It’s not that Andy Dessler’s been gone, actually, but in his move over to Grist, there wasn’t any way to get an RSS feed of just his stuff. Being an RSS junkie, I would forget to go directly, and missed some good stuff.
Apparently I’m not alone, so Andy’s going to do some sort of duplicate posting thing on his old blog site pointing to the Grist stuff. A bit of a hack, but hey, whatever works!
From the Environment News Service:
Expect Warmer Than Average Weather This Winter
Meanwhile, in other news, Sun Expected to Rise Tomorrow.
The move has also been opposed by the environmental and coal lobbies.
What could be so vile, so heinous that it could bring together these traditional enemies?
Don Pizzolato has a thoughtful post this morning on the Duke City Fix that reaches beyond the traditional “rise of the creative class” economic development palaver that underpins much discussion these days in Albuquerque to examine the underlying premises. In the careful way of my favorite writers, Don’s smart enough not to come to any bombastic conclusions. But his piece suggests that, while there may be meat on the creative class bones, it’s improper to hitch every neat new idea to the creative class bandwagon.
Go read the whole thing yourself, but I’d like to highlight one of his observations that resonated with me:
[T]he University of New Mexico should be a cultural and social hub, but is nearly invisible save for Lobo football/basketball and the occasional show at Popejoy.
This has always puzzled me. Perhaps a missed opportunity, perhaps something more complex that’s rooted in a strain of anti-intellectualism in our society. I spend a lot of my professional life in and around the university, what with all the scientists there and all. It’s a fascinating place, full of real live art and literature and science. Yet that life of the mind is largely self-contained, with neither the enormous university community reaching out to any great extent, nor the outside world peeking in.
Why is that? How does this compare to other academic communities elsewhere around the world?
The whole point of yesterday’s bike ride was sandhill cranes. Nature did not disappoint.
update: Looks like Johnny_Mango was there a week ahead of us. It’s like these birds are out there posing for photo ops.
Down in Albuquerque’s South Valley, along the river, is an old piece of vacant land sandwiched between a housing development and one of the last close-in farms. To the south is a lovely grove of cottonwoods that until recently was a horse pasture. To the north is a field of chiles, still hanging red on the dead plants this year. To the west is a narrow ribbon of bike trail. There’s some sort of hazardous contamination on the site, which is why nothing’s been built there and no one farms there. But when I first started riding the bike trail years ago, there was a little homestead back in the scraggly shrubs, a homeless guy who had built an elaborate home for himself out of scrap wood and tarpaper and bits of metal.
The camp disappeared a long time ago. If I remember right, it was about the time the U.S. Postal Service bought a big chunk of the land for a regional processing center back in 2000. I assumed they kicked the guy out and came in and tore down his “home”. The postal deal fell through, but the deed was done.
Yesterday, Miguel and I were on a bike wander and pulled up by accident next to the old camp. I’d always been zipping by, so I’d never given it a close-up look. I never noticed the little cemetery.
Continue reading ‘RIP Snoopy’ »
Via NEI Nuclear Notes comes word that John Warner is going to challenge James Inhofe for the top R spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Perhaps Kevin can ‘splain this to us.
The new winter forecast is out. El Niño’s still being a bit shy (“the coupling of the unusually warm SSTs near the date line with the atmosphere in the tropical Pacific has not yet become fully established” is the more technical description) but he’s definitely there.
I bet you that most of the world’s most cherished sites are all far more peed upon than most of the world’s most uninteresting, non-descript buildings.
John Quiggin threw down the gauntlet last week:
Although both global warming denialists and moon landing denialists routinely accuse NASA scientists of fraud, the two groups appear not to have made common cause as yet (Please correct me if I’m wrong).
Were that it were so, John. From someone called “gren” over at something called the “Justice Awareness and Basic Support” forum:
It is universally known that man has never set foot on the moon. For those that want to begin to learn the truth about that little lie then try moonmovie.com and the samples for starters. The astronauts could never have survived exposure to the radiation belts. Yet climate change hype might well mirror the moon landing hoax. Our earth has been warming up since the 1600’s , holes appear in the ozone layer as a matter of cycle during winter. The polar ice caps on Mars are melting and so begs the question whether this is a solar thingummy type scientific whatsit. Let’s load tony blair into a rocket and send him to Mars to probe the martians into why they are driving too much, spraying too many aerosols and overpopulating their patch.
QED.
