What I learned today: vegetarian soy sauce
While cruising today with Nora at 99 Bahn, the Asian market on Albuquerque’s far south side, I learned there are a lot of different kinds of vegetarian soy sauce. This particular one is House Wife brand:
Archive of entries posted on February 2011
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
I had the distinct privilege yesterday of sitting down with my ABQJournal Washington bureau colleague Mike Coleman (the sitting was virtual – Coleman was in DC) and penning a quick look at Jeff Bingaman’s remarkable career (sub/ad req) on the occasion of his announcement that he will not run for a sixth term in the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ »
On Evil Genius and Melting Icecaps
Cecil Adams goes through the thought experiment of how an Evil Genius might melt Earth’s icecaps, discarding one idea after another until landing on this: See how this grabs you. We come up with a process that traps energy in the atmosphere rather than letting it radiate away, perhaps involving an accumulation of gases such as …
Scientific Literacy
It’s hard to know whether this glass is half full or half empty: It’s from “The Conceptualization and Measurement of Civic Scientific Literacy for the Twenty-First Century,” Jon Miller’s chapter in the new American Academy of Arts and Science report, “Science and the Educated American: A Core Component of Liberal Education.” (pdf here) Miller has …
Winter Colors
I love our winter color palatte. This is one of the main ditches at the Bosque del Apache, a bird refuge on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque. Taken in December a few years back.
Environmental Flows in Tucson
Chris Brooks writes about the tension in Tucson between the use of sewage effluent for environmental flows and other uses. Tucson is in a very different situation from Albuquerque, where the effluent from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plan is returned to a flowing Rio Grande, and is accounted as “return flows”, used to offset Albuquerque’s water …
Turning the Desert Green
Via the satellite data analysis folks at Chelys, a view of what used to be called the “Colorado River delta”, which is now one of the great winter vegetable growing regions of North America. That’s the Salton Sea top left, the Imperial Valley and Calexico farming regions in the center, and the Gila and Colorado …
Sooner Or Later, Malthus Will Be Right
From Buttonwood: Were Chinese oil consumption to reach US per capita levels, its demand would rise ninefold, while Indian consumption would have to go up 23-fold. That would push global oil demand up to 260 million barrels per day, compared with just under 90m barrels a day at present. Clearly, that’s not going to happen. …
River Beat: Yo, Vegas – Bonus Water on the Way!
If all goes well weather wise over the next six weeks, the US Bureau of Reclamation will release a substantial slug of extra water in 2011 to help refill Lake Mead. Thanks to a decent snow pack, there is currently a 71 percent chance that the big reservoirs on the Colorado, Mead and Powell, will …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Yo, Vegas – Bonus Water on the Way!’ »
Running out of Water
A new Stockholm Environmental Institute analysis of water supply and demand in the Southwestern United States suggests we’re screwed. In the U.S. Southwest – Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah – there is less rain and snowfall each year than the amount of water used in the region. Today that shortfall is made up …