If he were president....

If Al Gore were president could he have made this happen?

April 1st

The countdown begins to the Amherst town elections. It will be interesting to see who tops the list at the end of the day on (unfortunately) April Fool's day. By any measure, this is a memorable campaign season for Amherst and a strong turnout will be welcomed (and unusual).

It's tough to judge who might be ahead by lawn signs and standouts, phone calls or leaflets stuffed in the door. But as the old saying goes, there's only two ways to run for office: scared or unopposed. Clearly there's opposition, this year more than last, which is reflective of the opinion folks have of the Selectboard. Running in a contested election takes a great deal of time, effort, and some money so the fact that so many people are willing to step forward and try can be taken as a signal of discontent. One open seat and one vulnerable incumbent makes for an interesting opportunity for change.

Hanging at the State House

Stan Rosenberg invited the Pioneer Valley Photo Artists to exhibit images at his office in the State House and I'm among those taking him up on the offer. The photos (40 in all) will be on display from April 1 through June 6th and can be seen during normal statehouse business hours (no weekends or holidays). Stan has long been involved in promoting the arts and is one of the founders of the Arts Extension Service.

The photo in the header is a slice of my contribution to the exhibit.

Error of our ways?

There's been some grumbling of late that the folks who got it wrong in the first place continued to get space in the media on topics like Iraq and the housing bubble. The question is why and Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution has the answer:

The answer is media incentives. It wasn't just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now?

The public wants to hear why they weren't idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren't idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

TATA for Now

No, I'm not going anywhere – just engaging in a bad pun for the purpose of restarting this blog.

TATA Motors of India, in what has to be world class irony, is buying to esteemed British brands from Ford Motors: Land Rover and Jaguar. Back in my dreamy misspent youth in western New York state (the hinterlands some 400+ miles away from The City) I used to dream about traveling across deepest, darkest Africa or some other god forbidden place in my Land Rover. Not luxury but the opposite. A bone jarring ride on terrain that required a vehicle as tough as the men on board. Luxury be damned, it was reliability and ease of repair we adventurers required.

Of course, that was I time when I would have purchased my big game rifle, a Weatherby .457 magnum, from that premier outfitter, Abercrombie and Fitch, located in Manhattan.

So now, Land Rover is reduced to selling SUVs to folks who have to negotiate the difficult terrain of southern Connecticut, in rain or snow. It is in competition with the Toyota Land Cruiser which seems to have pre-empted the Rover from its natural habitat if not the 'burbs.

Turmoil

Amazing.

What a cold, lots of work, an impending deadline and the second printer to go south on me in two months can do for one's blogging....

At any rate, town meeting is on once again (will they or won't they with the school budget?) with a special golf course edition planned for Wednesday for some local action and commentary. We have a dust up over casinos on the state level and can consider if the gov's municipal partnership act is in fact DOA. Nationally the Repubs look like they've found another pretender for prez (not that we don't have one now) and the Dems sorta think that it's Bush's war even though they keep enabling him.

The back cover of my copy of "The Black Swan" says that Nassim Taleb is temporarily the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at UMass. If you haven't read his book "Fooled By Randomness" you should -- it's a mind expanding exploration of the impact of random events on our lives and how that planned purposeful success that turned someone into a millionaire may well be dumb luck. I'm not doing the book justice. Now I'll have to check the UMass web site to see if he's doing any public presentations, if he's still at the university (funny, they never mention things like this when the alumni fundraising letter arrives).

Sic transit gloria mundi

So long Wolfie. The BBC has the skinny.

Still not a Latin scholar but this sums it up.

Extricandae copiae

Imagine, sixteen years of catholic school while avoiding Latin classes. So I'll have to take The Reality-based Community at face value

Them disappearing bees...

This from Salon.com. I still think its the iPods.

"First things first. The Internet, as you know, loves a rumor. Are cellphones killing the bees?

JEFFREY PETTIS: All the explanations that bees became disoriented by cellphone radiation, or this, that and the other thing -- there is zero evidence for any of it. All we know is we lost the worker population and they died away from the hive. What's unusual is they died over a short time period. Are they flying off to Nirvana? Who knows where they are? They are just dying away from the hive, which is normal.

ERIC MUSSEN: It's important to look at what's normal. In the summer, bees go through a six-week life cycle: three inside the hive, three outside it as foragers. Then they die of old age. When bees are coming to the end of their life for whatever reason, they just fly off and don't come back. They fly out to die because flying out and dying is what they do. The question is, Why are we seeing bees with such a shortened life cycle? Well, now we're talking about winter bees. As you move into fall, the colony is supposed to be rearing bees that have a long life expectancy -- from about October to March of the next year. The problem is the winter bees aren't making it. Everything just sort of fell apart near the end of this summer and those bees that were supposed to live up to six months didn't come close.

JOHN McDONALD: That cellphone thing is a major source of irritation to me. If it were true, I suspect about 10,000 people at Penn State would be lying on the street dead now. And yet you see them walking around and talking on cellphones. My son explained to me that cellphone radiation puts out a wavelength of about three inches. A honeybee is three-quarters of an inch long and so the bee is going to create virtually no shadow in that wavelength. That's one reason why I look askance at that theory. The other is where I live, in the middle of Appalachia, the bees are disappearing and there are virtually no cellphones.