All in a day

We heard that the daughter of local friends, along with classmates, went to Paris for the day.  By train and ferry, apparently.  That sounded fun to me.  I have occasionally invited my sister Barbara to come to Cambridge for a visit, primarily so that we could do what the students did - go to Paris for lunch.  I went from Cambridge to Vienna for the day, albeit a quite long day 4a to 11p.  I travelled by airplane, not my preferred form of travel in Europe but necessary in this case.  

I attended the final day of the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union, to deliver an invited talk to open a session entitled 'The Cryosphere - How Much Longer'.  Evidently that title caught people's attention.  We had 150 people or more in the room, remarkable for the afternoon of the final day of a week-long conference.  After me, international experts spoke on glaciers, permafrost, and Arctic ice shelves; I had used Arctic sea ice as one of my examples of prediction challenges.  All of us made an identical point - that components of the cryosphere have changed (disappeared) beyond historical precedent.  I gave a new talk on my current most-used theme - the need to quickly convert our IPY discoveries into predictive skill.  I used Arctic sea ice, an Arctic marine ecosystem, and Arctic vegetation as examples, showing innovative (in my view) modeling efforts in each case, drawing the conclusion that we have many components of an integrated prediction skill if we can only put them together.  Given that I composed the talk the day before, finished it in the airport before the flight, and polished and practiced it on the flight, I thought it went rather well.  As conveners and speakers gathered for a post-session coffee (or beer, Vienna after all), prediction and predictability dominated our discussion.

Mary Lou doubted that I would get up this morning for an early bike ride.  She didn't know that I had planned my workouts over the past week toward this ride or that I anticipated it during last night's travel back to England and Cambridge, particularly as the limo used the same route into Cambridge that I would take.  I did start early, 6:15, and had a great ride, one of my best (fastest).  Perhaps not as fast for a similar distance (30 kilometers here, 20 miles there) as I used to do in Boulder.  But that route had straight roads with wide bicycle lanes, four corners (two of which favored full-speed turns), and only one stop sign.  This route has narrow rough roads with no shoulders, 6 villages with speed-calming (reducing) impediments at entry and exit, 9 round-about intersections, and 3 km on Cambridge streets at start and finish.  Today's route also has ten stoplights.  I had green lights for most of them and went cautiously through the others; I never clicked out of my pedals.   

Tired now, writing this blog when I should work on my text for the Senate hearings, probably due Monday.  If weather allows I hope to do a long ride, at a relaxed pace, tomorrow morning.