California's "worse case scenario" - floods of Biblical proportions

At a conference in Sacramento last week, 117 researchers brought together to study flooding risks in California presented a chilling model they say could become a distinct possibility: A winter storm that brings warm South Pacific air over parts of California, creating an "atmospheric river" that could bring 10 feet of rain over 40 days, flooding large tracts of the state and bringing flood water to nearly a quarter of the state's homes...

As sensational as that scenario sounds, researchers say it's based in historical reality: Such storms have hit California before, most notably in 1861 and 1862, when floods turned a 300-mile stretch of the Central Valley into a lake...

"We think this event happens once every 100 or 200 years or so, which puts it in the same category as our big San Andreas earthquakes," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist of the US Geological Survey Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, which created the model with the help of researchers from FEMA and the California Emergency Management Agency...

The article closes by noting that the risks of such a superstorm "increases as climate change takes hold." Ah....

Good guys vs. bad guys

Here's a thought-provoking question posted at Reddit this morning:

"If we want our children to grow up smart, why do we send them mixed messages in cartoons saying that the villain is a genius and the hero beats them with brawn?"

Ponder that for a while.

Spirograph wheels

In my judgement, one of the best toys ever marketed.

From the Flickr photostream of Leo Reynolds.

Impressive Labyrinth skills

I used to be quite good at this game when I was a child, but I never tried it with two balls, as this fellow does.

When I watched this video at 22 words, I started wondering what year it was that my family had the game.  There are so many "labyrinth-" named games now that a Google search was frustrating, but I finally found an answer after adding the word "original" to the search - "Introduced in 1947, the original labyrinth has challenged young and old for over half a century."

Sources for national and international news

Data from a survey conducted conducted Dec. 1-5, 2010 "among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines" by the Pew Research Center.  At the link, the data are further analyzed by generations (18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65 and up):

The decline in the share of Americans who cite television as their main source of national and international news crosses all age groups. Over the past three years, the number saying TV is their main source has fallen 16 points among 18-29 year-olds, eight points among those 30 to 49, and six points among those age 50 and older.

Those data are presented in graphic form at the link.  Via The Daily Dish.

Cognitive biases

Just a few selections from an impressively long Wikipedia list found yesterday, via Robot Wisdom:

Anchoring – the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Bias blind spot – the tendency to see oneself as less biased than other people.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.

Experimenter's or Expectation bias – the tendency for experimenters to believe, certify, and publish data that agree with their expectations for the outcome of an experiment, and to disbelieve, discard, or downgrade the corresponding weightings for data that appear to conflict with those expectations.

Illusion of control – the tendency to overestimate one's degree of influence over other external events.

Information bias – the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.

Normalcy bias – the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster which has never happened before.

Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.

Status quo bias – the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same

Availability cascade – a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse.

Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable.

Ostrich effect – ignoring an obvious (negative) situation.

Egocentric bias – occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the results of a joint action than an outside observer would.

Herd instinct – common tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.

Ingroup bias – the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups.

Just-world phenomenon – the tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people "get what they deserve."

Many, many more at Wikipedia.

Another library bookshelf hidden door

Found at Bookshelf Porn, via Book Porn.

The woes of hybrid cars

Since spring, irate owners of hybrid Civics have been venting their frustration on the web. Some describe how their cars’ battery can suddenly die while trying to overtake or labour up a hill. Others talk of leaving their car with the battery fully charged, only to return an hour or two later to find it flat...

Honda’s answer has been to issue a couple of software patches that make the Civic’s battery work less energetically, and its petrol engine harder still. However, after having the fix downloaded, many owners claim not only that their cars have lost power, but also that their fuel economy has fallen from about 45mpg (5.2L/100km) on the highway to around 33mpg—little better than a non-hybrid version of the same model, which costs $5,000 less. Some have asked, unsuccessfully, to have the old software re-installed. Others have threatened to sue, and had their pricey batteries quietly replaced.

The surprise in all this is that the batteries conking out are the reliable old nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) variety—not the more powerful but finicky lithium-ion versions being adopted in the latest generation of electric cars and plug-in hybrids...

The best guess about what is happening is that it has something to do with the way the batteries are charged and discharged during use...

More at The Economist for those interested or affected.

WikiLeaks Task Force acronym: W.T.F.

Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F.  (source)

Res ipsa loquitur

Nice library

Biblioteca do Palàcio Nacional da Ajuda Lisboa III, Lisbon, Portugal.

Photo found at La Petit Poulailler, via Librarianista.

"Telling the bees"

The aptly named phrase consists of the practice of promptly informing Bees of a death in the family in order to preempt them from departing the hive once they realize they have lost their ‘keeper’. The custom is more common than you would think, even to this day, as recounted by the American writer Mark Twain in his famous novel, ‘Huckleberry Finn’;

“And he said if a man owned a beehive and that man died, the bees must be told about it before sun-up next morning, or else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees wouldn't sting idiots; but I didn't believe that, because I had tried them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me.”

In China, Beehives are turned a different direction after the death of their keeper, hinting at a superstition that harkens back to a more ancient custom. Details vary, but the essence remains the same – tell the Bees, and quickly. In England circa 1840, a woman inquired if the Bees had been informed of the death of their keeper and upon learning they had not, proceeded to prepare a dish of spice cake and sugar and presented it to the hive while jingling her keys and reciting the following rhyme; 

“Honey bees, Honey bees, hear what I say!
Your Master J.A. has passed away.
But his wife now begs you will freely stay,
And still gather honey for many a day.
Bonny bees, Bonny bees, hear what I say.”

I've excerpted this from a much longer, three-part article by Andrew Gough at his Arcadia site.  Lots of arcane information in each of the three parts.  Please explore and enjoy.   And a big hat tip to Uncertain Times for pointing the way.

Why the clown visited Molly

From a heartbreaking story reported by CBS News:

When older brother Jeff was 6, Molly disappeared. For a while Jeff asked constantly: "Where's Molly?" He stopped asking after being told repeatedly by his mother he had to forget his baby sister...

Jeff Daly reunited with the sister he last saw when she was just shy of her third birthday... Molly couldn't tell Jeff and Cindy about those missing 47 years, they set about filling in the details, which brought them to the institution where Molly was sent back in 1957: the Oregon Fairview Home.

Fairview, founded in 1907, was originally named the "Oregon State Institution for the Feeble-Minded." And it was hardly alone. By 1962, there were 123 state institutions around the country... "The doctors told my parents, 'It's okay. Let Molly go to Salem. She'll be in an institution. She'll be better off there.'"

...at first, Molly's father visited often, until Fairview's staff advised him to stop, because Molly would become inconsolable after he left.

But Jack Daly found an ingenious way to continue seeing his daughter... "He did go back," said Jeff. "It was only a way that I suppose my dad could have figured out. He went back as a clown."

The rest of the story is at CBS News (along with a link to the video), via BoingBoing.

The long winter night comes to Tromsø

In Tromsø, Norway - way north of the Polar Circle - the sun has gone down for the last time this year. To mark the beginning of the ‘Mørketid’ as the period without daylight is called, hundreds of local kindergarten kids each brought a homemade candle to the city square where they were all lit…

The sun is expected to return in early January 2011, as usual…

Via Ordinary Finds.

Green roofs

Via here, but I doubt that's the original source.

Addendum:  acb420 offers an Amusing Planet post several months ago as the source.  Tx.

Recognize this young lady?

Photo taken in 1952, when she was 18 and just entering a career of movie stardom and social activism.

Identity revealed at John McNab's Flickr photostream.

Card catalogue

This one at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) Memorial Library, via Librarianista.

I mourn the loss of the old card catalogs, not because I’m a Luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards, information by chance that is different in kind from the computer’s ramified but rigid order. (Annie Proulx)

Airport security before 9/11

A column at Salon reminds us that we lived with terrorism long before 9/11/01, and our response was much more measured and less theatrical.  He cites the period 1985-1989:

First on that list was the spectacular saga of TWA Flight 847, a Boeing 727 commandeered by Shiite militiamen in June of '85. Even before that crisis ended, Sikh extremists would blow up Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland -- the deadliest civil aviation bombing in history. The Abu Nidal group then murdered 20 people at the airports in Rome and Vienna, followed in short order by the bombing of TWA Flight 840 as it descended toward Athens. Abu Nidal struck again in Karachi, attacking a Pan Am 747 with machine guns and grenades. Then, in December 1988, Libyan operatives planted the luggage bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in what would stand until 2001 as the worst-ever terror attack against a U.S. target. The Libyans later used another luggage bomb to take out UTA Flight 772 over Niger in September 1989.

Also occurring in that same span were the non-terrorist bombing of a Korean Air Lines 707 and the downing of a San Francisco-bound Pacific Southwest Airlines flight by a recently fired employee who burst into the cockpit and shot both pilots...

With respect to airport security, it is remarkable how we have come to place Sept. 11, 2001, as the fulcrum upon which we balance almost all of our decisions. As if deadly terrorism didn't exist prior to that day, when really we've been dealing with the same old threats for decades. What have we learned? What have we done?...

We continue enacting the wrong policies, wasting our security resources and manpower... Cargo and packages go uninspected while passengers are groped and harassed over umbrellas and harmless hobby knives. Uniformed pilots are forced to remove their belts and endure embarrassing pat-downs...

In the 1980s we did not overreact. We did not stage ill-fated invasions of distant countries. People did not cease traveling and the airline industry did not fall into chaos. We were lazy in enacting better security, perhaps, but as a country our psychological reaction, much to our credit, was calm, measured and not yet self-defeating.

The writer is an airline pilot who is worried about the overreaction that will occur after the next incident.

With fixed bayonets !

"South Korean honor guards performed during a welcoming ceremony..." 
(Ahn Young Joon/Associated Press).

The tangled priorities of security theater

Airports are cashing in on the queues at their security gates by charging passengers to use fast-track priority lanes. At least eight have introduced the system and are charging travellers up to £5 to beat the queues.

A whistleblower security guard at Luton Airport, which adopted the system last year, claimed there is a deliberate policy to let the queues grow to encourage people to pay for the express lane...

The Luton security guard told the Daily Mail: 'Before the priority lane was introduced we had to keep queues down. 'Now the lane is there staff are told to create queues, which forces passengers to pay for the priority lane.'

The claim was denied by Luton Airport. The Air Transport Users Council, the official consumer body for passengers, described the claims as 'worrying'...

Earlier this week, Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary joined other airport industry leaders in condemning the current level of security screening. He said: 'What happens, particularly in the coverage of the Yemeni issues of recent days, is that we have another huge lurch by the securicrats into making travel an even more tedious ordeal for the travelling public...

More at the link, via J-Walk.