Sad news today: Tom Magliozzi, one of Cambridge Massachusetts greatest gifts to public radio (and Cambridge has given a LOT of gifts to public radio) died today. Car talk was, verily, one of the best things ever. I have one Car Talk story and this is as good a time as any to tell it. It might be the only link between Sean Connery and The Tappet Brothers. Look at the picture above. It is Harvard Square. Remember the movie Just Cause, starring Sean Connery and some other people? One of the first scenes in the movie has the mother of a young black man wrongfully accused of murder taking…

It's all here in this song!

Fred Upton is the incumbent Republican Congressional Representative for southwest Michigan’s 6th district. Upton is considered to be one of Michigan’s most powerful Republicans. He is the Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which is an important position in relation to climate change. He has been in the House since being elected in 1986. Most of his elections since then, including after redistricting (when he went from the 4th to the 6th district) were easy wins. In 2012 he was “primaried” by the righter-wing, but still won handily (Wikipedia editors, note that Upton’s Wiki entry…

This was technically difficult owing to internet conditions but interviewer Vijay Kishore Vaidyanathan did a great job with what he had. In particular he did a great job editing out the constant explosions in the background! https://soundcloud.com/mobile-journalism-4/talk-with-prof-greg-laden

A City of Death and Misery Everything I’m about to tell you in this story is true.1 You might not want to read this story while you are alone or while sitting in the dark.2 Kimberley South Africa is said to be the most haunted city in the world, and it certainly is a city with a remarkable and dark history. The culture of Kimberley is constructed from the usual colonial framework on which are draped the tragic lives of representatives from almost every native culture from thousands of kilometers around, as well as the seemingly ubiquitous Europeans with their greed, their unexamined privilege…

Jim Moore and I were both students in the PhD Program in Anthropology at Harvard a few years ago. He graduated about the time I entered the program. To give a rough historical touchstone, I remember the day he needed to get his thesis off to the Registrar, and there was a delay because it was taking longer than expected to deburst the pages fresh out of the printer. Anyway, Jim is Professor of Anthropology at UC San Diego, and has done a great deal of work with Old World Primates, the evolution of social systems, and related topics. A while back Jim wrote an important piece for American…

Of the seven Americans who have contracted Ebola, five overseas and two in Texas, all seven have survived. Comments from President Obama, focusing on how we have to be guided by the science: "Here’s the bottom line. Patients can beat this disease. And we can beat this disease. But we have to stay vigilant. We have to work together at every level — federal, state and local. And we have to keep leading the global response, because the best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source — in West Africa." CDC Update page for the West African outbreak…

NEW: Very first look at Ubuntu Linux 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta Mate Flavor See: Ubuntu Unleashed Here is a list of things to do after you have installed Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn. There is some discussion of whether or not you should upgraded to 14.10 here, but the short version is, for most people an upgrade from 14.04 is not necessary but not a bad idea, and an upgrade from any earlier version is a very good idea. Mostly, though, you should just upgrade. One could ask the question, should you be installing Ubuntu with Unity. You have to like Unity. I personally like to have a wider range…

Arctic Sea Ice extent continues to be a problem. This year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, ARctic Sea ice reached its lowest extent this year on September 17th, which is about the sixth lowest extent on record, following a multi-year trend of decline. There is variation from year to year. This year's minimum was almost exactly the same as last years. With the exception of 2001, minimum extent has been below the climatalogical average every year since 1998. Dana Nuccitelli has a post on this with excellent discussion and some nice graphics, and he has also produced a…

Some time in the 1970s. I keep hearing about this 17 year long pause in global warming. So I went and looked. I did a regression analysis of the last 17 full years of surface temperatures from the GISS database. There is an upward trend in warming during this period and it is statistically significant. Then I calculated a "running slope" over 17 year long periods from the beginning of the record (plus 8 years) to the end of the record (minus 8 years). For each slope I tested to see if the slope was less than +0.1 (the average slope across the record is 0.75). If a year centered on any…

Last summer we were driving up north, in our Prius, and one of those coal rollers tailgated us for a while, then passed us. On the right. On the median. Jerk. When we were trying to decide whether or not to buy a Prius, last winter, I looked into the usual things one looks into. I learned from the internet and various people that we'd never recover the extra cost of buying a Prius, because they were so expensive. So I got a little information together and called a dealer. "I'm thinking of buying either a Subaru Forester to replace our old and beat up Forester, or a Prius. But I've been…

Sins of Our Fathers, by Shaw Otto, is coming out shortly but can be preordered. JW, protagonist, is a flawed hero. He is not exactly an anti-hero because he is not a bad guy, though one does become annoyed at where he places his values. As his character unfolds in the first several chapters of Shawn Otto's novel, Sins of Our Fathers, we like him, we are worried about him, we wonder what he is thinking, we sit on the edge of our proverbial seats as he takes risk after risk and we are sitting thusly because we learn that he does not have a rational concept of risk. We learn that his inner…

that I wrote is here.

I could rephrase this question. What should we do about climate change. The reason I might rephrase this is because we may not be that sure of what we can do, but we should do something. Or, more accurately, some things. There are a lot of possible things we can do, and we have little time to do them. So, maybe we should do all of them for a while. We could spend years working out what the best three or four things we can do might be, and try to implement them. But there will be political opposition from the right, because the right is inexplicably opposed to any action that smells like…

Parrots are smarter than Nebo the dog "Nebo." The dog's name came from the direction of the enclosed front porch of the tin-roofed concrete block home of my friend Bwana Ndege, in Isiro, Zaire. "Nebo." It sounded like an older woman, a somewhat crackly voice, insistent. "Nebo. Kuya. Nebo." The old woman was calling the dog, in Swahili. Nebo, sleeping at first on the cool concrete floor under the dining room table startled awake, ears scanning. Nebo was a large Doberman who had never learned that one-man one-dog thing. He was gentle. And listening carefully. "Nebo." Louder, more…

Obama made Ebola the subject of his weekly address. He emphasizes some unique concepts: Science and facts.

How many lakes are there? We don't actually know. Lakes are often undercounted, or small lakes ignored, in larger scale geophysical surveys. It is hard to count the small lakes, or in some cases, even to define them. A recent study (published in Geophysical Research Letters) examines this question. We want to know how many lakes there are, and how much surface area they take up, in order to understand better the global Carbon cycle (and for other reasons). From the Abstract of this study: An accurate description of the abundance and size distribution of lakes is critical to quantifying…

You know Guy Himber's work. He worked on special effects for Aien 3, Underworld, Independence Day, Edward Scissorhands, I, Robot, lots of other productions. And now, he is playing around with LEGO. Steampunk Lego by Guy Himber is subtitled "The illustrated researches of various fantastical devices by Dr. Herbert Jabson, with epistles to the Crown, Her Majesty Queen Victoria; A travelogue in 11 chapters." The book itself is all steampunky, in fact heavily steampunky, with brown colors, gears and wheels as background images, and victorian techno-objects decorating a faux photographic album…

There has not been much hurricane activity in the Atlantic for a while now, so unsurprisingly the reporting is starting to slip again. This post goes out to all you reporters at CNN and Reuters and Yahoo and everywhere else. Imma give you an example of what you are doing wrong, then I'll send you to a place to learn up on it. A recent report noted that "hurricane force winds are now bearing down on Bermuda, and the storm is expected to arrive within hours" meaning the eye would arrive within hours (paraphrased). This is not what is happening. When there is a hurricane arriving at your…

Two items related only because these two seem to like each other and there are coeval happenings. Mark Steyn and Dr. Michael Mann's book Michael mann wrote a great book called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. It really is a good book, I highly recommend it. Mark Steyn is a right wing talking head and shock jocky guy whose behavior is that of a seventh grader. Since Mann's book was published, numerous anti-science and anti-environment Internet trolls have posted bogus, harassing, one-star reviews on Amazon of Mann's book. Often, these reviews come in…