My New Office
We made the move. I am in my new office now. It is smaller than my former office but much better because it has windows that have decent views. Although construction of the new American Institute of Peace blocks my direct view, over my shoulder is the Memorial Bridge and the Potomac, as you can see in the picture above.
The building is in a less convenient location than old SA 44, but I figure I will adapt. It has what I need, i.e. natural sunlight, showers & a refrigerator for my Coke Zero.
Below is the construction crane across the street. Notice the airplane. This is on the flight path, but we don’t get much noise.
I have a few odds and ends postings.
Ponderosa Pine Smell
NPR had a good article about ponderosa pine. Listen to it at this link. I wrote an article a while back about the smell of ponderosa pines, among other things. I didn’t know it was such an issue. Everybody agrees that the smell is distinctive.
Chrissy and I are going out the Arizona in November and we can spend some time in the pines in the mountains there.
Primitive Climate Change
The Economist has an article about how early human agriculture set off the first round of human influenced global warming. Good thing too. W/o that shot of CO2 and methane back around 7000 years ago we may have slipped back into the ice age. I read about this a while back, how early agriculture may have diverted the return to ice age conditions, but there is evidently now even more evidence for it.
Our early ancestors were small in numbers and primitive in technology, but they could be very active. Because agriculture was so much less efficient back then, they had to slash and burn a lot of land to support their small bands and all that slashing and burning put lot of greenhouse gas in the air. Soon after, they took up rice patty farming in some parts of the world, which is a big producer of methane, a more potent gas than CO2.