Bear Fitting Description of Bear Spotted

Bear mauls hiker in Kentucky. Says wildlife spokeswoman Barbara Atwood "They had a bear sighting yesterday. However, they could not confirm that it was the bear in question", adding hopefully that "...they feel confident the bear is still in the area." Hats off to anyone who can catch a bear without killing it. But this whole issue of catching a reprobate animal is a perpetual puzzle to me: how exactly does one confirm that a particular black bear is the bear? Every black bear I've seen looks exactly the same as any other. Sighting one amounts to sighting any one. (How might it fit some description? Rumbles about the woods? Wearing all black?)

So anyway this dubiously perspicacious observation exposes only my complete ignorance compared to wildlife experts who appear, from the ignorant outside of things, to be pulling off some sort of nature magic trick. On a related point, I'm confident that the perp is still in the area, too.

Administriva

I moved to Northern California in late May, and have been swamped with innumerable petty and thoroughly annoying details involved with opening a branch of the business, getting an apartment, finding my way around, and so on. So apologies to whomever has enjoyed this blog in the past. I'd like to promise that I'll be writing every day, but it's probably more prudent to say only that I've started blogging again, and the frequency and amount is still to be determined as I get further settled in.

The Climate Change Issue: Finally, We're Growing Up

I have some material I'll develop in an upcoming blog on (broadly speaking) rationality given uncertainty. This got kick-started from an interesting article from The New Republic about developing rational strategies to tackle climate change given the uncertainty of our predictions and the very many other risks (and their uncertainties) that we all face. It's a good read, and strikes a rare reasonable, non-partisan tone on the topic of climate change.