Silflay Hraka

The N&O has a whole article on it. It will disappear long before we go, so I’m reprinting it here.

A little deflation protects expectations

When driving on beach, let some air out of the tires and go easy on the gas pedal

By JOE MALAT, Correspondent

For decades, serious surfcasters have used traditional four-wheel-drive “beach buggies” to chase roving schools of fish along the oceanfront.

Now, the modern version of the beach buggy is a new breed, a sleek sport utility vehicle.

Contemporary surf fishermen use their vehicles to haul groceries and children during the week, surf tackle and coolers on the weekends. Compared to the vintage beach cars, these modern chariots are mechanical wonders, but some specialized driving techniques are necessary for successfully negotiating the beach.

For many SUV drivers, the first beach-driving event is a white-knuckle, raw-nerve nightmare. But driving to your favorite fishing spot on the beach should be fun, and a few “tricks of the trade” will help any off-road rookie get off to a confident and enjoyable start.

First off, let’s dispel a myth: Driving on sand is nothing like driving in the snow.
Munching through slippery snow requires traction and tires to dig in. The opposite is necessary for negotiating soft sand. A successful, and happy, beach driver wants to ride on top of the sand and maintain “flotation.”

Make those tires float by deflating them. Most experienced beach drivers suggest 20 to 24 psi (pounds per square inch) per tire. The magic number depends on factors such as the weight of the vehicle, power of the engine and the condition of the sand.

Regular radial tires, with a non-aggressive tread, excel on the beach, and the natural bulge of a radial’s sidewall is enhanced when the tire pressure is decreased to give the tire a wider footprint.

Trust a veteran
John Newbold, a 71-year-old resident of Nags Head, has been driving Outer Banks beaches for more than 30 years. He works part-time in a Nags Head bait and tackle shop and chases fish on the beach from Corolla to Ocracoke every chance he gets.

“I like to drive the beach so I can have all of my gear, bait, coolers, rods, reels, and tackle with me wherever I go,” he said. “When I’m after stripers or drum in the fall, I’ll run from Oregon Inlet to Hatteras Inlet. When the fishing is hot, I might fish for speckled trout, drum, bluefish, flounder and sea mullet all in the same day.”

His preferences are shared by thousands of serious surf anglers.
Newbold’s Ford Expedition could pass for a mobile tackle shop, with a front-mounted cooler-and-rod rack and custom-made cabinets for buckets, sand spikes, lures, tackle and hooks in the back. Every item is neatly stowed.
For Newbold, beach driving is a means to an end, and he has learned how to avoid getting stuck in the soft sand so he could spend more time fishing. He was glad to offer some advice.

“Deflate your tires to the right pressure,” he said. “Be sure to engage four-wheel-drive, usually high range for most vehicles, and go slow!

“Avoid sudden stops, jack rabbit starts, and sharp turns.

“Easy does it.

“If you get bogged down, don’t spin your wheels. It might be necessary to get out, clear the sand from around your tires and maybe let out some more air.”

Freedom, with rules
The Outer Banks offers surfcasters a multitude of opportunities to drive the beach, but there are some restrictions.

Vehicles are allowed on the beach in Corolla, Kill Devil Hills and Nags Head only during the fall, winter and early spring. Beach driving is permitted year-round at designated locations within the Cape Hatteras National Seashore on Hatteras and Ocracoke islands.

Beach driving is free in all of the above areas, except for Nags Head, which requires a $25 seasonal permit. (On the southern N.C. coast, Fort Fisher State Recreation Area is expected to charge a fee for driving on the beach, probably starting Jan. 1.)

The towns of Duck, Southern Shores and Kitty Hawk do not allow vehicles on the beach at any time.

Be sure to use the designated crossover ramps for beach vehicles; all ramps are clearly marked. In the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the numbers at each beach ramp correspond to the approximate number of the mile marker on N.C. Route 12, south of Nags Head.

Be ready to dig out
Remember that no matter how experienced or prepared a driver is, there’s always a risk of getting stuck. And don’t count on AAA, the traditional roadside security blanket, to help with a vehicle that’s bogged down at the ocean’s edge.

“We will gladly provide our members with a tow if their vehicle is within 75 feet of a publicly maintained road,” Sarah Bembry, a spokesperson for AAA Carolinas, said.

Beyond that, you’re on your own.

Many experienced beach drivers carry a tire gauge, tow strap, shovel, a jack and a couple of 18-inch square pieces of half-inch plywood for a jack pad. Without a firm base, the jack will disappear into the sand.

If a cell phone is your only piece of safety equipment, there are several service stations along the entire Outer Banks that will rescue you, but that help doesn’t come cheap.

Jarvis Williams, a Hatteras Island native who operates Cape Point Exxon in Buxton, the average cost of sending one of his wreckers out on the beach is about $150. That rate is typical among most of the local tow-truck operators but is subject to change.

“That figure might vary, depending on the type of vehicle, how heavy it is and where it’s stuck,” Williams said. “We pull out everything from small two-wheel-drive cars to trucks with campers on the back.

“And I have to charge more if the vehicle is in the water. I’ve had to get ‘em when most of the vehicle was under water, and most of the time they got stuck because they didn’t deflate their tires.”

If an Outer Banks surf fishing and beach driving trip is in your future, be sure “TIRE GAUGE” is at the top of your equipment list, and, as John Newbold says, “Easy does it.”

New poll up at the main site, for a cider.

The stout poll is going fairly well, with about 100 total votes the last time I looked. All the polls will run through the middle of September, so I’m not going to declare a winner, but Guinness looks to have the race in hand. I was pulling for Stone Imperial Stout, but it’s just as well that brand is doing as poorly as it is. I priced a 12 bottle case of the Stone at the beginning of the week, it was $99.

I buy a case at that price, no one’s drinking it but me, which sort of undermines the whole point of taking good beer on the trip in the first place. What’s the point of drinking good beer all alone?

The time and place for the good beer is at the end of day, sitting on the screen porch, watching the sun sink down over the sound, or perhaps in the morning, to take the edge off the caffeine demon. What to drink on the beach is a different matter entirely. Quality beer should be poured out of the bottle before it is partaken off, the beach is no place for glassware, and Solo cups get blown over by the wind or knocked over by the tide all too easily. The cups also don’t fit well into the bait well of a rod holder, whereas bottle and cans fill that space admirably.

Ideally what we want for the beach is a drink whose qualities are not diminished if it has to remain in its original container. American macro-beers fit this description nicely, as they don’t possess that many qualities to begin with. Natural, Miller, Michelob and Coors light were the big winners in that category on past trips, though of the four the Michelob went first and the Coors went last. Rolling Rock and Icehouse were also in evidence. Both ended up being leftover. I threw the last of them away a week ago.

But the American macro brew poll is yet to come. I drink cider. Cider goes down quick if all one wants is a quick snort before returning to the pole when there’s a run on, the taste of it overcomes even the nastiest bait slime, and it doesn’t mind staying in the bottle. I took a case of Woodpecker with me last year, then discovered that, lo and behold, if cider was available others also drank it. This year I’m taking two cases.

One thing to get out of the way. Despite the manner in which most grocers shelve it, cider is not in the same class as the hard lemonade, spiked tea, and various brand name liquor malt drinks. Those particular drinks are basically Zima with different flavors added.

And like Zima, they zuck. There won’t be a poll for the alco-pops, which is the industry name for the Zima classes. We don’t have a need for them, as none of us are underaged sorority girls, and the underaged sorority girls we invite on the trip in the weeks beforehand never seem to show up.

It’s too bad. By the middle the week the cabin usually needs a good cleaning.

Cider, on the other hand, has a history. It was the most popular alcoholic beverage in colonial American, and is still very prevalent in Great Britain. Should any of our British readers wish to touch us on a deeply personal level, sending any of the above our way would be an excellent way to do so. Scrumpy would go even deeper.

Cider makers don’t seem to realize that what they brew isn’t an alco-pop, which is why so many of them now offer berry flavors. I can’t imagine this helps their market share, so fifteen years from now there may be as few ciders available on grocery shelves as there were fifteen years ago, when there were none.

I had my first real cider at the age of eight or nine, in Chapel Hill’s Rathskeller with my father. It’s still served there, in iced mugs, though the alcohol content is negligible, if there’s any at all. Once I was legal , I looked for a harder version of it for ten years before Woodchuck finally appeared on the market. I’m not going to be happy if it disappears again.

Besides, that’s all Dad asks for when he and Mom come to visit, other than grandchildren. If I try and brew my own, I’ll probably kill him with it.

Ten Beers Enter! One Beer Leaves! – Cider Bracket

Strongbow
Weston’s Extra Dry
White Oak
Wyder’s Apple Cider
Rock Creek Draft Cider
Woodchuck Dark & Dry
Ace Apple Honey
Dry Blackthorn Cider
Macbeth’s Three Witches Hard Cider
Wildwood

I’ve also posted the Stout poll in case anyone would still like to cast a vote there. As I said above, all polls will run through September, so new ones will appear on the far left each week. The older a poll is, the farther it will be to the right.

The poll will appear here permanently, and over on the right until the next poll runs. All the polls will eventually appear here. Vote early and often. Write-ins will be counted, but only if they are in the style of the pool above. If anyone is upset by the omission of their favorite brand of cider, send us a six-pack, and we’ll apologize profusely.

If the cider’s good enough, we may even mean it.

Update: For those asking about Strongbow in the U.S, it can apparently be bought here. I’ve also removed the Stout poll. The more polls listed, the slower this page loads.

Today, In The Warren

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s ass, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own?

Sorry Blackavar, just couldn’t resist.

Wimpy Politicians Mortified By Unusual Intelligence Approach, Really.

Seamus, not a Shamus.

The post 9/11 reaction to a terrorism futures market, remarkably similar to what a pre 9/11 reaction would have been.

“You are telling me, Mr. Tenet, that you need to crack down on security because some street agent in Phoenix thinks a bunch of Arabs will hijack several planes simultaneously, fly them into skyscrapers and kill thousands? That’s unthinkable. How morbid. Your crackdown on security at airports would violate the civil rights of thousands. Moreover, this is racist profiling of innocent middle eastern men. I demand that you stop this immoral program immediately, and discipline the agent who proposed it.”

Come October, I’m eating nothing but Mr Brain?s Faggots. I’ll need someone to bring a camera.

Calling all Mr Brain’s Faggot Fanatics! Do you dare to eat Mr Brain’s Pork Faggots in a famous public place? DON?T BE SHY, send in a photograph, along with your name, address, email address and become a member of our Faggot Photo Gallery.

One company apparently thought a cartoon impression of Tonya Harding might help sell their hot sauce. You too can own a bottle of “Tonya’s Hot Sauce,” complete with a picture of a woman (looking a LOT like Tonya Harding) holding a pair of skates in one hand and a hub cap in the other. Unsurprisingly, the cartoon character is standing outside of a trailor.

The problem is that Harding never approved this use of her likeness and is now suing the company. Maybe she will make a sizeable nest egg to fall back on in case her boxing career doesn’t work out. Following her around with cameras would make for an interesting reality television show, although I guess we have already seen it before on Springer.

Today, In The Warren

The three basic objections to online terrorism futures.

Undersecretary of Defense C. Montgomery Burns

Beer of the night.

You’re not going to get a lot of discussion from me about the Prince; writing the post below about near killed me. It certainly rendered me brain dead. Supposedly the Prince is a blonde bock, but it tastes like a Michelob.

And yes, that’s the only label image I could find.

I will tell you that three years old is a tad young for helping Daddy polyurethane the new toy chest. I’ve got a patch of newly removed hair on the back of my scalp that will testify to that. I’m not sure which is worse, that Ngnat decided to paint the back of my skull, or that I didn’t notice it until three hours later, when it had dried solid.

I’ll also tell you to watch Moments in Time, and Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law. They are distilled genius.

Update: One last thought, obviously requiring brain power I don’t have right now. I’ll post it lest I forget it. Aside from the obvious licensing issues, what’s wrong with setting up a Napster-like music site, charging a person a certain amount for every song they download, and paying them a slightly smaller amount for every song downloaded from them?

Say downloading a song costs you a dime, but having a song downloaded from you puts a nickel in your pocket, with the leftover nickel going to the music industry, or directly to the artist if they’ve signed a separate deal. According to this article in the Industry Standard, at the height of Napster’s popularity in February of 2001, 2.79 billion downloads took place, which calculates out to….at a nickel charge per download….about 70 million dollars in one month to be divided amongst the record companies, artists and Napster, assuming number crunching is correct.

That would seem to be adequate to me, but I’m not a record exec. Thoughts?

No doubt about it, the Earth is warming up. However, Mars, Pluto, and Neptune’s largest moon, Triton are also warming up. This presents something of a problem for those who blame human activity for the recent increase in the earth’s temperature, as Homo Sapiens is so far found on only one of these heavenly bodies.

There is a theory that explains the temperature increase in all 4 locations, one that Senator Inhofe alluded to on Monday during a session of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It can be stated in fairly simple terms. “As the output of energy from the Sun increases or decreases, the average temperature of the earth also increases or decreases.” Those seeking a somewhat more detailed explanation should look here.

The “Blame the Sun” hypothesis, for lack of a better term, has the virtue of simplicity, and observation data from the planets and moon above to back it up. But since it posits a culprit other than S.U.V. driving Americans as the root cause of global warming, it’s not popular. It may also be fairly easy to prove or disprove, though as of yet no money has been budgeted for testing.

NASA is being given huge amounts of money to study global warming, yet it hasn?’t proposed the obvious project of designing a small, inexpensive satellite to precisely measure solar output over time. Studies of solar variability to date have relied upon data from old satellites not designed for the purpose of reliable multigenerational solar output measurements, and proxy data in, for example, deep-sea sediment cores. [See, for example, Haigh et al., "Climate Variability and the Influence of the Sun," Science 294:2109-11 (2001).] The U.S. pays about $2 billion a year of our money for global warming studies; that can buy a lot of silence.

Two billion dollars buys a lot of silence because keeping quiet and not deviating from accepted mainstream opinion is how struggling young climate scientists gain a place at the government teat. Those whose opinions formed the conventional wisdom indirectly control much of the access to federal funds through peer review, a process that is ideally used to make sure that the best scientific proposals get their share of always scarce federal funds. In practice funds go to research that won’t contradict the conventional wisdom, as the conventional wisdom is what the reviewers built their careers on in the first place. Peer review is at least as much about protecting one’s turf as it is promoting good science, and often more.

So, once one has decided to build a career on the foundation of global warming, challenges to the conventional wisdom must be vehemently rejected.

But a climate expert at today’s hearing told Inhofe that the mainstream climate research community believes the Soon and Baliunas study is “nonsense.”

The study is “fundamentally unsound,” testified Michael Mann, University of Virginia environmental sciences professor and a lead author of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report.

From the coverage here one would be forgiven for thinking Drs. Baliunas and Soon are the worst sort of charlatans, but their credentials argue otherwise. The article above also argues against the Baliunas/Soon study being arrant nonsense. Despite the fact that the story originally came from the Environment News Service, three of the four scientists mentioned in the article question the notion that human activity is responsible for the recent rise in global surface temperatures. Last time I checked “widely accepted” mean something like “nine of out ten dentists agree,” not “one out of four scientists insists.”

Yes, I know that’s probably not accurate on a wider scale.

The paper Dr. Mann rejects so strongly can be seen here. Judge for yourself, but the reason he’s gotten so….exercised about the study in question may not be because it contains questionable data or bad science. No, the problem with the Baliunas and Soon paper is that it explicitly rejects the foundation of Mann’s career, the “hockey stick” an estimated measurement of the earth’s temperature over the last thousand years, much of the older data for which was extrapolated from tree ring records. Here’s an excerpt from a separate study of the Mann research, discussing the methodology employed to create the hockey stick.

Figure 62 (a) shows the graph from Mann et al (1998)reconstructs Northern
Hemisphere climate from AD 1400 using the proxies already available, particularly multiple relatively-short runs of tree-ring width and density data from high latitude and altitude regions of Eurasia and North America. To this derived composite record are appended thermometer measurements from 1902-97. Figure 62 (b) from their 1999 paper extends the proxy record back to AD 1000, and updates the instrumental record to include 1998.

I would point you to Dr. Mann’s original research, but unlike the Baliunas and Soon paper, it is not freely available online. So much for the scientific ideal of shared knowledge.

Here’s what the Mann hockey stick temperature graph looks like.

According to Drs. Soon and Baliunas, one of the problem with Mann’s curve is that much of it rests on too narrow a datasource, the tree rings, what they call a “climate proxy.”

Research over the last several decades has provided additional climate proxy results. Analyses of climate proxies, which include tree growth, boreholes, pollen, sea sediments, coral, ice cores and mountain glacier deposits, document two climate anomalies in the last 1,000 years. One is the so-called Little Ice Age (ca. 1300 – 1900 A.D.); the other is the Medieval Warm Epoch (ca. 800-1200 A.D.) when the temperature was significantly warmer than in the 20th century in many regions of the world. These additional results, developed from expert opinions, came from such disparate proxies that they cannot generally be quantitatively compared on a temperature scaled to each other or to the SPM record. However, the local record can be aggregated to yield qualitative results on the two major anomalies of the Second Millennium.

According to Soon and Basiunas, a more accurate portrayal of the earth’s temperature swings over the last 20,00 years would look like this chart, first published in 1997.

Just a little different, don’t you think?

Baliunas and Soon also caution against drawing any firm conclusions based on growth rings taken from trees at higher latitudes, just where Mann got his data from.

As has been pointed out by many researchers, tree growth records, especially at high latitudes, have been showing unusual behavior: in recent decades, trees at high latitude have exhibited declining density of their growth rings, independent of rising temperature (see Figure 8). Experts on tree growth have been debating this strange phenomenon, with no resolution of the problem. Of course, factors other than temperature influence tree growth; possibly these other factors, such as levels of precipitation and available nutrients, change with time.

There are two points to note here: first, the unusual 20th century tree
growth trend occurs in the period used for calibration of the SPM record [1902-
1980], and perhaps partly in the period of validation (1854-1901). Without
understanding the profound disagreement between temperature readings and tree ring density, it is impossible to make reliable statements on the temperature of the past 1,000 years. The second point is that without understanding the disagreement between temperature and tree growth, it is possible that this phenomenon has occurred from time to time earlier in the record, further making a conclusion about 1,000-year temperatures untenable.

The Baliunas/Soon paper is a broadside of data, fired at the very basis of the studies that form the latticework upon which current global warming theory is built. In order to protect his career, Michael Mann had to call it nonsense, regardless of the whatever scientific virtue the study possessed. His position, and those of the dozens of climate scientists, hundreds of politicians and thousands of environmental activists are as threatened by this study as Pope Paul V was by Galileo’s teaching of a heliocentric solar system.

And, like the Catholic Orthodoxy before them, the scientific orthodoxy has largely managed to prevent open discussion of evidence that undermines their position.

But still, it moves!

Update: Two articles on global warming, by Drs. Soon and Baliunas, at Tech Central Station.

The 45th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is being hosted by Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics this week.
Upcoming Carnival stops include;

August 6th Across The Atlantic
August 13th Right We Are
August 20th Outside The Beltway
August 27th Creative Slips
September 3rd Rhetorica
September 10th Solport
September 17th Silflay Hraka – The One Year Anniversary
September 24th Pathetic Earthlings
October 1st Sasha & Andrew’s Roundtable
October 8th Dancing With Dogs
October 15th Priorities & Frivolities
October 22nd Eric Berlin
October 29th Who Censored Blogger Rabbit?
November 5th Wizbang!
November 12th Dead Ends
November 19th PeakTalk
November 26th Setting The World To Rights
December 3rd Begging To Differ
December 10th Signal + Noise
December 17th DrumWaster’s Rants
December 24th Winds of Change

If you’d like to host the Carnival, drop us a line. Information on how to join the Carnival can be found here.

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