Living Space

by JanieM

The picture was taken on December 11 of last year, just across the road from where I live. I wanted to catch the last bit of open water before it disappeared for the winter. 

In relation to the topic you’ll find below the fold, note that there are both year-round and vacation homes tucked under the trees all along the far shore of the lake. You’d never know it if you were to fly over this landscape; it mostly looks like unbroken forest. A lot of Maine is unbroken forest, or at least no one lives there, though a lot of the land is “working forest” and is  accessible by dirt roads. But along lakeshores, the forest cover is deceptive. Waterfront property, after all . . .

For many years I’ve been jotting down notes from various sources about categories in which Maine is tops (or bottoms) statistically. I started the list so long ago that some of my notes are pre-internet. For those, and even for some of the more recent ones, I was so careless as not to jot down where I saw them. So some of these items are unsourced, some aren’t current, and some were disputed in the first place. You will be shocked to know that it turns out to depend on who’s counting what.

But for entertainment’s sake, here’s my current list. Maine is (or recently was), among the 50 states:

• the oldest
• the whitest
• the least church-going
• the most forested (by a lot! but depending on who’s counting)
• the most rural (there’s a specific definition for this)

It’s also the one with:

• the lowest rate of violent crime (and in some years the lowest murder rate)
• the highest percentage of vacation homes (and/or homes that are vacant for at least part of the year)
• the most artists per capita
• the highest percentage of French Americans
• the most miles of paved road per capita
• “the nation’s highest percentage of both female registered voters and women who turn out to vote”

The topic that I would most like to write a novella-length post about at the moment is housing, but since I don’t have time, I’m just going to toss out a couple of headlines and see if anyone has anything to say. We’ve touched on some of this fairly recently, but the housing situation in Maine and elsewhere in this country is dire and the topic is many-faceted, so have at it.

To get us started, here’s a take on it that I knew nothing about until I heard someone quote the factoid in the title of this NPR piece.

And -- open thread.

Comments

[wj]

I recently read (can't recall exactly where) that Maine also had the biggest rise in ocean temperatures compared to normal. (Notwithstanding the ocean around Florida reaching hot tub temperatures.) Something approaching 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

[JanieM]

wj -- a quick google yields this, which is at least related to what you remember. Depressing. The cod fishery was thriving when I moved here; it's gone now.

[Michael Cain]

I'll stick to Colorado's elevation.

75% of all land in the United States higher than 10,000 feet is in Colorado.

The Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 is the highest automobile tunnel in the world.

The 15th step at the Colorado Capitol was designated as one mile high in 1909. It was changed to the 18th step in 1969 using better surveying equipment. It was changed to the 13th step in 2003 using the latest 1988 North American Vertical Datum.

I guess I'll tie it back to the OP: the 13th step of the Colorado Capitol is 11 feet higher than the highest point in Maine.

[wj]

The 15th step at the Colorado Capitol was designated as one mile high in 1909. It was changed to the 18th step in 1969 using better surveying equipment. It was changed to the 13th step in 2003 using the latest 1988 North American Vertical Datum.

Presumably you guys will get to revise it again, as the mean sea level rises.

the 13th step of the Colorado Capitol is 11 feet higher than the highest point in Maine.

And the highest point in Florida is (for the moment) 345 feet. I.e. too low to be noticeable from anywhere in Colorado, let alone at the state capitol. Or Wyoming or Utah or New Mexico or....

[JanieM]

Michael's measurement summary reminds me of this, which I ran across a few years ago:

Mount Everest's peak is the highest altitude above mean sea level at 29,029 feet [8,848 meters]. Mount Chimborazo's peak [in Ecuador - jm] is the furthest point on Earth from Earth's center. The summit is over 6,800 feet [2,072 meters] farther from Earth's center than Mount Everest's summit.

From the NOAA.

Maybe with sea level expected to change and change some more, a measurement from the center of the earth would make more sense. Then again, earthquakes and uplift could still require revisionist thinking.

PS, also interesting, also from the NOAA site:

You may be surprised to learn that Everest is not the tallest mountain on Earth, either. That honor belongs to Mauna Kea, a volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mauna Kea originates deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, and rises more than 10,210 meters 33,500 feet from base to peak.

[Michael Cain]

I only recently learned about the Indian Ocean geoid low, a place where variation in Earth's gravity 1,200 km off the tip of India causes the ocean level to be 100 meters lower than global mean sea level.

[JanieM]

Michael -- that's interesting. 100 meters seems like quite a lot!

[Snarki, child of Loki]

Mount Sunflower, the highest point in Kansas, is just a few miles east of the Colorado border.

The (unnamed) lowest point in Colorado is just a few miles west of that same border.

Be warned! Mount Sunflower is more treacherous than it appears: http://hikinginthesmokys.blogspot.com/2009/09/surviving-mount-sunflower.html

[Hartmut]

Mt. Everest is also an example of geography correcting the mapmakers. Since my childhood the height was given (wrongly) as 8848 m above sea level. In my adulthood it was worth a note in the newspapers that the mountain finally reached that height.
The Himalayas are, nothing new there, still growing up as a result of India crashing into Eurasia.
Is there an estimate when this continental collision will finally stop? And btw, whose fault was it in the first place? Did Eurasia take India's right of way? Or was it a misunderstanding because the laws of geology did nor specify whether it was priority to the right or the left (OK, in either case both plates would have had to assume that the other had right of way).

[Hartmut]

I should have written 'geography making up for the error of the mapmakers'.

[Michael Cain]

I seem to recall reading that the first measurement of Everest's height came in at exactly 29,000 feet, but the surveyors reported it as 29,002 so people wouldn't misjudge the precision of the number.

[wj]

And btw, whose fault was it in the first place? Did Eurasia take India's right of way? Or was it a misunderstanding because the laws of geology did nor specify whether it was priority to the right or the left (OK, in either case both plates would have had to assume that the other had right of way).

I don't think geology does "rules of the road." It's strictly a matter of Might Makes Right. Eurasia was the mightier, so it goes up while the Indian subcontinent gets shoved down into the inferno.

[Snarki, child of Loki]

It's all part of the long-term plan for India to invade China.

Very long term.

Holland will have had their land invasion of England, then sunk under the waves, long before.

[wj]

It's all part of the long-term plan for India to invade China.

Implausible. After all, it's giving China the high ground.

[Girl from the North Country]

Speaking of such matters reminds me that I ought to alert any non-Brits who admire David Attenborough, and who (like me) slightly panic any time they see his name trending (he is in his 90s), that there is a new kid on the natural history block. We have a well known TV naturalist called Chris Packham, hugely knowledgeable and who coincidentally is high functioning on the autistic spectrum, who has just released a new BBC series called Earth, on the geological and natural history of the planet. This is exactly the kind of high profile series that used always to be done by Attenborough, and it's pretty damn good, both visually and in his commentary. I'm watching an episode I recorded a few days ago, and he is walking along and explaining the rift valley in Iceland (I think it's called Thingvillir, but I expect nous knows the runic spelling) where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates are pulling apart from each other at the rate of one centimeter a year. I seem to remember from Norse mythology that the Vikings believed it was where some god or other threw an axe, and cleft the land in two. Very understandable when you see it.

[Hartmut]

Þingvellir
Pronounced: THING-vett-leer
"field/plane of the assembly"
Modern Icelandic pronunciation is quite different from the medieval* but the spelling stayed the same. In some cases even more un-intuitive than English but at least consistent.

*which we are well informed about since some anonymous guy in the Middle Ages wrote a book about it and gave a detailed Latin description about the Norse phonemes. And since we know how medieval Latin sounded, we can reconstruct the medieval Icelandic pronunciation from it.

[nous]

Adding to Hartmut's comment that the "th" in THING is an aspirated dental so more of a "TING" with extra breath than the Addams Family character.

And here's the picture I took back in 2017 of the two continental plates meeting at Þingvellir. It was shot from the North American side looking towards the European side. That's Þingvallavatn in the background.

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/364245434_10160522693292850_1146164702716763056_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&cb=99be929b-59f725be&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=NglfruRXW0MAX8XQWug&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.xx&oh=00_AfBnLivD2iz2P-4ONhWbJ9-MiW0b60JuPqdGmLJm0N5rqQ&oe=64CAB383

Sorry for the ugly URL. Hope it works.

[JanieM]

nous -- link works fine -- cool picture!

[Hartmut]

Looks like a painting.

[Girl from the North Country]

Yes, great picture, nous. Something told me you might have more than a passing acquaintance with the place!

[wj]

And, almost like it was planned, the Astronomy Picture of the Day today is this.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230730.html

That particular aurora is impressive, too.

[Girl from the North Country]

Crikey. ObWi is clearly currently in sync with the force...

[nous]

That was a ridiculously beautiful morning at Thingvellir. We got up early to beat the tour busses and the light was so long that it was almost impossible not to take a gorgeous photo.

https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/363821734_10160524151397850_6620115539267779128_n.jpg?_nc_cat=100&cb=99be929b-59f725be&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=ZHRwTWr5i6UAX8IXyTE&_nc_ht=scontent-lax3-2.xx&oh=00_AfAhktepYKw22nZGrC9_OWPqjS3fRY436QhqG_8nawiwgQ&oe=64CBD5FD

I was shooting everything quite underexposed to keep from blowing out the highlights.

[Girl from the North Country]

Wow. Fantastic sky. Fantastic everything.

[Michael Cain]

Last Friday, Fort Collins's YTD precipitation total reached the annual average number. The monsoon has finally started, so afternoon/evening thunderstorms are in the forecast every day this week. Flash flood watches are already up through Wednesday night.

Our cool/wet year -- we are now unlikely to reach 100 °F this year -- comes courtesy of heat domes in various other parts of the country. This week the main driver is the high pressure dome over central Texas.

[hairshirthedonist]

Paul Reubens - RIP (Rest in Pee-wee)

[Michael Cain]

Follow up... We kicked off the monsoon with a 90-minute lightning and thunder show, and just under four inches of rain.

[GftNC]

Justice, of a sort, for the family of Henrietta Lacks. It's going to be interesting to see how many other cases follow on from this...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/henrietta-lacks-cells-lawsuit-settlement.html

[GftNC]

Justice, of a sort, for the family of Henrietta Lacks. It's going to be interesting to see how many other cases follow on from this...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/science/henrietta-lacks-cells-lawsuit-settlement.html

[JanieM]

Hey, it's a full moon on Lughnasa.

Does that mean something extra special is going to happen?

[wj]

Perhaps it indicates especially bountiful crops. Which (thanks Putin!) are sorely needed this year.

Here's hoping.

[hairshirthedonist]

The Gaelic seasonal festivals make more sense to me as marking seasons than do the solstices and equinoxes. Maybe it's because I'm more attuned the amount of daylight than the weather. Spring and summer are equivalent in total daylight, just moving in different directions, as are fall and winter. Particularly as winter is concerned, I think of dark (early) winter, which includes late fall, and light (late) winter, which doesn't so much include early spring because of DST starting before winter is over.

Light winter can sometimes be bright winter when there's snow on the ground and I get home from work while it's still light outside. But snow is mostly a thing of the past where I live.

[hairshirthedonist]

Also, too, late spring and early summer drive me a little nuts because the sun comes up so early, even with DST. God forbid I wake up for whatever reason at 5:30 to the sun blasting through the shades. It makes going back to sleep much harder.

[JanieM]

I'm with you about the early sunrises, hsh. Also about the seasonal changes. Also about bright days in the winter. The blizzards and icy footing of January and February notwithstanding, I always breathe a sigh of relief when the daylight starts to last longer.

As for seasonal changes, I noticed when I first lived in Maine that there was a perceptible transition in early August, when you knew that the worst of the summer heat was over. Sometimes it's like a switch got turned. Everywhere else I've lived, August is sweltering. But not here.

This year it's almost a caricature of itself. Last week we were having maybe the third period of several days of sweltering heat, toward the end of which I am always tempted to get an air conditioner. But I never do, because:

1) my space isn't really well suited to it, and it would be expensive;

2) I detest air conditioning, so far more than I dislike a few days of hot and muggy weather;

3) every time I have that thought, the weather changes and I remember that I don't need air conditioning after all; except for a handful of nights each summer, I can cool the place off sufficiently overnight by just running a fan in an open window.

So this year we were having what passes for a heat wave here (and we were very lucky not to have what a lot of the rest of the world has had this summer). Yesterday the switch turned, and now the weather is 70-ish, sunny, perfect. I'm sitting here with cool air blowing in from outside, with a long-sleeved flannel shirt on. !! (Also cargo shorts, which I typically wear well on into the fall, for the sake of the side pockets as much as out of reluctance to admit winter is actually coming).

[nous]

The quarters and the cross-quarters work well so long as your climate is temperate, and of a sufficiently low altitude, and you are in the northern hemisphere. The more one or all of those things change, the less well it works. We used to have huge rows over this on the neopagan boards in the nineties.

I can remember trying to plan a Beltane celebration when we were in Colorado. A friend had some property up Boulder Canyon that we wanted to use, but when we got there to look the site over there was still snow on the ground and it was a month less far along than it was at the base of the foothills. It felt like the trees were still hibernating.

Think we ended up just going and drinking in one of the grove members' hot tub the next weekend for our celebration, because the drum circle at the cabin was Not Going To Work.

And now that we are in Southern California with a "Mediterranean" climate (nice bit of Eurocentrism, that)? Nope. Wheel of the year is not going to work for you the same way. You can have a fixed ecclesiastical calendar of quarters and cross-quarters, and you can have a wheel of the year that aligns with the local growing cycle, but you can't have both together.

If I were trying to practice Land-Based Druidry here in Southern California, we'd be coming up on the beginning of Ack!Spider Season.

[JanieM]

Ack!Spider Season

A climate pattern I'm going to avoid at almost any cost. Thanks for the heads up, nous. ;-)

[nous]

We used to walk 1/2 mile to the campus rec center for our morning workouts. On one late-August walk we counted 132 visible orb-weaver webs along the route, each with a happy resident in the center of a two foot web stretched between trees.

[hairshirthedonist]

We get some species or other of orb weavers. They'll be showing up soon. Sometimes we get one that makes a web in the frame of our back door, which is less than fun to walk into. They hide in a corner during the day, which makes it easier to miss the web without a large spider sitting in the middle of it.

Just when they've grown to their meaty full size, around Halloween, they disappear until the next year. It's amazing the size web they can weave in a single day, as much as 8 or 9 feet wide. I've watched a bit of the construction when I was lucky enough to come upon it.

[CharlesWT]

Horrendous flooding in Beijing and the surrounding areas.

"ZHUOZHOU, Hebei (AP) — China’s capital has recorded its heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years over the past few days as remnants of Typhoon Doksuri deluged the region, turning streets into canals where emergency crews used rubber boats to rescue stranded residents.

The city recorded 744.8 millimeters (29.3 inches) of rain between Saturday and Wednesday morning, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau said Wednesday."
Beijing records heaviest rainfall in at least 140 years, causing severe flooding and 21 deaths

21 deaths? More likely to be ten to a hundred times that or more.

Very little about it in Chinese state media.

[Michael Cain]

As for seasonal changes, I noticed when I first lived in Maine that there was a perceptible transition in early August, when you knew that the worst of the summer heat was over. Sometimes it's like a switch got turned. Everywhere else I've lived, August is sweltering. But not here.

Here there is typically a break from mid-July to Labor Day, but we have a reason. That's when the North American Monsoon reaches us. Even if it doesn't rain, the thunderstorms "bloom" most afternoons and cut the sunshine. The bloom reference comes from watching the weather satellite loops.

[JanieM]

I hiked for a week or so in Rocky mountain National Park in June of 1972. We camped in a meadow below Longs Peak and took day hikes from there. You had to plan around the daily thunderstorms that came blowing over a particular ridge....

Nice memories. Our last night there all the tents in the meadow got blown apart by snow and wind except two, one of which was ours -- it had been hand made by a college friend.

[Michael Cain]

Colorado summers -- glorious mornings, crap-shoot for the afternoons. Might also be glorious. Might be hot, especially if you have to be in the sun. Might be thunderstorms.

[Pro Bono]

Speaking of early sunrises: Cambridge is roughly on a latitude with Saskatoon. Huddersfield (an archetypal town in the North Country) is roughly on a latitude with Edmonton. But the climates are not remotely similar.