RyeBlog

The local media in Utah has taken it upon themselves to incessently harp about gas prices in the region. Here’s the story being told:

• Gas prices around the country are dropping precipitously
• Utah gas prices are dropping slowly
• Utahns are paying 20 to 30 cents more per gallon than the rest of the country

The conclusion the media feeds to us is that Utah residents are being gouged. An all-out witch hunt has been started, even going so far as to call for state legislators to investigate the reason for the high prices. KSL called for a one-day “boycott”. Heck - even the governor has decided to start a probe into the prices.

Look at the data for yourself

The sensationalist media seems to prey on the uninformed public being too busy to actually look at the data and think for themselves.

One Simple Explanation: Utah prices lag the national average by a few weeks

Note in the chart above, that in March the Rocky Mountain region was paying less than the national average. Hmm… You will also notice that if you shift the price curve over a few weeks - you will see that the Rocky Mountain Region pretty well mirrors the national average, only it lags behind by a few weeks. When prices are increasing, this favors Utah - because people we will be paying two-week old prices… but when prices drop sharply in the national average, we pay more.
Why is this so hard to understand? Sure I don’t know exactly what CAUSES the lag in prices, but it’s pretty simple to see on the graph - if you allow for a 5% to 10% error it’s a pretty decent approximation.
Also notice this: Prices in the Rocky Mountain region (that contains utah) are dropping just as sharply as the national prices. (Funny side note: I’ve heard local media taking credit for this drop in Utah gas prices, saying such things as: “Yes, I know gas prices are down to 2.49 a gallon, but can you imagine where they would be if we didn’t bring so much attention to it?” (My guess - probably even lower. It seems the only thing the attention has done is curb a slight amount of demand which has, in turn, stretched out the lag time of gas prices in Utah because they can’t move their supply as quickly, and therefore they are stuck trying to sell off the old gas that they bought at two-week-ago prices for a longer period of time)

It’s not just Utah

It’s conventient to go on a rant about how we are paying higher than the national average - but anyone who passed high school algebra should know that when you have an average in a population with any variance, you are going to have some values above the average and some values below it. That’s why it’s called an average.

In the above graph, the national average has little red triangles on it to make it easy to identify. From the above graph, you can see that a lot of regions are paying above the national average - and the West Coast (the top line) is worse of than the Rocky Mountain region.Note, some regions seem to overlap - which is what makes it look like there are more regions paying above the average than there are paying below it. I didn’t slice the country into regions, I just used ones that the government already had.

According to the logic of the media - only people living in the Lower Atlantic, Midwest, or Gulf Coast regions of the country are not being “gouged” by “evil oil barrons.”

In Conclusion

If you are a member of the Utah media and are tempted to continue going off on this topic - please be aware that eventually the quiet thinking members of society will get fed up and expose you for the idiots you are. This is a non-issue. Go find someone abusing puppies or something to talk about, and stop wasting my time telling me how I’m being “taken advantage of” and showing clips of random people at gas stations answering the question: “Which do you feel: violated, or gang-raped by the big oil company that is stealing food from your starving children’s mouths?”

MIAMI, FL. In what the National Weather Service is describing as a “major breach of privacy”, pictures of the first tropical depression of the season have been released on the internet. The first tropical depression of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season formed Saturday in the northwestern Caribbean Sea, and was expected to become the year’s first named storm. The National Weather Service auctioned off exclusive rights to publish photos of the storm for $3.50 to Earth & Sky Magazine - which won’t hit newststands until next week.
The increased public interest in tropical storms that led to the early leaking of the photograph is also creating quite a stir in the forecasting community. Forcasters this season are having a hard time even naming the storms.

Normally, it’s easy. We just go around the room and write down the list of in-laws we hate. This year, each storm is getting a great deal of attention. It’s like each storm is a celebrity or something. With other celebrities popping out kids named “Suri” and “Shiloh”, we feel a great deal of pressure to provide storms with names that are equally strange - preferably with a pseudo-religious backstory. We’ve thought of “Abana” - but who wants a storm that is “Stony; constant; dependable”. Then we moved to “Aijalon” - but that sounded too much like some kind of ghetto black kid name.

The forecaster wouldn’t comment on what the final name for the storm would be, telling us we would have to “Wait for the announcement, just like everyone else.” When pressured further, he admitted that he really had no clue.

A woman in Alabama was
hit by lightning while praying this past weeked.

…while she prayed, lightning suddenly exploded, blowing through the linoleum and leaving a blackened area on the concrete. Brown wound up on the floor, dazed and disoriented by the blast but otherwise uninjured.
She said ‘Amen’ and the room was engulfed in a huge ball of fire. The 65-year-old Brown said she is blessed to be alive.

There is nothing in the article that describes how they interpreted this “answer” other than a family member saying that “he will no longer assume it is safe to be indoors during a lightning storm.”

El senado primero votó 63-34 jueves para señalar inglés mientras que la “lengua nacional” después de los legisladores que
condujeron el esfuerzo dijo que promovería la unidad nacional.

Pero los críticos discutieron el movimiento evitarían que la gente con inglés limitado consiguiera ayuda del lenguaje requerida por una orden ejecutiva decretada bajo presidente Clinton.

El senado también votó tan 58-39 para hacer inglés la nación “común y lenguaje de la unificación.”

Para la gente que habla inglés, hay un artículo del CNN aquí.

Google today launched Google Notebook. Notebook lets you easily gather clips of things you see on the web and store them into little Google-hosted booklets. By default, your booklets (called “Notebooks”) are kept private for you to use for whatever you want.

Here’s how it changes your life. First - you don’t have to bookmark as many pages anymore. If you are using FireFox or Internet Extorter - all you need to do is right-click on the content you want to save to some kind of notebook - and then tell your computer to “Note This (Google Notebooks)”. It will copy the cliping (pictures and all) and dump them into a convenient notebook for you.

If, at some point, you decide that your collection of web-clippings on the origins of the Sanskrit language is good enough other people might like it - you can make it public. The second way Google Notebook will change your life is it will change the way you search for specific content. Instead of piling on search terms hoping to get some kind of magic result - the Google Notebook may provide you with a way to find a notebook of someone who already scoured the web searching for that same content.

Currently, public notebooks are not searchable… so I can’t provide any examples of this. In a few days, you will be able to search through them and see what kind of Notebook pages people have been making.

Anyone who has ever spent hours searhing the web on a specific topic can understand how useful this is. Just create a new notebook for it - and when you find stuff that is of interest - throw it in there. No need to keep thousands of windows opened any more… and no need to go crazy trying to find some way to organize your links. Note it and forget it - until you want to remember it.

Features I would like to see

• Collaborative Notebooking - It would be nice if you could create your notebook and give access to cetain specific people - so that you could all add interesting web clippings to a notebook related to a project you are working on… It would work like a dumbed-down wiki. Allowing open edits may be problematic due to spammers… but allowing specific other users to edit would be a very nice feature
• Blog Integration - It would be marvelous if you could scour the web - collect text clippings, and then have Google Notebooks easily post the content to your blog for you. The FireFox spin-off Flock currently has some kind of clipping service that does this - but it would be nice to have it ingetraged with Google Pages. (Perhaps Flock could just write the plugins to do the heavy lifting for that feature anyway)
• Multiple Levels of Subcategories Currently you can create your notebook and you can have subcategories - but that’s the limit to the depth of the notebook. More depth = easier organization.
• Better URL Names for Notebook Pages - When you make a notebook page public, the URL for it is gigantic - and impossible to remember. Easy-to-remember URLs would make public notebooks much more useful.
• Safari Plugin - an while you’re at it… an Opera plugin as well… FireFox and Safari are both rather slow browsers (once you load hundreds of windows like I commonly do). Between the two, most Mac users preer Safari - and if a browser is wanting raw speed they will likely use Opera. Supporting Safari and Opera
• Archive Option - If you use Google Notebooks to keep track of some temporary search… like looking for the best place to buy a certain digital camera or something - that notebook becomes mostly useless after you find the place. Still - in the future, you might want to access that notebook as a jumping point for another search. In the meantime- you don’t want to see it in your list of notebooks because it’s not important to you at the moment. Archiving them would be a good solution to the notebook-clutter problem that may arise.

If you want to see an example of what you can do with Google Notebook - you can look at this Google Notebook on Google Notebook that I threw together this morning. I snipped content from some news releases and form some review pages. It was very easy to put together… I can promise you that it reads better inside the Google Notebook viewer on their website - for some reason their public Notebooks look like trash.

Sign up for Google Notebook and have fun building Google’s search index collecting your information easily.

In 1982 the US Mint responded to rising copper prices by starting to make pennies out of zinc - and plating them with copper. Recently, zinc has become more popular (maybe due to a rise in production of those nasty-tasting throat-lozenges?). As a result, pennies now cost 1.4 cents to make.

What? Pennies? I thought those were outdated

Pennies may seem like they are no longer of much use - given the modern use of credit cards and debit cards to pay for things - but in reality the US Mint has been cranking these pennies out at 7.7 Billion per year last year, and is on pace to put out 9 billion this year.

Is everyone hoarding them - hoping that they can melt them down and make throat lozenges? Probably not. One explanation for the rise in penny demand is that states are raising sales taxes slightly - which results in retailers needing to give pennies out for change. Retailers ask their banks for pennies, and banks ask the mint for pennies… and the mint makes more pennies…

I think that the real reason is that kids these days are realizing that social security may not be a good retirement plan - and are starting to plan early for their golden years by putting pennies in piggy banks.

If my summary isn’t good enough for you, you can go ahead and read the New York Times Article.

Yes, a month or so ago some creative hackers figured out a way to get Macs with Intel hardware to boot into Windows XP. Their method worked, but certainly wasn’t pretty. The difficulty involved in using their method meant that only those who really really wanted to do it could.

Apple today announced their product “BootCamp” - available now to download for free. This will allow anyone to run Windows on an Intel Mac.

In other news: Michael Dell pooped his pants.

A recent study shows that smart kids brains develop slower. This should help parents, who always try to use any evidence to prove why their child will one day rule the universe with his superior intelligence to adjust their strategy. No longer will it be “cool” to explain “Oh, he’s talking so soon…” - because it turns out, that might just mean their kid is dumb.

Here’s to hoping my kid doesn’t talk until he’s 16 (years) - and his first word being “Schroedinger.”

Based on this new evidence, we can conclude this kid will be the next Einstein.