Jake's blog

Blue NC members tend to be more politically engaged than most. In your friend group or family, are you the one asking if people have voted yet, or telling them about the merits of the different candidates? If so, here's a way to help spread your knowledge beyond those you know directly.

All Republican challengers to council lost, including a stealth write-in campaign against Molly Leight in the South ward. Blue NC member Dan Besse (SW), successful Democratic primary challengers Derwin Montgomery (E) and James Taylor (SE), unopposed Democratic Mayor Allen Joines, and the other Democratic nominees for council in NE, N, NW, and S wards won. West ward is still held by a Republican who ran unopposed.

The incumbents were weighed down by screwups in the financing of the baseball stadium, the incentive package to recently departed Dell, and a bunch of pissed-off new residents in annexed areas. Despite this perfect storm of local reactionary fervor combined with the national teabagger craze, conservatives made exactly zero gains in W-S.

To make it worse for them, all those teabaggers' heads are currently exploding over NY-23. Though I'd trade that for Maine Q1 anyday.

I'm working on my Halloween costume (Yoshi!) so I'll cut straight to the news this week:

Science Friday comes to you rather late today because the esteemed author spent last night watching UNC pull defeat to an entirely pathetic, stupid, penalty-ridden, embarrassing, unprofessional, sorry-ass Florida State football team from the jaws of victory. Not that I'm bitter. Today's post: the Physics and Economics Nobel Prizes.

Here's some science for you—I'm taking advantage of the public wireless outside in downtown Carrboro and it's quite unpleasantly chilly out here. Fall sure did roll in since last week, and I'm not looking forward to lows in the 30s over the next few days. But more relevant to this post is that a bunch of Nobel Prizes were awarded over the last couple weeks. The Peace Prize got plenty of attention already, and since the other prizes hardly got any I won't give it any more. This week's post is devoted to the Medicine and Chemistry prizes.

A series of destructive earthquakes in Indonesia and the southwest Pacific has attracted a lot of recent media attention. It's unusual for so many destructive earthquakes to occur in such rapid fire succession as they did over three days last week, and especially for one country (Indonesia) to get hit by two powerful quakes on consecutive days. Given the topic's relevance and general badassness (full disclosure: I'm a seismologist and have a particular interest in it), this first edition of what I hope will become a weekly series is devoted to earthquakes and seismology.

It's summertime, and all of us down here in NC know what that means right? Urban heat islands, smog as far as the eye can no longer see, droughts and wasted water, and energy bills skyrocketing.

And so far, we've been blessed with a federal government too distracted by Bush's war on the Constitution to take real environmental action, and a state that throws even more funding at new coal plant construction in a Renewable Energy Bill. Not to mention our lovely senators at work screwing over their own state capital on transit. Looks like we gotta take matters into our own hands.