It is not that the great flood of 1861-2 has been forgotten in California. It is in the history books and is a staple lesson in media feature stories on the state's water problems, floods, and such all. I've mentioned this epic onslaught in stories once in awhile, and always think its most amazing...
Charlie Petit's Tracker
It is not that the great flood of 1861-2 has been forgotten in California. It is in the history books and is a staple lesson in media feature stories on the state's water problems, floods, and such all. I've mentioned this epic onslaught in stories once in awhile, and always think its most amazing aspect is not that it flooded Sacramento and a good deal of the central valley (there weren't many towns out there then), but that SF Bay was so engorged by river runoff that it filled beyond the normal high tide level. That meant the Golden Gate flowed outward day and night for a stretch, the bay became a muddy but near-fresh water lake. Given the power of the tide's flood at the gate, it is astounding that enough rain could fall to stop it.
This morning I learned the the USGS has a huge new report out on ARkStorms - newly recognized monster versions of a West Coast weather phenomenon recently in the news, the Atmospheric River. That was in...
So a precise slice of the area around Shippingport, PA, got a few inches of snow the other day. Accuweather's Jillian MacMath...
So a precise slice of the area around Shippingport, PA, got a few inches of snow the other day. Accuweather's Jillian MacMath explains rather neatly why. Upwind is a nuclear power complex, Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station, and not far from that the coal-burning Mansfield Power Plant. Altogether, five cooling towers were belching plenty of steam into the sky. The result, due to collision of hot moist air with supercold drier air at altitude, resembles a Lake Effect snow only more concentrated in area. A Doppler radar image by the Nat'l Weather Service revealed a distinct, narrow plume of snow stretching downwind. An inversion effect that kept the plume entrained, it says here, enhanced the effect.
This got lots of local...
Yesterday morning, before discovering that our MIT website was downed by a hacker attack to honor some other now dead-by-suicide hacker I could not recall hearing of, an AP story caught my eye. It sent me on a wander through my vast trove of rss feeds that supposedly carry science, enviro, energy, and...
Yesterday morning, before discovering that our MIT website was downed by a hacker attack to honor some other now dead-by-suicide hacker I could not recall hearing of, an AP story caught my eye. It sent me on a wander through my vast trove of rss feeds that supposedly carry science, enviro, energy, and medical stories to find others that don't seem to have given the science its due. With the site back in halting action, cautiously we venture forward....
(*AMENDMENT (Jan 24): See comments below for clear evidence I should have learned a little more about internet and rss history, and about the tragedy and issues behind the attack on MIT, before so casually referring to that cyber-incident./ CP )
The first story is a terrific yarn in itself:
- AP - Rod McGuirk: Explorer Ernest...
Two billows of space travel news with one common thread - new partnership projects that should help cash-strapped NASA to keep generating headlines - kept space writers busy over the last two days or so. In one case an old partner, the European Space Agency, has agreed to help put together a mission around the moon...
Two billows of space travel news with one common thread - new partnership projects that should help cash-strapped NASA to keep generating headlines - kept space writers busy over the last two days or so. In one case an old partner, the European Space Agency, has agreed to help put together a mission around the moon and eventually perhaps beyond that with the Orion capsule and launcher that NASA has been nursing for several years. Second, a new collaboration with Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace may mean that an inflatable module originally designed as a free-orbiting rent-a-room may be hooked to the Int'l Space Station for extra lab quarters. Hotel man Robert Bigelow bought the basic idea off NASA's discard pile years ago. Maybe it'll go full circle.
Neither has the grandeur of an expedition to an asteroid or a laboratory on the Moon's far side, and has scant scientific promise, but each does give space junkies a diverting story to read. Neither...
(Orginally posted Jan 15)
Just as your correspondent here was trying to figure out whether it's worth posting on the brace of news stories about the US government's latest biannual quadrennial National Climate Assessment released in draft form late last week, along comes...
(Orginally posted Jan 15)
Just as your correspondent here was trying to figure out whether it's worth posting on the brace of news stories about the US government's latest biannual quadrennial National Climate Assessment released in draft form late last week, along comes up on the screen a top ten list to my rescue. It has just enough hook to hang the report's coverage. I failed to spot this two or three weeks ago while assembling a New Year's list of lists of notable science news stories for the year. Now it has better use:
- Media Matters - Shauna Theel: 10 Dumbest Things Fox Said About Climate Change In 2012 ;
This list is mostly for laughs. To dig deeply into the manner in which Fox covers climate would take investigation and a strong...
Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
- The...
Sometimes a news story's structure has just the right cadence and sequence of thought to hit the reader with its most cogent point like a hammer blow- not on the first swing (ie in the lede) but just a bit below. And it's not the smack that readers may expect.
- The Guardian - Fiona Harvey: Peak oil theories 'increasingly groundless', says BP chief/ The US will be self-sufficient in energy by 2030, with only 1% coming from imports, the company's analysts predict.
One learns here that advanced methods of extraction, including of "unconventional and high-carbon oil" - such as from the Alberta oil sands that are glimpsed in that AP photo that the Guardian used - means that fears are probably groundless that worldwide economic turmoil is looming when oil and...
Never one to miss a chance to suggest everything is all about me ... last week a writer and editor playing partner of mine and I hit a court near campus and came across old pal Geoff Marcy, whose Cal-professor hobby is astronomy and planet-finding, pursuing his heart's true calling. A tall guy named Robert,...
Never one to miss a chance to suggest everything is all about me ... last week a writer and editor playing partner of mine and I hit a court near campus and came across old pal Geoff Marcy, whose Cal-professor hobby is astronomy and planet-finding, pursuing his heart's true calling. A tall guy named Robert, from the law school, was running him from baseline to alley and back while blasting serves like bolides screaming in from the Oort cloud. Whenever I play Geoff he kills me. This was good theatre. Hey Geoff, I said, I hear you and the Kepler gang got baskets of other Earths almost ready to deliver. You just waiting on that third orbit to confirm full Goldilocks zone? Not enough sigmas yet? Or are they all huddled around little red dwarfs?
My wise guy exo-jargon exhausted I shut up. He said we already have them. Just wait.
Boy howdy. That didn't take long. A passel of papers this week at the American Astronomical Ass'n meeting in...
Let me be among the last to wonder how a national network okayed a program that manages to interview oceanographer Robert Ballard, no slacker when it comes to self-promotion and grandiosity, and jobs him. It takes his verbiage out of context and ratchets the bloviating right into cloud cuckoo land. And this by one...
Let me be among the last to wonder how a national network okayed a program that manages to interview oceanographer Robert Ballard, no slacker when it comes to self-promotion and grandiosity, and jobs him. It takes his verbiage out of context and ratchets the bloviating right into cloud cuckoo land. And this by one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents in broadcasting, Christianne Amanpour.
The program ran in December as Christmas loomed with the modest title Mysteries of the Bible: Proof of Noah's Ark? ;
My goodness. This was a terrible bait and switch. Many watchers surely never got past the bait to recognize the switch. Selective editing and overdrawn overlines lead one to think that the biblical flood, you know a flood that is like the one in Genesis that covered all the world and...
Reporters got a slight reprieve this week from weariness while writing yet another global warming story on records set and on ecosystems and economies stricken by climate-related natural disaster. The reason is that both of the latest examples are such extreme events that even the most jaded reporter on the...
Reporters got a slight reprieve this week from weariness while writing yet another global warming story on records set and on ecosystems and economies stricken by climate-related natural disaster. The reason is that both of the latest examples are such extreme events that even the most jaded reporter on the climate beat has to be hitting the keyboard with vigor - imaginations going overtime trying to find fresh ways to express the superlative. The first instance of news is that the temperature average in 2012 for the 48 contiguous US states not only set a record as has been expected it demolished the old one by a margin that few would have imagined likely - a full effing (ie Fahrenheit) degree. Even though global temps last year were about on par for the new-normal but scorching last ten years, the US experience is a standout and not in a good way. The second is that in Australia temperatures have gone so high, and keep in mind it is still early in the Southern summer, that...
One suspects that within the lifetimes of most everybody under age 45 or so, a human being will orbit and perhaps set foot on Mars. My money is on private voyages for the restless, brave, and hyper-wealthy who might remain on our roasting planet 20 years or so from now and want to visit somewhere...
One suspects that within the lifetimes of most everybody under age 45 or so, a human being will orbit and perhaps set foot on Mars. My money is on private voyages for the restless, brave, and hyper-wealthy who might remain on our roasting planet 20 years or so from now and want to visit somewhere that's really cold. But, as measured by the behavior of news people paid to guess the public's interest in things, the very idea of such a trip strikes a deep and broadly shared chord.
The latest example is the broad covereage given to reports from a recent simulated Mars mission. The six 'crew' members, all men, spent 17 months confined in an interlocked barracks in Moscow, built in tubular fashion to evoke the shape that best holds pressurized air. Their two-way communications were subject to long delays, due to the transmission time lapse from real Earth to real Mars. They had to throw their trash out via space-lock type ports. They...
This is a post of opportunity, mainly just to share some unusual science writing in public and to somewhat relucantly reveal a little bit of this tracker's new semi-retirement. But it has to do with research, specifically on marine mammals, and it arises in a local new agency, so here is science writing...
This is a post of opportunity, mainly just to share some unusual science writing in public and to somewhat relucantly reveal a little bit of this tracker's new semi-retirement. But it has to do with research, specifically on marine mammals, and it arises in a local new agency, so here is science writing of a sort.
Recently we came upon and bought an old house, a vacation and family retreat sort of thing, on the outskirts of the town of Mendocino up north of here in the county of the same name. Googling around for info up there has somehow snared me into some news sites that push Mendo news my way. For unclear reasons I came upon a mostly internet, but also paper, hyper-local up there called the The Ava.com, with AVA for Anderson Valley Advertiser. It is headquartered in a valley on Route 128 in Mendocino County and that runs from Hwy 101 east of the coast range over to the coast - lots of bucolic wonder with the last miles through some glorious second...
Here's a beguiling headline and story that just ran in the UK:
- The Telegraph (Jan 6) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: ...
Here's a beguiling headline and story that just ran in the UK:
- The Telegraph (Jan 6) Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: China blazes trail for 'clean' nuclear power from thorium / The Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power. Good luck to them. They may do us all a favour;
A constant since the dawn of the nuclear age has been speculation - backed by experiments - that there are other ways to harness the atom for electricity than with the standard uranium fission reactors that bring with them such headaches as waste disposal, security risks including possible conversion of their related hardware to weapons production, and the possibility of meltdowns such as...
First reported by Russian amateur astronomers in September and by a lot of the specialty press at the time, and now getting a second news bounce including at one major wire service, comet ISON (for an astronomy consortium called the International Scientific Optical Network) is boring into the inner solar system as...
First reported by Russian amateur astronomers in September and by a lot of the specialty press at the time, and now getting a second news bounce including at one major wire service, comet ISON (for an astronomy consortium called the International Scientific Optical Network) is boring into the inner solar system as we sit. It appears to hail from the Oort Cloud way out there Barely pertinent aside: the OC is part of the Sun's family, is way beyond where Voyager I is now, so please again scotch the idea that said long-traveling probe is anywhere near exiting the solar system. As for ISON, its orbit will pivot around the sun just 1.2 million km or 800,000 miles from the solar surface and that's close. It's hot in there. If the experience does not cause the comet to fritter and tatter then on its way back out its bright coma and tail could be stupendous, brighter overall than...
[Originally posted Dec. 23, but now greatly expanded and updated.]
Lists! We got'em! Send us more (via suggest stories).
It's the time of year of slow news except for fiscal cliffs in the present case...
[Originally posted Dec. 23, but now greatly expanded and updated.]
Lists! We got'em! Send us more (via suggest stories).
It's the time of year of slow news except for fiscal cliffs in the present case, a season when media like putting together compendia of the year's high and low points mainly because the news hole is aching for fodder and some readers like these things.
The big daddy of these score sheets isn't even put together mainly by ordinary journalists but...
The AP's John Fahey, in a longish interview with Chevron's CEO John Watson, tried a bunch of times to learn if the oil man harbors any compunctions about selling...
The AP's John Fahey, in a longish interview with Chevron's CEO John Watson, tried a bunch of times to learn if the oil man harbors any compunctions about selling oodles of carbon footprint to anybody willing to pay for it. No dice.
Mostly the two talked about supply and demand and the business prospects for oil extraction. But Fahey, according to this Q and A, did repeatedly probe the man in the suit about fossil fuels, climate change, and corporate responsibility - if not in exactly those words. Here are questions he asked the man one after the other : "Do Fossil fuel producers bear the responsibility for curbing greenhouse gas emissions?" , "How should society go about reducing greenhouse gas emissions?", "The US is a wealthy country, how should we reduce emissions?", "When it...
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