Clean Coal

Has anyone else noticed a shortage of information on the Web about so-called clean coal?

I am going to begin a survey of the information that is available and report it here.

Stay tuned.

A brief socialist history of the automobile

Check out this brief socialist history of the automobile at
Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Matrimonial Math

The news broke today that Connecticut is about to become the third state to allow gay marriages.

I was feeling just snarky enough that I jumped immediately to the conclusion that people in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California must just be smarter than everyone else. Er, except New Yorkers.

However, I decided to be fair and test the hypothesis. My hunt for statistics netted me a data set produced by Morgan Quitno Press, which is lately become a subsidiary of the Congressional Review. It aggregates twenty-one different measures of the effectiveness of education in each state, and ranks the states according to which is "smartest."

Massachusetts and Connecticut, as I predicted, rank second and third respectively. California has not done so well. Of course California is a big compost heap of a state and I suspect its smartness is extremely regionalized. Curiously, Vermont and New Jersey, both of which have Civil Union laws, rank first and fourth.

So smart people are more liberal?

There is a correlation between how smart a state is and whether it is colored red or blue on the New York Times electoral map. I have grouped together states according to the Times's categories and predicted outcomes--Solid Obama, Leaning Obama, Tossup, Leaning McCain, and Solid McCain--and calculated average smartness scores for each group, expressed as a GPA.

Outcome	GPA
Solid Obama	2.36
Leaning Obama	2.14
Tossup	1.87
Leaning McCain	2.27
Solid McCain	1.60

The correlation is not perfect but I'm satisfied. I do wish we were doing better than a C+, though.

Arizona, John McCain's state, comes in last at number 50, though to be fair, Barack Obama's Illinois, at number 35 is not doing a whole lot better. Maybe that's why Obama had to sit through meetings with Bill Ayres.

Likes and Dislikes

This are lists, in progress, of things I like and dislike about Miami. I wanted to have two running columns, but I can't make that look good, so one list will follow the other.

Likes
rain
geckos
self-service check-out at the public library
tiny little frogs

Dislikes
snails
Republicans
poor connectivity of bicycle and pedestrian routes

Today's Reading

In response to the recent spate of TV ads promoting high-fructose corn syrup as a healthy alternative to sugar, I did a little poking around, and, no great surprise, found that while it may or may not be bad for our bodies, it is definitely bad for the planet. The Washington Post explains:

High-Fructose Corn Syrup: Not So Sweet for the Planet

Bike of the Month

I will probably find out that this bike is already famous and that its rider is a local celebrity. I had to capture it, though, it was too good. And the rider's outfit matched.

My salad was not bad, but nothing to write home about, and it was overpriced.

I can post by text!

I just sent this to my blog via text message. What will they think of next?