If food looks expensive in the grocery store, maybe this is part of the reason: the price of wheat is up 82% in the last five years. Up 32% just in the last 12 months.
Corn is up 46% in the last 12 months. I've read that here in Oregon the wheat crop this year has been ruined by the late June heat wave. I don't know about elsewhere. In May the Wall Street Journalwrote:
"Corn has been one of the sharpest risers in the broad rally in raw materials that is prompting companies to boost prices for goods and fueling concern among investors that inflation could hobble the post-pandemic economic recovery."
But it's paywalled. This May 31st article in a midwestern publication wrote (but also paywalled)
"The good news for farmers: Corn prices are on the rise, up nearly 70 cents in the past three weeks to their highest level in nearly three years. The bad news: That spike is largely because of heavy rain and flooding this spring that have hampered planting across the corn belt and stoked fears about a drop in production."
So it's only good news if you weren't flooded out.... Climate change's extreme weather? Of course, heavy spring rains and flooding have happened before -- it's the risk of farming. But these days you have to wonder.
When I was younger a woman I was heavily involved with and I decided to have an abortion. We were educated and well off and used birth control. But a doctor failed to tell her a medication she temporarily needed counteracted the pill, and she got pregnant.
It wasn't easy, but I don't regret what we did. I am outraged at what Texas has done and what other state legislatures will no doubt do, and the lies Supreme Court justices have told in order to pass nomination hearings, and the senators (like Susan Collins) who believed them in spite of evidence that they should not have. Those who favor a woman's right to choose are in the majority in this country and we have to take back this issue and allow women full autonomy over their bodies and their lives -- you know, like the anti-vaxxers insist on. I want young women and future young women to have the same options my girlfriend and I had -- the option to struggle with an ambiguous issue and, with or without a partner, decide for themselves.
It's not just the ban -- it's the draconian, mediaeval way in which Texas has instituted the ban, making everyone a bounty hunter against pregnant women in Texas seeking an abortion. You can be sued and convicted merely for aiding and abetting someone seeking an abortion. This threadroll by a lawyer and legal writer lays it out and is astonishing:
And it's not just abortion in Texas, though effectively banning it is bad enough. It's guns, restrictions on voting, the lack of affordable health care, banning the discussion of certain ideas (like "critical race theory," at least as the legislature defines it), a safety net, and more. Dana Milbank put it pretty well in the Washington Post yesterday:
Texas shows us what post-democracy America would look like. Thanks to a series of actions by the Texas legislature and governor, we now see exactly what the Trumpified Republican Party wants: to take us to an America where women cannot get abortions, even in cases of rape and incest; an America where almost everybody can openly carry a gun in public, without license, without permit, without safety training and without fingerprinting; and an America where law-abiding Black and Latino citizens are disproportionately denied the right to vote.
This is where Texas and other red states are going, or have already gone. It is where the rest of America will go, unless those targeted by these new laws — women, people of color and all small “d” democrats — rise up.
It still isn't clear that Trump, abetted by Mitch McConnell's theft of Supreme Court seats, won't yet destroy democracy in America, which effectively destroys America. The fascists smell blood. They are moral cowards who want more. They're determined to get it.
"There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct," Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State and author of "The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet" (PublicAffairs, 2021), told Live Science in an email.
Hockey season is less than four weeks away... The National Hockey League, that is. The regular season starts on October 12th with my team, the Penguins, at the Stanley Cup winning (again) Tampa Bay Lightning.
2022 also has hockey in the Winter Olympics, and it looks like Canada has made their choice for captain, as if there was ever going to be any choice: Sidney Crosby. (Of course, he's also captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins.) Here's Crosby and his fellow hometowner (close enough) Nate MacKinnon wearing the Canadian sweaters, with Crosby sporting the captain's "C" on his left shoulder:
If you're a hockey fan (or, needless to say, Canadian), Sidney Crosby will forever be a national hero due to scoring one of the most famous goals in hockey history/Canadian history (is there any difference?) at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in Vancouver, defeating the United States to win the gold medal in overtime. Here's a nice look back from the CBC:
Here's the live version of the play. First Crosby takes the puck through most of the U.S. team. Then, he defeats another U.S player to pass the puck. Then -- I didn't learn this until recently -- is that at 0:08 in the video you can hear Crosby yell "Iggy." He's shouting at Jarome Iginla, who he (Crosby) had just tossed the puck to back in the corner, to feed him the puck back on his (Crosby's) way to the goal. Amazing to able to hear that over the sound of the crowd.
Anyway, before I found the tweet on top with Crosby wearing Canada's "C," I was just going to post the video below, about Crosby's edgework on his skates. Crosby does this thing that I don't know if anyone else does, and you can see in the video's screencap and several times in the video -- at times he puts his skates heel-to-heel, so his feet are splayed out at 180 degrees to one another, and he then circles around, usually from behind the goal. Not only does he seem to gather a lot of speed from this maneuver, he keeps his face in front of him the entire time, looking right at the puck, instead of having to look to the side as everyone else has to when they're skating sideways. It's really beautiful to watch when he does it and it seems very effective.
I really regret that I didn't start watching hockey seriously until 2018, after the Penguins won their back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2015-16 and 2016-17, and most of all that I missed watching Sidney Crosby in his glory days from 2005 to about 2017, when he was spectacular. He's still pretty good, especially as a 200-foot player and particularly as a leader, and many people put him as one of the best five players to ever play the game (along with Gretzy, Lemieux, Orr, and Howe). But the Penguins aren't serious contenders anymore -- they've lost in the first round of the playoffs for three years in a row now -- and their superstars -- Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang -- are all in their mid-30s -- and they're slowing down and the team don't have the size needed in today's NHL, it seems. It's unlikely Crosby can lead them to another Stanley Cup. But hey, he has three, which is a lot more than most. And he has the Golden Goal, and about every trophy that it's possible to win. And he's such a nice guy.
Thanks for allowing an indulgent post. I guess this blog has become one of whatever I find interesting.
A television series based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy is coming to Apple TV+ on September 24, and the trailer (below) looks pretty good. It has two actors I like a lot, Lee Pace (of Halt and Catch Fire) and Jared Harris (of Chernobyl, Mad Men, and a lot else I don't know about I'm sure). Fortunately, I received a free year of Apple TV+ when I bought a new iPhone 12 this past spring, though I might have subscribed just to watch this. (It's only $4.99/month.)
Another scifi show this channel has coming is Invasion -- "Earth is visited by an alien species that threatens humanity's existence." Trailer below, from the producer of The Martian, coming October 22. Looks rather cliched, and not as good. How could it be?
I started reading Asimov's Foundation trilogy a long time ago, and only made it about a third of the way though. I wasn't as into scifi then as I am now, so I'm going to go back and give it another go. What I mainly remember is that the nuclear powered spaceships seemed rather out-of-date, scifi-speaking, compared to Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. (But maybe more realistic!) I once saw Asimov speak at a scifi convention when I was a graduate student at Stony Brook. But then I wasn't into scifi at all and I don't remember a thing he said. But I had read several of his nonfiction books when I was in high school and college, books with chapters where he would just riff about various planets and on comets and asteroids and the solar system and whatever came to his mind--and a lot always came to his mind!--which I always found interesting. So I wanted to see him in person.
That was the title of Paul Krugman's NYT column today: The Quiet Rage of the Responsible. Some put it in other ways, as below. I'm starting to feel angry, too, feeling that it's time to hunker down again, stay at home, when I barely started going out. With colder weather coming and now this much more contagious variant I wonder if this fall and winter is going to get worse than last year. I felt lucky to be spared last year and now it's seems we have to run the gauntlet again, largely because of the irresponsible and stupid behavior of a minority (read: MAGA) of America.
One thing I'm very thankful for is that I live in a part of the country where people are smart enough to take this pandemic seriously. The governor here in Oregon reinstituted a mask mandate as of last Friday, and when I was in the grocery store on Monday everyone had a mask on. I didn't see a single exception. COVID is rising in my county, which does contains a lot of rural area, but at least here in the suburbs, people are taking masks seriously.
I heard the perfect Covid quote today.
“If you don’t trust doctors and science to keep you from getting sick, why the hell are you clogging up hospitals trusting them to cure you?”
I saw a nurses post this morning asking a covid patient why she didn't get a vaccination. Because we didn't know what was in it. The nurse replied, I've used five different drugs on you in the last half hour, you never asked me once what was in it?
Lee Billings of Scientific American has a great, lengthy article on the "Decadal Survey," or Astro2020, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. This report, which comes out every ten years and is a year overdue but is now in final peer review and supposed to be coming out sometime soon, sets priorities for US astronomical projects for the next ten years. It's so important towards determining which megatelescopes get funded that, as someone in the article says, it's sometimes called "the voice of God." As I'm currently writing a long article about astrobiology, I found it very clarifying and insightful.
Anyway, in terms of the Decadal Survey's impact on funding priorities, there's this interesting and revealing quote near the end of the article. "Tremblay" is Grant Tremblay, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution, then there's this wonderful (in its way) quote from a "Beltway insider."
Or rather the New Great Observatories can only happen if astronomers become more savvy at what Gaudi has termed “astropolitics.” “I’m utterly convinced a ‘New Great Observatories’ program with Lynx, Origins, and LUVOIR or HabEx—a ‘LuvEx,’ so to speak—could be done with a single phone call to the right person,” Tremblay says. “Because on Capitol Hill, it’s not about total cost—it’s about annual appropriation. A couple hundred million dollars a year added to NASA’s astrophysics line would suffice.”
Such hopeful speculations are not necessarily just wishful thinking. “We’re talking a 1 or 2 percent increase in real dollars to NASA’s budget to enable another Great Observatories program,” says one Beltway insider. “These are the perturbations concerted advocacy can create. Only about 30 senators are really involved in appropriations, and the annual discretionary budget of the federal government is running at about $2 trillion. So divide $2 trillion by 30 and then factor in the staffers working for each of those senators. You’ll find, perhaps to your horror, that anything much below about half a billion dollars a year is essentially left to staffers and lost in the margins.” Tremblay puts it more bluntly. “NASA does not really work for the Executive Office of the President,” he says. “It works for the 25-year-olds a few years out of college who serve on appropriations committees. A flagship mission—or a whole new series of Great Observatories—could be green-lit over lunch by some low-level staffer while they’re eating a burrito.”
This is just amazing -- it looks like sci fi, but it's real. Having read books like The Search for Planet X as a boy, its a real delight to see something like this later in life:
Pluto’s ice mountains, frozen plains and layers of atmospheric haze backlit by a distant sun, as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft.
NOAA found the anomaly for the global mean surface temperature to be 0.93°C; NASA found 0.92°C, both were records for July in their respective datasets. And since July is the warmest month of the year, that makes July 2021 the hottest month in recorded history -- since 1880. OK, it was warmest only by 0.01°C. But a record's a record. 0.01°C a year is 1°C a century, after all, nothing to disregard in itself. It was hot in many places, and at least warm almost everywhere, except in the US midwest and south and in southern Africa:
Here's more on the acceleration of global warming according to the Copernicus database. Their measurements start only in 1979, but we can see that the globe has warmed about 0.8 °C in just over 40 years. And that the second-order fit (=> acceleration) is better than the linear fit). But their dataset doesn't give us the total warming since the pre-industrial era.
However, if we project these trendlines out, we see that, relative to 1979, we're on a path to have about 1.2°C of warming by 2030 and 2.0°C of warming by 2050. Not good at all.
The only way to get decent figures on this crappy blogging system is if you click on them.
These days the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe is the first monthly with a measure of the global average surface temperature anomaly, usually only a few days into the month.
They give the global anomaly, and one for Europe; their dataset starts in January 1979.
There's only about 10 and a few years available where you can calculate the 30-year trend.
But during that time, that trend is definitely increasing:
In 2009 the 30-year trend was 0.15°C/decade.
Now it's almost 0.25 C/decade.
The trend is increasing. A lot. In just over a decade.
The rate of global warming is increasing. That is, global warming is accelerating.
I honestly don't know much about this.... I guess some of your are getting a notification about new posts to this blog via email via this Feedburner? Now it's going away I guess.
I don't know how to fix that, I'm sorry.
But this blog must have an RSS feed (?), so hopefully you can get an email notification via that. I really don't understand RSS, so I'm sorry, I can't help you. But I hope you keep reading somehow....
Weinberg was a giant in the field of theoretical physics, making fundamental contributions in unifying the weak and electromagnetic interactions. He also wrote a few textbooks, one, on general relativity and cosmology, which I once learned a lot from, and still look in occasionally to verify something. (It's rather dated now.) During graduate school I went into Manhattan with a couple of friends to see him speak, probably it was at Columbia University, but I don't remember what he talked about now. We just wanted to see Weinberg.
Notably, Weinberg left Harvard in 1982 to go to the University of Texas at Austin. He must have gotten a very good deal, because it wasn't the kind of move you typically saw then, leaving such a prestigious university to go out west to a state school.
Weinberg is well known for a quote from his very popular book The First Three Minutes about the Big Bang:
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
Here's the trailer for the remake of Dune. Looks really good. I wasn't into sci-fi when the book came out, although I bought it and had it on my bookshelf for years -- it's either permanently in some box, now too smelly to read, or I donated it before some move or another. And I just could never get into the original movie by David Lynch, though I tried more than once. But this looks like it has potential. In theatres and on HBO Max in the US October 22nd.
One million hectares = 2.47 million acres = 3,861 sq miles = (62 miles)2.
By contrast Oregon has so far lost about 400,000 acres to fires this year. And yet it's already the 4th-worst year on record.
Remember how climate change was going to be beneficial in to Northern regions? That talking point was present in the Scottish curriculum up until very recently. It's not true. It was never true. Climate change is devastating in the North. https://t.co/T4HarOU0AD
— Prof Julia 🌍🌹🌱 ClimateAction FightFascism 🇵🇸 (@JKSteinberger) July 21, 2021
