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March 29, 2006
MidWest Haze Cam
The sky looked really hazy driving in to work today. I was surprised that our local Air Quality Index (AQI) wasn't elevated above "moderate" when I checked the MPCA web site. The AQI is a composite score based on ground-level ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and fine particles (PM2.5).
But I found out at MPCA's site that there's an even better way to get a sense of local air quality -- the MidWest Hazecam. The site has live camera shots and fine particle and ozone data for many big cities in the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes states. You can also link to it through the EPA's AIRNow site, which gives national forecasts for air quality along with several public health resources. And it's got several great maps. Did you know the U.S. Forest Service has air quality images? Here's one for the Boundary Waters.
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)
March 27, 2006
Unseen. Unforgotten.: Newly-published photos of Birmingham civil rights movement
This week's InternetTourbus mentioned an amazing discovery of old negatives dating from 1950 to 1965 in a closet at the Birmingham News newspaper office. That discovery has been published in a special report by the newspaper: Unseen. Unforgotten. It's an amazing journey through the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's in Alabama, split into four photo galleries. [Note, before you are allowed access to the site, you are asked for your ZIP code, birth year, and gender. The InternetTourbus suggested using the ZIP of the University of Alabama, which is 35487, if you don't want to divulge your own.]
There is also a companion piece available for download as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file:
http://www.al.com/unseen/unseen.pdf
Posted by rigd0003 at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)
March 24, 2006
Surprising Lead Poisoning Danger
I was reading a new MMWR Dispatch this morning about a lead poisoning death in a 4-year-old Minneapolis boy. What I found quite shocking about this tragic story (see the Strib's "Jewelry Recalled for Lead Poisoning Danger") was the source of the lead: a small charm bracelet that was included with a pair of Reebok shoes. The Minnesota Public Health Laboratory tested the bracelet and found that it was 99.1% lead! This was basically a chunk of lead given away with your shoe purchase! Health departments and consumer groups have worked hard to get lead out of gasoline, paint, crayons, candy wrappers, and dish ware. And still it shows up in products we'd consider safe.
The Minnesota Department of Health has some good lead prevention information on their web site.
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:01 AM | Comments (1)
March 21, 2006
Keeping your eye on Congress
I receive a lot of e-mails from various organizations asking me to write a letter to my congresswoman or senators supporting or denouncing some bill or another. I often like to do a bit of background on the bills and track them as they have amendments attached and work their way to the floor for a vote. After a bit of trial and error, I've come across three sites that complement one another nicely for the task of legislative research.
The first is a nice "straight from the horses mouth" site managed by the Library of Congress, called THOMAS. At THOMAS you can search the text of Senate and House of Representatives bills or browse the legislation sponsored by a particular congress person. The page for each bill contains a multitude of information: text, sponsors, amendments, committees, related bills, keywords for cross-referencing, and more.
If you are interested in not only whether the bill passed but who voted for and who voted against the bill, the key term to remember is "roll call." Roll call votes are published in the Congressional Record and can sometimes be hard to find. The easiest way to find the roll call for a particular bill is to find the bill's page in THOMAS and then click on "Major Congressional Actions" or "All Congressional Actions". For House bills, the key is to look for the links that begin with "Roll no." The link will take you the roll call of that vote kept by the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives. For Senate bills, the key is to look for the links that begin with "Record Vote Number." These links will take you to the roll calls on the U.S. Senate Legislation & Records site.
Another nice feature of THOMAS is the "Current Activity" section that features links to On the House Floor Now, Yesterday in Congress, and Schedules and Calendars.
The second useful bill-tracking site is GovTrack. GovTrack was started by Joshua Tauberer, a graduate student who set up the site as a pet project. While the site gets most of its information from THOMAS, it offers the added bonus of signing up for bill tracking services. Once you register, you can click on the Monitor button on any bill's page. GovTrack can send you daily or weekly updates of bill activity via e-mail. If you don't want to register, you can also track bills using the RSS and Atom feed links. Another nice feature is the Browse Bills by Subject page. I find it is sometimes easier to find something in the list of subjects rather than a simple keyword search, and the subject hierarchy often gives me a better idea of how to narrow down a search.
A final site I've found useful is citizenJoe. The site bills itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit group interested in highlighting national policy debates. The have a team of volunteer contributors from the liberal, conservative, and moderate camps. (FYI: they have an open call out for more conservative contriubtors -- see asterisk (*) at the bottom of the About Joe page.)
What I like about citizenJoe is the easy, bite-sized format. Their home page gives a synopsis of what's happening in Congress this week and highlights a current topic. The rest of the site is organized by issue: business, education, government, health, etc. These give a nice way to get an idea of the current bills in these areas. One thing I don't like about the site is the lack of a search feature. They point you to their site map instead.
Well, it looks like Congress is off this week, so maybe it's a good time to catch up on all that I missed.
Posted by rigd0003 at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2006
File under: Things I didn't know about Minnesota
In my morning e-mail perusals, I came across this from the Earth Observatory Newsroom: New Images - Northwest Angle, Minnesota. I've been living in Minnesota for about seven years and I just found out that our northernmost part of the state (also the northernmost part of the country contiguous U.S. -- sorry, Alaska!) was not attached to the state! The EO article mentions a Minnesota Public Radio story, which can be found here.
Posted by rigd0003 at 09:28 AM | Comments (1)
March 14, 2006
Web Authoring 101: Check the view in IE!
Just posted the story about my short trip out East when I got an IM from Ben that said something along the lines of "Picture? What picture?"
Apparently, Internet Explorer didn't like some of my HTML code, so it had left out the picture from that post and the one before it.
I could curse IE until I'm blue in the face, but the truth is it's basic HTML 101 that you always check your code in the multiple browsers to make sure things look okay. And I've been lazy. And Firefox is so good to me that I've haven't bothered with IE. My fault; I'm sorry. I just hope that checking those two is enough. I know there are other browsers out there -- I hope things look okay from there, too.
Posted by rigd0003 at 05:42 PM | Comments (1)
A Weekend Away (or There and Back Again...)
Took a little trip out East over the weekend to visit a friend. She had called me up early last month with the news that the Pogues were doing a short concert tour, including a stop in Atlantic City, not far from her home in Wilmington, Delaware. And it was the complete band that was touring, including the lead singer, Shane McGowan, whom I and many others believed had left this earthly coil.
The concert was on Saturday at the Borgata casino. The venue was nice, the casino was a casino, and the concert was great. It was a bit bizarre to see Shane amble out on stage, his posture a bit stooped. His enunciation, not good to begin with, was shot to hell by teeth that had been worn away by hard livin', leaving him with a pronounced lisp. But he can still sing -- and still howl -- and the band as a whole was fantastic and great fun to see up on stage. They gave us two hours of a great show.
On Sunday we took the train into Philadelphia to visit the Body Worlds exhibit at the Franklin Institute. I'd never been to Philadelphia before and I really enjoyed the short time I spent there. We emerged from the train station into the middle of the St. Patrick's Day parade. We walked down Benjamin Franklin Parkway following the parade and into the museum district (you can see a bit of the parade in the background behind the Love logo). It had been raining, so the crowds were a bit thin, but it was fun to see folks out having a good time. The exhibit itself was amazing and quite extensive -- a fascinating look at the human body.
We rounded up the long weekend by taking a nice walk along the near-by park trails yesterday. It was a beautiful day -- sunshine and 75 degrees -- and we took full advantage of the weather with a nice, leisurely lunch outside.
What greeted me at the Philadelphia airport later that afternoon was like a splash of cold water to the face: flights into Chicago (my transfer hub) were delayed. I actually was only delayed by half an hour at Philly since many of us were squeezed on to another flight that was leaving sooner. Chicago O'Hare was a zoo, of course, but actually not as bad as other times when Mother Nature had flexed her muscle and put the sqeeze on weary O'Hare passengers. I treated myself to a Chicago-style hot dog with the works as I waited for my delayed connecting flight. And I came home to a winter wonderland. Sunny and 75 to nine inches of snow in just a few hours. I'm excited about the snow, actually. For one, I didn't have to shovel it or drive in it. And there's the possibility it will stick around long enough for a snowshoe outing this weekend...
Posted by rigd0003 at 05:16 PM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2006
Truth stranger than fiction: Hirsute crustacean
There are weird and wondrous creatures dwelling in the depths of the sea. BBC News today had this story of a lobster/crab-like creature living along the deep thermal vents of the South Pacific. A crustacean so unique -- with silky hairs along its arms -- that a whole new taxonomic family name was created for it. This creature has been dubbed Kiwa hirsuta. According to the article, Kiwa is "the goddess of crustaceans in Polynesian mythology," and the hirsuta refers to it's hirsute quality.
Random thoughts:
• In the picture, this creature looks like one of those long-armed toy monkeys -- a rally lobster in the making?
• Goddess of crustaceans, eh?
Posted by rigd0003 at 11:02 AM | Comments (2)
March 02, 2006
House value estimator
Here's an interesting real estate web site I heard about from Bob Rankin's Internet Tourbus: Zillow.com. At Zillow.com you can type in a home address and see a basic description (number of bedrooms, bathrooms, etc.), the house's estimated value (it's "Zestimate"), and the estimated value for neighboring houses. You can also see how certain home improvements would affect the estimated value. Any changes you make are not saved. All of these features are available without having to subscribe or sign up for anything, just type in an address an go!
Posted by rigd0003 at 09:27 PM | Comments (1)
March 01, 2006
Restorative power of Spring
I flew in to Atlanta last night. As the plane began to descend ,and the web of city lights came into view, I could feel a dramatic change in the atmosphere. This is no metaphor I'm speaking of, but an actual change in the air: it felt humid. And it was not the oppressive humidity that blankets the South in the summer. This was the pleasant sort of humidity, the type that you often experience near the sea.
I had almost forgotten what that feels like. Minnesota is still a dry, very winterous land. So dry that my skin itches, so dry that cracks open up on the back of my hands, and my lips so chapped they aren't pink and smooth but white and rough and scaly.
So this short trip to Atlanta to attend a conference with no presentation obligations is turning out to be a great boost. A quick spring pick-me-up that reminds me of the promise that lies dormant back home. To all my fellow Americans who live North of the 40th parallel, you should come South for just a day or two around this time of the year. You should feel the big yellow sun on your skin, see the daffodils on the hillside, smell the greening of the earth. Then you can return to your northern home, restored and rejuvenated, still eager for Spring but now content to give it the patience you were running out of just days before, the patience to see that wonderful promise be fulfilled once again: the annual promise that Winter is followed beautifully -- mercifully -- by Spring.
Posted by rigd0003 at 10:11 PM | Comments (1)