J. Michael Andresen

This is a really frightening graph published in The Economist a month and a half ago: This is scary because China is set to overtake the U.S. as the largest overall producer of greenhouse gases and yet China produces less than one-fifth the amount per person. Imagine what the situation will be like when they catch up to us in per capita carbon dioxide emissions. They will then be producing 26 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to 6 billion tons per year for the U.S. China argues, quite reasonably, that the U.S. and Europe are responsible for the vast majority of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, so they should be responsible for reducing that level. The West became rich through continued economic growth since the Industrial Revolution. That was fueled in part by cheap and dirty energy. Why shouldn't China have the same opportunity to increase the standard of living for its people? Most embarrassing for the U.S. government, China outperforms the U.S. on a num...

Last week, Katie was assigned to depose a witness in Connecticut on August 7. We decided to coordinate that with the trip to Boston I need to take sometime in August. I therefore bought plane tickets to spend a week in Boston, arriving Sunday morning, August 5 and returning home a week later. The initial plan was for Katie to fly with me the first Sunday, do her deposition in Connecticut on Tuesday, and return to Minnesota on Wednesday. In an amusing plot twist, Katie will no longer needs to do the deposition. It turns out that the defendant (Medtronic) has decided to buy the plaintiff (Kyphon) That certainly obviates the need for any further patent infringement litigation between the two! This makes Katie's professional life a bit more complicated, since she was expecting to spend much of the next month working on this project. Now she will need to latch on to a brand new project, which will force an annoying level of uncertainty. Plan A (Katie traveling to Boston for the depositi...

We had a bird fly down our chimney into our fireplace a few days ago. By today, it became clear that it was trapped and would not be able to get out again. Though the cat enjoyed the glass-enclosed spectacle, I felt something should be done. This is Katie's recounting of the events to a colleage of hers: ===================================== From: Katie Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:46 AM To: Samina Subject: The bird is now dead. Michael killed it this morning it to put it out of its misery. (I saw both the bird and the cat watching the bird last night.) His description of the affair that I just received has left me very disturbed. So I felt the need to share. (I spare you the details, however, which I assure you are worse than your imagination.) Katie ===================================== From: Samina Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2007 10:53 AM To: Katie Subject: RE: The bird Oh my! I'm sorry that the situation worsened with an intentional killing. I trust it had to be thrown...

First, some wedding photos! (No, I am not the geezer. The geezer appears later in the post. Katie is, in fact, four months older than I am.) Here's one of the happy couple: Here's one with the wedding parties and immediate families in front of the waterfall that was immediately opposite the reception site: This one is a favorite of ours. While traipsing about in the grass, a number of small insects had gotten caught in the sheer netting of Katie's dress. We realized this after the posed photos were done and it was a group effort to remove them all as quickly and efficiently as possible: And now back to our regularly scheduled post. Katie and I went to see the musical Chicago last weekend. We arrived at the Ordway Theater about 40 minutes before curtain so that we could share a pre -show cocktail before sitting down. That meant that we went to find our seats just five minutes before the lights went down. I led Katie ahead of me as we wended our way to the seats in the m...