on the front porch.

And yes, my patio furniture never got taken in. That is the top of my parasol sticking up on the left there. The table is now completely buried. As are the chairs and the bench. Shame really because the cats can jump into the house via the window I took that picture from if they can spring off the back of the bench.

I have noticed that math texts often talk about the difficulty people have in understanding the concept of negative numbers. I always find this kind of statement odd. Negative numbers seem perfectly normal to me. And I know lots of little kids who are very comfortable with them. It occurs to me that this is a combination of climate and metric.

I live in Canada. In most of Canada, temperatures are below freezing for several months a year. In some parts of Canada, they are well below freezing. Even though something like 80% of the population lives within 200 miles of the US border, we still live pretty far north and pretty far from major bodies of water with warm currents that might moderate our climate. (The UK is further north but the Gulf Stream has a major impact on its climate.)

And we use the metric system. This means that the freezing point of water is 0. And all those months of “below freezing” means that we are using negative numbers in daily life to talk about the weather. We learn, as very small children, that a bigger number with a negative in front of it is colder. Many of us have thermometers just outside the window where we can check the temperature. It occurs to me that a thermometer is just a number line. Our kids are using number lines and dealing with negative numbers long before negative numbers ever appear in their math classes.

Now substantial swathes of the US have a similar climate to ours. The weather in Minneapolis is not significantly different from the weather in Winnipeg (at least to folks who don’t live out there). It’s cold. For several months. Even in the New England states, where it doesn’t get anywhere near as cold as Minneapolis, it is below freezing for several months. The thing is they use Fahrenheit. So despite the cold, it isn’t below zero (except in Minneapolis); or it isn’t below zero for as much of the winter. Negative numbers aren’t normal. They are probably associated with swearing about how &*(#& cold it is.

So, my top tip for all you Americans that have cold winters is to start using metric. Get a bilingual thermometer. Don’t bother to translate between F and C. You’ll quickly learn what various temperatures feel like. More importantly, your kids will get comfortable with negative numbers and the number line. Then when you teach pre-algebra and algebra, you can say “If it is -10 and it is going to get 15 degrees colder, will it be 5 or -25?” And they’ll get it. Believe me.

BTW, if anyone knows of any research on comprehension of negative numbers that might be used to test my hypothesis, do let me know.

While shovelling the 41 cm of snow that fell yesterday (after spending yesterday morning shoveling the 15 cm that fell on Friday night) I thought maybe there were educational advantages to this sort of thing. Here’s what I came up with:

1) Physics: an analysis of the forces required to lift snow and then throw it onto a pile that is over head height; demonstrations of levers (one hand as a fulcrum low on the shovel so you can push on the handle end and pitch the snow over your head) and inertia/momentum (throwing the snow forwards with an arc movement so it slides off the end of the shovel and travels)

2) Anatomy: which muscles are being used in the various processes of shoveling and pitching snow. (These are easier to identify the following morning when they are stiff.)**

3) History: digging out replica WWI trenches; the eager could include fire steps and dugouts for sleeping in. (My front walk is doing a passable imitation.)

4) survival skills: building snow caves and sleeping out overnight. (It doesn’t seem to be the right kind of snow for carving out snow blocks and building igloos. Pity.)

5) Geology: take core samples in the snow to determine the pattern of snowfall, melt, refreeze that has happened over the winter. I did this two years ago and it worked pretty well.

6) Aeolian processes (that’s the impact of wind on stuff; I know a geographer who studies this sort of thing in deserts): snow drift patterns and wind processes; comparing different shapes of snow drifts and explaining what might have been happening with the wind (e.g. why does it pile up in that corner by our back door)

7) Economics: Calculate the change in profit margins of snow removal contractors relative to overall snowfall. Graphing that would be interesting. (For those unaware of the business model, they charge a flat rate for the winter. Some have a clause allowing them to surcharge if total snowfall is over 3 metres.) A second project could be to investigate the economic benefits to those in the ski/snowshoe rental business, and ski resort business. Or the impact on the sale of condominiums. (I’ve seen a leaflet with the tag line “Sick of Shoveling” and an inside pitch for condos.) Advanced topics could include researching the emerging financial markets in weather futures and derivatives. (Yeah, that’s crazy. And they exist.)

Mostly, we are taking the old fashioned approach and staying indoors watching movies and reading books. Mat planted some seeds. I scrubbed the top of the stove.

It is now sunny. It looks quite beautiful. In fact, if it were January everyone might be in a much better mood about it. And at least we didn’t have that nasty “winter mix” that Andrea got.

*Winter mix seems to be the new term for ice pellets and freezing rain possibly mixed with snow. The new name makes it sound like salad greens or something but really it is nasty stuff falling out of the sky that makes any kind of travel extremely treacherous.

** The new ones seem to be triceps. Those haven’t hurt before so they must be required for getting it up over head height. I wish I didn’t know that. 

Apologies to Stephanie (who isn’t the only one, just the most recent), but it snowed another 30cm today. We are running out of places to put it, as you can see. Apparently we get 2 days respite before another snowstorm comes in on Saturday. In between we will have temperatures above freezing. That means water. All the storm drains are under banks of snow. So when it drops below freezing again we will have ice.

March is never nice. But this year is ridiculous. We have already had over 3 metres of snow this year (over 10 ft for the metrically challenged).

Isn’t that crazy? It got down to -24C in the city. The night before was almost as cold and yesterday morning I took this photo of one of my kitchen windows.

Can you see the ice along the bottom? That is on the inside? Those are double-glazed windows, too.

My kitchen is on the north side of the house though that particular window faces east. All of the windows (north, east and west) in my kitchen had ice on them yesterday and today.

Of course apart from the cold, it is beautiful out there. Sunny. Clear blue sky. Snow on the ground. Dry roads. (Yes, Mat has cycled to work both days though he wouldn’t win a fashion contest for what he wears.) The cat is most upset. He wants to be out there but the cold is not his idea of a good thing, particularly when it is windy. (He goes out anyway.)

Apparently it is going to start to cloud over this afternoon and then snow tomorrow. And then next week it will be really yucky. That’s what the weather guy said. I figure March is not going to be pretty. It never is.

This post is a bit of a rant disguised as an educational opportunity. Forgive me.

We got about 40 cm of snow on Friday. As you can imagine, it takes a while for all the side roads to be plowed. This is maybe the 5th or 6th snowfall of that magnitude this winter so folks really have no excuse for not knowing how to drive in it. And it isn’t like we never get snow in winter around here. But it seems that some folks have such a poor grasp of basic physics that they really shouldn’t be allowed out in this weather in charge of a heavy object that can move at speed.

This week’s example: Coming out of the gymnastics centre on Saturday the road goes uphill a little bit. Nothing crazy, mind you, but an incline. With snow on it. There are several cars going out of this dead end street. I’m behind someone in a mini-van. She must have taken 5 to 10 minutes to get up that incline. She’d get part way up and come to a stop, try to get started in the snow going uphill, fail, back down (I had the good sense to stay well back to give her room to manouevre though I did that because I could see someone wanted to get down the hill, and it wasn’t wide enough.), try again, rinse, repeat. As I watch her, she is slowing down as she goes up the hill. WTF? She completely loses any momentum that she has. She has only minimal grip on the road because of the snow. So she gets part way up this very small hill, comes to a stop, and can’t get started.

Newton’s first law of motion tells us that an object in motion wants to stay in motion unless some equivalent force acts against it (inertia). A heavy object on a hill with little friction (snow reduces friction) has the force of gravity pulling it down the hill. To go up you need a force greater than the force of gravity. Force is mass times velocity. So if you go a bit faster, you get some momentum that will overcome the force of gravity and get you up the hill. (This was not sheet ice, folks, just less traction than usual). By going more slowly than usual, this woman was actually making it harder for herself. She didn’t have enough momentum to get up the hill. And with the snow, she couldn’t get from stopped to enough speed to overcome gravity without spinning her wheels in the snow. Eventually she made it. I got up in one shot. As did the folks behind me as far as I know.

I suspect this woman was driving slower because there are circumstances when driving on snow when you want to slow down. Going around a corner, with reduced friction due to snow, inertia can do bad things if your speed is too high. I observed this during the last big snowfall (about 10 days previously). I turned right onto a 3 lane road to find a car in front of me perpendicular to the direction of traffic in the right hand lane (ish). Once he got himself sorted out, it appeared he wanted to be in the left hand lane. Clearly he had come around the corner a bit too quickly. The back end of his car wanted to keep going the same way it was going (inertia, again), so he fishtailed. His back end ends up on the left side of the road and the force starts him going in a circle. He stops himself when his front end is up against the right curb. Luckily it was a wide road. The car immediately behind him could get around him to the left and I could stop in time. Otherwise, it could have been a nasty pile up. By going slower around a corner, you can more easily control the effect of the desire of the back end of your car to keep going straight and keep the fishtailing to a minimum.

Momentum and inertia. No need to understand the formulae for calculating exactly how much force or how big a distance or anything else. Just a basic understanding of these basic principles of physics would make it so much easier for folks to drive safely in the white stuff. Sheesh.

The weather is absolutely gorgeous. It is just below freezing (so nothing is turning to slush) and sunny. A perfect day for skating on the canal. Tigger and I skated from 5th Ave down to Somerset and back for a total of just over 4 km. It took us 40 minutes. (Yes, I made her calculate our average speed.) She started off pretty well though she was going pretty slowly on the way back. She is getting to be a good skater. We rewarded ourselves with Beaver Tails.

you come out of the gym after your basketball game and think “It must be warming up. It’s snowing.”

For those who live in more southerly regions, we have just had a weather system involving strong winds from the north west. If you look on a map, that would be ARCTIC winds. The arctic is a desert.

* I realize that people from other northern places probably do the same thing.

It took a while to get started but winter is here. People think it’s weird but I actually missed Ottawa winters while I was in England. And I thought last winter was really awful. Too warm. Lots of ice.

My favourite kind of winter day is one with snow on the ground, blue sky, sunshine and about -10C. It has been a bit colder than that recently but absolutely gorgeous. I have a lovely warm red parka, Sorel boots (I read the little thermometer on the tag when I buy and it said -40 on this pair), those lined mittens, wool hats… Wrap up warm and get out and enjoy the weather!

This weekend my partner went skating for the first time since he’s lived here. He’s English. He’d only been skating maybe 10 times in his life and that in rented skates in indoor rinks with poor instruction (from what I can tell). He was refusing to learn but this year decided that it might be a nice way to spend time outdoors in the winter. So we took him around to the rink at our local rec centre. He did really well. He understood the principles from having watched me teach Tigger and a brief explanation. He has good balance. And he was away. He did fall quite spectacularly sometimes but that is partly because he knows how to fall properly (he did play rugby in his youth) and so tried to have some control over what was happening.

Yesterday I noticed that a section of the canal is open so we might have to go down there. It is much nicer to be able to skate for some distance without passing the same place more than twice.