Food/family: Nora, for her birthday dinner, chose sushi. Excellent.

Reading: I'm still picking my way The Great Maya Droughts. It's an oddly structured tome, with the author spending a great deal of time laying down exceptionally thorough theoretical foundations, as if defending against imagined arguments against what he's trying to say. It seems odd to me that one would need to defend the assertion that climate influences the arc of human culture.

Free software: DV's burnout post troubled me. What little time I have to devote to free software work these days I've been spending on libxml. I've seen Daniel be extraordinarily responsive, over and over again, to users with well-articulated needs and - and this is critical - a willingness to listen to Daniel when he reframes the problem.

Climate: From the Journal of Climate comes a tidbit from Shaleen Jain and colleagues of some relevance, I think. Variability of flows in four major western North American rivers increased over the last half of the 20th century. That means wetter wet years and drier dry years. They draw a dotted line between the trend, warming sea surface temperatures and projected 21st-century warming. They draw a solid line between the trend and water supplies in the West.