More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Using the bike racks on Albuquerque’s buses
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Romania This Time
More drought: Farmers have threatened to protest unless they receive more government help in coping with a prolonged drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of crops. The drought has cost Romania €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) in damages and has affected more than a third of the country’s arable land, an agriculture official said …
Water Under the Desert
From my colleague Sean Olson, on the discovery of brackish water 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) beneath the New Mexico desert: The county started drilling an exploratory well in the Rio Puerco about a month ago on the educated hunch there was a large supply of brackish salt water deep within the surface. It was a …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On dinosaurs and power politics metaphors: Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs came on with a bang during the period of Earth history called the Triassic, sweeping into power in what amounted to a geologic instant. But the new fossils, found at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, upend that story. As dinosaurs were beginning their rise …
Did Dinosaurs and Man Coexist?
Many years ago, some friends of mine did one of the all-time great April Fool’s jokes. (Note to readers. It was a joke. A hoax.) They buried a cast of a fossil dinosaur and a fossil human, and staged and documented an elaborate excavation. (Note to readers: the fossils were fake.) The “scientists” doing the …
Modeling Famine
A NASA group has come up with a new model that incorporates both remote sensing data and food prices to try to help anticipate food shortages: Brown, the lead author of a study to be published early next year in the journal Land Economics, said that until now officials have primarily studied the after effects …
The Hurricanes We Missed
Cool paper out today in GRL by Edmund Chang and Yanjuan Guo about the hurricane record. To try to estimate the number we might have missed when we had to depend on ship-board observations rather than satellites, Chang and Guo fed storm tracks from the satellite era into a simulation that included old-timey ship tracks …
Paseo del Nordeste Bike Trail
It’s not exactly Albuquerque’s most scenic bike trail, but I’d have to say this is really my favorite.
The Albuquerque Journal on the Bingaman Climate Bill
Others at my work (I had nothing to do with this) offer their take on the Bingaman climate bill: What does it take to ratchet back an energy-hungry nation’s contributions to global warming? In the Senate, at least 60 votes. Among proposals now on the table, the one with the best chance of clearing that …
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Australian Drought Easing
Continuing our down-under theme, word that despite the Aussies’ astonishingly bad day in the Tour de France Sunday, things in the south are looking up: Families could pay less for their Christmas dinner this year as the drought eases throughout NSW, state Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald says. Announcing the best drought figures since May …