Shallow Thoughts : tags : los alamos

Painting the Water Tower

I saw a notice in the paper that they're planning to paint the Barranca school water tower, something it has badly needed for some years. It made me wonder, though, how they did that.

Today I happened to be in the neighborhood and saw the preparations. It's quite an elaborate rig, with a crown of long poles from which hang separate lines that go all the way to the ground. Do the painters rappel down the lines and paint while hanging? What do they do once they get below the "golf ball" and need to paint the ball's underside or the stem?

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A Questioning Attitude is Cultivated

At the bottom of the truck route (the main highway going up to LANL), the lab keeps a sign, usually advertising things like Motorcycle Awareness Month or Work Safety Month. I think they change it more or less monthly.

A few days ago, this curious sign appeared.

Don't Dart.
Cross Smart.
A Questioning Attitude
is Cultivated.

It includes a logo of the Institutional Worker Environment Safely and Security Team, or IWESST.

I have no idea what they're trying to get across with this sign. If you want to cross this 55mph highway, don't dart across it because it's smarter to saunter slowly? And what does darting, or crossing, have to do with a questioning attitude?

Or does this relate to some deep secret known only to LANL badgeholders, so if I figure it out they'll have to kill me?

Well, I guess they've succeeded in one respect: they have me questioning the sign.

Countywide Internet Outage

Yesterday we had an event that really brought the community together: the entire county lost internet.

When we woke to discover our internet was out, the first step was to pull out a phone and try to load the CenturyLink outage page. But it wasn't loading ; nor was anything else. Apparently both CenturyLink and the Verizon cell network were down, though the phone showed one to two bars, as good as we ever get here at the house without going upstairs to the north deck where we can see the tower directly.

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Red Velvet Ant, and Other Interesting Insects

Jenni at the Los Alamos Nature Center had an unusual request: if I saw any red velvet ants, please scoop them up (alive) and bring them to the nature center for display. They already had a few, but wanted more.

Red velvet ants aren't terribly uncommon here in White Rock. I see maybe one a month. They're gorgeous: well named, with bright scarlet patches against black and a texture that looks velvety-soft. There are several other species of velvet ants worldwide, but only Dasymutilla aureola is common around the southwestern US; rarely, I'll see a white velvet ant, also called the thistledown velvet ant, D. gloriosa.

You don't want to try petting them to see if they feel velvetty, though: they're actually wasps, and possess one of the most painful stings in the insect world. The red velvet ant's other name is "cow killer", because of how painful the sting is (the venom isn't actually dangerous, and certainly won't kill a cow).

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Jerry Smith Speaks on Los Alamos Broadband at Lunch With a Leader

The March League of Women Voters' Lunch With a Leader featured Jerry Smith, the county's new Broadband Manager. I wrote it up for the LWV newsletter, but since that's PDF, I thought I'd post a more accessible copy here.

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Bear in White Rock!

Bears have been in our local news lately -- along with anti-bear measures.

A few weeks ago, the County Council voted to invest a sizable chunk of money in bear-proof garbage roll carts for every home in the county.

While this is probably a good idea up in Los Alamos, down here in White Rock it's silly. We almost never see bears here. But apparently people on the hill don't believe that, or are convinced that if Los Alamos residents all have secure roll carts, the bears will migrate down the hill to White Rock and start becoming a nuisance here. (Really! -- that was the argument for buying roll carts for White Rock too.)

Anyway, I've scoffed at this ... until yesterday. I was at Overlook Park at the weekly R/C flying get-together, and as I was packing up to leave, carrying planes back to the car, I saw a bear! It was sitting on the fence at the Collection Center (that's the current euphemism for what they used to call a dump), just chilling out. Didn't seem scared of me at all.

I was able to snap a quick photo and still escape with my life. Whew.

Maybe we do need those roll carts.

Petition for Better Los Alamos Broadband

Los Alamos (and White Rock) Alert!

Los Alamos and White Rock readers: please direct your attention to Andy Fraser's Better Los Alamos Broadband NOW petition.

One thing the petition doesn't mention is that LANL is bringing a second high speed trunk line through White Rock. I'm told that They don't actually need the extra bandwidth, but they want redundancy in case their main line goes out.

Meanwhile, their employees, and the rest of the town, are struggling with home internet speeds that aren't even close to the federal definition of broadband:

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Walking your Goat at the Summer Concert

I love this place. We just got back from this week's free Friday concert at Ashley Pond. Not a great band this time (the previous two were both excellent). But that's okay -- it's still fun to sit on the grass on a summer evening and watch the swallows wheeling over the pond and the old folks dancing up near the stage and the little kids and dogs dashing pell-mell through the crowd, while Dave, dredging up his rock-star past, explains why this band's sound is so muddy (too many stacked effects pedals).

And then on the way out, I'm watching appreciatively as the teen group, who were earlier walking a slack line strung between two trees, has now switched to juggling clubs. (I know old people are supposed to complain about "kids today", but honestly, the kids here seem smart and fit and into all kinds of cool activities.) One of the jugglers has just thrown three clubs and a ball, and is mostly keeping them all in the air, when I hear a bleat to my right -- it's a girl walking by with a goat on a leash.

Just another ordinary Friday evening in Los Alamos.

I Love Small Town Papers

I've always loved small-town newspapers. Now I have one as a local paper (though more often, I read the online Los Alamos Daily Post. The front page of the Los Alamos Monitor yesterday particularly caught my eye:

I'm not sure how they decide when to include national news along with the local news; often there are no national stories, but yesterday I guess this story was important enough to make the cut. And judging by font sizes, it was considered more important than the high school debate team's bake sale, but of the same importance as the Youth Leadership group's day for kids to meet fire and police reps and do arts and crafts. (Why this is called "Wild Day" is not explained in the article.)

Meanwhile, here are a few images from a hike at Bandelier National Monument: first, a view of the Tyuonyi Pueblo ruins from above (click for a larger version):

Some petroglyphs on the wall of Alamo Canyon. We initially called them spirals but they're actually all concentric circles, plus one handprint.

And finally, a cairn guarding the bottom of Lummis Canyon. All the cairns along this trail were fairly elaborate and artistic, but this one was definitely the winner.

Not exponential after all

We're saved! From the embarrassing slogan "Live exponentially", that is.

Last night the Los Alamos city council voted to bow to public opinion and reconsider the contract to spend $50,000 on a logo and brand strategy based around the slogan "Live Exponentially." Though nearly all the councilors (besides Pete Sheehey) said they still liked the slogan, and made it clear that the slogan isn't for residents but for people in distant states who might consider visiting as tourists, they now felt that basing a campaign around a theme nearly of the residents revile was not the best idea.

There were quite a few public comments (mine included); everyone was civil and sensible and stuck well under the recommended 3-minute time limit.

Instead, the plan is to go ahead with the contract, but ask the ad agency (Atlas Services) to choose two of the alternate straplines from the initial list of eight that North Star Research had originally provided.

Wait -- eight options? How come none of the previous press or the previous meeting mentioned that there were options? Even in the 364 page Agenda Packets PDF provided for this meeting, there was no hint of that report or of any alternate strap lines.

But when they displayed the list of eight on the board, it became a little clearer why they didn't want to make the report public: they were embarrassed to have paid for work of this quality. Check out the list:

• Where Everything is Elevated
• High Intelligence in the High Desert
• Think Bigger. Live Brighter.
• Great. Beyond.
• Live Exponentially
• Absolutely Brilliant
• Get to a Higher Plane
• Never Stop Questioning What's Possible

I mean, really. Great Beyond? Are we're all dead? High Intelligence in the High Desert? That'll certainly help with people who think this might be a bunch of snobbish intellectuals.

It was also revealed that at no point during the plan was there ever any sort of focus group study or other tests to see how anyone reacted to any of these slogans.

Anyway, after a complex series of motions and amendments and counter-motions and amendments and amendments to the amendments, they finally decided to ask Atlas to take the above list, minus "Live Exponentially"; add the slogan currently displayed on the rocks as you drive into town, "Where Discoveries are Made" (which came out of a community contest years ago and is very popular among residents); and ask Atlas to choose two from the list to make logos, plus one logo that has no slogan at all attached to it.

If we're lucky, Atlas will pick Discoveries as one of the slogans, or maybe even come up with something decent of their own.

The chicken ordinance discussion went well, too. They amended the ordinance to allow ten chickens (instead of six) and to try to allow people in duplexes and quads to keep chickens if there's enough space between the chickens and their neighbors. One commenter asked for the "non-commercial' clause to be struck because his kids sell eggs from a stand, like lemonade, which sounded like a very reasonable request (nobody's going to run a large commercial egg ranch with ten chickens); but it turned out there's a state law requiring permits and inspections to sell eggs.

So, folks can have chickens, and we won't have to live exponentially. I'm sure everyone's breathing a little more easily now.

My Letter to the Editor: Make Your Voice Heard On 'Live Exponentially'

More on the Los Alamos "Live Exponentially" slogan saga: There's been a flurry of letters, all opposed to the proposed slogan, in the Los Alamos Daily Post these last few weeks.

And now the issue is back on the council agenda; apparently they're willing to reconsider the October vote to spend another $50,000 on the slogan.

But considering that only two people showed up to that October meeting, I wrote a letter to the Post urging people to speak before the council: Letter to the Editor: Attend Tuesday's Council Meeting To Make Your Voice Heard On 'Live Exponentially'.

I'll be there. I've never actually spoken at a council meeting before, but hey, confidence in public speaking situations is what Toastmasters is all about, right?

(Even though it means I'll have to miss an interesting sounding talk on bats that conflicts with the council meeting. Darn it!)

A few followup details that I had no easy way to put into the Post letter:

The page with the links to Council meeting agendas and packets is here: Los Alamos County Calendar.

There, you can get the short Agenda for Tuesday's meeting, or the full 364 page Agenda Packets PDF.

The branding section covers pages 93 - 287. But the graphics the council apparently found so compelling, which swayed several of them from initially not liking the slogan to deciding to spend a quarter million dollars on it, are in the final presentation from the marketing company, starting on page p. 221 of the PDF.

In particular, a series of images like this one, with the snappy slogan:

Breathtaking raised to the power of ^you
LIVE EXPONENTIALLY

That's right: the advertising graphics that were so compelling they swayed most of the council are even dumber than the slogan by itself. Love the superscript on the you that makes it into an exponent. Get it ... exponentially? Oh, now it all makes sense!

There's also a sadly funny "Written Concept" section just before the graphics (pages 242- in the PDF) where they bend over backward to work in scientific-sounding words, in bold each time.

But there you go. Hopefully some of those Post letter writers will come to the meeting and let the council know what they think.

The council will also be discussing the much debated proposed chicken ordinance; that discussion runs from page 57 to 92 of the PDF. It's a non-issue for Dave and me since we're in a rural zone that already allows chickens, but I hope they vote to allow them everywhere.

Railroading exponentially

or: Smart communities can still be stupid

I attended my first Los Alamos County Council meeting yesterday. What a railroad job!

The controversial issue of the day was the town's "branding". Currently, as you drive into Los Alamos on highway 502, you pass a tasteful rock sign proclaiming "LOS ALAMOS: WHERE DISCOVERIES ARE MADE". But back in May, the county council announced the unanimous approval of a new slogan, for which they'd paid an ad agency some $55,000: "LIVE EXPONENTIALLY".

As you might expect in a town full of scientists, the announcement was greeted with much dismay. What is it supposed to mean, anyway? Is it a reference to exponential population growth? Malignant tumor growth? Gaining lots of weight as we age?

The local online daily, tired of printing the flood of letters protesting the stupid new slogan, ran a survey about the "Live Exponentially" slogan. The results were that 8.24% liked it, 72.61% didn't, and 19.16% didn't like it and offered alternatives or comments. My favorites were Dave's suggestion of "It's Da Bomb!", and a suggestion from another reader, "Discover Our Secrets"; but many of the alternate suggestions were excellent, or hilarious, or both -- follow the link to read them all.

For further giggles, try a web search on the term. If you search without quotes, Ebola tops the list. With quotes, you get mostly religious tracts and motivational speakers.

The Council Meeting

Dave read somewhere -- it wasn't widely announced -- that Friday's council meeting included an agenda item to approve spending $225,000 -- yes, nearly a quarter of a million dollars -- on "brand implementation". Of course, we had to go.

In the council discussion leading up to the call for public comment, everyone spoke vaguely of "branding" without mentioning the slogan. Maybe they hoped no one would realize what they were really voting for. But in the call for public comment, Dave raised the issue and urged them to reconsider the slogan.

Kristin Henderson seemed to have quite a speech prepared. She acknowledged that "people who work with math" universally thought the slogan was stupid, but she said that people from a liberal arts background, like herself, use the term to mean hiking, living close to nature, listening to great music, having smart friends and all the other things that make this such a great place to live. (I confess to being skeptical -- I can't say I've ever heard "exponential" used in that way.)

Henderson also stressed the research and effort that had already gone into choosing the current slogan, and dismissed the idea that spending another $50,000 on top of the $55k already spent would be "throwing money after bad." She added that showing the community some images to go with the slogan might change people's minds.

David Izraelevitz admitted that being an engineer, he initially didn't like "Live Exponentially". But he compared it to Apple's "Think Different": though some might think it ungrammatical, it turned out to be a highly successful brand because it was coupled with pictures of Gandhi and Einstein. (Hmm, maybe that slogan should be "Live Exponential".)

Izraelevitz described how he convinced a local business owner by showing him the ad agency's full presentation, with pictures as well as the slogan, and said that we wouldn't know how effective the slogan was until we'd spent the $50k for logo design and an implementation plan. If the council didn't like the results they could choose not to go forward with the remaining $175,000 for "brand implementation". (Councilor Fran Berting had previously gotten clarification that those two parts of the proposal were separate.)

Rick Reiss said that what really mattered was getting business owners to approve the new branding -- "the people who would have to use it." It wasn't so important what people in the community thought, since they didn't have logos or ads that might incorporate the new branding.

Pete Sheehey spoke up as the sole dissenter. He pointed out that most of the community input on the slogan has been negative, and that should be taken into account. The proposed slogan might have a positive impact on some people but it would have a negative impact on others, and he couldn't support the proposal.

Fran Berting said she was "not all that taken" with the slogan, but agreed with Izraelevitz that we wouldn't know if it was any good without spending the $50k. She echoed the "so much work has already gone into it" argument. Reiss also echoed "so much work", and that he liked the slogan because he saw it in print with a picture.

But further discussion was cut off. It was 1:30, the fixed end time for the meeting, and chairman Geoff Rodgers (who had pretty much stayed out of the discussion to this point) called for a vote. When the roll call got to Sheehey, he objected to the forced vote while they were still in the middle of a discussion. But after a brief consultation on Robert's Rules of Order, chairman Rogers declared the discussion over and said the vote would continue. The motion was approved 5-1.

The Exponential Railroad

Quite a railroading. One could almost think it had been planned that way.

First, the item was listed as one of two in the "Consent Agenda" -- items which were expected to be approved all together in one vote with no discussion or public comment. It was moved at the last minute into "Business"; but that put it last on the agenda.

Normally that wouldn't have mattered. But although the council more often meets in the evenings and goes as long as it needs to, Friday's meeting had a fixed time of noon to 1:30. Even I could see that wasn't much time for all the items on the agenda.

And that mid-day timing meant that working folk weren't likely to be able to listen or comment. Further, the branding issue didn't come up until 1 pm, after some of the audience had already left to go back to work. As a result, there were only two public comments.

Logic deficit

I heard three main arguments repeated by every council member who spoke in favor:

1. the slogan makes much more sense when viewed with pictures -- they all voted for it because they'd seen it presented with visuals;
2. a lot of time, effort and money has already gone into this slogan, so it didn't make sense to drop it now; and
3. if they didn't like the logo after spending the first $50k, they didn't have to approve the other $175k.

The first argument doesn't make any sense. If the pictures the council saw were so convincing, why weren't they showing those images to the public? Why spend an additional $50,000 for different pictures? I guess $50k is just pocket change, and anyone who thinks it's a lot of money is just being silly.

As for the second and third, they contradict each other. If most of the board thinks now that the initial $50k contract was so much work that we have to go forward with the next $50k, what are the chances that they'll decide not to continue after they've already invested $100k?

Exponentially low, I'd say.

I was glad of one thing, though. As a newcomer to the area faced with a ballot next month, it was good to see the council members in action, seeing their attitudes toward spending and how much they care about community input. That will be helpful come ballot time.

If you're in the same boat but couldn't make the meeting, catch the October 10, 2014 County Council Meeting video.