We first noticed this in a recent article in The New York Times, perhaps the most prolific employers of “size of Rhode Island” references of any media making noise anywhere these days. The article by Timothy Williams, headlined “Brutal Crimes Grip an Indian Reservation,” refers to a Wyoming reservation named Wind River:
A rambling stretch of scrub in central of Wyoming the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, Wind River has a crime rate five to seven times the national average and a long history of ghastly homicides.
About a week later, we read the following headline in a Web site touting “Solar Reviews”: “Solar Turbines: To Power New York with Solar, We Only Need an Area the Size of Delaware and Rhode Island?”
Yes, that’s exactly what Rhode Island aspires to be…New York’s wind farm.
Doing a little digging, we discovered this nugget going back to last summer in the Science Daily, under the headline, “Gulf of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ could be Biggest Ever”:
Researchers from Texas A&M University have returned from a trip to examine the scope and size of this year’s “dead zone” and have measured it currently to be about 3,300 square miles, or roughly the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined, but some researchers anticipate it being much larger.
The question is: How much larger? New Jersey larger? Vermont larger? Large enough to eliminate Rhode Island from the calculation entirely? This is one of the problems with global warming – for every Rhody-sized chunk of floating ice it creates, it turns the Rhody-sized dead zones and deserts into something more closely resembling Connecticut.
What would you like to see measured in Rhode Islands?
