1. These energy flowcharts are really cool. Example:
(click to make it bigger)
This really helps you visualize where our energy comes from and where it goes. For example, the vast majority of petroleum is used for transportation whereas coal is used almost exclusively for electricity generation. Alternative energies (solar, wind, hydro, wind, geothermal) are pretty much restricted to electricity generation at this point. A large amount of energy is lost when converting fuel to electricity, whether it comes from an alternative source or from coal.
They also have charts for carbon and water usage as well.
2. They’re done with TV screens they’re using all these laser beams – control you with a flash of light! It is both awesome and scary that science fiction is arriving. Here is the pop science version: Particular wavelengths of light can trigger nerve activity in animals endowed with these proteins, modifying nerve cells’ firing patterns at the experimenters’ will.
3. More scientists behaving badly.
4. I do not know about the rest of Klein’s post, but the assumption that the US needs an increased supply of scientists and engineers is a faulty one. There is a credible case that we have too many scientists and engineers, at least at the research level.
5. 105 mph. Would that we had signed him.
1. The plots are cool, but Tufte would have something to say about the inconsistent use of box size/line thickness to represent fraction (specifically for the input and output boxes – very misleading). Also, what do “Rejected Energy” and “Energy Services” mean? And, just as imported electricity gets its own line, it would be interesting to split all the primary sources into their domestic and imported fractions.
What he said
I think that “rejected energy” and “energy services” would be more appropriately named “lost energy” and “useful energy,” but I am not sure.
I think that’s right (and the numbers are consistent with the end-use energy efficiency assumptions in the text).
However, now I want to see (i) the efficiency of electricity generation for each kind of fuel, not just an overall efficiency, and (ii) all the efficiency factors involved (for example, it takes a lot of energy to turn underground oil reserves into petroleum at the pump).
I assumed “rejected energy” was wasted, which makes me find the chart encouraging. Reducing waste would provide up to 130% of total used energy.
I would guess “waste” as in leaving your lights on or your thermostat up would go under energy services, whereas “waste” as in thermodynamic and industrial inefficiencies would go under rejected energy.
Exactly. But it is still astonishing that we’re only getting 32% efficiency on electricity generation and 25% on petroleum combustion engines.
But again, without following the entire energy chain (including, for example, the transportation costs of production and distribution, so the plot has to include loops) these numbers are very misleading.
Do you have any sense how close they are to non-misleading numbers? It seems there has to be a percentage out there.
No idea, and I’m guessing it would be very hard to determine accurately.
The notes in their literature do say that the uncertainty measures on their efficiency estimates are very high, for one.
Also, I wouldn’t say the figures are mis-leading, more incomplete. I don’t think the numbers are totally useless.
Not totally useless, but I think they are misleading insofar as
(i) they invite the viewer to compare unlike with unlike, most particularly in distribution – a significant part of the inefficiency of electricity generation is in transmission, which is included (efficiency = retail electricity provided/source fuel energy), whereas the equivalent for petroleum is excluded.
(ii) they omit all infrastructure (extraction, transportation, storage, waste management, etc) energy costs.
good points.
so, um, now that we’ve been eliminated, sal is making us learn shit again?
He’s just setting us up for Class Struggle Tuesday.
I’m in charge of Democratic Politics Wednesday, but I have to come up with Yahoo! friendly headlines so we can expand our brand.
The race to a protected draft pick begins now!
3 & 4 are related, I believe.
Since the ratio of postdocs to tenured positions is so high, there must be a temptation for postdocs doing the actual bench work to come up with the most exciting selection/interpretation of their results that they can.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the assumption in 4b seems to be that if someone has a job in the private sector, they’re not a scientist.
I believe this is true; as it relates to postdocs however it is a decent definition given that it is the standard track to becoming a research scientist.
Still, I think there is a case to be made that there is an overproduction of research-level scientists and engineers given that so many of them enter non-science fields. That could also just be me trying to make my skillset more scarce and therefore more valuable.
I agree with this. I believe that papers are retracted more frequently from good journals than from bad ones – duh, why would you risk the consequences of scientific misconduct to publish something in Journal of Colloid Science and Technology Q: Interfacial Phenomena at Liquid-Noncrystalline Solid Interfaces?
We recently had an applicant for a junior postdoc position who claimed 150 refereed publications! Turned out they were all in places like the Antarctica Journal of Mathematics.
I was once invited to write a book chapter for a collection. I thought it was great, putting a book chapter on my CV would be helpful. But I did some research and found out that this publishing house and discovered that not a single one of their journals was included in Journal Citation Reports (example: Georgian International Journal of Science and Technology) and that they often repackage public domain material from non-academic sources for their “collections.”
Their model was apparently soliciting written contributions, requiring authors to make a “small contribution” to the cost of publication, and then print a few copies of a book that nobody would ever read. Pass.
Or there’s this model.
Great. Pumpkin.
It is not easy to ghostride large pumpkins.
I can’t believe he’s going to “play” third base.
See, we aren’t so far away from contention. One of the best teams in MLB plays Dan Johnson at 3B.
MOOV BARTON TOO THIRD!
5: I drafted him this season. Did not work out as planned.
Not the worst! Not the worst!
I can’t believe we have the second-best baserunning squad. Contact play!
I’m not surprised. Rajai, Coco, and Cliffy all steal some bases, and it’s a very fast team all around.
We’re number 10T! We’re number 10T!
(in the AL)
fontastic
Too bad the first multi-year OC of the Smith era sucks.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Yes we can!
Or can we?
Are those numbers obtained by summing the official attendance figures, because we know how reliable they are!
If you knock off 5,000 per game as the difference between the attendance announced in the box score and the actual count of warm bodies passing through the turnstiles you get just about 1 million for the season. That latter number makes a big difference in the A’s economic value to the City of Oakland in part because it’s the number that determines staffing levels for concession workers, ushers, security etc. It’s remarkable to notice how densely packed the stands are, compared to 2010, when CSN shows some highlight clip from the playoff years in the early part of the decade.
Which is odd, since we all know that the only reason for the low attendance is the crappy stadium.
Honest question: Do we think attendance numbers are lies wrt to tickets sold?
The revenue stream doesn’t care if people aren’t actually using their tickets.
I don’t know in general, but for some of those midweek-against-unexciting-opposition games that appeared to have <5K actually in attendance it's hard to imagine that there were another 5K+ people who had bought tickets and not shown up.
I’d be really interested to see league-wide attendance figures broken down by group sales. I’ve had a suspicion that in the Schott-Hoffman years on down, the A’s have relied VERY heavily on group sales (likely at steep discount, and possibly with some graft thrown in), especially to local public-sector institutions.
I personally attended two games this season where the attendance could not have been more than 3,500.
After the single smallest announced attendance of the season (8,874 on May 3), the cluster of the next smallest 9 announced crowds of between 10,047 and 10,136 is more than suspicious. I’ll just outright accuse them of finagling most or all of those numbers to get into five figures. The next 9 smallest crowds after those are between 10,512 and 11,860 with a relatively even spread across that range. So the cluster is not something that would happen in nature. Now, what the motivation is for lying about the numbers is a separate question.
As to the revenue stream: Do the A’s get a percentage of the concessions and parking? I’m sure Marine Layer has this covered somewhere but a glance at the “Featured Posts” isn’t showing me where to look that up. People who don’t use their tickets, or “ticket buyers” whose existence is a fabrication, don’t pay $17 to park their cars and don’t buy obscenely priced beer.
The A’s are required to make certain reports to MLB about daily ticket sales and revenue therefrom and the turnstile count. It would be nice if some of this information could be leaked in the way several clubs’ financial reports were leaked a while back.
Lies, Damn lies, and Republicans.
Say what you will about the tenets of unnatural soda-ism, at least it’s an ethos
I laughed.
Most educated people who hold suspicions about artificial flavorings nevertheless trust the conclusions of science and scientific institutions on other issues, like global warming and evolution.
The standard (not one that I endorse it) response is that the FDA is in the hands of Big Pharma and Agri-biz intrests, whereas climate scientists and evolutionary biologists are as pure as the driven snow.
…or some less hyperbolic version of that.
No, the world is made of hyperbole, not nuance.
I think that depends on the value of the cosmological curvature parameter.
Citation to wikipedia is meta-hilarious.
An interesting perspective on farming practices and atmospheric carbon.
This is timely.
Brilliant.
picotrebuchet and I are talking a lot about dinosaurs right now. His favorite is the stegosaurus; mine is ankylosaurus. We sometimes stomp around the house like a pack of rabid tyrannosaurs. Best part: we were at the science museum last weekend and he pointed to a sauropod and said, “apatosaurus” rather than the old term “brontosaurus.”
Are you reading Jane Yolen and Mark Teague’s “How do dinosaurs … ?” books?
No. Tell me more.
A quick google search makes me think that I’ve seen one of these books at a friend’s home.
Lily enjoyed them – the dinosaurs are obviously completely out of context, but each has its name beside it so you can combine a fun read with naming games.
Oooh. Thanks. When our next book-buying cycle comes around, I might add one or two of those.
They’re pretty standard fare – your library probably has them.
speaking of, did you ever read the “george and martha” series with lily? we loved them, and pico did, too. I think he was too young to really appreciate them, though, and i’d love to do read those again with him when he’s older.
No – I don’t know them, but we’ll take a look.
Genius.
Some of the meta-comments are funny too.
Klipper kludge
Just too stupid for words (and yes, linking to Politico is better than linking to this Chron article).
In case you ever wondered why Senators go out of their way to be primadonnas, the Chronicle’s “has failed to distinguish herself during her 18 years in office” line is exhibit A. Boxer is on the right side of just about every issue (much more so than Feinstein), but because she is content to vote without making a name for herself, she can’t even get a nomination against a woman who was fired from her last job for gross incompetence.
Christ.
Pretty funny how Boxer’s steadfast liberalness is what earned their endorsement in 2004.
2004:
Oh, and they also addressed her ability to work with GOPers:
Some of these are very good
I liked Gar-failed.
4. Alarming update: Specimen Test V? 1920? Jesus — the US government is issuing work permits to super-long-lived, unaging robots/hybrids!
KTOTD
Is this worth panicking over?
It kind of seems like it, but I don’t want to expend the energy necessary to panic unnecessarily.
Not to worry, the A’s have their own $3 TV rights deal lined up.
Oh, $3 billion …
Yes.
< commences panicking >
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
nm aneurysm bait:
Seriously. Sometimes I don’t know why we bother trying.
We were trying?
Oh I saw it.
May be somewhat overstated
Reprinting dubiously sourced chain emails now passes for blogging? What is this, 1995?
Awful article, and a stupid email.
Don’t drink and drive.
I wonder if the Yankees will be looking to move either Swisher or Granderson this winter.
MLBTR has our arb-eligibles:
Dierkes (insert standard mb NB here re: aggregation versus analysization) think that Jackson, Kouzmanoff, Hermida, Buck, Bonser, Gross, and Cust will be non-tendered. I disagree on Kouzmanoff and I think one or two of Hermida, Cust, and Jackson will be retained.
Wow.
Same shock when I learned that Hiram Bocachica had somehow garnered enough playing time to be arbitration eligible after 2006 (? or was it 2007?)
Bocachica wow wow.
He spent a lot of the year on the major league DL.
My guesses (similar to yours):
Probable non-tenders: Buck, Bonser, Gross
Probable tenders: Kz, Jackson
Not sure: Hermida, Cust. Also Rajai.
Dream on.
No realistic idea on any of them.
If it were me, I’d NT Jackson, Rajai, Gross, and Bonser.
As meh as I am on Kz, who else would play 3B next year?
Oh, and Buck. He gone.
My druthers:
* First time: Craig Breslow, Dallas Braden, Ryan Sweeney,
Travis Buck* Second time: Kevin Kouzmanoff, Rajai Davis,
Boof Bonser, Joey Devine* Third time:
Jeremy Hermida, Conor Jackson, Jack Cust,Gabe GrossAnd, of course, anyone who gets a silly award.
Tenders: Braden, Sweeney, Breslow, Kouz, Cust, Rajai, Buck, Devine
Buck will probably get $750K at most, which isn’t much more than the minimum. He was the starting LF to open the season, and I think they give him another year–especially given that he has an option remaining.
Jackson and Hermida are interesting, and I could see them holding onto one of them.
So is it considered a foregone conclusion that Ellis’ option will be declined?
Certainly Ellis isn’t the player he used to be, and Rosales may be a decent option to start at 2B. But the option is relatively cheap, and we’re not exactly brimming with depth (if that’s even possible) at middle infield.
Ellis’s late surge back into offensive relevancy seems to have made him well worth his option. He’s garnered around 2.5 WAR this year (apparently UZR decided that it still likes his defense) so a 5.5 million dollar option really doesn’t seem that expensive.
Depends entirely on FA pool and budget. I’d rather have TUOOD and Rosales than Ellis.
Is there really any reason to tender Jackson and pay him ~4 million dollars? He had one good season (3 years, 2 hamstring strains, 1 fungal infection, and 1 hernia ago) hitting in Arizona. He’s a poor defender even before the recent spat of injuries. I think he would be a pretty big waste.
If he gets that kind of award, you cut him rather than paying it.
He made 3 million each of the last two years, so he’ll probably get 4 next year.
That’s not really a lot of money in the baseball world. Whether it makes sense for the A’s depends partly on how they see a bunch of other players (Cust, Rajai, Carter, and various Unobtainable Objects of Delusions).
I guess. But why does he get a raise after not playing?
“If you look at the whole year from a Mark Kotsay standpoint …”
…you would be pissed about playing time?
More of a sitpoint for Mark.
Hear ye! Hear ye!
Podcast with Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone regarding the A’s move to San Jose.
Thanks for linking that.
You’re welcome.
YOTD:
DLOTD:
Alternate YOTD candidate/nm bait division:
I am not baited. Silly attack books are silly.
Generous.
{Likes}
Back when The Greatness of the Raiders was a real thing, there was George Blanda, dead today at age 83.
Humans are dense objects
It’s miserably hot again today, but at least it’s not LA, where it hit 113° today, the hottest temperature ever recorded there.
Yeah, but it snows in the winter! In DC!
Highest and best use of Sullivan
This has been a banner day for factcheck.org:
I bet Fox will run a story on this tonight.
The Republicans are doing their part to bolster employment in the fact-checking sector.
It’s hard to explain why you end up in Eragon and not GoodFellas.
THIS MAY BE THE SINGLE GREATEST THING I’VE EVER READ.
Thank you, mb.
I’m gonna hafta share this on **. I’ll give you full credit.
SciMond says awesome.
from dewan’s stat of the week:
Athletics’ infielder Daric Barton had rated well in limited time before this year, but finally getting a chance to play everyday he’s taken it to another level with 20 Runs Saved so far this year. Another new face, Ike Davis of the Mets, ranks second despite beginning the year in the minors.
I don’t know that CB Bucknor has missed any of these calls, but he sure doesn’t seem like he’s in control of this game. Having both teams mad at you doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it right.
Dumb play by Pennington. Didn’t he do the same thing a couple days ago?
global distribution of particulate matter (<2.5 microns in diameter). I'm guessing the presence of high levels of particulate matter in dry and desert areas is no coincidence. Close-up of the US:
I’m not one to over-coddle pitchers, but it’s hard to see the upside of letting Anderson throw 118 pitches tonight.
Well, you followed Anderson with Brad Ziegler and Justin James…
So you’d rather have James face Matsui instead of Ziegler? Among other things, that’s a good sign that it’s time for Ziegler to be thinking seriously about what he’s going to do in his post-baseball career.
Well… Grayson is coming unhinged the rest of the way. So there’s that.
The Democrats are doing their part to bolster employment in the fact-checking sector.
I really want to know if Angels callup Mark Trumbo is related to blacklisted commie film writer/novelist Dalton Trumbo, but 45 seconds of google efforts yield nothing, so I’ll probably never know.
Pretty much what we all knew deep down but didn’t want to admit
Shit.
Yeah, I dunno. I mean, I take Lew at his word when he says they ain’t gonna do it (sign TUOOD or Werth or Dunn), but I think grover pretty much demonstrated that they could do it with a minimum of financial hijinx.
While I’m feeling quasi-charitable, it could actually be that Lew does want to spend as if the team were his purty bauble — but that the tight budgeting/profit-and-revenue-sharing-taking is on orders from Mr Blue Jeans Jr. Lew’s public sniping at … well, the public writ large, as well as other stakeholders over his tenure as the A’s (ineffective) procurer could simply be misdirected anger at Fisher.
Or, he’s just an ineffective ass who’s unaccustomed to schmoozing multiple and disparate stakeholders.
Let it not be forgotten that the Wolffish A’s have turned an operating profit every year, even as conservatively estimated by Forbes. In light of the recent Pittsburg/Florida revelations, it seems likely that those profits have actualy been much higher than reported. So even with the Chavez contract, and the one-year pickups like Sheets and Holliday that didn’t work out, the team has still had money to spend on payroll, had they chosen to do so.
If the team opts not to invest in free agents this offseason, there really can be no doubt that the money it doesn’t spend on new players is going into ownership’s pockets instead.
Right. And my point is, Lew might not actually be pocketing a whole lot of that profit.
Well, he’s only a 10% owner, so presumably he’s entitled to 10% at most of the operating profit. But we know Pittsburg profitted by around $15M for each of ’08 and ’09 (Florida averaged $26M/yr!), it’s not unreasonable to guess that the A’s came in at maybe $10-12M per year. 10% of that ain’t chicken feed.
Suresure, and though while it’s likely chicken feed in comparison to Lew’s other revenue streams, the A’s are his day job — I’d guess that he’s been feeling for quite some time like the work:reward ratio for his efforts on the A’s is wayyyyyy too high.
He almost certainly gets a salary too, as most managing partners do. That’s probably at least a half million a year. Add another $1M year in the “profit share” per my speculation above, and I suspect that’s more than he gets in salary/profit share from his other enterprises. He’s getting compensated plenty well for the work he puts in.
And let’s not forget the way his asset is appreciating.
NSFW, but hilarious.