I have a standing policy here at the Inkstain News Center against quoting anonymous sources, but this is too sweet to pass up: My alligators tell me that Joe Monahan’s college nickname was “Squid”. “Alligators” is NM politics blogger Monahan’s word for his anonymous sources, who tell him all kinds of important stuff, some of …
Money for nuclear weapons cleanup in the stimulus bill (adwalled): The federal government will pump $384 million into New Mexico’s nuclear institutions to clean up and dispose of old Cold War waste in one of the largest economic stimulus investments in the state. Los Alamos National Laboratory will get $212 million between now and 2011 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Nuke Cleanup Edition’ »
This is not an April fool’s joke.
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow. But there’s a problem. A guy …
From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle: The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue. If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Why solving “the Web problem” does not solve the problem’ »
Sat down with my favorite search engine’s news goober this evening to see what’s up with cap-and-trade, and I can report that the sweep of coverage had a certain consistent flavor. Some representative headlines: US Might Not Benefit from Cap-and-Trade Cap-trade on carbon may push up costs Cap and Trade: A Huge, Regressive Tax Cap-and-trade …
Continue reading ‘My Random and Totally Unscientific Cap-and-Trade Headline Survey’ »
Roadrunner Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. We had a ringside seat this afternoon when Speedy, our neighborhood roadrunner (seen here atop our car last December) stalked across our front yard, eyeing a mourning dove. Speedy has the moves of a cat on the hunt – furtive, able to hold still. He hid behind plants, darting from …
My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time …
Continue reading ‘On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events’ »
Coming November 2009, from the University of New Mexico Press, The Tree Rings Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate, by John Fleck. It’s the story of western weather and climate, told through the work of a series of vignettes about some of my favorite scientists, written for middle school-aged kids. A little climate change, a lot …