Believe in the Greatest City that Reads in America

Baltimore 2010 Census Results by Race

2011-02-10T23:34:00.007-05:00

The 2010 Census results for Maryland are out, time to start the comparisons!

(data sources: QT-P5 data series for the 2000 census; P1-Race data series for 2010 census, note that if you follow the link you have to sort the table for Maryland counties)

Baltimore City lost population between 2000 and 2010. Not unexpected, although slightly worse than optimists (notably in city hall) expected. Overall Baltimore City is now home to 620,961 people, down 4.6% from 2000.

When that's broken down by race, here's how the changes from 2000 to 2010 look:

Now, replace an "i" with an "oun" and look what happens:
Interesting stuff. Baltimore County grew by 6.7% from a larger base, so the combined total population for Baltimore City + County increased. Interestingly, the proportion of census respondents listing their race as "White only" decreased in both Baltimore City and County! In fact, combining the two areas shows that "White only" has dropped from being a slim majority of respondents (54.6%) to a plurality (49.4%).

Looks like there are a lot of other interesting trends too. The more than doubling of "Some Other Race Only" as a response, the dramatic increase in respondents stating "Asian Only" in Baltimore County, and (of course) the huge increase in those claiming more than one racial heritage. Plenty more interesting data mining ahead.

In case you want to check out the data in tabular form:

Baltimore City Census Results

Race	2000	2010	Change
White alone	205,982	183,830	-10.8%
Black alone	418,951	395,781	-5.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	2,097	2,270	8.2%
Asian alone	9,985	14,548	45.7%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	222	274	23.4%
Some other race alone	4,363	11,303	159.1%
Two or more races	9,554	12,955	35.6%
Total:	651,154	620,961	-4.6%


Race	2000	2010
White alone	31.6%	29.6%
Black alone	64.3%	63.7%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	0.3%	0.4%
Asian alone	1.5%	2.3%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	0.0%	0.0%
Some other race alone	0.7%	1.8%
Two or more races	1.5%	2.1%


Baltimore County Census Results

Race	2000	2010	Change
White alone	561,132	520,185	-7.3%
Black alone	151,600	209,738	38.3%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	4,616	2,625	-43.1%
Asian alone	26,912	40,077	48.9%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	242	319	31.8%
Some other race alone	4,685	12,801	173.2%
Two or more races	5,105	19,284	277.7%
Total:	754,292	805,029	6.7%


Race	2000	2010
White alone	74.4%	64.6%
Black alone	20.1%	26.1%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	0.6%	0.3%
Asian alone	3.6%	5.0%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	0.0%	0.0%
Some other race alone	0.6%	1.6%
Two or more races	0.7%	2.4%


Baltimore City + County Totals

Race	2000	2010	Change
White alone	767,114	704,015	-8.2%
Black alone	570,551	605,519	6.1%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	6,713	4,895	-27.1%
Asian alone	36,897	54,625	48.0%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	464	593	27.8%
Some other race alone	9,048	24,104	166.4%
Two or more races	14,659	32,239	119.9%
Total:	1,405,446	1,425,990	1.5%


Race	2000	2010
White alone	54.6%	49.4%
Black alone	40.6%	42.5%
American Indian or Alaska Native alone	0.5%	0.3%
Asian alone	2.6%	3.8%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander alone	0.0%	0.0%
Some other race alone	0.6%	1.7%
Two or more races	1.0%	2.3%

I'm Still a Nerd

2011-01-21T17:32:00.004-05:00

Long ago, when I was new to blogging, I commented that I was a huge nerd because I decided to plot my car mileage vs time. I never stopped being that nerd, now I just have a much larger sample size.

My car mileage is still fairly linear, but you can see that there has been a slight change in the slope over the last couple years. (You can also see that I got really bad about getting my car in for regularly scheduled oil changes in the late 2008, early 2009 timeframe, but let's not focus on that.)

Looking back at the data, I can see that between January 2005 and January 2008 I drove approximately 44,000 miles. Admittedly, I did drive a huge road-trip one Christmas (nearly 4,000 miles in less than two weeks), but that's still averaging just under 15,000 miles per year. Over the more recent 3-year period (January 2008 to January 2011), I drove only ~35,000 miles. The funny thing is, I've actually increased my commute distance by a couple miles per day since June 2008. How am I driving less?

I think the big change is that in June 2008 I moved close a train station that allowed me to occasionally take commuter rail to work instead of drive. Nowadays I can also take the light rail or bike to the train station. I have also, over the last few years, become a big fan of new urbanism, walkable neighborhoods, and public transit (I've always been a fan of biking places if possible). Also, more recently, I've moved in with my girlfriend and now make her drive me places sometimes because car pooling is more efficient or I'm planning to drink alcohol (or I'm feeling lazy and talk her into driving). Also, this last fall I had a problem with a bent wheel that I procrastinated on fixing because I didn't want to pay all the money since I knew I needed tires anyway.

All of this combined means that I drove around 11,300 miles in calendar year 2010. That's about 2,400 less than I drove the first 12 months I owned my car!

Finally, in what is definitely a miracle of Honda engineering, my car continues to get around 30-32 mpg on average. So by those numbers, I'm saving myself 75 gallons a year which was probably worth between $150 and $225!

Finally, in a particularly ironic turn of events, in my 2007 blog post on my driving I was pissed off to learn how much of my gasoline costs went to taxes. Now, in 2011, I've educated myself a lot more about transportation funding/policy and I've seen some income growth while inflation has been nearly non-existent. As a result, I'm now a huge fan of raising taxes on gasoline in Maryland (since the gasoline tax is not indexed to inflation and has not been increased since 1992), especially if its used to fund effective public transportation, bicycle transit improvements, or improve run-off control from existing highways.

---

By the way, the latter part of the last decade was actually a period of time in which the US was becoming less car dependent. Some group called The Center for Clean Air Policy released a study that included a chart showing that from 1960 into the mid-90's GDP growth and growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) tracked each other almost exactly. But around 1995, the two started to diverge, with GDP growth outpacing the growth in VMT. Very, very encouraging news! Good blog post with commentary from the New York Times.

Baltimore Murder Charts - Year End 2010 Edition

2011-01-11T21:16:00.008-05:00

I haven't been the best at updating my blog recently, but one of the few original things I post regularly are charts covering Baltimore murders. My sources remain Murder Ink from the City Paper and the Baltimore Crime blog.

Murder trends for 2010 were not nearly as exciting as 2009. Murders declined again, but not by a large number. Most of 2010 looked like 2009, the main exception being that there were far fewer deaths classified as homicides due to prior year murders. As I've been doing, any homicides classified due to an act in a prior year are counted in that prior year (by going back and editing data). So using this methodology I get slightly different numbers than the official tally, but I think it's better for tracking trends.

In 2009 there were officially 238 murders in Baltimore, but 14 of them were due to acts of violence from prior years, so I count that as 224 murders. In 2010 there were officially 223 murders in Baltimore, but 4 of them were due to acts of violence in prior years (none of them from 2009 though, so no upward modification). So while the official numbers drop from 238 to 223 (a 6.3% decrease), my count drops from 224 to 219 (a 2.2% decrease).

Still, we've come a long way since 2007. The 2010 total is down 20% from 2007. The improvements are pretty obvious when you look at the homicides by month and the cumulative plot of homicides for the last four years.

In fact, 2007 was such a higher total than 2008-10, it's actually better to remove it to compare the more recent years.

So what do we have? Looks mostly like stability. Sure, from 2008 to 2010 there were about 14 fewer homicides in Baltimore, a total of a 6% decrease. Not terribly impressive, even if murders continue decreasing at this rate we'll have to wait until 2017 to see murders become something that happens only every other day. That's not a terribly cheerful prediction. Hopefully the continued focus on reducing illegal guns in the city will continue to lower shootings and homicide rate will drop faster.

It needs to. Baltimore's per capita murder rate remains one of the worst in the country. At 35 per 100,000 (my math based on 223 official murders and U.S. Census estimated population for 2009). However, if you are African-American in Baltimore the per-capita murder rate is unbelievable. According to Anna Ditkoff of Murder Ink, 90.6% of 2010's murder victims were African-American. Based on Baltimore's demographics, this indicates that African-Americans in Baltimore face a 50 per 100,000 per capita murder rate while residents of other races experience a 9 per 100,000 per capita murder rate. To put that in perspective, residents who are not African-American are safer in Baltimore than the average Albuquerque resident (source: Wikipedia article on crime in US cities).

Finally, my favorite chart that I create for tracking murder trends:

Vertical axis magnified:

Links to previous year's homicide summaries:
2009 Year End Summary
2008 Year End Summary

Christmas Shopping Strategy

2010-12-17T11:20:00.004-05:00

When making Christmas shopping plans, it's best to start by systematizing your thinking.

New Neighborhood, Same Hobby

2010-11-13T15:35:00.002-05:00

So I've moved to yet another Baltimore neighborhood, but like many urban neighborhoods I get frustrated by the litter I see when I walk around. Took a couple hours this afternoon and walked up and down the street picking up litter.

Results:

Given that my new neighborhood is a lot nicer than my old one it took a lot longer to pick up this much garbage. I did learn a few things about my neighborhood's litter patterns. Looks like a lot of the litter is due to single serving or individually wrapped junk food and discarded student bus passes. As you move farther from the middle/high school, the litter transitions to discarded take-out remnants and convenience store garbage. Litter peaked near the intersection with the main thoroughfare, likely because this is where vehicular douchebags have the most time to litter.

Overall, a much more pleasant experience than picking up garbage in my old neighborhood, where the overgrown city-owned property could fill up a garbage bag in 10 yards of deep cleaning. The only real problem I'm going to have is when my girlfriend gets home and discovered that our garbage can is completely full and we can't empty our own kitchen garbage can until Wednesday morning...

I actually believe that the biggest problem is that this is a long, well-travelled block with no public garbage receptacles. I'll have to see if I can call the city and have one put up. I think that the majority of litter is a crime of inopportunity - a combination of lots of foot traffic, single-serve junk food, and no garbage cans.

Admittedly, this is a pretty weak blog post, but after months of inactivity it's time to get back to writing about things that seem interesting.

Good News for Passenger Rail

2010-04-15T22:21:00.006-05:00

I saw some really good news today, Amtrak believes that they're in for their busiest year ever in FY10! (previous record was set in FY08). What's interesting was that even in the depths of the worst recession in ages, it turns out that Amtrak scored it's 2nd-best ridership year in FY09 (Amtrak reports all of it's stats by government financial year, so FY09 was October 2008 to September 2009, so it really encompassed the financial crisis).

Last September I grabbed some data on Amtrak ridership in Maryland. Turns out that Amtrak still had old state fact sheets hosted on their website, just no links (found this out using Google), so I was able to pull up data all the way back to FY03. I've just added in the data for FY09 and thought I'd publish the data here (keep in mind that this is ridership data; where ridership = boardings + alightings, so if you buy a round-trip ticket you get counted twice):

Baltimore and BWI Rail Station dominate Maryland Station usage, but there is a sizable contingent from New Carrolton and a non-negligible usage at Aberdeen. Overall, the ridership grew by 6.2% at Maryland stations, but the individual station usage is more noisy. Ranging from Rockville's 70.58% increase to New Carrollton's -21.7%. I'd guess that changes in service patterns probably explain a lot of changes in New Carrollton, but I don't follow rail travel closely enough to know. It is really interesting that the two least used stations (Cumberland and Rockville) saw ~70% increases and both saw increased usage in FY09 vs FY08.

Another thing that you have to consider is that many, many people who technically live in Maryland use Union Station as their Amtrak station (it is the 2nd most used Amtrak station in the country). So I also took a look at how all the Maryland stations stacked up against Union Station:

Union Station saw a drop from FY08 to FY09, but certainly not as much as Maryland. I imagine this has something to do with the fact that Marylanders could drive or car pool instead of taking the train but people in DC don't own cars. Or maybe it reflects all the bank executives that had to take the train to DC for bail-outs.

Even though travel to-from Union Station dwarfs travel to-from Maryland stations, there just aren't many states that use Amtrak as much as Maryland. Nearby stations in the top 25:

#2 - Union Station (4,278,930)

#8 - Baltimore (932,827)

#11 - Wilmington, DE (664,429)

#16 - BWI Rail Station (617,349)

Interestingly enough, if you increase the geographical area to include nearby parts of Pennsylvania, you'd pick up the #3, #20, and #22 rail stations (Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Lancaster respectively). For reasons I can not fathom, Pittsburgh gets fewer passengers than New Carrollton.

Overall, as a fan of train travel, I think a healthy passenger rail system would be a great thing for this country to develop (and I believe we're taking steps in that direction) so increased ridership is great news. Perhaps someday Amtrak will even make money outside of the Northeast Corridor!

Anyway, there's a ton of interesting info available from the Amtrak Information and Facts website. Basically you can look up total ridership statistics from any Amtrak station in the country and marvel at the fact that more people use the Aberdeen Amtrak station in FY09 than use Amtrak at all in Kansas, Utah, or West Virginia. Or learn that less than 5,600 people used the single Amtrak station in Idaho.

In case you're a big nerd like me, here's the raw data on Maryland total ridership:

	Aberdeen	Baltimore	BWI	Cumberland	New Carrollton	Rockville
FY03	40,658	855,675	541,438	6,831	229,101	1,961
FY04	43,755	918,624	590,610	6,919	216,579	2,654
FY05	48,047	980,122	578,554	7,839	218,184	2,554
FY06	37,414	910,523	561,505	9,100	206,830	2,984
FY07	38,702	977,379	587,845	9,182	204,008	2,905
FY08	45,052	1,020,304	644,640	11,257	203,449	3,178
FY09	44,495	923,827	617,349	11,484	179,344	3,345

Increase, FY03 to FY08	10.81%	19.24%	19.06%	64.79%	-11.20%	62.06%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	9.44%	7.96%	14.02%	68.12%	-21.72%	70.58%


	MD Total	DC
FY03	1,675,664	3,570,920
FY04	1,779,141	3,744,710
FY05	1,835,300	3,734,287
FY06	1,728,356	3,859,117
FY07	1,820,021	4,108,569
FY08	1,927,880	4,489,955
FY09	1,779,844	4,278,930

Increase, FY03 to FY08	15.05%	25.74%
Increase, FY03 to FY09	6.22%	19.83%

Good Ideas for Cycling Laws

2010-01-22T17:05:00.003-05:00

The Greater Greater Washington blog is a great resource for people interested in increasing the availability and safety of alternate forms of transportation. Today they have a really good post on 12 Ways Our Region Could Reform Bicycling Laws. If you're even a casual cyclist in Maryland, you should read this article. I know that since I've been reading that blog I've learned that not only are the roads less safe for cyclists than I thought, but that generally cyclists don't have much of a legal leg to stand on in Maryland if they do get injured (or even killed!) by a car.

Baltimore 2009 Homicides - Everyone CALM DOWN

2010-01-10T18:50:00.013-05:00

So the opinion in this town seems to be that Baltimore had 238 homicides in 2009 compared to an official 234 in 2008. Nationally homicides decreased in 2009. DC was way down this year. Quick, everyone panic!!

Bulls&%*.

In 2009 we had 14 prior year homicides. That means that 224 people died of injuries sustained in violent incidents in the city of Baltimore in 2009. 4 of those 14 prior year assaults occurred in 2008. Baltimore logged around 140 fewer non-fatal shootings in 2009 than 2008. As much as critics and "The Wire" fans would hate to admit, the homicide rate is lower and this city is safer than it has been in a generation.

The Baltimore Sun ran a very good series of graphics on what homicides and shootings looked like in 2009. The Sun shows that in 2009 there were around 450 non-fatal shooting in the city. While you might be like "DAMN!", if you look at the graphic you'd realize that only 2 years ago there were 652 non-fatal shootings. That's an incredible drop over a period of only 2 years. This whole "fight against bad guys with guys" that Bealefield is always on about seems to be making a difference. Frankly, given the level of non-fatal shootings, I'm shocked we managed to make it up to 238 for the year.

Actually, that's where homicides due to prior year assaults comes in. As I stated in the intro, Baltimore racked up 14 CY2009 homicides from prior year assaults. That's a lot. Per my research of the Murder Ink archives, we had 5 prior year homicides in '07 and 6 in '08. 14 is a big deal and it skews the real measure of how deadly the city was last year. In 2007, when the city record an official 282 homicides, 5 were a result of prior year result, which is about 1.8% of homicides. In 2009, we have 238 official homicides and 14 prior year assaults, which is 5.9% of homicides.

What this calls out for, no, cries out for, is someone to track homicides based on the date of the assault! Thankfully, I am willing to do this. I've carefully researched Anna Ditkoff's Murder Ink and the BaltimoreCrime blog posts. I've spent time auditing my numbers. Lots of time. My girlfriend has been frustrated by the time I've spent on this. But I've got your answer.

Discounting prior-year assaults, there were 279 murders in 2007, 232 murders in 2008, and 224 murders in 2009 as of the first week of January, 2010.

"But," you might say, "I don't understand! You said there were 282 murders in 2007 with 5 as prior-year assaults, so why is your total 279?" The answer is that I'm keeping a master spreadsheet. So if someone died in 2009 due to an attack in 2007, I go back and add the murder to the date in 2007 when the victim was attacked.

This master spreadsheet allows me to track a number that I call "Trailing Twelve Months Homicides". This statistic does not appear to be tracked anywhere else, but I think it matters. Restarting the homicide count every January doesn't show you how you're really doing. If you start counting every January, by March you're comparing 33 murders to 30 and coming up with a 10% increase in homicides when really it was just a couple bad weekends. There aren't a lot of homicides, really, so the data is really noisy and needs to be considered over at least a 12-month time period. So I think that Trailing Twelve Month Murders really makes sense.

So, without further ado, here's the plot of Trailing Twelve Month Murders from January 1st 2008 to approximately the present:

(Click on the chart above if you want to a better view of it, Blogger doesn't do a real good job with graphics sometimes)

Anyway, look at that graph for a minute. It shows that two short years ago the Baltimore murder rate was around 275 for the past 12 months. Today it's sitting much closer to 225. Back in mid-2008 we dipped below 215 per 12-month period before jumping back up to around 230. Most of '09 held steady around 230 (the 30-day moving average never got close to 250 for all of 2009). During the fourth quarter of 2009 the murder rate started slowly sliding downward. By the end of the year Baltimore was doing better than we had since 2008.

Why didn't you know this already? Because around Thanksgiving the ME's office started owning up to all the people that died this year who should be classified as homicides but were actually assaulted in a previous year. Ok, maybe it wasn't the ME's office. I actually have no idea who actually "owns up" to those statistics, but the point is that it hit us hard in December. Between Thanksgiving and the end of the year we added 8 prior-year assaults to the '09 homicide tally. So right as everyone started paying attention to the annual total, it jumped for an external reason. Prior-year homicides took December from a total of 19 homicides (about average for 2009) to 25 (a pretty bad month for 2008-09).

So the moral of this story is that Baltimore is on the right track. We're holding steady against last year (the best year for homicides in two decades) and even if we hold steady on new attacks, we're likely to drop the total. Non-fatal shootings are basically the feeder statistic for prior-year assault homicides and those have been declining, so I'd expect fewer of those next year.

Anyway, I may well dig up some more statistics about murders, but let me end this post with a prediction: I predict that 2010 will have no more than 215 homicides. When you add in the prior-year assaults, I'll take 220 as an upper bound for the official homicide tally in 2010.

Summary graphs for the year:

Finally, for the big nerds out there, here's the summary of homicides resulting from prior year assaults:

2007 - 5 (1991, 1997, 2x 1999, 2005)
2008 - 6 (1985, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2006, 2007)
2009 - 14 (1988, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 4x 2008)

Also, here's a link to my static XML murder charts.

How can we set Baltimore apart from other cities?

2009-12-30T16:13:00.006-05:00

Recently I've been thinking about quality of life in the city of Baltimore. Cynical people everywhere will assume that I am referring to how terrible it is, but I've actually been thinking about how it's been improving. I've been reading The Economist's special holiday double issue and they have a really depressing article on the city of Detroit and how it's basically disappearing back into the prairie from whence it came. It sounds terrible and depressing, but I can only imagine how depressing the city of Baltimore must have seemed circa 1994. I can only imagine because I didn't move here until 2000 and didn't really pay attention to the city until maybe 2005 or so. I've really only caught Baltimore on the upswing.

Baltimore is certainly not a world-renowned city, we are often overlooked for DC even in regional situations, but we've got a lot going for us. The Baltimore-Washington MSA is highly suburban and increasingly the suburbs are actually more expensive that the city (so there is actually reverse pressure on those who want a cheap house). Murders are down, even though 2009 will finish on par or slightly above 2008. Crime is down overall and although our mayor has been convicted of some crappy little crimes and is likely to be removed from office, I think we should see the bright side of this. Our mayor was convicted of SMALL crimes and will be removed from office. Cynics can say "well, that's all they were able to prove" - true, but it does send a bit of a message to all elected and appointed officials: "The mayor is going down over <$700 in gift cards, I'd better steer clear of gifts from developers this year." It's not much of a silver lining, but it shows that no one is above the law.

Anyway, on to improving quality of life. The Economist also had an article on America and why it's freaking awesome. Or something like that, because The Economist has a huge crush on America and the American way of life. The subtitle of the article was "The greatest strength of America is that people want to live." In the article they go on about how you can very much choose the life you want to live in the US. But it was this quote from the article that got me thinking:

If you like low taxes and the death penalty, try Texas. For good public schools and subsidised cycle paths, try Portland, Oregon. Even within states, the rules vary widely. Bath County, Kentucky is dry. Next-door Bourbon County, as the name implies, is not.

What is the quality of life factor that distinguishes Baltimore from other cities in the United States (much less the world)? There's what we're actually famous for (The Wire, eating crabs), what city government wishes we were famous for (the Inner Harbor, Harbor East, crime reduction, redevelopment successes), but what about the Baltimore way of life is really different?

For now, I'd say it's fairly typical urban, east-coast lifestyle without the cost. City school teachers can afford to access most of this city, afford to buy a reasonable home, etc (I know because I have a lot of friends who are or have been city school teachers - tough job, but reasonably well-paying for new graduates). But you can't effectively push that idea into the mainstream. People will instead point to the fact that there's no subway system like DC or New York. That crime is still too high. That the city government is corrupt.

We're a poor city, let's face it. We're making progress at green initiatives, but other cities are doing that too. The Circulator bus system is almost running (finally) and will provide great transit alternatives and the Red Line is looking like it might actually happen, but other, richer cities will always be ahead of us on transit. What we need is something that is not too expensive, does not rely on outsiders, and gives this city a sense of pride.

As you might have guessed, I've got an idea.

I think that Baltimore should start an amateur athletics league for the city. I would model it after Ireland's Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but maybe will a little less Irish nationalism. Basically the idea is that every little town in Ireland fields a team in Gaelic football and hurling (also Ladies' Gaelic football and Camogie). They play a regular season against other towns. What's great about this is that these are amateur athletes who live in the towns or counties that they're representing. What's crazy is just how successful this has been in Ireland - the number 1 and 2 sports by attendance are Gaelic football and hurling (per wikipedia)! The matches are covered in all the local papers and followed much the same way we follow college or professional sports in the US.

What if we founded something similar in Baltimore? This is a first cut idea, but what if we founded an amateur athletic league for adults with strict residency rules and played matches around the city? I'd set the boundaries as the city council districts because there are 14 of them and they are roughly in line with neighborhood boundaries. I'd say we start with popular, low-cost of entry sports that are popular with both genders and that would allow a lot of amateurs to try out. Here's what I'd start with:

Basketball - it's a no-brainer; most of the facilities needed already exist, a city-wide championship tournament would be pretty awesome
Soccer - low cost of entry, fairly popular, would get the yuppie's involved
Softball/Baseball - again, we already have most of the infrastructure available and it has a different traditional season from the other two

I'd say keep the rules simple:

Must be 18 or older (to sign the legal release)
Must be a Baltimore resident (BGE bill in your name at an address is good enough for the MVA then it's good enough for this league)
Can not be a current or former professional athlete
If you move to a new district, you can finish out the season on your old team or wait until next year to play
Volunteer coaches get a guaranteed term of 2 years and are selected by city council person (this would definitely encourage interest in local politics)
Open try-outs before each season (verify residency at try-outs)
Players provide their own practice equipment, but districts can raise money to buy practice equipment
City pays for referees and donates gym space for games (ideally we could get local colleges to donate gym space for championships, imagine the championship game held in Coppin State's new athletic center)
Conviction on any drug crime means you must forfeit two seasons of all sports
Lifetime ban for conviction of any handgun-related crime

If this works out, and I think that it might, you could expand to other sports with revenue generated from these sports (that's right, I think that this could have positive cash flow after a couple years). If you keep the cost inputs low (i.e. players pay for their practice equipment) and are able to get some sponsors for the championships and charge a dollar or two at the door, you could eventually afford to pay for more gym/field space and more referees for other sports. Eventually you could perhaps subsidize the cost of equipment for very costly (but popular) sports such as football or lacrosse. There's just no way you could ask players to front the cost of their football pads and expect east or west baltimore to be able to field safely-equipped teams.

Any extra revenue generated by these leagues should go towards the capital improvement budget of the Department of Parks and Recreation. The more popular that you make the amateur sports, the better the facilities around the city for children and adults to play sports.

I think you would also get a lot more of a city-wide sense of community. I bet the district 10 (Federal Hill) vs district 1 (Fells Point/Canton) soccer match-up would be a big draw. Probably the same for any east-side district versus west-side district in basketball. Better yet, the Fells Point/Canton team traveling to district 9 (solidly westside Baltimore) for a basketball game. Would the Hopkins undergrads be able to make the district 14 team or would they be unable to compete with home-grown talent?

Another thing that you could do with this is try to increase general health and athleticism. What if you added "Cross Country" to the sports and allowed each district to field a team of 100? Hold massive, city-wide 5k races every other week for a couple months leading up to the Baltimore Marathon?

Expansion plans:

Start with men and women's divisions of the three sports listed. Seasons would not overlap.
Do not need a junior division (we already have high school sports)
Add a "master's" division to popular sports
For very popular sports (such as basketball), consider expanding to a "junior varsity" team or even breaking districts into smaller geographic areas (I think the link to geography is very important)

Other thoughts

Don't add too many competing sports seasons - we want to make this popular enough that you actually get coverage in the Sun, not so fragmented that no one can pay attention
Have the men's and women's teams compete one right after the other. That was how we did it back in my high school and it helped to ensure a bigger crowd for the less popular team (often the women's team, but if the women's team is good and the men stink...)
Get some of the professional sports figures involved as coaches if possible
Get local bloggers and news outlets to cover at least the championships. You could probably get local TV broadcasters out to the try-outs for the first season as a novelty news story.
Make sure that basketball is the first season, every district will field a basketball team; not sure every district will be able to find a soccer team.
Play up cross-town rivalries, but provide adequate security

Sports to add

Cross Country - I really like the idea of getting very large teams together (it would pull a lot of people into the competition and you'd get a big multiplier effect as they told their friend about it)
Volleyball - could use the same equipment as basketball, but in a different season
Ultimate Frisbee - just because I love the sport and it uses the same infrastructure as soccer, bonus: self-refereed so you save a little money there
Golf - we have the infrastructure and it is fairly well spread out around the city; this would draw a different demographic as well
Track and field - takes a little more in terms of infrastructure (i.e. pole vault), but a lot of it exists at high schools and could be borrowed?
Duckpin bowling - we don't really have the infrastructure for this, but it's a Baltimore heritage thing - let's build some more alleys and really make it a city-wide passtime

Sports to avoid (at least initially)

Football - too expensive for players to provide practice equipment; mostly only played by men
Lacrosse - same as football, except for the gender thing
Cycling - equipment costs are out of reach for most Baltimore residents
Swimming - don't think we have the infrastructure (but I could be wrong?)
Wrestling - too many referees, too few fans of real wrestling
Hockey - not enough infrastructure, not popular here, expensive equipment
Weight lighting - I'd be leery of this sport given the temptation of steroids and the cost of trying to drug test competitors
Dodgeball, broomball, etc. - recreational leagues for these sports already exist and they are considered to be more about socializing and drinking than athletics; if this is to be a serious amateur sports league, steer clear of these sports

-----

Sports unite people and give everyone a great outlet for emotions. They give people a sense of pride in their community and can create community (I definitely saw this growing up in small town playing high school sports). Think about it, this is a pretty low-cost initiative that the city could start that could eventually result in a very real advantage to the city. Even if other cities eventually copied this model, I think that Baltimore, with it's long-time dedication to neighborhoods and local community could still have an advantage. Most importantly, I think it would succeed in the city better than the county, providing that extra incentive to bring people over the line and into the city's tax-base.

A Few Questions for the Graffiti Perpetrator

2009-12-13T22:44:00.010-05:00

Dear graffiti perpetrator*,

What is this graffiti all about? A statement of black power? A request to the Baltimore PD to end any racial profiling that you believe to be occurring?

Or did you leave out a comma? Did you intend this to say "NO STOPPING, BLACK PEOPLE" to indicate that this area was off-limits to parked vehicles and African-Americans?

Or is it something more obtuse and abstract, such as "NO STOPPING BLACK, PEOPLE", by which you that the darkness is unstoppable and will overtake us all one day and you are addressing this message to all citizens?

Please be more specific when you deface public property!

Sincerely,

A Concern Citizen

* - Sorry, not going to legitimize this vandalism by calling it the work of an artist. Semi-clever? Yes. Art? No. Crime? Yes.

Thoughts on Funding Transportation Projects

2009-12-05T20:13:00.006-05:00

The other day I was thinking about how difficult it is to fund transportation projects. There's probably an entire field of public policy research on this subject, but I'm going to go ahead and speculate that it has to due with it being such a large capital outlay over a short period of time and how that's tough to finance. Probably has something to do with the fact that it's easier to spend money that make money, even if you're a government. So usually these get funded by selling a lot of bonds and getting paid for over time from existing tax revenues.

But what if you could do it another way? I'm not arguing for higher taxes overall, those do suck for numerous reasons. Small, short-term taxes have a way of sticking around long after their original purpose (everyone's favorite example being the Federal Excise Tax on Long-Distance Telephone Calls). But what if it was a REALLY big, short-term tax? So big that no politician could dare continue it and so short-term that it would be over before outrage could really get going. Afterwards, it's a thing of the past and you've raised a lot of revenue.

So here's what I'm proposing: a one-week-long, $1.00 per gallon tax increase on gasoline sold in the state of Maryland with all revenue ear-marked for capital investment in the Red Line and Purple Line transportation projects.

Crazy, right? People would just not fill up on gas for a week, right? I'm not sure. Think about it though, not everyone can go a full week without filling up their cars with gas. Many people would probably dodge across state lines to Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, or DC to fill their tanks (Maryland is really poorly shaped for this idea - it'd work much better in a big square state like Colorado). And it's a little unfair to steal tax dollars from Eastern Shore residents to fund projects in the DC suburbs and Baltimore region. So maybe we have to come up with some way to split up the money so that Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore get some of the revenue. Those are details, most of the revenue will come from the Baltimore-Washington corridor and it will be spent there for building mass transit.

How much money could this tax raise? If you look at the numbers from 2007-2008 (latest data available from the state of Maryland), Marylanders sell something like 250 million gallons of gasoline every month. So given that people would probably really cut back on their driving/gas purchasing for that week, you'd probably raise around $50-75 million in revenue. To put that in perspective, that's equivalent to 6-10% of additional gasoline tax revenue. That's not a whole lot of money compared to the cost of the Red Line and Purple Line projects, but it's also a pretty painless cash grab. People might grumble, but it'd be over almost as quickly as it started.

The best time to run this would be over Memorial Day Weekend or Labor Day Weekend - lots of out-of-state drivers going up and down I-95 means lots of revenue from non-Maryland residents. Beggar-thy-neighbor? Just a bit, but states do this all the time (i.e. Delaware's I-95 tolls).

I'm not saying it's economically efficient - it probably falls too heavily on businesses and trucking. But it would do two things: cause a steep, one-week-long drop in emissions and raise money for desperately needed transportation projects (that would also reduce emissions).

Realistically, we ought to be increasing the tax on gasoline anyway (although not to endlessly expand I-270 as Montgomery County wants), Maryland hasn't touched it since 1992 and it's set as a price per gallon tax (that is, it is not indexed to inflation or the cost of a gallon of gasoline). Sure, taxes in Maryland are higher than nearby states, but the state also needs the revenue and for the sake of the environment we need to make gas-powered vehicles less attractive modes of transportation.

In the meantime, I'll keep trying to think of creative taxes that raise revenue without causing a lot of pain. I think this idea has some real merit. Maybe I'll be able to think of some others.

The Best Pancakes in Mount Vernon

2009-10-31T12:01:00.004-05:00

If you're like me, then your number one concern this morning was "Where will I eat brunch?"

Today, my girlfriend and I went to Howard's of Mount Vernon (900 Cathedral St.) because we wanted pancakes.

We just recently discovered that this little diner has the best pancakes in Mount Vernon, possibly all of Baltimore. I'm not sure if I can remember having better pancakes anywhere in the city or really anywhere. They're pretty much the Platonic ideal of pancakes, a little crisp on the outside, fluffy and light on the inside, served with real butter and maple syrup at a reasonable price. I'm especially excited to visit some time in the spring, they have courtyard seating during the warmer months.

Looks like there's a reason on only just noticed them - the Baltimore Sun has some history on the changes in ownership.

I less than 3 Recycling

2009-09-30T22:50:00.003-05:00

You can complain about a lot of things in Baltimore, but since the introduction of single-stream recycling and weekly recycling pick up, accessibility and ease of recycling is not one of them. I freaking love to recycle, so much so that I wonder if perhaps I'm getting a little too compulsive about it. To see if you love recycling as much as me, check off the items that you recycle:

Empty water/Gatorade/juice bottles/milk jugs
Empty beer/wine bottles
Junk mail
Newspapers
Magazines
Personal mail that you don't need (shredded first, of course)
Empty cans from like canned vegetables
Empty glass jars (from like salsa or whatever)
Cardboard boxes
Kleenex boxes (I rip out the plastic at the top of the box first)
Box from your microwaveable dinner
Empty bottles that you finish in the car and could throw in a trash can at the gas station but instead take home to recycle (I'm probably 50% on this one)
Pieces of note paper you no longer need
Post-it notes you no longer need (at work)
The cardboard thing they give you to insulate your hand from the coffee at Starbucks.
Plastic yogurt/pudding containers (wash them out first!)
Receipts from the grocery store / Target, etc.
Empty soda can/bottles you see lying on top of the trash at work when you know there's a recycle bin just outside the conference room/around the corner
Same scenario, but your co-workers are present
Clean-looking plastic bottles lying on the street while you're walk towards your house (sometimes)
Paperboard packaging for gum (like Orbitz)
Empty boxes of anything (ex: Band-aids, granola bars, cereal, anything...)
Cardboard tube from your paper towels
Cardboard tube from your toilet paper (I think I catch about 50-70% of them) (home only)
Paper packet from Sugar in the Raw (<50%>

So that was a list of things I habitually recycle. Yes, I really recycle all that stuff. I just like doing it. Even when it's just a receipt from Safeway, I feel better about it throwing it in my big yellow bin. I admit, the sugar packet thing is sort of ridiculous and I only do it sometimes. Also, I think my co-workers think I'm a little silly for grabbing empty soda cans off the top of the trash can and tossing them in the next recycling bin, but it's just so easy...

I feel like it's sort of the least I can do to reduce waste. For example, the other day someone had left a giant box outside their office with the word "TRASH" written on it in large print so the janitors would take it away. I went and got a marker and crossed out "TRASH" and wrote "RECYCLING". I'll never know if it worked, but I feel like I tried to reduce waste a little.

Speaking of recycling, if you are a company that ships things or a purchasing manager, please use/request recycling packaging. I much prefer to be able to recycle my packaging that have to throw away a bunch of packing peanuts. Packing peanuts are like the worst invention ever. Let's get a bunch of styrofoam and use it once for packaging! Let's guarantee it heads straight to the landfill.

Also, does it make anyone else mad that we still have disposal styrofoam cups in this country? Why don't we just outright ban them? If you want your coffee warm, but a travel mug!

With frustrations about single use, non-bio-degradable items like that out there, doesn't that make you want to recycle every damn little piece of paper you can?

Stimulate that MARC train!

2009-08-27T21:42:00.004-05:00

I saw some good news in the Baltimore Business Journal this week. The Maryland Department of Transportation has applied for $360 million of stimulus funds to be applied to commuter and passenger rail improvements. It's a laundry list of good ideas, many of them discussed the in the strategic plan for the MARC that the MTA put out a few years ago. It's great to see that we might actually get funding for some of these improvements. If this funding comes through it should help with some of the complaints everyone has about train delays and rail capacity issues. The Baltimore Business Journal article has a lot of good information on what they're looking into, but I'll highlight a few that I think are pretty interesting.

The most important is probably the $200 million to replace three bridges in Maryland. The new bridges will be three tracks instead of two, allowing for more high-speed (well, Acela at least) trains and increased passenger train usage overall. This is really an important development because increasing train capacity on these bridges is really vital to expanding train service and improving it's timeliness in the region. This is money that will go directly into engineering and construction over the next couple years and will accomplish exactly what the stimulus was meant to do - keep companies going until the economy recovers and the private sector can provide the business. It's a great opportunity to do some good infrastructure work that we'd like to be doing anyway, but might have to pay a lot more for services if there was more demand.

Maryland's Department of Transportation has also asked for $10 million to install a GPS-tracking system in the trains (sounds a lot like what I was on about on about in my complaining-about-the-MARC post).

In the category of really-important-projects-that-we-need-to-start-immediately-because-they-will-take-FOREVER-to-complete is the work to replace/improve/expand the Baltimore & Potomac (B&P) tunnel in Baltimore. This tunnel is really Baltimore's claim to passenger rail fame right now, because it is the choke point for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor (NEC). Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up on the B&P tunnel and on the original Baltimore & Potomac railroad. Basically, the tunnel was completed in 1873 and aside from some repairs and minor improvements to drainage in the early 1980's, it is essentially a 19th century piece of infrastructure. Pretty amazing when you think about it.

The B&P tunnel is a big problem for passenger rail travel along Amtrak's NEC because, as Amtrak's 2005 report to Congress on rail infrastructure in Baltimore (see page 2-16, Box 2-1) puts it, "A sharp curve at the south portal of the tunnel prevents southbound trains departing Baltimore Pennsylvania Station from accelerating beyond 30 mph. An uphill, milelong, 1.34 percent grade further constrains train performance." That's right, if you've ever thought "Hey, it feels like we're moving really slow," why heading south on the MARC, it's because that's exactly what was happening.

(Aside: That 2005 report is pretty fascinating, if dense, reading. After reading most of it one Sunday afternoon I got a much better appreciation of why we're still using such a difficult tunnel that opened 136 years ago. Turns out it's ridiculously difficult to build infrastructure in the Baltimore area due to geography - the "Fall Line" runs directly through Baltimore. The report was actually commissioned after the 2001 fire in the Howard St. Tunnel (another piece of 19th century infrastructure (completed in 1890)). When the Howard St. Tunnel was shut down due to a derailment, CSX freight trains on the south side of Baltimore had to detour west to Cleveland, north to Albany, and then head back south to reach the north side of Baltimore.)

So, anyway, this application for stimulus funds includes $60 million for studies and engineering on how to improve this tunnel. It's not going to be cheap, actual construction of a new tunnel will be in the billions of dollars. I have to be honest, I'm not super-optimistic we'll see that starting any time soon. Replacing the B&P tunnel will only shift the bottleneck to Baltimore's Union Tunnel on the other side of Penn Station. Although the Union Tunnel would be easier to upgrade because it's shorter and already has three tracks.

Anyway, there's your story for the day on how under-investment in passenger rail for the last 60 years has left us hamstrung now that we're winding down our love affair with the automobile. Don't get me wrong, I don't think we'll ever replace cars with public transit - I'm saying that America really needs more options for transportation. And if we don't start the projects, we'll never finish.

That's why I'm excited about this project, it's the perfect use of fiscal stimulus money. These are projects that you probably want to do anyway but might not get done when the economy is humming along. Once you're in a recession with a gap between possible output and actual demand and you decide you want the government to step in a provide some temporary demand until private demand recovers. Infrastructure projects like this fit the bill because they will improve passenger and freight movement capability and capacity when things begin to pick up again.

The MARC Train System in Graphs

2009-08-08T14:55:00.020-05:00

Recently I've started using the MARC train system a lot (precipitated by wrecking my car and needing to get to work). It's more expensive than driving and my commute is not bad (I have a reverse commute), but I've found it's really a pleasant way to get to and from work. I've also found that there are WAY more people riding the train that I'd thought. I stick to the Baltimore area, but I'm super impressed about how many people are using the trains every day.

The MTA does not publish ridership statistics on the MARC trains, so I emailed their “Contact Us” page. Much to my (pleasant) surprise, they replied almost immediately and were more than happy to share information. In a world where most places ignore your emails or take days to give you a non-answer, the MTA is a great exception. Anyway, I learned some interesting facts:

MARC train get a lot of riders
Generally, more people are riding the MARC now than ever before
It's impossible to make strong statements about how much ridership the MARC is getting

Statements #1 and #2 come from the data that the MTA supplied me. Statement #3 comes from their ridership counting methodology. Here is exactly how they determine daily ridership: on the first Wednesday of the month conductors count everyone who gets on and off at each station. Why Wednesday? Because Wednesday is typically the peak usage day for the system. So, as you'd expect, the data is SUPER noisy and absolute numbers are unreliable. However, after looking it over I'd say that it's probably pretty good from a general trends standpoint. Getting better data is probably possible, but very expensive and of questionable usefulness. I'm pretty sure that the data the MTA does get is good enough to manage the system.

On the other hand, what the MARC data lacks in detail on a day-to-day basis is made up for in it's historical value. The MTA sent me a spreadsheet with their data for monthly ridership counts going back to October 2001! They included their 12 month moving average data going back to February 2002! And, in the spirit of sharing, I've put that spreadsheet up for anyone to download.

It's a lot of data, and whenever I'm confronted with a lot of data I try to graph it to make some sort of sense of it all. So since they sent me this data I've been manipulating it in different ways, trying to see what I can learn and how best to describe the whole system.

(Note: The following discussion assumes that you have a passing knowledge of the MARC train system. Wikipedia and the MTA have plenty of information, but basically you should know that there are 3 passenger train lines – the Penn Line, the Camden Line, and the Brunswick Line. The Penn Line operates on the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor tracks, the Camden Line and Brunswick Line are at the mercy of CSX freight trains. All lines terminate at Washington Union Station. The Camden Line terminates at Camden Yards in Baltimore. The Penn Line passes through Baltimore Penn Station and continues towards Aberdeen and terminates at Perryville. The Brunswick Line has two spurs, one to Martinsburg, WV and the other to Frederick.)

A final note on this data. The MTA counts total station usage (i.e. boardings plus alightings), so the number of passengers is the total usage divided by 2. All of these numbers are daily numbers, but counted on peak usage days, so the average is discounted by some amount (which I won't even guess at). The MARC trains operate weekdays (an average of 250 days per year).

First off, total station usage by station. I have split Washington Union Station into 3 pieces, one for each of the rail lines.

First of all, you're probably thinking “Wow, I never knew that there were so many MARC stations!” and “Wow, everyone's going to DC and they're doing it on the Penn Line.” The Penn Line blows the Camden and Brunswick lines out of the water in terms of total ridership. In June 2009, the Penn Line accounted for 63.5% of total MARC system usage. There are many reasons for this, including facts like better on-time performance because the Penn Line is on Amtrak-owned tracks, good station locations in population centers, and the whole idea of the rich getting richer – the Penn Line is highly used so more capital investment is made on the Penn Line to length platforms, build parkings spaces, etc.

What does total system usage look like? Well, in June 2009 the 12 month moving average of total usage was running at 34,274, which indicates over 17,000 passengers on peak days. That's a lot of cars off the road when you think about. Especially considering that roads and traffic delays are fairly non-linear, the more cars on the road the worse the effect of each marginal car. Since most of these trains run for commuters to reach DC, traffic could be far worse without this service.

Just how many of these passengers are going to DC? From the data I have, I can't answer that question. I can, however, answer a related question, “How many of these passengers arrive or depart from Union Station?” And, “How has that changed over time?”

This chart shows some very interesting trends. Over the course of the last 7 years, the Brunswick Line has increased the proportion of trips that do not involve Union Station from 30% to 40%. That's very helpful for the keeping Union Station from being overwhelmed (spoiler alert: Union Station is pretty much overwhelmed by commuter traffic). I think it's pretty easy to explain this trend though. The Brunswick Line makes stops at Rockville, Kensington, and Silver Spring – good place to get off the MARC and get onto the Metro. Many of the commuters on the Brunswick Line may well be going to DC, they just have better options than Union Station.

The second interesting trends on that chart is that the Camden Line's fraction of travelers not going to Union Station peaked in 2008 and has since decreased. My estimation there would be that during high gas prices in 2008 a few more people started to use the Camden Line to commute to downtown Baltimore. Baltimore's traffic and parking situation is nothing like DC's, so when gas prices eased people reverted to their old ways. Honestly though, this could just be a strange blip in the data. The Penn Line has such noisy data for trips that do not involve Union Station that it's hard to understand. When you look at total trips (instead of a fraction of the whole), the data is noisy enough to make you think there is just something wrong with it.

There are some strange dips and peaks in the Penn Line data while the Camden Line and Brunswick Line show much smoother trends. What is good news for the MARC system is the combination of these two graphs. Trips that do not involve Union Station are increasing faster than overall system growth (as evidenced by the fact that total number of trips has increased as well as the fraction of the total). This means that instead of a system that runs trains full of DC commuters one-way and empty trains the other, you are starting to get a few more paying customers on those trains that would otherwise be empty.

Now for a look at the total system usage over the last few years:

If you're a fan of public transit you've got to love a chart that looks like that. The R2 value is 0.96 for a line of increasing ridership from 2002 through 2009. The fit line says every day from February 2002 to June 2009, an additional 1.75 passengers started riding MARC trains. That's great news for the system, but it's not unconditionally good news. I've had a hard time finding official numbers on what “capacity” actually is for the system, but the numbers I have seen are striking similar to actual usage. That means that system is actually operating near capacity and could probably increase ridership further with additional resources.

This is a lot of growth, but where is it coming from? Are there stations that have actually seen fewer riders? In general, growth is everywhere; in specific, the Penn Line. Over the past 5 years the Penn Line has added more usage than the Camden Line has total.

Line	12 Mon. Moving Avg. Ridership		Increase	Increase (%)	Average Annual Growth Rate
Line	June 2004	June 2009	Increase	Increase (%)	Average Annual Growth Rate
Penn	16,273	21,762	5,489	33.73%	6.0%
Camden	4,255	4,768	513	12.05%	2.3%
Brunswick	6,765	7,744	979	14.47%	2.7%

Total	27,293	34,274	6,980	25.58%	4.7%

Here are a few charts that show a “then and now” look at the three lines over the last five years. I've maintained the same scale between charts to illustrate how the Penn Line dominates the MARC system. I do not include Union Station simply because it would ruin the scale of the chart.

And finally, just because I have the data and can plot it, here is a look at Penn Line station usage over the last 7 years and Union Station usage by the three MARC lines.

For the Penn Line data, the most impressive part of this data is that even after the financial crisis and the tremendous drop in gas prices, the Penn Line has not lost passengers. Perhaps these passengers are like me, they started riding the train by necessity and they kept riding it because it's just a lot less stressful than fighting traffic. Honestly, I think the number one thing constraining ridership at some of these stations is just parking availability. The plans to build additional parking at West Baltimore will likely increase the ridership there.

Meanwhile, the data on Union Station shows just why that train station is able to support so many businesses and shops while Baltimore's Penn Station can barely support a snack stand and a souvenir store. Actually, that is a bit of a unfair comparison, Penn Station seems to have more than enough traffic to support a few more commercial enterprises – but I'll have more thoughts on that in another blog post.

Red Line - It Lives!

2009-08-04T18:56:00.005-05:00

After months of no news out of the Red Line, aside from the fact that a "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" decision would be made in the summer (after the public comment period ended in January), today there is finally some news!

Today Governor Martin O'Malley announced the LPA for the Red Line and it is 4C! If you have read any of my previous post on the Red Line, you know that this is the one that pretty much everyone wants. There is a vocal minority of people from Edmondson Village and Canton that are basically saying "Not In My Backyard", but it looks like O'Malley has picked 4C anyway since it's the most popular and likely to be funded by the federal government's New Starts program. This is key because if they'd waited much longer we would have missed this New Starts program and would have had to wait years for the next one.

Anyway, read the press release here. Go public transit!

-------

PS - Don't get me wrong, I think it's very important to address the concerns of residents in Canton and Edmondson Village, but they really haven't been able to provide a reasonable alternative that would have a price tag that anyone could afford. So compromises have been made, but effective public transit is really too important to our environment and future to not do this project. Some day I'll post a better description of the issue here, but no time today!

Updated Murder Charts

2009-07-25T13:39:00.005-05:00

It's been a few months since I've updated my murder charts online, but you can see the latest charts (updated thru 7/19) on my XML chart webpage. As of 7/19, we are at 122 murders for 2009 versus 116 at this time last year. That sort of seems like a big deal (murders are up 5.2%!), but murders are so infrequent and noisy that I don't think it makes much difference. Between 7/19 and 7/31 there were 9 murders in 2008. It's easy to imagine fewer happening this year.

Overall, we're running at 233 murders for the last 12 months. I counted 229 murders in 2008, so basically we're seeing the exact same murder rate for the last 18 months or so. Not bad considering that 2008 was the best year in decades for Baltimore.

Anyway, here's one more chart to illustrate how noisy murder statistics are, even in a city with as many murders are Baltimore:

Please note: July 2009 is a partial total (as of 7/19)

-----

Notes: Again, I do not count people who die this year as a result of an act of violence in a prior year. Since I have the luxury of going back and editing my statistics (FBI, BPD, etc. do not), I am only counting violence in the year it occurs. For more of a discussion on why I do this, see my previous posts on murders from January 2009 and March 2009.

A Word on Covers

2009-07-22T22:30:00.003-05:00

A song cover is a tricky thing. It's a good way to introduce people to your style of music using something that they're already comfortable with... if you do it right. If you do it wrong? Well, if the best song on your album is a cover it means that you need to hire someone to write some songs for you, because you suck.

Sometimes, though, you just hit it out of the fucking park.

For example: when Morrissey recorded "First of the Gang to Die", he was probably thinking 'Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted.' I mean, it's a good song. I'm not a huge Morrissey fan, but I do like that song. He's a pretty solid musician, but normally I'm not that into his stuff. Anyway, I like "First of the Gang to Die", it's catchy. You find yourself whistling about Hector being the first of the gang with a gun in his hand.

At this point, I recommend that you click on my link above and listen to Morrissey's original recording. You can definitely see what he was going for and you can appreciate that he has achieved it.

Then, NPR's All Songs Considered podcast introduced me to the cover of this song by an artist known as Zee Avi.

Damn. She fucking nailed it. I mean, Morrissey didn't even realize that this is what his song should have sounded like! He must have heard her version and been like "Ah, come on! How could I have known that's what my song was meant to sound like?" Sucks for him, because Zee Avi's voice and inflection are perfect for that song. Good news for us though, because I find it to just be an awesome song now. I haven't listened to her other stuff yet, but this could well be one of those times when a good musician and singer needs a strong songwriter, don't know yet.

Anyway, score another one for the All Songs Considered podcast. Seriously, it's like the most consistent source for awesome new music I've found.

Car-Sharing in Baltimore... Holy Electrons Batman!

2009-07-05T22:09:00.002-05:00

On the 4th of July I was walking past the Maryland Science Center when I saw a banner saying "AltCar, it's Electric!" I was curiously enough to visit their website, www.altcar.org, and it turns out that not only does Baltimore finally have a car-sharing service, BUT THEY HAVE A 100% ELECTRIC CAR FLEET!

Sure, for now the only location is the Science Center in the Inner Harbor and it's more of a novelty than anything, but it's a nice gesture and hopefully a precursor to better things to come. Heck, even the NYTimes is giving us props.

More Random Things Found While Cleaning Up

2009-07-03T17:17:00.006-05:00

So I was cleaning up again today and the trash was pretty boring for the most part...

A small Christmas ornament and a kitchen knife.

Not very interesting, but you do have to wonder how it ended up where I found it. At the very end though I did discover some interesting stuff...

Is this part of a tailpipe maybe?

But this is definitely the steering column from an old car! It was just lying there, right over the edge!

Quietly Awesome

2009-05-17T18:05:00.003-05:00

One of the most under-appreciated things about Baltimore is out park system. Baltimore was on the leading edge of the urban parks movement in the 19th century and it shows today. However, many of these beautiful parks were a little too “urban” for the middle class at the beginning part of this decade. The gentrification in Canton led to the rediscovery of Patterson Park as “Baltimore's Backyard.” In South Baltimore, Riverside Park is now a popular dog-walking location in the evenings – a far cry from the drugs and crime that troubled the South Baltimore area 10-15 years ago. Still, if your world revolves around communities that border on the harbor, you're only seeing a fraction of the green space that Baltimore has to offer.

I think that most people have noticed that Baltimore has some pretty big parks. However, I also think that a lot of people don't spend a lot of time exploring in Baltimore. Yes, it's a slightly dangerous city, but large swathes are safe for exploring. I recommend bicycling around the city more, it's a great way to learn where streets go and explore neighborhoods.

Still, I didn't realize how much Baltimore doesn't suck at public parks until I spent some time on the website of The Trust for Public Land. They have a lot of facts and reports about the state of public parks in America. What I found interesting is that for cities with a high population density, Baltimore ranks #3 in acres of parkland per resident. Here's the top ten list:

Park Acres per 1,000 Residents
(City Population Density: High)
#1 – Washington, DC – 13.1
#2 – Boston, MA – 8.5
#3 – Baltimore, MD – 7.7
#4 – Philadelphia, PA – 7.6
#5 – San Francisco, CA – 7.2
#6 – Jersey City, NJ – 6.8
#7 – Los Angeles, CA – 6.2
#8 – Long Beach, CA – 6.1
#9 – New York City, NY – 4.6
#10 – Chicago, IL – 4.2

Now, obviously, there are two factors in this equation. The total number of park acres and the total number of city residents. In Baltimore, park acres are fairly constant (except for when some vacant lot is deeded over to the Department of Parks & Recreation by another city agency). The fact that Baltimore has lost a lot of city residents over the last couple of decades really helps bring that number up. I might be crazy, but I am anticipating that the population of Baltimore is about to stabilize and turn around. If we want to stay ahead of Philadelphia we might want to consider building some new parks. Next time we redevelop something like Harbor East, let's set aside a few acres for a park.

One factor that I think is good is that Baltimore gets on the list of park acres per 1,000 residents with a lot of smaller parks, not one large park. Baltimore barely cracks the top 100 on largest city parks (#89 – Gwynn Falls / Leakin Park). That's good because it means that the city parks are spread across the city and more people therefore have access.

Finally, Baltimore has two of the oldest city-run parks in America:

23rd Oldest Public Park – Patterson Park, 1827
55th Oldest Public Park – Druid Hill Park, 1860

So, if you haven't checked out some of these parks, I highly recommend that you do some exploring. There are some really great parks in parts of the city that you normally don't go. Carroll Park, Lake Montibello (with a great bike loop around the lake), and even Middle Branch Park are great places to go and just be outside on a nice summer day.

Once you visit those parks, you'll probably ask yourself the same question I did - “How did we not screw this up?” The answer actually lies pretty far back in history. In 1859 the mayor of Baltimore decreed that no railroad would be given franchise to operate in Baltimore unless they paid 20% of gross income to the city for park building. That's an incredibly high tax, but railroads paid it because Baltimore was such an important port at the time. So from 1859 until the 1940's, the parks had this incredible source of income for operating costs and capital improvements.

All that history can be found in a really interesting report from the Baltimore Parks and People organization. It's called "Discovering Baltimore's Parks" - if you're at all curious about parks in the city of Baltimore and their histories (collective and individual), then you should check out that report.

More Random Things Found While Cleaning Up

2009-05-02T22:12:00.007-05:00

Here are a few more things I found when I cleaned up today. Two more "contractor-sized" heavy duty garbages of crap and now about 30 yards along the sidewalk are clean (at a depth of 5-10 yards).

1st Generation PlayStation Console

Old Cadillac Hubcap

Back Support to an Office Chair

It's just amazing how much trash in this area. I mean, I am finding areas where literally square feet of ground are covered in plastic bags. It's no wonder there are only vines growing here, there's just no open area to put down roots.

A Little Public Service

2009-05-01T19:30:00.005-05:00

So I took today off from work and just had a relaxing day. Around 4:30 I took my garbage out (I live in Mt. Vernon/Mid-Town, and must adhere to the draconian trash and recycling rules). I realized that it was a beautiful day and I had a couple hours before the trash people would come, so I could pick up some trash around the area!

I often walk near the sort-of park like trees and brush that border I-83. I decided to take some heavy-duty garbage bags that I have and clean up some of the trash that gets tossed into the brush. I found lots of plastic bags, plastic bottles, and aluminum cans. I also found this:

That's right, I found a donut tire on a rim. I also learned that spiders of all shapes and sizes LOVE living under and in tires. Pretty crazy. Here are some other things I found:

A half-full bottle of Ken's Caesar salad dressing
2 un-used condoms (still in the wrappers)
An Adidas gym bag that was home to ~1,000,000 ants
A piece of rebar (instrumental in transferring the ~1,000,000 ants in a gym bag into my trash bag)
A couple dozen 24 oz. cans of Steel Reserve... I sort of wonder if there's not just a guy who follows a routine of buying a beer somewhere and just always finishing it in that block
An empty bottle of prescription medicine from 2003 (seriously, if you're going to litter, why do it with something that has your name and address on it??)
What was probably, at one time, a can for paint thinner or some other noxious chemical (it had a spout) - it had long since lost the bottom to corrosion and leaked any harmful chemicals into the ground

Honestly, though, I get that stuff. I mean, you're walking along and you finish your beer or get tired of carrying your plastic Coke bottle with your chicken wing bones in it and you're sort of a douchebag, so you toss your trash in the brush.

Here's what I don't get: I found lots of plastic bags with dog poop in them.

Really? You're going be responsible enough to take a plastic bag out with you when you walk your dog. You're going to pick up the dog's excrement in this bag. Once you've got all that dog poop cleaned up, you carefully tie off the bag (so the poop doesn't get out, I guess). Then you toss the plastic bag in the brush and walk your dog back home. This is something you do?

Seriously, if I hadn't found multiple bags of dog poop in the brush, I wouldn't have believed it. Who is this person that's like "I can't leave dog poop in the grass for my neighbors to step it, it's better to throw a plastic bag on crap on public property!" What is the rest of their life like? Maybe they're very careful to lift the toilet seat before peeing, but then pee all over the stall? They let you merge on the highway but then tailgate you for the next six miles? They offer to pass the potatoes, but sneeze in them on the way? They offer to get the next round, then come back with warm Miller High-Life Light?

Anyway, I think these people suck. I can't decide if they're worse than people that don't pick up their dog poop. It's gross and unsanitary. It's bad enough that you live downtown so your poor dog has to poop on the same small strip of grass as 30 other dogs - for the sake of your dog clean up after it. And the sake of consistency, don't turn around and litter with your bag o' poop!

What's in a Name?

2009-04-27T18:33:00.004-05:00

I'm sure that more than a few people have wondered about the title of my blog. Well, here's a link that explains it all: Baltimore - 'Home of 1,000 Slogans'

Update on the Red Line

2009-04-22T21:05:00.004-05:00

The MTA has released a survey of the results of the public comment period! Yes, I actually did put an explanation point behind that. It's a pretty dry 18-pages, so I'll summarize it for you.

Generally, there were two types of comments:

1. People who want light rail, mostly 4C

2. People who live in West Baltimore and don't trust the MTA not to screw up their neighborhood.

You can hear that frustration in the explanation from the MTA that:

"The MTA has repeatedly indicated in the AA/DEIS documentation that there will be no residential displacements with any of the Red Line alternatives. Twenty‐eight comments, 2 from organizations and 26 from individuals, from the west side of the corridor stated concern about the loss of their home or property from the Red Line."

Anyway, I can see why the MTA seems to have (it seems) delayed a little from what it seemed like their schedule was. A whole lot of the comments received were critical of the surface alignment on Edmonson Avenue. A large enough number of these comments expressed concern about the surface alignment that it's hard to just ignore them.

There was another faction that opposed a surface route along Boston Street, but not nearly as many as you'd expect.

Anyway, although the MTA isn't going to announce the chosen configuration until summer, the comments are pretty overwhelmingly in favor of option 4C (which I also support and encouraged people to support).

The Red Line website says that the MTA will select the "Locally Preferred Alternative (LPA)" in "summer 2009". Not much of a hard date, but at least it's a goal. In the end though, I just hope they build something. You can't please all of the people, but the MTA has to please enough of the people to get this into the design and build phase in time to get federal funding.

Finally, I just wanted to note that there were 499 comments from individuals, including 72 in favor of option 4C. I'm pretty certain that at least 5 people made comments based on my blog post and Facebook event, so it's totally possible I was responsible for over 1% of individual comments!! Also interesting is the map with where they received comments from. I'm definitely responsible for at least one or two of the comments from outside the Baltimore area or state of Maryland (there were only 29 of those). So I feel pretty happy having contributed to the process - go process, go!

------

Also, Sheila Dixon's Red Line website is actually starting to look pretty good. Although it does still contain the phrase "Baltimore... We Got Next... the Next Generation of Light Rail, that is. The Red Line... OMG!!!"

MARC Train Policies - I'm Sorry

2009-04-21T22:02:00.004-05:00

So a recent comment on my blog post regarding the MTA's policies on MARC trains has shown that I didn't do enough in-depth research on the MARC train website.

The comment refutes my points pretty well. Yes, I could stand behind the claim of "Well, it's not well publicized if I didn't know this information" - but when you're wrong, you're wrong.

I still believe that there's a better "MARC Train Tracker" that what exists, but I'll give them credit for trying.

The only thing I would really say is that if the MARC fare box recovery rate is 60% at peak travel times does not preclude a profitable weekend train. I'd just like to see more of the analysis and assumptions that go into the calculations. It seems like that math should all be published in a report somewhere. There could be a nice section on the MARC website called "Latest MARC Reports" with summarizes of the information they provide to the MTA and to the State of Maryland. Why would this information not be published?

So to everyone at the MTA and the MARC train (if you ever stumble upon this post) - I'm sorry, I spoke/blogged before I really had my facts straight.

What a Difference a Couple of Years Make

2009-04-11T13:03:00.004-05:00

So a couple years ago I'd been working for nearly 3 years since graduation. My company has a pension plan, which I considered to be an anachronism of an earlier time. It's completely beyond my control! There's nothing I can do to save more or less. Plus, everyone knows you change jobs too much in the modern economy for a pension to really make any sense. I wasn't even vested in it and I had much more money in my 401(k). Besides, what are the odds the pension program will even exist when I retire?

I complained about this to a couple friends who had worked there around 5 years (at the time) and they both said "Well, I figure that the company will have to buy me out eventually, so it doesn't bother me that much that it exists."

Two years and a financial crisis later, the pension plan is looking pretty attractive. I actually read the plan details this afternoon! Despite putting a lot more money into my 401(k) it's value by 50% of the money I put in - for every $1.00 I put in, I had $0.50 left. Meanwhile, over the course of the last two years the cash-benefit value of my pension has doubled (between pay-based credits and interest credits). Suddenly the idea of a pension isn't so terrible.

I imagine that I'm not the only person in there mid- to late-20's coming to this conclusion. We heard all the conventional wisdom that the day of the pension was over and it was all about individual retirement saving accounts (401(k)'s, 403(b)'s, IRA's, etc.). After this financial crisis I wouldn't be surprised to see people actually viewing a pension plan more positively.

One the lessons I've really taken from all of this is that there's a lot more bad advice out there than good advice. I sort of always ignored the price appreciation in the real estate market because I didn't think that it was sustainable, but I was pretty shocked by how terrible the financial institutions of this country were run. I can't be the only person that's going to wary of any investment advice for a few years. Perhaps we'll see a resurgence of lower-return, lower-risk investments and savings.

It might even be worth re-examining the aversion to defined benefits programs. Many arguments that I've heard against defined benefits plans rest on the assumptions that the stock market will return 8% every year and that individuals are good at investing their money. Now that we've had a stark reminder that defined contribution programs (like individually managed 401(k)'s) can lose a lot of money, perhaps we can work on how to make defined benefits plans work more effectively. They can be costly to companies and governments, no shareholder likes a big earnings hit when the pension fund under-performs, but perhaps that's a price worth paying to allow workers to have some financial safety net for retirement.

It's a thought at least...

MARC Train Policies - The Opposite of a Good Idea

2009-04-08T18:53:00.005-05:00

(Update 8/8/09: I definitely wrote this after a bad experience on the MARC. After many more good experiences, I've written a new post on the system usage. Yes, there are frustrating commutes sometimes, but in general don't listen to my post below, just enjoy the train.)

(Update 4/21/09: Apparently some of the features that I wish the MARC system had already exist - mea culpa)

It's been a long, cold winter, but recently the weather has gotten nice enough for me to think, "Perhaps I should start taking the train to work again." From where I live I have the opportunity to walk to Penn Station, then take the MARC train, then walk 15 minutes to my office.

This morning, after not having ridden the train in some time, I was quite confused that I could not purchase a "10-trip pass" at the kiosk. These passes were mildly discounted from the normal fare, but not as cheap as a weekly pass. It turns out that the MTA eliminated 10-trip passes on January 9th, 2009. So what are your options?

Single trip ticket - $4.00

Weekly Pass - $30.00

10-trip pass - $32.00 ELIMINATED!

Monthly Pass - $100.00

That's it! You can buy a weekly pass, but unless you commute round-trip 4 days a week, you lose money. Or you can buy single trip tickets. As other bloggers have pointed out, all this is going to do is convince occasional riders to drive instead. Even with expensive gas, the ten-trip pass was more expensive than driving. Now that gas is cheaper, the MTA has decided that the train should be more expensive.

I'd go even further. Even if I decided to suck it up because I wanted to keep from putting miles on my car (and avoid an expensive repair for awhile), I'm going to have a buy a ticket for every trip. Either every time I walk into the train station or I'll have to buy a stack of them and hope I use them all before they expire. Also, I'll need a stack for each direction. I mean, eliminating or reducing the discount on the ten-trip pass sort of makes sense, I know the state budget is strained, but why does it make sense eliminate the existence of a multi-trip pass?

It seems like the MTA treats the MARC trains as a luxury service offered to the people of Maryland. Newsflash: people who ride the trains are part of the solution for congestion and sprawl!

The other thing that doesn't seem to register in the minds of the MTA - if the service is more flexible, people on the fence will use the service more often. And why is there still no weekend MARC service? In the morning, run a train from north to south, then back up. In the evening, repeat. I bet MARC weekend service would be pretty overwhelmingly popular. Sure, if you have a weekly or monthly pass you can ride Amtrak on the weekends, but I'm talking about making the train work for occasional users. Basically every person I know in Baltimore who has friends in DC has wished that there was some sort of weekend MARC service. I bet you could actually turn a profit on weekend service!

I am definitely a big proponent of realism and understanding that there's only so much money to go around. But mass transit is more than just a service, it's a way to reduce pollution and congestion. Better, more consistent, rail connections within Maryland should be a priority - not an afterthought in the state budget.

So I was just talking with my girlfriend about questions that I have about MARC train service that don't have real answers:

1. Why don't we know the on-time percentage of MARC trains? It's not rocket science, this is the year 2009. Surely someone could record when a train arrived at a station and then have that information put into some sort of database. If this isn't already done, seriously, why not? If it is, then why isn't this information public?

2. Seriously, what does it cost to run a train from Baltimore to Washington, DC and back? Why is this not public information? If it's so expensive that you can't offer this service, prove it! Or at least experiment with it.

3. Why can't we put a damn GPS receiver on every train? Stick with me here, this is a pretty advanced concept. Put a GPS receiver on the trains, have it transmit data back to some main server every 60 seconds or so, make this data publicly available for anyone to view. Sound difficult? It's not, you could do this with an iPhone and a free app. Maybe with something a little more advanced people could see where their train was while waiting in their nice warm car instead of freezing to death on the platform.

Here's a proposal. How about we tie the incentive pay structure in the MTA to on-time percentage? I mean, why not expand this to figuring out if the Light Rail runs on time or even the buses? GPS units are not that expensive and if you don't go wild and hire too expensive of a contractor to implement the software it wouldn't kill you to even outfit the buses.

I think the reason that MARC train riders are always so frustrated with the MTA is just the lack of transparency. For me, it's the lack of vision. The Baltimore-Washington metro area is not going to get any less urbanized. If the suburban park-and-rides are already overcrowded, it's not going to get any better. It's time for some real leadership and vision. I'm talking about an elected official willing to stand up and say "Hey, this costs money, but we're going to need this in 25 years, so we have to spend the money now." Then, they'd actually have to think about how to re-design public transit to lay the infrastructure for the next 50 years instead of just tacking on bus routes after the people are already there!

Impulse Buying in the 21st Century

2009-04-03T20:19:00.005-05:00

So I was listening to a Podcast from NPR's "All Songs Considered" (for those of you doubting my yuppie-cred, QED) this evening and I hear host Bob Boilen say, "Our next artist is a Canadian rapper by way of Somalia..." I reacted as you'd expect - "Of course NPR is playing Somali-Canadian rapper, it's just too damn quirky to leave alone." But then the guy was GOOD.

You might not believe me, so here's K'naan's music video for Dreamer:

How can you not get behind someone with lyrics as creative as "We're from the only place worse than Kandahar; yeah that's kinda hard" in the midst of a song about how there's nothing wrong with having a good time. So I've decided to put my money where my mouth is and make that impulse purchase. I've just downloaded K'naan's second album Troubadour. It's only $8 on iTunes and it's definitely something different to listen to.

Overall, I have to say that I'm surprised by how much I enjoy All Songs Considered. It's not all necessarily stuff I'd pick out to listen to a lot, but for the variety of styles Bob Boilen chooses, I like an awful lot of it. I guess having good taste in music is his job after all.

Baltimore Homicide Rate Update

2009-03-28T13:18:00.008-05:00

Update (7/25/09): The data in this post is now fairly out of date. I think the discussion in this post is still relevant and worth reading, so I do recommend that you keep reading. If you're looking for the most recent data, check out here.

----

As any resident of Baltimore City knows, there are a lot of murders in this town. I remember when I first discovered Murder Ink in the City Paper years ago and first tried to comprehend the tremendous number of murders in this city. Hundreds per year! And for every murder there are how many attempted murders / shootings each year? It's just plain madness.

I was excited as anyone as 2008 progressed and it started to look like Baltimore was having an out-of-trend year for murders. Despite a few very violent months (March, June, November and December were particularly bad last year), Baltimore ended 2008 with the lowest murder tally in two decades. Baltimore's per capita murder rate is still shockingly high as there are far fewer city residents today than 20 years ago, but last year was a marked departure from the rest of the decade (as I detailed in a post in January). In that post I noted that we shouldn't necessarily lose hope just because November and December had been pretty violent and January opened with 14 murders in 9 days.

Three months later I am happy to have been proven more or less correct. One of those 14 murders was determined to be justified as self-defense and the finally 22 days of January saw only 8 murders (not awesome, but not bad either). Since January I've been keeping track of murderous events and plotting them on some charts. A couple weeks ago I figured out how to make some nice Flash graphs of the data and put them up on a static website. In this post I publish some data as of 3/27/09, but the charts on my 2009 Baltimore Murder Charts site are updated approximately weekly.

According to my records, 228 murderous acts occurred in 2008. The official homicide tally was 234, but there were 6 people who died of injuries sustained in prior-year incidents. Since I'm interested in how deadly the city is right now, I don't track those numbers (although the FBI and others do). I have the opportunity to go back and edit my data, so if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I'm going to back and count that on the date the incident occurred instead of the when the death occurred.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to track murders this year was to be able to produce a "Trailing 12 Months Murders" chart. I think it's pretty informative and gives a good feel for whether or not murder rates have increased or not. For example, based on a very violent January, there is a perception that Baltimore is not going to be able to maintain last year's reduced murder rate. What I think has been under reported is that February 2009 had only 15 murders, the same number as February 2008.

As you can see from the Trailing 12 Months (TTM) Murders chart above, we're really not seeing any leap in violence this year. In fact, if you use a 30-day moving window to smooth out data a little, it's varied between 233.4 and 236.5. Above the 2008 total, but it certainly shows no sign of reverting to the bad old pre-2008 days of 250+ murders/year.

I think that it's important to consider some of these other graphs, just this week I heard a story on WYPR called "Murders Spike in Baltimore's Northeast District". They state that "Baltimore's homicide rate is nearly 25 percent higher then at this time last year." At the time of the story there were 47 murders in the city. Based on my records, at that time last year there were 40 or 41 murders (depending on exactly when the story was produced). By my count, that's (at most) 7/40 = 17.5% increase. Maybe I'm splitting hairs here, but I wouldn't exactly round 17.5% to 25%. I think I'd round it to either "nearly 20 percent" or "just over 15%". I guess the point of the story is that there have been more murders in the Northeastern District than normal. Still, I don't see why WYPR would want to talk up the homicide rate in Baltimore. They do note in the story that "Like other districts, the Northeast has seen a decline in robberies, burglaries and assaults from the same time last year."

So basically what the numbers show is that crime is down in Baltimore, except for some isolated, noisy statistics like murders in a certain district. Why not just be happy that murders are pretty much within the noise of last year's number - which was the lowest in two decades?? I guess I just don't understand WYPR's angle. 2009 is just not that much worse than 2008, especially if you take a look at these charts:

I look at the data I've got on murders this year and here's what I see:

After a bump in early January, the murder rate has been lower than last year for 2.5 months. (We were +10 on 1/9/09 compared to +5 on 3/27/09)
If you look at how many murders occurred in the 4th quarter of 2008 the 1st quarter of 2009 looks great.
I think we'll briefly be even with last year on cumulative murders in the first couple days in April, but probably run above 2008 until at least June.
I see no reason to believe we won't finish the year at more or less the same total as last year -> I think we may have seen Baltimore's homicide rate reset from the 250-270 range to something in the 220-240 range.

You know, it might be just about time to end completely doom and gloom picture of Baltimore's crime rate that has become true by definition. It's bad, it's a serious problem that requires enormous improvement, and it disproportionately affects the African-American community. But it has improved in recent years. We may have to start giving the Baltimore Police Department a little credit and the fact that the city is working better with Federal law enforcement probably helps. There are also a lot of community-based organizations that have contributed to the progress that has been made. We're clearly not there yet, but I don't think that we should continue to view crime in Baltimore as inevitable and uncontrollable.

I think we have to hope that economy does bottom out in 2009 and that unemployment peaks in early 2010 (as I've heard predicted) and does not take too long to recover. Baltimore's made a lot of progress in this decade, I'm looking forward to that continuing once we get to the other side of this recession. I feel that's still the one wild card in all of this; how quickly can investment and economic activity in Baltimore recover? Can we maintain momentum and making Baltimore a nicer, safer, and more inclusive city? If that doesn't happen, if community programs start going bankrupt and can't find support, things could definitely take a turn for the worse.

Update on 2009 Murder Charts

2009-03-14T23:07:00.003-05:00

So my project for the day has to be teach myself how to create a chart that I can update frequently and lives on a static webpage. I just can't figure out how to make Blogger work with the cool Flash-based chart that I've worked out, so I've had to sign up for another website*.

I'll post more about this later, but for now I'm just going to publish the post and update later:
You want murder charts? I've got your murder charts!

*FYI - That web hosting service is so full of advertisements, I can barely stand it. I'll have to find a better solution eventually.

Reasons to Wake Up in the Morning

2009-03-14T11:29:00.003-05:00

So my friends were all like "We're doing this pub run on Saturday morning, you should join us!" I was thinking "Wait, when does it start?" Turns out it started at 8 AM. I'm like "Do I look like I went to a school with a Division I football program? I never gotten up early just so I could start drinking!"

But I signed up for the Baltimore Running St. Patrick's Day Pub Run (not to be confused with any 5k events) and it was a great decision. First of all, it's a "variable distance race." That is, there are some bars you're supposed to visit, but there's no course and there's no specific order that you're supposed to visit the bars. They get everyone lined up at the start and say "Go!" Then a mass of people (like a >100 people) just start running through Fells Point (we started at Slainte). Everyone's running down different streets, wearing green shirts, wearing Guinness beads... it's unlike any race you've considered running.

So you run to some bars, but they're not actually open. Instead, they have a table set up like a water station at a real race with beer cups on it. The stations had Natty Boh mostly, but also some Guinness. My personal favorite was the fact that they had water bottles full of Irish whiskey. So you squirt a shot of Jamison in your mouth, chase it with a beer, and then start jogging again. You do it with your friends, so you're not running too fast. Plus there's a bunch of other people running around the city doing this too.

I generally had at least a beer at each stop and usually a little whiskey. A couple stops had Bailey's in water bottles too (my friend made himself a small Irish car bomb at one stop). We generally know our way around Baltimore, so even if we didn't know the bar, we could figure out a good way to get there based on the address. So we were pretty efficient, our race was 5.86 miles long, but it took us 66:14 (11:18 pace) to run because we hit all the stops to drink and we jogged nice and slow.

Seriously, it was so much fun. I actually refused to believe that we'd gone 5 miles, it just seemed to fly by (especially because we ran to the furthest bar and worked our way back). At the end, they gave us a free Guinness at the bar (which, if you're willing to pay a little money, can easily become an Irish car bomb). If you live in Baltimore, you should absolutely run this "race" next year!

Guess Who's Going to the Gym This Weekend?

2009-03-04T21:21:00.002-05:00

I've been meaning to use those stationary bikes that overlook the basketball courts...

Unemployed Douchebag Seeks Personality

2009-02-25T22:03:00.005-05:00

Have you ever had that terrible feeling that without your six-figure income you would have a hard time dating girls? How you ever wondered you'd get by without your $700 per month dating budget? I haven't and I honestly would not have believed such people existed until I read this insightful piece from the Washington Post called Market for Romance Goes from Bullish to Sheepish. Apparently, this is a widespread problem among a certain set of jackasses who made way too much money in their mid-20's.

I'm going to pick on one guy in particular. Why? Because he sounds like a douchebag. He was making a lucrative salary at a financial firm until he got laid off last year. Now he laments that unemployment is hurting his relationship with his girlfriend. I doubt it. I think being a whiny momma's boy is hurting his relationship with his girlfriend.

1. Be very overpaid financial guy in Cleveland with girlfriend in NYC. Fly frequently to NYC to visit girlfriend and take her to expensive restaurants.
2. Get laid off.
3. Move in with your parents in Alexandria. Take the Chinatown bus to NYC.
4. Whine about it in the Washington Post.

Why are we supposed to feel bad for this guy? Grow up dude. You're 27. Why didn't you use unemployment as an excuse to move to NYC and job-hunt near your girlfriend? If you cared about someone other than yourself, that's what you'd do. But instead, since you're not the super-awesome rich guy you thought you were, your ego is crushed and you slinked home to mommy.

The article gets even better on the second page, where a number of 22- (since when does 22 count as young professional, you're barely post-college!) to 27-year-old women state that they are only willing to date men who have a lot of money to throw around. Presumably these women have their own careers, but think that thinly-disguised gold-digging to totally normal.

In the end, I think that we learned a lot more about the culturally-shallow, personality-devoid, young professionals that our Washington Post staff writer hangs out with than we did about what it's like to be unemployed in your mid-20's. I was really hoping to hear some interesting stories, I know a few people in that situation and it really sucks. But the people I know have been doing their level best not to let it get in the way of their personal relationships or what they love in life. I suppose that's because they are interesting, fun people.

Honestly though, if these people can't figure out how to make a personal connection without involving a lot of money, perhaps it's best that they aren't able to date - as a society we should do our best to lower the possibility that they will ever be responsible for children.

I was particularly proud of this analogy

2009-02-17T23:15:00.004-05:00

At my workplace we have someone who has a tendency to write very confrontation emails and try to push forward their point of view... despite the fact that there's generally not any opposition to their views. In fact, we're actually waiting for them to take some actions so that we can proceed with their plan.

Recently, I expressed my frustration in an email:

[They] are like the guy shouting "The end is nigh!" at a convention of doomsday cultists. We know! Now would you stop shouting and start helping put strychnine in the Kool-Aid already?

Don't know if that was worth a blog post... then again, is there anything too insignificant for a blog post?

It Doesn't Always Have to be Like This

2009-02-12T23:57:00.003-05:00

In the time that I've lived in Baltimore, it's been almost true by definition that "you're never more than 3 blocks from a bad neighborhood." Tonight I was driving through the city and thought "Perhaps it doesn't always have to be like this."

When you get down to it, it's pretty incredible that I even live in this city. My parents are firmly from the generation that grew up outside the city (their parents having moved to the suburbs before they were born / from a rural area) and I think their idea of city life was cemented during the late 1970's (mid-80's at the latest). To walk after dark in an urban area is to take your life into your own hands, even at 8 PM in Mount Vernon. To me, you just have to be aware of your surroundings and in large swathes of this city you're going to be fine (although there are even larger swathes where you might want to be concerned).

So, just as my parents formed an opinion about how cities operate, I've got this picture of how cities work and I'm thinking that perhaps in a few years it will be outdated. My impression of cities (of which Baltimore is an extreme example) is that there are the "good areas" full of late-model apartments or rehabbed townhouses or warehouses converted to condos and the "bad areas" full of poverty, dilapidated housing, and crime. The transition from one to the other is very sharp (as little as a couple blocks or a bridge) and usually marked by recently rehabbed homes, construction, or real estate sale signs.

Tonight I realized that given the current financial collapse, the Baltimore real estate boom may have tailed off for good. I am still feeling slightly optimistic that Baltimore gets hurt less than the rest of the nation, so hopefully it doesn't go much the other way (I hear the B'more real estate market is holding up better than the national average). If that's true, then here's what we might see - the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor, but perhaps some middle-income neighborhoods will start to exist in between.

Seems crazy, right? For the last decade or so as fast as an area became at all reasonable to live in real estate values jumped up so quickly that only rich yuppie types could afford them. Since the rich and middle-class had been steadily departing cities for the previous few decades, that meant that they started pushing back poor neighborhoods. This has sort of ended, but if we're lucky, it won't totally reverse. If the expansion slows down then it might be possible for middle-income families to start migrating to the transitional areas near the rich yuppie neighborhoods. In time, the transitional neighborhoods could become a reasonable area.

I don't know, call me crazy, but I kind of do like Baltimore and I do want to believe that urban living can be a reasonable lifestyle in the modern world. I'm not crazy enough to think we're going to have mixed-income neighborhoods, but is it too much to dream to imagine a city with less of a bimodal income distribution?

Brentwood Ave

2009-02-05T22:54:00.006-05:00

(Clicking on the photo will let you download the full resolution version)

This is a picture I took the other day of a man walking his dog in front of the 1500 block of Brentwood Avenue. The entire block (1504 - 1528 Brentwood Ave.) is owned by an LLC called "Station Place, LLC". Baltimore City Tax Records show that they've been paying taxes of about ~$150 / year on each one of those abandoned structures since 2005 (as far back as the online records go). That's the sort of thing that frustrates me. Some developer is sitting on that property, waiting for the Station North Arts & Entertainment District to take off. In the meantime, the city is stuck with rat-infested eye-sores. Do owners of abandoned property have to pay any sort of special nuisance assessment? Seems like there ought to be something to compel property owners to either provide real upkeep on a house or forfeit it to the city.

More Thoughts on Murder - With Graphs!

2009-01-10T14:30:00.002-05:00

After my recent post on Baltimore's low (by Baltimore standards) murder total last year, a couple people commented that we should look at per capita murders rather than the annual total. I think that there is some truth in those comments, but after fooling around with the data a little, I can also see how you would get a misleading story.

First off, a quick word on my data sources; all data for 2000-2007 is from the FBI's annual Crime in the United States (CIUS) publication. The CIUS summarizes the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program every year. I'd never really looked at this before, but it's an amazing amount of information that's available to everyone. I'm jumping the gun a little on 2008, so any numbers for 2008 are unofficial and the per capita numbers are especially suspect because the Census Bureau has not released 2008 population estimates (so I assumed no population change since 2007, which is obviously false for places like Baltimore and Detroit). Finally, we need to remember that these are population estimates, not full Census data. Also, I'm no trained demographer, so I'm not necessarily qualified to really analyze any of this - but I do love to make a good chart.

I chose to look as far back as 2000 because 1) that's when I moved to Baltimore and 2) after you look too far back you start wondering if you're really comparing apples to apples. Anyway, here's a quick plot of where we've been as a city:

So you can look at graph and see that it's not immediately obvious that a reduction in murders from 261 in 2000 to 234 in 2008 might not actually reduce the per capita murder rate in Baltimore. Before we get to per capita murders, I'd like to think a little bit more about the total murders in Baltimore.

In 2000, Baltimore was home to about 648,000 people. At the same time East Newark, New Jersey was home to 2,377 people. From 2000 to 2008, 2,377 people were murdered in Baltimore. That's right, it took only 9 years for Baltimore's criminals to exterminate a population equivalent to a small New Jersey borough. Yes, it seems silly that New Jersey have a mayor and six city council members to govern the 0.1 square miles of land and 0.04 square miles of water that comprises the borough of East Newark, but I'm sure Mayor Joseph R. Smith would be very disappointed to have his entire city wiped out.

I'm making fun of New Jersey, sure, but the numbers really are mind-boggling. Just trying to wrap your mind around the idea of a couple thousand murders is tough. Here's another way to look at it: from 2000 to 2007, Baltimore's population is estimated to have declined from 647,955 to 624,237 - a decline of 23,718 residents. Over that same time period, 2,143 people were murdered in Baltimore (i.e. the entire population of Vernon, AL). Murders alone account for 9.0% of Baltimore's 2000-2007 population decline!

This ridiculously high murder rate is made even more tragic because of it's disproportionate effect on certain populations of Baltimore. For example, in 2008 91% of homicide victims are African-American in a city that is only 64% African-American (source: Baltimore Sun). It's just unbelievable; it works out to a per capita murder rate five times higher for African-Americans than everyone else in 2008!

Speaking of per capita murder rates, without further ado, here's the chart you've all been waiting for:

With the usual warnings about comparing crime statistics, I'm going to launch into what I think I've learned by looking at that chart. First of all, Baltimore's murder rate has been fairly constant, even when adjusted for a falling population. Over this time period we've looked a lot like Detroit, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that relationship loosen up over the next couple years. Detroit looks to be in for a much rougher economic ride than we are (knock on wood). It is interesting that both Baltimore and Detroit saw a big dip in murders this year (but St. Louis jumped out of trend). St. Louis's trend line is a little scary because they saw a big one-year dip earlier this decade, but then jumped right back up to a murder rate in the high 30's. Washington DC does give us a little hope, they managed to reset to a new, lower murder rate in the middle of this decade.

Other things you might want to know (but are not immediately obvious) - the city of St. Louis has about half Baltimore's population, so you'd expect the data to be a bit noisier since the murder rate LSB in St. Louis is twice as large as in Baltimore. DC is approximately the same size at this point (because Baltimore has lost a lot of population and DC is fairly steady) and Detroit is larger. However, I'd expect a big upward revision in Detroit's per capita murder rate because they are losing population fast enough that my "re-use the 2007 population estimate" makes the denominator too big.

Finally, it's kind of interesting how rock-steady the national murder rate has been this decade. It's varied from 5.5 to 5.7 - which is actually way down from the mid-1980's (when it was over 8 for a few years). When you look at the time-series data from the 1980's to the present you really start to appreciate the drop in violent crime nationwide. This is probably why your parents worry so much about you living in the city. Their concept of urban crime was set a generation ago, when it was objectively more dangerous to live anywhere!

As I said in my previous post, 2008 was a good year for Baltimore in terms of murders. We were 3.28 sigma below the 2000-2007 average for total murders (although, due to the vagaries of population estimates and a falling population we were only 1.62 sigma lower than average for the per capita murder rate). It'd sure be nice to say that 2008 was statistically significant and that something has really changed in Baltimore - that what the police are doing different is definitely working - but the first nine days of 2009 sure haven't helped (12 murders plus a shooting victim on life support).

The problem here is that for all the good work that the police may have done in 2008, 2-3 very violent months (November to now) could spell real trouble. Many people have criticized the Baltimore Police for jumping from strategy to strategy. If murders stay high for another 2 months, even if it's not necessarily out of trend for the last decade, there will be pressure on the police to change tactics yet again. Those crime rate graphs are powerful tools but as the platitude goes, with great power comes great responsibility. It is very, very easy to make a graph say whatever you'd like.

Working in a technical field, I see plots of things ALL the time. Even though your natural instinct is to look a the pretty lines or bars or whatever, you have to train yourself to first look at the axes, at the units, at the title, and then ask whoever made the graph "Where did you get your data?" Or "How did you calculate x?" Contrary to popular belief, measured data is not the end-all, be-all of engineering. Probably about half of all charts of measured data I see have some sort of fatal problem. That's when you start to see who the really good engineers are. The good engineers look a plot of data, even measured data, and if it doesn't match up to what their technical intuition says reality ought to look like they'll just say "I don't believe that, I think there's something wrong with the measurement." So after arguing about it for half an hour, someone will agree to go back and remeasure. A bad cal on the measurement equipment, a loose connector, operator misunderstood directions, measured from the wrong datum, measured the wrong channel, measured the wrong serial number, forgot to turn on the coolant, error in the test software, error in the spreadsheet math, test equipment not sensitive enough... the list of things that can go wrong in a measurement is endless.

So what does that have to do with anything? My point is that we're measuring physical properties at my workplace. I mean, these are things that are governed by physics, things that can't change. The most important thing to remember in engineering is that those measurements aren't the truth, if you're lucky you get a picture of what the truth probably looks like. So I figure that maybe half of all graphs of measured physical data are misleading or do not tell the whole truth (eventually you get there, but it takes a few iterations). Now we're talking about something that is not governed by a physical, or even rational, process. We're talking about violent crime and murder, so a short-term spike gets noticed. Even if it were just truly random process, sometimes you get a clump, the human brain tries to see patterns in randomness. But it's hard to adjust your mind to the idea that "Yeah, even if this were random, we could get 12 murders in 9 days," it's an emotional issue that skips over that logical part of your brain. People see 12 murders in 9 days and think "Surely this is a trend! This is a crisis!" But it doesn't have to be. It could just be a random coincidence. Just looking at the graph doesn't tell you the story.

Finally, murders are not caused by a mechanistic, or even rational, process. So to some extent, saying "We followed X police procedure and saw a Y% reduction in murders" is a worthless statement. There's a correlation all right, but is there a causal relationship? Murders are not one of those things that you can afford to have a control in your experiment (not that there are not advanced statistical methods that professionals can use to evaluate procedures that do a better job of controlling for other variables). My advice would be to take a look at how other forms of crime change, because some crimes are more rational that others. I may yet do this, but I'm also afraid that any improvements made by the Baltimore PD might be swamped out by the huge effect of the recession and increased unemployment.

Overall, I sure hope that they give Bealefield a little while longer to apply his strategies before forcing him to change to something new. I like a lot of the much-reported ideas (closer work with the state's attorney and US district attorney, sending repeat gun offenders away to federal prison for longer sentences, working harder to prevent domestic violence before it turns into assault/murder, focusing on arrest warrants for violent offenders) and would like to see how they turn out.

Ok, time for one last chart even though I've said about graphs and statistics are often misleading (every engineer can tell you about the time they passed some product because 4 out of 10 tested perfect only to find out later that 5 of the other 6 would have failed). I mean, despite all their drawbacks, a good plot or graph can sure be interesting.

(On the plot above I am counting murderous acts that occur in that year, so if someone dies of injuries sustained in prior year violence they are not counted. Since I have this all in a file now, if someone dies in 2009 from 2008 injuries, I will update my 2008 murder count instead of 2009 (this is the opposite of how Baltimore's PD (and I think the UCR) count murders)).

PS - I spent so much time on this post, I made a PDF version of it that is easier to read.

The Wire Nostalgia

2009-01-09T21:19:00.002-05:00

So recently I've been re-watching The Wire with my girlfriend (she's never seen them). I'm watching Season 3 for the first time in like 2 years, it's awesome - I forgot how good Season 3 was. As I re-watch it, I think Season 3 was really the peak of the show. There are so many plot lines going on simultaneously yet you can still follow each of them very easily. Season 4 is definitely a good one too, I'll be re-watching it next so I'll decide for sure then which one is better.

There is no chance that Season 5 will over-take either 3 or 4 for favorite in my mind.

Anyway, The Onion AV Club blog pointed me to an awesome collection of pictures from the abandoned soundstage used to film The Wire. The captions do include some spoilers, so if you haven't watched the entire series, be careful!

This is definitely a good use of the internet, this is entertainment for a minute or two for a few die-hard fans of a defunct TV show - I continue to marvel at how easily we can now document, in great detail, essentially trivial things.

Baltimore - Less Deadly, Still Dangerous

2009-01-02T00:14:00.006-05:00

So now that Baltimore has closed out it's least-deadly year in a couple decades, it's time to reflect on what it means. I'll spare you most of the details, they've been pretty well reported by the The Sun and the AP. 2008 saw only 234 murders in Baltimore City, which is a considerable improvement from 2007 (282) and the lowest tally since the 1980's. However, in the same breath we should mention that shootings and other violent crime are not down and property crime has slightly increased. However, it's a new year, why not focus on the bright side? (Because 2009's murder #1 occurred less than an hour into 2009?)

I think there is also a little further cause to view the 234 number a little optimistically. In that number there are 6 deaths that occurred in 2008 but were due to wounds that occurred in a previous year. Yes, that's consistent to how things have been counted in the past, but 6 is a pretty anomaly. The fact that there were only 228 events that resulted in a death in 2008 makes me a little hopeful. We're still the third deadliest city in the US (behind St. Louis and Detroit, but not by much), but progress is progress.

Anyway, it certainly sounds like Bealefield (Baltimore City Police Commissioner) is doing a pretty good job. His programs to curb violent crime started in fall 2007 and if everyone remembers, we were on track for 300 murders in '07 until they started to tail off in the fall. November and December 2008 were particularly bad, but it sort seems like they might be able to make some progress on this. Also, you gotta like his style: on New Year's Eve he chased down and apprehended two suspects with sawed-off shotguns! That's right, he not only goes on patrol, but he was willing to chase a couple guys with guns.

Here's a little chart I've made that shows how murders progressed during the year. I think I'll probably update it once in awhile when I'm curious as to how we're doing against last year's numbers.

(Source for Data: Baltimore Crime Blog)

As you can see from that chart, June, November, and December were all really bad months for murders in this city. I just made this chart in Google Documents (yes, I'm too cheap for Excel at home), but I think that in the future I'll pretty it up a little. It'd sure be nice to see the 2009 line underneath the 2008 one.

Also, I think a really interesting chart that I want to make is "Trailing Twelve Months Murders" which ought to reflect any changes to the murder rate more effectively. However, since I only have enough initiative to get data as far back as Jan 1, 2008, that chart will have to wait until later.

You know, another thing that you shouldn't discount: 2008 was a leap year. At our current murder rate, you'd expect ~1 extra murder in a leap year.

One of These Things is not Like the Others

2008-12-28T12:35:00.003-05:00

What's out of place in this picture?

(Photographed in the Cheyenne, WY, Barnes & Noble store yesterday.)

A Super-Delicious Pie

2008-11-28T09:47:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I was invited to dinner by my girlfriend and her family. Since I didn't have anything else to do yesterday (that's one of the things I was thankful for) I decided to bake a pie from scratch. I googled "best pie ever" and this was like the second or third link: Sour Cream Apple Pie with Streusel Topping

I decided to make the crust from scratch too, which was a time-consuming decision, but I thought "Why do something half-way?" Turns out there's a reason that they sell ready-to-use pie crusts - because it takes forever to make a pâte brisée. Actually, it probably would have taken less time if I owned a food processor like it calls for (an electric mixer is NOT a substitute for a food processor in this recipe... I ended up using two steak knives as a substitute).

Overall, it's worth the effort. So if you're looking to make a really tasty pie, I definitely recommend this one.

University of Baltimore Adds to I-83's Architectural Corridor

2008-11-17T23:37:00.006-05:00

UB has announced the proposed designs for their new law school to be build at the corner of Charles St and Mount Royal Ave. The Baltimore Sun has a bunch of pictures of the designs that were under consideration and they look pretty awesome. (For actual facts you're going to have to go to the Baltimore Sun Article I'm only going to talk about how cool the building looks).

Driving south on I-83 in Baltimore is going to be quite the architectural tour once this is completed (in 2013... about the same time they finish bricking the sidewalks along Charles Street). I'm still a huge fan of the new MICA building, but this could be pretty damn impressive.

Here's the design that won the international competition:

(This picture is blatantly "borrowed" from The Sun - if this is a problem I assume someone at The Sun will contact me and let me know.)

That build is so bright that the three people in the lower left foreground are fully illuminated despite standing in the shade! You'd think that for $107 million and all the time they spent rendering the building they could have at least photo-shopped people into the picture a little better.

I have to say that it looks like MICA and UB are in a competition to see who can build the coolest modern building (the UB student center at the corner of Mount Royal and Maryland Ave. is pretty sweet too). Either way, Baltimore wins.

Now that the competition is in full swing I expect JHU to purchase some land adjacent to I-83 and build a gigantic building for no good reason. I'm sure they'll fill it with labs or something and make grad students ride another shuttle to it, whatever it takes, I just can't see them sitting idly by while MICA and UB grab all the attention. Of course, I suppose there is the fact that JHMI is a city within the city...

Comment on the Red Line

2008-11-16T22:12:00.003-05:00

If you have ever visited a major metropolitan area with great public transit (such as Washington DC, Boston, or New York City) you probably returned to Baltimore thinking "Why can't my city have efficient, convenient mass transit?" The ridiculous mish-mash of transit modes is a joke to almost anyone who looks at it. We have heavy rail, light rail, commuter rail, buses, express buses, and commuter buses. Nothing connects to anything else (unless you count the stunted offshoot of the light rail that takes you to Penn Station, which I don't - see below).

In the next 6-8 years, however, Baltimore will build the Red Line. It's actually a really good idea. Basically it's a transit corridor stretching from Woodlawn, down Security Blvd., along the US 40 corridor through West Baltimore, cuts across downtown, Fells Point, and Canton before reaching the JHU Bayview campus. Along the way it will have legitimate interchanges with the MARC Penn Line (in 2 places!) and the existing light rail. Finally, Baltimore is going to invest in some transit that will connect areas where people live to area where they work and wish to go for entertainment! It's a revolutionary concept, but let's give Baltimore the credit it deserves, as the City Paper recently pointed out, "the Red Line is, remarkably, on schedule."

In fact, this is where you, the blog-reading public, come in. Right now we are in the public comment phase of the AA/DEIS phase of the project. I forget what DEIS means, but AA = Analysis of Alternatives. This is where they do a super in-depth study of the alternatives for this transit corridor. Then they solicit community input. Then they decide which option they will propose for Federal funding. So right now (until January 5th, 2009), is your big chance to help campaign for a good choice.

They considered 12 different options, which I have conveniently summarized for you. The format is "Alternative #: Title = My Interpretation"

Alternative 1: No Build = No one wants this, but you have to do it as part of the process for getting Federal funding

Alternative 2: TSM = Don't build anything, but time the stop-lights better.

Alternative 3A-F: BRT = Bus Rapid Transit, because what we really need is yet ANOTHER mode of transit in Baltimore.

Alternative 4A-D: LRT = Light Rail; the best option

It is imperative that you go to the Baltimore Red Line website and submit a comment endorsing Light Rail, preferably Option 4C.

Pretty much everyone in their right mind realizes that 4C is the best compromise. 1 and 2 are only included for completeness as part of the Federal funding process. Alternative 3 is included because, apparently, the Maryland Secretary of Transportation was a big fan of bus rapid transit (source is wikipedia for that). Let's face it, buses just seem cheaper and crappier than light rail. I don't think any upwardly mobile urban professionals have ever thought "I like this apartment because it's near a bus stop!" But how many people do you know who live in a certain part of DC because it's close to a Metro stop? Light rail is not as cool as a functioning subway network, but it's a hell of a lot better than some funny looking buses.

Here's a list of the organizations that endorse Option 4C:

The Greater Baltimore Committee (a business consortium)
The Central Maryland Transportation Alliance
The University of Maryland, Baltimore
Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center
Mercy Hospital
Baltimore City Community College
Sojourner-Douglas College

It's pretty much the only option that is both reasonably affordable and will actually change the way people travel across the city. It's not a completely done deal though, there is a lot of concern among community residents about how this transit corridor will work out. However, in my view, the most important thing is that this transit corridor happens at all. Sure, construction won't begin until 2013, but there is no way to make something this expensive go any faster.

In case you want to be more informed before you submit an online comment, there are 4 different light rail options:

A - Dedicated Surface

B - Downtown Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

C - Downtown Tunnel and Cooks Lane Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

D - Maximum Tunnel and Dedicated Surface

Here's my take on each of these:

A - Can you imagine if Baltimore and Lombard Streets had light rail tracks like Howard Street? This is a BAD idea.

B - This is a good idea, unless you have ever been down Cooks Lane in West Baltimore, then you realize that...

C - Is the best option. Light rail is what you want, it has tunnels to get it past bottlenecks, but is not out-of-this-world expensive.

D - Probably too expensive to get Federal help.

------------

Idiocy of Light Rail Connection to Penn Station

So it is technically possible to get from Penn Station to other places using the light rail, but my question is "Why would you?" It's impossibly inconvenient. It is only effective if you are at Penn Station and want to go to one of a few light rail stops along Howard Street. Otherwise you will have to get off the light rail train you're on and wait for another train that actually goes somewhere useful. It's design flaws like this that make Baltimore public transit a case study in how NOT to design transit.

------------

This is how the opening message on Mayor Sheila Dixon's Red Line Website:

Baltimore... We Got Next... The Next Generation of Light Rail that is. The Red Line... OMG!

Generally I think Sheila Dixon's doing an all right job, but I think that's just embarrassing.

Things You See While Running

2008-11-10T21:11:00.003-05:00

So I've become something of a distance runner over the last year. It's a pretty good sport, really clears your mind after a long day at work. However, if you're going to run over the winter, you're going to have to do some running after dark. If you're going to do some running after dark in Baltimore, you're going to have to run towards the harbor.

So it's winter, it's probably pretty chilly, so the harbor promenade is essentially deserted. However, one of the unique experiences of running on the chilly, deserted harbor promenade is that every so often you run through a break-up. Literally, you'll come up behind a couple walking together. You're not really paying attention, but when you get close you can feel the tension in the air. It's pretty clear that you're definitely interrupting. You probably startle them as you pass, but it's over quickly enough - for you.

This has probably happened a half-dozen times or so for me. I think it's a damn shame. On a fall evening the harbor is really quiet, the air is crisp, it's really a nice place for a stroll. But there's no one out there but me and the occasional couple breaking up. I guess you see a lot of people walking their dogs too. But my point is, it's a shame that people that get outside and enjoy the night a little more. It's not nearly as dangerous as you think (at least down near the harbor). Don't wait until you're breaking up with your significant other, get outside for a walk!

Bloc Party on the Financial Crisis

2008-10-20T22:44:00.003-05:00

This evening I was listening to "Pioneers" from Bloc Party when I realized that this song is actually the script for the Bush administration on the economic crisis.

"If it can be broke then it can be fixed!"

...

"It's all under control. It's all under control. It's all under control."

...

"If it can be lost then it can be won!"

...

"All you need is time. All you need is time. All you need is.. time."

...

"We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?"

I've heard this song so many times, but I never realized that they were talking about the financial crisis. I guess the sense of deja vu was caused by the way they keep repeating "It's all under control! It's all under control!" in that tone that tells you that it is anything but under control.

"So here we are reinventing the wheel" (a clear allusion to the seized up credit markets)

"I'm shaking hands with the hurricane" (that's how Bernanke and Fed must feel every day)

"It's a color that I can't describe, it's a language I don't understand" (John McCain on economics)

What is a crime worth reporting?

2008-10-12T20:30:00.003-05:00

The Baltimore Sun has a pretty good op-ed explanation on when a crime is considered "serious" enough to be reported by the BPD. The example they use is the "discharge of a firearm" that occurred recently in Canton but won't show up on any of their crime reports because no one was hit with a bullet.

I agree with the columnist, why can't the BPD publish a map that is updated every 24 hours that has a short blurb about each incident that has occurred, even things as small as property crime and firearm discharging. It's not a huge technological hurdle and everyone knows that they are tracking this data. Why not make it public information?

You Heard It Here First

2008-10-09T18:52:00.002-05:00

Circle this day in red, as I am now calling this as the right time to start buying some stocks. Maybe not an absolute market bottom, but I figure we're certainly below prices that you can rationally explain. Dow well below 9,000? P/E ratio for a the top 1000 companies in America sitting at 12.75? (That's a rough estimate based on the P/E ratio calculated for the exchange-traded fund PRF.) Yeah, I'd say we're pretty much at the bottom. Stocks haven't been this cheap since 2003! If you're like me, young and throwing money in a 401(k), count your lucky stars.

We're beyond belief right now. I bought $1,000 of GE stock the other day at $20.00 per share. That's at a P/E of 9.4. That's crazy, they're a profitable, dividend-paying company! Today they dropped down to $19.01 per share. Today GE is suddenly worth 5% less than yesterday? Do you believe that? It's madness, but if you've got some cash on the side it's awesome.

Paul Krugman put up an obvious blog post about today's sell-off:

"Seriously, I'm sure we'll be hearing all kinds of explanations of today's drop - it's Paulson saying that he'll inject equity, or Obama's rise in the polls (yes, seriously, that's the right-wing line), or some obscure ruling by some government agency.

But you want to remember Robert Shiller's classic real-time study of the 1987 crash. Basically, the crash had nothing to do with any news item. Investors sold because - drum roll! - prices were falling."

There's some seriously irrational shit going on out there. I recommend you make like me and pick up some quality stocks at fire-sale prices!

(Disclaimer: Don't bet the farm (haha! remember when people had equity in their property), invest savings that you don't need for at least a couple years just in case I'm wrong).

A Great Time to NOT Work in Finance

2008-09-21T16:12:00.004-05:00

I've been really busy at work lately, so I haven't been following the financial crisis as much as I normally would. However, I have to say that it has shaken the very bedrock of my beliefs in economics and what constitutes a good economic policy. But what I have seen has really made me happy that when I graduated from college I started work as an engineer, not a financial analyst.

It's a sobering time for everyone, The Guardian (a UK newspaper) agrees with me: The City's Greatest Lie was Convincing Us We Were All Rich. Replace "The City" with "Wall Street" and you have the American equivalent. Henry Porter of The Guardian sums up a lot of what I've been feeling lately:

"...[W]e were told we were living through an epic boom many people who were paying attention and did not borrow heavily felt no better off."

When you look at it that way, the lie that we were told is pretty obvious. Perhaps I'm just too cautious or risk-averse or (as I like to think) I am not easily swayed by marketing; but for whatever reason I've basically managed to not end up exposed to this crisis. Sure, my 401(k) is hurting a little, but I cut my exposure to MBS to a level that I can live with in mid-March and besides, I'm young. All I'm doing right now is building a base that will earn for me over the next 30-40 years. So if stocks drop in value and remain stagnant for awhile it just means that I get more for my money. I plan to be debt-free in February, which will allow me to amass assets more quickly. I've kept a fair portion of my savings in cash or CD's because I decided I wanted flexibility with the money, so I haven't lost value there.

The hardest part of personal finance is the ego thing. I'm not getting a great return on my money and it's very difficult admitting that I'm just not smart enough to figure out how to do that. Well, I'm probably smart enough, but I don't have the time and dedication to do it. So I have to accept that. In my opinion personal finance is way too emotionally charged to be approached rationally. It feels an awful lot like gambling in the way you react to investment gains or losses, or at least how I react to them. I'd like to figure out a better way to divorce myself from those feelings, but until I do I have to be very careful about the investment decisions I make.

So that's basically how I've ended up with little direct exposure to the financial crisis. I don't own a home. I don't have any variable interest rate debt. The little debt I do have could be paid off from savings if necessary. The debt payments I make could be greatly reduced if necessary, but I'd rather just make the payments since the point where I will be debt-free is so near.

This is the lie that we, the American public, were sold. The financial position that I am in is so crazy that almost no one can relate to it. Why keep your money in a savings account when you can open a brokerage account? Don't you know that historical stock market returns are way better than savings account interest? If not the stock market, buy a house! Don't you know about the tax deduction?

Those personal finance advisors seem like they know a lot. They've doctored all sorts of numbers to show how you can expect 8-10% annual returns. I'm not saying that they are outright lying, they put the assumptions in there, but they are also acutely aware of human psychology and how people fail to properly evaluate the fine print. Most people haven't read about the different biases associated with lazy measurements of stock market returns. They don't understand the difference between real increases and nominal increases. Worst of all, they don't LOOK for them. For some reason, there seem to be a lot of people that, when presented with a good deal, ask "Where do I sign?" instead of "What are you getting out of this?"

Ask yourself, why does Yahoo! Finance provide you with all those updated stock quotes? It's not out of the kindness of their hearts, it's because it presents an opportunity for show advertisements. They write articles on personal finance to promote more individual people investing. It's not because individual investing is good (statistically proven to be a terrible, terrible idea and probably a destruction of wealth), it's because individual investing is a profit center for some companies.

You have to realize, the information you get is provided by self-interested parties. All those people telling you that buying a house was a great idea probably had horse in that race. Did your home-owning friends tell you to go buy something? Is it possible that some small part of their desire to see you follow in their footsteps was to validate their own decisions?

As far as I can tell, trying to actively manage your personal finances for profit is a loser's game. A vast number of resources exist solely to convince you otherwise. Just walk by the personal finance section at Barnes & Noble. Don't buy the hype. In the words of Tyler Durden, "You are not a beautiful and unique flower." You're just as dumb as every other slob who has received sub-par investment returns when guiding his own investments. Sure, everyone knows a relative or a friend of a friend who got rich directing their own investments, but I'd guess that statistically it doesn't happen. Statistics are how we tell the difference between things that are true, things that might be true, and things that are definitely false. It takes quite a compromise of ego to admit that statistics apply to you, but it's true.

Which brings me back to the financial crisis. A few years ago I bought the analysis that these giant financial institutions had gotten really good at handling risk. They had very sophisticated models for pricing risk and they were doing a good job of it. The problem in that statement is that it assumes a number of things that we now know to be false:

1) The guys making the models are really smart.

2) Counter-party surveillance works.

3) People understood what they trading.

#1 is clearly wrong. Ask any engineer that graduated in the last 10 years. Up until maybe this year we were kicking ourselves for not getting into finance. It pays so much better than engineering and all of the classes at school were so easy. The guys making the models were just smart enough to convince their management that they knew what they were doing. If the management team didn't come up through that division they probably didn't know enough to really dig into the models. I would guess that they compensated for this (if they bothered digging deeper at all) by asking a subject-matter expert that they trusted or by comparing themselves to industry standards. Those are pretty well accepted ways for doing things like that, but I think we can all see the problems with that. It's a great way to breed group-think and systemic problems.

#2 is wrong because of the sorts of people you have doing this work. It's pretty clear that the counter-parties weren't keeping a close enough eye on each other. The problem is, again, that managers are paid to make deals. I'm sure risk managers are a pain in the ass and generally seen as an obstacle to getting work done. Besides, how can you judge a company poorly for using the same "best-of-industry practices" that your institution follows?

#3 makes me sad. It seems obvious that you shouldn't get involved in things that you don't understand, but it sounds like that pretty much happened all the time. People buying mortgage-backed securities just because of their credit rating? Seriously?

Maybe I'm crazy, but buying things you don't understand is a terrible, terrible idea. I can't believe people bought homes without considering what might happen to their payments under a variety of circumstances. Everyone believed the lie that they were rich and acted like they could afford to lose a lot of money. We didn't read the fine print and now we're all fucked. And it's everyone's fault, it was the same problem at the top as at the bottom. We got too lazy too really do our homework, we got used to a rising tide lifting our boat for us, so we didn't do the work.

There is only one way that wealth is created - produce more value than you consume. We haven't been doing that for the last few years, so now we really have to tighten our belts and move forward. Just like any person teetering on the edge of insolvency we have to budget carefully, buy only the essentials, and pay down the debt.

I'm sorry America, we're not as rich as you've been told. The government is not going to be able to provide all the things you'd like them to. You're going to have to pay higher taxes to get the things we already get from the government. You're going to have to stop bitching and start saving. You're going to have to admit that there's no shortcuts to saving for retirement. You've got to stop trying to goose results in the short term and start thinking of stocks you purchase as things you'd like to hold for years.

It kind of sucks, but it's what being an adult is all about. You don't get everything you want and you have to be happy with what you've got. Because if you don't, you're going to drag us all down.

And if you work in the financial services industry, try to stop contributing to the problem. Seriously, you guys get paid a shit-load of money, try adding enough value to justify that paycheck.

reddit.com is not worthless

2008-08-27T22:56:00.001-05:00

You might say that it's mostly full of stuff you don't care about. But if I hadn't just checked it out tonight, I would not have seen this video of a gummy bear being placed in molten potassium chlorate.

It's like being a vigilante, but with fewer bloodstains to wash out of your clothing

2008-08-17T15:41:00.002-05:00

I've just been made aware of something called Baltimore John Watch and I think it's a great idea. I'm personally pretty impressed that some people are willing to put themselves out there and identify the johns picking up prostitutes in their neighborhood. It seems to be quite controversial (apparently the johns hate it, the prostitutes aren't big fans, the drug dealers hate it because the prostitutes have less money, and people who live nearby hate it because it's just causing the prostitutes to relocate). In my opinion, it's great that someone is posting the license plate numbers and descriptions of people picking up known prostitutes while children are playing nearby. I don't have a whole lot of pity for men paying $20 for a blow job from an addicted, diseased hooker. More services for the prostitute themselves would be ideal, but it seems to me that compassion for the prostitutes and hate for the johns are not mutually exclusive.

Homeless Shelters for Muslim Women

2008-08-07T21:35:00.008-05:00

This morning WYPR had a really interesting story about homeless shelters in Baltimore for Muslim women. It sounds like a very under-served population, at least from the fact that they are always full and always have a waiting list. I wanted to find out some more about the shelter (and the other two small shelters in Baltimore), but it seems like they don't have much of a web-presence. I suppose that's not surprising considering that they have to sell food on the streets to make the monthly rent on their shelter.

I did find an older Washington Post article that mentions this shelter, an article from something called the Muslim Link from when the shelter opened in 2007, and a blog post that basically calls Muslims big whiners for feeling uncomfortable in Christian-run shelters. The blog post does raise a valid question about the possible hypocrisy of a Muslim-based shelter. Basically, the blogger's argument is that if the problem is that Christian-run shelters proselytize too much and make women of other faiths uncomfortable, the solution is not creating a different sort of faith-based shelter. Well, that's the blogger's argument stated in a less frenzied and rational tone - overall they're very upset that a minority group wants to be treated differently. Either way, I don't think it is very good criticism.

I would, instead, approach the problem as follows: you have devout Muslim women who feel that the policies and standards of most homeless shelters violate tenets of their faith. These women have nowhere to go, they may not be legal residents, and there may be children involved. I think that anyone can agree that the first priority should be to help these women get back on their feet, recover from the emotional trauma they've experienced, and become productive members of society. Because, and here's the great part, anyone and everyone can become an American. That's what's great about this place. America is what you make it, literally. Every generation we get to reinvent ourselves, every American has just as much right as any other American to contribute to the "American Culture."

So these women are Americans who need help, I say you have to keep your eye on the ball here - help women get into a stable situation THEN you can worry about "freeing" them from what you judge to be an out-dated belief system and adopt fully "Western" values. Don't get me wrong, I'm as big on blind religious faith being detrimental to society as the next east coast, liberal-leaning, over-educated blogger, but if these women only feel comfortable going to a shelter that is run by a mosque or Islamic organization, then I think we should encourage that.

Anyway, I'm thinking I might try to find a way to help out these shelters. Yes, I know that Muslim organizations make a lot of people uncomfortable; worries about radicalization, trouble with integration into Western society, blah, blah, blah. All the more reason for some mainstream American charities to get involved. The more integrated into the larger charity structure these organizations are, the more transparent their leadership and financing must become. Plus, I imagine that knowing that the shelter is supported by the larger society would make these women feel more accepted by society. Or not. I would still measure it a success if my donation helped a battered woman get out of an abusive situation.

Shakespeare in a Park

2008-07-12T11:00:00.003-05:00

This is one of those "here's a great thing I found in Baltimore and I think they deserve a 'shout-out'" sort of posts:

The Baltimore Shakespeare Festival

Right now they are doing Twelfth Night at "the meadow at Evergreen house." I'd never even been to Evergreen House, it's conveniently hidden between Loyola College and the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and inexplicably owned by JHU. You should go catch this play or their next one (The Taming of the Shrew, July 18 - August). The acting was fantastic and you couldn't ask for a more relaxing environment. The play starts at 8 pm, as the sun is setting, you're far enough off the road that you can't hear any traffic, there's a small brook at the edge of the meadow, it's just awesome.

We got there at 7:45 and were about the last people to show up. Apparently everyone else knew that you're supposed to bring some wine and a picnic dinner... I'm totally doing that next time! And, in case you forgot your wine or beer, it's available from the concession stand!

This is one definitely falls in the "Pro" category when you're considering living in Baltimore.

Supply Side Economics and the McNugget

2008-07-04T15:00:00.002-05:00

The other night my friend and I pulled into a McDonalds' drive-thru at around 11:15 PM. It was late, we'd just gotten out of ultimate frisbee practice, and we were pretty hungry. I ask my friend what he wants, he says "Three 4-piece chicken McNuggets." I think this is a good idea, so I decide to order my own 4-piece box of chicken McNuggets.

We get up to the ordering box:

Box: "Hello, welcome McDonalds, may I take your order? We are on our late-night menu."

Me: "What?"

Box: "We're on our late-night menu."

Me: "Do you have Chicken McNuggets?"

Box: "Yeah."

Me: "Ok, we'll take four 4-piece chicken McNuggets and ..."

Box: "We only have 6 and 10."

Me: "Huh?"

Box: "We only have 6 and 10."

Me: "..."

My Friend: "Can you tell them to put 4 McNuggets in a 6 McNugget box?"

Me: "That doesn't make any sense."

Box (helpfully): "We don't serve anything on our Dollar Menu right now."

Me: "So you can give us a 6- or 10-piece Chicken McNugget box, but not a 4-piece?"

Box: "Yeah."

Me (to my friend): "What do you want to do?"

My Friend: "I don't want to pay more for McNuggets."

Me: "Do you want something else?"

My Friend: "Can we just go somewhere else?"

So we determined that yes, we could go somewhere else. So we went to the Burger King across the street.

This just serves to highlight the fact that you should never, ever buy a 6- or 10-piece box of Chicken McNuggets. What I don't understand is McDonald's insisting on not selling their 4-piece boxes at night. I mean, it's not like they lock up the 4-piece boxes in a safe every night. They definitely have McNuggets. They just don't want you to be able to take advantage of the following (illogical) prices:

4-piece Chicken McNuggets - $1.00

6-piece Chicken McNuggets - $2.59

10-piece Chicken McNuggets - $3.39

20-piece Chicken McNuggets - $6.59

(prices from the McDonalds' in the Southside Shopping Center on Fort Ave.)

These prices imply the following graph of the marginal cost of Chicken McNuggets:

So why do McNuggets 5 and 6 cost so much? Let's put on our supply-side economist hat. We must assume that McDonalds has a constant profit margin on McNugget because of the competitive nature of fast-food chicken product market, so price differences in McNuggets must represent the underlying cost of producing those McNuggets. (You think I'm an idiot for making these assumptions? Check out this ludicrous discussion of the cost of tomatoes on the vine by an actual economist.)

Another interesting aspect of the Chicken McNugget market is that you can buy in multiple of 4 McNuggets at a constant cost, but if you add two more McNuggets to that box and sell it as a 6-piece box, your costs more than double! The science of Chicken McNugget production is a bit opaque to me, but this leads me to believe that 4 is some sort of natural unit of McNugget and that it takes a great deal of energy to split this basic McNugget unit for boxing purposes. I think there is a lot of evidence for this theory, considering that you can not buy an odd number of Chicken McNuggets (it must be prohibitively expensive to further split the McNugget units).

It's also possible that it is much more expensive to produce a 6-pc, 10-pc, or 20-pc box. In this case, I would propose packing additional McNuggets in the 4-pc box. Having recently purchased a 4-pc McNugget (during research for this blog post), I can tell you that there seemed to be room for additional McNuggets in the package.

Other theories that I have considered:

1) McDonalds employees are very bad at counting. It takes significantly longer to count to 6 than to count to 4. This is somewhat supported by the fact that McNuggets 11-20 cost more than McNuggets 7-10. However, McNuggets 7-10 are the cheapest in terms of marginal cost, far cheaper than McNuggets 5 and 6. Perhaps this supports the theory that the most basic unit of McNuggets is 4; adding multiples of 4 McNuggets costs very little, but adding 2 McNuggets is very expensive.

2) There are some non-linear properties to McNuggets that make them very hard to cook and transport in multiples of 6. (This does not explain why three packages of 4-pc McNuggets are cheaper than one 10-piece box). Perhaps there is some strange effect causes the 5th McNugget to be very difficult to cook, but it dissipates quickly once you reach 6 or more McNuggets in any one location?

None of these simple economic explanations tell me exactly why I couldn't order a 4-pc McNugget late at night. Perhaps we should be searching for a different explanation. Perhaps there is a McNugget specialist who has one, and only one, job all day long: the production of 4-pc Chicken McNugget orders. This explains the extremely low price of 4-pc McNuggets during the day - there is someone very, very efficient is producing them. The regular McDonalds employees produce the other quantities of McNuggets less efficiently (hence the high price of the 6-pc McNugget), but we do see some economies of scale in the larger orders (as you would expect).

Now why doesn't McDonalds employ the 4-pc specialist at night? Simple - they only need a few employees at night because there is lower demand for meals at night. They want to maintain as much variety on the menu as possible, so they are forced to use employees with general fast-food preparation skills.

Well, there you have it, what might otherwise seem like a mystery explained by the application of simple economic principles. The uneducated might simply assume that McDonalds was making more profit on a 6-pc McNugget order than on a 4-pc McNugget order because of a combination of hard-to-read menus and the assumption that marginal costs always decrease with increasing quantity, but we know better. We know McDonalds operates in a very competitive market; we know that they do not have monopoly pricing power; so we know that the price of McNuggets reflects the true cost to produce them; therefore we can reasonably surmise the existence of the single-shift 4-pc McNugget Specialist - it's the only possible explanation!

Open Letter to Google

2008-07-04T08:51:00.003-05:00

It's been a long time since I made a blog post, but I have a good idea that I want people to listen to. Specifically, I want Google to pay attention. Like anyone that uses Gmail, I take it for granted that I will have the entire history of an email exchange on one screen. But I have a problem. At work we have a Microsoft Exchange Server and have to use Outlook. As much as I love have 15 lines of my inbox taken up by one message chain, I would prefer to have it all collapsed down by conversation. This would be especially key for my email archives I think. It's a pain in the ass to try to find something in an email from last May from someone you worked a lot with last year. I've got 1200 email from someone and I need to find one sentence - "Sort by Sender" just doesn't cut it. At least cut that down to 400 or so conversations; better yet, give me Google search capabilities.

So Google, this is the product I want. I want something that can read in MS Outlook *.pst archive folders, sort the messages into conversation, and allow me to use Google search on the messages in the archive. Here's the catch, like many people, I work on very proprietary stuff - my company would NOT be cool with this being advertising-based and sending any sort of information about the emails to a central server. It would have to be a stand-alone program. But, I would pay for this program. I think that if you could offer me this product for $20, I would buy it. I would even fight my IT department to get a corporate implementation if I had to.

Even if you never really sell this product, could you just create a Beta version that people could download for free? What I'm really looking for here is to force Microsoft to modernize their email client a little. There are a few small variations, but MS Outlook's mailbox looks more or less like my AOL mailbox in 1998.

The fine line between preparedness and fear-mongering

2008-05-30T14:30:00.002-05:00

From pamphlet "With Your U.S. Passport, the World is Yours!" (provided to you free with you new passport):

Pandemic Influenza
For information about pandemic influenza and how you can protect yourself if there is an outbreak while you are abroad, please visit the official U.S. Government pandemic influenza website at http://www.pandemicflu.gov.

Vermont is Pretty

2008-05-27T22:28:00.002-05:00

Over the weekend I drove through Vermont for the first time. I wasn't in any hurry, so I took the scenic route and got a couple pretty great pictures with my camera.

It's not really worth uploading low-res previews (partly because it takes Blogger so long to do it), but check out the full resolution images by clicking on the links (each is >3.5 MB):

Black River in Vermont

Field of Dandelions (near East Wallingford, VT)

Most Important Internet Videos Ever

2008-05-07T23:15:00.004-05:00

We can all agree that the internet has revolutionized economics. For one this, it's pretty cheap to do almost anything. Things that used to be very expensive (or at least time consuming) are now very cheap, such as publishing your thoughts to the entire world. What has economic revolution enabled? Loads and loads of pointless crap!

It used to be expensive and difficult to create crap; and when you did create it, you had to maintain it. Not so with the magic of the internet. Create some crap and it essentially lives on, unmaintained, forever. For example, lolcats. Sure, in 1988 you could take a picture of a cat, right a humorous caption on it, and show it to your friends. In 2008 you can take a digital picture of a cat and caption it numerous time and share it with tons of people, some of whom might actually enjoy it!

In this spirit, Bravo has, for some unfathomable reason, brought us Green Porno. It is absolutely, without a doubt, the most unmotivated, unnecessary production I have ever seen. You just need to go there and watch it. It's not porn, it's really an in-depth discussion of sexual reproduction in insects and other creatures.

It's fantastic. I don't even want to know what sort of crazy logic led them to create this series of videos. I'm mildly curious how they sold this to the business types who work at Bravo. "Hey, so we want to make some 2 minute long videos where Isabella Rossellini dresses up as various insects and other creatures and pantomimes their sex lives while giving a very factual overview of what's happening. Then we'll put it up on the internet for free."

This business plan has Underwear Gnomes written all over it.

Seriously, watch one of these episodes. While you're doing it, think about how many people died fighting World War II so that we would have the freedom to watch fake insects copulate! Think about how we have the technology to beam vast amounts of data into people's homes and we use it to watch videos of people in insect costumes humping each other! While people in Africa are barely able to eke out a living, you're spending time watching two worms go at it!

PS - A note for those of you that dislike The Hater, I have to say that without Amelie Gillete I would never have learned of this awesome waste of time. Also, surprisingly, I don't think she hated this. She did claim that this makes Isabella Rossellini our de facto hero.

Crazy Fun Things to do in Federal Hill

2008-04-24T21:40:00.005-05:00

I've lived down here in South Baltimore for 3 years now, so I'd consider myself pretty adjusted to the average Friday/Saturday night in the neighborhood. Perhaps it's more like a building up a resistance to a drug, for some reason the same ol' hit of Cross Street just doesn't do what it used to.

It was with that in mind that I assumed a Federal Hill scavenger hunt would be just like any other party. Perhaps a scavenger hunt is going to have the same mean fun level as a normal party but a much higher variance, because I was very, very wrong. It was probably one of the most fun nights of my life. Sure, I enjoy drinking as much as the next guy (although, in all honesty, possibly not as much as the next guy in this neighborhood), but this party also combined two of my favorite things to do while drinking:

Doing things - especially active, unusual, exciting things
Competing at things - especially pointless, fun, team-oriented things

Yeah, scavenger hunt was pretty much the ideal party activity for me.

It also helped that it was superbly planned and organized. Everyone met up at one house, had a couple drinks, then we scavenged, then post-party at another house. The lists were even laminated! There were like 6 or 7 teams of 5 to 7 people, so there were a lot of people running all over Federal Hill looking for viryta or Chartreuse (from my favorite bar - Idlehour) or someone walking two dogs. The best part was how welcoming everyone was in at all the bars. By the second half of the hunt, we'd show up in a bar with our laminated list looking to sing karaoke and people would be like "Oh, you're with the scavenger hunt!"

Of course, what really makes or breaks the hunt is list. The guys did a fantastic job with the Federal Hill Scavenger Hunt List. Check it out and see what you think. We had from about 9:20 PM until midnight to gather photographs of as many of those items/actions/places as possible.

My team actually won with 860 points. It was a little unfair, 6 of the 7 people on our team are at least casual runners - so we used speed to our advantage. I was definitely in a flat-out sprint to make it to the second house on time after deciding to go for those last 10 points at 11:55 PM.

My favorite picture of the night:

Human pyramid (worth 20 points) and picture with "The J&P guy" (Pete) (worth 10 points) in a single picture. There's also some random dude spotting us. And by "spotting" I clearly mean "hoping to get a chance to fondle that girl's ass."

So word from the wise: if you're like me and you enjoy "doing things" and "competing at things" while having a couple drinks - attend the next scavenger hunt you get invited to.

Oh, and wear practical shoes (definitely saw at least one girl in heels for this... that team was unable to compete with our teams' highly appropriate footwear).

Do Something Productive for the Community

2008-04-23T06:32:00.004-05:00

No time for any insightful analysis this morning, just wanted to post about an upcoming event:

Friends of Baltimore Parks and Middle Branch Shoreline Day

If you're from the South Baltimore/Federal Hill area, you've seen Middle Branch Park. It's south across the Hanover Street Bridge from Port Covington. Anyway, it's actually a very nice park, but has a tendency to get a lot of trash piling up on the shore. There's a clean-up day schedule for next Sunday, May 3rd. I wish I could attend, but I'll be out of town that day. Anyway, just hoping to spread the word and maybe get some people involved.

This is NOT Journalism

2008-04-17T21:30:00.007-05:00

Over the past year I've been asking myself a question - Has CNN.com always been this depressingly terrible or is this a recent development? First off, all of their articles are apparently written for third-graders by middle-school students. Secondly, entertainment "news" takes up a distressing portion of their "Top Stories." They have also started the annoying habit of giving you the top three or four "Story Highlights" whenever you click on a story. Apparently if you don't have the time or reading comprehension skills to finish their three paragraphs (which usually add up to like 8 sentences), you can read the PowerPoint version of the story.

Occasionally, when nothing at the New York Times or the Washington Post catches my eye I may become sickly curious about what drivel CNN is broadcasting. Today, I feel they have reached a new low with the story Review: John Oliver gets laughs out of 'Terrifying Times'. It's a review of some stand-up comedy performed by a Daily Show "correspondent." It is also possibly the most poorly-written review I've ever seen.

It starts with the Story Highlights:

AP: "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver's "Terrifying Times" hilarious
Oliver: Wind-farming a bust - "Wind has been horrifically overfarmed"
Best way to emotionalize news: Score it to power ballads, says Oliver

Seriously. Someone read the review, determined that if you took nothing else away from this review, you would want to learn those three things. Let's deconstruct those bullet points:

This is a clutch bullet point here. Someone's been doing their PowerPoint. Count the facts that you can learn from that: 1) We didn't do independent journalism, but we subscribe to the AP Wire. 2) This is somehow linked to the "Daily Show," that show is popular and will inspire positive feelings in most people. 3) The subject of this article is John Oliver. 4) He has a show/movie/book called "Terrifying Times." 5) The show/movie/book is funny.
Oh shit! We put every single fact into the first bullet. How about we just take one of his jokes and make it a bullet? Now, let's rephrase it to take away the timing and comedic value...
Well, we already ruined the best punch line in bullet #2, but there's a 3 bullet minimum... did he say anything else funny?

Now that we're past that insult to our intelligence, let's take a look at why it's so insulting that Frazier Moore has a job writing reviews, much less for a national wire service. The article is just terrible. It's so bad, I don't think I've made it all the way through yet. Why not? I got to the part where it just devolved into quoting Oliver over and over. Here's the thing, half of stand-up comedy is delivery and timing - a transcript is unlikely to work as well. So when Moore starts paraphrasing the jokes you can imagine how that affects the quality of the article.

This is not a review of a stand-up routine, this is a summary, and a shitty one at that. I mean, I edited my high school newspaper. If someone had brought me this and told me it was their review, I wouldn't have been that surprised. We were a really small school, the journalism teacher was too burned out from teaching to care, and we took anyone we could get to write anything for the paper. I would have had to accept the article, rewrite the entire thing, and publish it under the writer's byline. I would, however, expect that most high school newspapers are able to produce more analysis in their reviews.

Perhaps Moore thought that by pointing out that Oliver is generally on target with his humor counts as analysis. Perhaps Moore thought "Hey, people don't want thoughtful analysis, they want to know what the jokes were so that when their co-workers are discussing it tomorrow they won't miss the pop culture reference." That's probably pretty likely I suppose, the general tone of CNN.com is that there is nothing worse that being mildly out of touch with pop culture (the thinking man's solution to this problem is The Onion AV Club's "The Hater" blog - stay in touch with pop culture by reminding yourself of your superiority to pop culture).

Now it would be pretty easy to look up some more of Frazier Moore's work, according to Wikipedia he has been the AP's TV critic since 1992, but I'm going to admit that I'm too lazy to do that (yes, Frazier Moore has a Wikipedia article - he pretty much must have written that himself, right? No one's like "Hey, you know what would make a good Wikipedia article? A short bio of the AP's TV critic!"). Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt, everyone phones one in once in awhile. Perhaps he literally phoned that one in, but he was using a Verizon cell phone and all his insightful analysis was lost when the call was dropped.

Anyway, it just offends me that someone can write that poorly and still be employed as a professional writer. I suppose being a TV critic is a tough job. I mean, the man's probably watched a lot of bullshit in the 16 years, perhaps he's started to believe that television has succeeded and America really is that dumb. Perhaps he's right. That's probably what scares me more than anything - not that CNN is so terrible, but that they aren't losing money. Why isn't capitalism working?!? Someone has to be able to do this better!

Next time on "I Hate CNN" - Lou Dobbs is a Terrible, Terrible, Populist Moron.

An anecdote

2008-04-08T20:48:00.004-05:00

The other day I had one of those experiences that makes you say "wow, this is a semi-interesting anecdote that, if spun the right way, really illuminates the modern human experience." When this happens to a free-lance journalist, the Bat-phone starts ringing at Slate.com. When this happens to me, I post about it on my blog.

The other day I got a pretty scary voicemail on my cell phone from BGE. "The account linked to this phone number will be denied service unless payment is made immediately." Now, I was pretty certain that I hadn't accidentally forgotten to pay the gas and electric bill for the last few months, but that isn't the kind of message you ignore.

So I call the phone number that they mention in the message, enter my account number, and learn that my bill has been paid in full (just as I thought). Nonetheless, that voicemail was a mystery and I'd rather not have my electricity accidentally turned off and have to explain to my roommates why all their food is rotting in the fridge.

Quick divergence - anyone else hate how hard it is to get ahold of BGE when you want to talk to a person? First you have to wait until normal business hours, then you have to find the secret number on the BGE website.

Step 1 - Do not visit the page headlined "Contact Us." That just leads you to one of those web forms that allows BGE to conveniently ignore you. Seriously, there should be a special kind of purgatory (yes, just purgatory, this isn't that big of a sin) dedicated to companies that don't publish a phone number at all, just a web form for questions. Have you ever been looking for information, run into one of those web forms and though "Hey! This will make my life easier! Instead of finding the information I need right now or talking to someone with that information, I can send a message into a black hole of accountability!"

Step 2 - Click on the "Customer Service" heading instead.

Step 3 - Careful! You can try the 410-685-0123 number, but when I did it just rang for awhile and then went to someone's voicemail. Yeah, like someone saying "Hey this is , leave a message and I'll get back to you." No way to know if that's actually BGE.

Step 4 - Try calling 800-685-0123; after convincing the computer that you didn't accidentally call that number instead of the automated bill-payment-by-phone or balance-inquiry-by-phone number, you can be put on hold and eventually talk to a real person.

Is it me or was that too hard? Here's my rule of thumb, if a company says that they're dedicated to customer service, but it takes me >5 minutes to get a representative on the line, they're full of shit. Open challenge to all companies: I want to go from Google to talking to one of your representatives in 5 minutes or less. This isn't rocket science, it's hiring a bunch of people to answer phones.

Ok, back to the story: So it turns out that the account that was about to be shut off wasn't mine, but it was linked to my phone number. Apparently whoever had signed up for the account had done it years ago, before giving up the phone number that I now have on my cell phone. This led me to think, what do I really know about this person who used to have my phone number:

Their name is Wade or Wayne or something that starts with a W (based on the wrong number calls I got for a surprisingly long time. I think I got a couple within the last six months).
They have lived in the same location for at least 5.5 years (that's how long I've had this phone number).
Based on the speech pattern of the people who inadvertently reached me, they are a lower-income, probably African-American, Baltimore native. This is based on my aggregate impression over many wrong numbers.
The are about to get their gas and electric shut off for non-payment.
They aren't going to get a phone call to warn them.

There's an odd asymmetry in this relationship, I know a few things minor details about this guy's life but have no way to contact him. He knows nothing about me, but can very easily reach me - he knows my phone number after all.

Advances in Medical Science

2008-04-04T19:39:00.005-05:00

As any dedicated reader of this blog knows, I often use this blog as a vehicle to promote products that have made a significant contribution to society (see this post for example). This is such an instance.

Humans have been getting and coping with blisters for literally millions of years, but only recently have I discovered the ultimate blister treatment. I couldn't have done this without my medical-student roommate (who is like 99% of a doctor; I mean, he's already matched to his residency so it's pretty much just a formality now, right?). My roommate introduced me to:

Band-Aid brand "Advanced Healing Blister"

Now aside from the deficiencies in product naming ("Advanced Healing Blister" sounds like a blister that is in the final healing stages, not an advanced treatment for healing blisters), this is a fantastic product. Eureka! Further, in-depth, research has taught me that these are "Advanced Healing Blister Cushions." Still not a very good product name... maybe that's why I've never heard of them, I just can't imagine an marketing jingle based on that phrase.

Anyway, let me contrast this treatment with historical blister treatment:

In the past, when you got a blister, you'd pop it, put some Neosporin on it, and put a regular band-aid on it. After a couple hundred yards of vigorous walking the band-aid comes off and sticks to your sock. Your foot continues to hurt... a lot if you're wearing the same shoes that caused the blister.

With this product? You pop the blister, stick one of these bad boys on it, and you're good to go. I ran 10 miles with one of these cushions over a blister, it not only stayed in place, but the blister didn't hurt or get worse!! It's this kind of innovation (or, since I don't know who invented these cushions, this kind of large corporate theft of a small company's idea) that made this country great in the first place! Thank you corporate America for allowing me to run without pain.

These adhesive cushion things cost more than your average Band-Aids, but they work infinitely better. If you're any sort of athlete or just someone who has uncomfortable shoes, you owe it to yourself to stock up on these "Advanced Healing Blister Cushions" immediately.

Mount Vernon not Tacky Enough? Call MICA!

2008-03-27T20:56:00.010-05:00

It's an unfortunate fact that, under normal circumstances, not a day goes by that I don't hear someone remark "I hate that Mount Vernon neighborhood, especially around the Washington Monument, it's just too pleasant!"

Thankfully, MICA has offered us a temporary reprieve from not only the beauty of the Mount Vernon Place but also from the unbearable usefulness of cutting through the park to cross the street! That's right from March 16 through March 29, project Golden Chain Link Fence is on!

Why would MICA surround the parks around the Washington Monument in cheap chain link fence that they spray painted gold? For an answer to that, you're going to have to go to http://www.goldchainlinkfence.com, or just continue reading.

The website claims that this fence is "temporarily shifting the way the space is seen and used." This is absolutely true:

There's only one way into the fenced-in area!

Also, notice their motto: "An Opportunity to Experience Mount Vernon Place from an Alternative Perspective." I have two problems with this:

That's not a sentence!
Instead of "Alternative," I would suggest the words "Ugly," "Godawful," or "Tacky."

-----

I mean, can you imagine the brainstorming session for this art installation?

"We need to do something public! Something people will notice!"

"We need art in a public places!"

"Hey, what about experiential art? Something that ordinary people take part in!"

"But how can we do it on our budget? How will be get people to notice?"

"What if we put something in there way? Like they have to walk around it?"

"A statue!"

"No! People are used to walking around things place on pedestals! We need something that changes the city landscape!"

"Let's close a street!"

"Let's block an intersection!"

"What if we parallel park really poorly so that there's less parking around?"

"Bad parking...how will people notice?"

"We could paint the cars gold!"

"What if we get towed?"

"Let's tear up a sidewalk for unnecessary construction!"

"How will people know it's unnecessary?"

"We could paint it gold!"

"Aren't jackhammers expensive though?"

"Jackhammers are way too phallic anyway!"

"Wait! I've got it! We could put up a fence!"

"Where?"

"I don't know, like around some space! Like it'll totally change the way people use that space!"

"Yeah... I get it! I mean, normally it's open space, but now it's fenced off!"

"It'll change everyone's understanding of the space!"

"But how will anyone know that it's fenced off to change their understanding and not just because the grass has been reseeded?"

"We could paint it gold!"

-----

What I don't understand is how they sold this dumb-ass plan to the city. "We can spread goodwill too by using the fence to create messages!"

Styrofoam cups in the fence to spell a word? Really? That's the best you can do? Don't you go to an art school? This is your plan for life? You're going to make art that's good enough to be sold for enough money to feed you? I mean, I know it's an art school, but isn't there someone there who has the job of saying "Hey, I know you mean well and you really want this to work out, but you just don't have any good ideas. Perhaps you ought to go over to ComputerTraining.com and take their Online Skills Challenge, I hear that Microsoft Certification can guarantee you a good career in IT management."

They probably sold this to the city by not actually letting on how fucking ugly their fences would really be. Instead, they probably just showed them pictures of the art installation that don't completely suck. There are some installed pieces that are actually a little cool, so it's not completely a waste.

Plus, as I just learned this evening, they're tearing down the fence tomorrow. I was up there over the weekend, when it was as ugly as it could be, but by this weekend you'll apparently be free to walk around Mount Vernon Place again.

Nonetheless, it was a dumb, dumb, dumb idea. "Visitors are encouraged and possibly even forced to 're-see' and 're-consider' Mount Vernon Place from an alternate perspective." Seriously - just because you can make it sound pretentious doesn't mean it's art.

Stars are Awesome Musicians, Fans of The Wire

2008-03-20T18:46:00.006-05:00

Last night I checked out the Stars concert at Sonar. I've been listening to their latest album, In Our Bedroom after the War, and it's fantastic. Seriously, you should really check out some of this band's music.

So anyway, the show: At first, it kind of seemed like they brought their B-game, the female lead kind of sucked on one of my favorite songs (The Night Starts Here) as they opened. But the crowd really got into it the show and you could tell that the band got into the groove quickly. It was awesome, but probably my favorite parts were when they gave shout-outs to The Wire, a show that every Baltimorean should watch and everyone who appreciates great television should love. It's weird that I haven't posted anything about The Wire before... I think that may be the next post.

Anyway, near the beginning of the show:

Amy Millan (female singer) - "We're really excited to be in Baltimore (a little noise from the crowd), we've never been here before, but we love The Wire (a lot of appreciative noise from the crowd). We were looking for Bubbles on every street corner on our way in."

At the end of the show:

Torquil Campbell (male singer) - "This is going to be our last song. I'm tempted to dedicate it to Stringer Bell (lots of cheering) ... [says some things I miss] ... did you know telling your mother you love her is ganster? It's about the most gangster thing you can do; maybe if Stringer Bell had called his mother and told her he loved her, shit wouldn't have gone down so badly for him."

Other things that are great about Stars:

They are so obviously Canadian, so absolutely Montreal, it's actually cool.
They have a bunch of flowers arranged on the stage and periodically throw some of them into the audience. This would be even awesomer if they were any good at throwing flowers. Torquil (the male singer) definitely needs to work on his release point. Still, throwing flowers to the audience was cool.
The bassist definitely referred to our fair city as "B-more!" at one point.

Things that were not awesome about the show:

The opening act was some douchebag who didn't even have a real band. He got some random band to back him up within the week before the show. Plus he can't write songs that don't sound stupid. However, when he let the random band do a couple songs, they were much better, so I recommend Pash.

Considering a Gentrifying Something? Read This Essay First

2008-02-11T23:18:00.000-05:00

Cold, windy Sunday afternoons are for reading. It seems to me that one of the great tragedies of our times is that few 25-year-old men are willing to say that. Or better yet, not enough parents of any age are willing to explain that to their children and then miss a football game to visit the library (or it's modern, yuppie equivalent - Barnes & Noble).

I spent over 5 awesome hours in Barnes & Noble, I only left because they were closing. I read The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, flipped through National Geographic, some sort of skeptic magazine, followed by (unintentional irony alert) a magazine called The Believer. I forget why I pulled The Believer off the shelf, but I want to draw your attention to a fantastic essay by Eula Biss: No-Man's-Land.

I highly recommend that you read the essay before continuing. But in case it's not cold and windy, I'll summarize quickly: It's a great essay, comparing the displacement of the Native Americans by white settlers as described by Laura Ingalls Wilder with the gentrification of neighborhoods in American cities. It doesn't make gentrification out to be entirely evil, which is nice, because I don't think I'm all that evil. The essay really hits its stride when it comes to being a "pioneer" of gentrification.

I can relate to having mixed feelings about being a pioneer of gentrification. I would estimate that the immediate area around my house is no more than 75% gentrified. There are still drug deals happening in the vicinity. I'm torn between feelings of guilt about pricing some families out of the neighborhood and desire for some sort of harm to befall drug dealers everywhere. I have a very Jermaine Clement (à la Flight of the Conchords) approach to dealing with drug dealers, I exact my revenge by thinking very mean thoughts about them.

Biss also brings up the fear that you are expected to maintain when you live in an urban area. About how your parents and friends and people you don't even know say "Isn't that kind of a dangerous?" when you talk about walking outside at night or going for bike ride.

For example, take this quote from the essay:

Gangs are real, but they are also conceptual. The word gang is frequently used to avoid using the word black in a way that might be offensive. For instance, by pairing it with a suggestion of fear.

It took me some time living in Baltimore (growing up and growing used to the city) before, as a senior at JHU, I finally started to notice the casual racism that surrounded the campus. That everyone casually used the word "ghetto" until it lost the significance of that word should car (the utter shame we should all feel for allowing such a thing to exist in America). Sure, for most upper-middle-class kids, ALL of Baltimore is a ghetto. It certainly doesn't look like where they grew up. It's all so poor, so crime-ridden, so... black.

Not that these students shouldn't be wary. There are muggings near campus, students can get hurt by crime, and if you have no idea how to tell a questionable neighborhood from a bad neighborhood it's no surprise that you're scared whenever you're out of sight of campus. That does not, however, excuse the remarks and actions that stereotype the vast majority of Baltimore's residents as being untrustworthy, drug-dealing or -using, and dangerous.

There is another passage in the essay that I found particularly striking.

We are afraid, my husband suggests, because we have guilty consciences. We secretly suspect that we might have more than we deserve.

That sentiment is hauntingly familiar to me. I've lived in this city long enough to feel like a real resident, but I still don't feel accepted by the city. Lately I've taken up distance running and as I've started to increase the length of my runs, I've started to push back the boundaries of my intimate exposure to Baltimore. Once I ran back towards south Baltimore from Patterson Park on Gough. Gough is legitimately crosses through what most people consider to be bad neighborhoods. There's even a four- or five-block stretch that passes through a housing project.

I didn't detour around the housing project, I just kept on trucking. For one thing, I was running, I had nothing on me but a key to my front door. I'm a tall man and although I don't think anyone considers me imposing, the world is a much more frightening place for a petite woman. So I ran right through the housing project.

As I ran through, I was struck with the familiar question: "Do you think these people hate me? Do they resent not only that I have so much more in material terms, but is it particularly offensive that I am even bringing my bourgeois hobby of running into their neighborhood?"

I'd like my running through their neighborhood to be interpreted in a positive way. Interpreted that I treat this housing project as just another city street and don't shun it just because it's residents are poor and predominantly (completely?) African-American. I'd like there to be some way to telegraph "I got a lot of what I have through hard work," but instead I'm sure just look like another rich, young asshole who can't wait to make them move further from my expensive coffee shops.

I feel this tremendous desire to help them by giving them good financial or educational advice or even personal advice. Heck, I'd love to explain to the kids why I'm running (Because it feels fucking great! Because it gets you in shape! Because it's about hard work and the sense of achievement that comes from completing something difficult! Because I don't want to end up with type II diabetes!).

There's no way for me to actually achieve any of this. The chasm that divides us socially is too much for me to bridge. I have to face that this sort of interaction is too far outside my comfort zone and if a conversation did happen, I would not be able to effectively communicate.

I run on, and the next thought is, of course, why do I feel I need to try to spread happiness by forcing my middle-class values on poor people? I think this, of course, because I am running and when you are running you have a lot time to try to think about things that aren't how tired you feel or how far you have left to go.

The answer to this question definitely points back to Biss's (the essayist) point about the feeling of "having more than I deserve." I feel guilty for having more than I deserve, but more subtly, I probably feel the desire to pass these values on to people poorer than myself in hopes of justifying my beliefs. If they adopt my values and also find success, then perhaps I am not party to some terrible crime. I'm just a person who has played by the rules, and here's living proof that anyone can succeed with these rules, so clearly the game wasn't necessarily rigged in my favor.

But I can't escape the fact that the game is partly rigged in my favor, even if I don't actively try to take advantage of it, I'm still a white, middle-class man. So I run on. I cross Central Avenue, reach Little Italy. Back on familiar turf, back to a neighborhood where you can take a date and purchase over-priced Italian food, wine, and dessert. Probably not much more than 2 miles to go on this run, I'm almost done!

I guess that's the other reason to run; because you can make visible, evident progress and you're always moving forward.

Biofuels: Still NOT a Good Idea!

2008-02-08T16:36:00.000-05:00

I was always kind of vaguely suspicious of biofuels - the argument has essentially been over which politician can lavish more subsidies on their constituents in the name of "green fuels" - and finally we have some better proof that FlexFuel vehicles = bullshit.

From the journal Science:

Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change

Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt

New York Times summary of the reports:
Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat

So basically, when you take into account the carbon dioxide emitted when land is cleared for use in biofuel growth (and eventually, because of substitution effects, some land somewhere is going to get cleared), you put yourself in a deep carbon debt that will take a few generations of using biofuels to escape.

Not to mention the fact that the entire life-cycle carbon cost of biofuels is kind of suspicious as it is. I'm supposed to believe that all of the energy it takes to grow the crops, harvest them, transport them to refineries, and refine them into fuel is less than the amount of energy you get out of the fuel? It's not like I'm breaking new ground in this analysis, check out this article from 2005.

So how much longer do you suppose we'll be hearing from politicians about how important it is to expand federal subsidies for biofuels? I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, if it's one thing that both Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it's that we need to transfer massive amounts of wealth to farmers and agri-business ($618 billion dollars, 2008-2017).

NYTimes Sees a Number, Decides Sky Has Fallen

2008-02-06T19:55:00.000-05:00

The magical thing about a recession is that you can't tell if one is happening or not until months later. This puts the news media in a delicate situation. There's no way to report on the thing that everyone is curious about. Reporting about recessions also seems to be a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, if you close your eyes, click your heals, and repeat "the economy may be slipping into recession," it just might happen.

Take, for example, an article today in the New York Times: Productivity Slowed in the 4th Quarter

I have several problems with this article.

Productivity did not slow. Productivity is not a thing that can slow, it is a measure of goods produced per unit labor input, so it can only increase or decrease. Productivity growth, on the other hand, can accelerate or slow down.
You look at that headline and your first reaction is to think "The US economy was less productive in the 4th quarter, the economy's really in the crapper!" Wrong. Productivity stilled increased, just at a slower rate than before.

Ok, so fine, maybe the headline is a little to pessimistic for me. Perhaps the article is objectively written in a thoughtful manner. But you're no fool, you can tell that I'm just setting you up with that statement.

In the body of the article you find nothing but doom and gloom. Productivity growth slowed to a mere 1.8% annualized growth rate in the 4th quarter, from a blazing 6% annualized rate in the 3rd quarter. Sounds disastrous, right? 1.8 is not a big number! It's certainly not as big as 6!

How about some perspective then? From Gregory Clark's "A Farewell to Alms," page 200, there's a table of long-term productivity growth rates. For the United States, from 1960-2000, the average growth rate of output per worker-hour was 1.75%.

To quote the article itself:

For the year, productivity rose by 1.6 percent, a slight rebound from a 1 percent gain in 2006 but both years were well below the average annual increases of 3.2 percent turned in from 2000 through 2004.

Because 4 years constitutes a reasonable amount of time to use to set your expectations. Seems more likely that we're just looking at productivity growth reverting to the long-term mean.

The whole tone of the article is ridiculous. It's basically written from the tone of "Batten down the hatches, it's going to get rough out here!" when all the data in the article says "We're not in a boom, but we may not be in a recession either." The article admits that productivity growth was twice what economists expected and that the cost of labor was lower than expectations, but then quotes an analysts that says everything is going to hell.

So my point is the New York Times has taken something that really means nothing or could mean anything, and decided to interpret it in the gloomiest possible fashion. What's worse, it's not even an individual reporter that we can blame. Apparently this is just a story from the Associated Press. Every news outlet is going to pick this up and people everywhere are going to clamor for an "economic stimulus" (which is synonymous with "increased deficit spending").

So I guess my point is, maybe there's a recession coming, but there's no way to really tell. Also, for most people, a recession is an entirely abstract thing that you can blame unfortunate economic events on. When you're using a home equity loan to finance your consumption, you have to know it's going to catch up with you eventually. When the entire nation is gripped by this mania, why are we surprised that the economy is slow for a bit? I guess that I just wish the news media had enough economic sense to parse the news a little better by themselves, rather than just weighting their stories to whichever camp has more analysts. Or, failing that, be a little more objective about things.

A Well-Kept Secret

2008-01-21T19:51:00.000-05:00

So the other day I felt like going to a play. No particular reason, just realized that I haven't seen any live theater in long time. So I fooled a perfectly nice girl into agreeing to see a play with me.

Now, obviously you have to have a date to a play. As a young, urban, male professional there are some fairly hard and fast rules about who you call when you want to go somewhere. For example, it can make sense to go out to dinner with a platonic female friend, but if I sat down in a restaurant with one of my male friends I would probably just feel like we should have ordered take-out and watched a sporting event instead. You may disagree, but this is my soapbox, so I get to interpret socially acceptable behavior.

So anyway, once you've decided to go to a play and acquired a date (or vice versa), you need a play to go to. I turned to the City Paper, because I assume that they'll know about all sorts of arty, not-profitable things. And that is how I found The Audrey Herman Spotlighter's Theater.

I was dubious at first, I've driven down St. Paul Street a couple thousand times and never noticed said theater. I've been to Mt. Vernon a lot, never heard of a theater besides Center Stage. Sure, I'm not really involved in the arts in Baltimore, but I've never heard of this place. It's not easy to find either, you have to walk around the side of an apartment build, to the sort of entrance that is affectionately referred to as "garden level" by landlords.

Once inside, though, you start to suspect this might actually be a well-kept secret. They sell wine, coffee, and candy in the lobby. $1 candy bars! The theater itself it awesome. It's so intimate, I've been in bigger conference rooms. Seats on all four sides of the stage, no more than 80 seats in the whole place. It's a small stage and you're right there, it's great. The actors were pretty fantastic. What more can you ask for in a theater?

It's absolutely a great experience, I can't believe that something this fun has been right here under my nose for so many years. So get out there and support your local theater! I would even be so bold as to suggest that you don't wait until you've got a date, get a friend or two and go check it out!

Excuse me, would you like something disgusting to drink?

2008-01-11T19:59:00.000-05:00

Excuse me, I can see you've just finished a vigorous workout. Do you realize that it's really important to replace your carbohydrates and protein as quickly as possible? Here, let me offer you this totally disgusting beverage.

We call it Clif Shot Recovery drink. We claim that this pale orange concoction is "mango-orange" flavored. We certainly did not come up with that after making the interns taste it and then try to name the flavor, we totally intended to create a "mango-orange" flavored drink. Notice the pleasant agave-rubber scent and the chemical aftertaste, I bet you didn't know that your body could get nutrition from something that tastes like this!

Go ahead, finish the drink! Just hold back that gag reflex for a few more gulps and your body will be in the fast-lane headed towards Recoveryville!

An Ode to a Taco Shell

2007-12-03T22:06:00.000-05:00

Every so often you're walking along, just living your life, when WOAH! Holy crap! That's a revolutionary product!

What's so amazing about that box of taco shells? At first, I didn't notice it either. But look closer, those hard taco shells are shaped like a "U" instead of the standard "V!" Revolutionary! A hard taco shell that will stand up on it's own while you fill it with delicious taco things!

Clearly, when you're walking through the taco aisle you're not expecting an entire paradigm shift, but that's exactly what I encountered. So I bought those taco shells (I can't tell you anything about the relative pricing of the various taco shell shapes, but can you put a price on this sort of innovation?) and tonight was taco night.

Let me tell you, those shells work exactly as advertised (in that picture). They sit there calmly on your plate while you make your taco, then remain standing while you make a second taco, then remain standing while you walk to the living room, then remain standing while you eat them! Want to have a drink of apple cider midway through your taco? No problem, just set your taco down on the plate, it will remain standing.

These are the best hard taco shells I have ever have ever experienced. My taco enjoyment was at least 50% above average for a hard-shelled taco!

My only question is, why have I had to live my entire life (to this point) with on V-shaped taco shells? How could we, the human race, miss such an obvious invention for so long? I fully expect these tacos shells will add about a tenth of a percent to US productivity over the next few years. I mean, seriously, think of all the man-hours of taco-spillage clean-up that will be eliminated by U-shaped shells!

Thank you Old El Paso, your Stand 'N Stuff taco shells have rekindled my belief in gigantic food processing companies like General Mills.

Metal Spinning?

2007-11-15T18:52:00.000-05:00

I feel that one of the primary missions of anyone with a blog is to answer questions. So it is time, once again, for me to answer a question that you did not even know you wanted to ask. Ready? So your question is:

"How do they form nearly perfect spheres (and hemispheres) out of aluminum or other metals? Shouldn't that be pretty difficult?"

The answer is metal spinning. It doesn't sound amazing, but it looks amazing when you watch metal spinning on video. That's when you realize it's totally awesome.

(Video is from Century Metal Spinning of Besenville, IL)

YouTube has an example from a metal spinning company that is making a vase:

I feel like that NBC public service program, The More You Know. Except they deal with smoking, violence prevention, HIV/AIDS, and other public health / public policy priorities, while I deal with machining metal. Actually, perhaps I should post more about machining metal to tight tolerances - it's an important subject that just does not receive much attention in our society. Children in our country really have no idea how hard it is to hold a .002" profile tolerance. Hell, given the general state of knowledge about engineering in this country, almost no one has any idea why tolerance analysis is important. No one discusses advanced manufacturing or design, I mean, did you know such a thing as water-jet machining existed?

I Participate in the Political System

2007-11-10T15:17:00.000-05:00

South Baltimore's congressman, Johns Sarbanes, held a town hall-style meeting at the Ella Bailey Recreational Center (attached to Johnson Elementary School). Since this is literally across the street from my house, I couldn't help but to go. I'll bet you'll be shocked to learn that my roommate and I represented 50% of the people between the ages of 14 and 30. There was a very strong contingent under 15 as the event was co-hosted by the South Baltimore Youth Council, which is apparently a civic organization for kids in South Baltimore. Seems like a really cool idea, it was definitely a lot different than the sort of "get kids involved in politics" organizations you see in the suburbs. For starters, it didn't seem to be entirely run by overachieving parents.

Congressman John Sarbanes speaking at the Ella Bailey
Recreation Center in South Baltimore.

Overall, I'd say it was a pretty good event to attend. Congressman Sarbanes did a pretty good job of explaining that he was helping to advance the general Democratic platform, but that it's a slow process. He did say that he expects things to improve after the 2008 election. Overall, the main impression I got was that it's pretty hard to be a freshman congressman. In the grand scheme of things in Washington, you have almost no say in anything. At the same time, you have to explain to constituents why you aren't impeaching the administration, lowering gas prices, or helping to keep crazy men from trying to kill them. (The woman in that article showed up to ask for help to somehow get the man committed to a more secure facility. The Congressman and his staff seemed pretty concerned about that one - hopefully they're able to help the poor woman).

Wow, here's a good note, apparently they apprehended the man in question this afternoon just before the town hall meeting.

Did John Sarbanes say anything of note? He did say that while he has not signed on to Representative John Conyers's health-care reform legislation, he believes that we need universal health-care. He supports a single-payer system as the eventual end state of the reform, but he's not sure that it's a political possibility right now. His justification is that a single-payer system will remove a lot of the bureaucratic costs involved with private insurance. I can't say as I know a whole lot about how the private health insurance system operates, but I do know that I generally am not required to take a lot of action with my insurance plan. It's pretty clear what I need to do and they offer a pretty great level of service. Also, because of the choices available to me, I am able to pick a plan with a generally low level of coverage (but some coverage for catastrophic events) and pay less for insurance.

My fear with a single-payer system is that it will become a new form of wealth redistribution - the government will require healthy people to subsidize the medical care for those with chronic illnesses. Many expensive chronic illnesses are not randomly distributed, they are influenced by individual life choices. To some extent, lower health care costs are one of the benefits that one should expect to receive from exercise. This is not, however, the make or break issue for me. All insurance pools risk and has this net effect to some extent. However, with a government-run system there will be tremendous moral hazard for politicians to rig the premiums and coverage to win votes. Basically, it's very easy to imagine a system that is obligated by law to pay out far more in benefits that it receives in premiums. The system could do this because it will be backed by the federal government, it will just result in further deficit spending, which it not something that our country needs.

(Yikes! Check out all the extra taxes Conyers is proposing to fund his health care program. You need that tax revenue plus $387 billion in savings from switching from private to public insurance. Let's spell out what has to happen, you need the federal government to create a bureaucracy to provide health care not just to those privately insured, but to the uninsured as well, AND do it for $387 billion less than it costs to run the current private insurance system. Oh, and you're going to build the system, launch the system, and achieve these savings by 2010. Does that seem even remotely plausible?)

Perhaps I could support a single-payer system if it was given independent, apolitical oversight. The mission of the system would have to be to attempt to equalize the value returned to each citizen as it compares to their burden of paying into the system. I certainly don't want people not getting health care, I just don't want give short-sighted political leaders to have yet another weapon in their battle against good fiscal policy.

Anyway, back to the town hall meeting. Representative Sarbanes seemed to do a pretty good job at answering everyone's questions. Nothing that he said set off any alarm bells of terrible fiscal policy or populist economic ideas (although he did talk about "profiteering" at oil companies and saying that "supply and demand don't explain all of the price [of gas]"). In general, he did a good job of supporting the children present and seems to genuinely care about his constituents and want to help. If nothing else, I never got the feeling that he didn't want to be there, it seemed like his heart is in the right place even if I have my reservations about how he'll vote on business regulation, health care, and other economic issues.

Congressman John Sarbanes with the South Baltimore
Youth Council.

What makes me want to buy an iPhone?

2007-11-04T10:15:00.001-05:00

It's not that it has all sorts of features, that it can browse the internet, or play music, or even make telephone calls. No, it's because they made me aware of Cansei de Ser Sexy. Cansei de Ser Sexy is the band that sings the song on the most recent iPhone commercials (the one where they keep repeating "Music is my boyfriend"). The name of that song is actually "Music is my Hot, Hot Sex." You should check out this video:

Cansei de Ser Sexy (CSS) really has everything you're looking for in an indie band. They're from a strange place (Sao Paulo, Brazil), they dress in really unattractive clothes, they can't really dance but are enthusiastic anyway, and they write songs that make you question their grasp of the English language. Best of all, they have a very ironic band name, Cansei de Ser Sexy is Portuguese for "Tired of being sexy." Apparently, that's a quote from Beyonce Knowles that this band latched onto. Considering the band, very ironic.

For examples of poor dancing:

As you may have noticed, they make a great music video. Can you really watch people dancing around like they're in an earthquake and not laugh?

Here's another awesome video:

I have to admit, I like this band in a not-completely-ironic way. I'm definitely considering buying their most recent album just based on the amount of entertainment I've derived from their videos already.

Alan Greenspan is an Inspiration

2007-10-30T23:22:00.000-05:00

Lately, I've been reading Alan Greenspan's memoirs "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World." I've got to say, I'm surprisingly inspired by this book. Not necessarily inspired as in "This is a work on literary genius," but inspired in the "Dude, I love market capitalism" kind of way.

Alan Greenspan's memoirs reinvigorate me to become a kick-ass businessman, because I believe that business can be a force for good. A well-run, profitable, ethical business makes the world a better place. Ethical does not mean merely following the law, there is a higher moral calling that everyone in business should strive to reach. Sure, there is are elements of power-seeking and a desire for wealth (or, if we're calling a spade a spade, greed) in my motives for a career in business, but business is honestly something that I enjoy doing. I like making things happen, finding ways to solve a problem, and creating a faster, more efficient, and hopefully more elegant solution. I really love coming up with a solution that benefits both parties. I think that's why I can be good at business, because I love finding a win-win situation. When I can solve a problem that I have while creating sales or profit for a partner company, I love it.

Some people can become doctors, thank God, because I don't think I could. Some become social workers or academics, but these professions just are not for me. I think that one reason people get into these professions is to lower overall suffering and improve people's lives. Doctors do it by curing, treating, or preventing disease. Social workers have a more direct impact on the lives of families and children. Academics study esoteric problems so that no one else has to. This may seem a little hard to fathom, but part of the reason I want to be in business is to improve the general lot of humanity. This is what I find so exciting and amazing about market capitalism, it's not a zero-sum game. By pursuing my own goals, I can make the world a better place. The long-term productivity gains enabled by technological advance and implemented by mostly private actors has led us to reach living standards that our great-grandparents could never imagine.

I suppose that this what causes me to disagree with so much of what I hear from the political left (but don't get me started on why I disagree quite vehemently with the political right). I truly believe that by applying myself to market capitalism, I will contribute to the common good. It takes advantage of my innate abilities and market capitalism is not evil. More importantly, what else can I choose to do to improve the common good? It seems almost impossible to be able to choose something that will actually make a difference in the world.

But if I believe so much in business and market capitalism, how can I be employed as an engineer at a defense contractor? I'm an engineer by the fact that I like solving problems and it was an undergraduate degree that promised to teach me useful skills. I work at a defense contractor for simple economic reasons: they offered me a good job right out of college. I am still both of these things because I'm gaining some great experience. I am yet young and my career has barely begun. Also, one of the things I've learned from my work is that while there are some decidedly non-market forces in large defense contracting, private defense firms can provide a very real and worthwhile service to our nation.

In short, if anyone has ever wondered why I've made the choices I have in my life, perhaps you now have your answer. Seriously, I feel silly sometimes at how excited I get about the idea of making business deals in general. I look forward to the next XX years of my life doing business and making things happen. I suppose that there are many motivations for people who pursue the general category of "business" in the private sector. I don't claim to understand or have the ability to explain these motivations, but I can attempt to fathom my own reasons. For that reason, I hope that this post can allows some of you doctors and social workers and academics to understand in some way why a person would choose to devote themselves to private industry.

I know I haven't told you much about the book. Suffice it to say, Alan Greenspan had an amazing career and was involved in a ridiculous number of the most important economic decisions of the last 30 years. It's also a very readable book about the state of the world economy and where it may go in the next few years. Good stuff, I definitely recommend it.

Public Service Announcement

2007-10-24T21:30:00.000-05:00

Tonight my roommate and I set out on a quest, a quest to determine "What are the two cities in America that are the hardest to fly between?" This question came up after I found that if I wanted to travel from Baltimore, MD to Liberal, KS (don't ask why I'd want to do this) I could do it in 3 stops (Detroit, Kansas City, and Great Bend) for only $316 one-way.

So then we tossed out city pairs that we thought would be difficult to travel between. I suggested Worland, WY to Bangor, ME (you can do it in 3 stops, Laramie, Denver, and Cincinnati). My roommate suggested Salisbury, MD to Nome, AK (you can do that in 3 stops, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Anchorage). Now, Kayak.com lets you sort by number of stops, and you can certainly find stupid, stupid itineraries (for example, 5 stops from Worland to Bangor and Salisbury to Maine).

So the real question is, can you find a city pair with 4 as the minimum number of stops? To do this we actually consulted the Alaska Airlines route map. It can be very difficult to get to Wrangell, AK, but I felt like that was kind of cheating. We only picked Wrangell because it looks hard to get to on the Alaska Airlines route map. Who cares if they are one of the oldest non-native settlements in Alaska? I've never heard of them before today.

We tried a lot of other Salisbury, MD combinations. Salisbury, MD to Vladivostok, Russia (3 stops - Philadelphia, Toronto, Moscow). Salisbury, MD to Hobart, Tasmania, Australia (3 stops - Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Sidney).

Finally, we struck gold by going back to Alaska. Salisbury, MD to Barrow, AK will take you a minimum of 4 stops and 17h, 46m. The 4 stops are Philadelphia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. That's the best you can do.

The worst you can do from Salisbury to Barrow is 6 stops and 32h, 50m (Philadelphia, Denver, Seattle, Anchorage, Fairbanks, Prudhoe Bay). Can you imagine stopping three times in Alaska before you reached your final destination?

So now I think the challenge is to find the city pair (extra credit if it involves Salisbury, MD) that takes 4 stops minimum AND is located in the lower 48. Worland, WY to Salisbury, MD won't do it (3 stops). Dodge City, KS to Salisbury, MD won't work either (Kansas City, Indianapolis, Charlotte). Bozeman, MT to Salisbury, MD in 2 stops! (Seatle and Philadelphia). As you can see, this is quite a challenge.

Another fun question is "If there are city pairs in the lower 48 that requires 4 stops to fly between, which city pair has the minimum distance between them?"

So you might wonder why I titled this post "Public Service Announcement." It's because this is a public service, people need to know the answers to these questions. We've just answered the question of whether or not you can find two cities that take a minimum of 4 stops to fly between. Trust me, you would have asked that question eventually.

PS - In case you're curious, on the other end of the spectrum, it's impossible to find an itinerary from Baltimore to Chicago with more than 1 stop. (A partial answer to "What is the easiest city to travel to from Baltimore?")

At Least We Don't Have Wildfires

2007-10-24T05:49:00.000-05:00

Baltimore may have a lot of problems, but at least we don't have wildfires. I work with some people out in San Diego, and the latest toll I've heard is the general manager of the plant is evacuated but doesn't know if his house survived or not and the engineering manager is just about to be evacuated from his home. Wildfires, especially in the dry brush around San Diego, are pretty scary; I never thought I'd say this, but today I'm glad I don't live in San Diego.

The San Diego Tribune has some pretty up-to-the-minute coverage. They also have a pretty awesome Goolgemap of the fires that includes some photos and addresses of the structures they know to be destroyed. So far they say that over half a million people have been evacuated and 1,300+ homes and businesses have been destroyed.

A Great Local Establishment

2007-10-14T13:46:00.000-05:00

This post is a thank you to Pete, the owner of J&P Carryout of 1538-40 Light St. If you live in South Baltimore anywhere near J&P, you probably know Pete. He's a friendly guy, always willing to stop and have a conversation with you. Plus, he makes a damn good cheesesteak.

One of Pete's greatest business decisions was to close at 3 AM on Fridays and Saturdays, because bars in Baltimore close at 2 AM. It was just such an occasion last weekend that I happened into Pete's establishment. Now, I had just come from a marathon "Round the World" party that had lasted something like 8 hours. And I had my brand-new, extra-expensive camera with me. It had made it with me through 6 house parties and 3 bars, but the second my pizza fries were ready, my attention was elsewhere.

About half an hour later, with my late-night junk food craving sated, I prepared for bed and thought "Wait? Where's my camera?!?" I sprinted back to J&P and was lucky enough to catch one of the cooks closing up. She informed me that they were closed and I shouted in a panic "I left my camera here a little bit ago!" I could tell by the look on her face that not only did she know what I was talking about, but that they might even have my camera. Sure enough, not only had they noticed that I'd left an expensive camera in their establishment, Pete had locked the camera up in the safe, figuring that I'd be back for it in the morning.

So here's to Pete, honest and friendly proprietor of a great local business. I completely recommend them to anyone in need of some late-night snacks.

Good While it Lasted

2007-10-08T21:47:00.000-05:00

Well folks, it was good while it lasted. From September 28th through October 5th, no one was murdered in Baltimore. That's right, for the first time in two years the city went a full week without a homicide. That ended on Friday night, as homicide number 232 was logged on Eutaw Place.

So, based on the latest information, 234 murders (as of 10/7) in 291 days is 0.8 murders/day (or 4 murders every 5 days). But from that point on, there are only 76 days left in the year, which puts us on pace for 293 to 294 murders. Sadly, that's good news, as Baltimore was widely predicted to reach 300 murders this year.

The acting police commissioner and the mayor have been jumping all over the lull in the violence (see video from WJZ story), claiming that their new policies are having an effect. Personally, I'll believe it when I see it. Actually, I lead a very charmed life for Baltimore, so I don't really see it. There's been 1 murder in my neighborhood (researched using this website) in the last two years and that was on the other side of the neighborhood at that. There are blocks in Baltimore with multiple homicides this year!

When you look at that Sun article, the most amazing thing is the list of murder-free streaks for 2006 and 2007. Twice we've gone six days, and 8 times we've gone five days. That's it, in the last 21 months, 630+ days, there have been only 11 periods of five or more days without a murder. I can't imagine what it's like living in the rougher neighborhoods of this city, imagine the stress of knowing that a shooting could take place any minute. How much longer can people live like that? What's the next step?

Return of the Blog...with Pictures!

2007-10-03T20:19:00.000-05:00

Now that the ultimate frisbee season is over for the year, I'm looking to have some more free time to write about things. Hopefully that translates into more blog entries. I've also spent a fair amount of money and purchased a Nikon D40x, so I will hopefully have some pretty cool pictures to post as well. For now, enjoy a couple of random Baltimore scenes...

Hmmm... Blogger seems to compress these pictures quite a bit. Here are links to full resolution versions (well, they're not full resolution, I cropped and compressed some from my camera's 10 megapizel output):

Baltimore Sunset
Harborview Condo Tower