Just water for me

and a bit of ice on top

I have found there is no shortage of topics to write about. This is very different than the concern I had when I started. The topic today is so basic yet I hope entertaining for you. I hope you agree as we talk about water.

This is the Daily Dozen app. Friendly reminders to remain on the straight-and-narrow. Flaxseeds every day is a stretch unless you are a true believer. No advocacy here. Great nutrition and health information via nutritionfacts.org

The Inspiration

My phone provides occasional reminders of the applications I use infrequently. When I get such messages, I do a quick pass-through and remove the ones I no longer use. I have an application called “The Daily Dozen” which was something I used every day when I was adapting to my change to a plant-based diet. I only use it rarely now and today reminded me to perhaps use it for a while again to see how I am doing. My “diet” is not restrictive of calories but rather guides to a list of things I should eat every day to be healthy and make consistent choices. If I manage to eat everything on the list I am so full and don’t really want much of anything else. If any of you download the application, drop me an email and tell me what you think. No advertisements, useful and not preachy.

Tonight’s post is a little long. Skip the pictures and caption and the tangent and it will be within my 5-7 minute mandate. Sometimes I get carried away.

The Setup

Some of the things on my “daily dozen” are important enough that I need to get more than one serving. The most important thing we all need the most and the single most important factor for flourishing life on this planet is water. Today is going to be a light-hearted look at good old water. I believe that everything if you look into it, is interesting if only you bring the right attitude and water is no exception.

The Details

Tonight, it will be stories about water. I will try to put them in an order that at least some of you read on before closing the email. I guess this is an experiment.

Water Story #1

I have spent about thirty years of my life in Minnesota. I am going to start with something very important to all of us, but especially us Minnesotans. If not for this “special thing” life would have been very unlikely to have developed here, on my favorite blue marble (credit to Carl Sagan).

As I write tonight I am following the recommendation of “The Daily Dozen” and enjoying a glass of ice water. In a recent post titled “Just Carbon Baby” I remarked that sometimes we fail to observe the obvious. In that post, I commented that many of us learn that pencils and diamonds are both made of pure carbon yet we don’t think too much about why one is so soft and the other is so hard. Water is the same. As I look over at my glass I notice that the ice in my glass is floating instead of sinking.

When things in our world are gases they EXPAND (become less dense) and take up a lot of space. When we press them together sufficiently (pressure) or cool them they become liquids and they take up less room (become denser). Finally, if we really compress them (or cool them more), they can become solid and they take up even less room (become even denser). Heavier things sink in lighter things.

Well, we have a problem because my ice is CERTAINLY floating in my glass and not sinking. Water is peculiar and rare. It has a VERY UNUSUAL structure in which frozen water (ice) is slightly LESS DENSE than cold liquid water. Of all of the compounds in the world, only a small number do what water does. So why does this matter? In a cold Minnesota winter, a lake in the northern portion of the state might freeze five feet thick. If that ice were to sink instead of float, even a deep lake might freeze solid to the bottom and EVERYTHING WOULD DIE. The ice is an insulator and allows life to continue below the ice and our state full of outdoor lovers gets to fish another season! The long and short of all this is without this special quality of water, it would be difficult for an ice age to end and there likely would never have been an “us”!

Water Story #2

Lots of things dissolve in water. This means water can take other things along for the ride. We all take it for granted or perhaps don’t think about it but:

• The sunshine heats us up and water of all forms is evaporated

• The evaporated water condenses into clouds

• The clouds send it back down as precipitation

This simple story is how those things that “were along for the ride” on a water molecule end up back on the earth where they started and maybe this time it lands in a spot where something can grow. That is just simple and cool and it is largely because water can dissolve so many things.

EDITOR NOTE / TANGENT
While writing this post I had a "eureka" moment". I have signed up for a Substack workshop to improve and focus my writing. Once a week VERY EARLY in the morning. I have spent some time understanding what and who I am writing for. I think a lot of my writing has moved toward talking about cool stuff to me and writing it in an accessible way even if the topic is "hard". This little tidbit about water and rain reminds me of a prior post titled "Aim for the Stars". I will warn that my early posts tended to be TOO LONG so only go there if you have the time. In that post I wrote about how math explains our world and the unusual nature of Fibonacci numbers. One of the "complexities" I glossed in that post was about how nature has evolved to shape its leaves to MAXIMIZE the water they can catch. In the end things are simple, and to our eye quite beautiful. It is very COOL to me that the very best way to explain this is not just to say "those leaves are beautiful" but to realize there is a formula that explains them. Both of these statements are true and it is amazing that our minds have developed a secret decoder ring to explain it. When I think of a bit of evaporation and then some condensation and finally precipitation I thought of a desert succulent plant I have. When I look at the leaves in a top view I realize that the angles of the leaves resemble a Fibonacci spiral which I describe in the post I reference. All of this is tied together and I am starting to see how often one of my "next" posts reminds me of an old one. Take a look at "Aim for the Stars" if you haven't seen it before. That one was fun and was written early in my writing adventure.

Our beautiful desert succulent. Not much water in a desert. What falls you better be able to catch or natural selection will leave you out of the equation. It is why there are not a lot of birch trees in the Sonoran Desert. Look at the leaves and how they spiral outward. They are beautiful and enchanting. There is a natural number called the golden ratio that might be part of the explanation.

Water Story #3

Water has a very high heat capacity. What does that exactly mean? It takes a lot of energy to raise the temperature of a water molecule. When we all boil a pot of water and then just want it to simmer we can do it pretty easily on our stoves. We don’t even have to be that precise with our flame setting. That is because of that high heat capacity! On a very hot summer day, this protects everything that lives in the water because the water is a great heat sink. Kinda cool.

I remember, as a child, we had old-style ice cube trays that you would fill with water. While I did not understand why the ice cubes always bulged upward in the tray once they froze…they got bigger! It is a wonderful thing when a “secret” of our natural world can be understood and explained. There has never been a better time to be alive. Looking back on a day, far in the past, in physical chemistry class when it all became clear why the cubes bulged.

Time to end this before it gets too long. Of all of the water on this very wet planet, 97% of it is in the ocean and way too salty. So that leaves us 8 billion people to make do with the 3%. Only 10% of that (0.3%) is readily accessible at the surface. With that knowledge, we should probably protect it at all costs. We can get along without a lot of things we seem to want but water is indispensable. In another turn of fortune for my writing efforts, this post has inspired a future post to come.

In the meantime, since we love our water here in Minnesota, here’s a great song about the water. Enjoy the song. Thanks to my friend “M” the music hound for the music recommendation.