There’s a romance about the tree ring lab, and the culture flowing therefrom, that seems to draw writers like me. It’s probably the same reason the sliced and polished slab of a tree’s trunk, marked with little flag markers pointing to moments in history (“Columbus lands”, “Declaration of Independence”) is such a museum of natural …
I consider the business model that supports my journalism a great privilege. But I understand that a big part of the benefit offered by news production is a classic case of what economists call a “public good“. That is to say, civil society as a whole benefits, even if you don’t have the time to …
I happened to be in the midst of reading Kuhn vs. Popper when I ran across this, by Nicholas Lemann, on the sometimes clumsy dance between narrative and analysis in journalism: Forming a hypothesis. It’s healthier to admit to yourself that you have one than to go into a story with the idea that you have no …
We’ve got some cool jewelry in the household thanks to Nora Reed’s work. You might like some too: I’ve always had a thing for swirls and black and white patterns. This high-contrast piece combines soft mother-of-pearl white with a few kinds of black and white beads; the colors echo themselves throughout it to create a …
Via Realtor.com, we find this lovely 7,000-square foot home in Boulder City, Nev., with a swimming pool plus a great view of the bathtub ring on a dwindling Lake Mead, where the pool water came from: Yours for just $1.9m.
My current water policy obsession is the question of what actually happens – agency by agency, water user by user – when the water starts to run out. Much of the “OMG, we’re running out of water!” discussion plays out in the form of graphs of the future that extend projected supply and demand curves, …
I confronted a litany of drought when I was making the rounds on my newspaper beat this morning. No doubt this has happened before and I’ve just not noticed it, but the current forecasts are dry at all the basic time scales I watch closely. I lined ’em all up so you could share New …
Continue reading ‘Running the table: dry at all relevant time scales’ »
At the peak of the housing bubble in January 2006, when the annual pace of new home construction hit a blistering 2.29 million units, an estimated 14 percent of laborers in the construction sector were undocumented immigrants, including 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers, 28 percent of drywallers, and 36 percent of insulation …
Based on the latest federal forecasts (pdf from USBR here), we can expect Lake Powell to drop 20 feet this year and Lake Mead to drop 10 feet. That’s the midpoint forecast. Could be better if it snows. Could be worse. So far the trend based on the first half of January leans toward worse. …
Continue reading ‘Draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs, 2013 edition’ »
So it looks like we’ll have solar panels installed by the end of February. How long after that will it take for global warming to stop?