Rain Report
0.58 inch after midnight at my house, most of it between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. Out at the airport, the National Weather Service got 0.69.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
I Love Rock and Roll
In which I spend my Fourth of July following the mayor of Albuquerque around backstage at a rock show: But there His Honor was Tuesday evening, with his rock star shades and a real roadie to plug in his borrowed red Peavey electric guitar, solo, banging out the opening chords to “Louie Louie”— the most …
Korean Spring
The azaleas in Seoul are blooming earlier than they used to, according to a report by Chang-Hoi Ho and colleagues in an upcoming issue of the International Journal of Climatology. This is one of those wonderful phenological studies in which researchers piece together a historical record of when plants flower, a relatively sensitive indicator of …
Monsoon: Cause for Optimism
One of climatologists’ predictors of whether or not we’re going to have a big monsoon is the date of onset. Early onset generally means a wetter monsoon.[1] We’ve got no crisp definition here in Albuquerque (and, in fact, the monsoon onset isn’t very crisp here), but in Tucson they’ve developed a very precise definition based …
Our Founding Father
In Frank we trust (a great old video clip of Frank Zappa debating freedom of speech – hat tip Ed)
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region
Going through some papers on my desk, I ran across this quote scribbled on a piece of paper: Many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative. That’s John Wesley Powell describing life in what he called the …
Making Sausage
Earlier this week, Kevin Vranes helped explain something that had been puzzling me: how members of Congress could use appropriations bills as vehicles to make policy. The item at hand for me was the Yucca Mountain language included in the most recent Senate version of the Energy and Water appropriations bill, which I’d been writing …
Monsoon Watching
Rio-Grande-after-rain Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. My first visit to Albuquerque, at least the first that I remember, was some time in the mid-1970s. I was a teenager, and we stayed with friends in Dietz Farm, in a house in the shade of the cottonwoods that backed up on the ditch along the east side of …
Stuff I Wrote A Really Long Time Ago
An old missive of mine resurfaces: “filesystem or file system“
Millar? Pee Wee?
With Ullrich and Basso out of the tour, and apparently half the people in Europe who have ever worn spandex being connected to doping in the Spanish press, David Millar suddenly looks mighty attractive, having just finished his two-year suspension for doping. Or, as a friend suggested yesterday, Pee Wee Herman’s starting to look good …