Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy Travelog #19
Santadi, Sardinia - Wednesday, 28 May 2025, 1pm

Our organized activity at Club today was a cave tour at the Is Zuddas Grotto in Sardinia. We could have opted for ruins and wine touring, mountain biking, or horseback riding instead but chose this because it was the most up our alley. As a serendipity we learned a lot about Sardinian history from our tour guide on the van ride over here, even though at the cave she handed us over to a cave specialist.



As we started into the cave I wondered if I'd chosen the wrong activity. I mean, limestone caves are basically all the same. And we've seen a lot of them. Maybe we should have done the ruins and wine tasting tour instead... though Hawk doesn't/can't drink, so that's why.



One interesting formation we saw is "Medusa". ...Okay, maybe that's more interesting linguistically than geologically because "medusa" is the name in Romance languages for jellyfish. It's like only we stupid anglophones have a different name for jellyfish that doesn't evoke the Greek myth of Medusa. And this formation does look more like a jellyfish than a demonic woman with snakes on her head.



Anyone who's visited a bunch of limestone caverns probably looks at the photo above and puzzles for a moment, "Wait, what's going on here?" That's because stalactites and stalagmites are virtually always oriented vertically, their shapes driven by gravity. Well, what happened here is that a block of stalactites fell from the ceiling. They're at an angle because that's how the block landed when it fell to the floor of the cave. And note it fell, like, millions of years ago, because of the size of stalagmites growing atop it.



Above I noted that stalactites and stalagmites virtually always form vertically. There's a category of stalactites that don't. They're called helictites, and they can grow in crazy shapes, thin tendrils extending sideways, curving around, forming curls and "S" bends, and even forking.

"What does Science know about why helictites form in such eccentric shapes?" I politely asked the guide, who'd been getting a bit frustrated about the parallel lesson in limestone formations I'd been whispering to a colleague who'd never been in a cave before.

Strangely I'd never though to ask this before. I mean, other cave guides have pointed out helictites, so I've known what they are, by definition, but not the science behind them. To his great credit, this guide had an education answer.

First, there are multiple theories, the guide explained. That's classic science right there. Science includes uncertainty, and true scientists acknowledge when/where it exists— an unfortunate fact that is frequently exploited by demagogues nowadays to dismiss science as wild theories that are merely personal opinion, all equally valid.

The leading theory, which our guide holds, is that helictites develop in eccentric formations because their rate of water flow is so slow that water evaporates quickly. Remember, all these cave formations are driven by the action of water responding to gravity. Rain water seeping through small cracks in the rocks above dissolves limestone. It flows downward along existing formations and forms droplets at the bottom. Rock re-crystalizes from these droplets. But with helictites it's thought that the water flow is so minimal that the water doesn't even form a droplet; it evaporates before it gets to that stage. Thus limestone deposits may form on the side of an existing limestone structure, or— via capillary action— at its upper tip.

All this week I've been thinking, "Wow, it's only been a few days since we found a dead guy in the condo next door." Well, we didn't find him; I was standing 10 feet back from the door assisting the police with their welfare check. They were pretty serious about it. They weren't just going to be, "Well, we knocked on the door and nobody answered, we've done all we can." They were prepared to break a door or window to gain forcible entry to the house and search for the guy. Something or someone told them this was serious. Plus, it wasn't just one officer asking, "Hey, have you seen this guy?" There were four officers at the scene.

I had helped them with ladders so they could climb up and look through windows before forcing their way into the house. They appreciated that. So it was as I stood back after helping them set up a second ladder to climb to the kitchen balcony that I heard an officer call down, "10-55". It turns out that's police code for "Coroner's case." As in, they'd spotted a dead body. And the circumstances evident from a brief visual told them the person was already dead, not lying injured or unconscious and in need of help. I'm sure if they thought there was any chance of the guy being alive but in need of help they would have busted the door down in 2 seconds flat.

Our neighbor was found lifeless on his stairs. The officer who made first visual contact said something about rigor mortis. It wasn't clear whether he said he saw rigor mortis or a body that was post rigor mortis.

...Post rigor mortis? you might ask. Is there such a thing?

Actually, yes. We searched that. And this:


Wow. Talk about things you don't expect to type into a search bar in all seriousness.

We were curious how long our neighbor had been dead in the house. Actually, it's more than just curiosity. We felt creeped out wondering, "How long has our neighbor been dead 15' away from us?"

It turns out rigor mortis takes several hours to set in across the body and then disappears about 24 hours after death. If he was in that condition when found, then he would have died anytime from Monday afternoon back to Sunday evening before. If the body was post rigor mortis then... well, that's where we were wondering, "How long could he have been dead before we'd smell it?"

The smell answer, BTW, depends on a number of environmental factors. Generally a dead body starts to smell noticeably within 24-48 hours, and really reeks within 4-10 days. Being in a climate controlled house pushes things toward the longer end of those ranges. As does the fact that the house was closed up. With door and windows closed, and no shared ventilation, it probably would've been a few weeks before we'd have noticed a smell from our place.

It's in the news this week that the drug phenylephrine, used as a key ingredient in a variety of cold medicines to reduce swelling of nasal passages, simply doesn't work. An FDA advisory panel made this unanimous finding on Tuesday after reviewing recent scientific studies showing that oral forms of the drug (i.e, pills and cough syrups) provide no more benefit to patients than a placebo. Example coverage: CNBC article, 12 Sep 2023.

My first thought when I saw the news was, "I could have told you that 10-plus years ago." That's how long ago I tried the medicine myself and quickly determined it doesn't work.

10-plus years ago is when pharmacies starting carding me to buy pseudoephedrine over the counter. Pseudoephedrine is the ingredient in classic formulations of brands like Sudafed. (Indeed the name Sudafed is derived directly from pseudoephedrine.) Apparently drug dealers of the illegal kind were cooking pseudoephedrine pills into meth. As governments required stores to clamp down on selling that legal drug, drug makers shifted their main brands to use a related but weaker active ingredient, phenylephrine.

I call phenylephrine weaker because that's how pharmacists described it to me when I challenged them about it.


Now we learn that "weaker" was just bullshit for doesn't work.

Grand Cayman Travelog #16
Hell - Thu, 18 May 2023, 12:30pm

This morning we picked up a rental car so we could do some self-guided touring today and tomorrow. But where would we go? One of the tour coordinators we'd chatted amiably with the past few days, who was still at the hotel because now he's working with another company that's running a president's club (there are signs), offered a suggestion when he saw us walking through the lobby to our car.

"Make sure you go to Hell," he suggested.

"Yeah, that's our plan," I answered. "We're going to Hell now. Then we're going to lunch."



Hell is a spot a few miles north of our hotel, on the northwest end of the island. It's an officially named place in the Cayman Islands. How official? There a Hell, CI post office here.

But what draws people here isn't just the post office, with its ability to send postcards officially date-stamped "HELL". That is only part of the allure. 😅 It's the jagged rocks in this area that gave it name that people come to see. Thus we pulled our car into the small parking lot aside a few families and minibuses to see it ourselves.



Don't remove Hell rocks! ...What are they going to do, though? Send you to hell? You're already there. 😂



So, what is Hell? Hell in the Cayman Islands is a small field of very jagged rocks. They look a bit like volcanic rock, which is one explanation for how the place got its name. A British official visiting the island long ago is said to have exclaimed, "My God, this is what Hell must look like!"

Actually the rock is limestone and dolomite. It was eroded into these jagged shapes not by wind or rain but by being eaten away by algae. The algae dissolves the calcium in limestone (limestone is calcium carbonated, CaCO3) leaving mostly dolomite. Scientifically this process is called phyto-karstification.

After touring the relatively small field of rocks we walked back out to the gift shops and post office. We bought a few postcards with pictures of Hell and mailed them to religious relatives so they'd be date-canceled as officially from Hell. 🔥😈🤣

It's not often that TV shows get science right. In fact it's downright rare. Even rarer still is a TV miniseries that teaches a class in nuclear physics in its finale. Episode 5 of Chernobyl (2019) did just that. With visual aids printed in Russian, no less.



In the miniseries finale, respected scientist Valery Legasov, played by actor Jared Harris, presents a step-by-step scientific explanation of what went wrong in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (as best as a scientific consensus is able to reconstruct it). It's clear, lucid, and compelling— quite possibly the best bit of science I've seen in a dramatic TV show or movie, ever. Alas it's also not real.

What's not real about it is that the scene portrayed never happened.

In the show, Legasov testifies at a Soviet trial for 3 of the plant managers, Anatoly Dyatlov, Viktor Bryukhanov, and Nokolai Fomin. His explanation highlights three things: 1) the unconscionable things the three defendants did wrong that led to the explosion, 2) the how-to that explains the question, "How does an RBMK reactor explode?" which many people didn't believe was possible, and 3) how reactor design defects known about years earlier and covered up by the Soviet Union also played a key role in the explosion.

So, what's the gap between truth and fiction?

— What's true is  that the trial actually happened. It was in 1987, as shown in the episode, and oddly was held at a converted gymnasium in Chernobyl, which was still radioactive— also shown in the episode. The three defendants in the episode were the actual three men tried there. And while historical footage from the trial is carefully gated by the former Soviet Union, the words and demeanors of the defendants are as accurate as publicly known.

— What's fiction is that Legasov wasn't there. The Soviets didn't need him. They didn't need to have a scientist explain the science to a jury (there was no jury) or even a judge to convict the defendants. It was a show trial, with guilty verdicts the foregone conclusion. The series shows that, too, BTW.

So why add drama-Legasov to the trial scene? I see two good reasons, both of which relate to the need to compress the timeline when telling a narrative story.

— First, it's an important narrative element to explain to viewers the science of what happened. What drama-Legasov elucidates in this scene is information that basically dribbled out of the secretive Soviet Union over the course of several years.

— Second, it compresses the timeline of the story arc of Valery Legasov's last 18 months of life. During that time in real life Legasov became increasingly vocal within the Soviet Union about the defects in the reactor design— a design which many reactors were built from. He suffered professional harm as powerful state leaders and colleagues who kowtowed to the state increasingly marginalized him. In the narrative this is all compressed into half an episode that takes place over the course of a few days.

The series ends where it began, ten months after the trial, on April 26, 1988, at 1:23:45am. It's two years to the minute after the Chernobyl explosion, the worst nuclear disaster in history. Legasov hangs himself. His suicide calls attention to the warnings he'd been struggling to get out. The scientific community takes renewed interest in what he had to say. That, sadly, is real— that it took his death to galvanize people into paying attention.

Rest in peace, Valery Legasov.

It was in the news last week that scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, on the edge of the SF Bay Area, achieved a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. In the multi-billion dollar National Ignition Facility (NIF) they created a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that generated more power than it consumed. Lasers pumped 2.05 megajoules of energy into a fuel pellet; the reaction generated 3.15 megajoules of output.

Okay, to call this a breakthrough is a bit optimistic. It's certainly an important milestone, though. It's the first time a controlled fusion reaction has generated more power output than input required.

Scientists talk about this as a ratio, Q, of output to input. In this experiment Q = 1.5 (approximately). While this being the first time reaching Q > 1 is huge, scientists figure we'll need to get to Q = 10 to make power generation cost effective. Though even the current Q = 1.5 is misleading. That's counting the amount of power the lasers fired into the fuel. Powering the lasers actually cost 100x as much energy— the amount measured by "the meter on the wall", if you will.

Fusion power generation also requires a sustained reaction with Q much greater than 1. NIF's December 5 reaction lasted only a fraction of a second because of limits managing the incredible heat generated. And even the brief experiments up to this point have stressed the machinery at the multi-billion dollar NIF enough that it will need a costly rebuild.

So, this month's experiment isn't really a breakthrough, though it is an important milestone. Just keep in mind that there are many miles left to go.

Update: Okay, so how long until we have Mr. Fusion powering our cars?

The second episode of the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl is entitled, "Please Remain Calm". It relates key parts of the story from 6 hours to 36 hours after the nuclear power plant explosion. During that time a team is assembles to lead efforts to understand what's happened with the explosion and contain its dangers. These are the main characters through the rest of the miniseries.



Two of these main characters are Dr. Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina (pictured above, left and right). Legasov, portrayed by Jared Harris, is a respected scientist and deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute. Shcherbina, portrayed by Stellan Skarsgård, is deputy chairman of the council of ministers, picked by Gorbachev and seniormost party leaders to coordinate this effort.

Legasov and Shcherbina's first scene together is a rocky one. Legasov has been invited to a briefing with Secretary General Gorbachev and a dozen senior officials. Shcherbina gives a briefing full of bullshit passed up to the chain to him by the craven plant managers who've basically lied their asses off (we saw this in the first episode, 1:23:45) about the extent of the accident. Shcherbina is an unwitting accessory to the lies because he's not educated on nuclear physics. But that's why Legasov is there.

Legasov smells the proverbial rat moments before the briefing by spotting key details in the written brief document. He basically explodes during the cabinet meeting when the accident is written off as "well under control", warning Gorbachev and all the ministers that the accident is likely far, far worse than reported. He argues there's likely been a core breach. Gorbachev and all the ministers are displeased with this news and the way in which it's delivered... but as Gorbachev says partly in criticizing him, "All I hear are suspicions and no facts." He instructs Shcherbina and Legasov to go to Chernobyl in person to find the facts.

Those two men aren't the only ones finding facts early on. Before we see Legasov and Shcherbina on-screen in this episode we meet the miniseries's third main character, Dr. Ulana Khomyuk. She's deputy director at the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Physics in Minsk



The episode actually opens with Khomyuk in one of her labs. It's Saturday morning, and only she and one of her research staffers are there. They open a window for fresh air... and a radiation alarm in the lab triggers immediately. She quickly collects a swab from the dust on the outside of the window and analyzes it with a spectrometer. The primary isotope is Iodine 131— a fission byproduct of Uranium 235, which could only come from a nuclear reactor's exposed core. With a bit of telephone sleuthing she determines the problem's at Chernobyl, over 400km away.

While Legasov and Shcherbina are real people who were key members of the team responding to the Chernobyl crisis, Khomyuk is fictional. Showrunner Craig Mazin emphasizes that she is a composite character, an amalgamation of the literally 100+ scientists who rushed or were sent to Chernobyl from across the Soviet Union. Introducing her makes it easier and more effective to tell the narrative.

It turns out Legasov, while very intelligent, is not actually the best person scientifically for the job. He's not a nuclear physicist! He's a physical chemist. He's distinguished and knows a lot about the behavior of radioactive materials, but he's not an expert on nuclear reactor design. Khomyuk knows reactors way better than he does, and points out a nearly fatal flaw in his plans later in this episode.

Keep reading: Three Go Forth

Pacific Northwest September Travelog #9
Mount St. Helens National Monument - Sun, 4 Sep 2022, 12pm

Sunday morning we drove from our hotel in Vancouver, WA to Mount St. Helens. We've been to the park a few times before, but in different areas. Four weeks ago we visited Windy Ridge, on the east side. Years ago we visited Lava Canyon and its waterfalls on the south side. But until today we'd never visited the main part of the park, the Johnston Ridge Observatory. Oh, we tried once, several years ago. The mountain was all socked in with clouds. Sunday this past weekend was the clearest looking day in the weather forecasts for our three day trip, so we chose it for a visit. Our planning paid off with beautiful, clear weather most of the day.



The photo above is a view of Mount St. Helens from the Johnston Ridge Observatory. From this spot you see the northwest face of the mountain, the area where it blew open in a violent eruption in 1980.

The observatory was built in 1997 near the camp of volcanologist David Johnston, one of several scientists who perished in the explosion. Some people might sneer at Johnston's death as, "If he's such a smart scientist, why was he standing on a volcano that was about to erupt?" Understand that a) this spot is 4 miles away from the center of the crater and up a mountain. Such was the force of the eruption that the top of this ridge was scoured bare. And b) the field work of brave scientists like Johnston at Mount St. Helens contributed greatly to our understanding of volcanic eruptions. Scientists today are able to predict with much greater accuracy when and how other volcanoes will erupt, helping improve the safety of people who live nearby.

One of many things that's interesting in this scene is the river flowing down from the volcano. At this time of year many streams run dry. This one is fed by melt from a glacier that formed in the crater after the eruption.



Here's a zoomed-in shot of the inside of the crater (above). There are not one but two lava domes inside it. They formed at different times since the 1980 eruption. It's hard to understand scale in this photo, but those domes are 800' high. The whole mountain used to be 1300' taller than the rim of the crater... that's how much rock came rushing down the mountain as part of the eruption.

Also, all the clouds you see inside the crater are steam. Yes, the area is still volcanically active.

Anyway, we weren't here just to visit the observatory. We were here to hike.



From the observatory there's a great hike out along Johnston Ridge to the east, leading to Devil's Point. It's around the nose of that bald ridge you see in the middle ground of the photo above. That's where we're going this afternoon.

Beyond that bald ridge you can see a snow-capped peak peeking up. That's Mt. Adams, elev. 12,281 ft (3,743 m). On the right beyond the ridge you can see part of Spirit Lake. Beyond Spirit Lake is Windy Ridge. That low saddle point in the ridge above the lake is where I began climbing 439 stairs to Windy Ridge last month.

More to come....

Saturday afternoon we began our 500+ mile drive back to the Bay Area after eating lunch and charging up the new car's battery. Our plan for the remainder of the day was to drive to Bakersfield, CA, 290 miles away. We'd stay overnight in Bakersfield. But as 290 miles was well beyond the car's maximum rated range of about 250 miles we planned a stop in Barstow, CA, 161 miles away.

Planning stops is a thing you've really got to do with an EV that's so much more critical than when driving a gas or diesel engine car. The reason is, with 100+ years of building out infrastructure, there are gas stations practically everywhere. EV charging stations are not everywhere. And while slow charging stations are somewhat common, the kind that can charge an EV rapidly are few and far between outside large cities.

We didn't expect that getting to Barstow would be a problem. But we almost didn't make it! Fifteen miles outside of town the car flashed up an alert on the dashboard: only 10% charge remaining. And the estimated range remaining was only 15 miles. We'd roll into town on fumes... electro-fumes! 😱

Where did all the range go? We had about 220 miles of range when we started this 161 mile leg of the trip. Well, the car was suffering poorer fuel economy than normally estimated. A few things:

1. It was hot. Temperatures ranged from 100° up to 110° (about 43° C) all through our drive. In hot weather the battery is less efficient and the cooling systems have to work harder.


2. We were driving fast. It was all highways at fairly constant speeds, but we were driving 80-85mph much of the way. (Note: we were driving with the flow of traffic. This is common on I-15 between Vegas and LA.) The motor has to work harder to overcome wind resistance at higher speeds, and resistance increases as a function of the square of the speed.


3. There were a few mountain climbs from elev. 1,000' to 4,000' on the route. While the EV regenerates power coasting downhill, it doesn't recover as much as the extra energy expended climbing uphill.

After the warning flashed up and we had our initial "Oh, shit!" reaction, I decided the best way to stretch the remaining charge was to drive slower. Dropping from 80-85 down to about 65 mph added back a few miles of range. Still, it was close. When we rolled in to the charging station in Barstow we had an estimated 5 miles left.

One thing that's missing from my post earlier today about the 103° weather is moaning about how hot it is. But that's because I'm not moaning. I had it easy today with an indoors job, working from home, with good AC in my house. I left the AC running all night and through the morning, which was good because by 10am it was already in the 80s outside.

I haven't always had it easy with summertime heat, though. When I grew up in Virginia, near Washington DC, we didn't have AC. ...Well actually we physically had AC, but my parents stubbornly refused to use it in all but the worst heat.

Heat + Humidity = Awful

Worst heat, BTW, wasn't 103° like we had here today. The temps there rarely broke the three digit barrier. But it felt way worse because of the humidity. There's a concept known as the heat index. This chart from the National Weather Service shows what it feels like (i.e., the effect on the human body) when high temperatures combine with high relative humidity:



As you can see in the chart, an air temperature of just 90° combined with 85% relative humidity (common in the area where I grew up) produces a heat effect on the body equivalent to 117° in low humidity. That's what everyone means, whether they know it or not, when they quip about Phoenix or Las Vegas, "Oh, but it's a dry heat!"

"But it's a dry heat!"

I experienced a funny little A-B test on this when I moved out to California years ago. We were driving cross country for 8 days. On the last day we started in Elko, Nevada, in the high desert where the air was cool. In the afternoon we drove through Northern California during what we later discovered was a record setting heat wave.

I stopped for gas around 3pm in Sacramento. I was dressed in trousers because they were appropriate for the weather where I started the day 400 miles away. It was hot out there, but not worse than what I was accustomed to as summer weather. "It feels like 90 out here," I remarked to Hawk.

Moments later we saw a thermometer sign at a bank down the street proclaiming 114°.

114°... But it's a dry heat!


Update: Keep reading in No AC on Memory Lane