AP reports on the post-Katrina real estate boom, echoing Sam’s thoughts about hurricane relief by selling off underwater real estate (similar issues to viaticals, really)…
and Overlawered covers the first Katrina lawsuits against the oil companies, similar to my prediction (not identical, as the lawyers haven’t thrown in the anthropogenic climate change - hurricane intensity angle… yet).
In this alt.food.wine thread I found an interesting discussion about what exactly various parts of a pencil taste like, after someone described a wine as “Graphite and smoke on the finish.” I certainly chewed up many pencils while I was school, but not for the flavor. This is an easy experiment though, so I immediately found a pencil and a sharpener. The lead don’t taste like nothin’ to me, either dull or sharpened. (I have to admit it did feel a bit cool on my tongue, no doubt due to its temperature being lower than my tongue’s.) The shavings, now, they smelled like pencil shavings.
You gotta love the French attitude to peak oil. Here’s the full quote, from the head of economic studies at the IEA, based in Paris:
“Le p
Both Creek Running North and Pharyngula are observing Lurker Day, wherein all readers, regular or random, friends, family or strangers, are invited to come out, comment, and say hi, if just this once. My guest status makes logs hard to get at, so I’ve started to wonder if anyone is reading at all, or if I’m just talking to myself here. Indeed, the only reader I know of is my wife, who claims she reads the blog regularly, but sometimes I suspect, hm, well, there’s no polite way to put this, but sometimes I think she might be faking it. So, despite the very real risk that no one at all will respond, and the sad truth of my meaningless existence will be made even more evident than it already was, I figured I would open up comments and see what happens…
Update Exactly zero comments: another sad, desperate plea for attention falls on the deaf ears of an uncaring universe. Of course, as my wife pointed out with an “I’m not laughing with you, I’m laughing at you” chuckle, this could have something to do with the fact that comments here are simply broken. *sigh*
Update 2 - 11/12/2005 (Sam) For the record, the comments aren’t broken, they are disabled.
The deeply weird AmericanConscience.org begins with this Fred Hoyle quote:
It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Of Men and Galaxies 1964)
It’s an interesting claim, and I’m reminded of my previous post on the topic. I’m just not sure if Hoyle’s claim is true. Is there really no hope for the species which remain on this planet after we’re gone?
At Pharyngula, one of the more bombastic of the moonbat blogs I frequent[1], hysterical atheist[2] blogger PZ Meyers spent some effort ripping into some other guy, apparently of the evangelical American Christian persuasion, named Joe Carter. Standard stuff, really. If I were to tell you that the only socially accepted demographic bias in liberal circles is against adherents of any popular American religion, you wouldn’t find much here to contradict me, but again that’s nothing unusual.
What’s interesting is that both Joe and PZ, along with lots of others, wade in through the comments, and despite the quantities of muck flying in all directions some interesting shiny rocks emerge. Only a lunatic would read the whole thing, but to give a flavor of the discussion, I’ve included part of one comment from near the end, selected solely because I get quoted, and (in honor of Monday) rendered in Pharyngula’s convenient “Talk like a pirate” mode:
Looking for word lists, I found this spelling test. Now, as readers of this blog know (if there are any I haven’t driven away yet), I may be a dreadful writer, but I do take some pride in orthography. I may not know how to string words together, but generally I know how to spell them. So I was dismayed to to get six wrong out of 50. That’s 88%, a B grade. And that’s on a multiple choice test, two choices on fairly ordinary words! Very chagrinning (sp?). See how you do…
UPDATE After reviewing my errors, I took it again. Six wrong again, but a different six! Stupider and stupider…
Last Tuesday evening, as the news reports of flooding rolled in and it started to become clear to me what the human scope of the tragedy would be, I thought of the one person I knew in New Orleans.
An AP poll has 80% saying don’t rebuild New Orleans below sea level. This sounds like a rough consensus, but it doesn’t include everyone, obviously. Here’s one alternative voice:
Joyce Jones, a retiree from Modesto, Calif., said: “If the levees were built stronger, they should put it back the way it is. We’re a nation of lots of smarts. Those Corps of Engineers can do just about anything.”
I find the language here interesting. I absolutely agree that the nation has lots of smarts, and, given those smarts and sufficient time, money, and effort, great feats of engineering are possible. However this statement contains an implicit limitation on what we are allowed to use those smarts for: can we apply the smarts only to the engineering, or are we also allowed to be smart about what goals we choose to engineer?
The other obvious question, not posed by AP, is “which sea level?” Do we pick a value from the 19th century, the 20th, or what reasonable expectations are for the 21st? And who gets to define “reasonable expectations”? This one could get very sticky and political, but get it wrong, and the same problem could repeat far sooner than necessary.
Next up, there is a stream of submissions to Nature: a comment by M&M, call it MM04a, a reply (call it MBH04), and a revised comment by M&M (call it MM04b). If MBH revised their reply, I haven’t seen it. In the end, the exchange was rejected. Some of the referee reports are reproduced at McIntyre’s website: the ones selected to be presented seem mixed but cautiously positive, the final referee reports and the rejection letter are not published. So what do these papers say?