music: Paper Tiger, the Felonious Groove Foundation. I am so tragically unhip that it was only recently that I grasped my own fondness for the funk. Plus, you’ve gotta love an album dedicated to Malcolm Gladwell and John Denver.

book: Just finished Lee’s Ferry: A Crossing on the Colorado, by Evelyn Brack Measeles. How to say this politely…. There are many times when I’m taken aback reading, thinking, “I wish I’d written that.” This was not one of those occasions. But it did give a good overview of the basic facts of John D. Lee’s establishment of the river crossing, with some fun stuff about the intersection of Lee’s and John Wesley Powell’s paths in 1872, when Powell was preparing for his second run through the Grand Canyon.

books: Been playing with Google Print, their digitized library project. There’s clearly no way to read a book this way, but it seems a potentially useful research tool. Is there anything Google can’t do? (Well, yes. More on this later.)

science: For a story I’ve been working on at work, yesterday I read the famous 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper. I am not a physicist, so it’s not easy going. But, equations aside, the paper’s central point is made with remarkable clarity. But there was this moment when I read one of the key paragraphs, and looked up at the author’s name. Einstein wrote this. Shivers. From his brain to mine. Insanely cool.

book: “Water and the West,” by Norris Hundley, a history of the development of the Colorado River Compact. I’m trying to understand who understood what, and when, about the nature of drought and its implications in the arid southwest. (The answers may be “no one” and “never,” which would help explain the fix we seem to be in.)

more reading: Global Water Resources: Vulnerability from Climate Change and Population Growth, from Science, July 2000. Its point is that, much like the discussions of hurricanes and climate change of late, it’s growing human population, not global warming, that is the driving variable in understanding the potential future impacts of drought.

music: The Bonnie Raitt Collection. I’ve got this riff to write about Bonnie Raitt and Casablanca, and the nature of carefully executed craft. (It’s one of those blog items I’ve thought through enough times on bike rides or while driving to work that I’m always amazed that I’ve never written it down.) Suffice it to say that I can always return to this album or that movie and never be disappointed. And if I were not happily married, I might chuck it all and follow Ms. Raitt from town to town, listening to her music and hoping against all hope to bump into her in the hotel lobby.

the bike: There is a simple pleasure in washing down the bikes.

code: It’s never as simple as I think. I’ve run up against the IE/Win Unscrollable Content Bug. Must …. test …. more …. browsers….