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Catching up on my reading

For the last couple of weeks I have been attempting to catch up on “reading” magazines that have been accumulating throughout the condo. Sometimes that has meant magazines that are almost a year old.

The magazines also include alumni magazines from a couple of my college/university alma maters as well as some miscellaneous smaller journals. The main magazines include Time, The Week, The New Yorker, The Smithsonian, Fortune, Forbes, Money, The Rotarian and Minnesota History. I put “reading” in quotes because I really do not read every last article.

For those of you familiar with The New Yorker, you probably know that many of the articles are quite long and there is also at least one short fiction story. The fiction story I usually skip in its entirety, but the one thing I never skip are the cartoons that are spread throughout every issue. I should also say that every issue has at least one cartoon that I fail to understand the joke behind it.

About a week ago I opened a recent issue of the Bowdoin College Alumni Magazine and found a photo in black and white and noticed what I believe must have been taken at a dance. The photo looked to be old to me because three of the guys were wearing coats, dress shirts, ties and with well-combed hair.

Below the picture were a couple of names and one of them had a “’21” behind his name. I had to look carefully again because at least the girls in the picture did not look to be from back in the 1920s. “Oh my gosh, the ’21 really means 2021.” Where has the time gone?

jtr

The Fortune, Forbes, and Money magazines are similar in many respects. There are stories about various companies, advice on how to invest, suggestions for improving management skills, biographies of some successful business leaders, etc.

I goofed up in having all three of these delivered at the same time. Usually I have subscribed to one, then let the subscription run out while I switch to a different one. I will be more careful in the future about overlapping subscriptions to all at the same time. No wonder I have such a backlog of magazines to “read.”

This month’s Smithsonian has two very interesting articles. I always pictured St. Helena’s in my mind as a lonely place with the sole figure of Napoleon who was exiled there and died there. It is way out in the ocean off the west coast of Africa. Live and Learn. Maybe I am not that different than some of the French because the article says, “Despite Napoleon’s prominence in French history, it was apparent that no one knew where St. Helena was.”

The other Smithsonian article is about fingerprinting and comparing its use to the use of DNA in fighting crime. We tend to think of DNA as being definitive, but as it happens there is still a bit of subjectivity to some of the collection and analysis of DNA in solving crimes.

jtr

Besides reading magazines (and books) I also read some newspapers to try to keep up on some recent events. I also like some TV show magazines such as “60 Minutes.” So here comes a coincidence – a three-way coincidence. About a week ago I read in this month’s Rotarian an article on climate change, particularly in Alaska. Then on the editorial page of Saturday’s Independent Jonah Goldberg refers to the Green New Dealers and indicating that some try to “scare the bejeebus out of the public…” making it “easy for people to dismiss them when their Chicken Little prophecies…” don’t come true. Then on Sunday evening, “60 Minutes” did a segment on Siberia. Both Alaska and Siberia are currently experiencing changes, viz. loss of permafrost.

While it does not seem imminent that whole nations will be lost soon with global warming, there have been some devastating losses already. The article about Alaska mentions Patricia Cochran, a native of Nome, Alaska, and the executive director of the Alaska Native Science Commission who has worked on environmental problems there for some 30 years. She reports that the large ice that used to be on the shores of the ocean no longer forms and that ice protected the land from erosion.

Roughly 85 percent of the population of Alaska live along the coast. The village of Shishmaref on a barrier island has seen erosion to the point that in 2016 they voted to relocate. Cost about $200 million. Another village, Newtok, farther south on the Ninglick River has been sliding closer to the river. The cost to move that village is $130 million.

The Siberian area that was on the show was a place where the woolly mammoth had lived. Preserved bones have come from some permafrost areas. When geophysicist Sergey Zimov worked there 40 years ago he could not shovel into the permafrost at ground level more than a few inches and now he is able to go down more than six feet before finding the solid ice area. The problem is that the permafrost area contains lots of organic material that once unthawed emits CO2 and Methane gases (both in Alaska and in Siberia), hence accelerating warming of the areas. Records from 1900 to the present show that the last five years have been the warmest ever.

It has been estimated that, “there is more greenhouse gases in permafrost than in all of the world’s remaining oil, natural gas and coal.” With about 25 percent of the northern hemisphere being permafrost, I leave any predictions and conclusions to you readers.

Until next time: Oh, Fiddlesticks!

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