should there be a national transit plan?

Nicest of the Damned: Amtrak shutdown

Unfortunately, Congress has forced Amtrak to maintain nationwide service, and there’s not a nationwide commitment to the service. If Congress wants universal service, they need to pony up the sliver of highway funds that Amtrak represents.

If they’re willing to let Amtrak cut unpopular routes, it could be profitable right now.

And Amtrak would cease to exist outside the NE corridor.

National rail service is skeletal at best, with the interstate highway system’s spread over the past 50 years.

If you want to ride the rails from Atlanta, you can go to Washington DC or New Orleans, but not to Florida (at least not without a trip to one of thoee other cities).

I can’t imagine the scenario that would make rail service really viable without drifting off into the realm of outright fantasy. Care to join me?
Continue reading “should there be a national transit plan?”

adult citizenship

If I could, I would abolish citizenship as a birthright. Make all who aspire to be citizens take the test immigrants take.

I don’t want to diminish citizenship, but to enhance it. I believe people take it for granted and should be reminded how valuable it is, how lucky they are, and how hard they should work to preserve and defend what they have.

One thing I hope to get rid of by this proposal is hyphenated citizenship, where people divide their loyalties between the country in which they live and some other country or region, often one they have never known. I’m all for acknowledging one’s family tree, but when origin or ethnicity is used as an argument against working for the common good, it’s wrong.

I’d also like to see a return to the idea of the commons, those things we all share but that can be ruined by the arrogance or ignorance of a few. From the air we breathe and water we drink to the roads we drive and the lands we all share, it would behoove us to stop thinking of it all as ours, singular, instead thinking of it as ours, plural.

The newspapers and magazines continually bemoan the lack of civic involvement, to say nothing of ignorance (quick: name your senators and house representative. Bonus points if you know when your senators are up for re-election).

But the only way to solve that is to make people earn the title of citizen. The founders of the republic risked the gallows for the ideas and principles we all claim to hold dear. In these self-interested times, people don’t even want to vote or serve on a jury, seeing these obligations as burdens rather than rights. Two hundred years ago, the notion of pure citizen democracy, where no one was born into privilege and everyone (according to the ideas of that time) was equal, was truly revolutionary, and millions flocked to this place where they could make a life for themselves. It seems quaint to think of these ideas now, but there are people willing to risk their lives, by crossing deserts or stowing away in freight containers, for the opportunities enshrined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. In short, they’re willing to earn it or die in the attempt.

Say what you like about their actions, they’re willing to risk all for a chance. How many of us are?

the pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance – A Short History


[The] original Pledge read as follows: ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and (to*) the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ He considered placing the word, ‘equality,’ in his Pledge, but knew that the state superintendents of education on his committee were against equality for women and African Americans. [ * ‘to’ added in October, 1892. ]

Dr. Mortimer Adler, American philosopher and last living founder of the Great Books program at Saint John’s College, has analyzed these ideas in his book, The Six Great Ideas. He argues that the three great ideas of the American political tradition are ‘equality, liberty and justice for all.’ ‘Justice’ mediates between the often conflicting goals of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’

In 1923 and 1924 the National Flag Conference, under the ‘leadership of the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution, changed the Pledge’s words, ‘my Flag,’ to ‘the Flag of the United States of America.’ Bellamy disliked this change, but his protest was ignored.

In 1954, Congress after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, added the words, ‘under God,’ to the Pledge. The Pledge was now both a patriotic oath and a public prayer.

It’s not like those words were always there. Just as the state of Georgia added the Stars and Bars to its state flag as a comment on desegragation, so too were these words added to the pledge. Both are relics of another time and just as Georgia outgrew its repugnant flag, the pledge can be returned to its inclusive and secular glory.

back to school

University of Washington Home Page

I’ll be taking a course through the UW on software design and C++ this summer. I took it last fall but was doing so badly at the end, I withdrew. This time I am taking it as a distance learning class: this means I don’t to try and stay awake during yawn-inducing lectures and slide shows from 6 to 9 PM.

look ma, no film

From Saturday’s videotaping extravaganza (oh, how much I have to learn about videography) to this afternoon, I have been able to create a CD with a video on it, suitable for sharing.

I did end up with a couple of coasters as I experimented with mkisofs(8) and it’s options. It was easy to create a disk image that could be loaded on a Mac as a disk, but counter-intuitively, that’s not what you want to burn to a CD.

I took what I learned and put it in a shell script for safekeeping. Variable $1 is the image file to be created and $2 is the directory tree that will be on the CD.
mkhybrid -R -J -hfs -l -o $1 $2

If I was to do one of these again, I’d do a few things differently:


  • go to the dress rehearsal and tape it, end to end, to see how long everything will be and get some cues
  • set up so you can see everything without being a distraction. I used a tripod but because I didn’t keep my face in the eyepiece, folks assumed I wasn’t shooting and walked across the frame. A step ladder (how geeky is that?) would have been a good idea, with a good clamp. The camera had a rotating LCD panel and a remote: I could have shot from across the room.
  • the camera has a still frame function: that would have been useful for head shots

If you believe that no experience is valuable unless you learn from it, I had a fine weekend.

I can certainly see the appeal for this kind of work.

fun with iMovie

The most succinct result I can give is: horsepower helps. It’s amazingly simple to do stuff like titles, music tracks, transitions, but boy, is it CPU-intensive. I am doing all this on a 500 MHz iMac DV, and I have run into multi-hour render and export jobs. Rendering titles is very well-done: the renderer takes a long time but it doesn’t bog down the machine at all. Exporting is just brutal. I am pulling a load of 6-8, with no other processes running.

The only feature I can think of to add is an estimate of disk space as well as of time to complete. If you’re trying to scale something to fit on a CD, it would help.

For example, I have a 19 minute project that takes about 140 minutes to export as a quicktime movie: it would help to know how big it will be so I can see if I’m wasting my time or not. If it’s too big for a single CD, I’ll need to work on it some more.

Update: The movie came in at 460 Mb or so, so it was fine for a CD.

The camera worked fine, though I think it came with a flaky firewire cable: I swapped one of my own in and it seemed to work better. The symptom was dropouts and extra clips: I had to extract the video a couple of times and would get different numbers of clips.

Firewire itself is very nice: I love a standard that more than one company supports. You drive the camera from the computer as soon as it’s detected, so you never need to touch it after that.

it can happen anywhere

We were just thinking of bringing the kids in for dinner when the neighbor popped her head in the back door to say the police were on the street looking a man with a gas mask and a large knife.

Sure enough, there were two cruisers two houses down, and a deputation of neighbors giving an officer some details. I secured our perimeter and am keeping an ear out.