A new climate model with an ability to account for the effect of updrafts indicates that while there would be fewer storms, those that do successfully form would be more intense making them more likely to cause damage. It’s not definitive yet, but it does add to a building body of evidence that global warming isn’t simply going to be about the temperature being a bit more uncomfortable.
Plants don’t fossilize well. As you can imagine, flowers even less so. So how can the existence of a flower from millions of years ago be proven? Biologists at Harvard have found a fossilized bee with pollen on it from orchids, showing that orchids apparently arose long before previously thought, as long as 76 to 84 million years ago.
That’s what David Ignatius writes about in the Washington Post. What it comes down to is a variation on my criticism of what motivates much of the current American business world. It’s not enough to make a profit. There’s never enough profit, apparently. The search is always on for a greater margin or rate of return no matter how risky or how questionable it might be for the long term good of the company or our society. It doesn’t matter what happens to those thousands of people you fire from their jobs so that Wall Street will approve of you enough to up the stock value and the incomes of those executives who receive a significant part of their income from stock options. There is no other value that matters. Now keep in mind that many would have this environment and set of values determine everything about our health care system.
The title of this blog obviously (or not) comes from the James Carville exhortation to the Clinton campaign in 1992. As surely as that message was important for that political campaign I think that remembering that it’s not the 1950s or any other decade/century in the past any longer at a deep level of understanding is important to discourse on every subject in the public sphere. People in their 50s or above who fail to understand why the truths they grew up with just don’t necessarily apply any longer irritate me no end.
As for me, I’m just a semi-elderly (for what I do) semi-geek who’s worked with PCs for 25 years while being an active science fiction fan as well. What do I mean by work with? Put them together. Keep them going. Program them. Network them. Explain them to other people. Troubleshoot them. Basically anything that has to do with a PC.
That having been said computer science was my third college major with the first two being chemistry and education with a speech and drama emphasis and english minor. What can I say? I also took classes that advisors frowned upon for not relating directly to my major(s). But they were interesting. A counselor once looked at my transcript and commented that most people are either good at the arts and social sciences or the hard sciences but my record looked pretty evenly balanced. Yep. When I retire I think I want to be a college student.
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