Savannah

Savannah Georgia

Savannah is a really neat little town. There are two interesting aspects to this town from a city planning point of view, and of course the place has a lot of history. One of the historical aspects to the town is that after Cump Sherman besieged and conquered it at the end of "Sherman's March to the Sea", he gave all the land south of Savannah, all the way to Florida, to the Africans. There is some nice land in there, and a lot of really pretty coastal waters. If I am not mistaken John Kennedy Jr got married at one of those islands, and the great lacrosse and football player Jim Brown was born and raised back there.

From a city planning point of view, the interesting thing is that the town was never levelled as part of the 1960's "Urban Renewal" program. All of the houses and businesses are in old buildings dating back to the 1840's. The layout of larger homes include slave quarters, and the town itself was laid out with a large number of parks - every two blocks there is a park. This let in fresh air and sunlight back in the day when everyone burned wood for heat and cooking.

The other interesting thing is that the freeways end here - as originally envisioned by Eisenhower all freeways ended at city limits. They weren't supposed to go through, and one result of the change was that lots of inner city neighborhoods were gutted when freeways were built. Since the government wanted to save money freeways were generally built on inner city land that was the cheapest - the black neighborhoods. So the real result was that up until the 1960s there were a lot of long-established family owned businesses in central cities, and the freeways put an end to that.

When I was in school the example that was used was Knoxville, but today you can go to a lot of cities and find a re-development district near a freeway, and you can bet it used to be a street full of black owned businesses. If you cross under the freeway you will likely find a neighborhood that has always been populated by blacks. So much for the legacy of Cump Sherman!

I have been talking to a lot of people around here about heat, and what it means and how PV=kRT is just the observable thing about heat. And it is not wholly accurate, or else people wouldn't try to invent "wind chill" or "real feal" numbers by including other variables such as humidity and so on.

But one interesting thing came up when I was reading a book by Tim Kantor. Kantor's father was on B-17's and one observation that everyone made on B-17s was that smells propagated faster at altitude. Now once I sat down and computed that if air molecules were vibrating at (as I recall) 4x10^9 vibrations per second, and if the molecules were (I forget) about 400 Angstroms, then the speed of propagation of larger molecules, such as scent bearing oils, would be about 20 meters per second, or 44 miles per hour.

People tell you its a sixth sense when the pretty girl looks up just as you start to gaze at her, but it is not. Its pheromones, and it takes about half a second for your skin temperature to rise, releasing pheromones at 45 MPH, so that she notices you looking almost right away. Now the thing to do to test this is to try staring through windows, or try staring at a cute girl who is 50 meters away. I think you will find I am right about the 20 m/s.

But it is faster at altitude, and I am open to anyones suggestions about why. Speaking of altitude, in Savannah they have a great Army Air Force Museum which includes a display that talks about the missions that Joe Kennedy Jr flew and was killed in. The heroism of this family is a big contrast with the President's family. The Bush family includes Prescott Bush, famous for writing a wholly fictitious account of his heroism for the hometown paper, and George Sr, who is famous for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, and George Jr who is famous for being absent.

Senator Kerry of course is famous for actually being in battle, and actually taking lead, and if you believe the papers, that makes him a coward. What's up is down. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?