From the work blog, a fond look back at what I was doing ten years ago today: Given as we are to the measurement of time in human terms – the second of a heartbeat, the day of waking and sleeping, the year of spring planting and fall harvest – the time scale of an …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Riffing on the Millennium’ »
It’s Science Saturday in the Albuquerque Journal. By which I mean that, when editors wander the halls looking for copy to fill the holiday news doldrums, there’s always an extra science feature on offer. (sub/ad req if you follow the links) VLA gets an upgrade: Rick Perley had a big smile on his face as …
That was a pun. It’s a story about dead trees (ad/sub req.). Printed on paper, which is made of dead trees. The dead piñon trees stretching across northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau stand out, stubborn clumps of gray still standing six years after they died. They were not alone. Craig Allen, the scientist who chronicled …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Dead Tree Edition’ »
I’m on vacation this week, with family converging, new binoculars in hand and birds to count, so posting will be light or (I hope) nonexistent other than my continued attempts to sell the book. But the whole climategate fiasco is one of those horrific-looking wrecks that you can’t avoid looking at and wondering if anyone …
When I was a little kid, I thought John Wesley Powell was the coolest, the one-armed adventurer daring the unknown as he ran the rapids of the Grand Canyon – the “Great Unknown” – for the first time. Standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, I would stare down at those little glimpses you get …
The Albuquerque Journal is engaged in a strange new experiment in running a front page column every day. There is a stable of three regulars, writers who are solely columnists, and a couple of us who are otherwise straight reporters share the remaining slots. This is the most interesting journalism I’m doing right now, but …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Wonder of it All’ »
I’ve not been posting on climate change much here at Inkstain recently for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, I’m trying to marshal all of my spare time (and Inkstain is a spare time gig) to think about western water. Second, the whole climate blogothing has seemed to be increasingly less than helpful, where all …
I wasn’t sure what additionally needed to be said about Rush Limbaugh’s shameful attack on Andy Revkin the other day, in which he suggested the New York Times reporter might help the planet by committing suicide. (Charlie Petit has a nice rundown on the various things being said about it.) But I thought the issue …
I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have …
Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223 In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of …