One of the things I really like about Corvallis is that so many different trees flourish here; there are at least two different kinds of walnut within a block of our house. We’ve harvested some already for eating, but there is a slightly menacing corollary of that bounty manifesting itself about this time of year. As if the hazards of being hit by a falling walnut or having your feet roll out from underneath you on a carpet of them wasn’t bad enough, when shedding fruit in great quantities, these trees draw crows in flocks large enough to qualify as Hitchcockian.

In attempting to devour the crop, crows can be seen trying to crack walnuts by attempting to pin them between their feet to peck at, or drop them from lamp posts, or wedge them in the manhole cover, or (my personal favorite) hurl them at human interlopers. Displaying an amazing variety of tactics, and using elements of the natural environment to their advantage, as well as (superficially, at least) learning from past mistakes presents something very close to empiricism.

How (or even whether) ’science’ is defined differently than empiricism is evident in the Stanford article above, but a definition of ’science’ is pretty difficult to pin down, even by example or in contrast. Nonetheless, it is something that isn’t present in the book Unscientific America, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. I liked a lot of things about the book, including their specific policy examples and seamless inclusion of philosophers of science in a discussion generally very practical in nature.

Their main point is diluted somewhat, though, by the absence of a definition of science, except by the research fields of either the authors themselves or those they quote. That range is not particularly broad, including primarily genetics, physics, astronomy, and some kinds of biology. This limitation to things that happen in the lab, and generally happen with complex infrastructure, either of mathematics or of instruments, does represent the esoteric and expensive character of a lot of contemporary research. It doesn’t, however, instill much fellow-feeling with other teachers or researchers, and while I agree that even without being overly thorough a definition of science could consume an entire book in itself, I think that a run at it would have helped the authors’ case.

One of the things I liked best about the book was that the authors don’t repeat the frequent lament about researchers bearing the burden of an uneducated public. Instead, they discuss the imperative for citizens to understand how scientific research and government policy fit into their lives while also pressing researchers and policy makers to own up to their lack of effort in teaching those citizens. This is a key point, illustrated by some insight into the training and career rewards of academic researchers. This also dovetails well with another distinction the authors make, and that is between citizen’s knowledge of isolated bits of information as opposed to a coherent fitting of conceptual knowledge with daily decisions. Another key point, and one not made often enough, especially not on purpose.

A curious omission is the lack of discussion about race, class, or gender in the science professions. This is an issue that can be either seemingly confirmed or apparently refuted, depending on whose anecdotes we listen to, but it is an important issue. It seems slightly inconsistent that the authors decry the weaknesses in the college education pipeline for scientists, but then in almost the next sentence, claim that the broken process produces high quality results. While I am not at all interested in attacking any career track or school or even mode of schooling, this a discussion of how rife the postdoc process is with infighting does not jibe with the successful products of that process having research as their greatest skill.

All of that said, I found that this book renewed my commitment to working in education, and to educating myself. The authors are arguing for greater public involvement in an important arena, as Jim Giles points out in a review in New Scientist, and that is a sentiment always worth stating.

Happy September equinox, everyone.

One of the cool things about this day is that it has a fairly high profile on the common, demi-Gregorian calendar, the equinoxes perhaps figuring even larger than solstices in my casual surveys. Another one is that it is only the autumnal equinox if you live north of the equator: otherwise, it is the vernal kind.

Meanwhile, though, while it is the closest we get to equal night and day (hence the name–nice of those Romans to use cognates so we’d recognize their mark on history) it is not, in fact, twelve hours of each. Due to a few things here and there, the total winds up being about twelve hours and eight minutes of daylight and eleven hours and fifty-two minutes of darkness, although I think the actual amounts end up varying by a few minutes depending on your latitude. Just goes to show that even recognizing one layer of complexity of function isn’t always enough.

Furthermore, as Dr. Tyson and Astronomy Picture of the Day have grandly demonstrated, the point on the horizon where the Sun rises and sets changes throughout the year, and today it rises pretty much due east and sets pretty much due west. On the December solstice it will reach its farthest south rising and setting, and farthest north on the June version. According to an astronomer I know who dabbles in such things, ancient sites like Stonehenge and Ahu a Umi still line up with these marks because even though the Earth’s axis wobbles on the ~28,000 year cycle of precession, the amount of tilt doesn’t change very much, and that is what matters for things like farthest north and south sunsets and -rises.

Since the new Moon on Friday marked the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Rosh Hashannah, we will have to talk about lunar calendars sometime soon, but not enough room in this post.

Generally speaking, it is unusual for ‘economic stimulus jobs’ and ‘underwater robots’ to appear in the same sentence. For a month this summer, though, those two concepts went hand-in-claw at a camp organized by Linn-Benton Community College staff and students. As a part of the Oregon Underwater Volcanic Exploration Team, high school students from all over the state received training in job skills like electrical circuit design, budget-keeping, and geographic information systems as they built and operated research submersibles called ROVs. The high schoolers were nominated by teachers and counselors in their home towns, and spent six days camping on Paulina Lake inside Newberry National Volcanic Monument east of LaPine. Each student designed and built their own ROV, which they got to take home at the end of the week. Money for the project came from a grant by The Oregon Consortium and the Oregon Workforce Alliance, by way of legislative money for job training in Oregon, where high-tech job growth requires constant workforce training.

The staff of OUVET, drawn from LBCC students who had designed and built their own ROV for a competition in Massachusetts earlier this year, were organized by physics professor Greg Mulder. Students describe Mulder as a great classroom teacher who also looks for opportunities to apply science to the outside world, leading field trips to Hawai`i as well as eastern Oregon. Mulder in turn talks about all of the hard work and creativity the students put into designing and building the research ROV sporting lights, a video camera, and a grasping metal claw, all of which have been tested at more than 200 feet deep. At the OUVET camp, staff and students used the research ROV to study the geology at the bottom of the lake, which has features of unknown composition, including a fifty meter tall spire just a few meters across.

All told, students got to design, build, and drive underwater ROVs, study geology, physics, and natural science, and learn about career paths and career skills. Not bad. Pictures and video are up on the OUVET website. I only regret there wasn’t a way to transcribe some of the great campfire conversations about the philosophy and culture of science. As a kind of supplement, I’ll include an excerpt from the outstanding book Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, set in small-town Prince Edward Island in the early 20th century CE, and which Elle was recently rereading, that illustrates the nature of deductive reasoning as neatly as anything I can imagine:

And yet here was Matthew Cuthbert, at half-past three on the afternoon of a busy day, placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill; moreover, he wore a white collar and his best suit of clothes, which was plain proof that he was going out of Avonlea; and he had the buggy and the sorrel mare, which meant he was going a considerable distance. Now, where was Matthew Cuthbert going, and why was he going there?
…
Mrs. Rachel, before she had fairly closed the door [of the kitchen at Green Gables, the Cuthbert's home], had taken mental note of everything that was on that table. There were three plates laid, so that Marilla must be expecting some one home with Matthew to tea; but the dishes were every-day dishes and there was only crab apple preserves and one kind of cake, so that the expected company could not be any particular company. Yet what of Matthew’s white collar and the sorrel mare? Mrs. Rachel was getting fairly dizzy with this unusual mystery about quiet, unmysterious Green Gables.

I once had a brief discussion with a much smarter fellow than myself wherein he argued that four was an arbitrary number for cardinal geographic directions. While I concede (now, as I didn’t then) that he is correct from a geometric point of view, there seems to be at least one evident physical reason for the choice: one direction each for sunrise, sunset, and halfway from each to the other.

While Guy Ottewell gives a potential (if esoteric) thesis for why A is the first letter of a couple of different alphabets, I have nothing like the speculative erudition to say whether my guess holds any water. I do know, though, that while useful direction finding tools can be simple, they can also be arbitrary. Polynesian navigators use celestial coordinate systems shaped from the rising and setting of the Sun and other stars, and these coordinate systems are sometimes symmetrical and even, but not always. Navigators also shape their course based upon other information including clouds, wind, sea critters, birds, and other factors.

One of these other factors was brought into sharper focus for me as I flew from Minneapolis to Cleveland last week, passing over Lakes Michigan and Erie on the way. As far as I’ve been able to figure, this trip was at a similar altitude to those from Hilo to Honolulu, flying at approximately 30,000 feet. What struck me as different, though, was that while I was used to seeing the Pacific Ocean with increasing complexity as more and different sets of waves gradually revealed themselves crossing and rolling on its slightly rough skin, I didn’t see any texture of swells on the two Great Lakes.

Having grown up about six blocks from the edge of Lake Superior, and spent time tagging along on boats with my father from a tender age, I can attest that the Great Lakes do possess waves of sufficient size as to be seen from the air. Those waves might not be the sixty-foot seas of the northern Pacific that cause the weather announcers to doubt their script in the middle of reading it, or even the massive rollers that create the fantastic offshore breaks at Peahi near Maui or Mavericks off California, but Great Lakes waves have sunk ships and otherwise imposed their presence in plenty of ways. In short, I was surprised that I couldn’t see anything from the air, even on a relatively calm day.

My guess as to the cause is something called fetch. In this case a noun, fetch refers to the distance across the water that a wind blowing in that direction has to build up waves. While modeling the problem quantitatively is by nature more complicated, fetch can have an effect equal to that of the speed of the wind. It is the biggest reason why small lakes don’t have big waves. Wind speed and fetch can also affect the rate at which waves come in, their period, a characteristic well known and scrutinized by surfers everywhere.

I’ll do some checking with other resources, but I would guess that the tapestry of overlaid swells that help Polynesian navigators orient themselves on the Pacific was also present on Lake Michigan a week ago, and that the chief difference in appearance wasn’t caused by a difference in height of the waves, but rather in their frequency. Lake Michigan is long and thin, perhaps 85 miles wide from Milwaukee, WI on the west side to Grand Haven, MI on the east, but 280 miles north to south from rural Summer Island on the UP to industrial Gary, Indiana. Thus, when the wind is blowing most directions, there is fairly little water to build up long distances between waves. Only if the wind blows due north or due south (winds being named for the direction they are blowing _from_, in most cases) is their enough fetch to produce swells wide enough to be seen from the air.

Any kindly contributors with more knowledge are invited to comment, particularly if you have done some calculations. I am halfway through building a KML file for the trip, and will post it to the comments when it’s finished.

Both the elliptical title of this post and the long distance from its antecedent have the same toothmarks: I’ve been reading so much, I haven’t wanted to write anything. I’ve enjoyed being both the style and the substance of The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, and read it interspersed with revisiting some Terry Pratchett and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Also slowly, slowly working my way through Borges Ficciones, wherein the most pertinent quote might be from The Library of Babel: “You, reader, are you sure you understand my language?”

I’m not sure I do, but it is wonderfully toilsome to try.

At any rate, the weather here has been early summer over the weekend–sunny and 70 degrees. The Sun is now transiting the meridian pretty high in the sky, and the skylights in our house are providing lots of light. As the Moon waxes these days, it picks up where the Sun leaves off, and it, too, illuminates our kitchen from above. We planted some roses in the backyard yesterday, and right now a delicate golden kinglet seems to be taking advantage of the legions of buds on the red maple right outside the kitchen window, making a hurried morning meal. For my own hurried morning meal, I cracked open a jar of apple butter received from one of Elle’s comrades at the university. I’m trying to use more glass jars so I can use fewer disposable containers; I’m also trying to buy as much food as possible in reusable containers.

Coffee has been a problem there, although since I buy bulk beans, I usually just end up with the strangely useless paper bags provided at the store. I also usually don’t buy expensive coffee, on the argument that if Kona estate peaberry isn’t laying around, I won’t know the difference. All of this is by way of saying that I was highly amused that Dunkin’ Donuts is marketing their coffee in grocery stores here, where I don’t think there’s an actual Dunkin’ Donuts storefront for a thousand miles: I prefer Dunkin’ Donuts to that Krispy Kreme, which we at least have in Portland. I am amused to no end that I stepped outside habit to buy a name brand product which is then not the product that gives the name. But it is pretty good coffee.

Front-page editors of various newspapers I saw yesterday seem to feel bound to report on the North Korean missle launch, and perhaps in honor of tradition to do it in the same way such things were reported during the cold war. Although I haven’t seen anybody labelled ‘Reds,’ yet. Perhaps they are referring to the limited historical and belligerent importance when they use smaller type for that headline than for budget stuff. Or perhaps they have taken notice, as Jeffrey Lewis has, that for as much as North Korea wants to impress the world by being a scary nuclear power, they are actually 0 for 3 with these kinds of things.

Sure, they did prove to their own citizens that they are still defiant, but that doesn’t seem too important right now. The NORK government is also still trying to tell everybody that they got a satellite into orbit, but people seem to be paying more attention to the statement by Obama, encouraging renewed consideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

That’s an unintended success.

Well, if I can say something without jinxing it, it appears as though our two weeks of winter may be over. Not but what it won’t be grey and rainy for a while yet, but the incipient buds are swelling more greenly on their socially networked branches. The leaves cluttering the sidewalks are from the sweetgums, and most of them only just fell within the last month. We’ve had some sunny warmth here and there, and while I haven’t seen any hummingbirds yet, the Steller’s Jays have been joined by squads of robins.

But the thing that really brought a sense of seasonal change for me was at the end of the cold snap we had in December. Hardly seems fair of me to use that term, when Fairbanks has been pretty chilly by comparison, but people take notice when we get a weeks worth of heavy frosts in Corvallis. At any rate, on about 29 December, I woke to find cirrus clouds covering most of the sky, and causing a strong, beautiful 22 1/2 degree halo around the Sun. I’ve long since given up any pretensions to being able to photograph such phenomena, so I contented myself with staring upward for several blocks on the way to work.

What I can’t bring myself to do, though, is extrapolate this into any kind of homily about climate change. It’s not that I lack regard for personal observations in favor of quantified, lab-coated science, but just that my wealthy-nation, suburban, privileged existence hasn’t afforded me the chance to really develop a nuanced sense of the weather. To quote Tom Bombadil, “I am no weather-master, nor is aught that goes on two legs.”

I do think that the nature of scientific analysis is itself changing, particularly as Chris Anderson et al talk about in the “Petabyte Age” case studies, but I still think that if we are going to critique data with anecdotes, they should be anecdotes from Moku o Keawe, or Anaktuvuk Pass, or Mali. This isn’t my white liberal guilt talking, it is an attempt at honest recognition of where knowledge about the world around us is stored, and how that knowledge is evaluated and applied.

This brings up another point about the way we view ourselves and the world around us: in fact about whether that distinction can be made at all. The recent story about vulcanologists happening upon an active magma chamber 2500 meters below the surface of Puna is a perfect example of this, although you can’t tell that from the BBC story. What I mean is that a description often heard from Anglo-European researchers in Hawai`i is that the islands are a marvelous laboratory for research and discovery. I don’t disagree that a lot of learning is effected there, but I take issue with that framing of the circumstances.

According to some of the people I have talked to, creating “the environment” in order to set ourselves apart from it is not a mode of thinking that occurs in Native Hawaiian culture. I’m certain that if my memory were better, I would recall the places in literary criticism or philosophy where the discussion of the situated observer takes place, but then again I’m not sure that they are close enough kin to the ideas I’m talking about even if they are the intellectual starting point that I use. The best summation that I can find is the discussion I’ve heard from some Hawaiian cultural practitioners where they talk with disbelief about the desire Anglo-Europeans have to indicate a specific piece of ’sacred’ land. That misses the point, according to these cultural practitioners, that land can’t be arbitrarily divided like that, or at least no land can be identified as non-sacred, so as in order to be busted up by a big drill.

I certainly acknowledge the infringement on politics to a debate like that, too, and nowhere more so than Hawai`i, where somebody once told me that land is politics. But I’m definitely not qualified to undertake that discussion. Talk amongst yourselves.

It’s been more than a week, and I still am saddened when I think of the loss of Phil Rounds. Ben Fleagle already did a better job than I did talking about it, and was closer to the loss. Right now, I feel pretty close, though. My thoughts go out to all in the Great White North.

And there are many who also appreciate the efforts of those who show how he was missed. Staff at the News-Miner did an excellent job with a several articles and an obituary. While I’m at it, I’d like to thank Todd Shechter for several email forwards, Josh Zwart for the thirty second version of A-shift history and pumpkin pie, and my wife for her diligence on Facebook.

But I think the most impressive is this video. Taken by Carol Falcetta, it shows the procession down University Avenue in Fairbanks towards Phil’s memorial service. The music is very nice, and the video itself shows some small measure of the respect this man held. First of all, remember that every engine pictured represents an entire department that committed to sending a crew for this. Also, for those of you fire service folks out there, wait until the end and count the number of law enforcement. Try to imagine another firefighter getting that kind of help from cops.

We’ll miss you, Phil.

I was always the awkward kid. The one who read too much and played too little; not strong, not brave, not confident. I was that kid well into my teens and if you watch me now, you’ll still see it occasionally. I don’t quite know how, therefore, I decided to be a firefighter: full-time for a few years, a volly for a few more, and now getting lost in the woods on a regular basis.

Maybe blame my roommate Myles, who talked me into taking an EMT class, or the instructor of that class, the incomparable Deena Thomas (nee Stout). Maybe blame Bud Rotroff, who made clear from the first Fire Science class I took with him that this was where serious people lived. But certainly, a great share of the blame can be laid on Battalion Chief Phil Rounds, who commanded respect for the University Fire Department from the first moment he entered a room. Ben Fleagle has written it already, all I want to do is lend my own voice to talking about a great guy I knew, who passed away a few days ago.

Anybody who ever met Phil couldn’t help but respect him, laugh with him, and for we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters who worked for him, we couldn’t help but be devoted to him. I’m pretty sure that my time on A-Shift was only about six months, but like many things that happen to you in your early twenties, it lasted much longer than that. A lot of fortune was good then, besides working for Phil and Jerry Philips: I met Jason Buist, Alan Rook, Josh Dronkers, Dave Shechter, Dan Miotke, Tim Mahon, Josh Zwart, Forrest Kuiper, and Adam Peterson. We did all those kinds of things like working together, fighting with each other, and drinking beer. Phil Rounds was the Battalion Chief, and Jerry Philips was the Captain, and we were firefighters at the University Fire Department.

Chief Edie Curry, another person I owe blame to for making me a firefighter, had one of the best Phil stories. She asked him to stand in as the representative of UAF & UFD at a conference held by FEMA at UC Berkeley to secure a big grant for disaster preparedness. With big names like that, and with us as a small school and a small (but mighty) fire department, it would have been easy to marginalize us. But not with Phil pleading the case. As Chief Curry told the story, he had no slides, no outline, no script. But anyone who knew Phil can guess how it ends: with the audience eating out of his hand. He stepped up on stage and flipped on the overhead projector, the screen blank. A bright white square lit up the auditorium full of emergency management professionals from across the country. Phil Rounds, never at a loss for an opening line, said: “This is what our campus looks like nine months out of the year.” After that, everybody was on his side. Thanks to Phil’s presentation and Chief Curry’s tremendous preparation, UAF got the grant.

Perhaps Chief Rounds was your Firefighter I instructor, or perhaps you worked with him at UFD, or perhaps you knew him through the National Fire Academy classes he taught all across Alaska. However it happened, his enthusiasm for the fire service, and for the firefighters he led, was unmistakable. He had a great sense of humor, a superb commitment to the fire service, and unending patience with the hotheads who worked for him. I don’t know much about Chief Rounds before he came to UFD, except that he was a firefighter for the Air Force at Miramar, and then at Eielson AFB. I know that I asked him once what caused him to work someplace where he was constantly dealing with new people, training them up only to see them leave. He replied that he felt it helped keep him young, but I’m not sure that was the real reason. It helped, I don’t doubt that for a moment. But I think that maybe he knew we needed him to keep us pointed in the right direction. He was modest, at least sometimes, and for every time he could look at you and with that look get you to reconsider the half-assed job you were about to do, he and Jerry also had a great stand-up routine at the 8 o’clock briefing.

I have to confess that I haven’t attended any UFD reunion picnics, and start to feel a little old when I look at pictures of people I knew then (you know who you are). I have sent messages to several of my former coworkers in the last few hours, though, and I hope to see at least one of them soon. I haven’t worn turnouts in a year or two. But I will always think about the time that I went from being the awkward kid to somebody who could make entry on a fire, drive an engine on dark and icy roads, and run a code when it really got hairy. And I know that I’m one of many when I say that Chief Rounds made that possible. He let us know that we weren’t the awkward kids anymore, not if we worked hard, kept our heads up, and trusted each other.

I wish I could be in Fairbanks for the memorial service. I will count myself lucky if I can talk to Buist or Chief Curry sometime this week, and I offer my deepest condolences to Bess and her family, and to the family at UFD. I’m not a smoke eater or a leatherhead, except by the grace of those I know who are, but I am someone who was proud to roll with University Fire Department for a time.

And I join Captain Fleagle in raising the parting glass to someone we all loved: Phil Rounds.

Kyle Hopkins kicks ASS! Just heard him interviewed on NPR about an Alaska politics article he wrote for the ADN, and I was both thrilled to hear about someone I had lost touch with, and relieved that so sharp a wit is covering the important Stevens-Begich Senate race closely.

Begin obligatory election response: pretty weird that the three most hotly contested (or at least most drawn-out) Senate races were the three states I was most interested in: AK (see above), MN, OR. End obligatory election response.

I’m just starting Rashid Khalidi’s book Resurrecting Empire, which doesn’t seem designed to flagellate liberal guilt so much as actually educate a willing audience about colonialist history from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent. A good book, and I liked it even more when I found out that he’s almost as dangerous as Bill Ayers.

National Geographic has a ten-page cover article on light pollution out this month, and we happily have our first clear night in about two weeks (not that that’s a record or anything–Alicia tells me that she remembers Kodiak going for something like sixty straight days of rain once, and nobody was talking about records being broken) Still, though, it is crisp and cool tonight. Jupiter looked bright until I saw Venus, and Manaiakalani is setting in the west as Ke ka o ka Makali`i is rising in the east. Even though I know something about how bad light pollution really is, I am reassured that I showed my nephew the same two planets and some of the same stars from the East River about a month ago.

I can’t find the quote now, but I read a while ago that an astronomer working at (I believe) the European Southern Observatory described humans’ disconnect from the night sky as the single biggest influence in our disregard for the environment. While that has the potential to be melodramatic, I agee with the point that the sky, and particularly the night sky, represent one of the least controlled, most atavistic aspects of our lives. If we stop paying attention to that, it is much easier to see ourselves as living in a managed, not to say manufactured, existence. The influence isn’t confined to us (and Nat’l Geo looks to talk about this, too) in that there’s the whole bit about moths’ and birds’ navigation systems being messed up with competitors for the moon now being a dime a dozen. And the terrible part is that it isn’t even very hard to fix. We can cut down on light pollution and excess electricity while still providing safe and effective lighting. I don’t put this on a par with nuke disarmament or anything, but it is a big issue. Whether you know the names of stars or not, being able to look to them is a dream we have in common.

Once again, I find that when I settle in to my life, finding few things worth blogging about, I am unsuited to change pace when I do bump into something blogworthy. Also, since I haven’t had an iPhone implanted directly into my brain yet, I still need to be near a computer with internet access for long enough to type a post. Tricky.

Anyway, on Wednesday I got to see both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific in a single day. While transcontinental flights are now so common that almost no one bothers to call them transcontinental anymore, I still think it is pretty cool. At the end of our trip to New York we took off from JFK which, like most other infrastructure in New York City, seems to be much too big, old, and held together by a combination of rust and duct tape to actually survive the traffic it handles. The flight landed at Long Beach, CA, and its airport provided a stark contrast in that regard.

It is not the smallest airport I’ve been in by a long shot, but I was seriously amused by juxtaposing its two small terminal buildings with the picture of gargantuan LAX just a few miles away. But irregardless of the structures the airplane parked at, I was still a little bemused by the notion that the bright water surrounding it was the same phenomenon but so far from the same source seen six hours ago.

On a completely different note, I was gratified to find TV channels available on our flight and watch the presidential debate. If for some reason you are not registered to vote or are ambiguous about voting, get in gear. This is very, very important.

I’d just like to clear up one point that has gone unaddressed, though. As someone who lived in Alaska for six years and am married to a native-born Alaskan, I am not in the least troubled by anyone’s membership in the Alaska Independence Party. While I wouldn’t use the word respectable to describe anyone in Alaska politics, and inasmuch as the entire state is one big fringe group, one of my roommates had an AIP bumper sticker on his fridge for many years. And truly, while Alaska does not have the strong political and cultural motivations for independence that Hawai`i does, they do have a case for finanicial independence that makes Quebec horribly jealous. The Alaska Independence Party is a venerable, if not particularly viable, institution in Alaska, and I leave it to you, kindly readers, to decide for yourselves what you think of a group whose slogan at one time was ‘Yankee Go Home.’

Stay tuned for more chuckles and musings involving public transportation, food, and Mediterranean culture.