True to my heritage

My family talks about the weather - a lot - so I reckon I should report on the snow today. It's not been too bad so far. We got several inches, but no more than half a foot, I don't think, between 0830 and 1600 today. It may have started back up, but it's dark, so I can't see it, and Kerry's home from the hospital, so I don't care too much. We're not going anywhere.

I need to call Hermanito Scott and see how he's enjoying the 1+ foot of snow and 50 mph winds in Boston. I expect he's not enjoying it much at all, and I can't see how my calling him will help, yet I feel a strong desire to speak with him. How odd...

On the plus side of the snow, I got to know one of our new neighbors, Ted, much better, as we shovelled the Holler's ultra-driveway. If Kerry wakes up, he and his wife, Eileen, may come over tonight, and we can all meet and chill.

I'm not too good at remembering people's names when I meet them, but Ted and Eileen were a piece of cake. I can't even think of them without hearing Dexy's Midnight Runners singing their names to me.

"Life on Earth snuffed out by global warming"

In case you didn't know it, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but The Australian reports that life on Earth has indeed ended.

OK, it's really just a misleading headline. The article is about a paper published in Science, suggesting that "continuous volcanic eruptions in Siberia", versus a huge meteor impact, set off mass extinctions 250 million years ago. The eruptions released a lot of hydrogen sulfide which set off global warming.

Actually, the article is kind of misleading, too, since it just talks about climate change, while the abstract of the paper emphasizes a lack of atmospheric oxygen and indicates that "sulfide toxicity was a driver of the extinction and a factor in the protracted recovery." Well, until there's a heated debate over regulating volcanic emissions, I guess we'll never get the full story.

Meanwhile, it's a small comfort to me to know that I'm not really looking at a squirrel eat our little remaining birdseed. After all, life on Earth was snuffed out.

Adios, Spinsanity

I'd wondered how the three guys at the spin-exposing website Spinsanity did their work as a part-time gig. Now I know: with some difficulty. They're closed the site (though the archives will remain available). I've enjoyed and recommended their site; I reckoned they deserved a "well-done" holler from The Hollerer.

I've only looked at it a few times, but factcheck.org seems to offer good, non-partisan, spinalysis.

Homework

I'm TAing for microeconomics again this semester. In a slight change from the fall, the professor is going to assign homeworks to be graded, not just for edification and enlightenment. Furthermore, he has delegated the task of selecting/creating the homework problems to me. So I've just spent an hour or so picking through problems from last year, trying to figure out what was assigned when, goes with which topics, etc, as well as thinking about logistics (when will problems be due, how will they get them to me, also etc). Not very exciting. But now my non-excitement has been shared with you and so diminished. Sorry, but thanks.

You might think that shoveling snow is not very exciting. You're right, but today it was oddly satisfying. Partly because it was oddly easy (light snow, only a couple of inches), but mostly because I am oddly nerdy. I was greatly pleased, not so much that the snow was cleared, but that a methodical herringbone of shovel tracks streched aaaaaall the way up our long-ass driveway. Pattern, regularity, predictability... delight!

Asinine

FOX BLURS CARTOON REAR END ON FCC WORRIES: Fox says it covered up the naked rear end of a cartoon character recently because of nervousness over what the Federal Communications Commission will find objectionable. The latest example of TV network self-censorship because of FCC concerns came a few wks ago during a rerun of a "Family Guy" cartoon. Fox electronically blurred a character's posterior, even though the image was seen 5 yrs ago when the episode originally aired.
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