jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Gmailless: Day Two

My Gmail’s still inaccessible. It took Jugboy 13 days. update: It’s back up, a 24-hour outage. Looks as though nothing was lost.

Depending on Gmail

I made the switch to Gmail nearly two years ago. I’d look it up and tell you the exact date, but I can’t because I can’t access my Gmail account. All day long, the same message: We’re currently performing some unexpected maintenance on your account. While we can’t predict exactly how long it will take, [...]

San Juan Chama water

Dan McKay has a good story in today’s Journal answering questions that have been bubbling up about water quality once the city of Albuquerque starts taking its water from the Rio Grande. If you’ve got the paper copy of the paper, Cathryn Cunningham’s graphic is quite helpful as well.

Drought in Northern China II

Various stories on the wire today discuss the Chinese government’s attempts to control expanding deserts. What I found interesting was this bit from the Indepedent: A persistent drought in northern parts of China has only added to the problem, sucking moisture from the soil and making it more easily picked up by the wind, officials [...]

Daybook

IMG_0059 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. ride: The picture’s from a pedestrian bridge over the interstate near my house. This is how we do a lot of our rivers here in the western U.S. – all concrete, but with very little water in them. In this case, it’s a bit of a puzzle that there’s any [...]

Drought in Northern China

From NASA’s MODIS satellite, an image of spring drought in northern China: You can also see the same thing in the IRI global standardized precipitation index, though on longer time scales the effect is not apparent.

Priorities

We can do without toilets, we can bring our own water, but we have to have Internet. Mount Stromlo Observatory director Penny Sackett, on the priorities for restoring infrastructure following the wildfire that swept across the observatory in January 2003. From Dennis Normille’s account in the May 5 Science.

The Return of Quark Soup

David Appell’s back. Yay. (His first two posts are about climate, so that’s where I’m putting him in the blogroll. I’ll amend as needed.)

Thin slicing Gladwell

I’m a huge Malcolm Gladwell fan. But for some reason, I hadn’t read Blink, his latest book. I bought a copy a while ago, and both Nora and Lissa have read and enjoyed it. (Lissa got me hooked on Gladwell in the first place.) I briefly picked it up right after I bought it and [...]

Creeping Drought

Steve B, in the comments, points to an AP story about a new study in Science Friday by Fu et al. on what they say is evidence that the jet stream is creeping poleward. They only hint at the implications in the paper, noting that “the poleward shift of the jet streams and the associated [...]

keep looking »