Buffelgrass

Posted by on

Apropos last week’s discussions of tamarisk comes this Tucson Weekly story about buffelgrass, an African invader that is playing havoc with the Sonoran desert:

In spite of the frantic warnings of ecologists and land managers, and despite some valiant and surprisingly effective local efforts, the problem is now so acute that biologists view buffelgrass as an imminent threat to the entire Sonoran Desert ecosystem.

My understanding is that buffelgrass is not (yet?) an issue in New Mexico, but perhaps someone down south (hint hint) can shed some light?

Hat tip Julio Betancourt for sending me the article. The guy’s on a crusade about this.

Zeitgeist

Posted by on

In order, the top search strings y’all are using to get to my blog:

  1. big ass
  2. john fleck
  3. pirates global warming
  4. google games
  5. bread mold
  6. rumpology
  7. environmental determinism
  8. global warming pirates
  9. chandler wobble
  10. global warming vs pirates
  11. brandon leslie
  12. John Fleck
  13. largest pineapple
  14. jeff Baxter
  15. cool domain names
  16. fleck
  17. tang dishwasher
  18. pirates and global warming
  19. Celestial Drops
  20. first hummer
  21. klaus oldenberg
  22. tingley beach
  23. celestial drops
  24. 3.14159
  25. stephen dowling botts
  26. python pi
  27. chandler wobble stopped
  28. pirates vs global warming
  29. pirate global warming
  30. moving to montana soon
  31. co2 science
  32. beaver dams
  33. mold on bread
  34. maunder minimum
  35. teflon pants
  36. man dinosaurs coexist

Daybook

Posted by on

reading: Tipped by the newly ubiquitous Kevin Vranes, I picked up The Wisdom of Crowds at the library yesterday, thinking it sounded all Gladwell. And who’s there on the back flacking it with a jacket blurb but Malcolm Gladwell.

music: Bill Evans on a quiet Sunday morning while I drank my coffee and read about death and destruction ’round the world.

bikes ‘n’ trains: On my ride this morning, I noted that they’re putting in a connection between the bike trail and the Journal Center Railrunner station.

word of the day: frangible

Wet Spring?

Posted by on

Via the Journal’s Bruce Daniels comes word of a forecast for a wet spring:

Who needs computer models and satellite imagery to tell which way the wind’s blowing?

Certainly not Joseph Weldon Crim of Portales. Using what he calls a Plains Indian ritual passed down to him through his father, the 70-year-old Portales resident got a glimpse of a slightly wetter-than-normal spring, with some severe hailstorms in the picture, according to the Portales News-Tribune.

Much preferable to those nincompoops with the computers.

The Tamarisk Assumption

Posted by on

It’s a given here in the desert southwest that tamarisk, a tough little red-barked tree that grows along our river banks, is evil. A European immigrant that arrived more than a century ago, it now dominates the banks of our desert streams and rivers, choking out native cottonwoods and sucking up precious water. At least that’s the conventional wisdom.

Tamarisk in Grand Junction

(tamarisk along the Colorado River in Grand Junction, image courtesy Colorado State University)

Here in Albuquerque, we’re spending big bucks to clear it out of our bosque, the woods along the river, based on that conventional wisdom. I’ve been pretty enthusiastic about the results – beautiful open woods, with the cottonwood returned to its regal riverside dominance. But I keep hearing inklings from the science community that we know less about the tamarisk and its role here than we think.

The latest inkling comes from the March-April issue of Southwest Hydrology, a publication out of the University of Arizona.

Continue reading ‘The Tamarisk Assumption’ »

Ipod “ands” and “ors”

Posted by on

One thing that frustrated me in the creation of smart playlists on my new podGoober was the apparent inability to use both “ands” and “ors” for logical grouping of music: like “music by the Supremes or Frank Zappa” and “hasn’t been played in a week”.

The iTunes software lets you “and” various criteria or “or” it, but not a mixture.

Hugo Schotman explains the clever hack.