Greg A. Brown

I spent so much time in high-school playing puzzpack in my math (and other) classes. A ridiculous amount of time. Good to know it’s still around.

The New York Times Magazine this Sunday featured an excellent article on the clash in southeastern US between diminishing water supplies and ever-growing cities. A teaser:

A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

Maplight.org is a really interesting (and useful!) venture that allows anyone to easily view the relationships between money received by congresspersons and the votes they place on bills. For great examples, check out the intro video they offer.

I’m normally pretty jaded to (and even against) wacky photographs of people with their pets, but this sequence of photos is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while.

The best investigative reporting (and documentaries) being produced today started a new season yesterday when Frontline aired “Cheney’s Law,” covering Dick Cheney’s continuing campaign to use the office of the Vice President to radically expand the conception of executive authority (see the extensive Washington Post series on the same subject). Along with the new season is a new website, and they stream their videos using flash (like YouTube) now, instead of the old system of Windows Media Player and Real Player.

Free music: the album Ptolemy’s Guitar by Roland Satterwhite. It’s a stripped-down, multi-instrumentalist sound like Andrew Bird’s Weather Systems.

This sums up my feelings about today perfectly.

Late last night, the New York Times published an article on how Al-Qaeda sympathizers use the internet to spread propaganda supporting their ideological causes. I was able to track the site down shortly after the article was published, but it was quickly forced offline (maybe by the traffic of bloggers independently finding the site and pointing to it?) with only Google’s cache remaining. But luckily for our little academic investigation here, the author of that site previously maintained a mirror on Wordpress.com that allows you to look through the archives for interest’s sake.

A PC vs. Mac forum with thousands of posts, but only one user. Exceedingly odd, with tendrils reaching over into creepiness as well.

Samantha Powers finished the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Problem From Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide back in 2002, and since finishing that astonishingly-good book has written quite a few articles and advised Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But she’s working on a new book as well, one that her job-related profile describes as “a political biography of the UN’s Sergio Vieira de Mello.” However, the info page accompanying a 2006 commencement speech of hers describes her next book as “on the causes and consequences of historical amnesia in American foreign policy.” I don’t know which one takes precedence - or whether they’re both describing the same project - but I have to say that the latter description sounds incredibly interesting.