Infospigot: The Chronicles

Road Blog: Apparition

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, about 40 miles south of the Las Vegas Strip on Interstate 15. The towers you see (shot from the passenger's seat of a car traveling about 70 mph toward Los Angeles) are each 459 feet high.

The simple version of how the plant works: Each tower is surrounded by an immense field of mirrors that focus sunlight on a collector at the top of the tower. Thus the beams of light made visible by the desert haze. That intense heat drives turbines that generate electricity. (This isn't the first time this type of plant has appeared on this here blog.)

For the more complex version of what's really happening at the plant, check out my friend Pete's coverage of Ivanpah here and here.

Road Blog: The Sports Book

Thom and I are in Las Vegas on an adventure I'll describe later. We're staying at Caesar's Palace, right on The Strip. Our arrival last night coincided with the beginning of the NFL's 2015 season, Pittsburgh Steelers visiting the New England Patriots, and when we went downstairs to dinner, we could hear cheering and shouting from people watching the game in the bars, lounges and restaurants around us. It was a mixture of one part fan enthusiasm, I think, and four parts monetary self-interest for the hundreds or thousands of bettors gathered on the premises.

After we ate, we went over to the Caesar's Palace sports book, where the house entertains wagers on all manner of sporting contests. The room is the size of a small concert hall, with screens showing games, highlights of games, and the current betting line on upcoming events, especially college football. By the time we got there, it was already the fourth quarter, and the Patriots' lead seemed secure. But while the game's outcome was no longer in doubt, the outcome of many bets -- whether New England would cover the 7-point spread, for instance -- had not yet been resolved. So the throng in the sports book was still hanging on every play.

At some point, I went to the restroom. Most men maintain silence while they go about their business in such settings. But as I stood at a tastefully style urinal, the guy next to me asked, "You have any money on that game?"

"No -- we got here too late," I said.

"I've got three thousand bucks on the under," he said. He was referring to the over-under, a proposition in which you can bet on the total points scored in the game. Taking the under means you're betting the total points will be lower than the number set by the house; betting the over means you're betting the score will exceed that figure.

"What's the over-under tonight?" I asked.

"Fifty-one."

The score at the time of the restroom visit was 28-14, meaning the guy would lose his bet if another 10 points were scored. The Steelers had been moving the ball, and this guy was nervous he was going to lose his three grand.

"Well, it's raining, anyway," I pointed out -- rain at the game might make it harder to score.

"Yeah -- let the rains come. Slow everything down," he said.

On screen in the sports book a few minutes later, the Steelers were driving again. Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh quarterback dropped back to pass. He threw an interception that killed a potential scoring drive.

I saw the guy from the restroom. "There you go," I said. He had already launched into a celebration. He was going to win his bet.

The American Community Survey and Me

So, this came in the mail last week. It's the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. As a journalist who sometimes tries to extract useful information about my community, state and nation from the census data, I thought, "Cool! Now I'm going to be part of that data." Of course, the envelope, with the notice "your response is required by law," makes it sound less cool. Still, I am a sucker for some (not all) of the rites of citizenship, so I dived into the survey.

One glitch I encountered: One is encouraged to fill out the survey online. No problem -- I live online. But after you sign in with your unique ID at the outset of the process, a personal identification number is displayed with an advisory that you'll need it if you need to sign out in the middle of the estimated 40-minute process. Of course, I didn't write down the PIN, had to sign out, and then was unable to sign back in to finish the survey. The Census Bureau can't (or won't) reset the PIN. So if you want to continue, you have to call and get the agency to reset the survey and start over.

Wanting to provide the response required by law, I called, got the PIN reset, and started the survey over. It was all pretty simple stuff --information on race, ethnic background, how long I've lived where I've lived, whether I rent or own, how much I pay for utilities, how much I pay for housing, income data. Then there was a series of questions about disabilities, including this:

I'd suggest a third choice for the answer: "Not yet."

Reading: 'A Thousand Illusions'

"Civilization creates for me a thousand other worlds that have little to do with my senses, a thousand illusions among which to choose. It is one of the functions of much of contemporary education and politics to convince me that my choices are limited to these creations. Were there a television in my home, it would spend twenty-four hours a day convincing me that life is either a series of dangers and disasters or an endless series of shallow and banal encounters with uninteresting people. Magazines and newspapers tell me the same story. Shopping malls connected by broad paved highways are filled with objects presented as the rewards of existence--the flesh of the world converted to doodads. Big Science has had a good deal to do with the creation of this deadly alternative reality, and science has willingly lent its hand to the great effort to to convince me that the evidence of my senses and the intuitions that arise from their use are illusory.

"But there is a scientific practice that precedes Big Science, a devotion to patient and scrupulous observation of the world and its creatures. I have come to love this discipline, now known as natural history, which delves ever more deeply into the physiological and behavioral differences between my species and others. There is an explosion of this kind of knowledge accumulating in our era, driven by an increasing awareness that many species are disappearing and that we known desperately little about them and therefore little about how to save them. …"

--Freeman House, "Totem Salmon"

The Correction

Page 2 of The New York Times print edition -- also online under the title Corrections -- is a favorite of mine. The conceit of the corrections page is that the paper will make an accounting for the errors that have appeared in its columns.

On one level, it's refreshing to see an institution as august as the Times owning up to its mistakes. On another, knowing how easy it is to err when trying to commit decent journalism, there's a little bit of Schadenfreude in seeing the dumb stuff that winds up in a paper that takes itself so seriously.

On a deeper plane, it's not possible for a corrections page to address deeper editorial and journalistic flaws -- the biases that all editors and publications have and the assumptions and coverage decisions they all make that tend to warp and distort what they say they're trying to capture -- truth and reality. That's something the paper's public editor (and ombudsmen in other organizations) are supposed to examine, though that's mission with a loud conflict of interest

Let's not let deep thoughts get in the way of fun, though. Most corrections you find are trivial. One I see in the Times today points out that they made a mistake in the spelling of a Norwegian city last Sunday. Another says that the paper got the location of a novelist's high school wrong. Big deal -- but thanks for pointing out the mistakes and making the fixes. I like the fact the Times foregoes the faux apologetic, "We regret the error."

There's one kind of correction that's especially precious to connoisseurs of the genre: The correction that begets its own correction.

Back at The San Francisco Examiner, the Monarch of the Dailies when it was published by the heirs of William Randolph Hearst and their hired hands, once published a story that mentioned two sons of the city's former mayor, Joseph Alioto. The sons, both attorneys, were named Joseph Alioto Jr. and John Alioto. The story was accompanied by a picture of one of them -- I can't remember which. The caption misidentified who was in the picture -- calling John "Joseph" or Joseph "John." The Aliotos complained. The Examiner duly published a correction with a substitute picture and a caption. Sure enough, the picture was of the other son, but the caption again misstated who was in the picture. The Examiner regretted the error -- twice.

This comes to mind because of a correction the Times ran yesterday (Saturday, April 11):

An article on Friday about the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War misstated the name of a song played by a brass band during a program at Arlington National Ceremony marking the date. It is “Yankee Doodle” — not “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the name of a 1942 musical film about the composer George M. Cohan.

Arlington National Ceremony? Well, it's fixed in the online version, anyway.

Road Blog: Madera County

It's far too late, or early -- the end of March has turned into April Fool's Day -- to go into detail about what's pictured here. Suffice it to say: One of the many feedlots I passed Tuesday afternoon while tooling along the back roads of Merced and Madera and Fresno counties on the way to Pine Flat Lake. As usual, I took my time with scenes like this and so when I finally got to the lake -- one of the 10 biggest reservoirs in the state -- twilight was coming on.

Anyway. The cows/cattle were beautiful, and I told them so. I kept thinking someone was going to show up to shoo me away from taking pictures, accuse me of being an animal sympathizer or such like. Nothing like that happened.

Now I'm going to bed.

Portrait of the Drought: Lake Don Pedro

In our last installment, we were taking in the sights of Lake McClure just as night fell. Now, let's reverse gears and go about an hour or so backwards, when I arrived at Lake Don Pedro -- on the Tuolumne River east of Modesto -- after an afternoon of noodling around near downtown Modesto (photo subjects: church, train station turned bus depot), Roberts Ferry Cemetery (graves) and numerous pretty spots along Highway 132, aka The Unknown (to Me) Highway, to look at trees, hills, rocks and clouds.

Highway 132, which heads east from Interstate 580 south of Tracy and goes through Modesto (city) and Empire, Waterford and LaGrange (town, town, hamlet), is the perfect route if you want to see two of California's biggest reservoirs because a) the lakes almost touch each other and b) the road runs right between them. Here's the map:

So I thought that I'd drive up there and see both drought-reduced lakes and, if I managed my time wisely, have time to get to a third a little further north, New Melones Reservoir, on the Stanislaus River. That was too big an if. I took it easy Sunday morning, found a few chores to do, sat and thought about it a little while, considered what a beautiful day it was, checked the time of sunset, saw that it was almost exactly 6 p.m., then finally, about 1:30.

I will say this: The light was beautiful all the way out of the Bay Area, across the Central Valley and into the foothills. As I drove out there, I wondered whether I would have enough time to happen across anything that would say anything unique about each lake. After awhile, the once-drowned, now-denuded reservoir landscape takes on a certain sameness: the red earth, the bare slopes showing the lines of the receding lake, the out-of-commission boat ramps, the house boats confined shrinking bays.

When I finally got to Lake Don Pedro -- according to a credible-sounding history, it's named after a Frenchman, Pierre Sainsevain, who came to California in the 1830s, became naturalized as a Mexican citizen, and was granted land near Santa Cruz as Don Pedro before heading to the Sierra foothills during the Gold Rush -- it was 5:30 and the shadows were getting pretty long. I shot a few pictures (a couple of them are posted here). It felt haphazard. I wasn't able to frame anything really different from what I'd seen at, say, Lake Oroville.

Then I headed to Lake McClure, But we've already been there, blogwise. It happened to be a more dramatic spot, the lake is much lower than Don Pedro, and the just-after-sunset light there added a dramatic element.

One other thing to note here about the appearance of the lakes in these two posts:

Lake Don Pedro is a big reservoir, with a capacity just over 2 million acre-feet. It's 43 percent of capacity right now, and its surface elevation is 710 feet above sea level. That's 120 feet below its "full" elevation, 830 feet. Lake McClure is about half the capacity of Don Pedro, and is currently at just 9 percent capacity. Its surface elevation is currently 605 feet -- 274 feet below it's brim-full level.

Portrait of the Drought: Lake McClure

Over the weekend, I went on a quick jaunt up to what I'd call the central Sierra foothills to take a look at a couple of the drought-drained reservoirs up there: Lake Don Pedro, on the Tuolumne River, owned by the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts, is the fifth-largest reservoir in California at just over 2 million acre-feet (enough water, by a popular rule of thumb, for about 4 million households); and Lake McClure, on the Merced River, which is one of the 10 biggest reservoirs at 1 million acre-feet or so.

As usual, I was running late, made more stops along the highway up to the lakes than was prudent, and got up to Don Pedro as the light was getting pretty long. Lake McClure was just a few miles away, though, and I got there when sunset colors were still in the sky. Still, not ideal reservoir portrait conditions.

Here's a little history to go with the images: A month ago, February 3, Lake McClure fell to its lowest level since it was filled in the 1960s. Per statistics from the state Department of Water Resources, Its volume shrank to 63,489 acre-feet (remember, capacity is 1 million) and its surface was at 585.99 feet above sea level. That broke a record set during the six-year drought of 1986-1992, when the lake fell to 66,228 acre-feet, 588.48 surface elevation.

The Lake McClure nadir during the terrible drought of 1976-77 -- the drought that saw Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, among others, fall to their record lows, was 72,200 acre-feet, 594 surface elevation.

Tomorrow, perhaps: some pictures of the Lake Don Pedro. The pictures here are from one of the boat ramps at the Barrett Cove area of Lake McClure.

All the News That's Fit to Print

I work in a public media newsroom that doesn't have unlimited resources. We need to be somewhat selective in what we cover, and we often discuss whether this or that story rises to the level of assigning a reporter to cover it or giving it some air time.

That guy arrested in an arson case that was worrying a couple San Francisco neighborhoods? Yeah, we'll do that one, as well as the six-alarm wild land fire in Pacifica -- emblematic of the continuing drought, maybe -- and Klay Thompson's historic 37-point quarter the other night for the Golden State Warriors. The latest report of homicides in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. No, we're probably not going to report on that unless we have something to add to the mere report of the crime.

One only has to peruse news organs of the past, though, to enter a world in which editors were not and perhaps didn't need to be so choosy. Their ad departments gave them X number of pages to fill with tidings of world and community affairs, and they'd be damned if they didn't fill them some way.

Here's an example uncovered while browsing the Dec. 31, 1890, number of the San Francisco Morning Call for a work project:

I'm just wondering how the affray at the ferry landing came to the attention of the Morning Call's editors. Was it an anecdote overheard at a bar? Did an ambitious copyboy bring this item in after witnessing the near-altercation? Was it a tale told at the police precinct house and passed on as a tidbit to a reporter? Or is it entirely fabricated?

I don't believe we'll ever know, but it reminds me of the sort of episodes millions of us send out in 140-character messages every day.

For the record, the ferry landing item is followed by this nugget, three sentences dripping with irony and pathos.

Blind and Friendless

John Miller, a negro, 30 years of age, was recently brought from Victoria, B.C., on the city of Puebla. He had no friends in Victoria, and the charitable people of that city having grown tired of supporting him paid his passage to this city. He is being taken care of by a generous policeman, but neither the Collector of the Port nor the Commissioner of Immigration know what to do with him.

King Day: 'I Come Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword'

Well, I'm posting past midnight, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is just past. But in doing some reading on the Montgomery bus boycott, I came across a sermon he gave in March 1956. His point of departure was a recent court decision that ordered the University of Alabama to admit black students and the violence that met the first enrollee. King reacted angrily to the university's decision to ask the student to leave school to restore peace to the campus.

It's hard to choose an excerpt because the entire text is full of truth and fire. But here's where he gets to the heart of his subject:

Yes, things are quiet in Tuscaloosa. Yes, there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price: it was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succumbing to the whims and caprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of capitulating to the force of darkness. This is the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the Almighty God. …

In a very profound passage which has been often misunderstood, Jesus utters this: He says, “Think not that I am come to bring peace. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.”

Certainly, He is not saying that He comes not to bring peace in the higher sense. What He is saying is: “I come not to bring this peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life, the peace that makes for stagnant complacency.”

Then He says, “I come to bring a sword” -- not a physical sword. Whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. I come to declare war over injustice. I come to declare war on evil. Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force–war, tension, confusion, but it is the presence of some positive force–justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God.

I had a long talk with a man the other day about this bus situation. He discussed the peace being destroyed in the community, the destroying of good race relations. I agree that it is more tension now. But peace is not merely the absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes, it is true that if the Negro accepts his place, accepts exploitation and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be a peace boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity, and if peace means this, I don’t want peace.

If peace means accepting second-class citizenship, I don’t want it.
If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it.
If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don’t want peace.
If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace.

So in a passive, non-violent manner, we must revolt against this peace.