I thought we voted for LESS war, wtf is this? news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100201/pl_nm/us_obama_budget_pentagon

Does anybody know the details on the promise of the 16-month Iraq pull-out? Today marks 12, does it look like we're we four months away from being out?

I'm REALLY light-sensitive and the thought of spending two days outdoors the summer for the Seattle to Portland ride makes me quake in my boots a little bit quite aside from the physical exertion required to bike 100 miles each of those days. So yesterday I took a trip to REI and learned that the sunglasses industry rates their products into four types.

1. Clear lenses that block no light
2. Pretty much all the sunglasses you've ever had
3. Really dark (the guy in the store gave me a number that I don't remember but it was something on the order of blocking 90% of all light)
4. So dark they recommend you don't drive a car with them because if you drive into a shadow, your world will black-out.

So I bought the type-4's. And, they come with these cool peripheral-light blockers for the sides that'll keep out a lot of the stray-rays. So far both days I've owned these sunglasses it has been cloudy, but I can stare directly at light bulbs with no discomfort, so that's good.

Then I rode home-wards and went out the Marine Drive trail to Home Depot, came home-wards again and bought groceries at new seasons near my house. It was 29.3 miles in all and it just about killed me. I have a long way to go before I'm up to a double-century like the STP. I'd better get started.

Hello Mz. Volm. I want to start by thanking you for your lifetime of work in transportation, your work on bicycling advocacy and, most recently, your decision to give an interview to Jonathan Maus of bikeportland.org. But I have a question about one of the issues you raised in that interview. You said that you want to find “a way that we can collect a little revenue from [the cycling] portion of the traveling public so that we can increase the resources.” I’m all for increasing resources but the cycling portion of the traveling public is already subsidizing motorists to the tune of $5.2 million each year. Why do you want to ask an already over-taxed population for more instead of simply correcting the existing imbalance? Here are my numbers:

According to the “transportation budget breakdown” I found on the city’s website [1], $109.1 million out of a total of $175.8 million of the transportation budget comes from sources that we all pay no matter what mode of transportation we’re using. But according to an old blog post by then commissioner Sam Adams [2], the city only spends $3.5 million per year or, about 2% of the budget on bicycle infrastructure. Even adjusting for the fact that cyclists pay less into the transportation fund than motorists do and the fact that cyclists only make up 8% of Portland’s daily traffic, the transportation taxes from that group still add up to $8.7 million (109.1 * 8% = 8.7).

In other words, Portland’s bicycle commuters subsidize motorized commuters to an annual tune of $5.2 million already. I’m sure that your career in transportation gives you access to better numbers than I was able to find and if you have corrections for me, I’d like to see them but based on the data I have, I don’t believe your position is well supported by facts and I urge you to reconsider it.

1. http://www.portlandonline.com/TRANSPORTATION/index.cfm?a=95525&c=47376
2. http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?189799-Portland-s-Transportation-Budget-Bikes-vs-Other-Modes

Recently it was brought to my attention that I seem to assign more "weight" to the bad things that happen to me than I do to the good things. I believhe this is a failure of mental muscle and I want to use lj to work out.

Today on my ride in, someone turning right across a section of implied bike lane (where the solid stripe has ended but the city has not yet painted the dotted stripe) yielded to me and another cyclist. I waved thank you and continued on to work. There are good drivers in the world who both see cyclists and prioritize our safety above arriving to work 30 seconds sooner.

It's been 13 days since I "went off the sauce" and I learned something surprising. My dopeamine receptors are totally blown. There is no volume of food I can eat, no quantity of calories that will take the edge off the persistent feeling that I might be about to starve to death. This is weird! Will somebody pass the tums?

I'm sure many of you saw that bikeportland ran a story this morning about an effort to get Oregon to adopt a vehicular homicide law. I really, really want this and if you ride your bike on city streets or love anyone who does, I think you'd benefit by it, too.

The story explains that the bill would make it a misdemeanor crime to commit a traffic violation that lead to someone's death and a felony crime if you did it while on a suspended drivers license. In other words, it makes it so that driving a car is the only thing I can think of where you might accidentally commit a crime. I think that's a win for one minor and one major reason:

• The minor reason is that it will weigh on the mind of anyone who happens to think about it and cause them to be more mindful of their driving


• The major reason is that it lets people know that the legal system does not consider streets just for cars. I can't tell you how often I run into that attitude and I think it leads to another common attitude that if I die on my bike, it's my fault for being where I shouldn't have been.

So I encourage you to write/call whoever you need to (Oregon Senate comes to mind), lets get this passed!

Well, I'm slightly surprised to find that I still have a job today. I expected that taking 11 days off in a row might be the kind of thing that gets me fired. I've certainly lost a lot of status because I'm not in the loop on anything but I think that might repair itself as I spend a couple of days on the job.

Woo-Hoo!

Men who stare at goats
Tonight
Kennedy school
7:40
$3

So I've decided to go off coffee, to ditch all caffeine, actually. After doing some reading on the Internet (because you know what a reliable source that is), I believe it's possible that caffeine has been contributing to depression and and anxiety. Besides, if I'm wrong, all I have to loose is a week of the mildest withdrawl the drug world has to offer and a hole in my wallet (I like good coffee and it's expensive).

we'll see how it goes.

• Recently, there was a very disappointing court case listed on bikeportland.org that held that it's completely legal to run over a cyclist if that cyclist is not riding in a painted bike lane. The circumstances were that the cyclist WAS in a painted bike lane but that the paint did not extend through an intersection, where a driver made a right turn. Bikeportland.org was able to come up with a long list of legal opinions from qualified people about why the ruling was wrong. I don't know if the cyclist will appeal and I don't know if the appellate court will overturn the ruling but the fact that it came out is very disturbing.
• Another recent bit of news is out of Washington and it isn't clear to me if it applies here or not but it's disheartening none the less. Since the Washington state government decriminalized most traffic violations and provided a list of exceptions that do not include killing someone, you can't only be charged with a crime ("crime" being different than "violation") if you kill someone with your car unless you were also doing something else wrong. It essentially means the "oops" defense will stand in Washington. The circumstances here were that someone made a left turn and hit and killed an oncoming cyclist. Nobody was drunk, nobody ran a red light. The motorist was charged with failure to yield to oncoming traffic. He also faced a criminal charge from a city ordinance that says it's a crime to kill someone with your car but the link I posted above is a story about the state court dismissing the charge on appeal.
• Portland lost 6% of its bicycle commuters in the last year. I've yet to see anybody come up with a reason why.
• I don't have statistics and I don't know the reason why, but I've seen an extreme uptick in ass-hat maneuvers from people driving cars. Tonight alone, I had two VERY close calls.

Taken together, those things paint a bleak picture and it looks like forward progress on bike advocacy, bike infrastructure and bike safety, be it real or imagined, is beginning to slip. Personally, I don't know what to do about it. But after tonight's ride, I'm starting to wonder if I've been lucky not to have been killed so far and if maybe I shouldn't push my luck? Do you have ideas on what to do? Do you have counter-evidence that progress is not inching backwards to cheer me up?

I should look at my own calendar before I post pleas for plans... nevermind

One of my internet nicknames is "shaggy" because when I adopted it in high school, I looked like Shaggy from the Scooby-Do cartoon. In recent years, however, the resemblance has become less obvious and I have to explain to people whenever they're trying to put my face together with my internet nick.

But today, as I was walking back to the office from picking up some lunch, a total stranger called out to me, "Hey, Shaggy! Where's Scooby?"

I'M BACK!!!

Looking for a place to be where you won't over-talk a certain D&D game? Try out the Monster Palace!

Yesterday, the Bike Portland blog pointed me at an article that gave me the words to describe a vague idea I've been trying to explore for a long time. Perhaps you remember my post about the woman who was killed by a semi on her bike and how upset I was that the driver was not held responsible? In the discussion that followed in the comments of that post I became convinced that my outrage was misplaced in that instance, but it doesn't stop me from wanting to see people who drive motorized vehicles held to a standard that is in line with the danger their vehicles pose to others... In other words, that case didn't provide a good example for what I want, but there's something there.

The article was about a Seattle city ordinance being struck down by the Washington appellate court because it is in conflict with state law. But the judge writing the majority opinion says explicitly that she's not passing judgment on the intent of the ordinance or the policy decisions that lead to it, just that it's not strictly legal. Then she explained EXACTLY what we need to do. Judge Becker said:

The Seattle ordinance appears to be an effort to lower the priority that motor vehicles presently enjoy in the competition for use of the public streets. By enhancing the risk of criminal liability a driver faces for merely getting behind the wheel, the city perhaps anticipates a future day in which an automobile is regarded as a dangerous instrumentality justifying the imposition of strict liability. We do not judge the policy choices embodied in the ordinance. Our task is only to determine whether it conflicts with state law.

There are a couple of terms that bear explaining more discussion:

• Priority: I think here she acknowledged that automobiles outrank bikes for no better reason than that they can. In other words, I have a much easier time accessing my tax-funded resources in a car than I do in a bike. I don't think that's right and I think that laws and changes in car-culture that make that less true are good things.


• Dangerous Instrumentaliy: Something that's inherently dangerous and needs to be used carefully or not at all. For example, explosives and live wires.


• Strict Liability: This would mean that someone subject to it is held responsible without proof of carelessness or fault. Using something that is a dangerous instrumentality is one way to incur strict liability and if it were applied to cars, it would essentially mean that if you gather that much kinetic energy to yourself, you're responsible for where it goes and we don't even have to quibble about why so much energy went into a human body if we know who created that energy. In other words, if you throw a 2000 pound brick at my head, you'd better miss 'cause if you don't, nobody will care why.

So if we classify a motor vehicle, or really anything heavy that moves very fast, as a dangerous instrumentality, I think we align legal responsibility with physics and that's the first step towards aligning cultural responsibility with physics.

I'm going skiing this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday depending on who's interested in coming with me and which day works better for them. I will go to Timberline resort on Mt. Hood which promises to be about an hour and a half away by car and I'd like to be there by 9:00 at the latest, so I want to leave town by 7:30. If you have your own skis, there's room in the car for them. At this point I'm planning on renting when I get there.

If you'd like to go with me, give me a ping.

A while back, my friend stereotype441 was telling a group of us about the physicist who initially suggested that matter might have wavelengths. Obviously, the theory has scientific merit but I'm more interested in how stereotype441 paraphrased his paper. He said (as near as I can remember),

So what if matter had wavelength, 'cause check this out: We could use the same math we've been using for waves and it also correctly explains mass physics

Like, wow. I love that wording SO HARD. I think it could be used for everything:

Calculus:
So what if for each number Epsilon there were some number delta 'cause check this out: ...

Lunch:
So what if I went to get some food, 'cause check this out: I'm hungry.

Job interviews:
So what if you hired me 'cause check this out: I'd rock like Bon Jovi at this job.

Break-ups:
So what if we're not right for each other, 'cause check this out: I'm not happy.

Politics:
So what if you voted for me, 'cause check this out: I loves me some America.

This is driving me slightly crazy and if I can't rant on my own LJ, where can I rant?

This article says the labor market improved in November

It didn't. The first derivative of the labor market improved in November. For those of you who never took calculus, let me explain. The first derivative describes the rate of change for something. It's not the numbers your speedometer is pointing to, it's how fast the speedometer needle is moving.

To extend the car analogy a little further, the economy is loosing jobs like a car slipping backwards down a hill. In November, somebody measured the rate of slow and said, "we're slowing down!"

This is something that needs to happen before we can see forward progress again and the slow-down in job loss is a good thing; it provides our first glimmer of hope for recovery. But I want to stress something. Things are continuing to get worse.

I've heard it said that for every day you don't exercise, you loose two days of fitness. I have no way of knowing if that's true and I doubt even a doctor could measure it that way but it feels true when I get back on my bike after a lapse in use, so I think it may really be close to that.

I think I need to amend that rule of thumb and say, "double for thanksgiving week."

Ok, I wasn't sure at first because I don't like change, but kde4 is a big improvement. Go team-KDE!

I just tried on a shirt I bought the last time I needed to go "business casual." I remember that I liked the shirt. I thought it was slimming and flattering. It looks like a tent now. Also, apparently I get this look on my face when I'm concentrating on something?