I spent a mesmerizing couple of hours yesterday afternoon with the diaries of John D. Lee.
The only place I could find it was in the Albuquerque special collections library, a lovely old building that used to be the city’s main library and now houses the rare stuff they won’t let you check out.
(click through for more on Lee)
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I got a nice note this morning from Lubo? Motl about yesterday’s post, quoted in its entirety here (with Dr. Motl’s kind permission):
Dear Mr. Fleck,
I think that you’re being outrageously unfair to me. Everyone who follows this debate knows that I understand those climate issues that have been discussed at least as well as William Connolley does. At least, unlike him, I know what the latent heat of ice is – while he believes it is 1000 times smaller than it actually is.
Therefore it is highly annoying that you call this semi-educated guy a “British climate researcher” while your sentences about me are constructed in such a way to indicate that my opinion does not matter so much. It’s just unfair in the case that you realize that what you write is nonsense. If you don’t realize it, then it may be that you are honest – but in that case your intelligence is probably not too high.
You also accuse me that I don’t realize that there are stupid people on all sides. I have no idea why you think that I don’t realize it. It’s just another lie – another completely unjustifiable accusation. For example, the creationists may be on my side politically, but they don’t have a scientific approach to biology. If you mean Crichton, you would have to give more details. Crichton’s speech was spot on and it was extremely intelligent. You have not found anything wrong with the speech either.
You’re just apparently used to the fact that you can write a few kilobytes of lies and false accusations, without any justification whatsoever, and there are always sufficiently many stupid and politically biased readers who will appreciate your acts nevertheless.
I believe that you should apologize to me for this outrageous text.
Thanks for your understanding
Lubos
I’m happy to welcome the reader who found inkstain after searching on cyclist gnome. I’m not working on or writing about GNOME much these days, in part because I’m spending so much time on the bike, but you’re welcome to sit and have a cup of coffee. Enjoy. Readers who visited Inkstain also might enjoy underwater cyclist swerves to avoid garden gnome.
Other fun search strings in the logs include “dakota 3.9 firing order” – something to do with auto mechanics, as near as I can tell – and “clean dishwasher tang”.
I grew up in inland Southern California, a childhood in the 1960s blessed with significant air pollution. Warm summer afternoons playing outside (or, later, running with my cross country and track buddies), our lungs would ache. But we’d do it anyway. Heck, we were kids. The fact that a measuring station a couple of blocks from my house recorded the region’s worst air quality one year was, for us, a point of pride.
That’s one of the reasons we moved to Albuquerque – we didn’t want our daughter growing up in that. Now comes a new study that “found the risk of death rose by 11 to 17 percent from the cleanest parts of Los Angeles to the most polluted areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties to the east.” (Hat tip Coco.)
I’ve recently made the blogoworld acquaintence of a character called Lubo? Motl, a string theorist at Harvard who has decided he has sufficient expertise to weigh in on the issue of climate change.
There is nothing wrong with doing this. All of us are entitled to have opinions on important public policy questions, and he should be thus praised for taking a stand. But he does it in a way that illustrates much that is wrong with political discourse. Here’s my favorite recent example, on the blog of British climate researcher William Connolley:
Sorry to be candid, but as far as this debate goes, all of you are dishonest and intellectually limited political activists.
This is it, in a nutshell. Lumo thinks that if you believe that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of climate change, then you are venal, or stupid, or both.
He’s not alone in doing this. In fact, this is a style of rhetoric common to talk radio and the blogosphere, and represents a common way of thinking and talking about all sorts of political and policy debates. It’s frankly intellectually lazy. It allows one to dismiss the arguments of one’s opponents without ever having to take them seriously. But in any sufficiently interesting political or policy debate, as I discussed elsewhere recently, there are sincere and reasonable people on both sides.
That doesn’t mean that some of your opponents aren’t venal and stupid, and that you shouldn’t call them on it. But if you don’t recognize two other things, you’re missing the boat. If you don’t recognize the venal and stupid people on your own side of the debate, you’re not paying sufficient attention, because they almost certainly are there. (Note to Lumo: you need to give Michael Crichton a closer read. Note to all those enthusiastic greenhouse gas reduction advocates who emailed me Ross Gelbspan’s hurricane piece: You shouldn’t be quite so attached to Gelbspan.) And if you aren’t seeking out and trying to understand the reasonable people on the other side of the debate, you’re not thinking the question through very well.
A climate-watching friend bids New Mexicans to watch Otis, an east Pacific hurricane running up the cost of Baja on a course that could bring its moisture into New Mexico next week.
1.37 inches of rain at my house, a bit northeast of the University of New Mexico. The National Weather Service is reporting 1.19 since it started raining late yesterday afternoon.
Sadie is so busted. From the front page of this morning’s Albuquerque Journal (paid sub. req.):
The one improvement in her life, her owner says, is that she recently figured out how to open kitchen cabinets to get at the trash can.
It was in the newspaper. It must be true.
This is apparently not Bart Simpson’s web site:
Just as a print of your fingerprints, palms, soles, and ears tell a story, so does your rump. The lines, crevices, and folds of your fanny…. can, to the trained eye, reveal your personality, fate, and future in luck and love.
Apparently all you need to do is send a close-up picture of your ass, along with a not insubstantial sum of money for a personal reading.
In its richest manifestations, real life is truly funnier than The Onion.
On the size of the Balloon Fiesta crowd: “There’s just no way that many people are attending the fiesta.”