Werme Family Home Page

The Old Man in better days
The Old Man in better days (he fell May 3, 2003).
Rest in pieces (sorry!)

I've been too busy for ages to update this as well as it should be. I've saved the old page as index-old.html while I reorganize this mess.

You've found our home page. This has links to our personal pages, shortcuts to some of the more important subpages and links to other sites in the Web to support some of our pages. Sorry about the lack of a flash animation with cacophonous music.

Family stuff, well, trips with one or more family members

I'll come up with some thumbnail tags for these.

Here is more of Paula's activities.

Ric's links

I'm a retired software engineer with roots that go way back to the days of blinkenlights, i.e. my daughter calls me a geek. I heard a NH Family Division judge say "Engineers are unreasonable people" so maybe I'm that too. I call myself a hacker - in the best sense of the word.

When I get time I'll write up my accounts of implementing FTP and Telnet back in my ARPAnet days at Carnegie Mellon for their PDP-10 computers.

While I can spend all day and all night working on code that ranges from Unix internals to WWW hacks in Python, hearing about NH's Division of Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) turned me into a political activist. It takes a severely broken system to do that to an old hacker! DCYF has improved significantly in the last early 2000s, but there is still much to be done. Most of my recent web work has been weather related, not just here but also in support of the blog Watts Up With That?.

The (early?) 2020s has been dominated by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease Covid-19. The frightening exponential growth that northern Italy and New York City endured convinced me that it was not a matter of if I would be infected, but when. Fortunately, those early outbreaks did settle down, but at the cost of dragging out the pandemic months longer than had it burned through the world, much like the 1918 influenza pandemic did. On the plus side, we had time to develop marvelous new vaccines made from Messenger RNA.

I wrote and automatically update a series of web pages on The Exponential Rise (and Fall) of Covid-19. I had hoped they would have some predicitive power to see when the pandemic was heading, but the exponent generally changes too quickly. The rise of the Delta variant is quite visible, as it hit as were getting close to squashing the damn virus. Many states were reporting a steep decline in new Covid-19 cases, but as Delta made inroads, the decline flattened and began to rise to distressingly high levels again. Then came Omicron, then Omicron collapsed and nothing appears to be waiting in the wings, so the pandemic may be over. Well, maybe after a "sub variant" is done. Nevertheless, I added a section in March 2022 about myocarditis and its link to the mRNA vaccines. The latter third of page discusses how most cases may be linked how the vaccines are administered and that restoring a once standard step (aspiration) is likely why Denmark has a much lower incidence of myocarditis.

On 2022 Mar 15 the US Senate unanimously passed a bill to put all states that observe Daylight Saving Time be on DST permanently. They passed the bill with no discussion, but as it was two days after the US returned to DST they were groggy and in no mood to debate. There is a lot to discuss and history to recall and I collected most of the issues I can think of in that web page.

My favorite pages

Several of these are mentioned in later sections with related pages. That's okay, I think these deserve an extra mention.

Weather and climate

Engineering, electronic toys, err, tools, etc.

Oh all right, geek stuff! Check out the last page of the Saturn collision page for my physics analysis.

The Equation of Time is the difference between sundial time and clock time. Why don't these tell the same time, anyway?

While I'm at it, here's sun data for Sutton Mills, NH for the year.

This is very much not an electronic toy. I have a Raspberry Shake and Boom seismograph and infrasound recorder that I bought to record wind turbine infrasound. I quckly realized it is an astonishing instrument that can record earthquakes nearly as well as research grade instruments. And vehicles, ice chipping, helicopters, quarry blasting, and even a meteor explosion..
Did you hear about the sundial to be sent to Mars? Here's a report on the Deimos events of the Martian Festival.
I've long been fond of the "qualitative display of quantitative data," i.e. graphs, plots etc. The master of the field, Edward Tufte, wrote the definitive books on the subject starting with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I brought a couple of things I did to one of his one day classes. He liked my baseball runnings enough so I converted it to experiment with his "sparklines" concept. I'm also experimenting with similar data for the 2006 Tour de France, the most complex sporting event worth sinking one's teeth into.
I got involved in a field test of a new rain gauge because I like to measure precipitation by weighing it. I over did it a bit, as the section on weighing cold air clearly proves.
Of course, one can also discover "attractive display of quantitative data." Sometimes that happens with bugs in graphics code. A mistake by someone at Stanford nearly 40 years ago still has me playing with a graphics hack I call Roses.
Besides Roses, I've been around long enough to see and create a fair amount of folklore. There's some stuff there that will confuse Millennials worse than a rotary phone! Like computers that execute off a drum. Huh?
How well does an Earth-bound Saturn automobile handle a head on collision with a pickup truck? Pretty well, all things considered. At least I'm still around to write about it!
My GPS pages on geocaching, a program called GPSBabel, and various other comments and observations.
From a USENET post, err, flame with an irascible engineer who disagrees with this engineer and most of the rest of the newsgroup, I put together a, well, let's call it a freeze frame of a frozen flame. It's useful more for some family photos than anything else. It certainly doesn't count as intelligent engineering discourse!

Political/Government pages

Everything else

Really ancient stuff

Here lies some stuff that is so old that few people would miss it if it didn't exist. OTOH, there are always people looking for old stuff on the web or from pre-WWW days. While I'm not really a horder (at least not an excesive horder), it's so easy to keep computer files around, here's some of them.


Tame the gov't
monster, click me


Lynx inspected! No Microsoft programs are necessary to appreciate this site.


Contact Ric Werme or return to his home page.

Last updated 2024 Feb 22.