Refresh, Refresh

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After reading this review, I really want to read Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy.

These short stories, especially the title story, literally pull you in to the high desert of central Oregon and drop you off, to feel, process, and face the emotional upheaval of our time, usually through the rich inner life of a young male character.

underage drinking

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I’ve always thought it was silly that our government deems 18 year olds responsible enough to be soldiers, but not responsible enough to drink. Under current law, it’s easy for underage people to get alcohol. A high percentage of the people I know have (or have had) fake IDs that get them into bars and work just fine in stores. And you can always get a slightly older friend to buy it for you. Current laws don’t discourage underage drinking much and there are few education programs discouraging things like binge drinking. Take the situation on college campuses for example. My university has 3 all freshman dorms. Almost every weekend night, there’s an ambulance outside at least one of them for someone with alcohol poisoning.

I think we should lower the drinking age to 18 with a few stipulations. I think 18-20 year olds should only be able to buy alcohol in bars. This is good for several reasons. Bartenders don’t serve people who are too drunk. It will be good for local businesses. And alcohol in bars is usually more expensive, so 18 year olds won’t be able to afford as much to drink. Make the consequences for buying alcohol from a store for people under 21 more severe. Ramp up consequences for DUIs for people under 21- say anything over the limit results in a 6 month suspension of a driver’s license and a 100 hrs of community service, in addition to already existing penalties. And students should get better education in high school and when they start college about drinking responsibly.

18-20 year olds aren’t going to stop drinking, but we can teach them to do it responsibly and “train” them a bit by forcing them to drink in public, not in a dorm room surrounded by other 18 year olds trying to prove they can drink someone else under the table.

COFECHA and file format problems

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I use a program called COFECHA to help crossdate trees. COFECHA uses some old school formats developed for punch-cards. Excel, which I used to make changes to ring widths, does not like these formats. There are lots of programs for changing formats, but it’s all a bit confusing.

Many dendrochronology programs produce and use Compact/Precision formats. When crossdating trees with the program COFECHA, it is often useful to convert Compact/Precision formats to formats recognized by spreadsheet programs like Excel and then convert back to Compact/Precision formats to run through COFECHA. So for any other confused dendrochronologists out there, here’s a method that works for me.

Compact/Precision format looks like this when you open it with notepad:

ira 11946 170 200 216 755

ira 11950 529 332 405 342 384 760 647 363 556 466

ira 11960 288 431 490 124 827 282 319 248 441 1082

ira 11970 1601 498 992 1407 850 1053 1356 951 1145 1621

ira 11980 1756 1381 1397 1626 1868 2739 2447 2250 1684 1942

ira 11990 1401 1390 861 1389 1158 1421 1454 1040 -9999

Sometimes the numbers seem to run together, but each line will start with a series identifier and each series will end with -9999.

Convert file from Compact/Precision to tab delimited .txt file with program YUX. Open .txt file with Excel and make necessary changes, being sure to save as a tab delimited .txt file. Convert to Compact/Precision format with program CASE, being sure to save the new file as a .rwl. COFECHA should be able to read this file.

If you get COFECHA output that only includes the title or part of the desired output, try playing around with the print options in COFECHA.  If COFECHA produces a completely empty output file, try copying and pasting the information from your .rwl file into an existing .rwl file and saving it as a new .rwl file.

All programs can be downloaded from the Ultimate Tree Ring Web Pages run by Henri Grissino-Mayer.

tree rings

drought and australian farmers

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The Australian government pays farmers during drought and wants to modify the program to help farmers deal better with climate change.

Agriculture Minister Tony Burke says he supports the payments system but wants it to be improved, with farmers given more help to deal with climate change.

…

“What we want to make sure of is that it can be improved so that whenever somebody goes through a period of drought and goes through a period of needing government assistance, by the time that period’s over, they’ve actually got themselves better prepared and better engaged to deal with climate change.”

Sounds good, right? Actually, if you’ve been keeping up with predictions of what climate change is going to do to Australia, this is not a good plan. This phrase – “by the time that period’s over”- demonstrates the problem. The period isn’t going to be over. I’m no expert on climate change, but a quick search shows that likely scenarios aren’t looking good. Here’s what scientists have to say about future moisture in Australia:

Considerable uncertainty remains as to future changes in rainfall, El Niño Southern Oscillation events and tropical cyclone activity. Overall increases in potential evaporation over much of the continent are predicted as well as continued reductions in the extent and duration of snow cover.

“Overall increases in potential evaporation” means that it isn’t going to matter if it starts raining again. When it’s warmer, more water evaporates and less water is available for plants.  So while we aren’t entirely sure what’s going to happen with rainfall, it’s going to be a rough life for plants regardless.  And what’s already happened is likely to continue happening:

There have been significant regional trends in rainfall with the northern, eastern and southern parts of the continent receiving greater rainfall and the western region receiving less.

Maybe a better idea would be to move farming to regions where more rainfall is expected.  Or find something else for the farmers to do.