The Keeling Curve shows that there is currently 406 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory. The highest concentration over the last year was a little above 410 ppm. It was around 340 ppm when I was born.

I’m traveling back to Seattle after visiting my parents for the last week. Down the hill behind my parents house is a pond. When I was growing up the pond had a good supply of fish, as well as frogs and turtles. As the years have gone on it has become more shallow due, in part, to the surrounding trees filling it with more leaves every year, and that has affected the pond’s health. As far as I can tell now, the remaining fish were wiped out last winter.

For a long time I have tolerated not being able to do Alt+Arrow in my terminal to hop over words. Alt+Backspace deletes single words, but Alt+Left inserts “[D” and Alt+Right inserts “[C”. Maddening! I’ve finally bothered to do something about it, and it was easy on my MacBook in iTerm2. See here. I only just switched it, but a quick run through of a lot of use cases did not turn up any surprises.

It’s not going to come as a surprise to anyone paying attention that the amount of arctic sea ice is decreasing, but reading about it is not always as compelling as seeing relevant visualizations. Below are a couple time lapse videos showing arctic ice extent and ice age from 1990 through 2016.

Climate change has devastated the Great Barrier Reef, with fifty percent killed since 2016. National Geographic Magazine has an infographic about this in its August 2018 issue.

I’m back home in Iowa for around a week. The first thing I heard when stepping out of the airport was a cicada. That’s something that is absent in Seattle: sounds of insects. There are no crickets, cicadas, or other audible insects in Seattle. I miss that.

An article in Business Insider this week marked the 106th anniversary since a newspaper in New Zealand published a four-sentence article titled “Coal Consumption Affecting Climate”.

I’m excited to be attending RustConf this week. I hope to come away with a better feeling of what the community is like, as well as perhaps learning enough about Rust to level up my skills with it. It’s actually been a couple months since I wrote any substantial amount of Rust (I’m still maintaining some of my Rust code and working through the last chapters of The Rust Book), but I really hope to get back to it at some level.

I’ve been an Emacs user since college. My seriousness as an Emacs user has varied over time, but I’ve probably never been much beyond somewhere between casual and intermediate. I’ve long suspected that I’m missing out on a lot of untapped efficiency potential, if only I invested the hours needed to learn more.

As I previously noted, emoji was broken in github-pages v188. It has been fixed in v189.