reading 1: Andrew Dessler’s Prometheus post on scientific uncertainty and the making of policy sparked a good discussion. And a copy of his new book, The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change, with Edward Parson, arrived over the weekend. Good so far.

reading 2: Back when I first started thinking about drought in the mid-1990s, Julio Betancourt sent me a preprint of a paper he and Tom Swetnam were working on for the Journal of Climate about large-scale ecosystem phenomena that are linked to big climate swings in the southwest that last decades. I’m rereading it for my drought class, and it’s rewarding deeper perspective I have on the issue a decade later. Mesoscale Disturbance and Ecological Response to Decadal Climatic Variability in the American Southwest.

music: The podgoober challenge: I’m loading all my music into the device and trying to listen to everything. Every piece of music I own. Today’s hidden gem: The Flourescent Leach and Eddie, back at the Filmore East in 1971, doing their big hit record. With a bullet. “Everybody sing along, like a big rock show! C’mon!”

distress call: What’s that boy worried about? Don’t worry J, help’s on the way. (More of Big Mig’s snaps.)

word of the day: osseous – of bone, or turning into bone