Link Banana

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never looked nearly this closely at the stuff.

(via Neatorama)

Announced with less than a tenth the fanfare of the ice on Mars, scientists now believe there is water on the moon. Add this to the near-invisible announcement of water in Mercury’s atmosphere, and it’s beginning to look like water’s far more prevalent in the solar system than we’d thought.

Two NYT Op-Eds from last Friday cry out for the good old days (and illustrate how broken my “readflow” is). They both make worthy points.

• Adam Kohen wants to know why states have been stripped of the ability to regulate many things they used to. Through the supremacy clause, the Bush administration stopped them from acting on, for example, sub-prime lenders before the crash.
• Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royte thinks that if big cities had more water fountains — as they did in the old days — there would be less demand for bottled water.

Sounding nearly as pessimistic as everyone else, The Economist assess which rivers around the world are most likely to lead to conflicts in the coming decades.

Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn’t add up to a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to be a stable and peaceful one.

Last week, Mario Batalli’s seemingly-bogus claim that pizza in New York was unlike anywhere else because of the city’s water got a lot of play. Thankfully, Mr. Kottke’s gathered some sensible rebuffs to this theory, the best of which is:

There are a lot of variables for such a simple food. But these 3 FAR outweigh the others:

1. High Heat
2. Kneading Technique
3. The kind of yeast culture or “starter” used along with proper fermentation technique

All other factors pale in comparison to these 3. I know that people fuss over the brand of flour, the kind of sauce, etc. I discuss all of these things, but if you don’t have the 3 fundamentals above handled, you will be limited.

Though you may think a column called Green.view would be unabashedly against the creation of vast artificial islands off the coast of Dubai, you’d only be partially right.

If one’s philosophy, for example is that the ocean should be largely left alone, then whether reclamation provides homes for more fish will not matter. Others, though, may take a more pragmatic view, thinking that the development has essentially created something from nothing. Indeed, many artificial reefs—scuttled ships and aircraft, sunken tyres and shopping trolleys—house marine life in otherwise empty waters.

That conclusion, however, risks oversimplification. While there may be more substrate for coral to grow, the question of whether there is actually more marine life is complicated. Do artificial structures in the ocean actually promote more life, or do they simply attract it? Dr Love reckons some reefs do one, some do the other and some do both. So while the artificial reefs have certainly created new habitats, it isn’t clear whether this is as a net benefit for the region.

The state legislators in Georgia went to the history books to try to cure their water problem:

SOON after James Camak demarcated the border between Georgia and Tennessee in 1818, he began to develop doubts about his work. Thanks to a faulty sextant and bad astronomical charts, he had drawn the line a mile south of the intended boundary, the 35th parallel. Were the error to be corrected, Georgia would find itself in possession of a short stretch of the Tennessee river.

Until recently, Georgia’s politicians did not pursue their claims to this sliver of territory very vigorously. But a bad drought, and the growing militancy of two other neighbouring states about the sharing of water, have prompted a change of heart. Last month Georgia’s state assembly passed a resolution calling on the governor to set up a commission to look into the disputed boundary.