Sometimes (not often) I hate being right. Several years ago, our school system had a bond referendum on the ballot for $600 million dollars to help build new schools throughout the county to help with the overcrowding problem. Thanks to a massive disinformation campaign by local Republicans and misguided Libertarians, the referendum was defeated. As a result, every year the county reassigns several thousand students from local schools to schools several miles away. This obviously pisses off the parents whose children are being reassigned, and yet the school system's typical response seems to be "Quit whining. It could be worse." Which is true, but even so... And the local news doesn't help the matter by mostly interviewing people whose kids AREN'T being reassigned, minimizing the apparent impact. Quit whining, you whiners. As long as my taxes don't go up, I don't give a damn about your bratty kids...
Anyway.
My kids' school is somewhere around 120% capacity, so last year the county proposed converting it to a year-round schedule. They made no provision to convert a local middle school to year-round, though, and when challenged on this, they responded "You're free to apply to the year-round magnet middle school in the next town up the road." This left the very real possibility of having children in both traditional and year-round schools, within the same family. I predicted the proposal would fail, and the county would "reward" us by reassigning our children to some crappy old school down the road a few miles.
And that's exactly what happened. The original section of our neighborhood, which was developed in 1998-1999, has been reassigned to an older school 7 miles down a very busy road (the kids who were going to the old school have been reassigned to a brand new school 5 blocks away). Newer sections of our neighborhood, including houses currently being built, will continue to be assigned to our local neighborhood school.
Even better is the fact that there has never been a proposal to cap enrollment in any away at the local school, which would allow our children to continue to attend. Even now, as part of the reassignment, the county has no plans to cap enrollment. If they cap enrollment, the county has to provide transportation to new residents whose children are assigned to a distant school. Instead, they put the burden of transportation on existing residents, and allow new residents to attend the neighborhood school. Brilliant!
No, really, it might.
This is an article describing thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic.
Basically, cold salty water is denser than cool less-salty water, so it sinks, forming North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW). This behavior releases massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere in the North Atlantic, moderating Europe's climate (all that stuff about Europe being warm because of the Gulf Stream is hooey).
Periodically, events have occurred that have curtailed or stopped the formation of NADW. Anything that increases the flow of freshwater into the North Atlantic can alter the thermohaline characteristics such that NADW formation ceases, less heat is released, and Europe gets colder than hell.
The Younger-Dryas Event is a well-documented example of this process. Oddly, and seemingly paradoxically, "global warming" can potentially result in Europe getting colder than hell: increased riverine output in Siberia (as a result of increased liquid precipitation in a warmed temperate or high latitude climate) will decrease the salinity of the North Atlantic, which will influence NADW formation. But of course, it's really way more complicated than that.
Neat. Global warming could make Europe colder. Try explaining THAT to Rush Limbaugh...
Dammit. Somebody hosed up my guestbook. Think I'll take the thing down. It's more trouble than it's worth. Some yahoo is always trying to get clever by putting html in their entry, and all it does is cause problems for me because I have to go fix their mistakes.
Anyway, what's with all the comments from people in Germany?? Strange. Maybe they all know each other.
It's raining and foggy. Of course it takes me twice as long as usual due to an accident, so I spend most of the morning bitching about it. Turns out two people were killed in a head-on collision that shut down traffic in both directions for three hours. Nothing like a little perspective to make me feel like a total ass for complaining about traffic...