Jim Scarantino is back, with a lovely essay on his old Kelty.
Gmailless: Day Two
My Gmail’s still inaccessible. It took Jugboy 13 days.
update: It’s back up, a 24-hour outage. Looks as though nothing was lost.
Depending on Gmail
I made the switch to Gmail nearly two years ago. I’d look it up and tell you the exact date, but I can’t because I can’t access my Gmail account. All day long, the same message:
We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, we’re working as quickly as we can to restore access to your email–apologies for the inconvenience.
I apparently am not alone.
The Googlemailbot, in response to an inquiry, helpfully added:
Your Gmail account has been disabled due to a technical issue. Our engineers are working diligently to find a solution so that you can regain access to your account.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and we thank you for your patience during our limited test of Gmail. (emphasis added)
I know, I know, it’s “beta”. It’s free. What do I expect? It is what it is. Sucks nonetheless.
The thing is, Google made mail work so well for me that it’s become indispensable. All the mail from my work (abqjournal) and home (inkstain) ends up in the same bucket, searchable forever. It’s a weird feeling, like part of my brain is missing or something.
San Juan Chama water
Dan McKay has a good story in today’s Journal answering questions that have been bubbling up about water quality once the city of Albuquerque starts taking its water from the Rio Grande. If you’ve got the paper copy of the paper, Cathryn Cunningham’s graphic is quite helpful as well.
Drought in Northern China II
Various stories on the wire today discuss the Chinese government’s attempts to control expanding deserts. What I found interesting was this bit from the Indepedent:
A persistent drought in northern parts of China has only added to the problem, sucking moisture from the soil and making it more easily picked up by the wind, officials have said.
This plays into one of the fallacies of drought – that it is an aberration, something outside of normal. In fact, what’s being called “drought” here is merely the dry end of the normal range of variability in northern China.
Daybook
- ride: The picture’s from a pedestrian bridge over the interstate near my house. This is how we do a lot of our rivers here in the western U.S. – all concrete, but with very little water in them. In this case, it’s a bit of a puzzle that there’s any water at all, seeing as how it’s not rained in a month. This morning I rode early and easy, wandering up through the heights trying to figure out where the water’s coming from. No answers.
- music: Scored yesterday in the Very Cheap Rack at Natural Sound, The Best of Dick Dale and his Del-Tones. The highlight? The King of the Surf Guitar does Hava Nagila.
- book: Blink. The latest Blinkish epiphany came on the bike ride yesterday. I’ve always ridden with a heart monitor. Yesterday I left it home. Steve, who is extremely wise and timed his attack perfectly on our last little climb (I went too early), told me a story about a friend whose running had become stodgy and stalled. The guy stuck his watch in a drawer. Worked wonders.
- word of the day: peewit (a bird)
Drought in Northern China
From NASA’s MODIS satellite, an image of spring drought in northern China:
You can also see the same thing in the IRI global standardized precipitation index, though on longer time scales the effect is not apparent.
Priorities
We can do without toilets, we can bring our own water, but we have to have Internet.
Mount Stromlo Observatory director Penny Sackett, on the priorities for restoring infrastructure following the wildfire that swept across the observatory in January 2003. From Dennis Normille’s account in the May 5 Science.
The Return of Quark Soup
David Appell’s back. Yay. (His first two posts are about climate, so that’s where I’m putting him in the blogroll. I’ll amend as needed.)
Thin slicing Gladwell
I’m a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. But for some reason, I hadn’t read Blink, his latest book. I bought a copy a while ago, and both Nora and Lissa have read and enjoyed it. (Lissa got me hooked on Gladwell in the first place.)
I briefly picked it up right after I bought it and read a couple of pages, then put it down. Not sure why. Just a gut reaction.
For those not familiar with Blink, it’s about, to quote Gladwell, “rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye.” He argues that our quick instincts can often be as accurate as reasoned thought, decisions made after lengthy deliberation and the gathering of gobs of information.
To a committed rationalist like me, a gatherer of data and deliberator, the idea that our gut can be just as good sounds like a load of crap. I guess that’s why I put it down the first time. Just trusting my gut.