19 July 08
The Tour de France
Our mornings in July go like this:
I get up, get the tea on, feed the cats, get online, go to the BBC’s cycling page where there is live text commentary (no choice if you’re on dialup) on the current stage (if you’re not following it, today is moving from the Rhone delta into the alpine foothills and punishing mountains that follow). Numenius gets up anywhere between one and three hours later and is usually still in time to catch the finish.
I started following cycling when Miguel Indurain was in his heyday. He was probably the finest athlete Spain’s ever produced. Now that Lance Armstrong is no longer the king of the peloton and the interest of Americans in bike racing has sort of returned to where it was before, it’s back to following the fortunes of the unlikely, the opportunists, the ones whose last chances are this year having been unfortunate enough to have come of age when Lance did.
It’s great there’s no obvious favorite. Sentimentally, I’d like Evans to win. But mostly I just love to follow this fantastic event over the three weeks it takes, watching the emergence of the likes of Mark Cavendish (Manx sprinter) and the breakaway hopefuls. Allez allez!
18 July 08
Bicycle Economics
Inspired by David Mackay’s online book Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, I worked out just how much more energy-efficient a bicycle is than a car. Here’s the math: the energy content of gasoline is about 10 kWh/liter. Our car gets around 25 mpg (none-too-efficient, I know) which equals 10.6 km/liter. Dividing through our car therefore uses 0.94 kWh/km. As for the bicycle, at a modest pace of about 20 km/hr, I use about 15 kcal/km of energy (this value comes from the excellent book Bicycling Science, by David Gordon Wilson). At 857 kcal/kWh, I thus use 0.0175 kWh/km on my bike. The bicycle is therefore 0.94/0.0175 or about 50 times as efficient as the car.
In working out these energetics problems, one quickly runs into a plethora of conversion constants. Here’s one for fun: since a kilocalorie is the same as a food calorie, driving the car 1 km uses the energetic equivalent of a pint of ice cream.
We’re doing pretty well though in minimizing our car travels. Going through our expenses this evening, I worked out that over the past six months, we spent far more money on bike maintenance and parts than we did on gas (those bicycle overhauls add up).
15 July 08
Three Weddings and a Baby Shower
Three invitations arrived last Friday. One, the wedding of some friends for whom I had designed the invitations, so not unexpected, but fun to receive all the same. The second, two dear friends will wed ten years to the day after they met. Thanks to California’s recent supreme court ruling, they can, legally, get married now. The third was to a baby shower, a couple expecting twins. They will get married the following day: the first lesbian shotgun wedding I’ve been invited to… Busy August, folks.
14 July 08
Night of Approaching Nights
ExpressJet has gone to the Great Airport In The Sky. They are ceasing flight operations as of September 2nd, citing high fuel prices. We flew ExpressJet on our trip this past April to Texas, appreciating the direct flight from Sacramento to San Antonio, though the journey ended by haggling with them about the return flight. (We won.)
I don’t see the airline industry as surviving this transition from cheap energy. Jet fuel has no substitutes — don’t expect to see hybrid planes in the air, and there is not a lot of room for improvement in the fuel efficiency of modern jet airplanes. Fly while you still can; the party’s winding up. Air travel will still exist in a decade or so, but it will be very expensive, circuitous, and basically only accessible to the rich and the elite.
This is, simply put, a vision of technological decline. It is an odd concept to get used to, conditioned as we are to expect ever-improving technology. Jet transport is an obvious, though painful, area to anticipate decline, but it stands to reason there may be others. Perhaps it’s time to ponder them.
Last night was Night of Night IX. This is an annual radio event commemorating the last commercial marine Morse Code station in the US, KPH located on Point Reyes, going off the air nine years ago. In this event, a number of these old transmitters go back on for an evening in tribute to the radiotelegraphers who worked for decades from ship and shore. I listened for a bit to the Morse Code, copying the stations from Point Reyes and from Mobile, Alabama. Voices from the past, to be sure. But we would do well to keep our skills up at trailing-edge technologies. They may yet come in handy.
11 July 08
Green Summit in November
I’ve been asked, in my capacity as Yolo Audubon president, to participate in a steering committee for a day long workshop to address conservation challenges in our region. The first meeting of this committee took place last night, and while I do actually have plenty to do this summer, I’m quite jazzed about this. It’s a fantastic group.
I sense a huge fatigue among the public, at least around here, about climate change and the environment. The brown smoke that hovers in the air, still, this morning, the days of suffocating heat we’ve been having, the drought this spring: undeniable signs of unpleasantness, with more and worse to come. The housing crisis and the price of gas and food, together, are clear indicators that what we’ve been building since WWII is untenable, unworkable. Back to growing our own food and walking or biking to the shops. This means, ultimately, less urban sprawl. (The wakeup call couldn’t have come faster, from my point of view, but I realize the transition is going to be messy, difficult, and very possibly violent.)
I think our task with this summit is to empower people to get engaged. Have workshops on how to understand planning policy and participate in the process. What does it mean? How can I help? How can I make what I do count? I don’t doubt that people around here have the will and the energy to get things to change, but they do need more tools to do it. I know I do.
This summit will come just after the general election, when the focus of everyone will be on the outside, on the country as a whole, on the body politic on the national level. Our green summit will be all about bringing it home…
8 July 08
Murk
It will be a long summer. Today it got to 106° F here with only a couple of miles of visibility, the skies still hazy with smoke as it has been for much of the past several weeks. There are still 18 fire complexes burning throughout Northern California, 10 of these in the mountains rimming the Sacramento Valley.
The current air quality is a lot better here than what it is today where we used to live. There is a major wildfire in the Santa Barbara area, in the mountains north of Goleta and UC Santa Barbara. The fire started on July 1, and has burnt about 10,000 acres. The eastern perimeter of the fire got very close to the little enclave in the mountains where we spent a year-and-a-half, the San Marcos Trout Club, but the fire was held at the ridge just above and to the west. For now the Trout Club seems okay: the residents had been evacuated but have been allowed to return to their homes as of this afternoon. And typical Santa Barbara summer weather is now helping there — evening and morning fog, highs in the low 70s.
7 July 08
Clawed
Diego had four teeth out last week. It was a miserable time for him, for us: he’s not yet four, and some kind of autoimmune virus thingy was just eating away at the roots of the teeth on the lower left of his mouth. All my vet friends say better out than in; he’ll learn to eat hard food (and in fact is already eating it with alacrity) and will get along fine. I feel like a failure as a pet-owner and all the rest. But after all, if he doesn’t need to catch his food, what does he really need teeth for? (I try to convince myself of this. Ha.)
The hard part, though, is the antibiotics. You mix the powder with water and shake hard, hoping its volatility lasts through the heat wave. (Unlikely.) The cat hears the syringe and hides under the bed, in the closet, or in one or two other places we have not been able to discern, even though there are only so many places to hide in 600 square feet.
I depress the plunger as claws from front and back feet try and get some kind of purchase on my flesh, hoping the banana-smelling stuff has gotten down his gullet in enough quantity to prevent whatever infection might be brewing, the source of impossibly larger vet bills.
My legs look like I’ve been running through brambles…
6 July 08
Anthocyanins Abundant
I think I’m turning into a pomegranate.
This all started when our landlady’s daughter tried to interest us in MonaVie. This is a multi-level marketed health juice based heavily around acai berries and other concentrated purplish juices. Being a subscriber to the what color is your diet theory of nutrition (build your diet around a full color palette of fruits and vegetables), I don’t doubt that this juice is very good for you, but the catch is that they want $30-$40 a bottle, depending upon the marketing scheme.
I like the concept, think I, but I can get my anthocyanin fix for a lot cheaper than that. A raid on the food coop nets us blueberry-pomegranate juice, black cherry juice, bilberry nectar (which according to amateur astronomy folklore helps night vision), mango-acai herbal tea, not to mention the Chilean cab. Mix it together, dilute it 1 to 2, there you go. Add to that all the plums from the tree heavy with fruit just outside, and I’m not doing badly for my reds, purples, and blues.
I’m starting to crave orange, though. The beta-carotenes may be next.
4 July 08
Lapelgate
The opening scene of Schindler’s List features the main character getting ready to go out in the evening. Combed hair, pressed shirt, tie, handkerchief. The final touch? The Nazi lapel pin. This will function for him as a pass-card; it’s membership in the club of the powerful and terrifying. Industrialist Oskar Schindler is mostly interested in making money, and he makes a fortune thanks to the Nazis and their war. The lapel pin gets him places. Really nasty places, and his story of redemption is the story of a struggle with his conscience, of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing, and because you can: it’s a choice.
I grew up in Franco’s Spain near the northern Madrid Guardia Civil headquarters. We’d see them wandering, always in tricornered pairs, always with tommy guns; but when they drilled at the Quartel, they’d pass under the Spanish flag (in those days it said “Una, Grande, Libre” (one, great, free) unlike the confederate version so in evidence during the recent Eurocopa) and kiss it. Kiss the flag. Take it in their right hands and press their lips to it. The motto of the Guardia Civil was “Todo por la patria” — everything for the motherland. Everything: extreme suppression of dissent, torture, intimidation, wiretapping. Everything. No freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom to assemble, nada. Behave and we won’t hurt you. Everything. Por la patria.
My country, right or wrong, in other words.
One of the most striking things about the Declaration of Independence — and the U.S. Constitution, which I’ve only recently read for the first time — is how they both assume that citizens not only want to be, but are, in fact, grownups. They reject the model of the powerful parent, either monarch or state, and instead require that the government serve at the pleasure of the people.
Of course this requires that the “people” take their civic responsibilities seriously; that they engage; that they inform themselves; that they vote. It is not a model of blind obedience. It’s hard work, citizenship. It involves wrestling with the angel of democracy, as Susan Griffin says in her new book. Not for kids. Not for fearful adults or stupefied zombie-like drones (see Wall-E for an example of how frightening that could really be). Grownups.
Ever since 9/11 the flag-fetish has become a cudgel. Ever since I’ve been alive I’ve been aware that Americans hang flags more, much more, than Europeans; even in Fascist Spain, it was only the state and associated enforcers who engaged in it. Here, lots of people hang flags. It’s called “patriotism.”
So now they’re going after Obama for not wearing a flag lapel pin. The omission is somehow his entry into the club of world terrorism, a sign that he secretly hates America and wants to blow it up. He’s not “patriotic” enough.
It remains to be seen whether the damage inflicted on the citizenry by these crazed fearmongers will prevail in November.
I really hope not, because what was embodied in the Declaration of Independence — and later in the Constitution — is nothing less than faith in the ability of reasonable people to arrange their lives, reasonably. How civilized. And, on this Fourth of July, what a great gift to the world.
4 July 08
Wilderness Arising
I can’t sincerely call this pessimism, being of the bicycle commuting elitist class, but I believe that the high fuel prices we are seeing now are here to stay and to get even higher. The price increase just seems too structural — there haven’t been any evident major shocks to the market to account for it. Lately, I’ve reading a good bit from The Oil Drum, a joint blog about energy and the future. A couple of linked tidbits:
This article describes how high fuel prices are calamitous for isolated rural towns. These levels of fuel prices are causing a lot of suffering in the short term — people simply cannot change their livelihoods in the near term. Speculating about the long term is fascinating — what will happen in say the twenty-five year span.? My guess is that a lot of these rural communities will simply cease to exist — they are too dependent on people being able to afford to make long-distance supply runs. Swaths of the countryside then revert to wilderness.
On another note, here is an interesting post about peak oil, technical societies, and learning from amateur radio, from somebody who just dived in and passed all three of the FCC amateur radio licensing exams.