Elephant Diaries: Career Advice From The President

I’d like to think the President of the United States has the best interests of America’s children in mind with this school address thing that has generated such a kerfuffle. But after reading the advance text, I’m not so sure: Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has …

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Water in the Albuquerque Mayoral Race

Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper: You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the …

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“a valueless and horrible desert”

I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River. Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto …

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Ghost Meter

Some time ago I purchased an Actron CP7875 PocketTherm Infrared Thermometer from Amazon. It’s a cool gizmo. I highly recommend it. You point it at whatever, and it tells you the object’s temperature based on infrared emissions. Today, Amazon informed me that people who bought the Actron PocketTherm also might like this: The accompanying description …

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Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?

There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …

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If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?

When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world? Now come Gabriele Villarini …

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