I’ve long been suspicious of ski area snow reports, preferring to go with Snotel data when writing about storms. It turns out my skepticism was warranted. From Zinman and Zitzewitz (pdf):
Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall on weekends. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more.
I am not a visual person. I’m a word guy. But I’ve lived essentially my entire life with visual artists. My dad’s a painter. My wife, Lissa, has worked in an enormous range of media in the nearly three decades I’ve known her.
This has given me a life spent watching art happen. Art as process, rather than object. Art as a verb, if that makes any sense.
Lissa has always been interested in textures. It was an absolute delight to go out wandering with her Saturday afternoon while she experimented with her new macro lens, seeing things up close. Here’s her favorite from the outing:
Cactus, February 2012, L. Heineman
Check out the full slideshow to get a feel for what my “art as a verb” afternoon was like.
As a journalist, I learned early to pay attention to the budget. It’s where we take all our policy ideas, goals and plans and make them real. Which makes tomorrow my journalistically favorite day of the year – the day the President’s annual budget proposal starts the process of deciding how our nation’s government will spend its money.
Here’s a setup in the Sunday newspaper on the largest single-ticket item for New Mexico:
Budget reality could come crashing down Monday on Los Alamos National Laboratory and the most expensive construction project in New Mexico history.
Faced with risings costs for two proposed multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons-related projects, one in Tennessee and the second at Los Alamos, the National Nuclear Security Administration may be forced to choose. President Obama’s administration, set to release its proposed fiscal year 2013 budget Monday, is widely expected to send the money to Tennessee.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the inability to play billiards on cruise ships to be one of society’s great technological dilemmas.
Problem solved:
Next up: poor people who have to cook with dung.
Jennifer Pitt sounds an optimistic note about the possibility that the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study could reclaim some priority for the retention of water in the rivers of the Colorado River Basin:
The future of this region promises to be more crowded, and likely hotter and drier, but that doesn’t have to spell the death of the Colorado River. Reclamation and the states are facing the need to make decisions of great consequence about how to supply and manage water use in every sector. Let’s hope their new commitment to look at impacts on the river gives them the wisdom to forge a path forward that meets our legitimate water needs and protects and restores healthy flows.
magic sock
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I purchased three pairs of socks at the old Gil’s Runnershoe World on Carlisle and Lomas. The store’s long gone, its building torn down and replaced by a Walgreens. But the socks remain. In 1997, I was wearing a pair of them when I was caught in a storm while hiking in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon. For a long time, two of the six socks carried the reddish-pink tint of the running gullies we had to cross that day. Given the memorable nature of that trip, this allows me to date the socks at, conservatively, 15-plus years old.
In the mix-and-match that is my sock drawer, the number of socks has dropped from six to the current two, but it is safe to say that I have worn these socks once a week for that entire 15-plus years. They were my favorite running socks, because they were so comfy, and now that the knee’s shot and I don’t run any more, they remain my favorite socks. As I said, they’re so comfy.
I do not understand the sock technology involved, what has allowed them to endure while other socks fall by the wayside, but it is indistinguishable from magic.
As the national media descends on the tiny Texas community of Spicewood Beach to capture the spectacle of water trucked to a thirsty town, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit the question of what we have learned so far from the impact of the Texas drought.
I tried to make a pie chart of the TCEQ data on water-short communities, but it proved unhelpful:
Texas population at various stages of drought risk
The difficulty here is that the software I’m using is incapable of making pie chart slices tiny enough to delineate the at-high-risk population from everyone else.
The folks in Spicewood Beach (population 1,296) and the other communities standing at the edge of the water supply cliff (2,871 who could be out of water in 45 days, another 3,162 if you extend that to 90 days, and another 7,441 if you extend that to 180 days) are in a heap of hurt, but most people in Texas (population 25,674,681) are not.
There’s no doubt that everyone else is in some level of hurt, but I’m struggling to think through how to conceptualize the effect of drought, if it is not running out of water. To be sure, there have been significant economic impacts, especially on the Texas agricultural economy. So I turned to the Philadelphia Fed’s state coincident economic index, which provides a nice single-number snapshot of the overall health of a state’s economy:
Texas state coincident economic index, graph courtesy St. Louis Fed
Whatever effect the drought has had in these terms seems to be lost in far larger economic forces.
For people like me who spend our time running around with our hair on fire trying to warn the public of America’s looming water shortages, Texas seems to me like an incredibly important case study about what happens when shortage finally arrives. So what’s it telling us?
…it will be economic pressures, not scientific findings, that largely determine what the world’s nations do, or don’t do, to limit the flow of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fuel burning.
Over at the day job, a piece on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s policy of refusing to make public the performance evaluations of the contractors that do the agency’s work:
Because it seems unlikely a glowing performance report could be used against a contractor, the agency seems to have decided that protecting the contractors from public evidence of poor performance is more important than the public’s right to know about that poor performance.
At 0.38 inch (0.97 cm), January 2012 was the second consecutive month at my house with above average precipitation. Here’s a map of New Mexico right now:
New Mexico drought monitor, January 2012
I live in that brown bit in the middle.