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I'm whipping up a new seasonal style for A Cry for Help. And, as usual, I am doing it live on the site. So if you're bored and looking for something fun and exciting to do, go down to "choose your views" and pick Spring! (or click here: Spring!) Then keep refreshing until I say I'm done. It's like watching grass CSS grow! UPDATE: OK, I'm done. Now comes the fun part: whose browser is displaying it weird? Also, I know I broke the old styles in the process, I'm working on them now. But what do you guys think of the "Spring"? I think we all needed reassurance that winter will not, in fact, last forever. UPDATE 2: People are IM'ing me about the new picture. They're my basil sprouts in my kitchen window (ice crystals courtesy of yesterday's storm). Image detectives will note that the pot and the window are actually photoshopped together (somewhat poorly), but the pot and the window are, in real life, that close to each other. Like the Bush national guard memos, we have false documentation of something that does exist. Unlike Dan Rather, I'll be here tomorrow.

The last couple weeks have brought amazing news to those of us who love the city of Providence: five huge projects that will dramatically change downtown (and the skyline!). The Westin is getting a new tower. The Big Three of the skyline will be joined by the OneTen Westminster condominium tower (you can tell they'll be expensive because the address is "OneTen"). The Holiday Inn is going from ugly duckling to (Hilton) swan, with more hotel rooms and a new 27-story tower. A block away a 25-story residential tower is going up. And nearby in LaSalle square will be another tall building full of lofts! That's some sweet developin'. The above rendering of the new Westin tower almost took my breath away. I was starting to think that I'd never like another building built in Providence (the GTECH building is awful, and the new OneTen Westminster tower looks like a glass box with a decent building trying to grow up its side). What a great addition to the skyline. Classic, powerful, and respectful of the city. Big thanks to David Brussat for getting the image to me when I couldn't find it anywhere else. His column from last week does a great job, as usual, of covering the exciting goings on of the last couple weeks. This is the sort of thing that would be perfect for the URBlog, but there's been no time at all. (I could use an intern, I think. Applicants welcome). If you're looking for blog-like commentary, Cotuit's gang at Urban Planet is doing a bang-up job. Exciting times. Hopefully we'll have lots more to come!

Following James's lead, I've decided to go commercial and put up some Google adwords on A Cry for Help. This is mostly so that I can afford some decent hosting and not have to deal with all sorts of outages and server errors (plus you won't have to hear me complain). I put them on the inner pages so my extremely strict front page design will remain unblemished. I hope no one minds too much. Also, in anticipation of trying to make millions of adwords dollars, I revamped the file names of the individual posts, which is extremely important for getting search engine hits. If you run Movable Type, here's the page I used to guide me along. And! I'm going over to php pages, which, if I'm feeling especially ambitious, could mean some cool new features for you guys (like an automated Q, perhaps? That one's for you, Jim). So that's the purpose of all the server errors and testing posts you may have seen here lately. It looks like everything is square now. Let me know if you run into any problems, or just have general comments. And if I start randomly posting about annuities or asbestos cancer lawyers, it's most likely because the [redacted!]. (I'm just kidding, my posts won't change. [redacted because googlebot has sarcasm detection turned off])

I just got back from my first day of Bee School! I can't wait to have bees! At the Garden show at the Convention Center a few weeks ago I ran into the Rhode Island Beekeepers Association, and got a flyer on their yearly bee school. I wanted to go, but eventually decided not to. Then I stopped by my dad's house yesterday and told him about it. He was so excited about it that he talked me into going. Plus I can TiVo Lost. So I went up to Lincoln, with a surprisingly large group of wannabeekeepers (© A Cry for Help), and got the first of five two-hour lessons in apiary. We learned that only female honey bees sting, that they'll fly up to five miles in search of nectar, and how newborn queens sting other queen larvae to death, thus assuming the throne. And you can watch it all in your own bee hive! So my garden is going to kick ass this year. The herbs are already sprouting, and I'm four short lessons away from having honey makers (if it works out, I'll of course share the bounty with anyone who will come see the hive that my father is kind enough to host). Mm, honey.

(Major spoilers in the article! Don't read if you haven't seen it!) This is a pretty interesting (and fairly obvious in retrospect) take on some movie that's got the kids talking, but what does any of that really have to do with the religious right?

I understand that not everyone has a background in science, and that even those who do are not necessarily versed in all fields of inquiry. But surely a person can recognize when they don't know what they are talking about. Nicholas Ratti Jr. of Bristol is not such a person.

Harold Ward's Feb. 19 letter ("Global warming and wind turbines") implies that wind turbines do not contribute to global warming. That is false, and directly contradicts the laws of science. Schoolbooks teach that objects moving through the air generate friction and thus heat, which is not insignificant. It is why meteors and space capsules glow white-hot when flying through the air. Schoolchildren do an experiment in which a paddle wheel is spun inside a closed container and the inside temperature is seen to rise. Wind-turbine blade tines approach the speed of sound, due to their huge diameter. The list of examples goes on and on. So wind turbines do, in fact, contribute to global warning. It may be tempting to argue that the amount of warming from one turbine is insignificant. But that would be true only because the amount of electricity contributed by one turbine is likewise insignificant -- making the argument an exercise in silliness. Ward's letter is yet another example of world-saving promises being defended with arguments that violate the most basic principles of science.

Maybe this isn't widely known, but the phenemenon of "global warming" isn't caused by the heat we create from friction, burning coal, running our cars for 5 minutes in the morning when it's cold outside or the Cranston school department opening their windows in the winter. On any given day the sun pumps more energy into the planet than we could possibly generate. Meanwhile, on the dark side of the globe, tremendous amounts of that heat energy from the sun radiates out into deep space. The issue we face now is one of increased concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, specifically carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide absorbs the sun's heat and keeps it from radiating out of the earth's atmosphere, like a greenhouse traps warmth and keeps it from dissapating into the outside world. By retaining this heat (energy), polar ice melts (on average), oceans rise, and worldwide weather patterns shift in unexpected ways, causing climate change that we may or may not be able to adapt to. In fact, usually when I see someone use the term "global climate change" as opposed to "global warming" I take it as a hint that what they have to say is credible. Wind turbines, generating electricity from wind energy, creates no carbon dioxide as a byproduct. The combustion of any fossil fuel (coal, oil, natural gas) does create carbon dioxide (a basic principle of science, if you will). The cause of global warming is not the heat we create, but the greenhouse gas byproducts of generating our power. Hopefully now it's clear why Mr. Ratti is woefully uninformed (or worse, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt). You might find problems with wind energy for any number of reasons*, but "it causes global warming" is not one of them. * for instance, your multi-million dollar ocean view might have an unwelcome addition, which is funny because that ocean front property will be the first to go as sea levels rise.

Starting tomorrow, mercifully, I will be able to go out to clubs and restaurants without waking up in the morning wondering why my house smells like an ashtray. Rhode Island becomes the seventh so-called smoke free state at the stroke of midnight on March 1st. The "so-called"s there because you can actually still smoke in our non-casino casinos, which business owners and citizens are rightly outraged at. After all, if you're going to push everyone off a bridge, you really should push everyone. I've got lots of stuff to link, including Providence resident Zoe Pierson's embarrassing display of a lack of reading comprehension skills here (regarding an article in the ProJo here). This link I saved from earlier this month about smoking bans in New York City and California, where some critics of anti-smoking laws are singing a new tune. Luckily, here in RI, our restaurant and bar owners are refreshingly positive about the ban, except for the unfair exemptions for some businesses/charitable organizations/money pits. And I support them. Conversely, I'd be for declaring Lincoln Park and Newport Grand red light districts and letting smoke filled rooms be the least objectionable thing to go on there. That would be cool. As for the local bloggy scene, only Jim seems to be weighing in, and he's at his overzealous best calling the restraint of releasing carcinogenic materials into enclosed public spaces "a huge infringement on personal liberties." Yowza. Personally, I can't believe the GOVERNMENT won't let me pee on the floor at Denny's. I've got rights, you know. But Jim gets it right calling out Gregory Rich, who was quoted in the ProJo article as saying "it was shoved down our throat. This is still the United States of America, and the people have a voice and a vote. And the people did not have a voice or vote in this." Ah, seventh grade civics class... Open your book, Mr. Rich, to page 243, "representative democracy." Speaking of representation, Jim also wants to know who voted for the new law. The General Assembly website is not exactly forthcoming with vote tallies, but I did the hard work of mucking through the pdf-laden quagmire that is the web home of our legislature, for the good of everyone, of course. So who voted for it? Every single state representative and senator, that's who. Not one nay. If anyone is really interested in reading up on the bill search for "8392" here (pdf) and here (pdf), and maybe look here. But remember, there's two things in life you never want to see made: laws and sausage.