Favorite newspaper corrections
From the New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003: An obituary of the nuclear physicist Edward Teller on Thursday misstated the number of hydrogen atoms that join to make helium in the fusion process. It is four, not two.
Archive of posts filed under the mind category.
Daybook: Sept. 1, 2010
For the ESA Nerds in the audience (a subset of Water Wonks), an update over on the work blog on the status of the San Acacia fish passage on the middle Rio Grande. From the bike ride, an observation: Bike rides on the Albuquerque flood control system trails sometimes feel like I’m intruding on the homeless …
Water in the Desert: Tempe Town Lake
Great essay in High Country News by Jackie Wheeler about the strange and wonderful (and currently empty) Tempe Town Lake and our quirky relationship with water here in the affluent desert southwest: In so many ways, Town Lake was frivolous, artificial, and naïve. It didn’t produce hydroelectric power. It wasn’t built by beavers or glaciers. …
Rain Follows the Lawn
A letter to the editor in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal has removed the scales from my eyes: The City Council recently turned down a proposal to restrict the rights of homeowners’ associations to require grass in residential landscapes. Grass has been made to seem like a culprit because of the amount of water it uses …
A Great American Song
When I was in Copenhagen a month ago, out walking in the evening, I came across a pair of buskers, folks singers, doing The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” I’ve always loved it, thought of it as a great American song. It was fun to stand in a square with a bunch …
Spam Bot Knows Whereof It Speaks
A spambot recently left the following comment on one of my water posts: water conservation should be done because we are already having some water shortage these days It was accompanied by a link to a web site apparently selling products intended to alleviate gastrointestinal distress. Less flushing, I guess?
Nighthawks
This was the best nighthawk week I’ve had in my yet young birding career. I’ve sort of vaguely watched birds since I was a kid, something I picked up from my mother. When Lissa and I got married, mom and dad passed on their Peterson’s guide, and we made a tradition of taking it with …
River Beat: Death on the Colorado
To track my favorite topic, I have a Google news alert set on “Colorado River”. I’m trying to track water policy issues, but every year beginning in spring that news is accompanied by a macabre uptick in stories about people falling into the river, flipping their boats, going missing, and frequently drowning. Crews search for …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Lead Wheel Weights
The issue of lead wheel weights has become a touchstone for me in thinking about risk perception and how we respond to various sort of environmental contamination. I did a story in 2001 about research by a clever scientist named Bob Root who had quantified the lead wheel weights falling off of our cars’ wheels. …
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Adventures in Air Travel Cont…
There are birds living inside Denver International Airport. I kid you not. I’m pretty sure they’re house sparrows, but their flighty, and my binoculars are stowed in my luggage, so I can’t give you a positive ID. When last we met our intrepid international traveller (me), he was stuck in Prague, the victim of a …