Returning to Santa Fe on New Year’s Eve, I was curious to see if there had been any snow over the Christmas holiday. The night before our departure for St. Thomas, a few inches had fallen, enough to make for a slow, nerve-racking drive to the Albuquerque airport. But it was clear as we pulled […]
As I was shoveling a path to my office early last week, the snow (about 4 1/2 inches) seemed particularly dense. Typing WeatherData[“KSAF”, “TotalPrecipitation”, {{2009, 12, 1}, {2009, 12, 31}, “Day”}] onto a Mathematica page showed that, melted down, Santa Fe received 0.19 inches of precipitation. But that was down at the airport. Amy C. […]
A couple of months ago, as an early Christmas present to myself, I bought a copy of Mathematica, the powerful software package invented by Steven Wolfram, a physicist/entrepreneur I’ve written about in the Times and interviewed on bloggingheads.tv. Once I’d downloaded the program, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I started […]
In 1988 the United States Supreme Court dealt New Mexico a devastating blow. It ruled that since the 1960s the state had been cheating Texas out of 10,000 acre-feet a year of Pecos River water. New Mexico was ordered to pay $14 million in restitution and to make sure that this never happened again. Emlen […]
In 2002, with Santa Fe suffering from the driest weather in decades, two newly elected City Councilors, Rebecca Wurzburger and David Pfeffer, introduced an ordinance that became Santa Fe’s first water budget. Each year the city would determine how much water was available from its wells and reservoirs — the Total System Supply — and […]