In the August 2009 edition of the Communications of the ACM, venture capitalist Tim Draper argues that now is the time to innovate and try to make something happen. Unfortunately, for you civilians out there, viewing the article’s content requires ACM credentials.

Update: I have discovered that this article is available as a preview of the digital edition of Communications of the ACM. How lucky; everyone can view it without credentials here.

In terms of American healthcare, Jonathan Alter sarcastically asks What’s Not to Like? The piece is directed against the belief that nothing is wrong with American healthcare, but avoids commentary on the big challenge: how best to address the problem.

Now for something that I care a lot about.

Fourteen days ago, Sound Transit opened Link Light Rail, a light rail line between Tukwila (about 1.5 miles from the airport) and Downtown Seattle. In December, track covering the final 1.5 miles to the airport will open providing a direct train link from downtown to the airport. Trains run every 7.5 minutes at peak and every ten or fifteen minutes during off-peak hours, depending just how off-peak it is. Until the track to the airport is opened, shuttles will run frequently from the Tukwila station to the airport terminal.

Despite my tardiness in writing about it, I have been excited about this project since I first heard about it, which was months before I moved here. Since I do not drive to the airport, this is a big step up personally in convenience in getting there.

The next step, after completion of the line to the airport terminal, appears to be tunneling 3.15 miles to the University of Washington, creating the University Link, which also includes the construction of stations at the University and on Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, this project will not be completed until 2016.

In the 2008 General Election, voter approval was given to expand the light rail service north to Northgate, east across the I-90 bridge to Redmond’s Overlake Transit Center, and south to the Redondo/Star Lake area of Federal Way. I have yet to see completion date estimates on these projects. The same expansion proposal also adds other forms of transit in other areas, such as more buses across the 520 bridge.

A coworker sent me a link to a transcript of an interesting talk titled “You and Your Research” that was delivered by Richard Hamming in 1986. It contains observations made and opinions formed by Hamming over his career — particularly the portion of his career at Bell Labs — about how to be a successful (or unsuccessful) scientist.

I recently read an interested article titled “Ice Memory” in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert. The article was published in early 2002 and is set in North-central Greenland where, in the summers of 1996 through 2003, scientists drilled an ice core from the top of a glacier down to bedrock at 3085 meters. The ice core encases a climate record back to around 123000 years before present.

The project was called the North Greenland Ice Core Project (NGRIP) and was created to produce an ice core to reproduce (or possibly not) the results obtained from cores extracted by earlier projects, particularly the core produced by the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP).

The article covers many topics including recent shifts in the understanding of the climate, a history of Greenland — specifically the first known European settlement of Greenland by the Norse, the objectives of NGRIP, daily life on the ice, and what the ice can tell us.

Central to the article are the startling observations (resulting from the study of earlier ice cores) of extremely abrupt changes in average temperature several times over the last 100000 years. Kolbert writes:

Around fifteen thousand years ago, Greenland abruptly warmed by sixteen degrees in fifty years or less. In one particularly traumatic episode some twelve thousand years ago, the mean temperature in Greenland shot up by fifteen degrees in a single decade.

The story ends considering the relationship between the rise of human civilization and the information extracted from Greenland ice cores.

I have not read enough to know how much agreement there is on the results from Greenland ice cores or what the sticking points are, but in spite of that, the story is quite interesting. More context would, however, be nice.

Since I read this piece more than six years after publication, I wondered what results had come out of the effort, specifically with regards to “Eemian Ice Age Event One”. A paper, “High-resolution record of Northern Hemisphere climate extending into the last interglacial period“, authored by the NGRIP members and published in Nature in 2004, reports that the GRIP ice core that led to the observation of Event One was contaminated by “ice folding”.