is this, from Robert Hass: Life, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies.
I first noticed it while I was out in the mountains of northern New Mexico back in the mid-1990s with Karl Karlstrom, a University of New Mexico geologist. I had tagged along on a summer field camp mapping exercise for a feature I was doing, and spent a good part of the day shadowing Karl …
Faster Internet: (I don’t really hate Colorado. I’m just enjoying playing with Data Explorer.)
The Telegraph’s “science correspondent”, Richard Gray, wrote a story over the weekend about the wonders that await in the the bathrooms of our future. The details are unimportant – click if you are curious about your toileting future. What matters more is the methodology. Because it turns out to have been based on a “report”: …
Continue reading ‘On futurologists, water closets and jet packs’ »
From the inbox: I would like to know if you are interested in purchasing the domain name removingwinestains.com. Based on your contact information I see that you own inkstain.net, correct? Yes, I do own inkstain.net. No, I’m not interested in branching out into the potentially lucrative field of wine stain removal.
I am not an expert in branding. So I do not know whether renaming the iconic Very Large Array is a good idea. What I do know is that when the idea was proposed, hilarity ensued. I do know that covering this story will be fun for months to come: Proposals will be accepted via …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: renaming the VLA’ »
You thought I was kidding about building pyramids. No, not for a minute. I am deadly serious, and I have an ally:
My sister, Lisa, found this old postcard at Mom’s last week: The caption on the back argues that Palm Springs is America’s favorite winter playground. Who am I to argue?
A guest post from my child, N. Reed Heineman-Fleck, which grew out of our conversations about my work chronicling the southwest’s fires of 2011: When Dad told me about the Los Conchas fire, and how it was different than normal fires–in some places it turned everything to black dust; it rolled instead of catching, it …
If our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses*, what does the “Badlands Express” ride at the New Mexico State Fair tell us about the modern West? Are these kids standing in for our lost Hayduke? *Note: I don’t think our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses. I just thought …