Don

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I’m sure opposing counsel would be willing to stipulate that Don Knuth is cool, but for the record, I’d like to submit the following evidence: Don Knuth is the first result when you search for “Don” on Google.

I found that yesterday via a typo accident, which got me to Googlewandering looking to see who owns other first names.

  • Bob Dylan owns “Bob”, though “Bob The Builder”, Bob Marley and the Church of the Subgenius score well.
  • The British National AIDS Trust owns “Nat”, though our Nat Friedman is now up to third, ahead of Nat Hentoff.
  • If you’re looking for “Fred”, you’ll have to fight your way past the Federal Reserve Economic Data web site.
  • It’s heartening to see that our most holy Mother of Jesus comes in ahead of cosmetics giant Mary Kay. Whatever one’s religious beliefs, that’s a sign of properly ordered priorities.
  • My name seems to be owned by John Bartlett’s Quotations: I have gathered a posie of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.

Disco Stu

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Driving home from work the other night on the freeway, I was passed by one of those fast red sports/muscle cars Detroit is making today – a Dodge Viper or some such.

Albuquerque’s “rush hour” is not much to speak of, not really a traffic jam, just enough congestion to keep you from going any faster than anyone else, which is always a little bit slower than some people seem to want to go. Such was the case with Viper Man, as he changed back and forth from lane to lane, looking for an opening that would allow him to go slightly faster, saving no more than a second or two with each move.

He seemed so muscularly, testosteronely out of place, all dressed up in that silly red Viper, that he reminded me of Disco Stu, desperately making move after move and going nowhere.

Could Plague Have Caused the Little Ice Age?

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That’s one of the intriguing corollaries of a hypothesis being put forward by William Ruddiman, an emeritus climate researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Ruddiman argues that, through deforestation and rice farming, humans have been having a significant effect on greenhouse warming for as much as 8,000 years – not just that last century or so that is the more common view today.
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Dry Crackers

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Having lived essentially my entire life in arid climes, there are some things I take for granted that perhaps I shouldn’t, as Nat helpfully points out:

There are, apparently, some advantages. Like you can leave crackers out on the table and they don’t get stale overnight. Wow.

Europe’s Summer of 2003

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Those of you who lived through the summer of 2003 in Europe know it was what might be called, in statistical terms, “an outlier” – 20,000 dead’ll do that. But it wasn’t clear to me just how much of an outlier until I read this paper by Christoph Sch?r et al. in the Jan. 22 Nature.

The paper’s a great example of the difference between the more conventional phrase, “global warming”, and the more useful and accurate way of looking at things – “global climate change”.
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Cholera and the Broad Street Pump

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Dontcha just love libraries? Nothing quite like the serendipity of finding something unexpected on the shelf next to the thing you were looking for.

On my mission to better understand statistics, I was at the downtown Albuquerque library Saturday going through all the stale, musty old stats textbooks when I stumbled up on Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information.


John Snow's Map of London Cholera Epidemic

Tuft tells the story of John Snow, a London physician in the 1850s who removed the handle from the Broad Street pump and halted a cholera epidemic that had killed half a thousand.
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Typecasting the Geeks

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From Geodog:

So I walked into the cafe tonight and looked around for the Joel group — like any other geek, I was too shy to ask anyone, but when I spotted a big table lined entirely with males, mostly in their mid-twenties to early forties, not too well dressed, predominantly European-American, I knew that I had found the geek gathering.

(Link via Joel.)

Snow Days

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I was talking to my daughter, Nora, and her friend, Andy, last night about snow days.

We all anecdotally remember the kids having a lot more snow days in the past, but it’s been years – Andy said he’s pretty sure at least four – since school here in Albuquerque’s had to be cancelled because of a big storm. I need to track down the statistics to see if our memories are right.

Here’s someone who has some related numbers:

Over the past decade, resorts across Europe have expressed increasing concern about the early melting of the snow cover. The Swiss Association of Winter Sports Resorts says that in the past 20 years the length of the season in the Swiss mountains has been shortened by 12 days due to the increase in temperature.

In the French city of Grenoble, the Snow Research Centre said that a 1.8-degree increase in temperature in France would shorten the annual length of snow cover at above 1500 metres to 135 days from 170 (minus 20 percent) in the northern Alps, and to 90 days from 120 (minus 25 percent) in the southern Alps.

Symbiosis

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It’s one of those fabulous examples of yet another huge world about which we know nothing: the realm of the symbiotic fungi living on the leaves of plants.

All plants seem to have ’em, but why are they there? They suck up a small amount of the plant’s energy, and in the brutal economics of evolution, that which takes away resources must also contribute something, or it’ll get whacked soon enough.
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