Been celebrating the Bat-Mitzvah-hood of my wonderful niece the last few days, and so benefited from some low-intertube days. Got dug into a book I’ve been peering at on my shelves for a couple of years now along the way. (One of the pleasures of travelling is the sudden opening of slices of time that the working day routine obliterates.) And this morning, still on east coast time in my childhood home town of Berkeley (explains a lot, doesn’t it), reading in bed just before 6:00 a.m., I came across this paragraph of just plain, intelligent, happy writing:
What caught my attention about the Beaufort Scale was at first the beauty of its language, but there was something else, something powerful, about how it does its job. What the Beaufort Scale is, fundamentally is scientific language. Its descriptions are beautiful, to be sure — but what they also are is distilled, thorough, complete. The Beaufort Scale, in Beaufort’s form, takes the wind at sea, anywhere all over the planet — wherever a ship might encounter it — and reduces it to a format that is not only clear but quantifiable and communicable. The Beaufort Scale takes observation and turns it into information.
That’s from Scott Huler’s de-fin-ing the wind, delightful book on the making and significance of the Beaufort Scale, the standard measure of wind strength sailors have used for a couple of centuries now.
Scott’s a friend of mine, and a fine writer. He gave me my copy of this book a while ago, and it was just the pressure of all the stuff my day job needs me to read that held it up on the pile this long.
My loss. I’m finding lots of smart pleasure as I go along with Scott, and nuggets like the passage above (on p. 124, if you’re asking) is that capture his gift for doing what I like best in science writing (or really, any text). He distills his narrative down to the essence of its point, the meaning to extract from the (delightful) journey through historical narrative and anecdote. Where and how and by whom the idea of matching measures of wind strengths to the effects of given speeds on something physical — a tree branch, a windmill vane, a sail — makes (in Scott’s hands) a wonderful account of how 18th century minds made sense of their world. That’s reward enough on its own — but in the passage above you get something more, something of how an enterprise, science, actually works, or rather, made itself into a system of acquiring both knowledge and understanding of unique rigor and power.
And with that note, apropos of nothing contemporary or political (unless you read well between my lines), why don’t we all enjoy some nice, fresh (never half-) baked open thread.
Image: J. W. M. Turner, Fishing Boats with Hucksters Bargaining for Fish, 1837-1838.
Santa Fe
Fascinating, thank you! Let me take this opportunity to recommend Patrick O’Brian’s novels to those interested in nautical adventure and history. Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin are a wonderful gateway in to the best and the worst of the high seas and early 19th century western civilization. And the Russell Crowe / Paul Bettany film adaptation is quite strong as well.
raven
The title of the painting led me to learn that:
SiubhanDuinne
That is indeed wonderful writing. And oh! the Turner painting! I love love love his skies!
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: Never knew that! Thanks for being curious enough to pursue it further.
raven
It’s interesting to see the scale calls 13-18 a moderate breeze. A rule of thumb on the fishing boats on the Gulf Coast is that you don’t want to be out there when it is over 15mph.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Here’s a nice piece on the painting.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@raven:
So there was a photo of Art Pope included in the definition?
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: Thank you again. That was a fascinating analysis. I’ll have to watch more of the Gio’s Paintbrush videos.
Randy P
Spent a good chunk of my professional life once studying/modeling ocean waves and living with scales like the Beaufort scale. Mostly from the comfort of a cubicle. I was used to seeing numbers for wave heights like 20 ft, 30 ft. I remember one database that showed the average wave height in parts of the North Atlantic in winter being 40+ feet.
Then one week I had the opportunity to ride a ship across the Gulf of Mexico in 60 knot winds, just ahead of a hurricane. I stood in the bridge one night watching waves crash over the bow and send spray into the windows of the bridge, WAAAY above the waterline. I turned to a young lieutenant next to me and asked how high these waves were. He shrugged and said nonchalantly, “not much, maybe 15-20 feet”.
I stared at them for a long time and thought about the numbers I’d been studying. In particular those numbers about the North Atlantic. 40 feet! Average! For months! Holy crap! I will never be able to watch “A Perfect Storm” because I know the story and I simply don’t want to see a 100 foot wave hit a ship. I just don’t. Not even in CGI.
My bible in those days was a wonderfully informative book called Wind Waves by Blair Kinsman. In the intro he made the case that anybody interested in studying the ocean should spend time sometimes just going out and watching it. In particular I remember a line about how anybody who relies on a rule like “every 7th wave is the big one” is sooner or later going to be knocked on their ass by wave number 6.
raven
@Randy P: I fish Hatteras and the Gulf a couple of times a year. I’ve been on a 65 footer in about 20 mph winds on an 8 hour trip where I was one of the only people out of about 45 who didn’t get sick. When I fished Maui on a 32ft Bertram only two of the six of us were able to fish, I got sock but kept going. The captain said that, for Maui, it was very calm but there was something about the roll that made it difficult. My dad was a WWII destroyer sailor and he always said they should have gotten submarine and flight pay on those “buckets of bolts”!
Dave
Thanks for the tip… Just got a used copy on amazon, can’t wait to read it, then pass it on to my sailing buddy!
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: When you google “Beaufort Scale” you can see dozens of charts and cartoons (and photos) illustrating the various points on the scale. Fascinating to see how many ways it can be visualized.
Librarian
“Ralph! Stop chewing that Turner!”
PurpleGirl
@Santa Fe: I’ve seen Master and Commander several times. As much as I like Russell Crowe, I came to really like Paul Bettany. I wish they would a few more movies with Aubrey and Maturin.
MikeJ
The Force 5 sailboat is named after the Beaufort Scale. 17-21 knots is a pretty fun breeze for sailing
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: I like this best.
raven
The there is Kentucky Windage
PurpleGirl
@raven: One activity at science fiction and related conventions is the Huckster Room. You want books, visual media, stuff like action figures and models and who-knows what else…. Look in the Huckster Room, someone is bound to be selling it. (One year, David Gerrold couldn’t make it to a Star Trek convention in Boston for the whole con because of a schedule conflict; knowing people who knew him, I got to man his huckster room table.)
HinTN
@raven: Tennessee windage is far more scientific! We wet our thumb.
raven
@PurpleGirl: I love it!
Randy P
@raven: Loved those hillbillies.
Was the training film going to make the point that you needed scienterrific calculator thingies to correct for the wind? But that feller plugged his target right good, one shot, just by chawin’ a little tobacky and reckoning about 5 inches to the right.
Robert Sneddon
@raven: My father was an Engineering Officer on a corvette escorting the Murmansk convoys. They were based on deep-sea trawler hull designs and so could handle choppy water quite well but when the wind went away their superstructures iced up badly and made them more likely to capsize. He always preferred warm weather for some reason.
raven
@Robert Sneddon: I was always partial to reading about the Pacific because of my dad. One day I heard Richard Snow talk about his book “A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II” and I picked it up. Great tale of that theater and what it was like. After my dad died I had a long conversation with one of his shipmates. When I listened to the recording I remembered that, even as he described 30+ landings and numerous sea battles, he said “thank god we weren’t in the North Atlantic. Hats off to those sailors.
SectionH
@PurpleGirl: And there’s a big divide between sellers who use the term Huckster (or Huxter) and the ones who insist on being called Dealers, because they think it’s more dignified. Which I’ve always though is a pretty odd attitude, but the less fannish types do seem to think so. Boskone used to print ribbons with Huckster and ones with Dealer on them so there was a choice. Iirc, the Huckster ones always ran out first.
raven
@Robert Sneddon:
SectionH
@raven: Those photos are great, but the ones above about a force 5 give me the serious creeps. I love messing about in boats, and I don’t get seasick (I’ve done transatlantic when I was one of about 3 people eating out of 100) but I’m also a wimp.
Ruckus
@raven:
I was a destroyer sailor, Vietnam era. Boat was stationed on the east coast so we did med and north Atlantic cruses. My underway refueling station was communications for forward refueling, which is out in the open. We refueled every 2 to 3 days when on station, even above the artic circle. North Atlantic during winter was, how shall I say, not so much fun. Wasn’t 20 ft seas but that was OK it was made up for by being fucking cold. Did cross the Atlantic once in December east to west through a 10 day storm that blew us about a few hundred miles off course. The waves tops were over my head while standing on the bridge when in the trough. Have pics of green water striking the bridge while I was up there. Of the 300 on board I’d say only about 10 of us didn’t get sick. I thought about it though. There were welded on pieces of the ship that were broken off in that storm.
Ruckus
@raven:
In my above post the wind scale for the storm I discussed was 11. Consistent winds above 50 knots, with gusts to almost 70 knots. And I know this because part of my equipment responsibility was the calibrated anemometer.
Robert Sneddon
@raven: The corvettes were the dogsbodies of the Fleet, lumbered with all the shitty jobs the flash Harrys of the destroyer squadrons could dump on them. My Dad told me of one time when his ship was heading north to rendezvous and it had been loaded up with supplies for the other ships, stuff like extra depth charges, 4.7″ ammunition and the like as deck cargo. He was working in the engineering spaces when the XO came down and told him there was some rough weather ahead and he should get a work party together to go up and secure the cargo. He went up on deck with some artificers, a bunch of wire ropes and a puller to discover the crates and the like were welded to the deck by several inches of ice and wouldn’t have moved if the ship had done a 360.
Ruckus
@raven:
Didn’t change between the wars. Not in the least.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: I liked that one a lot, too.
Marmot
Beauty is in the eye, I guess. That paragraph is just ponderous by my read. But I have a friend who’s into “the beauty of language” like you are, Tom, and I have a feeling he’d like it too.
For me, I’d like it best if the writer could plainly describe the Beaufort scale in 20 words, such that I could use the scale myself.
jenn
@Randy P: I love this comment. I love those moments when that piece from a book or those dry bits of data become *real*.