I’ve long been suspicious of ski area snow reports, preferring to go with Snotel data when writing about storms. It turns out my skepticism was warranted. From Zinman and Zitzewitz (pdf): Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall on weekends. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more.
I am not a visual person. I’m a word guy. But I’ve lived essentially my entire life with visual artists. My dad’s a painter. My wife, Lissa, has worked in an enormous range of media in the nearly three decades I’ve known her. This has given me a life spent watching art happen. Art as …
As a journalist, I learned early to pay attention to the budget. It’s where we take all our policy ideas, goals and plans and make them real. Which makes tomorrow my journalistically favorite day of the year – the day the President’s annual budget proposal starts the process of deciding how our nation’s government will …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: nuke budget setup’ »
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.
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 …
Continue reading ‘Bureau of Reclamation and water in the rivers’ »
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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.