On Bob Civiak’s report on the Reliable Replacement Warhead.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
From Fred Stutzman:
The student, whose sexual orientation was known to administrators, and agreed to live a closeted life along the lines of a particularly draconian set of rules, was ultimately expelled when he chose to signify his interest in the same sex in the Facebook.
(via dcm)
(update: 12:30 p.m. MST – Fred seems to have taken the post down for some reason.)
2005 Temperatures
A commenter asks: “By the way, I wonder when we’re going to get a warmer year than 1998?”
NASA’s GISS team answers today with some updated numbers: “The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world. ”
No surprise here, as the GISSers said the same thing a month ago based on Dec.-Nov. numbers. And I’m hesitant to hang too much on a single year, whether it’s 1998 or 2005, given both the issue of ENSO variability (El Nino years tend to be warmer) and the fuzzy error bars on the numbers that make an explicit “record” hard to pin down. What matters more is the underlying trend. But since you asked….
Infill
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?
A Trifle
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.
More On Arctic Warming
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
A New Temperature Proxy
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 Steve Lawrence Is Wrong
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.
California Greenhouse Reduction Costs
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.