I heard a story once about John Coltrane that I’ve always loved. I don’t remember where it’s from, so take this with a grain of salt, but the story was that Coltrane spent his whole life looking for the right saxophone mouthpiece. He had this sound in his head, and he was always looking for …
Benny the Ice Pick has some great advice for staying warm on the bike come winter.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
Check out Mark Justice Hinton’s very cool Househenge.
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 …
Continue reading ‘Environmental History of the Rio Grande’ »
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, …