the cast of characters

There are some exceptions, but this trip is populated mostly by geeks (of which I am one) and nurses (of which my sister is one).

There's a Bulgarian astrophysicist, currently working at Harvard in Massachusetts; a solar x-ray specialist. Before getting into solar science, she specialized in binary star systems where one of the stellar partners was a pulsar. She was interesting to talk to, and I think she was glad to be able to discuss her work a bit. She's young, but even in her short career, solar science has evolved so fast she's gone from trying to glean information from columns of numbers to being able to watch near-real-time movies of X-ray events. And if that's not enough, here's proof of her geekness: she carries some of the solar movies on her laptop. Other people have pictures of families, pets, cars, etc; she carries home movies of her local star.

There are several nurses about my own age--- all very nice ladies--- and one very young, bubbly and personable, pneumatically enhanced nurselet from Southern California; a child of her environs, she believes in "the metaphysical properties of rocks and crystals." Um, OK, that's nice.

There's a couple from the Nederlands, here on their third storm chase. So far, they've seen some nice storms (although not on this trip), but no tornadoes. Hmmm. Very pleasant, very friendly people; Rob and Helle.

There's a bus driver from Scotland who signed up for 4 back-to-back one-week trips this year, hoping to ensure a tornado sighting. He's painfully shy, but nice when you can get him to speak, in his delightful Glasglow burr. (He may have a low opinion of Americans, though. He told us he was "from Scotland... in the United Kingdom." Oh, *that* Scotland.)

There's a Canadian who now lives in New Zealand; a SoCal real-estate broker; a geologist, a 911 operator....

And more; 17 of us in all, spread across three large SUVs. Tour etiquette says you change vans every so often, so we'll be with different passengers from time to time.

Our leader is an erstwhile electrical engineer who started chasing storms as a hobby after being laid off. He has no formal training in meteorology, but has over ten years in the field reading weather maps and figuring out storm tracks. It leads to odd juxtapositions: he's extremely knowledgeable about the behavior of large storms in the American midwest, but has no larger-scale view of the weather. He is, for example, a climate change skeptic--- a truly bizarre point of view for someone in his position. It's made worse because some of those on the tour regard him as a general meteorological expert, which he absolutely is not, beyond the movements of tornadic systems. His views on climate change follow the all-too-familiar pattern that started becoming acceptable in the Reagan years: Start with a belief, reject the facts that don't fit, and call it "science" anyway. Many people in positions of supposed authority now espouse "faith-based" this or that, to the detriment of public discourse and public policy.

"It's a huge, huge scam," he said. "This climate change thing will make Enron look like a field day."

True science, of course, goes the other way: You adjust your beliefs to fit with the available facts. If new facts come in that don't fit with what's gone before, you gotta change your beliefs, no matter how comfortable you were with the old ones. In fact, you don't really believe in science unless you're willing to completely toss what you think is true in the face of new, objectively-proven data that shows your previous beliefs to be false.

Sorry--- that's a hot button of mine. I'll try to restrain myself.

Bottom line: It's an interesting group!