So now I live outside of Denver, which has been developing its own (above-ground) mass transit system (RTD) over the last several years. The recent spike in gasoline prices has increased ridership on both the RTD light-rail trains and the RTD buses. Finally, mass transit gets to shine, right? Isn’t this the ideal situation for mass transit?

Uh, well, no. RTD may have to cut services because it can’t handle the increased traffic along with the rise in its own fuel prices (emphasis mine):

RTD buses and trains are attracting new riders in record numbers as fuel costs and congestion drive more commuters to abandon their cars.

In fact, ridership is up so much that the agency is having difficulty keeping up with the costs of moving all those new customers.

RTD had an 11 percent increase in ridership last year and, through the first quarter of this year, is up another 8 percent.

But the transit agency is falling victim to its own success as it spends more for fuel while contending with flat sales tax revenue that’s combined to create a potential $24 million shortfall that could force service cuts.

As the agency adds buses to its most crowded routes, it is paying 55 percent more than it did a year ago to fill them with diesel fuel.

Worse, RTD is far off budget in revenue collections. Even with the unexpected increase in riders, farebox revenue is 3.3 percent lower than anticipated in spite of a general fare increase that took effect in January. . . .

And sales taxes, the backbone of RTD’s budget, are nearly 6 percent below budget through March.

I’m a fan — at least, in theory and in terms of my own use — of mass transit, but here’s my question: is there a mass transit system in the US today that is actually self-sufficient? That is, it pays for itself strictly (or even just mostly) by fares and other revenues, not by subsidies from local, state, or federal taxes? ..bruce w..

A Google search on the caption yields nearly half a million hits. ..bruce w..

For the past several months all eyes have been focused on the ongoing mess that is the remains of the Democratic primary. The untold and emerging story is the impending beating that the Republicans are likely to take in November. In interest of full disclosure I consider myself a conservative and tend to vote Republican more than Democrat.

The reasons for this upcoming Republican rout are several, but first a few words of wisdom from the Politico - GOP leaders warn of election disaster:

Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money. And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

A good measure of this is the fact that Newt Gingrich loves to tell people that “If you don’t listen to me you are doomed!”. I think Gingrich did some great work when he was speaker of the house, at least at the beginning. But now he is just another media shill, who is eager to generate interest in his books and selling them.

Also from the Politico - GOP loss could threaten leadership:

The dark clouds hovering over House Republicans hold one silver lining for Minority Leader John A. Boehner, GOP Whip Roy Blunt and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole: Expectations for November are now set so low that a loss of fewer than 10 seats could be seen as a sort of victory.

But if Republican losses break into the double digits, the three leaders could find it hard to hold on to their jobs, and rank and file members could throw their support behind a new generation of members — reformers who say their party should be making dramatic changes to prove to voters that it has learned the lessons that cost it the majority in 2006.

These newer members lack the votes now to overcome the wishes of more entrenched members of the Republican caucus. But a GOP bloodbath in November could change everything.

So let me help out the good folks at the Politico who seems to ricochet around near the heart of the matter but can’t seem to hit the target. Right now the Republicans are headed for a lot of races that are going to go to the Democrats. Lets looks at the reasons:

Republicans have enraged the conservative base - Plain and simple, over time the officials of the Republican party became self-indulgant and self-abosrbed. They wallowed in the privilege of power and became the party of big government, massive spending and questionable ethics. While it seems that modern Democrats giggle and wink at such behavior, the conservative core of the Republican party is unwilling to abandon standards so easily.

The voters (in general) are not done punishing the Republicans - The American people took congress away from the Republicans in 2006. In part this was because the conservatives declared that “enough is enough” and in part it was a broader message that President Bush was not popular. Truth be told that very few districts and states can elect a Republican member of congress without support from conservatives. Given who is leading the 2008 ticket, it is tough for any Republican congressional candidate to make the case that there is any interest in conservative goals and principles. Conservatives are still working through the betrayal of such duds as Dubai Ports, FEMA director Mike Brown and hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers and quite a few others. The Republicans have yet to get a clue and understand why they are being punished, so the beatings shall continue.

The Republican presidential candidate is not running as a Republican - No one thinks McCain is a conservative, nor should they. The core of the conservative movement (with apologies to Michael Savage) are summed up as: Borders, Language and Culture. McCain falls short on all counts. Distain for this career politician with no appreciation of conservative goals is going to lead to the core of the Republican party staying home or voting against the “R” ticket in November.

All told, we are likely to see a less conservative congress in the fall. There is a real potential to have a liberal President with both houses of congress Democrat.

I remained appalled at how poorly this program is administered. After I fixed all the problems and requested a review, Google insisted that my site still had ‘badware’, claiming to have done a scan of my website that very day. This continued for a week (with daily checks on my part — nope, still no badware — daily requests for review, and daily ‘Badware found’ designations from Google) until suddenly the ‘badware’ designation vanished yesterday (May 1st). I credit that largely to having posted a message in the Google Webmaster Groups forum the day before (Apr 30th), though no reply was made directly to that posting or to me via e-mail.

Given the disproportionate impact that Google can have on a website’s traffic — thus for sites with ads, the site’s income — and the difficulties that most people appear to encounter in getting Google to lift that badware designation even after fixing the problem (browse through these search results), I’m surprised that Google’s legal department hasn’t urged more caution and diligence on how this ‘Badware’ initiative is administered.  ..bruce w..

I’ve had almost this exact conversation with Sandra.  ..bruce w..

It’s May Day, nearly halfway through spring, almost halfway to summer. As I type this, snow is falling outside and has been for an hour or so; it’s actually sticking on the ground (we have at least 1/2″ already). And it’s supposed to fall through the day and into the evening. The current temperature (it’s about 9:15 in the morning) is just under 32 degrees F.

All this, of course, can be passed off as a late-spring fluke; anecdotes do not equal data (something the global warming advocacy media should get through their heads). What is significant is that it has been so cool this spring that none of our trees, bushes, or shrubs have started leafing out or blossoming yet (though we do have some buds starting up on the trees). This is in stark contrast to last year, when we had much greater snowfall (more photos here), yet everything greened up and blossomed on time.

I thought I might be imagining all this, until I read this passage from an article in the Denver Post about the anticipated runoff from the above-average snowfall the Rockies have received this year :

Temperature and precipitation carry the most impact in spring, when the two work to either steadily or suddenly lessen snowpack levels in the Colorado mountains. For the past four months, Colorado’s temperatures have been uncommonly cold, setting 15-year records for chilliness. That makes weather researcher Klaus Wolter think May could be warm and dry, a common trait of this winter’s surprisingly snowy La Niña. (emphasis mine)

Well, it’s May 1st, and I can only see as far as the end of our driveway, due to the snow falling. I’m going to go build a fire (we used up our usual 2 cords of firewood weeks ago, and I’ve been supplementing it by buying bundles at the local supermarket), and then finish reading this interview with Don Easterbrook [PDF] posted over at ICECAP (hat tip to Jerry Pournelle, though ICECAP is on my daily reading list anyway — as is Climate Feedback, btw).

Did I mention that it was 80 degrees yesterday? Must be all those sunspots.

I blame Bush. ..bruce w..

Hat tip to Ann Althouse. ..bruce w..

Back on March 5th of 2008 and February 10th, I pointed out that we were still missing sunspots. In fact in the weeks since then we have seen a few small sunspots appear, some that were judged to be part of the new cycle, and some part of the old cycle. This was quickly argued over, and it seems the general consensus is that everyone is waiting for the new cycle to get going.

As of today, there are zero sunspots on the face of our local star. This has been an unusual quiet period that may have broad implications for our environment and enjoyment of our planet. While most of the world is going ga-ga over “Earth Week” and trying to out green each other, the threat of a period of decreased solar radiation is becoming more real.

For everyone waiting for things to get really hot (Global Warming after all) the danger that it might get quite a bit colder instead keeps increasing slowly but steadily. From NOAA: Can an increase or decrease in sunspot activity affect the Earth’s climate?

Times of maximum sunspot activity are associated with a very slight increase in the energy output from the sun. Ultraviolet radiation increases dramatically during high sunspot activity, which can have a large effect on the Earth’s atmosphere. From the mid 1600s to early 1700s, a period of very low sunspot activity (known as the Maunder Minimum) coincided with a number of long winters and severe cold temperatures in Western Europe, called the Little Ice Age. It is not known whether the two phenomena are linked or if it was just coincidence. The reason it is hard to relate maximum and minimum solar activity (sunspots) to the Earth’s climate, is due to the complexity of the Earth’s climate itself.

It is now May of 2008, and the new sunspot cycle was to begin in late 2006 to mid 2007. Clearly the sun is taking a breather, and we should devote some fraction of study into what implications that might have to our climate.

Back in March of 2006 (that’s right - 2 years ago) the know-it-alls had this prediction that was published in the New Scientist:

Bumper sunspot crop forecast for next solar cycle

The next 11-year sunspot cycle will be late but strong according to a new computer prediction. The model used was virtually spot on when applied retrospectively to “forecast” the last eight solar cycles.

“We predict the next cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the last cycle,” says the model’s creator, Mausumi Dikpati, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, US.

[Later in the article]

The new results contradict those of a model published in 2005 that found the next cycle could be the weakest in 100 years. Leif Svalgaard, a member of the team behind that model, says the key difference boils down to one simple thing: “How long does the Sun remember its magnetic field?”

Based on the last 12 cycles, “large cycles usually start early”, Hathaway told New Scientist. He expects the cycle to begin in late 2006 or early 2007: “We’re anxiously awaiting the appearance of those first spots in the new cycle.”

What can we learn from this? Firstly that our science on this subject and thousands of others is far from complete. That means you must take predictions like the one cited above, and rises in global temperature due to greenhouse gases with a grain of salt.

The last 20 years have seen a rise in predictions based off of models. As computing power has increased more and more science people have stopped doing real science and started doing mathematical “models” in an attempt to short cut to an answer. This can sometimes work with fairly simple systems. Where it falls to pieces are in large scale dynamic systems with millions of billions of variables, most of which have not been identified. As a result we end up with pseudo-scientists applying more or less linear predictions to dynamic systems. This is always a good plan for getting it wrong.

• The 25 Least Inspiring Military Operation Names
• 5 Horrifying Food Additives You’ve Probably Eaten Today
• The 5 Most Ill-Conceived Action Figures
• and one of my all-time favorites: The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World

Most of these are at least amusing (if occasionally profane — ok, frequently profane), and some are actually educational and/or informative.

A few, however, are brilliant, and one of the latest lists — “8 (Pointless) Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow” by Henry A. Lee — qualifies as such. His insight is not just in the few cliches that we might immediately think of but in the consistent trends in comic book movie franchises that extend to 3, 4, or even 5 movies. I don’t want to give away much here — he deserves the traffic, and his revelations unfold in a measured way — but stop and think: in how many comic books movies have you seen the pattern of “the Brain, the Bod, and the Bumbler” among the villains? (And that’s not even one of his major laws, merely a side observation. My own observation is that it also appears among the heroes: think “Hellboy” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”.)

More than anything, his article explains why a certain numbing sameness tends to set in with comic book movie franchises: they all tend to follow the same patterns through the first, second, and third films. All Hollywood producers, directors, and screenwriters who work on comic book films should read this piece — but I’m not holding my breath. ..bruce w..

Last Monday (4/21), I brought up the SiteMeter statistics page for this blog and noted in passing that the traffic seemed a bit light that morning. I chalked it up to the usual variations in site flow and didn’t think much of it.

But then I happened to click on one of the incoming Google searches (as I often do) just to see what other sites that search brings up and where my blog ranks in the results. I was startled — and dismayed — to see something that looked like this:

I was rather dumbfounded, to say the least. I clicked on the ‘This site may harm your computer’ link and found myself at Google Webmaster, having their “StopBadware” initiative explained to me. Since this blog (along with all my others) is hosted on a dedicated remote server, I fired off an e-mail to the support staff, as well as to my co-blogger Bruce Henderson. In the meantime, I brought up CuteFTP and started searching through the blog’s files.

I quickly encountered some files that weren’t part of the WordPress installation — they had been recently created, and most of them started with the prefix “fx_” (as in “fx_wp-cron.php”). Henderson found them as well; he also found reports that this problem was related to a known WordPress exploit. I had not yet upgraded the blog to WP 2.5, since I’m always a bit leery of new major releases, so I got caught in the exploit as well.

I then proceeded to spend a full day cleaning up the mess. I backed up the blog’s contents as an XML file (to avoid copying out any PHP files), relocated the image files, then deleted the entire WordPress installation, including the database, leaving little more than an bare-bones index.html (’PLEASE STAND BY…”) file. I then did a clean installation of WordPress 2.5 and upgraded it with the security-related portions of WordPress 2.5.1. I then restored the blog’s content by importing the XML file (broken up into three smaller chunks, since WordPress will only import XML files < 2MB). I restored the image files and requested a new review of the website by Google.

Google told me that the site still had “badware” — but the section that was supposed to inform me where the badware was, was completely blank. Aargh. I requested a new review and noted in the comments that Google was telling me there was a problem with my website without giving me any information about what it was. This process continued for several days.

Today, I checked Google again and saw that this blog was still listed as ‘harmful’ — but now it pointed me specifically to the (current) third page of the blog. A cursory review of that page didn’t uncover anything. I then did some more online research and found a post talking about iFrame injections. I did a ‘view source’ on the 3rd page of this blog, searched for ‘iFrame’ — and bingo! There it was, embedded in my post on HP Lovecraft. I deleted it from that post, but to be sure, I exported the entire blog out to XML again, opened that file in UltraEdit, and did a search on ‘iFrame’. I found two legit uses of iFrame (some of Henderson’s Google maps during last fall’s San Diego fires), but found another iFrame exploit in an old post on ‘Time Traveller Day’. I deleted that one, then did a resubmit to Google.

Through all this, my site traffic had declined sharply, down to less than a third of what it had been averaging each day:

There was a brief spike on the 25th-26th, but that mostly Digg traffic on the ‘rainbow’ photo that Henderson posted.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Google ‘Stop Badware’ initiative. On the one hand, it sure brought the problem to my attention in a hurry — but only because I happened to backtrack on a Google search that landed at my site. (Google claims to notify via a variety of e-mail addresses, but I enabled several of those for this blog, with forwarding, back on the 21st and have yet to receive a single e-mail since then, despite several ‘Request review’ requests.) What’s more, Google has never provided any information about what the alleged ‘badware’ is that it found on my blog, and it is has been for the most part vague and unhelpful in letting me know where the alleged badware is.

In the meantime, for a full week now anyone using Google who hits my site sees that “This site may harm your computer” phrase. I can only cross my fingers and hope that Google in Its Inscrutable Wisdom decides that my site is OK now. Henderson and I have spent nearly two years building the blog’s traffic to its current level, only to see that drop by 60% in a single day and mostly stay there for the past week. We’re not alone in this mess; a Google search on “Google site may harm computer” yields 649,000 hits.

Have you checked what Google is saying about your blog? ..bruce w..