Amateur Earthling

Not All Capital is Fungible

There are only two real pools of capital: alternatively natural or human, external or internal, material or informational.

Natural (external, material) capital is the pre-existing wealth of the world, which was not dependent on our organization or existence: the metals we mine, the trees, the fresh water, the fisheries, solar energy, the fossil fuels, the potential for agricultural produce (as a co-location of soil, water, and climate). Human (internal, informational) capital is the value inherent in technology, skill, organization, understanding, and knowledge.

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Shared Links for Feb 20th

USA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel – CO2 emitted, broken down geographically by county, and source of emission, fully zoom-and-panable in Google Earth! (tagged: energy maps visualization environment co2 carbon )
In Amsterdam, The Bicycle Still Rules – The Netherlands spends about $6 each year per capita on bicycle infrastructure. California spends about about 18 cents. What would our state be like if we upped the ante? (tagged: bicycle transportation policy amsterdam california budget )
Drones parked in our own backyard, to Bomb our own People – Ah, the People have their own Eye in the Sky now. Google Earth allows Pakistanis to find the CIA's predator drones, parked in an airfield in Pakistan! So much for their government's denial of involvement. (tagged: transparency surveillance google pakistan drone )
Streams of Travelers – A one hour time lapse of a square filled with flowing pedestrians in Amsterdam. They're pretty dynamic, those walkers. (tagged: amsterdam pedestrian timelapse video flickr )
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America – Very cool animation of the spread of WalMart across America. Kind of like watching popcorn pop… (tagged: walmart maps economics visualization )

Shared Links for Feb 19th

Tinkering School – An awesome experiential school, at which kids are allowed to do dangerous things with power tools, in the name of learning to create things that work, and how to deal with frustration and failure. (tagged: education design ted school tinker )
Interactive Atlas of the World's Endangered Languages – Most of the world's surviving human languages (of which there are currently about 6000) will go extinct in my lifetime. Here's a map of where they are, who speaks them, and what they're called. (tagged: language extinct culture human atlas maps )
Mo(NU)mentum: a future urban drill core – A hypothetical drill core from the future, showing urban sediment through the ages: stone, to brick, to concrete, to asphalt, and finally plastic. Ever more refined and energy intensive materials, in thinner and thinner layers, until the present, at which… we note… sedimentation stopped. (tagged: art green construction urban )
Final CA Budget Cuts Gas Tax Increase, Still Nothing for Transit – Happy St. Fuckers day: the republican senator from Orange County finds sales and income taxes more acceptable than gas taxes. All state funding for public transit nixed. Gas to remain cheap. What a crock. (tagged: streetsblog california politics energy transportation taxes )
Los Angeles Bike Summit March 7th, 2009 – Los Angeles Bike Summit! Networking cyclists and bike advocacy organizations. Being put on by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. (tagged: bicycle advocacy los angeles bike transportation )

Notes on Biking in Pasadena

Here’s what I sent to Ryan Snyder, regarding my routes and destinations. Send him your routes too! (update 2009-02-26: my emails to this address have been bouncing, others have not had problems, but another address for Ryan Snyder is: ryansnyder [at] ca (dot) rr (dot) com.)

As several other people also pointed out, a big problem with Pasadena’s bikeways currently is that they pay very little heed to which roads are actually pleasant and safe to ride on. Here are some notes on the routes I use, and avoid. I’m an experienced cyclist, and have always used a bike as my exclusive mode of transportation (didn’t get a driver’s license until I was 25…). I live at 200 S. Parkwood Ave. (near the intersection of Del Mar and Allen).

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Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Workshop Notes

Update August 4th, 2009: The BMP revision is taking longer than initially planned. See this post and the comments from Rich Dilluvio for more information.

Pasadena is starting the process of revising its Bicycle Master Plan, so that it can continue to be eligible for funding from the Caltrans Bicycle Transportation Account. I went to the first public workshop last night to find out what the revision process was going to be like, and what kinds of things the City is considering. Overall, it was a very positive experience. About 75 people showed up, many more than I (or, I think, the organizers) expected, including a bunch of folks from Caltech and JPL. The consultant who’s actually writing the plan, Ryan Snyder, has worked on a lot of other bike and pedestrian plans, and was familiar with the kinds of infrastructure you see in northern Europe, and the bike boulevard projects in Berkeley, Portland, and Vancouver. To his credit Rich Dilluvio, the Pasadena Dept. of Transportation guy in charge of bike and pedestrian projects, chose to put together an advisory committee composed of people who actually bike, to represent the interested citizenry, see below for names.

This initial meeting was mostly just to introduce the people who are going to be involved, and outline the schedule and process. There will be at least four other workshops, and most of the participants can be contacted electronically if you prefer. A signup for the Bicycle Master Plan e-mail list was passed around. If you want to be notified of developments and future workshops, e-mail Rich (see below) and he can add you. If you can’t make it to the workshops, or would just prefer to do something else with your evenings, please still feel free to contact Ryan Snyder, Rich, or the members of the Advisory Committee with your concerns, needs, questions, or any other kind of input. In particular, Ryan specifically requested that people who ride in Pasadena, give him a list of the roads that are actually good for biking on – regardless of whether they are currently designated bike routes.

Continue reading Pasadena Bicycle Master Plan Workshop Notes

Shared Links for Feb 18th

Do the British love their children too? – Two girls run over while biking to their school 3 miles away. British (and probably American) "solution": re-allocate a school bus to their area (removing the bus from somewhere else). Dutch/German/Danish solution: provide better cycling infrastructure for everyone. Guess which one I think is better. (tagged: bicycle transportation infrastructure accident bike )
MIT open prototype initiative – A project to produce modular, open (freely available, non-proprietary) prototype designs for energy efficient buildings. MIT is so awesome. (tagged: green architecture design building )
LEED Platinum Prefab Home Now Available – Taking all the design work out of building zero energy homes should make it a lot easier to build them, but the contractors doing the actual construction still need to understand what they're doing, and how their application of building techniques will affect the end performance of the building (and their profits need to be tied to that performance somehow) (tagged: green architecture leed construction buildings )
Kidnapping Chrysler – Of course Cerberus (private equity firm that owns Chrysler, not three headed dog guarding hell) has a "fiduciary obligation" to seek a handout from the Feds. And by Jove, the Feds have a fiduciary obligation to refuse to give it to them! (tagged: bailout chrysler cerberus crisis economy gm )
Where data goes when it dies – Following from the Ma.gnolia implosion, Chris Messina muses on data loss and recovery… kind of an information grieving process. What are we going to do with all of this information anyway? 100 years from now, all historians will have to be AI. (tagged: data archive backups loss microformats recovery )
What really happened at Ma.gnolia – The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia was, despite its surprisingly large user base, basically run like Ideotrope – one guy with a server, and some (in retrospect) pretty janky backups. A couple of weeks ago, the 500GB MySQL database file got corrupted, the backups failed, and the site imploded. Lessons to be learned indeed: number one is don't do your own IT, now that S3, EC2, the Google Apps Engine, and other such scalable enterprise systems are available. We gotta get that server retired… (tagged: backups magnolia data servers hosting )
Baseline Scenario for 2009-02-09 – A rundown of the current global financial situation, and governmental attempts to get things under control. These guys aren't particularly optimistic at the moment about our ability to acknowledge just how beholden our supposedly powerful and developed governments have become to the banking industry. We're acting like Indonesia or Russia with their oligarchic overlords. (tagged: finance economy economics crisis )

Shared Links for Feb 12th – Feb 15th

Simon Johnson of the IMF on the ongoing financial bailouts – Simon Johnson works for the IMF, and what he sees in the US approach to its financial crisis is much more similar to say, Indonesia or Russia, than a "normal" developed world economic mess. He sees a clash between the government, and an oligarchy, in which currently, the oligarchy is winning. Hopefully we'll get our act together here… as the IMF isn't going to be stepping in anytime soon. (tagged: financial economy pbs moyers crisis economics politics geithner imf )
Bicycling's Into the Wild – Screw school, ride your bike into the forest and disappear. Almost sounds like me! Except instead of racing, I got into… grad school. Uh, hmm. (tagged: bicycle nytimes touring wilderness )
Roubini, Taleb, Marx, Lenin, and Python – Indeed, asking Taleb and Roubini for stock tips is like asking Karl Marx who won the English Football Cup in 1949. (tagged: roubini taleb montypython krugman economy blackswan finance )
The Orange Line Bike Path Buck Stops…Where? – Apparently there's a bikeway that parallel's the Orange Line bus rapid transit in the Valley. Who knew! Not the contractors who were paid $160,000 to maintain it, as it turns out. (tagged: ladot bike bicycle transportation bureaucracy )
Whither the War on Drugs under Kerlikowske? – Wouldn't it be nice to have a sane drug policy? Seattle's notoriously reasonable police chief has been nominated to the position of Drug Czar. I wonder if the Senate will confirm him? (tagged: drugs marijuana obama politics war seattle kerlikowske czar )

Shared Links for Feb 12th

Astronaut's Video Satirizes NASA Bureaucracy – I'm impressed that NASA actually let this satire out, and forced a bunch of managers to watch it… not sure if they're actually capable of fixing themselves though. We can hope. (tagged: nasa bureaucracy youtube satire astronaut npr )
Sexting Teens May Face Child Porn Charges – Can it really be kiddie porn if you took the photo yourself, and you're a (horny) minor? Seriously. This country is totally nuts. Maybe we should ban mirrors in teen bedrooms too. (tagged: sex technology porn sexting texting sms mms phone )
H.R. 801 That Conyers bill again! – A roundup of responses to John Conyers' H.R. 801: "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act", which would (despite it's ridiculous name) prevent the public from accessing the fruits of the research which they funded in the first place. We should be expanding NIH style open access requirements, not rolling them back (tagged: hr801 conyers PLoS open access copyright publishing science policy )
Congress is trying to restrict public access to publicly funded research – Under pressure from publishers, Congress is considering outlawing open access requirements like the ones that NIH imposes on its grantees, meaning that the fruits of publicly funded research will not be publicly available. We should be expanding open access requirements across all public research funding agencies, not rolling back what little we've got. Write your rep! (tagged: copyright PLoS publishing open access NIH PubMed HR801 research science policy )
Reports of Vélib’s Demise Greatly Exaggerated – How can one really ensure that public-private "partnerships" like the Velib program don't end up being subject to this kind of PR BS? Or alternatively, how can one ensure that such a program is efficiently and effectively administered purely by the public sector? (tagged: bicycle velib transportation pr cycling paris )

Shared Links for Feb 11th – Feb 12th

Getting Traffic Signals to Detect Bicycles – A short presentation on how induction loop traffic sensors work, and how to maximize your chances of being detected as a cyclist… and also how to make sure your sensors can detect cyclists, if you're a transportation engineer! (tagged: bicycle bike cycling transportation technology induction sensor loop )
Tweet-a-Watt, A twittering power meter – Now if only somebody would make these things work out of the box, instead of requiring a soldering iron… (tagged: energy technology twitter green )
China Needs U.S. Guarantees for Treasuries – Huh? What's a "treasury guarantee", and why would it be any more trustworthy than the promise to repay the debt implicit in any bond? Probably what they really mean is "Um, we're not really planning on buying any more of your Govt. debt, thanks. At least, certainly not at the pitiful interest rates you're currently offering." And so the Fed will "buy" it instead. I think this is called "quantitative easing" in doublespeak. Also known as printing money… (tagged: finance economy china federal reserve economics )
Does a Big Economy Need Big Power Plants? – Good, if somewhat superficial and dismissive, look at big power versus small power. I really hope Amory Lovins is correct. (tagged: energy policy efficiency economics lovins renewable )
Stimulus Bill Is Anti-Religious – Man, I *wish* the ACLU had drafted the stimulus bill! What's wrong exactly is prohibiting the use of federal funds for building religious institutions? Why would this not fall under separation of church and state? (tagged: politics religion stimulus huckabee conservative )

I Was the Victim of a Series of Accidents

Kurt Klein “wonders how liberals rationalize a Secretary of the Treasury who cheated on his taxes ($34,000–oops! rounding error)”. Well, here’s how I would do it. Not that I’d necessarily want to be called a liberal:

Continue reading I Was the Victim of a Series of Accidents