Chart: 30 Years of Wildfires in America

Our personal interest in wildfires started when we visited Yellowstone National Park in the midst of their infamous wildfires of 1988. Once the Yellowstone wildfires got our attention, California wildfires kept it. This year (2021) has been bad, but last year was worse, at least for us. Some of our friends lost their ranch to wildfire, and we spent several days sheltered in place under an orange sky and with an Air Quality Index that at times went well over 300. Not good.

The linked article assembles some interesting data about the number and size of wildfires over the past 30 years in the US. The number of fires is tallied in the dark orange plot in terms of fires each year; the light orange plot shows total acreage burned each year. The extreme ups and downs in both plots shows that these are very noisy data, but noisy does not mean random. If you trust your eyeballs to see trends, it looks like the number of fires per year might be slowly going down and the acreage burned per year might be slowly going up. Fewer fires but larger fires, perhaps.

To nobody’s surprise, the article mentions climate change as an underlying cause for our wildfire problems. I say “no surprise” because in today’s political environment climate change is blamed for everything from droughts to terrorism. Haven’t seen climate change blamed for tooth decay yet, but not much surprises us anymore. Regardless, climate change probably does play a role in our “fewer but larger” wildfires, but it is certainly not the only factor, and perhaps not even the most significant.

In addition to climate change and drought, other factors include forest management (let fuel accumulate or not), fire management (fight fires or let them burn), electric transmission/distribution equipment and right-of-way maintenance (prevent electric lines from sparking fires), and even railroad right-of-way maintenance (sparks from railroad car brakes have started grassfires near Livermore). These are hotly contested (pardon the pun) topics, and have been for years. They hit the news in a big way in 1988 during the Yellowstone fires, as differences between National Park and National Forest fire management policies came to light. We have plenty of reasons to bug our elected representatives on policy issues, but if you want to add one more to the list, you can urge them to cut past the political hype, dispense with the smoke and mirrors (pardon this pun, too), and look for technically sound, practical understanding of these factors that influence each year’s wildfire season.

The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs in the Next Decade

The US Bureau of Labor tallies a lot of data on work in the United States, and the article linked above highlights one of their more interesting analyses. Quick orientation: the horizontal axis is median annual wage, vertical axis is percent growth in employment for that kind of job, size of circle represent the numeric increase of jobs, and the colors represent job families. “Fastest growing jobs” certainly attracts attention, but it is not the whole story for people seeking guidance in starting a new career. Other broad areas worth a look.include the crafts and trades, and careers in engineering and the physical sciences.

Craft and trade careers might include electricians, plumbers, welders, carpenters, and so on. An electrician once told me that the median age of electricians in the San Francisco Bay Area is nearing 60 years old, and these people are not planning to work forever, meaning there will be plenty of opportunities for newcomers. Crafts and trades do not require college degrees or college debt, and many of these careers will pay apprentices for on-the-job training. Good workers can earn wages that put them in the right-hand side of the chart shown above. Can an electrician live on a six-figure income in the Bay Area? Probably just as easily as a nurse practitioner or an actuary.

Another category worth a look includes engineers and positions in the physical sciences. These require college degrees with advanced training in mathematics and science. A bachelor of science degree may or may not be enough; many people choose to earn a master of science degree before launching their career. Maybe this is not the job you see portrayed in the movies (unless the villain is a mad scientist type), but it is pretty much a blue chip approach to career planning for those with the right aptitudes.

Other areas come to mind that may not ever show up on any list of fastest growing jobs. How about teaching children? What about spiritual care by going into professional ministry? Not everyone has the right gifts to become a pastor or a teacher, but those who do might benefit from a little loving encouragement in that direction. Food for thought.

About 12 years ago I developed and taught a 12-week adult Bible study entitled “Christian Perspective on Islam.” The study compares Christianity and Islam based on their respective source documents (the Bible and the Qur’an) and main teachings. It keeps an emphasis on the Gospel, and avoids straying off into politics. Here we are a few years later, and I am updating it to teach again, starting on September 26.

All World Languages in One Visualization

Following up a post from several days ago, the article and chart embedded above attempt to illustrate the major languages of the world in terms of how many people speak each one as their primary toungue. A few caveats are in order, though:

First, several of the illustrated languages are actually macro-languages in the sense that they are clusters of several related dialects. For example, the Chinese macro-language includes Mandarin, Cantonese, and many other local and regional dialects. The situation is even more complicated if you consider the mix of first, second, and third languages found in any given metropolis. You can find well over 100 different languages spoken in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, and this degree of complexity might be found in large economic centers world wide. If a person speaks English at work but some variation of Chinese at home, where do they show up in the tally?

Second, this is not a static picture. English, Spanish, and French, for example, were spread by extensive exploration and colonization over the course of two or three centuries. These drivers ended, yet English and Spanish continue to spread, driven by demographic and economic trends. How did so many languages arrive in the Bay Area? The people speaking those languages moved there! And trends change over time; as the article points out, the population growth of French-speaking countries in Africa will probably make that language more prominent over the next few decades.

Third, some languages may be at risk of diminishing as the populations that speak them decline. They may not entirely disappear, but losses will likely start with local dialects and spread from there. One can’t help but wonder about the long term effects of population declines on local dialects in some areas of China, Russia, or Japan.

So now that you have these caveats in mind, and have read the article and inspected the chart, what kinds of long-term trends do you think might affect the rack-up?

The road to the top of Mount Evans in the Colorado Rockies used to be billed as the “highest paved road in the United States.” At the end of the road, at an elevation of more than 14,000 feet above Mean Sea Level, visitors could enjoy a cup of hot chocolate and a doughnut in a two-story stone-and-timber visitor center. Some of the more adventurous might take the rough path to the true summit, a few feet higher. And they might be forgiven for wondering where they could find some oxygen, since the air was relatively thin at that elevation. In fact, some entrepreneur had anticipated such a need and placed a coin-operated oxygen dispenser in the lobby of the visitor center.

The article linked below provides a fascinating description of just how thin Earth’s atmosphere really is in relation to the size of the Earth and its mountain ranges. It would be nice if they showed the altitudes of commercial flights, the heights of sprites emanating from the tops of thunderstorms, and other such comparisons, but this article makes for interesting enough reading as is.

Razor Thin: A New Perspective on Earth’s Atmosphere

People who can fluently speak two, three, or more languages impress me. Many of us can speak our native tongue reasonably well, and some of us have picked up a smattering of another language or two by way of frequent interactions with people speaking those languages. If you had the time and energy, what new language would you like to learn, and why?

This is the Language Each Country Wants to Learn the Most

The article linked above shows the language that people in each country would like to learn the most. The rack-up includes a few surprises. For example, who would expect US and Canadian residents’ top preferences to be Japanese? Perhaps this is because the analysis does not provide any information about the margins between first choice, second choice, third choice, etc in the survey results.

Personally, I would like to learn Spanish, simply because I run into so many people speaking that language. How about you?

Last Friday we had the opportunity to attend the installation and inauguration of Rev. Dr. Tom Egger as the new President of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. The day was busy, but truly a blessed, wonderful kind of busy. We thank God for President Egger, for the Seminary, for pastors, missionaries, and deaconesses being trained at the Seminary, and for the church that supports and benefits from their work.

Here are a few photos from last Friday: