A guy rides up on a loaded bicycle, and Johnny Mango gets the story. It's a perfect example of why I love his blog. Life is more the sum of small moments than it is the grand themes, and Johnny - Jon Knudsen, a retired teacher who lives in Albuquerque's Nob Hill neighborhood - has this fresh exuberance for the small moments that is incredibly endearing. My favorite journalism (to read, and to make) happens when a writer has an excitement for something fascinating seen or learned. "I just saw the coolest thing...." Johnny Mango has that. (You can see his stuff on Duke City Fix, too.)
A trail of bread crumbs leads to the self-proclaimed "National Conservative Weekly" Human Events' list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Chosen by a hand-picked panel of conservative scholars, it offeres no real surprises (Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, The Feminine Mystique) until you get down to the list of runners up. There we find Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species." Youch.
I had to work yesterday, but got off early enough that the bicycle and the warm summer evening beckoned, so I rode down to the river to check out the work at Tingley Beach. The riverside bike trail tracks down the "beach's" west side, but in the midst of a massive reconstruction of this age-old Albuquerque recreation area they've diverted the trail onto the new roadway. No cars. Just me and my bike.
By coincidence (or maybe not?) Johnny_Mango has an update on what's going on over on Duke City Fix:
What is most impressive about all this work is that somebody had the idea that Albuquerque deserved to treat itself like an important city. Tingley Beach and the linking rail line show this. The Rapid Ride shows this. The Belen to Bernalillo commuter line shows this. Our art, our museums, our public parks, our neighborhoods show this. Pretty soon maybe the rest of us will believe it: Albuquerque is important to New Mexico, to the west, and to the USA. And the ammenities we create today will change how people feel about being here.
(Sometime when I have more time I'll elaborate on why Jon's blog is my current favorite. In short, the guy's got these wide eyes and he's always using them, and he sees stuff and then tells us about it with an enthusiasm that's infectious.)
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: another attempt to spread my meme - why climate variability on decadal scales is so important to life here in the arid western U.S.:
It snowed like crazy Nov. 23, 1922, as representatives of seven western states hunkered down at Bishop's Lodge outside Santa Fe to negotiate what amounted to the future of the West.They were working out the final details of an agreement dividing the waters of the Colorado River, and if the climate gods were sending a message with the snowstorm, it was a misleading one.
It wasn't just a single storm. For much of the preceding two decades, it had been unusually wet across much of the West, new research suggests.
The people gathered at Bishop's Lodge did not know they were living in unusual times. They expected the bounty to last forever, and the Colorado River Compact that they signed the next day divvied up the Colorado's waters accordingly, assigning shares of water to each of the states in the river's basin.
Their assumption about the Colorado's flows turned out to be, in the words of climate researcher Ken Kunkel, "very optimistic."
The result is a future in which there may not be enough water to go around.
The story's based in significant part on a new paper by Connie Woodhouse, Ken Kunkel and others that offers new details on the nature and extent of the rainy early 20th century. I also relied heavily on the Severe Sustained Drought study, which resulted in a voluminous and incredily useful set of papers published back in 1995 in Water Resources Bulletin.
jfleck at inkstain = Jink at fecal stink. (To "jink" means to turn sharply.)
In which Pika notices our little secret weapon. The "wit of 10 wild horses" indeed.
The new Star Wars is, quite simply, the most colossally bad movie I have ever seen. Let me be precise: I have seen worse movies, but nothing so very bad on such a colossal scale.
Yesterday's Giro stage was epic.
The Finestre, the penultimate climb of the day, is insane - something like 11 miles at nearly 10 percent grade, with nearly the last half on rocky dirt road. All the players - race leader Paol Savodelli and the three riders most closely trailing him (Simoni, Rujano and Di Luca) arrived at the bottom of the climb together. This was, for all practical purposes, the last day of serious racing. Sunday's ride into Milan is just formality. The Giro d'Italia would be decided on its final two climbs.
There were no surprises to be had, no subtle tactics. It's like a batter facing Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth inning: you know you're going to see the cut fastball. Simoni is a great climber, and was only 2:09 down on Savodelli. Everyone knew Simoni would attack. The only question was who would be able to go with him.
Simoni went early in the climb. It wasn't one of those blistering attacks we've seen Armstrong or the late Marco Pantani do so many times, where they slip away from near the back of the pack, jump out of the saddle, swing wide and go. Simoni just started pulling away, slowly, steadily. Rujano, the kid from Venezuela with ears sticking out like an elephant's ("Pantani was a big hero of mine. I wear an earring because I want to be like him.") went with him, and the remarkable Di Luca - who knew he could climb?
Savodelli could not match the move.
By the top of the climb, Savodelli's lead of 2:09 over Simoni had been erased. But perhaps this was not like the ninth inning. Perhaps it was more like facing Mariano Rivera in the eighth, because on the back side of the Fiinestre, on the descent toward the base of the final climb into Sestriere, Salvodelli had his one more at bat. He descended like a madman, like a man trying to salvage victory from the grip of defeat. And when the reached the foot of the Sestriere climb, Salvodelli had his pink jersey back.
But Rujano! He and Simoni dropped Di Luca on the descent, and the two appoached the final climb together: Simoni, one of the sport's great climbers, and Rujano, the kid from Venezuela whose team made the Giro at the last moment on a wild card entry. Together they climbed, until the moment Rujano sensed victory and jumped. There is a beauty in the fluid movement of a truly great climber, pedaling perfect circles, out of the saddle, the fixed gaze, the ease. He did look like Pantani. And then there was Simoni, unable to respond, his body rocking to side to side as, broken, he uncomfortably muscled the bike up the final hill.
Rujano tore up to the finish line with a look of agonized ecstacy (is such a thing possible) on his face. Simoni limped in next, then Di Luca, then a powerful but clearly spent Savodelli amid a group of helpers, close enough to his rivals to ensure victory.
Savodelli, Simoni, Rujano and Di Luca threw it all down on those final two climbs. The result: after three weeks of racing, just 45 seconds of total time separated the three. Sport does not get any better than that.
Someone has planted cactus in the ratty little median on Indian School just east of University.
It's pretty clearly not an official city landscaping job. When the city swoops in, as they've done farther east along Indian School, they do it up all fancy. No, I'm imagining someone in the dead of night with a trowel and a box of prickly pear paddles.
The bike trail cross Indian School there, and it comes right at the end of my rides, so this morning I squirted the last bit of water in my bottle on the cactus. I am complicit.
Luke, I am your father.... Would you like to make that a combo meal?
I'm with Mark. I think accountability matters. I would like to know, for example, if Marston is a key campaign adviser to Brad Winter, or Greg Payne in drag. But I actually have a bigger problem with Marston Moore than his/her anonymity.
In his/her entire, well-written, knowledgeable, obviously well-informed piece, there is by my count exactly one word about policy. One of the great failings of the mainstream media in covering elections is the tendency toward horserace journalism - who's ahead, by how many points, who's positioning themselves where to capture which block of voters? That's what matters to political insiders, people who style themselves players in the game, but it isn't (or shouldn't be) what matters to citizens trying to understand how their votes might influence the city's future.
You didn't ask for my advice, Marston, but I'll offer it anyway. If you want to capture this reader's attention, sign your name so I can judge for myself who you are and what your agenda might be. And tell me what effect you think these people will actually have on the city we all love.
(P.S. Mark's suggestion notwithstanding, I'm pretty sure I'm not Coco. But who knows? If dreams were thunder, lightnin' were desire, this old house would have burned down a long time ago.)
sculpture by Nora Heineman-Fleck
This works on so may levels.
Over at the Fix, news you can use (at least the subset of y'all in and around Albuquerque who ride bikes) about a detour down by Tingley Beach on my beloved bike trail.
And, as a bonus, the Fix now has an RSS feed, which means they're, like, so on my Planet.
Ya know what I'd like is one of those trucks like the railroad guys use, that has regular tires but also those railroad wheels that drop down so you can drive it on the railroad tracks? That'd be cool. Or a Shelby Cobra. Or a riding mower. That would be neat, too.
Those who have run across the climate research work of Zbigniew Jaworowski might be interested in a recent analysis by Jim Easter, who gets a full 10 bonus points for what I believe to be the first instance of a Dashiell Hammett reference in the climate literature.
Grandma Stops Intruder With Garden Gnome:
"He lay there and I began to scream. I went back into the kitchen and found a rolling pin in case he came down. I didn't want to break another GNOME."
A bunch of disparate threads coming together here in one spot: climate change controversies, free software and a really hot weekend here in Albuquerque. (Don't worry, skeptics. I'm not gonna blame the heat wave on global warming.)
The climateaudit guys, critics of the hockey stick, have done their analysis in R, which is a nice and freely available (GPL) statistical tool. The new reanalysis by Wahl and Ammann also uses R and both groups have published their code.
So I've been playing a bit with R, which is a fun toolkit.
(click through for more)
Which brings me to this weekend, where the temperature hit 96 yesterday in Albuquerque, setting a record for May 21 by a couple of degrees. But knowing it's the hottest May 21st ever doesn't tell us everything. For that, a nice histogram of May 21 temperatures would be nice:
The data summary, from R:
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
64.00 77.25 84.00 82.11 86.00 96.00
You can see the way the data skews to the cool side, which also is obvious in the box-and-whisker plot.
Apropos of nothing, really. I was just curious about the significance of yesterday's temperature and was looking for a little data file to play with in R. Sorry, if y'all want to audit my work, I have no idea where I got the data, just an old file I had laying around.
The lily in our pond is happy this year.
The shade structure that collapsed in the big March blizzard let the sun in, and the lily responded with a lovelier than usual bloom. The fish, which have always been a bit of a mystery, seem more so. The cattails (the "weeds" of the title - I didn't plant them) seem more exuberant as well.
Autumn Gray, in this morning's Journal, picks up on a remarkable trend in the Albuquerque real estate market: out-of-market buyers using their bubble money to buy investment properties here:
Such sales are part of a trend that home builders and real estate agents say is driving up prices in the Albuquerque metro area and making it more difficult for local buyers to find homes.
"I've seen properties that shouldn't sell for more than $150,000 go for $200,000," said John Sheffer, a real estate agent with the Vaughan Company Realtors.
Local real estate offices first saw the increased interest here about seven months ago, and activity has escalated since.
Now it's not uncommon to spot groupings of California license plates at local home building sites.
One wonders what happens here, then, if my bubble-obsessed friend Aaron is right. I'd been thinking of this as a coastal phenomenon from which we were (at least relatively) insulated. I was imagining the housing market to be a series of relatively isolated islands. Autumn's story suggests the bubble moves with more fluidity than I had understood.
Today, birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, I bought my own copies of Freakonomics and The Tipping Point. I've read borrowed copies of both, but wanted to own them: Freakonomics so I could spend some time chasing down the footnotes and thinking through the implications, and The Tipping Point because - well - because when I grow up I want to be Malcolm Gladwell.
It was Todd at work who loaned me his copy of Freakonomics, after a conversation that started when he dumped The Tipping Point on another colleagues desk with the explanation that he really must read it. So I was amused when Gladwell sent this email to Dubner:
thought you would enjoy this. a man in the security line at toronto airport today recognized me, pulled out a copy of freakonomics, and made me sign it. we are totally co-branded! cheers, m.
It's especially noteworthy because Levitt's work totally undercuts one of Gladwell's primary "tipping point" examples: the reasons for New York's precipitous drop in crime. According to Levitt, it was abortion, not the city's decision to go after turnstyle-jumpers. It's a credit to Gladwell that he's willing to admit he was wrong and happily flack Freakonomics. So today I bought both. They're so totally co-branded.
Newly enthusiastic about baseball statistics, I followed a link chain that started on Levitt and Dubner's blog and ended up at Hardball Times. When I was talking at the ballgame a few weeks back with my friend Dan about the most underrated baseball statistics, I mentioned "runs scored" and "runs allowed." Hardball Times has a nice graph that succinctly explains the Yankees' improving but still quite modest record: they're giving up a lot of runs.
I met the knee repairman Tuesday ("orthopedic surgeon" sounds so frightening). After looking at the MRI and taking a set of fresh x-rays, he tried to soften his explanation: "I wish I had better news for you." The lateral meniscus in my right knee - the sort of wedge-shaped pancake of cartilage that cushions the outer half of the femur-tibia junction - is completely trashed. It's pretty much what my cycling buddy Sage predicted in a moment of candor: "bone on bone." I'll need surgery to clean out the crap.
So why isn't this more traumatic news? Well, first and foremost, it's fixable. There's going to be some unpleasantness over the next couple of months, but it's not a huge deal. It's not like I was just diagnosed with cancer.
But there's a second explanation, I think, for the satisfaction I take from the news. What happened to my knee was inevitable, the doc explained. Nearly 20 years ago, I suffered a freak basketball accident that fractured the top of the tibia. The knee repairman I had that time did his best to reshape the tibial surface - where the top of the tibia and the lateral meniscus meet. But it wasn't perfect, and over the years the surface of the tibial plateau has been slowly chewing away at the meniscus.
In other words, what I had been thinking of as a freak accident was in fact an event with a clear cause and a certain inevitability. Freak accidents are scary. Clear causes and inevitability are far more manageable. Risk perception is a funny thing.
"Now, I have to go play on line Pictionary, if you'll excuse me."
Matthew Bohnsack has a lovely illustration of what happens when it gets wet in the desert.
OK, so the whole tendonitis thing was a bunch of crap. It's torn cartilage in my right knee (lateral meniscus, for those of you in the baby boom generation uncomfortably familiar with the anatomical details). Surgery seems likely. Bike racing seems unlikely, at least for a bit.
In which Nora does Mandelbrot with a randomly sweet color sensibility.
An amusing grand convergence: two books I brought with me on my trip to Phoenix, both recommended by colleagues: Freakonomics and Moneyball.
Here's a blog entry in which the author of one trashes the other.
Freakonomics, the book, is a delight.
Freakonomics, the blog, seems promising.
Craig Counsell, the second baseman for the Arizona Diamondbacks, had been alive less than a month when Jimi Hendrix died. Hence the cognitive dissonance when, every time Counsell steps to the plate at the Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix - the BOB - they play Hendrix's opening lines from "All Along the Watchtower." It's a good song, regardless of the time warp.
The D-Backs seem to have an uncomfortable relationship with their desert namesake. The fluffy mascot hopping around at the stadium is bobcat ("BOBcat," get it), not a snake. It's hard to make a cute snake, and hard to imagine how you deck out a stuffed one to dance atop the dugout. But in the late innings, when rally energy is needed, a rattler appears on the animated sign board above center field. It's all rattle and no fangs, though. Snakes are scary, I guess.
There was good theater tonight, in the way of an early summer evening at the ballpark, a langorous nine innings that don't quite matter as much as nine innings in September. Luis Gonzalez, the D-Backs' left fielder, got thrown out for arguing a called third strike. It was the second time he'd struck out with a runner on third and only one out - the sort of scoring opportunity he's paid a substantial sum to convert. Counsell, to the tune of Hendrix, whacked two of the most lovely doubles into the right field corner. And my scorecard looks like chaos in pen, thanks to the complex lineup gymnastics a manager must perform in a league where the pitcher hits. That led to the final bit of theater, when Tony Clark came up to pinch hit. It was the number seven spot in the order, filled at games' start by the shortstop. But by the ninth inning, we'd seen a double switch, the seven spot in the order had become the pitcher's spot, and we saw Clark as a pinch hitter, two down in the ninth with the winning run on first.
He lofted a long fly ball to deep right-center, but a bit too high and not quite deep enough. Final score: Washington 4, Arizona 3.
I can add another major league ballpark to my life list.
Southwest Airlines does a sort of hybrid first-come, first-served seating that creates a fascinating game theoretical problem at the airport.
As you check in you get a boarding pass in group "A," "B" or "C," and the groups line up and board in that order. No assigned seating. The result at the gate is a somewhat complex waiting game. If everyone cooperates, we all get to sit until right before it's time to board. But inevitably a few people start lining up early, which starts a stampede. And then everyone ends up standing in line for a very long time. Here at gate A7 at the Albuquerque airport, where I'm sitting waiting for a flight to Phoenix, people have been lined up for half an hour for their flight.
The benefit of this group behavior seems minimal, but I admit I've done it myself more than once. Today, I'm sitting.
As has become my custom, for my birthday I went out today and rode my age.
The last couple of years my age didn't seem a particular challenge, so I added mountains. But with the knee feeling tweeky, today just getting out and cruising 46 miles seemed a reasonable bargain. Going slow rather than fast, I was reminded of why I ride.
Up on the Alameda Bridge, the USGS guy who takes care of the river gauge was there, taking river bottom measurements. I told him I log into his gauge ever day on the Internet to see how the river's flowing, and he seemed geniunely pleased. Someone cares! He explained to me how the gizmo works (radar, bounced off the river surface to measure its height), and showed me the device he uses to figure out where the river bottom is (it's constantly changing).
Down in the south valley, a crew was out planting chile.
And somewhere in between I ran into my teammate Sage, and we rode together and chatted. Lovely day.
Tomorrow: MRI.
British climate wag Benny Peiser went public last week with an analysis that had been rejected by Science magazine questioning the alleged scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions are changing Earth's climate. Peiser repeated an analysis published in Science last year by Naomi Oreskes, and claimed that Oreskes was wrong to say that zero papers among nearly a thousand reviewed questioned the greenhouse consensus.
(click through for more)
Peiser claimed he found 34 that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the 'the observed warming over the last 50 years'." Tim Lambert asked for the list, which Peiser kindly provided and which Lambert has has posted. Let's just say that my reading of the abstracts doesn't support Benny's contention. Go read them all if you want. I'll just offer one, in an area where I've spent a good bit of time trying to understand the literature for myself:
Global Climate-Change and Tropical Cyclones
Lighthill J, Holland G, Gray W, Landsea C, Craig G, Evans J, Kurihara Y, Guard C
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 75 (11): 2147-2157 Nov 1994
Abstract: This paper offers an overview of the authors’ studies during a specialized international symposium (Mexico, 22 November-1 December 1993) where they aimed at making an objective assessment of whether climate changes, consequent on an expected doubling of atmospheric CO2 in the next six or seven decades, are likely to increase significantly the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones (TC). Out of three methodologies available for addressing the question they employ two, discarding the third for reasons set out in the appendix. In the first methodology, the authors enumerate reasons why, in tropical oceans, the increase in sea surface temperature (SST) suggested by climate change models might be expected to affect either (i) TC frequency, because a well-established set of six conditions for TC formation include a condition that SST should exceed 26 degrees C, or (ii) TC intensity, because this is indicated by thermodynamic analysis to depend critically on the temperature at which energy transfer to air near the sea surface takes place. But careful study of both suggestions indicates that the expected effects of increased SST would be largely self-limiting (i) because the other five conditions strictly control how far the band of latitudes for TC formation can be further widened, and (ii) because intense winds at the sea surface may receive their energy input at a temperature significantly depressed by evaporation of spray, and possibly through sea surface cooling. In the second methodology, the authors study available historical records that have very large year-to-year variability in TC statistics. They find practically no consistent statistical relationships with temperature anomalies; also, a thorough analysis of how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle influences the frequency acid distribution of TCs shows any direct effects of local SST changes to be negligible. The authors conclude that, even though the possibility of some minor indirect effects of global warming on TC frequency and intensity cannot be excluded, they must effectively be "swamped" by large natural variability.
How Benny can claim that "reject(s) or doubt(s)" anthropogenic climate change is beyond me. It clearly "reject(s) or doubt(s)" the idea that greenhouse warming could cause more frequent or more severe hurricanes - a position reflected in the most recent IPCC report. But it explicitly assumes global warming because of CO2.
books: I'm flirting with two books right now. The Worlds of Herman Kahn is Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi's biography of the RAND thinktank guru of nuclear war strategy, the real Dr. Strangelove. It's an odd book, but that is a good thing. Thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war is and should be unsettling. Moneyball is Michael Lewis' look at Billy Beane and the Oakland As' love affair with statistics and low-rent pro ball. Dan McKay, who works with me at the Journal, sat down with me at the ballpark the other day and asked what I thought the most underrated statistic was in baseball. I suggested runs scored. He offered regression to the mean, and made an excellent case. He loaned me his copy of the book.
family: I had a lovely evening Friday, driving up to Española with Nora to see a student film festival. We stopped off in Santa Fe afterwards for a thin crust pizza at the Atomic Cafe, which she suggested. That she was able to take me to one of her places.... Well, it occurs to me that my daughter is largely over the divide between little girl and young woman, and she is delightful company.
cycling: It's hard to understate the frustration of reading the steady stream on my cycling team's email list as they talk about the training rides and the upcoming races. (Tomorrow morning it's hill climbing repeats. God how they hurt, and I love them.) Out of frustration I sent out a message Saturday organizing a Ride for the Wounded, promising no intervals, no hills, small chain ring only. I got some company, a nice leisurely 40+ miles with a couple of the wounded (two bad knees and an aching rib cage among the group). It was lovely.
The Phelpsoids' assessment of last week's Angel Action:
Some really tolerant people dressed up in PVC pipe and thread-bare, ratty sheets masquerading as angel’s wings, and people holding up banners attempted to block our fabulous signage, but it worked as well as stink trying to escape a feces eater. As we ducked in and out of their foolish attempt at sign blocking, Megan expertly maneuvered around their smelly selves, and said, "14 years on a picket line will teach you some pretty awesome tricks, amateurs."
So if Nora and her friends are amateurs, I guess that makes the "Tachmonites" .... what?
As Nora put it, "What a great way to spend 14 years."