It was with some happy surprise that I realized this evening, when looking at search string refers in the Inklogs, that this blog is in the Google top 10 when one searches on both cheap shit and weird shit.
I think we’ve got a new corporate slogan here: “Inkstain. Serving up weird cheap shit since, like, 1999 or something.”
Feedback in the Aug. 20 New Scientist ruminates on the exhibit at the Yokohama Museum of Eurasian Cultures that included CAT scans of mummified animals. It ponders the “doubly truthful” statement: “This is a cat scan,” and offers the neologism “diontologia” to describe such utterances. “Are there,” the author wonders, “any triontologias?”
I’m not sure if this counts, but when I was going to college in Walla Walla, Wash., many years ago there was a French restaurant downtown called The Left Bank. Its name was an obvious reference to the Seine’s Left Bank. But, as you faced it, the restaurant also was to the left of a bank. In addition, there was an old creek that flowed through the center of town – Mill Creek – that passed to the right of the bank. It was in a concrete channel, and largely covered, but still one could reasonably argue that the restaurant was on Mill Creek’s left bank. I argued that the Left Bank restaurant was a living triple pun. Could one also argue that it was a triontologia?
This, in a nutshell, is why I love the New Mexico State Fair:
It’s Launch Bay A3, one of the many Lego creations on display in the arts and crafts building. It’s an amazing labor of love and creativity with full symmetry as befits the zero gravity of space, where there is no up and down.
That’s the sort of thing you see at the fair, where everyone brings their passions together into one spot – the hiphop kids dancing and rapping, the Aloha Elvis made of beads, the Statue of Liberty also made of beads (with painted fingernails and toenails), the giant vegetables, the prize-winning cactus. I mean, where else will you see a tricked out low-rider bicycle being ridden by a carved wooden Day of the Dead skeleton? It’s the humanity….
Lissa and I went last night and wandered a while. We didn’t see everything yet. The fair now, for us, requires at least two visits. But we did manage to stay past dark so we could see the midway in lights.
The asters are in bloom:
(photo by L. Heineman)
That’s in our backyard. I saw a bunch out along the bosque trail this morning while out riding. If any of you know more about the natural history of our New Mexico version(s) of this plant, drop me a line. I only know ’em as “asters,” but this is an enormous family. There seem to be at least three found in and around Bernalillo County.
I’ve been helping my sister-in-law set up a web site, using free templates from Erisfree (hat tip luis). It’s my first real look inside a bottom-up CSS web design, and I love it! I’ve always funked around with tables nested within tables and other truly awful HTML hacks, and never really grokked CSS. Used properly, it’s sweet. I’ve been thinking about an Inkstain redesign, and this might give me a fun geek excuse.
I’ve always puzzled over one of economists’ central claim of markets – the idea that the market, in its chaotic efficiency, has already taken account all the available information in setting the current price for the commodity at hand.
It always seemed naively obvious to me that there must have been someone who got there first with the information, before the market reflected it, and made a killing. The question really seemed to be – how do we get to be the one who gets there first?
I was reminded of this today by James Annan’s economist joke:
Two economists are walking down the road, and one says to the other “Hey, do you see that? It looks like a 10 pound note in the gutter over there. I’m going over to get it”. The second replies “Don’t bother, if it really was a tenner someone would already have picked it up”.
The joke is in the midst of a nice post worth reading, the summation of which is that markets are not necessarily good predictors of the future (say, the price of oil in 2010 or something), but rather are good collectors of the best available current information about what the future might hold.
These are my people:
Times Picayune Reporter Found
Staff at the New Orleans Times Picayune received a shot of good news this afternoon, when editor Jim Amoss talked to missing Times Picayune reporter Leslie Williams for the first time since the reporter went missing on Thursday while covering Katrina along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.
“This is best news I’ve heard in days,” Mr. Amoss said by phone Sept. 5. “He was covering the story from Mississippi under hellacious conditions. He was on assignment and we’re just now hearing from him, we haven’t had a chance to debrief him yet.”
While I’m doing New Mexico nature writing, let’s consider the creosote.
A friend at work asked me this afternoon why creosote survived in Isleta, the pueblo south of Albuquerque, which my friend rightly thought was far north of its natural range.
As it happens, I had a paper on my desk that offers a bit of an answer.
Creosote is a spindly desert shrub that has always been dear to my heart. It’s the dominant species on the landscapes of the big deserts of southeastern California, where we used to camp winters when I was a kid. They arrange themselves spatially with a sort of rhythm that dominates the landscape.
My friend was right. Isleta, up around 5,000 feet in elevation (1600 meters) is pretty much at the top of their range, and they’re a very recent arrival. Farther south, packrat middens at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, north of Socorro, show they’ve been in residence for something like 2,500 years. But up the road at Isleta, they’re a more recent arrival, maybe less than 200 years.
Why? In part, us. To quote from the Duran et al. paper:
Rangeland overgrazing resulting from high stocking rates of cattle, sheep and horses in the late 19th century coupled with extended drought periods have created conditions conducive to desert shrub invasions into formerly grassland habitats.
Creasote bush – Larrea tridentata – is one of the first species to move in, followed by cactus (Opuntia) and Yucca.
Two fun bird sighting in the last few days.
Sunday, a flock of bushtits blew through. David Sibley describes them as “a disheveled-looking, long-tailed ball of fluff,” and I think that’s apt. There were eight of them at one point all perched on the stalk and leaf stems of a single sunflower in our front yard, picking off the aphids.
This morning, I pulled up the bike along the flood control channel after hearing the cry – Sibley uses the words “agitated” and “strident” to describe it, which is also apt – of killdeer. I had to look hard to find them, wading ankle-deep in the water on the channel’s bottom. I love the way the flood control channel is an accidental bit of nature, in between the rusty busted shopping carts and other urban detritus.
Three or four years ago, I heard a talk by Roger Pielke Jr. at an American Meteorological Society meeting that changed the way I think about the relationship between climate and human societies. It was about hurricanes, and he talked about Hurricane Mitch, which killed something in excess of 10,000 people in Central America – perhaps as many, by some counts, as 20,000. Roger’s simple point, as I remember it, was that the dominant variable in the equation leading to that death toll was the fact that the people in Central America were sufficiently poor that they lacked the resources to not die.
At the time, I had been rather naively thinking that the threat of more powerful hurricanes as a result of global warming was a good argument in favor of reducing greenhouse emissions. Roger’s talk convinced me that reducing societal vulnerability to the storms that will happen, warming or not, is a far more effective approach to helping people not die in hurricanes. I’ve since come to realize that, while there are good reasons to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reducing societal vulnerabilities in a range of areas, from droughts to floods, is a far more important issue in coping with climate variability and change, both natural and human-caused.
I can’t begin to keep up at this point with the important issues being raised by this discussion, but clearly Katrina offers an opportunity to crystallize this sort of thinking. Roger’s got a blog now, and has a lot to say. Go read it.
