• Category Archives Commentary on the news

  • A Brane Teaser?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                         Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    You may go now, the storm has ended.  Well, maybe.  The MIA, noted for never closing, closed yesterday and today.  The metrodome collapsed.  See.  We told you.  Zyggi Wilf and family.  I threw thigh high snow off our front sidewalk and trimmed down a waist high drift on our deck so the dogs could get out and come back.  Roughly a foot fell, always hard to measure.

    A local meterologist developed the gold standard for measuring snow depth.  He puts a hard rubber mat on the ground, lets the snow fall on it, then pushes a yardstick through the snow.  Check where the top of the snow meets the yard stick.  Voila!  No kidding.

    Snowapocalypse.  Snowmaggedon.  Snowmygod.  Local weather weenies tried to raise this to mega-event standards, but it just doesn’t get there.  Yes, we’re a major metro area and a foot to a foot and a half (south) makes the metro pretty miserable for travelers, but our snow totals are no record breakers.

    We do have a difference from a lot of other snowy locations.  When our snow comes in winters like this one, it cools the air above it and remains on the ground until spring.  That means accumulating snow fall becomes a challenge with parking lot snow mountains rising up like retail Himalayas and city streets sometimes going from two-sided parking to one-sided.  It begins to get interesting then.

    Is there a collapse vortex near this location?  Perhaps a quantum field breaking through into what we conceive of as the one and only true reality?  I mean, it’s a brane teaser I know, but it could be.  Think of the many worlds hypothesis favored by string theorists.  Why do I ask?  Well. This next picture, taken less than half a mile from the site of the dome collapse tells the story.


    Commentary on the news Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • Day by Day

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Thursday is art day; Friday is Latin day.  Today Greg and I will go over my (rough) translation of verses 36-48 of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Though slow going, I get a thrill each time I crack a phrase, write it down and it makes sense.  Even if Greg later points out I’m wrong.   I have a lot of opportunity for improvement and that makes the learning worthwhile.  Saturday is errand day and around the house work day.  Sunday, again, is Latin.  Monday is business meeting and Woolly day.  This leaves me Tuesday and Wednesday as buffer days.  So far, this schedule seems to work pretty well for me, though my lackluster performance yesterday made me wonder a bit.

    (this graphic illustrates the verses I’ve translated for today.)

    On the climate change front.  The world has begun to lurch forward on two aspects of climate change:  reduction of carbon emissions and adaptation.  In the more radical wing of the environmental movement adaptation or mitigation has been capitulation, something to avoid since it muddies the gravity of the problem we face.  A tipping point may be at hand.  Folks have begun to put forth adaptation in the context of realizing the global warming train has not only left the station, but is well on its way.  A certain, not insubstantial amount of warming is now inevitable, perhaps as much 2 degrees, possibly more.   Given that, mitigating projects that can help soften the damage, are not only a good idea, but necessary.  If proposed in the context of inevitable warming, mitigation projects can also underscore the need to take dramatic steps now to prevent more warming.  I’m hopeful we’ll see progress out of Cancun.

    My comments above do fly in the face of polling numbers that suggest climate change has receded in the public’s mind, especially as the economic crisis has shoved personal financial peril forward.  Understandable, but not good.  My hunch about a tipping point comes more from the gradual roll out of an increasing consensus about the science.  We’ll see.


    Art and Culture Commentary on the news Faith and Spirituality Great Work Humanities Myth and Story Politics 📎and tagged

  • Sticking It To The Man

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    File under sticking it to the man:  Wikileaks.  File under government mad, pouts, hunts down bad man and charges him with anything they can find.  Come on, guys. I’m no Rand Paulite and even I can see big government blaming somebody, anybody else for the mud in their own eye.  Let Assange go and quit acting like spoiled children.  Transparency is a good thing.   Even if it forces short term changes.  Face up to it and move on.

    File in the already fat folder:  Science fiction comes true.  A private corporation put a capsule into space and brought it back to earth safely.  Well, to ocean.  Scenes from 2001 floated before me with weightless passengers on a Pan-Am flight drinking Coca-Cola served by in-flight attendants dressed like Twiggy.

    Finished up verse 46 of the Metamorphosis.  If I did my arithmetic right, I am now one third of one thousandth of the way toward my goal.  Of course, this probably inflates the quality of my early attempts which a more adept me will have to redo.  Even so.


    Commentary on the news GeekWorld Humanities Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

    Back up at 8 am for an 8:30 conference call with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership.  This concerned information we may use when defending against roll backs to current environmental policy.  The sound quality was poor, but the information, presented in power point slides via a webinar website, had a lot of good data.  I can’t discuss it, but it was far from discouraging.

    Here’s good news just posted at the Trib:  Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton.   A tip of the hat to the state Republicans.  They read the state right; we’re weary of recount wrangles.  Perhaps we can begin a more bi-partisan approach to Minnesota’s future.  I’d like to see it.  Bi-partisanship is good for environmental issues.

    We will probably spend more time on administrative and rule-making work for the next two years than we have in the past. We being the Sierra Club and our allies.

    In between I looked up Latin words in preparation for translating lines 40-45 of Book I, the Metamorphosis.  It’s something about water and the sky and sun, but I have yet to put it together.


    Commentary on the news Great Work Humanities Politics 📎and tagged

  • The Seventh Generation

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Samhain                                  Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Any of us who work the legislature and the administration for any purpose have to take the 6.2 billion dollar deficit seriously.  It will disrupt state work, occupy legislative time and distract attention from other matters, especially longer term matters like environmental and conservation issues.  It could also, in light of its direct cause, the economic crisis and slow return of jobs to our state economy, tilt the scales in favor of jobs based proposals like the Polymet hard-rock, sulfide mine proposed for the edge of the Iron Range.

    In times when the books balance and the state’s economy hums along at full employment decisions with long term consequences are still hard to make.  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to simply duck the issues of logging off our state and national forests, their resiliency in light of climate change and the damage to them wrought by invasive species and powered vehicles.  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to put off financial investments in mass transit.  Why spend money when we already have roads and buses?  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to put off more ambitious clean energy goals, continuing to pump electricity out of toxic emitters like coal plants, balking at ground floor investments needed in wind and solar energy.

    It would be easy, but it would not be wise.  We have learned already, the hard way, that mountain tops once removed, will no longer rise toward the sky.  We have learned, the hard way, that sulfide mining produces heavy metal and sulfuric acid waste that lasts not years, not decades, but centuries, outlasting the companies that produced it, the jobs created and the governments that allowed it.  We have learned, the hard way, that generating energy with dirty fuels like coal, gasoline and nuclear fission has consequences, world changing, life shattering, additive changes.

    This means that especially now we must be vigilant, careful, thinking about the seventh generation when we make our decisions.  Will the seventh generation of Iron Rangers be better off with hard-rock sulfide mines spread along the Range?  Will my seventh generation, my grandchildren of the distant future, find a boreal forest in Minnesota? Will there still be unpaved portions of the metro area?  Areas saved by the development of rail, bicycle and pedestrian pathways?

    Hard times, hard as they are, come and go.  The clean waters we love, the dense forests through which we hike, the fresh air we breathe can all be imperiled by decisions made with long term benefits lost, traded for short term gain.


    Aging Commentary on the news Faith and Spirituality Great Work Politics 📎and tagged

  • Leave It Alone

    Posted on by Charles 1 Comment

    Samhain                                      Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    Coming home tonight from the city I encountered a traffic slow down.  It allowed me to get close to an older model GM car with a bumper sticker in letters too small for me to read from a distance.  The bumper sticker read:  Leave the Constitution and the Bible Alone.

    The world of such a person, that is a person who would both buy and display such a message, must have a lot of fear leaking into it.  Not surprising.  Job losses.  Uncertain economics at the national level.  A black President.  The furor stoked by the Tea Party folks.

    Think of it though.  A whole world bounded by two written documents, documents written by men, interpreted by men and now some women, too, but documents of humans nonetheless.  A world with absolute faith in those two written documents, a faith so necessary, so critical that if others tamper with them…  Well.  They’d better not.  Leave’em Alone.  This feels like such a lonely and fettered existence, cramped, perhaps like a one room apartment or a small economy car.

    Any conversation with such a person must not start with the constitution and the bible, it must start with the aspects of their life they believe protected by them.  Their sense of identity.  Security.  Safety.  Morality.  Only as people feel safe can they begin to question, until then, too much is at stake.

    So, for God’s sake, leave them alone.


    Commentary on Religion Commentary on the news Myth and Story Politics US History 📎and tagged

  • Teaching Pigs to Sing

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                           Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    “Trying to get people to reason in a way that is not natural for them is like trying to teach a pig to sing. You don’t accomplish anything and you annoy the pig.” – E. Jeffrey Conklin and William Weil

    This seemed like a useful thought as we approach the opening of the 2011 legislative session.  We need to change our message so that those in charge of the legislator can hear it and realize that safeguarding our environmental heritage is a non-partisan responsibility to our kids, our grandkids and their grandkids.

    More interviews today, more with talented people who want to work with the Sierra Club.

    Little new snow today so I don’t anticipate the crush this morning that I experienced yesterday.  And more Big History on the drive.


    Commentary on the news Great Work Politics US History