Flying Over Greenland - Icebergs and Glaciers

It was cloudy much of the way, but then I looked out and saw what looked like icebergs.  We left Anchorage at 3:30pm Alaska time and flew north and then east I'm guessing.  So it never got really dark.  And there were icebergs.

You'd think an Anchorage guy wouldn't get that excited about a few icebergs, but we were still at maximum altitude and the landscape was very different from the Alaska/Canada glaciers I'm used to. I suppose this would be a great time to comment on climate change, but never having been over Greenland before, I can't leap to any conclusions from these two pictures.

But the National Snow and Ice Data Center can make claims that I can't.

"Surface melting on Greenland’s Ice Sheet proceeded at a brisk pace, with three spikes in the melt extent in late spring. At this point, the pace rivals but is slightly behind the record surface melt and runoff year of 2012 (record since 1979), although ahead of the three preceding seasons. Melting in 2016 is especially severe in southwestern Greenland, and moving beyond the 1981 to 2010 rate everywhere except the northwestern coast (northern Melville Coast). This has led to the early formation of melt ponds along the southwestern flank of the ice sheet and early run-off from the ice sheet."

Reading the term 'melt pond' took me back to a photo I hadn't planned on putting up where I clearly saw a bright blue pond on one of the glaciers we flew over.  Doesn't look that bright in this picture, but it's the blue mark near the bottom slightly right.

The NSIDC site has images of Greenland showing the days of cumulative ice melt this year.   So, while I can't leap from my pictures of icebergs to comments about climate change, others who study this daily can make such comments.



Here's another glacier with the red moon far in the distance.  I was looking south.   At the time I wasn't at all sure what time it was in Greenland.  It was about 8:15 pm on my watch (Anchorage time) which would make it 4:15 am in Iceland (since it was a 7 hour flight and so we had two hours to go.)  I just checked and there's a two hour difference between Iceland and Greenland, so it was 2:15 am when I took these pictures.










The colors in this picture are very accurate.  The tiny pink moon is in the center of this picture.













It got cloudy again.  Now we're in Reykjavik for the day, our plane to Paris is at 4:20pm.  It's grey, 12˚C, windy, but not raining.

Titillation Or Legitimate Journalistic Endeavor?

The University of Alaska Anchorage faculty and staff got an email from the director of human resources Friday warning them that basic information - including salaries - would be released  shortly because of a Public Records Act request. You can see the memo below.

 This would seem a good time to direct folks to a 2014 post - Is Publishing Public Employee Salaries The Financial Equivalent of Showing Bare Breasts? - that looks more closely at the logic of publishing the salaries of public employees in such detail, and generally addresses the title question.

Here's the heart of the memo people got:

"I'm writing today to advise you that UAA, within the next week, will release employee information in response to a request for information under the Alaska Public Records Act (AS 40.25.110-.220), the State Personnel Act (AS 39.25.080(b)) and Regents' Policy (P04.01.062; P06.02.010-.100). Certain employee information is designated as public information by the references cited and must be released if requested. This information release will include the following for Faculty (but not adjunct faculty) and Administrators employed at the UAA MAU as of August 12, 2016: 

-- Employee name 

-- Employment Type (Executive Officer, Faculty, or Senior Administrator) 

-- Date of Employment (Original hire date) 

-- Job Title 

-- Annual Salary 

-- Campus (UAA, KPC, Kodiak, Mat-Su, PWSC) 

Ron Kamahele, Director UAA Human Resource Services"

Again, my discussion of the issues surrounding such releases is here.

Voting Should Be Like Brushing Your Teeth

You just do it every morning and night.  Because it's such an ingrained habit, you don't skip brushing.  It's like putting the key in the ignition, part of the routine that happens automatically.

For Alaskans, primary day is Tuesday.  Many of us have already brushed early, but the polls will close Tuesday night at 8pm.  There wasn't a lot on my ballot - US House and Senate primary choices, but my state rep was unopposed.  But, like brushing teeth, you just do it automatically come election time.

But like every metaphor, parts work and parts don't.  There's more thinking and preparation involved in voting.  If you don't brush, it's your teeth and gums that suffer.  If you don't vote intelligently it's your whole community that suffers.

And like brushing, just voting alone is not enough.  Flossing is important.  So is diet.  And learning about the candidates, supporting good ones with money, labor, yard signs are all important parts of healthy electoral hygiene.


[On other matters, it's been several days since Feedburner last worked for this blog and put my posts on other blogrolls.  For those of you who get here from other blogs here are some of the posts that didn't make it:

Mushrooms And Other Signs of Rain
Walkable Cities Circa 1669
If Women Relate Their Own Gender Battles To Clinton's, She Wins Big 
Man Goes 
Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?]

Mushrooms And Other Signs Of Rain

While July was the warmest month on record in Anchorage, ever, August, while not cold, has seen its fair share of rain.



The most easily identified Anchorage mushroom is this Amanita - Fly Agaric.  It opens up and looks like a small pizza (up to about 10 inches across).  Books say it's poisonous, but I've come to learn for Alaska mushrooms that tends to mean hallucinogenic.  I included some of that discussion in this 2007 post.

These are up to about six or seven inches across.  Wasn't quite sure what they were after a quick look through my field guide to mushrooms.

Some lichens and mosses growing on the deck.

This appears to be a polypore.  It was growing out of the ground, not on a tree.  It's about five inches across.

 Some raindrops on a nasturtium leave.

Reflections in a little puddle in a garbage can lid.

What I belief is a rosy russula.  The stem is also slightly pink.

The top and underneath of what I think is a tacky green russula.  It says they're good eating.

And the worms in the compost pile are doing their job.  As I turned things over with a shovel, I could feel the heat as nature turns our kitchen waste and leaves to compost.


Some posts that haven't gotten linked to the blogrolls that you might find interesting:

Walkable Cities Circa 1669
If Women Relate Their Own Gender Battles To Clinton's, She Wins Big
Man Goes
Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?

Walkable Cities Circa 1669

As we prepare for a trip to Paris, I've been doing some reading.  Joan DeJean's How Paris Became Paris  offers lots of history of how Paris became, in many eyes, the world's greatest city.  

Image of Louis XIV, 1661 from Wikipedia

Louis XIV began by conquering land controlled by the Spanish Netherlands which thus moved Paris
from a border city to a city more in the center of the country.  Then he built fortification along the country's new frontiers.  He then wanted to get rid of the walls that fortified Paris (and most other cities then) and open Paris up.

"At a time when other European cities remained as they had been for centuries, fortified units enclosed within walls designed for their protection . . . Louis XIV decided to redefine the city.
Rather than shore up the ragtag fortifications that surrounded his capital, as many were encouraging him to do, the king announced that france was in such a strong position militarily that Paris no longer needed to be enclosed with a system of defenses.  He ordered all of its walls demolished, parts had been built by his father, while other sections dated from the reign of Charles V in the fourteenth century.  This decision sounded the death knell for medieval Paris.
The king had the fortifications replaced with parallel rows of elms, what he later described as "a rampart of trees all around the city's rim."  The green wall was soon given a mission:  it was to sere as a cours, a gigantic walkway or space for communal walking - more than one hundred and twenty feet wide and extending, in the description of one of its architects, "in a straight line as far as the eye can see."

"In 1600, there was no public walking space in the city.  Then, with its sidewalks, the Pont Neuf had introduced Parisians to a new way of experiencing a city on foot, and the Pace Royale had given them their first recreational space.  Louis XIV applied these concepts on a citywide scale.  As a result, by 1700, Paris had become the original ret walking city, a place where people walked not just to get around but for pleasure." 

No wonder that, later in the 1700s, people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin enjoyed their time in Paris so much.  

In partnership with the official in charge of the royal finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and François Blondel, 'among the most brilliant architects of the age,'  Louis XIV transformed Paris.

"The city of which LouisXIV 'took possession' in 1660 still had the layout of a medieval city:  most of its streets were mere alleyways, narrow and dark.  This detail from Braun's 1572 map shows how such premodern streets functioned:  they helped people negotiate only their immediate neighborhood.  Indeed, in the early seventeenth century, the French word rue or street designated simply 'any passageway between houses or between walls.'  Late-seventeenth-century dictionaries further advised that 'when walking Paris, one should always take these big streets.'  In less than a century, the rebuilding of Paris had transformed the concept of a street."
"In the late sixteenth century, when municipal authorities first evoked the possibility of creating broader streets, anything over fifteen feet wide was considered impossibly huge.  By 1700, the French Royal Academy of Architecture had begun to establish norms: its members determined that a width of twenty-one feet was 'an absolute minimum.'  Several years later, Delamare noted that 'the average width of a Parisian street is now between thirty and thirty-two feet.'"

"When their plans made it necessary to demolish existing public works, in an early instance of what is now called historic preservation, the city's architects studied them carefully to determine their architectural merit.  Thus, in the case of the double Saint-Antoine gate, Blondel decided that one could be torn down but not the other, 'because of the beauty of its bas-reliefs' by noted sixteenth-centurysculptor Jean Goujon and of 'the exceptional design' of one of its archways.  The resulting blend of old and new was universally praised;  an eighteenth-century historian of the city still considered it 'the most successful of Paris' gates."

Porte Saint Antoine 1671 image from Wikipedia (click to enlarge and focus)

Wikipedia says the gate was demolished in 1788 because it was an impediment to traffic.

There's a description of paving Paris with cobblestones (seven to eight inches square, eight to ten inches thick).

From the start, those cobblestones were presented as essential to the cit's beauty.  Until the 1660s, the municipality had simply encouraged individual property owners to clean in front of their homes.  But in November 1665 the inception of official street-cleaning was announced in the press:  '4,000 men have begun to rid our superb city of dirt.'  The newsman, adrien Persou de Subligny, explained that the kind had taken time off from his military campaigns to make sure Paris was running properly and had decided on this new measure.  The following year another journalist declared that 'our paving stones are now gleaming.'

Lots to think about.  Visionary, holistic planning can do amazing things.  They did have to tear down old building but they were careful about how they did it according to DeJean.  No wholesale razing of buildings as the Chinese have done in the last couple of decades.  On the other hand, there were grand Chinese cities well before this.

If Women Relate Their Own Gender Battles To Clinton's, She Wins Big

I keep reading polls that say Clinton is only slightly less disliked than her opponent.  When I look at her opponent's records, this makes no sense to me.  When people believe something that makes no sense to me, I search for some explanation.  In this case, my tentative conclusion is sexism and the Right's smear machine that spearheaded campaigns like the Swiftboating campaign against Kerry.
The point of this post is simple:  If women can see the crap that Clinton is taking because she's a woman and relate it to the crap they take in their lives, Clinton can't lose.  The rest explains my thinking here.


Before the industrial revolution, there tended to be two worlds - the public world where men could go when they overcame the biological survival needs.   The women stayed in the private world.  As Europe evolved and with the arrival of the industrial revolution, women began moving out into the men's world.  Some jobs were almost exclusively reserved for women - sewing in factories, nursing, elementary school teaching.  But whenever women ventured into male domains - in the crafts, in factories, in higher education, in the professions - they were second class citizens.  There's so much documentation on this it seems unnecessary to provide links.  One example I recently read was  Barbara Goldsmith's biography of Marie Curie Obsessive Genius.   In it she documents all the ways that Curie had to fight against barriers that kept women out of science.  They weren't allowed in the best schools. (Her father taught her and hired tutors.)  They weren't accepted into the universities.  They didn't get appointments to academic posts.  Their work was belittled.

Deborah Tannen's  Talking 9 to 5  examines the  how the language of men and women use differs, and how this disadvantages women in male dominated settings.  She also talks about norming - how the white male is the norm in the US and in male dominated organizations.  As people differ from that norm (less masculine men, women, people of color) they stand out as lesser.  But as women, say, try to be more like the norm they become less 'feminine' and they get criticized for that as well.  And this seems to be a lot of Clinton's image problem - she's a woman trying to fit a role traditionally limited to men.  She doesn't fit as a man, but as she tries, she doesn't feel right as a woman to many either.  

Sexism is often hard to prove.  Often employees have been forbidden to talk about salaries so women don't know that their male colleagues get significantly more for the same work.  And women usually didn't have more than their own anecdotal experience.  But here is one study cited in Scientific American that does give proof of what I'm talking about:

"research from Yale . . . had scientists presented with application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position and who intended to go on to graduate school. Half the scientists were given the application with a male name attached, and half were given the exact same application with a female name attached. Results found that the “female” applicants were rated significantly lower than the “males” in competence, hireability, and whether the scientist would be willing to mentor the student."

Another example is powerful men taking sexual advantage of less powerful women.   The Roger Ailes case is just the most recent.  Significant here is how long this went on and all the pressure on women not to say anything.  And the pressure of those inside Fox not to challenge the all powerful boss who was accused, not to mention the network of other men who took advantage.

So most women understand what they're up against.  They've all experienced this in some realm of their life.  If they are lucky, they've been able to live in a relative safe bubble where it didn't happen often, but the more they ventured out of the small protected group, or up in an organization, the more likely they were to face obstacles.  And there is no question that men deal with crap from male competitors within organizations as well, but being beaten by a woman is worse than being beaten by a man.  Being reprimanded by a woman is much worse than being reprimanded by a man.

There's no other explanation I can see that explains her negative perception.  OK, she's more a wonk and her work is her life.  But so were Dukakis, Gore, and Romney and their ratings were much higher.  She has issues in her past, but that's been true of every high level candidate.  But men can be wonks in our society, but women should be warm and fuzzy.  That's changing, but given the polling numbers, lots of folks haven't made that move yet.

Reagan got the Iranians to keep the hostages until he was elected* then did the arms for hostages deal with Iran.   That wasn't a problem, but Clinton's emails are a problem?  Give me a break. Benghazi and email are manufactured problems, that in the larger scheme of things are trivial.  They aren't venal, and no serious damage has been proven.  If they want to talk about civilian deaths due to drone strikes, then that's a different issue.  But they don't care about dead foreigners.  Issues about Clinton's close ties to Wall Street are problematic, but few politicians get to her level without having a number of difficult connections.  They should be talked about.  But compared to her opponent, well, there's just no comparison.

Sure, it's more than just a woman thing.  It's also about winning the presidency and all the power that gives to one faction or the other.  But the fact that Clinton's a woman is being exploited by her opponents.  That's the very definition of sexism.

So, if Clinton can figure out how to get most women voters in the US to see that her negative ratings are a result, to a great extent, of our culture's inherent sexism, the same kind of sexism they deal with daily,  then Clinton will win big.   Especially if the women then explain it all to their fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands.  Tell them the stories of the harassment they deal with daily, the stories they don't usually share because, because it doesn't seem worth the trouble.

Good Time To Book Anchorage-LA Flights - From $127 One Way

I know there is a supposed logic behind airline ticket prices.  It's clearly not related to cost.

Fortunately, my mom lived in LA and prices between Anchorage and LA have been on the silly cheap side for much of the last four years.  Due, they say, to competition from Jet Blue.  Whatever the reason, flights in October and November this year (and maybe other times, I didn't look) are $127 one way, with a stop in Seattle.  Of course, there are also more expensive flights, but there are plenty at this low price right now.

In contrast, the lowest prices between Anchorage and Seattle are $163.  If you were to fly Anchorage to Seattle at their lowest fare at the end of October ($163) and then get a flight from Seattle to LA at the lowest fare ($59), it would cost a total of $222, not quite double the Anchorage-LA lowest fare.

There have been times when it was a better deal for us to fly to LA, get a round trip ticket to Seattle, then fly home from LA.    At these current prices, it would be cheaper, slightly, to just book a stop in Seattle in one direction and the cheap LA fare in the other direction.

The $127 price to LA is the same price flying Alaska Airlines in October to Bethel, Alaska.  To LA is about five hours, to Bethel is listed as one hour 22 minutes.  (There's also a $123 fare on Raven airlines, but it takes a little longer.)

The fact that it can cost more to fly to the layover city than the final destination city on airlines is not news.  People used to book to the distant city and skip the last leg of the flight.  Online discussions suggest that probably isn't a good idea because the airline can charge you the actual fare and bar you from flying with them until you pay.

I guess the point of this post is to alert Alaskans who have a reason to go to LA, that there are some good fares.  And LA folks who want to come to Alaska as well.  October isn't a bad time to come to Anchorage.  Fall colors should be good and we haven't had much October snow for a number of years now.


[If you get here from another blog's blogroll, there were two posts that never made it you may want to check out below;
Man Goes
Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?]

Man Goes *

I've got several draft posts, but nothing done.  Well, I did post "Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?" but Feedburner didn't get it to other blogrolls.  This is just a filler post, but did you ever consider that the name of the fruit mango is essentially, Man Go?  So technically the picture below should be Men Go.

Who Invented Inflatable Tube Guys?

You've seen the dancing in car lots and lots of other kinds of businesses.  But who thought this up?

It turns out to be something of an evolutionary process - starting with Israeli Doron Gazitt who started out making balloon figures on the street for kids, a design school project helped by his father's work in agriculture - with plastic green house tubes. Trinidadian Carnival artist Peter Minshall, and eventually the the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and the 1998 Superbowl halftime show.

"But these first tube guys didn’t look much like the simple wiggling noodle man that’s since come to dominate America’s used car lots. They were sixty feet tall, with two legs that each had a dedicated fan and a separate articulated torso, arms, and head. These weren’t tube guys. These were full-on tube gods."

All this comes from a fascinating history of inflatable tube guys at reForm, called

Biography of an Inflatable Tube GuyThe checkered past and lonely future of air puppets

Well worth the time with pictures showing the evolution from art to advertising distraction.  Or as, according to the post, both Gazitt and Minshall agree,

"the single-tubed descendants of their wacky inflatable Olympic babies are an abomination. Gazit calls them “very ugly and very unattractive,” and Gulick, 'an impoverished version of the device.”

The writer  does it all.  There's nothing for me to add, except I saw this red one Monday in front of High Frequency, a locally owned shop, where I bought a used phone for my wife before hers is no longer served.  I think I sidestepped the high prices at ATT for a reasonably good phone.  We'll see.  And it seems all the prices there are negotiable.

From Love To War - New Books At UAA

I checked the new books shelves at UAA library the other day and I'm finally getting around to putting up a short sampling.  I'm trying to spend more time off the computer, so this will be brief.  There were also some more technical books, but social sciences and humanities seemed to dominate.

These two books with practically the same title:

From an interview with Nancy Sherman the author of Afterwar:

"The concept of ‘moral injuries’ associated with combat experience, an affliction of growing interest to both military and healthcare communities, features prominently throughout the book."

And from a review of Zoë Wool's After War:

"In After War: The Weight of Life At Walter Reed, Zoë Wool shares her experience working with some of the most grievously wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During a year of research from 2007-2008, Wool conducted fieldwork with amputees recovering at Walter Reed Medical Center, the military hospital complex that has become emblematic of the post-war experience of American combat wounded service members."

There were two books about Yiddish - one on short stories and one on theater.
















These covers seemed a bit out of place at a university library - but they're Alaska stories.

And now that I've looked it up, it seems that sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.  From Lifeway, where you can watch a video of the author and/or read the transcript :

"Christian Romance Fiction author Dani Pettrey talks about her books Shattered and Submerged. We also find out more about her writing process, the role of fiction in ministry, and her favorite authors."

Here's a more academic look at romance.  You can read a review of Brossard's On Romantic Love.

This one deals with a subject dear to my heart - how we know things.  In particular it looks at how the stories sent from the New World back to Europe reflected what Europeans thought about the New World as much, if not more, than it reflected the New World.  From the back cover:

"Comparing the official 1784 edition of [Captain James] Cook's journal for that voyage with Cook's actual journal accounts, Curie demonstrates the representation of North America's northwest coast in the late eighteenth century was shaped as much by the publication process as by British notions of landscape, natural history, cannibalism, and history in the new world.  Most recent scholarship on imperialist representation of the non-European world takes these published accounts at face value.  Constructing Colonial Discourse combines close textual analysis with the insights of postcolonial theory to critique the discursive and rhetorical strategies by which the official account of the third voyage transformed Cook into an imperial hero."

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is one of the UAA/APU Books of  the Year along with The Color of Water.

These books should show up in a lot of different classes and discussed from the perspective of the course subject.  The "Topics of Relevance" for 2015-2017 is "Negotiating Identity in America."

From Project Muse:

"Networks of Modernism offers a new understanding of American modernist aesthetics and introduces the idea that networks were central to how American moderns thought about their culture in their dramatically changing milieu. While conventional wisdom holds that the network rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of information technologies, digitization is only the most recent manifestation of networks in intellectual history. Crucial developments in modern America provide another archive of network discourses well before the advent of the digital age. The rise of the railroad recast the American landscape as an assortment of interconnected hubs. The advent of broadcast radio created a decentralized audience that was at once the medium’s strength and its weakness. The steady and intertwined advances of urbanization and immigration demanded the reconceptualization of community and ethnic identity to replace the failing “melting pot” metaphor for the nation. Indeed, the signal developments of the modern era eroded social stratification and reorganized American society in a nodal, decentralized, and interpenetrating form—what today we would label a “distributed” network that is fully flattened and holds no clustered centers of power."

You can look at the table of contents here.

From a Journal of Europe Studies review of the book:

“Inner emigrants were nonconformist writers ‘dealing in ambiguity’, whose works had - and retain - ‘the potential to be read and understood simultaneously as both a form of tacit opposition to and acquiescence in the regime.’

From an interview with the author on why she chose to write about social media in the war zone:

"A: My brother was on his first deployment in Iraq while I was in graduate school studying communication. At the time, he and I mostly wrote letters back and forth. But I began paying closer attention to advancements in digital communication technologies, especially when the infamous Abu Ghraib photos emerged. At the time, it seemed like new communication technologies (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook) were becoming available at the same time we were becoming increasingly entrenched in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I was personally and academically invested in keeping a close eye on both of these “fronts.” I wondered how all this connection would change what it’s like to be at war."