🚀 go-pugleaf

Bob Harrington (bobh@everest.tandem.com) wrote:

: Have you finished the book?  There's a 44 page bibliography, in which is
: included 'The California Water Atlas', containing more tables, graphs
: and figures than one person could digest in a lifetime...
: I can only conclude that you didn't look at Reisner's bibliograpy, where
: he explicitly examines his sources for each chapter.

I finished the book this morning, but I read the bibliographies for each 
chapter as I went.  The comments that are included suggest further 
readings to get the "stories" of what happened, not the numbers which I 
desire.  Citations for *numbers* should be provided in the text itself.

Maybe the problem here is we understand citations differently.  To me, 
citations are of the form "(name,date)".  No big deal!!! I don't see why 
this is so much to ask for?   And yet without something, I am left 
having to rake through the copious bibliographies looking for needles in 
the haystack.

In fact, I'm surprised that people in this thread find that a mere 10-20 
characters interferes so thoroughly with the continuity of the text.  I 
guess I've just taken them for granted and learned how to block them out 
when I'm not interested.

: Your sense that Reisner's book is not a dispassionate scientific document
: is certainly correct -- Reisner is highly opinionated and I disagree with 
: many parts of his book... you seem to be suggesting intellectual 
: dishonesty, which I did not detect at all.

I am not particularly concerned about the book being opinionated.  I 
prefer someone like Reisner who writes with some chutzpah. But chutzpah 
only takes you so far.  The numbers carry you the rest of the way, and 
Reisner throws them around like the USACE throws around water- going for 
impact only. Aside from the lack of citations, what I dislike the most is 
how he keeps abandoning the common power plant measure of megawatts in 
favor of kilowatts, since 1,000,000 kilowatts is gosh darn *big*, but 1,000 
megawatts is not so impressive (of course they are the same thing).

Please, I don't want to allow this citation issue to blow too far out of 
proportion.  I *loved* the book.  But it's when something is so *close* 
to perfect that you feel the need to push the hardest to get it the rest of 
the way!

Cheers.

--
Greg Pasternack              | Because each and every reality needs
gpast@uclink.berkeley.edu    | a regular tune up.