You could have picked a worse locale...

... Paul could have tried to set up shop in Ester. That's my attitude towards the Goldstream General Store. About two years ago, you may recall there was a stink about the employees going on strike. The store used to be owned by some nice folks who decided to sell it quietly. So quietly that almost no one knew about it until it was done. The problem was the new owner had strong opinions about tattoos, religion, politics, and just about everything else. And they were 100% to the right of right. And he was rather vocal about them. Well, that's fine - that's anyone's right - but you have to question the business savvy of starting an outwardly conservative business in what's basically a valley full of hippies, dilettante dog mushers, unwashed students and university staff. The valley isn't as liberal as Ester, but it's pretty close. 

The problem, and the reason this  is back in the news, was because the new owner tended to talk to his employees about religion. A lot. In a hostile manner. Leaving aside the wisdom of talking about religion at work (there's a time and place, and that's neither), the employees thought the content of the conversation amounted to harassment at the least. Things to the effect of `Catholics are the root of all evil` and how they would go to hell. At least two employees have sued over this, and thus far, one has won. I'm surprised it's taken two years for the case to worm its way through the courts - this was about as open and shut as it gets, given the amount of evidence that Paul was saying those things. Getting redress for being obviously wronged through the courts is an incredibly slow process. I might have just said `forget it` and dropped the case myself.

What really gets me is the guy's business plan. It's terrible, to be blunt. This is Goldstream we're talking about here, no one wants to buy stuff they picked up at safeway, brought to the general store and slapped a mark-up on. You want to make bank in the area, open a store that sells local foods, or organic food, or anything of that sort. Make it a pick up location for those organic farm distributors that are so popular on campus. Sell to the clientele you can get,  not the one you wish you had. If they had even a little bit of local goods there, they would have many more customers than they actually do.

Alaska Census changes, 2000 to 2010

Data time, people! Behold, tables:

 

Borough or Census area	2000 estimate	2010 estimate	% change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	6,551	5,588	-14.70%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	14,070	13,477	-4.21%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	6,146	5,559	-9.55%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	10,195	9,636	-5.48%
Kodiak Island Borough	13,913	13,592	-2.31%
Bristol Bay Borough	1,258	997	-20.75%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	1,823	1,631	-10.53%
Yakutat City and Borough	808	662	-18.07%
Dillingham Census Area	4,922	4,847	-1.52%
Denali Borough	1,893	1,826	-3.54%
Sitka City and Borough	8,835	8,881	0.52%
Aleutians West Census Area	5,465	5,561	1.76%
Haines Borough	2,392	2,508	4.85%
Nome Census Area	9,196	9,492	3.22%
Northwest Arctic Borough	7,208	7,523	4.37%
Wade Hampton Census Area	7,028	7,459	6.13%
Aleutians East Borough	2,697	3,141	16.46%
Juneau City and Borough	30,711	31,275	1.84%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	6,174	7,029	13.85%
Bethel Census Area	16,006	17,013	6.29%
North Slope Borough	7,385	9,430	27.69%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	49,691	55,400	11.49%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	82,840	97,581	17.79%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	59,322	88,995	50.02%
Anchorage Municipality	260,283	291,826	12.12%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	3,436	2,150	-14.79%
Skagway Municipality		968
Wrangell City and Borough	6,684	2,369	-21.11%
Petersburg Census Area		3,815
Statewide	626,932	710,231	13.29%

I have the table organized by the number of citizens gained or lost. Note that Hoonah/Skagway and Wrangell/Petersberg is reported differently between 2010 and 2000, so they take up two lines (Only one value in 2000 per either pair). What leaps out at me is most of the change comes from the MatSu - a wopping 50% change in population! Yikes! Fairbanks has also grown at an accelerated rate, but not nearly as much. I was wrong about the North Slope - it has a greater % change than the North West Borough. I was correct about the YK, but too conservative about the rate of growth since both major census districts topped 6% growth. I was too conservative about how horribly hard SE is getting hammered. Aside from Bristol Bay, the biggest percent changes were in SE. The biggest absolute change, though, was in the Yukon-Koyukuk area:

Borough or Census area	Absolute Change	Percent of State Change
Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area	-963	-1.16%
Ketchikan Gateway Borough	-593	-0.71%
Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area	-587	-0.70%
Valdez-Cordova Census Area	-559	-0.67%
Kodiak Island Borough	-321	-0.39%
Bristol Bay Borough	-261	-0.31%
Lake and Peninsula Borough	-192	-0.23%
Yakutat City and Borough	-146	-0.18%
Dillingham Census Area	-75	-0.09%
Denali Borough	-67	-0.08%
Sitka City and Borough	46	0.06%
Aleutians West Census Area	96	0.12%
Haines Borough	116	0.14%
Nome Census Area	296	0.36%
Northwest Arctic Borough	315	0.38%
Wade Hampton Census Area	431	0.52%
Aleutians East Borough	444	0.53%
Juneau City and Borough	564	0.68%
Southeast Fairbanks Census Area	855	1.03%
Bethel Census Area	1,007	1.21%
North Slope Borough	2,045	2.46%
Kenai Peninsula Borough	5,709	6.85%
Fairbanks North Star Borough	14,741	17.70%
Matanuska-Susitna Borough	29,673	35.62%
Anchorage Municipality	31,543	37.87%
Hoonah-Angoon Census Area	-318	-0.38%
Skagway Municipality
Wrangell City and Borough	-500	-0.60%
Petersburg Census Area
Statewide	83,299	n/a

Anchorage had the greatest growth (Gold star for me) followed by MatSu and Fairbanks and the Kenai. Juneau, as I anticipated, remains essentially flat. I might have to double back on the Rural-to-Urban migration idea. There's 214 more rural residents than there were in 2010, which is a minuscule increase. Either there's more immigration than emigration, but elevated death to compensate, or births are higher than deaths, and there's a net emigration. The second scenario seems more likely.

Why didn't this show up in the school enrolment records in Anchorage? Well, it could be that people more likely to move don't have children yet, or maybe they're not all moving to Anchorage. Or, what I think is most likely - there's serious flaws in how we calculate enrolment in schools, where students from the bush are more likely to skip classes (true) and therefore not be reflected in the annual counts. This downward biases the enrolment numbers, and therefore funding, of schools with the students who need the most help.

But, that's navel gazing and guesswork. The real way to address this is to follow individuals, not counts of individuals. Census summaries we have access to can't show that that +1 person in the Kenai came from Juneau as opposed to Kansas. You need to do a more detailed breakdown than that to find those sorts of trends.

Finally, on the diversity front, diversity increased slightly (69% White to 66% White descent) mostly to an additional 1 percent more people of Asian descent, and a grab-bag of other.

There's a lot of information here, and I've barely played around with it. Hopefully, I'll get more time to dig deep into this well of information in the next little bit.

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!

CNN Skepticism

Last night, I was having dinner out at what I thought was a normal time, but thanks to DST was really nearly 9 at night. Consequently, the restaurant was very empty, and there wasn't many people to talk to or do the normal social things with while you wait for that one cook left around to fire up the grill again. I started watching TV, to kill some time. And let me say something that's been bugging me for a few years now.


Now, I'm willing to accept that some people have a nice, well-rounded education. I'm even willing to accept that these people are more likely to end up as TV anchors - thought I might think it has to do more with their looks than what's going on upstairs in some cases. But some anchors try too hard to come off as knowledgeable about everything. Here and Now, on NPR, is horrible about it. I can't listen to that show, because the host tries to act like she's an expert on car engineering as well as Mid-East geopolitics. I'm even willing to accept that the TV has an anchor that knows something about earthquakes, and disaster recovery. But honestly. Am I really to believe that their anchor just so happens to be an expert on nuclear power too?

It's not a topic you can B.S. your way through - I remember enough of my nuclear chemistry from college to know that the person was far past the limits of their knowledge. They couldn't pronounce any words right, and they had a frazzled idea of how things worked . It's clear someone tried to bone up on the subject in the 3 minute commercial break from reading off flash cards. Did she really have to act like she was familiar with the inner workings of a modern(ish) reactor? Honestly, if there's one subject where you can say "Well, I'm not sure what's going on, but the here's what the real experts say:" it's got to be nuclear power. But now, the "Energy Corespondent" was acting like they'd just got done teaching a short lesson to a class of graduate students and where now favouring us plebs with their bountiful knowledge.


So, to keep me from giving in to the same temptation that they have, let it be known I only have two areas of expertise. The first is critters. The second is Justin Beiber-ology. Maybe I am qualified to be a news anchor afterall.

DInner, deconstruted

What do you do when you're richer than any human could possibly want in a lifetime? If you're former Microsoft CTO, Nathan Myhrvold, you start out advocating searching for dinosaur vomit. After all, birds will sometimes spew, and what are birds, if not modern dinosaurs? But a man has to have a hobby between encouraging people to dig for Dino-Pellets. Nathan's is running a food science lab of his own making, which has just released a 2000+ page, 6 volume set on their years of research. It's called Modernist Cuisine.

Quite a few people have written about the kitchen lab, such as this current Network Today article, and this older New York Times article that shows that its been on their radar for a while. But I've noticed people have focused on the equipment Nathan's lab has, more than the really interesting bit - he's employed a scientific hypothesis testing framework for organizing his romp through the gastronomic world. Here's an example from the above NY Times article:

The conclusions have often been backed up by careful scientific exploration. For example, confit, the French technique of cooking slowly in fat, is supposed to impart a unique taste and texture as the fat penetrates the meat.

But Dr. Myhrvold said: “There’s no way it could penetrate. The molecules are too big.”

He said double-blind taste tests proved that the same tasty results could be achieved by steaming and then rubbing some of the fat on the outside.

This isn't new to the world - people have used it before -  but even normal advocates for culinary science are applauding him for how far he's take the process with this work. Cooking, sadly, is filled with too much woo - such as the load of misinformation surrounding organic vegetables (Isn't it enough to eat them because they're sustainable?), or the linking of cost with quality (the best thing you can do to improve someone's wine tasting experience is to tell them it's an expensive and rare wine). Some rigour is nice to see.

Sadly, such a book is not for the likes of me - it's 625 dollars for the full set. I'll have to be content with this really cool hamburger deconstructed infographic from the WSJ that came with their own story about Modernist Cuisine.

photo from the WSJ infographic mentioned above

In the annals of Dim Things To Do.

I've said it before. Heck, I've said it here. Do not pet the moose. You do not share a deep spiritual connection with them. They won't recognize you as a kindred spirit.  They aren't your bestest friend in the world. Some of them may be quite cute, but forget about taking them home with you. It isn't going to end well for either of you.

Even not counting car collisions, a moose is more likely to injure you than a bear or a wolf. People fail to appreciate that even a small moose can weigh 800 pounds, and can kick hard enough to break bones. It's not uncommon for wolf biologists to find that wolves in our area have had their skull fractured seriously at some point because a moose kicked them in the head. And a wolf skull is a lot more robust than a human's skull.

And besides, you probably wouldn't like it if a total stranger (and a different species to boot) came up and started petting you, either. Even moose like their personal space.

Petting a moose is about as dumb as it gets.

Moose-petters: 

A total lack of envy

Where last year's Yukon Quest's weather was unusually mild and fair, this year has been more par for the course - varying degrees of brutal. When I read about Hans Gatt going through the overflow, it sent shivers down my back (and not because it's cold inside). I've seen that situation before, and rarely does it end well for the person who goes through - especially in this weather. Right now, the remaining teams are headed for Eagle Summit.

The thing you need to know about Eagle Summit is that as brutal as the low-laying areas can be - it's -50F in the village of Eagle right now - Eagle Summit is worse. It's got all the cold, plus torrential winds that eat through everything. It's not uncommon for the air to be so thick with blowing snow that you turn into a walking snowman, but there to be so little snow on the trail that your snowgo is bumping and scraping the whole way. I've been caught out in a groundstorm out there before, and really the only thing you can do is hide down behind whatever passes for shelter, and wait it out. Some clever soul described the weather as "Visibility -10 feet:" Visibility is so low you not only don't know where you're going, but you have no idea where you've been.

With all due respect to the Iditarod, the Yukon Quest is the most difficult race to be had.

Dangit, I don't have any of my pictures of Eagle Summit on this computer. But just imagine some sort of winter-hellscape, and you're pretty close.

Spare change

I was checking out Craigslist, when I noticed an interesting property up for sale:

Arctic Circle Hot Springs is located in the heart of some of Alaska’s best gold county, access is by the Steese Hwy. 134 mile N. from Fairbanks, or from lighted and State maintained, 4,400ft airfield. This property is in need of much TLC however it is definitely one of a kind, and the potential to the right owner is virtually unlimited.

It looks like someone finally moved Circle Hotsprings back to the market. Rumour was that it was tied up off the market for various and sundry reasons, most of them stemming from personality issues. I wouldn't know anything about that specifically, beyond the hearsay, but it'll be exciting to see if that gets up and running again.

Not a reccomended Mfg Method

The sign allegedly translates to "Dependable handling of chemical products" (Sadly, I don't speak Dutch). Hat tip to Derek Lowe at In the Pipeline and Keeees (comment #1) for the link to the picture and translation.

Dubious headlines

From the Tundra Drums:

Troopers: Villages grateful for recent crime-sweep

Published on December 29th, 2010 12:20 pm

By MEGAN A. PETERS, ALASKA STATE TROOPERS SPOKESWOMAN

In other news, the IRS says that tax payers love them, and are grateful for audits.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't have law enforcement, but you can't have an objective story on police action if the story is written by the police. Objectivity doesn't work like that. 

Shame on Tundra Drums.

The Dragon has flown!

As much as I prefer NASA to own its own orbital fleet of rockets, this is really, really great news - the Dragon, a privately built rocket and space capsule built by SpaceX, has successfully achieved orbit and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean! This marks the first private craft that successfully achieved this feat. This is fantastic news, because it means that the day that I can take a vacation on Saturn's moons is a little bit closer. And, more practically, it means the ISS will probably have a little more life left in it.

Go to the link and check out the videos! It's neat!

Photocredit: NASA TV

The most ominous words ever written

Campbell saw no scenario where Miller would concede before the hand count. Lawyers are on their way to Alaska to help Miller battle over the numbers, he said.

http://www.adn.com/2010/11/02/1532963/senate-drama-could-just-be-beginning.html#ixzz14F3iaARc

 

Three predictions. 1) This will be tied up in litigation for at least 4 months. 2) The state supreme court will have to step in at some point to arbitrate what "the intent of the voter" actually means. 3) We're all going to be really tired of the election fight in less than 2 months.

You thought things were down and dirty so far...

Using Physics to save a life

There's this wonderful story making the rounds about how an engineer in Washington used a basic knowledge of physics to save the life of an elderly driver passed out behind the wheel. You can read all about it at the Seattle Times. Mr. Innes saw the driver of a truck was passed out and heading for a busy intersection, but the vehicle was still going. So he took his van, got ahead of the truck and matched the speed. Then, decelerating, he let the truck rear-end him, and then used that contact to slow down the truck. The trick here is that while both vehicles were travelling fast, they were both travelling in the same direction, so at the time of the crash, the difference in speed was only a few miles per hour. This resulted in a much less dramatic crash, after which he could slow presumably by breaking thus avoiding a crash with a larger difference in speed (like 80+ mph).

In a bizarre show of humanity, Mr. Innes was told that he wouldn't have to cover damages for the collision. The Insurance Company promises not to act humanely twice.

Does your doctor have a conflict of interest?

This morning, I was listening to KUAC when I heard a story about Doctors who had been disciplined in the past, but were now receiving money from pharmaceutical companies. You can read the original ProPublica story here. I think most people are vaguely familiar with this happening - or at least I hope most people are - but along with that story came a wonderful utility to find out if your doctor had reported income from the drug companies. Immediately, I checked for a doctor that had behaved very strange and found that their strange behaviour was all their own (or is hiding their pharmaceutical income). But perhaps you'd like to check your own too; I've gone ahead and linked the entry on Alaskan doctors here.


I should hasten to add that I'm not against pharmaceutical companies per se, as I'm a huge fan of new and modern drugs. I'll take a refined and purified analgesic over some willow bark and mashed up porcupine quills any day of the week (or at least those days where I need an analgesic). I am slightly leery of their marketing arms though, which can get up to some... morally dubious things. What really surprises me is that the amount that Doctors have received is so small; 257 million since 2009 seems like chump change. We're talking about 7 massive companies what have far more than that to throw around...

Coming to theatres soon

I just read that there's serious talk about there being a Myst movie. For those of you who haven't wasted as much time on computers as me, Myst is a puzzle solving game where you wander around an island pulling levers, getting inside a tree, and trying to unsink a ship. It's actually far less boring than you think, and is a great, non-violent puzzely game for getting the kids to think. But it's the absolutely worst material to make into a movie.

What's next? "Tetris 2: Revenge of the Z Shaped Block." Of course, everyone will agree that Tetris 2 was no where as good as Tetris 1: Crazy Blocks Falling From the Sky.

Don't worry people! I've got a biology post ruminating in my brain. I just need to plot it out on paper.

What happens when someone performs an act that's entirely legal in a majority of countries including the one they're in, causing no material harm to any person, through making an artistic political statement?

They have to change their identity and hide from death. That's exactly what happened to Molly Norris, of Draw Mohammed Day. Now, I won't pretend like the situation is not a bit more complex than a cut and dry instance of freedom of speech trumping all, but dangit it shouldn't be. Even granting that it is an "insult" just for a moment, well adjusted human beings should not react to insults with murder. This whole thing is like Salman Rushdie all over again.

He's not anti-science. He's just anti-science.

Here's a gambit you might recognize:

"Just because you are anti-evolution doesn’t mean you are anti-science," [John May] said. "I deeply respect science [...]"

It's a similar gambit to the "I have tons of black friends" gambit, or sentences that go "I'm not a homophobe, but I'm about to say they sleep with Satan himself." Sure he deeply respects science... as long as you're not talking about palaeontology, biology, zoology, phylogeography, or any of the other fields that don't make a lick of sense without invoking evolution. Normally, it's easy enough to ignore a crank, or point out he is a crank - and John May is a crank - but the problem comes from the fact that he has backing from Ireland's science minister.

Well, there's a rub.

Mister Lenihan backed out after it came out that John May ran some torrid magazine at some point. To be honest, I have less problems with that than he was backing this vacuous crap to begin with. After all, politicians are always in some sex-scandal or another. But a Science Minister who endorses creationism is a bit like a pacifist general, or a minister for finance who never really could do the sums, and thinks poplar leaves are accepted as a form of currency. It's a sign you might have problems.

The end all of Traffic Jams

I don't deal with heavy traffic well. I avoid driving in Anchorage or downtown Fairbanks because I find it a mix of scary and infuriating that's hard to describe - When I briefly lived in Utah, the traffic was a bit of a nightmare, and I took the train 9 times out of 10. So, when I read about a 9 day, 100km long traffic jam in China...

I'm very glad I consider College Road "heavy traffic!"

Daily Mail takes a trip into National Enquirerer territory.

A woman in North London claims she is a living magnet, says the Daily Mail. Oh, so many things I could say to that. "She has a magnetic personality?" "I can't see what drew the reporter to write this story." "She's definitely got a large chunk of ferromagnetic material between her ears, that's for sure." See? The possibilities are endless.

Magnets don't work that way. Magnets are definitely not controlled by hormones. But we shouldn't expect better from the Daily Mail, I guess. As someone once quipped - "The Daily Mail - because throwing feces was outlawed as a form of journalism."

Daily Mail:

Back again; Catching up with Stevens.

There's probably a reason why in English, "Fishing" also means blindly searching for something.

While I was in the field, enjoying bright sunny days in Southeast, I was necessarily away from news outlets and the like. So it came as a bit of a surprise when I got back at the end of the fieldwork and found out that Ted Stevens had died. Immediately, I asked some people near me (I was using a tourist internet connection) if they knew any details, since I'd just found out. Apparently they didn't live in Alaska full-time because their first question was "Who is Ted Stevens?"

It's one of those questions an Alaskan wouldn't need to ask. If you've lived here a year, or a hundred, you know Ted Stevens. There's a good chance you've met him in the flesh. One of my friends is repeatedly on record as saying that he owed his first job to Ted Stevens, when he funnelled some money this way. Obviously, Ted Stevens was not without his detractors. There are arguments for and against him, and one could debate in circles whether he was for good or ill. In fact, our skipper (who got the news on the sideband, but failed to share it with anyone since we were all ashore) launched into a heated debate with some other folks about Stevens' goodness (or lack thereof). I'm not sure this is the time to decide a legacy - when it comes to politicians, it's difficult to gauge legacy until time has passed just a bit. And I won't try to argue one way or the other just yet. But one thing I think we could all agree on is that Ted Stevens was a massive figure in our state.