April 30, 2006
For some reason I've been totally unable to find historic gas price data on the internet, but I randomly stumbled across some on reddit today, manually collected by one guy. It's even adjusted for inflation, for which I suppose Dr. Tufte would be pleased. [Note: my birthday is just a few short months away.] On the other hand, the price should really be on a log scale.
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April 29, 2006
The kid just sang us part of the chorus to Tattoo and the whole first verse of Heaven And Hell, both by The Who, while I goofed around on the computer and her mom read a book. She's now making pretend food for us to eat. This after earlier offering each of us a beer with a big smile as though offering a dog a treat: "Hey Dad, do you want a beer?" Nice.
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Frank Zappa on Crossfire in 1986. In addition to making Robert Novak and some Washington Times columnist look like fools, he swears on television as tastefully as I've ever seen. The clips full of scary, evil music that lead out to the ad break halfway through the segment include I Wanna Rock by Twisted Sister, which is a generic party song, whose inclusion proves that these guys had no idea what the hell they were talking about. I remember in high school when the song Suicide Solution by Ozzy Osbourne was held up as an example of rock music that glorified suicide: people seemed not to notice that the song was about the evils of alcohol. Frank even lucidly defends Van Halen's video for Hot For Teacher against these humorless jerks. Man, I wish we still had Frank Zappa.
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April 27, 2006
Senators demand that someone get tough on big oil, but not too quickly, so that their staff may continue to idle large SUV's while waiting to drive them exceptionally short distances in the beautiful Washington springtime. Nice. I'd personally like to see a demand-side incentive for better fuel efficiency: gas whose price is inversely proportional to the fuel efficiency of the car you're putting it into. Drive a Prius (60 mpg)? Gas costs what it costs. Drive a Civic (30 mpg)? Gas costs double, plus you need to buy twice as much to get the same distance, for a 4x increase in the cost of every mile driven. Drive a Yukon (15 mpg)? Gas costs four times as much per gallon, on top of which you need to buy four times as much gas, for a total of 16x the money you could be paying. The fifteen-fold surcharge could then be used as payment toward the wars that are fought over secure access to energy resources. But you can afford it; you bought an SUV, right? Everyone wins!
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April 14, 2006
April 07, 2006
My fancy new job is in an office building that is kind of inexplicably out on a pier sticking way into Boston Harbor, where enormous, ocean-crossing ships come in and out all day swapping mostly shipping containers with the large cranes across the channel from our windows. Today the Maersk Alaska rolled in, apparently empty. Unloaded, the thing is as big as a good-sized office building, like two or three Home Depots stacked atop one another. My new colleagues report that it's noticeably smaller than the big cruise ships that come in and out. It's almost as cool as when they tore the candy factory down across the street from my old job.
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