Posted 1:17 PM by Floyd

Interview With A Canadian

Starring former Winnipeg resident Evan Kirchhoff!

Hey Evan,

I was looking at weather reports yesterday and saw that your home town of Winnipeg was at -35 degrees Fahrenheit.

Glad not to be there!

How often does that happen?

On and off during December through February, possibly a little into March and November. Maybe 15% of the core winter days are brutally cold, the other days are just regular cold (zero to -10F, say). The snow usually melts in April or possibly May.

Are people able to function, or do they just huddle next to their radiators? Is it like a snow day where things shut down?

Nah, it's not a big deal! Forced-air furnace heating is probably as common as air conditioning in Atlanta, for starters (natural gas is cheap in Manitoba), although I lived in an old apartment with electric baseboard radiators at one point, and I froze my ass off when it got cold. And obviously you plug in your block heater and (if you're a pampered suburbanite as opposed to a student in a crummy apartment where they ration you to one $%&*#^$ electrical outlet per car) you plug in your interior heater so the steering wheel doesn't take your damned fingers off. Barring that, you need some kind of thermal insulator on the wheel itself, or you'll end up driving with big mitts on (gloves aren't thick enough for a cold plastic wheel). Keep a shovel and a bag of kitty litter in the trunk. Tire chains are forbidden, for road-damage reasons (and the city is pretty efficient at clearing the roads down to bare pavement after each snowfall). There's not as much snowfall as, say, Chicago, but it doesn't get warm enough to melt any snow during the winter, so the snow gets perpetually piled onto the boulevards until it's 5-7 feet high, creating blind intersections. And then it gets dark around 4:30 in the winter.

Apart from that, life pretty much goes on normally! It takes a LOT of snow to shut anything down (it's unbelievable what counts as a "snow day" in most U.S. states), and the cold alone won't do it. I can only think of a couple of times when the city actually shut down for a day.

I guess the salient difference from a normal Tahoe- or Michigan-type winter experience would be "pain". When it's really cold, stepping outside is like taking a bat in the stomach, and then your lungs feel like you're inhaling shards of glass, and your face burns for a little while, and then (mercifully) it goes numb. After that you want to keep track of how long you've been outside, because at some point tissue damage sets in, and it hurts MORE during the thawing process! But of course if you're a dumb little kid you just run around for a couple of hours making snowmen, and every year you kill the tip of your nose, the top edges of your ears, and a little round patch about the size of a quarter on each cheek. The dead skin wears off in a couple of weeks, so frostbite turns out not to be a big deal.

There doesn't seem to be real danger of (e.g.) losing a toe under anything resembling normal circumstances, and (from experience) even if you stay outside until your feet are frozen to the point where you can't feel them at all, where you stomp on one foot with the other foot and it just doesn't register, they thaw pretty harmlessly after about half an hour of sitting inside. And I imagine that many of these X-Treme Cold experiences are a thing of the past, now that every kid probably has the high-tech arctic gear from Columbia Sportswear and such. In MY day we just had $40 nylon parkas stuffed with cheap felt shavings, and felt-lined boots.

Another thing to consider is that the winter is extremely sunny, and blindingly so when the sun reflects off the snow. California's about the only place that doesn't seem "gloomy" to me at this point (Michigan was intolerably dark).


Hell, I can go on forever on the subject of "winter" (as you probably are beginning to note). The winter before I bought my first car, I rode a stock $99 12-speed skinny-tire drop-handlebar bike to university every day. It turns out that bikes are great on packed snow, but cheap steel shatters at those temperatures, so every so often I'd wipe out on some ice and smash another part of the pedals off. My chain would freeze solid each morning until I discovered the trick of lubricating the entire bike with 5W-30 motor oil.

Also, do you know what the record low is for Winnipeg? It was not on weather.com and Google didn't help much -- I did find that the record low for Manitoba is -63 F, but presumably that at the northern extreme of the province.

Hmm -- I see what you mean about weather.com, although even the graph of average temperatures in Farenheit is striking: 70-degree annual swing! Yeah!! (Note that summer is quite pleasant.)

Now, this somewhat under-documented page claims to record -44 C for Winnipeg, which is about -47 Faranheit.

I've definitely seen numbers in the negative 40s, but I don't recall anything lower. This is setting aside "wind chill", which becomes nontrivial. Usually when it's extremely cold the air is still, but if there's a real wind you can get -60 equivalents pretty easily. The weather reports didn't express this in temperature equivalents but in some bizarro Metric index of heat removal per unit area per unit time: 1500-2000 was quite cold, and 3700+ was the famous "Warning: Exposed Skin Will Freeze In Less Than A Minute".

*****************************************

Some personal background: I grew up in Geneva, New York. We had a lot of snow -- usually from Thanksgiving to Easter -- but what Evan calls "regular cold" would be considered bitter cold there. (Though we did have a block heater for the car.) As this temperature graph shows, an average winter day in Geneva has a high near freezing and a low of about 15. Contrast with January in Winnipeg, where the average high is 8 degrees and the average low is ten below. The temperature difference between Geneva and Winnipeg is therefore roughly the difference between Geneva and northern California.)

Posted 12:36 PM by Floyd

A commenter at the Captain's Quarters brings up an interesting bit of history that everyone (including me) seems to have forgotten:

Doesn't anyone remember that during Gulf War I, Saddam suddenly flew what was left of his Air Force to Iran, his former mortal enemy?

It was a huge one or two day story. As I recall it ocurred sometime during the six weeks of aerial attack preceding the ground attack into/around Kuwait. Saddam's Air Force was being taken out even though it was parked in its reinforced bunkers. All of a suddent the AWACS detected the flight of numerous (I don't remember how many -- over a hundred?) Iraqi aircraft over the border into Iranian landing fields, where presumably they're still sitting. Everyone was astonished by it and then the war moved on.

It's become clear to me in retrospect that Saddam's total amorality led him to believe that he thought he could "ransom" them later, even though he'd just been complicit in the deaths of half a million Iranians during their war from 1980-88.

I have yet to see anyone in the mass media -- repeat ANYONE -- make an analogy of this situation to the possible movement of chemical/biological agents in Syria and the Bekaa Valley Lebanon. And even more mystifying is why the Administration hasn't suggested it.

If Saddam would send weapons to his mortal enemies, hoping to redeem them later, just why wouldn't he do the same with his fellow Arab Muslim Baathist ideological soulmates?

Posted 10:00 AM by Floyd

Philippe the otter is running for president! He wants to cheer each American up by giving him or her a puppy named Mr. Poopytime! Go Philippe!

I could use a puppy to cheer me up right now.

Posted 9:55 PM by Floyd

Three weeks ago Tuesday my wife Sherry and I played bridge at the Palo Alto club. (Maybe I should have a cutesy blog name for Sherry. The DeclaraWife? The Declarette?) Eleven pairs attended, so each round a pair "sat out" because there was no one for them to play. By chance we got the last round sitout, so we left early. We checked the results on the web the next morning and found that we had won.

The web scores include all the individual matchpoint scores for each hand. When I play bridge I record what happened on each hand: The contract, who declared it, the result, the auction, and some notes about the hand. Here is what the entry for one hand might look like:

6S S

2C 2S 3S 5S 5N 6S

1460

3S! ruff out H

When I looked at the matchpoint results, I found that we were given the score of +100 on a board that was actually -50. This was enough to drop us into a tie for first. I was annoyed -- when I don't win I get upset about all the mistakes I made -- but I was a good citizen and sent an email to the director to tell him of the scoring error.

I didn't want to disappoint Sherry, which is why this story didn't make it into my blog. Unfortunately when we went to the club the next week, the director made the announcement that last week's results were wrong and that another couple had tied us.

Last night we played in the Wednesday night game. We both played well, and the opponents abominably, and we were fairly lucky. We had but two poor scores, one of which was the hand I whose notes I transcribed above: Sherry had AKQ9xx x JTxx xx, I had Jxx AKJxx AKx AK, and we languished in a small slam when the grand is 85% or so. (A suggested auction -- remember that we do not play Blackwood -- is 2 - 3, 5N - 7.)

Many of the hands had wild distribution. One example was board 23 (the Michael Jordan board): At all vulnerable, 3rd chair, I held

x T AKTx AQJT964

Sherry passed and RHO opened 1. I almost bid 2, but decided to bid 5 instead. This was passed around to RHO, who doubled. All passed, and I was charmed to see this dummy:

J9xx Jxxx xx K87

Despite RHO's 19 high-card points I scored up 750 in my doubled game.

When play was winding down I parked myself behind the director's computer and watched him and one of the other players enter the scores. It looked like we were headed for second place. We had about 60% but another North-South had 65%. The last few boards were entered and it was a little closer, but we were still about 7.5 matchpoints out of first place -- more than a full board as 7 was a top.

I stuck around to get the individual scores. While copying the scores I noticed that my doubled 5 contract was worth half a matchpoint. How could this be? It turned out that the scores, which were all positive for North-South, had been entered for East-West. I told the director and he fixed them. Now we were in first place by several matchpoints! I guess the effect of negating the scores had been to flip our top and the putative winners' bottom, so that we gained nearly two full boards.

Posted 11:39 AM by Floyd

I'm glad to see that some people who serve on government advisory committees provide real oversight and criticism. Today's Mercury News opinion page contains this essay by Greg Perry, Mountain View City councilman and the VTA Policy Advisory Committee member:

The Valley Transportation Authority is in a serious financial crisis. The VTA board and committees have discussed placing another sales tax on the ballot. Before opening our wallets, we should take a good look at why the VTA is in such dire straits.

The problem is not that the VTA is underfunded. It is one of the best-funded transit agencies in the nation, even after the last two years' sales tax decline. The real problem is that the VTA has higher costs than every other major transit agency in the country.

The VTA spends $134 to run a bus for one hour. The national median average is $58. Contra Costa County spends $73. Laidlaw, a private bus company, spends only $44.50 an hour.

The VTA's high costs are not explained by the cost of living, or the fact that the VTA covers a large area. San Mateo County has both problems, and it manages with $108 per hour to run a bus.

The real problem is that the VTA wastes money.

Ten years ago, it took the VTA 2.34 employee-hours to run a bus for one hour. Now it takes 3.15 employee-hours to keep that same bus running. Why does the VTA need more people now to do the same job? The national median is 1.91. Why does the VTA need 65 percent more people to run a bus than other agencies?

As another example, New York City and Santa Barbara use 486 administrative hours per vehicle annually, just under the national median of 489. VTA uses 1,965 administrative hours per bus. The national median is about one administrative employee per four buses. VTA has roughly one administrative employee for each bus. There is no reason why the VTA number should be this high.

...

Think this is bad? At least people ride VTA buses. VTA also operates a multi-billion dollar light rail system which has practically zero ridership. In other words, by examining bus operating costs one is cherry-picking the most efficient of VTA's operations!

Perry's examination of VTA's gold-plated incompetence is worth keeping in mind when you read the pro-mass-transit puff pieces which appear more frequently in the media. For instance, yesterday's San Jose Mercury News gushed about how high-speed trains were going to save us from our sinful polluting and traffic-causing ways:

Report: Trains would cost less, be better for Calif. environment

STEVE LAWRENCE

Associated Press

SACRAMENTO - A high-speed rail system linking California's major cities would be less than half as expensive and more environmentally friendly than building out highways and airports to meet the state's travel demands, a draft environmental impact report says.

The 2,000-page document, scheduled to be released Tuesday at news conferences in San Francisco and Los Angeles, looks at three options to deal with the state's transportation needs as intercity travel increases as much as 63 percent over the next 20 years.

Under the first scenario, the state would build only those highway and airport projects currently in the planning stages. Under the second, the state would build those projects and add an additional 2,970 miles of new highway lanes, nearly 60 new airport gates and five runways at a cost of nearly $82 billion in today's dollars.

The third option calls for a 700-mile high-speed rail system to supplement the currently planned highway and airport projects with trains running at top speeds of more than 200 mph. The trains would cost $33 billion to $37 billion in today's dollars and carry as many as 68 million passengers a year by 2020, according to the report.

"Our conclusion is, and data shows, that basically the high-speed train is the best of the three options," Mehdi Morshed, executive director of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, said Monday.

The first option would result in "almost a chaotic situation ... where we have extreme cases of gridlock," he said.

The second alternative "would cost more than twice as much as high-speed trains, if we could do it, and would have substantially more impact on wetlands, farmlands, air quality and other environmental impacts that we are concerned about."

How badly disconnected is Executive Director Morshed from reality? He says that building high-speed trains, which do not exist in California, compares favorably to highway and airport expansion because he's not sure that it's possible to build new lanes and gates. And how anyone could make the bald-faced assertion that high-speed trains would carry 68 million passengers per year is beyond me.

Consider: People who drive from, say, San Francisco to LA had the choice of flying, and rejected it. Many of them need their cars at the destination, so neither airplanes nor trains are suitable for them.

So a high-speed train system would need to compete with air travel. Trains are slower than planes, so they can be competitive only if they are much cheaper. But the infrastructure for operating air travel exists, while the trains and their associated infrastructure has yet to be built. Conclusion: A high-speed train system would be an expensive void, just like San Jose's light rail.

(Anyone who is thinking, as I did at first when composing this post, that trains can be competitive with airplanes because they are less of a hassle: Please smack yourself upside the head until your thinking improves. If you say "Sure a train would take an extra hour to get to LA, but it might be worth it because I wouldn't have to deal with security and long lines," you are saying that the advantage possessed by rail is that no one uses it. If trains were to draw millions of customers, they would have the same attendant problems of security and crowds that currently afflict air travel.)

Posted 11:17 AM by Floyd

Panopticon Sing Along

The San Mateo City Council demonstrates its nervous horror at the idea of human freedom:

Karaoke ban hits sour note
By Matthai Chakko Kuruvila
Mercury News

Steven Lin hoped his San Mateo karaoke restaurant would be a private haven, a place where people could unwind.

Modeled in part after karaoke clubs in Asia, Lin's restaurant would have secluded rooms where awkward crooners would have to be embarrassed only in front of their friends or families.

But when the San Mateo City Council voted last week to temporarily ban such rooms, fearing they could be venues for prostitution, drug use and underage drinking, it set off a very public brouhaha among some Bay Area Asian leaders and observers around the world.

The ban ``is based on anecdotal stories and stereotypes that are not true,'' said Albert Lee, co-president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans. The group held its annual Christmas party in a private room at a karaoke restaurant, where Lee's 7-year-old daughter sometimes took the microphone.

I don't even know what anecdotal stories and stereotypes the City Council is thinking of! Asians are stereotyped as many things, but drunks are not among them. And who believes that karaoke is a seedy swamp of prostitution and heroin addiction?

"Come sing Greatest Love of All! Love you long time!"

...

San Mateo police officers say the ban is not about culture, but about doing their job.

Private rooms would make it impossible for police to monitor the sale of liquor, as they are required to do, said Lt. Barbara Hammerman.

...

Really? What about restaurants with private dining rooms? Don't they sell liquor? How can the police even function knowing that there is a closed door behind which someone might be drinking a cocktail?

I had a friend over at my house last night. I served him a glass of wine, and didn't check his ID! Shall I be required to install a glass front to my living room, with a spotlight trained on it?

The city council and police are using incredibly sloppy definitions and reasoning. A "private" karaoke room is not "private" in the same way that my living room is "private". It's simply open to a select group of customers. If police can monitor liquor sales in an open karaoke establishment without a search warrant, they can inspect a "closed" room as well.

Does the San Mateo city council think that whenever a restaurant closes for a private function, it is trying to evade liquor laws?

Update: My wife Sherry was reading this last night and said: "Hey, Albert Lee is my former boss!"

Posted 9:23 PM by Floyd

Instapundit linked to a Donald Sensing blog post which criticizes the Bush-is-a-deserter meme. I found Sensing's argument overly technical and legalistic -- he says that "no civilian actually knows what desertion really is," that "desertion is a prosecutorial finding after the absent service member has been returned to military control," and that the absence must be motivated by "intent to remain away permanently". This merely serves to obscure the issue, which is whether Bush fulfilled his duty while in the National Guard.

But I don't need to be persuaded by Sensing that Bush was not a deserter; that was done by his commenters who were former Guardsmen. Going by what they said, written records would give you about as much information on what Bush did in the Guard in the 1970's as written records would tell you what went on in the Gobi Desert in the year 1500 B.C. Here are some of their tales:

Anyone trying to base ANY opinion or findings on military paperwork that is decades old is nuts. I spent almost a year at the 82d before I was finally "arrived" in the official system. If I hadn't screamed, yelled, and jumped on desks for that entire time, it never would have happened. And guess what the end result would have been if I hadn't -- 3 years where I wasn't REALLY at Fort Bragg. And that was on the latest and greatest computerized system.

Losing records among the Guard and Reserves is all too common. Even in today's system over 5% of personal called up cannot get their 201 to their gaining commands. It is the nasty little fact that no one talks about, and that's a huge improvement over what it was 30 years ago.

My brother is in the Naval Reserve, they have lost his physical the last three times he has taken it. Every month he goes back and they yell at him for not having a physical. This includes the shots. And yet the last three months he has had to have a physical, he may miss his 2 week duty this year because he has not taken the physical, according to the military. 20 years from now people may accuse my brother of skipping out of his 2 week duty this year. And yet he is angry because he is going to miss it.

Also read these comments from John Cole (Balloon Juice) on his personal experiences in this regard

His experience:
- I received three batteries of shots that are supposed to be administered once every ten years or so, because my shot records kept coming up missing.

- I was not paid numerous times throught my Guard tenure.

- I was deployed for my two week annual training with the unit in Fort Dix, upon arrival it was discovered that no orders had been cut for me, so I went back home, only to learn that the orders had been found and I had to re-deploy.

-Every semester as an undergrad, the paperwork for my tuition waiver was lost, so halfway through the semester I was dropped from all my classes. I would then have to go back at the end of the semester, when the waiver was finally found, and re-register for the classes I had already taken and then get grade modifications filled out by the professors. EVERY SEMESTER.

Posted 1:20 PM by Floyd

Gregg Easterbrook theorizes that Bush's announcement of a return to the moon is a bluff, in the same vein as Reagan's instigation of the Strategic Defense Initiative. SDI convinced the Soviets that they could not compete with America militarily, and Easterbrook thinks that Bush is trying to get the Chinese to build a presence on the moon and thereby bankrupt themselves. (Note: This is not a perfect analogy, but that's Easterbrook's problem, not mine.)

Easterbrook derides a New York Times article which claims that "Some experts in the United States speak ominously of a 'Red Moon,' the possibility that China might one day launch military astronauts into space with the aim of setting up a Communist lunar base." I hear this sort of talk on the web and on Usenet: China might "claim the moon," so we need to get there first.

People who say this treat the moon as if it were some small parcel of land that only one power could occupy, like Pomerania or the Bosphorous. But the moon has some 25 million square miles of surface. If the Chinese build a moon base, and it becomes evident that doing so has given them some military or economic advantage, there will still be plenty of room -- seven times as much room as within the borders of the United States -- for America to do the same.

It is true that China might make a claim to the entire moon which we would regard as invalid. But the Chinese could make other ridiculous claims as well. For instance, China could claim Pacific Ocean as their territory. Is it necessary for America to launch fleets to cover every square mile of the Pacific, to forestall this possibility?

Posted 12:48 PM by Floyd

Boy, the San Jose Mercury News really served up a devastating one-two combination of incisive wit today. Here's the teaser for the top article on the Merc web page:

Governor confronts new crisis, no script

PRISON MESS TESTS FLEXIBLE RESPONSE

In his first two months in office, Arnold Schwarzenegger has pretty much followed the script he and his advisers laid out after his election. But with a long-simmering crisis in the nation's largest prison system coming to a boil, the new governor and his administration are now suddenly forced to ad lib.

By Mark Gladstone / Mercury News Sacramento Bureau

Get it? Schwarzenegger is an actor who likes to follow a script, but he can't so he'll have to ad lib.

If you're still reeling from that masterful demonstration of rhetoric, you may want to hold onto your seat when you read the opening lines of this editorial:

Big biceps aren't always enough

GOVERNOR FACES HEAVY ISSUES THAT HE NEEDS HELP IN LIFTING

Let's hope Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is having a good time on the campaign trail drumming up support for his $15 billion bond issue, because otherwise the past week was a lesson about the difficult customers who walk through a governor's door and the limits on his ability to rid himself of them.
( By Phil Yost, 01/25/2004 03:01 AM PST)

Get it? Schwarzenegger is a bodybuilder with big biceps, but he can't always use them to solve the issues he faces as governor.

Either the Mercury News is populated with writers who think this nonsense is clever, or they know better but think it will appeal to their readers. Either the newspaper of the world's center of technology is staffed by some very dim bulbs, or said newspaper's employees think that Silicon Valley is filled with morons.

Please please tell me that just one person who was involved with the production of this drivel slapped himself on the forehead and muttered, "I went to journalism school for this?"

And is the Merc consistent with its use of this junior-high-school-level cliche-mongering? If Grey Davis were still governor, would we expect to see copy like this:

Governor confronts crisis lacking know-how

WORKERS' COMP MESS TESTS ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE

A long-simmering crisis in the workers' compensation system is coming to a boil. This will be a difficult problem for Governor Davis, a lifetime politician with little private sector experience.

Or this:

Being an emotionless drone isn't enough

DIFFICULT ISSUES REQUIRE EMPATHY