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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Radiation Danger

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From the “100 Years Ago” feature in today’s Nature:

It may interest some to know that radium destroys vegetable matter. I happened to replace the usual mica plates, used to keep in the small quantity of radium in its ebonite box, with a piece of cambric, so as to permit the whole of the emanations to pass out, mica stopping the gamma rays. In four days the cambric was rotted away. I have replaced it now several times with the same result.

Hmmm. A clue.

Science Wars

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Chris Mooney was at yesterday’s Congressional hearing on what is now euphemistically being called in Washington “sound science”:

The House Committee on Resources’ “sound science” hearing I attended yesterday represented, in my view, a fairly stunning attempt by Republican legislators to cast themselves as the party of “science,” while pushing proposals that would actually deemphasize science conducted by federal agencies while privileging scientific claims coming from the private sector.

Punditry

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I love it when the pundits are wrong:

Several reports these last few days have noted that Howard Dean had bagged about 8,000 absentee votes in New Mexico prior to his post-Iowa tailspin. This in itself should have made him competitive in New Mexico, since, as most of these reports went on to suggest, only about 50,000 people were expected to vote in today’s state-wide caucuses. In fact, combine the 15 percent of the likely vote Dean’s cache of absentee ballots gives him with the 15 percent support he garnered in the final New Mexico poll, and he’s basically in the same place, 30 percent, John Kerry is (at least according to the same poll).

But now come reports that there’s a major snow storm headed toward New Mexico (and the Albuquerque/Santa Fe population hub in particular) this evening. If the storm pushes turnout significantly lower than the expected 50,000, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think Dean could actually carry the state by a relatively comfortable margin.

(Never mind that his arithmetic is flat wrong, that Dean’s alleged 8,000 absentee votes plus 15 percent of the number Scheiber uses above gives him must 23.5 percent of the vote. That really doesn’t matter. He could have just waited a couple of hours to see what actually happened, rather than predicting the future, badly. What’s the rush?)

Journalists Predicting the Future

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The L.A. Times’ David Shaw has one word for journalists tempted to predict the future – don’t:

When a political reporter is trying to analyze what happened and why and what it means in a caucus or a primary election, it can be difficult to resist the inclination to apply those lessons to the next primary and predict its outcome ? and to persuade oneself that this is what readers and viewers want. After all, astrology columns wouldn’t be so popular if readers weren’t interested in what some presumed expert thinks will happen next.

But journalists aren’t ? shouldn’t be ? astrologists. When political journalists predict the future, their predictions often seem to eclipse ? and at times substitute for ? the reporting they’re supposed to be based on. Worse, those predictions can become self-fulfilling prophesies.

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Stuff What I Wrote Elsewhere

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From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal:

The Bush administration asked Congress on Monday for the largest nuclear weapons budget in U.S. history.

The Bush administration’s request of $6.9 billion for nuclear weapons work is larger, in inflation-adjusted terms, than the budget reached in 1985 during the peak of the Reagan administration Cold War. That was the previous largest U.S. nuclear weapons budget, according to a Brookings Institution study of U.S. nuclear weapons spending.

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