What was I supposed to do - call him for cheating better than me?

A post to the livable Albuquerque list (thanks to Pika for pointing out the list) mentions a marvelous idea from Otis White for making our cities better, more livable places: buy everyone a dog.

At the University of Minnesota, researchers have launched a two-year study to identify the elements of urban design (shaded streets, sidewalks, marked crosswalks, neighborhood retail, etc.) that cause people to get out of their cars. Said one researcher, “We could decrease the attractiveness of driving. We could increase the cost of gas, make congestion worse and increase the cost of parking. But Americans don’t want that. So then we need to make walking more attractive.” Actually, though, there may be another way of getting people on their feet: Buy each of them a dog. One of the study’s participants, a 62-year-old man, said he used to walk a lot but stopped when his Labrador retriever died. But since he signed up for the study, he’s started back. What’s his secret? “Now, I did something that I probably shouldn’t tell you,” he confided to a newspaper reporter. “I borrowed my son’s dog to get me out there every day.”

We live a short block from a park, and our big front window is oriented so that, during most seasons of the year, we can watch the parade, the walkers coming and going from the park. They have dogs and tennis rackets and the sidewalks spill out into the streets, very much a pedestrian space. The cars go slow, and there's little of the auto-people tension that can muck up a good walk.

So it was only a matter of obvious evolution when the skateboard kids started taking over the street for themselves. They first started in the driveway of the house on the corner by the park. The dad there works construction, and he built rails and ramps and all the other things the kids need. Soon they started claiming the street itself. Most evenings, either in front of the house or down by the park, they're doing their tricks, and claiming the street, and making the cars slow down for them rather than racing to get out of the way. It's a friendly sort of sharing of the street, not an assertive territoriality, which is I think part of what makes it work. You seldom see drivers annoyed - they have to stop at the stop sign anyway, and go slowly around the park, so the added inconvenience of having to give the skateboard kids the extra room is very little inconvenience at all.

It just works.

I shut down comments completely after awaking this morning to several hundred particularly vile porn comment spams. I'm going to leave them off temporarlily, but I love the comments I get, so if you have something to say, email me - jfleck at the domain above.

If you're still struggling with what to get me for my birthday, there's this:

"Everything about them is just like the traditional scissors found in desk drawers everywhere - just much bigger!"

OK, the thing is, it rained. There was a bike race and stuff, but after 72 consecutive days without measurable precipitation in Albuquerque, the gentle sprinkle the whole time I was racing tonight was a desert blessing.



Rainbows are tough to shoot, but you get the idea. Look close. It's a double rainbow.

The race was not as good, but not bad. The problem was that when I reached in my bike stuff box to grab my shoes this evening, there were no shoes. The 45 minute drive home to get them and back to the race meant I couldn't race the old farts' race, so I was stuck trying to hang with the pack in the "C" race. I managed to only get lapped once this time out, which is an improvement. Some of the laps in a pack, some doing paceline with another guy, and some out on my own. 23.3 mph.

I told Bill my shoe sob story. "Every time I get in the car to go to a bike ride," he said, "I always touch my helmet and touch my shoes." Good advice. I won't forget again.

I heard this story - I don't know if it's true - where a reporter asked John Lennon what his years in the music business had taught him about The Creator. Replied Lennon, "That He has an inordinate fondness for The Beatles."

I picked up a couple of live Frank Zappa CD's with the birthday gift certificate daughter, N, so kindly gave me and ran into a happy accident.

A year ago (funny, I'd forgotten, but reading the blog post I realize it was the same record store and the same daughter) I picked up Them or Us pretty much just for Frank's version of Whipping Post. The story goes that Frank was playing in Helsinki and some guy in the audience yelled out that he wanted them to play Whipping Post. Frank was bummed that he couldn't, so he and the band learned it.

So this evening I'm listening to You Can't Do That On Stage Any More (Vol. 2), and there's the original Whipping Post schtick:

Audience guy: "Whipping Post!"
Frank: "Say that again please?"
Guy: "Whipping Post!"
Frank: "Whipping Post? Ok, just a second. (Pause, he's apparently turning to one of the band members.) Do you know that? Oh sorry, we don't know that one. Anything else?"
Frank: "Hum me a few bars of it...please. Just show me how it goes, please. Just sing, sing me Whipping Post and then maybe we'll play it with you."
Guy: "Ooh-ooh-ooh."
Frank: "Thank you very much.
And now...
Judging from the way you sang it, it must be a John Cage composition, right?"

I might be moving to Helsinki soon
Just to raise me up a crop of
Dental Floss

Raisin' it up
Waxin' it down
Tying it to the Whipping Post
In the middle of town

From the comments, jfs says:

I think the global warming nonsense the commenter is refering to is not that fact that temperatures are increasing, which is what you cite in your links, but that the increase is not part of some natural climatic cycle....

The commenter raises a great question. Given the relatively short time we've had thermometers and recorded data, how can we make such bold assertions about the effect industrial greenhouse gas emissions might be having on climate?

For starters, I don't think we should be making bold assertions, and I'm always pretty careful about how I phrase what we know and don't know here. This is tough science. But there are some good answers to the question jfs raises. I'll be brief and point you to more authoritative resources than some schmoe's blog for the details and data.

The first is that climate proxies (tree rings, corals, etc.) have been used to extend the climate record back well before the era of thermometers and rain gauges. Those proxies suggest the current warming is unprecedented over considerably longer time scales than the 140 years jfs mentioned:

(That's Mann, Science, Vol 297, Issue 5586, 1481-1482 , 30 August 2002)

Second, the greenhouse warming hypothesis makes some predictions about the details of the warming, and how one might distinguish anthropogenic greenhouse warming from other types of natural variability. Among the indicators studied are the day/night diurnal temperature range (more warming in the overnight temperatures than during the day because of radiative heat trapping), differences between temperatures over ocean vs. over land, etc. When they look for those differences, they find them. (Karoly et al., Science, Vol 302, Issue 5648, 1200-1203 , 14 November 2003 - that's one of the links I offered, which perhaps jfs might want to give a second read)

Attempts to account for the amount and patterns of warming seen using other hypotheses - urban heat island effect, solar variability, etc. - have all come up short. (Chapter 12 of the most recent IPCC report has a lengthy discussion of all this. Web site directly to the chapter seems to be down today. Try back tomorrow?)

That's not QED, but it's pretty clearly the state of the science right now - the anthropogenic hypothesis is the best fit to the facts as we know them.

And yeah, Jimbob, you're right. I didn't say anything about what was causing it in the beetle post.
:-)

For the newfound Albuquerque crowd too lazy to go out and pick up the morning paper and too impecunious to subscribe (you know who you are): I commend your attention to Leanne Potts' story in this morning's paper (secret decoder ring link) about the Wild West show opening at Magnifico downtown next Friday.

I've always had a vague understanding of the power of Wild West iconography in German culture, on account of the German tourists one always meets traipsing about the desert of the Four Corners (a friend jokes that you can always tell the German tourists - they're the ones wearing sandals and dark socks). Leanne's discussion with Stefka Ammon, the German artist who organized the show, added a great deal to my vague understanding:

So why does the mystique of the American West hang on long after we all should know better?

"I think it is- oh, my Native American friends, forgive me this - because people still perceive (the West) as open and empty, a screen for all our imaginations, like a promised land," Ammon says. "Like, 'If I only were there I could be doing what I really wanted, I could really be myself.' ''

Today's comment of the day, a helpful observation from Joe:

Still trying to push that global warming nonsense...huh? Just too bad the facts don't support it.

OK, by my count Daniel is now up to 45 command line options for xmllint, which borders on the extreme. By my count I've only gotten 40 of them documented in the man page. Guess I've got work to do. It's tough to keep up with Daniel.

My friend Kelli has started to blog her triathlon training. The woman is fearless. Now I eagerly await her first entry about a rest day.

A commenter sent me off in pursuit of the Thomas Jefferson climate change quote, with good results. The full text is here (search on "Beck", second occurrence), a July 16, 1824 letter from Jefferson to one Lewis Beck, who had apparently sent Jeffeson something he had written on the climate of the west. The quote excerpted in Glantz's book shows Jefferson's interest in understanding anthropogenic climate change (another commenter pointed to the widespread notion afoot at the time that "rain follows the plow"), but the full text also shows Jefferson with a broad and keen interest in gathering good baseline climatological data on the continent:

Years are requisite for this, steady attention to the thermometer, to the plants growing there, the times of their leafing and flowering, its animal inhabitants, beasts, birds, reptiles and insects; its prevalent winds, quantities of rain and snow, temperature of fountains, and other indexes of climate. We want this indeed for all the States, and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century, to show the effect of clearing and culture towards changes of climate.

I have wondered what it must feel like to sit in the midst of a symphony orchestra, playing. Daniel Wakin explains (and gives a delightful account of his appearance therein):

A gleaming, sheer-cut wall of brass hit me from behind. Pounding timpani and crashing cymbals rattled my cartilage. A wave of woodwinds and strings swept me along. For a time, the monumental thrust and sharp rhythmic snap of the march in the third movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony made me feel as though the music were playing my instrument instead of vice versa.

.... a great orchestra, an organism that at its best has the might of a jet engine, the delicacy of an eye-surgeon's laser and the coloristic nuance of a Monet painting.

Oh, yeah, and happy birthday, Dave.

Cory Doctorow visits Microsoft to explain the history of technology, cryptography and copyright in one easy lesson:

Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we've changed copyright. Copyright isn't an ethical proposition, it's a utilitarian one. There's nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there's nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They're just the best way of balancing out so that people's physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.

Stink bugs are showing up in London, another global warming clue. But the real fun here is the source of the research - Max Barclay, who is described in the stories as curator of beetles at the Natural History Museum in London. How cool a title is that?

There are a couple of news reports out about a new Hadley study on the synergistic effects of greenhouse warming and the urban heat island.

The urban heat island effect, often used by skeptics to discount global warming data, is the very real effect in which all that pavement, buildings and other thermal mass that we've built up in cities makes them warmer places. While the deniers' attempts to use the UHIE to explain away warming is pretty clearly bunk - serious climate scientists have gone to to a great deal of effort to factor the effect into their data analysis - the effect is nontheless real.

The new Hadley study, according to the news accounts, seems to be pointing out the somewhat obvious point that for the folks living in cities, the greenhouse gases' enhanced heat trapping means more of that urban heat will be held in overnight, which means warmer overnight temperatures.

I haven't been able to find the study itself - if anyone's seen it, I'd appreciate a citation.

Being tragically unhip, or in this case really unattached to the mainstream of American culture, or maybe it's just too poor to go to the movie theater and too lazy to rent cheap video, I've only now gotten 'round to seeing Bowling for Columbine.

L and I curled up on the big leather couch last night and watched one of the finer pieces of journalistic observation of our culture that I've read/seen in a long time. (note to self: read David Brooks, provide snarky compare/contrast)

I've mentioned before my discomfort with Michael Moore's stunts and Rush Limbaugh-esque talk radio style of discourse. But I'm willing to fogive him a great deal after seeing Bowling for Columbine.

This is not the kind of journalism I do, or would be comfortable doing, with the even-handed "on the other hand" and the comfort that comes from hiding behind the ideas of others. (This is the reason for the discomfort and reserved tone you sometimes see in this blog on issues that matter. I've got two decades of training as the dispassionate journalist in the art of holding my cards close.) But the trick to this film is that Moore does an exceptional job of exploring the territory in searching for an explanation without simply offering up an easy answer.

My problem with the talk radio discourse in America today, whether it's Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh, is the emphasis on the easy answer. Anything genuingely interesting is never going to be that easy. What I loved about Moore's flick was the puzzled demeanor he portrayed as he explored the subject. Yes, we drop bombs on other nations and shoot one another and put bars on our windows with alarming frequency. But why?

It was an iimperfect film. The Dick Clark ambush was classic "Roger and Me" theater that didn't add much to the deep theme. The first part of the Charleton Heston interview was terrific - Heston's discomfort at that deep theme. But then Moore overstepped, I think, with the schtick wth the little girl's picture. That was just over the top, more about scoring points than exploring the issue. But those are quibbles. It's not my film.

As a postcript, I'd like to add that Michael Moore has an Erdos number of four, a Kevin Bacon number of two, and a Noam Chomsky number of one.

I stopped by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell today to visit the shrine to my brief career as a UFO debunker.

Back in the day, when Roswell was still something of a live item, someone brought what he claimed to be a fragment of the recovered alien spacecraft to the Museum and Research Center. It was an odd bit of metal, strangely colored with swirling patterns - clearly not of this world. But by a bit of luck and some amount of work, I was able to track it to its source - not Aldebaran, but the studio of a jeweler in St. George Utah who made lovely metalwork, strangely colored with swirling patterns. (Sadly, the stories don't appear to be on the web any more. I'll try to get them posted again on the paper's web site.)

On a wall in the museum is the framed fragment, along with copies of my stories laminated for history, and this note characterizing them:

The news stories were written by John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal staff writer. They are based on Fleck's independent research and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or endorsement of the museum.

There is one piece of mine still around from that time period, an opus of an anthropological take on the Roswell Incident at 50. It's got an interesting passage that's relevant to the specific wording in the note on the museum wall - its reference to my "independent research":

Anthropologists Ziegler's and Saler's analysis suggests it's understandable Friedman would present his work as a research endeavor.
The traditions of the UFO subculture require the story be told "in the format of an investigative report," they write. What it really is, they believe, is "the folk narrative of an embedded culture."

(More history on the fragment here .)

Reading Mickey Glantz's Climate Affairs, I ran across this odd reference to what appears on first blush to be Thomas Jefferson's great insight into the effects of humans on climate. It quotes an 1824 letter in which Jefferson writes that climate surveys "should be repeated oce or twice in a century to show the effect of clearing (of land) and culture (settlements) towards changes of climate." Insightful man, that Jefferson, eh?

The X Prize:

For pure space age weirdness, it's hard to beat Burt Rutan's White Knight and SpaceShipOne.

The new spaceship looks like a pair of giant insects mating. Strange insects at that.

This is not your grandfather's rocket ship.

Nora thinks she's figured out how to get my blog's feed to show up on her friends page. Let's see if this works.

I've always loved what seems to me to be the fundamental coolness of science - the idea of seeing things no one's ever seen before. That's what hooked me on this:

Training their telescopes on it repeatedly over the years, they saw an expanding shell of matter thrown off by the blast. Astronomers have seen such a shell before, but when they pointed a cluster of radio telescopes at NGC891 in November 2002 and again last June, they saw something new.

At the center of the expanding shell of gas was another tiny new dot. Something small but bright had formed at the very center of the void left by the expanding blast.

I've been moaning for a while about the relative paucity of interesting local blogging. Albuquerque's got a pretty active life of the mind, but I've not found very much being written in the blogorealm. So I've been happy lately with my encounters with Quirky Burque. Added to my blogroll.

Ya know how in the wee hours, half awake, you get all loony?

That's how I felt this morning Lissa woke me up at 3:30: "Do you smell the smoke?"

When I drove home from work last night, before sunset, you could see the pall of smoke blowing up from the South Valley, from a fire in the woods along the river.

It's many miles from our house - probably ten or more - but it's still disconcerting in that half-waking pre-dawn to smell the smoke.

My socially conscious daughter points out in the comments to my previous post that she and her friends are not Eurocentric. They also circulated a petition demanding that the United States, "as one of the leading industrialized nations of the world," remove the bureaucratic barriers that are preventing refugees from Zaire's civil war from finding asylum here.

At a dinner part once (a Washington, D.C., dinner party, really) a guy told me a joke that Ronald Reagan had told him. It's my two degrees of separation from the Great Communicator:

A farmer is giving a guy from the city a tour of his farm when they see the famer's three-legged pig.

"Why does that pig only have three legs?" the man asks.

"That there is an amazing pig," the farmer replies. "Last year, I was plowing out on the south field when my wheel caught in a ditch and the tractor flipped over on me. The pig saw I was in trouble and ran to the house, oinking at the door until my wife saw what was wrong and went for help."

"That's amazing," the city man replies. "But I still don't understand why he only has three legs."

Says the farmer, "You don't eat a pig like that all at once."

My socially conscious daughter and her friends yesterday evening collected 34 signatures on a petition abhorring the terrible violence now besetting the border regions between Latvia and Estonia.

Their petition demanded UN peacekeeping forces and "immediate foodstuffs and monetary support to the suffering civilian populations." The majority of people they approached signed, though some disagreed with the petition. One person asked them if they supported the war in Iraq. When they said "no," she responded that she did, and would not sign. Another said, by way of explaining his refusal, "I'm an American! I'm a Republican!"

Today we learn about the strange hobby of one Greg Packer, a New York man who has "been quoted or photographed at least 16 times on separate occasions by the Associated Press, 14 times by Newsday, 13 times by the New York Daily News, and 12 times by the New York Post." This is not Norman Ornstein or something, someone widely quoted because they have weighty comments on the important issues of the day. This is some guy who specializes in getting himself in those "man on the street" schticks that reporters have to do to liven up otherwise dull copy with generic human reaction.

You know, I always come up with an answer for everything, number one. And, and I always give everybody, you know, the respect and the time that they need. I make it very easy for them. I make it accessible....

I failed last night in my efforts to set up phpBB on Inkstain (Nora and her friends want a bulletin board) because of a PHP version mismatch. The suggestion on the PHP site - upgrade your PHP - is not an option. So I'm looking for a good GPLish alternative. Any suggestions (keeping in mind the jfleck motto - "I do not want to be a hacker.")? The main thing the kids seem to need is threaded discussion.

Let's see, how to strike the appropriate tone here. I don't want to get this wrong, to create the wrong impression, to sound immodest. It's been easy and fun to describe my cycling exploits with self-deprecating humor when I get spit out the back of a pack of racers and trounced, or get dropped, gasping for air, on a long climb with my much stronger training buddies. Modesty as schtick. Let me keep that tone for a moment here, then, by pointing out that the race was just the Cat 4, for beginners and old farts, and that the effort by several of us on the last lap to pull back a three-person break and set up a bunch sprint was a complete failure. The breakaway guys were all tremendously stronger, and were gone before we could even think a second time at pulling it back together.

Some 25 guys started, and like every other crit I've done, there was hammering from the beginning. But this time was different. Instead of gasping on the tail, I found I could push up through the group at will, taking turns at the front. The speeds were, for me, intense - over 26 mph for the first couple of laps before we settled in in the mid-25's. But this time, the lead motorcycle was never out of sight. I was still gasping, but gasping at the front.

The speeds were enough to split the field, and we had about ten or so in the lead pack. Breaks kept going off of the front, and a couple of times I was able to get in one, but they always came back together until the last lap.

On the back stretch of that final lap, there were three people off the front, perhaps 20 yards ahead of the field and accelerating. I moved up along the inside, found the back wheel of the guy who was pulling the pack. I knew I had no speed and was simply going to be happy helping on the front. My thought was that we needed to pull back the break, but those guys had such a burst of speed that by the time we headed into the final turn they were gone.

So there we were, in the final turn, and I'm second wheel in an accelerating pack. Coming out of that turn has been a tricky problem for me, trying to stay on the wheel of the guy in front of me, but this time I managed it, sucked his wheel long enough, then burst past him.

They guy who'd led me through the turn, I realized later, was one of the more skilled riders who raced the Cat 4's to help us out. They'd been in the bunch all along, showing us how it's done. At the end, he was giving me a sprinter's lead-out, and as I pulled past him, he said something encouraging, pulled off to the right, and the last 50 yards I was on my own, taking a clean fourth place.

You have to look way down at the very bottom, but there I am.

Glynn: Your fascinating account of the struggle between The Possibles and The Probables leaves this ignorant American puzzled as to the sport involved. I'm assuming it's not cricket, since I can't imagine one would "come out fighting" in that gentile battle. And perhaps not tennis, since that requires fewer players. Perhaps rugby? Here in America, we have National Anthem at the start of every baseball contest, but there is no holding of hands. And, given the martial nature of our Anthem and the current political complexities of our place in the world, the song carries a bit of extra baggage right now whereever one stands on the underlying geopolitical questions.

Lissa's garden goal is to have something blooming throughout the year. It's rather an evolutionary process - each year some experiments, with the things that survive seeding or being replanted the following year, and the things that don't being replaced

It's like a big game of Sim Yard - add water here, some seeds there, then let the game run for a cycle to see what happens.

This year, the hollyhocks have proven themselves extraordinarily robust, a seemingly natural follow-on to the iris bloom that lasted through mid-May. They're doing so well, in fact, that Lissa's going to have me weed out quite a few of them once they're done blooming. We haven't planted a hollyhock in years, but they seem quite happy reseeding themselves and spreading out to find the wet spots. Now that there are places that get reliable water, they're exploding. They seem to be hybridizing, too, with all kinds of weird color mixtures from white to a deep red with lots of pinks and purples in between.

Around the neighborhood, lots of cholla are in full bloom, but ours is just starting. The various cactus have been coming in waves, too. And in the backyard, the yarrow is doing its thing. It's modest, a soft canopy of tiny flowers that lacks the bright and frilly colors of its more showy neighbors:

The bees and the butterflies know, though. They're absolutely swarming over the top of the yarrow, doing some serious feasting. The flashy colors may be the best evolutionary adaptation to the human garden, but the yarrow's got a fine state-of-nature thing going for it.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere:

The bunker-buster is the most visible of a number of growing nuclear weapons programs, including a proposed plutonium bomb factory, that are under attack in Congress.

"Congressional support for these programs is not very strong," Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., warned Bush administration officials during a March 23 hearing on the nuclear weapons budget.