California faces another drought as lake beds turn to dust – a photo essay
Water shortages and dry conditions are already affecting the state as the governor has declared an emergency in 41 of 58 counties
We Californians always complain about how dry it is, and how we are feeling the long term effects of climate change slowly desiccating us. But what does that LOOK like?
The UK Guardian, which has a fantastic US bureau (I am a happy digital subscriber), pulled these images together to show you what a dry spring looked like.
And it’s even drier now.
To give you a sense of how widespread this is, the US Drought Monitor (droughtmonitor.unl.edu) makes simplified graphics to show how the many different climates of California, from snowy mountain to redwood forest to foggy coast, are in various stages of water shortage.
It is HISTORICALLY dry.
This isn’t just abstract news for us. This is why trees and plants that never needed supplemental water are now dying in our local parks and gardens; why our forests are vulnerable to insects and fires; why people who retire to the Sierra foothills suddenly can’t get insurance for their homes; why salmon can’t make it out to sea from far up the rivers where they hatched; why farmers are watching their orchards from a more optimistic expansion era dry up…
We have always been zealous about drought tolerance and water conservation, but there is only so much we can do at home when the natural systems that get that water first are already dry.
These are gorgeous and science-y and geeky all at the same time.
The US Postal Service has released images of the sun in different wavelengths of light, which you can buy online or at your local post office. They are SUPERB.
(You were expecting me to write about the Star Wars Droid stamps, but I won’t indulge you. Ha!)
Binti (2015) Binti: Home (2017) Binti: the Night Masquerade (2018) Binti: Sacred Fire (2019) by Nnedi Okorafor published by DAW Books, Inc., New York 2020
Binti is a very good student, a math genius, and a traditional Himba girl adorned with fragrant red clay. When she’s the first of her people to be accepted to an interstellar university, her family just shrugs it off – Himba girls don’t DO that. An education would just upset her family and damage her chances of marriage.
She goes anyway, and just when she is getting to know the other students on the university-bound starship, the massacre occurs…
Binti won a Hugo and a Nebula, and it’s easy to see why! This collection of novellas covers so much ground, from living ships to parental disapproval, from bullying to interspecies mass murder, from tradition to homesickness, from the weight of being the first of your people to do something to the awkwardness of having your friends meet your family, and the rather outrageous burdens that are put upon the heroine’s shoulders while she copes with what she has experienced…
Okorafor moves at a fast pace, and does compelling worldbuilding without getting bogged down in minutiae. It’s fun! There are lots of characters, but they all have a purpose. There is ancient tech of unknown utility, which is one of my biggest weaknesses. (*squeal!*) Descriptions of organized university biomes and the seeming madness of people with hidden communication devices were some of many satisfying elements in Binti’s world.
I’m especially glad I read this collection after it was fully compiled, so I wouldn’t suffer suspense over what happens next.
Cabins by Philip Jodidio published by Taschen 2018
This hefty, dense, trilingual (English, German, and French) volume features extremely charming illustrations by Cruschiform (Marie-Laure Cruschi), great photos, consistent and clear floor plans (!gasp!), and outdoorsy-buildings, only some of which are cabins.
While the promotional text discusses rustic simplicity, and there are a few rugged/utilitarian structures, MOST of these aren’t modest buildings you could track mud into. I mean, there are some without heating, or that are only intended for seasonal use, but many are fully developed, large, contemporary homes for the well off.
I adore this “boathouse,” but we have boathouses in our public parks here in SF, and they are basically uninsulated garages for boats that are rusting and have bird poo on them. They don’t look like this:
This home by AR Design Studio in the UK is fantastic. Too fantastic for cabin-hood! It is a retreat from… another home on the property.
The design of the book is great – the illustrations are stylish, fun, colorful, and provide clear transitions between projects. The consistent floor plan graphics help explain how the buildings should work. The index is well organized, and the essay at the front is worth a read.
The projects themselves range from translucent structures that you can camp in, to wine country vacation homes, to buildings where you could live normally, to those that are better suited for ‘glamping’ (pretend glamour camping). There is at least one where I can imagine snowshoeing in from the edge of the property with a sled full of cocktail ingredients and catered food, though unpacking supplies in the immaculate kitchen that appears to have no food preparation tools of any kind would be daunting. 🙂
It’s difficult to tell what the criteria for SUCCESS in the design category is. The program for a cabin (a real cabin) is looser than one for a home, but that leaves their utility ambiguous. Are we snow camping, or are we entertaining? Can our older parents visit, or is it too difficult to access? Is it comfortable for a weekend only, or a week, or a month?
The structures that are fully furnished are easier to interpret – I know my parents could sit down without me having to bring furniture, so that’s great. Some bedrooms are completely filled by a bed. Why? Should you need to leave the bedroom to open a suitcase and dress? Should you need to climb a ladder into a loft to sleep? Does the enormous trap door in the floor without railings feel sketchy when you’re hauling in your supplies? Is a glass-enclosed bath a great idea if your parents are visiting for the weekend?
The client’s desires and goals for using the space are mentioned at various levels of detail, but without giving away too much, I’d love to have a scorecard to compare the programs on a practical level, considering the range of projects. Accessibility (how able-bodied do I need to be to get in, and how many stairs am I hauling supplies up), is there enough floor space to dress in the bedroom; is there enough light to read; is there space to draw/paint/write; is the temperature range comfortable in its intended seasons, is there any storage space for the outdoor gear you need to get there… This would be especially valuable because of the glossy architecture magazine convention of showing most of the spaces without human occupants, without normal personal possessions, and without any normal living functions being performed.
This is a fun collection to leaf through, and I do have at least one new Swedish island cabin getaway fantasy now, so I think this book has accomplished its mission.
Fugitive Telemetry (the Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells published by Tor April 2021
Yes, everyone’s favorite socially-awkward security unit is back for the sixth novella in the Murderbot Diaries. Yes, due to the fast nature of the novellas, you MUST read them all in order, as the characters and situations that brought them together are all assumed to be understood by the time you arrive at this novella.
Without spoilers, I can say that this novella is… a MURDERBOT MURDER MYSTERY! No, I didn’t see that coming. This fast-paced adventure allows Murderbot to help station security solve the murder of a human within their ordinarily very boring jurisdiction. Is the killing related to Murderbot’s favorite humans? Are they in even more danger than usual? Is Murderbot itself a suspect?
One novelty to this novella is that Murderbot ordinarily provides great running commentary of all of its thoughts/fears/fluid-losses, and this time around, it HOLDS BACK so you have to find out during an action sequence who did it. That was a sneaky surprise!
Of course, this novella just makes me want another, and while I’m happy that Wells has signed a contract to write more, I WANT THEM NOW. You’ll want them, too, and I recommend this volume to tide you over slightly longer while you wait impatiently for more.
I’m back online and typing very gently after a few weeks’ rest for my dominant arm, which needed to recover from a sprain of my ulnar collateral ligament. I hadn’t even really known it was possible to sprain an arm outside of sports involving throwing balls, and yet, I achieved it!
While my twice-broken, once-surgically-reassembled LEFT arm has more reasons to resent me (!!), my right arm is still making its displeasure known. I look forward to not waking up fast and for the wrong reasons due to its response when I stretch in the morning, half-awake! (Gaaahhhhh!)
Good advice: do not sprain any of your ligaments!
Outside of sitting around in pain, there has been a lot going on. My very liberal hometown achieved getting 80% of adults vaccinated against COVID-19 weeks ago AND has had a less than 1% rate of positive test results, and so has started to ramp up ordinary urban activity. This means that going to the store no longer has a high personal risk score I have to calculate.
Good advice: live in an area where people believe in science!
There IS still a risk score, what with news of the delta variant rising elsewhere, but also because I have people in my social and professional circles that I just can’t TRUST to protect me (or others). I’m not spending any time indoors with anyone who refuses to be vaccinated, and while I like to think I don’t know such people, it turns out I do.
They will not be appearing on my indoor social calendar.
Combined with the social calendar hygiene that I applied for people who expressed unreasonable right wing and/or conspiratorial views in the last 4 years, I’ve only had to drop a few people, but the quality of my social calendar is much improved!
Good advice: spend time with people who care about your health, safety, and well-being.
After writing a terse letter to a pen friend who takes lots of medicines, but also insists broadly, in defiance of facts, that the COVID vaccines have not yet been tested (!?!) , I have had to reflect that smart people can be hopelessly GULLIBLE. Not just about how drugs are tested and approved in the US (where our regulatory regime makes them more valuable and widely trusted than those of many other countries, counter-intuitively – regulations can be quite beneficial in unexpected ways!), but gullible or oblivious to a range of things. Peers I care about have expressed unexpected lack of awareness of: the fact that eggs they buy in the store aren’t fertilized; what forms of birth control are available and how they work (and that some also prevent transmissible diseases); that heart disease is not random, but caused by lifestyle (or, infrequently, by genes – just like cancers); that there is more than one kind of cancer, and that cancer treatments differ; that the main way to obtain vitamins is through eating foods that contain them…
As someone who is curious about the world and who reads constantly, the idea that some of my peers wouldn’t know these things shocked me at first… but should it?
Good advice: read, and spend time with other people who read.
I don’t often write about video media, but I enthusiastically recommend the lovely, bittersweet animated series Don Hertzfeldt has been building, currently up to three episodes.
My synopsis of the first episode (2015): a woman from the future visits her toddler self, to explain that someday she will be cloned, and her memories will be transferred to her future clones. The toddler and her future self explore the beautiful, colorful, abstract, terrifyingly glitchy future, in which time travel tourism sometimes gets you killed.
To prevent spoilers, I will not share a synopsis of World of Tomorrow, Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts (2017)(vimeo.com), but the sense of risk and quest to find a meaning in life that you can accept continues, and the toddler’s future woman clones become more adventurous!
World of Tomorrow, Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (2020)(also vimeo.com) is a painful, funny, complex adventure in which the woman clone from the future leaves clues to a man clone of the future so they can connect somewhere in time, though the effort seems increasingly likely to get him and his future clones killed.
These short, poignant, funny, philosophical films earned all the awards they have been given and deserve even more. The simple stick figures make the characters feel innocent and universal; the abstract backgrounds and art are great; the use of his toddler relative’s voice is brilliant; and the way all of these stories reflect a human struggle to find meaning makes these emotionally moving. I recommend these zealously, regardless of your tastes!
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot published by Crown; audiobook published by Penguin Random House 2010
OH MY GOODNESS, THIS BOOK. This book is several books in one. At least.
This is a book about the dawn of cell culture, and the scientific beginnings of being able to keep human cells alive outside the body. This ties directly to the biotechnology industry I work in, and provides a history of early techniques and advances that I didn’t know I needed to know!
This is a book about the lives of American Blacks in or from the 1950s American South, the struggles of people too poor to leave the lands on which their ancestors were slaves, the burdens on women who lived with older male cousins who molested them, and the social hierarchies that followed those who left to the north, where no one questioned doctors. (I have never been more grateful that my Black ancestors fled to the midwest… Thank you, grandma!)
(Please note that I am bi-racial, and my family uses Black more than African-American in our self-descriptions; you’ll see me switch between these terms, and sometimes switch cases (Black or black) in my writing.)
This is also a book about remarkable scientific advances that occurred in during an ethically horrific era, in which studies were performed on people, especially African-Americans and institutionalized people, without their consent.
And of a highly ethical, profoundly curious, deeply committed biologist who wanted to know where HeLa cells REALLY came from, and worked for years with the family of Henrietta Lacks to learn the human story behind the cells.
This book is an emotional roller coaster! From scientific research challenges, to scientists sharing technology freely, to religious Lacks family members who feared their relative was being cloned and that her soul would never rest, to disabled children suffering through medical experiments their families didn’t consent to, to temperamental collaborators, this isn’t the story I was expecting, but it was a remarkable tale, and the audio books was produced to be an amazing ‘listen.’
I recommend this book highly for anyone interested in cell culture, biotechnology, genetic rights, the horrors of mental institutions for the poor, informed consent, being black in the 1950s in the US, and science sleuthing! Sloot does an amazing job of telling the story of writing the book within the book, which is a true adventure. What an author! What a researcher!
I’m a huge fan of San Francisco’s collection of antique, operational streetcars from many cities with similar rail sizes, and now I have an ADORABLE new way for tracking them! I can just go to streetcar.live and see cute icons of the trains on the F-Market and E-Embarcadero lines, and click into the image for more details about that particular streetcar.
Market Street Railway’s Real-Time Streetcar Guide
With this live, interactive map, track San Francisco’s vintage streetcars and find them near you.
(Yes, you can buy stickers or pins of those cute icons at the Market Street Railway online store, or at their museum near the Ferry Building.)
Lena by qntm published online at Things of Interest (qntm.org/mmacevedo) 2021
I’m going to classify this as a book, because I am using that classification for novellas, and I make the rules here. [ahem]
This story gave me the CREEPS. The best way I can think to describe it is as ethical horror for the Amazon.com age.
If technology was available to image your brain and make an AI copy of your mind and personality, how would others want to use that copy of you? How would scientists want to use it? How would your EMPLOYER want to use it?
See how dark your thoughts just went?
It’s somehow all the more creepy by the matter-of-fact, research-abstract tone.
I would have found this relatable for many reasons, including some geeky ones relating to emotional responsibility I felt over my clones in a 1990s role playing game. (You don’t need to know more about that.) But it also feels… appropriate to the moment in late stage capitalism that we are in.
Just go read it. It’s concise and remarkable. (The author moderates the comments, so the comments are readable!)
