Waldo Jaquith

What’s so special about Thursday. They could have made it Wed. and people would’ve gotten a 5-day holiday. I just wish something could be done about the dubious term “Black Friday”. Does anyone think that Walmart has been losing money the first 11 months of the year?

I remember well the American Radio Relay League as my father was in frequency management for VOA for a few decades. I recall seeing the ARRL pubs lying around although I doubt I read them much. Waldo is probably the only one here that knows what a QSL card is. My father probably had the world’s largest QSL card collection until I donated most of them to some radio museum a few years back.

Posted by robert on 25 November 2011 @ 3pm

There are actually a few other hams who are regulars here. I never got a single QSL card, and certainly never printed up any of my own. I was only interested in ham radio as a means of internet access (via packet radio). As soon as I got access via UVA, I lost all interest in ham radio.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 25 November 2011 @ 5pm

It’s also terribly embarrassing for climate change chicken littles when a volcano spews out more CO2 in a few hours than all of mankind could possibly hope to in a decade. Bloody inconvenient, those volcanoes.

Posted by I. Publius on 27 November 2011 @ 5pm

If that were true, that would be embarrassing. But you’re off by two orders of magnitude:

“A lot of climate skeptics claim that volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans do,” [volcanologist Terrence] Gerlach said. “They never give any numbers, but the fact is you will never be able to find the volcanic gas scientist that will agree to that,” he said.

[...]

While there is uncertainty in the measurements–researchers estimate between 0.13 and 0.44 billion metric tons per year, with their best estimates between 0.15 and 0.26 billion tons–even the highest end of the range is dwarfed by anthropogenic emissions of 35 billion metric tons in 2010.

Gerlach noted that human land-use changes alone, which include deforestation, release 3.5 billion metric tons per year. Cars and light-duty trucks produce 2 billion metric tons; even cement production produces 1.5 billion tons. Any of these by itself is still several times higher than the annual emissions of all of the world’s volcanoes .

Pakistan or Kazakhstan each produce about the amount of CO2 as volcanoes do each year, Gerlach noted in the article.

As Gerlach points out, for volcano CO2 emissions to match human emissions, Mount St. Helens would have to erupt every two and a half hours.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 27 November 2011 @ 8pm

It’s a little thing, but the fourth Thursday of November can never fall on the 30th. When November 30th is a Thursday, it’s the fifth one of that month.

Posted by Steve Kass on 10 December 2011 @ 1pm