It’s About To Rain
Janet Denzel
Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon!
Pinging any website had a 98% packet loss rate. The internet connection was still up, but only in the most annoying "technically accurate" sense. Nothing loads when you have a 98% packet loss rate! The network may as well have been dead.
I was upset. I had just started dating someone a few months prior, and she was currently on the other side of the planet! How was I to explain that I couldn't stay in touch because it wasn't raining?Mobile data at the time was exorbitantly expensive, so much so that I didn't have a data plan at all for my cell service at home. I couldn't just use my phone's data plan to work around the problem, like one might do today in a similar situation.
My dad's office had a very expensive, very fastFor the time, of course. commercial internet connection. The home internet options, meanwhile, weren't great! In my family, we are often stubbornly against settling for less unless there's absolutely no other choice.
Unlike debugging software, a lot of this hardware debugging was annoyingly physical. I had to climb up ladders, trace cables that hadn't been touched in 10 years, and do a lot of walking back and forth between our home and my dad's office.
On my umpteenth back-and-forth walk, as I was bored and exasperated, I started noticing how much our neighborhood had changed in the many years I hadn't been living at home full-time.Before college, I spent four years at a boarding high school. I was on our national math and programming teams for the IMO and IOI), so I even spent most of each summer away from home at prep camps and at the competitions themselves. Many of the little neighborhood shops were new. Many houses had gotten a fresh coat of paint. Trees that used to be barely more than saplings had grown tall and strong.
Every time it rained, the rain collected on its leaves and branches and weighed them down. The extra weight bent them out of the way of the Wi-Fi line-of-sight!Interestingly, objects outside the straight line between antennas can still cause interference! For best signal quality, the Fresnel zone between the antennas should be clear of obstructions. But perfection isn't achievable in practice, so RF equipment like Wi-Fi uses techniques like error-correcting codes so that it can still work without a perfectly clear Fresnel zone.
Hope you enjoyed this true story! April Cools is about surprising our readers with fun posts on topics outside our usual beat. Check out the other April Cools posts on our website, and consider making your own blog part of April Cools Club next year!
In the sense of "rain" falling from the sky you should say "it rains", where the word rain is a verb. "It is rain tomorrow" is an incorrect sentence; a "day" cannot be "rain"! You should say here "it'll rain tomorrow". However, with conditional "if" you don't use "will" in the same clause. So the correct sentence is "if it rains tomorrow, we won't go out", "if clause" takes the present simple when talking about the possible future.
It is not just me, everybody knows someone who says their pain from osteoarthritis is affected by the weather. There are many personal claims that people feel more pain with drastic changes in weather. A study looking at people with knee, hip, and hand osteoarthritis found that 67% of people with those conditions perceived that the weather caused them more pain.[1]
With so many people with osteoarthritis who feel pain when it rains, the lack of consistent scientific evidence behind this phenomena is puzzling. There are typically three factors to the weather that are believed to influence knee pain: temperature, humidity, and rain (due to changes in atmospheric pressure). A review of all of the studies looking for a relationship between these variables and arthritic pain found inconsistent results.[2] Some studies found there was no relationship, others found a relationship between each of the aspects of the weather. When a relationship was found, it was usually with cold temperatures, high humidity, and low atmospheric pressure. But, sometimes it was the opposite of all of those!
One thing that is consistent throughout; there is a group of people who have osteoarthritis and are weather sensitive, meaning they have more pain with changes in weather.[2] Rain and other changes in the weather appear to be linked to knee pain in some people, but not in others. It depends on the individual.
Rain and atmospheric pressure:
The specific aspect about rain that is theorized to cause pain is not the actual water, but the change in atmospheric pressure that causes it to rain. In people with knee osteoarthritis, the destruction of cartilage and tissues around the knee expose the nerve endings of pressure sensing nerves. This is thought to increase the sensitivity of these nerves, leading to pain with the drastic changes in pressure that come before it rains.[3] It is also thought that the change in pressure will cause the damaged tissue in the knee to expand and contract, leading to pain.[4]
Cold temperatures:
Colder temperature is another factor that might increase knee pain.[3] In the knee, there is fluid in and around the joint that allows it to move smoothly and without pain. It is thought that the cold causes the fluid to thicken, creating a stiffer joint and more friction between the surfaces, resulting in more pain. The cold weather might also affect how easily the muscles and tendons around the joint can contract and expand, further attributing to increases in pain.[3]
Humidity:
My grandpa moved to Arizona every winter because he said the dry heat relieved the pain from his arthritis. He may have a valid point! For some people, humid weather is more connected to the pain they feel in their knee. It is thought that the humidity in the air causes the damaged and inflamed tissues in the knee joint to expand, which would further decrease the space in the joint and cause pain.[3] In dry weather, these tissues can relax, creating more space within the knee joint. This would allow the knee to move more freely with less pain. It is important to remember that this is not a proven theory and moving to a dryer climate will not necessarily decrease your pain.
The purpose of a knee replacement is to decrease pain and make everyday activities easier for those who have osteoarthritis. Knee replacements with proper physical therapy has been shown to be successful in decreasing pain and improving quality of life,[6] but some people still can feel pain or stiffness in their knee when it rains. One explanation could be that a knee replacement only helps with the symptoms of osteoarthritis, it does not actually cure the disease itself. Additionally, your knee is literally heavier and might feel weird after a knee replacement, which could still make it sensitive to changes in the weather. Even with these factors in consideration, the hope is that the decrease in pain after a knee replacement with physical therapy will carry over to feeling less pain in the knee when it rains.[6]
There are several factors to the weather that might cause someone with knee osteoarthritis to feel more pain. These include: the change in atmospheric pressure before and during rain, cold temperatures, increased humidity, and the effect bad weather can have on your mood. While there are many theories for why these aspects of the weather increase pain, nothing is proven and it is all highly debated in the scientific community. There are also many people who have osteoarthritis, but their pain is not affected by the weather at all. This could be due to them not being sensitive to changes in weather, or because they have found a way to successfully manage their pain (exercise has been shown to be the most effective in this regard). The majority of people with osteoarthritis do feel pain when it rains and there are many theories as to why. Even though some people do not feel pain and none of the theories are proven, I can assure you that you are not imagining the pain in your knee that comes with rain!
Curovate can help you manage the pain you feel in your knee from osteoarthritis. The physical therapy exercise app focuses on knee replacements, hip replacements, and ACL surgery, but you can also use the knee replacement protocol to help manage your knee osteoarthritis. The app contains daily exercise plans that include physical therapy videos and the ability to track your progress. You can download the app from the App store or Google Play store below.
Funding: U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Santa Clara Valley Water District, U.S. Geologic SurveyAffiliation: Research Network with the Public Policy Institute of California
California has seen so much rain over the past few weeks that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. Yet, most of the state remains in drought.
Managed recharge has been used for decades in many areas to actively replenish groundwater supplies. But the techniques have been gaining more attention lately as wells run dry amid the long-running drought. Local agencies have proposed more than 340 recharge projects in California, and the state estimates those could recharge an additional 500,000 acre-feet of water a year on average if all were built.
One method being discussed by the state Department of Water Resources and others is Flood-MAR, or flood-managed aquifer recharge. During big flows in rivers, water managers could potentially divert some of that flow onto large parts of the landscape and inundate thousands of acres to recharge the aquifers below. The concept is to flood the land in winter and then farm in summer.
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