Far South of I-10

We're in the New Orleans area for a few days and it's the 5th anniversary of Katrina. We didn't see much riding through town, it looks like NO east is still pretty beat up looking though. Watching the coverage of Katrina from a local news perspective made me go back to see what I wrote at the time, and it made me think I would have done a better job as governor or mayor than those dodos did. Mayor Nagin just ordered a mandatory evacuation, by reading the legaleze version of the order instead of saying more plainly it is time to leave, and if you don't leave no one will come rescue you. Hopefully it wasn't poorly executed and too late. Governor blanco just mentioned that President Bush called to make sure there was a mandatory evactuation. She keeps mentioning being blessed, and she keeps repeating herself and mentioning flying in and looking at the traffic. Instead of a governor she is really just a traffic reporter and a bad one at that. I voted for Bobby Jindal,

I'm traveling from europe back to the western hemisphere and my laptop's battery died. There are power plugs in one of the houston terminal b corridors of despair, but non are near a chair so I must sit indian style on the ground, looking like an unjolly budda. I did miss a flight yesterday and get stuck in Rome. The other option was waiting six hours then flying standby to spend the night in Newark. I skipped the standby and stayed in Rome. I did a nice hike from the Vatican to the Pantheon, then through all the fori and all the way south to somebody's bath (caracella? pretty impressive ruins of a giant bathhouse)

I'm changing URL's for this blog, I started to when we moved to colombia, but I never really have time. Please update your links. http://farsouthofi-10.blogspot.com/

Another flowchart today from Achewood . Any time a cartoon includes a flowchart spitting in the face of death, you gotta love it. (pretty uneven cartoon, though, but when the topics range from lying robots to gay porn, ya gotta expect that. It could be eat, drink and be merry, because tomorrow some crazy korean kid could blow us all away!

The Nytimes has an article today about how solar power still doesn't make economic sense. They use an example for a house with a system that costs $54000, which to me seems excessive. The only way solar power will make sense for anyone is to first cut down the demand side of the equation, you can't solar power conventional air conditioning! I took a class a few years ago on designing and installing PV systems, and I learned from that class that it is possible to either be a shark and screw people out of a lot of money and sell them things they don't need, or you have to live like the instructor did, in a crappy 30 year old camper. The 3rd way to live would probably entail me continuing to work in the oilfield while selling PV on weekends. To me, the people that installed a $54000 system are sharks. A rule of thumb would guestimate a pv system costing $15/watt installed. So a $54000 system would be a 3.5 kilowatt system, and if New Jersey gets 4-5 usable hours of sunlig

Bill Whittle at Eject,Eject, Eject has a fantastic post rebutting conspiracy theories that is like a cool wind blowing through a teenagers fetid bedroom, his post has the cleansing power of logic to sweep away the augean stables of stupidity that infests the modern world. My favorite quote: ALL of these 9/11 conspiracy sites have museum-grade idiots stating what “obviously” happens at velocities and temperatures that they are flat-out incapable of understanding. Not only are these people too stupid to understand the physics involved with what they are bloviating about…they are too stupid to realize that they are too stupid. Too many people believe the conspiracy theories in the world today. They use magical thinking instead of logic and science, which tells me that when the world crashes some day, it'll be hundreds of years before it gets back to the same level again since society is currently dismembering the enlightenment structure that got us to this point, we're racing ba