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Showing posts from May, 2019

Regarding Annex: What Enfield residents say they want

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  Five years before the Annex's future became a live debate, residents were already telling the town what they wanted it to be. The 2020–21 community survey never asked about the Fermi building, but about 20 people raised it on their own (out of 512). Fermi might not have been top-of-mind -- but recreation clearly was. This chart ranks the ten themes Enfield residents raised most often in the open-ended, write-in portions of the 2020–21 town community survey, which drew 512 respondents. Each bar shows how many comments mentioned that theme; the colors flag whether it read mainly as a frustration (red), a wish (green), or an answer to the survey's redevelopment questions (navy). Many residents raised several issues at once: One person might have asked for both more recreation and lower taxes. Source. Town of Enfield community survey, conducted December 4, 2020 through March 11, 2021, with 512 participants. Method. Comments were grouped into themes by Claude Opus 4.8, an Anthropi...

The three phases of climate change conversion

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Bushnell Park, Hartford, May, 2019 Unless you live on the shore, climate change in Connecticut isn't all that noticeable. Spring still seems like a spring. A little wetter, perhaps, but people don't associate an increase in precipitation with a changing climate. The most noticeable impact may winter's polar vortex. Polar air that is otherwise blocked off by the jet stream breaks free and plunges south. But our single digit cold is nothing like what the people in the Midwest experience. Most people don't consider these low temperatures far outside the usual. But awareness that something is changing is arriving, slowly still. The average person who truly understands what's happening goes through a life-altering climate change conversion that comes in three phases. First, they may be aware of the issue, recognize it's something of problem, and generally agree on the need to end use of fossil fuels. They may even know what the Keeling Curve is. But ...

Pix: Hats in Hartford

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Hartford CT, May, 2019. Random street photo. 

Hartford, Connecticut, scene, May 4, 2019

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