My friend Kelli has started to blog her triathlon training. The woman is fearless. Now I eagerly await her first entry about a rest day.
More on Jefferson on Climate
A commenter sent me off in pursuit of the Thomas Jefferson climate change quote, with good results. The full text is here (search on “Beck”, second occurrence), a July 16, 1824 letter from Jefferson to one Lewis Beck, who had apparently sent Jeffeson something he had written on the climate of the west. The quote excerpted in Glantz’s book shows Jefferson’s interest in understanding anthropogenic climate change (another commenter pointed to the widespread notion afoot at the time that “rain follows the plow”), but the full text also shows Jefferson with a broad and keen interest in gathering good baseline climatological data on the continent:
Years are requisite for this, steady attention to the thermometer, to the plants growing there, the times of their leafing and flowering, its animal inhabitants, beasts, birds, reptiles and insects; its prevalent winds, quantities of rain and snow, temperature of fountains, and other indexes of climate. We want this indeed for all the States, and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century, to show the effect of clearing and culture towards changes of climate.
The Symphony
I have wondered what it must feel like to sit in the midst of a symphony orchestra, playing. Daniel Wakin explains (and gives a delightful account of his appearance therein):
A gleaming, sheer-cut wall of brass hit me from behind. Pounding timpani and crashing cymbals rattled my cartilage. A wave of woodwinds and strings swept me along. For a time, the monumental thrust and sharp rhythmic snap of the march in the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony made me feel as though the music were playing my instrument instead of vice versa.
And this….
…. a great orchestra, an organism that at its best has the might of a jet engine, the delicacy of an eye-surgeon’s laser and the coloristic nuance of a Monet painting.
Grey Hair
Oh, yeah, and happy birthday, Dave.
Cory on Copyright
Cory Doctorow visits Microsoft to explain the history of technology, cryptography and copyright in one easy lesson:
Whenever a new technology has disrupted copyright, we’ve changed copyright. Copyright isn’t an ethical proposition, it’s a utilitarian one. There’s nothing *moral* about paying a composer tuppence for the piano-roll rights, there’s nothing *immoral* about not paying Hollywood for the right to videotape a movie off your TV. They’re just the best way of balancing out so that people’s physical property rights in their VCRs and phonographs are respected and so that creators get enough of a dangling carrot to go on making shows and music and books and paintings.
(via Miguel)
Stink Bugs in London
Stink bugs are showing up in London, another global warming clue. But the real fun here is the source of the research – Max Barclay, who is described in the stories as curator of beetles at the Natural History Museum in London. How cool a title is that?
Greenhouse Warming + Urban Heat Island
There are a couple of news reports out about a new Hadley study on the synergistic effects of greenhouse warming and the urban heat island.
The urban heat island effect, often used by skeptics to discount global warming data, is the very real effect in which all that pavement, buildings and other thermal mass that we’ve built up in cities makes them warmer places. While the deniers’ attempts to use the UHIE to explain away warming is pretty clearly bunk – serious climate scientists have gone to to a great deal of effort to factor the effect into their data analysis – the effect is nontheless real.
The new Hadley study, according to the news accounts, seems to be pointing out the somewhat obvious point that for the folks living in cities, the greenhouse gases’ enhanced heat trapping means more of that urban heat will be held in overnight, which means warmer overnight temperatures.
I haven’t been able to find the study itself – if anyone’s seen it, I’d appreciate a citation.
Bowling
Being tragically unhip, or in this case really unattached to the mainstream of American culture, or maybe it’s just too poor to go to the movie theater and too lazy to rent cheap video, I’ve only now gotten ’round to seeing Bowling for Columbine.
L and I curled up on the big leather couch last night and watched one of the finer pieces of journalistic observation of our culture that I’ve read/seen in a long time. (note to self: read David Brooks, provide snarky compare/contrast)
Continue reading ‘Bowling’ »
Roswell Redux
I stopped by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell today to visit the shrine to my brief career as a UFO debunker.
Back in the day, when Roswell was still something of a live item, someone brought what he claimed to be a fragment of the recovered alien spacecraft to the Museum and Research Center. It was an odd bit of metal, strangely colored with swirling patterns – clearly not of this world. But by a bit of luck and some amount of work, I was able to track it to its source – not Aldebaran, but the studio of a jeweler in St. George Utah who made lovely metalwork, strangely colored with swirling patterns. (Sadly, the stories don’t appear to be on the web any more. I’ll try to get them posted again on the paper’s web site.)
On a wall in the museum is the framed fragment, along with copies of my stories laminated for history, and this note characterizing them:
The news stories were written by John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal staff writer. They are based on Fleck’s independent research and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or endorsement of the museum.
So I’m immortalized on a museum wall, even if the “curator’s note” accompanying them is a bit of a backhanded whack.
There is one piece of mine still around from that time period, an opus of an anthropological take on the Roswell Incident at 50. It’s got an interesting passage that’s relevant to the specific wording in the note on the museum wall – its reference to my “independent research”:
Anthropologists Ziegler’s and Saler’s analysis suggests it’s understandable Friedman would present his work as a research endeavor.
The traditions of the UFO subculture require the story be told “in the format of an investigative report,” they write. What it really is, they believe, is “the folk narrative of an embedded culture.”
“Folk narrative.” I like that.
(More history on the fragment here .)
Jefferson on Climate Change
Reading Mickey Glantz’s Climate Affairs, I ran across this odd reference to what appears on first blush to be Thomas Jefferson’s great insight into the effects of humans on climate. It quotes an 1824 letter in which Jefferson writes that climate surveys “should be repeated oce or twice in a century to show the effect of clearing (of land) and culture (settlements) towards changes of climate.” Insightful man, that Jefferson, eh?