Thanks to the fine work of Jeff Waugh and his Planet buddies, I've now got my own aggregator running on Inkstain - Planet Fleck. Some minor hacking of the python was required on account of the odd way I'm using the SWCP server farm. Now if Telsa would make an RSS feed, and Pika would fix hers....
No confetti. All right, go balloons, go balloons. We need more balloons. All balloons! All balloons! Keep going! Come on, guys, lets move it. Jesus! We need more balloons. I want all balloons to go, goddammit. Go confetti. Go confetti. More confetti. I want more balloons. What's happening to the balloons? We need more balloons.
Added Prometheus to my blogroll. It's a science policy blog out of the University of Colorado which is provocative on pretty much a daily basis.
I'd rather lost touch with Dan York's blog, and was happy to find its latest incarnation.
Over on Advogato, he's got an interesting discussion of the way the technologies available for distribution influence the content and pacing of his postings.
It's easy to forget sometimes that English is a very different language than American:
"The great British faggot is full of flavour and a great belly warmer at this time of year."
I think it's great that Ali is willing to go off on his own with a new version of GNOME that meets his needs and those of his collaborators. The beauty of free software is that one has the right to tinker in whatever direction one wants. One size cannot possibly fit all, so if Ali wants to make a different size, more power to him. Those who share his views now have a place to devote their energies.
I also must echo Mikael's concerns, and say I will not miss his somewhat abrasive personal style in our midst. It will be interesting to see how his new collaborators negotiate that sometimes difficult terrain.
jrb is onto something very cool here with step one of his "visual index" to GTK+ docs.
While we celebrate Lance Armstrong's victory today in the Tour de France, it's worth a moment to reflect on the story of Sister Mary Andrew Matesich:
Her doctor suggested that she consider entering a clinical trial, in which she would receive an experimental treatment. The idea intrigued her. "I am a scientist myself," she said in an interview. "I have a Ph.D. in chemistry. The scientist in me was interested."The idea that she could help to advance research appealed to her intellectually, but in a religious way as well. "As a sister, a member of a religious order, someone in a service capacity my whole life, I want to continue to be of service to others," she said, adding, "I wouldn't be alive today if other women hadn't been in clinical trials."
Sister Mary is as good a reason as there is to wear yellow.
L and I went on a wander yesterday afternoon and ended up walking in Otero Canyon in the rain. It was lovely.
We were headed to the back side of the Sandias, the mountains that loom over Albuquerque, but a big heavy thunderhead was draped over them so we headed down South 14, out around Oak Flat, and ended up parked at the Otero Canyon trailhead as the clouds began drifting south onto us.
We figured when we started there was a good chance we'd get soaked, but it was warm and nice and we had our rain gear, so we just wandered up the trail a bit - not far, but enough to feel the atmospherics of a lovely summer shower. And the smell. Desert mountains in a summer rain.
It's been extraordinarily wet at our place this summer, though a big part of that is the random luck of the summer thunderstorms. The official Albuquerque rain gauge is at the airport, a little less than five miles from my house. They've gotten 2.43 inches so far in July. I've gotten 4.21 inches. The luck of the thunderstorm draw. It's also, more deeply, the nature of the highly variable desert climate.
If you live in, say, coastal North Carolina, where you get a lot more rain (they average 51 inches a year to our 9.4), you also have a lot less variability. The wettest year on record in coastal NC is 69 inches, the driest is 39 inches. In other words, the wettest year on record is 35 percent above normal, the driest is 24 percent below normal. In a dry climate, the variability is much greater. The wettest year on record here is 17.6 inches, 87 percent above normal. The driest was 3.6 inches, 64 percent below normal. Generally speaking, desert precipitation regimes have a much bigger "coefficient of variability," to use the statistician's cumbersome but helpfully precise moniker for the phenomenon. This, more than the simple lack of precipitation, is what makes deserts harder places for plants and animals and us people to live in. The most helpful definition I've found of drought is "less water than you've come to depend on." If the Anasazi had gotten a predictable 11 inches a year up at Chaco (avg. 11, max. 21, min. 5) they'd have been fine.
That's not a very romantic way of looking at the rain in the desert in the summer. The numbers help explain it, give it depth for me. It's the lack of rain, and its power when it arrives, that is its romance. That and having my beloved with me for the walk. That's romantic too.
(Data courtesy of the fine folks at the Western Regional Climate Center)
This email from Byron Poland made my day.
I too have a yellow rubber bad with the words LIVESTRONG etched in it. I wear it for my mother who has survived lung cancer (removal of one lobe)and 5 years later brain cancer, 1 brain surgery, 4 weeks of radiation and 1 dose of stereotactic radiation. The radiation cooked most of her hair permanently, and she goes around proudly with her bald head (i'm growing up to match her well). She has lived through a second brain cancer scare just last year, that required another brain surgery! She is by far the strongest person I know, and no she can't climb the Alps,or the Appalachian Trail for that matter, but she is alive and Living Strong. Lance is a huge motivation to thousands and thousands who have had to live through cancer. I wear a yellow rubber band to remind me I really don't have it so bad.
A friend at work told me how her mother week before last was all concerned about the weather. "I don't think the weather's supposed to be bad here today," my friend told her mom.
"No, in France," her mom replied. She was worried about the bike riders.
I tell you this story by way of explaining that what Lance Armstrong does matters, and why I'm wearing a goofy yellow rubber band around my wrist. My friend's mom is starting an aggressive round of chemotherapy this week. The whole not-dying-and-living-to-ride-again thing is so incredibly important.
I don't for a minute think Armstrong let Ivan Basso win at La Mongie Friday because of the cancer thing, as some in the press have tried to suggest. But I also don't doubt for a minute the sincerity of Armstrong's attempt to help Basso's mother. "We've been friends for a long time and off the bike we're trying to work a little bit on his mum's situation, to try to see if she can win the fight against cancer," Armstrong said. There's a sort of awkwardness to the normally smooth-talking Armstrong's cadence in that sentence that's endearing.
Living strong doesn't have to be about time trialing up L'Alpe d'Huez. It can be something as simple as being fearless about tearing apart the drier to fix the drive belt yourself, even when you're scared you won't be able to put it back together.
So I feel a little bit silly about the fan boy thing, wearing the yellow thing on my arm. But it's for my friend's mom, and my dad, and my beloved Lissa and all the other people who stare down chemo and puke and lose their hair and turn around to live their lives. "It's a long way from Indianapolis to Puy du Fou," Armstrong said after he won the opening prologue of the 1999 Tour. Indianapolis was where he underwent cancer treatment. Puy du Fou is where he put on his first yellow jersey.
Words to live by.
By request, here's Sunday's Sunshine Spin, courtesy of my borrowed Geko GPS:
But what you really want to see is the elevation profile:
(That little downhill on the left is the ride from my house to the start. You don't see it on the right because I had to turn the GPS off - the batteries were getting low. Trust me. I rode back up it.)
It was a great ride. Thanks to Barbara and all the other great volunteers who put it on. Good cause, good fun.
I'd been asked how I was making the traces. It's a Garmin Geko GPS unit, with a web-based software package from Endless Pursuit. I'm not necessarily recommending this. For starters, it seems to only be Windows-based, and requires IE at that. But since you asked....
Another option worth considering might be actually obeying the speed limit. Speeding-related crashes killed nearly 14,000 people in the United States in 2002, which is very close to the number of people killed in drunk driving-related accidents, and I would hope that you're not going to argue for your right to drive drunk. I know you don't think of yourself as a danger out there, but likely pretty much none of the people involved in all those wrecks did either, and that's still an awful lot of dead people. What's the rush?
Overheard cell phone conversation - a man sitting on the bench in front of the supermarket:
"No, you're the brat."Pause.
"No, you are."
The GPS is like a giant Etch-A-Sketch:
Nothing like a walk with purpose.
My friend Nancy, who is about as hooked on recreation geek toys as a girl can be, loaned me her Garmin Geko for the weekend. So Sadie and I took a walk:
We walked 1.12 miles at an average speed of 3.24 mph. Given GPS accuracy, I think those numbers are good.
A fact to tuck away for next week: last year Ivan Basso lost 4:24 and 2:02 to Lance Armstrong on the two time trials.
My friend Mark, who's been doing battle over the antiquated RS 2477 law that some argue allows off-roaders to tear up private property, has put up a great new Official RS 2477 page.
I've rather stumbled into a debate about climate science on a Canadian coal industry blog, of all places.
I had to jump in after I saw posted a newspaper editorial suggesting that the famous Mann et al. "hockey stick" graph is now discredited, and that therefore the whole edifice of climate change science has therefore crumbled. First of all, it's not true that Mann et al. is discredited. But even if, the whole of climate science is much more rich and complex than a single paper!
For you Albuquerque readers, there's a fun bike ride coming up Sunday, the Sunshine Spin. It's a fundraiser for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. There's an easy ride up the riverside trail or a hammerfest up Tramway. The folks putting it on are great people, the cause is good. The idea that you can live well with cancer and live well after is an incredibly important message.
Look for me. I'll be the one wearing the yellow wrist band.
Happy Bastille Day.
update, 8 p.m.: Says Merckx: ""He didn't respect his word."
Pika: Note to Chuck - It's a monsoon forecast. We're not only supposed to like it, we're supposed to go outside when it starts raining in the afternoon and stand in it, grinning like idiots.
My wife, Lissa, is not only beautiful, but smart and talented. Here's proof:
Last night I threw some clothes in the dryer that I needed for work today. When I went to take them out, they were still sitting there wet. I figured I'd forgotten to turn the dryer on, so I hit the start button, heard the engine rev up, and left.
An hour later, they were still sitting there, wet. The dryer was busted. Dollar signs flashed before my eyes. "Don't worry," Lissa said. "I'll deal with it tomorrow. We can put up a line or something until we get it fixed."
This morning, she told me she had an idea what was wrong. Maybe it was just a busted belt. This afternoon, she called me at work. It had been a busted belt, and they had a new one at the store where we bought it. Total cost to fix it: $13, plus a few hours of her time. Lissa completely rocks. But it gets better.
When she had the dryer torn apart, she found a ton of change that had fallen out of various pockets over the years. The total take: $14. That's a $1 net profit.
Kudos to the folks who put on the beautiful Oak Flat bicycle race in the mountains Saturday.
The race is in the mountains east of towns. The course is all up and down, but gently so, nothing terribly steep. It travels a 12.5-mile (20-km) loop. The beginning winds gently downhill on a narrow, twisting little road through the woods that would be a delightful little ride if one was cruising gently, but it was more than a little nerve-wracking in the midst of a bunch of riders hammering and still getting a feel for the group dynamic. The downhills straighten out, though, before it begins twisting back up a lovely little valley and then into the open, climbing back to the start-finish line.
Because it's so beautiful - the parking and setup area is in the Oak Flat campground - it's a big cycling festival, half race and half community gathering. There were more than 150 people racing. It's enormous. I got there an hour before my race, and spent the time alternating between some warmup laps up and down the road and around the campground and socializing.
The group I raced in, the E's, did two laps, and we pretty quickly broke up into a peloton of 13 or so at the front. I was able to sit in for most of the first lap, but mostly on the back of the bunch (repeating my usual mistake). When we got to the steepest bit of the climb back to the start-finish line, I got dropped (geez but it's disheartening when the follow car passes you!), and spent the next few miles trying to chase down a riding partner so I wouldn't have to do the whole second lap by myself.
I finally caught John Duran, who I've raced with before (I don't think I've ever beaten him), and we shared the load for the second lap.
The second time up the finishing climb, John dropped me, but then he missed the turnoff, which meant a cheap 12th-place finish for me. (Remembering the lesson of the crit a couple of weeks ago when I got passed at the line, I kept watching over my shoulder up the whole run-in to the finish. No one.)
It was fun afterwards, hanging around the finish line watching the speedsters come across (the big boys and girls did more than the two laps I did in the E's) and visiting. Everyone has a story, and "How'd ya do?" triggers them all, each patiently listened to by the others.
Aaron makes many good points. This is one of them:
Andrea Lafferty, of the Traditional Values Coalition, says, "There's an arrogance in the scientific community that they know better than the average American." Perhaps that's because scientists are are educated and knowledgeable enough that "knowing more than the average American" is actually their job, just like "being better at fixing cars than the average American" is how an auto mechanic gets paid to fix cars by average people who respect that expertise.
Standing out on the sidewalk, in the sun, in the pouring rain, with a couple of other people grinning from ear to ear. Nothin' like the first summer rain.
Lissa and I had just finished an early dinner in the Double Rainbow, or whatever it's called now, when the rain started. The front window looks out on old Route 66, and it was still sunny when we saw the rain - big heavy drops, glistening in the light as they dropped at an angle slightly off of perpindicular. Lissa looked at me. "Wanna go walk in the rain?"
People were standing out on the sidewalk in it, looking up and smiling, and we turned left, then up a little alley. In the five minutes it took to get to our car, our shirts were soaked - the sort of rain where there's space between the drops, but each drop is enormous, and the air is still hot and the raindrops icy cold from their travels.
The rain kept getting thicker as we drove home, and by the time we got to our house the streets were running. But there were still people playing soccer in the park. The first summer rain is like that.
The rain gauge showed two tenths of an inch when we got home, that in probably 15 minutes. There is little quite so satisfying as sitting on the front porch watching a summer rain, which we did. It's always a struggle between the pleasure of the rain and the cold from the wind and the icy raindrops. The air stays warm - the temperature at our house dropped from 100 to 75 in half an hour - but the splash and the chill still eventually won out and we we went inside . It's still raining now, an hour later, gently, just small drops. And the sun's shining. I love New Mexico in the summer.
I carried out my sacred duty yesterday, officially declaring the start of the monsoon.
Dew points here are finally starting to rise, and the palpable angst is beginning to ease. I can imagine the religious fervor of an older time, before we had sounding balloons and satellite imagery, though I suppose it could be argued that the technology has simply become new religion. (I personally think not, but I'll tolerate the argument, if only for metaphorical purposes. Tracking radar echoes on the Internet is my rain dance.)
It occurs to me that the appeal of the Tour de France has parallels with the popularity of survivor-style reality television programs. You put 200 bike riders together on television for three weeks, putting them through wacky and impossible challenges ("You mean we have to ride on cobbles?" or "We have to ride up that?") and see who's left standing at the end.
(Iban Mayo just got voted off the island.)
Spent the morning yesterday on the mountains on a bike.
Next Saturday is the Oak Flat Road Race, and I wanted to pre-ride the course so I had some idea. It's a little less than two miles through the mountains, all ups and downs but not terribly steep and a beautiful course. It's a little less than 13 miles. I'm in the E race, so I'll do it just twice.
I went with my weather-geek buddy Charlie. We've known one another for years, but never ridden together, and it was fun. He brought along Jeff, a youngster who works with him. Charlie's an old road bike racer, and he's done Oak Flat before, so he was showing us the course. I was figuring we would need to be a bit gentle for Jeff, who is new to cycling, but he was strong as a horse - no worries there. He kept dropping Charlie and I and then waiting for us to catch up.
Sam Abt is my favorite cycling writer. He's got a terrific eye for the ebb and flow of the Boucle. He pretty much nailed this one right:
Thor Hushovd, a 26-year-old Norwegian, has a big goal. Now in his fourth Tour de France and the winner of a daily stage in 2002, he says he has figured out how to gain the yellow jersey of the race's leader.
Remember, this was before today's stage.
Friends Paul and Anita dropped by yesterday with a turtle for us.
We have a male - Speedy - and they brought him a mate. Their backyard is a turtle world, and they're always looking for good homes. We were flattered that we passed muster. We're looking for a name. Suggestions welcome.
OK, the usual caveat - one data point is not enough to prove that anthropogenic climate change is upon us, just as one data point would prove that it isn't. But here's another one that is entirely consistent with the models' predictions: early snow melt in Yosemite. (We watched the same thing happen in the watersheds of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado that feed our rivers here.)
This is the sort of thing that the models predict. Note that this is another chance to test whether the pattern of change is a result of natural variability or human-caused climate change. In this case, the potential source of natural variability, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, doesn't fit the warming seen in the last few years.
Hunting for a reference to an old paper by Gwin Vivian, I ran across this talk from a few years back by the ubiquitous Jared Diamond. The questions raised by Diamond are relevant to the topic I've been reading about of late, the effect of climate variability on human societies. My question is why some societies adjust to variability on a decadal scale, while others collapse
Diamond poses the question more broadly: why did some pre-industrial societies collapse under environmental stress, while others survived? Like the best questions, this one offers no easy analysis, but part of the answer seems to have to do with a society's ability to live within available resources. He uses the example of Easter Island, where people keep cutting down the trees until there were none left, then seemed to have started eating one another. This was not a fruitful coping strategy.
And what of Chaco (my favorite set piece for this discussion)?
We can now return to the question subject to longstanding debate: was Chaco Canyon abandoned because of human impact on the environment or because of drought? The answer is: it was abandoned for both reasons. Over the course of five centuries the human population of Chaco Canyon grew, their demands on the environment grew, their environmental resources declined, and people came to be living increasingly close to the margin of what the environment could support. That was the ultimate cause of abandonment. The proximate cause, the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back, was a drought that finally pushed Chacoans over the edge.
Uhh, I guess it's really "game theory on the roads of Belgium" right now, but you get the idea.
Last year, RAND social scientist David Ronfeldt's piece on game theory in NASCAR racing got a lot of traction. Game theory's fascinating, and NASCAR is a terrific laboratory for its study, with complex problems of cooperation and defection.
But NASCAR's got nothing on Le Tour, where it looks as though Iban Mayo and the Euskaltel squad have been caught behind a split in the peloton. That gives all the "heads of state," as Phil and Paul would put it, a motivation to cooperate. For now.
With Le Tour about to commence, a poster to the local bike-racer's mailing list offers a link to Phil and Paul Bingo.
Here's the part where I'm self-deprecating about my bicycle racing skills and really mean it. No false modesty here. I got skunked Tuesday night.
This is the Beginners and Old Farts race again, 20 minutes at a pretty brisk tempo. I was able to hang with the pack, and even lead on a lap, until we came down the front straightaway with three laps to go and some guy put on an absolutely brutal acceleration. I could see him making his move, but I just couldn't respond quickly enough. Maybe six of the 10 people who were left were able to go with him, and I just fell off the back. Fast.
Caught out back, I picked up a second straggler and asked him to get on my wheel, but he couldn't stay with me, so I was just left to fend for myself. Gradually I began pulling them back, but there was just no way. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that the guys behind me were long gone, so as I turned the corner into the finishing straight I didn't sprint. Big mistake. The two buys behind me who had been long gone weren't.
If I had been paying attention, I would have seen Bill, the finish line judge, pointing up the road behind me as I cruised in to the line, but I didn't get it until two guys hammered past me in a ferocious sprint about 10 feet from the line.
Lesson learned. If I'm cruising in to the finish line, keep an eye out behind.
I jumped back in to the C race, but it was a pretty half-hearted effort. I was on the back of the pack for a lap when, coming into the front straightaway, a gust of wind that must have been blowing 50 miles per hour swept over us straight on. I kid you not. Someone said later it blew over a porta-pottie. The sand was blinding, and pretty much everyone sat up until it passed. I hung on for a few more laps with some stragglers, then noticed my back wheel slipping a bit in the turns and realizing it was losing air. Good excuse. I was outta there.