From my colleague Sean Olson, in today’s Albuquerque Journal (ad gated): While desalinating water could become a valuable tool to support a growing New Mexico, residents will have to be ready to bite the bullet when it comes to the huge energy cost associated with the technique. Experts say that cost comes in two forms: …
Went bicycling looking for killdeer. Found one, but in the process also saw more than a hundred pigeons. (I counted. Somewhere I wrote down the number. It was something like 167, but when the subject is counting pigeons, you shouldn’t trust three-digit accuracy.) There’s a great book about feral pigeons, called Feral Pigeons. Google books …
Continue reading ‘Feral Pigeons: Notes From a Blog Post I Never Got Around to Writing’ »
Has the global food price slide finally stopped? The Economist food price index is up 10 percent over last week.
I’ve never lived through deflation, and don’t much understand its implications, so I’m reading Ben Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression. That got me wondering about the current numbers, which the St. Louis FRED site (“Better than Boing Boing!”) helpfully graphs for us: Blue includes energy, red is without. Click through to see it bigger.
Jeff Jarvis, who has (for better or worse) become something of a new media guru stalking the land of the old, caused a bit of a stir in my world when he posted last Saturday on the amazing success of the LA Times news web operation: David Westphal reports an important and historic crossing of …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Overhead of Print’ »
There’s a common confusion among “Netizens” about the reason for the mainstream news media’s demise – the notion that newspapers are in decline because they have not done their job of informing the public well enough. Paul Mulshine, reporting from Newark, offers a different explanation: They assume newspapers are going out of business because we …
On the lessons from Chaco (ad gated): New Mexico has always been a dry place, at least on the time scales that matter for the ancient civilizations Henderson and Robbins were trying to understand. Our history could be written as a story of people forever searching for a stable water supply to support the cities …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Water in the Desert Edition’ »
We look up data and muse:
Ned Resnikoff with a message many of us in old media are good about hearing: The journalist can no longer afford to keep his audience at a comfortable distance, or ignore the work of others covering the same topic.