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, …
Electa Draper in the Denver Post over the weekend on what happens when streams reclaim their flood plains in a human-altered world: Before Colorado was settled, its narrow canyons were river channel from wall to wall. Humans added roads and buildings in these tight spots and confined the channel. In one week in September, the …
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I’d come to take the wood ducks living on the Rio Grande Nature Center pond for granted, until I recently picked up a camera. Really lovely birds:
The politics-economics interface is what fascinates me about this new idea kicking around to replenish the rapidly draining Ogallala Aquifer by moving water across Kansas from the Missouri River. As Brett Walton explained last month in Circle of Blue, it’s a modest study at this point, with costs split between the state and federal government. …
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Amid the outpouring on the occasion of Lou Reed’s death, a particularly fine epitaph from the folks at the Westboro Baptist Church (pdf): From his early days as a frontman for the punk band The Velvet Underground and his inclusion as part of Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory, Lou Reed has been teaching sin and rebellion …
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A storm blew through Santa Fe last night. Lissa and I drove up into the Sangres to see the snow:
Circa 1958, a unique argument in favor of the development of the next wave of dams in the Colorado River Basin. At the time, the Eisenhower administration had failed to include any “new starts” for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects in its Fiscal Year 1959 budget. Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana, was alarmed: Your attention …
Full caption: Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb. Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for …
With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature. That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels …
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he …
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