I’ve been reading the saga (beginning, end) of a Brooklyn cyclist who foolishly, stupidly, idiotically let a complete stranger “try out” his bike. I don’t know anything about bicycles but it looks like a very expensive one. Gothamist says it’s a KHS bike and has aerospoke wheels. I never knew that people buy “performance” wheels for bicycles. I wish I had that kind of disposable income.

It was in this Gothamist summary that the phrase “breakless fixie” was used. A quick trip to Google showed me this referred to a fixed gear bicycle that had no breaks. I’m still a little confused about what a fixed gear bicycle is though. I get that it only has one gear and you can’t do any freewheeling on it. I also read a lot of people say you can’t coast on it. This confuses me because I suspect I’ve ridden on a fixie before. Actually, I learned to ride a bike on a fixie. At least I think I did. The one I learned on didn’t have any brakes on the handle bars. I had to slow down by backpedaling. That makes it a fixed gear bike right?

I bring this up because all the forums and blogs I read when looking up “breakless fixie” describe these bicycles as super difficult to ride. They’re dangerous. They’re bad for your knees. One even said they are difficult to turn. I don’t understand any of this talk. I was maybe six or seven years old when my dad taught me to ride on this bike, which I think was a fixie. I loved the thing too. I had loads of fun biking around Greenpoint with him. Months after I learned, he bought me a brand new bike that did have brakes. It also did allow freewheeling so I guess it could not have been a fixed gear bike, but I never ever changed the gears on that one. I didn’t know how. I thought multigear bikes had some control on the handle bars to switch gears but my bike didn’t have that. Could that bike have been a fixie with brakes? As I said it did allow freewheeling so maybe not. I really don’t know.

I really think the fright around breakless fixies is just hype. If I could ride one as a six year old, why would a twenty-something have any problems? I remember when I got that new bike, of course I loved that my dad completely surprised me with it, but once I started riding I really didn’t like using the handbrakes. It took me a few weeks to get used to it. I really enjoyed backpedaling to brake. It felt so natural.

Hey and what’s this talk about not being able to coast on a fixed gear bike? You can coast if you just take your feet off the pedals. Hold them up or out. I did that plenty of times. You certainly can’t do that for long but you’ll coast a few feet. And there is a risk of getting your ankle or lower shin whacked with the pedal if you’re not careful. That’s hurts like a bastard. Of course that’s assuming my first bike was actually a fixie. I don’t know enough to be certain.

Here’s a funny little confession. I don’t know anything about bikes now, and I knew even less as a child when I was learning. Years later I discovered the bike I learned on was a girl’s bike. It was purple with a white banana seat. That seat may have had decals of daises on it, or I could be confusing it with another bike. I still have no idea why there is a gender difference for bicycles. Why does that top bar’s placement have to be different for different sexes? I don’t get it.

My point? None really. I do wish I knew once and for all if that bike really was a fixie. If it was then I think everyone who complains about them is a wuss. Also, I rather miss biking. Those were some good childhood memories.

Think about this one. There’s a special ambulance created to harvest the organs of people who die suddenly. Does that sound ghastly to you? New York City will have such an ambulance soon. It’s a test project funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration; an agency I’ve never heard of before. It’s buried within the labyrinth of the US Department of Health and Human Resources. We should all fear anonymous bureaucracies.

This sure sounds ghastly to me. The program will start with one special ambulance, and if successful, will expand to a city-wide fleet of them. Other cities would then start copying the program.

I question how this special ambulance will operate. For one, why can’t existing EMTs simply be trained to have regard for organ harvesting? It doesn’t make sense to have a separate ambulance for this service. The point of creating this is to save time. This organ-saving ambulance would administer whatever sort of drugs and care are needed to preserve a victim’s organs for transplantation. However, to provide the necessary fast service, they would have to be dispatched at the same time as the regular ambulance. It seems like such a duplication of effort. Will these organ-saving EMTs be twiddling their thumbs while the regular ones try to save the victim’s life?

Another worry is the objectivity of these special EMTs. What if they get to the scene first? Can we really trust they’re going to make a legitimate effort to save a victim’s life, or will they be more worried about hitting their quota for organ deliveries? Don’t tell me their won’t be a quota. Of course there will be. Otherwise how can the program be judged? There is going to be some number set of organs harvested that will justify the program’s existence. That number can easily be divided among the groups of EMTs into what number they need to hit to keep the program on target.

I have been creeped out about organ donation ever since I watched Max Headroom as a child. I barely remember anything about the show, but the one aspect that’s vivid in my mind is the booming trade in human organs. One scene from an episode still disturbs me today. It was towards the end of the show after Max and Edison somehow thwarted the weekly nefarious plot. To trim their losses after their plan fails these two blanks (people living separated from the central computer, and look like punks), driving an old van, decide to plow into one of the black-suited anonymous network grunts, and sell his body to an organ harvesting company. As they were dropping him into the deposit slot, you could see him weakly struggling to get out of the body bag. So chilling.

With or without Max Headroom, I find this idea disturbing. Organ donation is supposed to be an individual’s choice. Body parts are not community property to be harvested when convenient. I hope this test project fails. I’m pretty sure I know how to do it. It just needs one big lawsuit and a well publicized case where the victim’s family will scream about how the EMTs murdered their relative to get their organs. After that the program would be unsustainable.

The Wall Street Journal had an eye-opening opinion piece last Tuesday. It explained the work of Kurt Houser, an economist, who noted a very interesting fact about the federal government’s ability to collect revenue. Looking back to 1950, revenue collected by the federal government through taxes remained around 19.5% of GDP. It fluctuated some, but the range appears to be within a percent.

This is economically shocking because tax rates certainly fluctuated far more than just a percent. So last year when tax rates topped out at 35%, the federal government took in about 19.5% of GDP. Back in 1985 when the top rate was 50%, the federal government took in about 19.5% of GDP. Way back in 1960 when the top rate was 91%, the federal government STILL took in about 19.5% of GDP. How can that be? It seems obvious that if the government demands more in taxes, it should be getting more.

There are two things at play here. First, raising the tax rate slows GDP growth because it’s reducing the amount of money available for investment. Second, raising the tax rate encourages more people to hide their income. Both effects combine to reduce government revenue collection. If tax rates go up, it’s possible the government may collect a little more but it will be less than if tax rates were left alone and GDP was left to grow at a faster pace. What’s really fascinating is the 19.5%. Why is that the settlement level?

This information may have been old hat to economists but it was brand new to me, and it’s making me rethink my opposition to a flat tax. Why should we continue to bother with our convoluted tax code? The federal government will end up collecting 20% of GDP no matter what we do. History has proven it. Why not just make all our lives simple. We can do away with all deductions and everyone will pay the same rate. If you want to do something for the poor, you can set a zero tax cut off on income. Maybe everyone who makes less than $25,000 a year pays no taxes. It would save everyone a lot of trouble and it can be designed to be revenue neutral. After all, the outcome (revenue generated) is going to be the same, so why continue with a complicated process?

I would like to register my disappointment with the Internet. Ya see, last week I found a need for sewing. Tyler has been ripping open his toys at a faster rate and I just don’t want to buy new ones every week. Rather than throwing them away, I wanted to try to sew them back together. So I turned to the Internet hoping to find some easy instructions.

I did find instructions, but nothing was easy. All the sites with text descriptions made no sense to me. They have me wrapping thread around my thumb, pulling this way, rolling it, whatever! I couldn’t keep track. So I turned to YouTube because it has everything right? Pffft! Sure I found sewing videos, but it seems like 90% of instructions are for people learning to use a sewing machine. Doesn’t anyone hand stitch these days? The few that I did find about hand stitching were of such crappy quality they were useless to me. I mean, if you’re going to make a video about sewing, don’t you think it makes sense to zoom the camera to a closeup of your hands? This idea eluded so many.

Eventually I found a website with some decent, but not great, still images of someone sewing. From that I managed to learn one method of stitching. I was so relieved to get that done. I’m still a total novice but it feels good to be able to mend a simple rip now. I’m no longer completely helpless to fabric! Since that first night I’ve stitched up three of Tyler’s chew toys. Two have survived.

My cablebox is busted. For about two weeks now, it will randomly lose its TV guide and I have to wait to download a new one from Comcast. So now I’m scrolling through the channels and I come upon the Arizona/Oklahoma NCAA women’s softball game. First of all, the difference between the girls is striking. Arizona’s team is nearly all petite and cute; not at all what you expect from a softball player. I totally have a crush on Adrienne Acton now. Oklahoma is like bizarro Arizona. It’s populated by husky farm girls. I’m sure their wide hips will help them with birthin’ babies for the farm though so it’s not without benefit.

But soon a question popped into my head. Why do these teams play softball? I thought the game was invented as a form of baseball that groups of people with a mixed skill set could play together. It’s the sport of choice for office teams around the country because it’s easy for uncoordinated and barely mobile people to play. So why do these girls play it? It’s not as if they aren’t athletic people. I don’t understand why they don’t play regular baseball. I feel pretty confident in saying they could handle that game. What gives?

Food has gotten expensive right? It’s not just me noticing this? I’m sorry if that’s such an obvious question considering all the TV, newspaper and magazine coverage it has gotten. Doubt has crept into my mind today though.

I was reading an article about some clerical screw up Congress had regarding the farm bill that was vetoed by Pres. Bush. I greatly dislike this farm bill, but that’s not what has addled my brain. One part of a line in that article, not even a full sentence, confused me.

…and additional $30 billion would go to farmers to idle their land…

Wha? Why? Food price inflation is only second in prominence to gas price rises. Rising food price have caused riots in several cities. Yet Congress still wants to give billions away to farmers to grow nothing. Shouldn’t we be trying to grow everything flat out? This isn’t the time to let land lie fallow. You only do that when food prices crash because you’re trying to prop them up for next harvest. We’re in exactly the opposite situation now. Farmers are raking in huge profits. They don’t need to hold back production. Everything they grow will sell and at a handsome profit.

Shamelessly populist Senators want to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies to help out “the people”. As if Congress getting more money to waste will do me one bit of good. Why aren’t they hauling in corn-growing Iowa hicks to the Senate and threatening them with a windfall profits tax too? It would be just as fair.

Everyone who flies to and from New York is going to get higher airfare thanks to the federal government. The transportation secretary announced they will try to force airlines to auction landing and take off slots at Newark Airport and JFK.

Supposedly this measure is to “boost competition” among airlines. What a joke. What they’re doing is increasing the cost of operating in NYC. This will make it even more difficult for future budget airlines to set up operations there. Auctions will raise the cost of these slots and only the deep-pocketed mega airlines will be capable of coughing up the money. Of course the higher cost will then be passed on to us consumers.

The real reason the government is doing this is because New York City’s airports are crowded. It’s as simple as that. The city is both a large hub and major destination in its own right. Lots of people fly there and that means lots of jets use the area airports. This auction is a response to scarcity. The take off and landing slots are in short supply. Rather than continue to sell them at a fixed price, an auction would certainly reap more money from them.

But the government wants to spin this idea as being consumer focused. The Department of Transportation is pursuing auctions and hourly flight caps in the name of stopping flight delays. Sounds great right? It’s gubernment standin’ up fo’ the little man! Except by putting limits on flights you make those flights even more valuable and therefore expensive. The little man may take off on time, but he will definitely pay more to fly.

A real consumer focused plan would involve creating more slots. You could try expanding the area’s three major airports with new terminals. Newark is landlocked so you would need to take over existing property there. JFK and LaGuardia are against the ocean. We could create new land by filling in some of Jamaica Bay and the water north of LaGuardia.

But in the same vein as that idea, I would love to see a new NYC airport built on an artificial island. What I find tragic is that it sounds like a crazy idea. Yet Asia has six: Kansai International Airport, Chubu Centrair International Airport, Kobe Airport, New Kitakyushu Airport, Macau International Airport, and Hong Kong International Airport (Chek Lap Kok Airport). Is New York less important than Kobe or Macau? New York has to suck it up and accept a limit on flights while Asian cities plan for the future?

How is it the Chinese and the Japanese can get organized enough to propose, plan, build and operate an airport built on an artificial island, but here the idea is practically science fiction. It’s like we’re the Medieval Europeans who marveled at the achievements of the Romans but lacked the capability to match them. I’m sure they tried to patch up the buildings and infrastructure the Romans left behind as best as they could, but eventually they decayed beyond repair and no one knew how to replace them. We are a civilization in decline. We let our infrastructure decay and stagnate because we’ve become afraid to make any changes to our surroundings.

An artificial island would cost billions to build for sure. I don’t think the government would have to pay for it though. The local New York authorities should put out an RFP for this project. Let private corporations step forward with plans to finance the construction and then fully own and operate the new airport. The government’s responsibility would be left to building highway and rail connections. I understand that won’t be cheap but it’s still cheaper than building the whole project alone. The incentive is the same as all infrastructure projects. When you build them, you provide the foundation to grow your economy faster. Spending, say, $500 million on some new roads would translate into future billions in tax revenue from the increased economic activity you get from faster, easier air travel.

I feel the ideal space for this new island would be in Lower New York Bay, south of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Right now there is just some beaches on the shore, some single family homes and Staten Island University further inland. I would expect a lot of these houses to be bought up and replaced by hotels serving the new airport. Depending on your political persuasion, that sounds like great progress or horrible development. I like it being near the Verrazano Bridge because only a short extension of I-278 would be needed.

Right now there are two artificial islands already off that coast. Hoffman Island and Swinburne Island were constructed in the 1800s to quarantine contagious immigrants found at Ellis Island. They would likely be destroyed for the airport, but since they seem to be uninhabited I don’t think that should matter.

How big would it need to be? Well New York is a major city so I think the only fair comparison should be with Chek Lap Kok Airport. It handled 47 million passengers in 2007. That enormous addition to the city’s air capacity would be a boon. This airport covers about 12.5 square kilometers. Let’s see what a hypothetical island, of the same area, would look like.

This island is a rectangle of 4 km by 3.1 km. What the actual airport would look like I leave to real engineers. This shows just you how it would fit into the area.

Building this is a engineering possibility. I doubt New York, or anywhere in America really, has the political courage to get it done though. No government official would want to propose a privately owned airport. Neither would they stand up against people who complain that beaches would be lost even though they can be replaced elsewhere, or ones that complain about noise even though the runways could be oriented so jets approach from the ocean. Oh and I almost forgot about the people who complain that air travel isn’t environmentally friendly at all and want government to discourage its use. Oh well. I guess we’ll just have to learn to enjoy our higher airfares.

Finally there is some exciting space news! There’s talk floating around NASA of a mission to land astronauts on an asteroid. How fantastic is that? No boring robotic mission. No dull orbiter taking pictures. This is an actual challenge.

Ostensibly this mission’s task would be to retrieve asteroid samples for study. We should be able to learn more about the early solar system from that. But if that was the real mission, we would just send another robot. The real point is to test out the new equipment NASA has been building. The lumbering Space Shuttle is going into retirement in 2010. This mission would put the new Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule to the test. Besides the technology, it would give NASA ground crews experience in managing a long distance mission. No one has had to do that since Apollo 17.

I think the most important aspect is that a mission to this asteroid would give NASA practice in a manned rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid. Remember that these are the asteroids likely to hit Earth and doom civilization. If we’re going to try and deflect one in the future, it would be good to have some practice in getting near them.

We do we need to practice that? One thing that jumps to mind is that the surface of most asteroids isn’t solid rock but rather a thick layer of soft, fine dust. It’s impossible to stand on. Now one idea for asteroid deflection is to attach an engine to an asteroid that would push or pull it into a different orbit. Should this become necessary, we would want to feel certain that we could anchor an engine to this dusty surface. Anchoring the Orion capsule in this mission would be our first attempt and could raise some unforeseen issues we’ll need to solve. I’m sure there’s other stuff too that my non-engineer mind can’t think of.

I hope the public gets as excited about this as I am. This is the sort of push-the-envelope thinking NASA should have been doing throughout the 1980s and 1990s. That feels like a lost twenty years. Sure there was some interesting science done, but no great achievements. The 1950s had the advent of rocketry and satellites. The 1960s was the quest for the Moon. The 1970s were a little slow. Apollo was wrapping up, but at least there was Skylab. Then in the 80s and 90s NASA retreated behind robotic probes; practical but boring. No one gets inspired by that. Getting a manned lander on to an asteroid is a step in the right direction. I hope those NASA bureaucrats are feeling a little daring.

So I voted on Monday night. I became a permanent vote-by-mail voter and that was the day I received my first mail-in ballot. I’ll admit it felt a touch exciting because I had long sworn never to bother with this. But there I was filling out the forbidden ballot.

Cable news assumes every newly registered voter is doing it because they’re Obamamanics. That’s not me. I’m not even inspired by fear of Obama. My decision had nothing to do with the presidential election. I did it for Prop 98. Even though I’m quite certain it’s going to fail, I still wanted to vote for it. Rent control is an issue that just makes me so angry I had to do something, even if it was hopeless. But I won’t go into that again.

What actually had me stumped for a bit was the election for county judge. There were five choices on my ballot and I had no idea who these people were. This is exactly why I don’t feel a county judge should be an elected office. Let them be appointed by the state. I really didn’t know anything about the candidates and the election statements by the candidates tell you nothing. If you live in a conservative area, you get candidates proclaiming they will be a “hang ‘em high” judge. If you’re in a liberal area they all say they’re interested in following rehabilitative justice. Blah, blah, blah. All meaningless!

So all I could do is enter all the candidates’ names into Google and see what came up. I didn’t get much info. I ended up picking the guy who seemed most worried about dealing with juvenile criminals. He was the only candidate to mention anything specific. Everyone else just put out some bland statements about being fair. Below I’ll copy and paste some examples from all of them.

• Follow the law and reach a fair result in every case
• All parties will be treated equally and fairly
• Commitment to Justice, Fairness and Integrity

Well DUH! That’s what all judges are supposed to do. If I were applying for a job as a bus driver I wouldn’t say in my interview, “I will be a bus driver who drives the bus.” These guys are just saying they will be fair without any explanation from their life or experience that proves it.

I didn’t vote in any primary election though. A few weeks ago I received a letter asking what sort of ballot I wanted. I chose the non-partisan one. The letter asked me to choose a “Democratic ballot” or a “Republican ballot”, etc. I thought that meant I would get a ballot that was pre-filled with whatever the political party had chosen for candidates and issues. I was quite appalled at the idea. As it turns out, that was just a question on whether I wanted to vote in any primary. Whoops! Live and learn.

Even though voting is pointless, I guess I’ll continue to do so since I went through the bother of registering and I can do it by mail. It was a pretty simple process once I made up my mind.

Here’s the situation. I’m folding my laundry on Thursday night. I’m scrolling through the TV channels trying to find something to watch while I fold. That’s when I come across a show called “Texty Videos” on the LATV network. No, it has nothing to do with the city of Los Angeles. It’s a compressed way to write “Latin Television” meaning Spanish-speaking.

I never heard of this show before but for fun I decided to give it a try. The premise is to scroll people’s text messages while videos play. Yeah I don’t understand the desire to send text messages to a TV show either. I was only half way through the thought that this was a pretty stupid idea when this text message scrolled by.

I miss you baby. I promise I will get a job and stop trickin.

Two sentences, fourteen words that instantly tell you ALL about the audience for this show.