2015 Pictures Dump

            So I spent another summer working construction observation. As always, I was sure to keep my camera handy. Same as last year, I think got enough interesting shots to deserve a picture dump.

            I was on a project in the Bakken Oil Patch. They say work has slowed down, but it still looked plenty busy to me.

There were always a couple drilling rigs nearby

Work didn't stop after the drilling was done either

            The work I was observing was the rebuilding of about nine miles of county road. There was plenty of earth moving and paving to provide photo opportunities.

Lots of Caterpillar equipment

Scrapper high jinks

Hours were generally long

            The project ran from May to November. I was up there long enough for this:

Brand new box culvert

            to go to this:

Frozen box culvert

            Such is life on the road. Everything take on a special perspective.

Special mileage milestones

Cooking pizza in the testing shack

Pink paint got on everything

One day the wind blew at least a thousand tumble weeds through site in about an hour

This was my hotel receipt at the end of the year

             I also took plenty of pictures of little things that happened to catch my eye.

I didn't paint this

The fact that this single pylon had a complete covering of mud intrigued me

Something about the symmetry

North Dakota still has it's old timey charm

It's like Chinese New Year

Textbook mud spatter

Work rarely stopped

  

I had to take some more flare pictures

            And of course I had to photograph all the wildlife I saw.

Cow of both the Red and Black Angus varieties

Plenty of seagull, just not a lot of sea

The Birds

Pheasant and Fiber Rolls

I learned this year that they're ground squirrels, not gophers

They don't have the teeth to be gophers

My pet, snakey

Muddy turtle

A little green frog

Crawfish crawling back to the water

 

The clam couldn't crawl

Fuzzy Caterpillar

Bug on my clipboard

            Sometimes I didn’t actually see the animals.

This isn't even a barn

Sinister raccoon tracks

  

            And the animals weren’t always alive when I found them.

This is not snakey

Didn't smell as bad as it looks.

Not all baby birds learn to fly

Not wiley enough

This one was still pretty fresh

            And that does it for this year’s work pictures. I only made it snorkeling once over the summer. Pictures were sub-par compared to last year, but I guess I can throw the best one in just for continuity.

High fish count, low visibility

            No ducks this year. I was upset too.

More Duck Facts

Needs more duck facts.

1. Ducks have five stomachs and they can convert matter directly into energy.
2. When dropped in a vacuum, a duck feather will fall faster than a bowling ball.
3. Ducks have this thing called a cloaca that serves as an all-purpose orifice for their urinary tract, intestines, and reproductive organs. This isn’t all that special, but I think it’s neat. Also, they defecate and micturate at the same time in one semi-solid blob.
4. Duck sneezes are a powerful stimulant that can be dangerously habit forming. Be sure to call your doctor if symptoms persist more than four hours.
5. Ducks are terrible drivers.
6. The brain waves of a duck are mathematically perfect.
7. A lone duck singlehandedly held off over 500 men at the battle of the Daisy Park Bridge.
8. They can smell if you’re not having fun.
9. Jeff Goldblum is friends with several ducks.
10. Ducks exist across six spatial dimensions. 
11. According to classical mechanics, duck flight shouldn’t be possible. It only occurs due to the cumulative effects of quantum tunneling. 
12. I’ve seen a duck punch through a concrete wall.
13. Duck bills are a 14 on the Mohs Hardness Scale.
14. That creaking sound that you hear at night; that’s a duck in your walls. It’s checking for bad wiring, because only ducks can prevent house fires.
15. Duck feathers are a fractal pattern down to the atomic level, and have near infinite surface area.
16. Nervous tissue from ducks is a room temperature superconductor.
17. Ducks are allergic to ska music.
18. The morality of ducks is based around if actions will make someone smile.
19. The nose that fell off the sphinx was actually a duck bill.
20. The universe only exists within the mind of a duck.
21. Life started on Earth when a duck traveled back in time and pooped in the primordial ooze. We evolved from duck poop is what I’m saying. Also, the duck came first, not the egg.
22. The English unit, foot, is actually based on the Welsh word for duck, “fwtl” (also the origin of the word “fowl”), and not the anatomical feature. The distance was originally based on the length of a prototype duck, which is mummified and kept in the basement of the Tower of London. Now it’s based on how far light travels within a specific fraction of a second, which is lame.
23. Your dragon style is no match for my duck style kung fu.

Maths

            I’ve done some math during my life. It was always my favorite subject in school and I eventually ended up studying engineering in college, which was practically all math. My job doesn’t go to quite the same level, but I’m still using a calculator regularly. What I’m setting up is the possibly unexpected idea that I don’t believe math applies directly to the real world. Let me explain.

            Math to me is a conceptual tool that is useful for modeling, predicting, and simplifying real life phenomena, but only after the phenomena has been reduced to an idealized form. Generally the more math you use the less idealization, but even the most basic parts of math are based on idealizations of the real world. Take pi as an example. Pi is the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference, and already we’re dealing with idealization because perfect circles don’t exist in nature. Already one step removed from the real world, pi still doesn’t fit into our math. Pi gets a lot of attention for being an irrational number, meaning that it consists of a never ending and never repeating string of digits. This might seem mysterious and unpredictable, sort of a loose cannon of the number world, but to me this is a glaring example of how our math is flawed (I keep saying “our math” because I don’t believing the math that humans use is the only possible math, but that is a whole other discussion that I don’t want to get into at the moment). Since it’s impossible to write down all the digits of pi, it can only ever be used as an approximation. The true value of pi completely escapes our grasp. Just a heads up, this fact is also true of every single measurement ever taken. That’s a pretty devastating blow to math’s ability to represent the truth of the real world, and it’s also a reason why pi isn’t all that special. Technically, there are a few measurements that define units. When you weigh the International Prototype Kilogram it’s exactly one kilogram, but that’s more a(nother) reason why the IPK is stupendous and less a triumph for mathematics.

The IPK is so great

            Leaving out all that irrational number bullshit, we’re still left with adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, aka doing arithmetic to, discreet objects. For example, take four apples. Add two apples to get six. Double the number of apples to have twelve. Divide out a fourth of the apples to have three. Then subtract two apples and one apple is left. Repeated an infinite number of times, this process should always result in one apple. It’s too bad that the apples have to be completely idealized first. The reason this apple arithmetic works is that it assumes that one apple equals one apple equals one apple, just like how the number one equals the number one equals the number one. In the real world, every single apple is unique, so they can’t be used like numbers. One apple plus another apple is not equal to a different apple plus another different apple, but one plus one always equals one plus one. Numbers are also homogenous in a way the worldly objects aren’t. It is impossible to cut an apple in half and have two identical pieces the same way that the halves left after dividing one in half are identical. The only example of arithmetic that might work in the real world is if you subtract out everything to get zero, because if you have three apples and then take all three away it doesn’t really matter what kind of apples you had to begin with. Only math has to go and ruin this situation too, since if you ask any math major they’ll tell you that subtraction doesn’t exist, it’s only addition of an inverse. Inverse apples definitely aren’t a real thing, so there goes that.

An inverse apple?

            Now it might be possible to do this kind of arithmetic with quantum particles, because as far as physicists can tell all electrons are identical (as far as values for mass, charge, and spin go anyway). Assuming this isn’t just due to a lack of measurement precision; electrons start to look a lot like numbers. An electron can’t be divided into fractions and subtraction is still right out (an anti-electron is kind of like an inverse electron, but an electron plus an anti-electron results in energy, not zero) so it’s not perfect. This leaves addition and multiplication as a sort of fancy way to count. There’s also the fact that the quantum mechanics that describe the behavior of electrons are far removed from experiences of the macroscopic universe and can only be expressed using math, so I’m not ready to except quantum particles as an example of how math existing in the physical world.

            I’m not trying to say that math is bad or doesn’t have value. The measurements, predictions, and models that math can create are absolutely amazing and incredibly useful. Almost none of the aspects of modern civilization would be possible without math. Sure, the Romans build some pretty great stuff without using math as we understand it, but I think we’re doing things better now (the road I help build beat Roman roads any day). I just think it should be acknowledged that math is using abstractions and idealizations, and isn’t some great truth at the heart of the universe. Also pi really isn’t that cool.

Wildlife Pictures

            I also took some pictures while I wasn’t working or underwater. They’re all wildlife photos. I think my fallback career should be a National Geographic photographer. That, or a foot model.

            Anyway, first off are some of St. John’s terrestrial and airborne wildlife:

A Ghost Crab on the beach

Some lazy Asses

Some angry anoles

A seagull that wanted my breakfast

  

Iguana

  

Here is the pelican that was diving into the school of minnows

            There were also Mongooses on the island, but they were too skittish to get a picture of. My only picture of the local deer was in low light so it didn’t turn out very well. I think the deer had island dwarfism because they were really small compared to the deer I’m used to. Speaking of deer, I also took some wildlife shots in South Dakota too.

This is what I think of when I hear the name Mule Deer

A nice sized mantis

  

And a fuzzy caterpillar

            The South Dakota animals may lack the novelty of those in the Caribbean, but I still like them. That does it for the picture dump. If you work for National Geographic feel free to give me a call.