Peace Like a River

How can we walk through the \u27valley of the shadow\u27 when it feels like another trial or loss might be the one that finally breaks us? Posting about peace through suffering from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world. http://inallthings.org/peace-like-a-river

My Mark Twain: Old Man River

Flowing across his pages, the Mississippi River inextricably winds itself through Mark Twain’s canon. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that my image of Clemens, my Mark Twain, is as a personification of his beloved river. Twain draws his readers to the water’s edge, seduces readers to stare into his depths, and reflects the achievements and failings of humanity. Furthermore, like the Mississippi River, Twain embeds himself in the American psyche

Highlights, 2005

Iowa has nearly 72,000 miles of streams. With one week of camping, miles of paddling, on-going educational opportunities, and hundreds of dedicated and hard-working Iowans, Project AWARE can make a difference – one stretch of river, one week a year, one piece of trash at a time. If it seems like a vacation to the participants…it is. They just learn and improve the river as they go

White Like Me: A Problem or Plus

In a tiny Iowa rural community, stuck like a mud dauber\u27s nest on the banks of the Little Sioux River, a WASP was born and brought up thinking everyone in the world was just like her. As she went on to be educated, she was told she was the product of a culturally deprived childhood. Everyone was not like her. Didn\u27t she know people were different? Didn\u27t she know there were minorities in the world

Backwater controls of avulsion location on deltas

River delta complexes are built in part through repeated river-channel avulsions, which often occur about a persistent spatial node creating delta lobes that form a fan-like morphology. Predicting the location of avulsions is poorly understood, but it is essential for wetland restoration, hazard mitigation, reservoir characterization, and delta morphodynamics. Following previous work, we show that the upstream distance from the river mouth where avulsions occur is coincident with the backwater length, i.e., the upstream extent of river flow that is affected by hydrodynamic processes in the receiving basin. To explain this observation we formulate a fluvial morphodynamic model that is coupled to an offshore spreading river plume and subject it to a range of river discharges. Results show that avulsion is less likely in the downstream portion of the backwater zone because, during high-flow events, the water surface is drawn down near the river mouth to match that of the offshore plume, resulting in river-bed scour and a reduced likelihood of overbank flow. Furthermore, during low-discharge events, flow deceleration near the upstream extent of backwater causes enhanced deposition locally and a reduced channel-fill timescale there. Both mechanisms favor preferential avulsion in the upstream part of the backwater zone. These dynamics are fundamentally due to variable river discharges and a coupled offshore river plume, with implications for predicting delta response to climate and sea level change, and fluvio-deltaic stratigraphy

My Life Is Like a River

What a woman does in writing, in telling, is to search, sifting through the many versions and possibilities to find the shape and truth of her life, the story she doesn’t yet know, the image and narrative she struggles to bring, like herself, into being. (Modjeska, 1994, p.31) Reflecting on my life journey, I realize that my life is like a river, no holding back. Like the river flowing from one place to another, my life constantly changed and was always on the move. In due course, the river itself changed, so did my life. Many years ago, on the eve of my journey to study in Canada, I was so sure of my dreams for the future and myself. Unexpectedly, my life took a different turn and I have never stopped changing. The decisions I made years ago, eventually led to multiple transformations of my social understanding, educational philosophy, teaching practice, and character. I have come to reconcile with my past and recognized A Time for Everything, as well as having gained the strength to move on for whatever the end may be

The river model of black holes

This paper presents an under-appreciated way to conceptualize stationary black holes, which we call the river model. The river model is mathematically sound, yet simple enough that the basic picture can be understood by non-experts. %that can by understood by non-experts. In the river model, space itself flows like a river through a flat background, while objects move through the river according to the rules of special relativity. In a spherical black hole, the river of space falls into the black hole at the Newtonian escape velocity, hitting the speed of light at the horizon. Inside the horizon, the river flows inward faster than light, carrying everything with it. We show that the river model works also for rotating (Kerr-Newman) black holes, though with a surprising twist. As in the spherical case, the river of space can be regarded as moving through a flat background. However, the river does not spiral inward, as one might have anticipated, but rather falls inward with no azimuthal swirl at all. Instead, the river has at each point not only a velocity but also a rotation, or twist. That is, the river has a Lorentz structure, characterized by six numbers (velocity and rotation), not just three (velocity). As an object moves through the river, it changes its velocity and rotation in response to tidal changes in the velocity and twist of the river along its path. An explicit expression is given for the river field, a six-component bivector field that encodes the velocity and twist of the river at each point, and that encapsulates all the properties of a stationary rotating black hole.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. The introduction now refers to the paper of Unruh (1981) and the extensive work on analog black holes that it spawned. Thanks to many readers for feedback that called attention to our omissions. Submitted to the American Journal of Physic

[Review of] Carolyn Gilman and Mary Jane Schneider. The Way to Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840-1920

In the early 1800s, when Lewis and Clark visited the Hidatsas, they lived at the mouth of the Knife River with their close allies the Mandans. The estimated 2,000 Hidatsas farmed the fertile valleys and lived in villages overlooking the river. But in 1837, smallpox struck these village dwellers and diminished their numbers by half. The remainder of Hidatsas and Mandans decided to leave their homes and journey north, settling in Like-a-Fishhook village. In 1885, the Hidatsas moved again, this time settling in Independence, North Dakota

A tool for better management of water quality during periods of algal blooms: the case of the River Oise

Like other rivers in the Paris area, the Oise is subject to important seasonal algal blooms. This eutrophication generates notable problems for the production of drinking-water from a treatment plant on the river at Méry. A mathematical model has been developed to simulate variation in water quality in a pre-treatment storage basin, and another model is currently being adapted to model the River Oise. Integration of the two models should provide a comprehensive tool for predicting variations of phytoplankton and water-quality parameters associated with algal blooms. This will be a decision-aid for optimizing control of the treatment process for providing potable water

A GPI-Based Critique of The Economic Profile of the Lower Mississippi River: an Update

The Genuine Progress Indicator, or GPI, is an alternative economic indicator that seeks to measure net economic welfare—the economic welfare that is gained by economic activity after the costs of producing that welfare (such as the costs of air pollution, water pollution, resource depletion, climate change, and the like) are deducted. From a GPI perspective, the economy of the Lower Mississippi River Corridor is not nearly as robust as traditional modes of economic analysis would suggest. There are clear paths to increasing GPI (and human economic wellbeing) that have implications for environmental, economic and river-management policy