Harriet_Porber

halp

Wow, great to see a government encouraging it instead of saying you can't do it! I'm also right next to the Rockies just far south of you in Colorado, and we get very different messages.

It is weird. Like if every house had 200 gallons of storage, that could add up to a small dam's worth of storage at almost no cost to the government. It makes more sense to me to encourage houses to store it.

It really might come back around to blame capitalism - since like 90% of water is used for agriculture here maybe the downstream money makers are the ones yelling the loudest.

Water rights in the Western US are wild. I wrote a small rant above if you're interested. There is very legitimately not enough fresh water to go around from rivers like the Colorado to support continued agriculture and population expansion. (I blame agriculture 10x more than population, but that's my hot take)

Oh boy - it's a rabbit hole. As much as I like to blame capitalism for things, this one kind of stems earlier than that. Water rights and usage in the Western US is pretty fucked, and it's only going to get worse with climate change.

I have some hot takes after reading Cadillac Desert and some other books on water rights. I'm going to lazily link to another comment where I wrote a tiny bit about this book. What's fun is lots of river water allocations in the Western US were written in times of excess and aren't even remotely accurate for normal times let alone times of drought. The Colorado River has only flowed through to the Pacific Ocean like once in decades (citation needed) and Mexico doesn't even get their allotted share. It's mouth to the Pacific is mostly a dry bed of dirt 🫠.

My house is in the watershed of the South Platte River, so Nebraska is the one who'd get mad if I put out a 3rd 55gal drum rain barrel. There's a fun 100 year old compact that says Nebraska is allowed to seize land to build a canal to take their full allocation - a couple years ago Nebraska started to threaten to inact on their rights and Colorado's just like 'good fuckin luck'

We're closer to playing out Mad Max in my lifetime than I'd like. Sorry to bring down the vibe in Gardening 😂

store the rainwater for use later.

And then there are even further rules on storing water in some places - in Colorado I'm only allowed ~100 gallons of rainwater collection storage because someone else owns the water rights to the land my house is on.

lol unprecedented? The entire country of LA would not exist without the early-LA government buying up water rights in the eastern sierras to pipe to LA, and then telling the local farmers there they were shit outta luck the first time drought hit.

If anyone is interested in Western US water rights - Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is a great book. I usually recommend at least the first quarter of it, as it gets pretty dry and repetitive in the second half. But the first couple chapters talk about the first expedition down the Colorado River and early water rights, which was super interesting. Second half of the book mostly goes over large water projects like dams and aquaducts.

basic astronomical observations

No, this is not basic. I should really not engage with a troll, but for anyone else curious about why this is cool:

Current estimates on the size of the sun are on the order of +-1000km. "Wright said different papers using a variety of methods have produced results that differ by as much as 930 miles (1,500 km)"

This request for cell phone observations is trying to do some wild math way out of my comprehension, based on the flashes of light shining between mountains and valleys on the moon, to calculate the size of the sun down to single-digit kilometer accuracy. That's three orders of magnitude more accurate than our current measurements. And this type of measurement can only happen during an eclipse.

To me that is absolutely wild, good job NASA 🚀

Earth’s natural satellite can serve as a valuable research partner in measuring the sun’s oblateness. This is due to a phenomenon known as “Baily’s beads,” which are the tiny flashes of light during an eclipse that occur as solar light passes over the moon’s rugged terrain of craters, hills, and valleys. Since satellite imagery has helped produce extremely detailed mappings of lunar topography, experts can match Baily’s beads to the moon’s features as it passes in front of the sun.

The way I'm guessing this works is: Baily's beads will be detectable on shitty cameras since they will be distinct flashes of light, and since we have very detailed information of the moon's topography they can determine information on the sun based on your phone's location and the timing of the flashes of light.

And if that is how it works, that is fuckin rad. A+ science.

Do you live in a major US city? Police 1000% frequently sepenia businesses for CCTV footage, and are increasingly getting standing access to existing cameras. And to a lesser degree I believe they are installing their own cameras, but I have hit my limit of finding sources for someone else's comment while taking a shit.

Wow you made a lot of assumptions about the type of person I am entirely off the fact that I genuinely enjoy stuffed crust pizza. You think me enjoying stuffed crust means I have no principles nor willpower? You might want to try not judging people so hard over incredibly unimportant things.