Weather Shenanigans

On December 18th, 1 week before Christmas, it reached 74° F here. On January 6: 73°. Yesterday: 67, Today: 68. (Temperature history.) I know we've set at least one record high so far in this stretch, possibly more.

Starting tomorrow January weather is supposed to finally arrive for real, with highs in the 40s and 30s again.

I'm not sure what to call the last 30 days - June-uary, maybe. (Already 545 occurrences of that neologism out there...)

A while back Stephen Colbert did a fine interview with a global-climate-change expert, playing (of course) the skeptical red host. His argument against global warming's existence: "it gets cold in the winter!" pretty much sums up a lot of the 'denier' position. (Aside: The 4 stages of global warming denial)

Well, we seem to be working on the "it gets cold in winter!" part.

(Cue: "But it's cold in California!") Yes, yes, that's a good example of why 'global climate change' is the better label. While overall the whole globe is getting slowly warmer, how it manifests itself in any particular place and time is quite unpredictable - could be wider temperature swings, could mean more violent storms, could be insufficiently different from normal to notice.

But the underlying pattern is still observable in the data, which is what ought to count.

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 Overdue Tabdump

Software

• BBEdit 8.6, now with Markdown syntax coloring. Trying it out right now.. liking it.
• Planet Perl; Perl Advent Calendar 2006
• Planet Catalyst; Catalyst Advent Calendar
• Planet Mozilla, Planet Movable Type .. more Planets here.
• IBM DeveloperWorks: Get the most out of bash
• O'Reilly: Building Tag Clouds in Perl and PHP
• hackdiary: Using Wikipedia and the Yahoo API to give structure to flat lists -- making useful graphs of relationships based just on mentions in each others' Wikipedia entries.
• The Rule of Least Power

  When designing computer systems, one is often faced with a choice between using a more or less powerful language for publishing information, for expressing constraints, or for solving some problem. This finding explores tradeoffs relating the choice of language to reusability of information. The "Rule of Least Power" suggests choosing the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.

Social

• Guy Kawasaki: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
  • The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work at Google is forty-seven.
  • The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight, so you could skip the MBA, work at Google, and probably get most of the connections you need. Later, you can hire Harvard MBAs to prepare your income taxes.
  • People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.

Journalism

• A Tiny Revolution: Washington Post's Thomas Ricks Courageously Waits Four Years To Tell Us What He Thought About Iraq's WMD - this is a classic problem with today's journalism; what shows up in print is not what the reporter has found out, just what every side's public statement is. So the news is not really news, but still gets printed where news should go.

• adrian holovaty: J-schools, computer science and the bigger picture

  "Should we be training computer science majors in journalism (or vice versa)?"

  Ideally, journalism schools would address the need for journalists who can capably produce automated Web applications. But I realize that manipulating databases and writing code isn't for everybody...

  Furthermore, I don't think it's necessary for somebody to have formal journalism training in order to do well in this emerging field. (The heresy!) At the various news Web sites where I've worked, the best coworkers I've had were not journalism majors... And, whaddya know, despite their lack of journalism background, these people had no problems understanding the basic need for ethics, fairness and accuracy. It's not like the basics of journalism are hard to learn.

  ...one more important thing needs to happen before "journalism via computer programming" can become widespread: Newsrooms need to welcome technical people with open arms and give them an environment in which they can thrive. Treat techies as bona fide members of the journalism team -- not as IT robots who just do what you tell them to do. Let them be creative. Give them interesting problems to solve. Trust them. ...newspapers will need to change their attitudes, culture and resource allocation if they want these people to stick around. Otherwise, they'll pack their bags after a couple of months and go work for Google.

2006 roundups

• BBC News: 100 things we didn't know last year

  3. Urban birds have developed a short, fast "rap style" of singing, different from their rural counterparts
  28. More than 90% of plane crashes have survivors
  45. Cows can have regional accents, says a professor of phonetics, after studying cattle in Somerset
  57. The word "time" is the most common noun in the English language, according to the latest Oxford dictionary
  86. Six million people use TV subtitles, despite having no hearing impairment. (I do that sometimes...)

• MetaCritic: aggregation of "top 10 movies of 2006"

Via goodness knows how many people, including Medley, rc3, Genehack, The Scoop, kottke... and some just from my own surfs.

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