It must feel really good, part 2

Never underestimate the power of a few database administrators to change the world...

MAPlight.org ('MAP' being an acronym for 'money and politics') makes it much easier to determine where there's a link between campaign donations and legislative action. From their site:

MAPLight.org combines three data sets:

• Bill texts and legislative voting records
• Supporting and opposing interests for each bill
• Campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics

Combining this data makes visible key information that could never before be determined easily. For example:

• Contributions given by interests supporting and opposing each bill
• Average donations given to legislators voting “Yes” and “No” on each bill
• Timeline of contributions and votes for each bill, graphically identifying when legislators received large donations before or after their vote.

In the fall, Senator Clinton said, "The idea that somehow a contribution is going to influence you, I just ask you to look at my record." Well, now you can.

Here's a link to MAPlight's video tour (about 6 minutes).

How cool is Netflix?

Pretty cool indeed.

Just finished streaming 'No End in Sight' as part of the five-ish hours of online viewing I'm allotted on top of our two DVDs per month. Good quality, didn't hiccup or get that crazy digital frazzle even once, and could be paused every time I had to get up to comfort a teething baby that just wanted to sleep.

Great deal for five bucks a month.

It must feel really good

To be a slightly geeky, good-hearted billionaire with foresight, brains, and enough money to replace an outdated and foot-dragging industry.

From Green Wombat:

Google announced Tuesday it will spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing new solar and wind technologies while investing in green tech startups. The goal, according to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Send the fossil fuel industry to the coal bin of history by making renewable energy cheaper than coal, a main culprit in the global warming crisis.

“Assuming we can develop this, we want to deploy it as broadly as possible," said Brin during a conference call. “Which means we’ll license the technology or put it in place ourselves.”

keep new

It took me awhile to discover the ‘Keep New’ button in Bloglines and it has been my bane ever since. Anything remotely interesting gets kept new as if I’m ever going to have time to go back to it. Today, I actually did manage to make some keep news old. Two of those were from All About Cities:

Toronto on the rise?

I love Toronto – I haven’t been there in years, but there were a few years when I was a kid when we went a number of times. It was diverse, pedestrian-friendly with good public transportation, cosmopolitan, and a hell of a lot of fun, and it looks like all of those factors have only increased. Can’t wait to go back with a bike.

Olympics and obsolete notions

Wendy notes that Seattle and Vancouver tried to launch a joint bid to host the 2008 Summer Games but were rebuffed by the IOC because “only one country can bid.” To their credit, they’ve tried again, this time setting their sights on 2028 - I think it would be great to see extra-national metropolitan centers hosting. Her speculation that athletes could even identify with their “mega metro-regions” in the future the way they do with their countries now got the gears turning as well.

Another direction I think worth investigating that she doesn’t mention is taking the Summer Olympics out of global rotation and hosting them permanently in Greece. Countries could still vie to host, they would just have to move their costumes and trinkets to Greece to do so. A permanent facility could drastically improve security measures, improve the Greek economy, simplify travel, and save money that is often shelled out without returning the long-term benefits hoped for.

the sum of the hypotenuse equals...

It's explanations like this that make me wish I'd had a math teacher who actually gave a damn AND had the stones to throw the textbook in the garbage. Hell, either would've been nice.

Jeez, it's too early for this.

Morning Kiddies!

Jim may wind up regretting his decision to let me on board.

Anyway...it's time for your input.
Does the Finger Eleven song "Paralyzer" have the musical beat and lyrical inflection of the Revolting Cocks version of "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"?

Posted: Beware of Doug

I'm happy to welcome flickr's own mean turkey sammich to the bad juju fray. As you can see from the below post, he's quite the young go-getter.

Multiple choice test time:

Why does bad juju need another contributor?
a) Readership has gone through the roof!
b) I can't keep up with all the comments on my own.
c) I'm in a lonely, lonely place and need to be held.
d) I figured 'what the hell, how bad could it be?'
e) If he's posting, he's not emailing me at work.

(hint: it's not A or B)

Buy Nothing Day!

http://adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd/

Finally! Activism for the lazy.
This plus Festivus and I may just get through the month of December sane. Maybe.

UPDATE (from Jim): In case you didn't understand the motivation behind Buy Nothing Day, watching this video will make it crystal clear.



I don't know what those people are all rushing toward at stage left, but part of me hopes it's a chain gun and a meat grinder.

Zeppelin V Pterodactyls!!

The video's alright, one of those things better viewed with friends and beer as at the Magic Bag, but I LOVE this poster.

get bear naked

From my Nov/Dec 2007 edition of Arbor Day (arborday.org), "The company is making a donation to plant 50,000 trees in Sequoia National Forest in California and Huron-Manistee National Forests in Michigan to restore areas devastated by wildfire, insects, and other natural causes.

Bear Naked also gives a hell of a guide to what sound like some good hikes. I'm updating my destinations list. Again.

v e l o... c i t y

Based on this list of the top cycling-friendly cities in the world (link from All About Cities), I'll be updating my list of desired travel destinations, and maybe my residential wish list as well.

Some highlights:

• 40% of ALL traffic in Amsterdam is by bike and plans include construction of a 10,000-bike parking garage
• Portland, OR has 260 miles of bike network
• Boulder, CO has spent 15% of its transportation budget on bike infrastructure, and 95% of arterials have bike lanes
• Davis, CA residents voted to get rid of public school busses and own more bikes than cars
• Trondheim, Norway uses the world's first bike lift, modeled after ski lifts
• 40,000 San Francisco commuters regularly use their bikes
• There is a bike path that completely surrounds the metropolitan area of Barcelona

In addition to daily getting around, I believe the absolute best way to see a city is by bike. After riding all over the place in twenty years, I've always found that my memories are clearer, I've seen places and things I wouldn't otherwise, and it's been more enjoyable than it would have been behind the wheel of a car in a strange place. It's slow enough to be able to look around a little, but fast enough to be able to really cover some ground.

Photo from Treehugger.

wind channeling

Mark my words: we will be hearing, probably from one of the more progressive cities like San Francisco, Chicago, or Dubai, about situating new buildings to direct wind through progressively narrower slots which will be filled with wind turbines (likely micro-turbines or vertical designs like the Helix). It's interesting to think how something like this could change the layout of cities overall, and where land may become more valuable (at the intersections of acutely-angled roads, at edges of downtowns, etc.).

The building I work in inadvertently creates the same effect with the building across the street, giving us one really windy corner and side all the time, even though prevailing winds hitting the other sides of the building are normally mild. There are buildings which are integrating turbines and micro-turbines are becoming increasingly viable, especially when installed as arrays, so why wouldn't we start to take action to reap the benefits?

Incidentally, wind power is something I don't remember seeing in any of those cool old deco glimpses of our future cities.

This isn't the image I originally had in mind (though it works, with its soaring facades and atomic-structure plazas and towers), but I like it and it just happens to be hosted by Cory Doctorow, one of my favorite authors. And, while Google sent me fruitlessly to this page to see it, there's a ton of other interesting stuff there as well. Damn the internets and their endlessly fascinating tangents and serendipities!!

kill paper spam

I just stumbled across Catalog Choice, a free service that removes your name and address from companies' lists. It's very easy to use and can reduce the amount of crap piling up in the mailbox (they even allowed me to opt out of the weekly generic, loosely packaged coupons we get) which can take at least a small bite out of the 19 billion magazines mailed in the US on the off chance that you'll actually want to buy their crap. Easier than a phone call to each company.



I have no idea how the two compare, but Greendimes seems like the more aggressive, if for profit (meaning you have to pay for their service), slightly older brother of Catalog Choice and may be worth looking into also. They not only stop junk mail, but also plant trees with every membership (saving you the trouble of planting trees, I guess).

What did cilantro ever do to you?

Do you like cilantro? These folks sure don't. They even have haikus.

The curry sickens
It looked good on the menu
Alas cilantro
- Popmusicguy

Worse still than sushi
Still more food conspiracies
My rage frightens me
- Popmusicguy

God made cilantro
If ten plagues were not enough
It was his backup
- Popmusicguy

"My rage frightens me" Funny stuff. My own attempt:

Cilantro I like
But to meet Popmusicguy
I will buy the beer

I'm amazed that anyone could dislike it enough to start a website. The power of the long tail. But chipotle, that's gotta be the most god-awful crap ever put in a salsa. Every time I see a new chipotle-flavored anything from some trendy franchise restaurant I want to hurl. So in the spirit of IHC, I wrote a haiku.

Ugh! Chipotle! Yuck!
Now there is an herb that is
Worthy of my ire

You're welcome to submit your own.

e2

Another thing worth watching online right now is the very well done e2 series from PBS. I just caught the Growing Energy episode and it was chock-full o' tidbits like:

In Brazil, flex technology has increased car sales by 20%, with a continued 22-23% rise over the last year. They will be increasing production to meet demand. "This technology has helped us sell cars." (translated from Portuguese). Though this is in a country where people actually put ethanol
in their flex vehicles, it's a good indicator of gains to be had by developing a system that isn't reliant on a single source of fuel (gasoline).

It only costs $50 more to make a car in Brazil with the flex technology. And we're not talking about some third-rate home-grown car company with no other overhead, we're talking about BMW and Volkswagen. I'd be interested to find out how much it costs the Big 3 to do the same - I honestly don't know if it's more or less, but either way this factoid underscores exactly how little the American car industry has done in terms of rethinking transportation technologies.

My only gripe is that you'll have to pay attention to the viewing schedule - the episodes are available online for limited times depending on when they're supposed to be aired.

Savage War

I came across a 2002 article by Dan Savage titled 'Say YES to War in Iraq.' Until then I'd only ever read his often over-the-top but always intelligent sex advice column 'Savage Love' fairly regularly for years and once was surprised when an NPR interview I'd stumbled into turned out to be him; he sounded so normal, so white bread and shock-able. So here's what that funny and insightful guy had to say back then:

For those of you who were too busy making papier-mâché puppets of George W. Bush last week to read the papers, you may have missed this page-one statement in last Friday's New York Times: "The White House is developing a detailed plan, modeled on the postwar occupation of Japan, to install an American-led military government in Iraq if the United States topples Saddam Hussein." These developments--a Republican administration recognizing that support for dictators in Third World countries is a losing proposition; a commitment to post-WWII-style nation-building in Iraq--are terrific news for people who care about human rights, freedom, and democracy.

Hook, line, and sinker. Funny how someone who is obviously very smart made such a misguided and completely credulous argument for going to war in Iraq. Goes to show that thoughtful expertise in one area can mean just about dick in another.

I know, I know: 'In other news, water is wet.'

my money's on zonbu

A hundred bucks, and $13 per month.

If these guys are able to do what they say they're going to do, at a fraction of the cost of most people's laptops and PCs, why wouldn't every non-computer-expert household in the country buy at least one, if not one per person?

It's a really interesting, and inevitable really, business model. They're just applying the 'adding value by removing hassles and offering only what most people need from a central location' principle - it's almost the same aesthetic as 'access not ownership,' as it frees people who just want to buy songs for their iPod, cruise the net, and upload some photos from worrying about security subscriptions, maintaining bulky hard-drives, etc.

I forgot where I read it, but someone made the point that in spite of all our advances, we've had to become expert in so many more things than we ever had to before. The example listed things like pumping one's own gas, not that it's hard to master that, but it was one more thing that had been shifted from a company's shoulders onto ours (more recently, automated checkout at the grocery). Personal computers are rife with this same problem. Decidedly un-technical people have had to learn too many things just to keep them working. Couple that with the fact that many companies have recently cashed in on reducing that kind of clutter for their customers, and I see a huge market in simpler 'hosted' computing.

Oh, and did I mention they're pretty green, too?

the dead

The other night I caught just a couple of minutes of a feature on Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and author from Milford, Michigan. I was riveted, and turned it off reluctantly. It was much more interesting than anything about undertaking or Milford could ever be expected to be. The part that I saw was mostly him reading his work; he has a voice, both spoken and written, whose soft precision lightens its otherwise mortal gravity.

Through the miracle of the internets, I'll get to watch the whole thing online.

If you doubt you'll actually forgo all the other things vying for your attention to go watch an I-don't-know-how-long video about an undertaker from Milford, at least read Tract, his "direction" to those that will arrange his funeral.

On the subject of the dead, a couple of weeks ago we went to my family's annual apple picking and picnic. I haven't actually picked apples in years, though I remember trying to keep up with my now-slow uncles as they climbed trees and dodged thrown apples. This year, we didn't even bother with the orchard which has grown depressing, commercial, tacky, and vastly overpriced. There were fewer people when we arrived late at the picnic, as there have been every year since my Nana died; she was the sun we all spun around, the important thing that kept us a family in spite of animosity and disdain. When she died I felt like my heart and been ripped out, and three years later I still avoid thinking too deeply about her in public. She appears sometimes in dreams and I'm so relieved to have her back I hate waking up.

So there I was next to a slide my daughter was playing on, trading niceties with a cousin I've always gotten along with though we have nothing in common but blood. Nana's arm slipped around my waist and her white hair appeared in my peripheral vision and I put my arm around her shoulders and felt happy she was next to me and I looked down and of course it wasn't her. It was one of her daughters that I avoid putting an arm around and reality slammed silently shut around me and I had to keep smiling for another minute before I could walk away, awash in both that perfect recollection and its absence. I'd really like to sit down and talk to Lynch about this, as I think he would be one of the few people that could say something other than a well-meaning platitude in response.

Berkeley rethinking financing

This is so cool I can't even stand it: The city of Berkeley, CA is putting the pieces together to finance the installations of solar arrays for houses or commercial buildings in the city.

Here's how it works:
You'll own the solar (or water heating) system that's put on your roof, but the city will pay to have it installed. Then, instead of paying back the loan every month like you would if you financed through a bank, you pay an additional assessment on your tax bill.

Why is this better? Because you can write it off in your federal taxes, the city will likely offer a better financing rate since it will be borrowing and lending millions of dollars rather than you borrowing $15-30K (for a house), and the assessment stays with the house, so you don't have to worry about paying the whole thing off if you sell the place (which, by the way, assesses higher with a photovoltaic system).

I'm sure people more versed in such things than me could compare the pros and cons of that last point, but I don't care. This is really sexy, and if it works could herald a new method for quickly distributing alternative sources of energy throughout the otherwise reluctant small-scale sector.

UPDATE: From Green Wombat, Berkeley has approved the measure, and wants to start signing up homeowners who want to participate in June'08. My bet is that participation will be huge, quickly reaching 50%.

The homeowner immediately begins saving money on electricity bills without incurring the $15,000 to $30,000 upfront cost of installing a solar system. They also usually get a boost in their property value from the solar array and the property tax that pays for the system is deductible on their federal income tax return. When the house is sold the solar array and the tax assessment remain with the property, passing to the new owner and thus further diluting the cost of the system.

...

"This is going to create green collar jobs," said Bates.

Berkeley's left-wing politics often puts it on the fringe of the U.S. mainstream but when it comes to environmental policies, the Bay Area city has led the way. Berkeley, after all, was the first city to adopt curbside recycling decades ago, now common even in some of the reddest of red states.

Telegraph Top 10

The Telegraph UK has come up with an interesting list of The Top U.S. Conservatives and Liberals. By 'top' they mean currently most influential. Hugely questionable spoiler: Mr. 9/11 is #1 for the reeling right. If true, that's pretty sad. Most interesting pick I saw was the Governor of California in the eighth slot - for the liberals. Shrewd pick.