Follow the yellow brick road. I don’t want to feed the troll directly. (Let’s just say that Mr. Fumento continues to demonstrate his journalistic integrity via, uh, “creative interpretation” of original texts.)
PoMo Island
Postmodernism is one of those things, like pornography, that’s difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.
Today’s example: The Real Gilligan’s Island, a “reality” show based on a sitcom. And then, on network TV news, an interview with an original cast member from the “real” Gilligan’s Island.
Disentangling the strands of reality is left as an exercise for the reader.
A Brick in the Wall
All in all, we just need to be paid for helping put another brick in the wall.
Trader Joe’s
Lissa and I finally made the pilgrimage this afternoon to the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Fe.
When people ask where we’re from, we typically say “L.A.,” but we actually lived for many years in South Pasadena, a little bit of old-school suburbia between Los Angeles and Pasadena. It’s the home of Joe Coulombe’s first Trader Joe’s, and we did a lot of shopping at the second, a crowded little cheese and wine emporium on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena. The stuff was cheap and good and, most important, a bit odd. Workers wore Hawaiian shirts, stuff was stacked around in wooden crates like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?
The first TJ’s in New Mexico has been greeted with almost religious fervor, but to be honest I was a bit nervous about making the pilgrimage. In this age of Wild Whole Oat Foods markets, with their colored concrete floors and beautiful produce and oh-so-hiply-pierced staff, I was worried about what TJ’s might have become. But I was pleasantly surprised. There was Joe’s low-sodium V8 knockoff vegetable juice – cheaper than V8 at the regular supermarket. Intriguing frozen vegetables. Frozen salmon patties. Stuff stacked around like it had just come off the boat. And did I mention that it was cheap?
Prairie Dog Linguistics
My colleague Tania Soussan has a delightful story in this morning’s paper about the question of whether prairie dogs have language:
Some of those words or calls were created by the prairie dogs when they saw something for the first time. Four prairie dogs in Slobodchikoff’s lab were shown a great-horned owl and European ferret, two animals they had likely not seen before, if only because the owls are mostly nocturnal and this kind of ferret is foreign. The prairie dogs independently came up with the same new calls.
In the field, black plywood cutouts showing the silhouette of a coyote, a skunk and an oval shape were randomly run along a wire through the prairie dog colony.
“There are no black ovals running around out there and yet they all had the same word for black oval,” Slobodchikoff said.
He guesses the prairie dogs are genetically programmed with some vocabulary and the ability to describe things.
More RS 2477
More on that wacky RS 2477 from Property Owners for Sensible Roads Policy.
A Computer Is Just a Computer
The Hypothetical Wren, on standing in line at the computer lab to use Windows machines when the Macs are free:
I was dithering whether or not to stay in line or just sit down at one of the lonely computers, since no one at the head of the line seemed compelled to use any of them, when someone else came up, someone really loud, willing to ask the questions out loud that I am not, and, half-asking, half-yelling, said, “YOU PEOPLE ARE ALL IN LINE FOR THE WINDOWS THINGIES, RIGHT?”
They were.
The People’s Science
“I always felt that science as the preserve of people from Oxbridge or Ivy League universities – and not for the common mortal – was a very bad idea.”
– Benoit Mandelbrot, in last week’s New Scientist, on seeing his fractals on T-shirts
Perceptions of Drought
A friend of mine began noticing New Mexico’s drought a couple of years ago when he realized he hadn’t needed chains or snow tires on his pickup truck in a while. He lives up a hilly dirt road, where snow can make it tough coming and going. But he realized he hadn’t been having problems in recent years.
I thought of my friend this afternoon when, while at the library, I stumbled by happenstance across an intriguing paper in the journal Climate Research by a Norwegian researcher named Elisabeth Meze-Hausken on how people perceive climate change in northern Ethiopia(1).
(More below the fold.)
Continue reading ‘Perceptions of Drought’ »
Cooling Greenland
In the wake of the release of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, arguing that anthropogenic warming is heating up the arctic faster than expected and faster than other parts of the globe, a familiar counter-argument has resurfaced – that Greenland is actually getting colder. Given the currency of the argument (it was prominently feature in a Tech Central Station-sponsored letter signed by a group of climate scientists to Sen. John McCain, R-AZ), it’s worth reviewing a rather straightforward bit of Global Climate Science 101:
The anthropogenic warming hypothesis does not predict the same sort of warming everywhere. The hypothesis predicts that some places would warm a lot, some less, some might even cool. That’s why “global climate change” is a more accurate way of describing it. From the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:
You can see how citing Greenland’s cooling provides something of a misleading picture of the overall situation.