Followup, at KNCO: Problems Suspend Toy Run for Next Year (throwing candy, candy mess on roads, bikers w/o helmets)
If you don't want to get stuck at an intersection for a half hour or so, you need to avoid travel in & between our towns starting at midday today - the toy run starts at noon in Nevada City & goes to the fairgrounds ("1:00-3:30 pm"), circuitously and without ever stopping to let motorists (or peds?) through.
I once asked a participant how long he thought was acceptable, to have motorists wait; he refused to answer.
I looked on the Toy Run website for a map of the run, to see what routes if any are still available to drivers while the run is in progress, but the only map they provide is one showing how to reach the [Rood Center] starting point.
Putting on my Keachie hat, what the organizers could do, if they wanted to avoid inconveniencing the community, is divide the bike traffic into 10-minute "slugs" at the outset, with 2 or 3 minutes in between; then the ride could still be nonstop for the bikers, but cars could still get through while the ride was in progress.
And providing a route map - ideally with estimated start/end time the bikers will pass through each segment - would be helpful too. (Does Google let you do animated route maps?)
Showing posts with label local news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label local news. Show all posts
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Congratulations to CA Science Fair Product Science winner Samantha Beckett
Congratulations Samantha!
(After the recent Castillo hoax, when I saw the Union story Young scientist wins second state science fair prize I went to the science fair site to verify; and indeed, here she is. Well done, Samantha!)
(After the recent Castillo hoax, when I saw the Union story Young scientist wins second state science fair prize I went to the science fair site to verify; and indeed, here she is. Well done, Samantha!)
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Quick report on Shibatani talk on climate change & Sierra water resource management, at Fri May 21 Sierra Club meeting
(The talk was announced here (fixed link))
We need climate communication that tells citizens what they need to know, to make informed and responsible decisions.
But as with just about all communication on climate that's gone on in this county, I found Friday's talk frustrating - largely because it was a talk on what Shibatani has to offer, not on what we-the-public need to know; and he's a hydrology consultant for organizations like NID, so his talk was geared toward their issues. Its two themes were uncertainty and the need for adaptation - I didn't hear much if anything about topics like the following: the fossil-fuel-funded effort to confuse the public about climate, evaluating whose interpretation of the science to trust, ocean acidification, weather vs climate, the difference in robustness of global vs. regional predictions, insurance against risk, uncertainty not being our friend, signal vs. noise, the "bathtub" metaphor, lag time (largely due to the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere), the fossil-fuel-funded effort to stop AB32, mitigation (prevention) as economically far preferable to adaptation, or where we-the-public should be focusing our efforts.
The talk was aimed at water managers, not at citizens.
...and from the content of the Q&A, IMO the citizens badly need to hear what the talk didn't deliver; "straining at the mosquito while the elephant is running wild" comes naturally when you're in an "act-locally"-oriented mindset, but if it's not countered, it's going to trample us.
And a fair amount of disinformation did slip in - primarily but not entirely in the "uncertainty of climate models" section, since to emphasize what's uncertain without also addressing what's robust & why, doesn't serve the audience well. And I heard mention of cooling in the last 10 years, when actually we've just had thehottest 12-month period in recorded history (plus heat's still going into the ocean (img)). And the talk implied that the climate threat's been oversold, when in fact it's been undersold.
Recommended for those who don't think CO2 is as important as it's cracked up to be: Richard Alley's "CO2- the biggest control knob" AGU lecture.
I also got the impression this was a talk by a consultant (tone: "this topic is complex so if you can't follow it, you need me") not by an educator (tone: "here are the important things for you to know"); though others may have come away with a different impression.
A good general presentation on climate change is the Hayhoe slideshow, followed by Krugman's climate economics and Begley's what-we-should-do, & then as needed, Coby Beck, SkepticalScience.com or the EPA "CO2 endangerment" responses to comments (pdf for now), for addressing commonly held (and promulgated) misbeliefs.
(E.g. to counter the monckton/sppi "29 year temp rise has undershot the IPCC prediction" graph (top one here) from the talk, you can go to EPA Response (4-26) (pdf) ( "Two recent studies have addressed whether recent temperature trends are consistent with model runs, and both...find that the recent trends are well within model variability." )
(plus, as mentioned above, the oceans - where most of the heat goes - have continued to warm.)
This isn't an issue we can afford to stay uninformed about.
We need climate communication that tells citizens what they need to know, to make informed and responsible decisions.
But as with just about all communication on climate that's gone on in this county, I found Friday's talk frustrating - largely because it was a talk on what Shibatani has to offer, not on what we-the-public need to know; and he's a hydrology consultant for organizations like NID, so his talk was geared toward their issues. Its two themes were uncertainty and the need for adaptation - I didn't hear much if anything about topics like the following: the fossil-fuel-funded effort to confuse the public about climate, evaluating whose interpretation of the science to trust, ocean acidification, weather vs climate, the difference in robustness of global vs. regional predictions, insurance against risk, uncertainty not being our friend, signal vs. noise, the "bathtub" metaphor, lag time (largely due to the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere), the fossil-fuel-funded effort to stop AB32, mitigation (prevention) as economically far preferable to adaptation, or where we-the-public should be focusing our efforts.
The talk was aimed at water managers, not at citizens.
...and from the content of the Q&A, IMO the citizens badly need to hear what the talk didn't deliver; "straining at the mosquito while the elephant is running wild" comes naturally when you're in an "act-locally"-oriented mindset, but if it's not countered, it's going to trample us.
And a fair amount of disinformation did slip in - primarily but not entirely in the "uncertainty of climate models" section, since to emphasize what's uncertain without also addressing what's robust & why, doesn't serve the audience well. And I heard mention of cooling in the last 10 years, when actually we've just had thehottest 12-month period in recorded history (plus heat's still going into the ocean (img)). And the talk implied that the climate threat's been oversold, when in fact it's been undersold.
Recommended for those who don't think CO2 is as important as it's cracked up to be: Richard Alley's "CO2- the biggest control knob" AGU lecture.
I also got the impression this was a talk by a consultant (tone: "this topic is complex so if you can't follow it, you need me") not by an educator (tone: "here are the important things for you to know"); though others may have come away with a different impression.
A good general presentation on climate change is the Hayhoe slideshow, followed by Krugman's climate economics and Begley's what-we-should-do, & then as needed, Coby Beck, SkepticalScience.com or the EPA "CO2 endangerment" responses to comments (pdf for now), for addressing commonly held (and promulgated) misbeliefs.
(E.g. to counter the monckton/sppi "29 year temp rise has undershot the IPCC prediction" graph (top one here) from the talk, you can go to EPA Response (4-26) (pdf) ( "Two recent studies have addressed whether recent temperature trends are consistent with model runs, and both...find that the recent trends are well within model variability." )
(plus, as mentioned above, the oceans - where most of the heat goes - have continued to warm.)
This isn't an issue we can afford to stay uninformed about.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Folks, we have a winner...kudos to Yubanet
A timely local fire report and some very grateful readers.
(I'd post this to Twitter, but Twitter's down. again.)
(I'd post this to Twitter, but Twitter's down. again.)
Friday, May 15, 2009
Brian's leaving KVMR News
Reliable sources (plural) informed us today that Brian, the keeper of the news at KVMR, gave notice a week or two back.
Another journalism-at-KVMR news flash - a couple days ago I learned we have another big-fish editor here in town, Michael Young from the LA Times foreign desk; he's on the KVMR board. Move over JeffP; it looks like we're going to have to rename a certain street Editors' Row...
Edited*:
Welcome Michael and Karen (belatedly; they moved here a summer or two ago.)
(Michael, if you start a local blog, please put it in the the Suggestion Box for Nevada County Voices.)
Another journalism-at-KVMR news flash - a couple days ago I learned we have another big-fish editor here in town, Michael Young from the LA Times foreign desk; he's on the KVMR board. Move over JeffP; it looks like we're going to have to rename a certain street Editors' Row...
Edited*:
Welcome Michael and Karen (belatedly; they moved here a summer or two ago.)
(Michael, if you start a local blog, please put it in the the Suggestion Box for Nevada County Voices.)
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