No Joke
This is not an April fool’s joke.
Archive of entries posted on March 2009
Elephant Diaries: Leveraging Audience
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow. But there’s a problem. A guy …
Elephant Diaries: Why solving “the Web problem” does not solve the problem
From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle: The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue. If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has …
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My Random and Totally Unscientific Cap-and-Trade Headline Survey
Sat down with my favorite search engine’s news goober this evening to see what’s up with cap-and-trade, and I can report that the sweep of coverage had a certain consistent flavor. Some representative headlines: US Might Not Benefit from Cap-and-Trade Cap-trade on carbon may push up costs Cap and Trade: A Huge, Regressive Tax Cap-and-trade …
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When Roadrunners Attack
Roadrunner Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. We had a ringside seat this afternoon when Speedy, our neighborhood roadrunner (seen here atop our car last December) stalked across our front yard, eyeing a mourning dove. Speedy has the moves of a cat on the hunt – furtive, able to hold still. He hid behind plants, darting from …
On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events
My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time …
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The Tree Rings Tale
Coming November 2009, from the University of New Mexico Press, The Tree Rings Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate, by John Fleck. It’s the story of western weather and climate, told through the work of a series of vignettes about some of my favorite scientists, written for middle school-aged kids. A little climate change, a lot …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Sandpile Edition
On Joshua Cooper Ramo’s Age of the Unthinkable: Instead of tanks and planes and armed battalions, we face “adaptive microthreats and ideas,” like improvised explosive devices made of cheap cell-phone components. Because of such thinking, Ramo writes, “no major power has been able to defeat an insurgency anywhere in the world” since World War II. …
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Elephant Diaries: “between systems”
One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist (at least the way I do it) is an embarassing lack of original ideas. My job is to entertain, understand, sort and pass judgment on the ideas of others, then explain the ones that meet some sort of preliminary test of usefulness and/or relevance. Ideas of …
Elephant Diaries: Measuring the Effect
This paper, a study of the effect of the closure of the Cincinnati Post on elections, got a good ride in the metamedia blogosphere a few weeks back when it came out, but I just got around to reading it. Interesting stuff, and you can see why it was popular with we inkstained scribes: The …