T10a

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Here is a blog by Charlie Loyd. My e-mail address is my first name at the domain planet.parts and your comments are welcome. Corrections are too, although house style has various idiosyncrasies that closely resemble errors.

Everything is in beta right now. Permalinks might change, and I may edit without remembering to bump the edit timestamp. The design is certainly not fixed. It’s all a static site generated by some spaghetti python.


The blog’s timekeeping is linked to CO₂ concentrations partly to feel the tide plus waves of that curve – the sense of weaving. I write this at about 423 ppm, on the last day of 2023. We’ve been here twice before, in the first half of the old year. We’ll be here twice again, in the second half of the new year. It’ll happen a sixth time, one way or another.

The time → ppm function is modeled from about a decade of total column measurements at NASA Armstrong, distributed by TCCON. It’s annotated here.

Usually when people fit a curve to CO₂ concentration just to have it (and not for a specific scientific purpose) they use the Keeling record and an exponential or quadratic model. Those are fine choices. They represent the rate of change of the rate of change, and most of the time you’d want that. But I want data from closer to me in space and time. And I want a linear (plus seasonal) fit in order for the blog to slowly break. When we start to notice it’s out of sync with the actual CO₂ concentration, we’ll be sensing that our trajectory has turned to one side or the other.


The type is Jos Buivenga’s Calluna, but I try other options more often than I remember to update this sentence. I think Calluna manages something like the best Caslons: an even, gently rolling color from afar, but a lively and distinctive character as you get close. The style sheet starts from Jan Tschichold’s Penguin Composition Rules. But, for example, with unhyphenated ragged-right text in shortish lines, it seems wise to indent by a li rather than an em.



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