Albuquerque Water Conservation Stalls

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My ABQJournal colleague Sean Olson has a story on the front page of this morning’s paper about the rise this year in water conservation in Albuquerque:

Albuquerque has used about 16.4 billion gallons thus far in 2008, up from about 15.6 billion gallons through the same period in 2007, according to water authority statistics.

The data suggests that we’ve done a good job of reducing per-capita water usage here in Albuquerque since the mid-1990s, when water conservation efforts began here in earnest. Work by Dave Gutzler over at UNM shows a neat correlation between climate (specifically warm and dry weather during the water-consuming months) and consumption. But you can see this dramatic drop in water usage beginning in the mid-1990s – a clear break from the past.

I wonder if the numbers underlying Sean’s story suggest the low-hanging fruit has all been plucked.

Birds

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stuff I wrote elsewhere:

You will see them most any evening these days in Chris Witt’s Albuquerque backyard: the darting, diving, buzzing hummingbird and the aloof nighthawk, feasting on insects in the dim distance. If you were building the bird family tree, you would have no reason to think the two were close kin. But thanks to the work of Witt and a team of other scientists, we now know that they are.
In a scientific tour de force, the scientists have used genetics to rewrite the birds’ family tree.

Some days its better not to read my stories in the newspaper. There was a great little bit of business about Chris’s Philadelphia childhood that was cut out of the story, I presume for space. I’ll dredge it up when I get into the office this morning and share it.

Mesa del Sol

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Sunday’s ride with the fixie boys was a particularly amusing one:


View Larger Map

There in the middle you can see that we sorted out some nice shortcuts through the airport, and at the southern end some fascinating dirt road wanderings around the new Mesa del Sol development. Bonus points to Andrew for helping us find the dramatically trashed 7-11 they built for the new Terminator movie they’re filming out there.

The Chimney Dove

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mourning doveLast week, Lissa heard a sound in our chimney. Faint flapping. A bird had somehow become stuck.

For days, she tried figure out how to free it, tortured by its grim fate. She tried using a broom to shoo it down into the living room, banishing Sadie so she wouldn’t eat the poor creature if it finally escaped into the house. She tried leaving the flue open.

I was at work Thursday when the following IM chat transpired:

10:02 AM me: what happened with the bird?
Lissa: I opened the flue again and I looked up into the chimney and saw it
10:03 AM I tried to grab it but couldn’t so I propped the flue open again, put the light down there and put Sadie out

eventually it flew out into the house

10:04 AM so I threw a throw over it and put it oputside where it immediately flew into the middle of the street
me: yay!
Lissa: I watched it for a while but then I thought out of the genepool with you
10:05 AM but the next time I looked out there a walker was shooing it out of the street where it had just about been squished by a UPS truck
me: 🙂
10:06 AM Lissa: it flew back to our yard
me: So it’s either going to recover or become cat food. But at least you gave it a chance at life.
10:07 AM Lissa: I watched it poke around on the ground until a big dove (it’s a baby dove) came along and pushed it around
the mom?
10:08 AM me: Was it a dove?
Lissa: it flew away but later it or another dove came back and flapped at it until it went onto a bird of paradise loww tree branch
I just looked out there again and it is gone
no cats around so I assume it’s up somewhere safe
10:09 AM baby dove
very sooty

This morning, sitting in the backyard, I saw a family of mourning doves on the back wall, three youngsters and a big mom bird. One of the youngsters was a sooty dark gray.

“It’s pretty resilient for a bird that was trapped in a chimney for three days or more,” Lissa said.

(image courtesy Wikipedia, sans soot)

Rock, Meet Hard Place

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The Financial Times is reporting pressure at the G8 meeting from what the British call “campaigners” for the West to restrict its production of biofuels because of the effect it’s having on on food supplies:

ActionAid, a charity, blamed G8 countries in a report for what it said was a halving of agricultural aid since 1980 to $3.9bn, just 3 per cent of the subsidies given to farmers in the developed world. “Structures that provided access to credit, agricultural inputs and technical assistance have been dismantled,” it said.

The charity also called for a scrapping of all biofuel subsidies and a five-year moratorium on the diversion of arable land for biofuel production.

Appell’s theorem suggests that is unlikely. As petroleum becomes more dear, we’re likely to burn what we can, a point highlighted by the EIA:

Fuel ethanol production is projected to increase from an annual average of 420,000 bbl/d in 2007, to 580,000 bbl/d in 2008 and 640,000 bbl/d in 2009.

Happy Roswell Day

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Happy 61st anniversary of nothing terribly interesting happening down in the deserts of southeastern New Mexico, and let me take this opportunity to reprise one of my all time greatest hits: Roswell Myths Crash Into Reality:

In conventional historical research or journalistic exposé, says Brandeis University anthropologist Benson Saler, successive investigations fill in details and amplify previous work.
“Key elements in the early stories are not usually contradicted in later stories, but more details are filled in as each story emerges,” Saler and Brandeis colleague Charles Ziegler wrote in a new Roswell book co-authored with New Mexico scientist Charles Moore. “The Roswell story does not display this pattern.”
Each successive account of the Roswell Incident by UFO researchers contradicts the previous as the storytellers battle for control of the tale.
There is divergence, not convergence.

RIP Karl Pflock