I stopped a couple of weeks back to take a picture of one of these sculptures, which are being installed at Tingley Beach. A guy riding by on his bike said to me, “Pretty hideous, isn’t it?”
Well no, not so much. I quite like ’em.
Hibiscus
There are several different ways I ride my bike. One is all spandex and zooming fast, which I love. But the best way is to wander, making a series of random decisions that take me all over the place. Riding with friends Saturday on one of those rides, we ended up in a sort of random block-circling exercise in Albuquerque’s Country Club neighborhood, on account of we kept seeing lovely flowers in people’s yards we had to stop and look at.
One in particular deserved a second look, so Lissa and I drove over this evening. You don’t often see hibiscus in the desert. Water and all. No scale on the picture, but these things are big as dinner plates.
A Very Sad Day
I don’t normally double-post, but there are issues involved in this that are of relevance here as well as at the Journal.
Reporters depend on smart people to explain things to them. That generally means people who are intimately involved in the subject at hand. When the subject matter is an issue of controversy, that dependence comes with a price – the most knowledgeable people are most often partisans in the debate. So while they understand their own side of the argument intimately, they are often dismissive of the other side. For reporters, the real treasures are those who, while they may be partisans, are smart enough to understand where the other side is coming from, and are able and willing to have thoughtful conversations across the divide.
University of New Mexico history professor Tim Moy, who died Sunday in Hawaii, was such a treasure. Tim’s specialty was the history of science, especially the history of the nuclear era. Over the years, I had occasion to lean on Tim’s insights many times in two areas – the arguments over evolution and its alternatives, and things nuclear. Among the subjects I cover, I can think of none more polarizing than those two. A frustrating characteristic of both debates, for me, is the way the disputants talk past one another, each assuming the other is venal, or stupid, or both. Tim, while he had his own views, was smarter than that. His insights into the nature of those debates, their cultural underpinnings, showed a respect for the participants that I hope we could all emulate.
My thoughts go out to his family, to those in the UNM community who surrounded him, and to his many friends.
Kelsey on Nuclear Power
From Plastic Manzikert:
Nuclear Power is not the only option, but it is a valid option. There are flaws, of course – it’s more expensive than carbon dioxide emitting power generators. That’s an economic problem, and as the world moves away from fossil fuels, that disadvantage will go down.
More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Romania This Time
Farmers have threatened to protest unless they receive more government help in coping with a prolonged drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of crops.
The drought has cost Romania €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) in damages and has affected more than a third of the country’s arable land, an agriculture official said Saturday.
Some 2.6 million hectares (6.42 million acres) of crops have been damaged by the arid spell, 36 percent of the country’s total arable land, Agriculture Ministry official Gheorghe Albu said.
Water Under the Desert
From my colleague Sean Olson, on the discovery of brackish water 3,770 feet (1,150 meters) beneath the New Mexico desert:
The county started drilling an exploratory well in the Rio Puerco about a month ago on the educated hunch there was a large supply of brackish salt water deep within the surface.
It was a gamble with more than $2 million in taxpayer funding attached to it— but the county has come out on top.
Last week the county hit the jackpot: the potential for up to 50,000 acre feet of water per year for 100 years discovered at about 3,770 feet, county development director Michael Springfield said.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On dinosaurs and power politics metaphors:
Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs came on with a bang during the period of Earth history called the Triassic, sweeping into power in what amounted to a geologic instant.
But the new fossils, found at Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, upend that story. As dinosaurs were beginning their rise to power, other dinosaurlike creatures lived with them side-by-side for 15 million to 20 million years, the newfound fossils suggest.
Did Dinosaurs and Man Coexist?
Many years ago, some friends of mine did one of the all-time great April Fool’s jokes. (Note to readers. It was a joke. A hoax.) They buried a cast of a fossil dinosaur and a fossil human, and staged and documented an elaborate excavation. (Note to readers: the fossils were fake.) The “scientists” doing the excavation found, amazingly, that the dinosaur had been eating the human! (Note to readers. This was all faked. Dinosaurs and humans did not live at the same time.)
The original page still exists, and periodically resurfaces as some credulous reader stumbles across it. I blogged about one such occasion a couple of years ago. And now, by the powers of the Google, that blog entry is one of the top hits when you search on dinosaur man coexist. The result is a steady trickle of traffic. Most readers apparently are savvy enough about the Internet technology to click through on the link that explains the hoax. But some, not so savvy on the clicky thing:
wow what a find well this adds on to the list of things that evolutionists cant explain or there probably going to say this is a hoax because it would totaly ruin there theory o yea and the earth is not that old its probably only at the most 10000 years old and throughout history there have been evidence supporting that humans lived with dinosaurs like the inca stones for example the funny thing is there is more evidence of this than the whole theory of evolution…lol man will do anything to explain away that there is a God who created us
Not so savvy on that whole shift-key-capitalization thing either, except for that once.
Modeling Famine
A NASA group has come up with a new model that incorporates both remote sensing data and food prices to try to help anticipate food shortages:
Brown, the lead author of a study to be published early next year in the journal Land Economics, said that until now officials have primarily studied the after effects of occurrences like floods or droughts that might affect crop production as their best means of warning of a coming food security crisis. “With this new study, for the first time we can leverage satellite observations of crop production to create a more accurate price model that will help humanitarian aid organizations and other decision makers predict how much food will be available and what its cost will be as a result. This is a unique opportunity for an economic model to take climate variables into account in a way that can aid populations large and small,” she said.