Ah, perchlorate - an issue near and dear to my paycheck! I can't comment on the toxicology... but once again I am reminded of just how silly it is to plumb with a single set of pipes. I don't want to drink diluted rocket fuel, but I'm pretty confident that it won't hurt me to pee into it, or wash my clothes with it. Ground water contamination is putting a pretty severe cramp on many communities' available water supply, Pasadena included. Since imported water supplies are considerably less than infinitely plentiful, it would behoove us to start thinking about how to make full use of all the water we've got.

In other nerdy news, the Sumatran earthquake caused water to slosh around in wells in Virginia... and in Southern California. Of course our wells only fluctuated by an inch and a half, which isn't nearly so spectacular as the fluctuations observed in Virginia (bedrock wells are wacky!) - and the project for which GeoMonkeyCo was monitoring the wells is so lawyer-ridden that we can't release the actual data yet. But I have a superfabulous little set of graphs accumulating on my cubicle wall!

If anyone knows how and where to find seismograms from the Western US in an Excel-friendly format, that'd be swell (UPDATE: SCEC has 'em). I fiddled with the NEIC's databot, but couldn't swing the conversion code. My Fortran skillz are not l33t, CM6 compression 0wnz0rs my megahurtz! *sob*

I'm so writing my city councillors on this one: 3-ton SUVs are illegal in my neighborhood (and others). I'm sure if they tried to enforce the ban, all the Hummer owners would get together and "help" with the City Hall renovations... but hey, an irate citizenry knocking down historic buildings is a small price to pay for gradual improvements in the ecological impact of Pasadena's passenger fleet, n'est-ce pas?

UPDATE: Monkeyfilter believes numerous technical definitions of vehicle weight been unfairly bandied - only the heaviest of the heavy SUVs are illegal. But that still takes care of the Hummers, hoorah!

A discussion on Frogs and Ravens has morphed from earthquakes to water resources - which was at least partly my fault. Maybe mostly my fault. So, here I am with a steaming pile of blame ready to plop back down on my own blog.

This isn't the first time I've twigged onto a casual remark about how large, rapidly growing, arid megalopoles are sure-fire recipes for disaster. Having worked with the SoCal water supply for nearly a year now, I've been feeling like I should have a response, and what follows are some thoughts in that direction.
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Criminy crickets, I've been meaning to post this since Tuesday; lost it once in a browser-closure, and all the other times have had absolutely nothing to do with a certain promising game of Nethack, not at all. At any rate, an article in the L.A. Times last Sunday looked at ground water squabbles between the Navajo, the Hopi, and a coal mine; read it fast before it vanishes into the money-charging archives.

The story is chock full of quotes about connections between the earth and the sky and our toes, which fit very well into the popular "Indian sheds a single tear for your litterbug ways!" model of a monolithic Native American culture but don't yield much insight into the technical or political issues involved, and the political issues are fascinating. The technical issues are fascinating too, but of course this is exactly my line of work, so who knows what the general public would think. Nevertheless, I'm surprised that there were no statements from the activist with "a Master's degree" on the scientific merits and demerits of the coal mine's technical report.

Not that I'd accuse anyone of allowing a healthy interest in the spiritual relationship between a land and its native peoples to degrade a piece of journalism; I'm just sayin'.

I agree with Dick Cheney! Or at least, the Dick Cheney of 2020:

"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States," Mr. Cheney, who is now vice president, said shortly after introducing the legislation.

Yes, let's.