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KSFR

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

I should have mentioned in my previous post another significant factor in the Santa Fe news scene: KSFR. Under Bill Dupuy the public station’s news department has provided in-depth interviews on local events and made some scoops of its own. If you miss the noonday report on the radio, you can hear it on the KSFR web site. But not this week. To save money, Mr. Dupuy and the rest of the newsroom have been furloughed. The move is also partly a publicity stunt to draw attention to the station’s financial plight and tomorrow’s one-day fund drive. It worked for me. I’d thought of donating weeks ago while listening to the station. Then it broadcast that exasperating astrology show, Moonwise, a celebration of superstition in a world already short of reason. But KSFR News and many other programs deserve support. I went to the website to make a donation. I urge my readers to do the same.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Thornburg Watch

Sunday, December 6, 2009

We are fortunate in Santa Fe to be living in one of the last two newspaper towns. If the Journal is scooped by the New Mexican — or vice versa — it will come back the next day to match or top the story with one of its own. And if both dailies become complacent there is the weekly Reporter nipping at their heels.

Given all that, I’ve been reluctant to believe that the New Mexican is deliberately suppressing the Thornburg bankruptcy story. There are too many good reporters and editors at the paper. But something there is seriously wrong.

Last month in the Journal Jackie Jadrnak reported another disturbing Thornburg development: Larry Goldstone and Clarence Simmons, the executives who were forced to resign after allegations of financial wrongdoing, were seen in a surveillance video removing two computers and a few dozen boxes of records from their old offices north of Santa Fe. They shipped most of the stuff to their lawyers in Washington.

Fearing that evidence might be compromised, Joel Sher, the federal trustee appointed to oversee the bankruptcy, filed a legal complaint insisting on the return of the goods and complaining of Mr. Goldstone and Mr. Simmons’s “continued flagrant disregard for the demands of the Trustee.” Last week the Journal followed up on its story: the two former executives have agreed to comply.

Mr. Goldstone and Mr. Simmons are among Santa Fe’s most prominent citizens. Thornburg Mortgage was once the city’s great financial success story. But any Santa Fean who depends on the New Mexican for news about this matter will have no idea what has been going on.

The Reporter also continues to work the story with a piece last week by Corey Pein: How Much Does Thornburg Pay In Taxes? Drawing on court documents, Mr. Pein shows that the company has earned $19.9 million since filing for bankruptcy last May. After overhead costs, only $816,773 remains for the creditors to fight over. Here is another interesting item: 


	[Thornburg], which laid off 130 workers in April and more

	since, has paid all of $973 in unemployment taxes in the

	months since its bankruptcy. Two years ago, Gov. Bill

	Richardson -- who has received many thousands in campaign

	contributions from company founder Garrett Thornburg over the

	years -- signed into law a bill that cut employer

	unemployment tax payments to the lowest rate allowed by

	federal law, saving corporations an estimated $26 million in

	2008.

The company has also paid no property taxes because of the deal it struck with the city in 2007 involving industrial revenue bonds. The tax break was granted under the premise that Thornburg was a crucial component of the local economy.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Christmas Window

Sunday, December 6, 2009

De Vargas Center, Santa Fe

De Vargas Center, Santa Fe

When I moved here in 1992 there was a Montgomery Ward at the north end of De Vargas Center. It was demolished to make way for the expansion of the Alberston’s grocery, which used to be in the space now occupied by Sunflower Market. A boutique called Surrender Dorothy replaced the antique consignment shop where I purchased a windup Victrola phonograph. Across from the Baskin Robbins was a telescope store. I remember when my wife and I bought and lugged home our 10″ Meade reflector, powerful enough to see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter, even through the glare of the streetlights on Camino Cabra and Canyon Road.

During those years the Furr’s Cafeteria was supplanted by Santa Fe Bar & Grill and the Dairy Queen by a post office. Until very recently a locally owned game store, something like the Android’s Dungeon in the Simpsons, sat across from the Outdoorsman, which sells weaponry. Posters in the window currently offer a special on assault rifles and compare how badly you can damage another human being with a .45 or a .410 revolver. “You be the judge.” And the jury. Just down the corridor is the dais where Santa Claus is now receiving visitors.

It’s a strange world we live in.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Dialing for Data

Thursday, December 3, 2009

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 playing around. I typed an arbitrary trigonometric formula — Tan[x]/Tan [y], {x, -5, 5}, {y, -5, 5} — into a Mathematica notebook page and asked for a three-dimensional plot. It looked like a good place to go hiking:
tantan

In Mathematica (but not here) the image becomes a virtual object that you can grab by the corner and twirl around, exploring every nook and cranny. Plot3D[Sec[4 x]/y^3, {x, 1, 6}, {y, 1, 6}]] gives you this:

secant

I wondered if I could find some combination of tangents, sines, and secants that would reproduce the contours of Talaya, Atalaya, and the other mountains I see from my eastern window. But I was already in over my head.

Not only can you see a function. You can hear it. In Wolframese, Plot[Sin[700 t + 100 t Sin[350 t]], {t, 0, 4}] means this:

trig

Replace “Plot” with “Play” and the image becomes a sound (Warning: Turn down the volume on your headset before pressing the button below.):

More germane to the purposes of The Santa Fe Review are Mathematica’s meteorological functions. Type in WeatherData[“KSAF”, “TotalPrecipitation”, {{1970, 1, 1}, {2009, 12, 31}, “Month”}] and Mathematica pulls in National Weather Service records of monthly precipitation at the Santa Fe Airport. I’d been looking for something like that for years. The Western Regional Climate Center has a page of historical measurements beginning in 1972. But midway through 2006 the updates inexplicably stopped. By importing the Mathematica data into a spreadsheet, I hoped to make a fuller range of information available.

Water molecule

Water molecule

I immediately ran into a problem, not with Mathematica but with the numbers it was getting from the weather service. According to its data, Santa Fe received 40 inches of rainfall in 1988 — and 45 inches in 1991 and 52.57 inches in 1994! This in a city where a good year might bring 12. (Maybe a corrupt database explains the suspiciously high normal rainfall figures in the New Mexican’s daily weather chart.) On the other hand, we’re informed, it didn’t rain a drop in Santa Fe from October 1981 until September 1984, a three-year drought that somehow hasn’t made it into the history books.

In search of better information, I reluctantly turned to the confusing labyrinth of a website run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Many clicks later I finally found historical records from 1932 through 2009. But there was a catch. This is government information paid for by taxes. By all rights it should be in the public domain. But NOAA wanted $100 for access. Through some weird fluke, I found that if I started with 1933 instead of 1932 the price fell to $40. So I put the item in my shopping cart and paid with a credit card.

Here’s what I got for the money, an unruly data dump that began like this:


	COOPID,WBNID,STATION NAME ,CD,ELEM,UN,YEAR,A,S,MO,DA,  JAN

	,F,F,MO,DA,  FEB ,F,F,MO,DA, MAR ,F,F,MO,DA,  APR ,F,F,MO,DA,

	 MAY ,F,F,MO,DA,  JUN ,F,F,MO,DA,  JUL ,F,F,MO,DA,  AUG

	,F,F,MO,DA,  SEP ,F,F,MO,DA, OCT ,F,F,MO,DA,  NOV ,F,F,MO,DA,

	 DEC ,F,F,MO,DA,ANNUAL,F,F

	------,-----,------------------------------,--,----,--,----,-

	,-,-

	-,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,-----

	-,-,

	-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,--

	----

	,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--,------,-,-,--,--

	,--- ---,-,-,--,--,------,-,- 298072,99999,SANTA FE

	,10,TPCP,HI,1933,9,9,01,00, 00073, , ,02,00, 00021, , ,03,00,

	00029, , ,04,00, 00080, , ,05,00, 00099, , ,06,00, 00230, ,

	,07,00, 00200, , ,08,00, 00190, , ,09,00, 00124, , ,10,00,

	00116, , ,11,00, 00102, , ,12,00, 00047, , ,13,99,-99999,M,

I wrestled with the gibberish until finally, 12 hours later, it succumbed. Here it is, the most complete record of Santa Fe rainfall and snowfall you’re likely to find: Santa Fe, New Mexico Monthly Precipitation, 1933 to 2009. You can also download my spreadsheet and the raw data. No one should have to buy this information again.

The measurements come from five different stations: Santa Fe (298072), Santa Fe 2 (298085), Santa Fe 7 SE (298087), Santa Fe Seton (298088), and Santa Fe 2 SE (298090). For unexplained reasons, the Santa Fe Airport (23049) isn’t included in the set. Maybe that is just as well since it was the source of the bad Mathematica data.

From the table I learned that the driest year has been 1956 with 6.68 inches. The wettest was 1965 with 20.71. The average from 1933 through 2008 was 13.56 inches. But during this decade it fell to 12.13. Through November 2009 we’ve had 9.68 inches. (That’s at the airport. My historical chart for the other locations runs only through July.) The snow last night was refreshing. But any way you parse the data, it will take a blizzard to make this even an average year.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 26, 2009

jeep

The old Jeep at Chiricahua National Monument

I should have taken the Cash for Clunkers deal. In August I wrote about why I did not: My 1992 Jeep was in fine condition with only about 125,000 miles on the odometer. I looked forward to driving it for 125,000 more.

But fate intervened. I was driving south on Calle Lorca between San Mateo and St. Michael’s Drive when a pickup truck swerved head-on into my lane, smashing the front of my car. As pungent green radiator fluid poured onto the asphalt, the other driver apologized and I called 911. Twenty minutes later an officer arrived and asked for the usual documents. My license and insurance card were in my wallet, but I searched through my glove compartment again and again and could find only last year’s registration. The renewal sticker was on the plate, but the cop was unsympathetic. I got a ticket and my disabled Jeep was towed to a body shop at the Santa Fe Auto Park.

As I drove around town for the next few days in a rented Impala with Texas plates (I’m pretty sure some teenagers jeered at me on West Alameda), I longed to get my trusty Jeep back on the road again. Then the insurance adjustor called to tell me that he had declared it a total loss. Though he estimated repairs at less than $2,400 — a new grill, radiator, and air conditioning condensor and some minor body work — it was cheaper for the insurance company to pay me the book price and then sell the wreck to a junkyard.

There was another catch. Since the other driver was 100 percent liable, his insurer was obliged to pay for my rental while I waited for the Jeep to be repaired. But since it had been totaled there were no repairs to wait for. I was summarily informed that I must return the Impala or pick up the charges myself and that, in a few more days, I would be responsible for storage costs for the Jeep. In New Mexico, anyway, insurers can get away with that.

I drove down to the body shop for the last rites: removing the ski rack, license plate, and various belongings. I was cleaning out the storage compartment between the two front seats and there it was: the missing registration. Just the day before I’d paid for a duplicate — $5 plus a $20 “convenience fee” at MVD Express.

I brought the papers to traffic court and sat for an hour and a half listening to all the sad stories. There was the Mexican immigrant who didn’t have his registration or any of his documents because his wife was holding them hostage in a divorce dispute. There was the old man who was only allowed to drive to the McDonald’s on Pacheco Street but had strayed a few blocks north to pay a utility bill. There was one person after another asking for 60- and even 90-day extensions to pay a $100 fine. The judge, Ann Yalman, was kind, sympathetic, and fair. When my turn came, she dismissed the citation. I left the court feeling a little luckier and thankful that it was only a car I’d lost.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Synchronicity

Sunday, November 15, 2009

charlesandfelixAlmost as soon as I entered the lobby of the Lensic on Saturday night, I could see that the audience was different from the usual symphony crowd. I spotted Geoffrey West, a physicist and theoretical biologist whose work I wrote about years ago in the New York Times, and Doyne Farmer, who appears in my book Fire in the Mind. There were other scientist friends like Joseph Traub, the Columbia University mathematician. Sandra Blakeslee, fellow science writer and cohost of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, was in the audience. And during intermission I nearly collided head-on with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobelist whose exploits I chronicled in Strange Beauty. I don’t think he has ever forgiven me. I felt for a few hours like I was living in a small town.

Science is as much a part of Santa Fe’s soul as music and art. With the Santa Fe Institute and the Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra both turning 25 this year, they had come together to produce Voyages of Discovery in honor of Charles Darwin and Felix Mendelssohn, who happen to have been born 200 years ago.

While waiting for the show to begin, I talked for a minute with Cormac McCarthy, who once advised me that “a semi-colon is simply an excrescence similar to bird lime.” (He had been reading the manuscript of The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments before it went to press.) He has also raised my suspicion of commas. I’d met him in the 1990s at a Santa Fe Institute dinner, and I remember his lamenting the lack of a really good biography of the quantum theorist Paul Dirac. (There is one now: The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo.)

Davis mansion and Santa Fe Institute

Davis mansion and Santa Fe Institute

Symphony concerts customarily begin with board member and psychotherapist Penelope Penland, her hair radiant as electrified neon, thanking the evening’s underwriter — usually Garrett Thornburg or Eddie and Peaches Gilbert. This time it was Andrew and Sydney Davis. Earlier that day the New Mexican reported that the county had finally finished determining the value of their new home, which looms on a hilltop over the Santa Fe Institute: $20.4 million. County Tax Assessor Domingo Martinez says it’s probably the most expensive house in New Mexico. One can only hope so.

Other than the coincidence of their births, Darwin and Mendelssohn didn’t have much in common. But if you look hard enough you can find connections. Both men went on big boat trips and got very seasick. They came home and produced great works — Origin of the Species and the Scottish Symphony. Only the former is indispensable.

Between renditions of the composer’s work, the actor Jonathan Richards read letters from Darwin. Kirk Ellis, a documentary television producer, filled in for Mendelssohn. David Krakauer, a Santa Fe Institute researcher and impresario, alternated with the orchestra’s conductor, Steven Smith, in providing commentary. Whether or not this all congealed, it was a noble experiment and a good excuse for bringing two different Santa Fes under one roof.

It was snowing after the curtain calls, and music was booming from Evangelo’s across San Francisco Street. Back at home I searched the web for a list of other 1809 birthdays: Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kit Carson, Edgar Allen Poe. A century later in 1909 Wallace Stegner, Al Capp, Lionel Hampton, Malcolm Lowery, and Vivian Vance were born. Samuel Johnson arrived on earth in 1709 as did Jacques de Vaucanson, famous in some circles for inventing a mechanical duck, an early attempt at artificial life. Maybe they all could be squeezed somehow into a grand finale celebrating Santa Fe’s 400th —  and the human preoccupation with anniversaries that end in zeroes, or at least with a 5.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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The Biscochito Affair

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Last night Channel 13 News in Albuquerque broadcast an embarrassing report about Santa Fe’s Cuarto Centenario. At least it was supposed to be embarrassing. “After pouring [sic] over hundreds of expenditures involving more than $1 million,” Kim Holland reports, “News 13 found gaps in receipts, contracts and reports about what exactly the money was spent on.” The text of her story, So many candles; so few receipts, appears, typos and all, on the station’s website.

Missing receipts are obviously a concern, but Ms. Holland’s examples are petty. It’s hard to get overly exercised about a grand total of $264 in taxpayer money going to ship biscochitos to London. “The city isn’t saying how schmoozing the Brits benefits Santa Fe taxpayers,” she admonishes. A shocking revelation.

	And there was $1,700 for a Spanish delegate dinner. Yet there's

	no record of what the event was for, who was on the guest list or

	what they talked about, and again the city's [sic] isn't saying

	either.

The dinner was presumably connected with the visit this fall of the Spanish prince and princess, which was one of the Cuarto Centenario’s successes.

The only real surprise in her report is that $5,000 went to Carlos Fierro to lobby Congress for funding and to raise donations for the celebration. But as Kiera Hay reports this morning in the Journal, he completed his work well before he was charged with vehicular homicide.

The bottom line is this: of the $1 million Channel 13 investigated, the big controversy is over those biscochitos. The real story about the 400th anniversary is the excessive amount spent on salaries, web hosting, graphic design, and so forth — and those were documented expenses.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Free for All

Monday, November 9, 2009

sfchiefadIn Sunday’s Journal, Kiera Hay continued her investigation of what Santa Fe got from the half a million dollars it spent on “creative tourism.” Her first story appeared on September 27 and has been followed by two more: Who Paid for Conference Booze? and Nonprofit Claims City Owes $30K for Conference Work. A sidebar provides a detailed breakdown of the money spent for the Santa Fe International Conference on Creative Tourism last year. Expenses included $10,000 for a lackluster website — more government economic stimulus for the local web design industry.

This kind of good journalism takes effort and ambition, and I’m glad to spend the $110 a year it costs to subscribe to the Journal’s online edition. That comes to just 30 cents a day. The Journal is one of the few newspapers in the country that refuses to put its content on the Web for free. It pays a price for its obstinacy. If you search Google for “Santa Fe creative tourism,” none of Ms. Hay’s fine reporting will appear. Nor will you find Karen Peterson’s biting editorial on the subject.

In a blog called Journal Watch, Tracy Dingmann chides the paper for not getting into the spirit of the Internet Age. Information, she says, repeating a wornout mantra, “wants to be free.”

Does she mean libre or gratis? Free as in free speech or free as in free beer? People are naturally happiest when they don’t have to pay for the value they receive. That includes both readers and advertisers, who have been offering pennies on the dollar for online ads. My old employer, the New York Times, is by far the most widely read newspaper on the Internet, with more than 20 million unique readers a month. And like almost every other newspaper in the country, it is in a financial crisis, struggling to support the quality of its journalism with a diminishing income stream. One of the few newspapers that is profiting anymore is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Its publisher, Walter Hussman Jr., has been charging online readers for the last seven years. This month he was chosen by The Atlantic as one of the world’s 27 Brave Thinkers. You can read all about it online for free.

Most people I know in the journalism trade follow a blog (one of the very first) called Romenesko, which is a great, if depressing way to keep up with the news about the news. We read about pay walls, which mostly just serve to maintain the more lucrative print readership. We read about compromises — charging for “premium content” while everything else is free — and about micropayments, in which information would be metered like electricity. In the long run, journalism will find a way to make real money in a virtual world. Meanwhile I’m not at all convinced that the Journal has the wrong idea.

It was Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, who first said “Information wants to be free.” That was 25 years ago, and he added an important qualification: “Information also wants to be expensive. That tension will not go away.”

Related posts: My Anti-blog, Ecovoyeurism

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Water for Rent

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Highway 53 between Ramah and Grants, N.M.

On Highway 53 between Ramah and Grants, N.M.

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 Hall, a professor emeritus of law at the University of New Mexico, wrote about the saga in High and Dry: The Texas-New Mexico Struggle for the Pecos River, the most interesting book I know about water in the Southwest.

The river begins as a creek funneling snowmelt off the south slope of the Santa Barbara Divide in the Pecos Wilderness northeast of Santa Fe. On its way down the mountains, the Pecos is joined by the Rio de los Chimayosos, which drains the Truchas Peaks, then by Beatty Creek, Jack’s Creek, Panchuela Creek, Winsor Creek, and Holy Ghost Creek. Roaring with water, the stream continues south through Santa Rosa, Fort Sumner, Roswell, and Carlsbad before crossing the Texas state line. Ensuring that there is anything left by then to satisfy Texas has been a legal, political, hydrological, and engineering nightmare.

As recently as 2001, in the depths of the drought, Tom Turney, who was New Mexico’s water czar (the proper title is State Engineer), warned that he might have to make a priority call: upstream users with junior water rights, including the city of Roswell, would have their supply cut off. That was enough to grab the attention of the state legislature: $34 million was appropriated to buy up 18,000 acres of Pecos farmland and take it permanently out of production. To get through the year without incurring penalties, $900,000 was spent to purchase water from the Carlsbad Irrigation District, and thousands of acre-feet of ground water was pumped by the state and dumped into the river.

Given all that effort and expense, it was strange to learn last week from Julie Ann Grimm in the New Mexican that a proposal is still on the table to pump 6,850 acre-feet a year of Pecos water all the way back to Santa Fe, a distance of 450 miles. The entrepreneurs behind the scheme, Berrendo LLC, have been pulling out all the stops. All that new water, they say, would mean more affordable housing and a more reliable, diverse water supply. It would also mean more subdivisions and sprawl. According to the company’s presentation on the Santa Fe City website, Berrendo has the support of Fort Sumner’s mayor and city council and the De Baca County Commission.

When a similar plan was hatched a few years ago to pipe in water from the Estancia Valley, local residents came here to rally in opposition. In Fort Sumner, we’re told, they are eager to get out of the farming and ranching business. Why bother with cattle and alfalfa when you can sell your water at a premium to the city slickers in Santa Fe?

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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Our Fifth Anniversary

Thursday, November 5, 2009

It’s been a year of anniversaries. Both the Santa Fe Symphony and the Santa Fe Institute are celebrating their 25th. The Reporter celebrated its 35th and, I realized belatedly, The Santa Fe Review turned five years old. It seemed like a good time to spruce up my do-it-yourself design. First I had to think harder about what this actually is. As I’ve written before, it is not a blog, and I don’t want it to become one. I’ve liked starting a new page every few weeks and then updating it until it seemed like time to start another. Sometimes I think of the result as a continuing saga, serialized nonfiction about this wonderfully strange town.

On the other hand, the format made it hard for other publications to link to individual articles, and for new readers to locate standing features like Who Owns the Plaza? After lengthy meetings with my graphic designer (me) and my web programmer (me), I’ve come up with what I hope will be a good compromise.

Though the pages look a little crisper, this will remain a low-key operation. Sometimes the Andrew Davis webcam will fall off the table, as it did over the weekend, and remain on the floor until it’s picked up and re-aimed. And the image from the Tom Ford webcam will continue to get blurrier until I get around to replacing a permanently fogged double-glazed window pane.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

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