The Glovis Summit came to port on Friday, November 18, 2016. Two harbor tugboats assisted her as she docked at Pier 14. Ships like this come into San Juan harbor once or twice a week, but usually dock on the far side of the port.

The Summit is a vehicle carrier, a PTPC (pure truck, pure car), one of a fleet of 38 owned and operated by Hyundai Industries of Korea. Hyundai manufactures vehicles (KIAs, Hyundais) in Korea and elsewhere. The vehicle carriers transport the finished vehicles around the world. There are, for example, five or six vehicle carrier sailings per month between Korea and the US west coast ports of Tacoma and Portland. Glovis has routes to Europe, Africa, South America, the Red Sea, Australia, New Zealand – pretty much everywhere in the world.

The Summit came here directly from Ulsan, Korea, across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal, if information from an independent shipping website is to be believed. Once docked, the rear ramp was lowered and vehicles began to spit out of her. Dockworkers (I presume they are longshoremen) drove the cars and trucks down the ramp (the Summit is a RORO –  roll on, roll off vehicle carrier), though some kind of scanner set up by port officials, and then were directed to one of several areas of the pier. Vans collected the drivers and took them back up the ramp for more cars and trucks.

It is hard to know how many KIAs, Hyundais, and trucks came off the Summit. I would guess close to a thousand. Since the Summit can carry about 6,000 cars and trucks, there are still vehicles for the next ports.

I find it hard to believe that the Puerto Rican market can absorb that many new vehicles. And remember, a ship like the Summit arrives in port two or three times a week, presumably carrying other brands – Subarus. Lincolns, BMWs, Nissans. For example, an NYK carrier arrived this morning, Sunday, two days after the Summit came and left. The NYK ship (NYK stands for Nippon Yusen Kaisha; it is a Japanese logistics company) arrived either from Europe on its way to the US west coast and then to Japan, or from Veracruz, Mexico after stops at US east coast ports. If the NYK ship is on that route, it will call at Venezuelan, Colombian and Central American ports before returning to Veracruz. That city is home to several automobile manufacturing plants, including Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Land Rover, etc.

I would have to guess that San Juan transships some of the cars and trucks to smaller Caribbean islands, with less capable port facilities. I don’t know how that occurs. I do know that there will be a steady stream of trucks transporting the new arrivals, eight or ten at a time, to somewhere, auto dealers around the island, car rental companies, etc., for the next several days.

The Summit left after about 12 hours in port, headed for Galveston, if a shipping website is to be believed. I did discover that another logistics company, Ghanem Forwarding LLC out of Baltimore, rents space on the Summit. You can take your vehicle to Galveston, Jacksonville, Baltimore, Port Newark, or Boston, and have it loaded onto the ship as it heads for West Africa, So if you want to tour Ghana or Nigeria, or Benin or Senegal with your own car, this is how you can do it.

As the image above suggests, the Zika virus is of concern here in Puerto Rico, as it is in Brazil, other parts of South America, other Caribbean islands, and the US mainland. Zika’s rapid spread around the world represents an object lesson in globalization, and the complex interactions among environmental factors, disease vector(s), and humans. Still, by a fortunate series of events, the Zika virus is reasonably well understood, and two vaccines are now or soon will be in clinical trials.

The current Zika outbreak seems to have begun in the South Pacific. A woman and her husband returned to Australia after travel to a funeral in the Cook Islands. She went to the local hospital, outside of Melbourne, complaining of a fever, headaches, and an unusual rash. Australia has a particularly well developed system with regards to travel-related diseases. Nenad Acesic, a fellow in infectious diseases, took the call.

Acesic first considered the usual suspects, including dengue and chikungunya, both mosquito-borne viral diseases (and both present in the Caribbean now, as well). However, the patient’s symptoms were milder and spontaneously cleared within a day or two. Acesic’s forays into the medical literature caused him to suspect Zika. A blood test showed the presence of the virus.

Acesic learned that Zika had shown up in 2013 in a cluster of cases, perhaps as many as 32,000, in French Polynesia, again with typical symptoms similar to but milder than dengue and chikungunya. There were, however, some cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a debilitating but temporary paralysis, at the same time as the Zika outbreak, a bizarre premonition of more serious complications to come. What Acesic did not know was that the Tahiti soccer team had, in 2013, with many supporters, traveled to Brazil for the Confederate Cup tournament. It is possible, but cannot be proven, that Zika entered Brazil then.

Zika was first isolated in 1947 from a rhesus monkey in a forest in Uganda. Its name derives from that region. The monkey was infected as a part of a naturally occurring mosquito – monkey – mosquito cycle. At some point, the virus jumped to humans and became part of a mosquito – human – mosquito cycle. The map below, derived from serological data, shows the spread of Zika since the early 1950s.

Brazil is the epicenter of the Zika virus in the Western Hemisphere. In 2015, health workers noted an increase in Zika cases in the northeastern parts of Brazil. Again, the cases were mild and seemed self-clearing. Some weeks later, however, health workers noted an increase in children born with small heads, a tragic condition known as microcephaly. In the Brazilian state of Bahia, the background rate for microcephaly before Zika was about 0.02 percent. After Zika was introduced, the rate rose to between 0.88 and 13.2 percent of women who had been infected with Zika in the first trimester of their pregnancy. The incidence of patients with Guillain-Barre syndrome rose as well.

Mosquitos were implicated in the spread of the disease, and two invasive species, originally from Africa, Aedes aegypti and Aedes allopictus, seemed primarily responsible. Both species are sip-feeders, that is, they take a little bit of blood per bite from multiple victims. The mosquitos are unwitting carriers – they seem to derive no benefit from their hosting activities. After a sip of blood from an infected individual, the virus replicates and, over a 5 to 10 day span, moves to the salivary glands, where it can be injected into the next bite victim.

The ecological habits of A. aegypti and A. allopictus overlap such that one or the other species is around most of any day. Their habitat requirements are modest –they can breed in small pools of standing water such as bird feeders, gutters, flower vases, shower stalls, and toilet tanks, all close to or within houses. Females require blood meals for egg development; males do not feed on blood. (I am trying very hard here to not be anthropomorphic). They both have characteristic black and white bands on their legs.

The Zika virus is relatively simple, as viruses go. It is an RNA virus of the Flaviviridae family and the Flavivirus genus. It is related to the dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, and West Nile viruses. There are two Zika lineages: African and Asian. The Zika responsible for the current outbreak in the Americas is most closely related to the Asian, the same lineage found in the French Polynesian outbreak.

The Zika virus congregates in the semen of infected men; transmission by sexual contact has been observed during the current outbreak. And that the virus can move from mother to fetus, with devastating results, is of great concern. While cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome have increased during Zika outbreaks, there is as yet no clear understanding as to how this occurs.

So there is the Zika Troika – susceptible human hosts, mosquito vectors well adapted to human habitats, and an agent whose clinical manifestation is sometimes benign, sometimes horrific. The possibility of sexual transmission, not of the classic host – agent – vector troika, adds complexity to the picture.

Public health responses to a disease outbreak focus on one of more components of the troika. In the case of Zika, one could hope for a readily available vaccine to prevent infection by the virus. Or, mosquito control efforts might reduce the population of infected mosquitos. Perhaps a genetically-modified virus released in the environment can, as it spreads, act as an inoculating agent and confer disease resistance. Of course, public health education efforts can reduce the incidence of Zika spread by sexual contact. Individual actions – use of effective insect repellent, vigilance in clearing suspected breeding areas – can help.

There are good reasons to hope a Zika vaccine will soon be available. Researchers quickly noted that the Zika viral strains were genetically similar. They also noted that the disease is often self-clearing, and that a previous Zika infection confers resistance to continued exposure. Several virology laboratories around the world were able to shift their focus to Zika research, using skills and methods derived during research into HIV, among other diseases. As I write this, it appears two Zika vaccines are ready for clinical trials starting some time in 2017, a remarkable feat made possible by the relative simplicity of the Zika virus, and the ability of labs around the world to shift their skills and attention to this new disease.

Mosquito control efforts for species as wide-spread as A. aegypti and A. allopictus have proven difficult. Chemical insecticide sprays may be effective in the short term, but are often met with opposition from the public. A more promising method involves mosquitos genetically modified to carry a self-limiting gene. Modified male mosquitos (remember, male mosquitos neither bite nor carry disease) are released in large numbers. They mate with females; the offspring inherit a gene that causes them to die before reaching maturity. Early trials showed a greater than 90% target species reduction. The modified mosquitos have been approved for use in Brazil, and the US Food and Drug Administration has, in 2016, approved their use in the US.

The genetically-modified insect technique can presumably be applied to other mosquito species – perhaps the Anopheles that spreads malaria.

In any case, I’ll be using insect repellent, just as I have all along. I think I am a poster boy for DEET. And, I’m sure I’ll be an early adopter of a Zika vaccine when it comes out. Perhaps, if we’re really lucky, the vaccine will also confer immunity to dengue and chikungunya. If so, the vaccine might be know as the CDZ vaccine.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy life here as I always have. Happy hour – time for a beer.

Notes and Sources

I relied on two general articles. First, Siddhartha Mukherjee, “The Race for a Zika Vaccine’, New Yorker, August 22, 2016. See that article for more details as to the development of a Zika vaccine. Mukherjee wrote The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for General Non-Fiction. I am now reading his latest book The Gene: An Intimate History, which I am  enjoying immensely.

See also Robert L. Dorit: ”Zika Goes Viral”, American Scientist, September-October 2016. Dorit’s emphasizes public health considerations and writes of Zika as an example of an emerging epidemic.

See Wikipedia entries for Zika virus and Aedes aegyptii for general information.

The map showing Zika spread is from Wikimedia Commons. The complete attribution is: Faye O, Freire C, Iamarino A, Faye O, de Oliveira J, Diallo M, Zanotto P, Sall A (2014). “Molecular Evolution of Zika Virus during Its Emergence in the 20th Century“. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. DOI:10.1371/journal.pntd.0002636. PMID 24421913. PMC: 3888466.

The image of the Aedes aegyptii mosquito is in the public domain, having originated at the US Center for Disease Control.

The image of the Zika virus from Wikimedia Commons. The full attribution is: David Goodwill (RCSB Molecule of the Month 197, June 2016) [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. See it at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A197-Zika_Virus-ZikaVirus.tif

The modified male mosquitos, known as OX513A, were developed by Oxitec, an offshoot of Oxford University. This seems promising as A. aegypti is a vector of dengue and chikungunya as well as Zika – a three for one benefit. Google OX513A for more information.

January 22, 2016

I sing of prows and bows, bulbous and otherwise. It seems all  of the ships (cruise ships, bulk freighters, car carriers) entering harbor have bulbous bows.  I wonder why. I suspect the answer has to do with the Reynolds Number, and maybe also the Froude Number.

The Reynolds and Froude Numbers are examples of ratios that show up again and again in various calculations, so much so they are accorded names. Perhaps the best known ratio is the Mach Number, which is simply the ratio of the speed of an object divided by the speed of sound in the fluid the object is in. Since it is a speed divided by a speed, the units cancel out and the Mach Number is dimensionless, a number with no units, i.e., feet, seconds, etc. In fact, all of these ratios are dimensionless.

Consider United Airlines flight 144, a Boeing 757-200 flying from Chicago to San Francisco, at the normal cruising altitude of 36,000 ft. The air traffic controller in Denver wants to know the aircraft’s speed, to make sure the planes in that corridor remain properly spaced. She, in the terse style of air traffic controllers the world over, makes this transmission:

               United 144, Denver Center: State your Mach.

The United flight crew dutifully responds:

               Denver Center, United 144: Mach is zero point eight two.

That is all she needs to know. She asks the same question of the Delta Boeing 737-800 ahead of United 144, and the JetBlue Airbus A321 trailing, and she has the information she needs.

You might ask yourself, yes, but how fast is that United flight going? Recall the definition of the Mach Number:

We need to know the speed of sound in air at 36,000 feet. This is a bit tricky – the speed of sound in air is not constant; it varies with temperature and pressure. A little research finds an appropriate equation

where A is altitude in 1000 feet. United 144 is cruising at 36,000 feet, so A is 36, and we can solve for the speed of sound in air at 36,000 feet, which is 574 knots. Since United 144 told us it was traveling at Mach 0.82, we have

and so United 144 is traveling at 471 knots, or 535 miles per hour.

Let’s say you are driving 45 in an area with a 30 mile per hour speed limit. A cop pulls you over, and asks if you know how fast you were going. Here’s what you do: Express your speed as a Mach Number. Forty five miles per hour is 66 feet per second, and the speed of sound at sea level is about 1100 feet per second, so

and you can tell the cop you were going at Mach 0.006. This sounds a whole lot slower than 45 and just might save you a ticket, points, and a fine.

By the way, the Mach Number is named for the efforts of Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist who, in the 1870s and 1880s, studied the acoustics of supersonic projectiles, among other things.

The Reynolds Number is like the Mach Number in that it is a dimensionless ratio of two things, but the things are a little more difficult to envision. The Reynolds Number is defined as

where the inertial forces are the forces causing an object to move through a fluid, and the viscous forces are the drag and friction forces on the object generated by the interaction of the object with the fluid. Another way to state the Reynolds Number is

where the characteristic length and velocity are dictated by the problem being studied.

Let’s assume you’re a passenger on United 144, cruising at 36,000 feet, and you decide to open the emergency exit and jump out. You tuck yourself into a ball and begin your descent. At first, under the influence of gravity, you accelerate, but as you go faster, the drag forces increase. The drag forces soon equal the gravitational (inertial) forces, and you reach a constant velocity of about 140 miles per hour. In this case, the characteristic length would be the diameter of the ball you’ve formed, about three feet, and the characteristic velocity would be what is called the terminal settling velocity, about 140 miles per hour. Your Reynolds Number would be

The viscosity of the atmosphere at -40 C is about 0.00011 square feet per second, so, after converting miles per hour to feet per second, you calculate

You could calculate your Mach Number as well. By use of an earlier equation, we can calculate the speed of sound in air at, say, 10,000 feet. which comes out to about 640 knots, or about 725 miles per hour.

Your Mach Number is therefore

An engineer, looking at the Reynolds Number, would say you were experiencing fully developed turbulent flow. Looking at the Mach Number, she would say you were going pretty damn fast. You’d probably be thinking other things.

I wonder what Francoise de Moriere was thinking on the evening of October 19, 1962. Francoise was a stewardess, as they were called then, on an Allegheny Airlines Convair 440, and she fell to her death when an emergency door inexplicably opened as the plane was at 1,500 feet on final approach to Bradley Airport, near Hartford, Connecticut. James Dickey wondered the same thing. He later wrote, of his poem Falling:

The original idea came out of a newspaper item I once read to the effect that an Allegheny Airlines stewardess had fallen out of an airplane and  was found later on, dead. But when you have a little hint like this that entertains your imagination, you take off with it and make your own thing out of it.

Dickey changed the location to Kansas; the stewardess fell towards the rich black earth of the Corn Belt. The poem begins with the stewardess being sucked out of the plane.

                                                                           As though she blew
The door down with a silent blast from her lungs    frozen    she is black
Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taken by the throat

She thinks of herself in several ways as she falls – an owl looking for chickens, a goddess, a diver. She imagines herself diving into a pond:

                                                                                                if she fell
Into water she might live    like a diver.    Cleaving.…perfect    plunge
Into another    heavy silver     unbreathable   slowing    saving
Element: there is water    there is time to perfect all the fine
Points of diving    feet together    toes pointed     hands shaped right
To insert her into water like a needle     to come out healthily dripping
And be handed a Coca-Cola

Knowing she will be considered special, she undresses as she falls.

 

                                                                                              there is no
Way to back off    from her chosen ground     but she sheds the jacket
With its silver sad impotent wings    sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece
Of her skirt    the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse    the intimate
Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost
Of a virgin    sheds the long windsocks of her stockings     absurd
Brassiere    then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming
Off her: no longer monobuttocked    she feels the girdle flutter     shake
In her hand    and float     upward     her clothes rising off her ascending
Into cloud    and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe
Like a dumb bird    and now will drop in    soon   now will drop
In like this

the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas

Joyce Carol Oates called Falling “an astonishing poetic feat.” I’ve always been intrigued by her, not least because many of her books are set in upstate New York. I recently read and enjoyed Carthage.  Perhaps she will be the topic of one of these letters.

James Dickey either knew nothing of Reynolds and Mach Numbers, or chose not to include them in Falling. I’m glad – I like it the way it is. In fact, he said of the poem

I felt justified in writing “Falling” the way I did. I wouldn’t want to go back and try to write it again. I suppose there are faults in it which people will be pointing out to me for years, but I did it the way I wanted to do it, and I’ll stand by that.

The Reynolds Number did not appear in Falling, but it does show up in other strange places. Here’s one you may not have thought of. In 1997, NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The Cassini attained orbit around Saturn in 2004, and on Christmas Day, on a close approach to Titan, the Huygens probe separated, and, after a bit of maneuvering, parachuted through Titan’s atmosphere and landed on her surface, sending back data and images as it fell and for about 90 minutes after landing. The images caused great excitement.

The surface conditions on Titan are such that the hydrocarbons – methane (CH₄), ethane (C₂H₆), and maybe propane (C₃H₈) can exist as solid, liquid and vapor, just like water on Earth. There might therefore be a hydrocarbon cycle on Titan, with hydrocarbon clouds and rain, rivers and lakes. In fact, radar returns from Cassini showed large flat areas on Titan thought to be hydrocarbon lakes. Can we make some reasonable guesses about flows of liquid hydrocarbons in the channels in the images?

On Earth, the velocity of water flowing in a river channel is reasonably well understood, and depends on three things:

This makes sense, if you think about it. The channel slope adds gravitational energy to the flow, forcing the water downstream, and the friction forces act to retard the flow. The result is usually a nearly constant flow velocity in a given channel geometry. In this sense, the fluid flow velocity problem is similar to jumping out of an airplane and reaching your terminal settling velocity – in both cases, the friction (drag) forces equal the gravitational (inertial) forces.

Mission scientists know about the optics on the Huygens probe, and so with a little bit of work one can estimate the width of a typical section of channel to be about 30 meters, or close to 100 feet. In the absence of other information, assume the channel is rectangular, with vertical sides. We don’t have any direct data for channel slope, but the general topography is pretty rugged, so try slopes of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 %.

Acceleration due to gravity on Titan is 1.35  meters per second squared, or about 14% that of Earth. The surface temperature is about -180 C; atmospheric pressure (like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is mostly nitrogen) about 145 kilopascals, as compared to about 100 kilopascals on Earth.

We can now use an equation to calculate flow velocity. Based on knowledge of water flow on Earth, there are several equations to choose from. We used this one:

where g is Titan’s gravity, f a friction factor, D a number dependent on channel geometry, and sinS is the sine of the slope, i.e. 0.01, 0.02. We know the value of g and have made reasonable assumptions about channel geometry (rectangular) and slope. The only thing left is f.

We used this rather imposing looking equation to solve for the friction factor f:

where k_s is based on the size of the pebbles, stones, rocks in the channel, D is the same as the equation above, and Re is our old friend the Reynolds Number.

The image to the left is from Titan’s surface, taken just after the Huygens lander touched down. We used this image to estimate the size of the rocks in view and hence k_s. For the Reynolds Number, we used the viscosity of liquid methane at -180 C, a characteristic length based on the assumed channel geometry, and an assumed flow velocity V.

 

We solve for the final flow velocity by an iterative process. It turns out a reasonable estimate for the velocity of liquid methane flowing through a channel on the surface of Titan is about 0.8 meters per second, or about 2.5 feet per second. By the way, this is a typical value for the velocity of water in a stream on Earth.

I think this similarity of velocities should be celebrated, and hereby propose the following ditty:

On Earth and TItan
Fluids flow, aliken.

OK, so I’m not James Dickey, but at least my ditty has some truth to it unlike, for example

A pints a pound
The world around.

which is false for both US (1.04 lbs) and Imperial (1.25 lbs) pints, at least when the pints are filled with beer.

By the way, the Cassini is still orbiting around Saturn, and occasionally gets close enough to Titan to gather more information. Here is a 2006 false color image derived from the Cassini’s radar system. The dark regions are areas of low radar backscatter, interpreted as  hydrocarbon lakes.

Perhaps, even as you’re reading this, the Sirens of Titan are on an excursion, in rowboats on Ligea Mare, with brightly colored parasols as protection from hydrocarbon droplets falling from the Titian sky. Perhaps their rowboats have bulbous bows. If so, the Sirens surely used the idea of the Reynolds Number in designing them. Of course, the Sirens would not have known that, on Earth, the number is named for Osborne Reynolds, an English mechanical engineer. Maybe the Sirens named the ratio after one of their eminent engineers. Maybe on Titan it is known as the Potrezebie Number.

I don’t know how the Sirens designed their bulbous bows. Here on Earth, it is pretty tricky, and there is not yet, in so far as I can discern, a simple design method. Rather, ship designers resort to scale models, and test the models in tanks.

The trick here is to run the model so that the Reynolds Number, and hence flow regime the model experiences, is the same as the full scale ship will experience. Different model configurations are tested, and the one that uses the least energy to maintain a constant speed is deemed the most efficient.

Bulbous bows work by reducing drag, and the results are quite remarkable, reducing fuel usage by 12 – 15 % in large vessels with them as compared to similar sized vessels without them. They work best when the ship maintains a constant speed, and for long distances. That’s why they are on cruise ships, bulk freighters, and tankers, but not, most likely, rowboats plying Titan’s hydrocarbon waterways.

You may be wondering why and how I developed an interest in bulbous bows. When I was 10 or 11 I came across a copy of Playboy that featured photos of the very buxom British model June Wilkinson. (Google her name – I bet you’ll see what I mean). One particularly memorable photo had her leaning back, with a full glass of champagne balanced on each of her very large and otherwise unadorned breasts. The caption for that, or perhaps another, photo went something like: ‘June, proud of her prow, . . .’

As you can surmise, this made quite an impression on me. I’ve been interested in prows and bows, bulbous and otherwise, ever since.

 

Notes, sources, credits:

The full text of Falling can be found at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/.

The quotes from James Dickey and Joyce Carol Oates are from http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/dickey/falling.htm

The two Titan images are copyright  ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. I downloaded them from http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/ which has many more  images from Huygens and other space probes.

The Cassini radar image is copyright NASA/JPL/USGS. See http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/  for more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission.

I assigned the problem of methane flow on Titan to five students in my senior course in Open Channel Hydraulics. The five – Mabel Gutliph, Matt Huchzermeier, Tyler Kreider, Jeff Newsome, Trevor Schlossnagle – attacked the problem with skill and enthusiasm. I shared their results with researchers at MIT, who were as impressed with their work as I was.

January 20, 2016

I’ve been thinking about snarks lately, and snarkiness. If you think that’s because I’m sometimes snarky, disabuse yourself of that notion. Right now!

A snark is a fictional animal. Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) mentioned, but chose not to describe, the creature in his nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits), written from 1874 to 1876. The poem borrows its setting, some creatures, and a distinctive vocabulary from his earlier poem Jabberwocky, published in 1871 as a part of his children’s novel Through the Looking Glass.

Some linguistic authorities suggest that snark is derived from snide and remark, and is thus an example of a portmanteau word. Lewis Carroll was the first to describe words this way. In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice that some of the strange words in Jabberwocky are two meanings packed into one word, like the two halves of a portmanteau, a type of Victorian suitcase. Slithy, for example, is lithe and slimy, and mimsy is flimsy and miserable.

Carroll is more explicit about portmanteau words in his introduction to The Hunting of the Snark, where he writes “Humpty Dumpty’s theory, of two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau, seems to me the right explanation for all. For instance, take the two words “fuming” and “furious.” Make up your mind that you will say both words, but leave it unsettled which you will say first … if you have the rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say “frumious.”

There are current examples of portmanteau words – motel from motor and hotel; smog from smoke and fog. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin seems to be a modern master of the form. She created refudiate, from refute and repudiate. I think that was probably an error – I do not give her the benefit of the same linguistic capabilities as Lewis Carroll. She once, in a tweet, used the phrase ‘cackle of rads’; frumious minds debated what she meant. Perhaps I’m being snarky.

The Snark lived on an island along with the Jubjub and the Bandersnatch, the island where the Jabberwock was slain. A band of ten Englishmen, all of whose names begin with B, sail off for the hunt. Once on the island, they split into two groups. Their strategy was creative:

             They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

            They pursued it with forks and hope;

            They threatened its life with a railway-share;

            They charmed it with smiles and soap.

In the end, the Baker called out that he found the Snark, but he disappeared before the others arrived, thus proving the Snark was really a Boojum.

The poem received mixed reviews. A reviewer in Vanity Fair said the poem was ‘not worthy of the name of nonsense’, which seems nonsensical to me. I mean, if nonsense is not nonsense, then what is it? Thoughts like this keep me awake at night. A second reviewer wondered “if he has merely been inspired to reduce to idiotcy as many readers and more especially reviewers, as possible.” This has now become my second all-time favorite remark from a critic.

The United States Air Force deployed a missile during the Cold War they named the Snark. I probably built a model of it as a kid.

So why this interest in the Snark? The fiscal crisis here as led to some interesting exchanges. About two weeks ago, an external panel asked the government about the status of an audit, which was late. The government replied that the audit was in the hands of the auditors, who were responsible for the tardiness. The panel said they needed the audit to assess the reality of the fiscal crisis. The government asked, rather snarkily I thought, why, since the previous audit did not act to prevent them from purchasing Puerto Rican bonds of various types.

By the way, the first image (featured image, in blog parlance) is from the first edition of The Hunting of the Snark. It is the map used by the ten British sailors to find the island where the Snark lived. I’ve been thinking of sending a copy to Governor Garcia Padilla to help him navigate the fiscal crisis here. But I probably won’t – he might think my gesture too snarky.

 

Notes: For more information, see Wikipedia entries on portmanteau words, The Hunting of the Snark, and Lewis Carroll.

My favorite quote from a critic? “If vacuity had weight, this could kill an oxen.” Look it up.

January 18, 2016

The 2016 Festas de la Calle San Sebastian ended yesterday. This is a huge event. All of San Juan is shut down to traffic; hundreds of thousands of people attend. It is four days of drink, food, music, impromptu parades, and dancing in the streets.

The festival has nothing to do with the medieval Saint Sebastian, so far as I can tell. Rather, it started about 45 years ago as a small festival on Calle San Sebastian, at that time the home of several artists and art galleries. It has evolved to a city wide festival, with six soundstages throughout the city hosting live music acts.

Preparations began several days in advance. Temporary traffic barriers were placed to create bus lanes to carry revelers to and from the city. Beer deliveries reached a fever pitch. Food stalls were erected and readied.

Once the festival began, busses ran in convoys to and from Sagrado Corazon (last stop on the urban train line) to Old San Juan, with motorcycle escort, along dedicated bus routes.

Impromptu parades spring up, seemingly at random. They always have some kind of music, and sometimes effigies of people not known to me.

A representation of an airplane came by, first the cockpit, then rows of passengers carrying their luggage, and then the wings and tail assembly. I have no idea what this was all about.

Some of the parade people were on stilts. This must have been tricky – they were in large crowds, on uneven pavement. And they were dancing to the music.

The Medalla parade group had the best of all worlds – people on stilts, strange effigies, and thought of cold beer.

Of course, no festival would be complete without plenty of street food – pizza, corn dogs, bacalliato, arepas, empanadillas. All good stuff.

I imagine some of the marchers are thinking about next years festival. I sure am.

 

 

 

 

January 17, 2016

            The Puerto Rican government officially defaulted on some municipal bond obligations due on January 4, 2016. This is not surprising – the idea of default had been mentioned several times and in particular every time a bond payment became due. The Governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, again asked the US Congress to allow Puerto Rico the authority to restructure its debt.

The required payment for all bond obligations was $902 million dollars, and the government paid all but $37.3 million. Bond repayments are subject to a number of constraints – some obligations have higher priorities than others. For example, I believe general obligation bonds are repaid before other types of bond obligations. Governor Garcia Padilla stated the Puerto Rican government would repay the following bond obligations on January 4:

• $328 million of general obligation, of which $163 million comes from transfer from other sources, a process known, rather dramatically, as ‘clawback’,
• $9.9 million owed by the Government Development Bank,
• $15.4 million owed by the Sales and Use Tax Financing Corporation (COFINA) bonds,
• $8.7 million owed by the University of Puerto Rico,
• $9.5 million owed by the Puerto Rico Convention Center District Authority,
• $101 million in bonds from the Highways and Transportation Authority,
• $13.9 million in bonds owed by the Retirement System Administration, and
• $10.1 million owed by the Puerto Rico Industrial Corporation.

Actually, the situation is worse than this repayment suggests. Some payments (e.g., Retirement System) came from monies in their trust fund. Since those funds have been depleted and not replenished, the Retirement System is technically in default, although not yet to its bond holders. All told, the total default was about $174 million.

It seems nothing is easy in Puerto Rican politics. You would think the government would get some credit for producing such a modest default to bondholders, $37.3 million in default versus $902 million owed. Financial analyst Daniel Hanson doesn’t think so. Hanson, who works for Height Securities, in Washington, D.C., said “When a debtor repeatedly claims they have no cash but then pay more than $900 million in debt service, the credibility of the debtor must be called into question. The governor repeatedly blamed the U.S. Congress for PR’s plight during his remarks, but when Congress returns from its recess, the lack of credibility and commitment to reform within the PR government is likely to push Congress closer to imposing a federal control board over the territory.”

I’m not sure of the role of Height Securities in all this. Height Securities apparently specializes in political intelligence as it relates to investments. It is under SEC investigation for allegations of insider trading. It allegedly released information to selected clients, before the official government announcement, about an impending decision regarding health insurance, thus allowing recipients to benefit by investing in the health insurance companies before their stock prices went up.

The debt issue is complex. Bonds have been issued by 17 different issuers; there are thousands of creditors (Conflict of interest statement: I do not think I own any of these bonds. Just in case you were curious). When bonds are issued and sold, there are rules for repayment. There are undoubtedly embedded inter-creditor conflicts throughout the bond debt structure. This is one, perhaps the principal, reason why the Puerto Rican government is seeking from Congress the authority to restructure its debt burden.

Entities that buy large amounts of bonds can purchase insurance. In the event of default, the insurance companies pay the bond holders. As you might suspect, these insurance companies have not been silent. In particular, the Ambac Insurance Corporation, in conjunction with the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, wrote a letter to Governor Padilla questioning the legality of the ‘clawback’. Last month, Governor Garcia Padilla, in an executive order,directed the Secretary of the Treasury of the Commonwealth to ‘clawback’ revenues pledged to the Puerto Rica Infrastructure Financing Authority (AFI in Spanish).

The two insurance companies have a considerable stake in this – they insure $863 million in bonds issued by AFI. They claim that the AFI enabling act requires the transfer of the Rum Taxes, the most important of the excise taxes here, to AFI before any other entity. That these Rum Taxes were ‘clawed back’, diverted for other uses by the government, is the basis of their claim.

It is, as I have noted before, an interesting time here. But I think I see a way I can help – I’ll drink more rum. Mojitos, here I come!

 

Sources: This has been distilled (another rum reference) from several articles in the San Juan Star. an English-language daily newspaper here.

January 10, 2016

The holiday season has ended for this year. Municipal workers are taking the decorations down and getting ready for the San Sebastian Festival, which starts this Thursday. I’ll have more to day about SanSe16, as it is called, in a later post.

The unofficial start of the holiday season is the annual parade of decorated yachts, proceeding from the yacht club at the Miramar marina to the piers in Old San Juan and back. Thousands of people come and line the shore to see the yachts. I went in to Old San Juan last year for the event but could not make my way through the crowds to get near the piers. This year, I decided to stay on our balcony and watch the event from there.

The yachts started parading down the channel towards Old San Juan just before sunset. They were guided by San Juan police boats and US Coast Guard vessels.

Once by the piers, the yachts moved more or less in line around the piers. We’re a little less than two miles from there so my pictures don’t do justice to the parade.

The yachts made their way back down the channel towards the marina. By this time it was dark, and the extent of the decorations became apparent.

A few days later, I walked into Condado. The small park there had gotten the Christmas treatment, with the trees covered with lights and a Christmas tree as well.

Some Puerto Ricans had decorated their vehicles and drove through Condado. I’m told the guy on the motorcycle is retired. He decorates his bike for the holidays. By the way, his passenger is a mannequin.

The Plaza d’Armes is in the middle of Old San Juan. This is where the men of San Juan would muster and draw their arms for the defense of the city. (Apparently, the Spanish did not have open carry laws). For the holidays, the fountain is turned off and covered with plywood, thus creating a stand for a Christmas tree. The fountain’s four statues, illustrating the human aging process, are eerie guardians of the Christmas tree, The other trees are all covered with lights as well.

Plaza Colon (Columbus, in English) also gets lights and a tree. Plaza Colon is at the foot of Calle Fortalezza and close to Castillo San Cristobal, one of the two historic forts in Old San Juan.

Puerto Ricans celebrate Three Kings Day. The night before, children fill bowls with hay for the King’s camels, and place them under their bed. They wake up to find the hay gone and gifts left by the Kings.

As I mentioned, the decorations are coming down now. Old San Juan is preparing for SanSe16. More on that later.

 

 

 

 

January 7, 2016

Puerto Rico’s fiscal difficulties, well reported in the press, have once again called into question the relationship between the island and mainland United States. I say once again because the relationship has evolved over time in complex and perhaps unanticipated ways.

The central question has always been how to afford Puerto Rico (and, for that matter, the other US territories) political autonomy while still maintaining a close relationship with the US. Luis Munoz Rivera and other Puerto Rican statesmen sought autonomy from Spain in the decade just before the Spanish-American War, and then found themselves in the same discussions with the United States. The Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 allowed Puerto Ricans to choose US citizenship (the vast majority did), and established a local government subject to US oversight.

The authority for US oversight emanates from the Property Clause (also called the Territorial Clause) of Article 4 of the US Constitution, which reads:

The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to Prejudice any Claims of the United States, or of any particular State.

Several Supreme Court cases in the early twentieth century, collectively called the Insular Cases, determined the role of Congress in governing the so-called insular areas, i.e., the island territories obtained as a result of the Spanish-American War. The Court established that the territories belonged to, but were not part of, the US, and therefore Congress could determine which parts of the Constitution applied to the territories. Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as unincorporated territories, were therefore granted a status different than the incorporated Alaska and Hawaii, for which the Constitution fully applied.

In 1922, the Supreme Court, in Balzac v. Porto Rico (sic), clarified the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories. The Puerto Rican jurist Juan R. Torruella, appointed to the First District court by Ronald Reagan, studied the Insular Cases and, in his book The Supreme Court and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (University of Puerto Rico: 1988), described the distinction as follows: “an unincorporated territory is a territory as to which, when acquired by the United States, no clear intention was expressed that it would eventually be incorporated into the Union as a State”. Torruella showed his status as a moderate jurist in 2012, when he helped declare the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. (I wonder what Reagan would have thought of that).

The Insular Cases (seven or nine, depending on who does the counting) were all decided in 1901; six of them related directly to Puerto Rico. They echo to this day in that recent decisions affirm their logic. For example, in Harris v. Rosario (1980), the court held that providing less aid to Puerto Rican families with dependent children (as compared to mainland families) was not in violation of the Equal Protection Clause, since, in US territories, Congress can in effect discriminate against its territorial citizens. Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote a strong dissent, noting that the Insular Cases were questionable and reminding the Court that Puerto Ricans are US citizens.

In fact, Jose Trias Monge, a Chief Justice of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court from 1974 to 1985, wrote that the Insular Cases were based on ideas that could only be considered bizarre by current standards. These include:

• Colonialism and democracy are “fully compatible,” and

• There is “nothing wrong when a democracy such as the United States engages in the business of governing other” subjects that have not participated in their democratic election process.

The comments of Torruella and Trias Monge, and the Balzac case, came after an important change in status between the US and Puerto Rico, a change that reverberated into the United Nations and has implications to the current fiscal crisis. The change was caused in part by the actions of the sometimes violent Nationalist Partisans.

The Nationalists sought complete independence from the US. They sometimes resorted to violence to achieve their political ends In April 1932, Nationalist partisans marched to the Capitol to protest the adoption of the current Puerto Rican flag. In 1935, a confrontation between Nationalist supporters and police at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico left five dead, including one police officer, in what became known as the Rio Piedras massacre. In 1936, Colonel Elisha Francis Riggs, the highest police officer on the island, was assassinated in retaliation for the massacre. The perpetrators, Nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elias Beauchamp were subsequently arrested and summarily executed at the San Juan police station. In Ponce, in 1937, a march by Nationalists celebrating Emancipation turned violent and 17 unarmed citizens died, as well as two territorial policemen. This event lives on as the Ponce Massacre.

The Nationalists, in spite of their activist policies, did not gain meaningful political power. The more practically minded Luis Munoz Marin founded the Popular Democratic Party (PPD) in 1940, with social and economic reforms as their primary agenda and independence a longer term goal. Six years later, dissidents who saw the PPD moving away from the goal of independence, founded the Puerto Rican Independence Party.

The Truman administration found itself in a difficult position. Puerto Rico was in effect a colony, and Truman, both publicly and privately, opposed colonialism. (One deviation: Truman did assist the French in their efforts to regain control over their former colonies in Indochina. The effects of that decision led directly to my year in Viet-Nam, 1968 69. But that’s another story).

The PPDs move away from independence was noted, and Congress responded, in June 1950, with PL 81-600, which allowed Puerto Rico to draft its own constitution, subject to two stipulations: the constitution had to create a republican government and had to include a bill of rights. A Constitutional Assembly was formed, and worked, starting in September, 1951 and into 1952 to draft the Puerto Rican constitution. The Puerto Rican electorate overwhelmingly ratified the new constitution on March 3, 1952, and Congress approved it, subject to some changes in wording in two sections, via PL 82-447, on July 3, 1952. Truman said, at the signing ceremony: “H.J. Res. 430 is the culmination of a consistent policy of the United States to confer an ever-increasing measure of local self-government upon the people of Puerto Rico. It provides additional evidence of this Nation’s adherence to the principle of self-determination and to the ideals of freedom and democracy.”

The Constitutional Assembly was reconvened and agreed to the wording changes. The Constitution defined the structure of the government (bicameral, with an Assembly and a Senate), courts, elections, powers and responsibilities, and other features. Governor Munoz Marin inaugurated the new constitution of July 25, 1952, and Puerto Rico officially became a Commonwealth (Estade Libre Asociado). Puerto Rico thus joined Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Virginia, as well as Dominica, the Bahamas, and Australia, as political entities with that name. And, by the way, July 25 became a Puerto Rican holiday.

The Nationalists did not accept the idea of a constitution, and, in 1950, began a series of protests that became known as the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Revolts of the 1950s. In October 30, 1950, several uprisings occurred, notably at Utuado, Jayuya, and San Juan. Truman described these as “incidents between Puerto Ricans.”

Grisello Torresola and Oscar Collazo, Nationalists living in New York City, rejected Truman’s characterization of the October 30 uprisings, and planned to assassinate Truman to bring attention to their cause. Truman, living at the Blair House while the White House was undergoing renovations, survived the attack, but Torresola and one police officer died. Collazo was convicted in federal court; Truman commuted his death sentence to life, and President Carter released him for time served, in 1979. Collazo returned to Puerto Rico and died there, in 1994.

Nationalists struck again in Washington, on March 1, 1954, when four Nationalists ( Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez) unfurled a Puerto Rican flag in a visitors gallery in the US Capitol and fired 30 rounds into members gathered on the floor of the House of Representatives, where they were debating an immigration bill. Five members were wounded; all survived. The four were captured, convicted, and sentenced to long sentences. Over the objections of the Puerto Rican governor, President Carter pardoned all four in 1978-79 and they returned to Puerto Rico. Figueroa Cordero died in 1979, of cancer; Flores Rodríguez in 1994, of a brain tumor. Lebrón and Cancel Miranda remained active in the liberation movement. Lebrón died in 2010, at age 90, after leading protests against the US Navy’s presence in Vieques. Cancel Miranda was awarded a medal from the Cuban government in recognition of his anti-colonial efforts.

The new constitution and status as a Commonwealth allowed the US to argue that Puerto Rico was no longer a colony, since it had the ability to govern its own internal affairs. The United Nations General Assembly, during its 8^th session, in 1953, passed Resolution 748 (VIII) which removed Puerto Rico’s classification as a non-self-governing territory as defined under Article 73(e) of the UN Charter. The vote, even with considerable US pressure, was anything but overwhelming, with 20 votes for, 16 against, and 20 abstentions.

Puerto Rico’s political status is still being debated. In 1960, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 1541 (XV) which lists the factors for determining when a colony achieved a full measure of self-government. However, the General Assembly did not apply the criteria to Puerto Rico. Cuba, starting in 1971, introduced annual resolutions to the UN’s Decolonization Committee asking for a reconsideration of the Puerto Rico case. The US consistently blocked General Assembly action, arguing that Resolution 748 removed Puerto Rico from the jurisdiction of the Decolonization Committee, and that the matter should be decided between Puerto Rico and the US.

The relationship between the US and Puerto Rico comes down to three alternatives: independence, statehood, and a continuation of territorial status, perhaps with mutually-agreed changes. Various plebiscites and referenda have never shown more than 4-5% of those voting in favor of independence. A referendum in the most recent election, November 6, 2012, found 54% of respondents rejected the current status under the Territorial Clause; a second question showed 61% of respondents favored statehood as the preferred alternative. There were, however, procedural issues with the wording of the questions, and so the results are ambiguous. As for the second question, 61% of those who voted on the question voted for statehood, but, for some reason, many voters did not address the question, and therefore the question did not get a majority of the total vote.

The ambiguities in the 2012 referendum notwithstanding, Pedro Pierluisi, the Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner to Congress, filed HR 727, the Puerto Rico Statehood Admission Process Act. If adopted, Puerto Rico would become the fifty-first state on January 1, 2021, if a majority of the electorate in Puerto Rico votes in favor of admission via a federally-sponsored vote. Congress has not yet taken any action of HR 727. By the way, if Puerto Rico ever does become a state, it will be the twenty-ninth or thirtieth most populous state, with a population similar to Connecticut, and be represented by 2 Senators and 4 or 5 Congressmen.

Puerto Rico thus remains in a political limbo, where the US Congress can determine whether or not, for example, the Puerto Rican government can declare bankruptcy so as to restructure debt, an opportunity afforded to US states and cities which, of course, are not subject to the Territorial Clause. Congress ducked the issue at the end of the session last December, much to Governor Padilla’s dismay, and in spite of his testimony before Congress.

This is an interesting time here – stay tuned.

 

Sources: I pulled together information from several Wikipedia entries for this piece. For more information, see Wikipedia entries on the Puerto Rican Constitution, Nationalism, general history, and political history, and several links in each of those entries.

The first image is the frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’ The Leviathan. It has no particular relevance to this post other than that Hobbes’ treatise is an early discussion of social contract theory, and that Hobbes discussed the idea of commonwealth as an ideal for a political entity.

Citation for frontispiece: “Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes” by Unknown – http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/world/world-object.htmlhttp://www.securityfocus.com/images/columnists/leviathan-large.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leviathan_by_Thomas_Hobbes.jpg#/media/File:Leviathan_by_Thomas_Hobbes.jpg