My Car’s Sick

Ahh, the sights, smells and sounds of thunderstorms in springtime, not much can top that. It’s been storming a bit tonight, but at least it’s provided some nice background this evening to my slaving away at my computer on some powerpoint slides for the RKW group presentation in Mesoscale on Friday, and more recently, getting a few more paragraphs written on my Cloud Physics paper. I think it’s really starting to come together a bit more for me, I’ve finally decided on a rough course to follow for the rest of the paper, hopefully that’ll get me in the target 5-7 page range by the time it’s all said and done. I’m really wanting to try to get that done, or at least mostly done, tomorrow night. Then I can start focusing on that monster 15 pg paper for Mesoscale…
I dropped my car off at Ripka’s Garage this evening, they’re gonna take a look at it tomorrow. Hopefully they’ll be able to figure out why my car hasn’t been liking to warm start for the past 3-4 months. They had a hunch it might be something like the temperature sensor, but I just hope that whatever’s wrong it won’t cost too much money to fix.
I officially signed on to Joel Peltier’s dispersion research group that I mentioned in my last entry, so I’m no longer unemployed for the summer, which is a good feeling.
Dave mentioned in a comment on my last post that I needed to mention something about global warming on my blog. As luck would have it, I’ve run across a couple of great articles on the subject this week, so I thought I’d pass them on to everyone. First, a paleoclimatologist from James Cook University in Australia wrote quite an interesting article declaring that, according to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, there has been NO global warming since 1998. Who’d’ve thunk it? And second, Richard Lindzen, the Sloane Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal today about how most climate scientists who don’t parrot the global warming alarmist line are being intimidated into silence, usually by having their research funding cut. As an interesting side note, both of those articles I linked to mention Michael Mann, who is in his first year on the faculty in the Department of Meteorology here at Penn State.
In some other interesting articles, the man whose real-life story became the basis for the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” also wrote an article for the WSJ recently, trying to highlight how the world is ignoring the lessons learned in Rwanda when it comes to the genocide occurring in Darfur, about which Western governments are doing absolutely nothing.
Congress’s African AIDS relief plan is being assailed by relativists, despite statistics which back up its effectiveness.
24 fans of the world rejoice! Kiefer Sutherland has signed on for another three years of the show, pretty much ending some rumors that I’d heard going around that this might be the last season. So I guess that kinda takes the suspense out of whether or not Jack’s gonna die this season…
Apparently police in LA don’t have enough to do, because they issued a citation and fine to an elderly woman for not crossing the street quickly enough.
And finally, salad greens have a whole new meaning Down Under. And to think that I always got all my groceries at Coles when I lived in Melbourne…
Well, I think that’s quite enough of a break for tonight. Time to get back to work, and try to get another couple paragraphs of my paper written before I call it a night.