Russell's Blog

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 event 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 transpiration 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 pla