Russell's Blog

To my surprise, I learned this weekend that Davis has a lively population of burrowing owls, Athene cunicularia. How cool is that?

I took some nice shots, but Jonathan has a 300mm zoom, and I don't.

They're one of the few species of owl that is active during the day, though I think these guys were only awake to watch various chattering bipeds on the hiking trail. They seem comfortable with people getting within about 30 feet of their burrows, so you can get pretty close. If you go any closer, they start to do the "I don't like you" dance. If you ignore the display and keep getting closer, I'm not sure if they would run into their burrows or have at you with their claws and beaks. Owls will mess you up, even these little guys. At least they're polite enough to warn you, so heed the warning.

I was going out to the garden to wash off the cat-litter-scooper this evening, and I noticed a tiny bat clinging to my screen door. It was hanging out about knee level, and I was worried my cats would take an interest in it. So, I tried to shoo it away, but it just chirped at me and clung onto the screen harder.

I thought maybe it was hurt (or worse, sick), so I captured it in a plastic bowl to observe. It didn't do anything to evade capture, and allowed itself to be sort of gently scooped up by the edge of the bowl. It walked around a little and chirped, but didn't do try to escape.

Since it didn't seem to be interested in flying around the apartment, I transferred it to the lid of the bowl, where it allowed itself to be photographed. I put a bead of water near its nose, which it prodded a little but didn't seem to drink.

I brought it outside again to see if I could get it to fly away. I held the lid out over a soft patch of ground and lowered it quickly, it spread its wings but didn't fly. I tried a few more times, and got it to fly as far as the fence. Finally, some tapping on the fence convinced it to flap away.

Does anyone know if this is normal behavior for this kind of bat?

This summer has turned out a bit like a chocolate bar in the sun; everything started out nice and neat, but everything ended up squished into the bottom of the wrapper.

Right now, I'm working with Andrey Kislyuk on our little piece of the DARPA FunBio project. We're in the middle of a two-week code sprint, so I'll save that for a later post.

I also moved to a new apartment, and that didn't go nearly as smoothly as it could have. The guy we subleased from was in the process of buying a house, and the loan underwriter decided to yank back the money after he'd closed escrow (or was in escrow, or something). Evidently they wanted a sworn affidavit from the gardener that he was contracted to take care of the grounds. Anyway, the upshot was that instead of a nice leisurely move, he got stuck in the apartment for three weeks longer than he expected, and I was homeless for a week. Fortunately, one of the staff scientists in our lab was generous enough to let me stay at his apartment. Neil and Buzz got to learn about stairs, which they evidently adore.

Over Labor Day weekend, I went with Srijak and some of his friends from San Diego on a day hike at Lassen Volcanic National Park. I've always loved California, but it's nice to be reminded from time to time exactly why I love this place so much.

Because it's awesome.

Here are a couple of random cool things that aren't quite enough for a post on their own, so I'll stick them together.

It's been absurdly hot in Davis. Since the summer started, I've lost about nine days of productivity on account of my brain being too hot to function. By the time I get to the heavily air conditioned Genome Center building, I spend the rest of the day wanting to stick my head in a bucket of ice water.

Happily, the evenings tend to be very pleasant. And no, I'm not going to take Nate Silver up on his challenge. Good on you, Nate.

On Saturday, the Mondavi Center hosted Dengue Fever for a free concert on the quad. They are really great live! Chhom Nimol got all the little kids in the audience to come up on stage and dance. It was a great show.

My labmate Lizzy just adopted an adorable rescue puppy of unknown origin named Dweezil. He is very sweet, and already very well adapted to life with humans. He seems to love everybody, but Lizzy especially.

Meanwhile, my own rescue animals continue to puzzle me. Why does Buzz like to sleep behind my monitor? It's hot, and the cutter on the tape dispenser keeps poking him in the head and causing him to emit annoyed grumbling noises and squirm around. There are lots of comfy places he could sleep, but he likes this spot for some reason.

A little more than a year ago, my mother installed 14 SunPower 230 watt panels on her roof. After a year of production, my mom's solar array has produced 5.3 megawatt-hours of electricity. That's about $1500 worth of electricity production.

Her actual use was about 3 mwh, yielding a surplus of about 2 mwh over the year. Rock on! Pasadena Water & Power won't actually write a check for the balance, but are carrying it forward indefinitely. Eventually, I suppose, they will figure out a way for her to cash in. I figure that someday she will be able to buy an electric car, and the extra production (plus the surplus stashed away in her utility bill) will go toward charging it.

Before installing the panels, she had whittled her electricity usage from about 32 kwh a day down to about 13. I thought it would be interesting to see the how things look now.

I decided to invert the Y-axis to represent net energy balance from the homeowner's point of view. Negative numbers represent net consumption, positive numbers are net production. The green region indicates the interval since the panels were installed. PWD bills on a bi-monthly basis, so unfortunately there are not very many data points.

The panels were installed in the middle of a billing period, so the first data point lifts away from the prior trend, and settles on a new trend. The third point in the green region -- the one that dips back into the negative -- is the middle of winter. Production was lowest, and my mom was running a space heater at her desk to keep her feet warm.

After it started to cool down yesterday, I went for a bike ride around the research farms, and I saw what I thought was a seam in the bike path. It wasn't until I was almost on top of it that I noticed that it was the shadow of a snake crossing the path! I ran over the poor guy before I could hit the breakes.

Fortunately, the snake survived, and went slithering into his hidey hole in the roots of one of the huge trees that line the bike path. I used a stick to touch the end of his tail to make sure his spine wasn't broken, and he reacted in about the way you would expect a not-run-over snake to react.

Sorry this isn't a very good picture. Since T-Mobile pushed out the Android Cupcake upgrade, my phone has been ridiculously, pathetically slow. It took almost a minute and a half to get the camera application open and snap a picture. By that time, the snake had spent 30 seconds slithering around on the bike path checking itself out (which would have been an awesome shot), and then gone about 20 feet into the grass. Boo Android! Fix your shit!

The snake was about four feet long and about the width of two fingers. The head was sort of bullet-shaped, as opposed to shovel-shaped, so it's probably not a viper. My guess is garter snake.

My article on bike safety is in print in the Davis Enterprise! I was invited to write this column as a follow up to my Davis Crash Map article and Anna's accident in 2007.

It's not up on their web site yet. I'll update with a link one they post it.

:: update ::

Here is the text of the article :

The Davis Enterprise: June 19, 2009
Davis Bicycles! column #20
Title: When road design gets personal Author: Russell Neches

Two years ago my little sister was riding her bicycle to a friend’s house. A woman was diving home from work. They met when the car hit Anna at 30 mph.

Before I go further, Anna is OK.

The weeks following the accident were hard. Aphasia, hematoma, and dental prosthesis became a regular part of family conversation. It was a month before we were sure she would get better.

Anna lives in Norman, Oklahoma. Norman is a lot like Davis; it’s roughly the same size, population and distance from the state capital. Norman hosts a big university and encourages bicycling.

After the accident, I desperately wanted someone to take responsibility. At first, I blamed Anna for not being more careful. Then I read the police report, and blamed the driver. But when I visited Norman and stood by the splashes of dried blood on the asphalt, I found I couldn’t blame either of them. The blame belonged to the road itself.

In sharp contrast to Davis, Norman has some of the sloppiest road design in America. The road where the accident happened has no curb, no sidewalk, no lane markings, no lights, and no center divider. The street is a smear of asphalt that informally fades into gravel and scrubby grass on its way to becoming front yard. This wasn’t some lonely country road. It happened downtown, right next to the University of Oklahoma. The equivalent spot in Davis might be about Seventh and E Streets. Until Anna’s face slammed into the windshield, the driver had no way of knowing for sure that she was driving on the wrong side of the road.

Davis does a pretty good job when it comes to road design. Even out amongst the farms, most of the roads have reflectorized lines to mark the center and shoulders. This isn’t because paint is cheaper in California. It’s because public officials have found that the lines help people be safer drivers.

With Anna’s final round of reconstructive surgery still in the works, I hope I can be forgiven for being preoccupied with bicycle safety. I’m a scientist. When scientists get worried, we go back to the data. Mapping the last couple of years of Davis accident reports indicates that the biggest problem spot in our town is the much-debated Fifth Street corridor.

It has been proposed to transform the stretch of Fifth Street north of downtown from a higher-speed four-lane road with frequent stops into a lower-speed two-lane road with center turn pockets. The design would look somewhat like B Street does now. I was surprised to learn that the two roads carry about the same amount of traffic.

Not everyone likes the idea, and some warn that slowing traffic may result in congestion. This must be taken seriously, and so detailed computer models have been constructed. The models show that the proposed design would actually increase throughput and reduce congestion somewhat.

This counterintuitive result is something with which I have personal experience. I grew up in Los Angeles, the poster city for congestion. It got that way because people tried to solve congestion problems by adding lanes. What we got for our billions of dollars was even worse congestion. LA has more acreage under roads than under destinations, and yet it is still asphyxiated.

Roads are ancient technology. Roman engineers would find California’s freeways impressive, but would learn little from them. But even ancient technology can be improved. We didn’t get from swinging stone axes to landing robots on Mars by refusing to try new things. Lane reduction has been tried in other cities, with great results for safety and efficiency.

The proposed Fifth Street design sounds like something worth trying. It will make Davis a safer, more efficient place walk, bike and drive. Repainting and installing different signals is part of the normal process of maintaining and improving roads. The proposal would simply guide this process. If it doesn’t work, the city has more paint. My family learned the hard way just how important lines of paint really are.

I’ve made an interactive map at vort.org/media/data/crashes.html displaying the last couple of years of Davis accident data. I hope it will inspire you think about how our roads are designed, how those designs succeed, and how they can be improved.

— Russell Neches is a microbiology graduate student at UC Davis. He has commuted to school and work through Los Angeles, New York and Boston on various vehicles including bikes, cars, trains, subways and on foot.

:: update 2 ::

Here is the direct link to the article on the Davis Enterprise website : http://www.davisenterprise.com/story.php?id=621.3

I want announce a little project I put together over the weekend. For want of a better name, I'll call it the Davis Crash Map. Basically, I analyzed the accident report spreadsheets from the City of Davis Public Works Department, and made an overlay for Google Maps to visualize the data. The spreadsheets are a bit difficult to analyze, so I'm leaving out the reports that aren't clear to me (about 15% of the reports). The reports that gave me some trouble seem to be randomly distributed over the city, so the overlay should still give an unbiased picture of what is happening.

In particular, this is map is intended to examine bicycle accidents. I hope people will look at this map, and think about how they behave on the roads, weather on foot, on a bicycle, or in a car. How you behave on the road has direct, and sometimes dire, consequences for you and for other people.

However, there is more to this than behavior. This is also a design question. Roads are not natural features. They are designed and built by people for use by people. As with anything that is made by humans, there are good designs and bad designs. These designs have a real impact on peoples' lives. In the case of streets, the impact on your life can be very literal, as this map shows.

Even good designs can always be improved. Davis is a pretty safe town in which to walk, bicycle and drive. But if you study this map, and think about it as you go about the town, it's also clear that things could be better.

I'm not a traffic engineer, or a civil engineer, or a city planner. I claim no expertise in those areas. I'll leave it to other people to make specific suggestions. However, I think it is important for the users of streets -- pretty much everybody -- to think about what kind of streets they want. This map should help give you a better idea of what kind of streets we actually have.

For some reason, people seem to get very emotional about traffic. I grew up in Los Angeles, home of the nation's worst traffic jams. Perhaps this is to make up for our lack of a professional football franchise. Passions about transportation, especially mundane things like parking spaces and HOV lanes, get people really worked up. Los Angeles is also famous for road rage, and nowhere is it in greater evidence than in the corridors of City Hall. Public meetings on traffic can make I-405 look like afternoon tea. In fact, thousands of people from all over the world tune into the internet broadcast of the Santa Monica city council meetings to listen to Californians scream at each other over the exact position of little blobs of paint on little strips of asphalt.

What the conversation needs, I think, is some perspective. Data can help provide that perspective, especially if it can be represented in a way that is easy to understand. Maps are good at that.

If you will indulge me, I'd like to share my perspective on this data. Each marker represents a traumatic event for someone. Under some of those markers, a life came to a sudden, violent end. I'd like to share a picture of what kind of event a marker on this map represents. You won't find a marker for this event because it happened in Norman, Oklahoma, a college town that is a lot like Davis.

Anna and me

In October of 2007, my little sister was riding her bicycle near her house. A lady in a Mercedes made a lazy left turn, and crossed onto the wrong side of the road. She hit Anna head-on. Anna went up and over the hood of the car, and face-planted on the windshield, breaking her nose and her front teeth. The lady slammed on the breaks, and Anna then went flying off the car and slammed her head on the pavement. That much is clear from where my mother photographed the tire marks, the blood stains, and scattered teeth.

Who designed this street, anyway?

The sequence of events afterward are a little unclear, since Anna does not remember anything from that day, or for several days before and after the accident. The police report includes several details that are impossible or don't make any sense; for example, the officer thought she was coming out of a driveway onto the street, but the driveway did not belong to anyone she knew, and was paved in gravel (extremely annoying to bicycle on). The report also places the accident on the wrong side of the street, which was obvious enough based on the tire marks and blood. Based on what her friends say she was doing -- biking from her house to a friend's house -- she would have just been pedaling along the side of the road. The details of what happened are somewhat unclear, other than the evidence left on the road and gouged onto my sister's face.

After hitting the pavement, she evidently got up and staggered around for a bit, and then collapsed. She stopped breathing, and officer on the scene couldn't find a pulse, and assumed that she was dead. This was the reason given for not immediately summoning an ambulance.

Then she suddenly revived and started mumbling. The lady who ran her down went into screaming hysterics, and had to be restrained (or evacuated, or something). It was only then that an ambulance was called. From the report, it appears that paramedics and police spent a good deal of time tending to the driver of the car, who was having an anxiety attack, instead of Anna, who was bleeding from massive head trauma.

Anna then spent the next several days in the hospital. My mother got on the next flight to stay with her. For the next several days, Anna went through long and short memory lapses and dizzy spells of various lengths. When I spoke to her on the phone over the next several days, she also had some kind of aphasia, which was very jarring to me because she is normally a very articulate person. And then there was the puking. Brain injuries often come with a heavy dose of overpowering nausea. She was on anti-nausea drugs for a long time after the accident.

It took a long time for he to start feeling "normal" again. Almost two years later, she's still not sure she feels completely normal. Fortunately, thanks to some really great work by her surgeons, she looks normal. Needless to say, she is both very lucky and very tough.

Anna's bicycle. The police kept it as evidence, but allowed my mother to photograph it.

You could say that I have a personal stake in this, and I will not claim to be unbiased. Many people who argue against safety measures that would slow traffic argue their case on the basis of personal responsibility. We are each responsible for our actions, they argue, and if you do something stupid, you are responsible for the consequences. Why should people who don't do stupid things be inconvenienced?

I agree completely. However, if one casts any real issue into the frame of personal responsibility, then things are rarely so simple. Everyone who could act in a situation has responsibilities, even if they are not they are directly involved. When you have the power to prevent something bad from happening, and you choose not to act, then some of the responsibility falls on you. Every unfortunate, stupid thing that happens involves a cast of thousands of silent, but not blameless, bystanders.

We have a responsibility to at least attempt to protect people regardless of what they are doing -- even if it is stupid. This is especially true when it comes to the things we build. We shouldn't, if we can possibly avoid it, build things that injure and kill people. If we can think of ways to make something we build less dangerous, we ought to give it a try.

Anna and Earnie, about a year after the accident.

My little sister was stupid not to wear a helmet that day. The lady in the car was stupid not to have been on the lookout for cyclists. But neither of them deserved what happened. Each of them is obviously bears some measure of responsiblity (and I have my own opinions on how those measures are apportioned), but the city of Norman also is also responsible. The city didn't even bother to paint a line down the middle of the road; what was the driver supposed to be on the wrong side of?

Yes, this is about personal responsibility. We, the public, build the roads. We are responsible for the markers on this map, and all the terror, trauma and tragedy they represent. Let's try to do better.

I've been tinkering with a little data visualization applet for looking at bicycle crash data in Davis, and I thought this map might be interesting to people. This is a image was generated with Google Maps and a heatmap overlay generated with a gheat tile server.

This is for 168 bicycle accidents that happened between 2004 and 2006. I have a lot more data, but 95% of the work in this little project involves parsing and renormalizing it. Evidently, police reports are not written with data processing in mind! I suppose that makes perfect sense. An officer at the scene of an accident probably has things on her mind besides generating a nice, easy to parse data point for future analysis. The priority seems to be completeness, rather than consistency. My parsing code, for example, has to be able to correctly detect and calculate distances measured in units of "feeet".

I'll release the applet here once I make an interface for it (and get the rest of the data imported). Stay tuned.

I was biking home today, and I decided to take a detour to enjoy the warm evening (and to avoid the not enjoyable warm apartment). About half way around the Davis Bike Loop, I remembered that I wanted to try out My Tracks. Here's the result : Neat!

After wandering off the Bike Loop a bit, I decided to head home. I was biking down Russell Blvd., and I witnessed a very scary car accident. The accident happened where I stopped recording the track, at the red marker. A guy in a cherried-out lifted F-150 was sitting at the traffic light (that's the point where I turned around). When the light turned green, he floored it. According to the other witnesses, he was racing with someone, or trying to catch someone who had cut him off. I couldn't see the other car because it was behind his gigantic stupid truck.

What I did see, though, was that he accelerated continuously until he reached the next intersection (the red marker), where he had a head-on collision with a girl in a 1990's Honda Civic trying to make a left turn. His engine was deafeningly loud even a block away, and I heard it roaring and down-shifting right up until the crash.

Looking at the damage to her car, it looked like he basically ran it over. The lift kit on the truck put his undercarriage about level with her roof, and there were even little ladders installed to climb up to the doors. After he ran over the Civic, he swerved around a bit, jumped the median, sideswiped a small SUV in the oncoming traffic, spun 180 degrees, and snapped his axle. When the axle snapped, I heard his engine redline for half a second and then cut.

Happily, nobody was hurt. The girl in the Civic was pretty much petrified, though. She was convinced that the accident was her fault because she didn't get out of the way.

I told her this was nonsense; the truck was going more than double the speed limit, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have his lights on (it was dusk, but not completely dark yet). She asked me about five times, "How much do you think it will cost to fix?" I told her, "Cost you? Nothing. He was committing maybe a dozen moving violations, and probably racing someone. His insurance company will probably be so happy not to have to pay medical bills that they will buy you a whole new car."

Maybe she could have been a little swifter completing her turn, but it's a busy street and there is a lot of pedestrian and bicycle traffic (it parallels a bike path). Making a quick turn is probably not a good idea. Or, maybe she could have waited until this asshole passed, but, as I pointed out, he was going maybe 50 or 60 in a 30 zone, and accelerating. She timed her turn right for reasonable traffic flow, but didn't account for total maniacs among the oncoming traffic. It would have been difficult to judge when he would reach the intersection she was turning through.

Oi!

As it turns out, Davis has been thinking about redesigning this stretch of Russell Blvd. for several years. If you look at the proposed design, it would have made this accident impossible or unlikely. You can't race on a one lane road, and a landscaped medium would have prevented the second collision.

I was biking to the gym yesterday, and it occured to me that since it was so beautiful outside, I may as well just keep biking. So, instead of sitting on the stationary bike, I did a three and a half hour ride down some random county road. It was awesome, even with my funny little commuter bike.

Along the way I passed this pathway planted with olive trees through the middle of one of the UC Davis research farms.

Note to self: Plant more olive trees.

After almost fifty-some hours riding the train, I have a few impressions worth sharing. I had a lot of time to think, and a lot of things to think about, so I'm going to break this up into a couple of posts.

I expected to get a great deal of work done in that time, and I accomplished absolutely none of it. Not a single jot. I basically spent the whole trip either looking out the window, or happily asleep. There is just too much to look at; breathtaking snow-capped mountains too numerous to name, scores of towns and a dozen cities, the vast arid emptiness of New Mexico, lonely volcanic prominences rising from Euclidean flatness, knots of green trees rioting in pocket valleys bracketed by sterile sun-blasted volcanic rocks, and the profane, hideous pointlessness of Texas cities.

The trip was a grand tour of the majestic beauty of our country, and an industrial colonoscopy showcasing a great deal of what is wrong and twisted about its economy.

I will spare you my gasping about mountains and trees. I lack the skill with words necessary to even crudely sketch such things. You simply have to see it. Instead, I'll tell you about the ugly and fascinating things I saw. They leave me truly awed.

The first thing that struck me was the vast and penetrating impact of exurban development.

It was heartbreaking to see just how much of the land is already destroyed. In California, luxury homes and golf courses fill every level patch of ground from the outskirts of incorporated Los Angeles to Palm Springs. Tuscon and Phoenix have similar, lower-budget penumbras of sprawling exurbs stretching two hundred miles in every direction. In the space between the outskirts of Palm Springs and the outskirts of Tuscon, people are busily making preparations to link these two cities with a continuous smear of houses. I was relieved to notice that many developments in the margins seem to be abandoned. One of them was nothing but rain-swelled chip-board and wind-tattered Tyvek nailed to dozens of identical frames. I regret that the photos didn't turn out.

That isn't to say that I don't have sympathy for the lives and fortunes that are suffering as a result of the economic pestilence that ruined these ventures, especially the craftsmen and laborers. But the fact is, nobody should be building out there. America's natural spaces should be treated like places of worship. Look at these houses huddling at the foot of this mountain:

These are money changers in the temple. I'm not against money changers in general, but they shouldn't ply their trade in my temple. Actually, this is quite a bit worse than the New Testament parable. The money changers could be thrown out and the sacred space restored. After the developers are thrown out, millions of their innocent dupes remain.

As beautiful as it is, this land is both exquisitely fragile and damn miserable to live on. Fragile because there is so little water, and miserable for its looming and contrarian propensity for devastating floods. Fragile because of the trophic poverty of the nutrient-starved ecosystem, and miserable for its tendency to erupt in sudden racing conflagration. Fragile because of the extreme sensitivity of the wildlife to disturbance -- a few scattered bottle caps have likely doomed the recovery of the California condor -- and miserable for the tendency of the wildlife to apply claws and fangs and venom to pets and loved ones. Fragile for the delicate balance of commodity prices and labor market conditions that make inhabitation possible, and miserable for the stress and strain of living on the knife's edge of financial viability, and doubly miserable when the distant rumbling of our global economic system brings your financial house crashing down on your head.

The only way most people can be comfortable in this kind of place is to obliterate it. Suck dry the aquifers, poison coyotes, shoot the mountain lions and the red-tail hawks, pave the chaparral, relocate factories and office buildings and depots from the distant city, blast and grade the mountainsides for drainage ditches and flood control swails, murder the night with the eyewatering glare of sodium vapor floodlamps. Then what have you got? Just another hot, boring place.

Yes, we can inhabit these places. Such is human ingenuity and power that given sufficient amounts of dynamite, concrete, oil and steel, we can probably live anywhere we can reach. We can blast and pave and bulldoze and burn any landscape to suit our purposes. The great challenge of the 19th and early 20th was to learn how to do these things on the scale required by the lethally difficult lands of the American West. A hundred years ago, life in the Mojave desert was so hardscrabble that few of even the most intrepid adventurers bothered to attempt it. Today, we build full-scale replicas of Scottish seascapes on which we play golf.

The great challenge of the centuries to come will be to abstain from exercising this power, and instead develop better enterprises in which to invest our blood and treasure.

A lot of people fought long and hard to give me the right to a secret ballot. This time around, though, I'm happy to show it to anyone who cares to look.

I like this ballot system much better than the InkaVote thing they have in LA, and much better than any kind of computerized bullshit. I spent four years using computers to design fusion reactors, but I sure as hell don't trust them with an election. Pen and paper, thanks.

I propose a ballot initiative to amend California's constitution to end ballot initiatives. Who's with me?

I like the idea of a little direct democracy, but it if I'm going to be expected to cast votes on these damn things all the time, then I want my damn legislator's salary. The initiative process should be reserved for extremely serious problems, like succeeding from the union if the Republic gets overthrown by evil blob aliens, or whatever.

What should be proposed, exactly? What if initiatives needed to pass at 66 percent? Or maybe if we required that a third of all California voters sign the petition to get it certified? How do we get rid of these damn things?

I was wondering how we'll know when the credit crisis is over, and I thought I'd share my gloomyness with you, dear readers.

The Big Money people invested vast amounts of capital in malls and condominiums, and now they have to come to terms with the fact that these things are not productive assets. All of that capital was blown on green lawns and shiny baubles, instead of invested in equipment and training. Now the capital is gone, with nothing to show for it but a bunch of luxury stucco boxes in the desert with no schools, no jobs and no water rights.

You'll know we're near the end of it when they start bulldozing abandoned subdivisions and planned communities. That's the reality of the situation; we built too much housing, we built housing of the wrong type, at the wrong size and scale, with the wrong materials and the wrong technologies, and we built it in the wrong places. Until Americans face that reality, the financial system will stay broken. But once the bulldozers get to work, you can be pretty sure that the reckoning is underway, and the stock prices you see are close to honest.

The metric for recovery that I'm keeping in my head is this; when it becomes profitable in Southern California to buy up a bunch of crappy houses, tear them down, plant some orange trees, and sell the oranges, then we're good.

For the first time, I just paid more than $4 a gallon for gasoline. It cost $40.34 to fill the tank on my tiny Toyota Yaris. My commute to UCLA is 37 miles each way, and I get about 38 MPG for that trip. I normally do a little better, but the Sepulveda Pass always seems to wreck my milage. At about $0.11 a mile, one trip costs me $7.77. If I drove in every day, it would cost me about $155 a month. That's almost as much as the payments on the car. If gas goes up another 84 cents, then I'd be paying more for the gasoline than the car just from driving to school.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, a Metro day pass costs $5, and a month pass is $62.00. If you commute in LA, chances are pretty good that your employer will buy your pass for you.

Here's my ballot for the 2008 California Democratic primary. As you can see, I voted for Obama. I hope you will vote for whoever you feel would be the best nominee, but some people may be intersted to hear my reasons for voting as I have.

Why I Won't Vote for Hillary

Hillary's campaign has focused relentlessly on one theme: Experience. She's been fighting for middle-class Americans for a long time, particularly on the subject of health care. People who don't like her have tried to minimize Hillary's role in the Clinton White House; they evidently don't remember the 1990s. The trouble is not that I don't think she has the experience, it's that I'm not particularly impressed by her accomplishments.

That's a pretty sweeping assertion, so let me offer the most important example of what I am talking about. The touchstone moment of Hillary Clinton's tenure in the White House was the introduction of the health care package. At the time, it was clear that health care was in crisis, and the plan assembled by the Clinton White House under Hillary's supervision probably would have more-or-less ended the crisis. I'm not going to claim that it would have been a great system, or that it was a wonderful piece of legislation, but it was clearly a bold step in the right direction. Unfortunately, the bill failed, and it failed so spectacularly that it hobbled Bill Clinton's domestic agenda even after his successful reelection.

Why did it fail? It failed for a lot of reasons, but here are the ones that stick in my mind :

• It was a gigantic piece of legislation, more than a thousand pages of dense legal jargon. I still remember the news clips of Congressional aides setting out copies of the bill on overloaded, buckling folding tables. There was no hope whatsoever that an ordinary person, even a very motivated one, could have learned enough about the bill to understand it on its merits.
• The bill was produced in secret. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons even went as far as to sue the Health Care Task Force to find out what was happening in the closed meetings. They were drafting legislation that would change the whole health care system, and they shut out the doctors. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
• The plan itself was a hideous chimera; the idea was to take the scenario under which most Americans obtain health care coverage (i.e., from their employer), make it mandatory. Then, there was a system of price controls, and various other administrative thingamajigs... In short, it lacked any kind of unity of vision that would have allowed the Clintons to articulate how it was supposed to work.
• The Task Force deliberated for a very long time to excrete this gorgon of a proposal, and by the time it was out in the open, the initial enthusiasm and excitement had evaporated. The bill's opponents had a nice, long time to organize their attack. The attack went off like clockwork, and Newt and his cronies rode the momentum of this attack into the 1994 elections and seized control of Congress. The Clinton's didn't just loose the health care bill, they lost every bill that could have been promulgated to a Democratic Congress.

Universal health care is a pretty grand endeavor. You'd have to look at the Social Security Act to find a piece of legislation with a similar breadth and scope, so let's take a peek at the Social Security Act of 1935. It represented a historic change in the relationship between citizens and government, but the legislation is only a few dozen pages long. It doesn't take long to read, and an ordinary person can pretty much follow what most of the bill does.

The original act has been updated several times since the program was created, but the original legislation completely captured the theory, practice and most of the essential features of the program. It was fairly simple, it was astonishingly efficient (even before computers), and it works.

Hillary's health care bill didn't fail because the nasty Republicans killed it. It failed because it was a murky tangle of legal spaghetti-code constructed in secret under dubious circumstances and championed by a callous, tardy and tone-deaf technocrat.

Hillary claims that she's learned from her mistakes. On a personal level, I'm more than happy to forgive her. I think she made an earnest effort to do something good for a lot of people. However, the fact remains that we've seen Hillary spearhead a major legislative effort, and she did just about the worst job you could possibly imagine.

There are a lot of people who are very excited about the prospect of a female president. I think it would be pretty great, actually. On the other hand, she is running for president. You don't put someone in that office because you like them and think they deserve your loyalty. You put them in that office because you want them to do a good job, period. The presidency is not a reward; it is a duty. It should be given to person best able to peform that duty, and Hillary has an established record of arrogance and poor decisions.

Women have fought for a long time to be taken seriously in the workplace, in academia, and in politics. I take Hillary seriously, and I seriously don't want her to be president. She clearly has the brains and the grit to be president, but then again, I don't think she's particularly unique among women in that regard. There are millions of women who could competently serve in the capacity of President of the United States. There are women out there doing much harder jobs.

The Clinton campaign mantra is that Hillary is experienced. Yep, she certainly has lots of experience fighting for good, worthy things. On the other hand, she also has a conspicuously inauspicious track record when it comes to accomplishing these good, worthy things. She and her husband presided over the Democratic Party's most devastating legislative failure of the 20th century. I don't see why we, as voters, should reward failure.

Since then, Hillary has managed to help precipitate a number of other spectacular legislative failures :

• Voted to authorize the Iraq war
• Voted for the PATRIOT act (twice)
• Voted to confirm John Roberts

On the Other hand, we've got Barack Obama. Mr. Obama might not have quite as impressive a resume as Mrs. Clinton, but

1. he is nevertheless an astonishingly accomplished individual and
2. he has never done anything to wreck the Democratic Party.

Both Obama and Clinton are clearly competent to hold the office -- especially in contrast with its current occupant. Mr. Obama is more charismatic, though I thik more has been made of this point than it deserves. The reason I am voting for him is that of the candidates on the ballot, he is the one with the best record of good decision making. I don't agree with everything Mr. Obama says -- I emphatically agree with Paul Krugman on the topic of mandates -- but I think Mr. Obama is the most likely candidate to actually deliver a health care package. Mr. and Mrs. Clinton had their chance, and they blew it.

The upper atmosphere was pretty think with smoke today, though I don't see any ash falling in Pasadena or near UCLA. 500,000 people have been ordered to evacuate from what may be the worst outbreak of fire in California history. A constellation of fires are burning from Santa Barbara to the US-Mexico border.

There aren't enough firefighters, and, as has been the case for a long time now, much of California's National Guard is in Iraq. The Guard that is still here is also missing a lot of vehicles and equipment, because the equipment is in Iraq now, or because it was destroyed in Iraq. The Guvonator had to order 200 guardsmen away from patrolling the US-Mexico border, and people's homes are still burning without a firefighter or a guardsman in sight.

For those readers outside of California who are chalking this up to the various "natural" disasters for which California is famous, I'd like to offer a little explanation. Southern California is a desert. Specifically, it is biotic system called chaparral. Normally, it looks sort of like this :

The land is loosely covered with scrubby sagebrush and small, knotted trees. Small clumps of grasses or wildflowers grow here and there, but mostly the surface is exposed rock. There is almost no water whatsoever. One of the peculiar features of this kind of land is that it is supposed to burn. Chaparral plants evaporate volatile oils -- turpentine -- into the air to encourage fires. This is why Chaparral smells so nice, and why it fucking burns all the time.

So, the problem is this: What kind of idiot would build a house in the middle of a place that is supposed to burn to the ground every four of five years? The answer is that it isn't the idiots, it's the assholes. The people who built those houses (and whole towns, in many cases) knew exactly what was going to happen. But they slapped the houses together and sold them to regular folks looking for a place to live. They've been doing this for a hundred years.

For the New Englanders who read this blog, think of it this way. Rivers are supposed to flood periodically, usually into special areas called floodplanes. These areas have plants and animals that are adapted to life in a place that floods from time to time. In fact, many of them would die if there weren't floods. We know all this. Nevertheless, people still build houses in floodplanes. Usually, though, the home owner isn't the one at fault. They just moved in, and then one year, their house floods, and everyone says, "You idiot, you built your house in a floodplane."

Well, chaparral is sort of the same thing. Instead of a floodplane, it's a fireplane. It's a really, really stupid place to build a house.

But of course, the homeowner didn't build anything. Usually, a gigantic multinational corporation, like KB Home, is responsible for developing the site. No, you say, no developer would knowingly build in a floodplane, or in a fireplane, or some other obviously dangerous place. Allow me to direct your attention to one of their developments in Arlington, Texas :

According to plaintiffs' attorneys, the land that KB Home developed into the Southridge Hills subdivision was once owned by the U.S. government and was part of a naval training range. Commonly known as Five Points Field, it was used as a military practice bombing range during World War II, the firm said.

The government sold the property in 1956. Lawyers said in its deed to the purchaser, the U.S. government acknowledged that the property was subject to contamination by the introduction of unexploded bombs, shells, rockets, mines and charges. The government recommended that the target impact area be restricted to "above surface" use only, the firm said.

They built homes on top of fucking bombs, and then sold them to people without telling them. So, do you think they have any qualms about selling people homes in floodplanes, chaparral, and hurricane highways?

Now, I'm not against building homes or against multinational corporations building them. However, it is worth noting that if my IBM ThinkPad exploded and burned into a cinder because the battery charging circuit was defective, no one would be shocked or surprised if I expected IBM to replace my laptop with one that doesn't explode. Houses placed in unstable locations are defective. Whoever built them should be expected to replace them with houses that aren't defective. If we held companies like KB Home to the same standards we hold Apple and IBM, then we wouldn't be evacuating 500,000 from regions that are naturally supposed to burn.