I note, somewhat belatedly, that I’ve been blogging here since January 2005 (or November 2004, if you want to count a first experimental WordPress post).
My first substantive post, BBC: Small-class pupils ‘do no better’, began:
New British research suggests that there “is no evidence that children in smaller primary classes do better in maths or [...]
I bought my monthly Caltrain pass yesterday. Along with a parking permit, it came to $189 (Caltrain charges by the zone; this happens to be zone 2 to zone 4). Taking the train saves me about 45 miles of driving per day, so to break even, if I take the train 20 days a month, [...]
Eventually.
Caltrain to offer real-time delay data
Caltrain commuters accustomed to facing long delays without warning will finally be able to check ahead and see if their train is running on schedule.
Caltrain officials said this week they have reached a deal with a private vendor to install global positioning system trackers in their locomotives, and use the [...]
(I’ve flagged this post Local Interest (for the Minneapolis/St Paul area) and Arts for the obvious reason.)
I’m packing to go home after a week in the Twin Cities area. Like California (and no doubt lots of other places), Minnesota has some great craft breweries. The big one is Summit, and I’m always happy to resample [...]
George Skelton in the LA Times. I heard Whitman’s obviously bogus ad the other day and didn’t get around to doing the arithmetic. This is going to be a depressing campaign.
Meg Whitman’s radio whoppers
… Neither major party has a lock on truthfulness. I’ve written about false advertising by Republicans and Democrats alike for years.
Now, [...]
Well, so far so good… Click through to the NOAA article for a bigger version of the map.
NOAA: El Niño to Help Steer U.S. Winter Weather
El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean is expected to be a dominant climate factor that will influence the December through February winter weather in the United [...]
Most days, I ride Caltrain to work. Setting aside its insane policy (not entirely its fault) of cutting service and raising fares as a means of dealing with just about any problem, my main gripe is that it’s really hard to get any prompt information about service and schedule problems. This despite the installation a [...]
A snippet from a longer column. It’s no less worrying to us living here.
State of Paralysis
… What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.
Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human [...]
Now this is pretty cool (and a little depressing for some of us). Neil Freeman has a nifty set of subway maps, all at the same scale, of a bunch of major cities. The contrast is striking.
Here’s Paris:
Tokyo:
and BART, (San Francisco) Bay Area Rapid Transit:
The Bay Area does have a smattering of other rail systems—SF [...]
Matthew Yglesias has a post on The Declining Demographics of Suburbanism, which by all means read, but what caught my eye was this graph:
The change isn’t quite so dramatic as it appears at first glance (it’s based at 40%), but it’s dramatic enough. There are two relevant trends, say the Census Bureau.
Increases in longevity [...]
80° on the coast today. The horizon, sharp in the morning, has gone all hazy. Where’s that G&T, Jeeves?
The USGS has a nice collection of scanned historical maps of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here’s the one I was after, a c1902 map of the area where I now live.
These maps are available in medium-resolution JPEGs (this one at 1600×2161) and higher-resolution MrSID files (this one at 6614×8933). Mac users can use a [...]
The FRBSF’s Kevin Lansing wonders, and concludes with a rather noncommittal “further research is needed”; “unsatisfying”, says Mark Thoma. It seems to me that Lansing’s actual views are clear enough, a little earlier in the Letter.
Monetary Policy and Asset Prices, by Kevin Lansing, FRBSF Economic Letter
…
Beyond the setting of short-term nominal interest rates, a broader [...]
There’s always a good reason to visit the San Gregorio General Store, especially on a weekend, but this Sunday there’s a better reason than usual. SGERC does a terrific job of stream monitoring on the San Mateo County coastside, and they can use all our support.
Brother Don and Friend Gillian, proprietors of the online runners’ supply (among other things) store ZombieRunner, have opened a physical (offline?) store in the old Fine Arts theater on California Ave in Palo Alto CA (if you’re not familiar with the terrain, think Silicon Valley, Stanford, etc, and you’ll have the general idea).
Go there for [...]
My local school district serves a Silicon Valley bedroom community on the Pacific coast. The district has been shrinking for the last decade, but beneath the steady shrinkage are some interesting demographic changes.
I posted an article on the subject at Coastsider.com.
Itamar Moses’ Bach at Leipzig is in repertory at Shakespeare Santa Cruz; I saw the matinee performance on Thursday.
The NYT’s Charles Isherwood was not impressed in 2005.
Sitting through Mr. Moses’ reverent attempt to mimic the brainy irreverence of Tom Stoppard is like being forced to consume glass after glass of flat Champagne, with no hope of giddy [...]
I wrote a piece over at Coastsider.com on what is, in the event, a rather minor agenda item from the last meeting of our local school board.
The district’s middle school has reached the final stages of NCLB’s “Program Improvement” (that’s what California calls it; I think the Feds say “School Improvement”). Having failed to made [...]
Just before sunset, on my way home this evening. The view is from Highway 1, just north of Lobitos Creek. Mustard and wild radish, I think.
There’s a new link over there on the left to a nice (if I say so myself) SF Bay Area weather page.
The National Weather Service has a lot of useful information, but my favorite, the Area Forecast Discussion, can be pretty hard to read until you get accustomed to its all-caps (and sometimes rather abbreviated) [...]