The most misleading things I read this week, part II

From a New York Times article on power consumption by consumer electronics:

Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.

I don’t know what the IEA’s study said exactly, but I am pretty sure that it wasn’t anything like this. Maybe that the amount of energy consumed by gadgets will be equal to the output from 560 coal-fired plants, which would make sense. But consumer electronics are not going to require massive construction of additional facilities, because what drives power capacity needs isn’t total generation but peak generation—meaning how much power is used at a given time. So all that power you’re using to to charge your 18 devices overnight? Does not require a single additional plant to be built, but rather leads to capacity utilization for existing units—which is quite low in off-peak hours—to be slightly higher.

(NB, also, that quoting a number of power plants is pretty useless, since they come in all different sizes. Granted, most folks don’t think in megawatts, but it wouldn’t be hard to say something like “560 coal-fired power plants, each of 100 MW.”)

The most misleading things I read this week, part I

From a Wall Street Journal article on the proposed Waxman-Markey climate legislation:

Battle lines in the national debate over the bill highlight a growing split between mostly Republican states heavily invested in oil and gas production and Democratic-leaning coastal states that have invested in alternative sources of energy and rely on service industries.

A better way to put it would be:

Battle lines in the national debate over the bill highlight a growing split between states—Republican and Democratic—with significant gas production and gas-fired power generation and Democratic-leaning coastal states that have invested in alternative sources of energy and others, with significant coal production and coal-fired power generation, that have been bought off with handouts for the coal industry.

That is, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are Democratic-leaning, sure, but by no stretch of the imagination have they invested in alternative sources of energy or rely on service industries. Rather, these are states that produce an enormous amount of coal and whose legislators were powerful, and prevalent, enough to ensure the coal industry got theirs in the bill’s negotiations. But make no mistake, the Democratic alliance for the Waxman bill isn’t just from the least carbon-intensive states, or those without significant production of fossil fuels.

On moving and sports teams

In a post on another topic, I thought this was interesting:

When I realized I was most likely going to stay in Washington, DC and write about politics forever and ever and ever, I decided to abandon my New York sports heritage and adopt DC’s teams. I know it’s a minority view, but I don’t think it makes sense to let the dead hand of where you happened to spend the first 18 years of your life dictate behavior for decades and decades going forward. And even though the Giants won a Super Bowl since I abandoned them and the Redskins don’t look very good this season, I stand by that decision-making.

My feeling is that it depends on how much you cared about the teams to begin with. Growing up in Dallas-Ft. Worth, I was a huge Rangers fan, liked the Mavericks (which was pretty hard in the late 1990s, I’d add), tolerated the Cowboys, and could not stand the Stars and all their bandwagon fans.

Then I spent two years in southeast Michigan, where I developed a soft spot for the Tigers (again, no easy feat in the early 2000s, although hiring Dombrowski soothed a lot of the pain), respect for the Wings, annoyance with the Pistons (mostly for having to hear about how great they were, with no note of how awful the East was), and like everyone, a sense of bewilderment at just how many asinine moves Matt Millen could make with the Lions.

And now, going on eight years here in Houston, I absolutely cannot stand the Astros, embrace my complete lack of caring about the NHL, have adopted the Rockets as my favorite NBA team, and have a growing attachment to the Texans.

But the bigger picture, I think, is that living in different cities allows you to a) see local franchises for what they really are and b) allows you to pick and choose which ones to adopt based on their characteristics. I don’t mean to say “adopt the new town’s team if they’re better than the old town’s,” because I in no way endorse bandwagon jumping. But I do think there are quasi-objective characteristics that make rooting for one team easier than another. For instance, I don’t think I’ll ever have the emotional attachment to the Rockets that I do the Rangers, but I really admire how Daryl Morey puts together his team, and as such I root for them.

Would I have learned as much about Morey, and liked him as much, had I not lived here? Probably not, so in that sense, living in Houston has made me a Rockets fan. But that’s a very different—dare I say, “adult”—route to becoming a fan than the one I took to loving the Rangers. With them, I was five, they were local (keep in mind, I lived in Arlington proper, not just D-FW), and that was that. So while there plenty of other baseball organizations that are probably more objectively appealing (Oakland, Tampa Bay, and hell, Detroit, etc.), I doubt I’ll ever develop another emotional attachment to a pro sports team. Even though, of course, I do miss being able to go to games regularly, and other “amenities” of rooting for the hometown team.

But not having everyone around me be a die-hard for a Jerry Jones-owned team? Well, that’s one of life’s true blessings.

Things Ron Darling lied to you about

During today’s Red Sox-Rangers game, nationally televised on TBS.

1. Steven Strasburg cannot return to San Diego State if he doesn’t sign with the Nationals. You can’t have followed the draft at ALL and not know this—Strasburg has hired an agent (not a so-called “adviser”), which is why his posturing has been about the independent leagues and Japan, not about returning to San Diego State.

2. The Rangers bullpen has not been a weakness this year. Even after Frank Francisco’s disastrous outing on Friday, the Rangers bullpen ERA ranks third in the American League this year. And given that the team currently has the third-best record in the league, it’s really hard to see how the ‘pen has been holding them back. If you want a weakness, try on-base percentage (12th in the AL), or pitches per plate appearance (don’t know the rank but I can promise it’s extremely ugly). The pitching, both from the starters and the bullpen, has been great. I’ll grant that it doesn’t seem like the bullpen would be among the league’s best, since it lacks marquee names Ron Darling has heard of, but that doesn’t really excuse the lack of preparation.

3. That quite a few of the Rangers young pitchers will throw more than 200 innings this year, which could potentially lead to their regressing next year, as this workload is much higher than they’ve ever thrown before. First, the facts:

• Derek Holland has thrown 101 innings between AAA and MLB versus 150 innings last year.
• Scott Feldman has thrown 131 innings this year, compared to a combined 163 last year.
• Tommy Hunter has thrown 126 innings this year, versus 174 innings in 2008.
• Neftali Feliz has thrown 85 innings this year and threw 127 last year.
• Brandon McCarthy? Matt Harrison? I wish their workload were the issue.

The Rangers have 46 games left this season. Even if both Hunter and Feldman make every scheduled start, they’d have to average 8+ innings per outing to get to 200 innings for the year. I’m high on both guys, but I really don’t think there’s any chance of that happening.

Leaving aside Darling’s awful numbers, though, the meat of the argument is wrong as well. The conventional wisdom is that a young pitcher shouldn’t see his workload go up by more than 30 innings from one year to the next. But I would bet a large chunk of change that none of these guys will surpass that threshold. Maybe it feels like they should, since Holland and Hunter and Feliz and Feldman are throwing so many meaningful innings in August. To the Rangers’ credit, they managed these guys’ innings early in the season (unintentionally so, in Feldman’s case), so that now they’re in position to give the team key outs and starts late in the season—but that doesn’t mean these guys are being pushed too hard, or that they’re primed for a letdown next year.

Check back for another edition, most likely, as the Rangers will be the TBS national game again next Sunday.

A day in the life

Recently my husband and I have been watching (and really enjoying) old episodes of How I Met Your Mother, which prompted:

Him: Isn’t that the girl [Allyson Hannigan] from American Pie?

Me: No idea.

Him: Tell me you’ve seen American Pie.

Me: No, I hate that kind of humor, you know that.

Him: I knew you were 35 when you were 6, and 35 now, but I thought in between you might actually have been a teenager.

Me: Nope.

Paris: Day 2

Sunday we got up intending to walk to the Musee d’Orsee, but that plan was quickly scrapped in favor of the Metro, as it was quite cold. We’ve visited a lot of big cities in the last few years, and Paris seemed by far the most compact, at least in terms of tourist attractions—more so than New York, London, Washington, D.C., Chicago, etc. Occasionally we took the Metro because of the weather or at the end of a long day, but pretty much without exception we could have walked wherever we were going.

Museums are free on Sundays, so I was a little worried about the crowd, but the best thing was that, since we had bought the passes, we were able to enter right away, rather than waiting in line with the masses (presumably because they control the crowd in the museum by not letting everyone in at once). Even though we didn’t save any money on this one, we saved a lot of time, which was well worth it on such a short trip.

My favorite part of the museum was the architecture—it was built into an old train station (this will be convenient later). But I did, somewhat to my surprise, really enjoy the art, also. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to comment intelligently, but I did realize that I liked Impressionism and especially Post-Impressionism more than I thought. Now, that said…this trip has, I think, fulfilled my lifetime Impressionist quota. But it was pretty cool to have almost all the famous works by almost all the famous artists collected there together.

Then, we went literally under the museum to the now-underground train station, which had some non-Metro trains to places outside the city, including Versailles. It was maybe a 20-minute ride, and then a couple blocks walk to the palace, and in doing so you go from a quiet suburb to a sea of tourists. There were dozens of tour buses parked outside, and we did have to wait in line (but not pay) for this one, although in doing so we met some scientists from Alabama.

Inside the palace was also quite crowded, and I have to say, of all the iconic Paris places we went, this was my least favorite. Its appeal, I think, is in its ornate-ness, and I have much more simple, modern taste. But suffice it to say that I have never seen so much gold in my life.

We paid separately to go to the gardens behind the palace. They weren’t quite what I expected (more greenery and less flowers) but nonetheless pretty impressive and worth visiting. But by the time we finished there, it was 2 or 3 in the afternoon and we were starving.

One of my favorite things about London, where we went two summers ago, were the crepes, which so far we haven’t found anywhere in Houston. So one day in Paris with no crepes was plenty, and luckily there was a creperie on the way back to the train station from the palace. Service was fast, thankfully, and crepes were delicious.

Back in Paris, we went to the Eiffel Tower, only to find a long line (and one we couldn’t bypass with our museum passes) go to up. But, come to find out, there was a much shorter line (and lower price, but the line length was the motivating factor) provided you walked up rather than took the elevator. We’re veterans of active vacations, so needless to say, we were game. It was 50-100% more steps than the Arc de Triomphe the day before, but more enjoyable, because the stairs were back-and-forth rather than spiraled, and out in the open rather than cramped. The views from the tower were lovely, as you’d expect, and between that, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Pompidou Centre, we had a pretty good feel for the layout of Paris.

As I started to think about what we would do the next two days, I realized that I didn’t want to make a Normandy trip if we had time, but instead wanted to make time for it. CW was amenable to that, but it meant a busier Monday than we had anticipated. Just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower is an architecture museum CW had wanted to go to, but it was closed by the time we arrived shortly after 5.

Back at the hotel, we investigated a few options for Caen and then continued watching State of Play, a fantastic BBC mini-series we had brought from Netflix. It’s recently been adapted into a US movie, but I’ve read negative reviews, and frankly am not surprised, since it’s hard to condense a 6-hour show into a 2-3 hour movie without losing a lot of the details and thereby appeal.

Day 2 pictures here.

On the drama of sports

Sports are entertaining for a variety of reasons, but usually for the drama of who will rise to the occasion and win or the potential for an unusual or historic achivement. But sometimes, when both players/teams are performing at historic levels on a big occasion, the drama surrounds who will lose. That is, sports are unforgiving, and it’s interesting to watch who draws that short end of the stick and/or eventually chokes, and how they react afterward.

Such was the case in Sunday’s Wimbledon final, in which Andy Roddick didn’t lose his serve until the 30th game (not a typo!) of the fifth set. But actually, that match reminded me of a sporting event that had the same drama and none of the interesting payoff. (For example, as Roger gave his acceptance speech on the court afterward, he mentioned that he knows the feeling, having lost 9-7 in the fifth set last year—prompting a good-natured but biting comment from Roddick that Federer had already won five Wimbledons at that point.)

Anyway, that was the 2003 President’s Cup tie. All would have been fine if they had stuck with the usual rule, which is that the previous Cup winner retains the trophy in the event of a tie. Less than ideal in that it sets a different standard for victory for the two teams, but at least doesn’t rob us of the drama. Instead, we got a pretty innovative playoff format—one guy from each team in a singles match for the Cup. Of course, how it played out was Tiger playing for Jack Nicklaus’ US team and Ernie Els for Gary Player’s International one.

Both of these guys are (perhaps, were in the case of Els) legendary players, and there was the compounding factor that each was playing for his childhood idol and greatest player in his country’s history. Both guys were playing well, so to me the most interesting part was, which one of the young guys is going to let his captain down?

Certainly, there were reasons to quit, like the impending darkness and Tiger’s needing to rush off to the South African jungle to propose. Sometimes logistics gets in the way, although I would have loved to see them bust out the flashlights and/or come back the next day. But what drove me insane wasn’t the less-than-ideal conclusion but the way it was celebrated by the golfers involved and especially the golf media.

The argument, at the time, was that both teams had played well and would have been deserving winners. As if that matters at all! Roddick played well and would have been a deserving winners! The point of sports is that despite all that, there is no forgiveness, and somebody has to lose. That golf failed, and indeed I think still fails, to realize that is a reason it remains outside the mainstream.

I feel so much better now.

For the sake of clarity

Can we not use “girlfriend” to describe someone seeing a married man? Witness this article (not excerpted in case folks don’t want to rehash the gory details), which uses the “girlfriend” characterization three sentences before mentioning that McNair is married.

I don’t mean this from a Puritanical perspective, because I really couldn’t care less about that, but from the perspective of describing the situation as accurately as possible. To me, “girlfriend” connotes that both people involved are unmarried (or at the very least, separated). And we have a word, mistress,  for when they’re not—why the reticence to use it here, when it really would improve readers’ understanding?

Why I don’t call myself a feminist

Because of crap like this, which assumes that what is really best for women is for them to do what you want them to do, not what they prefer:

This weekend, both the Times and the Post published complimentary yet enormously frustrating profiles of Mark Sanford’s wife Jenny. They portray her as a tough, sharp domestic goddess, without ever questioning what such a tough, smart woman is doing playing domestic goddess in the first place.

Who the hell are we to say what a tough, smart woman should or shouldn’t be doing? I agree that, to the extent that women are pressured to give up their careers and stay at home, we should seek to eliminate those external forces. But it’s just as oppressive, and just as liberty-denying, to prevent women (or men!) from staying at home as it is to prevent them from working.

And this part is even worse:

Because she did the thinking and the babies, now she’s a very tough, very smart woman with a killer oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe who is best known, personally and professionally, for having a husband who likes to “spark” on women other than her. Turns out doing it all amounted to doing everything for everyone but herself. And that may be admirable, but, in light of her husband’s behavior and Mrs. Sanford’s seemingly real and impressive talents, it’s some seriously misdirected energy.

I think her children might have something to say about whether or not that energy was misdirected. And honestly, I’m not even sure Sanford would agree it was misdirected—she certainly doesn’t seem the type to give a shit what Joe American thinks of her. And even if she did, maybe it’s more important to her to have devoted herself fully to her husband and children, even if the marriage didn’t work out in the end. Just because I only played three minutes of garbage time doesn’t mean I regret joining the varsity soccer team.

Ultimately, my views are shaped by the fact that my sisters and I were raised by a tough, smart woman who didn’t work full-time outside the house. Would she have made different decisions about her career had she been working today, or had she been in a different field? Would we have turned out any worse as a result? Who the hell knows. The point is, it’s a highly personal decision, unique to each family and its priorities, and you have no place whatsoever to judge just because it’s not the same one you would have made.

Paris: Day 1

NB: I wrote this more than a month ago but waited to post until CW had uploaded our pictures. He did that soon enough, but by then I had gotten really busy at work and never got around to writing about the next three days—will work on that now.

Took the Continental red-eye, which unlike the one we took to London a couple years ago, leaves at 3 p.m., which makes it a little harder to sleep. A big tailwind meant we got in an hour early, at 7 a.m., meaning we had quite the long day ahead. Charles De Gaulle, I must say, is a real mess of an airport, with no convenient way to move between terminals and awful traffic.

We opted for the Air France bus to the Arc de Triomphe, since quite a few of the travel books we’d read ahead of time warned of pickpocketers on the Metro line from the airport especially, but in Paris generally. (This was a somewhat constant source of stress for me, unfortunately, even though I didn’t bring my purse anywhere.) We made our way to the Hilton, which took our bags but (understandably) didn’t have a room for us at 9 in the morning.

We were exhausted, having only slept a little bit on the flight (and not much the night before either, in hopes of being tired enough to sleep on the plane) but a four-day trip to Paris really does impose some discipline in terms of getting stuff done every day. So off we walked to the Musee de l’Orangerie,where we waited in line for half an hour before buying 4-day museum passes. Even though we would end up only being in Paris three days (more on that later), this was a great purchase, both because it allowed us to skip quite a few lines and more importantly because it incentivized us (me, really) not to be cheap and to try a lot of different museums. In the end we probably roughly broke even on the cost versus what we would have paid otherwise, but it was well worth it for those other reasons (I should mention that I really, really hate waiting in line).

The museum was cool, with the highlight of course being the Monet murals that cover two huge rooms. I was crashing hard at this point, though, so we took a break by the mini-lake outside the museum. CW (up for Husband of the Year with this) stayed up and watched my purse, which we didn’t want to leave at the hotel, while I took a much-needed nap for 45 minutes, despite of course being quite tired himself.

Now with a modicum of energy, we walked by the Louvre and to the (further than I realized!) Centre Pompidou, which is the modern art museum. Having just been to the MoMA in New York (among my top three favorite museums, which is saying something coming from me), the Pompidou was somewhat disappointing, although perhaps somewhat because some of the permanent exhibitions were closed for renovation. But still, given that the MoMa literally had almost every single piece of modern art I’d ever heard of, it would be hard for anything else to compare.

By then it was mid-afternoon, and we were ravenously hungry, so we stopped at a nice Italian place for lunch, which gave us enough energy to at least make it to the Metro and back to the hotel (3+ miles away by then). Then we got a long-awaited, lengthy nap, before heading out to the Arc de Triomphe at night. It was funny, too—our hotel was half a mile or so from the Champs Elysses, and walking there was extremely quiet…until you reach the Champs Elysses, where it’s a huge mass of tourists.

There are quite a few restaurants there, as well, but we were just looking for a pastry (actually I wanted a crepe, but none were to be found on that side of the street), so we ended up going to McDonald’s, and I have to say I got a pretty big kick out of the fact that there’s a McDonald’s on the Champs Elysses. But, in our defense, it actually has a full-scale bakery, complete with crossaints, those crossaints stuffed with chocolate, espressos, etc.

The Arc de Triomphe is surrounded by a massive traffic circle, which wouldn’t be quite so notable except that there is not a lane marker in sight—never mind that it’s the equivalent of probably six lanes wide. So needless to say, you have to take a tunnel under the circle to get to the Arc de Triomphe itself. In a prime example of something I might have cheaped out on without the pass, we got to skip the line (and paying) and head up an extremely tall (300+ steps) spiral staircase. (Paris, in general, is most definitely NOT ADA accessible.)

In the dungeon-like space just below the observation deck, they had a cool computer application on which you could pull up images of the various other arches across Europe. I guess this makes me an ugly American, but I didn’t even realize building arches after winning a war was a big thing.

Needless to say, it’s a fantastic view from the Arc de Triomphe, and the trip down the stairs was somewhat easier, at least. We had timed things well, as even though it was quite late (probably 10 by then), it was just starting to get dark, so we were able to get some nighttime pictures of it as well.

Day 1 pictures here.