Water

Consider the molecules in a glass of water.

Randomly, some will diffuse upward, some downward. But this mobility is not equal; a molecule that reaches the top may escape into a more rarified state, escape the surly bonds of hydrogen bonding and be one with the upper air. Indeed, what holds most molecules of water back is other molecules of water.

Now consider this statement.

"The progress of the lowest 90% of the population is far lower than that of the highest 1% of the population."

There is nothing new under the sun. How can it be otherwise?

Well, yes, there are alternatives. If your glass of water is a glass of steam, then most of the molecules are in random motion and will soon escape the glass. Some will hit a glass wall and condense, having lost sufficient energy or been sufficiently attracted to the glass or other molecules of water. If your glass of water is a glass of ice, nobody goes anywhere.

But a glass of water is normally taken to be just that — a glass, with liquid water in it.

Water Requirements

Most studies will tell you that the human body needs about 2-3 litres (2000-3000 ml) of water a day. Most people read that figure and forget the rest of the material. Your body is amazingly adaptable. It doesn't have to be obviously fluid water — it can be in coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, meat; overcooked or oil-fried stuff tends to have less water.

In fact, it's actually possible to not drink any 'water' water for days as long as you have a reasonable wet diet. This isn't necessarily a good thing, but just as most herbivores in arid regions can survive on plants and occasional liquid water, so can you.

Some charlatans out there are touting electrolysed water and stuff like that. It makes no difference except that the processes involved tend to filter out some less-useful components in potable water. The fact is, your body specialises in homoeostasis, and it will compensate within reason.

This all adds up to one more reason why we need to be a little bit more forgiving of our diet and lead a balanced (and more fun) lifestyle. Have a nice wet day!

Impurities (Part 3)

So is pure water water pure? Or does water carry the memory of its past lives? I have spent time thinking of how this can be, and my conclusion is that the memory of water, if such exists, must be heavily diluted by time and chance, for time and chance happen to every molecule.

Yet there are those, especially homoeopaths and dowsers, who contend that water remembers. And I should say, I believe that clay and other aluminosilicates can indeed remember, for all that memory needs is present in their most crystalline formations.

Today I had a conversation about that. Crystals and false-crystals, how they replicate memory at a distance. In the lunulae all of decayed bronze and gold, we see the moon; in the carbonaceous glitter of diamond, we see the stars. O, all the golden and silver apples!

Metal is the bane. Metals conduct, and in the sudden earthing of electrons, they wipe memories clean. Who knows what the clay knew, before heat-haze and electron-storm glazed it into the fired husk of itself? Yet the impurities that remain make it beautiful again, just as we humans are.

The Attributes of God

We learnt, in the old days, of Mass and Distance, Duration and Energy; we learnt of the Fluid Electric and the Power Dynamic. These we learnt were the fibres and the sinews of the universe, the impulses and the machinery. And if there was a God, He had to be beyond all these things.

So as we learnt more and more, the boundary seemed further and further, our horizon wider and wider. And still we said, if there is a God, He has to be beyond all these things. Which seemed to us that, if true, it meant that God was further and further away, and had less and less space.

For we filled all the space of our thought with names and named things, and if what we named was not God, then why, of course, there was always 'beyond' for God to be in. This was when we were young and foolish; we thought of our powers to name and to identify as great powers and mighty.

But what we failed to see was that we could name every molecule in our little puddle (and for every 18 grams of it, there were 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or so) such molecules) and give names to every possible interaction between each one (and of those there were many more) — and this was not yet wisdom, nor power, nor majesty. For being part of a puddle, and knowing about water, and each molecule, and on our scale, the differences between them (for no two molecules can be the same, according to the High Priests of the Quantum) and what they did — these were nothing compared to the greater molecules beyond, and beyond, and beyond.

And still, we said, well, God is not a water molecule, and we can see all that is, it is all water molecules, and perhaps, the forces of van der Waals, the temporary loves and hates of evanescent dipoles, and above all, hydrogen bonding — and within all, covalent bonding, and around all, perhaps gravity. So God, if there is God, is beyond that.

One day, another puddle was consumed by fervent heat, and its elements laid bare. And in that one blinding moment, we realised that there was oxygen, and hydrogen, and smaller things than that, including a binding energy that we could not have known. And all these things we tried to name, even as the names sublimed in the radiance of the final moment. This fascinated us.

Yet another puddle was consumed by a plant, and photosynthesis occurred in the sunlight and carbon was added to the vocabulary. But though there were also magnesium and nitrogen and phosphorus and many other elements, the new universe of carbohydrates did not see them, and rejected them. We were quite sure that such things must exist, but they were beyond our experience, and we saw them not, and wondered at shadows.

=====

The man sipped his black, black coffee. He wondered what they would think, if there were minds dwelling on the surface of water molecules, and a molecule of 2,4,6-trimethylxanthine hove into view. He wondered what they would think of his spoon, unused, if he were to plunge it into the atrament. They would probably understand sugar, and not like it much, he decided.

He blew across the face of the hot, hot coffee. And he had compassion upon them.

But no, he was not yet God, although very soon, the coffee would make its way through the marvellously complex world of his biochemistry.

Lost Horizon

I grew up along the eastern coastal plain, where the sea licked at the beach outside my gate. My grandfather owned a boat, and an ancient salt-corroded binocular telescope from which you could see the ships. Below the viewing platform was a scrubby lawn which somehow repelled the salinity enough to allow my grandmother to grow all kinds of plants nearer the house, including those sweet peas whose purple flowers she used to dry and grind up to make food colouring for dumplings.

I remember when they began the piling works for the conquest of the sea. My mother, resting in the afternoons; her legs twitching and the house shaking each time the huge steel logs hammered the girders into the ground; it was a cacophony that never ended, but just drifted further seaward. As did the sea itself.

I watched the sea as they took it away, the daily dumpings of stone and sand, the concrete, the piling, the slow removal of the tide which went out and never came back. They 'reclaimed' the land from the sea, and when I was small, I hoped the sea would reclaim it back. Now I'm much older, and people are beginning to think of defences against the sea because of global warming. But everyone forgets where the huge limestone caves in the region came from, which show the tide levels a few centuries ago were as much as 10 metres higher than they are now.

There was a port way up in the north before it silted up. There were deeper harbours further south. The sea has fallen away. Proud humans have built entire high-rise complexes like a girdle around the land, a fence to keep the sea at bay, a new coast road, a barrage, a marina, an array of manmade fortifications, even an airport. But the sea is still there, twinkling, waiting.

Some day, the fish may swim through the gutted hollows of the tall towers. Some day, humans will go back to the boats and not the steel ships. I will be old by then, but I will also be a young boy, watching the tide at my back gate as the sun sets and the wild water rushes in.

Sore Throat Remedy

A sore throat is one of the most irritating conditions simply because it prevents sleep, reduces the enjoyment of food and even of breathing or talking. It is one of those things that relentlessly bugs you.

Fortunately I've learnt that there is one remedial treatment that always works — the old-fashioned salt-water gargle. Put one teaspoon of salt in a large mug of warm water kept by the sink. Whenever your throat bugs you, gargle with some of the mixture and then spit it all out. Make sure the throat gets bathed in it.

The throat will feel strangely soothed, and you will also feel less inclined to cough or otherwise make life more painful for yourself. Salt water is also an antiseptic of sorts. If you have mouth ulcers as well, it will help.

A Flood of Thoughts

It is the greyest, wettest afternoon in a very long while. It's not just the sheer quantity of water falling from the sky — that is something quite common at this time of year here — but the amount that is unable to flow away because it's high tide. The old canal, widened at huge taxpayers' expense, has proven unable to fully cope. It's still a big improvement over the days of my youth though.

I remember that I was still a student when I last waded in hip-deep water through that stretch of the Road. You had to be very careful lest you step on something unpleasant, and you had to take off your shoes so that you could put them on again at the other end. It was very slow going.

Today was not like that. But the subdued light, the resigned-looking motorists, the sad headlamps that might flicker and go out soon — these were known of old. There was an ambulance stuck in the mess. But no amount of civic cooperation would float it across the little lake where even the 4WD vehicles dared not go. I found myself wondering if the person who needed it would be in trouble.

The light was astonishingly uniformly grey. It somehow contrasted nicely with the butterscotch-milk colour of the canal waters. At this rate, iron-tainted aluminosilicate clay deposits will be a thing of the past, and this island will be down to granite bedrock. But I have faith that this won't happen. I know the Patriarchy well: they'll just import topsoil from the Southern Archipelago as usual.

Waterworld

I remember a really dire movie about global warming. It was called Waterworld and starred Kevin Costner. Essentially, after a bad bout of global warming, humanity is literally all at sea. Finding land is like finding the Holy Grail.

It was a very humid night. I woke up having dreamt something like that. It was a chilling experience.

Water

A lot of stuff has been said about the nearly supernatural properties of water. Some people believe that you have to drink eight glasses of the stuff every day or all manner of dreadful things will happen to you.

But water is one of the most likely molecules to form, one of the most ubiquitous. If any biology were to develop, the odds are high that water molecules would be part of it; the stuff is a universal solvent, with a curious spread of thermal and electrostatic characteristics.

The human organism is (like most other terrestrial life forms) a complicated agglomeration of impurities in a blob of water, with interactions defined by the aqueous medium. These impurities — fats, proteins, minerals, and other kinds of molecules — interact with water either positively (hydrophilic) or negatively (hydrophobic); their interactions with each other are often enhanced by mutual hydrophilia or hydrophobia.

Some parts of us repel water; this is not unnatural, because if we didn't repel water, we'd quickly dissolve. In a sense, our continued existence is due to the residual equilibrium and other equilibria we have with water. I remember a medical case some years ago in which a person drank too much isotonic fluid and destroyed his muscles. Sometimes you need a hypertonic solution, sometimes you need a hypotonic one; these are defined by the amount of water relative to the amount of solvent.

Remember, your cells exist in balance with water levels. Too much water, and they will function as badly as if they had too little. The body excretes excess water, because it's bad for you. So perhaps the best rule is what I've learnt over the years: if you're hungry, eat; if you're thirsty, drink; if you need to excrete, do it with celerity.

Follow the Water

My latest research sidetrack has come in the form of water analysis. Dallas Murphy's interesting account of the work of oceanography, To Follow The Water, has many interesting things to say about the movement of water. He points out that the Gulf Stream causes something like 36 Sverdrup units to go northward from the Caribbean region to the North Atlantic, keeping Europe warm and preventing an Ice Age. A Sverdrup unit is one million cubic metres of water per second. It's an awe-inspiring figure.

More to the point, while we can measure the large movements, the currents and vortices, they still remain susceptible to chaos at the local level. In late 2004, the meridional overturning circulation (in which cooling high-density salt water sinks and less-dense salt water rises in the ocean) appeared to have slowed for a while. Headlines saying that the Gulf Stream had stopped sprouted like a virulent disease. Of course, if the Gulf Stream really had stopped, we'd all be in serious trouble.

All the major oceans have these huge currents, one cycle in each hemisphere, with branches. If these currents were rivers, they'd be really huge rivers. The Gulf Stream is about 100 km wide and 1.2 km deep. It transports 1.4 petawatts of heat; that's a million billion joules per second and is about 100 times the energy consumption of the entire human race. If only we could tap it!

Water

My latest project has to do with water. Again and again, we are told that the Earth's surface is mostly water, that our bodies are mostly water, that everything we associate with life is mainly water. And it's all true.

Water as a physical medium effects change in the surface of the earth, conveys trade and piracy, is the object of political machination and outright violence. The location of a harbour, access to the sea or to a mighty river, or the ability to block any of these features — these things have determined the rise and fall of settlements, cities, civilisations.

Water as a concept is the most ubiquitous of metaphors. It has been used to talk about sex, electricity, music, finance, demographics and change. It is still, it is moving, it is pacific, it is violent, it is stored, it is harnessed, it is drunk, it is open, it is all things to all, and there is nothing like it. It is poetry in itself, and makes poetry in others.

Water as a chemical compound is the universal solvent; its combination of strong dipolar character and molecular integrity makes it a stable compound that renders other structures less stable and more willing to react. It is the medium for more necessary biochemical reactions than can be counted, and it alone allows nutrients to spread farther than they normally would.

Water, I have just realised, is not a topic that can easily be compressed into twenty pages or so. But I will have to try not to write a book about it, or I shall surely be... up the creek without a paddle.

Impure

We are almost completely water; we are walking swamps. 80% of the human body is water and the rest is stuff. There are metal ions and proteins and fats and complex little molecules that are deadly in their own little ways. There are giant molecules trying to hold the whole mad show together. Somehow, we have integrity; somehow that integrity relies on impurity.

We are impure water, and we are the highest order of all creation.

Pooled Resources

Here's a quote from the infamous DwarfWiki.

Murky pools are small pools of water one Z-Level deep on the surface of the map. Dwarves with the fishing job active will attempt to fish in them. Murky pools can evaporate completely in summer in sufficiently hot climates, or can be drained manually, but in either case can be refilled by rainwater or melting snow or ice.

Drinking from a murky pool will give dwarves an unhappy thought. Dwarves will not normally drink from murky pools if they can at all help it; they will prefer to remain thirsty instead of drinking from a murky pool, holding out for the hope that well water or some alcohol will be produced in the mean time. However, if there are no other water sources that present themselves, dwarves will eventually force themselves to drink from a murky pool when they become very thirsty.

On reflection, I am very happy I no longer have to drink from murky pools.

Rehabilitation

Today I saw a marvellous spectacle which quite displaced my flow of thoughts on examinations for a while. So this is a post that has nothing to do with being an examinee. Rather, it has to do with a flow of a different kind.

As I was walking up the hill, I realised that the last few days of loud machines and aromatic diesel fumes had been because of something called (according to a large blue official-looking sign) the 'Sewer Rehabilitation Program Phase 3'. Not only that, but the agency responsible for it was named the 'Water Reclamation Board'.

I was alternately amused and horrified — amused at the thought of the criminal sewer undergoing interrogation, debriefing, and rehabilitation in some isolated waterway; horrified at the thought of what the juxtaposition of 'sewer rehabilitation' and 'water reclamation' meant. Did it mean that once-criminal sewers had been purged of their water, which in turn was to be given back to society as in Frank Herbert's Dune sequence? Or did it mean that the sewers were being converted to marinas? Or what?

Life is wonderful when you stop to sniff the diesel and read the signs.