What I Love About Scientists

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Say it, Kim:

I do geology because it’s beautiful. I love being outside, scrambling through brush, and then looking up and seeing the mountain across the valley, or the potholes in a streambed, and feeling as though the breath has just been knocked out of me. I’m fascinated by the stories hidden in the textures of metamorphic rocks. I like to spin the stage on a petrographic microscope and watch the pretty colors. (Come on. I can’t be the only person who does this.) I like the twisted shapes of multiple crenulations seen in thin section, and the smoothness of slickenlines on a fault plane. And I like being confused: walking up to an outcrop and wondering what on earth could have made it like that, and does it really make sense given what everyone else has said about it.

Ag, Cities, Water in Australia

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Australians seem to want to confront the inevitable conflict between ag and urban water use by buying out the farmers:

Australia’s government promised Tuesday to spend about $2.9 billion to buy river water from farmers in a bid to address the country’s worst drought in a century….

But a mayor in the farming district targeted by the water purchasing plan cautioned that the it would reduce Australia’s agricultural exports at a time of global food shortages and inflation.

“The cost of food will certainly rise. The nation’s exports will drop,” Brian Sharp told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The Inefficiences of the MWD

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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provided my introduction to the strange world of western water, so I was intrigued by the findings outlined here, in the introduction to David Zetland’s thesis:

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET), a cooperative of retail and wholesale water utilities, serves 18 million people. This case study explains how MET—as a cooperative—is inefficient and how its member agencies suffer from this inefficiency. I show that MET is inefficient by demonstrating that its members have heterogeneous preferences over outcomes: Members that are more dependent on MET prefer policies that increase water supply; others prefer lower rates. Although heterogeneity had existed since at least the 1940s, MET avoided conflict well into the 1970s.

You know you’re in the rich world when…

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From the AP story on the Mars-Wrigley merger:

“In terms of Warren Buffett’s sweet spot, these are exactly the kind of brands that he wants,” said Jet Hollander, a former candy industry executive who is president of the snack food consulting firm Pre-Eminence Strategy Group.

I’m guessing they don’t have “snack food consulting firms” in Malawi.

Backyard Birdseed

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My colleague Susan Stiger did a nice job in this morning’s newspaper of connecting the dots between global food and local bird food:

Don’t believe everything is connected? At the moment, gasoline prices, Burmese cooking oil and potato chips are ruffling the feathers on your backyard birds.

This is a good example of an effective way of coming at an issue orthogonally to help people to think about it. It would not suffice as the only story about the linkage between global and local food, but it’s an excellent adjunct to Susan’s other work on the subject.

Signs of Spring

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  • kids in the bumper boats at Hinkle Family Fun Center
  • first hummingbird, sitting on the power line in the backyard (2005: April 16; 2007: May 2)
  • first bloom on the Harrison’s rose (yesterday, exact same date as first bloom last year)
  • first of the main purple iris bloom in the front yard, over the last couple of days
  • my sister, stretched out on the lounge chair in the backyard in the sun, reading a mystery

When I have some time, I’ll track down the spring-to-date climate data. It’s been dry here in Albuquerque, that much is for certain.

update: Another one I forgot: the big ants by the driveway are out.