Hold 'em all up

You can't make this stuff up.

Alabama senator Richard Shelby has put a hold on all of President Obama's appointments. Meaning that they can not be appointed unless the senate overcomes a filibuster.

Why did he do that? So that his state gets two pork-barrel projects: an aerospace contract and a FBI lab. Shelby is unapolegetic about his use of earmarks. And if I were from Alabama, I'd be fully in support of his behavior too.

But as a nation, it's not in our interest to have these kinds of rules. The Senate needs reform. The Brits did it with their anachronistic House of Lords a few years ago. We need to follow suit.

Photo: Shelby Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama.

Two for two

I was in Madison, Wisconsin and so missed the ice and snow storm in Norman. I came back to this:

In less than a month, we've had two major snow storms which is quite unusual for Oklahoma. I missed the Christmas Eve blizzard too -- we were on a family vacation in the Yucatan then. The similarities don't stop there. We returned from Mexico and got stranded in Dallas because there were no flights into Oklahoma City. The time, the airport was closed on Friday afternoon, leaving me stranded in St. Louis. Two for two then in missing the winter storm and in being stranded.

The difference, of course, is that this time it was not all of us. Just me being away from home. S2 (the five-year old) made me a card and wanted to mail it. Mom, ever practical, pointed out that I'd be home before the postman came to pick up the mail. Since this ended up not being the case, S2 had an extra day of waiting before she could show me "her surprise":

The uses of a zero rupee note

A non-profit organization in India has pioneered the use of zero-rupee notes. The idea is that when a citizen is asked for a bribe, he hands over a zero-rupee note in protest.

I would have thought an official demanding bribes would be shameless, but surprisingly, this seems to work:

Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

Equatorial weather desired

"Nice day, eh, buddy?," remarked the taxi driver in Madison, Wisconsin today. Such a nice day that he was driving with his window rolled down. It is 21F and the wind is bitingly cold. But, yes, the sun was out. There's a crew watering the lake, so folks can skate tonight. This is what, in Madison, goes as a nice winter day. But it does beat ice, freezing rain and sleet, on the menu of outcomes in Norman tomorrow night.

It's times like these that I miss my childhood. Ice and sleet (like the bubonic plague) were just words in books when I was growing up in Africa, 6 degrees north of the equator. And 21F? I can not recall ever talking about the temperature.

p.s. do click the link for "6 degrees north". Google Maps now has a feature where they link photographs of the area.

Melbourne not so friendly anymore

Suddenly, it seems that Indians and Australians can not agree on how to interpret events.

A 21-year old Indian student was stabbed and killed in Melbourne. A few days later, a 29-year old Indian was set ablaze in the same city. Indians in the city were convinced that it was all racially motivated and protested that a string of attacks since 2004 had been systematically ignored by the police. The Australian police disagreed, called the events "crimes of convenience".

Another attack on an Indian student took place on a train. Video of this showed up on YouTube but was taken down because (some of?) the attackers were under 18. But of course, you can never totally shutdown video like this. The Australian response is "these guys are minors and this video is illegal" while the Indian response is "these guys are thugs ... why haven't they been punished?"

An Indian paper ran this cartoon:

prompting outrage in Australia. A bit unfair to taint Australians with the legacy of the American South, but from an Indian standpoint, all racist white people wear hoods.

Meanwhile, the number of Indians wanting to study in Australia has plummeted by 46%. Indian students started considering Australia and the UK after 9/11 when the US made visas harder and harder to get. Does this mean that we start getting those students again? Or will they take another look at Indian universities which have also been getting much better?

Priorities

When it comes to expanding Daylight Savings Time by a month, Congress can find the votes. No dysfunctionality there. But when it comes to climate change or health care legislation, no way.

Democrats have simply seized on Scott Brown's election as an excuse to not do anything.

Ax me now

A bunch of Atmospheric Science Librarians -- librarians -- had a panel discussion today: "Do you know where your data is?"

Librarians, at the very least, should know that data are.