This week’s column, in which I play the national security card (sub/ad req): These are the same folks responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. They are thinking this way because the language of risk and uncertainty is familiar to people in the national security community, and it is their job to think about and help …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: In Uncertainty Lies Risk’ »
About that whole Colorado River shortage thing? Chill. From a Central Arizona Project statement sent ’round to reporters today: According to the Bureau of Reclamation, current conditions on the Colorado River indicate a 97 percent probability that more than 2.5 million acre-feet (more than 850 billion gallons) of additional river water will flow from Lake …
Another happy discovery from the hard drive cleanup project. I’m thinking this is from 2003 or ’04, maybe?
Out on assignment yesterday we found ourselves on the stretch of New Mexico Highway 60 that crosses the Plains of San Agustin, out by the Very Large Array, I got to thinking about long straight roads. Between Magdalena and Datil, 60 runs 23 miles of absolute straight, not a single bend or deviation: It’s …
Via the work blog, a hilarious tidbit from this morning’s New Mexico Drought Monitoring Working Group meeting – a Special Weather Statement sent out Saturday by the El Paso office of the National Weather Service: For the last several weeks parts of the Rio Grande have gone completely dry…especially on El Paso’s west side. Many …
I sat in the audience dumbfounded last month listening to Pat Mulroy speak at the 16th Annual Water Conservation/Xeriscape Expo here in Albuquerque. Mulroy is the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that wholesales water to the Las Vegas, Nev., area, and is arguably the most prominent figure in western water politics and …
Continue reading ‘“the largest artificial watershed in the world”’ »
In the elevator at Mazano del Sol, the retirement apartments where Mom and Dad live. Lady gets in with a fabulous cane – wooden, lightly carved and lovely bright paint job. Me: That’s a great cane? Does it have a story? Her: Got it in Old Town. Twelve bucks. It works. And she spryly strode …
Ezra Klein’s nominally talking to economists, but you guys sitting in the back might get something out of this as well: Listen to political scientists, sociologists, etc. They have perspectives, evidence and training worthy of consideration.
So I’m not sure how this happened, but apparently I’m all over the Internet this week as the token science journalist trying to defend my entire profession. Good luck with that, me. Eli started it, and I tried to discuss things with him there. I figured I would get an indulgence since he was kind …
In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall: “Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by …