4 May 2024
Physics for Poets
The Venturi Effect
Yesterday, Dear Husband was explaining to me The Venturi Effect. Not the Ventura Effect, which is the consequence of cramming too many aging surfers and hippie-dippie-trippies into the crumbling infrastructure of Southern California!
The Venturi Effect occurs when water vortexes down a glory hole, which is one type of spillway for a dam. It’s basically the water circling the drain and taking everything down that drain with it.
I likened the physics to the idiots who didn’t get away from the corrupt elites/politicians/bribers because they thought they were getting something out of the criminal destruction of America. Or England. Or France. Or any nation that had been built through the magnificent attributes of Western Civilization.
That’s how I think.
My analytic mind understands the physics, the chemistry, the electronics/electricity, and the engineering aspects of an activity, or non-activity. But my creative mind, or Muse, automatically connects the scientific fact with poetic insight, and makes an apt analogy.
When I first met Dear Husband, at CSUS, in an evening class on the Ancient Near East, during our final semester before graduation (and the path to my final semester had been very lengthy), he explained to me that he had to do some work on moments of inertia.
“I’ve been going through a lot of those moments lately,” I confided.
The Venturi Effect is quite different from the roto-rootering of plumbing, drains, and water clean-up. Almost a decade ago, I explained to some avid digital politicos that DT specializes in roto-rootering his way to the actualization of his noble goals. I then had to check online to see if that company is still in business, and it sure is! That capitalist enterprise has really cleaned up on cleaning sewers!
Draining and the cleaning the Swamp has taken a bit more time than I’d anticipated, but I’d venture to say that the only job well done is a job thoroughly done.
When I worked as a technical writer (tech-writer) at the Sacramento District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I penned an article for the REMR Bulletin. REMR is the acronym for Repair Evaluation Maintenance and Rehabilitation Research Program; but only the first 4 words are used in the acronym. You see how successful rehab and research are, at least where the U.S. Government is concerned.
The article was a smashing success. I even got my pic alongside the text. I won’t forget that photo op. Dear Structural Engineer-Supervisor showed up at my desk that morning, and announced that the photographer from Graphic Arts was coming to take my picture for the REMR article.
That morning, I’d not put on any makeup so that I could sleep another 15 minutes. I had the time-allocation down to a science. If I didn’t wash my hair, an entire 20 minutes got added to the sleep-number!
In those days, Macy’s was in business and located on the nearby Mall. I took an early coffee-break, and, instead of drinking tea, I stopped by the Lancôme and Estée Lauder counters, and applied some sample eyeliner, eye shadow, mascara, and a quick sweep of a neutral-toned lipstick. As I recall, it was very windy that day in April.
Dear Husband loves those B&W glossies so much that he keeps them in his office, hidden away somewhere in a folder so that I don’t throw them out! My patented pattern is to ask for the tossed-out treasure a few days later, just before the garbage container (no longer a can) gets hauled down the trail for pick-up by the garbage-men.
Garbage has become a huge industry in America, just like sewer clean-out. Garbage is not just for disposal anymore. The recycling craze has fostered the treatment of rubbish to the nth degree. The geniuses of eco-marketing came up with the peddling of recycled-polyester clothes that, surprise surprise, aren’t selling. I went online last night to peruse the pathetic garments. The smell of desperation hit my scent-hound nose. and I had to close the laptop due to poly-pollution.
Today, it is raining. Mucho rain in Placer County, and even in Sacramento. There’s a Winter Storm Warning. I’ll not complain about the weather because, essentially, a human being cannot change the weather, unless one tries cloud-seeding. The chilly, wet and windy spring we’ve experienced here is, in my poetic-physics opinion, linked to the earthquake activities in that Ring of Fire (a region that has nothing to do with the Johnny Cash song).
Whatever happens in the sky is affected by whatever happens in the ground, perhaps not as deep down as the Moho layer, the Mohorovičić discontinuity, which is the boundary between the Earth’s crust and the mantle.
But, maybe so.
It’s all theoretical, anyway, which means it’s not scientific fact, or the toxically manufactured trash-for-profit like The Science (TM).
Meteorology and geology are oftentimes paired. The two fields are not married, but they do go hand-in-hand. The Coriolis effect is the angular momentum on the water, caused by the spinning of the earth, thereby creating currents of wind, and the water circling the drain. In the northern hemisphere, the rotation is counter-clockwise; in the southern hemisphere, it’s clockwise.
In either direction, the dirty, creepy, lewd loonies are going down, down, down the tubes.