cities. physics. food. environment. fatherhood.

Sunday’s Super Bowl was an interesting game: the lead changed several times and until the very last seconds of the game, it seemed like either team could win.

Emotionally, at least, there’s a similarity between watching election night returns and watching sports: as the votes tally up, one can form a mental picture of a literal race, and if your favored team or candidate is behind, you cheer when the gap closes. Of course in sports, the actions of the players determine the course of the game, and crazy things can happen. In elections, it’s all over once the polls close. Barring irregularities like the 2000 presidential election in Florida, it really doesn’t matter what order the votes are counted in, and once the votes start to be counted, there is nothing anyone can do to get more votes. Cheering doesn’t give anyone a boost.

Of course, for all those involved in a political campaign, it also ends once the polls are closed, especially for the losing candidate. But even for the winning candidate, the dynamic of everyone involved changes dramatically. Those hours of uncertainty, after the polls close but before the winner is known, are the only possible time to have one last gathering of the campaign, and it might as well be a party, and you might as well find out how you’ve done.

And for everyone at home, watching the election returns can be entertaining, to know as soon as possible what happened. So as thoughts of Super Bowl turn to thoughts of Super Tuesday, I present my rudimentary election watching spreadsheet.

The television networks often project a winner even when it’s mathematically possible for either candidate to win, and the spreadsheet I offer here lets you play along, too. It only uses three pieces of information: the number of votes each candidate has, and the percent of precincts that have reported.

If we make the approximation that all precincts will have the same number of voters–not generally true, but hard to get a better number without detailed precinct-by-precinct data–then we can project the total number of votes that have been cast, and from that calculate the number of votes remaining to be counted, and of those the number each candidate would need to win, and finally, what percentage of the remaining votes each candidate would need.

These percentages are really illuminating: if you calculate that a candidate who has 45% of the vote so far would need to have 67% of the remaining vote to win, then you could call the election for the other candidate with a fair degree of confidence.

To use, just put the most recent vote counts in cells A3 and B3, and the percentage of precincts reporting in C3. The rest is calculated automatically. Use the Fill Down command to create multiple lines for running progress.

Watch Returns

I recently found, via DailyKos, a 20-minute video and accompanying website, The Story of Stuff, that provides an refreshingly pertinant voice in the discussion about consumerism, sustainability, and the environment. The presentation is of course rather simplified, and in some cases–such as when explaining what changes in new models of computer–it is oversimplified to the point of giving defensive nitpickers plenty of ways to discredit the piece. But the overall story that’s told is spot-on, and the simplifications are unavoidable if you’re trying to compress the story of the entire journey of everything we consume, from resource extraction to disposal, and its consequences, into a short video presentation. And any inaccuracies are very tiny when compared to the mis-representation one receives daily from advertising and mass media and the other side of the consumption debate.

It was slightly ironic, then, that the video couldn’t really run well on my 7-year old G4 Cube, so instead I watched it on my year-old Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro that I have home from work.

The Story of Stuff presents a viewpoint that I wish were more common in, say, Sierra Club Radio, which more often than not is more focused on finding “green” stuff to buy, instead of rethinking our relationship with stuff. (To say nothing of Consumer Reports, about which I hope to write more later.)

Watching The Story of Stuff, two parallel “readings” come to mind.

The first is a recent Washington Post story on the debate about the CSPC’s position on the use of Brominated Flame Retardant chemicals in furniture–the same BFRs that are highlighted in The Story of Stuff. With growing evidence that BFRs are, in fact, toxic, the debate on the surface looks like it could be about balancing the long-term risks of exposure to BFRs with the benefit of reduced risk of fatal fires. But that’s not what the debate was about. A leading cause of fires in homes is cigarettes igniting upholstered furniture. The cigarette industry wanted to avoid a mandate for self-extinguishing cigarettes, and looked to push the fire-safety problem onto the furniture makers. They bought off the fire marshals (who, it should be pointed out, are in no position whatsoever to evaluate the health risks of exposure to BFRs) and were assisted by the BFR manufacturers. The furniture industry put up a huge fight, and has mostly won, but the struggle continues. Completely on the sidelines are anyone looking out for the best interests of ordinary citizens.

The second piece is a segment on This American Life about textile workers in Cambodia. No, this is not a sweatshop horror story–Cambodia, apparently, has developed a textile industry the right way. Labor laws–which, by and large, are enforced–are modeled after French laws, and working conditions are generally good and wages considered fair. One gets the impression that Cambodian garment workers really do consider factory work to be a substantial step up from subsistence farming, the livelihood of roughly 70% of the country: industrialization is more complex than being forced to leave an degraded environment that once sustained people for generations. But more than that, the degree to which Americans buy new Cambodian-made clothes makes a huge difference in the quality of life of the garment workers, and the people who sell food or slippers or whatnot to the garment workers. It’s a reminder that “the economy” is not entirely about faceless corporations and the wealthy robber-barons who run them, but sometimes resembles the system that textbooks describe.

I was 34 years old when my son was born; my father was only 29 when I was born. Yet despite the fact that more time will have elapsed between my childhood and my son’s than between my father’s and mine, my perception is that while the world in which I grew up was fundamentally different than that in which my father grew up, my son is growing up in a world that is a slow, gradual evolution of the world of my childhood. Perhaps it’s because it’s only relatively recently that I’ve self-identified more as an adult instead of as a young person, and have wanted to categorize more years of advancements as belonging to my youth than I would acknowledge belonging to my father’s youth. I don’t really know what the right comparison to make is–Matthew is several years away from an age against which I can compare any real memories. And when he’s old enough to think about it, I could imagine Matthew reasoning that the lack of digital photography, a ubiquitous internet, and the need to buy music on physical media all as evidence that my youth was stone-age by comparison. We don’t really know what the world will look like when Matthew is old enough to remember it, but we can make some comparisons about the years in which we were born.

First, transportation. Amtrak was formed in 1971: passenger rail when Matthew was born is roughly the same as when I was born, and completely different from when my father was born. At some point before I was born, the passenger-miles of the airlines overtook that of the railroads. The present Interstate Highway system, begun in 1956, is similar to when I was born.  

So I think its fair to say that the transportation world in which I was born was fundamentally different than that in which my father was born, but Matthew’s transportation world is similar to mine.

For sports, my dad grew up in the era of the original 6 NHL teams, and before interleague play in Major League Baseball, but looking at the figures per 100 Million population is interesting:   

So while the NHL has definitely grown in each era, there was more football per capita when I was born than either now or when my dad was born. Most significantly, there was more baseball per capita when my dad was born than either now or when I was born. Sort of makes me wonder about all the hand-wringing that goes on about how baseball expansion is supposed to have diluted the available pitching talent.

One other facet that I thought was different about my dad’s youth, but isn’t really, is candy. I remember my dad telling me about ads for Clark bars when he was a kid–even though they’re still available, they really aren’t heavily advertised, nor were they when I was young. But according to this timeline of American candy bars, it looks like the golden age of candy bar inventions were the 1920s and 1930s; pretty much the same selection had been available for my dad as for me, and Matthew benefits from the rather small handful of candies (Whatchamacallit, Twix, Skittles) that were introduced during my youth.

Progressives in this country proudly refer to themselves as being a part of the “reality-based community,” a play on a quip that apparently came from the current White House. I think there’s a deep sense in which this notion resonates, about progressive ideas in general, but that’s not what this post is about. Progressives need to play the part of being members of the reality-based community, and that means rejecting all intellectually bankrupt notions, and not just the conservative ones.

It irks me, then, when I hear fellow progressives take astrology seriously. I don’t want to take the time here to explain in detail why it’s nonsense to think that the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, when one is born, such that the Sun appears to be amongst a group of stars which are not necessarily anywhere near one another in real space but whose projections onto the celestial sphere are reasonably close, to be in one of twelve approximations to the thirteen regions of this sphere through which the plane of the ecliptic passes, can have anything to do with one’s personality. But rather, let’s look at a consequence if this notion were true.

If you want to believe that horoscopes have any meaning, then you have to accept the notion that there are inherent characteristics shared by all who have any particular sign. If you are said to have certain personality traits because you’re, say, a Capricorn, then it’s a trait you should be said to share with all other Capricorns. What we have are twelve equivalence classes, canonically labeled by the names of 12 constellations. But there’s no reason that these are the only names we could use for these groups. Why not just pick one representative member of each equivalence class? Remember, everyone in each group is supposed to share certain personality traits, so what you’re really doing is picking someone whose personality, by definition, is representative of everyone with that sign. Including, of course, people that you don’t like.

So for progressives, I give you the Political Zodiac. When a fellow progressive asks you what your sign is, reply with the appropriate name on this list, instead of the name of the constellation. Remember, the whole idea of astrology is that you have something in common with others of your sign: 

A few years ago, for Christmas, we got a fondue set from my brother and sister-in-law. With everyone here for Christmas this year, we decided to echo a tradition of the sister-in-law’s family and have fondue on Christmas day; as per our family’s tradition, we do the turkey Christmas eve so that we aren’t spending all of Christmas day roasting a turkey.

We did discover that a sterno-powered fondue pot, although fine with cheese and chocolate fondue, in which you coat a piece of bread or fruit or cake with a thick yummy liquid, isn’t up to the broth (or oil) fondue in which you actually cook a bit of meat or vegetable in a simmering liquid. We were thinking, though, that it would have been nice to have had an electric fondue pot as well, but unless you’re really into fondue, do you really want to have two (or more) fondue pots around all the time?

Wouldn’t it be nice, that is, if there was some sort of small appliance “library,” or community registry of small appliances that people could borrow for a day? Crock pots, chafing dishes, large coffeemakers: all things that are very useful on occasion, but I don’t know that I want to devote shelf space to all of them.

Grating the Gruyere and Emmentaler, I realized that the density of grated cheese can vary tremendously, and was sort of annoyed that the recipe in my Fondue cookbook gave only volumetric measures for cheese, not weight. I looked up two other cheese fondue recipes, and found, for the basic ratio of cheese to white wine:

• Fondue cookbook: 4 cups cheese to 2/3 cup wine
• Joy of Cooking: 1 pound cheese to 2 cups wine
• Fannie Farmer: 1 pound cheese to 1 cup wine

Fannie Farmer further states that 1 pound of cheese is “about 2 1/2 cups.” In the back of the Joy of Cooking, you can find that 1 pound cheese is 4 cups grated, and this ratio, 4 ounces grated cheese per cup, is also given in several Cooks Illustrated recipes, although they don’t have a cheese fondue. Thus it looks like all the fondue recipes are talking about the same amount of cheese, but with a factor of 3 in the cheese:wine ratio. 

In a sense, it is this wild variation in recipes from trusted, standard sources that leads Cooks Illustrated to try 50 variations of a recipe before publishing the one they find to be the best. But there’s another lesson here, which I eventually took in: if you melt some swiss cheese with some wine, and throw in a bit of kirsch and a little nutmeg, salt, and paprika, you’ll get something very tasty, and if you’re still worrying about the ratio of cheese to wine, then you haven’t had enough wine yourself.

In Montgomery County, Maryland–one of the suburban jurisdictions bordering DC–a ban on trans fats in restaurants took effect this week, at the start of the new year. The most rational explanation I’ve read of what trans fats are, and why they should be avoided, is Michael Chu’s writeup, mostly about fats and heart disease, on his site Cooking for Engineers. The quote that stands out most–and I wish he had a citation for this; he has citations for many other points the article makes–is this:

 In addition, trans fats have been found to replace necessary saturated fats in fat cells resulting in an unusable substance taking the place where a fuel and nutrient source should have been. This leads to the body increasing capacity of fat cells in order to maintain fuel and nutrient storage levels.   

The Post has an article that details the preparations Montgomery County restaurants  have taken to prepare. I hadn’t given much thought to the ban itself, but what struck me reading the article is how pervasive industrial pre-prepared foods are in restaurants. Apparently, pancakes and pretty much any baked good comes from a trans-fat laden mix. And the Tastee Diner’s cheesecake was from Sara Lee. 

When buying food for home, I read labels and generally try to avoid processed foods, but in restaurants I generally gloss over all that. Partly, of course, because it’s really difficult to figure out what goes into restaurant food. I suppose I make a big mistake if I assume restaurants approach food in the same way that I do at home. I suppose it’s naive to have thought that restaurant corned beef hash could have come from anywhere but a can, but still, I find it a bit disheartening to learn that the cheesecake came from some factory far away.

One of the biggest changes moving from academia to being an employee of the U.S. Government was that I now have to keep track of vacation days–I get 19.5 per year, in addition to the 10 federal holidays. So I don’t always take the entire week between Christmas and New Year’s off, but this year I did, using up four vacation days to get an 11-day stretch at home. (The President was gracious enough to give Federal employees Christmas Eve day off.)

As with most vacations, I had anticipated making progress on a whole list of projects, but, as is also usually the case, I hardly touched most of them.

Let me say right off that the first problem is that the ‘to-do list’ mentality is not really the appropriate way to describe spending time with my son. I played with him and photographed him and read to him, and the fact that I didn’t get to cross any of these things off a project list is really irrelevant.

But still, it does seem like a whole bunch of time went by without much productive being done. And I think it’s partly because even though I do have some to-do lists made up, I didn’t really plan my vacation.

Planning might seem line anathema for vacations, an unwelcome imposition of order onto what ought to be relaxing, but I’ve come to differ. You must, at some point, plan your time: one way or the other, you’re going to have to figure out what you want to do. At the most inefficient, you can use up your vacation time deciding what to do, and in the end I think I don’t think that ends up very satisfying.

I think our sense of elapsed time–whether a vacation has flown by, or seemed like a good break–is strongly correlated with the number of changes we experience throughout. A “leisurely” day–getting up late, eventually eating and getting dressed, thumbing through the newspaper, and then thinking about what to do, to be followed, perhaps, by actually doing something in the afternoon–does not put one through very many changes, and seems to go by quickly. (This does describe a large number of my eleven days off.)

By contrast, I think of two-day conferences I’ve been to, with separate events in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings–lots of changes–and recall that they usually end up feeling satisfying, or at least, I can’t recall feeling like time flew by with nothing being done.

Planning out vacation time in advance becomes more important if you’re traveling somewhere, because then, your time at your destination is very rare and very expensive. What a waste to spend your time sitting in a hotel room flipping through a guidebook!

When my wife and my mother-in-law and I went to Korea, we did a lot of planning: to know what the bus and train schedules were, and what days the museums we wanted to see were open, and how to get from a hotel to a site of interest. And the planning paid off: we still marvel at how much we saw in ten days. Quite a contrast to this year’s eleven days of holidays.

Our houses protect us from the elements, keeping us in an environment that’s usually more comfortable than that of the outdoors. I can deal with a house that’s too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer. Water, on the other hand, I’m more touchy about. I expect a house to keep water in it’s place, and really get agitated when water appears in places it isn’t supposed to be.

Which is what happened Christmas eve day.

It started a month ago or so, with a leaky toilet. Not very leaky: there was just a steady drip, from one of the bolts that holds the tank to the bowl. When I discovered the leak I didn’t really want to figure out what the problem was, so I put a bucket under the toilet to catch the drips. The bucket couldn’t fit under the place where the drip was coming from, so I had to make a little plastic chute to direct the water into the bucket. This is the way I’d left it for several weeks.

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The solstice is the reason for the season, of course, which usually fell around December 25th in the old Julian calendar. The moment of the solstice, of greatest angular tilt, happens on different days this year in the US. In the Eastern and Central time zones this year, the solstice is actually early morning of December 22nd, at 1:08am EST. But since I don’t consider the day to really change over until 3:30am, today is solstice day. Days will get longer for the next six months!

The morphing and mixing of various winter-solstice celebrations eventually gave us Christmas. Much of this happened when Pope Gregory I told his missionaries to re-brand Pagan traditions as Christian. The pagan roots of Christmas celebrations and, no doubt, the fact that seventeenth century English celebrations of Christmas had degenerated into something that resembled a cross between Mardi Gras and Halloween were part of the reasons that the Pilgrims started the War on Christmas by outlawing its celebration. Now, I don’t particularly extol the puritanical approach to life, but as an atheist whose cultural background is nominally Christian, I have occasionally been conflicted about whether to celebrate religious holidays, including Christmas. In the end, I decided that I’m comfortable keeping those Christmas traditions that the Christians borrowed from the Pagans, which fortunately covers most of the good stuff.

Including, of course, gift giving. The Pagans were well-attuned to the natural world, and knew that as the winter Solstice approached, the sun was sinking lower and lower in the sky. They believed that through an intense flury of forth-quarter consumer spending, the invisible hand of the market economy would pick up the sun and move it higher in the sky. Which is more or less what everyone believes these days.

Perhaps the best reason to listen to Sierra Club Radio is to hear the fascinating guests that come on the show, who often manage to say something insightful despite host Orli Cotel’s bubbly demeanor and loaded questions. But one theme has come up in two recent programs–indeed, you hear it often from the Sierra Club–that really gets to me: the notion that the answer to the problem of our nation’s oil consumption is to “go farther on a gallon of gas” by raising fuel economy standards. Since raising fuel economy standards is just about the only progressive thing left in the energy bill that made it through Congress, much has been made of this phrase of late.

It seems simple enough: increase the fuel economy, and our fuel use goes down. But there’s a really big if here: that’s if the number of miles driven doesn’t go up. I will argue in this post that there’s no evidence to support the notion that the amount of driving will stay fixed. This is the problem with the phrase: “going farther” implies more driving, by using the same amount, “a gallon,” of gas.

From the standpoint of an individual, many environmentally-minded folks buy high fuel economy cars in order to achieve “guilt-free” driving. When faced with a transportation decision: whether to travel, and if so, which mode to choose, the fact that one has a car with higher than average fuel economy certainly makes it easier to choose to drive. This is actually a well-known phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox: improvements in efficiency of consumption of some good leads to a larger overall rate of consumption of that good, because use of that good becomes feasible for more uses as the efficiency grows. It’s the same reason you spend more time online when you have a faster Internet connection. Overall, America’s gasoline consumption is analogous to a (faltering) dieter who eats a whole box of fat-free cookies because they’re “healthy.”

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