Sunshine and death on the streets of Albuquerque, via the lens of Miguel. (And apropos of nothing except an odd coincidence, as I’m penning this post, I’m listening to Bela Lugosi’s Dead. Which Miguel gave me. Wooooo….)
Dia de los Muertos
39-16
I heard a story once about John Coltrane that I’ve always loved. I don’t remember where it’s from, so take this with a grain of salt, but the story was that Coltrane spent his whole life looking for the right saxophone mouthpiece. He had this sound in his head, and he was always looking for the mouthpiece that would make it.
I’m probably stretching the metaphor to the breaking point when I compare Coltrane to my riding buddy Jaime and his endless search for the perfect bicycle wheels. But it is a point of endless fascination. We have been riding together for five years, and during that time Jaime has never stopped buying, selling, shopping, trading up, talking to wheel makers. Yeah, Jaime really seeks out and talks to people who make bicycle wheels. Jaime can tell you, for example, about the guy who makes racing disk wheels out of kevlar, and is having a hard time getting the raw materials because of the military demand for kevlar body armor.
To a non-cyclist, this might sound bizarre, but wheels really matter when you’re trying to go fast on a bicycle. At high speeds, most of the workload is spent to overcome wind resistance, and spoked wheels cutting through air are like egg beaters. Weight matters too, because you’ve got to get all that mass turning, and keep it turning. But the wind resistance is the biggest issue with wheels.
Cover those Knees!
Benny the Ice Pick has some great advice for staying warm on the bike come winter.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the shiny new toy is going elsewhere, and the astronomy community, god love ’em, has a much more rational approach for prioritizing limited federal spending than most (at least within the National Science Foundation’s astronomy budget – don’t get me started on NASA), so it looks like there’ s a good chance we’ll see the end of one of New Mexico’s and the nation’s great old observatories.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program:
Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found.
As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found.
“I begin to worry,” said Ralph Levine, a retired federal official who until recently worked on the program. “If we ever had to use these things, would they in fact work?”
The investigation, released Thursday, is the latest from the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General, an independent oversight team within the agency that has repeatedly criticized the test program.
It echoes concerns Levine raised internally in a series of reports and memoranda beginning in 2002. Levine, who was based at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Albuquerque office, retired in January.
Odd v. Even Numbers
If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures:
Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author explains why these two cultures differ by surveying the history of numbers, including yin-yang thought from ancient China, ancient Greek philosophy, and modern European mathematics. The author also mentions that oddness and evenness are only mathematical concepts, but understanding the cultures and histories of individual countries contributes to world peace.
I’m all for world peace.
Save the Land
Agricultural practices are a key variable in whether we see an Australian dust bowl this year, according to a story this morning in The Age:
Better farming practices and widespread de-stocking are likely to save Australia’s parched agricultural land from turning into a dust bowl, research suggests.
But the drought – shaping as one of the worst on record – still could result in large amounts of soil being swept off the continent and major population centres hit by rolling dust storms.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece on Marty Hoerling’s new work using the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report climate models to generate Palmer Drought Severity Index numbers for Western U.S. climate divisions over the next century:
Global warming is driving the Southwest toward “a new era for drought,” according to a top federal climate researcher.
Extreme conditions seen during the worst droughts of the last 50 years could become the norm during the next half century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at their current rate, according to Marty Hoerling of the federal government’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder.
Rising temperatures are the reason. Whatever happens to rain and snow patterns, a projected temperature increase of more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 50 years will create a long-term drying trend, according to Hoerling.
“Temperature is going to become increasingly important,” Hoerling said in an interview.
Househenge
Check out Mark Justice Hinton’s very cool Househenge.
Environmental History of the Rio Grande
A few years back, the U.S. Forest Service funded historian Dan Scurlock to prepare an environmental history of the middle Rio Grande basin. It’s a treasure, referred to lovingly by researchers and folks in the climate/water/environmental policy community here. But it’s very hard to come by a copy.
I recently discovered that the Forest Service has made PDF’s of the whole thing available on line:
From the Rio to the Sierra: An Environmental History of the Middle Rio Grande Basin