074: let go, let fly, forget

cumulonimbus clouds v. small aircraft, childhood best friends, leaving a job + Seamus Heany + read to the end for a photo of angelic children

Has it ever struck you as odd that the phrase “talking about the weather” means “talking about something boring?” Weather is one of the most unpredictable and consequential forces in our lives—this is an idiom without an antecedent.

Recently, I learned that clouds are so dangerous to aircraft that aviation regulations require extra training before pilots are allowed to navigate them. Clouds are, at best, airborne potholes caused by contrasts in air density that make a plane bump up and down. At their worst, they can be sources of atmospheric instability strong enough to break its wings.

One of the causes of this “clear air turbulence” is named for the 19th century German physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholt, a guy who almost certainly had tobacco stains in his beard and who wrote, extremely poetically, that “every perfect geometrically sharp edge by which a fluid flows must tear it asunder and establish a surface of separation, however slowly the fluid may move” (source). Put…