The Blogging/Scholarship/Media Interplay

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This story got me thinking about what I think has become an increasingly interesting interplay between blogging scholars and journalists. It quotes Jeffrey Lewis, proprietor of the excellent Arms Control Wonk blog and manager of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center.

Reporters depend on smart people willing and able to explain things. Scholars are especially valuable to reporters because of the standards of intellectual rigor that generally attend scholarly work. Before the Internet and blogging, finding those scholars required a lot of trial and error, reading the scholars’ primary literature, having a fat Rolodex and a playing a lot of open-ended games of telephone: “Who do you know who’s smart about China’s nuclear program?”

Those techniques are still important, but blogging scholars seem to be short-circuiting that process, to the benefit of both reporters and the public discussion about the issues with which they deal. By definition, you see, bloggers are people who have already telegraphed their willingness and ability to try to explain things.

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Methodist Pies

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I had to put on the leg and arm warmers for this morning’s bike ride. The cottonwood across the street is starting to show yellow. And it’s still dark when the alarm goes off these days. That can mean only one thing: it’s State Fair time! I love the fair for many reasons, not the least of which is Methodist Pies. Over on the Fix, Andrea waxes poetic about the pies made each year by a team of local church volunteers. I can’t add much to what she has to say, except that they pretty much always have no-sugar-added pies on offer.

Daybook

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  • reading: Linda Cordell’s Archaeology of the Southwest. This is one of those standards that you’re supposed to have lying around to refer to, but who actually reads these? (I am, actually. Great overview of what’s known.)
  • music: Stevie Ray Vaughn and Dick Dale doing Pipeline. Do they have waves in Texas?
  • bonus extra track: Don Ellis and his Orchestra’s Electric Bath. This is stuff I used to listen to when I was barely old enough to be in Boy Scouts. Sometimes more beats than four in a measure. Blew my little mind the first time I listened to it.
  • computers: At a meeting recently, I sat behind a guy using MindManager to take notes on his laptop. I’ve also recently been exposed to the whole “wicked problem” thinking. So lately I’ve been playing with various bits of software along these lines, including the aforementioned MindManager (very sweet, very expensive), FreeMind (fully free, both “free beer” and “free speech”), MindMap (not so expensive, not quite as sweet as MindManager) and the very interesting Compendium. Dunno if this stuff is useful, or just distracting toys.
  • phenology: The first bits of yellow are showing up on the cottonwood across the street.
  • days: Happy Venezualan Civil Servants’ Day

Greenhouse Guilt

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I’ve been riding my bike to work lately when I can. I can’t always do it, because some days I need a car to go out on interviews. Herein lies my greenhouse guilt dilemma.

According to this analysis, cycling to work will cause a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions over my lifetime. While in the short run using my bike instead of a car leads to a net reduction, it also has the unexpected negative side effect of improving my health. Because I’m therefore likely to live longer, my net lifetime greenhouse gas emissions go up.

I think I have a solution. To make my cycling carbon neutral, I plan to take up smoking.

Drought Perception and Reality

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Expectations are as much a part of drought as is climatological reality. Take this LA Times story:

CANTON, Texas — The effects of a long, stubborn drought are everywhere here: in the parched, wasted fields and the bony cows nosing the dirt for nonexistent grass; in the cracks splitting stone-hard earth and the worried faces of farmers running out of savings, and options.

“It’s sad when you see what’s going on all around you,” said Windy Watkins, a feed-store manager. “This has been the lives of so many for so long, and now it’s gone. It’s heartbreaking.”

The reality is that in the East Texas and North Central Texas climate divisions[1], the 1990s were extraordinarily wet. The dry years they’ve been having lately have been bad, but not out of the ordinary range of variability when you look at the long term record. By the numbers, the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and (arguably) the ’80s were worse.

When it gets wet for a while, people come to think of it as normal. The worst drought problems, in a sense, happen not as a result of it getting dry, but of it returning to normal after it’s unusually wet for a while. This doesn’t make the problems any less real, but helps explain where they come from.

[1] data here

Politics of Water

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I don’t begin to understand the politics of water. The science of water I can barely see how to get my arms around, but that’s a tame problem. The politics of water is a wicked problem. So I pass this along without any clear idea of whether it’s right, just the thought that it’s interesting:

Water is an issue. Drought relief is an issue. The RNC hasn’t done very well on drought relief, and economically irrational draw-downs of Upper Mississipi tributary impoundments, from the Missouri south to the Canada, to float Upper Mississippi barge traffic, have killed hydro-electric and irrigation in the Northern Plains.

Since we know that running on inside-the-beltway issues — choice, peace, and so on, our view, “the correct view”, isn’t competitive, why bother? Why not run on water?