The Klobuchars

I hope local yokel Amy Klobuchar gets the vote for US Senate instead of the cross-eyed toadie Mark Kennedy. Klobuchar has huge name recognition in Minnesota, partly because of her father's popularity as a newspaper columnist, environmentalist, and radio host. Jim Klobuchar, a former sportswriter for the Minneapolis StarTribune, wrote one of my favorite columns of all time, essentially lifting the veil for me behind the marketing of sports team "homerism". His main premise still holds true: if sports writers never wrote up close and personal stories documenting athletes' private lives, no sports fan would ever care which team wins or loses. Every big-time sporting franchise would lose a significant fraction of their die-hard fanatics because the players would become nameless automatons.

I use to live and die according to the machinations of the Twins and Vikings, but no more. But by effortlessly ignoring whatever some sports hack writes about a millionaire ballplayer going to some children's hospital as a charitable action, I brush off the success or failure of my hometown teams.

Klobuchar wrote about a taboo topic -- that which no sane (i.e. gutless) sports writer should talk about. That kind of journalistic honesty rarely shows up in the big media and in his own way spoke truth to power.

Oh and by the way, Amy Klobuchar, as a Democrat, understands all the important energy issues that a Republican's corporate and 'minionist walking papers would never reveal. I trust she also inherited some of her father's honesty and integrity, and will speak truth to power in much the same way.

Obvious

Unlike a significant fraction of the population, I don't have a hard time understanding why academics vote progressive -- apparently some 3/4 of the time. Instapundit claims it occurs because of a lack of "diversity". What he attributes to group-think of some sort, I actually believe amounts to intelligence and plain logic mixed with critical thinking. In other words, things you learn at the university level.

This number does not differ much from a report released last year, and with the possibility of even higher numbers on the elite campuses.

And it goes back even further:

At the birth of Western culture, a teacher called Socrates was executed for filling "young people's heads with the wrong ideas."

Khebab plots

Khebab at TOD (linked via Big Gav) presented a range of peak estimates all on one plot.

I placed the Oil Shock Model data as stars on the graph. My estimate -- based on discovery data -- remains on the pessimistic side, agreeing largely with the ASPO data from October 2004 and Bakhtiari from 2003 (both using conventional plus NGL as the production total). ASPO has since upwardly corrected their estimates, something that I have really no basis for, as discoveries have not gone up much since late 2004.

Non-linear thinking curve fitting

Someone at TOD came up with the eyeball fit to the peaking of world oil production:


In the category of other weird statistical anomalies, the peakoil.com site shows up in the top 50 energy sites -- today 3 down from Chevron.

And who else but David Byrne should provide us the latest thinking in bicycle transportation. Mr. Byrne went to a talk by the former mayor of Bogota, Columbia:

One common measure of the cleanliness of a mountain stream is to look for trout. If you find the trout, the habitat is healthy. It’s the same way with children in a city. Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

When I was elected mayor of Bogotá and got to city hall, I was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead, we installed a bus system that carries 700,000 people a day at a cost of $300 million. We created hundreds of pedestrian-only streets, parks, plazas, and bike paths, planted trees, and got rid of cluttering commercial signs. We constructed the longest pedestrian-only street in the world. [more than 20km!] It may seem crazy, because this street goes through some of the poorest neighborhoods in Bogotá, and many of the surrounding streets aren’t even paved. But we chose not to improve the streets for the sake of cars, but instead to have wonderful spaces for pedestrians. All this pedestrian infrastructure shows respect for human dignity. We’re telling people, “You are important — not because you’re rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human.” If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society.

...

• “If a bike lane that isn’t safe for an 8 year old child it isn’t a bike lane.”
• “Traffic jams are not always bad. The priority is not always to relieve them. They will force people to use public transportation.”
• “Building more highways never relieves congestion.” (This was not his insight, but he reminded us how true it is.)
• “Transportation is not an end — it is a means to having a better life, a more enjoyable life — the real goal is not to improve transportation but to improve the quality of life.”
• “A place without sidewalks privileges the automobile, and therefore the richer people in cars have more rights; this is undemocratic.”

Worst Candidate

If former Minnesota Senator Rod Grams (R) succeeds in uprooting incumbent congressman Jim Oberstar (D) in Minnesota's 1st district, I will likely go into convulsions. The district covers northern Minnesota and includes Duluth, the scenic "Arrowhead", north shore of Lake Superior, Boundary Waters wilderness, and Voyagers National Park.

The potential convulsion-inducing issue statements that I heard Grams recite today include:

1. The claim that Oberstar overspends on bicycling paths in the district. (Not that a congressman has any control over actual spending, so this must mean pork -- a very lean form of pork apparently)
2. The claim that northern Minnesota industry can generate ethanol out of the abundant poplar trees growing in the region
3. Lower taxes can bring back iron mining (which essentially ended over 20 years ago)

Grams' ethanol breakthrough will apparently generate a new industry for the district's citizens, who commonly refer to the poplar trees as aspen.

Sounds like a good idea: cut down the other hardwoods and conifers, then plant and harvest fast-growing poplars which will rapidly leech the soil, initiate strip mining to capture the rest of the locked-in iron ore, and everyone will want to visit and ride on the scenic biking paths. Who wouldn't want to see an imitation lunar landscape, decimated for your convenience and available at a fraction of the cost of the original?

Update: I found an independent opinion on Oberstar's respect for bicycling, and of his legislative methods.

During his little speech, Oberstar shared a little story about how he wanted to insert some pro-cycling language into some transportation bill, but he lacked the support of his colleagues to do it. So he got one of his staffers to write it up in such a way that nobody would understand it, and inserted it into the bill unnoticed, and it passed.

Poll

Tom Friedman has worked his way back to the idea of energy independence.

Coming in No. 1, with 42 percent, was "reducing dependence on foreign oil." Coming in a distant second at 26 percent was "combating terrorism." Coming in third at 25 percent was "the war in Iraq," and tied at 21 percent were "securing our ports, nuclear plants and chemical factories" and "addressing dangerous countries like Iran and North Korea." "Strengthening America's military" drew 12 percent. Mr. Carville also noted that because their polls are of "likely voters," they have a slight Republican bias — i.e., they aren’t just polling a bunch of liberal greens.[PDF poll]

Unfortunately, I believe this particular poll suffers from a lack of orthogonality. Too many of the concerns rely on combatting terrorism, which essentially ends up splitting the vote N-ways. But if Tom Terrific has spotted a trend, bet that it gets promulgated far and wide.

Role models

First Bush showed a keen mid-life interest in bicycling. Now he has transferred that interest to disgraced congressman Mark Foley. Talk about your good role models for the next Floyd Landis, errrr, I mean Lance Armstrong.