Via Google Maps Mania, word of a new tool to make it easier to embed a Google map in, for example, one’s blog. Let’s give it a try:
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
In pursuing the idea, Wingenter is entering a scientific-political minefield— the field of what is called “geo-engineering.”
The most widely discussed geo-engineering proposal, pushed by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, involves a fleet of jets spewing aerosols that would deflect the sun’s rays, cooling the planet in the process.
Other suggestions include launching giant mirrors into space to block some of the sun’s light.
One risk, said Ken Caldeira, an expert in the field at the Carnegie Institution in California, is that geo-engineering might be used as an excuse to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
“A world with a lot of greenhouse gases and a lot of geo-engineering might be better than a world with a lot greenhouse gases without geo-engineering,” he said.
Water in the Desert: Thorny Devil Edition
While we’re busy building pipelines to northern Nevada and figuring out how to desalinate brackish groundwater, a desert lizard called the “thorny devil” has opted for a simpler approach, according to a news piece in Science by Greg Miller:
They discovered that the hinges contain tubelike channels about the width of one or two human hairs, a good size for harnessing capillary forces to draw in water. In thorny devils, the network of hinges covers the entire body and appears to funnel water to an area near the corner of the lizards’ mouth, the researchers report in this month’s issue of Zoomorphology. They found a similar plumbing system in another rain-harvesting lizard, the Texas horned lizard (Phrynosoma cornutum), but not in seven related lizard species that don’t transport water.
Drought: The Supply and Demand Question
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.:
Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of average in several other Western states, including Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.
For New Mexico, the number at the end of July was 78 percent.
Tracking the supply side of this question – how much precipitation has fallen from the sky – is relatively straightforward. For the water year (meaning since Oct. 1), the key snowpack-producing areas of New Mexico are above normal. So why are our reservoirs so low? Is it lingering effects of prior years’ droughts? Go back two years. Three years. Four years. Five years. Not really much different – normal or above normal in all the key places.
This highlights the thing that’s not so easy to track: the demand side of the equation.
Water in the Desert: Cocoposts Edition
Mike Campana seems to be channeling Coco in this post about Las Vegas:
It may be time to tie land use planning directly to water planning.
The subject is Las Vegas, which is running out of water. Or, more accurately, is running into more people. There’s plenty of water for fewer people. The subject is also of some relevance here.
Walkscore
Via the Google Maps Mania blog, the entertaining (and potentially useful) Walkscore web site. Input your address and they score your neighborhood’s walkability and tell you about bookstores and libraries nearby that you’d never heard of, and bistros that are closed.
Water in the Desert
Lissa and I took Sadie for a walk this morning to the ponds out in the bosque beyond Tingley Beach. They were finished in 2005, and are really starting to grow up. Baby cottonwoods line the edge, with cattails growing like bonkers at the southern end. We saw what we think was a green heron. Didn’t get a close look, and didn’t have binoculars with us, but one of the biologists who works down there confirms they have green herons around. They’re a smaller bird than the great blues and the night herons we’ve seen before.
I’ve started a Google bosque map, and added the ponds as its first push pin goober.
Lisa’s tomatoes
A product of my sister, Lisa’s garden. They tasted as good as they look.
I’m Jimmy Carl Black, the Indian of the Group
Back in the summer of ’78, my friend John Colton visited me in L.A. It was his first visit, and while we were there, he made sure we drove around Beverly Hills, looking for jockeys on rick people’s lawns.
Dweezil and the gang played Uncle Reemus at last night’s Zappa Plays Zappa Plays Zappa gig in Albuquerque. They played much of the canon – Peaches en Regalia and Muffin Man, my two favorites, as bookends, with a wickedly funny and technically devilish visit to Brown Shoes, along with Ray White belting the Illinois Enema Bandit with cheerful fury. And Montana, and City of Tiny Lights, and My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama, and on and on.
My sister, Lisa, got tickets for my birthday, and it was as fine a birthday present as I could have imagined. It’s a risky endeavor, because Frank Zappa’s music is so beloved and so technically challenging that Dweezil and the band could easily have fallen on their collective faces. We’ve always known Dweezil can play guitar, but could he play his dad’s stuff? They didn’t fall on their faces, playing with a combination of technical mastery and loving good humor. I’ve never seen such a concentration of old men with pony tails, and it was all good fun.
Before the show, the guy sitting in front of me turned and asked me if I knew “Weasels Ripped My Flesh.” He told me a story about sitting in a bar in Los Alamos, watching a trio, and realizing the drummer was Jimmy Carl Black. He went home between sets and got his copy of “Weasels” so Black could autograph it.
“I have everything Zappa ever recorded,” he said. He’d seen him five times. He has a T-shirt with Frank’s autograph. His son’s middle name is “Zappa.”
I should’ve asked him if he has a lawn jockey.
What Eli Did on his Summer Vacation
The New York Times has a story today about Eli’s summer vacation project:
The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the native vegetation, the sky is rich in rain-producing clouds. But the sky on the farmland side is clear.