Happy Thanks Giving!
"Dear Congressman: We're melting. Love, the Glaciers." - Al Gore
Okay, I just had to speak up on this mind-numbingly ignorant rumor about Hadley CRU. Background: Fox News is claiming that an email from a university shows once and for all that Global Warming Theory is a scam. Apparently, the University of East Anglia's computer was hacked and the following phrase (ooh, 3 words, that must disprove global warming!) was found: "Hide the decline".
Aside from the obvious question, where's the rest of the frigging sentence, there are several reasons why this proves nothing. Oh wait I stand corrected, this does prove one thing: that Fox News and global warming deniers will do anything to scam the American public.
First off, scientists hide data all the time. No, not to "deceive" anyone. They hide columns or rows just as you would minimize a window if you were working with several Word documents at once. In statistics programs like JMP, it allows a scientist to see data in a less jumbled fashion.
Second, for Fox news to suggest that this proves climate change is a hoax, they would have to prove that East Anglia scientists were the ONLY people who proved global warming theory. (And we know that sentence is redundant, right)? Let's suppose the Large Hadron Collider managed to wipe that university off the map - demolish all the data. We'd still have overwhelming evidence from a Godzillion other places.
Global warming theory has been tested over and over again, by many other scientists. To date, no one has disproven or even come close to disproving human caused global warming.
Global warming is not a political party. It's simply a sub-category of pollution. If you want to understand it, read the primary literature. Don't get your scientific data from television. Please read my Global Warming facts and myths to undersand better. And here's Al Gore. Science didn't work, so he's gonna try crazy.
We're having our bi-yearly alternative Thanksgiving. It's a long drive to my sister's and the holiday food is way too heavy. I don't normally eat turkey or mashed potatoes. My family feels obilgated to make unfamiliair recipes for my diet restrictions, when I'd rather just help out cooking. But they want to be in control, so I just doodle around in the kitchen. I also get tired of people asking why I'm not drinking. Sometimes we spend the holiday with our friends Rosie and Mr. Spacely. Rosie is an amazing cook. We both love the same foods, so cooking with her is a delight. Eggplant, Asian-American fusion. It's really light, healthy holiday food.
We all sit by the fireplace and discuss snowshoeing or winter hikes. They have a pileated woodpecker family that lives in their backyard, so we watch for them. It's all very casual.
This year we'll spend the day spoiling our cats. It will be the new strays' first holiday with us. Sometimes I call my Apache friend, she tells the most amazing Native American stories. Native Americans all take part in gatering the food and preparing the meal.
I think this kind of cooperation is what makes Thanksgiving more special for people like my Apache friend; everyone has a job to do, everyone works to put food on the table. It's more about survival than indulgence. So I'm glad to share the holiday with friends.Happy Thanksgiving, Voxers!
I don’t know. I’ll be the bigger person, I just need to be strong
enough. I am strong at other things in life, believe me. My broken
heart will keep on reminding me that sometimes I will miss him and
sometimes I wont, but thinking of him is just a never ending force.
Sincere and honest truth, there is only one person who can fix it- the
one who broke it. But, it's something that he can't/won't ever fix. Not sure if I'd let him try. I'm finding that I can stand on my own, it's shaky and scary and utterly perplexing, but I can do it. Just watch.
Sometimes, when its late at night, and I'm lying in bed trying to sleep, I feel like walking up to Lizzie's room and saying to her
what the fuck are you actually doing?
Because it sounds to me like she's moving a large herd of cattle through a small obstacle course.
Or sometimes its like hospital noises. You know, random things crashing about, television blasting, phones ringing, laughing. At any moment I expect her to crank up the vacuum cleaner.
And I'm beginning to think she's retarded in some way. Because no matter how many times I ask her to try and be quiet after 10.30pm, she persists in being exactly the opposite.
It seems that she lives in the filth and squalor that only a teenager can live in for months, then suddenly decides she must clean her room at 11.30pm.
This also requires a loud thumping up the hallway past my bedroom to the bathroom, where she deposits an extremely large pile of dirty washing which she is always surprised to find hasn't been washed ready for her by the next morning. It also means a large pile of towels to be washed, some of which feel suspiciously like they have never been used, just left on the floor for a while.
Now here it is, 11am and she's still in bed. Meanwhile I had to be up at 5.30am to fit a 30km bike ride in before my day even began and she'll be up soon wondering why I need an afternoon nap.
I wonder if you can have morning tea naps.
I've been seeing these amusing Garmin ads on tv recently. They're wild . I like the nutcracker one. We used them in grad school but I had no idea they had such a weird sense of humor.
I had a flashback to one of our grad school forest projects. We worked in teams of four to analyze the community ecology of an Audubon Sanctuary. We only had one day of work left, but a huge snowstorm was on its way.
Two of us decided to just work a few hours to get the data we needed. We were doing some veg inventories (that's a fancy way of saying we had to identify trees, and just by their bark).
Well, the snowstorm started early. We went off trail only to find that the work took much longer than expected, and pretty soon we were in whiteout conditions. Everything looked the same. We had our compass but we were in a hurry to get back, knee deep in snow, freezing cold and not anywhere that a GPS would work. Garmin's ad reminds me of that day, except we were on foot, in the woods and losing light. Whee!
Staring at our compasses (which were declinated all funny for various reasons), I turned to my partner and said, "why don't we just follow our footsteps back"? We found the trail quickly after that. I love low-tech solutions.
I am taking a short break. Typing one-handed...
Sucks!
Am in reading mode.
Be back to interact when I feel better.
Later! :)
Thank god its only 24 degrees today. Thats 20 degrees cooler than yesterday. We've had four days over 40 (thats over 100). Tells of a hot summer coming up. Already bush fires all over the state.
And yesterday this poor old King Parrot dropped by looking for water. Its the second time I've seen him and he's about the most exotic thing I've ever seen in our backyard. Besides myself of course.
No idea what he's doing around these parts. They usually hang in rainforest type areas and that I can assure you we are not.
Wonder if he's someones pet. Hmmm.
Anyway of course yesterday was the day a leak appeared in the bird bath and there was harldy any water in it. So of course then I went in and gave Daz a serve for being a slack arse and not fixing it immediately and that now the poor bird would probably die from heat stroke and it would be all his fault.
But I've dragged an old bird bath out and filled it so hopefully he'll come back.
Hopefully Betty won't try to eat it. Because she hates magpies, (don't we all). Doves are ok. Magpies are scum.
So here are some fairly crap shots of the beautiful boy. I didn't want to get too close and scare him off. He sounded exhausted. Those little strips of bluey green down his side are almost fluoro. (fluorescent for you non australians)
