A long-standing theme here at The Santa Fe Review is how the city’s developer-friendly land-use laws have been slowly eroding the character of the older neighborhoods. It’s far too easy, even in the historic districts, to split off part of an already occupied lot and build another house to sell. (Please see Sorrows of San […]
The New Mexican’s Tom Sharpe has done a reasonably good job this week untangling the issues in the proposed new telecommunications ordinance, but I winced when I saw that he was planning to devote a full day of his series to the “health effects” of electromagnetism. The paper has embarrassed itself before by taking wild […]
Though the City Council wasted a lot of time last month listening to histrionic claims about health effects of wireless technology, there were good reasons for the postponement of the vote on a new telecommunications ordinance. While municipalities cannot override the federal government in setting standards for electromagnetic exposure, they do have the power to […]
After I wrote last month about the misrepresentations of the electrophobes (please see Electromania Part 1 and Part 2), I heard from Bill Bruno, the Los Alamos physicist who is a leader in the fight to banish all things wireless from within the city limits. I asked him to give me his best shot, the […]
Saturday morning on the Dale Ball Trails, as I kept to the edges to avoid the Cerro Gordo mud, I looked down and saw a rifle shell sitting in the snow. Back at the trailhead parking lot I’d noticed an empty six-pack left by Friday night partiers (16-ounce cans of Bud Light, the calorie counters’ […]
Whenever you read a book or have a conversation, the experience causes physical changes in your brain. In a matter of seconds, new circuits are formed — memories that can change forever the way you see the world. It’s a little frightening to realize that every time you walk away from an encounter, your […]
Scientific truth is cumulative, and no single experiment can be taken as more than a clue. To be believed it must be replicated and stitched into the expanding web of knowledge. The journals are littered with isolated observations that turned out to be wrong. In the comments section of the New Mexican story mentioned here […]
If there were such a thing as a license to be an investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham’s should be revoked. Mr. Ketcham is the author of an article in this month’s GQ Magazine, Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous to Your Health, that has been spreading like swine flu through the Internet. Citing anecdotal evidence […]
It’s been just over a year since I drove out to the corner of Astral Valley Road and New Moon Overlook to see the Galisteo Basin Preserve, a land development that has been marketing itself as an ecologically inspired community of the future — a way to preserve a vast old cattle ranch by squeezing […]
In his book, Money, John Kenneth Galbraith described the reaction of George Ball, a diplomat and undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when he left public office to make his fortune in the financial world. “Why,” he was overheard saying, “didn’t someone tell me about banking before?” Just find a bunch of […]