Connecticut’s Senator is up for election. Because of Lieberman’s perceived conservative bent, he’s taken a lot of flak in the last few years from hard-line Democrats. Now that he has to stand for election, Lieberman has to defend himself in the primary.

Normally I would ignore this news because I try to think as little about Joe Lieberman as I can. His opponent in the Democratic Primary has forced me to bring this up. First you should watch his two campaign ads.

Isn’t this Lamont a huge dork? Don’t you just want to beat him up and steal his lunch money? I find these ads pretty annoying. They start out okay, but the end, where he has his family and supporters cheering, is just so irritating. Like I care that his family encouraged him to run. The only issue he addressed that I can remember is that he’s anti-Iraq War. Granted I have no idea what the issues are in Connecticut but there must be some.

At least the dog was cute. Makes me wish I had a dog.

If the British monarchy fascinates you, this news will have you riveted. The current royals are descendents of an illegitimate king! The legitimate monarch, established by genetic testing, is the 14th Earl of Loudon.

The key to this claim goes way back to Edward IV who ruled from 1461 to 1470. In those days the law required the heir to the throne be legitimate. According to a British TV documentary, Edward IV was proven to be illegitimate. This one fact invalidates all monarchical developments afterward. Henry VII’s conquest of the throne is illegitimate because the throne he conquered was already illegitimate. The 1701 Act of Settlement, which established the succession for after the childless reign of William III, was invalid because it was passed by a Parliament that was summoned by an illegitimate king.

I do see a problem with following this logic. If the Act of Settlement is invalid because Parliament was illegitimate, doesn’t that make all acts set by Parliament since 1461 invalid? I would like to see the monarchy change hands but because of that can of worms I doubt Parliament would bother to pay any attention to this.

I finally got my windshield repaired. The task kicked off last weekend’s “Busy Weekend” activities. I gotta say I have mixed feelings with the results. Last week when I originally made my appointment, I first tried to do some research online about glass repair. I had never done this before, nor do I know anyone who has. So I tried to do some searches and find some opinions about it. Hopefully I could find a good company.

I searched for about 20 minutes and all I found was one entry on a message board where someone was complaining about the lousy job he got from a company called Safelite when they replaced his windshield. Apparently the installer improperly sealed the glass, so he ended up taking it to a local shop to fix it. What a disappointing search! It told me nothing, except the name of a glass company. So despite that one bad review I made an appointment with Safelite. What really sealed the deal for me was that Safelite sends people out to your car to work on it. Yeah I bet other glass companies do that too, but where were you two weeks ago when I could have used their names? They gave me a quote of $52 and I waited a week for the guy to come.

Here it is a week later. After a boring afternoon of waiting, the guy calls me for directions at about a quarter to five. He arrives at five o’clock and I meet him outside. For some reason I expected him to be all white trashy. I think it was his voice. On the phone he sounded pretty country. So you can understand I was surprised when he turned out to be a black guy. He was really thin too, so maybe he was Haitian.

We went over to my car and I showed him the three craters in my windshield. The price went up from $52 to $72 because it’s $10 for each additional repair. I was pleasantly surprised because in my head I was worried they would charge me $52 for each crater. So I agreed to the repair, filled out a little paperwork and he got to work. He was a nice guy. We chatted a bit about his job, the Bay Area, sports, New York City.

The repair process was really quick. He drills into your windshield, presumably to widen the crater, and then squirts the acrylic on to the glass. It’s sort of like how a dentist drills your teeth before filling it. Anyway, he places a clear piece of plastic over the scratch to smooth out the wet acrylic. Then he puts a UV light over the damage. A minute of UV light hardens the acrylic. This is where the truly impressive part comes. As you can imagine squirting acrylic solution on your windshield is messy. It doesn’t just stay in the damaged glass pit but runs all over and the UV light hardens it all over. So at this point, the repairman takes out an ordinary razor blade and quickly slices upward on my windshield. He did it so fast and effortlessly it actually scared me. I thought for sure he must have wrecked my windshield. After that he just cleaned up the glass with a paper towel and left.

I took a good close look at the glass and I didn’t see any scratch from the razor or anything. I am still very impressed with that deft maneuver. That sort of work is why I paid $72. I do have mixed feelings about the actual crater repair though. This work did not restore my glass to its original condition. If I look, I can still see marks where the craters were. I have been driving around like this for a few days since, and I don’t really notice them anymore. I think if anyone who doesn’t know about the three craters studies my windshield, they’ll probably just assume I have a little dirt on there. I would probably feel better about it if I knew beforehand what to expect. I do wish I thought to take some before pictures. Damn my slow brain!

As part of my daily workplace reading I came across Megnut and her troubles patronizing her local green market. Her post jumped out to me because I shared the same experience this weekend.

I spend most Saturdays in a sleep-like stupor until the afternoon, where I while away the time with HGTV and This Old House. Finally in the late afternoon I gather up the energy to crawl in the shower and scrub my filthy body. As a result of this hectic schedule, I typically miss the Sunnyvale Farmers Market. I’ve wanted to go for more than a year, but never got it together until last Saturday.

I was in rare form as I left the house at 10:30 in the morning to run several errands around town. I actually happened upon the farmers market by complete accident. I was heading to Target to get a fruit bowl, so I could stop using the big silver mixing bowl as one. Plus I thought a decent bowl would class up the kitchen. Anyway, with all the construction involved in the demolition of the Sunnyvale Town Center (America’s saddest mall) I took a wrong turn and came upon the closed street. It wasn’t until after I left Target I realized what the closed street was all about. So I uncharacteristically changed my plans and set off to the market, on foot no less!

At the Macy’s facing side of the market it was fairly deserted, which was what I was expecting all along. I stepped into the middle of that intersection and then looked down the street to see the whole block lined with tents and the crowd abuzz. I was pretty shocked. I never imagined this was so popular. I can’t say I took a stroll through the market because of the number of people. I really had to pay attention to make sure I didn’t collide with anyone. Still though I did catch some glimpses of their offerings. Cherries dominated the market with five different booths dedicated to them. This must be the height of the season. I did see a number of signs that said next week would be the last offering for cherries. What the hell? This is what people mean when they say to eat according to the seasons? You get a couple of weeks to eat cherries and that’s it for the year. What a deprived existence.

I did consider buying something there but I stopped myself for several reasons. First, the prices weren’t that great. They seemed to be higher than my local supermarket, and I already feel like I’m getting ripped off there. I also found the crowd overwhelming. Some of the booths were crammed with people and I didn’t feel like fighting to get high priced fruit. I also felt a little like a hypocrite for considering buying from these hippies. I have spoken against organic farming for years and to give these people my money, just didn’t sit right with me.

To bring this back to Megnut’s story, remember the prices at the farmers market weren’t so great. I was paying about the same or more. Megnut was paying more than double her grocery store’s prices. Farmers have great P.R. They have created this aura of humility and honesty around them. That’s blinded us all to the fact that farmers are just businessmen. They have a product and they’re working to squeeze every bit of profit they can from it. All they need to do is lug their crops into the nearest town, put on a smile and slap the word “organic” on their sign, and they can jack up their prices all they like. There will always be some well meaning person who will pay way more than they should.

amNY didn’t want to let New York Magazine have all the fun of predicting NYC’s future. They did jump ahead to 2030 though. amNY wasn’t as detailed as NY Mag’s 2016 piece but it did a better job of raising the bile to the edge of my throat. The piece is a mix of self-righteous hipsterism and Sex and the City airheadedness.

I guess what actually got me all worked up was the article’s attitude toward transportation. Pompous lectures against cars in NYC are not new, but this same article also dismissed the subway like it was yesterday’s news. If you’re opposed to cars, how can you look down your nose at the most successful mass transit system in America? I’m flabbergasted.

amNY first says cars will become so expensive to keep in 2030 that only the rich will have them. Yet there will still be gridlock in the city because there are so many cars. Does that mean NYC is set for a huge up-tick in the number of rich people living there? Sounds to me like something pretty good for the city.

Congestion pricing has been done in London and possibly a few other cities I’m not aware of, but amNY is proposing a different system. The city is going to keep tabs on the distance millions of cars travel and charge them accordingly. This can’t be a simple bill determined by your mileage because you get charged higher prices depending on what time and what roads you drive on. So the city will be watching everywhere you go. Sounds like scary big brother tactics coming to reality but sadly it’s not completely far fetched. There is a pilot program going on in Oregon where drivers are being billed according to their mileage and time they drive. Even so this didn’t track what streets you drove on. It was a simple per-mile fee. Auto insurance companies are experimenting with something more invasive. There was another pilot program where drivers were given a discount if they let the insurer install a GPS tracking system and radio. This device recorded the location of the vehicle at all times. The person’s premium was adjusted based on how much they drive and also if they were habitual speeders.

I can’t blame insurance companies for wanting to be nosier even if I don’t like it, but it’s just wrong for government to charge different rates for service. Why do you ask? After all, you don’t even own a car. Why should your taxes go to keeping the roads in good order? The answer is that everyone depends on the roads. You may not ever drive and have no friends that drive but everything you use relies on the road network. Whether it’s from a supermarket, a farmer’s market or some hippy food collective, those goods used the roads to get to you. Besides, drivers already pay more than non-drivers. We the car-owners pay plenty by having to register our car with the local DMV. I think I paid $150 last year.

By the same token, I’ve felt for awhile that NYC should really take the subway back under its own control. Just like the roads are basic infrastructure we should all share the costs of, in New York City the subway is just as vital as the road network. Maybe you’re wealthy (or patient) enough to use cars everywhere you go, but your lifestyle depends on all the workers who rely on the subway to get around. Let’s take a big company with many wealthy workers like Lehman Brothers. Forget about the workers who can afford to have a car centered lifestyle (even though I bet a lot of them take the subway anyway). That company probably still has thousands of workers who don’t make enough to give up the trains. If the subway disappeared, Lehman Brothers couldn’t continue business.

But I’ve gotten off topic… amNY, after it’s anti-car prediction, goes on to dismiss the subway. It admits the Second Avenue line will be built, because it has no choice. Construction has already started. However that’s the only change they expect. Gene Russianoff, the head of the Straphangers Campaign says, “Most of us will be thankful if the subway system is still up and running 25 years from now.” What a smartmouth! What about the 7 train extension? What about the new Atlantic Avenue line? I’d hardly call two new subway lines and an extension nothing. Not to mention whatever plans will be proposed in the next ten to twenty years. Frankly, I’d expect more from the MTA if NIMBYism wasn’t de rigueur in every neighborhood.

Instead of the subway, amNY is predicting bicycles and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) will make inroads with commuters. Suggesting bicycles is wide-eyed naivety. New Yorkers won’t bike to work because they don’t want to kill themselves. Biking is a lovely hobby when you do it in open space. Riding through congested streets is only asking for death. Even in a bicycle-friendly fantasy world where cars are banned, most New Yorkers will shun the bike because they don’t want to arrive at work sweaty and smelly.

The MTA is considering several BRT projects in the outer boroughs. BRT will probably become a part of the transit mix in NYC even though I consider it the gayest MTA project. This sort of transit is only suitable for emptier spots of the city because it requires so much space. BRT creates a bus only lane on a city street. In some spots the bus only lane might just be marked with paint. In other areas, special medians might be built to separate the bus lane from regular traffic. This takes away a lot of the available roadway, so therefore it’s only suitable for areas that don’t get much traffic. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to pick spots of BRT, I’d put it along the north end of Queens – Ditmars Blvd to Astoria Blvd to Northern Blvd. Also along the extreme west side of Manhattan. BRT should act like a feeder to the subway. The north Queens BRT should dump people into the N train. The West Side BRT should dump people into that new 7 train extension.

The culture and living section of the article sounded downright ditzy. Anti-wrinkle cream will make intergenerational dating acceptable? I can believe it will turn a whole generation of the old into huge liars about their age, but I really don’t think it will change society. May-December relationships will still be oddities.

The article is assuming these relationships don’t happen because of looks. I disagree because May-December relationships are based on mutual exchange. Today the exchange typically follows that the young one gives hot sex, while the old one gives money. If you remove the ugliness from most old people, what happens to the exchange? The old, who now look good again, don’t need to go to the young for hot sex. If the old aren’t as costly to maintain in a relationship as the young, intergenerational dating might actually go on the decline.

In my mind, it’s a matter of culture. Similar age groups get along better because they have more in common. Today people reach out of their age group to get something else. The old date the young for their hot young bodies. When you remove that advantage, the young have nothing else to offer the old.

Here’s my prediction for 2030: More of the same. Things will change, and people will bitch about change. That is as universal as death and taxes.

In my lifetime I have called many things a waste of money. I can usually be counted on to rail against travel as a waste of money. I’ll roll my eyes at designer clothing. At times I’ve even called food a waste of money. Yet just today I have discovered the most efficient way to waste money.

You’re probably wondering what makes it so efficient. After all couldn’t I just throw money away to achieve waste perfection? I put that sort of behavior into a separate category. Wanton destruction of money takes a different mindset than buying something which has little or no value.

With this in mind please visit NYC Garbage. This slightly-painful-to-navigate website allows an artist (I guess) to sell you bits of trash from New York City, neatly packaged in see-thru plastic boxes. This can be yours for the low, low price of $50. Your garbage will be scavenged from an authentic New York City trash can, hand packaged in a handsome display case and individually labeled with a sticker of authenticity. Made in the USA!

This here is a perfect waste of money because your purchase has zero intrinsic value. You’re buying garbage in a box. The only value it could have is whatever esteem its owner derives from owning it. However I can see one use of this. If you’re ever in a situation where you’re forced for one reason or another to give a gift to someone you don’t like, what could be better than this? You can derive value in knowing you gave your nemesis something entirely worthless while still abiding by whatever social convention that forced you to give a gift in the first place. Is there a slicker way of saying, ‘I don’t really like you’?

Yet another pebble has chipped my windshield. This is the third and worst crack yet. I was innocently changing lanes on 101 North at the 85 overpass. Two cars ahead, another guy also changes lanes. Then BAM! I get whacked with a pebble.

It hit me so hard I thought someone was throwing stuff at my car. Then I noticed in the center of my windshield a brand new pit. Better still the new mark had little cracks coming out from the center. Very cartoonish.

Fortunately I maintained my composure and didn’t freak out from the impact. I took it much better to than my second hit which left a really nasty gouge. Maybe I’m just used to having a scratched windshield. So sad. Why on Earth does this happen to my new car? It never happened once in the four years I drove my Ford.

Friday I have an appointment with some glass repair company. They quoted me $60 online, and I hope that price stays the same once I show them the damage. They have three chips to fix and I don’t want to pay 3 x $60.

I have been waiting for this for weeks; ever since An Inconvenient Truth came out in the theaters. I haven’t gone to see AIT because I know it will raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels. From the clips I’ve seen on TV, it spouts same drivel we’ve all been hearing since the 80′s. Our evil, polluting civilization is wreaking havoc on gentle mother earth, and if we don’t make whatever changes environmentalists say immediately, the world is set to descend into catastrophe.

Despite the media attention, global warming is not an open and shut case. Climatologists are still debating the causes of it. The best bit comes from a paleoclimatology professor at Carleton University. The professor explains that 450 million years ago carbon dioxide levels were ten times higher than they are today, yet that period was one of the coldest in Earth’s history. So how could the past century’s moderate carbon dioxide increase be responsible for the increase in temperature?

In some respects it doesn’t matter who’s right. The Earth is getting hotter whether it’s from carbon dioxide release or not. What we need to do is prepare ourselves for the change in climate. This is another part where I think AIT fails to be honest. The movie presents global warming as a problem that is immediate. The problems that come from climate change will occur over decades, not overnight. If sea levels rise, we will have many years to gradually move our cities inland or build walls to hold back the sea. People will simply have to adapt to changes in weather. Populations will certainly shift, but why is that considered bad? Again, this will happen over decades.

One of the major worries of climate change is the availability of drinkable water. A recent development in desalination has taken a major step toward making that technology useful to much of the world. Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab have developed a new filter made of nanotubes. This filter cuts the cost of desalination by 75%. If this innovation can be industrialized, it can solve so many water issues. California has several desalination plants whose cost range from $1000 to $4000 per acre-foot (AF) (see chart at the bottom of the previous link). A 75% cut puts that range at $250 to $1000 per AF, which is on par with drilling new groundwater wells in some areas. Water supplies can become more secure and plentiful with technologies such as this nanotube filter.

Technology has gotten a bad reputation in the last 30 years or so, but frankly, technology solves problems. New inventions will solve the problems to come. So stop worrying. As long as we invest in science, we’ll be okay.

Anyone remember the last State of the Union address? Of course you don’t. In that speech President Bush mentioned the promise of cellulosic ethanol. That sort of ethanol is produced from junk plant materials. Stuff that has no use other than maybe compost. Things like corn husks or switchgrass. That speech, after the comedians stopping making fun of Bush for bringing up switchgrass, was the start of a government push towards developing cellulosic ethanol. That was just six months ago.

I bring this up because researchers at Delft University have announced a new method to create ethanol. Ethanol has been produced for decades using baker’s yeast to metabolize sugar. These researchers have altered the yeast by inserting a gene from a fungus. The gene makes it possible for the yeast to metabolize xylose, a type of sugar prevalent in these agricultural wastes. Cellulosic ethanol is now possible! Okay this research has been going on for years before that speech but it’s a funny coincidence that this development happens when the technology now has such a focus on it.

The researchers have to work on bringing the process up to an industrial scale. Sometimes it’s tricky to get a method that works in the lab to work in a factory setting. They said it should take five years to get it working in an industrial setting. Mark your calendars – June 9, 2011. Check the news that day and see if cellulosic ethanol is produced on an industrial scale.

And I was actually thinking my next car might have a diesel engine. It’s a surprising world.

Over and over again we’re bombarded with the idea that energy supplies are running short. Awhile ago I posted an article refuting this common knowledge and made the bold statement we’ll be using fossil fuels at least up to the 22nd century. The Economist has another article in its June 1st edition that shows we’re a step closer towards making my prediction come true.

Qatar is an emirate in the Persian Gulf with little petroleum but lots of natural gas reserves. Unfortunately since it has Saudi Arabia, Iran and the UAE as neighbors, it doesn’t have a ready market for the world’s largest reserves. Sure you could turn the gas into liquefied natural gas, or LNG. However it’s costly to convert and you need to ship it in specialized tankers. Worse yet there aren’t a lot of ports that can accept LNG. The energy hungry US doesn’t have a single port that accepts LNG.

Here comes South African energy behemoth Sasol to the rescue. Sasol is bringing a technology called “Gas to Liquids” or GTL. GTL dates back to the 1920s, but Nazi Germany and Apartheid-era South Africa did the most to develop the technology because both countries suffered from crippling energy shortages. Germany and South Africa used this technology is convert coal into petroleum. The project in Qatar will adapt the techniques to convert natural gas into diesel fuel.

The diesel can be shipped using the current petroleum infrastructure. Better still, vehicles that use the GTL diesel produce less emissions. Sasol is hoping for a huge success here, not only because it would anoint them as the IT player in natural gas, but because then they would be in a much better position to push their coal conversion technology. If this isn’t company hype, it’s a winner for everyone. Well, everyone except the Iowa ethanol pushers.