Revive Pedestrian Culture by Removing Stoplights and Sidewalks?

This is an interesting idea:



I do walk to work nearly every day, and there's definitely something to this critique. However I do like the long sidewalks where I can zone out and pay attention to my book. Perhaps we should just ban private autos from the inner city altogether?

The Earth in One Long Strip

The Laundry Files

I just want to leave a brief note about a book series I just finished, Charlie Stross's "Laundry Files." As per my usual habit of late, I listened to them rather than reading. Good stuff! They're nerd thrillers with a Lovecraftian horror gloss, very funny, very entertaining, well-performed, and passably written. It was interesting, actually, to see how Stross's writing improved over the series; the first one was towards the beginning of his career while the latest was only released last year. (Though there were still a few too many "The penny drops" for my taste.)

It's a four-book series, so far—there's a kind of looming doom thing going over the later books that hasn't come close to happening by the end of the fourth book, The Apocalypse Codex. Word is that he's planning on a 9-book series with the Big Event (called Case Nightmare Green in the books) towards the late middle.

Anyway, nothing much to say about these in particular. If you like thrillers, or spy-fi, or horror, they're worth a shot. I found them quite useful as an exercise inducement—always nice to have something compelling to bribe yourself with to get one's pushups accomplished.

How to Be a Dad

Buried in the jokes here Ze Frank has my dad's style pretty much pegged: Something worth shooting for, should I ever have kids.

The Sierra Club Was Once the Victim of a Politically Motivated IRS Attack

The 1950s and 60s were about the apex of dam building in the United States, and the capstone of the era was to be turning all of the Colorado through Grand Canyon into a staircase of reservoirs. The bottom and top had already been drowned in the form of Lake Mead (created by Hoover Dam in 1935) and Lake Powell (created by Glen Canyon Dam in 1963) respectively—the two largest reservoirs in the country. Two more dams were planned for the heart of the canyon: one at Marble Canyon and one at Bridge Canyon.

These dams got quite close to being built; I've explored the test tunnels drilled in the rock walls at the Marble Canyon site.

The Sierra Club led the campaign against these projects, culminating in one of the most famous advertisements of all time, a full-page New York Times spread asking "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can float nearer the ceiling?" In response, pro-dam forces got the IRS to suspend the Sierra Club's 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Though this did cause damage to their finances, membership more than doubled in protest and eventually, the dam plans were put down permanently.

Here's the full story, excerpted from one of my favorite documentaries, River Runners of the Grand Canyon:



Preserving our greatest natural wonder more than justifies keeping dams out of Grand Canyon for me, but in hindsight this was a stroke of luck even on raw economic development terms. Though clean hydropower is a nice benefit, it has been clear for twenty years and more that the truly key resource in the Southwest is water, and the Colorado is already badly over-dammed. Reservoirs are of no use if there is no excess water to fill them, and the region already consumes the entire output of the Colorado, which almost never makes it to its old outlet in the Gulf of California.

In fact, it's worse than that. Reservoirs lose a great deal to evaporation, especially in the arid and hot Southwest. Lake Powell is doubly bad, due to the porous sandstone in which it is situated, losing between ~400,000 and 800,000 acre-feet of water (130-260 billion gallons) to evaporation and seepage every year. With that and the perma-drought that has settled over the region, Lake Powell has not been full since 1999 and quite possibly never will be again.

[Cross-posted.]

Department of WTF, Orbiting Astronaut-Performed David Bouie Covers Bureau

Dig this:

Collected Links

I need to start doing these posts again. So here we go:

1. Soros versus Sinn on the "German question."

2. Cap and trade doing quite well in the Northeast.

3. The corporation as a command economy.

4. Dani Rodrik on the state of economics.

5. Everything You've Been Told About Radicalization Is Wrong

That DFW Speech Remixed

I quite liked this:

Humanity, You're Okay

My Next Climate Video Unveiled

This time I narrated it myself. Probably again quite amateurish, but I think it came out reasonably well considering my lack of experience. Check it out:



Comments or suggestions appreciated, though please remember I'm still a noob at this stuff.