Science
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Borg’s Woods News
I just learned by Eric Martindale’s comment to my Borg’s Woods post in February that the March 13 storm knocked down many of the trees in the old growth urban forest that was our neighborhood playground when I was a kid. For more here’s a post in the NJUrbanForest blog, and here are some pictures… Continue reading
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After the monsoon
We had a week of record rain here in Eastern Massachusetts. Lots of roads were closed as ponds and brooks overflowed their banks, and drainage systems backed up. At various places on Mass Ave north of Cambridge water was gushing up out of blown-off manhole covers. Traffic was backed up all over the place. Yesterday,… Continue reading
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New England on Spin Cycle
That’s what the radar shows right now. Outside the winds range from strong to scary. The rain is steady and horizontal. The storm rotates counterclockwise. If it had an eye, it would be on Boston. New York, as you see, is getting snow. This illustrates this winter’s weird weather pattern. Mid-Atlantic states get buried in… Continue reading
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Los Angeles vs. Nature
John McPhee is the best nonfiction writer alive. My opinion, of course. But I happen to be right. Nobody describes anything better. No writer does a better job of digging into subjects most would find dull (rocks, pine barrens, river levees, minor species of fish) and making them not only interesting but relevant. Sometimes extremely… Continue reading
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Fun with Infrastructure
Last month The Kid and I went to the top of the Empire State Building on the kind of day pilots describe as “severe clear.” I put some of the shots up here, and just added a bunch more here, to share with fellow broadcast engineering and infrastructure obsessives, some of whom might like to… Continue reading
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Don’t forget
Reuters: Cellphones may protect brain from Alzheimer’s. Specifically, After long-term exposure to electromagnetic waves such as those used in cell phones, mice genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s performed as well on memory and thinking skill tests as healthy mice, the researchers wrote in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. Your species may vary. Continue reading
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Matterhorn by Moonlight
There are mountains, and there is the Matterhorn. It’s all a matter of sculpture and presentation. Great art, great framing. The Matterhorn is ice sculpture. It was carved by ice out of rock pushed to the sky by a collision between Italy and Europe that’s still going on. The ice was as high as the… Continue reading
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Progress
Back when I started coming over to Europe for work (mostly to France), in the mid-90s, I listened almost every night to U.S. armed forces radio (then called the Armed Forces Radio Service, or AFRS) on 873KHz on the AM (or, in Europe, MW) dial. I’m listening again now, almost surprised to find it still… Continue reading
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And the longest night of the year
We passed the Winter solstice at 17:47 today, universal time, or 12:47pm Eastern time here in the U.S. It’s 4:02pm right now in Boston, as the Sun enters the horizon at the lowest angle of the year. From now until the summer solstice, the days will only get longer. That’s the optimistic angle on the… Continue reading
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Do we want “smart” utilities?
‘Smart’ Electric Utility Meters, Intended to Create Savings, Instead Prompt Revolt is a New York Times story that perhaps suggests a deeper truth: People don’t want their utilities to get smart on them. Except, occasionally, on request. Like, when a bill one month is strangely high. These paragraphs encapsulate several problems at once: At the… Continue reading
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Liberating the Net from Telephony
Yesterday the FCC released a public notice seeking comment on the “transition from circuit switched network to all-IP network.” (Here’s the .pdf. Here’s the .txt version.) Translation: from the phone system to the Internet. This is huge. Really. Freaking. Huge. Or maybe not. Could be it’s all just posturing or worse. But I don’t think… Continue reading
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The Infrastructure Dynamic
I just posted Rupert Murdoch vs. The Web, over at Linux Journal. In it I suggest that the Murdoch story (played mostly as Bing vs Google) is a red herring, and that the real challenge is to free the Web and ourselves from dependencies from giant companies I liken to volcanoes: We’re Pompeians, Krakatoans, Montserratans,… Continue reading
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Have a nice daze
The dark and gathering sameness of the world. An excerpt: The consequence of this is a “plague of sameness” and the loss of a distinct species every ten minutes. Some types of fruits and vegetables have lost 90% of their variants. An entire language disappears every two weeks. “We are not gaining knowledge with… Continue reading
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It’s too early
The older I get, the earlier it seems. So many gone things once looked like final stages: AM radio, nuclear bombs, FM, stereo, FM stereo, TV, color TV, quadrophonic sound, answer machines, PCs, online services, bulletin boards, home PBXes, newsgroups, instant messaging, cell phones, HD, browsing, pirate radio, free wi-fi, friending, tweeting. Yeah, some of… Continue reading
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Getting quakes straight
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has an excellent Earthquake Center for all the earthquakes in the world, which is very handy at a time when many are happening at once, followed in some cases by tsunamis that cross seas to strike coastlines minutes to hours later. For example, this list of earthquakes of magnitude… Continue reading
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It was a little tougher 214,000,000 years ago
Above is the best (or the widest) shot I could get of Lake Manicouagan, which is the largest visible impact crater on Earth. Only three (or maybe four) are larger and none are visible. The Manicouagan impact event happened about 214 million years ago, give or take. That was 14 million years before the end… Continue reading
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Saving Stony Ridge Observatory
Above is the latest (as of this morning) MODIS satellite map (on Google Earth) of Station Fire spottings in the Angeles National Forest north of the Los Angeles basin. Near the center I’ve marked the Stony Ridge Observatory. While less familiar than the famous Mt. Wilson Observatory (and little known outside its own circles), Stony… Continue reading
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Naming disasters
Why do mainstream broadcasters keep calling that big fire north of Los Angeles “the so-called Station Fire?” You never hear “so-called Hurricane Bill” or “so-called Hurricane Erika”. Why is that? The main reason is that hurricanes have a much better naming convention. The surnames of hurricanes are first names of humans. The first names of… Continue reading
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Living on Borrowed Land
Why do mature redwood trees have trunks that rise two hundred feet before branches commence, live for centuries and have bark that’s a foot thick? Because they are adapted to fire. Why does the silver-green chaparral that covers California’s hills and mountains burn so easily? Because it’s supposed to. Why, other than its color, is… Continue reading
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That should break the heat
Mostly I work like a hermit: in an attic with two window air conditioners fighting the heat and providing an endless source of dull noise that furthers my sense of productive isolation. For the last few days of record-high temperatures, the AC units have been losing the fight. Today they’ve been winning, so I haven’t… Continue reading