Miami News-Digest

Q: Your first song, "Snappin Peas, and Rolling Pennies"... What's it about? Tell us a little bit about the lyrics. A: At its heart, it is about the feeling that "someone" can be both your destination and your home. I wrote it from my own emotions and personal journey, but the more I listened to it, the more I realized that it existed within a much older mythic tradition. Older than the Greeks... or Egyptians, or recorded history. This was transcribed on the human heart. Q: Wow... So...The verses move through scattered images: snapping peas, rolling pennies, dandelion wishes, awards, islands, storms, crowds, and finally the quiet intimacy of holding hands and seeing someone’s face.  They sound like memories from one life, or fragments collected across many different lives.  A: Sure...There is ordinary domestic happiness, childhood, innocence,  stuggle...besides fame, travel, hardship, and longing. Yet through it all, it seems to be pointing toward the...

Atmospheric Circulation without Presupposed Global Geometry Cyclostrophic Sign Degeneracy, Stationary-Planar Mechanisms, and an Assumption-Explicit Program of Model Comparison Abstract The familiar association between pressure systems and preferred directions of atmospheric circulation is commonly interpreted through equations written for a rotating spherical surface. This interpretation is strongly developed mathematically and has extensive predictive applications, but the interpretation should not be confused with the observations themselves. This paper asks what may be inferred from atmospheric circulation without presupposing either spherical geometry or surface rotation. Five principal findings emerge. First, cyclostrophic balance determines the magnitude of tangential velocity but not its clockwise or counterclockwise sign. This sign degeneracy applies to vortices in which an inward pressure-gradient force supplies centripetal acceleration; pure cyclostrophic b...