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:
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, …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert: the winter palette’ »
[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 …
Continue reading ‘The importance of technology, barbed wire 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 …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘When streams reclaim flood plains in a human-altered world’ »
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. …
Continue reading ‘The new political economics of moving water’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘teaching sin and rebellion to generations of brutish American youth’ »