The Telegraph’s “science correspondent”, Richard Gray, wrote a story over the weekend about the wonders that await in the the bathrooms of our future. The details are unimportant – click if you are curious about your toileting future. What matters more is the methodology. Because it turns out to have been based on a “report”: …
Continue reading ‘On futurologists, water closets and jet packs’ »
From the inbox: I would like to know if you are interested in purchasing the domain name removingwinestains.com. Based on your contact information I see that you own inkstain.net, correct? Yes, I do own inkstain.net. No, I’m not interested in branching out into the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal.
I am not an expert in branding. So I do not know whether renaming the iconic Very Large Array is a good idea. What I do know is that when the idea was proposed, hilarity ensued. I do know that covering this story will be fun for months to come: Proposals will be accepted via …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: renaming the VLA’ »
You thought I was kidding about building pyramids. No, not for a minute. I am deadly serious, and I have an ally:
My sister, Lisa, found this old postcard at Mom’s last week: The caption on the back argues that Palm Springs is America’s favorite winter playground. Who am I to argue?
A guest post from my child, N. Reed Heineman-Fleck, which grew out of our conversations about my work chronicling the southwest’s fires of 2011: When Dad told me about the Los Conchas fire, and how it was different than normal fires–in some places it turned everything to black dust; it rolled instead of catching, it …
If our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses*, what does the “Badlands Express” ride at the New Mexico State Fair tell us about the modern West? Are these kids standing in for our lost Hayduke? *Note: I don’t think our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses. I just thought …
My friend Jaime Dispenza, a triathlon coach, was out for a training run recently, when… I’ll let him describe it: After my second of four intervals I approached the river and there standing in ankle deep water was a couple holding hands. OK, no biggie I have seen this before. Then I noticed there was …
I had a really scary dream this morning. My memory is vague, but I was somehow involved in making decisions about how to allocate the water in a big river among various users. But we didn’t have good data on how much water the river actually held. Terrifying.
On my way home from a bike ride this afternoon, I stopped by the vendor selling sweet Moriarty corn out of her pickup truck on old Route 66 just west of Tijeras Canyon: I could only fit three in my shirt pockets, which will not be enough to get my family through the winter.