While browsing with my 10-year-old in the children's section of the Seattle Public Library today, I stumbled into Stone Soup, bimonthly literary magazine targeted at kids under age 13. It contains stories, poems, and book reviews written by kids. They pay $40 per published article, which would be a lot of money to a kid and quite an incentive to submit something. I guess it works, since they claim to get 250 submissions per week.
Nine of out ten new houses built in 1950 were those one-story "ranch style" homes with big front picture windows, tiny lawns, and open kitchens framed with wood paneling and simple room dividers. Today's Slate, features Witold Rybczynski, author of the Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became Danville, a new book dissecting the construction of a suburb. He explains the history of ranch homes (in California we often called them "ramblers"). These are the highlights:
Having lived in a ranch style house in Sunnyvale for five years, I guess I took it for granted that this was the way houses (particularly in California) are supposed to be. But it's nice to know that America has moved on.
So far we've been lucky not to dent our cars (knock on wood), but to be honest I'm wary of most auto collision shops. They seem to get their business via insurance companies, so over time there's a natural incentive for them to do the bare minimum necessary to settle a claim, which can mean shortcuts like non-standard or plastic parts instead of the real thing. So how to evaluate? The May 2007 Kiplingers suggests http://www.assuredperformancecare.com as a web site for independent body shops, not beholden to insurers. Here are the sites they recommend that are closest to Mercer Island:
1424 130th Ave NE
Bellevue, WA 98005
(425) 453-2901
1500 130th Ave NE
Bellevue, WA 98005
(425) 454-0855
Taylor's Auto Body Collision 1
330 Main Avenue South
Renton, WA 98055
[don't bother writing this down. If you ever need your car fixed, just Google "Richard Sprague Auto Body" or something similar to get to this page again]
I'm pretty much convinced that global warming is real, that it is exacerbated if not caused by human activity, and that the next 100 years will see significant climate changes. Although I'm generally skeptical of politicians, I think in this case Al Gore's facts are basically correct, that mainstream science is about as united as it can be, and that opposing the consensus is about as productive as arguing for a Flat Earth. Both Scientific American and The Economist have come out strongly approving the idea and, without time to do original research myself, until now I found no reason to question them.
That's why now I find myself shaken by a new 1-hr documentary from Britain's Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it on Google Video, but I don't know if it was uploaded legally or not so it may be pulled by now. There is also a copy at http://www.jimclark.net (along with another bunch of content that, frankly, makes me skeptical of the facts in this video, but still).
The documentary quotes from many experts (former New Scientist editor, professors from M.I.T. and elsewhere, senior NASA scientists, etc.) who not only question the science behind Al Gore's movie, but offer convincing reasons why it appears that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus in spite of very good counter-evidence.
Briefly, the film argues that changes in solar activity influence earth's climate far more than anything we humans can do. Meanwhile, the way science is funded creates an industry of people who will be unemployed if man-made global warming isn't a problem. There is so much government money flowing to climatology study these days that, for example, a lonely scientist wanting to study squirrels will rewrite the application in a way to make it appear to be related to global warming.
One interesting claim is that the whole concept of global warming was kick-started in the early 1980s when Margaret Thatcher funded research that would help discredit coal mining (and their unions) as a long-term source of energy.
At the very least, I am now wondering why we should let Al Gore's movie be shown to public school kids without also showing something like this one. Anybody know if there are any counter-counter arguments?
From Scott Moore, former publisher of Slate, on Frontline
In other words, you'd take a pile of money -- not even all that much money in relative terms -- and go and create new staffs in a handful of cities around the country and start creating an online-only competitor to the local newspaper. You wouldn't have the same cost structure as the newspaper, but if you were putting out a product that was of equal quality and perhaps much more attractive and Web-like in its approach, you might take a lot of their audience away. And because your cost basis would be lower, you could make a lot of money on that.
People already get a lot of their local information this way, but it's just not tied into a newspaper. What happens when somebody turns that into a central news portal that is super-local? The traditional newspapers won't be able to compete.
