Don’t Wear That Helmet

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Another contribution to the bike helmet debate (see also here):

Drivers get more than 3.1in (8cm) closer to cyclists wearing helmets than they do to bare-headed riders and female cyclists are given more room on the road than male riders, according to a survey from the University of Bath.

Dr Ian Walker, a traffic psychologist, used a bicycle fitted with an ultrasonic distance sensor to record data from more than 2,500 overtaking motorists in Salisbury and Bristol.

He said drivers were twice as likely to get close to his bicycle when he was wearing the helmet.

Walker also wore a long wig for the experiment, and found that motorists gave him more room. He inferred that motorists give women cyclists more room. But it might be that motorists are more courteous to cyclists in drag.

Thinking Well About Climate

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I’ve said before that Kelly Redmond is something of a national treasure. This interview by Kit Stolz is a good reminder of why.

In an age of scientific generalization, Kelly, deputy director of the Western Regional Climate Center, is the quintessential generalist in a couple of different ways. First, he’s conversant with all the key scientific work anyone’s doing that has any implications for understanding the climate of western North America. Second, he’s always out and about talking to the people who need climate information, giving him a great sense of what’s actually important at the interface between climate science and society.

Skiing Down Under (Or Not)

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A friend on the opposite part of the planet sends along this, and wonders whether it’s an outlier or a harbinger of bad ski seasons to come:

The non-profit group that runs southern Tasmania’s ski-tows is facing a loss of thousands of dollars after a snow-free winter.

With the season due to end in three weeks, the ski-tows at Mt Mawson have not opened once this year, and the ski runs are covered in green growth.

Southern Tasmanian Ski Association spokesman Julian Oakes says the group still needs to pay for insurance and summer maintenance, without any income.

“It’s been disastrous really,” he said.

“We have had no tow operation at all this season, and early April it was looking promising but then the weather didn’t follow through and we’ve had very little snowfall and there’s no cover there at the moment.”

This follows a poor season last year.

What Would Jesus Drink?

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Not bottled water, apparently:

The United Church of Canada (UCC) is advising its 590,000 members to stop buying bottled water, and expressing concern at a number of levels around the issue of water consumption.

“The main thrust is our concern about the privatization of water,” UCC social policy coordinator Richard Chambers told the Canadian Press. UCC, he said, “is committed to supporting municipal water sources wherever they exist in the country, and strengthening those.”

A Seismic Curiosity

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I don’t know this subject well, but I’m pretty sure this is unusual:

A strong earthquake occurred about 250 miles (405 km) south-southwest of Apalachicola, Florida at 8:56 AM MDT, Sep 10, 2006 (10:56 AM EDT in Florida). The magnitude and location may be revised when additional data and further analysis results are available. This earthquake was felt in parts of Florida, Georgia and Alabama. No reports of damage or casualties have been received at this time.

No doubt this means the End Times are near.

More on Blogging and the Academy

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My friend Luis, who was thinking hard and well about this stuff before he went to law school, co-links to my recent post on the blog-media-scholarship nexus and this Mike Madison post. There apparently is a discussion afoot in academic law circles about the blog, to whit: Is it scholarship? Madison suggests the question is ill-posed:

Can we talk? Have a real conversation about the future of legal scholarship? I don’t know. But there have to be some ground rules that don’t put the law review genie in the bottle.

First, we’d have to agree to stop debating whether something is “scholarship” or not, and instead start talking about where and when and how different types of writing and speaking and presenting engage each other.

Lissa for Congress

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So I’ve been cogitating over a blog post of a couple of weeks, a schtick about our local congressional race. But it seems events have superseded my attempt at humor before I ever had a chance to write it down.

The schtick involved ads in which each major party candidate accuses the other of various sorts of corrupt malfeasance. (Locals in the audience – you know what I’m talking about. I won’t bore the rest of you with the details.)

So my schtick was going to involve an effort to get the candidates to focus on the issues that matter – the bumper crop of weeds in my garden after the bountiful summer rains. “What are you going to do about the weeds in my garden?” I was going to rhetorically ask the candidates.

The thing is, Lissa’s been working like mad on the weeds and has them pretty much whipped. So I think I’m just going to skip the schtick and write in Lissa on the November ballot.

Water in the Desert

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San Juan Chama Intake

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

This is the intake structure for the city of Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama project water. It’s just south of Alameda on the east side of the Rio Grande. (here on Google maps, but it hadn’t been built yet when this satellite image was taken.)

The water comes across the continental divide out of the San Juan River watershed, and is dumped into the Chama River – hence the name. We’re going to start using this water for our city drinking water beginning in 2008 under the current schedule. Currently, we pump fossil groundwater, but that is unsustainable.