Darrel Aubertine

There has been little in the local press regarding Democrat Darrel Aubertine’s Tuesday night upset win over Will Barclay for New York’s 48^th Senate district, and its potential ramifications on the balance of power in the State Senate.  Aubertine’s win cuts the Senate’s Republican majority to a rather slim 32-30.  The Democratic minority is now pushing hard to find a Republican Senator willing to defect.  At 31-31, Democratic Lieutenant Governor David Paterson gets to cast any tie-breaking vote.

For the first time in 75 years there is a chance that Democrats could control the Assembly, Senate and Governor’s offices after November’s elections.  I can’t think of anything that will energize both parties more than attaining – or stopping – this.  I wonder what Senate majority leader Joe Bruno will be strategizing about this spring and summer.

I am not an advocate of same-party dominance in all branches of government, but in New York, a change from the current status quo is perhaps the only way to shake up the state’s abysmal political machinery.

Get ready for a lot of campaign spending, and a tremendous number of political advertisements in a year guaranteed to be full of political advertisements. 

My Very Exciting Magic Carpet

“My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.”

Just in case you needed a mnemonic to remember all the planets (including the three dwarf planets):  Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris.

Some fourth-grader in Montana came up with it.

Now if only I could come up with a way to remember the spelling of my wife’s middle name:  Is it Ann or Anne?

Red-Cooked Fish

I wouldn’t normally blog about meal recipes, but this meal is so delicious that I had to write something about it, if for no other reason than perhaps to help guarantee that it will not be lost to history.

The following recipe is from  Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, by Ellen Schrecker (1976).  It is one of the very best meals – perhaps the very best – I have ever had.  If you enjoy spicy Chinese food, then this recipe is well worth the effort required to prepare it.

 

Health Insurance

I am not overweight.

I am, however, paying significant health insurance premiums subsidizing many less-healthy people who are so grossly overweight that they are experiencing chronic medical problems.  The obesifying of America is only going to make it worse as deaths from weight-related illnesses like diabetes are increasing at alarming rates.  As an employer I grow tired of paying out $4K+ for employee health insurance premiums and then, as an employee, another $4K+ for the remainder of my health insurance premiums.

Getting health insurance companies to recognize me as a healthy, low-risk individual and putting me into a low-risk pool (as good drivers are able to do with auto insurance) is not likely to become an option in the near future, while I am still healthy enough to take advantage of it.

So here’s my idea.  Add a surcharge to every restaurant and fast-food meal that is based on the average “health rating” for that restaurant.  The health rating is simply the total number of calories of food purchased by the restaurant, divided by the number of meals served – giving an average caloric count per meal.  The surcharge is to be collected as a direct reimbursement to lower overall insurance costs.  If we can’t get insurance companies to lower their premiums or health care providers to reduce their costs, then we can at least come up with a more creative way to pay those costs than simply increasing premiums by 20% year after year.  Think of it as a cigarette tax on gluttony.

This is not to penalize restaurants but rather to force people who are habitual gluttons (or simply bad eaters) to pay more for the health costs that we will all eventually incur for their bad habits. I imagine that McDonalds will need to add hefty surcharges, as well any place that sells chicken wings, pizza or Chinese food.

The hefty taxes added to cigarettes were certainly one reason that cigarette use has decreased in America.  Maybe charging us for choosing unhealthy eating will have the same effect on our consumption of stuff that is not good for us.

 

Foolish Fundamentalism

I have stated this before:  Exluding science in the name of God isn’t salvation, it’s laziness.  The Museum of Earth History, a rather extraordinary place in Arkansas based on Creation Science and the belief that the world began about 4,000 years ago, is one such place where the ownership group profits from that laziness.  Worse, the distortion of good science (Mary Schweitzer’s discoveries is just one example) is simply regrettable.

There is no need for this. 

The hard line camps that preach either science exclusively, or religion exclusively, are both in need of an examination of what each other has to offer.  Important as the Good Book might be, I think the fundamentalist extreme, in particular, needs to read a little more than just the Bible.

I believe that my God wants me to learn as much as possible the truth about this world in which he put us.

About Photographs

I have taken roughly 10,000 photographs since my interest in photography dawned at age 14. My early photographs are catalogued, and I am ever thankful I did that as my brain would never have been able to remember all those faces or places.

None of my post-marriage photographs are catalogued and virtually all of the prints are still in the same envelopes the film processor mailed to us. We look at them only rarely.

Today I am in the process of taking that huge photographic archive plus my parents’ collection and digitizing them all, using a Nikon Coolscan V ED negative scanner. The resulting 6000×4000 pixel images (in JPEG format) take up on average about 25 megabytes apiece on my hard drive. Eventually, the resulting 250 gigabytes of digitized photographs will become the archive of my family and me. Losing that archive to a hard disk crash is not something I want to consider, so everything will get backed up to one or two different media, hopefully a media that will not be too obsolete in ten years.

And that’s a problem. Each new digital format means that some old format will no longer be supported. Floppy disks are essentially gone. Non-SATA hard disks are obsolete. CD ROMs, with their 720 MB limitations, are destined for perhaps the Smithsonian, but not the average person’s home. Even DVDs, which were introduced in late 1996, are bound to go the way of the Dodo as Blu-ray discs replace them as the recording medium of choice.

Each new generation of ever-denser but not necessarily longer-lasting media means that my archive will have to be converted again and again. Unless my children see merit in what I am doing, my last conversion will take place shortly before I die, and roughly ten years after that my photographic collection will be gone. In a sense I miss the days of silver halide and B&W prints which, when stored carefully, have a shelf life of a hundred years.

My life will have been defined by about 2.5 trillion bits. In the not so distant future, some genealogical member of my family may whittle it down to this:

• Born:
• Married to:
• Died:

Drag Racing

This article really bothers me.

Some people are idiots.

Buffalo – We’re Not in the Top Ten – Again!

Article Deja Vu?

Today’s Yahoo News brings this article, which describes the ten most depressed housing markets based on the decline in selling prices over the past year. Buffalo is not in this list. Far from it, from a housing selling viewpoint Buffalo’s performance in 2007 ranked 12th best out of the top 150 metropolitan areas in the U.S.

There is no doubt that housing is cheap in this area – our median selling price was $105,400 while the average price in the Northeast was $261,700. This might not allow us to retire equity-rich, but it puts us in a very enviable position: We are not nearly so financially stressed when purchasing a home as most other parts of the country; we did not need to seek out creative mortgage financing in order to purchase our homes nearly as much as most other parts of the country; we are not defaulting on our mortgages; our housing prices are going up, not down, and it is still easy (relatively speaking) to feel comfortable buying a home.

Last week’s Forbes metropolitan misery index missed something when ranking the ten most miserable cities in the U.S. (see this article) because it fails to even consider the stress that struggling with financing, being in over one’s head, defaulting on a mortgage, and losing one’s home has on an individual’s psyche. Personal misery was left out of the equation.

If there is any unmeasured quantity that deserves to be measured, it’s the level of comfort one feels about one’s own satisfaction relative to where they live. Buffalo would undoubtedly rank near the top of this list, as the financial livability, housing, congestion and stress of pace connected to this area are, respectively, good, outstanding, outstanding and very low.

According to Yahoo, the 10 most housing-depressed cities are

• Raleigh
• San Francisco
• Austin
• San Antonio
• St. Louis
• Houston
• Portland
• Dallas
• Denver
• Baltimore

Because none of these cities showed up in last week’s most miserable cities list, one might conclude that there is little correlation between the uber-stress of being financially over-extended and metropolitan misery. I would argue that there is a connection, and that it may even factor into such issues as our nation’s ever-expanding waistlines. I think a measure of life satisfaction, by metropolitan area, is in order.

Well we’re not in this week’s Yahoo top ten. Why are they getting so hung up on depressing statistics?

Satellite Shootdowns

The U.S. announced today that it is going to shoot down one of its errant spy satellites rather than risk having its hydrazine-filled fuel tank fall and rupture in a populated area.

Although I enjoy a good conspiracy theory I don’t really believe in them; but in this case I think the Pentagon is using the concern over hydrazine merely as a PR tactic.  In my opinion the military has been chomping at the bit to test its anti-missile technology in a real scenario, and they will not/cannot let this opportunity slip by.

My reasoning is this:  Since when has the military machine been that concerned about a few lives here and there?  Since the end of bombing runs on Vieques?  Since the courts forced a stop to deafening whales with eardrum-shattering sonar?  Since the termination of the CIA’s LSD experiments in the ’60s?  Since the 18-month delay between the start of the Iraq war and the utilization of armored Humvees?  Aviation Week reports that the falling satellite’s danger zone is 20-30 yards, making the chance of a direct hit over a friendly community extremely remote.

Then there’s China, which successfully shot down one of its own satellites early last year.  This Administration and the Department of Defense have gone to great lengths to demonstrate their manhood through their carrot and stick diplomacy and are not to be outdone by some upstart country like China.

General James Cartwright indicated that the shootdown “…is a one-time deal” because of software changes needed to shoot down a satellite versus a ballistic missile.  I don’t buy that argument at all.  The math used to track and intercept a ballistic missile (which follows a parabolic path) and an orbiting satellite (which follows a circular path) are virtually the same.  While not trivial, the modifications are straightforward.

And then there’s the hydrazine itself.  Consider that over the years several mishaps have occurred shortly after launch, spewing hydrazine and other toxic gas clouds as well as debris over a wide area; yet the only article I can cite showing official concern over a hydrazine cloud or debris hitting the ground was after the Columbia shuttle disaster in 2003.

It adds up to an over-eager defense department needing an excuse to try an experiment that they themselves would otherwise condemn – oh wait, they already did.

Lake Mead

CBS and Yahoo News each had an article today about the reduction in Lake Mead’s volume which, should current dry climate conditions continue, will render the lake unusable in 6 to 9 years, and drain it by 2021.

Had I not been there in 1982, 2003 and 2006 I would probably not appreciate this article nearly so much; but having seen the lake essentially full and then half-emptied in a single generation, I am well aware that barring a weather miracle the disappearance of Lake Mead is almost inevitable.   The potential disaster that could envelop the Las Vegas suburbs -which Nevada politicians will try to avoid by sacrificing farm irrigation – is just a little further along the horizon.
The demarcation between white and gray rock in the photo above is the high-water mark (reached shortly after my first visit to the lake), which is over 90 feet above the current water line.  The top of Hoover Dam is a good 120 feet above the water line – looking down from above, the water seems very far away.

From the area just north of Boulder City (and just west of the lake) are two water treatment stations that ozonate the lake water prior to sending it down to Las Vegas.  These pumping stations use two giant straws that stick out into the lake, and constantly sip away at it.  The tremendous growth of Las Vegas and its suburbs has forced the Nevada State Water Authority to draw up plans for a third straw, which will go on line sometime around 2010.  They do not make a sucking sound, but coupled with the ongoing decade-long Western drought these straws have effectively overwhelmed the Colorado River’s ability to replenish the lake faster than the water is being drawn off.  Without a dramatic change in the current weather patterns the predictions posited in today’s articles will be unavoidable.

Lake Mead and its shoreline are hauntingly beautiful.  Go see it now, before it disappears.

Buffalo – We’re Not in the Top Ten!

Today’s Yahoo News brings this article, which is from Forbes.com describing the ten most miserable cities in the U.S.  The criteria for determining what was used to qualify a city for a miserable ranking includes the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, commute times, weather, crime and the number of nearby toxic dumps.

That’s some interesting, selective criteria that did not include other factors like social inhomogeneity, employment diversity, education opportunty, proximity to potable water, obesity, cancer rate, mortality rate, affordable housing, shopping experience or any other factors that you and I could devise with a few minutes of brainstorming.

According to Forbes, the 10 most miserable cities are

• Detroit
• Stockton, CA
• Flint, MI
• New York City
• Philadelphia
• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• Modesto, CA
• Charlotte, NC
• Providence,RI

The article is so much crap.  A much more interesting (and perhaps socially relevant) article would have been one that surveyed a few thousand Americans and asked what they considered to be the most miserable cities, and why.  I bet the answers would have been very different.  Buffalo might have been included in the top ten of that survey.

Perception alone has a major influence on how a municipality is treated with respect to government, business and the media.   Buffalo knows this all too well, probably ranking extremely low on the national scale (perception) yet much higher locally.  We (mostly) consider this a great place to live and raise a family; the rest of the nation might have a different opinion.

At least we’re not in this week’s Forbes top ten.  Whew.