Month: May 2005

Car Talk

My Way News

WASHINGTON (AP) – If getting stuck in traffic makes you want to roll down your car window and scream, look no further than another of those studies to find the bad news: Gridlock is getting worse. Congestion delayed travelers 79 million more hours and wasted 69 million more gallons of fuel in 2003 than in 2002, the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2005 Urban Mobility Report found.

Overall in 2003, there were 3.7 billion hours of travel delay and 2.3 billion gallons of wasted fuel for a total cost of more than $63 billion.

“Urban areas are not adding enough capacity, improving operations or managing demand well enough to keep congestion from growing,” the report concluded.

Honolulu became the 51st city in which rush-hour traffic delayed the average motorist at least 20 hours a year. The Hawaiian capital joins such congested areas as Washington, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago – and Virginia Beach, Va., Omaha, Neb., and Colorado Springs, Colo.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Loophole may allow US crime spree

A loophole in US law may allow people to get away with any major crime within a 50-square mile “zone of death” in western Idaho, according to a Michigan law professor.

Backpacker in Idaho
A small swathe of Idaho could be the venue for the perfect crime

This lawless oasis is said to exist on the edge of Yellowstone National Park because of a poorly drafted statute in the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Criminals are entitled to be tried by a jury drawn from the state and legal district they committed their crime in, the constitution says.

But, argues Prof Brian C Kalt, while Yellowstone comes entirely under the district of Wyoming, small parts of it spill into the states of Montana and Idaho.

“Say that you are in the Idaho portion of Yellowstone and you decide to spice up your vacation by going on a crime spree,” Kalt writes in a forthcoming paper for the Georgetown Law Journal.

“You make some moonshine, you poach some wildlife, you strangle some people and steal their picnic baskets.

Fideism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In Christian theology, fideism is any of a number of positions.

It is occasionally used to refer to a belief that Christians are saved by faith alone: for which see sola fide. This position is sometimes called solifidianism. Note that sola fide is a doctrine mostly accepted by Protestants.

A more widely used meaning for the term is that fideism essentially teaches that reason is more-or-less irrelevant to religious belief. Specifically, fideism teaches that arguments for the existence of God are fallacious and irrelevant, and have nothing to do with the truth of Christian theology. Its argument in essence goes:

* Christian theology teaches that people are saved by faith.
* But, if God’s existence can be proven, either empirically or logically, faith becomes irrelevant.
* Therefore, if Christian theology is true, no proof of God’s existence is possible.

Either him or Brin, I suppose.

I am: Robert A. Heinlein Beginning with technological action stories and progressing to epics with religious overtones, this take-no-prisoners writer racked up some huge sales numbers.

Which science fiction writer are you?

The Huffington Post | The News Wire: “According to a new book exclusively obtained by the Huffington Post, Saudi Arabia has crafted a plan to protect itself from a possible invasion or internal attack. It includes the use of a series of explosives, including radioactive “dirty bombs,” that would cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades.

Bestselling author Gerald Posner lays out this “doomsday scenario” in his forthcoming “Secrets of the Kingdom: The Inside Story of the Saudi-US Connection” (Random House).

According to the book, which will be released to the public on May 17, based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.”

And I’m honestly embarassed that I didn’t. Jim Lampley caught it, though.

The Huffington Post | The Biggest Story of Our Lives: “At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted.”

I went so hard after the hard math angle, I never even thought to consult the Vegas line. Even know that Vegas isn’t perfect and that there are upsets, the odds against the oddsmakers calling it wrong are very, very slim.

I say it again, folks: we got took. I wonder how long you have to claim a ticket…

So you’ve noticed that gas prices have jumped up a lot, and you weren’t prescient enough to put yourself on the waiting list for a Prius six months ago. What can you do? From cheapest to most expensive:

1. Slow down. It’s simple physics, folks– energy = mass x velocity x velocity. Slow down, you don’t burn as much gas. In addition, jackrabbit starts and sudden braking also use up gas more quickly.

Plus, if you slow down, the person behind you goes slower too. Think of it as helping enforce your will on others, in a subtle way– so subtly they barely notice it. If a few people get together and do it, you can save mileage not only for yourself, but also for that SUV behind you that really needs to conserve gas even more.

2. Empty your trunk. Remember the mass part of that equation? Same deal. Every 200 pounds of unnecessary weight reduces mileage by one mile per gallon. (Oddly enough, this is yet another reason for you to lose weight. Drop 20 pounds, and you save 3 gallons of gas a year.)

3. Inflate your tires. You might even consider over-inflating them by a pound or two.

4. Use cruise control. That helps you maintain a constant speed, so you don’t have to change velocity (see #1 again).

5. Stop wasting gas to drive to the cheap place to get gas. I’ve seen people drive 20 miles out of their way to get to “the cheap gas”– the savings are wiped out because they had to drive to get there.

6. Stop using the drive through window. Park the car and go inside. And stop driving around for a nearby parking space, just take one and walk a bit.

7. Avoid traffic jams. If you live in a major urban area, you burn a lot of extra gas just staring at the license plate in front of you– the average in this part of the country was 25 gallons or so a year. If you’re in a bad traffic jam, turn off your car.

8. Get directions. If you don’t get lost, you don’t waste gas driving around.

9. Get an oil change. Let a few months go between oil changes, have you? Get one. It’ll help.

10. Get a tune up. Your car might be using more gas because it needs new spark plugs, or your tires aren’t aligned.

And in the future, if you feel you must vote for oil executives to high public office, could you at least vote for ones that don’t run their companies into the ground?

Anime Angels: Sure, why not? It’s probably not the… no, I take that back. It probably is the silliest thing I’ve seen this week.

Jesus’ General: “God hates AT&T, MCI, Verizon and homosexuals

Thanks to the hard work of the Christian men at the FCC, God’s word is finally being heard on the radio. Earlier today, I was scanning the dial when I came upon something being broadcast on the French station that made me holler hallelujah.

A man named Eugene Mirman was talking on the telephone to a sales rep for a Christian communications company. She told him that the best way to destroy homosexuals is to sign-up for her long distance plan. That way, she assured him, he wouldn’t be contributing to AT&T, a hard-core porn peddler; MCI, a purveyor of child pornography; or Verizon, the choice of homosexuals everywhere.

You can hear a recording of the call here (mp3).

Remember, remember, the fifth of November.

“Why fans make better Star Wars movies than George Lucas.”

Brewster Kahle, a man who made the vision of BiblioBytes look small. And Wikipedia, the folks who brought the vision of Douglas Adams to life.

Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, the guys who wrote some of the smarter pop-culture movies of the last decade, have been writing a bunch of columns on their adventures in Hollywood and the art of writing. Read them and you’ll learn even more from their failures than from their successes.

And finally, the best post I’ve seen on retail politics in months. And this is why I’ve said that if they wanted it, either Jon Stewart or Oprah Winfrey could be the next President of the United States.

Notable Quotes – Yahoo! News: “‘Ours is much hotter because VINCENT PRICE is not as hot as me and ELISHA CUTHBERT.’

–PARIS HILTON comparing the remake of the horror film ‘House of Wax’ with the 1953 original, in the New York Post.”

I think the reasons Paris Hilton got hired for this film were A) to make people think Elisha Cuthbert was a great actress in comparison, and B) because there’s a real market for people who want to see Paris Hilton die a gruesome death.