Summer Meanderings

Its summer, and we have the heat. Today will be a scorcher. There's a big wildfire burning over near Markleeville, which is south of Lake Tahoe on the east side of the Sierras. Its a biker hangout, consisting mostly of taverns at a junction of some otherwise steep and twisty roads. It is not heavily forested. The Eastern Sierra are dry, so the trees are typically further apart. So the fire is likely sagebrush rather than trees. I like it because the sage and other plants smell good and its ideal territory for trout. A good region for fishing. So far I haven't gotten more than a trace of smoke in the air, mostly a slight orange in the afternoon light. When it finally gets here we might see huge clouds obscuring houses. That happened last year from the King Fire smoke. We'll see.

I just finished reading an article (which I reposted on my blog) written by an ecology professor fed up with loons destroying the efforts of genuine ecologists by insisting its the end of the world and they need your money to tell you how screwed you are and attend really good parties and enjoy a jet set lifestyle. Real ecologists study what is there, without bias, and sometimes recommend solutions to restore habitat so the interesting creatures have somewhere to live. The article points out most of the habitat loss already happened and the worst problems have already been fixed. That we've already turned a corner and things are getting better. And how reality is bad for "business" if your business is flying around the world to eco-resorts, banging slutty hippy chicks, and demanding money for research on how we're all "doomed!". He's saying that the con artists have ruined the science. Yes, that is what happens. All the people laid off from the USGS had a comfy life studying rocks. They had to find some new way to live and the collapse of geologist wages in 1994 made them desperate. Thus we get Warmist cults and Doomers. So really, this is Bill Clinton's fault. The corruption of ecology is his legacy.

My classes continue. I need to put more work into the internet searching classes but I'm doing well so far. I'm overlapping my research subjects with my interests, as recommended by the professors, so I'm getting pretty thorough information, something they appreciate. I have an exam in the computer class to do today. Looks easy enough.

Due to the heat, I walk early, since even the early morning sun is scorching hot. I do classwork after that, shut into my room and closing up the house before it hits 80'F inside. I bought pairs of shorts so I'm properly dressed for the weather. Shorts in my home town were tricky. The summer fog would freeze you until around 10:30 or 11 AM, then shorts make sense after that, until around 4-5 PM, at which point the ocean breeze would bring more fog again and temps would plummet once more. We carried jackets year round. I hope to be able to post my findings here once I've gotten stuff more organized. My post on pulling trailers with a passenger car has been viewed 20,000 times. Same with the one on RVs. It seems there's a lot of interest in that. Housing prices are inflating again, as more Baby Boomers bail out of their lives in the Bay Area and move up here to retire. There are still no real jobs here, outside of the medical ones caring for the dying retired people. There are so many ghost towns. I suppose retirement villages like this will be the last of them, other than actual gas stations along the interstates, and even those only make sense if there's a population to serve. Otherwise, trains are more fuel efficient than trucks. They're much slower and more complicated to schedule, however. If they ever got efficient, Walmart would use them.

After some thought I can honestly say I am looking forward to seeing San Andreas. The trailers made me laugh and laugh. I can't see it in a theater because laughing for 90 minutes straight is just plain rude, and that was my response to The Day After Tomorrow, Volcano (tar = lava because... cracks in the ground!), Deep Impact, Armageddon, and Dante's Peak. I didn't bother seeing that Mayan Apocalypse one because I'd literally cracked a rib in a coughing fit and it was healing. Yes that's possible. And it hurts. Some of those movies only existed because some nerdy researcher had showed off some speculative science with CGI from the university supercomputer to get a grant, and Hollywood bought the rights, which is also not how science works.

The problem with movies built around university CGI showing off some speculative science that might have happened is low information voters then vote for blowhards who fund con men that pretend to be scientists that then insist on genocidal political policies that sound good to other maniacs, mostly for access to "research grants" and getting into hippy chicks panties. That's how bad science works. It is a scam. If you remove the funding, the con men go somewhere else. Real science happens without funding, often by volunteers recording data while doing something else. We don't get films about a SLOW ice age returning because it doesn't look good in a 90 minute film. Instead we get demonic space hurricanes that freeze fuel lines. Dumb.

It could have been a good and interesting film about the creeping ice age, but no, that sort of story isn't easy to direct like this schlock. Summer blockbuster movies often suck. They are a loud way to spend $15 for a movie ticket one afternoon. Arguably healthier than drinking $15 worth of booze in the same time period, but that's like comparing apples to qumquats.