Jim Belshaw on walking into his house upon discovering that his old Datsun pickup had been stolen: Here’s the worst part: As I rushed back into the house to tell Liz, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was going to make a good column. Once again, Philip Roth came to mind. He said nothing that …
paper of the day: From Jia-Lin Lin at the Climate Diagnostics Center in Boulder, more evidence that the models don’t get El Nino right real climate: From the Climate Prediction Center: La Nina’s roaring back real climate II: I saw on yesterday’s bike ride that the Rio Grande is back down, under 1,300 cubic feet …
My attempt at sketching in the background behind the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee’s proposed cuts in the U.S. nuclear weapons program: Nuclear weapons spending has long seemed an entitlement for New Mexico. With two of the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories located here, a big chunk of the U.S. nuclear weapons budget is …
I’ve been wanting to make cool Internet maps for a while, but making them click-by-click by hand was such a chore. The idea is to use Google Earth and Google maps, so people who might want to use the bike trails can zoom in and figure out exactly where they are. It’s worth noting that …
Tim Egan on a city in the desert: Is there a similar point at which the city becomes imperiled? The skeptics say: No, we can engineer our way around it. Look at the ballpark where the Diamondbacks play baseball: It has a retractable roof, which is closed while the stadium is cooled by industrial-strength air-conditioning …
Ban Ki Moon has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post linking the calamity in Darfur to climate change: Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand — an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid …
Things are looking rough in Alabama: Prolonged dry conditions have stunted the growth of hay and pastures, forcing Alabama cattlemen to sell off their herds because they can’t afford the cost of feed. Wayne Davis of Elmore County is slowly selling off his 150 head of purebred Charolais — a few already, more soon. “I …
From Tennessee: Jack Daniels water supply is running low and putting the century-plus whiskey business in jeopardy.
Water management, sale and delivery has traditionally been the province of government in the United States. But an interesting story out of Texas heralds some significant potential for change: In the five years since billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens started trying to sell water from beneath the vast empty spaces of West Texas, he hasn’t …
on the evolution of the U.S. nuclear weapons budget – the latest bit of punctuated equilibrium