Thanks to Alison Croggon for changing my settings from Digest to Regular.
Thanks to Candice Ward for saying I am an ape in Jerusalem.
Thanks to Mark Weiss for telling us how he used to throw dark phlegm.
Thanks to Patrick Herron for the mention of his enclosed dog, Mufti, and
its love of surf. I can't believe Patrick knows Willard Bascomb's book, _
Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface_ too. It is superbly
written. It is a masterpiece of prose and "science." I have been in
possession of the 1964 first edition (by Anchor Books of all publishers)
since 1991. Here is a section chosen randomly: "The surf changes from
moment to moment, day to day, and beach to beach. The waves are influenced
by the bottom and the bottom is changed by the waves."
Patrick may be interested to know that before Willard Bascomb was director
of the Mohole Project for the National Academy of Science and the Executive
Director of the Maritime Research Advisory Committee of the National
Academy of Science, he was a surfboarder.
Here is another section: "Having broken into a mass of turbulent tumbling
foam, carried landward by its own momentum, the ex-wave will, if the water
deepens again as it does after passing over a bar, reorganize itself into a
new wave with systematic orbital motion. This reorganization is probably
the result of dumping the mass of water from the wave crest into the
relatively quiet water inside the breaker zone; the impulse generates a new
wave. The new wave is smaller than the original one, the difference in
heights representing the energy lost in breaking. The new wave, being
smaller, proceeds into water equal to 1.3 times its height; then, it too,
breaks."
It is one of the most comforting books I have read. Many charts, many
stories of brutal storms, crisply presented equations and many black &
white photographs of backwash marks, swash marks, sand domes and pinholes.
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