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Sharing the Road with Rudy : 3 life lessons for all of us

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Rudy

“You are good. But, it is not enough to be just good. You must be good for something. You must contribute good to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must be spread to others.” – Gordon B. Hinkley

The sky ahead was turning different colors like an analog TV on its way out. Soon a pea green tint filled the sky in high-definition intensity. Alone against this sky Rudy was pedaling hard with a steady crosswind searching for shelter. Little did Rudy know he was ahead of the catastrophic EF5 multiple-vortex tornado that struck Joplin, Missouri in the late afternoon of Sunday, May 22, 2011. Soon he made it to the next town and was safe.

Rudy is not a tornado chaser, but a man with a mission to promote safe drinking water. I first wrote about Rudy in 2009 when he was doing his first Blue Planet ride and rode over 2,000 miles. Every year since that ride he has expanded his epic rides.

Yesterday Rudy started his 2013 tour by biking 75 miles. His self-supported solo bike ride will start in Michigan before heading down to New Orleans and then back north. The ride will take forty days and cover over 3,000 miles. As if 3,000 miles is not enough he then heads to the Baltics to ride an extra 4,000 miles in 60 days.

rudy

Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Rudy. Anyone who has braved potholes, storms, and cars for days on end in the name of clean water has something to share for all for us.

Lesson #1. The Start is the Only Moment You’re the Boss Of

Rudy was just a normal person until he first heard about the Blue Planet Run at the Atlanta Marathon Expo in November 2006 and was shocked to learn that so many people lacked access to safe drinking water. That night he applied for the 2007 Blue Planet Run and ended up as one of the 21 runners selected out of 350 applicants. This effort kickstarted his annual epic bike tours.

Rudy did something sometimes we all have problems doing. He started. Last week I read Jon Acuff ‘s new book “Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters.” One of his biggest points is that we all need to do one thing – START! As Jon says “The starting line is the only line you completely control. The start is the only moment you’re the boss of” Anyone who has finished big has had a small start.

Rudy said starting every year is still hard, but once he has committed himself he has no choice, but to start.

Lesson #2. Slow down so you can taste the bugs.

Rudy says one of the greatest benefits of biking is the ability to use all your senses. To quote Rudy:

“Out in the country, folks were mowing their lawns and one of the greatest benefits of biking is the ability to use all of your senses. There are the refreshing smells of fresh-cut grass clippings and blossoms of flowering trees lingering in the air. Furthermore you can feel the soft winds of spring fly in your face and raindrops falling on your head. Then there is the amazing array of sound bites from all around you including, but not limited to, chirping birds, the loud sizzling sound of crickets and frogs.

And yes, you can even tantalize your taste buds from an occasional bug flying in your mouth, as you were just about to open it for a breath of fresh air.”

When you use all your senses you gain a new sense, a sense of awareness. We all could use reminders to slow down for some fresh air and the occasional bugs.

Lesson #3. Kindness connects us all..pass it on

In Rudy’s own words from his ride last year:

In Bacons Castle, Virginia I stopped at a local grocery store to buy lunch. With a chicken sandwich and a bottle of ice tea in hand I walked up to the counter to pay, but to my dismay discovered that my wallet was missing. I finally came to grips with reality that with 2,000 miles to go, I had lost all my cash, credit cards, driver’s license and medical ID cards. As I was about to leave, the store owner came out and handed me the sandwich I had ordered but could no longer afford. She had watched me panic and search as I was looking for my wallet and knew it wasn’t a ploy.

Two local men had overheard the conversation and Michael, a big bearded man walked over to size up the situation. He asked me what I needed and offered to pay. “It’s hot out there and you need to hydrate,” he said. We went back in the store where he loaded me up with several cool and refreshing drinks. I was very upset with myself for having been so careless with my wallet but at the same time now experienced care and kindness from several people that was truly heart warming.

Hearing stories like these from Rudy’s travels remind me that no matter how many miles one travels or how well-organized  you are, we all depend on acts of kindness to get through life. Here is a chance for you to pass on some kindness and help support Rudy’s 2013 Blue Planet Ride!

Go, Rudy, Go! Safe travels.

Blue Planet Network works to connect the public, funders, and implementors using an online platform and other creative tools to increase investment impact, promote collaboration, and radically improve water program planning, management, monitoring, and analysis. Since 2006, Blue Planet Network has grown from 5 to 96 global members, working in 27 countries. Blue Planet Network has supported its 96 members to bring sustainable safe drinking water sanitation to over one million people in over 2,360 communities. As the world’s largest open-access database of water and sanitation projects, Blue Planet Network enables its members to track water projects totaling $40.6MM. All data is openly available – from how projects are developed and implemented to what they deliver vs. original goals.

May 7, 2013 Filed Under: communication, Conservation and Sustainability Tagged With: , ,

7 Ways to Use Evernote to Gain a Second Brain

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Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 9.07.49 PMAnytime you are adding 100,000 new customers a day, you must be doing something right. Evernote now says its has some 50 million users. I have used this service for the last three years and only recently realized how absolutely I depend on it.  Just this past month, Evernote helped me:

  • Get a good night sleep when I recovered an online reservation after a hotel “lost” my reservation. This was way faster that finding it in the endless email bin.
  • Share files online with a large group easier than using email, ftp, or a similar service.
  • Trash some new business cards.  Who wants more paper these days anyway?
  • Find a lost receipt that I needed for an expense report. More money is always a good thing.

So, what is Evernote?

It’s your other brain. What makes Evernote special is not its ability to store notes, files or pictures, but the ability to search and sync on any device.It is a hot butter knife to informational overload.

While it is easy for Evernote to get lumped into all the other online services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, there are differences as shown on the table below. One of the main difference is that in Evernote all notes gets converted into a proprietary file format which gives you the ability to scroll throughout notes visually, ability to search for text in your pictures, pdfs, and handwritten notes.

Screen Shot 2013-05-03 at 7.35.26 AM

Basic Setup

When I first started using Evernote I created way too many notebooks.  This past year I have simplified down to just to four collections of notebooks called Stacks (An Inbox, Personal, Research, Work).  I tend to think of notebooks as files in a physical drawer and a stack is really just a drawer or a collection of notebooks. I don’t tag every note religiously. Evernote scans every word so I just use the keyword search.

Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 9.19.51 PM

So, How can Evernote Help You?

1. Someone emails you a good paper or article, but you have no time to read.

I can’t tell you how many emails I get where someone sends me a paper, newspaper article, or a link that I really don’t have time to read. With Evernote you get a specific address to email attachments that looks like this… watercrunch@evernote.com. I just send the email to this Evernote email address. Evernote takes care of the rest.

I have been able to find some great gold nuggets that I have completely forgotten about by doing this. In your email message you can actually direct the attachment to a specific notebook with proper syntax in the subject line of the email. [Subject: This is the subject of the note  @Notebook #tag1 #tag2 #tag3 Note title comes first, tags and notebook that are used must already exist. Also, notebook cannot contain "@" or "#" and tags cannot contain "#".]

2. Are you heading to a Conference? Use Evernote.

I use it to save the conference agenda, hotel reservations, and record any new contacts. Evernote Hello App for your phone has gotten more stable and better in the last three months. I use it to scan in new business cards. It automatically fills out the contact information into the right fields and then imports all the data into Outlook. Trash the business card before you even leave the conference. I also keep up with professional accreditation hours from conferences using Evernote.

3. Forget bookmarks, just save, forget, and search later.

When I read something good online, I save it on Evernote with Evernote clipper for Chrome. You can save the actual web page – text, links, images and all with a single click or if you just like to remember a certain section you can highlight and save directly into Evernote.  Also, if you want to read a web page without all the ads and insert into Evernote, Clearly is an extension you need to add to your browser.

 4. Share files with others.

If you want to share a file or a notebook full of files, Evernote is just as easy to use as Dropbox. You can also share files with users who do not have an Evernote account if you’re not planning to give them access to edit files in the notebook. Just set the permissions to view-only, and anyone with the link can view your notebook.

5. Supercharge Evernote with ifttt

ifttt, If This Then That, connects two services of your choice to create an automated flow called recipes. Recipes consist of triggers and the resulting actions. You can create your own Recipe, or use an existing Recipe created by other ifttt users.

I admit as I write this, it is hard for this stuff not to sound too geeky, but it is actually pretty easy. I use this recipe to automatically take any favorite email in Gmail and export it into Evernote. I use a recipe to send all my favorites in Google Reader over to Evernote. You can also do lots of other things with ifttt. For example, this recipe texts me if it is going to rain the following day.

Screen Shot 2013-05-02 at 9.42.35 PM

6. Scan and search your white board results or hand-written notes.

You are in a meeting and you have created a hand-written jumbled mess on a white board. Don’t just take a picture of it. Use Evernote to translate handwritten notes to make it all searchable.

7. Save notes and highlights from Kindle

If you read a lot of books on the Kindle and highlight certain passages or make notes you can also import these easily into Evernote. First log into your Amazon Kindle page .  This page has a list of all your books, with links to the notes and highlights. Your notes and highlight page will look like this below.  Next just highlight your text and use your Chrome Evernote Clipper to highlight and clip into Evernote.

Screen Shot 2013-04-30 at 2.38.31 PM

So, how are you using Evernote?

May 3, 2013 Filed Under: communication Tagged With: , , , ,

Looking back at Sea Level : Caution, objects may be bigger

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How big is your rear-view mirror? Most of the time, professionally in water resources, my rear view mirror is big enough to see the last 90 years. This is the time period for most of the USGS gage data that I use for different projects.

A couple weeks ago I watched a video on Google Hangout (I do hate that name) about sea level rise. They discussed how much and how fast will sea level rise in the coming decades and what makes sea level rise hard to predict. Participants included:

  • Josh Willis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • Sophie Nowicki, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
  • Mike Watkins, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • Virginia Burkett, U.S. Geological Survey
  • Andrew Revkin, Pace University & New York Times Dot Earth blogger

One graph they presented in particular caught my attention. This is one of those rear-view graphs that reminded me of one of my graphs that I use when talking about climate variability. In my graph, I use downloaded tree ring data to show a twenty year drought here in South Carolina in the 1750s and ask what that drought would feel like today.

The graph NASA presented was a 2,000 year record of sea level from North Carolina. I did a little research this weekend on the origins of this graph (again thank you Google).

For this graph, scientists used microfossils called foraminifera—or just forams—as a proxy. They were preserved in sediment cores extracted from coastal salt marshes in North Carolina. Why use forams? They lived in tidal inundation areas and were able adjust to sea-level rise. The ages of the cores were estimated using radiocarbon dating and other techniques.

The team compared their results with tide-gauge measurements from North Carolina over the past 80 years, and global tide-gauge records from the past 300 years. It matched well. They even had to adjust the data to take into account the fact that apparently the Outer Banks of North Carolina are sinking (1.0 mm/year), a term they called “glacial isostatic adjustment”.

Sea Level Rise Graph 2000 years

The graph shows four phases of sea-level change

  • Sea level was stable from at least BC 100 until AD 950
  • Sea level, then increased for 400 y at a rate of 0.6 mm/y, in the 11th century known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly
  • Period of stable, or slightly falling, sea level that persisted until the late 19th century, known as the Little Ice Age
  • Since then, sea level has risen at an average rate of 2.1 mm/y, representing the steepest century-scale increase of the past two millennia. This rate was initiated between AD 1865 and 1892

I think looking at sea level rise through those graphs forced me to think more about the future. While there is much uncertainty going forward with sea level projections for the next century, varying from 1 foot to 6 feet, coastal communities need work on their own process to deal with this risk. In NOAA’s 2012 report titled Incorporating Sea Level Change Scenarios at the Local Level, they suggested the following:

When it comes to planning for sea level change impacts, the “one-size-fits-all” approach is not realistic. There are simply too many scientific variables, risk perceptions, and political implications unique to each location to consider. For this reason a scenario approach is preferred. Considering a range of possibilities lets community members and officials incorporate appropriate variables for their community when deciding how to best prepare for the future.

Remember you can drive without a rear-view mirror, but at some point something big may hit you from the back or side. So the question for a coastal community would be how comfortable are you with that risk?

April 24, 2013 Filed Under: history, Southeast, weather

Soft Glow of Electric Sex : Moving your State Boundary for Water.

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Georgia wants to move their northern boundary to include a tiny bit of the Tennessee River. Some wild estimates speculate that one billion gallons of excess capacity in the Tennessee River is available to meet all of Metro Atlanta’s water needs for the next generation. Crazy? Borders can’t move, right?

No, it’s not as crazy as you would think. State borders can move. State boundaries in the South have moved in the past, are being tweaked now, and probably will be adjusted in the future.

  • South Carolina is finishing an 18 year and close to a million dollar effort to re-establish the boundary between South Carolina and North Carolina. In its 350 year history, this entire border has only been surveyed once. Right now, over 90 property owners may be paying their state taxes to different state starting in 2014.
  • Georgia and South Carolina sparred along the Savannah River because changing patterns of islands and the river were hard to verify based on an eighteenth century boundary delineation. Ultimately, in 1990, the United States Supreme Court awarded South Carolina 10,000 acres of water and 3,000 acres of islands which increased the size of the state by a whopping four and a half square miles.
  • Every hear of the Walton War? In the early 1800s, North Carolina and Georgia actually fought over a small strip of land between the states. A surveyor by the name of Andrew Ellicott finally proved that this land was within North Carolina and in 1811 Georgia relinquished claim to this land.

How can Georgia and Tennessee fight over a border that is exactly 35 degrees North of the Earth’s equatorial plane? Both states agreed to this when they were admitted into the Union.
Case closed, right?

In 1818 Georgia and Tennessee commissioned a joint survey of their border along the 35th parallel. Probably due to the equipment or astronomical tables used, the survey noted the boundary line a mile south of where it should have been. Georgia has tried to correct the mistake many times in the last 200 years. Georgia’s new proposal this year would accept the current border with the exception of one and one half miles of land allowing access to the Tennessee River.

So, this two-hundred year old border cartographical conflict is not new, but what is new is the reward. Water is the prize. In a way, however, the prize is really just like the leg lamp in the movie Christmas Story. You know the leg lamp I am talking about.

Allure of the Leg Lamp

Allure of the Leg Lamp

  • It’s fragile. Could it really and survive in a real household or world. Real-world issues such as Interbasin Transfers, environmental concerns, distribution, and mad wives still have to be considered at some point.
  • Ultimate reward? Large transfer of water is thing of wonder for some or an object of horrid disgust for others.
  • Conversation Starter. Anyone who has leg lamp shining as a beacon in the front window would attract attention, especially from other states.

Water planning for the future is really not about finding the ultimate leg lamp. It’s about trying to make that epic turkey dinner in a crazy household with kids trying to shoot their eyes out; only, half-way through the process, you realize that planning is really about working together and learning that duck sometimes tastes as good as turkey.

Christmas Dinner

March 25, 2013 Filed Under: Southeast Water Wars

Clemson Engineering Hydraulics: Reining in Chaos and Keeping the World’s Infrastructure Pumping.

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flow3

Buried in the bowels of modern infrastructure caught between the placid and pumped, turbulence can be a ruling lord in this domain if not controlled.

Pumps think they are in control, but they do need help. Pumps need uninterrupted and unthrottled flow into the inlet nozzle. Pipe bends and crammed intake configurations can vex performance. You can forget about using a numerical model. It’s impotent here. A numerical model’s no mans land. It’s simply too small and too chaotic of a flow area to model this way.

What can you do? You need to man up and build a scaled down model of the flow area and test it. There are only a few labs in the world that can do this type of testing and one is five miles from my house.

Although it’s been on my must do list for a number of years, I finally toured Clemson Engineering Hydraulics (CEH), a hydraulic consulting firm and physical modeling lab with David Werth, PhD, P.E. who is a founding partner and principal engineer of the lab. David is one of those guys that is full of  passion when he is describing the lab and this is exactly the type of person you would want on your team.

He has conducted over 140 physical hydraulic model studies for an extensive variety of pump intakes including those for water/wastewater, cooling water, flood control, and sea-water intakes. He has been involved in the conceptual design and hydraulic modeling of intakes ranging from 100 gpm to nearly 500,000 gpm. When he started this lab over five years ago he literally bet the house by maxing out his credit cards and getting an instrumental loan to start the lab. Thankfully the lab business has grown every year and now is spread over two large industrial buildings. The whole complex seemed to me more like a series of movie back lots where lots of different disciplines converge.

In any given week, they are working on three to six studies which means they are constructing, testing, modifying, or demolishing scaled down models. As we were walking through the facility I felt like I was on a mini world tour. Currently they have projects from Japan, Ireland, Korea, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain.

Clemson Engineering Hydraulics
Clemson Engineering Hydraulics
Inside
Inside
87E64A7B-0905-42DD-8F18-E5D841DF699A
87E64A7B-0905-42DD-8F18-E5D841DF699A
Outside
Outside
Dr. Werth
Dr. Werth
Building a New Model
Building a New Model
C274B684-93D2-4659-8C5E-5283D38DB53D
C274B684-93D2-4659-8C5E-5283D38DB53D
A Blend of Art and Engineering
A Blend of Art and Engineering
Old Model Parts Graveyard
Old Model Parts Graveyard
Using Red Dye to test the Flow
Using Red Dye to test the Flow
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Many of these studies are for new installations, but more than half are for facilities that are having trouble or being modified beyond what they were designed to do.

He was quick to discount some general myths of physical modeling such as:

  1. Physical Modeling is Expensive. Many times they can build a scaled down physical model for less than $30,000.
  2. Physical Modeling Takes Forever. In as little as a couple weeks his team of four carpenters can build a scaled down model.
  3. Physical Models are Not Accurate. Flow separation is a significant problem because it can result in large pressure velocity variations around the impeller which leads to imbalanced loading decreased performance vibration. With carefully placed a red dye it is quite apparent how the flow is moving, good or bad.

Some of their model testing simply confirms that under full flow conditions the proposed design would perform satisfactorily. Other testing requires iterative modeling to determine any modifications needed to improve the flow conditions. Transforming basic raw materials like PVC pipe, plywood and acrylic glass into scaled down models requires a bit of ingenuity combined with years of experience. There are no “How-To” books on this. For example,  shaping acrylic into different piping configurations requires a little art mixed with hard core engineering.

It is reassuring that in the age of all things digital, analog physical models remain a powerful design tool.

February 18, 2013 Filed Under: Infrastructure, Southeast Tagged With: , , , ,
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