On the city of Albuquerque’s greenhouse gas reduction claims (adwalled):
It is a claim every Albuquerque resident who cares about global warming could be proud of: Since 1990, city residents have cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent.
It is also untrue.
See also ethanol vehicles.
I’ve always been fascinated by astronomy’s variable sky community – the folks who look for things that change.
Most traditional astronomy involves parking a big telescope on a single object and watching it for a while. But the variable sky – things that change on time scales ranging from minutes to hours to days – is another world entirely, rich with unexplored possibility.
My latest effort in this area was a little riff over the weekend on the RAPTOR telescope at Los Alamos:
Looking for things that change is a simple concept. To understand our world, our brains do it all the time— tracking our field of vision, looking for things that are different from what they were a moment ago.
Something that moves might be prey— a rabbit we could eat. Or it might be a lion hoping to eat us. Either way, it pays to notice things in our field of view that change.
But astronomy has long been primarily about the study of the constant, eternally quiet sky. Most things don’t change most of the time. As a result, mammoth telescopes point for hours on end at tiny patches of sky, slowly tracking faint objects as they pass overhead, creating one or a handful of images of what is essentially an unchanging sky.
That is fine for studying a single object. But imagine hunting for rabbits or trying to avoid lions by looking at a single spot in the forest through a soda straw. You’d probably starve, unless you were eaten by a lion first.
I’m not sure how effective this will be, but the government of Indonesia seems hell-bent on making sure more of the carbon trapped beneath the Earth gets out in a timely fashion:
Indonesia has been offering incentives, particularly for oil and gas,
seeing them as strategic businesses that could impact the country’s revenue.
Finance Minister Sri Mulyani said in December that the government hoped the
incentives would help meet the country’s target of 1.034 million b/d in 2008.
Indonesia has been struggling to maintain its oil output as mature fields
yield less oil. In 2007, the oil sector contributed Rupiah 165.39 trillion
($17.6 billion) to the country’s revenues.
An interesting search string that brought a reader to Inkstain over the New Year’s holiday:
What a great question.
I usually avoid climate wars stuff on the work blog, but we had a letter to the editor in our business section last Thursday that invoked the “Inhofe 400” as part of a critique of mainstream climate science. So I responded.
A piece I wrote in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal about a new approach to maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile has triggered some thoughtful discussion at the Arms Control Wonk blog. See also some stuff on my Journal blog, and the usual crappy anonymous comments but a few good signed ones at the LANL blog.
Here’s a lazyweb question, the product of an afternoon at the office with entirely too much time on our hands. (Hey, it was this or writing about White Christmas. Again.)
The “storm death toll” is a newsroom staple:
At least 19 deaths were linked to the weekend-long blast of ice and windblown snow, which led to multi-car pileups that closed sections of several major highways on the Plains.
I’d like suggestions regarding how to deconstruct this number.
Let us assume that 19 people did, in fact, die in traffic accidents related to the storm. During non-storm conditions, what would be the normal traffic death toll in the area in question? How does that compare with the death toll during the storm? (My hypothesis: that lots of people stay home during a bad-ass storm, and that despite the storm-related traffic death toll, the net effect is to reduce the total traffic death toll. Just call me “Lomborg.”)
Years ago, when I had two working knees, I used to enjoy running in local 5k and 10k races.
I would often linger at the finish area, hoping against hope that I might win one of those coveted top three age group finish medals. It rarely happened, but if the field was small enough, I always had hope. That was the scene after a race down at Isleta Pueblo, south of Albuquerque, in the early 1990s. As they came to my age group, they skipped right over the third and second place finishers in my age group and called my name to come up and collect my winner’s medallion.
It took a moment for the reality to sink in. I had been the only person in my age group entered.
It is with that humility that I proudly point out that my this blog has been named one of the top 10 water blogs. Thanks, Jared. I was surprised you could find ten. Good work.
From the 
Died in a haberdashery accident.