Photo Post

Couple of photos from the backlog. Haven't been making many lately - too much work going on. Bleah.

HD home movies from Los Alamos during WWII

It turns out there are some very high quality home movies from Los Alamos during the war years.

Based on the LA-UR number, they weren't released until 2011. I wonder if there are more? I'd assume the fellow shot more than 11 minutes of video.

New Mexico already has marriage equality?

There’s an interesting sudden flap regarding marriage equality here in New Mexico. The mayor of Santa Fe and one of the city councilors, as well as the city attorney, apparently looked at our marriage laws and concluded that they are gender-neutral. On the other hand, both the Santa Fe and Los Alamos county clerks (the latter a Republican) don’t buy it.

I actually read New Mexico Statute 40-1, which is about marriage and not very long. I’m not a lawyer, but I saw no reference to the gender of spouses except in Section 40-1-18 (not 40-1-8 as claimed in the Monitor article linked above), which lays out the proper form for a marriage license application; this refers to “male applicant” and “female applicant” as well as “bride” and “groom”. The argument that these labels simply reflect tradition rather than an actual proscription of gender seems quite plausible to me.

I hope a courageous same-sex couple steps up soon to demand a marriage license. What fun if it happened in Los Alamos.

Rackspace triple fail

For several years I had a virtual server with Slicehost. They were great. Then, Slicehost was bought out by Rackspace. They are... not quite as good. Among other things, Slicehost let me set an alternate e-mail address in case my reidster.net address doesn’t work for some reason, but Rackspace doesn’t.

Anyway, a couple of days ago I received an e-mail from Rackspace saying my credit card was expiring. Thanks, I’ll go update it. This led to a series of brown-paper-bag failures....

Fail #1

One of the things that drives me batty is websites that don’t let you type in the credit card number with spaces. I like to proofread the number before I submit (shocking, I know); this is far more difficult with an unbroken series of 16 digits rather than the 4 groups of 4 that’s on the card.

This is particularly annoying because it’s literally one line of code to strip out the spaces before processing, no matter what language your site is implemented in.

Rackspace is indeed one of these obnoxious websites (and to boot their error message is particularly vague — just says the number is “invalid”), but they’re a youngish internet company, so maybe they’d be willing to make the fix.

Fail #2

The expiration notice had an e-mail address for questions, billing@rackspace.com. Great! I replied with a quick note asking them to fix the credit card number issue.

Oops, it bounced due to a problem somewhere in the bowels of their support system:

Reporting-MTA: dns; mx1.ord1.rackspace.com

Final-Recipient: rfc822;mosso-billing@tickets.stabletransit.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0 (permanent failure)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 5.1.2 - Bad destination host 'DNS Hard Error looking up tickets.stabletransit.com (MX):  NXDomain' (delivery attempts: 0)

This should never happen. A responsible company has monitoring systems in place to ensure that such failures are discovered before they are visible to customers.

Also, that DNS lookup works fine for me:

$ host tickets.stabletransit.com
tickets.stabletransit.com has address 209.61.177.249
tickets.stabletransit.com mail is handled by 5 mail.tickets.stabletransit.com.
$ host mail.tickets.stabletransit.com
mail.tickets.stabletransit.com has address 209.61.177.249 

Fail #3

Now there’s two problems, one really quite embarrassing. Maybe there’s an alternate way to complain? I see on their website they have live chat, but I don’t want to waste time with that; I want to send a note and be done.

I see they have a web form. Great! But.... their anti-spam widget is a little too enthusiastic:

This is with Firefox 18, Adblock turned off (not that either of those things should matter).

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your company can change simple e-mail suggestions into negative blog posts for all the world to see.

Now, there’s a lot of friction in moving a VPS from one vendor to another. But maybe I should be looking anyway. Suggestions?

Regarding Los Alamos open space

Los Alamos has hired some trail consultants to produce a trails master plan. I attended a working group meeting in early December to discuss the matter. This post outlines some ideas on Los Alamos open space and what I think we ought to do. (My previous post on the topic addressed a specific proposal for a bike park.)

I’ll open with some of my observations about the state of open space in Los Alamos, and then propose some guiding principles based on those. Finally, I offer a smorgasbord of specific policy recommendations.

Observations

I grew up in Los Alamos, left for 12 years when I graduated from high school, and returned a year ago. I love the outdoors and spend as much time outside as I can. Given that context, here’s what I’ve noticed:

• We have extraordinary and unique open space. Los Alamos County has 11,000-foot mountains, large and small tuff canyons, large and small basalt canyons, ponderosa forests, spruce/fir forests, piñon-juniper forests, meadows, mountain and canyon streams, mesas, the Rio Grande, a national monument, tremendous views, and much much more. What I find most amazing is how intimately Los Alamos proper is embedded in this open space: the canyons in the middle of town mean that most anyone has access within a few minutes walk to places that may be a stone’s throw from someone’s back yard but feel like they’re in the middle of nowhere. Few, if any, other towns in the world have what we have.
• Our open space is at risk. For example, in my own memory, large blocks of county forest that I spent considerable time in were lost to development (Ponderosa Estates and Quemazon), and there are continual pressures for development such as the recent golf course flap. Forest Service land abutting the town has no particular protections, and there’s precedent for transferring it to others. LANL can develop its open space as it wishes.
• We have an access problem. While there’s quite a lot of nearby open space we have great access to, it turns out there’s also a lot we don’t, for various reasons. For example, DOE land, pueblo land, and the Valle Grande are wholly or partially off limits. When a home turns over or new homes are built, traditional access to the woods through the private land can be lost. Also, trails on DOE land are frequently closed; as a scientific and security institution with various amusing political pressures, LANL is understandably not all that interested in managing for recreation.
• Our town is too dependent on the lab. Los Alamos is a one-company town, and its economic health is tightly entangled with LANL and the vagaries of its federal funding stream. In trying to move past that and seek economic stability, we should find our competitive advantage: what can we offer that others can’t? Retail development that excludes local business certainly isn’t the answer; maybe an outdoor-focused economy is.

The point being: our open space has tremendous value, and community policy should reflect that.

Principles

Any robust policy or plan needs to have a small number of guiding principles. In the case of Los Alamos County open space policy, I propose these three:

1. Preservation. Open Space should be preserved in its natural state, and existing impacts should be mitigated.
2. Access. Human access for non-motorized recreation should be provided to the maximum reasonable extent. Any limitations on access or activities, whether based on ecology, security, politics, or otherwise, should be as focused as possible.
3. Collaboration. Los Alamos County should work with nearby land owners, large and small, to build an integrated ecosystem of open space that works towards the above two principles.

As an aside, these highlight a key flaw in the focus of the meeting I attended: any master plan should not be about trails. It should be about open space. Trail planning is only part of that.

Some recommendations

Given the above principles, here are some things that I believe we as a community ought to do. To start, we need some policy changes:

• Add to the county’s strategic plan a specific acknowledgement of the value of Los Alamos open space and the above principles.
• Rezone unbuilt county land in a way that preserves its natural character in perpetuity.
• Compute and publish open space metrics to compare our access to open space to other communities. For example, a common metric is something like “miles of trail within N minutes’ walk of the average home”; I don’t care for this one because I believe the focus on trails is wrong, as I’ve noted above. Rather, how about something like “acres of open space within 1 mile of the average home”?

Also, the county should initiate collaboration efforts with nearby landowners and other interests; for example:

• Seek federal protections for Forest Service land adjacent to town. Wilderness designation is one option, though perhaps not appropriate here because it prohibits mountain bikes. But there must be something that protects Forest Service land from development and the impact of motorized access.
• Work with DOE to secure non-motorized recreational access to DOE land (e.g., in Los Alamos Canyon). This could include targeted land transfer requests, or perhaps the county could take over trail management and the corresponding liability for targeted lands, leaving security responsibilities with LANL. (This would better align institutional incentives with open space access.)
• Seek easements through yards to access open space. For example, at Arizona Ave. & Club Road and the terminus of San Ildefonso Road on North Mesa. This should be low pressure — if a given homeowner isn’t interested, that’s fine, and the county should not continue to bother him or her. Nearby properties may also be options. However, the county should also maintain a list of desired access points and approach new owners when targeted properties turn over.

Finally, here are some things we should build or do:

• Write a comprehensive, long-term master plan for trails. This is apparently in the works — i.e., the county is actually spending money on it — which is great!
• Mark the trails better, to distinguish officially maintained county trails from social trails. Ideas include:
• Classier signs. Right now trails are marked with tacky fiberglass stakes; let’s instead put up nice wooden, metal, or stone ones that reflect the quality of our trail network.
• An official county cairn, perhaps in two variants (main trail and access). We could have a multi-stage public contest to produce robust, easy-to-build, recognizable designs that can be constructed in any local environment.
• Improved printing on trailhead kiosks; currently, all but the newest ones have severe fading problems. Also, kiosks need an easy-to-read locator map with a “you are here” indicator.
• Complete the Perimeter Trail. Currently you can go from roughly the cemetery around the northwest side of town to the ice rink in Los Alamos canyon. The Perimeter Trail should be extended to form a true loop around town: down Los Alamos canyon to the Y, then up and over the mesas to Rendija Canyon and back to the cemetery.
• Complete an extended Perimeter Trail which loops past Bandelier and White Rock.
• Build a road biking loop from town to Bandelier, White Rock, and back up to town. This could follow NM502, NM4, and the truck route with proper shoulder extensions.
• Build quality road bike access from the back gate up into the mountains to the Valle Grande and beyond.
• Create a “Jemez Mountains Grand Loop Trail”. This would be a long trail, on the order of 200 miles, which wound a loop through the Jemez Mountains. The point would be to create a world-class long trail — perhaps a National Scenic Trail — with buy-in from all the communities surrounding the Jemez. Perhaps there could be a variant allowing one to stay in the backcountry for the full 200 miles and a variant where one traveled light from community to community and stayed in hotels or bunkhouses instead of backpacking. (I’m not the first to have ideas like this; in particular, Dorothy Hoard and others have floated the idea of a Valles Caldera loop trail.)

Where should Los Alamos put a bike park?

Los Alamos County has decided to spend a little bit of money on developing a master trails plan. As part of this, I attended a small working group (10 people including Craig and the two consultants) on Tuesday night.

There’s a lot to say about our open space, of course, and I have another post in the works on general issues raised at the meeting and elsewhere. For now, what I’d like to talk about is narrow: one of the proposals on the table is a “family bike park” along the lines of Valmont Bike Park in Boulder, CO (but much smaller — more like 7-12 acres instead of 40).

In principle, I’m not terribly excited by this idea, simply because I don’t do that type of cycling, though I don’t find it fundamentally objectionable and can understand how it would appeal to some folks. I do think that other stuff (e.g., trail access easements) is a higher budget priority, but as part of a master plan, sure.

One thing that does concern me is location. The leading proposal at the meeting was the site of the old sewer treatment plant in Pueblo Canyon (outlines in this post drawn by me):

I was quite skeptical of this location at the meeting, and after visiting today, it seems like an even worse idea. That is, very few towns have the internal open space that we do (the notation “Los Alamos” above is the center of town, according to Google); our internal canyons and forests are an extraordinary thing that ought to be protected. And Pueblo Canyon is the heart of this.

Accordingly, the location above is not the place for a boisterous bike park where lots of people gather regularly. Also, this location would draw vehicle traffic down a secluded canyon (Olive Street is currently closed to vehicles, aside from the utilities department, which is a separate issue).

There seemed to be some sense at the meeting that the site is essentially a brownfield, already severely impacted and thus appropriate for development. I don’t believe this is so. There is indeed an unsightly dirt parking lot and a large weedy field. What I think we should do is replant the parking lot and roads with ponderosa and the field with native grasses (the closest meadows are on North Mesa, which is in a different ecosystem). I suspect ample volunteer labor would be available for this sort of thing.

Anyway, I simply can’t support developing a bike park at the above location.

The trail consultants tell me that an ideal site would be “a relatively flat area with shade, water, proximity to the current trail network, parking, and easy access for kids” and “close to town but not too close to neighbors”. A minimum size would be 7-12 acres (the area above is about 10) with 20 parking stalls. That’s a tall order in space-constrained Los Alamos, but I have a couple of suggestions which I believe more or less meet these requirements:

1. Old DOE building site:

 

This is roughly 8.5+ acres south of Trinity Drive. It’s closer to downtown than the sewer plant site, and it really is a brownfield: as you can see above, it’s a large parking lot with a dirt patch in the middle.

Access to the existing trails network is a little harder: somehow, you have to get across Trinity (4 lanes, 35+ MPH) and Canyon Road (not as hard). We could add some ped/bike signals, or even drill a 700ft tunnel over to Pueblo Canyon. :)

However, it has good access in principle to the Los Alamos Canyon bottom, which goes places. Negotiations with DOE are required to make this work, but I think the odds are good for an eventual trail down the canyon from the townsite to the White Rock Y (a lot of this already exists), and if one can get upstream just a couple of hundred yards, one can access the existing Perimeter Trail. Also, the site connects to a potential future Canyon Rim Trail leading to downtown and beyond on pavement — i.e., the site may be better future-proofed than the sewer plant site.

2. DP Road. For example:

I haven’t spent much time down on DP Road, and it’s got weird issues like being in the process of lab cleanup. I’m also told that it’s “zoned commercial and the county intends to use it for light industrial purposes”, but I think it’s worth considering despite that — if we decide that it’s the right spot for a bike park, then it should be a simple matter to re-zone it.

Anyway, I don’t know anything about the above 11-acre parcel other than it seems blank on Google Earth. It’s close to a near-term extension of the Canyon Rim trail and has decent access to downtown and the trails beyond via Central Ave; also one can get to the somewhat airy Pueblo Canyon Rim Trail by crossing Trinity, and perhaps potentially go down the hill to Los Alamos Canyon bottom.

Why the dollar coin is a dumb idea

Apparently the proposal to replace the dollar bill with a coin is floating around again. This is a dumb idea. Why?

Right now, there are two classes of cash:

1. Heavy, worthless money: change. Stuff it in your pocket and then into a jar at home where it accumulates until you get bored and take it to the bank. This exercise ties up little value.
2. Lightweight money with meaningful value: bills.

That is, when you make a cash transaction, you go just one place to get value (i.e., bills from your wallet) and receive bills plus essentially worthless cruft in exchange. Bills go back in the wallet, the change goes somewhere else to accumulate.

If you substitute a coin for the dollar bill, now you have heavy money with value to deal with. Not only can the heavy money no longer be simply tossed aside to accumulate, you must now deal with two places (wallet and pocket) to get cash to offer in payment.

I’ve been to Canada, and it’s a complete pain in the neck to cart around a pocketful of heavy yet valuable money and dig though both wallet and pocket when making payment. Let’s not make the same mistake.

Oct. 12 hailstorm

Six weeks ago, there was a big hailstorm in Los Alamos. The photo below is the street in front of our house immediately afterwards. About 3/4" of hail and rain fell in about 10 minutes.