The Telegraph’s “science correspondent”, Richard Gray, wrote a story over the weekend about the wonders that await in the the bathrooms of our future. The details are unimportant – click if you are curious about your toileting future. What matters more is the methodology. Because it turns out to have been based on a “report”: …
Continue reading ‘On futurologists, water closets and jet packs’ »
A: The Endangered Species Act A useful question came up on the Twitter last week about California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan that’s nicely answered by a state legislative analysis I read this afternoon. The BDCP is a key part of process underway now in California that seems to be headed toward creation of a Peripheral …
Continue reading ‘Q: What’s behind the Bay Delta Conservation Plan process?’ »
We spent Saturday at the Bosque del Apache, a wildlife refuge south of Albuquerque. It’s early in the season for the well-known sandhill crane wintering grounds, but in addition to cranes we saw mobs of pintails, a cormorant, a family of grebes (I’m reasonably certain they were westerns, though they’re tough to tell at a …
In a worth-reading piece today in the New York Times, Robert Crease uses this example to illustrate the disconnect between our ability to measure things and our ability to effectively use our ability to measure things: Is the ability to measure tiny levels of toxins making us safer, or leading us to spend enormous sums …
From Jim Hamilton’s new look at the risks of an oil production plateau: Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting …
From the inbox: I would like to know if you are interested in purchasing the domain name removingwinestains.com. Based on your contact information I see that you own inkstain.net, correct? Yes, I do own inkstain.net. No, I’m not interested in branching out into the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal.
Lissa and I flew to St. Louis two weeks ago to visit a dying old man we love very much. Bill’s been very sick. Lissa called in September to say we wanted to come see him, but he put us off. He didn’t want us to see him that way, to remember him that way. …
The scale of the “third straw” Las Vegas is poking into Lake Mead is one of those made-for-journalism anecdotes that tells the story of a great western city’s thirst. The new intake is insurance that Vegas can still get water from Mead if lake levels drop below intakes one and two, a tacit admission of …
With the latest monthly report from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, we now have end-of-water year numbers, and a chance to take stock. It’s been a terrific year for water supply on the Colorado River system: Lake Mead ended the year with a surface elevation of 1,116 feet above sea level, up 32 feet from …
Continue reading ‘There seems to be a lot of water in Lake Mead. Relatively speaking.’ »
This blog post has two introductions: 1) When I grew up in the far suburbs of Los Angeles, I was surrounded by aerospace culture. It drove our economy and employed many of my friends’ parents. Or, 2) When I was searching for an “expert” to help me in my epic 1980s journalistic debunking of Rose …