Tag Archives: place

Why Does the NYT Dialect Map Think I Come From Stockton?

by Arkady549e Posted on December 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Everyone’s favorite timewaster of the past couple of days has been the New York Times’ online dialect map. Answer 25 questions and it will tell you where you grew up. My results were disappointingly vague. Lots of people reported that the app practically located the city block they came from, but in my case it didn’t even get the right part of the state. I’ve spent my entire life within a radius of about 20 miles centered on Orange County, but the app thinks I come from northern California:

I had trouble with several of the questions. The freeway/highway distinction had a couple of answers that seemed OK. I refer to large vehicles on highways as big rigs, trucks, and semis fairly interchangeably. I’m fairly agnostic between yard sale and garage sale, as well as between drinking fountain and water fountain. But I took the test several times to see if answering these few questions differently made a difference, and it didn’t. I kept coming up as a northern Californian.

So I dug in further. Which question was IDing me wrong? After plowing through the test about a dozen times giving different answers to one or two questions at a time, I finally figured it out. It was this one: “What do you call the small road parallel to the highway?” I think of this as a frontage road, but when I switched to service road, the app pegged me with eerie precision:

So what’s going on? The truth is that here in Orange County we don’t really have roads like this, so I don’t call them anything. The only time I see them is when I’m traveling, usually in a car going north on I-5. Once you get up into the San Joaquin Valley, there are signs for these roads all over the place, and they’re always called frontage roads. Since that’s the only exposure I have to them, I call them frontage roads and thus peg myself as a northern Californian.

I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than just this, but since the test rotates questions it’s hard to consistently hold every variable constant but one in order to get clean results. As near as I can tell, frontage road reliably places me north of Bakersfield, but service road occasionally does too depending on how I answer some of the other questions. Most of the time, though, service road plus my natural answers to everything else places me solidly in Southern California.

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Why Does the NYT Dialect Map Think I Come From Stockton?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

by Elyse Corder Posted on November 29, 2013

Mother Jones

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Today is a “Where’s Waldo” edition of Friday catblogging, except that Domino is a lot easier to find than Waldo. Our quilt this week is another double Irish chain. Thanks to poor planning on my part, nearly all of our Irish chain quilts got backloaded into the end of the year, which is why you’re seeing a bunch of them lately. And there’s still one to go. This one is machine pieced and hand quilted.

In other news, I’m reliably told that whatever else you may think of it, the Daily Mail is your go-to destination for pictures of cute cats and other animals. Also, judging from its front page, it’s the place to go for hyperbolic Black Friday News. Here is today’s top headline in the US edition: “Black Friday chaos sweeps America: Man shot for a TV and another is stabbed for a parking space as shoppers turn violent.” You may, if you wish, take this as a data point against my thesis that Black Friday is fading away.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 29 November 2013

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How Not to Argue With Your Crazy Relatives at Thanksgiving

by JannaLucero Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Can I waste some time venting about a teensy little pet peeve of mine? Thanks. Here’s a brief Twitter conversation I just had with Chris Hayes:

Hayes: Devoting our whole show on Wednesday to how to talk about politics, news with conservative family members. Should be fun!

Drum: Will be interesting if it’s real. Usually this stuff isn’t. Needs to be arguments that actually address conservative worldview.

Hayes: Oh, I don’t think it will be useful. No one ever persuades anyone of anything. But will be fun!

I don’t really mean to fire off any cruise missiles at Hayes or anyone else over this, but every year there’s a spate of blog/magazine pieces about how to discuss the political hot potato du jour with your crazy right-wing relatives at Thanksgiving. And every year they’re fake. Mostly they provide stock liberal responses to imaginary conservative talking points, and as Hayes says, they don’t really do any good.

Now, maybe there’s no help for this. Liberals and conservatives have been arguing for centuries, and so far neither side has convinced the other to surrender. Still, wouldn’t it be more interesting to at least try and write something real? That is, come up with the kinds of comments that your Fox-watching aunts and uncles are really likely to drop into the conversation, and then come up with replies that might actually persuade someone who’s a conservative. The downside is that this isn’t as much fun: there will be no killer facts and figures in this list that demolish Uncle Joe’s Obamacare tirade and leave a smoking crater in his place. (In our collective imaginations, anyway.) Instead, we’ll have a collection of items that turn the battleship a few degrees at best. No one’s going to suddenly decide that Paul Krugman has been right all along, but maybe you’ll be able to seed a few doubts about Sean Hannity’s commitment to the straight dope.

This would be hard work. You’d have to actually watch Fox News for a while to make sure you know what’s really on conservatives’ minds these days. Listening to a bit of talk radio and reading some chain emails would help too. And that’s not all. You’d almost certainly have to team up with an actual conservative to help you understand both the worldview at work and the kinds of arguments that might appeal to his ideological comrades-in-arms. And why would a conservative help you with this project? Beats me. Maybe you could trade: you get some arguments that appeal to actual conservatives and he gets some arguments that appeal to actual liberals.

Anyway, somebody ought to do this. I’m a hermit, and my entire family is pretty liberal, so I’m not a very good candidate. But someone out there is. Who wants to do the country a public service?

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How Not to Argue With Your Crazy Relatives at Thanksgiving

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Chevron is pleased with how much money it made last year, which is nice

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 11, 2013

Chevron is pleased with how much money it made last year, which is nice

By Philip Bump

Hey, hey! Happy times at Chevron headquarters, located at 10 Satan Street in a secret city that hovers out of sight behind storm clouds. The company’s fourth quarter profits will be “notably higher” than third quarter profits! (Third quarter revenues for the company were only $56 billion. Sad face.)

Bruna CostaChevron headquarters, somewhat obscured

From Bloomberg:

The outline given by the second-largest U.S. oil producer by market value hints at a bright succession of earnings reports when the world’s biggest publicly traded energy producers begin releasing results in coming weeks, said Brian Youngberg, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. in St. Louis.

“Chevron’s results certainly provide an optimistic preview of what its peers in the integrated energy sector have in store,” Youngberg said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Hooray! Optimism in these dark times. Refreshing.

As for ExxonMobil:

Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, is expected to report net income of $43.8 billion for 2012, according to the average of six analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Clap clap clap clap! It will either spend that $43 billion by giving $6 to every living human being or by buying more things that enable it to suck more oil out of the ground more quickly to hasten the planet’s wrenching slide into a changed climate. (Sad face.)

Somewhere, behind the darkest cloud in the night sky, a toast is made. “To as much as we can get, as soon as we can get it.” Glasses clink. A single lightning bolt flashes to the ground leaving a scorched “X” that marks yet another place to drill.

Source

Chevron Strikes Optimistic Note for Quarterly Earnings, Bloomberg

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Chevron is pleased with how much money it made last year, which is nice

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Record-high average gas prices in 2012 are almost certainly great news for oil companies

by kowalski099 Posted on January 2, 2013

Record-high average gas prices in 2012 are almost certainly great news for oil companies

By Philip Bump

These prices are actually low by today’s standards.

The Wall Street Journal is tremendously incensed about gas prices. For the record, it tells us in the headline of an article, gasoline was the most expensive ever in 2012.

The national average price of [gasoline] for the year was $3.60 a gallon, a significant jump from the previous record of $3.51 set in 2011. While 2008 is famous for a huge summer spike that drove the average above $4 a gallon, price[s] weren’t as consistently high as this year, leaving 2008 in third place overall at $3.25. …

AAA said the national average has broken a daily record high for a total [of] 248 days in 2012, including 134 consecutive days of records. April 5 and 6 marked the highest daily national average of the year at $3.94 a gallon … while the price dropped to its low point of $3.22 on Dec. 20.

The paper’s heavily conservative readership might be puzzled by this news. After all, this is what domestic oil production is doing:

And as we know from Republicans, increased drilling means gasoline prices should be going down. But they aren’t (as we’ve noted before). They’re bouncing all over the place.

GasBuddy.com

If we’re to believe that the key to reducing gas prices is more drilling, the second chart in this post should look like the first, except upside down. It doesn’t. It looks like this chart …

Post1.org

… which is the price of a barrel of oil over time. Because that’s what gasoline prices correlate to: how much a barrel of oil costs on the international market.

That gas-prices chart also looks a little like this one.

Data from DailyFinance.com

This graph shows quarterly earnings for oil companies. Up in the summer of 2011, back down, then up again. The correlation is between how much gas costs and how much oil companies earn.

At the end of this month, those companies will start releasing their 2012 profits. If the all-time high average price is any indicator, Exxon and Valero and Chevron and BP probably had a pretty good year.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Record-high average gas prices in 2012 are almost certainly great news for oil companies

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Fracking threatens farms and food safety

by Myrna Posted on November 29, 2012

Fracking threatens farms and food safety

By Susie Cagle

Some of our most fertile land for growing food also happens to be fertile land for blasting out tons of shale gas. You might guess who’s already winning this battle.

Boris van Hoytema

The Nation reports on the effects of fracking pollution on America’s farms, focusing on North Dakota cattle farmer Jackie Schilke, who farms atop Bakken Shale.

After fracking began at 32 sites within a couple miles of her ranch, Schilke’s cattle started dropping dead and Schilke herself started suffering from poor health. Ambient air testing found high levels of a bunch of nasty chemical compounds associated with fracking, and with cancer and birth defects.

State health and agriculture officials acknowledged Schilke’s air and water tests but told her she had nothing to worry about. Her doctors, however, diagnosed her with neurotoxic damage and constricted airways. “I realized that this place is killing me and my cattle,” Schilke says. She began using inhalers and a nebulizer, switched to bottled water, and quit eating her own beef and the vegetables from her garden. (Schilke sells her cattle only to buyers who will finish raising them outside the shale area, where she presumes that any chemical contamination will clear after a few months.) “My health improved,” Schilke says, “but I thought, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing to this land?’”

Around the country, farmland near fracking sites is being contaminated and livestock are getting sick and dying.

In Louisiana, seventeen cows died after an hour’s exposure to spilled fracking fluid. (Most likely cause of death: respiratory failure.) In north central Pennsylvania, 140 cattle were exposed to fracking wastewater when an impoundment was breached. Approximately seventy cows died; the remainder produced eleven calves, of which only three survived. In western Pennsylvania, an overflowing waste pit sent fracking chemicals into a pond and a pasture where pregnant cows grazed: half their calves were born dead. The following year’s animal births were sexually skewed, with ten females and two males, instead of the usual 50-50 or 60-40 split.

As natural-gas drilling operations move into the Northeast, where there’s a high concentration of organic farms and local-focused eaters, expect to see more conflicts between farmers and frackers. Big questions lie behind those sad images of dead baby cows: How “cheap” is natural gas that costs lives? And is energy independence more important to us than food independence?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Fracking threatens farms and food safety

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