Welcome Eleanor Kathleen
A big planet earth welcome to Eleanor Kathleen, and we’ll do our best to take care of the place until we’re ready to hand it off to you.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
More on My Newest Obsession
Robert Lee Hotz had a great piece over the weekend in the LA Times about phenology as a climate change detector: By analyzing decades of records kept by regional maple sugar producers, climate researchers are finding clear evidence here of what Rex Marsh can feel in his bones. The weather just isn’t what it used …
Ride to Health
From the Sept. 25, 1939, Life magazine: Ride the New Light-Weight Bike Bicycling is winning new thousands of devotees because it’s one of the most exhilarating sports in the world. It brings a tingle to the blood, a glow to the cheeks, a sparkle to the eyes. Beyond all that – it’s fun! And now …
Puffs of Cotton
I was sitting in the parklike setting that is Journal center today, having lunch, when a gust of wind sent a swirl of cottonwood cotton hither and yon. It was lovely, and is properly a thing to make one happy.
BBC on the Overselling of Climate Science
Via James Annan, a BBC piece on the “cry wolf” problem: Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue. I’ve written narrowly about this problem before from a …
Continue reading ‘BBC on the Overselling of Climate Science’ »
My New Favorite Ball Cap
It’s hard to pick a good ball cap. I don’t wanna sound all touchyfreaky, but it’s like they pick you. At any given time, I’ve always got a favorite ball cap, the one I want to grab when I go for a walk on a sunny day, or when my hair’s all bad hair day …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Any day you get to quote Charles Darwin is a good day indeed. (OK, I actually had to paraphrase, but still.) Pity the poor Galapagos tortoise. An icon of evolution, he also apparently makes a nice dinner. When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos in 1835, he noted that tortoises differed from island to island. It …
Blogs as a Phenological Tool
So I had this idea that I’d be able to look back through old blog posts and find out when the iris bloomed in our front yard each year, and that I’d be able to offer this slightly tongue-in-cheek riff on how bloggers writing about their gardens could create a sort of informal phenological network, …
National Precipitation
David comments on how wet it’s been in Oregon, prompting me to find a national map: (From the Western Regional Climate Center’s excellent Standardized Precipitation Index page, where you can pick your starting point and the most useful way to display the data.) Wet up north, dry down south. To first order, a classic La …
Notes from the Ballyard
There is almost certainly some special place in purgatory reserved for me, but I was rooting in the 8th inning last night for Jason Bergman, the New Orleans Zephyrs relief pitcher, to hit our Mike Colangelo. You can see from my scorecard that Zephyr starting pitcher Andrew Good was having a bit of trouble with …