Today’s word of the day is febrifacient: a thing that produces fever. In his 1845 “Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California”, Lansford Hastings noted the obvious of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain Region: it doesn’t rain much here, while in the winter “snow falls very frequently, though not to a great depth.” Sounds like …
I use the Spam Karma WordPress plugin to protect myself from people trying to boost their Google rankings by leaving comments on my blog. It pretty much runs itself, so I never pay it much attention. So I was astonished when today’s SK Simple Digest Report landed in my inbox. SK has caught 5,214 attemped …
A friend points to one of the great baseball names, Twins’ rookie picture pitcher Boof Bonser. According to the MLB web site, the former Florida high school star had his name legally changed in 2001 from “John”. (Thanks to copy editor Malcolm.)
cotton_region_shelter Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa finished a nice sturdy stand for the cotton region shelter in the backyard. It’s the standard National Weather Service Coop setup. Of course my backyard would be a terrible place for a genuine Coop station – too close to buildings, etc. But this gives me a feel for how …
I don’t know how to tell for sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that this is the first time Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted in the climate literature. It’s a discussion of the latest version of the Hadley global temperature data set, and the team has gone to significant effort to quantify the uncertainties: A …
A new paper (actually came out last month, so not quite “snap snap” new) by Kostas Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier[1] looks at trends in drought severity and duration over the 20th century in the continental U.S. In much of the country, drought is getting less severe, but unfortunately not in the places that matter most …
In which Nora samples our zeitgeist via the bumpers of our cars.
Raymond Bradley has a paper in tomorrow’s Science[1] laying out the significant threats to water supplies in the Andes as a result of global climate change. This is the sort of thing Roger Pielke Sr. wisely argues that we need – a better understanding of climate change effects on a regional scale “focused on regional …
Continue reading ‘Threats to Water Supplies in the Tropical Andes’ »
Luis reminded me the other day of one of the few smart insights I’ve ever had: the notion that in the free software world, a free-for-all of self-organizing social systems, “evolution” of a sort selects for nice people. Commenters at the time (rightly, I think) complained that “nice” was a bit “self-patting.” Jeff Waugh worked …
The back garden’s at a really nice place right now, with a modest hollyhock show underway and the first early sunflowers blooming. Last night, Lissa and I were sitting out at dusk enjoying it, and were treated to a visit by a pair of lesser goldfinches. They’re little birds, able to sit on the sunflower …