Tree Rings’ Vegas Tale
James May explains why you can’t use tree rings to date the age of a Las Vegas casino (and some other dendro science): Learn more: The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Worlds of Wonder)
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River
tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …
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Peak water, Arizona style
Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?
River restoration – it’s all about the groundwater
I’m looking forward to Requiem for the Santa Cruz: An Environmental History of an Arizona River, a forthcoming University of Arizona Press book by Robert Webb, Julio Betancourt and colleagues. While we spend a lot of time talking about how to return water to rivers in the arid southwestern United States, this group of authors …
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A Google Street View picture of me, riding a bicycle
A couple of summers ago, I saw the Google Street View car coming down the Interstate 40 onramp at Carlisle Boulevard, parallel to my bike trail, as I was coming home from a ride. I looked a few times, hoping they’d captured my endorphin smile, then forgot about it. This evening I remembered to check:
Water in the desert: the winter palette
Yesterday my sister and I busted Mom out of the nursing home for lunch and a drive down by the river to see the tail end of the fall colors. Down by Tingley Beach, an Albuquerque municipal park adjacent to the Rio Grande, the cottonwoods were still putting on a show, but they’re clearly tiring, …
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The importance of technology, barbed wire edition
[T]he traditional wooden fences of earlier American frontiers were simply not feasible in a landscape whose most distinctive feature was its lack of trees. Ranchers could of course get any amount of wood they needed from lumber merchants in Chicago and the Mississippi Valley – if they could afford it. Earlier fencing styles were so …
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What is nature, striped bass edition
Can the decline of an “invasive” species be taken as a sign of an ecosystem’s declining health? That’s the question raised by an interesting Alastair Bland article in the East Bay Express on the latest numbers for striped bass in the Sacramento-San Joaquin-San Francisco Bay Delta system: Scientists say the existing population may be as …
Owens Valley and the 100th anniversary of the LA Aqueduct: Chinatown was just a movie
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, economist Gary Libecap’s take on “The Myth of Owens Valley“: The allegations are that Owens Valley water was stolen from farmers by a rapacious Los Angeles and, once it was shipped out of the valley through the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the agricultural economy …
Computers are good at chess, mostly
If you want a chance at beating a computer at chess, there is one simple way: Make the computer itself move the pieces across the chess board. For all the playing strength of the programs, the computer-driven robots that move the pieces don’t do such a great job. From Tyler Cowen’s fascinating Average Is Over, …