July 4th, 1:20 PM
odometer start: 2809.3
now: 2827.1
After dinner I called the University and talked to someone at the Computer
Center. I asked him what sort of machines they have and he answered PDP-10.
I was afraid of that, as U-M is about the right size for a small -10 system.
I mentioned I was biking through and sort of job hunting along the way and he said
they'd have an opening for a system programmer on 1 Aug. Argh.
In my wanderings around town I've quickly come to the conclusion that this
is a really neat place. I've talked to everyone I can find and they're all
quite happy to chat. Service-wise things are quite good - Penny's, Newberrys,
excellent bike and outdoors stores (even if they don't have Gatorade).
Spent the night in a dorm on campus and since I can't talk to anyone today
cause its a holiday, I'll be here tonight, too. Today I've been wandering
around. Went back to the Missoula Fire Jumping Center to take in their free
tours. Doug - a lot of ski bums work summers there and ski all winter. Good
way to stay in shape. Also stopped at the airport and got last year's
climatological summary to get an idea of what sort of weather to expect the
rest of the year. One woman I talked to at the weekly City band concert says
they have 1 or 2 blizzards every winter but normally is fairly mild. Let's
see what NOAA says.
"In the winter, the continental divide shields the area from much of the
severely cold air... Under certain conditions, however, the cold arctic
air... moves with force into the valleys. When this happens Missoula
experiences severe blizzard conditions."
Neat! January extremes last year were -19 degrees on the 10th and 44 a
week later. July and August are hot (ave. High 85 - 89) but dry with lows
about 50 degrees. Enough - you should be bored to death by now. Oh - last
year was hot - normal Julys and Augusts are only 84 and 82 degrees.
Oh well. More on job tomorrow.
July 5th, 3:20 PM
Well, job possibilities here quickly faded. Turns out that the opening is
for an administrative programmer, not systems. What's more, even had
they needed a systems programmer, pay would be about 2/3 CMU pay, so I
lose.
Since there's a cold front moving through today that has some moisture
associated with it, I've decided to stay under cover yet another day to avoid
some rain. There's been a little and the skies are brightening a bit, but
I'll wait a while longer. In fact, I think the forecast calls for a greater
chance of rain tomorrow, so I'll wait and see what tonight news has to say.
Just came back from the library here where I prowled through a bunch of
topos and caught up on all my Science
News reading but may run out of stuff to do tonight. I went to a concert
by the Montana Chamber Orchestra last night which was pretty good. The
concertmaster used to be the concertmaster of the Boston Pops before he came
here. Also at the concert a listener was the guide who took us around the
Fire Jumping Center!
Not much else to say. Might as well ride over to the post office and mail
this.
Oh - I've been forgetting to send you some of the propaganda I've been
picking up.
Photo notes
4: The hill with the M really bugged me. The main thing was its flat face and grass
cover. Left of the M there's a sharp ridge and the hillside beyond has trees. I had the sense
that the M side had been sanded down and its soil was still too thin to hold enough water or
mechanically support trees. Or maybe it just got too much sun due to its westward face. The
straight channels down the face bugged me too. They didn't really look like streams, they're
more like gullies, and maybe gullies behave differently here than back home in Ohio. I
probably just assumed the horizontal lines showed sedimentary strata, but gee, aren't all
these hills volcanic? My hike up to the M didn't provide any other insights.
That October, I opened the latest issue of Science News and skimmed an article about an odd
area on Mars. It has terrain very much like the scablands in Washington State which were
scoured out by the Lake Missoula Flood. That got my attention and then I
noticed the M on the photo above
the article. It turns out that during the last glaciation Missoula was 950 feet below the
surface of a lake held back by a glacier. That dam failed and the estimated 500 cubic miles
of water in the lake may have drained at a flow rate greater than all the rivers in the world
combined.
So that was the answer, or at least the beginning of several answers. It now appears there
were several floods, the horizontal features are "strand lines," past shorelines that record
erosion by wave action, but there's still much to learn.
Read about Glacial Lake Missoula and
watch its link to a very good video by
Tom Foster and Nick Zentner. The image below is from the video and shows some of what I
talk about above. And doesn't quite show all the scouring I expected.
