Water Resources and Wetlands – A Honey of an Anklet

Some links: 108

D.C. Circulator buses find new homes far from the city
Fact-Checking the ‘President Who Follows Science’ on his environmental record
An Inside Look at the Subway’s Archaic Signal System in NYC
An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy, by Anaïs Godard

Your version of the future has no room for her. Thankfully, she doesn’t need your permission to belong. She’s already here.
Leo Mazzone is still rockin’: An Old-School Pitching Coach Says I Told You So

“All anyone in the majors watches now is how damn fast a guy can throw,” he told me, rocking on his heels. “Grunt and heave, grunt and heave. It’s not pitching; it’s asinine.”
Oh, lovely, first the Colorado and now this: A Crucial River Treaty Is Tangled in Trump’s Feud With Canada

Negotiations over the Columbia River basin could affect the environment in Canada and electrical generation and flood control in the United States.
Damn, those things are much bigger than I realized: a rubber bullet in the Museum at the Times

Hmm, the Times and the Post have different headline casing styles.

Some links: 93

It’s about damn time: Fairfax “County will officially rename L** and L**-J*cks*n Memorial highways next month.”
Jacob Fenston on the current moderate drought condition in the DMV.
Team develops autonomous robot to stave off spotted lanternflies. I wish that phys.org didn’t have to finance itself with skeevy ads.
Benj Edwards bought an encyclopedia that doesn’t require Wi-Fi or USB.
Adverse effects on South American farmers of pesticides used on coffee grown in the sun: “skin disorders, respiratory problems, to high blood pressure, organ damage, cancer and cardiovascular disease.” Elsewhere, In Hawaiʻi, trials are underway to control Coffee Berry Borer with a parasitic wasp, Phymastichus coffea.
Tasty. Might tempt me back to eating beef: Rachel Leah Blumenthal discloses “The Mysterious Origins of Steak Tips, a Uniquely New England Dish.”
Missy Dunaway paints the birds of Shakespeare, including the unloved Eurasian Starling (Sturnus vulgaris). She explains Hotspur’s joke, and pulls in Fugate and Miller’s debunking of the Central Park urban legend.
Grace Abels asks, “Can ChatGPT fact-check?” “While sometimes reaching accurate conclusions, ChatGPT struggled to give consistent answers, and sometimes was just plain wrong.”
Beautiful small pleasures, One: Tap dancing in the New York subway. “The notes that you’re not playing also have just as much importance as the notes you do play.”
Beautiful, small pleasures, Two: David Greer tastes a wild strawberry. Epicureans vs. Stoics. 3QD has a problem with crapola ads, too.

Sea change

Farmers and town-dwellers cope with the collapse of California’s water supply in the Westlands Water District. Great longer form reporting by Dan Charles.

Some links: 79

And two pieces about what’s happening with water in the West:

Luke Runyon checks in with a water district in Colorado that has imposed water taxes on itself, lest the aquifer that it depends on run dry.
Dale Kasler and Ryan Sabalow report from Sacramento: New Deal-era water decisions threaten to clobber a massive rework of an aging water distribution network. A map by Sharon Okada, with four different colors to represent stakeholders, lays out how messy this problem is.

Clinch

Akiko Busch suggests that we learn the names of some of our rivers and other natural features.

The name of the Brazos River in Texas was derived from the Spanish Rio de los Brazos de Dios, meaning the “River of the Arms of God” — what the waterway appeared to be to early settlers in that parched part of the country.

Ed Yong has put together an excellent background piece about the outbreak of Proliferative Kidney Disease that has killed whitefish and threatens trout species. The fish kills led Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) to shut down of 183 miles of the Yellowstone River. The coverage elsewhere that I saw simply repeated the FWP statement that a “microscopic parasite” was responsible and left it at that. But Yong did the reading, and used it to describe the peculiar morphology and life cycle of the infectious parasite Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae, a jellyfish relative and one of the myxozoans.

Myxozoans have performed a crazy evolutionary double-back:

In this free-swimming form, they look very jellyfish-like, with identifiable tentacles, mouths, and guts. Perhaps the ancestors of myxozoans went through a similar phase in their evolutionary history, when they were already devoted parasites, but still kept some obvious traces of their cnidarian heritage.

As they evolved further down the parasitic path, they lost these ancestral physical features. They did away with many genes too. “They have the smallest known animal genomes,” says [Paulyn] Cartwright [at the University of Kansas], “and they lack some of the genes that we consider hallmarks of animal development.” For example, the all-important Hox genes, which direct the construction of animal bodies… are simply missing in myxozoans.

Baltimore adventure

An afternoon in Baltimore, visiting an old friend, a new friend, and friends through Leta’s G&S qwert.

Travel by water taxi, light rail, Metro, and MARC. Hey, Metro, lose the cheesy music piped into the underground stations. And why are American ticket vending machines such a U/X train wreck?

My newly-met friend is the Inner Harbor Water Wheel, views fore and aft. The wheel is positioned at the channelized mouth of Jones Falls, where it empties into the harbor. Floating trash and debris, man-caused and otherwise, is steered into the maw of the machine by the booms; trash is lifted and deposited into a dumpster. River currents, augmented by solar panels, power the gizmo. The googly eyes? Because Baltimore.

Unplugged

Drain Lake Powell? Abrahm Lustgarten writes that it could happen, and indeed be for the best.

First come, first served

Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam, in colloboration with ProPublica, have written a very good series about the perverse incentives and magical thinking that infuse water policy and management in the Colorado River watershed: Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4.

Edward and Dave would approve

Drain Lake Powell! That’s one of the provocative suggestions by former head of the Bureau of Reclamation Dan Beard. He makes his case on an episode of Colorado Matters.

Demonstration

State-of-the-art stormwater management—in Los Angeles? Yes, indeedy: Jacques Leslie explains.

Experimental Lakes Area

I submitted my class report on the Experimental Lakes Area of western Ontario for grading. This was the last paper that I needed to write for my certificate!

Bocce balls

Brian Hayes meets Stanley Crawford and gets to know the New Mexico acequia system.

The water in an irrigation ditch is a shared resource, like the unfenced common pastures that so famously became so tragic in early-modern England. In fact, the irrigation ditch is even more vulnerable to selfish exploitation than a pasture that’s equally available to all: Those on the upper reaches of the ditch have it within their power to divert all the flow into their own fields, depriving those below. Yet they choose not to do so. What explains their forbearance?

BYOB

The streetscape in south Texas is dotted with coin-operated water vending machines, like this example from Watermill Express in a convenience store parking lot on U.S. 281 in Pharr. What a great idea! A simple way to cut down on the amount plastic that goes into water bottles!

Now, it’s probably a litle naive for me to be so enthusiastic about a business model that perhaps depends on the unreliable quality and quantity of municipal water supplies in this part of the world. (I found the tap water potable, but some profess to dislike it, seeing as how the lower valley is downstream of several large states.) And providing drinking water for farm laborers working in the hot sun isn’t the same sort of problem as hydrating your kid’s soccer team.

Nevertheless, I wish companies like this well, and I hope that they can expand northward.

I dropped a quarter in the slot, placed my festival-issue water bottle under the spout, and pressed the button. The bottle holds much less than a gallon, so some of my purchase was wasted. The water isn’t chilled, but it’s wet and tasty.

I also saw drive-up ice dispensers around town. And the drive-through espresso huts that you see in the Atlantic Ocean tourist communities are replaced here by Hawaiian ice kiosks.

Reclamation in a conflict zone

Via Utne Reader, Samiha Shafy profiles Azzam Alwash, co-founder and director of Nature Iraq, that country’s only environmental organization. The organization’s focus is reclaiming the wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which were drained and poisoned during Saddam Hussein’s regime for political purposes.

Category: Water Resources and Wetlands