Aren Cambre's Blog

(EDIT: Replaced first video with much better one.)

This video, shot from a San Francisco streetcar, is from 1906, just a few days before the San Francisco earthquake:

Note the huge numbers of pedestrians on the road, the dangerous interactions between various transportation modes, the lack of efficiency, and the layers of clothing.

I don’t know how many of those buildings survived the 1906 earthquake except–of course–the building at the end.

Here’s a similar scene today:

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…and this guy claims he has a video of the same area from 2005:

Well, kind of: “Our business now too many times is a fat kid in a t-shirt in his mother’s basement eating Cheetos and writing his blogs.” (source)

I’m not fat, I live in my own house, and I don’t eat Cheetos, but I do wear t-shirts. Oh, and my blog was the source for one of his station’s broadcasted stories.

I was interviewed by BBC World Service last night. Reporter Jeff Baird, an American BBC employee from Oregon, saw that Fark.com linked to a news article about my Texas speed trap report. Lawrence Pollard did the actual interview.

We did it over Skype. I didn’t have good equipment, so I had to put my face about 4″ from the microphone on my son’s Asus netbook. If you listen to the interview, you’ll hear disturbances in the audio. I guess I leaned too closely or breathed into it?

The Russian subway bombing prevented them from playing it in the London breakfast show, but it played a few times before their dawn.

The interview.

The full 27 minute segment I was on. (I think I am towards the end.)

This plain text belies my excitement, but this was a major high for me. I cannot believe I’ve been broadcasted on wordwide media.

Just found this transaction on a Target receipt:

• $20 – gift for a 6 year old girl
• Crap that doesn’t matter:
  • $1.50 – gift bag that will be thrown away
  • $2.50 – card written by someone who knows neither the giver nor the recipient
  • $2.50 – tissue paper for the gift bag that will be thrown away

So in this case:

The total gift’s price was inflated by a third.

Why do we buy cards we didn’t author, tissue paper, and gift bags? Do the recipients ever care?

I sent an email about the primary election to my neighborhood association. 16 days later, my Democrat state legislator Allen Vaught sent an email about primaries to his constituents.

Guess where some of his email came from? Compare snippets:

Imitation is sincerest form of flattery?

Both the emails are below in full. You’ll notice my email clearly inspired the highlighted part of his email.

I am listening to a podcast of A Shot of Reality on NPR’s On The Media’s Feb. 5, 2010 show.

The host is interviewing Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, a British medical journal recently made (in)famous for feeding the vaccine/autism hoax.

The editor says The Lancet must be more careful in the future.

Translation: more of The Lancet‘s future articles will support the status quo. This will reduce hoaxes, but it crowds out legitimate alternative theories.

Are academic journals even relevant? Whatever relevancy they have is mainly because the research community is clinging to an outdated model. And let’s don’t forget these wickedly expensive journals have their own fiscal incentive to perpetuate themselves.

Research is living and constantly evolving. Why then rely on a content delivery method that can only create frozen, dead documents? Where corrections require new, frozen documents? This is silly.

Some say if we don’t have journals, we effectively lose the peer review process because respected academics aren’t the gatekeepers. Hardly. Wikipedia’s not perfect, but it shows that a completely open model, that even allows anonymous editing, can produce highly reliable information. Services like the Educause-sponsored academia.edu show it shouldn’t be hard to limit involvement just to the research community–not to the “select few” researchers but the entire community. This increases veracity by at least an order of magnitude.

Richard Horton said that Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the fraudulent research, was respected politically and academically for years, and his words were taken as “gospel truth.”

Doesn’t this sound familiar? Doesn’t this sound like James Hansen, Al Gore, IPCC, etc.? All of whom deliver polemic research so political, agenda-driven, and error-full that people are stating to question the scientific basis of global warming?

The Texas Railroad Commission and WFAA channel 8 are scapegoating Atmos Energy, Dallas’s natural gas provider, for house explosions it did not cause.

The state blamed Atmos for a May 2009 Irving home explosion. Tonight, Brett Shipp, a WFAA reporter, all but blamed Atmos for a November 2009 Mesquite home explosion.

The theory is that deteriorating “Normac couplings” in buried gas distribution lines are leaking the fuel, causing these explosions.

It’s a load of crap.

In the Irving case, the state blamed a leaking fitting “under the street.” Yes, as in, under the street, 20+ feet in front of the house.

Um, no.

Natural gas is lighter than air. It goes higher as quickly as it can. That means it’s not going to travel sideways 20-40 feet into someone’s house. Also, it dissipates rapidly like any other gas, like a poofy cloud. So any gas that could reach the outside of a house from a buried line would be faint.

The state’s asinine theory probably breaks several laws of physics. That wisping gas would have to travel laterally from this coupling, in a focused vector, through a yard and through a concrete foundation, and accumulate in a house.

The Mesquite situation is similar. The WFAA cameras clearly showed a gas meter all the way by a fence. And Google Maps Street View shows that the gas lines are in the alley, separated from the house by many feet and a wood fence. (Picture of the next door neighbor’s gas meter in the alley–the exploded house is at 2505 Catalina.) These allegedly faulty couplings would be in lines buried under the alley, at least 20 feet from the house!

Sorry, this house could not have possibly been exploded by Atmos. Something was wrong with something inside the house; that’s the homeowner’s responsibility. It’s irresponsible for WFAA to tar Atmos Energy for this.

Why does this matter? WFAA is campaigning for Atmos to replace tens of thousands of these Normac couplings. Maybe they leak more than statistically ideal, but I have yet to see a convincing case that these couplings routinely cause imminent danger.

Furthermore, the cost of replacement is tens of millions of dollars. Guess who pays that? You and me, gas customers! So basically WFAA is campaigning for our rates to be increased to fix a problem that has not been proven to cause any harm.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Nestle makes a “limited edition” dark chocolate chip and mint chip mixture for Christmas. Here it is, next to a normal bag:

Regular bag on top, mint on bottom

Visual queues say they’re the same except for the mixture of mint chips.

Nope! Compare bag sizes:

• Regular bag: 12 oz
  
• Mint bag: 10 oz
  

Chocolate chip cookie recipes need 12 oz bags. Even Nestle’s own toll house cookies recipe needs 12 oz!

I wish Nestle could have made the size difference more clear. How many recipes get turned upside down when the cook discovers that Nestle shorted him 17%?

This may surprise attendees of the 1994 National Order of the Arrow Conference (NOAC).

Order of the Arrow is an honor society of Boy Scouts that uses American Indian imagery.  The 1994 NOAC conference’s closing ceremony prominently featured then-popular Return to Innocence by Enigma in an Indian-themed ceremony.

Only problem is that’s not an Indian voice. It’s an aboriginal Taiwanese chant.

So now you know. The NOAC planners are probably blushing.

Here’s the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JpJjsHgYHA

EDIT (5/21/2010): The host is Chip Beall, who left a comment below.

Below is is my Texaco Star Academic Challenge performance from 1993 or 1994. Yes, Clear Brook High School made it to TV.

At least wait through my part of “meet the contestants.”