An Excursion: Day 1

Over the next ten days or so I'll be doing an interesting experiment in stress and traveling. The first leg of this journey begins in about ten minutes, when I embark to the hideous township of McMinneville for the state speech and debate tournament, but things will improve when I fly off to Detroit and then Washington DC for various other events. Things are looking rather indeterminate in many ways, as the economist would say. The prospects for speech and debate success are mixed: we'll probably do well, but not as well as the championship prognosticators among us hopefully predict. My global warming model is also an amalgam of good and bad. The carbon cycle component works frighteningly well, predicting CO2 levels in the atmosphere within 1% or so of actual values over the past 40 years. Despite the success of the carbon cycle, it is still missing many biotic feedbacks, which are nearly impossible to model because of a dearth of information. On the other hand, my climate component is still a royal disaster. In the absence of non-solar radiative forcing, it predicts an equilibrium atmospheric temperature of 264 K, an oceanic temperature of 317 K, and a land surface temperature of 223 K. I'm seriously considering gutting the ocean and land components and just using a highly simplified atmospheric temperature model with some fudging in the radiative forcing, to make the model comply with reality. I present it before an audience of unknown size in six days.

Anyway, this is the state of my existence. I barely sleep. I subsist on tea, Japanese rice crackers, and spinach salads. That's all for now.