Stan Taylor

While attending his county Democratic Party meeting, Rafe Colburn made an astute observation:

North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall was the other elected official who gave a speech, and hers was almost entirely a defense of federalism and the importance of state’s rights. For my entire life, I thought that state’s rights was a Republican issue, but now I see that it’s a power issue. The party in power in Washington wants to exercise that power, and the opposition at the state level wants to prevent it. So now we’re in a situation where Republicans want to expand the power of federal government, and Democrats at the state level want the federal government to butt out. I think this is the reason for the clash between Republicans in Congress and the federal judiciary. The conservatives in federal courts haven’t gotten the memo that the Republican party no longer cares about federalism, and the Republican Congress will not accept checks or balances.

A lot of people are making doom and gloom predictions about what will happen in the next few years of decreasing availability of oil. On the other side are the optimists like John Scalzi:

As bad as it may get, I don’t think it will get as bad as many people might fear — or at the very least, won’t be bad for long. To begin, America and Americans are happy to put off until tomorrow what ought to be done today, and this emphatically includes dealing with energy issues. However, when Americans are finally at a point where something has to be done, it gets done. . . And so with something like an oil peak; if America is looking down the barrel of ruin, it will suck it up and do what is necessary to persevere. It’s done so before within the last 100 years with WWI, the Depression and WWII. We are admittedly out of practice (a happy side effect of having dealt with the issue so well before), but we can and will do it again.

I agree with Scalzi that the Great Depression and the two World Wars are good examples of Americans dealing with difficult situations, but if Scalzi is also suggesting that the effect of diminishing availability of oil will be ‘no worse’ than those times, I have to take issue with him.
The Great Depression had a severe impact on the lives of many Americans–including rampant hunger, homelessness, etc. I certainly would not want to live through a comparable economic downturn. Likewise, most Americans had to make great personal sacrifices in order to mobilize for the second world war: food and fuel rationing, being strongly urged to put their savings in government bonds, etc.
If the coming economic situation rivals the Depression or World War II, then I would consider it pretty severe.

Ed Felten has an informative blog post about the U.S. government’s proposed radio-enabled passports. After a short discussion of some of the potential problems with this technology, and why the government didn’t go with a technology that reads passport info only on contact, Ed concludes:

It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it’s late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether we have hit peak oil production (this BoingBoing entry links to a lot of good articles). But I’ve come to the conclusion that many people are missing the point. Peak oil production is only half the equation. Demand for oil is the other half. Things start to get rough if oil production peaks, but it also gets bad when demand increases significantly compared to production. Taking demand into the equation, things are looking grim for the US, as several large countries–primarily China and India–have developed to the point that their demand for oil has increased significantly, competing with the US for a finite production.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve tried to make sense of the devaluing dollar, the fact that China a a few other nations buy so much of the bonds to cover our federal deficit and what it all means. I’m happy to report that my understanding was pretty much correct. This New Yorker article by James Surowiecki explains the situation pretty succinctly.
In short, Americans have been maintaining our standard of living on borrowed money, and the Chinese are our largest lender. Of course, it’s been in their best interest to maintain our consumerist lifestyle, since the US is a big export customer for Chinese goods. But if the Chinese ever decide it’s not in their best interest to continue buying (so much of) our debt, our fate is in their hands. It’s all a vicious cycle, and it cannot continue forever. This concern keeps me awake nights.

Paul Rademacher created an application that combines real estate listings from Craigs List with Google Maps. It’s really cool.
But Dan Hartung points out one cool feature of Paul’s application that any real estate site could benefit from: overlapping price ranges. On most real estate sites, the value ranges on the dropdown are discrete prices ranges, e.g., $50-100K, $100K-150K, $150K-$200K. In Paul’s application, however, the ranges overlap: $50K-$150K, $100K-$200K, etc.
I remember when we were house hunting a couple of years ago, our price range was right at one of the price borders for one of the real estate sites. It was a real hassle to have to check out two complete price ranges. Paul’s solution would have helped us.

I saw these Huggies ‘Baby-shaped’ diapers in the grocery store this morning:

So, what shape are the other diapers? Hyena shaped? Wombat shaped?

From the unfortunate-use-of-the-English-language department (click image to see a larger version):

Since satellite photos were added to Google Maps a few days ago, a lot of bloggers are showing ‘memory maps’: satellite photos of places they’ve lived. Here’s my contribution.
In 1970, when I was eight years old, we moved from Wichita, Kansas, to Spring Branch, Texas, north of San Antonio in the Texas hill country. We moved to Cypress Lake Gardens, a subdivision that had been started in the mid-1960s and was planned as a high-class resort with golf course, airstrip, etc. When we moved in, few houses had been built, the golf course was unfinished, and the streets were all still caliche (dirt). A year or so later, the developer was murdered, so the subdivision went into bankruptcy and receivership. Consequently, it remained in pretty much the same state until I left in 1982.
It was a pretty lonely place to grow up. Since I traveled twenty miles to elementary and middle schools and eleven miles to high school, I saw most of my friends only at school–at least until I got a car and a driver’s license.
On the other hand, my playground consisted of thousands of acres of undeveloped Texas Hill Country. The satellite photo shows a creek running through the area. This is Rebecca Creek, which features clear springs, incredible remote canyons to explore and one of the greatest swimming holes I’ve ever seen.
Differences between then and now: there are about twice as many houses now–though it’s still pretty sparsely developed–and the golf course was finished and opened a few years ago. The side streets of my old subdivision are still caliche. That big road with several cul-de-sac streets coming off of if at the bottom of the image looks like a new subdivision (looks like the streets were still being developed when the satellite photo was taken).
I identified our former house with a star. Click on the image below to see a larger version (Warning: it’s big: 375KB):

I’ve been an avid runner since my teens, and I was active and fit through my twenties. Grad school was good for that: due to my flexible schedule, I could run when I wanted, and my bicycle was my primary transportation around town.
But right after I turned thirty, that all changed: I was no longer a full-time student; I got my first sit-on-my-ass-all-day job in software development; we moved from sunny Austin to New Jersey; and, within a few months, we had our first child. As a result, I struggled with my running, and consequently, my fitness and weight. Moving back to Austin helped a little: I ran the half marathon in 1998 and 2001, but my running routine remained very up and down.
This situation improved somewhat when I took my current job last summer. Our office complex has a small gym with treadmills, so I started coming in early on Tuesdays and Thursdays to beat the traffic and run before work. And now that it’s spring, I’ve run at the Town Lake hike and bike trail a few times instead of on the treadmill.
Last fall, when I saw my family physician for my annual checkup, she noted that I had gained a couple of pounds a year for the past ten years–starting at about age thirty.
In November, Katie and I decided that we would try a low-carb diet and really try to improve our family’s eating habits. We already ate pretty well, but there was still room for improvement, we felt. We did some research and decided on the South Beach diet.
We started our new eating regimen at the first of the year. I weighed 235 pounds at the time. I’m 6 ft, 1/2 inch tall, so that gave me a body mass index of 31, which is technically obese. It was a struggle to run 3-4 miles at a time on the treadmill.
I’ve since lost between 25 and 30 pounds, and my usual treadmill run has increased to five or six miles. This morning, I ran one hour, four minutes on the hike and bike trail, which is between seven and eight miles.
After this morning’s run it hit me: I’m back! I feel like I’m in a good running routine for the first time in years.