Good Tuesday to You,

The Island of Hawaii, referred to as The Big Island, is six time zones from Dallas, which is a big adjustment. It is about 4,000 square miles in size. All of the other Hawaiian islands together could fit into half of The Big Island. A drive around the island on the Queen’s Highway is about 300 miles (483 kilometers), which makes it big but not that big.

The island is composed mostly of lava rock from the volcanoes that formed it. Someone told me that the only other rock on the island is a green stone called olivine, which makes up the only green sand beach in the world, which is on the far southern tip of the island. By the way, that southern tip is the southernmost point in the United States — it is farther south than Key West in Florida.

Climate diversity is truly amazing on this place in the middle of the ocean not close to any continent. The eastern or windward side of the island can receive 200 inches (508 centimeters) of rain in a year, while the west or leeward side receives only a couple of inches. This is because the center spine of the island is comprised of three volcanoes, which are very high and form a wonderful windbreak where the moisture carried in the wind shoots up the side of the volcano to a height where the cooler temperatures precipitate out the water vapors in the form of clouds and rains on the eastern side. The poor western side doesn’t get the water because the eastern side squeezed it out.  So the western side is as dry as and looks like west Texas in places. The eastern side is lush, tropical and green.

It is all wonderfully visual and confusing and thought provoking.

Have a thoughtful and full and entertaining day wherever you are experiencing it,

Grandpa Jim

The new July issue of National Geographic arrived in the mail yesterday. I enjoy Nat’l Geo. When a young relation of my mine has a significant life event, college graduation, marriage, first job, I give them the Geographic for Christmas each year. My list is growing quite long.

It’s not all pictures. Yes, the photographs are outstanding, and with the captions, the pictures are an exciting look-and-read in themselves. But, don’t forget the articles – they are fascinating in content and extremely well written. It’s just that the photos are so over-the-top that I forget and don’t always get to the text.

Last night I did read. I was enthralled by the article “Vanishing Voices” on the disappearance of languages. With the magazine’s indulgence, I will share some facts and make some comments. (For ease of reading and to help with my observations, some numbers have been rounded up or down — see the article for the actual digits.)

Seven billion (7,000.000,000) people are reported to live today on our planet, the Earth, in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Those seven billion people speak seven thousand (7,000) languages. That sounds okay. Each language has quite a number of speakers, on average a million speakers for each way of speaking. But that is not how it is heard in real life.

Half the people, three billion and five hundred million (3,500,000,000), speak the top ten (10) languages. In spoken order, these most enunciated tongues are Chinese (way out in front as #1), followed by Spanish and English (almost tied), then Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese and German. These ten loudest forms of speech are heard everywhere around the Globe, carried by the economic clout and wide-ranging influence of their lands of origins.

Almost all the other half of the people on our planet, close to three billion and five hundred million (3,500,000,000), speak half of the remaining languages, three thousand and five hundred (3,500) tongues. That’s about a million voices for each.

But, wait, that still leaves a lot of languages and not many people to speak them?

You are correct. Only about seven million (7,000,000) people, a scant 0.1% of our home world’s population, speak the remaining 3,500 languages, half the languages on our planet. On average, this means only 2,000 people can be heard for each of these 3,500 remaining languages.

Where I come from, a town of 2,000 is a very nice small town. It is not a big town. If the residents of that small town spoke a different language from the bigger nearby towns, not many out-of-towners would visit. Over time, the small town’s young people would leave for better jobs and more fun in the cities. That little town would fade way.

Since 1950, 254 languages have disappeared. They are extinct. Another 1,842 are threatened. One language dies every 14 days. By January 1, 2100, the start of the next Century, 87 years and 7 months from this coming Sunday (check my math), 3,500 languages spoken today will be gone. Half the languages spoken today will be gone.

This is the same as saying that 3,500 small towns, each speaking one of the 3,500 small-town languages, will be uninhabited. They will be ghost towns.

An occasional tourist or history buff will drive down the quiet Main Street and notice the quaint, even unique, architectural touches of the homes and boarded businesses. The visitor will park and walk to the Five-and-Dime. Standing there, the city dweller will wish there was someone to talk to, someone to tell the secrets of that town. Then, our visitor will remember that the residents of that small town spoke a language only they understood. They couldn’t be understood by anyone else. Shaking his head and putting the key into the car door, the driver will stop for a second and listen. What did it sound like? When people yelled “Hello,” kids shouted and merchants gave change and thanked you for visiting, what did it sound like?

Will we ever know?

Grandpa Jim

Good Monday Morning!

We approach the Summer Solstice this week. Wednesday is the day, June 20th, the longest day of the year for us in the Northern Hemisphere, and correspondingly the shortest in the Southern Hemisphere. The sun stops here and starts heading back down that way for a while. Click on the “Articles” drop-down and check out “When are the Solstices?” under the tab “When is it?”

I hope you all enjoyed a great Father’s Day yesterday. I spent time with two of my three grandchildren and called my Dad to wish him a Happy Father’s Day. Later, we had a nice walk on the trail. It is always a joy to be out and take the airs.

Well, I have to run errands and stuff and work on the next Uncle Joe story, which is scheduled for publication on June 29th.

Keep checking in and we’ll be checking back,

Grandpa Jim

gpajim@unclejoestories.com

We’re #1!  Uncle Joe Stories just ranked #1 on a Google Search under its name, “Uncle Joe Stories.” Thank you all for visiting and reading. The purpose and goal of this site is to provide you materials that you enjoy reading and stories that you can read and tell to others. The content is all new and original. For example, the very first wake-up-in-the-morning thought for the Mary Story to be published tomorrow is just a week old today. We appreciate you all so very much. Please keep stopping by.

Now, back to the blog. Thursday is marching on and I wish you each an excellent June 14th.

Hail was in Dallas yesterday! The text message from my daughter-in-law at 6:36 p.m. reads, “Whoa, had to pull over to avoid giant ice falling from heaven.”  The next text is the picture of a piece of hail the size of a tennis ball. They are fine. The car is a bit dented but no windows were broken. From the pictures on the Internet, a lot of windshields were busted and quite a few skylights in homes and offices shattered. Thankfully, no injuries were reported.

Update: The paper reported this morning, June 15, 2012, that there were some minor injuries. “There were no deaths, serious injuries or sustained power outages.”

What is hail? Is it giant ice falling from heaven? Are angels sipping grapefruit slurpees and sloshing down icy chunks over the giant cup lips. Are the celestial cherubs playing chilly tennis and smashing one ice ball and then another over the cloudy fence?

On Earth (as opposed, I suppose, to what it might be on Saturn where there is no or little water), hail is the precipitation (or rain) of frozen water from the sky in the form of balls or lumps of ice, called hail stones. The individual ice ball or lump forms in a thunder or cumulonimbi cloud. A tiny droplet of water is caught in a cold updraft, freezes solid forming a little ice pebble, grows like an onion as it rises and water droplets and vapors freeze in layers on its surface, becomes bigger and bigger, until it weighs so much that it stops and starts to drop, growing ever larger as it falls, leaving the cloud and crashing to the ground. That is the life of an individual hail stone. A bunch of hail stones make a hailstorm and that is what happened yesterday in Dallas, Texas.

Update: In today’s paper, there is the following delightful further explication of hail formation, which adds to the life of the individual hailstone described above: “A hailstorm needs lots of warm, moist air near the ground, subfreezing air high above and a strong push to get the warm air moving up. . . . Ice pellets came together high in the clouds and fell, only to be pushed back up by powerful updrafts, where the pellets got another coating of ice. Over and over and over and over. If the udraft is strong enough, the hail gets held aloft, where it collides with other hail and raindrops, allowing it to grow larger. Eventually, hailstones get too heavy for updrafts to hold them aloft, and they fall. Wednesday’s storm had particularly powerful updrafts. The National Weater Service figures it takes updrafts with speeds of 81 mph to create a baseball-size hailstone and winds of 103 mph to produce a softball-size hailstone.” The paper reports we had “hail the size of softballs.” Wow! Thank you to The Dallas Morning News for their very helpful and wonderfully detailed science reporting.

Regions that see the most hail are the interiors of continents in the middle latitudes and the edges of mountain ranges. Hail is less common in the tropics because the air is warmer. The mountains of northern India have some of the largest hail in the world. China, central and south-eastern Europe and southern Australia have high numbers of hailstorms.

In the United States, where the states of Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming meet is called “hail alley” and that area has more hail than any other place in North America. Cheyenne, Wyoming, is the “hail capital” with 9-10 hailstorms in a hail season. On July 23, 2010 (the day before my birthday), the largest U.S. hailstone fell in Vivian, South Dakota. It measured 8 inches (20 centimeters) in diameter and weighed 1.93 pounds (0.88 kilograms). You could have put a candle on that one and used it for a birthday cake.

Although hailstorms normally last only a few to 15 minutes, they can blanket the ground with up to 2 inches (5.1 cm.) of hail. On July 29, 2010, a foot (0.3 meters) of hail is reported to have accumulated, and depths to a meter (39.37 inches) have been reported.

In the Middle Ages, church bells rang and cannons fired to prevent hailstorms.  After World War II, seeds scattered from planes. In Russia, rockets and artillery shells launched into the clouds. With all the noise, people grabbed the dog and ran for cover, which was good, because nothing seemed to work to prevent the hail.

Keep an eye to the sky, listen for the sirens, check the weather reports and move to cover. Giant ice falling from heaven is to be avoided. Let the angels play and wait until the slurpee chunks melt and the ice balls evaporate.

Thanks again for visiting,

Grandpa Jim

gpajim@unclejoestories.com