A weird musical moment: I’m listening to this old scratchy bad Charlie Parker album I bought on a discount rack, and I realize I’m listening to the theme from Star Trek. It’s a song called “Out of Nowhere.” The CD box doesn’t say when it was recorded, but Charlie Parker died in 1955, so I’m …
My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model: There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the …
I’ve been a bit of a slug about rounding up my rainfall data, but I finally got around to totalling things up from The Amazing Monsoon. Here are the numbers: Month Avg. NWS My house June 0.61 1.14 0.99 July 1.38 3.55 3.76 August 1.42 3.74 5.80 (Avg. is the National Weather Service’s long term …
I can humbly say “I knew Andrew Dessler before….” 🙂 I stumbled across him a few years back when he co-authored a paper with Ken Minschwaner, an atmospheric physics guy here in New Mexico, so the roots of our conversation predate my obsession with climate change. Now Andrew’s made the big time (“I define success …
Zhuang and colleagues, in GRL, publish a new analysis of high-latitude carbon source/sink behavior. Their conclusion, considering among other issues CO2 fertilization and the contribution of fire to the system (see here for a discussion of the fire CO2 source/sink issue) that the region’s CO2 contributions will go up as things warm over the century, …
My source for real estate skepticism, Aaron, has an update: [T]he number of places in my neighborhood for sale keeps piling up– $500k condos, $900k single-families, that kind of thing. So thought I’d look around to see if there’s any news about that impending real-estate disaster I keep thinking is just around the corner. Remember, …
If you look at the National Hurricane Center’s latest track for Lane, it looks like the moisture is headed our way here in New Mexico by some time next week. So far, though, the forecasters at the local National Weather Service office don’t think it’ll get here: CONDITIONS WILL REMAIN DRY UNDER A RIDGE OF …
On the grim science of counting Darfur’s dead.
In the comments here a while back, Benny Peiser, publisher of the invaluable CCNet electronic newsletter, said this: John As you know, CCNet publishes *both* sides in the numerous climate change debates. It was with that in mind that I read Benny’s latest CCNet missive: “MORE TROUBLE FOR IPCC AS SCIENTISTS PREDICT SOLAR DOWNTURN & …
One of my favorite bike racers, Alexandre Vinokourov, is winning the Vuelta. Vinokourov is a great joy to watch – an unpredictable, attacking racer with a flair for the dramatic. I had no idea he was winning. It’s not that I intentionally boycotted the Vuelta. I just got out of the daily habit of checking …
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