Fun Run

This weekend was the First Annual AMCMS Fun Run.  I must admit it was fun.  A two mile run at 8:00 am on Saturday.  I’ve been running, most days, for a month so that I wouldn’t embarass myself at the event.  I wasn’t trying to break any records just wanted to be able to jog at a decent pace for the entire race.   And that is about what I did.  I certainly didn’t set any time records but I did ok.  My time was somewhere between 15:35 and 15:45.  So I was pleased. 

The best part of the entire run was seeing the look on some of my students face as I would pass them.  Many would speed up and pass me back up only to be passed again later.  One kid made me proud though, I’ll call him Bill and he is on the cross country team  (remember this is 7th grade so he has only been running cross country for a couple of months).    A mile and a half into the race I came up on this young man and a fellow cross county runner.  Bill turns and sees me coming.  He tells his friend lets go.  His friend says no.  Bill’s response is, “I can’t let Mr. Alexander beat me!”  

“Who cares.” the friend responds. 

“Come on I can’t”  With that Bill leaves his friend behind and picks up the pace.  After a hundred yards we are even.   By this time though Bill is getting tired.  We pass a water station and Bill seems to be getting demoralized.  I tell him it is ok.  His response was great. 

“Your not going to beat me Mr. Alexander!” 

“Good.”

At this point though I begin to pull away.  There is probably only a quarter of a mile left, but Bill didn’t give up and with a hundred yards left he kicks in and beats me.  He did a great job and didn’t let his fat history teacher beat him.  Way to go Bill!  But watch out next year.

Oil from the Middle East

So how much oil do we actually use from the Middle East?  Is it 50% of our oil? No, Okay it must be at least 40%?  No, 30%?  No, 20%?  No, a little less than 13%. 

“Of the 7 billion barrels of oil (BBO) we currently use each year, only 0.9 come from the Persian Gulf. We produce about 3 billion barrels domestically; our largest foreign suppliers are Canada (0.6 BBO) and Mexico (0.6 BBO); Venezuela and more than a dozen smaller suppliers take care of the rest. Getting to the point where the U.S. need not import any oil from the Middle East would not be very hard.”

from Getting over Oil

Peter Huber and Mark Mills  (Author’s of The Bottomless Well)
Commentary, September 2005                               

Order

Electricity is expensive as far as energy is concerned.  But electricity is highly ordered. 

“The order in energy is the ONLY part that has any value.  The sun provides us with 100 watts of light for free, through a couple of square feet of skylight, at noon on a moderately sunny day.  Yet we pay good money for a 100 watt bulb and the elecrons to light it.  A photon is a photon, but better-ordered photons packed into less space, delivered on demand, are worth far more than the diffuse, disordered, episodically available alternative, however “renewable” the sunlight may be.”

Chapter 1 of The Bottomless Well

Where do all the Quads go?

1 quad = 10¹⁵ Btu = 2.931 x 10¹¹ kilowatthours

Quads=thermal units of raw heat.

The U.S. uses 100 quads of energy a year.  Approximately 40% goes to electricity, 30% transportation, 30% heat.  Here is a great graph from The Bottomless Well. 

Click here Energy Usage.

I am an Environmentalist!

…As late as 1910, some 27 percent of all U.S. farmland was still devoted to feeding horses used for transportation.  Feeding that organic transportation system required twice as much land as we use today for all our roads and highways, oil pipelines, refineries, and wells. 

….A Quad’s worth of wood is a huge forest– beautiful to behold, but bulky and heavy.  Pound for pound, coal stores about twice as much heat.  Oil beats coal by about twice as much again.  And a gram of U-235 is worth about four tons of coal.  The proponents of solar, wind, biomass are pushing against a powerful hisorical trend.  Left to its own devices, the market has not pursued thin, low-energy-density fuels, however cheap– it has paid steep premiums for fuels that pack more energy into less weight and space.

All of this is just on 1 page of The Bottomless Well. 

We must protect our earth and make energy more available to more people at cheaper prices!  If not oil, then what?  NUCLEAR!  unless of course it is Iran because they just want to kill people because we don’t believe in Allah.  We must DEFEAT the Islamo-fascist! But I digress…

More to come.

Death

Do other people wonder, “What if this person didn’t die?”  Or “What would this person think of this situation.  I wish they were alive to comment.”  I know I am not the only one.  I’m not talking about friends and loved ones as much as public individuals.  A short list of people I have had this thought about over the years.  C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, St. Paul to name a few.  Then their are others who I say, “I hope they don’t die soon, they have more to teach me.”  This list would include, Thomas Sowell and David McCullough.

Taxes

I still plan on writing about The Bottomless Well but while that is on hold I better keep trying. 

Neal Boortz posted some interesting facts about income and the income tax on his website.  We always here about how the gap between the rich and the poor is ever-widening.  We also here how the rich don’t pay their “fair share”.  All of it is a bunch of dog squeeze (to borrow a common phrase from boortz). 

Of course during the Clinton Years the top 1% of wage earners went from earning 13.8% of the nations income to 21%.  Well by 2004 that has dropped to 19%.  Not that I care if the rich are making a ton of money or not.  But I thought it was greedy Republicans who do everything to help their rich country club buddies fatten their wallets on the backs of the “working” poor.  Right!

So the rich must, at least, be paying less in taxes now, right?    Eh-ah!  The amount of money they pay in taxes is up too.  Don’t forget that the amount of tax revenue the government is bringing in each year is more than the year before.  Even with the tax cuts.