One of the padres in New Mexico sent a letter home back in the 1600s expressing amazement that the residents of Gran Quivira, one of the pueblos near Albuquerque, saved their urine for use in the muds they used in building. It’s a dry place, you do stuff: Residents in tropical Queensland state will soon …
Nora sends along this Oct. 23, 2001 Macforum discussion of Apple’s big announcement: All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.
Let us not gird science to our loins as the warrior buckles on his sword. Let us raise science aloft as the olive branch of peace and the emblem of hope. John Wesley Powell, in an 1882 talk, “Darwin’s contributions to philosophy” update: It’s worth pointing out here that Powell was full of extraordinary amounts …
Western South Dakota is one of those classic drought cases. It was extraordinarily wet there during the 1990s, well above the long term mean. Of the 10 wettest years in a century of records in northwest South Dakota, four came during the 1990s. An astonishing six years during the 1990s were greater than one standard …
Drought-induced famine is largely a political rather than climatological disaster, as this account by Teshome Erkineh of response to drought conditions in Ethiopia demonstrates. It happens when societies, for whatever reason, fail to cope with climate variability. A million people died in 1983-84 because of drought. In 2003, under what was a more severe drought …
I have absolutely no earthly idea what ionospheric plasma blobs are, but I’m pretty sure they’re a serious threat to life as we know it, or possibly they’re associated with the villain in a 1950s science fiction film, or else I read about them in Zippy the Pinhead. Whatever, I’m pretty excited that Pimenta and …
Marco Tedesco at the University of Maryland suggests a new technique for remote sensing of snowmelt atop the Greenland ice sheet. When he uses it, he reports: Long-term results show that snowmelt extent has been increasing at a rate of ?40,000 Km2 per year for the past 14 years. Snowmelt detection over the Greenland ice …
We subsidize ethanol so we can use it instead of gasoline in our cars. The price of corn rises. Poor folk in Mexico can’t afford their staple food: Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history. Dramatically rising international corn prices, spurred by demand for the grain-based fuel ethanol, …
More (sub. or ad req.) on the question of when a “secret” is not really “secret”: In the past, the annual review was made public immediately on request. But policies implemented in 2003 granted agency employees widespread discretion to mark documents “official use only,” delaying or preventing the release of many documents once routinely made …
I’ll probably lose whatever dirty hippie cred I had left, but this is the car I lust after – Carroll Shelby’s Cobra. I mean, not just the car Shelby designed, but the one he designed for himself: “It’s a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago,” Shelby …