PIGIN SCIENCE BLONG BLOGFELLA IM BUGGEREMAP FINIS
After while I developed Willis’s Rule of Rumors, which is that you need to divide all the numbers in a story about some other island by the square root of the distance to the island in miles, because rumors are a power function of distance. In the Solomon Islands...I wrote... a post called “In Which I Talk To The Thunderstorms”
WILLIS ESCHENBACH WRITES:
"NOTE: It’s a holiday here in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands... So I thought I’d repost a piece that I wrote the last time I was in the Solomons, which was ... posted on WattsUpWithThat, where I publish my scientific work.…"Though I find his choice peculiar-- when I sailed through the New Hebrides I sent my work stateside to The Bulletin of the American Physical Society and JOSA, I can't resist adding a few Bislama Tok Pisin reviewers notes to Willis's tale of the South Pacific--
I got up at 3AM a couple of days ago, and about 31 hours later I landed in Gizo … in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, surrounded by islands with mystical names like “Simbo”, “Ranongga”, and “Kolombangara”...
I swear, if you dropped me blindfolded into Gizo I’d know what country I was in just by the smell... composed of something like one-quarter human sweat, one-quarter garbage, one-quarter betel nut spit, and one-quarter the cheap black local tobacco smoked rolled up in standard printer paper … with a soupçon of human excrement thrown in for the occasional nosegay.
I swear, if you dropped me blindfolded into Gizo I’d know what country I was in just by the smell... composed of something like one-quarter human sweat, one-quarter garbage, one-quarter betel nut spit, and one-quarter the cheap black local tobacco smoked rolled up in standard printer paper … with a soupçon of human excrement thrown in for the occasional nosegay.
I love it. It smells like home... I also note, courtesy of the irrepressible climate scientist Willie Soon, that the new Miss Solomon, Emily Chan, has said that she’s going to raise her voice on climate change …Everyone speaks ... the common everyday lingua franca, which is Solomon Islands Pijin. It makes do with a tiny vocabulary, so lots of words have to work overtime... Here’s an example from a billboard advertising that the local rice, “Solrice”, has gone back to its original processing and taste:
Thunderstorms are great majestic beasts. If you had never seen one or heard of one in your life, imagine your surprise if a lovely peaceful day suddenly clouded up. Then it started to rain. Then it was pelting down hail. Then a blinding bolt of lightning blew your ears off … you’d think the world had gone mad.
[ ME TINKIM LAPSE RATE BLONG INTERTROPICAL CONVERGENCE
WILLIS HIM NO SAVVY VERIMAS ]
As you may know, I think that thunderstorms and other emergent phenomena (tornadoes, hurricanes, El Niño, East Pacific fair-weather gale) along with other phenomena act as a homeostatic regulator of the global temperature.
[ WILLIS HIM COME LONG SOLOMONS MEKEM HAUS 1987, BYEANBYE HE MEKEM TOK TOK ALLSAEM GRANDPA BLONG SIMPSONS: ]
