Reminded by Coco’s trenchant observations on the politics of impact fees, I’ve a question: of all those new home permits being issued in the metro area, what proportion is in multi-home developments, and what proportion is in single-lot infill around the city’s fringes?
My anecdotes tell me infill is going gangbusters right now, but I know fringe development is as well. Anybody know the numbers?
More evidence that the British own this language and we’re just borrowing it for a bit. From New Scientist, the story of a chap “who confused his guests at a dinner party by apologising for an astringent apple-based dessert, saying:”
This pie is a trifle tart.
From GRL:
Even though the arctic zone of continuous permafrost has relatively cold mean annual air temperatures, we found an abrupt, large increase in the extent of permafrost degradation in northern Alaska since 1982, associated with record warm temperatures during 1989–1998. Our field studies revealed that the recent degradation has mainly occurred to massive wedges of ice that previously had been stable for 1000s of years.
Jorgenson, Shur and Pullman: Abrupt increase in permafrost degradation in Arctic Alaska, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L02503, doi:10.1029/2005GL024960, 2006
The temperature at my house this morning was 19 degrees F (-7 C) when I rolled out the door for the bike ride at 8 a.m. We met up with the posse half an hour later at the Kwik-E-Mart up on Indian School and Tramway in the foothills, and I pulled out a little chunk of a Clif bar to eat. It was hard as a rock.
The normal chewy goodness of the Clif bar was hard as a rock.
The rest of the ride, my Clif chunks became a crude but useful gauge of temperature.
More evidence that Steve Lawrence is wrong: dinner at Los Equipales, on Jefferson a block south of Central. Yum. Thanks for the tip, J_M.
Center for Clean Air Policy: “(W)e conclude that Governor Schwarzenegger’s goal of reducing GHG emissions to 2000 levels by 2010 can be met at no net cost to California consumers.”
I’ve made no effort to judge the validity of this work. I merely pass this along as a data point in the discussion.
There’s a good good post on Prometheus about a new paper by anthropologist Myanna Lahsen on the culture of climate modelers. The bottom line is the way modelers tend to believe their own models – to substitute them in their own mind for reality. It reminded me of a paper published last year in which B.G. Hunt and T.I. Elliott model climatic conditions in the Yucatan and use them to discuss drought and its implications for the Maya.
Based on proxy records, some researchers have suggested that drought played a role in the collapse of the Classic Maya (it’s debated), and Hunt and Elliott wanted to model the thing.
It’s an interesting paper, with careful discussion of the model’s shortcomings – like, for example, “its inability to reproduce the observed range of SST (sea surface temperature) anomalies associated with El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events.” And then they offer this howler. A set of model-generated figures show rainfall anomalies that seem to match up nicely with the proxy records:
These figures confirm that major rainfall deficiences are a systematic, but irregular, characteristic of the Yucatan region.
No, they don’t. They show that the model exhibits systematic but irregular rainfall deficiencies. What they tell us about the rainfall itself is a bit more epistemologically tricky.
This is a bit of a cheap shot, because much of their discussion is generally more subtle, treating the model as a useful tool in exploring the physical system, rather than a direct representation of it. But in the context of Lahsen’s paper, it’s an interesting slip.
Avelino Maestas blogs live from Silver City. Some peak oil there, plus, more importantly, “peak water.”
Reading Jennifer Couzin’s article in Science magazine on the Woo Suk Hwang stem cell debacle at the gym this morning, I felt some sympathy for the journalist stuck in the difficult spot Couzin is in. In writing about the peer review process of the fraudulent stem cell paper at her own magazine, Couzin had no access to the peer reviewers. “Science,” she wrote, “declined to identify the board members who vetted it.” In other words, the guys down the hall, who work for the same employer I do, wouldn’t tell me what they know.
I can undestand the need for some sort of firewall between the journalists at Science and the people who review and approve scientific publications. But it sure must have been uncomfortable for her. And it got me thinking – why not make the names of peer reviewers public as a matter of routine? Would that sort of accountability not improve the process?
Turns out I’m not alone. Kevin Vranes poses the same question.