sculpture by Nora Heineman-Fleck
This works on so may levels.
Fixin’ the News
Over at the Fix, news you can use (at least the subset of y’all in and around Albuquerque who ride bikes) about a detour down by Tingley Beach on my beloved bike trail.
And, as a bonus, the Fix now has an RSS feed, which means they’re, like, so on my Planet.
Wheels
Ya know what I’d like is one of those trucks like the railroad guys use, that has regular tires but also those railroad wheels that drop down so you can drive it on the railroad tracks? That’d be cool. Or a Shelby Cobra. Or a riding mower. That would be neat, too.
Illegal Code
Oh dear! The FBI’s code doesn’t validate.
Jaworowski
Those who have run across the climate research work of Zbigniew Jaworowski might be interested in a recent analysis by Jim Easter, who gets a full 10 bonus points for what I believe to be the first instance of a Dashiell Hammett reference in the climate literature.
Licensed to Drive
The Power of Gnome
Grandma Stops Intruder With Garden Gnome:
“He lay there and I began to scream. I went back into the kitchen and found a rolling pin in case he came down. I didn’t want to break another GNOME.”
A Heat Wave, Viewed Graphically
A bunch of disparate threads coming together here in one spot: climate change controversies, free software and a really hot weekend here in Albuquerque. (Don’t worry, skeptics. I’m not gonna blame the heat wave on global warming.)
The climateaudit guys, critics of the hockey stick, have done their analysis in R, which is a nice and freely available (GPL) statistical tool. The new reanalysis by Wahl and Ammann also uses R and both groups have published their code.
So I’ve been playing a bit with R, which is a fun toolkit.
(click through for more)
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Weeds
The lily in our pond is happy this year.
The shade structure that collapsed in the big March blizzard let the sun in, and the lily responded with a lovelier than usual bloom. The fish, which have always been a bit of a mystery, seem more so. The cattails (the “weeds” of the title – I didn’t plant them) seem more exuberant as well.
Albuquerque Real Estate
Autumn Gray, in this morning’s Journal, picks up on a remarkable trend in the Albuquerque real estate market: out-of-market buyers using their bubble money to buy investment properties here:
Such sales are part of a trend that home builders and real estate agents say is driving up prices in the Albuquerque metro area and making it more difficult for local buyers to find homes.
“I’ve seen properties that shouldn’t sell for more than $150,000 go for $200,000,” said John Sheffer, a real estate agent with the Vaughan Company Realtors.
Local real estate offices first saw the increased interest here about seven months ago, and activity has escalated since.
Now it’s not uncommon to spot groupings of California license plates at local home building sites.
One wonders what happens here, then, if my bubble-obsessed friend Aaron is right. I’d been thinking of this as a coastal phenomenon from which we were (at least relatively) insulated. I was imagining the housing market to be a series of relatively isolated islands. Autumn’s story suggests the bubble moves with more fluidity than I had understood.