Cover those Knees!
Benny the Ice Pick has some great advice for staying warm on the bike come winter.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program: Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found. As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found. “I begin to worry,” said …
Odd v. Even Numbers
If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures: Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author …
Save the Land
Agricultural practices are a key variable in whether we see an Australian dust bowl this year, according to a story this morning in The Age: Better farming practices and widespread de-stocking are likely to save Australia’s parched agricultural land from turning into a dust bowl, research suggests. But the drought – shaping as one of …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece on Marty Hoerling’s new work using the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report climate models to generate Palmer Drought Severity Index numbers for Western U.S. climate divisions over the next century: Global warming is driving the Southwest toward “a new era for drought,” according to a top federal climate researcher. …
Househenge
Check out Mark Justice Hinton’s very cool Househenge.
Environmental History of the Rio Grande
A few years back, the U.S. Forest Service funded historian Dan Scurlock to prepare an environmental history of the middle Rio Grande basin. It’s a treasure, referred to lovingly by researchers and folks in the climate/water/environmental policy community here. But it’s very hard to come by a copy. I recently discovered that the Forest Service …
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End Times in New Mexico
The whole Planet X pole shift calamity turned out to be a bust. Sorry, life and civilization as we know it were not destroyed. But not to worry! 2012 is just around the corner. As prophesied by the Mayan calendrical thingamajigs, we’re all pretty much screwed in just six short years. Not to worry, though, …
Global Dimming and Soil Moisture
Here’s a fascinating bit of business in GRL (I’ve only seen the abstract, haven’t read the paper): Summer soil moisture increased significantly from 1958 to the mid 1990s in Ukraine and Russia. This trend cannot be explained by changes in precipitation and temperature alone. To investigate the possible contribution from solar dimming and upward CO2 …