Latest idea for watering.

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Very adjustable. Still experimenting with it (hence the stool). Does a nice curtain. Full circle to partial circle, many nozzles. Doesn’t adjust water pressure, though. If you’re interested in further particulars, use my contact form and I’ll let you know where I found this.

And this is why. Scale. Those black dots on the pine needles - insects that suck the sap out of needles. Causes “Lion’s Tail” effect on pine trees. They establish themselves in May/June, killing needles over the next winter, looking like this next spring. Little bastards play the long game. Blasting trunks with high pressure water gets their larval stage off - cheapest way to deal with them. No amount of pressure will get these black buggers off in this late stage. You just have to accept the bare nature of the trees. They will survive, though they’ll look like death until the next (clear) year.

Climate change has made this a huge issue in our local area. Pines don’t have enough water to generate generous sap. If a neighbor doesn’t treat, this comes back again and again and again and again … and again … (stop me now) …

Back to real work.

Nice Marmot: Existential.

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“Without this present civilization, we couldn't support that number of people. And soon, we won't.” I agree. My perspective is a little different, I suppose coming from the hardscrabble existence of the high desert. I see Mother Nature (or whatever one wants to call that ‘force’) having either setpoints or ‘spirit’ focused on reducing our numbers. Pandemics, climate crises are going to trim our populations significantly. We’ve gotten to, or at least are very close to, the point where our ‘civilization’ can no longer conjure up miracles to support more humans. Then there’s the whole ‘fall of empire’, rising authoritarianism, and all the murderous violence that is latent in our species. Deeper subject for another time, all of this. So glad, Dave, you’re in this same headspace. Again, as with Euan below, I don’t feel so alone.

More Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire remnants.

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Various views from a couple of trips. One is the burnt hole in the ground, what’s left of a tree-corpse after extreme heat.

ProPublica: I Moved to Rural New Mexico to Report on the Aftermath of a Massive Wildfire. My Neighbors Were My Best Sources.

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A really good article. This is a story that needs telling, more priority than it is getting. When I return from my photo shoot this morning, I’ll see if I can gather my burn scar photos and post them in a gallery for y’all.

Tip via SilenceIsGolden on Masto.

Fifteen minutes of linkfinding.

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ReadWriteWeb: Apple iMac could be set to try out touchscreen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After I use my iPad, it drives me crazy when I try poking my laptop or desktop’s screen.

Paris Review: Backyard Bird Diary. Always wanted to create one of these kinds of diaries. Been a long time since I’ve sketched. I should buy some colored pencils.

Capital+Main: Power of the Pulpit: How Conservative Congregations Scale the Church-State Wall to Political Victory. Listen to what Bible scholar Dan McLellan says about this.

AppleInsider: Neil Young tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad. Water-drop torture is the same, no matter the brand.

PVC: Podcast playback: immersive reading + italics on website-desktop & mobile. I know there are rules for use of italics; I use them when they make the most sense for emphasis. Keeping their ‘power’ is paramount.

Vox: Biden is not “waging war” on American energy. He’s boosting it. Yet OPEC still has its heavy hand on prices. Seen that recent $0.30/gallon price increase?

DP Review: Nikon Z9 gets firmware v5.0 with portrait processing options and feature refinements. A Z8 or Z9 is on my dream wishlist.

SciAm: How the Solar Eclipse will impact electricity supplies. Paywall keeps me out. If you’ve got a subscription, enjoy.

CNet: Do You Need a Screen for a Projector? As an A/V professional, I can tell you that you’ll be blown away by the quality of a good projection screen. The materials have advanced so very far. Contrast and color are exponentially better than they were just a decade ago.

Zeldman: Open-source moderation.

Fifteen minutes and NetNewsWire.

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VF: Mark Seliger’s Portraits From the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Beautiful light.

Atlas Obscura: Why the April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse May Blow Your Mind. A nice discussion of the experience of awe. Reminds me of some of my experiences back in September and October of last year.

fx guide: The Ultimate RC podcast +1 (Reunion Show) – Nikon buys RED. “The Good, the Bad, and the Damn Annoying.”

The Hill: Press: Does telling the truth matter anymore? Bill Press hits the target.

Popular Information: New data explodes myth of crime wave fueled by migrants. “… across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.” We all know the 'crime wave’ rhetoric was bullsh-t.

PVC: The Updated Professional’s Guide to Buying an M Series Mac. Still love my M1 Ultra Macbook Pro.

Guardian: Legal action could end use of toxic sewage sludge on US crops as fertilizer. I thought this had been outlawed decades ago! Good lord. So many more toxic chemicals these days, on top of heavy metals.

New Scientist: Mars's gravitational pull may be strong enough to stir Earth's oceans. Now that’s going to set tarot readers and astrologers wild.

ReadWriteWeb: A rogue AI might be able to replace all music with Taylor Swift covers. Our local radio station plays “Hotel California” so many times a day, I think I’d welcome a Tay-Tay cover.

Medium: How long does it take to design a website? Many clients will balk, yet this is a very realistic timeframe. The reality is, many will not have the cash or the deep desire to have such a highly-customized site. Hence Squarespace, Wix, Wordpress themes.

One of my favorite trails has been shut down.

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I found this little parking lot, leading to a singletrack and a fire road that connected via a long arroyo at the beginning of the pandemic. Zari and I had this all to ourselves for the first two years of that event. I can, however, understand why it needed to close. Mountain bikers are tearing it up, dog walkers are leaving shit all over, making it absolutely gross for the first 100 yards of the walk, and random 4WDs keep meandering down tearing up the landscape. Whoever the owners are, I would like to let you know we always bagged Z’s poop, occasionally cleaning up others’ leftovers, to keep the trail clear.

This is bittersweet. I am sad to lose access, but so very grateful to have had the access when it was needed most.

Vox: Winter heat waves are now a thing. Here’s how to make sense of them.

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“When temperatures rise above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it leads to more rain than snow. Regions like the Western US rely on snow accumulation in the mountains to store water for use throughout the year, and more rain than snow can mean more flooding in the winter and drought in the summer. On the other hand, if air temperatures rise but stay below freezing, that can lead to more snowfall since there is more water in the air.”

There’s a lot of denial in Santa Fe. So many have moved in here from California and Texas, they have no experience of what Santa Fe’s “original” climate was. They enjoy and celebrate it now … whereas we who have been here a decade or two, are mourning the major flora and fauna changes, the unlivable summer heat.

I’ve related before, Santa Fe was always a ‘ceiling fan’ town. A/C was not necessary. Most evenings, even in summer, were light-sweater temperatures.

No longer. We’re getting weeks of 95 plus fahrenheit days. Let that Sun cook the flat asphalt roofs, which radiate that heat far into the wee hours of the morning … some weeks, unable to completely cool off, building heat within our adobe homes.

It’s not a good situation.

It’s really hard to interact with people who have a layer of Teflon in their brains to the realities they live in. Trying to find the proper conversational ‘hooks’ to get people to restart their thinking processes on this is a real challenge. You would think that walking them through a landscape littered with dead piñons from the ‘03 beetle die-off (95% of piñons in SF died, fully 50% of our city-altitude forests) would generate a reaction. Nope. “I think the grey trunks are SO BEAUTIFUL”. Nice, I agree in theory. But not when you’re walking through a field of a hundred tree-corpses. A complete rejection of reality.

Capital+Main: Another New Mexico Legislative Session Ends, and Again — No New Oil and Gas Reforms.

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If you wonder why oil and gas bulldoze through our Legislature, look no farther than this: “Revenues from oil and gas production comprise more than 40% of New Mexico’s $10.2 billion budget for the 2025 fiscal year and the Legislature spent much of its monthlong session allocating those billions to everything from education to health care to roads.”

Vox: Surprise! There’s a reason to be (cautiously) optimistic about the climate.

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“We need to really get moving on this stuff. This is the worst time for people to disengage and look away. So, for me, the role of optimism is to drive people to actually take action.”

Small actions taken by lots of people can have huge effects, it’s true.

NBC News: On YouTube, climate denialism takes a turn.

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“… analysis suggests that the outright dismissal of climate change is no longer as convincing an argument, so climate skeptics are shifting the ideological fight to how seriously humanity must take climate change or what ought to be done about it.”

30 years too late, but I suppose one should welcome small favors.

Later: And then, you get articles like this. (clucks tongue, rolls eyes)

KRQE: New Mexico to buy $500 million worth of brackish and treated water.

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“Underground in some parts of New Mexico are brackish aquifers. Those underground sources of water are potentially usable if someone makes the effort to remove dissolved solids, like salt, from the water. Brackish water can be found near Albuquerque, Raton, Las Vegas, Roswell, Tularosa, and several other spots around the state, according to the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. The governor says ‘produced’ water (used water) from the oil and gas industry could also be treated.”

Color me as ‘not thrilled.’ Brackish, I don’t mind terribly. Expensive to treat seawater, too. But ‘produced water’ from fracking operations … this sounds like a ruddy huge handout to the OG folks. Oversight? Guarantees of safety? Again, not thrilled. Not even close.

SAR Colloquium: “It Shows My Way”: Roads, Religion, and Power in the Chaco World

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I just got finished editing the formal presentation portion of this event. If you’re at all interested in Chaco and all the fascinating details of that amazing spot, you absolutely need to tune in here. You need to register, but it’s free. Robert Weiner gives insights, pulling together some of the latest and greatest research - along with input from the tribes who trace their lineage directly back to those ruins.

This presentation stands out particularly because native voices, native oral histories have largely been proven true of late, so science is only now listening, gaining vital context into cold rock and dry artifact.

One other detail. All the LIDAR in the world will not help us if frackers and other mining concerns continue to encroach on Chaco’s boundaries. Some of these roads are only discoverable by technologies like LIDAR … roads are down to 1/2” to 1/8” impressions now. Imagine what extraction technologies, trucks and other forces will do to the remnants of this once-great settlement. They’re already way too close. Anna Sofaer has done outstanding work both researching Chaco, working with the tribes, and helping preserve its landscape. Give, if you can (end of year giving is very welcome).

So … tune in. It will be available as a video afterwards, I will link it here (once I assemble it post-broadcast).