Gold went up from around $783 to $862 today.  Maybe I should hold on to my gold after all.  I was going to sell it to pay off some debt.  Maybe right now is not the time…

"A Brabus Maybach," he said, as she turned her head in time to see him give the wheel a little pat. "The firm of Brabus extensively tweaks the product of Maybach, to produce one of these."
-From chapter 17 of Spook Country by William Gibson

I must go buy this book…

So it looks like tropical storm Fay might become a roaring hurricane before it makes landfall.  The Florida Keys and Orlando, both of which occupy fond places in my heart for various reasons, are in its path.  So I’m keeping an eye on it.  Her.  It.  Whatever.

You know…they need to stop giving these dangerous things cutesy names.  Instead of Fay, how about Insane Clown, or Babbling Homeless Man With An Axe, or Drunken Train Engineer or Laughing Pit Bull or Flying Anvil Swarm…

via The Local…

Germany wants limits for uranium levels in drinking water

The German Health Ministry is reportedly preparing to establish maximum levels for uranium in drinking water after a study found the radioactive material in water supplies throughout the country.

How about zero?  Geeze… 

So I’m in Portland for the fifth year in a row at the OSCON Open Source Developer’s Conference.  And as in prior years, the Institute has put me up in the DoubleTree just a couple blocks away from the convention center.   That’s do-able largely because of the deep discount the hotel gives to OSCON convention attendees. 

The rooms I’ve had have ranged widely from the small to the large.  Last year they put me in a really nice deluxe room.  This year it’s one of their smallest.  What’s going on I found out, is that the hotel basically fills in the blanks with conference goers.  We get, at a very nice rate, whatever the hotel couldn’t book at the regular rate.  And I am not complaining.

DoubleTree beds are decadent.  I’ll reliably stay at a DoubleTree whenever I can afford it for the bed.  I get, hands down, the best sleep ever on these beds.  The chain has them custom made to their own specs, and you can actually buy one yourself.  Swear to god one of these days I will…but they are not cheap.

It’s not just the mattress and box springs, it’s a whole system including a cushioned mattress cover, box baffled down blankets and triple sheets plus lovely jumbo down pillows.  I was so looking forward to getting to my hotel after a long day’s flight, crammed into a tiny passenger jet seat, and lay down in one of these lovely beds.  It’s been two nights of heaven so far.

One thing you tend to forget about when you take a yearly cross-country road trip is jet lag.

(It’s What time???)

As it turns out, turbulence while taking off is even more nerve wracking then turbulence while landing.

(Safely in Portland)

When adding a few flowers around the house fails to improve the scenery…

Flowerpot’s spontaneous combustion blamed for fire

MENDOTA HEIGHTS, Minn. – Fire investigators said a fire that destroyed a Mendota Heights home last week was caused by a flowerpot. Fire Chief John Maczko said a flowerpot on the home’s deck spontaneously combusted.

While rare, spontaneous combustion can happen to pots with the right mixture of soil, moisture and heat.

Homeowner Dan Stoven said it’s hard to believe, but said he’s just glad his 17-year-old daughter was able to escape when passers-by entered the home to wake her up.

Investigators said the soil was in a plastic pot that had become hot after several days of high temperatures and humidity. It ignited July 8, and wind helped the fire grow and spread to the deck and then to the house.

Next time I go shopping for flowers I need to check their flame retardant rating.

Wow…  It’s really Work trying to draw this bad… 

…don’t ask.

When Smirk entered the White House in 2001, the price of gasoline was bumping around the $1.80 mark.  Crude was bumping around the $30 a barrel mark.  You can’t blame that jackass and his idiot henchmen for all of the increase, but his splendid little war is one factor exacerbating it.  The other is actually more Reagan’s fault then Bush’s.  Reagan began the financial deregulation process that led straight to the sub prime mortgage meltdown we have now, and the resulting credit crunch.  Investors, worried that all of a sudden real estate isn’t the safe haven for money it used to be, are putting their dough into buying commodities like…er…crude oil…which drives up the price.

Why it is that people assume republicans are better at managing an economy then democrats is beyond me, other then I guess people think that if you’re rich you must know how to make money.  Some rich people do.  Some rich people absolutely love to make money.  And those people rise the standard of living for everyone.  Their energy makes the world a better place.  But others are rich because they merely hunger for wealth and they don’t care how they get it.  The ones of low ambition turn to petty crime.  The really ambitious ones build empires, corrupt governments, and legally rape everyone and everything around them blind.  Guess which sort gravitate to the republican party.

Anyway…I was just reading this over at Eschaton…

After more than five years of petroleum price increases, American consumers appear to be expecting the worst. A CNN poll taken last week showed that 59 percent of Americans believe it is very likely that they will pay $5 a gallon for gasoline before the end of the year and that an additional 27 percent say it is somewhat likely.

Economists say these expectations make it more probable that people will change behavior rather than simply wait for a turn in the traditional up-and-down cycle of commodity prices. "People now realize that prices may come back down, but they’re not going down to where they were," said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. "We’re going to have to live with higher energy prices for a while. And that’s affecting their behavior and what they buy and don’t buy."

For Rusty Davis, a handyman from Arlington, the high cost of gasoline is changing the way he runs his business. He has started to refuse jobs outside the county. When he does travel to jobs, he now takes his fuel-efficient car and leaves behind his work van, which gets only 12 miles to the gallon. He also used to do free estimates in person. Now he does them over the phone.

My brother does that kind of work for a living, and when I read that I thought of him.  He doesn’t do estimates over the phone for the obvious reason that you need to see the situation you’re getting into before you bid on it if you don’t want any unpleasant surprises gulping down your profit margin.  I would expect he just adds in the higher cost of gas to his bids now, if he has to go far afield.  But much of his work is local so I doubt he drives very far, very often to a job.  But I don’t think he’d turn down a job outright simply because it involved driving a distance.  The thing to do is bid it for what it will cost you and if you don’t get it…well…you can’t work a job that’s going to cost you more then you make back from it.

My brother has a big Ford truck, but he also has a smaller one he can use when he doesn’t need the capacity of the big one.  I expect that one’s getting a lot more use now.  I remember when all those air foils started appearing on tractor-trailer rigs back in the late 70s and 80s.  Before the first oil embargo it didn’t matter how much fuel one of those things burned because it was so cheap, and the profile of most of those big rigs was like a fist going down the highway.  Then suddenly the truckers were having to find ways to squeeze out every little bit of milage they could and there was a new appreciation for air drag.  Now you see them all the time on the big trucks.  Something else I’m starting to see more of on American highways are the mid-sized and smaller European trucks and vans.

More fuel efficient automobiles will come and that’s a good thing, but if you really want to keep the cost of living down, investing in more fuel efficient trucks will do a lot more for the economy.

Via Jonathan Schwarz at This Modern World…  Google News from some other, nicer planet where the humans are sane…

I had work to do for a deadline this coming Wednesday and I figured I would be staying home Friday, and most of the weekend.  Friday is my usual telecommute day, and at the end of it I usually drive down to Washington to gather with some friends at the 30 Degrees bar for drinks and a nice restaurant later.  But this Friday I couldn’t make it because I had to spend that time at the computer in my home office instead. 

When I came home last Thursday my little neighborhood street was packed almost solid with cars.  This should not be a hard city street to find parking on because it’s a little dogleg of a side street that only has rowhouses on one side of it.  On the other side are four widely spaced detached homes, some of which have their own parking pads anyway.  So that side of the street is usually open.  But we have two households here now on my end of the street, on the rowhouse side, that like to hog the available parking like they’re the only people who live here.  One of them is a little gay diva who rents his house out to two other people and between them and their friends parking on the street there isn’t much space left.  The other is a straight couple who just had a baby…so they’ve had family and friends over all week long.  Another guy is moving and he’s had friends over helping out.  The net result is that my little out of the way city street is suddenly hard to find parking on.  Last Thursday I had to park halfway up the street, and then wait for a space near my house to open up.  It wasn’t until Friday morning that I was finally able to park in front of my house.

So I started the weekend feeling reluctant to move the car anyway.  Having to fight for a parking space here is something I’m not used to.  In point of fact, I bought the house here on this street specifically because parking seemed to be no problem here, as opposed to some of the other densely rowhouse packed streets in the neighborhood.  Now I’m seriously considering putting a parking pad in the back yard, which would eliminate the only yard I’ve ever had in my life.  I kinda like having that little 8 by 15 foot patch of green grass back there…tiny as it is.  But I need a place to park my car, and there is always the even smaller front lawn I can always make a fuss over.

I’ve been busy at the computer most of my waking time this weekend, getting stuff done for work.  But I live within walking distance of two nice grocery stores, and Saturday evening after it had cooled down a bit, and then again early this morning, I was able to take a short walk to buy some food.  I also took a brief cigar walk around the neighborhood late last night, when I started getting cabin fever.  It’s a nice neighborhood to stroll around in, when it’s not sweltering.

But my cigar humidor is getting a tad empty.  I toyed briefly this afternoon with the thought of taking a quick drive to my favorite cigar store in Cockeysville and loading up.  So a few moments ago I checked outside to see what the parking situation looks like.  It’s still bad, but not horrible.  I thought it over for a moment.  There were just a few spaces on the street, but later, as guests go back home for the work week, more will probably open up.  But did I want to drive all the way out to Cockeysville just to buy cigars with gas prices being what they are now?  I still have a few good cigars left in the box to tide me over until I need to buy something else out in Cockeysville. 

Now…see what happened? I would probably be on the way home from my favorite cigar store right now, were it not for the price of gasoline.  It is making less and less sense these days to drive somewhere for just one item.  I can walk to two good grocery stores and a handful of drug stores to get most of my day to day necessities.  The things I need to drive outside the beltway to get I now find myself carefully planning out.  Instead of making several trips out there I try to make only one. 

The net result being that car sits in front of my house a lot more then it did when I bought it.  I’m still in new Mercedes love.  I still go outside periodically and just…stare…at that car like I just brought it home.  But you know…I’m finding I appreciate it all the more when I drive it less often.  Driving it has become something of a special occasion now.  The last time I bought gas was almost two weeks ago. 

I doubt I’m the only person making these sorts of calculations because gas has become so expensive.  I’ve noticed now for several weeks that traffic has been much, much lighter on the highways then usual.  Thing is, I haven’t actually started spending less on things like food and other necessities.  I’m holding off until I can combine trips, instead of getting stuff on an as-needed basis.  If that’s what other people are doing, then this isn’t necessarily hurting retail too badly.  On the other hand, I’m not shopping and impulse buying either.  I’m just buying things I need.  That’s probably hurting business.  But the housing bubble burst would have done that without the gas price spike.

Especially that data.

Biblical literalism or low IQ: which came first?

A few months ago I posted data which showed, unsurprisingly, that Unitarian-Universalists tend to have high IQs and Pentecostals not so much. What about something like Biblical literalism and IQ? Well, I plotted the IQ values from the General Social Survey for selected denominations and plotted them against the proportion which believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Prepare to be greeted by a very banal reality below the fold….

I see the scale.  I see the apparent correlation.  But there is no ‘g’.  And since I haven’t moved in fundamentalist circles since childhood, most of the stupid I see on a day to day basis doesn’t involve biblical literalism at all.

Just because you’ve embraced a theology that relieves you of the necessity of thinking, doesn’t mean you’re incapable of it.  If you haven’t ever met someone who hates having to think about life because doing that gets so very painful at times, you haven’t lived for very long, or talked to people much.  The smarter the person, the more vulnerable they are to cults, booze, drugs, and misanthropy.  And if fundamentalists are so stupid, then how’d they come to own the Republican Party?

Okay…I’m going to Mexico Thursday and I should be paying more attention to my Spanish then German.  But I’m reading This Interesting Column by Rick Perlstein over at Talking Points Memo , about the American right’s failure to grasp the changing world around them…

The Germans have a word, vergangenheitsbearbeitung, or "working through the past," to describe that nation’s attempt to achieve something that, while not nearly as world-historic, dramatic, or portentous, is structurally similar to what has been happening on the American left over the last decade or so, apparently without many conservatives noticing: doing the hard work of reckoning with collective errs, facing up to them, unflinchingly staring them down, and restoring a community to balance by transcending them as best as we mortal humans can.

Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.   Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Christ almighty.  Okay…I think I’ve figured something out about Germans.  When they want a new word, they take the definition of that word, remove all the spaces between the words in the definition, and presto…they have their new word.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  Vergangenheitsbearbeitung.  I’m not sure I can make my mouth do that without pausing for breath.

That’s as opposed to us terse Americans, who simply take the first letter of each word in the definition and make a word out of that.  Radar.  Laser.  Scuba.  CD-ROM.  WTF.  Okay…that last one isn’t a word…yet… 

On the one hand, ten dollars gets you about one-hundred pesos.  On the other, an item selling for ten dollars here in the United States costs about one-hundred pesos in Mexico, apparently…