My Brother on Video

My brother Damian recently played bass and sang backup for Eric Burdon on Google Music, doing Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.” They shot at Rimrock Ranch in Pioneertown, a cool spot that Reanna and I had been looking at for a wedding venue. The rest of the band is Eric McFadden on guitar and Wally Ingram on drums. Here it is:

 

A Violent Storm on the Beaufort Scale

Yesterday I woke up to a violent wind storm. I walked up to the house for breakfast and found Grandpa Bob had been blown over in the driveway and he was struggling to get up. A gust had blown him straight over backwards. He was embarrassed but not injured at all. (I hope to be able to take a fall like that at 93!)

Growing up in the desert, wind was my least favorite weather. I’ve been blown into a ditch on my bike and had countless teenage hairstyles ruined by wind. It is kind of exciting to see something so powerful, though. We had gusts at 66 miles per hour, making it a “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale (see below), just between a gale and a hurricane. In the Pacific northwest, and especially in cities, this intensity of wind blows trees into houses and causes pretty radical damage. Stuff around here is built for wind. You might lose your roof and you will definitely lose anything that isn’t “nailed down hard,” as we say, but the plants and other structures will be fine.

Here are a couple of very short videos I took. Turn the sound down–they are loud. Can you see the sandstorm about a half mile away in the first one?

The Beaufort Wind Force Scale, according to Wikipedia:

Calm > 1 mph

Light air 1-3 mph

Light breeze 4-7 mph

Gentle breeze 8-12 mph

Moderate breeze 14-17 mph

Fresh breeze 18-24 mph

Strong breeze 25–30 mph

High wind 31–38 mph

Gale 39–46 mph

Strong gale 47-54 mph

Storm 55-63 mph

Violent storm 64-72 mph

Hurricane  ≥ 73 mph

 

Map Animations

I had the idea that animated maps could be a very cool way of presenting data. You could show changes over time and space of any quantity that we collect, and do it in a way that is much more intuitive and appealing than graphs or databases of numbers.

After some considerable (though not exhaustive) searching, these were the most interesting animated maps I found, and I think they are worth watching. I have to say, though, that my overall impression is that this is a sadly underused technique. Come on, data people! Off the top of my head, I’d like to see animations of demographic shifts, weather and climate changes, number of scientific papers published, regime change by region… Get creative!

I should say, before presenting the map animations I found, that I either do not know or am not certain of the accuracy of the sources of the data presented in these animations. Data presentation can be used to inform or mislead, and I do not present these as True, just Interesting.

Several religions mapped over time:

 

This one starts slow, but the first several minutes of nothing happening make the last couple minutes fairly shocking:

 

 

 

Hans Rosling, Data Presentation

This is a cool visual presentation of global health and wealth. I often find presentations of data to be either dense and non-intuitive or boring. This one is interesting and inspiring.

Hans Rosling also has a TED talk here that is really worth watching, on population, fertility, child survival rates, and wealth.

(By the way, I found this clip while looking for good map animations, which seem like a great way to present data. It’s pretty slow going so far, though. Any recommendations?)

 

Goodbye, Ev

A family member and friend of mine died just before Christmas, and I’m still reeling from the loss. Ev was one of my favorite people in the world. He was kind, generous, thoughtful, and strong. He was smart, funny, and interested, always fun to talk to. He was a great model for me of a good way to be a man and have a family, and to live with integrity. When I think about how good and uncomplicated our relationship was, I can’t help imagine that he was like that with everyone. I imagine that everyone who came into contact with him benefited like I did. Losing him seems straightforwardly a loss for us all.

Something else I keep thinking is that I am lucky to have known Ev well enough to feel this much grief. It didn’t have to be that way. He lived in very-northern California, far enough away that I might easily have seen him only at occasional Thanksgiving dinners. He also lived near a part of the I-5 that I drove by several times a year, most years. He and his family made it abundantly clear that I was wanted there, any time I was passing through. I always had a place to stay, a meal, and good conversation waiting. So I saw him several times a year and was able to connect with him that often. Lucky for me.

There is a way that you are born and marry into family, but in another very real way, you make your family. Who do you spend time with? Who do you keep up with? Who do you care about and for? That is your family.

I am so glad that Ev and I made each other family.

Ev, in flannel, goofing around with family, at home, after a ferocious snowball fight and enthusiastic snowman-building, 2010.

 

NME 2011 in Review by WordPress

WordPress sent me this in an email. Last year they let me post the whole summary (here) but this year it’s just an excerpt with a link to the rest of the information. Their summary this year is more interesting than last (including a map showing that, for example, 24.5% of my hits from Asia were from India), but it’s annoying that they are using this teaser to advertise some of their new features.

Anyway, happy new year everybody!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

 

 

 

On Transportation

I’ve been visiting Vancouver for a few weeks and most days we end up commuting at least once from the west side of the city to the east side and back, mostly by car, sometimes by bus. (I’ve done it by bike, too, but not on this trip.)

It’s about six or seven miles each way and takes about 30 minutes. Google maps says 20 minutes by car, and I’ve heard rumors of 15-minute trips, but I’ve yet to experience one less than 30. Yesterday, our commute was 10 miles and it took 50 minutes (extra Christmas shopping traffic, I’m told). That’s five miles per hour in the middle of the day. It was worse on the way home, at 3:30 rush hour.

I found myself quite impatient with this situation. Five miles an hour does not seem a reasonable speed to travel. I think of Los Angeles as congested, but in non-rush-hour traffic I expect to be able to get to another city in 20 minutes–from the train station in Los Angeles to my brother’s house in Glendale, for example.

The thing is, I’d be on the I-5 most of that trip. There are freeways all over the place in LA. This is strikingly not the case in Vancouver. We are on surface streets wherever we go, hitting stoplight after stoplight, very often with no left-turn lanes so traffic piles up behind each turner. Suddenly I miss all of those ugly, loud LA freeways.

Reanna and her family argue that the fact that it sucks to drive in Vancouver is an accomplishment. The more it sucks to drive, the better, because more people will use public transportation or bicycle. We fought to keep freeways out of here, they say. I was reminded of how upset my grandfather gets when he talks about the freeways in LA. The house he built was one of the houses they demolished to put in a freeway (it might have even been the I-5 that went through his house). Freeways went through the middle of neighborhoods, loud and ugly, splitting them in two. It’s very hard to imagine that happening in Vancouver, if only because the real estate is too expensive.

I am pro-public transportation, so when I’m not stuck in Vancouver traffic I think it’s a shame that LA was designed for cars. Maybe it is the relative ease of car-travel that has kept LA’s public transportation from moving to the next level — though LA, at least according to this article, is quite low in miles of freeway per person compared to other major US cities.

This situation does not strike me as a straightforward win for Vancouver, though. People still drive a lot, and in cars constantly in their least efficient mode, stopping and starting all the time. The busses use the same congested, no-left-turn-lanes roads as the cars, so they lose efficiency and speed along with them. Maybe the answer is to have the government quadruple gas prices or insurance prices to make driving a rich-person-only thing, and leave the roads for public transit. I’d much rather see public transportation that wins because of how great it is, rather than because of how crappy driving has become, but I guess I would take what I could get. Not that I could get quadrupling the price of anything related to driving even here in the most progressive part of Canada. That might be less popular than putting in freeways.

In thinking about all this, I wanted to be able to compare the transportation systems in different cities and found it quite difficult to do. We need a single-number transportation index that takes into account the average speed of travel, average energy-expenditure per mile, and how far people travel on average to live their lives in their area. People-miles per gallon-minutes, maybe, or maybe people-kilometers per joule-minute. Any economics or urban planning students out there looking for a project?

 

The Elements of Friendship According to John Gottman

John Gottman is a rock star of the science of marriage relationships. He studies them in great detail, minute interactions, facial expressions, heart rate, stress hormones. Using that data he can predict with a high degree of accuracy which relationships are heading for happiness or unhappiness, stability or divorce. I should say that this is prediction in a technical, statistical sense, not in the sense of prophecy. He can’t tell you if your relationship will fail, only whether your relationship behaves in similar ways to those that have failed in the past. Still, that’s a lot better than nothing, and it’s been enough for him to build an exciting theory of relationships.

In his theory, the most important, without-which-all-is-lost part of your relationship is the friendship. By friendship, he means several very specific things. Here is a summary of his summary from his newest book, The Science of Trust:

1. Track your partner’s inner experience by asking lots of questions and remembering the answers.
2. Make a habit of finding things to appreciate your partner for and letting them know each time you do.
3. Notice the things your partner does and says that could be responded to, and respond positively to them. Pretty much all of them—you can miss or fail to respond to at most 3 out of 20.

If you are not doing this work, he says, you are not behaving like couples who manage to sustain satisfying, meaningful, passionate relationships, who manage conflict well enough, and who stay together longer than 6 years. Maintaining friendship in this manner is the bare minimum.

 

How to Enhance Your Nutritional Status

Reanna and I explored  LA’s fashion district last week. I think her favorite part was looking at the (to me) bewildering assortment of fabric. My favorite part was this sign, in a frozen yogurt joint near Santee Alley:

We read this sign while eating the store’s product, the most intensely sugary frozen yogurt ever created. This snack was pure entertainment, not food, so the fact that the store was plastered with signs like these was… hilarious?

Another odd thing is the indefinite reference of the sign: is is about the health benefit of blueberries or yogurt? (They offered a few fruits as toppings. We had strawberries on our pina-colada/cheesecake frozen yogurt and they were the only really enjoyable element of the snack.)

Then there’s the singular “benefit” mentioned in the sign, followed by four bullet-points.

Then there are the points themselves. Firstly, the yogurt–or the giant blueberry, or some other thing–”fights and lowers cholesterol.” This may only be funny to me because of all the research I’ve done lately on cholesterol. (I discovered I may have familial hyperchoesterolemia, so I looked into it.) Cholesterol is a kind of fat molecule that our bodies make to use as structural elements in our cell walls, sex hormones, and other stuff. It’s not a poison or virus. Fighting cholesterol makes about as much sense as fighting protein or fighting B vitamins. “Lowers cholesterol” is somewhat less nonsensical, but it turns out that what seems to matter is not so much the high- or low-ness of cholesterol in your blood, but how your body is packaging that cholesterol. If your body is packaging cholesterol in big protein sacks (called LDL) more than in small protein sacks (HDL), then you may be in trouble. And even then, your health risk depends a lot on the size of the big protein sacks that you make–if your big protein sacks of cholesterol are properly big, you are probably OK. If they are relatively small, that is bad news. My point is, this sign’s emphasis on “lowering” serves advertising purposes only.

Next point: “Improves the digestibility of food constituents.” I love the wording. I wonder if they are referring to eating in general, here, as putting food constituents into a digestive tract definitely improves their digestibility.

Next point: “Strengthens the immune system.” Compared to what, I wonder? And what are the units of immune system strength?

And my favorite: “Enhances one’s nutritional status.” I imagine nutritional status is a kind of social status, conferred by eating a big tub of frozen yogurt in public. That would explain why our relatively small portion cost over $7.

 

Review of the 1988 Mazda B2200 Pickup

Left: About to put chains on my B2200, just north of Mt. Shasta. Right: Mazda & Reanna, Indian Cove, CA.

My Mazda B2200 pickup was first sold the year I started driving, 1988. I bought the truck from my girlfriend’s dad in 1992 for $3,800, with about 80,000 miles on it. It was my second vehicle, after a 1979 Honda Civic that went through two engines in three years. It wasn’t a great deal but I thought it was a good vehicle after driving it off and on for six months. Nineteen years later I can say that it was a good buy.

Now it has 254,566 miles on it, total, and is 83,857 miles into its second engine. It just pulled a load that weighed over 4,235 pounds for 1,112 miles – from Eugene to Joshua Tree – including the highest pass on the I-5 and several other passes. I never even had to go into first gear to get up those grades. In fact, it made the entire trip with no problem at all. (I don’t recommend pulling 4,000 pounds with your B2200, by the way. It’s only rated for 1,000 pounds of cargo, passengers included. It’s basically a station wagon in the shape of a pickup. But we did make it!) It was a slow trip, though. We were surprised to pass a tractor-trailer on a hill just south of Eugene, so we started a tally of vehicles passed:

Tally of Moving Vehicles Passed Between October 30 and December 4, 2011. (That driver passed us back as soon as we started downhill.)

My B2200 gets between 15 (around town) and 27 (on the highway, no stops, downhill, with a tail wind) miles per gallon. That’s 350 miles to the tank. I average about 22 mpg over a year of driving – pretty bad, I know. Gas mileage is my main complaint about the truck. It may run pretty clean, though. At its last smog check – in 2001 because Oregon does not require them – it blew 17 parts per million hydrocarbons (of 120 allowable and 30 average), and something less than .01% carbon monoxide (of 1% allowable and .1% average) at an idle, 792 RPM. At 2,453 RMP it blew 35 ppm HCs and still less than .01% CO. We’ll see how it does ten years later, now that I’m back in California.

The truck costs me about $1,500 to own and operate each year. I spent exactly $9,253.21 from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2010 on everything truck-related, including fuel, registration, parts, labor, insurance etc etc. That was while I was living in Eugene, though, where I didn’t have to drive much. We’ll see how much it costs now that I’m living in driving country again. I should also say that I do most of my own auto repair – anything easy. I’ve done pretty much all of the routine maintenance, things like spark plugs, caps, rotors, fuel, air & oil filters, and tire rotations, plus other parts as they broke or wore out: the power steering pump, alternator, generator, shocks, various hoses and belts. I took it to real mechanics for the harder stuff, like the new engine, a couple mufflers, a vacuum leak, a new bumper and fender.

Whenever I hit a major repair, I have to decide if it’s worth it to keep going with this truck. Each one costs more than I could sell the truck for. So far I’ve always gone with my truck. It always seems like the it’s worth it. The transmission will probably be my next big expense – I’m still on the original transmission. That will cost $1,500 or so.

It definitely looks like a beater. Plenty of primer. I bumped into a few things over the years and always had more pressing things to spend my money on. During the big move, Reanna and I talked about a new paint job to reward the truck for hauling all my worldly possessions over those passes so admirably. We’re thinking yellow, or maybe red. My dad used to be a car painter, so he can show us how.

Moments With My Truck: A reunion, a roadtrip, the recent move. (Collages by Reanna)