My new favorite search string, in the logs this morning: “article on t.v. reports on october 31 about bedbugs”.
Writing for Love
Via Luis, a trail of bread crumbs leads to Paul Graham:
Actually, the fad is the word “blog,” at least the way the print media now use it. What they mean by “blogger” is not someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. That’s going to become a problem as the Web becomes the default medium for publication. So I’d like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes online. How about “writer?”
Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that’s what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online. And, like Microsoft, they’re losing.
I don’t think Graham is right that the web will become the default medium for publication. (See paper – fine technology.) But there is much more good writing out there, and all the good “amateur” stuff (in the best sense of the word in which Graham uses it) has a passion that we’ve got to match if we’re going to compete.
See the Duke City Fix for an example of what I mean.
It’s Not Just CO2
Finally found the time this evening to tack a comment onto a post at Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, in which he suggested the media hasn’t been writing about a new NAS report because it “is inconvenient for those who view the radiative effect of human-caused CO2 increases as the dominant forcing of climate change.”
Roger’s been flacking this report in his blog, and I finally felt needled enough by his complaint about a lack of media coverage to read it. (And by “read it,” I mean “read the executive summary.”) It raises some interesting issues that are relevant to the climate writing I’m trying to do – the need to better understand effects at the regional level.
He’s wrong, I think, to blame the lack of media coverage on some sort of bias in favor of a simplistic picture of CO2 forcing. That assumes greater sophistication on the part of the reporters covering this issue than I think is the case. The more likely explanation, as I suggested in the comments, is that it’s a nuanced report with no obvious “bang them over the head” take-home point. Or William Connolley’s explanation may the right one – that we’re just stupid: “The media wouldn’t have a clue what it was about.”
If I were to write about it, though, I’d have grabbed at something different than what I think Roger wants me to. The report suggests that some of the secondary climate forcings that are not terribly well understood, especially tropospheric aerosols and land use changes, are significant at a regional scale: “Improving societally relevant projections of regional climate impacts will require a better understanding of the magnitudes of regional forcings and the associated climate responses.”
As I’ve written before, I’m a consumer of climate science trying to help inform policy choices at the regional level. This is the sort of thing I need.
Vampires
This morning I donated blood. Most of the the staff at United Blood Services was in Halloween costume. For some reason, there were a disproportionate number of vampires. Wonder why.
Ben Bernanke and the ERA
I know precious little about monetary policy. But I am inclined to enthusiasm about Ben Bernanke’s nomination to replace Alan Greenspan after hearing this on NPR about what might be called the “Bernanke-Jaffee Theory” on baseball’s hallowed “earned run average.”
The ERA is a measure of the average number of runs a baseball pitcher would be expected to give up over a full nine inning game. It’s is calculated based on the number of runners a pitcher allows to reach base who eventually score. The rub, as Bernanke and former Princeton colleague Dwight Jaffee came to undertand, involves runners who reach base on a pitcher’s watch, but only score later after a relief pitcher has entered the game.
The run is charged to the first pitcher, and the second pitcher gets off scot-free. Yet it took both events for the run to score. The result is that relief pitchers tend to have artificially lower ERA’s, as measured by their actual contribution to runs being scored, while the starting pitchers’ ERA’s are artificially higher, as Jaffee explained in the NPR interview.
This is a reverse manifestation of another inefficiency in the baseball marketplace that has always annoyed me – the obsession with the Run Batted In. When a player gets a hit that allows a player already on base to score, he is credited with a Run Batted in. This is the manliest of baseball statistics – a high RBI total. Yet two discreet acts are required for this to happen, and the first, the guy who got in base in order to be driven in, receives little credit in the hagiography of baseball commentary. Their contribution to this total can be measured in simple runs scored, yet one almost never hears baseball announcers waxing poetic about a players’ runs scored total over the previous season.
The wacky Sabermetricians (baseball statistics junkies) have come up with all sorts of variants of a statistic called “runs created” (see here for a discussion) to try to come up with a more meaningful number. I don’t pretend to understand them any more than I understand monetary policy. I just try to keep track of how many runs a player has scored. It’s a reasonable measure. But I fear we’re stuck with the ERA.
This Old Globe
While doing the blog software transition, a trail of crumbs in my old archives led me to Dan York’s blog, one of my old Advogato blog buddies. Turns out he’s a collector of old globes, and has just launched This Old Globe, a blog about globe collecting.
Transition Complete, Sort Of
WordPress installation went off without a scratch. Well, I’m not completely scratchless. Some tidying up to do. Like figuring out how to get my own RSS feed to work on my own Planet. But it’s a sweet piece of software.
Inkstain Administrivia
There was a great house ad that they ran on the front page of the South Pasadena Review once years ago when I lived there that had the phone number for you to call if you didn’t get your paper. It occurred to me that if I didn’t get the paper, I wouldn’t have had the number to call.
With that in mind, I’m posting now to explain that, if all goes well this evening, this blog will be converted to WordPress (so William and Ken can post comments). The practical importance of this is that those of you reading via RSS feeds will need to point to a new location. I’ll attempt to keep the old links working via a symlinks, but given my modest technical abilities, if you see posting on this blog drop to zero, you might wanna check your feed, as it is very unlikely that I simply had nothing to say.
If, on the other hand, you’ve been looking for an excuse to drop my feed, now’s your chance.
Climate Change Effects
So the planet’s warming? So what’s so bad about that?
The question is trickier than it sounds, because in addition to being a noisy bit of the Climate Wars argy-bargy, it’s a big source of uncertainty for policy makers trying to understand what sort of adaption will be required and what sort of mitigation should be undertaken.
The problem is that there’s actually precious little data about how bad it really might be – where might crops whither and where might they prosper, and what’s the net difference? Where might water supplies dwindle, and where might they increase?
This afternoon in Science Express, a team led by Dagmar Schr?ter at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published a serious and useful look at the question for Europe, matching up climate models with economic scenarious to try to get a clearer picture of impacts over the next century. Especially significant was what they called “water stress,” with lots of people living in places that in the future may not have enough water to support them the way they live today. Cropland declines significantly, and forest fires go up:
Among all European regions, the Mediterranean appeared most vulnerable to global change. Multiple potential impacts were projected, related primarily to increased temperatures and reduced precipitation. The impacts included water shortages, increased risk of forest fires, northward shifts in the distribution of typical tree species, and losses of agricultural potential. Mountain regions also seemed vulnerable because of a rise in the elevation of snow cover and altered river runoff regimes.
Not for sure the last word on the question(s), but a useful one nevertheless.
Phenotypic Plasticity
I just got around to reading a fascinating news story and research paper in the Oct. 14 Science about biological response to climate change.
One can imagine a biological need for plants and animals to respond to changing climate. So as it gets warmer, for example, evolutionary pressure might favor birds that lay their eggs sooner in the spring. But Daniel Nussey and a team at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology found a much more interesting and subtle thing happening with a Dutch population of Parus major – the great tit.
For Parus major, climate change is a problem. As Elizabeth Pennisi explained in the Science news piece, the birds time their egg-laying so the chicks hatch when there are gobs of caterpillars to eat. With climate warming, that happens sooner in the year.
One can easily imagine a rather simple drift resulting, favoring earlier egg-layers. But the researchers found something more complex going on. The birds were evolving toward a greater “plasticity” in their egg-laying behavior. Rather than a fixed genetic switch that allowed them to lay eggs earlier, evolution was favoring birds that seemed to have more flexibility in their egg-laying in response to changes in climate. As Pennisi put it:
Most of the birds did not adapt and maintained their original schedule, and the numbers of surviving offspring have begun to decline. But there were some exceptions. Even in the 1980s, some individuals altered their behavior in accordance with the climate, laying eggs earlier in the warm years and later in the cool years. These climate-attuned females have twice as many surviving offspring.