This is serious:
Careers at stake with each swing, baseball players leave little to sport when it comes to their bats. They weigh them. They count their grains. They talk to them.
But in towns like this one, in the heart of the mountain forests that supply the nation’s finest baseball bats, the future of the ash tree is in doubt because of a killer beetle and a warming climate, and with it, the complicated relationship of the baseball player to his bat.
(Hat tip Belshaw.)
On the political turbulence affecting the Airborne Laser:
A delay in a key test and a potential multi-billion dollar price tag to field a working system has members of Congress on the verge of grounding the anti-missile Airborne Laser.
With headquarters at Kirtland Air Force Base and most of the hands-on development and testing being done in California and Kansas, the laser program is the latest in a long line of efforts to develop shoot-to-kill laser weapons.
The program’s backers imagine a 747 flying high above the field of battle, ready at a moment’s notice to zap off a laser and destroy an enemy’s Scud missiles soon after they leave the ground.
According to one early Pentagon plan, a fleet of seven of the planes was to be under construction as early as next year.
But getting the laser off of its ground-based test stand and into an airplane that could eventually take it into battle has proven so difficult that members of Congress appear ready to say “enough.”
Simon Donner observes the hurricane-wildfire link:
Has the epidemic of wildfires reached the point that we need to talk about the summer fire season the way we talk about the hurricane season? Should we be as concerned, or maybe even more concerned, about the migration to the edge of the national forests as the migration of people to the coasts in the southeast?
I believe the question was rhetorical, but the answer is “yes.” Wildfire is another issue, like hurricanes, that has been used to argue for greenhouse gas reductions. To the extent there’s a climate change-wildfire link (see here and here), perhaps building more houses in the woods needs to be part of the policy response discussion.
Last night’s spectacular thunderstorm over Albuquerque is a great example of the spatial variability of the summer thunderstorm season. Lissa and I were out for a wander around sunset and saw it coming from the north, great flashes of lightning against the sunset sky. We had to stop at the market to get some breakfast fixings. The wind, an outflow from the storm to the north, was howling as we got out of the market, and we just made it home as the raindrops started falling.
At my house? 0.22 inch. Out at the airport? Just 0.02. I’m not sure exactly where the rain gauge is, but it’s something like four miles from my house. So far this month, they’ve had 0.35 inch at the airport, which is the “official” Albuquerque rain number. I’ve had 1.15.
To get a good idea of the spatial variability, check out COCORAHS.
I knew Big Toe had some historic interest in bike racing, so I asked him this morning if he wanted to go over with us to Mom and Dad’s to watch the prologue of Le Tour. He said “No,” in a way that puzzled me.
When we got home, I found him out in the garage, working on my old green bike. He’d heard me say something about wanting to flip the back hub, and he’d done it for me. He seemed sad, and I asked him why.
It seems that back in 1998, he’d been working as one of the Festina team’s bike mechanics. He was in the car with Willy Voet when he was stopped in Neuville-en-Ferrain with the dope in his car. That was the year the Tour fell apart amid its first genuinely public doping scandal, but I never knew about Big Toe’s involvement. The bastard Virenque did his penance and was allowed to return to cycling, but Big Toe was banned from the sport for life.
I’ve never seen Big Toe this way. it looked like he had a tear in his eye as he cranked down the nut on my bike’s rear axle. Perhaps best not to bring up the Tour around him for the next few weeks.
Via Mike Campana, an interesting essay by Chris Milly about the problem climate change poses for the folks who build dams and such:
I would argue, in fact, that changing climate is the new “default hypothesis,” rapidly
displacing the assumption of stationarity upon which generations of hydrologists and engineers have built their careers—not to mention untold dollars worth of dams, wells, levees, reservoirs, hydroelectric power plants, bridges, irrigation systems, and culverts.
Stationarity is the assumption that the future will be similar to the past, in a statistical sense. Historical observations have been the rawmaterials for hydrologic analyses under the fast-fading regime of stationarity. If we can no longer invoke stationarity to convert observations into predictions, what can we do? What additional ingredients are needed for hydrologic analysis?
Alan Johnston is free.
My colleague Bruce Daniels explains why the 0.87 inch of rain (and hail) that fell at my house early yesterday evening is not the monsoon.
The folks at BikeABQ are advocating what I think is a fabulous idea: the Silver Bike Boulevard. The idea is to take a street that is already low traffic, slow speed and turn it into a bike-friendly boulevard. Silver’s perfect for the job: it parallels Central, which is bad for bikes. It has a lot of stop signs, so traffic is already slow. It’s right by the university, so it’s already got a lot of bike and pedestrian traffic. In other works, it’s already in use as an informal sort of bike boulevard.
1.26 miles of flat urban riding.
Full kml file.
Riding the Coal Avenue bridge over the railyard this morning I saw this: the California Zephyr, a string of cars in the old fashion, being towed behind the Amtrak. I had to stop and chat up the proprietor, a fellow named Alvin Bishop. The cars were built in 1948, when streamlined meant something. Bishop’s company restored them, and does high-end tours out of California. They were headed for Santa Fe. The Amtrak drops them in Lamy, and the local hauls them up to the Capitol City.
