should I make more but smaller posts?

[solarbird]

spazzkat and I biked to the hardware store, and also stopped by the bookstore so he could pick up a book for his shiny new contract that starts tomorrow. It was a nice ride. The best part was that I made it all the way up the hairpin-curve trail from Burke-Gilman to Bothell Way. The hard part hasn't been the severe angle (not too hard) or the severe slope (not too easy @_@) but the fact that they're combined in such a way that it makes me want to flip backwards off my bike. Until now, anyway. I finally got enough weight forward - hm, I was carrying cargo in backpack, I wonder if that helped - so that I could keep going forward and not lift the front wheel and tip backwards.

Monday's miles: 15.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 732.2
Miles out of Rivendell: 272.4
Miles to Lothlórien: 194

Anyway, most of today's miles are from that; then I walked down to the shops to meet Anna coming back on the bus, and we ran a couple of errands and got some salad stuff while we were down there. It was nice.

I didn't get a new watering can, though. The plastic nozzle on the one I have now disintegrated last summer, and I taped it back together from its assortment of pieces using high-strength clear shipping tape, because you can't buy replacement shower nozzles for these little plastic watering cans. Astoundingly, that worked all last summer and into this spring, and, in fact, the part that I fixed that way is still fine - but the parts I hadn't taped are taking their turn at disintegrating. And when I started taping those parts back together (at a loss of some of the holes in the shower head), it cracked in a couple more places. It really is like an eggshell at this point.

Despite that, I've taped it some more and it's working, less some of its spread. I wanted to get a new one at the shops, but the only ones they had at the Rite-Aid were also plastic, and I think I've had just about enough of that.

Watering can,
Watering can,
Watering things that only it can,
What's it like? It's made of metal!
Watering can.

Meanwhile, there go the last fleeting remnants of my heterosexualityrespect for the American electorate. Read the graph carefully. There are only two lines. One line is Bush's approval rating. The other line is the inverse of the price of gasoline; up means cheaper. Particularly over the last several weeks, it's just kind of, um, yeah. From here.


The Old Gateway

Oh, and jwz's post earlier today, about this story? As soon as I saw it I knew it was Dr. Bach-y-Rita's little startup he set up to commercialise the work that got me interested in going back to graduate school. And I was right - it's him, with his first commercial application. Not the direction I'd have gone. But that's why I need to be in graduate school, dammit! I've got these ideas!

Oh well. Time to take college chemistry, I guess. Tra la la!

Comments

[gelfling-flys.livejournal.com]

If you are riding the trail to Bothell, you are not far from Molbecks. They have pretty much everything.

[solarbird]

Yep, we were, in fact, right next to it earlier today. (Paul wanted to go to that B&N.) But I thought I'd seen a metal can down at the closer shops, and I didn't want to try to carry a metal watering can on my back on top of the other things (parrot food, caulk, cheap caulking gun) that I was going to be carrying. It turned out the one I saw from a distance before wasn't actually metal, and the wild bird store was both closed and as far as I could see from the outside they didn't have any watering cans, which isn't surprising I guess since you don't really water birds that way.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Well come on, everyone knows that Bush controls the price of gas, after all we went to war for cheap oil, he wants to bomb Iran for cheap oil, but he's not sharing the cheap oil with us, he's keeping it all for himself! I mean everyone knows that all prices for everything are set by the government, right?

/lame sarcasm :-)

[solarbird]

It is indeed very annoying.

[sistawendy.livejournal.com]

Re: Dubya's popularity as a function of gas prices, I'm a) not at all surprised and b) not as disgusted as you are. If you live outside a big city proper, economics are heavily skewed toward cars. All those gas-guzzling masses have done a rough calculation about how much time and flexibility are worth. Since I live fifteen minutes from work by bus or bike and ten by car, I don't have to make that calculation, and neither do a lot of city dwellers.

It'll probably warm the cockles of your heart to hear that DC's Metro had two of their busiest days ever in the last week.

[solarbird]

It's that of all the things he's done and/or hasn't done that you can argue about being good or bad, this one - which isn't so much his doing - is the one that appears to matter. Okay, a national energy policy that wasn't stupid and was earlier would have been good. But Bush is nowhere close to off mainstream on this. Nowhere close. The apparent implication - that the only thing Americans actually care about is how much their cars cost to fuel, and that they place credit (or blame) for that directly on the president, is so detached from anything I can describe as reality that it makes my eyes bleed.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I've ranted about this at people several times in the last few weeks, most recently at my dad while we were out skiing on Sunday. Yeah, I'm happy people are growing to hate Bush. It's just depressing why and what that means about American attitudes in general.

And yeah, I also understand correlation vs. causation, but I think this is more than that.

[zedness.livejournal.com]

Is is just me or does the correlation between cheap gas and Bush's approval rating only start occurring after September, 2001?

[solarbird]

urge to kill rising!

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

A new president traditionally has a surge in approval just after being elected, then a downturn a few months later. Time span between that and 9/11 is awful short to make any sort of judgement.

[risu.livejournal.com]

Do we know it's causal and that it runs in that direction?

[risu.livejournal.com]

I suppose what I'm really asking is if there's any reason the price of gas would vary based on some representative group's confidence in the Administration, instead of the other way around.

[solarbird]

I don't, of course, know that it's causal. But I've been listening to the political radio a bit and reading polling breakout data, and people surveyed are saying that the reason they're much less happy right now (and in some cases specifically with the Bush administration) is that gasoline prices have gotten so high. What bothers me is how well those curves fit, particularly over the last year or so, where a gas price rise one week means a popularity fall the next, and a gas price fall one week means a popularity rise the next, with much too much regularity.

It's certainly possible that an unpopular president makes oil traders more nervous, though. This one certainly has over the last few weeks; everyone financial is citing the Iran situation as a big part of the recent breakthrough past $70/b. (There are other interesting theories I should probably talk about too, such as the fact that this listed price is the light sweet price, and there is evidence that while total liquids have certainly not yet peaked, light crude may have back in 2004; while OPEC helps keep total production and shipping numbers as opaque as they can, there are some estimations showing that light sweet shipments have not climbed since then. There is further speculation that a substantial portion of the current inventories may be non-light-sweet crude, meaning that the apparently-high inventory levels are somewhat illusionary. These would combine to produce this kind of climb in the light sweet price.)

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't wear a backpack while riding a bike! Makes your center of gravity too high and you are more likely to fall!

Cathy

[solarbird]

So strapping that anvil to my head for weight training not such a good idea, then?

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

Not so much, no. Unless it is shaped to protect your skull like a helmet--then at least your head would be safe! Except for the brain squishing around inside your skull, of course....

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Soon after deployment, the military will internally ban hot sauces and hot food and beverages. :-)

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

That's a *fascinating* graph, but given just how much of the gas pricing is affected by crude oil futures speculation, and the sort of events that drive crude oil price speculation, it's not hard to make an argument that this chart is omitting the actual causative factors. Correlation is not causation, no matter how many assholes are in the bush administration, and how idiotic the electorate can be.

[solarbird]

Correlation is not causation
I know. Ice cream and muggings; I took economics. Polling breakout data I read earlier this week (via FOX News), though, indicates a majority of their sample (56%) specifically citing high gas prices as their reason for disapproving of President Bush's job performance. That's not proof either, of course, and neither is people saying that on the local radio talk shows.

I would love to see this graph extended backwards through Clinton.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

I would love to see this graph extended backwards through Clinton

Me too. And today we hear BushCo announcing that they are going to dick with the Strategic Oil Reserve inflow in order to ease the price pain for their electorate. Which sort of implies that *they* believe what the graph wants you to believe. Well, if high gas prices are what it will finally take for people to vote the bastards out of congress this november, i guess i won't complain too much, at least in the short term. Sigh.