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.

A bulbous bow on a cruise ship moored at Pier 1, San Juan. The top of the projection is even with the normal waterline of the ship. Note the glyph indicating the presence of the projection.

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.

Another view of the bulbous bow on the cruise ship Silver Whisper.

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.

An image from Huygens, from an altitude of about 16 km above Titan’s surface, showing what appear to be drainage channels. Higher areas are lighter, darker areas are probably flat plains.

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.

An image returned from the surface of Titan by the Huygens on January 14, 2005. The rocks range from about 4 to about 15 cm across.

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.

False color image from radar survey of Titan’s surface, July 22, 2006. The dark areas are areas of low radar back scatter from hydrocarbon lakes. Titan’s largest lakes have been given fanciful names: Krakan, Ligea, and Punga Mares.

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.

Model ship in a test basin. Instruments record the forces on the model, and the energy needed to maintain a constant speed.

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.

A Snark ground-launched missile, deployed by the US Air Force in the late 1950s, early 1960s.

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.

Getting ready for the festival. I don’t know what the date on the beer means. If that is the ‘use by’ date, there were no issues, for sure.

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.

Busses into and out of Old San Juan, and some of the thousands of people they brought into the city.

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

A parade proceeding up Calle San Sebastian, in Old San Juan. This was on Thursday night, and the crowds weren’t too bad.

Another series of parade images.

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.

An airplane fly-by.

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.

Paraders on stilts, on Calle San Sebastian.

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

A parade group generating thoughts of cold beer.

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

Food choices at the festival.

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.

Yachts proceeding to Old San Juan, December 12, 2015. The sailors on the freighter had an excellent spot from which to watch the yachts.

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.

Yachts parading around piers in Old San Juan, December 12, 2015.

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.

Yachts returning to the marina, December 12, 2015.

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.

Christmas decorations in Plaza Antonia Quinones, in the Condado section of San Juan.

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.

Christmas tree in Condado, and a motorcyclist celebrating the holidays.

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.

Three images from the Plaza d’Armes, Old San Juan, December 2015,

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.

Decorations in Plaza Colon, Old San Juan, January 2016.

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.

The Three Kings, Old San Juan, January 2016.

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

November 17, 2015

The Almirante Saboia was back in port the weekend before last. I did not see here enter port, but I suspected something was going on. I saw a few groups of young men wandering around Old San Juan. Their heads snapped around every time a nice looking woman walked by. Since this behavior is typical of sailors who’ve been at sea for too long, I figured some kind of ship was making a port call. I walked down to the port and found her docked at Pier 1.

You recall I wrote a little about this ship last year. See my post Two Warships in Port to refresh your memory. She is a landing ship, built to support amphibious operations. She was originally built for the Royal Navy, and saw duty in the Falklands.

I wonder what the purpose of a port call is. It is probably in some part ceremonial, with official welcomes and greetings. There are probably meetings with US Coast Guard and Navy officials, going over protocols of various sorts. I suspect the sailors look forward to a bit of shore leave.

Of course, the port call may have been unplanned. Tropical Storm Kate was brewing in the Atlantic, near the Bahamas, and perhaps the Almirante Saboia came into port to avoid the storm. Kate formed on Monday, November 9, near Cat Island in the Bahamas. That Kate formed so late in the season is unusual in an El Nino year. She is the eleventh named storm of the year, just below the average of twelve, but high for an El Nino year.

By the way, the Great Lakes steamer Edmund Fitzgerald sank forty years ago, on November 10, 1975, with all 29 of her crew. She sank during a strong mid-latitude storm that passed over Lake Superior near the Fitzgerald, subjecting her to winds of more than 50 knots. Pressure at the center of the storm was as low as 975 mbs. See the figure below, and recall that Hurricane Patricia’s central pressure was 879 mbs, indicating again just how powerful that storm was (see my post Joaquin, Patricia and Chapala – Oh My!).

Surface weather map valid for 6 am CDT  Monday, November 10, 1975. Note the very strong low pressure over the western Great Lakes. This is the storm that generated ‘the gales of November’ that caused the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The storm’s central pressure soon fell to 975 millibars. Image credit: CIMSS Weather Blog from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

The Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot was motivated to write his song The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald because he thought the event was underreported. He was, in particular, disturbed by contemporary newspaper accounts that gave her name as the Edmond Fitzgerald. Lightfoot’s song was released in 1976 and reached number 2 in the US; the number one spot was defended by Rod Stewart’s Tonight’s the Night. The event even made it into a Seinfeld episode – I’ll leave it to the TV buffs to figure out which one.

The Great Lake iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald. Image from adhemar-marine.blogspot.com.

            November 14, 2015

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson was here in Puerto Rico this past weekend. He actually made sense when asked about statehood. He pointed out that the last two states to enter the union – Alaska and Hawaii, back in the mid-50s – had financial difficulties then, and have since prospered. He thought the same thing could happen here. The debt problems here, he said, are the result of unfair treatment of Puerto Rico as a territory. Puerto Rico is currently trying to manage $72 billion dollars in public debt and the issue, as you can imagine, is contentious.

The current fiscal difficulties here in Puerto Rico have many people talking about the Jones Act and its effects on the economy. The problem is that there are really two Jones Acts, both passed about the same time. They both, in their way, relate to the current economic conditions.

The Jones-Shafroth Act, signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1917, was written to establish a system of government on the island, and to clarify the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. Section 3 of the law also stipulated that Puerto Rican municipal bonds would be triple tax exempt – no federal, state, or local taxes – no matter where the bondholder lived.

The Spanish American War of 1898 occurred as Puerto Ricans were seeking greater autonomy from Spain, at a time when the Spanish government was itself in turmoil. Luis Munoz Rivera, born in Barranquitas in 1859, was a leader of the autonomy movement. He was born to Luis Munoz Barrios and Monserrate Rivera Vazquez and, by Spanish custom, took both his parents’ names. Barranquitas, then a small rural town, offered few educational opportunities. Luis was home-schooled at first, then finished the town school, first in his class, at age 10. He showed great interest in Cervantes, especially Don Quixote. By age 14, unable to continue his education in either Cuba or Spain, he was helping with legal documents for his family’s business, and also writing poetry.

In 1883, presumably against his father’s wishes, Munoz Rivera joined the Liberal Party, which, in 1887, at a meeting in Coamo, splintered into a new party, the Autonomists. In this, he became associated with Román Baldorioty de Castro, José Celso Barbosa and José de Diego. The Autonomists pursued a separate government for Puerto Rico, while keeping some relationship with Spain.

Their influence grew rapidly, and the Conservative Party responded by closing newspapers. Governor Palacio, an appointee of the Spanish monarchy, soon caused the arrest of more than 100 liberals. In spite of a travel ban, the liberal politician Juan Arrillaga Roque travelled to Madrid and made the situation known. King Alfonso XII responded by replacing Palacio with Juan Contreras Martinez, and political tensions eased somewhat.

Luis Munoz, in 1893, travelled to Spain to learn of its political system. While there, he met Praxedes Mateo Sagasta, president of the Spanish Fusion Party, and realized he was the Autonomists best ally within the Byzantine Spanish political system. Upon his return, he found the Autonomist Party in disarray, with Barbosa and his followers (the Barboistas) rejecting any ties with Sagasta, thinking he was a Royalist.

Munoz Rivera and his followers (the Munocistas) drafted the Plan de Ponce and, after much debate, agreed to send four members, including Munoz Rivera, to Spain. Sagasta proposed that, should he become Premier, he would grant a Chapter of Autonomy giving Puerto Rico the same degree of sovereignty as any other Spanish province. Sagasta became Prime Minister after the assassination of Antonio Canovas del Castillo and granted, in December 1897, the promised autonomous government.

Munoz Rivera’s accomplishment was short-lived. An on-going revolt in Cuba had garnered American interest, in large part because of the lurid yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire. On February 16, 1898, the battleship USS Maine (Remember the Maine!) exploded and sank in Havana Harbor. This became the pretext for the Spanish-American War of 1898. Military operations in Puerto Rico began with a US Navy bombardment of San Juan on May 12, 1898, and a land invasion, in Guanica, with 3,300 American troops, beginning on July 25. The military campaign ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on August 13, at which time Cuba and Puerto Rico came under US military government.

I believe this building was a hospital during the US Navy bombardment of San Juan, in 1898. It is said that a shell landed in the hospital but did not explode, thus allowing an orderly evacuation.

The arrival of the Americans led to another split among the Barboistas, who generally welcomed the Americans, and the Munocistas, who feared becoming an American possession. Munoz Rivera retired to his family home in Barranquitas and published a poem, Sísifo, which related Puerto Rico’s politics to the eternal struggles of Sisyphus.

Munoz Rivera was persuaded to return to San Juan, but the discussions between the Americans, the Barboistas, and the Munocistas became bitter. In 1900, the Barboistas formed the pro-statehood Republican Party of Puerto Rico. Munoz Rivera wrote scathing denunciations of the pro-statehood movement in his newspaper El Diario, which led to rumors of assassination attempts, actual exchanges of gunfire, and, in 1901, attacks on the newspaper’s offices.

Munoz Rivera moved his family to New York City where he continued his criticism of the US position on Puerto Rico via his bilingual newspaper Puerto Rico Herald. He travelled back and forth and, with the help of Rosendo Matienzo Cintron, Antonio R. Barcelo, and Jose de Diego, founded the Union of Puerto Rico party, which won the election in 1904. Munoz Rivera was elected to the House of Delegates.

In 1910, he ran for and was elected as Resident Commissioner to the US House of Representatives. He befriended influential Congressmen, including Henry L. Stimpson and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. In 1915, he proposed equal rights for Puerto Rico, without statehood, with greater autonomy in Puerto Rican affairs. This evolved into the Jones-Shafroth Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on March 2, 1917.

Munoz Rivera was not alive to see the signing. He died on November 16, 1916, from complications of a gall-bladder infection.

The complicated relationship between the US and Puerto Rico thus had its roots in a revolt against Spanish rule in Cuba, a sunk battleship, yellow journalism, an American naval bombardment followed by invasion, and the efforts of impassioned Puerto Rican statesmen.

Puerto Ricans honor the statesmen of the Autonomists in various ways. The park across the street from our building is Parc Luis Munoz Rivera, and Avenida Luis Munoz Rivera is a major highway in the Hato Rey section of San Juan. The expressway to the airport is the Baldorioty de Castro; there are Avenida Barosas in San Juan, Catano, and other cities and towns. Avenida de Diego goes south through Condado to Santurce.

I’ll have more to say about the Jones-Shafroth Act in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.

Notes: First image is statue of Luis Munoz Rivera in the park that bears his name.

See the Wikipedia entries for Luis Munoz Rivera, the Jones-Shafroth Act, and the Puerto Rican campaign of the Spanish American War for more information.