Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I love the New Mexico State Fair. This is why: a giant Lego rendition of the Tower of Babel. Everyone’s strange and wonderful obsessions come together at the fair.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
The Infamous Colorado River
A blog post showed up in my Colorado River news feed, about a winery on the west slope in Colorado, that is irrigated with water from “the infamous Colorado River” (emphasis added) What an odd way of describing the Colorado. Is the great muddy lifeline of the West really “notoriously evil,” “having a reputation of …
No Dogs, No Bikes
For my bike ride this morning, I headed north to check out the new bike path into Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which my colleague Rosalie Rayburn wrote about in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req). We’re a week away from Albuquerque’s famed balloon fiesta. I’ve always enjoyed riding bikes in the mornings and watching a zillion …
Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
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Measuring Snow
I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have …
Manure spontaneous combustion II
Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223 In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of …
Manure Spontaneous Combustion
In Vol. II of his exhaustive 1882 treatise “Legal Medicine“, Charles Meymott Tidy, M.B., FCS, Master of Surgery; Professor of Chemistry and of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at the London Hospital, Medical Officer of Health for Islington, Late Deputy Medical Officer of Health and Public Analyst for the City of London, Etc., Etc., noted …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta
The experimental restart of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant, which should get underway after the first of the year, is more than a technical experiment in operating the big desalination equipment. It is, I think more importantly, a fascinating experiment in cross-border collaboration, as I describe in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req): Beginning …
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In Search of Bafflegab in the New York Times
I’m pretty sure Michael Tobis and I share important goals and values. We both, I think, believe that political and public policy processes have the best outcomes when science is well understood and used by the participants. We both, I think, believe that journalism can and should play some sort of role in helping toward …
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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Mike Connor
I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …