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Clark: What if you created a dictionary without the help of lexicographers? On my reading list, a book by a friend of a friend—Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. Video introduction here. Anna: Two interesting reads for anybody who likes to eat food. First, a new take on women and dieting that implicates corn and soybean oils—namely Omega-6s—which are found in all kinds of processed...

Permeable pavement can make old-school road engineers and pavement builders anxious. To them, the idea of water seeping through roads like they’re made of Swiss cheese just doesn’t seem right. Water runs off roads, not through them. Or at least it used to. In the Northwest, there’s a growing acceptance of the use of pervious concrete and porous asphalt for roads, sidewalks, parking lots, and driveways. The unconventional pavement does...

What a year! And one of the best ever for Sightline’s blog. We’ve been through a complete redesign of the site and emails, introduced new issues, and penned over 380 posts that were read over 400,000 times. Thanks for sticking with us—it’s our readers (all 176,162 of you) who made 2011 such a success. It’s late December, so ’tis the season for year-end roundups. Here’s a look at the top...

Here’s my Christmas gift to you: useless regional trivia that you can use to annoy your friends and family this weekend. Below, you’ll find all the geographic place names in the Northwest that include the word Christmas. British Columbia Christmas Creek (the northern one), flows into Hyland Lake way up north near the border with Yukon Territory. Christmas Creek (the central one), flows into Eagle Creek near Wells Gray Provincial House and...

Eric dP: This week it seemed I read nothing that wasn’t depressing. It started with the Nation taking a troubling look at the fracturing of Occupy Wall Street. More troubling was Eric Scigliano’s media analysis of recent global warming coverage, or lack thereof. Despite a spate of major developments, he finds that journalists are almost ignoring the topics. Finally, it’s not accurate to say that I “enjoyed” reading them, but...

Clark: Now this is a true catastrophe: a craft brewer is worried that climate change is making beer more expensive! Gahh! Valuable tips for the holidays:  4 ways to hack your brain to avoid impulse purchases! Physicists with lasers and very big brains are trying to figure out if reality is actually just a hologram.  “More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t...

I’ve finally had a chance to absorb the US EIA’s latest quarterly coal report, which takes us up through the middle of 2011. As I’ve shown before (here and here) coal exports in the West have had a volatile history. In this chart, you can see the last 15 years of quarterly data, complete with upward spikes in the last few quarters.

Clark: Reusable bag humor. Graphs: It’s taking longer and longer to replace jobs after a recession. The world’s sexiest programmable thermostat. AHH! Maybe neutrinos CAN move faster than light. Anna: Here’s polling that shows—yet again—that American values differ from those of Western Europeans. Most notably, and no big surprise, at the same time we’re more religious, and more likely to think our country is superior (49% of us), we’re more...

An essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, first published in the mid-1980s but republished in book form in 2005, offered the first serious analysis of a topic near and dear to any political observer’s heart: bullshit.  Frankfurt argues that bullshit differs from lies in one important way. The liar believes that there IS such a thing as the truth: it’s the thing that the lie is designed to conceal. In contrast,...

Eric dP: It was with a sort of grim satisfaction that I read the Washington Post’s excellent feature, “Wall Street’s resurgence frustrates its claims, and Obama’s.” It’s a close look at recent bank profits, bonuses, and growth and it gives lie to the complaints from the finance sector that the Obama administration is treating it punitively. It also, of course, gives lie to the idea that the Obama administration is...