Gyroscopic self-leveling pool table
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the inability to play billiards on cruise ships to be one of society’s great technological dilemmas. Problem solved: Next up: poor people who have to cook with dung.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Bureau of Reclamation and water in the rivers
Jennifer Pitt sounds an optimistic note about the possibility that the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study could reclaim some priority for the retention of water in the rivers of the Colorado River Basin: The future of this region promises to be more crowded, and likely hotter and drier, but that doesn’t have to …
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Magic socks
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I purchased three pairs of socks at the old Gil’s Runnershoe World on Carlisle and Lomas. The store’s long gone, its building torn down and replaced by a Walgreens. But the socks remain. In 1997, I was wearing a pair of them when I was caught in a storm while hiking …
Texas drought resiliency update
As the national media descends on the tiny Texas community of Spicewood Beach to capture the spectacle of water trucked to a thirsty town, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit the question of what we have learned so far from the impact of the Texas drought. I tried to make a pie chart …
it’s economics
Revkin: …it will be economic pressures, not scientific findings, that largely determine what the world’s nations do, or don’t do, to limit the flow of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fuel burning.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: transparency and accountability in federal nuclear contracting
Over at the day job, a piece on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s policy of refusing to make public the performance evaluations of the contractors that do the agency’s work: Because it seems unlikely a glowing performance report could be used against a contractor, the agency seems to have decided that protecting the contractors from …
Drought’s over! (not)
At 0.38 inch (0.97 cm), January 2012 was the second consecutive month at my house with above average precipitation. Here’s a map of New Mexico right now: I live in that brown bit in the middle.
Rate hikes and public infrastructure
One of democracy’s great shortcomings, on display these days especially in California, is that we want the government to provide the stuff that we want, but we’d just as soon not pay for it: Local officials say they need the money to upgrade outdated water-treatment facilities, sewer lines and water mains. In some cases, improvements …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: wastewater reuse
My search for folks working the solution space alights on the growing enthusiasm in New Mexico for wastewater reuse: In other states, especially water-short Arizona and Southern California, cleaning up sewage and reusing it in new and creative ways is becoming common. And in less obvious ways, by returning sewage effluent to New Mexico’s rivers, …
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Colorado River models: wrong but useful
Climate scientist Tamsin Edwards triggered a fascinating discussion when she chose the famous George Box quote – “all models are wrong, but some are useful” – as the name for her new blog. In a delightful exchange on Twitter (which I followed in real time and which Edwards quotes extensively in the blog post linked …
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