Full details in the WeRobot 2020 Call for Proposals.
Kevin Drum tips me over the edge:
This year’s Academy Award for the most pregnant use of an adverb goes to a Senior Administration Official speaking to the Washington Post about the homeless in Los Angeles:
We’re not rounding people up or anything yet. You guys in the media get too ahead of yourselves.
Quite so. All they’re doing is looking at cavernous storage facilities near the airport that might be used someday for rounding up the homeless. Why is everyone getting so upset already?
I don’t necessarily want to associate myself with every word in John’s Buell’s post at Informed Comment, The Politics of the Local Weather Broadcast: Call your Station and Demand News of Climate Crisis, but it inspired me to wonder why it is that the local and national weather news doesn’t include the latest figure on atmospheric carbon dioxide. I’m not a climate scientist, but the overwhelming scientific consensus seems to be that the more CO2 in the air, the more the earth traps heat. That should be of concern to everyone. And the data are not hard to find–such as at CO2.Earth, which reports a current number of 409.95 ppm, which is certainly the highest number in the past 1,000 years.
Mentioning the weekly CO2 number as a routine part of the weather report would not only make the point that weather forecaster think carbon matters, it would sensitize the public to the so-far inexorable rise in a key heat-trapping gas.
This is a international issue, but it’s one of particular salience to South Florida: There’s a pretty simple thermodynamic correlation between atmospheric heat and water temperature. And we know that hurricanes get stronger when they go over warmer water. Higher temperatures also contribute to ice-cap melt, raising sea level. Want to avoid more of this? Time to call or email your local weatherperson?
This rap video featuring ‘Alexander Hamilton’ vs. ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ over the merits of centralized, government-fiat currency, versus decentralized cryptocurrencies.is surprisingly good; actually it’s very good:
Talia Boiangin
Congratulations to MiamiLaw 3L Talia Boiangin who won third place in a national competition, LSAC’s first-ever Access-to-Justice Legal Tech Competition. Her winning project was the Cyber Civil Rights Resource Guide, an app that places non-consensual pornography statutes and tips for removing such images at victims’ fingertips. Ms. Boiangin won $5,000 for her app.
Well done! Now how about that paper you’re writing for me….
Jotwell Blenderlaw Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch
