The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has been in the news lately. The price of oil has risen significantly in recent years; demand for oil has increased world wide while supply has not followed suit. So the rise in price is not really surprising, though the rate of the increase is steeper than expected. U.S. Geological Survey studies describe significant oil reserves ready for drilling in ANWR, but many members of congress have refused to allow drilling because of environmental concerns.

It sounds all the world like a binary issue; true vs. false, black vs. white, environment vs. big oil. But I don't accept that; I always find that issues such as this are so often presented to the public in a way that's overly abstracted and simplified to the point of deception, and that if one looks beneath the surface and studies the issues a little bit more, that things can get really interesting, and all sorts of possibilities present themselves. So hold on tight, there's some analysis coming...

The "ANWR 1002 Area"

According to the USGS assesment:

Technically recoverable oil within the ANWR 1002 area (excluding State and Native areas) is estimated to be between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels (95- and 5-percent probability range), with a mean value of 7.7 billion barrels (table 1).

7.7 billion barrels of oil is very significant; that's more than 1/3 of the oil reserves in the US, and it's more than 1/2 the oil reserves in all of Mexico. And if that wasn't enough, the oil is easlily deliverable as it's located something like 40 miles east of the Alaskan pipeline (!!!).

I think it's important to note that these oil reserves are not for all of ANWR, just the " ANWR 1002 Area", which is a section on the northern coast of Alaska, about 1.5 million acres, roughly 30 by 75 miles. ANWR is about 19 million acres, so the 1002 Areas is about 8% of ANWR, or about 0.035% or 1/3000th of Alaska.

As a side note I'd like to point out that Alaska is huge. You can fit two Texas's plus a New Mexico in the area occupied by Alaska. You can fit four (four!) Californias into the area occupied by Alaska. The population of Alaska is 680,000, about the same as the city of Baltimore, with more than half of that in the Anchorage metropolitan area. So the state is mostly wilderness.

A Simple Land Trade

I'd like to offer up my solution to the problem; a way to have both environmental protection and drilling: a simple land trade.

Offer up 1.5 million acres of other Alaskan land, land without significant oil reserves, or where the oil is too difficult to retrieve, to be declared a wildlife preserve in trade for drilling in Area 1002. I mean, it's not like the caribou need oil reserves to survive. The US government already has the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska nearby, 23.5 million acres of undisturbed land, and some of that could be offered up. You could sweeten the deal by offering more land for Area 1002, say a 20% enticement.

Or the ANWR borders could be extended downward a little bit to compensate. It wouldn't take much, let's try a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: Looking at a map I see that ANWR has border of about 400 miles within Alaska (that's intentionally not including the Canadian border and the Beaufort Sea shoreline). The ANWR 1002 Area's 1.5 million acres is equivalent to 2344 square miles, so extending the (somewhat arbitrary) ANWR border by 6 miles should do the trick.

You might not even need the whole Area 1002 drilling, maybe only half of it. Perhaps 750,000 acres, or 4% of ANWR.

It's Not About the Price of Gasoline

I should point out that I'm not for drilling in Alaska because of gasoline prices. I think a high gasoline price is fine. I wrote an article some years back, A Modest Proposal to Improve the National Energy Policy, that proposed that high gas prices are the only practical way to conserve oil, to encourage more efficient forms of transportation, and to develop alternative energy sources. The basic idea is that there's no incentive to develop an engine that runs on, say, orange juice when orange juice is more expensive than gasoline. Also let's face it; people getting huffy about gasoline prices is the height of arrogance, especially considering that prices are so much higher in Europe. On the other hand, the price has been going up a little faster than the economy can safely handle, and unlike with my alternative tax proposal, the oil revenues are currently going to some nasty places.

With a land trade, the environmentally concerned lose no land, they might even gain some, we can increase the supply of oil significantly, create more jobs, create more business income for domestic drilling companies, more tax revenue from that, reduce the trade deficit, reduce the dependence on foreign oil, reduce the oil profits to countries that want to kill us. And at the same time, it would also have an overall positive effect on the environment. That's pretty good!

Can the Alaskan Oil Pipeline handle the capacity? Easily. According to pipeline's web page, it is currently running at about 1/3 capacity. That's a shame it's so underutilized, the pipeline is a remarkable engineering achievement.

Environmental Issues are Upside Down

The main concern over drilling is environmental, and I find this especially intriguing. Yeah sure, any drilling is going to be bad for the environment to some degree. But for the oil we use, what we don't drill domestically we have to import. When we drill within the US we do so with an overactive Enviornmental Protection Agency, and with a huge number of environmental laws, regulations, and oversight, as well as an army of lawyers ready to pounce in the event anything screws up. When the equivalent amount of oil is drilled in the mideast, the environmental impact is far greater. And then after the drilling is done, more oil has to be burned shipping that oil around the planet, with the attendant danger of oil spills, and then even more oil has to be burned for the tanker's return trip. In comparisons to oil tankers, delivering oil by pipeline is more efficient.

A ban on domestic drilling doesn't mean that the oil isn't pumped, it means that the oil is pumped elsewhere, with a significantly nastier environmental impact. So taking an actual world view, drilling oil domestically will be much better for the global environment than importing oil.

Even if we didn't need to import oil, hypothetically, it would could still be a global environmental win to drill in Alaska and export the oil, because the oil would be drilled under less environentally messy conditions than in the middle east.

Unfortunately...

Unfortunately there is also some nasty politics involved. Right now a democrat congressman has little incentive to positively impact the economy as they don't want the Bush administration to look good during an important election year. If they can earn righteousness points by associating themselves with a bogus no-compromise environmental stand at the same time, there will be a strong inclination to vote against drilling.

From Thursday's San Jose Mercury News, Sunnyvale Homeowners Told To Cut Redwoods That Block Solar Panels:

So it appears that California law states that if you put up solar panels in the shade of your neighbor's tree, your neighbor has to cut down the tree or pay a $1000.00 per day fine.  Wow, that's insane.

[I wrote this a couple months ago, but I've been so busy with my day job recently that I haven't had a chance to do final editing until now.]

Have you heard of the Hot Fuel issue?  I first read about it in an editorial by Tom Elias in the local fishwrap:

Tom Elias in the Palo Alto Daily News: Gas Pumps Robbing Us

Wow; I was completely stunned.  There are so many blatant falsehoods and so much crazy twisted reasoning in this piece, it's just beyond comprehension.  I mean, just take the first two sentences:

It's one thing for consumer advocates to argue endlessly that oil companies are guilty of long-running collusion in setting prices.  There's plenty of evidence they are correct in that contention - the similarity of prices offered by different companies at the same intersections is one indicator.

If you have a number of retail outlets of any kind physically close to each other, the laws of simple economics and business survival dictate that the prices will be mighty close.  And gas stations are usually privately owned with prices determined by the owner or manager, not by oil companies.  So that's two blatant falsehoods in the first two sentences.  And the rest of this horrible piece is similarly dishonest.

But then I discovered that Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) held Domestic Policy Subcommittee hearings starting this past June to investigate high gasoline prices, specifically to "examine the effect of the thermal expansion of gasoline on the practical price of gasoline at the retail pump".  Huh?  It's right here:

Kucinich Media Advisory: Hot Fuels -- Big Oil's Double Standard for Measuring Gasoline

And here's a letter to the National Conference of Weights and Measures, signed by Kucinich and 13 other congressman and senators, all Democrats (!!!).  It urges a vote on temperature adjusted fuel and claims that the current system "is simply unacceptable".

And you can find the opening statement to the hearings on YouTube, here:

YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Kucinich's Opening

Man, oh man...  Again, almost every sentence is a blatant falsehood or a deception.  It's just a cascade of absurdities, one on top of another.  As if it's planned, as if it's on purpose, as if the goal of each absurdity is to stretch your ability to accept the next absurdity.

Hmmm, I've just coined a new phrase:

Cascade of Absurdities (n) -- The strategic use of a continuous stream of falsehoods or deceptions in a presentation for the purpose of propaganda, persuading the audience of a particular fictional belief by breaking down their connection to reality, common sense, logic or the basic laws of physics.  Often falsehoods presented later are based on falsehoods presented earlier, encouraging the listener to accept the falsehoods that are flying by just to keep up, even if only to stay politely interested.  There is no space left available for any kind of logic or reason, there is no opportunity allowed to question inconsistencies.

The technique is often used in a positive way in filmmaking, where the storyline might take place in an environment far removed from the viewer's everyday world, say some time in past history, or in the future, or in a fanciful world.  It's necessary to pull the user from their day-to-day life and quickly bring them into this new environment, and the viewer is a willing accomplice because they want to get into the story.  An example would be the delightfully twisted laws of physics found in the Roadrunner cartoons.

Dreams are similar.  In a dream you find yourself thrown into some made-up situation, into some alternate reality, and the standard rules of logic are nowhere to be found.

Yes, gasoline expands with temperature; that's fundamental physics.  In fact, almost all materials, in almost all states (solids, liquids, gases) expand with temperature.  Orange juice, milk, beer, anything made out of wood or metal, expands with temperature.  Gasoline has a coefficient of expansion of about 0.000950 per °C.  So a 10°F increase in temperature causes a volume quantity of gasoline to expand 0.5%.  For comparison, kerosene is about 0.000990 per °C, mercury (like in thermometers) is 0.000181 per °C.  (If you want to compare that to the expansion coefficient of water, it's a little difficult because water is very nonlinear in that regard.  At temperatures near boiling, water has an expansion coefficient of about 0.000695 per °C, but that drops with temperature and actually goes slightly negative near freezing.  But I digress.)

Pumps at gasoline stations in the continental US are calibrated at 60° F, so yeah, if you fill up when the gasoline is 20° F higher you'll get 1% less gas by weight, and likewise if you fill at a temperature of 20° lower, you'll get 1% more gas by weight.  The "problem", if you want to call it that... no I won't even give it that credibility...  The issue is that we purchase gasoline by liquid volume for convenience, and purchasing by weight (or more accurately, mass) would be a little more true to the intent.

Anyway, I'm thoroughly appalled by Kucinich's project.  Here are just a few reasons why:

• Dennis Kucinch and his cohorts seem to not posses the most minimal science background.  But that doesn't stop them.

• When someone decides to tell Dennis Kucinich and his friends about thermal expansion, their reaction isn't along the lines of, "my, that's a fascinating side effect of molecular structure", but instead they start on a quest to insulate the public from the laws of physics and blame it all on an oil company conspiracy.  Amazingly enough, they have a firehose of outrage conveniently available.  And they have the political resources to start congressional hearings on the issue immediately.

• The solution proposed by Kucinich and friends is to redefine the meaning of a gallon unit of volume measure, and require all gas stations to conform to that new meaning.  (Wow, if you can change the meaning of a basic unit of volume measure on a whim, it would be all that much easier to change the meaning of words like "liberty", "freedom" and "vote".)

• Kucinich: "Since the 1920's the oil industry has taken temperature into account for wholesale transactions".  Well, yeah!  If you're in the business of transporting large quantities of a liquid that expands with temperature, it's completely important that you take expansion into account when you fill your transport containers.  Otherwise you'd have exploding tanker trucks all over the place.  It's also probably lots more convenient and more accurate to measure wholesale quantities of gasoline by weight; weigh the tank before, weigh the tank after, and subtract.

• Kucinich: "They make sure that the same amount of gasoline by weight and energy content is transacted."  The oil companies have absolutely no interest and no incentive in assuring that the same amount of energy content is, uh, transacted.  Heck, different gasoline formulations will by their nature have different energy content.

• Kucinich claims that Canada uses temperature compensation for retail gasoline sales.  That may be true, I don't know, but that brings up two important points.  One is that he's assuming that if Canada does it, it must be right.  And secondly, since the average temperature in Canada is significantly lower than the average temperature in the continental US, and retail gas stations would stand to profit from such an arrangement.

• Kucinch: "We invited Exxon, Mobil and Shell to testify today, because they have large commercial presences in both Canada and the United States.  And we hope they could explain why they decided to do one thing in Canada and another thing in the United States."  The issue is US vs. Canadian law, not Exxon, Mobil and Shell's corporate policies.

• Kucinich: "The majority staff of the subcommittee conducted a study of the hot fuel premium American consumers are likely to pay during the coming summer season.  Using actual gasoline temperatures by month, and by state, and forecast prices for the summer, the staff calculated that gasoline retailers will sell over 500 million gallons of gasoline that are, in effect, created for free by thermal expansion, and consumers will pay over $1.5 billion for those heat-expanded gallons.  And they will be getting less energy for it.  People are paying for gasoline they're not getting."

  Kucinich describes how he selected measurements from the very hottest months of one specific summer and extrapolated them to the entire year.  Kucinich is using cooked numbers (heh-heh... get it?) and he's even admitting it, but the cascade of absurdities is so thick that there's no time for debate.

• According to the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 20th century average temperature over the continental US was 53.7° F.  Gasoline transported by rail or by road will average out toward that temperature.  At a gas station, fuel is stored in underground tanks, which have the effect of averaging the outside temperature even more.  So averaged over the year the consumer will see gasoline pumped at 53.7° F, which is 6.3° F below the 60.0° F calibration of the gas pumps.  This means that the consumers are actually ahead of the game.  (Well, if it was a "game" -- by that I mean, any overall statistical price difference would be absorbed into the price at the pump anyway.  The only reason I mention this is that its Kucinich's primary argument.)

  (That said, I'll be the first to admit that you can't just go by these numbers.  One could argue that the physical distribution of the samples used for the NOAA measurements may be very different that the physical distribution of gasoline retailers.  But on the other hand, gasoline spends a large fraction of its time in transit between refineries, distributors and gas stations.  At the very least, these numbers are far more believable than Kucinich's data, which are not referenced and are bogus according to his own description.)

• "People in this country people end up paying a lot of money for gas they're not getting."  No, for every gallon they pay for, an actual gallon is pumped.  It's not the oil companies' fault that liquids expand with temperature.  Are there going to be be subcommittee hearing on other liquids?   Milk? Orange juice? Beer?

  (Admittedly those expand less than gasoline, and they're purchased and in smaller quantities than gasoline.  Still, in these days of zero tolerance...  Actually though, since coffee is mostly water and is served quite hot, so its expansion coefficient gets close to gasoline.  One should be able to extend Kucinich's arguments to a Starbucks lawsuit pretty easily.)

It may sound like I'm hammering on Kucinich, and, yes, I am.  While others are involved too (specifically congressfolk Wilson, Davis, Cummings, Moran, Hall, DeFazio, Grijalva, Sutton, Watson, Hirono, and Senators Boxer, McCaskill, and Lautenberg), Kucinich is leading the project.  And there are similar movements occurring at the state level.  And I'm not making personal attacks, I'm going by his own words.  And unlike the standards and practices at CNN, MSNBC, or The Daily Show, I'm not taking the words out of context.

But there's more...

None of the plans Kucinich and friends are proposing will actually do any good.  "Good" in the sense of increasing fuel efficiency, reducing waste, increasing the availability or lowering the price of gasoline at the pump.  Instead, the goal of the hearings is to spend money retrofitting every gas pump in the continental US with a meter that compensates for temperature.  'Sounds like a boon to the company making those meters.  What company makes those devices, and are they contributing to any politic campaigns? One can only imagine.  That cost will be paid by the consumer, of course.

There's also the news media aspect.  Performing the usual searches, I find lots of articles in the news media that fully support Kucinich, repeating his claims, without questioning the assertions.  Or his sanity.  Besides the article at the top of this page, there are these:

ABC News: $1.5 Billion 'Hot Fuel Premium' Hits Summer Drivers
ABC News: We're Being Cheated with 'Hot Fuel'
CBS News: Hot Fuel Costing Consumers Big Bucks?
Kansas City Star: Hot fuel for you means cold cash for big oil, retailers
Kansas City Star: End sought to overcharges
Consumer Affairs: Hot Fuel Bilks Consumers, Lawsuit Charges
USA Today: Motorists sue oil titans, retailers over 'hot fuel' losses

And so forth...

Actually Fox News and the AP don't drink the Kool Aid straight, although neither does the math nor mentions the effect of the winter months:

Fox News: Oil Executives Deny Gas Overcharging
AP: Hot gas is hot topic in courts and Congress

More on YouTube:

YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Cummings' Questions
(Oh man, this is embarrassing... Elijah Cummings roughs up Michael Cleary of the National Conference on Weights and Measures pretty badly.)

YouTube: Hot Fuel Hearing -- Cummings and Kucinich Exchange
(Massive bloviating.  "People find it so incredible that they find it unbelievable."  Oh baby.)

('Interesting that Nancy Pelosi has 1,016 videos on YouTube.  Who knew?)

I find it fascinating that this issue is a political morality play in a perfect storm.  A politician who finds basic physics offensive, blames it on the oil companies, gets other politicians and the media on his side, and attempts to enact legislation that costs far more money than it was supposed to save.

More resources:

Hot fuel and the 60 degree volume standard: Are we getting ripped off?
An interesting blog entry from "Another Monkey".

National Conference on Weights and Measures
Click on the meetings for some interesting notes.

This is crazy stuff, man.

Editor's note: I've been incredibly busy lately; a massive crunch at work, major rennovations on the house, crazed holidays, and, oh yeah, regular life. Not to worry, I'm still here. I've got about a dozen unfinished posts that I'll get out eventually. Sometimes current events incite a timely post that jumps out in front of the pack...

Evan Sayet's Blog is back in gear after an absence, and it's great. In his post "Who Are These Democrats?" he points out that the major Democratic Party candidates for president are all severely lacking in experience, accomplishment or any sort of proven skills. It's an important point and a valid criticism.

Evan describes how the candidates have been using the words "change" and "hope" in speeches and interviews instead of proposing any constructive, concrete, practical plans that have a chance of working. And Evan points out how utterly meaningless the words "change" and "hope" are. That's very insightful; when you think about it, it's hard to imagine words that could have less meaning. Especially in the context of someone who is auditioning for the position of running a nation. It's effectively saying, "I got nuthin'."

But recently it's become worse than that; the words "change" and "hope" have become the centerpiece of every speech and interview.

'Don't believe me? Okay, I'll propose the Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Drinking Game. The next time you see one of the major Democratic 2008 presidential candidates speaking (Clinton, Obama, Edwards), and any speech, event or interview will do, gather your friends 'round and listen closely. And every time you hear the words "change" or "hope", everyone has to take a swig of their favorite alcoholic beverage. And with each swig, reflect on how thoroughly meaningless those words are.

And likewise, I'll also suggest that if you hear a Republican candidate use the words "change" or "hope" in a remotely similar way, that they might not be worthy of your vote.

Earlier this year, writer and comedian Evan Sayet gave a powerful talk at the Heritage Foundation called Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals Think.  The entire lecture is readily available on YouTube:

YouTube: Evan Sayet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

It's lengthy as video clips go, but the man is so engaging and insightful that you may be hooked within the first five minutes.  And here is the transcript.

I don't agree with him completely, or rather, I think there's more to the issue than he describes.  And some of his examples might suffer from misinterpretation.  But nonetheless, Evan Sayet has nailed some fundamental issues in ways nobody else has, and this may be one of the most important speeches of our time.  Seriously.  If you know intelligent, well meaning folks, whose logical reasoning leads them deep into Orwellian territory, and tells them that George Bush is Hitler and that terrorists are freedom fighters, then this guy has a plausable explanation.

(And doesn't it strike anybody as being just a little weird that capital-L-Liberal is pretty much opposite lowercase-L-liberal?)

As I'm writing this, the YouTube clip is approaching 300,000 views, so the word is clearly getting out there.  Congratulations Evan, this is a remarkable work.

The CNN YouTube Democratic Debate was on a couple weeks ago.  I think I saw a little bit of it on TV and the rest on YouTube clips.  Of course it was ridiculous, with an insane cast of characters.  I mean, besides the candidates (ba dum dum).  The debate questions were in the form of YouTube clips, including the snowman with the Mr. Bill voice, the lesbians, the guy with the guitar, and the choreographed rednecks.

The Republican party is thinking that maybe this YouTube debate thing might be more of a trainwreck and possibly not the optimal way to discuss the important issues of the day, and perhaps they shouldn't be doing this and instead come up with something better.  Melissa Jenna thinks otherwise, and tells us so, in no uncertain terms, here:

Melissa Jenna: Throwing Away Opportunities

I'm digging the teddy bears.  HotAir.com described the situation as "We've lost the perky vote".

Okay, that clip is spectacularly funny, and has been making the rounds lately.  But there's more to this...  Melissa Jenna is significant because she provided one of the questions used in the YouTube debate.  Check it out here:

CNN YouTube Democrat Debate: Voting Machines

And congratulations to Ms. Jenna.  Too bad she didn't notice that her question was not actually addressed during the debate.  Bill Richardson used it as a springboard for some grandstanding, a bogus accusation of the Republican party, and a proposal for increasing voter fraud with "same day registration", but that's about it.  That's right, Ms. Jenna, the content of your question was basically ignored.  And yet remarkably, you think this is a good format.

It's too bad that the Democratic candidates choose to ignore you, because it was actually an interesting question.  So how about if I address the question? Specifically, "Don't you think that standardizing our voting practices would increase legitimacy and possibly even voter turnout in our elections?"

No, I don't see that standardizing the voting procedure would necessarily either increase legitimacy or improve turnout.  An accurate and legitimate tally of the votes is certainly important, but standardization, by itself, does not guarantee, or even encourage, accuracy and legitimacy.  Quite the opposite, the chance of the most accurate voting procedure being chosen as the standard is about as slim as Beta being choosen over VHS, or as a Mac being chosen over a PC.  And with a national standard, states would not have the option of customizing their voting procedures to their particular situation.  And if some state comes up with a superior voting system, it would be much more difficult for that voting system to be tested, proven and adopted.

The second half of Ms. Jenna's question concerns voter turnout.  Y'know, I can't imagine a single case of someone saying, "Oh dear, I just moved from one state to another, and now I don't want to vote because these voting machines might be different than the ones I'm used to."  But okay, just for a moment, let's assume that what you say is true, that a different voting system is a disincentive to voting.  If so, standardizing on a new national voting system would probably require all voting systems to change, and that would maximize the number of voters disenfranchised.  That's not a good thing.

Fundamental to Ms. Jenna's question is the scenario of intending to do good, not actually solving the problem, but instead placing the federal government in charge of it, and assuming that will solve everything, and that would be the very government that she doesn't trust, even to deliver her mail correctly.  Does the federal government have any real incentive to continuously maximize the accuracy and legitimacy of the elections?  Not really.  In fact quite the opposite, one could imagine a less than honorable political party that stays in power by rigging an election.  It's so much better to keep the elections at the most local and regional level possible, where there's a huge incentive for the local community to assure that the elections are run accurately and legitimately, and where the local community is in the best position to monitor the election.  Further, most elections, and most items up for a vote in any given election, are for senators, representives, assemblymen, city council, mayor, dog catcher, whatever.  Do you really want the federal govenment involved in that?

So yeah, if I was running, I would be the candidate that found your question interesting and felt compelled to answer it honestly, in a way that didn't suck up to your vote, and not just steal the time for promoting myself and to make outragious accusations of racism toward the other party.

I've been in a couple recent discussions about income taxes with some random folks recently, and the people I've talked to all seem to believe that under the Bush administration either the taxes have increased, or that taxes have been reduced only for the wealthy, or that taxes for the wealthy have been reduced while the taxes for the poor have increased.

Of course this is an easy one to check out as the tables are readily available at the IRS web site.

Here's the income tax from the IRS 1040 Tax Table, filing single. I've choosen the years 1998 and 2006, because the former is positioned six years into the eight-year Clinton administration and the latter is positioned six years into the eight-year Bush administration.

Note that all the tax rates have gone down, and the average reduction is 16.16% (!!!).  That's quite significant.  And with respect to the present day, the tax rates used to be an average of 19.27% higher.  The greatest reduction was for the lowest income level, where the income tax used to be 33.51% higher.

And note that the four largest tax rate reductions are at the five lowest income levels.

(What's with the glitch at $20,000.00? Probably a correction; the 1998 tax rate at $20,000.00 was already the lowest rate of these numbers, lower than the $10,000.00 rate.)

Actual taxes will be even less today because of things like the child tax credits, which GWB introduced.

So yeah, income taxes are significantly reduced over the last eight years, they're reduced more for the poor than the wealthy, and it's a very good thing...  And, of course, most people will believe the exact opposite.

CalTrain

Because of my job I get to ride CalTrain between Palo Alto and San Francisco an average of about once a week.  CalTrain is the line that goes between San Francisco and Gilroy, a total of about 80 miles, and that includes Silicon Valley and San Jose.

As train lines go, Caltrain is somewhat mediocre; the track doesn't venture very far into San Francisco, the schedule is thinner than it ought to be to serve the 6th largest metropolitan area in the nation, the rides on the old cars are so bumpy it can make one nauseous, and while the new Bombardier Bilevel Coaches are very nice, there are few of them in service.

CalTrain certainly doesn't suck; but it could be so much better.

How to Increase Train Ridership

A friend once described a way to massively improve train ridership.  "Look at Disneyland," he said.  There you have rides that are an awful lot like mass transit in many ways, yet they are so popular that they are always packed to full capacity and visitors have been known to wait obscene amounts of time in line for the rides, even though the trip ends exactly where it started.

So he suggested that passenger cars and the stations should be done up a little more like Disneyland..  Basically, get someone like Steven Spielberg to design your commuter train line.  How cool would that be?

The big revelation here is that we're not being very imaginative with our trains.  And that's unfortunate; there are so many possibilities.

So Here's a Business Proposition

So here's a very promising business idea, free to anyone who reads my stuff:

Install a trendy cafe in some of the newer CalTrain passenger cars.  Run a Starbucks concession (or better yet, Peets, for local flavor) with pastries, bagels and espresso in the morning.  And in the evening serve local beers (Gordon Biersch, Pete's Wicked, Anchor Steam, etc.) and local wines.  Provide free WiFi access, of course.  Market it as The Place To Go for dating hookups, for planning startup companies, and for making venture capitol deals.  The layout of the Bombardier cars is pretty much set up for it.

Of course you'd have to work out a deal with CalTrain, and you'd need to set up warehouses at both ends of the line for resupply and cleaning.  The cost would be completely reasonable, certainly not significantly more than setting up a regular cafe.  And it has the potential to be a huge win.

Seen in yesterday's San Jose Mercury News:

I swear that's the headline and opening paragraph exactly.  The rest of the article gets even more insane.  Could someone please explain the strategy here?

Last week Al Gore gave a talk about global warming and his new book The Assault on Reason.  What kind of vehicle does the San Francisco Bay area Gore fan drive to a talk about global warming and reason?  Local photographer Zombie provides the answer in the form of this shot of the parking lot during the event. (And who can't see this one coming...):

So let me get this straight... Al Gore flies in on a private jet to give a talk on global warming and reason, at a venue not served by public transportation (other than the occasional bus), and the audience drives SUV's to attend.  Wow.

But there's more...  Just yesterday Hillary Clinton came to Silicon Valley to speak about being elected president and her education plans.  Hmm, how'd that go?  Here's a photo from Yahoo News:

Oh man....  Hillary, if you want a job for tomorrow you're gonna have to learn to spell tomorrow.  And that repeating-key-phrase-in-the-background thing that's so popular with politicians these days amplifies the error something fierce.  Dan Quayle, all is forgiven.

It just gets sillier and sillier.

'Been slacking for a bit... I'm back now.

Two notes on the recent elections:

"I, for one, welcome our new democratic overlords."

Nancy Pelosi on Saturday Night Live
(This sketch is just so amazing, and Kristen Wiig nails it perfectly.  It's hard to tell with the reduced resolution here but there's this creepy glare she does with her eyes at certain points.)

(The SNL clip showed up on YouTube soon after the show aired, but was quickly pulled.  A bunch of idiots whined about YouTube in the usual places, but they don't understand that the clip was pulled for copyright reasons.  Then other idiots whined about NBC, but they don't understand that NBC is pretty much required to police their material or lose the copyright.  Of course, if NBC was smart they would make this available on their web site.  Anyway, I've since found another place that has the clip.)

Diving into the fields of politics, economics and energy, I've just written an article called "A Modest Proposal to Improve the National Energy Policy and Substantially Reduce Energy Waste and the Terrorist Threat".

Crazy, crazy stuff.