Missing The Moon

It's taken me a while to get round to it, but I have updated my comparison of Ken Ring's November rainfall and sunshine forecasts for New Zealand's four biggest cities to the actual figures, as recorded by NIWA. His rainfall forecasts are woeful. He gets Dunedin more or less right, and the other three completely wrong. On the other hand, his figures for sunshine are much better, and I can give him four "hits" there. So five out of eight for the month - slightly better than 50 percent - better than usual - but still no real evidence for forecast skill. I'll update with December's figures in January, and then post my conclusions. Regular readers may have guessed that's he's unlikely to do well. And I have to say I've missed our occasional exchanges on the NZ "Climate Science Coalition" web site, which no longer allows comments. They were swamped by automated comment spam, but seemed to think they were being picked on by Gore supporters. Says a great deal about their perspective on life...

Tuesday, December 19, 2006 9:59 pm (permalink)

|

The Truffle Book

Winner of the Special Jury Award at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. "Absolutely rivetting" - a well-known prince. Available as softback, limited edition hardback, and PDF. Free sample PDF.

Full text searchable in Google Book Search.

topics

current reading

It's taking me far too long to read this. I have been a fan of Pynchon since reading Gravity's Rainbow as a student. Against The Day strikes me as one of his most approachable novels, full of fantastic characters and wild invention, but I've been busy doing word things, and sometimes the last thing I want to do is read. But this is like fine wine, keeps tempting me to another glass. At 1085 pages, I'll be squiffy before I'm finished.

just read

I've read two books called Heat in the last month. One was damn scary, and one was by George Monbiot, about global warming (which has a fantastic cover). Some would say I've been and gone and had my mid-life crisis, but it didn't involve doing an apprenticeship at the altar of real Italian cuisine and a tyrannical chef. Bill Buford is not me, and for that I'm grateful. I suspect he may be too. I enjoyed it - the kitchen stuff was pretty compelling (as was the Italian butcher I may just have to visit next time I'm on Italian truffle time), but somehow the whole thing didn't hang together. I know where Bill's coming from - and I can sort of sense where he went - but his own motivation (and his family's reaction) remain mysterious.