Before the AK census data

The AK census data will be posted today at 10am, AKDT.  Before they post it, I want to make some minor predictions about what the data will show.

This is like the Nenana ice classic, except I don't get anything if I'm right.  ;)

Big winners - Anchorage and Fairbanks. Juneau will remain relatively flat (less than 2% growth if any). In South East, some of the islands in the Alexander archipelago will show a decline; I'd be surprised if it's more than 5%. The YK will show flat to moderate growth (the couple of districts will show 1-5% growth). North-West (Kotz area etc) will show some minor growth, while North Slope will shrink slightly.

I'm torn - I know the nation, as a whole, is diversifying. But the big drivers in state population are migrants to Fairbanks and Anchorage/Matsu, who are predominantly white. So whether the state follows the trend and becomes more diverse depends on the exact balance between internal growth and migration.

I strongly think the data will not reflect a rural to urban migration like people (including me) were suggesting a few years back. I think the preliminary data in the form of enrolment makes that dubious - total rural migration will be small, or zero.

And, as a wild card prediction, Anvik will become the new state capital, stunning the rest of the state. In your face, Juneau!

Energy Needs

I'm going to steal a page from "Mad Engineering" today, and try to think creatively about one of the big problems that's facing Rural AK: Power. Renewables are good, but you still need diesel power for covering all the spots where there's no wind blowing, or sun shining (Yes, Solar Power works in AK). You can't effectively tie villages together in a grid so that wind energy from one village can help a village having a calm day - the cost of running power lines between villages is very high! And the cost of running powerline from the railbelt grid is even bigger.

What could be a steady power-producer for the villages? Orbital Solar. It sounds crazy, but the idea isn't that futuristic - you put a solar array in space where solar power is much more efficient (because we lose a lot of energy to the atmosphere). It's then beamed down to earth as radio or microwaves, where it's collected by antennas. You can position the satellite so it's always in the sun, even at night. Each village would have a microwave dish to collect energy from the power station being beamed to it.

Surely something like this is expensive, but there's a chance you could get a partner to help you develop this - the Military is very interested in the idea because it will allow them to have electrical anywhere in the world, and shipping diesel to Afghanistan might be the only place more expensive than the bush! Collaborating with the Air Force to test-bed this technology would be a great way to bring it to the bush.

So: How crazy does this sound? :)

Socratic Soc. lecture on Richard Dawkins, Pt. 1

I went to the lecture at the UAF on Richard Dawkin's book, The God Delusion. I took pretty extensive notes, but note sadly the lecture was actually rather weak. The Q and A was actually pretty laid back for as sceptical as some were.  Here's my notes of what he said. They might or might not make sense.

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Eduardo Wilner.
Philosophers dress like hobos. :)
Quotes Douglas Adams "People Will Be Offended."
Offensiveness comes from the Gut, not from reason.
Comment about Theology - Don't really need to address here.
Roadmap:

1. Arguments for God
2. Religion as a Phenomenon
3. Religion, Morality and Meaning.

"And then the Flying spaghetti monster ate Jesus."

The question shouldn't be "Do Science and Religion Clash" Obviously, they do. Question is, fundamentally should they?

Why don't we see icons of Darwin everywhere, but we do see Jesus on walls?

Scientific Thinking:

1. Find a phenomena
2. Come up with a model. Come up with a "experience feedback method."
3. Deduce a prediction
4. Make observation for the prediction.

Religious Thinking:

• Faith (of a supernatural nature) assenting to the divine truth through divine will
• Dogma - Divine revelation and some church authoritative teaching. 

NOMA: Non-Overlapping Mageseria
Gould says: Methedology should match subject matter.
Eduadro says not true. Apply both science and religion to origions, one gets "Eve", the other gets "Lucey." WEAK ARGUMENT
They have very overlapping magesterium .

Watch Vs. Rock - Find a watch, it must have a watchmaker.
     "Where is the damn watchmaker?"
     However, there is a hierarchy of the improbable.
Trying to invoke designing agent for life, universe, watches, invokes an infinite regression. Who designed the designer, etc. Designer is far more improbable than just the watch, without a naturalistic method for getting to the designer.

UAF: Harvard of the North. Everyone raises their hand saying they understand Natural Selection.


Religion as a phenomenon
Replicators don't need to be biological entities - can be thoughts/ideas.

Currently 2850 gods recorded.
Estimated 6 new gods per day in the world (!)
Religion formation is a regularly occurring phenomenon.

Religion as a byproduct of other brain traits

• Willingness to believe parents as a child.
• Vulnrable to viral ideas.
• Hyperactive Agent Detecting (We think the laptop/car/weather has a motive).

Gives humans preadapted niche for Religious memes.
      "Memes are creatures of the mind, but not our Creatures"

Religion and morality
Is there a objective moral truth without the divine?
"a) But is moral X right because god says so, or b) does god say so because it is right?"
     a) Arbitrary choice by a deity, so not objective.
     b) Objective morality even without deity.
God does not help philosophers prove there is an objective morality.

We cherrypick our morals
   "Sodom - Worse than New York!"
    "The X-Rated parts are left to mysterious ways."
    Use 10 Commandments (most of them) and ignore the bits about stoning and thread use and ritually murdering your kids.

Religion and Child Abuse?
    Can children be religious?
    Would we talk about "A Marxist kid?"

Indoctrination is NOT abuse.
    But training kids to ignore facts.
    A "Marxist Kid" can apply reason and reject Marxism as an adult.
    Religious Kid cannot, because Religion generally rejects objective reasoning.

Science and Meaning? "Think of us who die as lucky ... to have existed!"


Q&A:
Dave Klein strikes again: Separating people making up gods from people's religion. Different phenomena. Not necessarily linked.
Professor sounding guy: "I'm a little disturbed by your certainty." If you're wrong yesterday, who's to say you won't be wrong tomorrow?

---

I didn't take good notes in the Q&A section, and didn't write down his responses. On the whole, it was definitely worth a good think, even if I don't agree with many of the conclusions. I'm glad we can talk about this topic without people getting heated and nasty.
Does Gould's NOMA extend to philosophy? Philosophy tends to deal with un-knowables... e.g., this could all be a very vivid dream, and we can't prove it's not with science. I'm amazed by how Dave Klein can ask such pointed questions, even when it looks like he's not paying attention. We are lucky to still have him around. And finally, there was a very good crowd there. I wonder how many people show up to the next talk on Richard Dawkins' biology books. Those I'm infinitely more familiar with - The Selfish Gene is a must read for all graduate students.

Why you should participate in the Census

The best reason to participate in the census, I was told, is to keep Anchorage from running the state.

I imagine in Anchorage, people are being told the best reason to participate in the census is to remind everyone else they're half the state's population.

:P

The Bad Squire

You know, I've had this song on my playlist for a few years now. It's called "The Bad Squire," and it's based on a poem by a clergyman named Charles Kingsley in the 1800s. Chumbawamba - you know, the band that wrote Tubthumping? - did an album called "English Rebel Songs (1381-1984)" where they sing a lot of these old songs with just the acoustic guitar. Anyhow, I actually gave it a deep listen, while I was writing changes to my research manuscript I've been working on for a year now. I knew the song was about how a land owner punished the poor for poaching game, when the the poor were trying to protect their crops so to ward off starvation. But I actually heard some lyrics for the first time, that really brought me to the here and now:

You have sold out the labouring man, Squire
Both body and soul for to shame
To pay for your seat in the House, Squire
And to pay for the feed of your game
You made him a poacher yourself, Squire
When you'd give not the work nor the meat
And your barley-fed hares robbed the garden
At our starving poor little one's feet

(Emphasis my own). That choked me up, when I made the connection between the lyrics with what people still go through today, in the vill. It's no longer a class selling people to wallow in poverty, but urban interests. But is the end result any different?

Here's the song in total:

And we're back!

I'm back from things, and phew, let me whine! First, I didn't catch a moose. This is a bigger problem, because I couldn't hunt a Caribou in the winter 40 mile hunt (it was closed), and my efforts at getting a Minto Flats permit were thwarted by a car accident. I'm mentally running through lists of possible sources of fresh meat, and we're a few months out from the next opportunity. I've followed the old wisdom that you should fish your butt off in the summer in case you don't catch anything in the winter, but I'm starting to get very, very tired of salmon.

Other sage advice is to be generous with what you catch. The good person does it because that's the right thing to do. But even the selfish person should, so when they run low on meat, they can go begging to their family and friends. ;)

Part of the problem was how ADF&G divided up the antlerless hunt this year. All the closed zones made it very difficult to get to legal animals, and it forced people to hunt in zones that they knew nothing about. Maybe that wouldn't have been so bad on its own, but ice conditions were horrible. I broke through ice on a small river at one point, and only luck made sure I got the snowmachine out. Other places, the warm weather caused overflow to melt completely through, cutting off access to several trails into the flats. And then there was Salcha.

Salcha has open water everywhere. Ice out there is fragile in places, and has shifted around extensively. It took excess of an hour to find a safe path across the river. Wesst of Salcha I saw my only legal animal, but I couldn't shoot it because I was too busy making sure my snowmachine didn't go into the water to get to my gun before it saw me and went running. Finally, to cap it off, some fragile ice broke behind me (shifted?), and I had to take a very, very long way around back to my truck.

In general, things went wrong. And that's really the last large game in the interior until bears start waking up. There's always the haul road for Caribou, if I can find someone to split gas with, but I'm not sure how that is in March-April. Getting up there is a long process, and an expensive one. Other options include going out birding for ptarmigan. Luckily, I love ptarmigan (both eating them, and I like them alive, too!), so that's an option. It would definitely break up the monotony of salmon-salmon-salmon! Or I could go out for other fish, too. There's some options, but nothing that'll get me red meat.

Well, there is one...
Fred Meyers'.
*shudders* No thanks.

The year is 1510. How are you doing?

Orac, someone I read for his tirades against quack medicine (And for his interesting comments on cancer research) poses an interesting conundrum, though not a fresh one: Let's say you got sucked back in time, 500 years if you're in Europe, 300 if you're in a colonized area. You have nothing but the shirt on your back, your shoes on your feet. How well could you do? How well could you do at your modern job?

That's an interesting thought experiment, for sure. I'm interpreting it as me having the survival basics for Alaska: My jacket, boots, hat, and a pair of car-hart bibs. It doesn't matter much if I get sucked back 500 or 300, since this part of Alaska is pretty much the same either way.

On the basics, I could probably do slightly better than average. The biggest problem would be language, since this is Athabascan turf ca. 300 years ago. I don't speak a lick of it, so I'd head down river as soon as I could. I'd be better if I could come in winter, when I could trap. I'm spoilt by rifles, but I can make improvised traps with the middle-est of them! I could also catch a moose, which would give me a leg up on dozens of things. You just funnel them into a spot, and snare their leg or head. It's deadly effective (and not illegal 300 years ago). I even know how to make the hang-man's variant.

Summer I'd have a rougher go. I know enough wild edibles, but I couldn't get fresh game. Fish, maybe, but I don't know how to make my own fishing gear from scratch. I'd manage to make it to winter, before I really came into my own and could be reasonably fed. Either way, after that first winter, I'm golden. I can make a boat (I know how to build a Kayak from naught, even without power tools), and down river I go. It's worth noting that Yup'ik I speak, and Yup'ik spoken 300-500 years ago would be very different. It's like going back to Edwardian times, in English - words change, grammar drifts, and inflection tweaks over time. However, I'd do better with it than I would do with my lack of Athabascan! Down river, I could at least trade for tools I need, or knowledge of how to make said tools. Sure, everyone can hunt and trap in those days, but extra food or skins are always worth something. All and all, I could scrape along, until I learn to hunt and fish without modern tools.

With the latter point - how well could I recreate my job? Well, to begin with, beyond knowledge everyone of that day already has (where/when animals are), most of my field would be bum useless. Carrying Capacity? The relatedness of beavers? Evolution? Although all that knowledge has modern, practical applications, in the Qasgiq 500 years ago, it's useless beyond pure knowledge. If I was in Europe, I could recreate electricity, introduce pasteurization. Germ theory would be handy. Here, there's no native metal beyond some gold, and gold is pretty useless until you get into advanced metallurgy. I could make glass (it'd take a while), and maybe help some people with a crude monocle, but a microscope and showing germs would be... well, useless. Except. Except for one thing, which is anti-biotics. See, Penicillin sp. looks pretty characteristic. It's like a hand waving to you. I could isolate at least one antibiotic. This would make me very, very popular. Even if I couldn't produce oral forms (which takes a lot of preparation, IIRC).

If I wound up in Europe, I could write extensively. My ability to read and write would make me very valuable - heck, even 1700s it's a rare skill. I could ply that for a job. Not so much in the lower Yukon. I could leave notes on papyrus, but no one could ever read them (unless I taught folks how to read, which is a useless skill until late 1800s when English material shows up). But I could leave notes on natural selection, descent with modification, how genetics work in broad strokes. The composition of cells, and the use of DNA. The existence of cells, period. Basic sanitation. Making a prism would require finer glass working than I could do on the lower Yukon, but if in Europe, I could prove light is made of multiple colours.

The bulk of my chemistry would be bum useless, since I wouldn't have chemical extracts. My knowledge of spectography would be useless. I do know how to isolate phosphorus, though. With some fooling around, I could probably get it on a stick, and make matches. Fish wheels aren't complicated. I'd need to take material with me from the Fairbanks region (They're wood intensive, and I want big logs), but the ability to make one would make me popular, too. CPR. Heimlich maneuver. Both vaguely useful.

So, I think I would do all right, but the bulk of my biology knowledge requires advanced tools to exploit. Most of what is useful is my medical, physical and chemical knowledge (in that order). I'm just in a rotten place for time travelling and setting up shop as a biologist. If I really wanted to do that, London is the place for me to be. Amusingly, I'd be a better general doctor than biologist. London, or 300 years ago, Boston. Survival, I could do in Alaska, though I'd never be a Nukalpiaq by 300 or 500 years ago's standards. Snow machines and guns have made us all today lazy.

So, I suppose I'll pass this on: How well could you re-create your job 300 or 500 years in the same place? How well could you survive?

What was 09 for?

Leave it up to an Aussie to say it.

It sounds barbaric when you put it like that...

From an issue of "The Citizen" from 1910

There were forty-seven homicides in Louisville during the year just closed, and not a single hanging. Life in the Falls City is much cheaper than property.

Also, elsewhere, there's a mention of Taft's visit to the Canal. I wonder what we think is important, that 100 years from now will be laughable. I wonder what we do now that will seem totally inhumane 100 years from now. The idea of chasing down a person and stringing them up is, I think most of feel, repellent. Contrary to the course of justice.

Phew! And, was Alaska Worth it to the States?

I've finished my week long sprint to the finish line, yesterday, and I was so burnt out I loitered around drinking Moose Drool and doodling while watching TV for the rest of the day. A friend of mine told me I look like hell, which means I probably look positively monstrous to the public at large (since my friend is not exactly the `most polished` of people...). Still, it's done, which means I can go back to normal life for a week, before the holidays strike. :)

Enough about me! Was Alaska worth it? To the states, that is. Arctic Economics makes a great point:

An annual gross state product of over $40 billion is not the appropriate benefit measure.  That's gross, not net.  Moreover, $40 billion - or whatever the right benefit figure is - would have been heavily discounted in 1867.  Still more - Alaska costs a lot to maintain; the $7.2 million was a start; we had to defend it from the Japanese, rebuild it after the 1964 earthquake, and pay the heavy costs of governing in this large, remote, and often hostile environment.

Instead, they argue, you need to look at the differences between the outcomes if the US had bought Alaska (what we have today) and what would happen if it hadn't. It's hard to quantify things such as the benefit of having a military base near the far east (apparently it's at least worth Eielson Airforce Base's operational budget), but Dave Barker at the University of Iowa takes a crack at it.

Of course, the more ego-centric question is "Is Alaska better off having been bought by the US?" That's harder to quantify. If we were to assume Alaska would be bought by England (and ended up part of Canada), politically it would depend on whether Alaska ended up acquiring provincial status. Given the comparably large population of AK, I think it might have (~600k is larger than the population of Newfoundland and Labrador) - it's my gut feeling that Candian Provinces enjoy slightly greater autonomy than American States.  Definitely the Alaska would have better representation - Somewhat better than 3% representation, compared to our <<2% representation currently. While whether Eskimo have done better living under US law than their counterparts living under Canadian law is highly debatable (there's a Ph.D. dissertation for Rural Development somewhere in that topic!), the fact that NWT spun off Nunavut as a separate territory and Quebec is granting areal autonomy to Nunavik definitely speaks somewhat better of modern outcomes.

It would be very interesting to quantify each outcome, but it appears at least politically, Alaska drew the short straw!

I don't have an appropriate picture to go with this post, so here is a random fox:

Which state has the best beer?

There's an old joke about American beer being like doing the dirty in a boat - I'll let you figure out the punchline - but American beer does surprisingly well both in sales and in awards, when in international competitions. This is even more true when you consider American craft beer production was wiped out thanks to prohibition, and a lot of know-how was quickly lost.

Two beer journalists decided to find out which state in the US gathered the most medals in beer competitions. They plotted it out in a lovely map, which I'll repost here.

The answer to who was the best, unsurprisingly, was California. Actually, I was a little surprised, since Oregon and Washington are collectively referred to as "Beervaria" due to their large number of microbreweries. But these numbers don't take into account the fact that, say, there's many people in California, and no so many people in South Dakota. That's why Strangemaps - a neat little blog I just found - reshuffled things for medals per million people.

1. Colorado – 64.4
2. Oregon – 42.5
3. Wisconsin – 38.6
4. Washington – 16.2
5. Missouri – 15
6. Pennsylvania – 13.5
7. Massachusetts – 12.6
8. California – 12.8
9. Texas – 5.6
10. New York – 5.1

But! cried StrangeMaps' readers. You just reshuffled! You didn't see if anyone would make the top 10. A little math later, and Alaska quickly sits on the top of the heap with 78.68 medals per million people - heads above California and nearly double Oregon.

What really surprised me was that Alaskan Brewing Co. is such a winning brewery. If I'm reading their numbers right, they have the most medals for someone who wouldn't be considered a macro-brew. More than Deschutes, long one of the best craft beer producers in the US.

Definitely something to drink about.

Advice to the Fairbanks Newbie.

Yup, it's that time of year again! New Student in Fairbanks? Welcome to the middle of nowhere*! Fairbanks can be a great, exciting place to live, but like anywhere else in the world, it takes some getting used to. Here's some basic tips to help you get by:

• Homes come in to varieties - dry, and wet. Dry places have no running water. In Fairbanks, this is not a big deal. You haul your own water in a carboy from a water seller, and campus is littered with showers for students. Please leave the showers clean, though!

• Don't go out and buy everything with the words 'Polar Fleece' on it. Instead, wait until it starts to cool off, and look at what the Locals are wearing. And then, after you've seen how Fairbanksans manage, dress like the locals. Otherwise, you'll waste a lot of money. You'll probably notice we dress in layers, and we're not too fashionable.
  

• Get your vehicle winterized now. Buy studded tires before the first snow. There's always a massive backlog of people at the auto shops in town who need that work done when the white stuff starts flying. You can have studded tires on your vehicle as early as September 15th. It's not a bad idea to make an appointment for the 16th, just so you're not caught off guard by snow.

• Be social! Go out, meet people. Drink at bars (if 21), attend student events. Especially around campus, there's lots to do. I'm always perplexed by people who say that Fairbanks is full of introverts. Michael Feldman said something to the effect of `There's no where else where you're around so many people who like to be with other people who don't like people.` ;)
  

• Develop some outdoor hobbies so the winter isn't as boring. If you're trapped inside, of course Fairbanks seems like an awful place! I would remind you that for a minimum of a year, you'll be a non-resident for hunting and fishing purposes**.

• Get ready for some stickershock, because stuff isn't as cheap as it is in the states. It runs from 25% to 33% more than it runs down below. Frozen foods are expensive in the summer. Fresh produce isn't really fresh in the the winter (and the summer, it can get pretty questionable too). If you're aware of this, things go much smoother. If, like me, you love to do confectionery stuff, be prepared to shell out big money for extracts (besides vanilla) and uncommon spices. Sometimes, I just have friends in the states send it up to me, since it's cheaper.
  

In general, try to have fun. Don't hole yourself up. And whatever you do,

• Don't tell us how you did things back in [insert lower 48 state here]. People will say, "That's nice." But they'll be thinking, "What a jerk." You're not in Kansas anymore! :)
  

*The villages are not the middle of nowhere. The villages are the far-edge of nowhere.
**Yes, you can fish in the winter. It's as fun as fishing in the summer!

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While we're on the topic of students returning to UAF, here's a comment from the article "UAF Prepares for Swine Flu Outbreak:"

Swine flu will work just like everything else at UAF. It will show up late, move excruciatingly slowly through the bureaucracy, get lots of talk but little actual help from the risk management office, hang around the Pub far too much, provoke quite a bit of dorm-room puking, and finish its two-year program about seven years from now. Then it will just hang out on campus hoping for a job.

Too funny!

"Will trade dogsleds for labour..."

Only in alaska:

will trade custom built dogsleds or skin kayaks for manual labor (Fairbanks)

I build dogsleds and skin kayaks and am looking for help building a new shop. If you are looking for a new dogsled or skin kayak and have carpentry skills, maybe we can make a trade. email for more information.

I think I know who it is. Fairbanks isn't that big, and you can count the number of people who have the knowhow on one hand...

Here comes the sun little darling

It's got to that point of the year, where you need to get out the tinfoil...
... Unless you want to wake up at 5:30 each morning!

Tinfoil. It's Alaskan home decor.

A hot cup of... what?

What's the non-alcoholic drink of choice in AK? In the bush, and lots of the road system, it's not coffee like most people would guess. It's tea. Tea is popular in ways most people outside wouldn't guess. The big one is lipton, but people love Hidden Stash too. People buy lipton by the bulk, and go through it as quickly. Part of it is, in a lot of places if you show up to someone's house, you'll get offered tea (and frequently food, but this is a post about tea). 9 times out of 10. I promise you, if you show up at my house, I'll offer you tea. It's just sort of what people do. Now, I have coffee too. In fact, Kuuvviarsugtua. Taugam, instead I'm having tea because I didn't think through breakfast. The hidden stash orange one.


Somehow, in my upbringing, I got it in my head that you shouldn't accept what people offer you, because it's inconveniencing them, or being a burden. But the saying is out here, if someone offers you food, you make room in your stomach - it's rude to refuse. It makes it awkward for me, because to be polite, I have to act in a way I think is rude.

I blame my parents, society, and TV. Oh, and the devil's music.

Some perspective.

Here's a little sliding scale for folks who have a understanding what various metric temperatures mean. Did you know that the US is legally a metric nation? Honest to god truth. Happened somewhere a couple decades back. Congress just showed about as much attention and followthrough to converting signs and measures as they do in all their endeavours. At the time of writing this, the thermometer said it was -46°C. Where does that put us?

• 50°C 122°F Warm day in Kuwait; Melting point of Californians.
• 45°C 113°F Average August day in Kuwait
• 40°C 104°F A hot day in Salt Lake City. Most Alaskans spontaneously combust.
• 35°C 95°F About Human Body temp. Austrailian beach weather.
• 30°C 86°F A hot day in Fairbanks. A lovely spring morning in California.
• 25°C 77°F Allegedly "Room temperature." Australians put on a jacket.
• 20°C 69°F Chrysler trucks start working properly.
• 15°C 59°F My room Temp. 50% of Australians die of cold exposure.
• 10°C 50°F An average July day in Barrow. Fall in Michigan.
• 5°C 41°F Midwesterners reach for their jackets. You can see your breath! Still some time left to garden in Alaska.
• 0°C 32°F Water Freezes. North Carolinians decide it's damndably cold. Alaskans put on shorts and suntan.
• -5°C 23°F Remaining 5% of Australians boggle that the numbers can go /negative/. Fairbanksans wash their trucks. Best Ice Cream temperature. Chrysler trucks don't start.
• -10°C 14°F Michiganders start to complain about the cold. Alaskans get in some BBQing before the temp falls. Sweater weather.
• -18°C 0°F 0°F was chosen as the zero mark because it was colder than it got in Denmark, and it turned out someone didn't like using negative numbers.
  
• -20°C -4°F Anchorage starts whinging about the weather incessantly, while the rest of Alaska wishes they'd shut up. Primo skiing weather. Time to grab the jacket in Fairbanks.
• -25°C -13°F Unmodified diesel begins to gel. Fairbanksans decide it might be getting a little nippy. Midwesterners flee for Hawaii.
• -30°C -22°F All atomic motion in 90% of Canadians stops. Fairbanksans decide it's sorta cold. Unaided German Cars won't start.
• -35°C -31°F Inversion layer begins to build. Fairbanksans waffle around and decide it's kinda cold. Landlords in the Midwest finally decide it's okay to turn on the heat.
• -40°C -40°F Things begin to break from the temperature. Mercury Freezes. Fairbanksans admit it's `cold.` Unwarmed Toyota Tachoma won't start.
• -45°C -49°F Electronics begin to break, and then burn up from the temperature. Bethel residents shut up about how `wind chill` is worse, and are just glad they live in a comparative tropical paradise.
• -50°C -58°F Kerosine begins to gel. Hawaii starts to look really good. Dog insists on sleeping in your bed with you.
• -55°C -67°F Kerosine finishes gelling. Tok wonders why people in Fairbanks are fussing about a minor coldspell. People out in Fort Yukon finally get around to closing the kitchen window.
• -60°C -76°F Tok admits it's nippy. Dogs move from sleeping in your bed (with you) to sleeping directly on the woodstove.
• -63°C -81°F Recorded low for Alaska. Sled dogs take vacation to Hawaii. UAF considers closing campus for half a day, but still doesn't.
• -65°C -85°F The temperature at which pretty much all `absolutely true` sourdough stories take place.

Things that do not like this weather.

I think I'm going to try my hand at a list of things that don't really work past -40. At low temperatures, things just decide to give up the ghost. At really low temperatures, important things in your house start breaking. When it gets cold, Alaskan's start navel gazing; with that in mind, here's some things most people wouldn't think of not working.

• Bubble Levels.
• Truck Fan Belts.
• Cheap Ski Goggles.
• Skis or Snowboards.
• Air Compressors. (I won't double dip by adding `oil atomizers`).
• LCD Screens.
• Cameras sealed with Camera Grease.
• Ducttape.
• Propane Tanks.
• Traditional Toilet Seats. (God save the person without blue foam!)
• Garden Variety Extension Cords.
• Plastic Buckles, Snaps, and plastic slidey string balls.
• Shopping Cart Wheels.
• Elastic or some Bungie Cords.
• Christmas Lights Timers (or at least mine doesn't).
• Apparently (I found this out last night) Pole Mounted Transformers can go `boom` much more easily.
  
• Composite Axe Handles. (Another recent discovery!)
• Most engines with an electric start (beyond cars).
• Camal Backs.
• Pens - and plastic pencils snap easily.
• Most pieces of unsealed optics, such a binocs, spotting glasses, jeweller lens.
• 99% of Electric Thermometers.
• Moleskin.
• Regular shoe soles (Hat tip to Avery for pointing this one out to me).
• Tires.
• Some sorts of motion sensors.
• ATMs