Russell's Blog

Somehow this escaped my notice. Trader Joe's is building a new store in Davis! And right across the street from me, no less. Hurry up and bring the good eats, TJ's.

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.

Spent the day writing a piece of code I already wrote six months ago. Not sure how I managed to forget. The new code wasn't very good, so I threw it away. Day down the tube.

Even asleep, Neil seems to understand.

I was feeling lousy today, and I heard that the internet was running low on pictures of cats. So, here are some pictures of my cats.

I normally don't talk a lot about my personal life on my blog, and except for the occasional announcement, I'd like to keep it that way. People's little triumphs and tragedies are mainly interesting to those directly involved, and are at best kind of boring to everyone else. A lot of my friends and family do read this blog, but by and large most of you are strangers or acquaintances. I try to respect that.

Those of you who are close to me know that I'm going through a sad time in my life right now. Those of you who work or study with me have probably noticed that I've not been my usual cheerful self. In deference to the many people who aren't here to read about that, and the fact that I can barely think about it (never mind write about it), I'm not going to discuss what's happened on my blog.

The one thing that has helped has been hearing about all the cool things that other people are doing. So, even though I'm not exactly Mr. Social right now, please don't take that as a sign that I want to be left alone.

On the contrary. Now would be a great time to tell me about whatever is on your mind, especially if it's cool.

To those of you who've been kind enough to treat me like a normal person over the last two weeks despite my melancholy behavior, I owe you guys. Really.

One of the wonderful things about web applications is that they can be available 24-7. They can sit there and quietly do their jobs -- taking orders, billing credit cards, assigning work orders, or whatever -- even when the office is empty. That's one of the main reasons one would go to the trouble of putting a web front end on something in the first place.

So, the question of the evening is, does the UC Davis registrar know this?

Um... no.

This is a completely automated process. If you do this during the daytime, it just goes ahead and populates a table in whatever chthonic legacy database system that is swaddled in this blob of early 1990's vintage web programming. It's not like having the office open at the time actually helps.

Attention Amazon.com shoppers! It's 4:45 Central Time, and Amazon.com will be closing for the day in 15 minutes! Please complete your order before the site is disconnected for the evening. We will open again tomorrow at 8:30 A.M. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com!

On the upside, at least it doesn't complain that my browser isn't supported. Yay.

The eye doctor in Davis confirmed that my magical eye bubble is central serous retinopathy. Here's a much better picture (now also on Wikimedia Commons).

That volcano-shaped thing is supposed to be a little pit (that's what "fovea" means).

I'm a bit pissed off that the Zeiss optical coherence tomography machine that the doctor used to take this image evidently keeps the data locked up in a proprietary format, and can only exchange data with other Zeiss products. The doctor says he can't even save a screenshot. The only way I could get this picture was by snapping a photo of the display with my phone.

I'm impressed with the technology, and I'm happy to pay for it. It's much better than the machine used to take the image in my first post about this, and allowed for a quick and unambiguous diagnosis. I just don't want to pay more for it than it actually costs. Ziess is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook here by leveraging proprietary data formats and locked-down data sharing to coerce doctors into buying their equipment instead of someone else's. Except, the stakes are higher for medical products.

Back in May 2007, I decided I'd try writing a Wikipedia article. I can't remember why I was seized by the impulse. I think I was supposed to be studying for something, and I'd already cleaned the bathroom and organized my closet. I pondered for a some time on the problem of selecting a topic obscure enough not to have a page already, and yet not so obscure as to become a target for the dreaded Deletionist clan of Wikipedians.

And lo, the Tasty Bite page was born. Looking at the page traffic, I fear that it will eventually become my most widely read piece of writing.

Well, they are pretty tasty. Oh, and those very mediocre pictures? I took those myself, and then consumed the contents of the pouch. Also, my friend Srijak says there is no such thing as "Bombay Potatoes," but he eats them too.

Dr. Robert Lustig at UCSF gave a very interesting public lecture for UCTV on the relationship between sugar consumption and a host of health problems, ranging from obesity to diabetes to gout. I won't reiterate his argument, but the kernel is that he has bestowed the term "poison" on fructose. By "poison," he means poison in the same sense that alcohol is a poison. Fructose and ethanol are both chemicals that causes health problems, and that only the liver handle. Keep in mind that if the body were a city, the liver would be the part of town with the scary industrial stuff, all pipes and loud noises smokestacks and funny smells.

In the lecture, he suggests that fruit isn't necessarily bad, because fruit tends to come along with fiber, and fiber slows down the rate at which the sugar hits your blood. This gives your gut microflora a chance to get at it and metabolize it into less harmful compounds (though with the unfortunate but health-neutral side effect of flatulence).

Anyway, this got me wondering. Which sugars are in which fruit? Not all sugars, or fruits, are equal. So, here's a nice chart I made from some data I found somewhere on the internet.

I computed the ranking by generating a "badness" index as follows :

It makes me a little sad to see apples, pears and mangos down there at the bottom, though I'm delighted to see avocados at the top. Also, I would like to remind you that not everything that is quantitative is scientific, and making a nice chart of some data you find on a random web page is certainly not scientific.

Over the summer, my dad decided to buy a nice little go-to scope for looking at the assorted planets and galaxies in our neighborhood. He wanted something relatively simple to operate so he could maximize the number of cool things seen in a given amount of time. He asked me if I could fine something with good optics and a usable go-to system -- the optics to keep him happy, and the go-to system for the assorted small children people keep bringing over and setting loose in his house.

Since I'd been playing with a couple of other Celestron products, I recommended either the Meade LT-6 or the Celestron NexStar 4SE. Honestly, I'd hoped that he would choose the LT-6, but since it costs about twice as much, he opted for the 4SE instead.

I'm out in Nantucket for new years, so I finally got a chance to try out the telescope this evening. The viewing conditions were not ideal (extremely windy and bitterly cold, and my right eye isn't still isn't back normal yet), but I think I can conclude that the telescope itself is pretty nice. I'm a little less impressed with the mount and the NexStar go-to system, though in fairness I haven't given them a fair shake yet.

And shake is indeed the watchword, I'm afraid. This was supposed to be Mars :

Admittedly, there was a bit of wind, but the telescope was planted firmly on a large stone pad and I used the time delay feature on my camera so that I wouldn't be touching anything when the shutter fired. This was only a 1 second exposure, so the shaking is pretty bad. I guess if you are hoping to do some astrophotography, don't bother with NexStar mounts. It feels good and strong, but it vibrates. Your eye can follow along just fine, but it sucks for taking pictures.

The telescope itself might actually be pretty good for basic astrophotography. Like a lot of Cassegrains, the 4SE has two optical ports with a mirror to switch between them. Celestron makes simple T-adapters for several models of SLR cameras, so you can bolt your camera body directly onto the second optical port. If you already have a DSLR, using it with the 4SE is very easy. Experimenting with 4SE and my Nikon D50 body seem fairly promising. Here is a shot I took looking through the window, which is laden with fingerprints, dog-nose-prints, and other assorted examples of encrustation and slobber :

Well, it's kind of easy, if you're comfortable using your DSLR in full manual mode. This is one area where I think the consumer telescope makers are missing a big opportunity. All DSLR camera bodies these days have some sort of interface for talking to the lens bolted onto its adapter ring. This allows for all sorts of nice features to work, like automatic light metering, autofocus, image stabilization, selecting F-stops, and so on. My Nikon D50 even has a little motorized driver to push the focus ring of autofocus lenses that don't have their own motors. There are lots of third-party companies that make lenses that work with various SLR bodies, so the interface standards must be obtainable. Why not make a smart T-adapter? A really basic, non-motorized autofocus lens for most DSLRs can be found for around a hundred bucks. I bet a lot of people would happily pay a hundred bucks for a T-adapter with a light meter and an autofocus driver. You'd have a point-and-shoot telescope, and all the brains to make the image capture work would be in the camera body. Which would be awesome.

I'm going to try again tomorrow night. I'm going to try keeping the tripod legs fully retracted, and hopefully there will be less wind.

About three days ago, I noticed a funny purple splotch in the middle of my right eye's visual field. It looked sort of like the splotch you'd get after seeing a camera flash, so I figured it would go away. Instead of going away, the next day it was bigger and darker. The day after, it was dark enough that I couldn't read with my right eye.

So, I decided it was time to put my health insurance to work -- which was pretty naive of me. Since I'm away from campus, I had to get a referral from an emergency room doctor (Anthem will only accept referrals from the UC Davis campus health center, or from an emergency room MD). Neither the cost of the emergency room visit nor the eye doctor was enough to exceed the deductible, so it all came out of my pocket (and Mimi's pocket). The deductible resets at the end of the year, which is in about a week. Lame.

Anyway, I was worried that it was some sort of retinal detachment, and was relieved to learn that it wasn't. Evidently, I have what amounts to a watter blister under my retina. Here it is :

Evidently, these things are usually stress-induced. Weird.

Also, I thought this was pretty neat. Here's my optic nerve :

Cool, huh?

Update : Well, the bubble got a lot bigger today, but space distortion started to go down. I think that means it's widening and flattening. I read up a bit about this kind of problem, and they are almost stereotypically associated with stress-addicts. I didn't think the last quarter was particularly stressful -- I rather enjoyed it. I've certainly had academic terms where I felt a lot more stress.

Usually, when I notice stress, it means that I'm feeling really unhappy about what I'm doing. The normal effect of that feeling is to make it harder to do whatever it is I'm doing, which I've always vaguely regarded as personal weakness. But if I can push myself hard enough to get blisters under my retina when I'm happily chugging along on my work, that makes my loss of productivity when I'm unhappy seem a lot more rational. I can almost imagine that it's a safety valve to prevent me from burning myself out -- at least on something that sucks.

So, I'm going to take this as a good thing. I've never been able to excel at classes I don't like, even when I found them to be very easy. No matter how motivated I was to "just get it done" (the advice of practically everyone in my life), something always sapped my energy. I'd pile on effort, and find that the effort required for the task seemed jump up just enough to absorb most of the extra effort I put in. But being unhappy and being under stress are not the same thing.

So, if I cheerfully worked myself into a stress-induced retinal blister, that's a pretty good indication that I've found something that bypasses my brain's "this sucks" filter. Now, I suppose I'll have to stop relying on my weirdly strong disgust with things that are boring to protect me from injuring myself. That's not a bad problem to have, actually.

Of course, all of this could be utter hogwash. I might have given myself a mystery eye bubble by reading all of John Scalzi's books in a week.

The calculus on the health care bill is very simple. If Democrats create a law that forces people to give their money to private insurance companies, and fails to create any sort of publicly administered alternative, the American people will hate it.

Conservatives and libertarians will hate it because it tramples on their freedom of choice and because it costs more than it ought to. Liberals and progressives will hate it because its a giveaway to companies that are widely agreed to be Evil Incarnate. Centrists will hate it because it won't work.

This isn't a "starting point" that can be refined as time goes on. It is a step in the wrong direction -- awarding even greater power and money to the already too-powerful insurance industry. It will give the industry the ability to raise premiums even higher and faster because people will legally have no choice but to pay them.

All major pieces of legislation evolve over time. They tend to do a better job of doing what they were designed to do in the first place. This was true for Social Security, Medicare, and many other social programs. It would be true for this healthcare bill too. The problem is that this healthcare bill doesn't do much of anything for citizens. It simply makes a gift of our freedom and livelihoods to the insurance industry, pure and simple. The bill will indeed evolve over time; the wussy regulations it creates to protect patients will get stripped out the instant the Republican party controls the government again.

I can swallow the idea of paying taxes to support a public service -- if the public service actually works. I cannot swallow the idea of being legally obligated to buy a product from a private party.

It's amazing. The Democrats in the Senate have actually managed to find an arrangement of circumstances that would actually be worse than the status quo. That's quite an accomplishment, given the breathtaking moral bankruptcy of our health insurance system.

Kill the bill. It will sink us.

My mom is doing some species survey work for the Navy, and got interested in these insanely tiny Chalcid wasps. Some of them are smaller than a grain of sand wingtip-to-wingtip, so it was pretty difficult to identify them under her binocular dissection microscope. I suggested maybe she should try out a consumer digital microscope before trying to get her grant coordinator to spring for anything huge and expensive. She picked up a Celestron microscope on sale from Amazon.

Obviously, it's not going to perform like one of the Nikon or Leica lab scopes, but it cost about one thirtieth as much, and it's humorously easy to use. If she can use it to zero in on the features used to identify these things and easily document what she sees, it'll do.

Here's what I was able to capture with a Chalcid wasp in ethanol with no slip cover. No effort was made to orient the objective, stain it, or improve the contrast. I just focused and hit the capture button.

Hmm... Looks like it might actually be usable with a little practice. The depth of field is not great, though.

I've been curious about the feasibility of making usable lab equipment as mass-produced consumer products. This scope is probably good enough for some specific problems, but not as a piece of generally usable lab equipment. But it's not as far away as I expected, actually.

One of the cool things about living in Davis is the amazing number of unique creative enterprises and projects people open up to the public. I suppose Davis is a comfortable place for people to try things out.

If you live in Davis, you should try Sasha's Soup Club. After a few weeks of envying the tasty lunches my labmates were enjoying, I joined the mailing list. I just received my allotment Leek and Potato soup, delivered by Sasha herself.

What can I say? It's damn good soup, exactly as described. The flavor of the potatoes and leeks both stand out nicely. Whatever else is in it, the other flavors are there to make a nice background.

I get nervous about making things with so few flavors. When I aim to make a simple soup, it will usually end up with six or seven different ingredients with strong flavors. If one of them comes out a little weak, you can still enjoy the others.

My general approach to hobbies is massive over-engineering. This is why the computer desk I built for my mother is rated for 7200 pounds (I tested it by stacking dead tractor engine blocks on top of it). I know that I'll never make a living as a chef or as a furniture builder. But if I build something, goddamnit, it's not going to fall down. So, when I make soup, or a sandwich, or a salad, I keep adding ingredients that I'm sure will taste good until something in my head says, "Yup, it'll hold."

It's greatly reassuring to me that there are people who know how to make awesome things with simple economy. I know I can make potato leek soup myself; I made some just last week. It was good, but then again, anything would be good if you loaded it up with enough garlic, onions, cheese, olive oil, peppercorns and sea salt. I wouldn't have had the confidence to make this soup.

Now, the only problem is not eating it all before I have a chance to gloat over it at lunch.

Now that I have a free moment between chopping potatoes and mashing them, I figure I should post the paper and talk I wrote summarizing my first lab rotation.

I tried to make the paper look like an PNAS article, but alas, their LaTeX template leaves much to be desired. I like how the talk turned out little better, thanks the wonderful Beamer package for LaTeX.

Mimi and I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to print a three page PDF document. First, her dad's year-old HP OfficeJet 6300 stripped a gear in its paper feeder with no paper in the loading tray. It now seems to be beyond repair. So, we went over to her cousin's house, and a her HP all-in-one choked on a strangely formatted paper size directive. The error codes suggest that the printer's firmware got corrupted, but we couldn't get any more detail on account of Vista's printer stack simultaneously shitting itself, and remaining resolutely shat even after the usual Windows hokey-pokey of uninstalling/reinstalling, rebooting and banging the table and swearing.

We emailed the damn thing to her sister at her office, and she spent an hour futzing around with it before getting it to live uncomfortably on an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper, only to discover that someone had swiped the fuser wire from the big office laser printer. Six hours after we started, the three pages finally emerged from an old printer Lan found somewhere in a closet.

This seems to be the normal experience when you want to print an important document. Why is it still so awful? Why do people not riot in the streets and burn HP executives alive on pyres of new-but-broken plastic-crap printers? Why do people continue to allow PostScript to live?

One of the projects I've been working on this semester is designing a teaching unit for the UC Davis introductory biology curriculum. The introductory biology courses are required for a whole bunch of different majors at UC Davis, so all three of them are offered every quarter. It's a huge effort, and thousands of students take these classes every year. This is part of a teaching seminar led by Scott Dawson (don't bother Googling for him -- you'll find the wrong guy). The idea behind Scott's seminar is to take the half-dozen or so concepts that the BIS2A, 2B and 2C students struggle with, design teaching units aimed at those topics, and then try them out on volunteers. My topic is stochastic processes, which has been great fun. The project isn't finished yet, so I'll save the details for later.

One of the other issues we've been addressing in the seminar is how scientists relate to non-scientists. This is, for obvious reasons, an essential teaching skill. Even if they hope to be scientists someday, students are not scientists. If you don't find a way to talk with them about science, then you're wasting their money and their time.

The idea that the educator is largely responsible for the success (or failure) of the student hasn't really seeped into higher education, although it's been the standard thinking in primary and secondary education for decades. Not all elementary school teachers are good at what they do, but it is generally agreed that if they are good, the results will be seen in the subsequent success of their students. In higher education, things don't really work this way.

The most often cited reason for poor instruction at the college level is that many professors consider teaching secondary to their research. While this is clearly true in many cases, teaching in higher education doesn't just suffer from playing second fiddle to research. Many, many professors (even whole departments) who take teaching seriously are nevertheless not very good at it.

There are two causes, both of which are systemic problems. First of all, people who teach at the college level are usually not trained as teachers. Many (most?) professors have no education training whatsoever. Yet, even if you have natural skills, teaching isn't something you can do effectively without at least a little theory and training.

The result is that most of the teaching in colleges is done by amateurs and autodidacts. In contrast, at the primary and secondary level, teaching has been a job for trained professionals since the turn of the last century.

The second problem, which is partly a symptom of the first, is regular old-fashioned chauvinism. It is the responsibility of the student to learn, but many professors fail to see how they fit into this. This might be acceptable at a private, endowment-supported institution, but such places are exceptions. The Harvards and Oxfords of the world are free to treat their students however they like, but public institutions are ultimately responsible to the taxpayers. The taxpayers support such institutions for two reasons; to conduct research, and to educate their kids. Sink-or-swim pedagogy is a dereliction of duty.

This is a problem that extends far beyond the classroom. I was listening to NPR on the drive down to Los Angeles, and caught a story on All Things Considered about the reception of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Some extracts :

"That fraction of people who figured that they could and should keep more or less up to date with what was happening in geology, in botany, in zoology, even in physics and mathematics is a much bigger fraction than it is today," says Steven Shapin, a Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

...

"We hear about scientific findings," says Shapin. "But the proportion that can evaluate them and follow along with them, as opposed to hearing about them, is very, very small."

Shapin says that since people can't be completely conversant with the relevant science, "They're looking for an answer to the question, 'Who can we rely on? Who's speaking the truth? Who can we trust?' "

I think the good professor is missing the point. The problem is not simply that science has gotten more complicated and technical. It is true that there is more of it, and that it moves faster. The reason I don't buy Dr. Shapin's argument is that this is not at all unique to science. Everything moves faster and is more technical now than in 1859, and people seem to cope just fine.

The problem is that scientists do not spend enough time talking with the general public. Only a small minority of scientists take the trouble to arrange their findings in a form digestible by the lay audience, as Darwin did. When they do, it is almost never cutting-edge research that fills the pages. Very few scientists go on television or the radio. The practice today is to bring research to lay the audience only when it is neatly tied up (or, the research community feels that it is, anyway). There are those who do otherwise, but there is a negative stigma to it; scientists who announce their findings with press releases instead of peer-reviewed papers are usually regarded with suspicion.

Darwin's target audience for Origin -- the typical educated Briton in 1859 -- would not have much of an advantage on the average American in 2009. A Victorian gentleman would probably have had better handwriting and more patience for trudging through elliptical turns of phrase than an American high school graduate, but I don't think they would have much of advantage when it came to comprehending an unfamiliar scientific topic. The advantage Darwin's audience had was that it had Darwin.

When a good teacher notices that a student is failing to learn something, they will look first at their own teaching methodology for the problem. The same goes for scientists; when the general public doesn't understand or care about a scientific topic, a good scientist should look first at how they are publicizing their work. If the public doesn't think your research is important, then either you aren't explaining it well enough, or maybe it actually isn't very interesting.

Looks like I got my gene to grow in E. coli!

The colonies that didn't get the plasmid I'm using to carry MXAN7396 turn blue when grown with X-gal (bromo-chloro-indolyl-galactopyranoside). The ones that got the plasmid don't.

Neat!

I finally got through the double-PCR phase of the protocol without wrecking something. Yay!

My hacked up version of the gene gene is getting snipped up with everyone's favorite restriction enzymes (BamH1 and EcoR1). Then I get to splice it into a plasmid, and electroport the plasmids into some cells, and maybe they will do something interesing.

I've been doing my first laboratory rotation in Mitch Singer's lab, and trying to learn what people are actually doing when they publish these spiffy experimental results. So far, I've mostly been wrecking things. Fun disasters of the week :

• Wrecked a DNA extraction by grabbing the wrong Pipetter and putting 300 microliters into a tube instead of 3.
• Misread an illegible label and used butanol instead of ethanol, destroyed second attempt at the aforementioned DNA extraction.
• Dropped the wrong tube in the trash, screwed up the third attempt at the aforementioned DNA extraction.
• Kept a gel on the UV bench too long while trying to chop out little cubes with a razor blade, annihilated all the DNA, and screwed up fourth attempt at aforementioned DNA extraction.
• The PCR cycler didn't close correctly, and my reaction tubes evaporated; screwing up fifth attempt at aforementioned DNA extraction. (At least this one wasn't my fault.)

I'm now spending the evening in the lab running everything over again, for the sixth time. Yays!

I definitely sticking to informatics -- that part of the rotation is going pretty well. I'm just not cut out for benchwork.

PG&E is no angel, but it deserves credit for making what looks like a good-faith effort to get California off of carbon. It's serious enough to have quit the US Chamber of Commerce to distance itself from the group's extremist views on climate change.

PG&E still owns six coal burning power plants, curiously located in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (presumably it uses them to swap power with other generators). It generates about 46% of its electricity from hydroelectric dams.

Rucker Creek dam, a small PG&E facility in Nevada County

One of the more interesting projects PG&E is undertaking is improving the resolution of its demand monitoring using SmartMeters. There is a lot of hype about the "Smart Grid," but basically it boils down to realtime use monitors, like these :

that are wired up to report the data somewhere. It's basically an off-the-shelf Tweet-A-Watt.

According to the PG&E web site, they are using SmartSynch meters, which use TCP/IP over some kind of wireless network. It's difficult to find information about the hardware itself, probably on account of the assorted idiots wetting their pants about people h4X0ring their refrigerators (actually, I don't know if Bill Mullins is an idiot, but his article about smart meters is depressingly typical).

Yes, it is possible for a bad person to break into your PG&E account to obtain this data.¹ But so what? Power meters are inductively coupled to the circuit they measure. They can look, but they cannot touch. IOActive, a security research firm, claims that they can break into certain smart meters and "cut off power." I suppose we are meant to construe this as "cut off power to the house," but that isn't what power meters do. That is what those huge knife switches, with the lock-out-tag-out rings, are for. I'm skeptical that a certified electrician would work on a residential circuit with a computer controlled on-off switch. I certainly wouldn't. What "cut off power" probably means is that they can shut down the microcontroller, and stop the meter from collecting or reporting data. We're left to speculate, though, because the report is confidential. I speculate that they are hyping a buffer overflow exploit to gain as much attention as possible.

Nobody is going to h4x0r your refrigerator and reprogram it to be an E. coli chemostat. If you are worried about your personal data floating around on the big bad internets, your worries are better directed at your bank and your health insurance provider. The bad guys don't care that you left your bathroom light on all night last Thursday; they just want the routing number for your savings account.

While the data isn't very valuable for nefarious purposes, it is extremely valuable in the noble (if mundane) pursuit of frugality. Here's what PG&E shows you if you've been upgraded to a smart meter :

Having the graphs is neat, but the usability of the site is poor. Fortunately, they let you download the data as CSV files, although you have to go a week at a time. It's all very 1995. Happily, Google.org is working on a real-time data browser tool called Power Meter which will make this a lot nicer. For now, a just wish I had an XML-RPC interface.

I've already learned something from this data. On the 29th and 30th, I was at the Granlibakken conference center for the UC Davis Host Microbe Interaction conference. Those days show dramatically less power use between about 22:00 and 2:00, which is when I'm usually hacking at my desktop machine. One more reason to start thinking about replacing this behemoth.

1. Actually, it's stupidly easy to gain access to someone's PG&E account if you have their account number. Just create a new web account, type in the account number, and there you go! Now you can really fuck with them by paying their bill, which is about all you can do with a PG&E account.

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?

I finally got fed up with the pathetic official Android release from T-Mobile, and rooted my G1 and installed the CyanogenMod firmware. Cyanogen feels about twice as responsive as Cupcake! It's like a whole new device.

Also, the tethering app is awesome. It turns your G1 into a WiFi base station and routes traffic from WiFi to 3G. Since I'm still waiting for broadband at my new apartment, it's a lifesaver.

I suppose tethering (and rooting the phone) technically violates T-Mobile's TOS, but I'm convinced that T-Mobile will allow both sooner or later. It's just too awsome, and it would help them sell more contracts.

It's kind of difficult to abuse tethering anyway; it sucks down the battery very quickly, and the latency is significant. It's the sort of thing you'd only use in a pinch. Those happen to be the situations where a little benevolence or selfishness from a big company can shape a customer's opinion forever. T-Mobile seems to be more sensitive to that kind of thing than the other networks. I know they've got their reasons for banning tethering apps, but I think they could be convinced to change their minds. (You can download various petitions from the Android Marketplace.)

Openness is where Google and T-Mobile could really go after the unwholesome, anticompetitive and un-American AT&T/iPhone alliance. The open nature of Android is a step in the right direction, but T-Mobile needs to get its legal department on the Open Access bandwagon if it wants to press the advantage.

After all, if some random people on the internet can roll better firmware for the G1 than their in-house developers, isn't it a strategic business advantage to let them?

I've been trying and failimg to get to sleep. The average interval of cat bombardment, and the mean momentum of the incident cat field has been unusually high. It took me a while to realize that this was related to the weather; it is lightly sprinkling. My cats have never seen rain.

That's a sobering thought in two ways. On one hand, they are old enough to have very well developed personalities, and yet are younger than the Obama administration by several months. On the other hand, it's been that long since it rained.

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.

For the last couple of weeks or so, Jupiter has been bright enough to cast a visible shadow on a moonless night. I'd been peering at it through the trees as I walk around town, thinking about buying a telescope. Then news came about the Black Smudge on Jupiter, discovered by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley -- on a homebrew Newtonian -- and I thought, "That's it. I'm buying a telescope."

The problem is, I've never owned a telescope. When I was a kid, we had an ancient four inch refracting telescope, but it was missing some crucial parts, like the focusing drawtube, parts of the tripod, and one of the cast iron counterweights was broken in half (probably from coming unscrewed and dropping on the pavement). I played with it a lot, but for obvious reasons I never got to actually do any astronomy with it. When I lived in Ohio, I once used the Natural History Museum's incredible 500-mm Dall-Kirkham Cassegrainian to peer at Saturn.

Almost all of my telescope knowledge I owe to my college Optics course and its lab section, and the endless mind-numbing, poorly worded homework problems involving lenses and mirrors and pictures of carrots (I never found out why the objective was always a carrot). I could probably design a simple telescope on paper, but calculating a magnification factor and peering through a scope are very different experiences. I've been rummaging through telescope reviews on the internet for years, wondering how much I would really care about this or that optical aberration, or if I should spend more money to have less of it.

I decided to buy a really inexpensive telescope just to have a point of reference. This is what I've been playing with all weekend :

This is a Celestron FirstScope, purchased from Amazon.com for $43. Stephen R. Waldee wrote a ridiculously detailed review of this little thing.

When I was in eighth grade, everyone had to buy a Texas Instruments TI-82 graphing calculator. At the time, I had a computer (an elderly Macintosh SE loaned by a friend's mother, who had upgraded to a Quadra), but this was back when compilers were comically expensive. I could run programs, but I couldn't write them. The TI-82 wasn't as powerful as the Mac SE, but it did have a very well designed built-in BASIC interpreter and a fantastic library of functions. While my algebra teacher was tediously reviewing the previous day's homework, I tuned out and taught myself programming, Boolean algebra, functional formalism, iterative numerical methods, graphics, animation, and all sorts of other cool and useful things. Those stolen hours in eighth grade led directly to a degree in physics, four years working as a computational physicist, and graduate school in computational biology. The TI-82 was available, and it was extremely well-designed despite its limitations. In fact, I learned as much from what the TI-82 couldn't do as I learned what it could.

That's kind of what I have in mind for the FirstScope.

Anyway, I've been having a grand old time looking at Jupiter and the Galilean moons. Here's (more or less) what I've been seeing :

This is a 1 second exposure using a Takahashi TOA-150 that I rented for a few minutes using Global Rent-a-Scope. This guy beats the stuffing out of my telescope (the Takahashi is a $27,000 instrument!), but I'm really not using it for its intended purpose. What I see with the 4mm eyepiece on my telescope is essentially the same as what you see above.

I checked Stellarium to see which moons are which. From left to right, it's Callisto, Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, Europa, and the star HIP 107302.

Jupiter will occult HIP 107302 later today. This is kind of neat, since HIP 107302 is bright enough to see with the naked eye (at least when Jupiter isn't near it). If you Google for "Jupiter HIP 107302," you'll find that it's the brightest star Jupiter will occult for the next hundred years. Light from HIP 107302 will illuminate Jupiter's atmosphere from behind, and, I presume, yield some interesting data about its structure and composition for people suitably equipped to make such measurements.

Just for fun, and to be fair to the Global Rent-a-Scope people, here's another shot I took around midnight of Andromeda that really shows off the Takahashi's beautiful optics.

This is a 600 second exposure. I could probably do better if I fiddled with the exposure a bit, or did a color series instead of a single exposure, or knew anything about post-processing astrometric photography.

I've looked at M31 with my own little telescope, but all I see is a dot where the central core is. On the other hand, I was using the telescope sitting on the hood of a car in my apartment building parking lot under an obnoxious buzzing outdoor lamp. No night vision whatsoever. My verdict is that I've already gotten $43 worth of astronomy out of the FirstScope, and I haven't even used it under decent viewing conditions.

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.

If you should happen to be filling out a longish web form (say, for example, a blog post) using the Android browser, and someone calls you, the browser will dump all your windows and obliterate the POSTDATA. Gee, thanks. That's exactly what I wanted.

Come on people.

A guy in my apartment building just fell down the stairs right in front of my bedroom window. I put my glasses on and saw a puddle of blood slicking the concrete walkway, about ten feet from my pillow. About half the blood was coming out of his forehead, the other from a seep in his shirt where his collarbone is.

I went outside to see if he was moving. He wasn't. He didn't respond when I spoke to him. So, I did the logical thing -- I grabbed my phone and I called 911.

And it fucking crashed. So, I tried again, and it crashed again. I was in the process of ripping out the SIM card and charging up my old phone when the Davis 911 dipatcher called back. The good news is that the EMTs were fast. As soon as the dispatcher hung up, I stepped out to the street to wait for them, and I could already see the lights coming up the street.

So, listen here Google, T-Mobile and HTC: FUCK YOU. Fix your shit.

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.

In the last 24 hours, my cats have learned four things.

1. Maximum face nuzzle! The larger (as yet unnamed) fellow really likes to nuzzle people. It's his thing. He climbs up on your chest, at pushes his hot dry nose into your face as hard as he can. A few days ago, he discovered that he can increase the nuzzling intensity by winding up a bit, like a pitcher throwing his own head. Yesterday evening, he discovered that he could increase the nuzzling intensity even more by getting a running start, and face-planting into my face while I'm reading.

   He is now starting from the hallway, and using the corner of my bed as a springboard to launch himself at my head at a full gallop. He tucks his paws under his belly and closes his eyes, so he comes in like a little furry nose-missile. I dare not get out of the way, or he'll hit the wall behind me and hurt himself. About half the time, I managed to catch him before he hits me.

   His little brother sits quietly on top of the pile of books next to my bed, and watches his larger brother do this with a sort of sad, disappointed expression on his face.

2. Do not eat dental floss. They climbed up onto the sink, opened up the medicine cabinet, and pulled down my dental floss. They then managed to unravel the whole spool by chasing it around the legs of the kitchen table. Thusly restrained, they then proceeded to eat the dental floss, one cat at each end. I woke up to two very sad kittens, attached to each other by their pyloric valves, separated by about twelve inches of knotted dental floss. There was a lot of puke everywhere. I carefully pulled the floss out of their throats, which led to more vomiting. They hated it, but didn't struggle or scratch. They looked very surprised once they felt better.
3. Stink beetles taste terrible. This hardly needs elaboration.
4. Falling in the toilet is not fun. This evening, the larger fellow decided he was suddenly interested in the toilet bowl, which he's never cared about before. Perhaps this was part of a quest today to gain as many disgusting experiences as possible. He followed me into the bathroom while I was hanging up the towels from the laundry, and I could stop him, he scrambled up and over the seat and into the bowl head first. He seemed genuinely shocked to discover that he could not avoid the water at the bottom. Vigorous thrashing and yowling commenced. His little brother looked on from the threshold, looking grave and embarrassed (as usual). I pulled him out, and he stopped yowling, and stuck him into the shower, and he resumed yowling.

   Now he smells like Irish Spring, and keeps casting suspicious glances at the toilet. A few minutes ago he followed me into the bathroom again, and did his threat display (puffy tail, arched back, hissing, sideways-walking) at the toilet. His little brother, once again, observed from the threshold with a grave and embarrassed expression.

I've adopted two kittens! They were captured with their mother in a feral cat colony out in the farmland somewhere around Davis. As much as I love cats, feral cats are a terrible ecological problem; they eat their way through the native bird population astonishingly quickly. The mother is supposed to be a champion huntress, which is kind of bad. She is too wild to become a house-cat, but fortunately not wild enough that she would have to be put down. Evidently she's been spayed, and will eventually gain employment as an official rodent control officer at a farm or vineyard, safely away from nesting areas.

However, I have a problem. I don't know what to name them! They have provisional names, but they're already growing out of them. They are brothers, so I'd like to name them accordingly. If you know any good names of brothers, or brothers-in-arms, from history or literature, please post below.

Candidate names are :

• Buzz and Neil
• Romulus and Remus
• Castor and Pollux
• Lio and Erasmus
• Watson and Crick
• Wilbur and Orville
• Yuri and Glenn

I tried to think of some characters from Shakespeare, but most of the brothers in the plays murder each other, or do other dastardly deeds. Not very fitting for these two guys. They are just about the least mischievous kittens I've ever met. The worst they do to each other is to induce unwanted consciousness via squirming.

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 received my buccal swab kit from the National Marrow Donor Program. It took about three minutes to prepare. It's about as hard as brushing your teeth.

I especially like the biohazard sticker for sealing the sample card. Then, you just stick it in the mail.

They'll do the tissue typing, and (hopefully) add me to the database of marrow donors.

Seriously, why haven't you signed up yet?

Dear Iranian Security Forces:

Welcome to Vort.org, now from Tehran. Please spend as much time looking at this page as possible. There are lots and lots of links to follow. Who knows what important security information you will find? It is very important that you read every single post on this blog. Carefully. And discuss each of them with your superiors.

I may have scattered the names and locations of many active dissidents in old posts on my blog. Then again, maybe I haven't. You won't know until you look. Please take your time.

You can be from Tehran too:

<meta name="ICBM" content="35.696189, 51.422961">
<meta name="geo.position" content="35.696189, 51.422961">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Tehran, Iran">
<meta name="geo.region" content="ir">

If you can read Hebrew well enough to find the right contact form on their damn web site, please tell Bezeq that the following IP addresses are part of a botnet:

84.109.41.197
84.109.105.38
84.109.42.218
84.109.105.30
84.109.105.218
84.109.120.173

That is all.

Starting today, the first 46,000 who sign up can join the National Marrow Donor Program for free. Tissue typing normally costs about $50, so this is pretty neat.

I don't get along very well with needles, but this is kind of, you know, important. And it's fairly unlikely that any particular donor will be asked to donate. Tissue matches are very specific, which is why it's so important to get lots of people in the database.

If you are Asian, or any sort of nifty minority, then it's extra important that you sign up. If you are mixed race, then it's very important.

Mimi lost a friend to cancer this year because they couldn't find a marrow match. There could have been one more name called at her graduation if there'd been just a few more biracial hits in the marrow database last year.

Look at it this way. Superman saves people all the time, but he has to go through all sorts of bother and trouble with the secret identity and such. A few days of lower back pain seems like a pretty awesome deal in comparison.

If I'm ever asked to donate marrow, I'm getting a cape.

Now that she's all graduated and stuff, Mimi came out to Davis for my birthday this week. She took me to this place in Napa called, of all things, Ubuntu. Not only is it a nice word in Zulu, but it's also a Linux distribution, a restaurant and a yoga studio. Anyway, they were the runner up for best new restaurant of 2008 in the New York Times Food & Wine section.

It was delicious, but kind of difficult to describe. Evidently, the chef walks out into his garden each morning, peers at the ripening ingreedients, and invents the day's menu based on what's ready to eat. Neat!

Anyway, Mimi is here in Davis until Friday. We're having a great time biking around town and doing Davis-y things.

On Friday morning, a fellow named Boris and two of his friends got on their bicycles for a ride. As they pedaled along, observing the speed limit and traffic rules, a speeding truck overtook them. As it bounced over a speed bump, it's rear door swung open and snagged a parked car, and flung it across the road. It came within a few inches of crushing Boris and his friends.

So far, the event I've described above seems fairly unremarkable. Things like that happen all the time. There are two unusual things about this crash, though. First of all, the incident was caught on tape by a security camera, so we know exactly what happened. The three near-victims were Lord Adonis, Kulveer Ranger, and Boris Johnson; the UK's minister of transport, the director of transport of the city of London, and the mayor of London, respectively.

Helmet in hand, the mayor of London walks over for a better look at the car that almost killed him. This iPhone shot is by user Beatnic on Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

The three were cycling through London to scope out possible routes for a system of protected bicycle "super-highways." Mr. Johnson had the following to say about the incident:

"I am relieved that no-one was hurt, but this incident reinforces the need for us to make London's roads safer for cyclists, which I am determined to do and to make London the best city for cyclists in Europe.

"Cycle Super Highways, which are part of our record investment in cycling, will play a central role in this, providing clearly demarcated routes for cyclists that lorry drivers and others will be aware of."

What does this mean for American cities? I would take three lessons. First, London is huge, cramped, and damp. Yet London is looking to bicycles as a significant part of its transportation mix, and the city government takes it seriously enough that the mayor himself is regularly out surveying bicycle routes. Bicycles are a serious metropolitan transportation system, not just a recreational activity. Relative to London, cities like Davis are in a much stronger position when it comes to cycling; it should press its advantage.

Second, helmet laws and cycling safety initiatives are important, but even the most careful cyclist -- even the mayor of London -- can do very little to protect himself from a rampaging truck.

Third, out-of-control vehicles are depressingly common. If you want bicycles to play a serious role in municipal transportation, you must deal with vehicle safety.

As if vehicle safety weren't worth pursuing anyway! 43,000 Americans die every year in car accidents. That's like one 9/11 hijacking every month. Bringing this number down will take more than airbags and antilock breaks. It will require making some changes in the way we drive, and the roads we drive on.

NASA's Earth Observatory posted a fantastic article yesterday about a big computation effort led by Paul Newman, a scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Newmans's group set out to answer the question, "What would have happened if we had failed to regulate CFC gases?"

CFC gases were essentially banned in 1989 through the Montreal Protocol, the world's first international environmental treaty of global scope. So, what did we avoid by banning CFCs?

Newman's group found that we avoided a previously unanticipated runaway cascade of ozone depletion, which would have led to a nearly complete loss of UV protection over the temperate and tropical regions -- not just over the poles.

The year is 2065. Nearly two-thirds of Earth’s ozone is gone—not just over the poles, but everywhere. The infamous ozone hole over Antarctica, first discovered in the 1980s, is a year-round fixture, with a twin over the North Pole. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation falling on mid-latitude cities like Washington, D.C., is strong enough to cause sunburn in just five minutes. DNA-mutating UV radiation is up more than 500 percent, with likely harmful effects on plants, animals, and human skin cancer rates.

By the end of the collapse, the UV index would have exceeded 30 in temperate North America. A UV index greater than 10 is considered extremely dangerous.

We're talking about radiation levels similar to Hiroshima in the days following the atomic bomb (though at a different spectrum), except across the whole planet, every single day, for centuries. A walk on the beach on a sunny afternoon would have been permanently disfiguring, and possibly lethal.

Instead of this hellish scenario, CFCs peaked around the year 2000, and they're already down about four percent. The simulations predict that the ozone layer should finish healing by about 2065. Sweet.

We saved the world, at least from that particular disaster. What did we sacrifice? Basically, nothing. We had to switch to different refrigerants, and it took a few years before people figured out how to make air conditioners that worked as well as the old ones. It might even have been a net positive for the economy, since it accelerated engineering innovation and equipment upgrades, and thus efficiency.

Carbon dioxide is going to be a bigger challenge. We emit a lot more carbon than CFCs, and the things we do that emit carbon are, for the most part, much more fundamental to our economy than running refrigerators and air conditioners. Nevertheless, the Montreal Protocol is a valuable lesson. It shows that politics can influence the world in positive ways, even when everything is a mess. 1989 was not exactly a banner year for political stability, good leadership, or economic strength.

Mimi just called a few minutes ago to say she finished running her half-marathon! Neat!

Now she just needs to finish her thesis...

The term "alternative energy" annoys me. It is a sloppy bit of wordsmithing. Do we really have an alternative to this?

No, actually. We don't. It's obvious, by simple inspection, that the scene above cannot continue. Even if we wanted to continue making electricity this way, it is impossible. Any activity this intensive and inefficient will run its course very quickly. It could happen in several ways, but the simplest and surest way it will stop is that they will simply run out of coal.

On one hand, we have a few reasonably non-destructive means of generating energy, like wind and solar. On the other hand, we have idiocy and crime. How is it alternative energy when there is essentially no choice?

As I've pointed out, coal is responsible for most of our carbon emissions, but provides less than a third of our generating capaicty. That is stupid. I suggest we dump the terms "green energy" and "alternative energy," and simply call those things energy, and use the term "dumb energy" to refer to coal.

Interesting thing of the day : If you plug the following nucleotide sequence into Google :

"gctagttaaa aaaggaaatt catacccaaa"

The only hit you will find is the Swine Flu genome. Google is a sequence homology tool!

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'm not sure if I'm glad or sorry to have missed this conversation.

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'd like to give a big fat raspberry to the X.org people today, and possibly the Debian X.org maintainers, for pushing busted X.org packages. Booo!

If you should happen to download said packages, you will find mouse and keyboard input on your computer completely disabled once the login manager comes up. If you log in via ssh (or boot with "single" in your kernel boot options), and look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and observe the following,

(II) The server relies on HAL to provide the list of input devices.
	If no devices become available, reconfigure HAL or disable 
        AllowEmptyInput.
(WW) AllowEmptyInput is on, devices using drivers 'kbd', 'mouse' or
        'vmmouse' will be disabled.
(WW) Disabling Keyboard0

then you have contracted this particular affliction.

Dear X people, why the fuck would you make the default behavior to ignore properly configured devices? Especially when this can brick peoples' computers? Yes, I know about this. I stand by my raspberry. HAL still doesn't enable the right quirks for my motherboard, even though I submitted FDI files more than two years ago. HAL does not, and will not ever, work for everyone. When it works, it's nice, and I'm in favor of it. But please, please stop making life suck for people HAL doesn't help.

A pox on you all!

Anyway, the way you fix this particular bug is to add the line

Option "AllowEmptyInput" "false"

to the ServerLayout section of your xorg.conf file. For example

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier      "Default Layout"
    Screen          "Default Screen"
    InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
    InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
    Option          "AllowEmptyInput"    "false"
EndSection

Props to K.Mandla for figuring it out.

A little while ago, I was riding home on my wonderful Brompton bicycle, and the chain tensioner suddenly disengaged. That had never happened before, and I discovered that the gear on the chain tensioner had completely smashed to bits. Here's what it looked like :

After puzzling about it for a while, I think I understand what happened. I use the same chain oil on my Brompton that I use on my racing bike. The "oil" is actually a mixture of a heavy lubricant in a volatile solvent. The solvent evaporates after coating the chain, and dissolves whatever gunk has accumulated. I think the solvent damaged the plastic. I've seen this happen with some plastics when they come into contact with gasoline. The gasoline dissolves the plasticizing agents, and leaves behind an open matrix of molecules, like a very, very fine sponge. The open matrix has a huge surface area and oxidizes rapidly. Your nice flexible plastic turns into something hard and crumbly, like a stale cookie.

That's what I think happened here. The remaining bits of plastic are still relatively flexible, but the bits that broke off have turned into a powdery mess.

The guy who sold me my bike offered to let me buy an idler wheel off of one of the bikes in his stock, but I didn't want another plastic gear. Here is what I built :

I bought a standard anodized aluminum derailleur gear from a local bike shop, and attached it to the Brompton chain tensioner arm with a few pennies worth of standard hardware. The new idler wheel (gear? cog?) slides along a little stainless steel tube I picked up at the hardware store and cut to length. This gives it enough play to allow for easy shifting. The tube has just the right tolerance to allow the gear to spin very easily, but not wobble.

Here's the exploded view :

From top to bottom, the parts are :

• regular old bolt
• two washers
• stainless tube
• gear
• another washer
• lock washer
• nut

The gear is part of a Shift Biscuits pully set (though probably any pully set would work), and the steel tube is 7.94mm x 7.4mm (stock No. 7117) cut to length with a hacksaw (this took a while). The rest of the hardware is standard hardware store stuff.

I had to saw off the plastic axle tube on the chain tensioner arm because it would have prevented the idler wheel from sliding into the right position for the outer gear. I chose a bolt with a hex-head that fit snugly into the socket on the tensioner arm (similar to the bolts on the toggles for locking the frame in place). Once the nut is tightened against the lock washer, the axle is extremely rigid. The gear slips across the tube with almost zero play.

The shifting action is actually much smoother than it was with the plastic gear, and the bike seems to make a little less noise than I remember (that could be my imagination).

Yay! I've got my bike back, and without another dorky plastic gear, too. Neat!

To my Iranian readers, happy new year! It seems president Obama is taking the opportunity to deliver a friendly message, too.

So, here's a link to the story on the BBC. Sorry, I couldn't resist. And sorry for the gratuitous alliteration.

Florence Itken, my great aunt, passed away yesterday. I was always very close with her growing up, and I lived with her for a year after I graduated from college. She was a great friend and teacher.

Flo was a teacher, in fact, from the time she was a little girl until the moment she slipped away yesterday. I thought I might share a few words about this great passion of hers.

Just as the Great Depression struck its most demoralizing chords, her father Solomon passed away, leaving the family to live off of my great grandmother's meager income as sweatshop worker. Like many first-generation Americans, Flo provided a lot of practical support for her mother, and helped her two sisters with their schoolwork. Flo was twelve, my grandmother Vivian was nine and my other aunt Selma was five. Florence spent her teenage years watching over her sisters's schoolwork and helping her mother.

Anna had missed the opportunity for formal education, and so my great grandmother was determined that her daughters would receive the best education possible. She had grown up in a rabbinical household in what is now Belarus, but she left for America (alone) as a young teenager. Later in life, she was an avid reader in English, Yiddish, Russian, and a bit of German and Hebrew. But until the Depression and the war were over, and her daughters safely making their way in life, all of that was on hold. Anna's hopes for her daughters' future depended on public education. Sight unseen, she placed those hopes on the University of California.

Whenever I think of their journey from New York to Los Angeles, I always think of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and imagine the surviving Itkens making their way among the bedraggled columns of Americans on the long road to California (though, I cannot imagine them tolerating any literal bedragglement). The fictional Joads fleeing the Dust Bowl for greener pastures of the California Central Valley, the actual Itkins fleeing the tenements of the Lower East Side for the sanctuary California classrooms. Fortunately, things turned out much better for the Itkins than the Joads.

All three of the Itkin girls went to UCLA, and all three of them became teachers. Florence became a colleague and friend of the great educator Corinne A. Seeds, for whom UCLA's Lab School is named. To give you an idea of the company Flo kept, you can read about Ms. Seeds (Flo always called her Ms. Seeds, even though they were close friends) in Pedagogies of Resistance: Women Educator Activists, 1880-1960, or if you're near Tufts, you can look up Professsor Kathleen Weiler, who is writing a biography of Ms. Seeds.

Barely out of college, Flo was one of the few people who publicly supported Ms. Seeds' opposition to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (for which both of them received death threats). Along with Ms. Seeds and others, my aunt was one of the shock troops of John Dewey's progressive movement. It is because of them that primary eduction is actually educational.

Flo was the principal of Kenter Canyon Elementary for, I think, about forty years. During her tenure at Kenter Canyon Elementary, it was the top-performing elementary school in the LA Unified School District. This was in no small part because Flo was an excellent teacher herself, and because she acted as a human firewall between her staff and "the conniving bureaucrats downtown," "the pencil pushers" and "the idiot school board." She retired on May 31st, 1980. Flo has teased me for my whole life on account of the fact that I caused my mother to miss her retirement party by arriving in the world on that particular day.

When I saw her on Saturday, she used what little energy she had to ask me three questions: How is school? When is Mimi graduating? Tell me what you've learned. Those were her last words to me, save three. To understand those three, I'll have to make a little diversion.

For Flo, politics was an integral part of being a teacher. She believed that a good teacher should fight for her students, and should not be shy about carrying the fight wherever it had to go. The task of an educator is to create opportunities for her students. That means that an educator is called upon to confront prejudice and ignorance when they threaten those opportunities. Flo believed that smashing social barriers was just as important as multiplication tables (although, this was not a simple distinction to her, since one can smash social barriers by teaching multiplication tables, depending on who was doing the teaching and who was doing the learning).

Of course, she didn't clutter up her classroom with politics. Education is a science, and she was a serious practitioner. Her politics was about clearing the road ahead of her students.

It came as a huge shock to me that her views were so forceful. She was the very model of an elementary school principal -- proper, patient, and professional. She was the sort of lady that hippies feared; she would have told them to wash up, given them The Look and used The Voice, and made them feel very foolish.

Flo kept her radicalism under tight control, unleashing it in calculated measures. The people who saw her act on those principles never knew what hit them. She only brought out the knives in board meetings and budget committees. Most of the time I knew her, she seemed like a funny, sweet old lady. But when Her Children (or students generally) were threatened, the sweet old lady was suddenly made of steel. She would, and did, go to war for her pupils and for her teaching staff. I suspect that her first objection to Japanese internment was that it took students out of their classrooms, and death threats weren't going to stop her from raising hell about it.

I was with Flo through the 2004 election, and she was devastated. George Bush was, in her view, a teacher's worst nightmare. He was a great propagator of ignorance, advocate of prejudice, a spoiled, dull child of a rich politician, and a conniving bureaucrat. Flo described the mandatory testing in the No Child Left Behind Act as "a bunch of skull-measuring" and "a jobs program for bad administrators."

A few days after Kerry lost, I was having breakfast with Flo and talking about the election. Flo waived at the double fistfull of pills she was trying to swallow and said, "Damn him, now I'm going to have to do this for another four years." Like all of Flo's Pronouncements, it was accomplished. She weathered four years of Parkinson's disease, heart failure, blindness, broken bones and (most painfully) the dismal news of the last four years so that she could deliver her vote for the sake of her students.

I asked her what she thinks of our new president. She gasped, and gave me the thumbs up. "I'm so proud," she said, speaking, I know, as a teacher.

Florence loved flowers, but if you really want to honor her memory, please do so by supporting teachers.

I wish the WiFi Alliance people would stop worrying about the maximum speed of the 802.11 family of protocols, and instead worry about improving cooperation among networks. When 802.11b was new and shiny, it was fairly unlikely that you'd have to worry about spectrum competition. Now, wherever you are likely to find one network, you are likely to find a dozen.

Usually, this kind of mess happens in residential areas, but I've seen it lab buildings also. I would be more than happy to route a few of my neighbor's packets on my network in exchange for less spectrum congestion. What is needed here is a protocol that would allow owners of clashing access points to decide who they are friends with.

Of course, this would mean that anyone who owned an access point would have to be able to assert common carrier status, which could have some interesting side effects.

As a Jew (or as some people might insist, someone of Jewish ancestry) and as an American, I'd like go on record and say that Avigdor Lieberman is a fucking piece of shit. So is his party, so his his loyalty oath, and so is everything he stands for. And I'd like to extend a big fat "Fuck You" to everyone who voted for him, and to everyone who signs his loyalty oath, and to every fellow traveler throughout history.

If you don't know who he is, imagine crossbreeding Ann Coulter, George Wallace, Sarah Palin and Joseph McCarthy, and then Bar Mitzvah the result.

I just got my first pieces back from glaze firing today! They turned out much better than I expected, though, honestly, I wasn't expecting much.

This is a smallish cereal bowl (about eight inches in diameter). It is, thus far, the most symmetrical piece I've made, and I'm really happy with it.

This was the first piece I threw. I haven't thrown clay since I was about eight years old, so this is the first in about twenty years! I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's actually reasonably usable and not altogether hideous.

After convincing Kyrgyzstan to evict us from our air base at Manas, Russia is evidently offering us transit rights to resupply our troops in Afghanistan. As I was looking at the map in the Sacramento Bee, I was reminded of what a logistical nightmare our operations in Afghanistan are. There is a reason the region has such a violet history; it has the most unfavorable political and geographical cartography on the planet.

And guess who is smack in the middle of it?

I made the map above as a friendly and non-scientific reminder about why diplomacy with Iran is so important to American interests. The outcome might not be a friendly Iran, but it would be really great if we could, you know, fly over it without getting shot at.

I went to see Kodo at the Mondavi center this Wednesday. I've been listening to Kodo since Mondo Head came out in 2001, and they just keep getting more awesome. I especially enjoyed Yoshie Sunahata's solo, which I'd not heard before.

I cannot stress this enough: Go see this show if you can.

I was reading Planet Gnome, and followed Pascal Terjan's post to the PyPy project, and decided to play around with it. I've been studying for midterms all day, and this looked like a mildly educational way of goofing off for half an hour.

After the initial amusement running some of my python code in a python interpreter written in python and running in another python interpreter, it occured to me that there is absolutely no way I could articulate why I think this is cool to someone who didn't already think it was cool.

Yet it is, nevertheless, kind of awesome.

Today is that last day of George Bush's presidency. I have waited eight years to write those words, and oh how sweet they are!

A good friend of mine remarked recently that while he liked reading my blog, it was depressing him. So I went back over the archives, and I realized that a lot of it has been pretty depressing. But then again, it's been a pretty depressing time for America, and I think a lot about national issues. There have also been some rough patches in my own life; my advisor at UCLA closed down his group and moved to the UK, and I had to figure out what to do with myself. That has colored my writing.

Tomorrow, two things are happening that believe will administer a stiff dose of optimism around here. First, America will be under new management. Second, I am scrapping my plans to work in physics, and joining Jonathan Eisen's lab. These are not wholly unrelated events, and so I decided to address them together.

First up, the big picture stuff.

On the evening of November 7th, 2000, I discovered rather to my surprise that I do, in fact, love my country. My recollection of the evening and the time that followed has an amusing resemblance to a romantic comedy; I played the insensitive jerk who doesn't appreciate his wonderful girlfriend until she is suddenly gone. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that she is carried away by baboons. Or perhaps Richard Gere. Or maybe Richard Gere playing a baboon.

Then, for the first excruciating half of the movie, I slowly begin to understand how much I needed her. I discover, to the merriment of all, that I cannot cook, that I don't understand money, and so on. The movie trailer features a memorable scene in which I am eating molding Chinese takeout in my underpants as my life comes crashing down around me.

Then, and epiphany! I should win back the girl from the baboons, or Richard Gere, or whatever. Some amusing side characters are introduced who help me on my hilarious and humiliating quest of self-discovery and girl-retrieving.

That's kind of how it went. Instantly, as soon as the results started to come in, I felt an icy lump in my stomach. When it became clear that George Bush was going to win, I started to recognize the feeling. It was familiar. The last time I had experienced it, I was a fifteen-year-old at the bottom of a drainage ditch, looking at how my right hand was twisted around backwards and resting backwards against my forearm, the radius snapped and the ulna cracked lengthwise and telescoped into itself.

The most lucid memory I have about breaking my arm was that it did not hurt. The pain came much later, after everything was nicely set and wrapped up, and the doctors had explained that it would heal nicely. But at the bottom of the drainage ditch, there was this very singular feeling. Not fear, or pain, or surprise, but cold, icy dread, like the firmware of my brain had suddenly broadcast the message, CRITICAL ERROR! and terminated everything else in my head. Emotions, ideas, thoughts, memories, all were gone. There was nothing but a paralyzing tsunami of Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

That's what I felt on November 8th, 2000. Something terrible had happened. I had lost something really, really important, but I was too dumb to understand what it was. My country, which I had loved all along but never appreciated, had been carried away by baboons.

As the months and years unfolded, I got to know what I had lost from the shape of the hole it left. I discovered the first ragged edge of that hole during the Hainan Island incident. America suddenly seemed bumbling and weak, thundering with indignation and then groveling pathetically. The State Department evidently couldn't even be bothered to write the official letter of condolence for Wang Wei's death in Chinese, and so the CCP naturally translated it to sound like an admission of guilt. The Bush presidency was pretty much downhill from there.

But this is a romantic comedy, after all. I spent the summer of 2006 in Oxford, mostly apologizing for the idiot in the White House to all the nice people I met from the rest of the planet. I came home determined to get my country back. So I started researching candidates for the midterm elections. There were some really great people running, and so I sent in my tiny little donations over the internet. I signed petitions, sent grumpy letters to newspapers and did a little phone banking. Six months later, a nice lady from San Francisco became the first woman to wield the Speaker's gavel.

So, you get the idea. Struggles, setbacks, successes; lots of painful, cringe-worthy scenes that screenplay authors think are funny. I've got my country back, and I've learned my lesson. I'm never going to take her for granted again. Today, the credits roll. The movie is over.

The prognosis for the next couple of years is dismal. The economy sucks, our financial system has utterly collapsed. Wall Street is a financial Chernobyl; we've gone through the blackout, the meltdown, a series of ruinous detonations as various subsystems superheat and explode, and we are now watching it belch radioactive smoke into the Jet Stream as the whole thing slowly burns. We are also hurtling towards a point-of-no-return in the great phase diagram of atmospheric carbon. Oh, and we're fighting two wars.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy. Our problems have solutions. We've just elected a guy who has a very clear view of this colossal mess we're in, and doesn't flinch.

Now, I'll take a step down in scale a bit, and talk about why I'm leaving physics.

I decided to study physics for a very simple reason; our planet's atmosphere is filling up with carbon, and if we don't stop digging shit out of the ground and lighting it on fire, we're going to wreck the place. Like most people, I figured that we need a big source of energy that doesn't involve burning black stuff from the ground.

But the more I learned about the energy economy, the more I came to understand how wrong I was. Yes, we use a lot of energy. Most of it is from burning black shit we dig out of the ground. But for the most part, we fritter it away. We spend gigawatts lighting empty rooms, running idle computers and refrigerating nonperishable food. We blow a big fraction of our electricity into the night sky, benefiting no one, except perhaps future generations of alien astronomers. We blow billions of gallons of fuel driving to places we don't want to go, flying to places we don't want to see, and moving products we don't enjoy.

In the very near future, we're going to have less fuel and less electricity. And you know what? It's going to be fine. Little by little, prices will go up, and the waste will go away. In retrospect, we will see that most of the energy we use today was utterly and completely wasted. We will learn to waste less of it, and everything will be fine. People will wonder what the big deal was.

There will be some fancy technologies, like solar panels and wind turbines. I learned a bit about that by designing a solar array for my mother's house this summer. It generates more than she uses, cost about as much as a small car, and took three days to install. It will pay for itself in about sixteen years, or maybe sooner if rates keep climbing, and it will last for about 40 years. It was almost disappointing how straight-forward it was (though it was a lot of fun). Cutting her energy use from almost 40 kilowatt hours a day to less than 10 was totally painless. When it's time to replace the washing machine and the refrigerator, her house will draw less than 7 kilowatt-hours a day. The panels generate about 13 to 17 kilowatt hours a day; her last electric bill was negative $102.

In a nutshell, here is the solution to the energy crisis : Stop being a pussy.

We don't need to be "saved" from this. Not by fusion reactors. Not by advanced nuclear whatever. Not by magical carbon sequestration. The human race will have fewer gigawatts to play around with, and so we'll use them more carefully. The reality of the energy crisis is this: Our sense of entitlement and its associated low inclination to innovate is coming face to face with the laws of physics. Physics will win. Exit crisis, pursued by a bear.

Energy is neither cheap nor abundant. It never has been, and it never will be. If you don't believe me, get on a stationary bike and do 860 calories of work (you'll burn about 2400 calories, or three good meals). That's one kilowatt-hour. You will be tired as hell. Right now, you pay about a dime for that much work. No matter how you generate it, it's crazy to pay so little for so much. It should come as no surprise that there are hidden fees in the fine print, like "may destroy the Earth." Cheap energy was always a Faustian pact.

There are lots of good reasons to build reactor tokamaks, but cheap energy isn't one of them. Fusion would be a great power source for space exploration; the fuel is everywhere, you don't have to worry as much about radiation, and you get your vacuum pumping for free. Sometime soon, I think we'll do just that. But for now, I simply refuse to grind through all that horrible mathematics just so Cody McFuckhead can leave his X-Box running while he goes on spring break.

This is actually a delightful discovery. As long as I was getting my understanding of the energy situation from media sources, it looked very very grim. Things look totally different once you become conversant in the ways we make, transport and use energy. Climate change is a real crisis and a real problem, but the solution is anything but rocket science : Bulldoze all coal-fired power plants, and forbid the construction of new ones. Do it on a nice predictable schedule, and let utility prices rise just at a pace that allows people to keep up with the adjustments they have to make. Provide targeted aid where it's needed, like weatherizing and insulating houses for low income families. Space it out over ten years, and start with the utility markets that can adjust the fastest.

Bulldozing our coal fired plants would cut America's carbon emissions in half, an only sacrifice about 27% of our generating capacity. If organized carefully, utility prices would rise to less than $0.40 a kilowatt hour, and then fall to near previous levels as conservation measures come on line. Why is that so scary? We don't suffer from a lack of alternative energy, we suffer from a lack of balls.

I thought about this a lot over the summer. Obama's victory finally gave me the clear concience to change direction. The newspwpers are filled with hand-wringing about the budget deficit, but I'm more concerned about America's chutzpah deficit. Obama might not be able to fix the budget anytime soon, but he's already recapitalizing our country with a desperately needed infusion of guts.

I was always interested in the computational side of physics, and so a shift to computational biology is not as big a shift as I'd feared, especially since I am only just starting. It's a different world, and I'm already starting to feel that it's a better fit for me.

Energy has always fascinated me. "Follow the money" was Mark Felt's advise to Bob Woodward during Watergate. If you want to understand politics, economics and history, money is the skeleton that gives shape to events. The currency of the universe is energy. It is the specie of all things from galaxies to microbes. If you want to understand the physical world, you follow the energy.

The energy balance sheets seem to contradict the idea that we have a crisis of power generation. Quite the contrary; they indicate a massive glut. That in itself raises other questions. For example, how has this glut of cheap energy distorted our economy? How will the end of this glut change our economy?

I'm not an economist, and I don't want to be one. In any event, following the energy leads to other more interesting questions. How has the flow of energy shaped us? A photon strays into the waiting chloroplast, ultimately making a sugar molecule. The molecule becomes part of the meal of a gazelle. The gazelle and a hunter sprint together through a blazing sunset over the Rift Valley a hundred millennia ago. We owe our existence to a wrinkle in the ledger books of the planetary energy accountancy. How does that work?

Things are looking up.

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.

This quarter, I'm taking :

• Mathematical Methods : Laplace transforms, Fourier transforms, Greens functions, and their applications to partial differential equations.
• Quantum Mechanics: Again. For the heck of it.
• Numerical Methods: Analysis of the performance, stability and error propagation of numerical algorithms in finite precision systems.

So far, it's way more fun than last quarter. Still, I'm disappointed that the molecular structures course I wanted to take conflicts with numerical methods. Hopefully I can take it next quarter.

The preliminary exam for mathematical methods is in the middle of finals week at the end of this quarter. That is going to suck.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I saw an awful lot of houses. Some of them made me a little jealous, and others made my skin crawl. All of them got me thinking about the housing crisis.

While the housing bubble was in full swing, I had a very strong intuitive reaction to house prices; everywhere I looked, I saw prices that felt two to ten times too high. As it turns out, my intuition was right. Houses that were worth something were vastly overvalued, and there were an awful lot of houses that simply should not have been built at all. The latter was usually due to a combination of uninspired design, remote location, and natural hazards. Again, it turned out that I was right. (I don't claim exclusive clairvoyance here. Lots of people felt the same way.)

There are many things that helped create this situation. The answer the idiot-media has been pushing is that subprime loans flooded the market with money by giving loans to people who didn't qualify. The flood of cash drove up prices, which are now coming down. Leverage is definitely part of the problem, but the subprime aspect is overblown and widely misunderstood.

The fundamental problem is that there simply isn't enough affordable housing. People need homes, and there are good financial reasons why people want to own their homes. If home prices are out of reach, then of course people will abuse leverage whenever it is available. The market simply isn't supplying enough affordable housing.

Why not? The simple answer is the conflict of geography and geometry.

There are two categories of factors that contribute to the value of a home; the home itself, and the resources that can be tapped from the home. The resources available from the house provide options to the homeowner; more options mean better quality of life. More options also mean that a particular house could satisfy the needs of a greater number of potential owners, giving it more resale value. History has proved again and again that the second category is vastly more important than the first. Hence the expression, "location, location, location." This is why airless, vermin-infested closet space in Manhattan sells for millions of dollars while palatial estates in Riverside can be had for less than a tenth as much. It goes without saying that the owner of the airless Manhattan flat has access to more resources, and resources of higher quality, than the owner of the ranch in Riverside. That is the geographical aspect of the problem.

The geometry aspect comes into play when you consider how structures are distributed and how resources are made available in these structures. The Earth provides an approximately two-dimensional plane (actually, modern economic and military history can be viewed as a consequence of the increasing importance of the Earth's spherical geometry, but right now I'm thinking of more local effects -- read, for example, the chapter "Global Midway" in War and Remembrance to get a sense of what I mean). Resources available from a particular location scale like the square of the density of resources within the distance accessible from that point. As the density increases, people will start building upwards (sky scrapers) and downwards (excavation). This introduces a volumetric effect, causing the available options to scale like the cube of the local density of resources. As density continues to increase, it becomes financially viable to build mass transit, which extends the radius of practically available options. This introduces a quartic scaling. As the density increases further, it becomes necessary to seek synergies and greater efficiency to minimize use of space. This introduces a scaling at the fifth power of density.

So, as the density of a settlement increases, geometry militates the use of ever more potent means to reduce the footprint of an available resource, which in turn facilitates greater density. Each new means of increasing density adds an additional linear scaling, so that the ultimate scaling is approximately

Of course, a polynomial of infinite order is the Taylor expansion of the exponential function. So, we can claim that the approximate value of a home scales exponentially with the density of resources in that area. The first three terms are required by simple geometry, and higher terms increasingly represent technological and social responses.

Really, this is the lower bound on the value; the value of a home also depends on how many other people might want it. If people select a home mostly for the choices it makes available to them, and each person has a different collection of choices they want, then there is some kind of combinatorial scaling as well (I'll leave this one as an exercise; you can get several different scalings depending on the assumptions you make).

Meanwhile, the value of the house itself scales linearly with the cost of the stuff you put into building it (labor and materials). However, nicer houses tend to be larger, and thus neighborhoods of big houses tend to be sparse. Thus, if the value of a home is the sum of the value of its location and its embodied value, embodied value will inevitably be overwhelmed by the locational value. This is a classical Malthusian conflict, but in this case the functions represent different things.

So, why the crisis? Well, we have artificially capped the growth of density. Zoning laws forbid the construction of new Manhattans, and require the gradual erosion of existing high-density neighborhoods as their buildings wear out and need to be renovated or replaced.

This is the story we tell each other about how this happened; the automobile gave people greater mobility, allowing them to live in the suburbs and countryside while they still work in the city. So, there was a great exodus from city centers to suburbia. This narrative has things exactly backwards. Density at the city periphery was legally capped and aggressively driven down, which forced people into the suburbs to seek affordable houses, making automobiles necessary to access resources that were previously available on foot. The first story is a marketing pitch, the second is recorded history.

In the early post-war period, opinion surveys consistently showed that the top transportation issue on the minds of Americans was the improvement of streetcar service, and the top housing issue was the rapid inflation of rent and other prices in city centers after the wartime price controls were lifted. People did not particularly want cars and suburban bungalows; they simply made a rational choice in the face of exploding rent and decaying public transportation. Even so, suburbia remained relatively unattractive for most people until Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, and picked up steam in the early 1960s when racial tensions transformed the suburban exodus from an economic issue into a racial one. See, for example, the abandonment of Detroit, or white flight from Los Angeles to Orange County. That is the story of suburbia.

There is one more geometric factor to consider regarding the value of a house. The cheapest possible thing to add to a house is square footage. The "core" of the house -- the appliances, utilities, cabinetwork and main structural elements -- represent the bulk of the cost of home construction. Big houses are worth less, on a per-area basis, than small ones.

For the last 50 years, we've been building increasingly sparse neighborhoods of increasingly big houses. In real terms, the cost of ownership has gone up dramatically (heating, cooling, lighting, transportation, maintenance, taxes), while the real value of our houses and neighborhoods has decreased. Both of these scalings are exponential in nature; a modest increase in square footage translates into an exponential reduction in value per square foot.

In 1950, the average American home was 983 square feet. In 2004, it was 2349 square feet. In the neighborhoods most impacted by the building frenzy from 2004 to 2007, it almost doubled again, to around 4000 square feet for new construction. We're talking about a quadrupling of home sizes in 50 years!

Bigger homes require more land, and so density of resources available from these places must scale inversely with the square of home size -- and by the reverse of the argument above, decreasing density introduces higher order scalings whose sum produces an negative exponential effect. So, as homes increase in size, their value will exponentially approach the cost of the raw materials that went into them, until at some point the value falls beneath the associated costs, and owning one becomes a net liability.

The benefits and costs of owning a particular home are tied to labor market conditions, commodity prices, nearby development, and many other things. Thus, the narrower the margin between the benefits and the costs, the more likely the normal fluctuations of the economy will land you with a net liability. Adding leverage into the mix just makes the margins even narrower.

There is the nub of the issue. "Affordable" doesn't mean low price; it means getting a lot of value for a given cost (I am using the terms 'value' and 'cost' in a concrete sense, so you may substitute 'enjoyment' and 'effort' if you like). It means having a comfortable margin between the benefits of home ownership and its associated costs. It means a margin that is wide enough to absorb the risks we face in the event that they become realities. It means that you can still pay your bills if gas prices go up, or if you get a new job, or whatever. This lack of affordable housing doesn't just hurt poor people, it hurts all home buyers. We have a huge glut of houses that have virtually no value in them it all, except maybe as firewood, and almost no available houses with a decent number of readily available resources.

This isn't a situation we can bounce back from through financial mumbo-jumbo. The problem is intrinsic to our built infrastructure. The solution requires physical changes to our landscape. It will take a long time. Much hay has been made about the culpability of Wall Street in this crisis, usually portraying "Main Street" as the innocent victim. This is bullshit. Main Street is just as culpable, and maybe more so. Solving this crisis will require re-writing building codes and zoning laws, not just baking regulations. The crisis will ease up when we have enough compact, high-quality homes in good neighborhoods. By "enough," I mean we have to keep building them until the prices for these places puts them within reach of households at or below the median income.

It really doesn't help that our cultural prejudices insist on equating square footage with value; it is a false economy. Square footage is the high-fructose corn syrup of our financial system; cheap to produce, tragically unhealthy, and no matter how much you have, it never satisfies.

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.

Since I've been telling anyone who'll listen for the last couple of years that we've got to use trains for travel more often, I decided that I should take my own advice. I'm going to visit my little sister in Oklahoma, so I'm taking Amtrak there from Los Angeles. I'm taking the Texas Eagle to Fort Worth, and then the Heartland Flyer to Norman, Oklahoma.

It's going to be a long trip (about two days). It could be a lot shorter, but we've been letting our passenger rail service rot for sixty years. I'll post pictures from the trip when I get to Norman, and sooner if I can snipe some WiFi along the way. Until I do, here is a picture of the Capital Corridor train rolling into Davis.

I just got the email from AIP a few hours ago; my first paper as first author is published!

It was a surprisingly long process. I think most of the delays were due to my own lack of experience. Hopefully, they are lessons learned, and my next trip through the publishing gauntlet will be easier, faster, and hopefully even more fun.

My uncle asked me if I would try to explain what I did in simple terms, so here it goes.

There is a thingy called a tokamak that is basically a very fancy Thermos. It keeps hot things hot. If you can make the stuff inside hot enough, it will work like a nuclear reactor. This is interesting because it is possible to build much better, much safer nuclear reactors this way. The trouble is, these Thermos things cost billions of dollars. The one they are building in France is going to cost something like nine billion bucks, and it will get barely hot enough enough to work as an experiment. Real ones would cost even more.

The good news is that the current designs for these fancy bottles only use a few percent of their heat-trapping capacity. That's what 'beta' means in the title; you can think of it as the heat-trapping efficiency of the machine. This is different from the energy efficiency, though. The heat trapping efficiency is more like how full you can fill the Thermos. Right now, we are building a nine billion dollar Thermos, and only filling it to 2% of its theoretical capacity. If we could use more of the heat-trapping capacity, then you could maybe reduce the cost by a factor of ten or a hundred (or increase the performance by that much).

So, this line of research is all about computer simulations of these doughnut-shaped nuclear Thermoses, and how they behave when they are nearly full.

In some other papers, I helped show that it is likely possible to build a nuclear Thermos that you can fill almost all the way up. In another paper, I also helped my friend Pierre show that it is possible to start with a nearly empty Thermos, and fill it to nearly full without anything bad happening (it all comes down to how you pour, to stretch the metaphor).

Typically, you have a theory that you trust, and you want to know if your computer simulation matches the theory. In this case, however, we built a computer simulation that contained very few assumptions. It solves Maxwell's equations (for magnetic fields and currents) and Newton's equations (for moving masses). This is nice, because those equations have been tested really, really well over the last 130 years. It also means that you can take the output of the computer program, and very easily check to see if it is correct.

As a result, we had the opposite problem one normally faces in science; a computer program that we trusted, and a theory that maybe we didn't. In this paper, I used the computer program to validate that the theory was correct. I did this in an unusual way. The theory is approximate, and so we expected it to go funny in some places. I treated the computer-generated output as the "exact" solution, and showed that when you subtract the theoretical result from the result we got from the computer, the difference is precisely the amount by which we expected the theoretical result to go funny. (In more rigorous language, I proved that the deviation from the numerical result has the same scaling as the error term in the expansion.)

Here is a link to the paper, in case you don't have access to AIP.

It was a nice day today, so I decided to walk around for a few minutes and take some photos. It was a nice break from studying for finals. I thought this was an interesting juxtaposition.

The arch of an open boxcar I saw today...

...and the Arch of Constantine

What do you think?

One of my favorite bloggers died on Sunday. I didn't know anything about her personal life until today. She was fighting ovarian cancer with a poor prognosis, and died at 47. Her obit is in the New York Times.

She was probably the clearest, most readable and best informed voice on the mortgage crisis, period. She was also pretty much the only person who had anything positive or funny to say about it. Or, at least she set mood for the general commentary at "dry wit," when it easily could have been "catatonic depression."

From her platform as a co-blogger on Calculated Risk, she wowed people from Nobel laureates to analysts at the Federal Reserve. Pretty much everything I know about the details of the mortgage crisis I either know because she explained it to me, or because she explained it to someone else I read (e.g., certain Nobel laureate economists).

She had hoped to return to mortgage banking after the crisis and after recovering from cancer, but she made such a mark with her writing over the last two years that most people doubt that would have been possible.

One thing that makes big media so stupid is that they always turn to the same stable of pundits for commentary on complex issues. Unfortunately, most of these guys are not very bright and not very informed. But there is a solution. For every issue, even issues as murky and choked with dull tedium as the mortgage banking industry, there are people like Tanta. She was an expert straight from the trenches, but with a view broader than anyone could see from the ivory towers of academia or the skyscraper corner offices of industry. She was exactly the sort of person that major media outlets should recruit for beat reporting. The murkier the issue, the brighter such people can shine.

Alas, this particular glimmer in the gloom has gone out.

This morning my dad sent me a New York Times op-ed by Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, on the total idiocy that is executive bonus pay. Here's the main bit :

Of course, there are many reasons to be disgusted with executive pay. It feels unfair that so many people make so much money managing our money, and it is often difficult to see how their talent and abilities justify their compensation. We find it particularly offensive when executives receive high bonuses after disastrous performances. But doesn't the promise of a big bonus push people to work to the best of their ability?

To look at this question, three colleagues and I conducted an experiment. We presented 87 participants with an array of tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for instance, to fit pieces of metal puzzle into a plastic frame, to play a memory game that required them to reproduce a string of numbers and to throw tennis balls at a target. We promised them payment if they performed the tasks exceptionally well. About a third of the subjects were told they'd be given a small bonus, another third were promised a medium-level bonus, and the last third could earn a high bonus.

We did this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low so that we could pay people amounts that were substantial to them but still within our research budget. The lowest bonus was 50 cents — equivalent to what participants could receive for a day's work in rural India. The middle-level bonus was $5, or about two weeks' pay, and the highest bonus was $50, five months' pay.

What would you expect the results to be? When we posed this question to a group of business students, they said they expected performance to improve with the amount of the reward. But this was not what we found. The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.

My dad asked, "Surprised?"

Nope. Not surprised at all.

The whole theory of executive pay is based on a slightly different idea than motivation. Boards are not exactly trying to motivate their executives to perform, they are trying to attract what are invariably described as "the highest caliber" candidates. It works if you assume that ability is some kind intrinsic property of humans, and that if you dangle a big reward in front of a big group of people, the most able ones will triumph and seize the prize. It's naked social Darwinism. That's what people mean when they talk about people's "caliber," or whatever. It's sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking usually gets the sloppy thinker into trouble. A gigantic, world-girding economic catastrophe, for example.

I think bonuses fail for an even simpler reason than Dr. Ariely suggests: In a strictly scientific sense, there is no such thing as a smart person. There is no way to rank human beings based on cognitive skill in any meaningful way. In fact, it's not even clear we can define "cognitive skill." It's a 19th century idea that has been so thoroughly debunked that it has become a kind of parlor game for psychologists.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but chief among them is that we do not, in any substantive way, understand the nature of intelligence. We may think we know it when we see it, but we have no way of measuring it.

Tests of intelligence are actually on worse scientific footing than those people you see on TLC videotaping empty hallways through osmium-doped filters in the effort to prove the existence of ghosts. At least the ghost hunters are usually honest about their total lack of evidence, and at least there is some reasonable expectation that if there were ghosts, that you would would see them on the tapes. The College Board, and ETS, and pretty much every professor engaged in teaching that I've ever spoken with lack even the intellectual honesty of crackpot ghost hunters.

Clearly, there is variation among people when it comes to performance of specific tasks. Some people are really good at memorizing sequences of numbers and repeating them back in some carefully jumbled order. This is usually taken as an indicator of mathematical ability. Nevertheless, I find that I cannot memorize sequences of numbers to save my life, but that doesn't stop me from doing quantum mechanics.

So, once we've measured everyone's performance on the regurgitating-numbers-test, and put everything in a big table and sorted the table by score, what have we learned? Well, not very much. We might be able to draw some conclusions about people in general, perhaps, by correlating performance on the test with choice of breakfast cereal, or whatever. But it doesn't tell you anything of significance about an individual test subject.

However, it is usually possible to tell a smart idea from a dumb one. Unlike people, ideas can be subjected to detailed analysis. They can be examined for internal logical correctness. They can be modeled by equations, or simulated, or tested empirically, or compared to historical data for similar situations and the results considered. They can be slotted into a multiplying zoology of ready-made intellectual frameworks, and poked and prodded and stretched and tortured in all sorts of interesting ways. They can be placed head-to-head with other ideas in the analysis gauntlet, and in many cases it is possible to pick winners, or at least to triage pretty good ideas from dumb ones.

It's more work to pick smart ideas ideas than to pick smart people because the techniques we have for picking smart people are a fraudulent mummery that can be conducted with hardly any work at all. And lo, we see that systems in which ideas compete work very well (e.g., science), and systems in which people compete are either totally artificial (e.g., sports) or tend to function worse than had you picked the players at random (e.g., business, politics).

If you dangle a big reward in front of a big group of people, all you really know about the person who seizes the reward is that you have found someone who is good at taking large amounts of money from people. If I were looking for someone to run my company, I would be suspicious of such a person.

There were a lot of remarkable things about Obama's campaign, but one of the most significant aspects is that it was funded by millions of ordinary people who could only muster small donations. I've been thinking a lot about how that model could be turned bigger problems. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Most people set aside part of each paycheck for a variety of things. 6.2% of each paycheck (up to $102,000) pays for contributions to Social Security, 1.45% goes to Medicare. Then there is income tax withholding, contributions to 401k plans, health plan co-payments, and so on. I think we should create an additional voluntary withholding item with a variable rate that would feed into a fund that invests in revenue generating national infrastructure.

The idea is to offer taxpayers an investment option with a risk profile somewhere between Social Security (which is designed to be a sure thing) and a 401k (which can be lost completely). Contributions would be invested only in critical national infrastructure projects, like transport and renewable energy. The investments would be structured so that they would pay dividends. For example, the fund could build wind turbines, and the dividends would come from the electricity revenue.

This would help solve three problems :

• It would give taxpayers a relatively safe investment option. The dividends might fluctuate from year to year, but the investment could never be lost. This would provide a nice compliment Social Security and a 401k.
• It would create a pool of money designated for projects of crucial national importance. The fund would be big enough that it could invest on a scale impossible for private equity. Also, the focus on generating long-term reliable revenue instead of capital gains would allow the fund to invest on a much longer time horizon than most private equity.
• It would bring patriotism, volunteerism and ecological-mindedness into alignment with individual financial self-interest.

I suppose similar things exist in the private sector already, mainly in the form of green mutual funds and suchlike. I've never been very impressed with them. Mutual mostly seem to focus on capital gains, which seems like a crummy way of monetizing basic infrastructure like electrical generating capacity. These funds are also generally very small, which means they cannot invest directly in projects and they have high overhead expenses.

I'm not interested in yet another speculative investment option. The private sector does a good job there, and doesn't need to be duplicated. I'm thinking of a different sort of model, more like social entrepreneurism, but with mass-participation.

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.

Normally, I really, really hate mornings. When my radio clicked on this monring, it was in the middle of a country song. The first lyric that came up was, "I'm so tired of Mr. Wrong, I'm gonna find me a Mr. Right." That was the first time I've woken up laughing in years.

I'm going to fix myself a nice steaming cup of democracy.

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?

Continuing on yesterday's theme, here is another thing that is stupid: Tax cuts. Now, I don't especially like paying taxes, but if given the choice, I'd take a raise over a tax cut any day. A pay raise for me means that not only am I wealthier, but everyone is wealthier. A tax cut means I'm getting a little wealthier at the expense of others.

But that's just my personal preference. Others may feel differently. However, there is another very simple economic reason why tax breaks are a stupid way of encouraging businesses, especially new industries. As Todd Woody writes, if you give a generous tax break to a small company, it often doesn't have the income to take advantage of the incentive. So, it has to form a tax equity partnership with another company that can use the tax break. With the credit markets screwed up, and Wall Street burning equity like books at Bebelplatz, it's gotten pretty damn hard to put together tax equity partnerships. Not to mention that if you are big company taking large losses, your writeoffs probably provide all the tax relief you need.

Under good conditions, the senior partner in the tax equity partnership often stands to gain a lot more than the junior partner, and the incentives end up helping the wrong people. Under current conditions, few companies are lucky enough to actually need a tax equity partnership with a scrappy little solar company with big plans. End result: a lot of those tax breaks are worthless to the people they are intended to help. Worse still, the more urgently the help is needed (like when the economy stinks), the more useless the tax breaks become.

So, enough with the tax breaks. They are stupid. If the government wants to help establish a new industry, as it did with semiconductors, the internet, and electricity, there are much more sensible options. For example :

• Invest directly, especially in R&D.
• Establish public trust funds to take equity positions in promising companies.
• Agree to buy the product at a predictable price.

That last one is probably the most important right now. The federal government is huge. When it makes significant purchases, it is big enough to jumpstart whole industries. That is how the semiconductor industry got off the ground. If Congress wants to get the solar, wind and geothermal industries rolling, it should simply agree to buy all the electricity they can make, and to hell with tax incentives.

While I'm greatful that Peet's Coffee and Tea provides Wifi for people who buy coffee from them, I think their censorship software is very, very stupid. Take this salacious image, for example :

SonicWALL brilliantly flags this as 'Pornography.'

Seriously. This is a huge waste of everyone's time and money just to make sure nobody sees any boobies.

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.

A few days ago, the new Django 1.0 packages got installed on our colo machine. Evidently, the Django people decided to break a whole ton of stuff. It took me a couple of days of desperate hacking to get the site up and running again before classes started.

Bad Django. No cookie.

So, it looks like once again, the Democrats are letting themselves get stampeded into yet another colossal Whitehouse-hyped fiasco. Everyone is so very impressed with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, and their wonderful credentials, that they're willing to take their bullshit at face value. Remember Colin Powel's photos of Iraqi mobile weapons labs? Remember the incredible haste with with which Congress was forced to ram through amnesty for treasonous telecommunication companies? Remember the $300 billion we blew on the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008? Like most Americans, I sent most of mine to the Saudis. Pfft.

I am continuously astonished by the ability of conservatives to refuse to, you know, conserve. When difficult times come along, there is somehow always a refusal to prioritize and make sacrifices. That doesn't make the difficult times go away, so instead we end up sacrificing important things instead of unimportant things. For example, when it was clear a few months ago that consumer spending was flagging, it was decided that putting a few extra dollars in the people's pockets would help.

What did Congress do, at the urging of the Whitehouse? It borrowed the money. If that were the only way to put a few hundred bucks in people's pockets, then so be it. But it wasn't. One of the things that was taking money out of people's pockets was the spike in gasoline prices. Push prices down, and everyone who uses gasoline would be that much richer. What's the simplest way to reduce gas prices? Why, to use less of it, of course. What's the simplest way to do that? Impose a speed limit. Duh.

A conservative financial decision would have been to lay it out to the American people this way: We can either borrow the money to give to you, and then make you pay for it with higher debt maintenance payments and higher taxes, or we can impose a 55 MPH speed limit for 200 days. Now, driving 55 sucks, but don't you think it'd be worth it to avoid running up the debt? Don't you think it'd be worth it for lower prices and a little extra money in your pocket every week?

But no! Driving huge vehicles far, fast and for no reason is the American Way of Life! It's evidently more important to protect the sanctity of the gas pedal than to safeguard the solvency of our republic.

When it rains, it pours! I've been hanging around all summer wondering what to do with myself, and now suddenly there is a huge explosion of activity. After a four day expedition to Davis to sign paperwork at Graduate Studies, register for classes, look for a job, look for an apartment, and get a sense of what it will be like to live here, I drove back to Los Angeles for my cousin Nathalie's wedding (Sunday) and my great aunt's 88th birthday (Monday). Both were beautiful. Then I packed my car and drove back to Davis this afternoon.

Tomorrow, I have a job interview and tour for an on-campus job working in one of the Department of Entomology greenhouses. Not quite as good as a TA position, but it would pay for rent and get me outside and moving around on a regular basis.

I still haven't found a place to live yet, but a very nice fellow from my department is letting me crash on his living room floor until I do. Classes were supposed to start Thursday, but evidently the professor for that course isn't here yet.

The student affairs officer at UC Davis said that there are possibly some TA fellowships still available from other departments. I want to make sure I get one, so I'm jumping in my car and driving to up to Davis with a couple of crumpled bills in my pocket, a shopping bag of canned soup, and an empty bank account.

Ah, adventure! I'll try not to get E. coli poisoning this time.

It looks like the New York Times was seriously shocked by Sunday's news. So shocked, it seems, that that they left grammatical errors all over their headline story about Lehman Brothers :

A.I.G. will be the next test. Ratings agencies threatened to downgrade A.I.G.’s credit rating if it does not raise $40 billion by Monday morning, a step that would crippled the company. A.I.G. had hoped to shore itself up, in party by selling certain businesses, but potential bidders, including the private investment firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG, withdrew at the last minute because the government refused to provide a financial guarantee for the purchase. A.I.G. rejected an offer by another investor, J. C. Flowers & Company.

I think the copy editors must have been on the phone to their brokers.

Evidently I'm going to graduate school. I'm just not yet sure where, or what I shall study. Decisions, decisions.

My first attempt at sourdough bread seems to have produced a pair of unexpectedly tasty results. I was rather skeptical that this would actually work the first time. The taste came out much better than I had hoped for; awesome sourness, but not so sour as to overpower the flavor of the wheat. These are 50% whole grain, so they have some nice texture from the bran, but are still chewy and moist.

The boules didn't quite shape up the way I wanted them to, and sort of spread out on the baking pan once they came out of the bannetons. That's why they're more disk-shaped than sphere-shaped. Also, I didn't attempt anything fancy with the crust.

I cultured the starter from stone milled rye flour, and fed it alternating whole wheat and white flour every 12 hours for two weeks. The starter was the only difficult part. I killed my first starter by accidentally overheating it in my makeshift incubation pan. I gave up on the precise temperature control, which seems to have produced a somewhat less lively starter. It lifts the dough just fine, though.

The ingredients were :

• 1/4 cup starter
• 3 cup whole wheat flour
• 3 1/2 cups white bread flour
• 2 1/2 cups water
• 2 tsp salt

I know it's better to use grams than cups for measuring flour, but I don't have a good bench scale yet.

This made two loafs, which I put into bannetons for 12 hours of rising. I baked them for 45 minutes at 375F, with a pan of water bubbling away at the bottom of the oven.

I made the bannetons from some small fruit baskets that were sitting around attracting junk accumulation. I made the liners by reclaiming some nice raw linen that was part of an IKEA laundry basket that had fallen apart at the seams (carefully washed, of course). I floured the banneton liners carefully, so they didn't stick much at all.

I thought the whole point of nominating John McCain was that he was supposed to be the honerable candidate, and that he would take on the issues with the Democratic nominee. You remember the issues, right? Our assorted wars, our collapsing banking system, forclosures, the energy clusterfuck, torture, wiretapping, abortion, global warming, gay rights, taxes, the budget -- that stuff.

So, uh, when is he going to get into that stuff? He is seriously going to talk about Paris Hilton? WTF?

After taking a few days to think about it, I've decided to withdraw my endorsement for Barack Obama. I've removed the campaign logo and links from my site to indicate this decision.

To be clear, I do hope he wins, and I will vote for him. I hope he finds a way to win back my endorsement. However, I simply cannot actively support him after his vote on FISA.

Kudos to Obama for his artfully penned response to the gigantic groundswell of outrage, but this is something that leaves me profoundly disappointed. FISA was an unnecessary, rotten, law to begin with, and this law takes it from rotten to putrid.

Let me put it this way. Say you are an FBI agent, and you are working on a case. You think you need a wiretap ASAP. If you don't feel that the case is compelling enough to wake a judge up at 4 AM to get her to sign a warrant for your wiretap, then the agency probably shouldn't waste its time and resources pursuing the case.

The whole reason for requiring warrants to search and seize property is to focus law enforcement on compelling cases. The system is designed to weed out speculative and frivolous investigations, and investigations for improper purposes (political intimidation, for example). The administrative burdens placed on law enforcement are SUPPOSED to be burdensome. Sure, we should feel sympathy for the plodding investigator as he navigates through the red tape. But we should also recognize that the hassle he must undergo is a sort of administrative calisthenics. It makes for more thorough investigations, more accountable practices, and more successful prosecution.

If we want to help our hypothetical plodding investigator, we shouldn't make his job simpler. We should give him more material resources. Worried about not getting warrants quickly enough? How about expanded staffing to process warrants? Better IT infrastructure to handle the process faster and more efficiently? Or heck, why not just set aside office space for judges nearby the operations center? Processing warrants is one of the key duties of serving on the bench, and in my experience, judges generally take all parts of their jobs very seriously.

Even if we grant, for a moment, the ridiculous "ticking bomb" scenario that seems to motivate all conservative thinking on domestic security, special legal "tools" like FISA are still totally unnecessary. Terrorism cases are not unique in the urgency with which they must be pursued, or in the scope they must cover, or in the potential number of victims. Ordinary homicide investigations can be just as urgent; racketeering and organized crime cases can be just as broad in scope; environmental cases can involve just as many victims. Terrorism is unique only in the sense that it can potentially combine these aspects. Terrorism cases are bound to be complex and difficult, but the difficulties have nothing to do with complying with appropriate judicial oversight. Any competent homicide detective knows how to obtain a warrant when she needs one in a big hurry. The FBI organized crime people know how to obtain warrants for complex investigations. Investigators who handle environmental cases often use the potential for mass casualties to obtain authorization to conduct wide-ranging investigations. Terrorism investigators need to do all those things at once, and so they need low caseloads, a lot of very competent support staff and a well-run computer network.

As with any other class of investigation, we should not expect better results by relaxing judicial oversight, or in the case of the new FISA law, no oversight whatsoever. Quite the contrary. Exception from the fourth amendment allows more latitude for sloppy work, but won't help an honest cop catch any bad guys. What conservatives are really asking for when they rail against judicial oversight is that they don't want honest cops; they want Gestapo.

Naturally, conservatives don't want the EPA or the Forrest Service to have expanded investigative or enforcement powers. Extra-constitutional intrusions into the private lives of Americans are evidently reserved for manly things. For girly things, like protecting spotted owls from logging companies and children from arsenic poisoning, conservatives never fail to come out in favor of judicial micromanagement. This works in concert with their habit of appointing industry lobbyists to the judiciary.

What angers me about Obama's position (and the Democratic leadership) here is that they conceded a fundamental philosophical point to the GOP. They are granting that security theater is more important than the law. Not only that, but in the same stroke, they endorsed the criminal behavior of the people involved in what is probably the largest and most serious breach of the fourth amendment in our history. I cannot abide it.

I will vote for Barack Obama, but I'm not going to endorse him, or give him any more money. Instead, I encourage you to contribute to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The contractors installed the last row of panels this morning and switched on our solar array. Our house now produces about 15% more electricity than it uses!

The array produces between one and three kilowatt-hours for every hour of sunlight, so for today's half-day of production, we've generated 13 kwh.

Here's the read-out on the inverter :

Sadly, I don't have a way of getting the data out of the inverter yet. Once I add the RS-232 module, I'll have have more interesting things to say about our system. I'll post some pictures of the array itself once we've passed inspection.

The Sunny Boy inverter has an interesting user interface. There aren't any buttons -- you interact with the display by knocking on the front panel with your knuckle.

A friendly reminder to those who are following the nomination process: Party primaries are not national elections. Political parties are essentially private clubs. Subject to a few basic limitations (e.g., Brown v. Board of Education), they can make up whatever rules they like. If the Democratic Party wants to select the presidential nominee via a dance-off, or a hip-hop battle, or an egg toss, that is perfectly legal.

I keep reading about how the party isn't allowed to take away Florida and Michigan's delegates. Of course they can; it's a private club. In fact, their rules stipulate that they must strip the delegates in this circumstance.

It's obvious to everyone that the nomination process isn't perfectly equitable, but the system we have now is a huge improvement over the smoke-filled-room method of the very recent past. Hillary Clinton has raised some important objections to how the system works. That's good. It needs improvement. However, winning the nomination and fixing the nominating system should not be conflated. This is her party, after all. She's been extremely influential in the party for almost sixteen years. If she wants to advocate for reforming the process, then she was welcome to spend some of those sixteen years of influence, you know, influencing. After the election is over, if she uses her influence to push for reform, that would be a great service to the party and to the nation. But pushing for reform in order to win isn't good for anyone.

I should point out that the general election system isn't exactly perfect either. Any competent candidate must demonstrate the technical abilities needed to campaign and win, fair and square, even in a system that is unfair and warped. I should also add that the Democratic nomination process and the general election process closely approximate a fair and equitable system, to a precision of a percent or thereabouts.

Elections are political instrumentation. They measure the prefrences of large groups of people. Say, for example, that you take a measurement with a volt meter. It reads 5.13V, plus or minus 0.5%. It's not acceptable to write down 5.17V because you think the probe contacts are a little dirty, and that's throwing off the measurement. However good your intuition and experience, that's called fudging your numbers. If doesn't change the results, then a little fudging won't do much harm, even if it is bad methodology. If it does change the results, then it's fraud. Bad scientist. No tenure.

Our contractor, EE Solar, is about halfway finished with the solar installation at our house. Here is what they are installing :

• 14 SunPower 230 watt panels
• One SMA Sunny Boy 3000 inverter
• A second digital utility meter
• AC and DC disconnects with lockout-tagout switches.

The 14 panels will be arranged into two arrays with south-facing exposures producing 3220 watts of DC power. The inverter is about 95% efficient, so the nameplate capacity will be 2854 watts. The USGS indicates that we should get about seven to eight hours of usable sunlight per day on average. The array should produce an average of 17 to 20 kilowatt hours a day. This should easily cancel out our usage, and maybe a little beyond. I'm hoping for slightly better production, since Pasadena is higher and dryer than most of the LA basin.

Here is the equipment after delivery and upacking :

We were supposed to get a Sunny Beam monitoring station, but evidently there are some issues with buggy firmware, so they won't be available until September (more about that later).

So far, roof has been preped, the mounting rails are installed, the conduits are bolted in place, the DC wires are pulled, and the inverter has been bolted down. All that's left is to hang the panels, do the AC wiring, and get the inspection.

The installer crew was supposed to finish that on Friday, but evidently they decided to take the day off. The project manager at EE Solar pitched a fit. Nick, the crew boss, called on Friday to say he was really sorry. I told him that his schedule is his business, but if he can't come when he promised, he ought to let us know. On Moday, I'll ask him to run some extra conduit for ethernet to make amends.

In 1990, my family moved to Ohio. If you've ever talked to me about it, you know that I don't have many happy memories to relate about the experience. However, in Ohio, I gained a great friend.

Soon after we moved, my parents left for some sort of vacation. I don't remember where they went. My mother was taking classes at Wright State, and one of her classmates and her husband stayed at our house to keep my little sister (and me, I suppose) out of trouble. They brought their cat with them, who was not quite fully grown.

This was a very unusual cat. He was still a kitten, but he had none of the usual kitten hyperactivity. He was always utterly calm. He showed a keen interest in everything. He would peer down the sink drain intently, explore behind and underneath every piece of furniture, and sniff every plant in the garden. If you were eating something, he would wait patiently until he was allowed to examine it. Usually he didn't want to eat any, he just wanted to have a look and a sniff. He explored avidly, but carefully, methodically, and patiently. He had none of the aloofness or disdain that cats often show. His interest was genuine, but he just wasn't excitable.

He never made a sound. Not for any reason.

He was affectionate, but not attention-seeking. If you picked him up, he would purr, but he never bothered you for attention. When he wanted food, he would sit at his bowl and wait, patiently, and sometimes for hours.

My mother's friends felt bad keeping him in a small apartment, and they were going to move after they graduated. When my parents returned, they let us keep their cat. He was a beautiful orange tabby, and so they had named him Tigger. However, his personality had turned out so utterly un-Tiggerlike that we felt compelled to give him a new name. So, I named him Red Fred.

Fred grew into a massive, powerful cat. By the time he was five, he was a solid rectangular block of cat muscle, weighing perhaps eighteen pounds. He could easily have been the alpha cat, but he was uninterested. He left the alpha cat position to PVP (that name is another story), who was scrawny by comparison. Fred continued to patrol the neighborhood, evidently spending most of his time observing things. He would sit at the bottom of the driveway and watch people walking along the sidewalk for hours, or on fences staring into people's kitchens.

Whatever he did, there was a solemnness about it. He made you want to be quiet around him, so as not to disturb his observation and reflection.

When he hunted, he never bothered with birds or mice, and instead caught full-grown rabbits. As far as we know, he did not eat them. He would carefully carry them into the kitchen by the scruff of their necks, like kittens. He would then release them, and watch the resulting mayhem with interest. Some of the rabbits he caught were heavier than our other cats, and there was always a lot crashing about and shouting as we tried to expel them from the house.

He was also utterly trusting. One evening, he came to the door with a huge gash in his side, opening his flesh from his belly to his spine. He let my mother pick him up with just a small flinch. If you've ever had to work with an injured animal (or an injured person), you know how unusual that kind of self-control is. When she took him to the vet, he sat stoically on the examination table as they cleaned his wound and stitched him up. The vets were utterly astonished; there were three assistants in the room to hold him down, but they had nothing to do. They stood and watched as Fred bravely went under the needle, fully aware of what was happening. He still never made a sound.

Many years later, his friend PVP died. Thought his long life, PVP maintained a constant monotonous litany of hoarse, solemnly discordant meows. Fred found his body in the garden, and uttered his first sound. My mother came running to see what the strange noise was. After that, every few weeks, Fred hid himself alone in a closet or in the basement crawlspace, and imitated PVP's meow, eventually stretching it into a long, deep yowl. It was an eerie sound, much too deep, loud and extended than one would imagine could come out of a cat, or even a person. It sounded like he was on a PA system. He would do this for a few minutes, and then emerge from his hiding place as though nothing had happened. After that, this ritual became part of his life.

There are lots and lots of great stories about Fred, but they all share a common theme: Fred was a sage. I'd like to think that if there is such a thing as reincarnation, then he must have been a tulku, maybe taking one last look at the world.

On Tuesday, he had a stroke, and died without pain among people who love him. He was about nineteen years old.

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.

The Supreme Court of California has ruled that the ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. Even the dissenting justices wrote that they support same-sex marriage -- they are of opinion that it isn't mandated by the California constitution.

Honestly, I was expecting it to go the other way.

Patt Morrison had a lawyer for the losing side on her show a few minutes ago, and he basically framed his position this way: Allowing same-sex couples to get married places personal choice above community standards. Allowing people to ignore community standards will erode the morality of our culture. That sounds like a pretty weird argument for a supposedly conservative point of view.

When it comes to something as private and personal as marriage, let community standards be damned. America's uniqueness flows from its protection of personal liberty, even when that means protecting things that you would not do yourself, or that make you feel uncomfortable when other people do them. I've visited the Harmonious Society, and I like it here better. A lot of blood has been spilled over the years for the liberty we now enjoy. If living in a free society means we have to watch dudes kissing on TV, I'd say that's a bargain price for a lot of protected liberty.

Mazel Tov.

When I was little, we used to have Smog Alerts in Los Angeles fairly regularly, sometimes for a few consecutive days. My elementary school used to keep us inside on those days, and I used to stand on the second floor balcony that overlooked the foothills, staring at the crap in the air. Around noontime, it looked like an overcast sky, but without the ceiling effect. It diffused all the way to the ground. Then, in the afternoon, the sky would explode in a malignant display of colors. The horizon was capped by a black line hovering above the ground with a mantle of crimson and orange, like the lips of a steamed muscle. The sun would squat over the ocean in a rust-colored splotch smeared across a quarter of the sky. Shadows turned the color of tea, and the air turned pinkish and cloudy like you were peering through gasoline. It looked genuinely dangerous.

Astonishingly, those days were a measured improvement over what my parents experienced. The smog used to be thick enough to obscure the sun completely, turning the daylight into a diffuse glow. Sometimes, it blocked enough of the daylight to create a sort of murky twilight. Here is the first known photo of LA's smog, from 1943 :

Beijing is like that, except the mantle of smog is much, much wider than the one that covered Los Angeles in its worst years. For the Olympics, China has been working to improve the situation, but the progress so far is not very impressive. Days with good air quality, called "Blue Sky" days, would be emergency smog alerts in Los Angeles. The Beijing Air Blog has some interesting data on China's ongoing battle with air pollution, though there haven't been many posts in a while. Here is Tienanmen Square on April 27, 2008, which was officially a Blue Sky Day :

The smog extends pretty far from the city. This is the shot from a train window about a hundred miles north of Beijing. The factory (refinery? LNG plan? cement factory?) is only about a mile or two away, and it's almost completely invisible.

I'm not going to delve into why this is a bad thing. Global warming, cardiopulmonary disease, lead, mercury, yadda yadda. You already know the arguments, or you can make your own. Here's a reason that doesn't require any sort of scientific background to understand. The day after I took the photographs above, a heavy thunderstorm scrubbed the smog out of the sky. This is what China is supposed to look like :

China is a damn beautiful country, when you can see it.

I keep meaning to sit down and write a blog entry about what it's been like so far, but things keep happening at a break-neck pace, and I just haven't had time. I only have a few minutes to write something, so I'll write about one of the small annoyances of this crazy place: Plumbing.

As everyone knows, China is making a huge effort to modernize. For the most part, it has been quite successful. In America, we mostly experience China's modernization in the form of the ever-escalating technical complexity of Chinese imports. Not so long ago, only crappy plastic toys and knock-offs had Made In China stickers. Today, you are probably reading this post on a computer made mostly out of parts bearing the same imprint. However, the overwhelming majority of China's modernization is for domestic consumption only. The streets are jammed with cool Made In China products that you will never see in America. The electric scooters, for example. The cell phone service is better in your average one-horse Chinese village than it is in Los Angeles.

Americans tend to assume that most of China's economy is geared toward exports; it isn't. The flood of Chinese goods we see coming into the Port of Long Beach is just the oversplash of China's industrial berserker rage. Most of it stays right here.

On the other hand, they don't seem to have quite figured out plumbing. I was trying to figure out why my 17th floor hotel room always smells like a sewer. It occurred to me that maybe there was something wrong with the drain. Notice anything missing?

That's right. No trap. From the booming roar that issues from the drain every time I use it, it sounds like it's a pretty straight shot from the sink to the sewer main in the basement, seventeen floors down.

Whoever designed this fixture was clearly aware of this problem; the drain has a built-in airtight, noise insulated drain cover. They opted for a heavy rotating high pressure plug instead of a little bendy bit in the pipe.

As Mimi would say, "That's China."

From somewhere above the Mongolia/Siberia frontier.

I suppose it is somewhat fitting that, on my way to visit the planet's newly crowned Number One Emitter of carbon dioxide, I should get a fantastic view of the patch of the planet that all this carbon dioxide is having the most dangerous effect. I visited Greenland in 1993, so it's interesting to see what it looks like 15 years later. Normally I think out-the-window shots are pretty crummy, but I think these make up for their poor image quality and composition by being pretty damn interesting.

This is the ice pack on the Davis Straight, between the west coast of Greenland and Canada. As you can see, there really isn't any pack ice. In August of 1993, we had planned to sail across the straight to visit the Baffin Island. We had abandon those plans because the pack ice was too heavy to navigate, even for our specially equipped vessel. We had to hug the coast of Greenland, following shipping lanes kept clear with ice breakers.

This is the west coastline of Disco Island. In 1993, it was kind of impossible to tell where the pack ice ended and the island started. Now, it's pretty obvious. After we visited Disco Island, we spent a few rough days hammering our into Baffin Bay. The noise of the ice crashing against the hull was awful. Imagine being trapped in a garbage can while someone beats it with a chandelier. We gave up and turned around after a few days of it.

This is Disco Bay. In 1993, I remember standing on the Greenland side. The pack ice on the bay had ruptured, but it was very thick and clogged with icebergs. The noise of the ice grinding and grumbling on the chop was so loud that it was impossible to have a conversation without shouting. Now, it looks like the Charles River in Boston around springtime.

Here is a glacier on Disco Island, just 'cause it's awesome.

I have a bad habit. I often open my IMAP mailbox directly on the mail host with mutt. This inevitably causes occasional complicated messes when I butterfinger something. For example, a few days ago I accidentally moved all of the read messages to a separate mailbox. I merged the message back in, but not before my desktop, which was patiently monitoring my IMAP mailbox on the other side of town, decided to synchronize a few thousand messages with the IMAP server. This resulted in lots and lots of duplicate messages.

The trouble was, the duplicate messages had different X-IDs so, their MD5 hashes would be different. After fiddling around with formail for a few minutes, I got impatient and banged out this fun little Python hack :

import email, imaplib, getpass

M = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL( '**********' )

typ, data = M.login( getpass.getuser(), getpass.getpass() )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Login failed.'

typ, data = M.select()
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Selection failed.'

typ, data = M.search( None, 'ALL' )
if typ != 'OK' :
    raise Exception, 'Could not get message IDs.'

id_list = data[0].split()
mids = []
for id in id_list :
    typ, data = M.fetch( id, '(RFC822)' )
    if typ != 'OK' :
        raise Exception, 'Could not fetch message ' + id
    mail = email.message_from_string( data[0][1] )
    mID = mail.get( 'message-id' )
    print mID
    mids.append( (mID, id) )

mids.sort()

dupes = []
for i in range(len(mids)) :
    if m[i] == m[i+1] :
        dupes.append( m[i+1] )

print 'Found ' + len(dupes) + ' duplicate messages.'

for m in dupes :
    typ, data = M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)')

print 'Marked ' + len(dupes) + ' for deletion.'

typ, data = M.expunge()

print 'Expunged ' + len(data.split()) + ' messages.'

Duplicates begone!

It's a little annoying that imaplib doesn't have a friendly wrapper function for marking messages for deletion, but M.store( m[1], "+FLAGS", '(\\Deleted)') does the job just fine.

I'm going to China in about a week to visit Mimi. I'll be in Beijing for about twelve days, and I'll have about $500 to spend. What should I do?

For the last couple of years, I've been running Typo, a Ruby on Rails blogging tool. It was nice, but there were a few persistent problems I encountered :

• It was sloooooow. Nothing I did seemed to get it to run faster, even with carefully tuned caching.
• It was unstable. Typo would run happily for months, and then mysteriously explode. This usually happened while I was traveling, or busy with something more important.
• It was difficult to fix. Usually, when Typo would come down, it took a few days of research and pestering people to figure out why.
• The database migrations between versions were awful. You'll notice that the first year of posts don't have any tags. They were deleted by a bad migration. I have backups, but merging them back in is nightmarish.

A lot of the problems I experienced are with older versions of Typo. They've definitely gotten better over the years. But there is one big reason I'm abandoning Typo; I don't want to code in Ruby. I do most of my coding in python. I like python. I seems silly not to use the knowledge I have from doing computational physics in python.

I have used Blogmaker for most of the main elements on my site, but with a fair bit of hacking to make it do more of what I want. I also wrote a Typo-to-Django import utility, if anyone is interested. The URLs are slightly different, so I'm going to watch the 404s for a few days.

The Hitachi 1.8" hard drive in the IBM X40 is probably the worst data storage product I've ever used. It is expensive, excruciatingly slow, irritatingly loud, and non-standard. There are basically no options for replacement except to just buy another one. And, as I discovered to my sorrow, it is also fragile and unreliable. So, I decided to replace it with a Compact Flash card.

You may have heard something about Solid State Drives (SSDs), such as the one available as an option for Apple's MacBook Air. You can think of this project as sort of a poor-man's version of these products.

While most CF drives are relatively small and expensive, there are a few products that seem to sacrifice speed for capacity. This may seem sub-optimal, but the drive it will be replacing is astonishingly slow to begin with. According to hdparm, it can do buffered reads at 18 MB/sec, but in practice that seems pretty optimistic.

If I understand correctly, the Compact Flash interconnect standard is basically a subset of IDE. So, you just need a little passive adapter board, and you can plug a CF card directly into an IDE port. I used a D44MIDECF adapter card from Addonics. At $20, it's a little overpriced. There are no active components, and the board contains only the CF plug, the 44 pin IDE pinout, a jumper, a surface mount resistor, a surface mount capacitor, and a surface mount LED. On the other hand, it is something of a specialty part, so I suppose I should be happy that they bothered to sell it to me at all. For the CF card, I found this monster on NewEgg.

The X40 doesn't have removable media (other than the SD/MMC reader). I've always hated fiddling around with boot floppies and installers anyway. Supposedly, Debian has gotten their installer in better shape since I last played with it. That was more than five years ago. I just skipped that whole process, and built out a minimal Debian install by hand. I popped the CF disk into my SanDisk USB Flash reader, and did the following :

sudo fdisk /dev/sdc 
   # created a 31 GB primary partition tagged as Linux [id 83]
   # and a 1 GB primary partition tagged as Linux Swap [id 82]
sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1
sudo mkswap /dev/sdc2
sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/flash
sudo debootstrap sid /mnt/flash/ http://linux.csua.berkeley.edu/debian
sudo chroot /mnt/flash
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 grub sudo 
mkdir /boot/grub
update-grub
vim /boot/grub/menu.lst
exit
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/flash --recheck /dev/sdc

Then, pop the CF card in its little adapter board into the drive bay, and boot. Hooray! Here is how hdparm identifies the CF disk :

/dev/hda:

 Model=, FwRev=20070912, SerialNo=CF CARD 000040D9
 Config={ HardSect NotMFM Fixed DTR>10Mbs }
 RawCHS=16383/15/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=576, ECCbytes=4
 BuffType=DualPort, BuffSize=1kB, MaxMultSect=1, MultSect=off
 CurCHS=16383/15/63, CurSects=15481935, LBA=yes, LBAsects=63438848
 IORDY=no, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120}
 PIO modes:  pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 
 DMA modes:  mdma0 mdma1 *mdma2 
 AdvancedPM=no

 * signifies the current active mode

The default IDE settings for the CF drive result in very slow performance, so some tuning is in order. I edited /etc/hdparm.conf accordingly :

/dev/hda {
        write_cache = on
        io32_support = 3
        dma = on
        lookahead = on
        interrupt_unmask = on
}

Here is the output of the script :

Setting parameters of disc:
/dev/hda:
 setting 32-bit IO_support flag to 3
 setting unmaskirq to 1 (on)
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 setting drive read-lookahead to 1 (on)
 setting drive write-caching to 1 (on)
 IO_support    =  3 (32-bit w/sync)
 unmaskirq     =  1 (on)
 using_dma     =  1 (on)
 look-ahead    = not supported
 write-caching = not supported
  /dev/hda.

The result is actually a little faster than the Hitachi hard drive :

sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing cached reads:   1474 MB in  2.00 seconds = 737.30 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   44 MB in  3.13 seconds =  14.06 MB/sec

So far, I'm pretty happy.

Now that it looks like the Pentagon is finally ready to use the Military Comissions Act, I think it's important that we all get something straight. Waterboarding is not "simulated drowning." It does not "mimic the sensation of drowning." It is actual drowning. Just as you can choke on a under-chewed wad of burger meat without actually choking death, you can drown for a couple of minutes without expiring. It is absolutely possible to kill someone in the process of waterboarding them.

So yeah. It's torture. And we did that to some guy as part of an investigation by the duely constituted authorities. America is in the torture business, and it's official. The only question now is what sort of paperwork has to be filed for torture-induced confessions to be admissible in the tribunals, which by the way, are entirely under the direction of the executive branch.

The only question is this: Can we be as good at show trials as the Soviet Union? It's a challange, but I have great faith that us dilligent, hardworking can-do Americans can put together the most justice-y show trial yet.

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.

Random discovery of the day : If you should happen to find yourself at the grocery store without a membership fob, or if you don't want to sign up for a membership, you can always use the phone number from the Tommy Tutone song 867-5309 (Jenny). Pretty much any area code will work.

A friend of mine has asked if I can explain why Bill Clinton enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, relatively high popularity despite the troubles he faced in office. Obviously, one can only speculate about workings of another's mind, but in this case I think it may be possible to speculate with some measure of confidence.

The first possible explanation is that there are simply more Democrats than Republicans.

However, this doesn't really explain very much by itself. The glib talk-show explanation of Bill Clinton's popularity is that the economy was good during the Clinton years, ergo Clinton was popular. End of story.

Of course, the president does not have much direct influence on the health of the broader economy, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that most Americans who fondly remember Mr. Clinton's tenure are aware of this. A more nuanced explanation is required.

It will probably come as no surprise that I have my own theory. We are, after all, speculating on the thoughts and feelings of millions of total strangers, so my theory is probably as good as any, or perhaps at best slightly more plausible. At least it does not suffer from the obvious bogosity of the it-was-a-good-economy theory. Since theories are supposed to have names, I will name my theory Popularity Due to Reduced Rate of Disaster.

The theory goes like this. While the president does not have very much influence over the immediate overall health of the economy, they can exercise a large amount of influence over specific aspects of it. Particularly, the White House can be enormously effective at wrecking things. You don't need thermodynamics to tell you that it is easier to make a mess than to clean one up.

So, why is Bill Clinton relatively popular, and George W. Bush so unpopular? If you look for explanations in ideas and politics, you might be able to formulate some sort of explanation based on how much Americans tend to agree with the thinking of the current and former occupant of the White House. This sort of analysis is the bread and butter of TV pundits. Happily, most Americans don't think like the gasbags on TV, and so the ideological analysis offered there is very likely wrong.

I think it is more reasonable to suppose that Americans draw conclusions from the evidence that they encounter in their own lives, and have a mostly casual or academic interest in aggregate effects like GNP growth or the nominal inflation rate. This is probably why so many Americans think we are in a recession even though the GNP is growing: If you're working hard but struggling financially, then the economy sucks, and you're not likely to feel otherwise upon hearing that GNP is growing and the nominal rate of inflation is low.

So, when a president wrecks part of the economy, it may not register significantly in macroeconomic diagnostics, but it may have a big impact on how large numbers of individual people feel. I think that this is probably the most plausible model for popular opinion, at least as a first-order-approximation. A person may be ideologically inclined to agree with a president, but if that president does something that directly harms that person, I don't think the ideological agreement matters very much.

Looking back on the Clinton presidency, it is difficult to point to anything remarkably wonderful that he did, especially when set alongside other multi-term 20th century Democratic presidents (e.g., FDR). But perhaps more importantly, it is also difficult to point to anything remarkably bad, either. The worst thing Mr. Clinton did, most people agree, was have "sexual relations" with a consenting adult, and then lied about it. Sure, it was sort of embarrassing, but it had no impact whatsoever on any American, save for the dozen or so people with a personal stake in the matter. Americans came to the sensible conclusion that it wasn't really any of their business and wasn't really very important, and so the dual impeachment efforts in Congress and in the media were spectacularly unpopular.

When Mr. Clinton was still in office, the friend who posed this question remarked that the aspect of the Lewinsky incident that bothered him most was that Mr. Clinton's brief affair happened "on the public dime" and on public property. These are legitimate points, but one should keep in mind that the man was working sixty to eighty hours a week. Even if we deduct the time wasted on the affair, the public still got a fantastic bargain in terms of dollars paid per hour of presidential work, especially when contrasted with Mr. Bush's short work week and frequent, lengthy vacations. Of course the celebrated liaison happened in the Oval Office; Bill Clinton worked longer hours than a galley slave.

As far as practical impacts on individual lives, Mr. Clinton was clearly not a very bad president. In some moderately important ways, he managed to do some real good, but that probably isn't why he's popular. The real reason, I think, is the sharp contrast with the presidents before and after. George W. Bush has managed to wreck an extraordinary number of things. For example cities New Orleans and Biloxi, habeas corpus, the first, second, fourth, firth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth amendments to the Constitution, America's international reputation, the nation of Iraq, the World Bank, the Department of Justice, an so on. While Mr. Bush has not actually destroyed any of these things, and I think they each will eventually be rebuilt, the damage done nevertheless is real. It has had real, widespread impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans.

Rather than speaking generally about these things, I think it would be more illustrative to delve into three anecdotes that I think are representative of the sort of damage that happened before and after Mr. Clinton's presidency. Each of these events has caused substantial material harm to individual Americans.

Skid Row

Since I live in Los Angeles, I am practically compelled to mention the death-blow Ronald Reagan dealt to America's the mental health care system. As governor of California, he called for the firing of 3700 mental health employees from the Department of Mental Hygiene in 1969. The California legislature reduced the layoffs to 2600 employees and began construction of new treatment centers to replace the old-fashioned residential hospitals that were to be closed. In the resulting departmental turmoil, tens of thousands of very sick people were literally dumped onto the streets of California's cities. Most of them stayed on the streets. As the Vietnam War chewed through the draft-eligible population in the following years, a disproportionate number of these new mentally ill homeless were veterans suffering from what we would now call PTSD.

To give you an idea of why this screw-up has had such permanent consequences, you have to remember the time period in which all of this was happening. This was the early 1970s, a period of weak economic growth extremely high inflation. It was very hard on middle class families. If you were a discharged mental patient or a veteran with brain trauma, it was simply impossible to get by. The network of treatment centers has turned out to be almost completely impotent.

When Reagan became president, he duplicated these policies on a national scale. Mentally ill people flooded into city centers across the country. Many of these cities are lethally cold in the winter months, so many mental hospitals and cities evidently used the last dribbles of federal money to buy one-way train tickets for their patients. They sent them to the one city that everyone knew was nice and warm in the wintertime, and already had a big enough homeless population that no one would notice a few more: Los Angeles. If you look at the distribution of LA's homeless population, it is still clustered near the rail terminus.

Before Reagan, Los Angeles didn't have a very significant homeless population. Today, it has a permanently homeless population of 82,000 people, and at some point during the year, and additional 254,000 Los Angeles residents are homeless for some period of time.

The evence is even more offensive upon revisiting the reason it was carried out. The mental hospitals were shut down because Reagan believed that they were inefficient, and that it would be simpler to scrap the system and build a new one than to attempt reforms. All of this human misery was for the sake of speeding up the realization of a relatively insignificant cost savings.

Stranded at the Airport

My second example, again from Reagan, is the Air Traffic Control system. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike to protest long hours, low pay and unsafe working conditions. Let me repeat that last one. The air traffic controllers went on strike to protest unsafe working conditions. Not unsafe for themselves, but unsafe for the traveling public. It is the only example that I know of where a trade union has gone on strike for the sake of public safety. Reagan ordered them back to work, and when they refused, he fired them en mass, and banned them from government service forever.

The fallout of Reagan's decision has left an indelible mark on America's transportation system. The positions left open by the fired air traffic controllers were filled by managers, non-union controllers, and temps. To decrease the likelihood of accidents, the FAA was forced to enlarge the minimum safety envelopes around aircraft. With low wages, long hours, ancient equipment (which hasn't been upgraded since the 1960s), poor benefits and terrible morale, it's been virtually impossible to hire new air traffic controllers. So, the conditions that triggered the strike in the first place have actually gotten worse. Reagan's purge of air traffic controllers drastically reduced the safety and the throughput capacity of the entire civil aviation system.

In some very busy airports, this throughput capacity reduction is substantial. Nearly all airport delays can be ultimately attributed to congestion at a handful of very busy airports. This congestion is a consequence of the larger safety envelopes required by the FAA to allow them to do without the 11,000 highly-trained professionals that it can neither replace nor re-hire. So, next time you're stuck sitting on the tarmac or at the gate, you can thank Ronald Reagan for putting union-busting ahead of public safety and the operational effectiveness of the FAA.

It's worth noting that both the Teamsters and PATCO endorsed Reagan in 1980.

Backdating

The last example I will give is somewhat personal and esoteric, but it is perhaps the most important. Over the last three years, many companies have been caught doing something called option backdating. The scheme works like this. An option is an agreement with the issuer of a security -- in this case, stock certificates issued by the board of directors of a company -- to either buy or sell the security at a particular price. Executive compensation packages often contain a basket of options at various prices. Usually, these options are held in escrow until a specified date, at which point they are released from escrow. The recipient may the "exercise" the option, which in this case means either buying or selling the security at the agreed upon price.

In the case of stock options, boards usually issue options based not on a price, but rather the at a price on a particular date. The scandal that has been swirling around a number of companies, including high-fliers like Apple, is that they issued stock options to their executives that had price-point dates before their issue dates. An option is supposed to be a security whose value is based on the price difference between now some point in the future. This is why options are sometimes called "futures." However, if you issue an option whose value is based on the difference in price between the price now and some point in the past, then you you know exactly how much the option is worth. In other words, it's not an option at all; it's cash.

What Apple did, and what hundreds of other companies did between 2002 and 2006, was issue these "backdated" options to their executives. Each instance of options backdating constitutes three separate acts of fraud :

1. It allows the company to directly pay their executives billions of dollars in cash, but expense the associated costs as operating overhead instead of payroll, thus hiding the actual impact of executive compensation from investors.
2. It allows the companies to avoid paying payroll taxes on this money, depriving Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid of billions of dollars.
3. It allows the executives themselves to declare the money thus received as capital gains instead of income, on which they pay 22% instead of 46%.

The companies who were caught doing this were finally asked to stop sometime last year. Insofar as I can tell, there has been no substantial punishment for options backdating yet.

I did not really appreciate the magnitude of this scandal until I talked about it with my father, who has extensive experience as an entrepreneur and has served on the boards of several companies. My father started a company called Teradata (NYSE: TDC). Teradata makes database computers.

My father once explained to me that there were only two entities that posed a serious threat to his company: IBM, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Teradata went after IBM's main business, courting some of IBM's most lucrative customers. When the company was still operating out of a grubby little building near the LA airport, they went toe-to-toe with IBM in the marketplace, and they prospered. My father was very worried that IBM would do something illegal to destroy his company, but fortunately, IBM played fair.

As scary as it was duking it out with the largest technology company on Earth, what really scared my father was the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was absolutely terrified that a there would be some sort of mistake in their accounting, or in their public filings, or in their communications with investors, that would bring down the wrath of the SEC. As soon as Teradata was incorporated, he made sure that he had the best accountants and the best lawyers he could possibly find, and he demanded absolute perfection from them. My father loathes accounting, but he spent more time checking the ledgers than on the engineering of the computer that he himself had invented. That is how scared he was of the SEC.

That is how scared everyone was of the SEC in those days. It was assumed that even a small error in the corporate accounting would lead immediately to the destruction of the company and the end of the careers of everyone involved.

When I was much younger, I once complained that it was unfair for the SEC to impose such stiff penalties. My father responded angrily, "No, it's not unfair. Teradata is made out of other people's money." Even while the ax was hanging over his own neck, my father strongly supported this strict regulation.

When Teradata was founded, no one would have dared something as shady as options backdating. They would have been ripped to shreds. So, why did it happen? Simple. George W. Bush nerfed the SEC. Companies know that America's financial cops don't have any bullets.

When you look at the credit crunch, the looming subprime disaster, and the wave of mortgage foreclosures crashing down on America's middle class, it shouldn't be any surprise how it happened.

Gamesmanship or statecraft?

Returning to the question at hand, why is it that people like Bill Clinton? That's easy. He didn't wreck anything. He appointed mostly competent bureaucrats to lead federal agencies. The ones that weren't competent got fired. He understood that the president's job is to make the government work, and he logged eight years of eighty hour weeks to make sure that it did.

His ideology was not neither inspired nor inspiring, but people like him anyway. This was the great puzzle that the conservatives who opposed him have never figured out. Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay believed that politics is all about ideas, and as far as campaigns are concerned, they were right. However, good government is not about ideas. It is about duty, service and implementation. Government doesn't run on ideas, it runs on deeds. In that respect, government and politics are very different activities.

Bill Clinton is popular because he was pretty good at government. Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, George Bush and now the whole Republican Party are deeply unpopular because, while they are exceptionally good at politics, they are miserable failures in government. As long as Republicans continue to confuse politics and government, they will remain puzzled by Bill Clinton's enduring popularity.

I took the General GRE yesterday, and two of my three recommenders have uploaded their letters. I was sure that I had bombed the quantitative section, so I was flabbergasted to see my score at the end was rather excellent. Evidently, they really do slip experimental questions into the test that they don't score. I really appreciate the instant score report -- it saved me from two weeks of misery.

Now I just have to track down my undergrad ID number to get Northeastern to cough up my transcripts. It's astonishing how much energy this process takes, but the hard parts are done.

I was looking for something to do while Mimi was taking a nap today, and I remembered that the Energy Information Administration has tons and tons of cool data on their web site. It's more fun than video games.

So, I decided to play a little game: Let's pretend that America has just ratified a treaty that obligates us to cut our CO2 emissions by, say, 50%. How do we do it?

First, let's see how our emissions break down by economic sector :

Since about 1978, emissions from the industrial sector have been fairly flat. Meanwhile, transportation has been exploding, and overtook industrial emissions right around the end of the Clinton administration. Commercial and residential emissions have been growing at a steady clip, with residential emissions leading the way.

First, let's look at the biggest, fastest growing culprit, the transport sector.

No surprises here. Petroleum, mostly gasoline, makes up the overwhelming majority of emissions, with natural gas just barely registering. The single most effective measure we can take to cut emissions, then, is to cut petroleum consumption in the transportation sector.

This is going to be difficult. The trend has been an inexorable rise for more than half a century, and probably longer. Even the oil shocks of the 1970s don't look very impressive on the 50-year scale. In fact, in the decade prior to the shocks, there was a rise in the rate of emissions (and thus consumption), and the shock resulted in a regression to the previous trend. So, we're going to need more than just improved fuel economy. We're going to need new technology. Most importantly, we're going to have to get people to stop driving so much.

This is a tall order; if we want people to drive less, we need to uproot the automobile fetish that our country has developed. This will require a big mobilization of cultural assets. Right now, people will sacrifice a great deal of money, time, space, convenience and health to own a car. This preference has to be reversed. Culturally, we need to find a way to make car divestiture a desirable achievement. It has to be cool not to have a car. Here is an area where entertainment can play a positive role. For three generations, it's been the opposite, with movies and television fetishizing car culture from the very beginning.

We need movies and TV shows that exploit the coolness of riding the train, or walking to work, or riding a bicycle. This shouldn't be difficult. Good entertainment is all about human interaction, but the automobile is the most isolating mode of transportation possible. If you want to write about people, then trains, buses and bicycles are fertile venues, while cars are not. If we've got TV shows that revolve around crimelab investigations and people with magic and superpoweres, why not a TV show about bus drivers? There are a hundred angles you could take on that idea; it could be a noir drama, or it could have a supernatural element, or it could be a crime show. You could set it during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and make it a historical drama. You could set it during and after 1929, and make it a period piece.

Here are three policy initiatives that could get things moving in the right direction. First, all cities with public transportation have registered trademarks for their systems. The federal government could create a fund that would pay for product placement of these public transport "brands" in movies and TV. The more positive the circumstances of the placement, the larger the bonus.

Second, attack consumption directly. Raise fleetwide fuel economy standards. Raise taxes on gasoline and diesel. Go after really conspicuous consumption with direct measures; refuse to certify new Hummers, Ferraris, and Vipers as road-worthy. Give people tickets for driving aggressively.

Third, fix Amtrak. Create an endowment to support its operation and expansion so that it won't be at the whim of Congressional funding. Fund the endowment with fuel taxes, tolls on interstate freeways, and fines levied on the airlines for violating the Passenger Bill of Rights. The Atlantic and Pacific coastal cities should have rail service like France's TGV -- 200 mile per hour express trains with reasonably priced coach tickets.

Next, let's have a look at the industrial sector.

The clearest trends are volatile but stagnant conditions in petroleum and natural gas emissions while coal emissions crash and electrical emissions soar. Looking at the beautifully anticorrelated trends in coal and electricity emissions, I suspect something fishy is going on here. Let's have a look at electricity generation.

Ah ha! The industrial sector is outsourcing its coal burning to the electricity generators, who are burning coal like there's no tomorrow, if you'll pardon the gallows humor. Emissions from electricity generation are actually somewhat higher than for transportation, though they are on the same order. However, the trend in emissions from coal is actually significantly steeper than for petroleum use in the transport sector.

The coal explosion in the electricity generating sector is responsible for the rise in emissions in other sectors as well. For example, the commercial sector :

The emissions due to electricity in the commercial sector notch almost perfectly into the trend for emissions from coal. The residential sector doesn't notch in quite as clearly, but the trend holds.

It's the same trend across all non-transport sectors. We see the stagnation of petroleum and natural gas emissions while coal vanishes and emissions due to electricity explode, following the trend of coal in the electricity sector.

This makes it very clear. The absolute emissions and the growth of emissions in all non-transport sectors of the economy are due to burning coal for electricity. You'd expect coal to make up most of our electric generating capacity, wouldn't you?

Nope. Coal is responsible for most of the emissions from electricity generation, but only about a third of the electricity. We get about twice as much electricity from natural gas, but it's responsible for a relatively small fraction of our emissions.

Of course, this should be fairly obvious from the chemistry of coal and methane: Coal is more than 90% unsaturated carbon, consisting of long chains of double and triple bonded carbon atoms and aromatic cyclic structures, mixed with amorphous graphite and some volatile hydrocarbons, while disassociated methane is four-fifths hydrogen by volume. Coal is mostly carbon, and natural gas is mostly hydrogen.

The upshot is this; if we can wring about 30% worth of efficiency improvements from the non-transport sectors of the economy, we can do away with our coal plants altogether. This will cut the emissions of the industrial sector by about 40%, and 65% and 75% for the residential and commercial sectors, respectively.

Alternatively, we could aim for about a 15% efficiency savings, and double our nuclear capacity, or increase our renewable capacity by about fivefold. Whatever policy is chosen, it is abundantly clear that it must result in the eradication of coal from our electric generating portfolio. Even petroleum and natural gas are better.

Our prospects in the non-transport sectors are actually pretty good compared to the transport sector. We have a mix of different technologies, none of which make up a plurality of our portfolio, and most of the emissions can be attributed to the second-largest minority component. We have 1,493 coal plants which have an aggregate capacity of 335 gigawatts. That is an equivalent capacity to about 55,833 wind turbines. That many turbines would cost about $446 billion to procure and install. For comparison, the direct cost of the Iraq war has been about $478 billion, as of today.

Technically speaking, a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions is not far-fetched. It's well within our ability to build and to finance. A 20% reduction could probably happen without any noticeable drag on our economy whatsoever -- we just need to provide good incentives for saving electricity, and preferentially shut down coal plants.

Don't be afraid of mandatory carbon caps, even aggressive ones. If we can blow half a trillion dollars on a pointless war that gains us no advantage whatsoever, we can afford to fix our emissions problem. Maybe not both at the same time, but we'll be leaving Iraq soon anyway.

There is a group that is putting together a presidential debate specifically focused on science. I think the idea is that it would come after the primaries, so it would be among nominated candidates. How cool would this be?

Moderator : Senator, on the issue of dark matter, you have...

Clinton : Read my lips: No. New. Particles.

Moderator : I see. Mr. Huckabee, what is your position on dark matter? Do you agree with the Senator's assertion that it is baryonic in nature?

Huckabee : No, no I do not. If it were baryonic, it would interact strongly with light, and we would be able to see it. Then it wouldn't be dark matter, would it? No, I believe that we are facing something new and terrible; an abomination to those of us who actually obey the Pauli Exclusion Principle. That is why I have a four-point-plan for eliminating the scourge of dark matter from the universe.

Clinton : This is exactly the sort of misplaced priorities that I've been talking about. How can we be talking about non-baryonic dark matter when we don't even know the properties of the Higgs? What if there is no Higgs boson, and the whole supersymmetric model goes out the window? What if the Higgs turns out to have a mass in the range of only a few TeV, and these non-baryonic particles aren't heavy enough to explain the non-observable mass in the universe? Or what if the Higgs is hundreds of TeV, and the supersymmetric particles are too rare? We don't have the answers to these questions. This whole business of non-baryonic dark matter is really putting the cart before the horse.

Furthermore, I really must object to my opponent's fermion-centric position. While it is indeed true that Americans are mostly made out of fermions, we would not be the same country without the patriotism and hard work of bosons. Who would mediate the electroweak force if it weren't for the photon? Who would bind together our nucleons without the meson? My opponent is, at this very moment, harboring gluons in every proton and neutron in his body.

Seriously, though, whoever wins the nominations, I would just love see this sort of debate.

When you're at the gym, do you ever watch all the spinning wheels and slowly reciprocating weights and think about what a waste it is that all of that effort isn't captured and put to work generating electricity? Isn't that a lot of energy?

My usual workout includes a ten mile bike ride, which I usually complete in about 45 minutes with heavy resistance. According to the machine at my gym, I burn about 500 calories, or 2.1 megajoules, in the process. I'm going to assume the machine means kilogram calories, which is what you see on food labels.

Evidently, I'm putting out a bit more than three quarters of a kilowatt. That's a bit more than one horsepower, which is 745.7 watts. This is a bit surprising -- that's not too far shy of what Wikipedia says you'd expect for the first six seconds of a cycle sprint (900 watts). A professional cyclist can hit about two kilowatts during a sprint. So, 775 watts sustained over 45 minutes is not too shabby.

If they had bothered to wire my exercise bike into the grid, LA Fitness would have obtained 581 watt-hours from my efforts. In Pasadena, we pay $0.15 per kilowatt-hour, so I managed to produce a little less than a dime's worth of electricity. If a hundred people did the same workout, which is roughly what I'd expect over the course of a day, we would together generate $8.72. The gym could save that much by switching off the TVs when no one is watching, or turning down the music a little. The electricity you can generate on an exercise bicycle isn't worth the wires that would carry it.

According to the Department of Energy, the average American household uses about 29.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, so you'd have to pedal at the sprinter's pace of 1216 watts, all day, every day, just to keep up with your household use.

My 2.1 megajoules of peadaling is actually a lot of energy. What astonishes me is that even this rather large amount of energy is worth so little.

Update : My friend Chris points out that the bike at the gym is probably reporting some kind of estimate total power, including power dissipated as heat, that it extrapolates from the work you put into the mechanism. He suggests that around 20-25% of the calories you burn are available as work, so that means I am putting somewhere around 155 to 194 watts into the bike. This probably has an error of 50% or worse, since the bike is extrapolating the total power from the mechanical power, and then I'm extrapolating back to the mechanical power from the result. The actual electricity one could generate is more like $0.02 worth.

My mom has been interested in energy conservation for a long time. She's managed to take a pretty considerable bite out of her electricity and gas usage by taking some very simple steps. Below, I've plotted her energy use over the last couple of years. I was only able to find a handful of bills, but it's enough to see the trend. The first big reduction is just from minor adjustments in habits -- turning the lights off when she leaves the room, and opening the blinds to use natural light in the daytime. The second big reduction is from installing compact florescent bulbs. That doesn't sound very exciting, but it cut her electricity use by 50-70%. If you've been doubting that those sorts of changes make a difference, seeing is believing. This is, by the way, without any new appliances. She's still got a washing machine and dryer that are almost as old as me, a non-EnergyStar dishwasher, and a massive professional refrigerator that predates EnergyStar altogether.

The most obvious place to start, of course, is the refrigerator, which I estimate to be sucking down between 2.5 and 5 kwh per day. Or, at least, that's what it would have used when it was new, so it could be as much as 20% more than that. To maintain that nice downward trend, I've advised her to trade up to a Sun Frost RF16, which absolutely crushes the competition, using less than half a kwh per day. The most efficient models from big brands use about three times as much. Also, they're built right here in the USA, in Arcata, California.

The cost-benefit analysis for washer, drier and dishwasher isn't quite as stark. The main reason for swapping those out are to save water and gas. For gas, the easiest savings can be had by replacing the water heater, and she's already got an awesome tankless water heater. For water, toilets and outdoor watering are the main culprits. She has a couple of dual-flush toilets on order, and a there are a bunch of rain barrels staked in the driveway. They will be hooked up when the new rain gutters are installed.

When that's all done, she'll be ready to push the trend line the rest of the way down to the axes. Ultimately, solar is the way to go in southern California, but as long as panels cost a couple of dollars per watt, you'd be crazy not to do the easy stuff first. In any event, she wants to have some excess capacity in her photovoltaic system. Someday, she swears, she's going to have an electric car.

Tuesday, the New York Times ran the latest in the series of bizarre articles claiming that the troop surge in Iraq is working. The premise of the article rests on perhaps the weakest justification for optimism I have ever read, anywhere.

The security improvements in most neighborhoods are real. Days now pass without a car bomb, after a high of 44 in the city in February. The number of bodies appearing on Baghdad’s streets has plummeted to about 5 a day, from as many as 35 eight months ago, and suicide bombings across Iraq fell to 16 in October, half the number of last summer and down sharply from a recent peak of 59 in March, the American military says.

Mein Gott! Days pass without a carbombing! Let us rejoice! The article parrots this sickly good news, which is the best news the chefs at the Pentagon can cook up from the year's putrid harvest. Need I remind you that the New York Times is once again reporting Bush administration numbers as if they were fact. That hasn't worked out so well for the Times in the recent past, but here they are, doing it again.

Much of the fall in violence can probably be explained by successful ethnic cleansing throughout Baghdad.

Why are they buying this pitiful, slightly-less-awful picture? Simple. They can't speak Arabic. Juan Cole offeres a more complete picture of what's going on in the region, a picture he is able to express thanks on an amazing ability called "bilingualism." Actually, Cole is fluent in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and reads some Turkish, according to his CV. Evidently, the New York Times can't be bothered to make itself aware of what is reported elsewhere. What sort of picture does Cole see in the Arabic media? It still looks like a full-blown civil war to me.

On Saturday, I decided to head to the VA complex next to UCLA to watch the Global Warming & America's Energy Future Presidential Forum. I guess you could include it among the unending barrage of presidential debates we're suffering through. Having caught just enough of the last Democratic debate on CNN to ruin an otherwise enjoyable dinner, I was was pleasantly surprised that this forum turned out to be rather interesting.

The panelists asked sharp questions, but there was no attempt to "get" the candidates. There was a refreshing absence of false dichotomies, litmus tests and provocations. They just asked difficult, technical questions. For example, Edwards said that we ought to essentially ban coal, but that coal miners should not be made to bare brunt of this economic realignment because the problem is not their fault. He was asked the obvious follow-on question : That means compensation. How do we pay for it?

And then something astonishing happened. Edwards answered the question directly, and the panelists let him. He'd already explained that to reduce emissions, we need some kind of carbon tax. It's estimated that such a system would raise about 20-40 billion dollars a year, depending on the details of implementation (which is up to Congress). This block of money would be divided among three goals; remediation of environmental damage, research, and helping people in "dirty" industries get new, better jobs.

The audience was very enthusiastic throughout, but the enthusiasm crested highest on the occasions when the panelists, candidates and moderator insulted CNN, particularly Tim Russert. I guess this reflects the fact that the only thing less popular than Congress is the Media. If Wolf Blitzer had walked onto the stage, he would have been booed out of the hall. Child molesters are more popular than the Media.

The candidates don't have to use FOX or CNN as their forum. There are lots and lots of nonpartisan issue-oriented groups that would happily host debates. The questions will be less stupid, and the format won't be designed to maximize catfighting. Issue-oriented groups will listen to answers longer than 15 seconds without getting bored, assuming the candidates stay more or less on topic.

The biggest surprise, for me anyway, was that I felt a lot more confident about Hillary after hearing her speak without an idiot media stooge nipping at her heels. She made it very clear that she understands the issue of climate change, and that she understands the need for bold action. She has some specific proposals, but they aren't really unique from what Edwards proposes -- not that I fault her for that. It's pretty obvious what needs to be done, so all the serious proposals will tend to look about the same. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because her intelligence has never been in question.

The trouble I have with Hillary is not concern that she would make a good president. I think she would do a pretty good job. At least as good as her husband did, and probably better. She is smart and capable, and her priorities are pretty much right. The problem I have with her is that I think she would make and awful leader for the progressive movement. She represents a view -- "The perfect is the enemy of the good" she said during the forum -- that is immiscible with philosophical leadership. She would be a competent administrator. She would work hard and push for the right things. But I can't see her galvanizing a new progressive coalition. She would leave the Democratic party in the same state her husband left it; hollowed out and fractured.

The electorate is crackling with a punishing voltage of dissatisfaction, and it isn't any mystery what is pissing people off. There are very real, terrible problems facing our country. People have a whole menu of issues to be pissed off about -- climate change, our inept counterterrorism policies, income inequality, health care, a hostile international community, our diseased financial system, the trade imbalance, Iraq, and more. And Washington is doing nothing to fix this stuff. Nothing.

On one terminal, we have three hundred million Americans who like to get shit done, and on the other terminal, we have a few hundred politicians in Washington who aren't doing shit. The system has been charging up for a very, very long time. We need a president who will be a big fat wire between these two terminals. We need a way to pipe our collective dissatisfaction into Washington until its denizens either get to work or vaporize from the political scene. I can't see Hillary doing that. She is a natural insulator; her natural instincts are to mediate and compromise. That's very admirable, and in a different situation would be highly desirable. But if someone doesn't hook the terminals up, eventually the whole thing will short out and we can kiss democracy goodbye.

Maybe I'm wrong about Hillary. A lot of people are enthusiastic about her, and that's a good sign. It would be nice if she stopped undermining the progressive part of the party, and started beating up on the GOP for keeping Washington paralyzed.

Also, I think a lot of people fail to appreciate what a great thing Dennis Kucinich is doing for the party. First of all, he's not undermining the Democratic part by running in a third party, like Nader did. Second, by running boldly to the left of the pack, he is flanking the other candidates, making them harder to attack. It's safer for them to take liberal positions because they will still be moderate on any scale that includes Kucinich. This something that happens frequently in Republican primaries -- there is an unpopular fascist thug, and the other candidates look nice and moderate by defeating him. Not that Kucinich is an exact mirror of that picture. He would probably be a center-right candidate in most functioning democracies. This highlights how important it is for the Democratic party to have people like him.

Now, if we had a few actual Communists in Congress, like most democracies, then moderate liberal politicians would have lots of maneuvering room. The Democrats could hold up practically any serious proposal, and it would look conservative when contrasted with the lunatic position from the Communists. Single-payer healthcare? Look, it's better than Communism, don't you think? You don't want Communism, do you? Great, so vote for our plan.

Anyway, I'm pretty disappointed that Barak Obama didn't come to the event. It was very unfortunate.

Something to think about next time you're sitting on the can: 2.5 billion people do not have access to a toilet.

Next time you get into a seat up/down argument with a co-inhabitant, why not settle the argument by recognizing how lucky you are to have a toilet in the first place? Donate a few bucks to the World Toilet Organization.

Yesterday afternoon, my little sister was hit by a car while riding her bicycle across the University of Oklahoma campus. She suffered lacerations and abrasions to her face, lost a couple of teeth, and a number other injuries. She also has a serious concussion. She is now experiencing memory loss, disorientation, extreme nausea, and huge amount of pain.

All of this is, in a sense, good news. She was very, very lucky, given that she was not wearing a helmet. The prognosis is that she will recover completely after some unknown amount of time. My mother flew out to Oklahoma on the first available flight, and she'll be staying with Anna at least throught next week.

She is an exceptionally smart girl, and she knows perfectly well how important helmets are. When we were little, I witnessed her flip her bike and pile-drive her head into the sharp point of the curb in front of our house. She was not hurt, but her helmet nearly split in half. We still have that helmet, even thought it is ruined. The seven inch long, two inch deep gash across the crown makes it perfectly clear that Anna would have died that day, had it not been for a geeky-looking early 1990s vintage Bell helmet. The very first serious email I ever wrote was to thank Bell Sports for saving my little sister.

Now is not the time to wonder why she wasn't wearing her helmet yesterday. Maybe she lost it, or maybe she figured she was only going to ride a short distance, or maybe she didn't expect any cars on campus. We may never find out, given that she doesn't remember the accident. For now, we're focusing on when we can take her out of the hospital, and how long it will take her to recover.

I am writing this here today to ask you, dear reader, to always wear the proper safety equipment. Concussions are not funny. Shit happens. Protect your noodle.

I am going to go ahead and shamelessly plug Bell helmets. Bell has been making helmets since 1954, and they invented the modern bicycle helmet in 1975. Bell saved my little sister once, so they've got my vote for life. Buy a helmet, and make sure it is on your head whenever you so much as handle a bicycle, in case you are overpowered by a sudden uncontrollable urge to peddle around. In fact, buy two, just in case you loose one, or for variety, or for the hell of it.

If you are wondering how to make bicycling safer, you can do two things. Wear a helmet, and bicycle more :

The analysis undertaken in this study suggests that policies which lead to an increase in cycling will not increase the likelihood of cyclist crashes. From the work reported here, it seems the more cyclists there are on the roads the lower the risk that any individual cyclists will be involved in a collision. Road safety professionals concerned about reducing the likelihood of cycle crashes might consider measures that increase cycling.

Go to FreeRice and see how good your vocabulary is. Every time you answer correctly, you earn ten grains of rice for the UN World Food Programme from the site's advertisers.

I can't wait to say, "My, you look positively vermicular today!"

(via TreeHugger.)

On my way home from UCLA today, I decided to see how fast I ride my bike from Westwood and to the terminus of the Metro Purple Line on Wilshire and Western. Particularly, I was interested to see if I could get there quicker than the 720 bus. To make it fair, I waited until there was almost no traffic for the bus to get mired in. Rush hour now lasts well into the late evening, so traffic was heavy but not jammed at 9:00 PM.

I waited for a 720 bus to pull into the station, and then took off. It was pretty much a dead heat until the Starbucks at San Vincente, and I got a couple of lucky breaks from the walk signals. I beat the bus to Western by about four minutes, completing the trip in 43 minutes without breaking a sweat. Oh, and it's mostly an uphill ride with lots of pedestrians to which one must yield.

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.

Since I am now commuting to UCLA from Pasadena, I've spent a lot of time wondering how to cut down of the time, expense and misery of commuting. Most of that pondering happened while trapped somewhere on the Ventura freeway, or the perhaps on driving aimlessly around Westwood looking for a parking spot.

To that end, I've started using the Metro as much as possible. The Metro Gold Line is fantastic, and gets me from Lake Street in Pasadena to Union Station downtown in about 20 minutes (less if I catch an express). The Purple Line gets me as far as Koreatown, and this is where things start to suck. From Wilshire and Western, it's about seven miles to UCLA. During business hours, the 720 bus takes about an hour and 45 minutes to traverse this miserable stretch of urban leprosy. The worst part is Beverley Hills, which I would gleefully bulldoze if given the chance.

It's maddening. The first 22 miles of the trip take about 30-45 minutes, depending on intervals between trains. The last six and a half take three times that.

While I was riding a 720 bus packed with more people than I attended high school with, it occurred to me that 6.5 miles in 105 minutes is a little slower than four miles per hour. I could probably beat that walking on my hands.

So, I bought some new tires for my bicycle, and gave it a try. Sure enough, I passed five or six 720 busses as they sat like flatulent beached whales in the morning rush hour traffic. With all the traffic lights, it's a slow ride, but it takes about 50-60 minutes, so I'm averaging between 6.5-7.8 miles per hour. In West Los Angeles, velocities this high are known to cause Cerenkov radiation. I could go a lot faster if drivers would actually look at the road instead of staring blankly into space while driving their Range Rovers in the bike lane, parking in the crosswalk or on driving on the sidewalk to get around busses (yes, really). It would be certain death for a cyclist if all of this mayhem weren't happening at the speed one can push a loaded dumpster up a hill.

There is just one problem, though. When you're not riding it, a bicycle is miserable thing to carry. You may as well be traveling with an Alexander Calder sculpture.

So, I bought a folding bicycle :

This is a Brompton M6R. It folds up really, really tiny, and has little wheels on the bottom to roll it like a suitcase when it's folded up.

Surprisingly, the small wheels don't seem to make much of a difference with stability. The only difference, really, is that it takes a lot less torque to turn the front wheel, even at speed. This makes it feel "twitchy" at first, but the sensation goes away after about twenty seconds of riding. The Bromptons also have really strong breaks. You have to be careful not to pitch yourself over the handlebars.

Compared to my road bike, the Brompton is almost alarmingly responsive. This makes it ideal for crowded situations -- it's easy to avoid unexpected obstacles, squeeze through narrow spaces, and stop suddenly. When it's folded up, it's nice to be able to walk down the train platform without goring people with the pedals or stabbing them with the quick release levers.

The Brompton has two main disadvantages. First, it's a little on the heavy side. I didn't shell out for the titanium version, so it weighs in at 23 pounds. This turns out not to matter very much, except when lugging it up long flights of stairs. The second disadvantage is that I must answer a never-ending stream of questions about it.

I will write a more detailed review of the bicycle itself in a few weeks.

Only a few day ago, I discovered that my wonderful Toyota Yaris probably outranks my mother's (also pretty neat) Toyota Prius in terms of lowest carbon footprint. It appears the Yaris has the smallest carbon footprint of any car available in the United States.

Unfortunately, when it comes to fuel economy standards, what Toyota gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. Thomas Friedman expounds in his op-ed today :

What I don’t get is empty-barrel politics — Michigan lawmakers year after year shielding Detroit from pressure to innovate on higher mileage standards, even though Detroit’s failure to sell more energy-efficient vehicles has clearly contributed to its brush with bankruptcy, its loss of market share to Toyota and Honda — whose fleets beat all U.S. automakers in fuel economy in 2007 — and its loss of jobs. G.M. today has 73,000 working U.A.W. members, compared with 225,000 a decade ago. Last year, Toyota overtook G.M. as the world’s biggest automaker.

Thank you, Michigan delegation! The people of Japan thank you as well.

But assisting Detroit’s suicide seems to be contagious. Everyone wants to get in on it, including Toyota. Toyota, which pioneered the industry-leading, 50-miles-per-gallon Prius hybrid, has joined with the Big Three U.S. automakers in lobbying against the tougher mileage standards in the Senate version of the draft energy bill.

This is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to allow so few companies to dominate such an important market. It virtually guarantees that even the "good guys" to get mixed up in bad business, and no approach actually taken will stand out as clearly the right one. If there were more car companies each with a smaller market share, it would be more likely that at least one of them would hit on the right mix of innovation, marketing and public policy.

Remember, Toyota also makes the unfortunately-named Tundra. Imagine yourself a future history textbook author in a time when there isn't any actual tundra left in the world. Would you pass up the opportunity to bash a company for naming a product after the ecosystem it helped erase from the Earth?

The police in Burma are firing warning shots and arresting the monks who are defying a ban on public gatherings. I was literally holding my breath listening to the BBC reporting from Rangoon.

I first studied Burma when I was a freshman in high school. Burma was the topic in policy debate that I dreaded the most; just thinking about it put me on the verge of tears. Even today, I find it utterly impossible to say anything rational about the situation there.

Much of humanity is sustained through its daily misery by the hope that evil can be defeated without resorting to evil. We all hope that somehow, someone will figure out a way.

If I believed in God, I would pray for Burma.

Ikea has a very nice and aptly-named LED lighting product called DIODER. It has four lamps, uses about a watt, and nicely illuminates a good-size desk.

I installed one for my mom's microscope workspace. Yes, I'll do something about the dangling wires when I have time to buy wire-ties.

This idea has probably been floated before, but it occurs to me that there is a very simple plan for getting us out of Iraq: Hold a national referendum in Iraq on whether or not to continue the occupation. If the Iraqis tell us to get out, then we should get out. Immediately.

The Republican position seems to be that we have to stay in Iraq to protect its "young democracy," as the president described it yesterday. There could hardly be a more democratic way of settling this question. On the other hand, a referendum is almost sure to result in a resounding "Get Out."

If the Democratic Party is looking for a nice, reasonable, uncontroversial plan for getting out of Iraq, I can't see how this one could be attacked. We're ostensibly in Iraq for its own good. If we're not wanted, then we ought to withdraw. No one could call it cutting and running if we are asked to leave.

Los Angeles traffic provides fertile grounds for situations that can be modeled with the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's not difficult to guess what strategy the owners of the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Chevy Tahoe have decided to play :

I encountered these two defectors in an extremely crowded parking structure in Old Town Pasadena. This isn't just antisocial behavior. The owners of these two titanic vehicles are also breaking the clearly written rules.

It occurs to me that the decision to buy these vehicles in the first place can also be modeled using many, many iterations of the Prisoner's Dilemma played against every other driver. Here's how such a model might be constructed. The options are :

• Buy an SUV (defect)
• Buy a compact car (cooperate)

In a single round of Prisoner's Dilemma, it is usually reasoned that the only rational choice is to defect. However, when two individuals play many iterations against one another, more interesting strategies can succeed. The strategy that seems to do the best in most situations is some variant of generous, randomly forgiving tit-for-tat. To apply the Prisoner's Dilemma to the automobile market, you must view the game as continuously ongoing because a player can trade in their car for a different model at any time, and the game is played against every other driver on the road. Each iteration makes a marginal contribution to the total outcome for the player. For example, the actual risk of death is the sum over the marginal risk of death arising from the outcome of each game.

The outcomes are :

		Player's Choice
		defect	cooperate
Stranger's Choice	defect	Punishment for Mutual Defection Both players buy an SUV, negating the advantages of owning a larger vehicle. Both players are penalized with substantial marginal increases in traffic congestion, gas prices, risk of death, risk of injury, and rate of damage to shared environmental resources.	Sucker's Payoff Player suffers moderate marginal increase of gas prices, traffic congestion, and rate of destruction of shared environmental resources than the Punishment for Mutual Defection. However, the player suffers a worse view of the road and substantially increased marginal risk of death and injury.
	cooperate	Temptation Player suffers a moderate marginal increase of gas prices, traffic congestion, and rate of destruction of shared environmental resources than the Punishment for Mutual Defection. They also enjoy better view of the road and a substantially reduced marginal risk of death or injury.	Reward for Mutual Cooperation Both the Player and the Stranger enjoy a better view of the road and substantial marginal reductions in gas prices, traffic congestion, rate of destruction of shared environmental resources, and risk of death and injury.

In computer models of the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and in real-world situations are well represented by the model, strategies that are "nice," "generous" and "forgiving" tend to thrive. These terms have a technical meaning here. "Nice" simply describes a strategy that will not defect first, "generous" describes strategies that will not retaliate against other players when they defect under some circumstances, and "forgiving" describes strategies that will "forget" about past defections of other players. Richard Dawkins describes this in some detail in The Selfish Gene (see Chapter 12: Nice Guys Finish First), basing much of his argument on the research of Robert Axelrod.

If the automobile market really can be modeled using the iterated Prisoners Dilemma, then we would expect to see the most successful strategies in Axelrod's tournaments, which are mostly "nice," become the dominant strategy for car-buying. That is to say, we should see mostly compact cars. So, why do people keep buying SUVs? They are playing Defect against the rest of us, hoping to receive the Temptation outcome from most of the iterations of the game.

This is especially curious because because both the Punishment for Mutual Defection and the Sucker's Payoff are very severe. It doesn't take very many people playing Defect to block the view on the road, to drive up gas prices, to dramatically increase the risk of death an injury for all drivers, and to accelerate the rate of destruction of our shared environment. The Reward for Mutual Cooperation should be a very strong attractor in the problem space.

It's very tempting to think of SUV buyers as stupid, or as assholes, or as sociopaths. However, it is more useful to model the decision as a purely rational decision based on what they think will be the best strategy. For most people, it probably isn't a rational choice, but that doesn't actually matter. In the model, we pretend that the players are playing as if they are making rational choices. This is how computers play Prisoner's Dilemma, even though they aren't capable of rational choices.

Game theory offers a fairly convincing (and rather grim) explanation for the phenomenon of SUVs. It makes less sense to play Cooperate if you don't think the game will go on for much longer. On the last round of the game, it becomes the classic, non-iterated Prisoner's Dilemma for which the only rational choice is Defect. Everyone knows that we're running out of oil. Consciously or unconsciously, people are behaving in a way that suggests that the shadow of the future is shortening.

While I listened to Petraeus and Crocker tiptoe clumsily around perjury, I couldn't help but wonder how many people will take them at their word that the level of violence is declining. I find it difficult to understand how the level of violence is decreasing when the rate of killing has been increasing. I guess it must depend on how you count the bodies. Evidently, ordinary muggers shoot people in the face, and death squads shoot people in the back of the head. Accepting, for a moment, this ridiculous criterion for distinguishing muggings from sectarian killings as reasonable, it seems very weird that we don't count muggings as violence.

Ambassador Crocker, for his part, repeated the assertion that Iran is supplying the insurgency with sophisticated weapons, particularly explosively formed penetrators. If you will direct your attention to the photograph below, from Wikipedia :

This is a sophisticated weapon that exploits some very tricky hydrodynamics. It is also improvised from an ordinary copper pipe. The penetrator (the bowl shaped part) looks like it was turned out on a lathe, and that the machinist was either not very skillful or not very concerned with quality. Note the disk-shaped depression in the center where the lathe spindle was attached. The penetrator appears to be soldered to the pipe with plumbing solder.

I don't think the insurgency needs anyone's help to build these. The hardest part would be obtaining the explosive material. Who is supplying the insurgency with explosives? The simplest explanation is that they helped themselves to the weapons caches we left unguarded at the beginning of the war. How many improvised explosively formed penetrators could you make with 377 tons of high explosives?

Maybe Iran isn't being very helpful when it comes to American interests in Iraq. After all, why should they? I have no doubt that Iran's leadership would be delighted to see things go as badly for America as possible in Iraq and elsewhere. However, it's not as if Iran actually has to do anything to make Iraq a disaster for America. The fact that they don't like us is not in itself a very good reason for them to arm the insurgents. Practically any government in Iraq is likely to be friendly with Iran. Iran actually has a lot of good reasons to want the insurgency to stop.

If I were Mr. Ahmadinejad, I would just sit on my hands. At most, I would give some political support to Iraqis who might be friendly to Iran should they gain or keep power. But weapons? Why bother when the insurgents have already looted all the weapons they could ever want? It would be redundant and unnecessary.

Like most Americans, Mr. Crocker knows that we've either lost or that we're loosing. What sets him apart from the rest of us is that Americans are grown up enough to accept responsibility for the bad outcome of this conflict, and Mr. Crocker would rather blame it on someone else.

Charles Boustany turned up on CNN to peddle the administration's latest outrage -- that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq substantially. So, Wolf Blitzer asks a hard question :

BOUSTANY: We’re clearly seeing some major improvements. Clearly in the Anbar Province, we’ve seen significant improvement. We were able to walk the streets of Fallujah. Sectarian deaths are down.

[...]

BLITZER: And Congressman Boustany, you say that the number of casualties is going down. But we took a closer look — and The Los Angeles Times did as well — citing Iraqi Health Ministry numbers. In June, it was 1,227 civilian deaths in Iraq. In July, it went up to 1,753 civilian deaths in Iraq. And in August, the month that just ended, 1,773 civilian deaths in Iraq. Those numbers are going in the wrong direction.

Ah, the numbers. It is rather alarming how often important news comes without any specific discussion of the numbers upon which it hinges. Someone needs to send Mr. Blitzer a pundit-snack. Good pundit.

But reading a triad of four digit numbers from a teleprompter (or maybe even from memory) is not the best way to communicate about numbers. That might be appropriate for MegaMillions, but we owe these particular numbers more careful examination. We are, after all, talking about the deaths of human beings as a direct result of our collective decisions at the ballot box.

So, I looked up the data on conformed killings of Iraqi civilians. Against the background of men and women and children turning up as abandoned corpses on the street, there are a lot of mass-casualty events. There are also a few rare days when there are no confirmed killings. It's somewhat difficult to see the trend in the raw data. So, I borrowed an analytical tool from the financial world -- the moving average.

That looks like a slight upward trend to me. The GAO agrees. Their data measures the number of attacks, rather than the number of dead, but one would expect attacks and deaths to correlate.

General Patreous is going to make his presentation in a few days, which everyone assumes is going to say that the surge is working. If it doesn't explain these numbers, then the report should be ignored.

Evidently, when a chunk of software is simultaneously licensed under the BSD license and the GPL, it becomes unusable to projects that use the BSD license. No, wait. GPLed projects can borrow BSD licensed code, but not visa versa. No wait. When a chunk of code is under a dual BSD/GPL license, you get to pick which one to follow, which means you can ignore one of them.

Fuck. I hate this shit.

How about this :

The No-Lawyers License

Permission is hereby granted for the use of this file and all of its contents and any representation, derivative, or portion thereof for any purpose whatsoever, unless :

• You are a lawyer
• You are an employee of a law firm
• You are a contractor of a law firm

If the conditions above are violated, you are prohibited from examining, discussing, writing about, quoting, referencing, citing, or interpreting this file or any of its representations, derivatives or portions for any purpose whatsoever.

I just want to write code and let other people use it. If people make improvements, I'd be happier if they gave their improvements back to me. Why is this so goddamn difficult?

I've got too much crap. I want to sell some of it. If you see anything you like, email me!

I have posted a Flickr gallery of all the stuff I'm selling.

Vintage WiFi Station -- $15

This is a commercial-grade Nokia 802.11 access point. Yes, 802.11, not that fancy Johnny-come-Lately 802.11b or that bling-bling 802.11g. The original.

It runs at a stately 2 MB/s, with none of this rushing around at manic 11 MB/s speeds or barbaric 54 MB/s speeds. It has a removable Bay Networks BayStack 660 PCMCIA card, which I presume can be replaced with something more modern if you want to spoil the experience. And it is an experience, let me tell you. I've done no fewer than six Debian installations over this wonderful example of Scandinavian craftsmanship.

Lest you think this device is obsolete, I should point out that it works just fine with newer WiFi cards. Also, ask youself this: How fast is your internet connection, really? Is it faster than 2 MB/s? Probably not. Probably, you pay for 768 KB/s downlink, and you actually get 480 KB/s. You aren't fooling anyone with that fancy 54 MB/s 802.11g access point (that only actually runs that fast when you put your laptop directly on top of it, anyway). Your bits aren't moving any faster that your ISP says they will.

It's WiFi from a more civilized age.

Laser Level -- $25

Bulldog laser level, complete with tripod, carrying case, and eye-protection. Yours for $25.

Intel Centrino mini-PCI WiFi card -- $30

This was the original card that came with my IBM ThinkPad X40. I wanted an Atheros-based card, so I bought one and replaced the Centrino card. It's been sitting in its little anti-static bag since ever since.

For various reasons, a lot of people remain very skeptical about global warming. The most often cited (sane) reason for maintaining this skepticism is that the data has been patched together from many different sources, and that no single source of evidence conclusively demonstrates that global warming is occurring. With such a complicated argument, perhaps there are alternative explanations, one might wonder.

The important thing about global warming is that it is a theory, and thus it is falsifiable. If there are doubts about the validity of this theory, we can design an experiment that would reliably falsify the theory if it were, in fact, wrong. NASA has designed and built such an experiment, called Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). It would sit at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, where it can continuously observe the Earth's daylight side. From this vantage, it would calculate an accurate, up-to-the-minute energy budget for the whole planet. It would also collect detailed measurements of the atmospheric and surface composition of our planet.

If anthropic global warming is a bad theory, then DSCOVR would shoot it down in a hurry. On the other hand, if the theory is correct, as most climate scientists have concluded already, DSCOVR would provide us with simple, conclusive evidence gathered with uniform methodology.

But the global warming skeptics, or at least the ones in Congress, have never been interested in actually falsifying the theory. They were much happier wallowing in ignorance.

Republicans didn't buy it. In 1999, GOP Congressmen put the project on ice, calling it the "Goresat," a "multimillion-dollar screen saver." Dick Armey, then House Majority Leader, quipped, "This idea supposedly came from a dream. Well, I once dreamed I caught a 10-foot bass. But I didn't call up the Fish and Wildlife service and ask them to spend $30 million to make sure it happened."

Lost in the grandstanding was the critically important science behind DSCOVR. In January 2006, NASA quietly canceled DSCOVR altogether, citing "competing priorities." Many in the scientific community are incredulous that such an important mission might be lost to rank partisanship. "Gore favored it," says Dr. Park. "This administration is determined that a Gore experiment is not going to happen. It's inconceivable to me." Climate analyst Trenbeth said, "It makes no sense to me at all either from an economic or a scientific viewpoint. That leaves politics."

Science ran a letter from Francisco P. J. Valero titled Keeping the DSCOVR Mission Alive. I will quote the relevant part since most people don't have access to articles in Science :

Our proposal was selected by NASA after rigorous scientific and technical reviews. Solar activity observations were added at NASA's request to satisfy scientific needs and NOAA's operational requirements for space weather monitoring. DSCOVR is firmly based on the ideas developed by the science team. The transmission of live images of Earth added to the educational outreach component of the mission but was by no means the primary objective.

Many scientists, both in the United States and abroad, view DSCOVR as one of NASA's most important and innovative Earth science missions. The satellite has been built and could still be launched in time to provide synergistic data coincident with current and future orbiting systems. It offers great potential both as a source of fundamental scientific observations and as a pioneering Earth sciences mission from deep space.

France and the Ukraine have offered to launch it for us, but NASA has rebuffed their offers.

Next time you find yourself arguing with someone about global warming, tell them that the experiment to prove or disprove it, once and for all, was canned by Congress when the Republicans were running it. By their own admission, they canned it because they wanted to humiliate Al Gore. All we have to do is launch the damn thing, instead of letting it sit in a box at Goddard Space Flight Center at the cost of a million dollars a year.

From the moment it became clear that the stated reasons were both manifestly ridiculous and demonstrably false, petabytes have been devoted to speculation about the "real" reason why the United States invaded Iraq. They range from "'everyone' believed that there were WMDs..." to simply "the oil." Thus far, I have found no explanation that is particularly compelling, so I've left the question unanswered in my mind.

That is, until The Editors provided one that can turn aside old Occam's Razor. Of course it's speculation. However, since even the best friends of the White House can only speculate on what goes on in there, speculate is all we can do. This administration is a black box. Well, a black box from which leaks a steady drip of incompetence and malfeasance, but a black box nonetheless. I suspect that even with the benefit of historical perspective, the academic study of early 21st Century American History will do no better on this topic than speculating on the circumstantial evidence.

The Editors offer what I consider the first successful sally in this endeavor. If it's anywhere close to true, then I think its profanity is completely justified.

This month's Physics Today has a fascinating article by Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy about the fate of science in Islam. Dr. Hoodbhoy is a professor of nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. He covers a lot of ground, from the golden age of science in the Muslim world (the 9th-13th centuries), it's collapse with the rise of Asharite fundamentalism, to science in modern Muslim states.

Americans should look carefully at what happened in Baghdad in the 13th century. The Muslim world was resplendent civilization of intellectual tolerance, cultural pluralism, and political liberalism. This period came to an abrupt and bloody end with the overthrow of Mu'tazilah thinkers and leaders and their replacement with the stricter, inflexible, literalist Asharite thinkers. The bloody death of rationalist religious inquiry splashed across every aspect of civilization, dooming science, politics and culture to a prolonged dark age.

Americans would be well served by the study of this sad patch of history. It has many important parallels with our own inflexible, literalist religious doctrines.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or "butterfly-collecting" activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Hoodbhoy's argument here is broadly applicable. It is just as true for Islam as for Christianity, or Judaism, or any other religion. It is even true for non-religious doctrines. The study of physics was able to flourish under Stalin, but evolutionary biology and genetics, which tended generate ideas embarrassing to the cause of Communism, were repressed and grossly distorted.

Could this happen in 21st century America? You bet.

Like coal and gas power stations, nuclear power plants are heat engines. They produce power by exploiting the difference in temperature between two heat reservoirs. When most people think of a nuclear power plant (or any heat engine, really) the component that naturally dominates one's attention is the hot reservoir -- the reactor. The reactor contains most of the clever science and engineering, so it commands attention. But it takes two reservoirs of comparable heat capacity to make a heat engine.

Surprisingly, though, the electricity production of a given power plant is usually not limited by the reactor. We know how to build staggeringly enormous reactors, and even small reactors can be designed to run extremely hot. Rather, the generating capacity is limited by the heat capacity of the cold reservoir, which is a function of the natural environment in which the power station is situated. Nuclear reactors are cooled by water, so the generating capacity of a nuclear power plant is directly proportional to the quantity and temperature of water available from the environment.

So, what happens when there is a drought? Or a heat wave? Or both? The heat capacity of the cold reservoir shrinks, and the generating capacity of the power plant shrinks with it. It doesn't matter how big and fancy the reactor is if there isn't enough cooling water.

The water in the Tennessee River has gotten so hot this summer -- more than 90 degrees Fahrenheit averaged over a day -- that the TVA was forced to shut down one of the reactors at Browns Ferry. The heat capacity of their cold reservoir has shrunk so much that they can only operate two of their three reactors. The TVA is already suffering from reduced production at their hydroelectric stations due to drought conditions.

The lesson here is that nuclear power isn't simply a solution to global warming. It a technology that is threatened by global warming.

Evidently, no one noticed that in passing the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, Gonzalez will get yet another nifty new power. Now, he can fast-track the process of killing prisoners. Hurray!

I wonder if it has ever occurred to the friends of the administration to wonder how these various expanded powers might be exploited by a hypothetical power-hungry, incompetent and ruthless ultra left-wing Democrat. It wasn't that long ago that people were actually somewhat concerned that a seemingly moderate Democrat might turn out to be a card-carrying Communist taking his instructions (or his ideas) straight from the Politburo. On the basis of such a possibility, wouldn't one want to blunt the power of such a disastrous individual by insisting on a limited executive?

I think we can take Republican party's embrace of expanded executive power as sufficient proof that they understand that the radical left is dead. They know that the most sinister thing the Democratic party has to offer is a few small-time crooks and the occasional philanderer. We can take the very fact that supposedly serious people are willing to promulgate the idea of a "unitary executive" as evidence that the advocates of the theory do not expect their political opponents to exploit such powers.

They are probably correct. If one may indulge in some speculation, what would Al Gore, had he been elected and had turned out to be a foaming-at-the-mouth enviro-communist, have done with the power to indefinitely detain people as "enemy combatants?" Whose phones would evil-universe Al Gore illegally wiretap? I can't imagine any answer to these questions that isn't just plain silly.

Barring some exceedingly bizarre event (e.g., the conquest of the United States by space aliens), I will probably vote for one of the Democratic presidential candidates next November. For the first time in living memory, we face the refreshing dilemma of choosing among genuinely good candidates, rather than the drudgery of selecting the least odious. I have to admit that even my least favorite Democratic candidate would probably make a pretty good president. But I wouldn't trust any of them with the wiretapping powers Congress granted to this president by passing the legislative turd that I shall dub the Illegal Wiretapping Reauthorization Act of 2007.

So there you have it, folks. The Republican leadership trusts any Democrat to exercise executive power responsibly and effectively. If they didn't, then they would be less enthusiastic about the expansion of executive power. Clearly, they trust the field of Democratic candidates more than I do.

The Simpsons and Burger King have a cute little Flash application that lets you turn yourself into a character on the show. Here is what I would look like, I suppose, if I appeared on The Simpsons :

I'm curious how much it actually does with the photo you upload. I wish they had one for Futurama. I think it would be even cooler to be a head in a jar.

While I was on jury duty last week, I rode the train from Pasadena to the courthouse in Downtown LA every morning. One of the best things about jury duty, I think, was riding the train. I took the Gold Line from the Lake Street station in Pasadena, switched to Red Line at Union Station, and then switched to the Blue Line at 7th Street, and hopped off at Grand, less than a block from the courthouse. The whole trip took took about 40 minutes when I caught a local train at Lake Street, or about 28 minutes if I was lucky enough to catch the Express. Driving from Pasadena during rush hour would have been... excruciating. At least an hour and twenty minutes.

I miss the train. It was quiet (except, inexplicably, for the tunnel leaving 7th Street), fast, and comfortable. I was always able to find a seat, even during peak hours. The stations are nice. I got a lot of reading done, and the scenery is interesting. If anything, my opinion of Angelenos has improved considerably from the random sample I encountered.

Now that I've been released from the jury, my trips to UCLA in West Los Angeles are by car. The train doesn't go here, and the buses from Downtown are slow, infrequent and astonishingly crowded. My most recent ride on the 720 bus featured a fifteen minute interval smashed face-to-face into the enormous pot belly of a 400-pound black man, who didn't seem to enjoy the experience any more than I did. No amount of shuffling and begging ones pardon were sufficient to disengage skin contact. The only solution was to stare out of opposite windows and wait for the rumbling glacier of sweat, flesh and steel to reach its destination. Riding the bus sucks.

West LA needs to get with the program, or it's going to become a slum. All the interesting new development in Los Angeles is happening Downtown, and the new zoning changes are only going to accelerate that. Running the Red Line down the Wilshire corridor to Ocean Boulevard is only a start. The proposal to turn Pico and Olympic into paired one-way streets is utterly idiotic, but understandable given that people in West LA would probably chew off their leg before allowing a even a single precious lane to be sacrificed for a light rail project.

I know that individual events, however strange, can't necessarily be attributed to global warming. But... A tornado in Brooklyn?

Finally, the judge released from jury duty, so I can talk about what I've been doing for the last week-and-change.

The case was pretty simple, but wasn't completely cut-and-dry. Here is the basic sequence of events :

1. There was a birthday party with about 12 people. The defendant was one of the guests.
2. The party ended, and the guests went to the sidewalk to get their cars.
3. The valet brought her 2007 Mercedes S-class to the curb, but did a crappy job of parking it.
4. Another car (an brand new Austin Martin) stopped to wait for the defendant's car to pull out.
5. Traffic backed up for about a block (a long block).
6. Two motorcycle officers saw the traffic, and noticed that the blockage started at the valet area. This had happened before. They made a U-turn to see if they could get things moving again.
7. ???
8. The defendant, now in her car, pulled away from the curb. The Austin Martin took its spot, and traffic started moving again. The officers decide that nothing more needed to be done.
9. The defendant's car stopped after traveling about the length of two parked cars. The defendant later explained that this was to put on her seatbelt.
10. Seeing that traffic was once again blocked, the officer activated his lights and his squawker.
11. The defendant moved her car up the street about the length of three parked cars, and turned onto Hollywood Blvd, where she yielded to the curb.
12. The officer had only intended to prod her into moving along, but since she had pulled over, he figured he should investigate a little more.
13. The officer smelled alcohol as soon as the window was rolled down.
14. The officer ordered her out of the car and performed a field sobriety test, on which the defendant performed poorly (but not the worst he'd ever seen). The officer then offered her a voluntary breathalyser test, which measured her at more than twice the legal limit. She was arrested, booked, and tested again at the police station with a more sophisticated machine, where she once again came in at more than twice the legal limit.

She was charged with driving under the influence and with driving with a 0.08 BAC or above.

The sticky part was what happened at between items 6 and 8. The arresting officer testified that the defendant was in the car the whole time. Basically, that nothing happened between item 6 and 8. The defense alleged that the defendant was waiting for her designated driver, and that the officer ordered her into the car, and ordered her to move it. Unfortunately, the evidence that might have supported this allegation (witness testimony) was apparently deemed inadmissible.

I suppose that the judge decided that whether or not she was ordered to drive was irrelevant, on the grounds that she could have refused the order. However, one of the key elements needed to sustain this kind of charge is that the act needs to be voluntary and deliberate (although one need not necessarily intend to break the law). If the officer's order somehow stripped her of her volition, that may undermine the charge.

However, we were never permitted to hear evidence to support the allegation that she was ordered into the car. Evidently, the judge didn't buy the argument that such an order might have stripped the defendant of her volition. So, based on the evidence we had on hand, we were forced to hand down a verdict of guilty on both charges.

Personally, I would have preferred to hear the argument and evidence pertaining to her volition. I probably would have urged a guilty verdict anyway, but I think it might have been relevant. After all, if a police officer orders you to do something, most people feel an extraordinary pressure to comply. If, in this case, the officer orders you to do something that happens to be illegal, I suppose it must be ones own responsibility to refuse. If that is what happened, the argument should have been vetted before the jury. It might not have helped the defendant, but if that is why she did what she did, she should have been permitted to explain herself.

Anyway, I'm very curious to find out what arguments were made during the sidebar discussions. Maybe I'll feel better about the verdict when I find out what was kept secret from us.

Otherwise, the experience was very interesting. We had a very entertaining bailiff. If you ever get pulled over by a Los Angeles County Sheriff named Rodriguez, and who has big tattoos on her biceps and talks very fast, she's only acting like a jerk. She's actually a very nice person. The jury had a lot of interesting people.

Oh, and George Takei was in my jury pool. He was dismissed, but I got a chance grumble a little about transportation to the courthouse with him and to say hello as he was leaving the next day. I wasn't quite sure if it was him, but his voice is absolutely unmistakable. He's also a really nice guy in person, though I don't think that's really news to anyone -- except maybe Tim Hardaway.

Just in case you didn't have enough reasons to hate smog, researchers at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine have announced the results of a study concluding that exposure to diesel and coal exhaust causes heart disease. Many people live for years with elevated cholesterol without developing heart disease, and many people live with smog without developing heart disease. However, it appears that the combination of elevated cholesterol and exposure to fine particles from hydrocarbon combustion activate the genes that lead to the hardening of arteries.

So, if you live in the city, then you really need to listen to your doctor if she tells you to lower your LDL/HDL levels.

Anyway, I suppose PG&E is moving in the right direction by building the world's largest solar plant in Southern California -- a 6000 acre, half-gigawatt solar thermal plant in the Mojave desert. PG&E has contracted Solel, and Israeli company specializing in solar energy, to build the plant. There are already nine solar thermal plants operating in the Mojave desert, totaling 354 megawatts in capacity. When the new plant comes online, Mojave will have nearly a gigawatt of solar thermal generating capacity.

According to LADWP, the city's peak demand is 5.7 gigawatts, and a little more than half of that demand, or about 2.97 gigawatts, is met by burning coal. Assuming LADWP substitutes the new solar thermal capacity for coal capacity, LADWP could reduce its utilization of coal generating capacity, and thus emissions from coal, by about 18%. That's a significant chunk, but not nearly good enough.

Figuring out how to reassemble IKEA products is probably a common problem for people when moving. Fortunately, if you threw away the instructions, you can always download them again from the IKEA website.

Now, the only problem remaining is to remember the unpronounceable Swedish product name.

The Republicans are filibustering the amendment to Defense Authorization bill, and Mr. Reid is forcing them to actually stand up and do it. It's been quite fun watching them sleepily fumble through their speeches. The opponents of the filibuster look and sound like they planned well. They've had their naps and their coffee, and have been turning up for their 3 AM speeches ready for a fight.

A lot of people have been calling this political theater, and that real debate doesn't happen during these marathon sessions. The speeches so far, though, have been pretty serious.

Mr. Reid has threatened to instruct the sergeant at arms to round up enough senators to keep the quorum. I'd love to see some senators -- of either party -- dragged half-asleep onto the Senate floor in their pajamas.

A few days ago, a skunk died behind my house. Even a tiny whiff of the sent carries the unmistakable note of death. The smell is caused by two compounds, cadaverine and putricine, which form as a result of protein hydrolysis during putrefaction of animal tissue.

The testimony of Richard H. Carmona before Congress about his term as Surgeon General is tainted with an all-too-familiar stink. It's like catching the cadaverine-putricine whiff of decaying flesh while walking in the garden. There can be no mistake about what it signifies.

There is a common thread that runs among this sad episode and the US attorney purge, the Katrina disaster, the Libby/Wilson/Plame/Armitage clusterfuck, the missing WMDs, Abu Garib and the generally brain-dead strategy of the Iraq war.

This administration doesn't know what a civil servant is.

As we are reminded ad nausium, US attorneys, the surgeon general, the secretary of defense, and everyone else in the executive branch serves "at the pleasure of the president." This is true, in a general sense. What the administration doesn't understand is that this does not mean that these people serve to please the president.

It is the job of the president to choose the best technocrats he or she can find. Once installed, it is the job of the president to insure that these people can practice their trade. But this administration believes it knows the law better than the US attorneys it hires, military planning better than the War College, foreign intelligence better than its own intelligence analysts, disaster planning and emergency response better than FEMA, operational security better than the CIA, interrogation and detention practices better than the military police, and medicine better than its own surgeon general.

But they don't. No politician could. That's why we have experts.

I guess it's more or less official now, so in the grand tradition of the inter-tubes, it requires a blog announcement. I've moved out of my apartment near UCLA, so I'm not essentially homeless. I'll be shuttling around between Pasadena, UCLA and Cypress for the foreseeable future.

I suppose that means I'll be inhabiting the guest house behind my mom's house, but right now the situation has more to do with storage than inhabitation.

Now I get to find out how much of my security deposit my landlord will return.

Only one week ago, the Bald Eagle was officially taken off the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife. This is the first Independence Day since 1918 that the Bald Eagle, the symbol of our nation, has been considered safe from extinction. In celebration of this achievement, I would like to offer my thanks to the man who did the most to make this possible: Richard Nixon.

While its image fluttered over the California statehouse in Sacramento, the California Brown Bear was driven to extinction. The last one was shot in 1922. The UCLA Bruins are named for an extinct species. With the extinction of Ursus californicus, the flag of California has become a pathetic commentary on the mismanagement of our natural resources. With the Bald Eagle's removal from the list, America has dodged that particular humiliation.

Most people agree that Richard Nixon was, by nearly every measure, a terrible leader. In his domestic and foreign endeavors, he left a legacy of terrible failures. In foreign policy, Nixon's failures were numerous and severe :

• He escalated the war in Vietnam by secretly (and illegally) bombing Laos and Cambodia.
• He encouraged and aided the overthrow of Chile's government by Augusto Pinochet.
• He gave material support to Yahya Khan, the dictator of Pakistan, during Bangladesh's war of independence, putting America in a position of complicity in genocide.

The bright spot in this record of failure was that he was able to drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. This was an important strategic achievement, but it came at the expense of betraying an ally, Taiwan. This did little to help the of reputation of American friendship. The Nixon Doctrine of replacing American troops in Vietnam with South Vietnamese soldiers was a military failure, but succeeded as a politically feasible way of getting out of the war.

But it isn't fair to remember Nixon simply for his failures and Pyrrhic victories. So, for today, let's remember Richard Nixon for his achievements on his watch. Among them, Nixon...

• indexed Social Security to inflation
• created the EPA
• proposed, signed and enforced the Endangered Species Act
• created the Supplemental Security Income
• created Occupational Safety and Health Administration
• helped create hundreds of state parks
• raised wages for federal employees
• implemented the first affirmative action program

But the most important thing Nixon did, ultimately, was resign. He recognized that the nation was more important than his own hopes and goals for his tenure in office. He had the courage to admit that his failures had grown too numerous and too serious, and he decided that the best way to serve the nation was to offer his resignation.

For all his faults, Nixon's final act as president was to place his country before himself. He was in many respects a very poor president, but he still managed to leave behind a legacy important achievements. Every time you see a seal depicting the Bald Eagle, remember that it Richard Nixon helped save it. So, on this Forth of July, I'd like to salute Nixon's tarnished patriotism. Let his epitaph be, "In the end, he was a patriot."

Four years ago today, George Bush said this :

"There are some who feel like, that conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is: Bring them on. We got the force necessary to deal with the situation."
-- George W. Bush on Iraq, 2 July 2003

Nowadays, "they," being the insurgency, attacks us "there," being nearly every corner of Iraq, on a daily basis. Nearly every day, in ones and twos and sometimes more, our guys are getting picked off.

The deaths happen with such regularity that the news has ceased to say very much about these singular, individual and profound losses, but write instead to the general condition of having our soldiers die in Iraq. The news from Iraq is reported in the much the same manner as the general condition of the weather. The reporting on casualties has the same tone you might expect to hear, "It has been hot this Summer."

Today, George Bush celebrated the anniversary of "Bring them on" by commuting Scooter Libby's prison prison sentence. Scooter Libby, who perjured himself before a federal grand jury in an effort to cover up the deliberate and criminal disclosure of the covert status of a an operating CIA officer causing the endangerment and/or loss of valuable intelligence assets, was effectively pardoned today.

George Bush must be aiming for an approval rating in the 15% range.

For Father's day, I've been helping my dad get Ubuntu working on his new laptop (a Dell Latitude D420). Getting Ubuntu configured has turned out to be surprisingly painless, especially compared to Windows XP.

My dad had originally hoped to buy a machine with Ubuntu pre-installed. Unfortunately, getting Dell to actually sell you a computer with Ubuntu is more or less impossible. My dad isn't the only one to come to this conclusion. HP and IBM have a similar approach; they make a big deal of offering Linux pre-installed on their hardware, but it's only offered on a tiny and undesirable subset of their products, and the sales department will do everything possible short of hanging up on you to prevent you from buying one. So, he gave up and bought the machine he wanted, figuring he'd postpone his switch to Ubuntu.

After a failed attempt to restore his Windows XP installation from backups on is old computer, reinstalling XP from the provided CD turned out to be a neigh impossible task. With no drivers for any of the hardware (even the USB bus), once the OS was loaded, we couldn't think of a way of getting the drivers onto the disk so they might be installed. The machine uses a USB CD drive, so without the USB bus drivers, you can't even burn a CD with the drivers. The needed drivers are probably somewhere on the XP install CD, but there's no way of getting them.

So, we figured we'd give Ubuntu a shot after all. The process could hardly have been more painless. The only shortcomings of the Ubuntu install process are legally imposed and have easy workarounds -- fetching the Broadcom firmware for the wireless card, for example. After completing those chores, the machine Just Works.

My dad is a smart guy, so I wasn't worried about the "normal" sorts of troubles in switching to Linux. When you switch to a new OS, there is a reasonable expectation of effort required to learn the new environment. He'll figure out how to use the the software and OS features on his own. I was worried about poor hardware support. My dad can figure out how to install software and use it without my help, but it'll be a while (if ever) before he would consider compiling his own kernel to fix a hardware issue. It's not reasonable to expect someone who is switching to a new OS to repair it and learn it simultaneously.

Fortunately, all of the headaches I was fearing seem to have been addressed. It suspends and resumes without complaint, you can join wireless networks (including encrypted ones) from a nice little drop down menu. The network menu lets you switch between an ethernet connection and a WiFi connection if both are available. The Add/Remove Software application is intuitive and easy to use. No indoctrination into kernel compilation and command line tools is immediately necessary.

So, our assessment is that Ubuntu is, so far, much more user friendly than Windows. An inexperienced computer user would have a better chance of getting Ubuntu installed correctly than Windows. On this hardware, it wouldn't be all smooth sailing, but it's pretty close. If you're experienced enough to know the definition of words like "partition" and "firmware," then it's a piece of cake.

It's a shame, really, that Dell won't sell Ubuntu on this machine. Ubuntu is slick, snappy, easy to use, and it makes their hardware look good.

My dad's only complaint so far has been, "Yuck. This brown color is ugly. How do I change the color scheme?"

Well, now that Speakeasy has been acquired by Best Buy, I'm going to give up on it. I had such high hopes, but now I feel like an asshole for ever recommending them. The customer service has been rude and unhelpful (to my mother, no less!), the installation was painful, it's overpriced, and the actual service is miserably slow. And by slow, I mean like dial-up slow.

One thing I liked about dial-up service was the profusion of choices. There were dozens, and in some places, hundreds of ISPs. The ISPs offered lots of features and competitive prices. Now, the "choice" usually boils down to :

• Your friendly local cable monopoly, or
• Your friendly local telephone monopoly

Not unexpectedly, we pay high prices for crappy service. The monopolist providers cheerfully spy on us on behalf of quasi-legitimate entertainment cartels and clearly illegal government programs.

I want my choices back. There are a lot of smallish local DSL providers in LA, like Pacific Online and LA Bridge. Has anyone out there had any experiences (good or bad) with smaller DSL providers?