The Near Future Of Transportation Is Diesel

Yet another study showing diesel is the most efficient way to power a vehicle - Diesel VS Hybrid VS

Ethanol, which is best?

According to a new study, diesel tops hybrids and ethanol isn't even really in the game.

And a recent report from the Univeristy of Wisoconsin indicates worldwide biodiesel production can increase 20 fold. From my reading of the report it appears that if the United States fully invested in biodiesel production it could provide for 50% of roadway transportation needs. Global potential for biodiesel is "enormous"

Here's the report itself - A Global Comparison of National Biodiesel Production Potentials

Diversity Is Ecomonics, Not Race

I believe economic class says more about diversity than race. Nothing is more annoying than people (usually Caucasian limousine liberals) talking about "how diverse" a place is when all they've done is look around at other faces.

CS Monitor - Values of blacks and whites are converging, survey finds

On the topic of diverging values, 44 percent of blacks polled in 1986 said they saw greater differences created by class than by race. Today, that percentage has grown to 61 percent.

Brandon Inge Gets His Due

For the past two years I have said Detroit's third bagger, Brandon Inge, is the most underrated defensive player in baseball. Not anymore. Steve Phillips puts him on his end-of-year web-gems team on Baseball Tonight and FieldingBible.com reveals his defensive play is near the top of the American League according to their plus-minus rating system (how many more plays a player makes versus the league average)

Another Year, Another Story On The Growing Yellowstone Supervolcano

NatGeo - Yellowstone Is Rising on Swollen "Supervolcano"

Locavore Is Word Of The Year

Oxford’s Word of the Year, and Runners-Up

Daniel Day Lewis In NY Times Magazine

For Megan - NY Times Magazine's interesting profile of Daniel Day Lewis as part of his new movie. The New Frontier’s Man

...his method of working demands near-total immersion in the life of his character. Despite the fact that he is the most eloquent of men, able to speak extemporaneously in flowing paragraphs without the use of colloquialisms, he is unwilling to expose the mechanics of his acting process. “It’s not that I want to pull the shutters down,” Day-Lewis said, as he finished his sandwich. “It’s just that people have such a misconception about what it is I do. They think the character comes from staying in the wheelchair or being locked in the jail or whatever extravagant thing they choose to focus their fantasies on. Somehow, it always seems to have a self-flagellatory aspect to it. But that’s just the superficial stuff. Most of the movies that I do are leading me toward a life that is utterly mysterious to me. My chief goal is to find a way to make that life meaningful to other people.”

...For his films, at least initially, imagining the life of his characters often involves a kind of physical invention of their world. During “Last of the Mohicans,” he built a canoe, learned to track and skin animals and perfected the use of a 12-pound flintlock gun, which he took everywhere he went, even to a Christmas dinner... For “There Will be Blood,” he studied the historic period for nearly two years and became comfortable with the tools of California oilmen circa 1900.

UFO's Go Pop!

Talked about UFO's gaining acceptance recently, and here we go with a story at MSNBC.com - Former pilots, officials call for UFO study

Maybe The Mayans Were Geologists?

Seems like enjoyed beer like a geologist would. NY Times - Love of Chocolate May Have Begun With Cacao Beer

Dr. Henderson suggested that the Mesoamericans fermented cacao first to make beer, eventually discovering, likely by accident, that the fermented seeds made an even better beverage.

Cacao and Chocolate timeline from chocolate.org

Obama's Economics Advisor

NY Times - Bending Ears on Economics as ’08 Nears

Dr. Austan Goolsbee is the senior economic advisor to Barack Obama. He's from the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago has more Nobel Prize winning economists than any other institution.

Review Of The Current Pop-Economics Books

Maybe Money Does Make the World Go Round

The Jedi Templars?

Jedi in Star Wars are Templars in medieval Crusades

Sports On Cable Television

Disclaimer - I do not want football programming on basic cable.

Football on TV is huge. But DirecTV is evil. DirecTV is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Not only does DirecTV call customers on the Do-Not-Call list to ask if they want to hear a sales pitch anyway, but they also carry the Big Ten Network.

The Big Ten Network was launched by the Big Ten Conference in conjunction with Fox Sports which is owned by News Corporation. The Big Ten Conference wants to be on basic cable, at a cost of $1.10 per subscriber. Most cable companies want to place the channel on a sports tier so that only sports fans who want the channel pay for the channel. For comparison, a cable company can carry MTV, the Comedy Channel, and the History Channel for the same price to customers as The Big Ten Network.

This is the complete opposite of how the Fox News channel was launched in 1996. At that time News Corp offered cable operators $10 per subscriber to carry the channel. And 10 year carriage agreements were signed at only $0.13 per subscriber. Fox executives figured that when those 10 years were up they would have a successful channel and therefore demand higher rates from carriers whose customers were now accustomed to having Fox News on basic cable. This "crack cocaine" strategy worked.

Because of the outrageous fees the Big Ten Network is demanding I am led to believe that News Corporation never intended the channel to be carried by cable companies. But if a few companies gave in that is even better because of the extra and unexpected revenue and this would make the cable companies holding off on the channel appear non-responsive. No, the Big Ten Network was launched as a vehicle to drive customers to DirecTV in order to inflate subscriber counts prior to News Corporation selling their stake in DirecTV to Liberty Media.

NFL Network has insane pricing too. The price to a cable company to carry the NFL Network's eight football games is the same as College Sports TV + ESPN2 + ESPNU (and the NFL Network is asking some providers for a 250% raise.) While the NFL is popular (22.5% of the people watching TV saw the end of the Patriots vs Colts game last weekend), why should 75% of people be saddled with fees that subsidize the TV habits of 1/4 of the audience? Today the NFL Network came out to ask cable customers to switch to another provider if theirs doesn't carry the channel for free. This is probably just another ploy to drive subscribers to DirecTV, which has been a long time 17 billion dollar per year whore for the NFL. For example they get 2 million suckers to pay $269 for the NFL "Sunday Ticket" each year. The NFL has a long time love for all things Rupert Murdoch. It all started back in 1993 when he grossly overpaid for rights to the NFC football games. This left 12 big-market CBS stations with a huge hole in their Sunday programming - so they jumped ship to Fox. And so began the meteoric rise of the NFL's popularity and the rise of the Fox channel. Murdoch and Fox have been pimping for the NFL ever since and it appears now that the NFL is returning the favor.

The NHL is being much more reasonable. For example, Charter Communications is launching the NHL Network this month - but in the Digital Sports Tier. Not basic cable.

What is amazing is that people (including football fans) complain about rising cable rates - but these are tied directly to increased programming costs (who do you think really pays athletes multimillion dollar per year salaries) and when some cable companies attempt to keep costs down these people complain. And it wouldn't surprise me if the same people clamoring for these football networks also want a'la carte television (paying only for the channels they watch). So the cable companies try to offer an a'la carte tier and get hammered for it. It is disingenuous at best.

Bibliography:
2004 Annual Report - Cable TV Economics
Wikipedia-Big Ten Network
Putting Fans First (funded by Comcast)
NFL Network
Murdoch's Biggest Score

Iraq Is The First Peak Oil War

Juan Cole with another terrific must read post - Oil Peak or Peak Oil?

What is clear is that Dick Cheney's desperate bid to grab Iraq for US petroleum corporations and for proprietary contracts to supply the US is backfiring big time. Instead of reducing the importance of Saudi Arabia, Cheney and the Neocons have magnified it. Instead of bringing online a big new supplier (Iraq) they have actually reduced the average production from Iraq as compared to the days of the UN sanctions on Saddam! Instead of assuring the US position as a superpower by assuring it special access to Gulf petroleum through military means, Cheney and his friends have destabilized the key energy-producing regions of the world and are driving some producers to deliberately seek proprietary contracts with China s so as to avoid over-dependence on an overbearing US that openly announces it would like to overthrow their governments. (I'm thinking of Venezuela here; with tweaking the same thing could be said of Iran).

Cheney's militarism is too blunt an instrument for the delicate job of assuring US energy security. Nearly $90 a barrel is not security for us-- it is a threat to our economy. Prices may not stay this high all that long in the short term, since primary commodity markets to fluctuate. But as the peak oil people point out, no new big fields have been found or exploited for a very long time, and demand from China, India and elsewhere is growing rapidly. It is going to be an expensive or cold winter for a lot of Americans. It likely won't be the last. Courtesy in some part, the short-sighted and counter-productive policies of one of the country's most notorious traitors, Richard Bruce Cheney.

Heritage Turkeys

NY Times - Preservation’s Progress

Buy the turkeys at Heritage Foods USA.

Roads As A Refuge

National Geographic - Moose Moms Prefer Traffic to Grizzly Bears, Study Says

Undefeated Miami Hockey Is #1 Team

October 30 - Miami climbs to No. 1 in college hockey

November 5 - Miami Near-Unanimous No. 1 In USCHO.com/CSTV Poll

Alton Brown Regarding Top Chef

Food fight for the next Iron Chef
"Those people are one step up from Denny's," said a fiery Brown. "My mom could do that. There's nothing cheesy or cheap about (Iron Chef)."

You've go to root for Cleveland's Chef Symon!

This Is What Peak Oil Looks Like

Seen at the Peak Oil Optimist. IHT - IEA says oil prices will stay 'very high,' threatening global growth

The unusually stark warning by Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, about the impact of Asia's emerging giants comes as the agency prepares to issue its influential annual report next week, which will focus on China and India.

In preparing the report, Birol said he had experienced "an earthquake" in his thinking...

Demand for oil in China, he added, would eventually equal the entire supply from Saudi Arabia.

And this post at Raise The Hammer: Yes, We're in Peak Oil Today
And the below image hosted at Raise The Hammer shows all you need to know:

The Verizon Vs Cable Battle

My post at TC Tech Notes - Verizon Gets Better, Cable Companies Get Badder

We Knew It!

(the title is a reference to the Arrested Development episode "Sad Sack")

But you know it is true - we hate the most in others what we most despise about ourselves. MSNBC - Wash. legislator resigns amid gay sex scandal: GOP lawmaker denies he is gay, claims he fell victim to extortion attempt

A Republican state legislator who repeatedly voted against gay rights measures resigned his seat Wednesday amid allegations he had sex with a man he met at an erotic video store while in Spokane on a GOP retreat.

What's funny is that he doesn't deny the sexcapade with the other guy, but he does deny that he's gay. Or as Joh Stewart pointed out with Larry Craig, "I like the gay part but not the lifestyle"




Just add Richard Curtis to to this list - Top Five Republican Gay Sex Scandals

Yet Another Example Of Democrats' Overinflated Sense Of Self Importance

Continuing the series "the problem with the Democratic Party is the democrats".

Democrats end Colbert primary bid

Despite meeting a Thursday deadline to file his entry fee for the Democratic primary in South Carolina, state Democrats then spent 40 minutes discussing how to deal with Colbert's candidacy.

After his bid was rejected by a committee vote, executive member Waring Howe criticised Colbert's intentions in standing.

"He's really trying to use South Carolina Democrats as suckers so he can further a comedy routine," he told the Associated Press.

In addition, Mr Howe said, Colbert "serves to detract from the serious candidates on the ballot".

Not everyone was opposed, however.

"I think you're taking this a little too seriously," state lawmaker Gilda Cobb-Hunter told the committee.