JAWRA Blog

Potomac River Basin

Heard a good talk this afternoon, by Joe Hoffmann, Executive Director of the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB). A threatened species.

The ICPRB should be an unquestioned success story. When I came to the Washington, D.C. area in 1969, people were talking about water supply as the ultimate limit to growth. The Corps of Engineers, still at that time in full building mode, had proposed a set of 20 dams in the upper basin. Costing billions, the project likely would have decimated the shad fishery. With a then-radical view of the system as a whole, the ICPRB brokered an agreement whereby three major water suppliers managed their resources jointly. Cost? A tiny fraction of what had been proposed. Water security: No longer a critical issue in the region. Environmental impacts: The Potomac now supplies shad fingerlings to other basins.

So how do our Virginia legislators reward such enlightened management? (See AWRA blog.) Not only has Virginia not funded the ICPRB for the past two years, it threatens to pull out of the agreement entirely. To call such a action stupid would be  an insult to stupid people!

Ken's Montblanc pen

A minor tragedy happened the other day at JAWRA World Editorial HQ. Casey, the official JAWRA cat, jumped up for her customary mid-morning scritch and brushed my Montblanc pen to the floor. A plastic part inside cracked. OMG! I’ve used that pen for almost 30 years. It’s been all around the world producing a shelf of travel diaries. Every paper I’ve written, every speech, and (true!) every computer program has started in outline form from that gold nib. I feel struck dumb, or at least illiterate.

For those into fine pens, the pen in question is a Montblanc Generations model 320P in burgundy. It’s no longer sold to individuals because Montblanc realized it was way too good for an entry level model. Sleek and light, it fit comfortably in my pocket, and it wrote (Why do I use the past tense?) writes like a dream. The pen is a minor celebrity on the Web. It served as the model when I created a banner for the Contact USGS page.

My cherished pen now is on its way to the Montblanc pen hospital. A repair probably will cost me, but it’s only money. I just hope the parts are available.

Why all this concern over a piece of technology which has long been obsolete? Even I now take more notes on my iPad than on paper. My slide rule, once a constant companion, likely will never be used again for serious calculations. A fine pen, with its smooth feel and tactile feedback is a reminder that good writing is more than just a bunch of electrons. It is thought.

Warm weather here at JAWRA World Editorial Headquarters. Sat outside in fountain plaza drinking a latte. The ice rink still is operating, thanks to good refrigeration, with some skaters in short sleeves.

The Wall Street Journal the other day carried an article, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” It was signed by 16 concerned scientists. You can check the list for yourself. 16 out of how many hundreds studying climate change who think it’s real? I was concerned a couple of years ago when the owners of Fox “News” acquired the venerable old WSJ. Are my fears realized now? Maybe it’s time to panic about the news media.

Just received the awful news Jim Biesecker, USGS Retired, passed away today. Jim was my boss during the time we were building USGS’s water.usgs.gov website. He was a great guy to work for, one of the real characters of USGS. Buy any USGS’er a drink and you’ll surely get stories about Jim.

An adept manager, Jim was the one who found the funding (I hesitate to use the term, “slush fund!”) to create the popular real-time streamflow service. Please think of Jim next time you get your data.

If you’ve tried to use Wikipedia today, you’ll have noticed it and many other websites have gone dark for today in protest against two proposed internet piracy bills. Our websites will stay open, though I too am naturally wary of measures promoted to protect big music and movie interests. There remains a great danger of shutting out dissent and innovation.

I will repeat JAWRA’s policy to scrupulously respect the letter and the spirit of copyright law. (See my Rights Management posting.) Responsible publishing by authors and editors remains the preferred enforcement tool.

The Wall Street Journal this weekend carried an excellent article, “Citizen Scientists.” Covering the medical field, it described how ordinary citizens are beginning to conduct their own research into medical issues. Their techniques are becoming increasingly sophisticated, though they still often fall short of the “gold standard” of medical research.

The water field has its own version of citizen scientists in the many school and community sampling efforts to study local waters. Though techniques are not always state-of-the-art — flow-adjusted, cross-sectional water-quality sampling, for example, still is a rarity — they contribute valuable information at places not usually visited by government sampling programs.

The Wall Street Journal article mentioned the problem citizen scientists have in extracting data from professional medical research: Competition among researchers causes them to tightly hold onto their data. This is one aspect in which water resources differs from medicine, at least in the United States. Led by EPA and the USGS, virtually all major water-resources databases are freely available to the public. As I’ve said before, we’re lucky not to have the big bucks afflicting our field!