Word: murray
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...ability to balance on the simplicity-complexity fulcrum is producing results elsewhere too--in increasingly complex software that yields increasingly intuitive user interfaces (think the iPhone); in algorithms that show how the movements of schooling fish mirror the behavior of investors, making stock-market predictions more reliable. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize--winning physicist and a co-founder of SFI, likes to cite the case of physicist Karl Jansky, who founded the science of radio astronomy in 1931 when he was studying the hiss of electromagnetic static that bathes the Earth--part of the same hiss you hear...
Early last year, the bush storyteller Murray Hartin penned a 14-stanza poem in three hours flat. Rain From Nowhere is about a farmer on the brink of ruin who receives an empathetic letter from his father. A celebration of resilience and hope, it is as moving a piece of Australian verse as has been published in decades. It's also pertinent. The driest continent on earth is in the grip of the worst drought in its recorded history. Beginning in 2002 and spanning, at times, the breadth of the country, the dry spell has pushed farmers to the limits...
...With everything else that's going on, the drought-ravaged rice and wheat farms of Australia's agricultural heartland - the Murray-Darling Basin, named for its two major rivers - have become the world's problem. As to how long that problem's likely to last, scientific opinion is divided. One school of thought is that there's no evidence global warming is causing this drought or will ever cause anything like a permanent one; there's even a theory that higher temperatures could help boost Australian agricultural production by bringing more rain to some parts of the country...
...Even in normal times, the Murray-Darling Basin, which covers parts of four states and the Australian Capital Territory, isn't water rich. On average, it receives a modest 250-300 mm of rain a year, and much of the terrain is semi-arid. Its farmers have mostly thrived until now because over 70% of the country's irrigation resources are concentrated there. But with the drought dragging on, the allocation of surface water to farmers last Southern spring - planting time for rice farmers - was zero...
...Such cautious optimism doesn't extend to all crops, however. Insiders doubt whether Australia's rice production will ever return to pre-drought levels. Under proposed water-policy reforms, farmers in the Murray-Darling Basin will be subject to tighter restrictions than in the past. "My wife and I are sticking it out," says Ian Brunt. "But we've got three boys with equity in their own farms, and they've had enough and want out. They're sick of drought and sick of the politics of water." Murray Hartin's poem ends happily, with the hero hugging his wife...