Michaela Sue

Autumn is here, the leaves are falling off of the trees. It's still early enough in the year that I have daylight for my trip back home from work, but there is very little extra time now to make any side-trips without ending up in the dark. We're not yet at the point in fall where huge unmarked dark piles of leaves get deliberately placed on the road for (eventual....) pickup by the city. That doesn't come until the season of darkness. Always great to have the roads narrowed by loose mounds of debris when it's dark out in the late fall.

The thing I was really thinking about is the off-road section of Oak Leaf Trail between Villard Avenue and West Congress Street in Milwaukee. This was in terrible condition and was completely torn up and repaved over the summer. The pavement is smooth and it's been slightly raised in places so it will hopefully flood less. This is actually a useful route in a part of town where few streets actually run all the way through and connect to anything else, and being beside the river it avoids actually intersecting streets except at the ends, so it's reasonably safe. In the US bicycle/pedestrian routes generally just run randomly into streets and intersections in whatever the cheapest manner is, without regard to traffic safety.

So, when they finished the paving, for a few weeks, it was brand new and clean. No loose debris, no broken glass, no sticks and branches, no wet slippery leaves. Since it's out of the way enough to not be clogged with dog-walkers, you could really ride fast on the smooth clean surface. (In the US there is no such thing as a cycle facility, only dog-walking facilities that are shared with bicyclists. It makes for very slow, somewhat hazardous cycling in nice weather when the walkers are out.)

Unfortunately, the leaves are falling. It will never be clean again. Right now there are wet slippery leaves all over, and the loose gravel and mud is starting to build up. The pavement itself will be in good condition for years to come. Later in the year the fall of leaves will stop and the accumulation will dry out and partly blow away. The mud and dirt will reach an equilibrium. The debris will get better and worse, but it will never actually be completely clean again like it was for a month or two. I sweep up some broken glass from time to time, but clearing a few kilometers by hand is not really a one-person unofficial volunteer project. Sure, in theory a sweeping machine could be run through, but where the money for that would come from, I can't imagine in this country. Completely impossible.

It is too bad that 107th street in that area, probably the best on-road route, is in such horrible condition. Real roads, the ones used for cars, are always cleaner, and no dog-walkers. It's an unnecessarily wide street, with little motorized traffic, but the pavement is really wrecked. It makes it hard to move to the right to let people pass, then get back out to get around the occasional parked car, because the road holes and cracks are so bad you have to hunt for a spot to move left or right. Someday that will get repaved, and the northbound downhill will be fun someday when the road is good enough to enjoy the speed.

Sunday's activity was taking the kayaks out to Lake Shore State Park to launch off the gravel beach and paddle around. We went out into the harbor and up the Milwaukee river to around Michigan Street. There is a lot of river and canal to explore someday.

I went back to Pike Lake today. I remembered to bring my dive mask (with prescription lenses!), so I did some underwater swimming. Another lovely day.

( a few random photos )

I went to Pike Lake by bicycle on Saturday. It had been quite a long while since I last did so. It's about 50 km one-way, and it's a pretty but also hilly trip. The Bug Line trail is quite pretty, but the loose, narrow, crushed stone trail surface is not so nice. There were lots of people out on the very nice day, and that trail is barely wide enough for two-way traffic. The tunnel of trees effect is nice, though.

Monches Road and St. Augustine Road are narrow and twisting and very hilly, and there are more steep hills on Waterford Road and Kettle Morraine Road. Slow hard going on the way up, and, whee! descend twenty or thirty meters in a few tens of seconds at scary speed. 62km/hr for a moment down one of them, and high fifties on others with brakes on and curves ahead. I saw many motorcyclists, who enjoy the winding roads but don't have to suffer on the way up for their thrills.

It was a nice day at the little lake. Pike Lake was actually reasonably warm, with a layer of water at the very surface that was quite warm. Lots of people swimming and playing. I did some swimming, spent a few hours hanging around, and then, as you can see on the GPS track, took the easy way home, following Highway K (on the west), which is straight and wide with gentle grades. It does offer views off into the distance at places, so it's not just a dull slog down the highway.

Cycle through rural Wisconsin for a few hours and you're bound to think up questions. Like, is a Polled Hereford a cow who has been asked her opinion about various topics?

I've very much enjoyed reading Atomic Awakenings by James Mahaffey. A lot of it is retellings of more-or-less familiar stories from the early days of nuclear physics, the World War II weapons program, and the early days of nuclear power. What he describes as the "Age of Wild Experimentation." Some of the stories are more obscure, and he makes what looks like an effort to track down the truth about some of the stories. The writing style is entertaining, a bit humorous.

Something I didn't know about is the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory, which is now the Dawson Forest Wildlife Area, north of Atlanta. Back in the 50s and 60s, it seemed like a more remote area. There, a totally unshielded 10 megawatt nuclear reactor was used to irradiate objects under test. A nuclear aircraft would have to have minimal radiation shielding, so the effects of the intense irradiation an aircraft components was of interest. This was done out in the open air. They had to keep track of wind direction to keep the dose to the public from argon-41 activated from the argon-40 in the air down to what at the time was considered acceptable. Plus they had a tower with a microphone on it to listen for approaching aircraft, so they could scram the reactor before irradiating the pilot. At a radius of 3600 feet the "Lethal Fence" was built to control access.

On command from a control center far underground, the reactor would come up from out of the pit to a point 10 feet in the air and assert itself on anything that dared be inside the Lethal Fence, and sometimes even beyond that. In full form it could kill anything. It even killed things that were not alive, such as landing-gear assemblies and aircraft radio transmitters.

Not only did it kill small animals, it killed the bacteria in and on them, leaving the bodies preserved.

Apparently, the operator, Lockheed, later decided to try to get into the cobalt-60 business, unsuccessfully, but they managed to contaminate the whole facility with cobalt-60. There have been several cleanups, and it's been a bunch of half-lives now (half-life is jut 5.27 years), but it's supposedly easily detected around, along with the europium-152 made from the tiny traces of europium naturally in the soil.

Anyway, if you live near Atlanta and want to see something unusual, bring your Geiger counter and scare the normal people who are just riding their horses around the pretty natural area. The hot cell facility is still there, too thick-walled to easily dismantle. Here's a photoset on flickr of the park. The coordinates given in the book were accidentally transposed, it should be 34° 21' 04.03" N 84° 08' 38.75" W [fixed! Sigh, hard to get the jumble of numbers and symbols right!], the location of the big hot cell building. The remnant of the Lethal Fence is just faintly visible on the Google Earth image if you can find the right spot. I think the clearing with the shadow-shield described in the book is at 34° 21' 56.66" N 84° 10' 5.02" W, and you can see a circle around it, most easily to the west, at about 1km radius.

More local to me, one of these days I need to visit the Palos Hills Forest Preserve in Cook County, Illinois (near Chicago, and near but outside the present-day Argonne Lab site). There you can visit one of rather few combination picnic areas / nuclear waste dumps. Material from the very first (man-made) reactor, Fermi's famous pile originally built at the University of Chicago, and a second, slightly later reactor, is buried there. Back in those days, it seemed like a more remote area....

From Tom Vanderbilt, the Traffic Safety Film of the Week. This one is not a real safety spot, it's humor, and it's also in German athough you really don't need to speak German to understand it. (That last one is 'all at once,' the rest should be pretty obvious.)

Joyce and I rendezvoused with the Satellite Crêpes cart as their orbit around the city took them to Gardener's Market at Locust and Bremen in Milwaukee. We tried a Capricorn (mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, garlic oil) and a Supercluster (Prosciutto, shredded cheese, basil, tomatoes, truffle oil) and both were terrific, plus watching them cook them is a show, too.

I've been seeing the letter V within a circle spray-painted all over the place. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Now, back when I was younger, the thing kids marked all over was the letter A within a circle, which was supposed to mean Anarchy. Just the concept that appeals to 14 year old boys. The V, I don't know. V is for Vitamins? Evidently not Verbosity. Possibly Valence shell electron pair repulsion? That must be it. The circle around the V would be a subtle reference to a spherically symmetrical s orbital. Something like that.

The winter storm wasn't nearly as impressive as the forecasts, with only a few centimeters of snow on the ground instead of 20 or 30, though it's very wet snow. The same amount of water in fluffier form would be a lot deeper. There were some intervals of very heavy snowfall rates last night, though, which was pretty impressive to see. I took a few photos this morning. Spring snow is always interesting to walk in. The ground is all snow-covered, the tree branches covered with snow, but the birds are loudly singing like spring. Mid winter isn't silent, but there is much less birdsong than there is now.