Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens

Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. High today: 3. It's been an early-season "Colorado low" day. Seems like 5-10 cm of wet snow packed down by subsequent freezing rain and rain. It's still raining moderately. The cold front is just making its way through Windsor: it was 10C there at 9:00; 7C now. Looks like we might get up another degree or two before the front arrives, but it's supposed to drop back below freezing tomorrow and stay there for the rest of the week, so it looks like we're going to be living on a glacier for a while.

A few days ago, EC was calling for a high of 12 in Toronto tomorrow. The Weather Network and Accuweather had something like -2 and 0. The latter two will be pretty much right and EC will be way wrong, but the fact that it has been 10 degrees at Windsor tonight goes to show how close EC came to being right. That's the way the weather game goes. Last week EC came out with its season forecast for the winter; it got widespread headlines with the claim that it'll be the coldest winter in "nearly 15 years" (which means since '93-'94, because I remember how incredibly cold it was day after day after day in February of '94, walking home to my residence at Queen's). I'd like to think that they tried to impress on the various media reporting on this that, actually, it being a very cold winter is only the most probable thing that will happen. It being a warmer-than-normal winter is, of course, not out of the question; it's just less probable. Anyway, what was reported, exclusively, was the EC says it will be very very cold, so if it's not, and of course there's a good chance it won't be, everyone will be able to smugly believe that EC was wrong, as usual. As always!

Michael Kuss also came out with a seasonal forecast last week, and he says: normal December, cold January, above-normal February. (Edit 12/03: Mis-remembered that by a fair margin. Actually, he says a bit below normal December, normal January, normal or above February.) I'm starting to wonder, though, just what the art is in being a weather forecaster these days--they're all, as far as I know, using pretty much the same data and pretty much the same computer models. I was surprised when it became apparent that the weather gerbils on CBC actually produce their own forecasts, but really, it is something a gerbil can do, now that it's all based on computer modelling.

I am, at least, still continually assured of the gerbilhood of the gerbils: last week, Natasha Ramsahai pointed out a strong radar echo running along the middle of Lake Ontario, and said that she and Nick Cernkovich had just been talking and agreed that it was probably "ice in the upper atmosphere". What? WHAT? I dunno, an ICEBERG in the upper atmosphere might give you a strong radar echo, but it's hard to see just what would be holding it up there. (Suspended ice, on the other hand, like, you know, snow, gives you weaker radar echoes than rain does. (Ice pellets, by their nature, do not exist in the upper atmosphere. (Not that the radar is scanning the upper atmosphere in the first place.)))

Phew. Here is, if not the LAST, at least the SECOND-last graph resulting from my Incredible Waste of Time, which, incredibly, keeps wasting more of my time. This graph is the result of two things: first, I thought that I really ought to combine my three previous graphs to show how they correlate; second, I thought I ought to see how the whole business correlates to The Economy. So, I spent maybe an hour yesterday afternoon trying to find annual averages or whatever for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, before giving that up as a) fruitless, and b) not really informative anyway, and going on to try to find annual US GDP figures. This proved more fruitful, and even finding figures "chained" to constant dollar values wasn't as much of a chore as I was afraid it would be. (I did, however, give up before finding figures that were both "chained" and rendered per capita.) So, without further ado:



So, what does this tell us? First, there seems to be a significant correlation between recessions and subsequent decreases in both faculty complement and PhD production. I had actually thought that the 1991 peak in both faculty complement and PhD production was likely an artifact of faulty data, until I was reminded by the GDP figures that there was a recession in the early '90s. The economic slowdowns around 1961, 1970, 1974, 1991, and 2001 are all accompanied or immediately followed by decreases in PhD production and faculty complement (except 1961, when faculty complement figures aren't available). The only economic slowdown that bucks the trend is the one around 1982, which occurs at the bottom of the great faculty and PhD-production meltdown that starts in the mid-'70s; faculty complement starts rocketing up right at the time of that recession, though PhD production keeps drifting slightly downward for a while.

What's actually most interesting to me about the GDP line is how insignificant the recessions look. When there is a recession, at the time, it feels like the sky is falling, but every time, within a couple of years, GDP is way ahead of where it was before the recession.

And then of course there is the fact that the United States is more than five times richer than it was in 1959, while people by and large don't feel any richer, but that fact is losing its novelty for me. (Though it does bear on something that I'm starting to think about more frequently, which is the ancient imperative, still with us, to leave "a better life"--which is to say, more and better stuff--for the next generation.)

(The GDP figures are the official figures reported in January of each year; I probably should've gone with the ones reported in October--as it is, you could say that the plot points lag the economy by almost a year--but the important thing is the trend, anyway.)

I say that this might be the SECOND-last graph resulting from my Incredible Waste of Time because it occurs to me that the next thing I should, incredibly, waste more time on is looking at the figures for Canadian universities only. There are two reasons I probably won't do this: first, the idea of dragging all those volumes of Review of Metaphysics off the shelves again makes me queasy; second, the Canadian numbers are so dominated by U of Toronto that there's probably no point bothering.

So, I dunno, maybe we might get back to our regularly scheduled programming this week. For now, this: a week or so ago, I came across something mentioning "the New Right", and it occurred to me that I hadn't heard that term in quite a while, and then it occured to me that maybe the word "neoconservative" got flipped on its head partly because "the New Right" got absorbed into it. What "neoconservatism" has come to be is pretty much defined by the ideologically aggressive foreign policy of the Reagan New Right, which had at least nothing in particular to do with, if it was not in conflict with, what "neoconservatism" was at the time.

Also, Mike Huckabee is pretty much what a Red Tory was in Canada before "Red Tory" got flipped on its head. We no longer have a word in Canada for what people like Mike Huckabee are; I guess there never was a word for them in the US.

And finally: it appears that all the seats in today's Russian parliamentary election have been won by illiberal parties (and that the man wanted by the UK in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has retained his seat in the Duma on the list of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's "Liberal Democratic" party). As saintalbatross was alluding the other day, this is not the way things were supposed to go after the end of history. It sure makes the "regime change" idea look pretty bad.