Posted inSustainability

Climate change trends in Oregon discussed at Salem City Club

Truth is preferable to falsehood, for sure. But it can be damn depressing at times. That's how I felt today while listening to a Salem City Club talk about climate change from an Oregon perspective. The speaker was Erica Fleishmann, Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, who is the Director of the Climate Change Research Institute (CCRI), a network of researchers and professionals that is housed at Oregon State University in Fleishmann's college. One of CCRI's missions is to research and monitor the state and regional climate. Every two years CCRI publishes an updated Oregon Climate Assessment. The…
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Posted inCurrent affairs

Should progressives pursue policies of abundance? Probably.

I identify as a progressive, though for me, the term basically is synonymous with liberal. At any rate, I'd call myself a moderate progressive/liberal. Meaning, I'm not as far to the left as Bernie Sanders, though I agree with much of what he says and stands for, and I'm not as far to the right as John Fetterman, though I also like much of what he says and stands for.  So it isn't surprising that I resonate with the general thrust of a recently published book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance. In fact, I just ordered the book.…
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Posted inScience

Artificial Intelligence explained to City Club by Willamette University professor

Last Friday Calvin Deutschbein, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Willamette University, gave a talk on Artificial Intelligence, otherwise known as AI, to the Salem City Club. Deutschbein is holding a microphone in the photo below. He started off by talking about intelligence in general. It has something to do with (1) representing the world, (2) finding patterns, (3) predicting the future, (4) acting optimally. His example pertained to his cat. I'll adapt it to our dog. Mooka, our Husky mix, clearly is adept at making sense of the world. After all, ever since dogs became domesticated, probably via ancestral…
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Posted inHome life

My fall into a creek shows why doing one thing at a time makes sense

Yesterday I fell off a bridge into running water. Fortunately, it was a tiny bridge and the water wasn't very deep. How it appears to have happened contains a life lesson. Yesterday I was taking our dog, Mooka, on her usual late afternoon walk, which begins on our property in rural south Salem. I had her on a leash, since the area by a creek is favored by raccoons, and we don't want Mooka running off and tangling with one. I'd just crossed a little bridge that crosses the main part of Spring Creek, a short creek that feeds Spring…
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Posted inWeblogs

Typepad told me they aren’t going out of business. Hope that’s true.

I've been blogging with Typepad since 2003, which is when Wikipedia says Typepad launched. So I must have been one of their earliest customers. Now I have three Typepad blogs. So while I've gotten used to fairly frequent Typepad outages as problems with the blogging service have become more common, when I couldn't log in to my account on March 3, I got more concerned than usual. Even though things were back to normal by the next day (which for Typepad is still pretty crappy, especially when it comes to uploading photos, as this person complained about in 2022), I…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Health

Laurel Hines, my wife, supports changes to Oregon’s Death With Dignity law

The Oregon legislature is considering a bill, SB 1003, that would make changes to our state's Death With Dignity law -- which allows people who have six months or less left to live to exercise control over the time and manner of their death by taking physician-prescribed medication. Passed by Oregon voters in 1994, and affirmed in 1997 when it took effect after a legal challenge, the law is a good start, but it needs improving. That's why my wife, Laurel Hines, testified in favor of SB 1003 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3. Laurel told the…
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Posted inSalem

Ukrainian refugee speaks at Salem City Club on day Trump insults Ukraine

The timing was coincidental. Still, yesterday it was jarring for me to leave for the noon Salem City Club program on "Finding Home in a New Culture and Country" after learning the news about how Trump and Vance had insulted Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, which really was an insult to the entire country, only to find that one of the program speakers was Kseniia Hnatovska, a Ukrainian. Here's how she was described in a City Club email: Kseniia and her family fled Ukraine at the onset of the war and undertook a long and challenging journey that brought them…
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