Radioactive Pencil Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. In July, 1921, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Walter Meyner, of New York City, a patent for the radioactive pencil. Meyner’s idea was to mix ordinary graphite with “self-luminous material of the type ordinarily employed in so-called `radium paints.’” The self-luminous pencil, or crayon, would be, …
White Iris Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. The little miniature white iris in our front yard started blooming this week.
Conservapedia is threatening to ban Nora. Her offense? An entry on the shovel: A shovel is a tool used for moving earth, sand and other granulates. It differs from spades because it is a real tool and not a suit of cards. My little girl is growin’ up good.
Protecting Us From Monsters Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Sadie’s primary job is to protect us from monsters. From her observation deck (a stool at the front window), she can monitor the approaches to the house. Sometimes the monsters are delivering the mail or taking away our garbage. Sometimes they merely walk by our house for …
Andrew Dessler and Chris Reddy had an op-ed in the Newport Daily News March 16 (the text is in a blog entry by Andrew here) that took a very interesting approach to the scientization problem. It was in response to an op-ed that resurrected the hoary old “water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas …
Continue reading ‘An Interesting Response to Scientization’ »
I just got around to reading Wally Broecker’s interesting piece in the March 9 Science about “the carbon pie.” One of Broecker’s arguments is that market carbon emissions trading will be insufficient to meet atmospheric carbon goals, and that carbon capture will inevitably be required: Because CO2 sales would serve only as a temporary stopgap, …
Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy News is off my normal blog topics, but it’s a blog worth a read. Steve’s been toiling in the trenches for years, documenting government secrecy issues and publishing about them long before there were blogs. Today’s entry is particularly relevant to my professional duties: In what is being characterized by subordinates as …
We’re seeing some extraordinary snowmelt right now. Coming a month early, it’s setting this-date-in-history records up in the Rio Grande Gorge: Never, in more than a century of record keeping, have we seen a March snowmelt like that flowing down the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico right now. Record warmth across the mountains …
This is a fascinating harbinger of things to come on the Colorado River, as the dry side of the natural range of variability collides with rapidly growing water demands: A plant built to remove salt from highly saline irrigation runoff has sat idle in this southwestern Arizona community for more than 14 years after only …
Australia’s drought means no palms for Palm Sunday in New South Wales: Up to 300 NSW churches could have no palms for Palm Sunday with suppliers blaming the drought and logging for the shortage. Instead, churches will be supplied with paper replicas for the religious day, observed on April 1 this year as precursor to …