Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

[Send to classmates after an exam in statistics]

I am sure it was not the bar exam.  I am familiar with the bar exam.

The bar exam is an exam that continues for hours on end, that poses difficult and indeterminate questions, that leaves you wondering how badly you screwed up.

But that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is written by people who have enormous knowledge of things so surpassingly tedious that you cannot imagine yourself ever reaching their depths of exactitude.  The bar exam explores your ability to parse utterly precise nuances — to such a point that, if you do begin to master them, you may even take a perverse pride in your insight into things that will almost never matter, to almost anyone you will ever know.

Again, however, that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is the last major hurdle before you proceed into a highly lucrative profession — one in which your familiarity with the truth, or your ability to inquire into the true state of affairs, will not be remotely as important as your skill in making reality appear to be whatever your client needs it to be.

That’s why I’m sure this was not the bar exam.

They should design a fabric that holds up perfectly well for a period of, say, three years, or 35 washings — and then suddenly begins to disintegrate.  They could market it as something of a joke, but somewhat seriously too:  “Buy him a new shirt — and prevent it from becoming The Old Standby” — with a picture of a closet that still contains shirts from yesteryear.

There is talk of the Greenland ice cap someday disintegrating, and parts of Antarctica continue to do so. These are potential sources of fresh water for nations conveniently located. It seems that a fleet of tugboats, with specially designed barges, might provide the best devices for pushing those huge hunks of ice into places where their water can be used.

It seems that pushing rather than pulling is the better way — that this is why tugboats, despite their name, are designed and often used to shove. I don’t know how many tugboats it would take to move an iceberg the size of Manhattan. Of course, a tugboat right up against an iceberg would be in danger of being damaged or sunk by huge chunks of ice splintering off of the main mass, so it might be helpful to design relatively unsinkable barges to serve as buffers between tug and berg.

Where to take the iceberg is another question. Maybe they could dynamite it into smaller fragments, and winch them up, on skids, onto melting racks on dry land. Maybe they could park it in a deepwater lock, pump out the surrounding salt water, and let it melt. Maybe they could design a floating water-extraction device that would melt and pump water, from the top center of the berg into an accompanying tanker, at a much faster rate than it would melt in the surrounding icy ocean waters.

I am thinking about the western U.S. drying up, and I wonder whether it would help to pump massive amounts of ocean water into a large natural or artificial basin somewhere in Nevada.  This would obviously not be the more authentically natural move, at least not in the sense of leaving things as we found them; then again, if it counteracted our abuse of fresh water sources, maybe it would be authentically natural enough.

The purpose of this pumping effort would be to create an inland sea from which water could evaporate in such quantities as to provoke rainstorms further east.  And that’s my question, or questions.  Lake-effect rain and snow works on the lee side of the Great Lakes.  I am guessing that the Great Salt Lake may be the source of some of the snow on the Wasatch Range.  Do Lake Tahoe and Salton Sea not feed moisture into the atmosphere, or are they just not big enough to make a noticeable difference downwind?  (Or maybe they do, and I just haven’t heard about it.)  How big a salt lake would it take to produce a green streak eastwards?  Could the power of the ocean waves drive a pump that would shove water up over the Sierra Nevada, or would they have to build a power plant to feed enough water to stay ahead of the rates of evaporation and seepage into the ground?  Would the seeping water carry its salt with it, and if so, how far?  Presumably the salt left behind would create a salt flat when/if the salt lake ultimately dried up; would this then create a permanent lifeless zone?  Could they build a glass lid over the lake, so as to trap evaporating water into tanks for pumping or shipping elsewhere in the West?  If they went in the greenhouse direction, could they design the lake as a massive irrigated space, with troughs that would capture the salt and a forest of leafy plants between the troughs, so as to create some sort of tropical ecosystem?