Correction

After checking the Atlanta Journal site, it looks like the pipelines are pumping into Atlanta again, even if not at full capacity. The price spikes and lines were a result of panic buying on the part of consumers, and price-gouging on the part of stations.

Holy Cow

Miranda and Laura
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

I just checked my voice messages and I had one from my friend Dave in Athens, Georgia. He says the only pipeline bringing gasoline to the Atlanta area runs from New Orleans and there are only 8 days of gas left in the city. There are gas lines, fights, and gas is up to $3.49 already!

I've seen nothing about the impact on Atlanta or other major cities any any online news site. I don't know about TV news, because I don't watch it, but I believe I've scooped cnn.com and msnbc.

This photo has nothing to do with that, of course, but they are Dave's girls, Miranda and Laura. This was the only shot I took on my recent trip down there.

Gas Up Now!

One expert on gas prices (he works for the "Oil Price Information Service" so how can he not be an expert?) says there is "no question" gas will hit $4.00 in the near future, due to the damage to the gulf oil infrastructure caused by the hurricane.

I have to drive to school, or at least to the park-and-ride, so it will hurt me, but looking at the bigger picture I say "burn baby, burn." The enjoyment of watching morons gassing up their Expeditions and their Hummers is worth it.

First Classes

First day of classes was today. It feels a little strange to be back in a classroom again after a 3+ month layoff, but that's OK.

I thought I was going to get away with going into campus only on Tuesday and Thursday, but they switched the class I'm TA'ing and it's now on MWF, so I really should go to that.

Looks like the levee did fail in New Orleans after all, last night or earlier today. Now they're having to rescue people from the rescue centers as downtown N.O. fills up with H₂0.

Near Miss (But Still Really Really Bad)

It looks like New Orleans was spared the absolute worst of the hurricane as it took a turn for the north at the last minute and also weakened to a category 4. The western eye wall actually passed over the city, but the east side of the storm is the most dangerous. Damage overall is still extreme, probably on the order of hurricane Andrew, the U.S.'s most expensive disaster to date.

Today I went down to campus and got my ID made, picked up my books and filled out payroll forms at the department. I met Allison, our department grad student coordinator, and it turns out she and I went to the same junior high school.

Katrina and the Waves

I was reading a rather alarmist story entitled "Katrina may be 'our Asian Tsunami'" on cnn.com and noticed they extensively quoted my advisor, Rick Luettich!

Rick Luettich, a professor at the University of North Carolina's Institute of Marine Sciences, compared Katrina's expected impact on areas far up the Mississippi to "grabbing the end of the bed cover and giving it a hard snap."

That snap will push "probably in excess of 10 feet" of floodwater up the river, he predicted. "It will propagate up the river like a wave," past Baton Rouge, more than 70 miles away, he said.

For 15 years, Luettich has been developing a hydrodynamic circulation model -- called AdCirc -- that he said the Federal Emergency Management Agency has endorsed to help emergency managers predict storm damage.

Apologizing for the possibility that his comment could be interpreted as somewhat ghoulish, he said, "This is, in some ways, a little bit exciting for us, because it's a real opportunity to test this technology we've developed and see how well it works."

Lets see. This will probably be the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history by an enormous margin, and could kill hundreds or even thousands of people. Nah, I can't see why calling it "exciting" would seem ghoulish.

Speaking of ghoulish, note that the url for the story ends in "/katrina.doomsday/index.html."

Katrina Update

Katrina is still category 5 and holding her course for the southeast Louisiana coast. Right now it seems perfectly lined up to strike south to southwest of New Orleans, which would result in its strongest leading-edge winds pushing water directly into Lake Pontchartrain, on which the city sits.

Lazy Weekend/Perfect Storm

I've had a very lazy and unproductive weekend. I should be doing more to settle in, but I'm tired of the moving process and have spent most of my time playing Sim City 4 and Empire Earth II on my laptop.

There's a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico that's making things look very, very bad for New Orleans. Katrina crossed over southern Florida a couple of days ago as a mere category 1. In the Gulf she's grown into a category 5 monster with 175 mph winds, and is lined up directly on New Orleans for early tomorrow. Storm surge could be 25 feet. The city of New Orleans is an average of 6 feet below sea level.

Only three category 5 hurricanes have hit the U.S. in recorded history: the strong but small Andrew in 1992 (South Florida), Camille in 1969 (killed 256 in Mississippi) and the most power hurricane ever recorded, the unnamed 1935 Labor Day hurricane that killed 600 in the Florida Keys.

All lanes of Interstate 10 out of New Orleans have been converted to outbound, but the governor says the highway is completely clogged with stop-and-go traffic.

Now, cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move. -- Memphis Minnie

Orientation

I was supposed to go to various orientation sessions yesterday and today, but it turned out that I spend yesterday driving from Asheville instead. Then I unpacked stuff until late into the night, so I got up late this morning. Then it took so long to get to the park-and-ride and into campus that I missed most of today too. Judging by the quality of the getting-to-know-the-area session put on by the chamber of commerce and the campus tour I took this afternoon, though, I didn't miss very much.

I went to a social for new grad students this evening, but after a short while standing around wishing I was someplace else, I made it happen. I was apparently misinformed about the availability of free food.

I'm loving my new laptop, especially combined with wireless networking. I even have a wireless mouse attached right now. My old desktop machine had an ungodly rats nest of wires behind it. Right now there's not a wire in sight, and I like it.

Quake Update

Thanks to Dave, it's now confirmed that there was a 3.8 magnitude quake about 20 miles from where I am (Weaverville). Apparently there are a lot of people more on top of things than me, because nearly 2000 people had posted reports about this quake to the USGS site before I posted mine (and I wouldn't even have done it then if Dave hadn't sent me the link).

My specific recollections: as I said I was watching the Daily Show when the house started shaking, about to the same degree it might if a freight train were running through the back yard. There was a booming then rumbling sound sort of like distant thunder. The windows rattled. The whole thing lasted maybe 5 seconds, no more. My mother was working on the computer and said "what the hell was that?" I said "An earthquake."

All in all a very cool. I wouldn't want to be in a big one.

This was the second bit of excitement for the evening. Coming back from Chapel Hill, on the way down Ox Creek Road from the Blue Ridge Parkway about half a mile from the house we saw a bear.

Earthquake!

So about three minutes ago I was sitting there watching The Daily Show and the whole house, for no apparent reason, shook for a few seconds. It was either an earthquake or an enormous explosion of some kind. I'm pretty sure the former, but I've never been in one before, so Idunno. Update later.

New Laptop

This is the first post from my new laptop that arrived today. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 600m with a Pentium M Centrino at 1.8 GHz with 1 GB memory and 80 GB hard drive, running XP Professional. It has a DVD R/W drive.

I shortened the warranty from the standard 4 years to 3, since I never keep a computer that long anyway, and used the savings to get the accidental damage replacement plan. I decided that this is particularly important for oceanographers after seeing May's laptop get instantly fried by an unexpected splash of salt water. It's also important for people like me who sometimes get pissed off by computers and throw them up against the wall.

I rented a Penske 12' truck and packed it up today. Tomorrow I'll drive it from my parents' house in Asheville to my new place in Chapel Hill.

Fish

So what sort of fish should I put in my new (old) 90 gallon tank once I get it set up? I'll be moving again in a year or two at the outside, so here are some considerations based on that combined with personal preferences.

• Freshwater only. As I discussed, salt is too expensive and too much of a pain. I want something relatively low maintenance and cheap.
  
• Nothing else specialized and high-maintenance. I don't want discus, for example, which require treated soft water, a highly planted tank and are expensive.
  
• Probably not a planted tank. Again, it's maintenance and a pain to move. I'd have to get the nice custom hood that Dave and Laura had made set up again, and I'd rather wait. If I don't have plants I can just slap a strip light on there.
  
• Nothing wimpy. Something that will survive some neglect. Also, I like largish, active fish.
  

I think all this argues for a cichlid tank. For some reason African cichlids have always bored me to death. They're very colorful, but in a fish store I can't get away from the Africans fast enough to look at something else. It's good old New World cichlids for me. And I don't like the atypical-looking ones either, like angelfish or severums.

Far and away my favorite freshwater fish is the jaguar cichlid, Parachromis managuensis. They are a very large, agressive cichlid with a gorgeous pattern and in the best specimins a beautiful violet sheen. They also have canine-like fangs that are easily visible and bright red eyes. My tank could hold a decent-sized one of these. The problem is that I'm not sure what else I could put in the tank that it wouldn't kill.

Another option would be to go with a group of smaller and much less agressive firemouth cichlids. I could have a group of about eight of these and also add a few of the oddball "freak fish" species I like to have.

Decisions, decisions.

Athens Trip

Friday afternoon I drove down to Athens GA to see my friends Dave and Laura and their adorable daughter Miranda. In the process I picked up a giant (90 gallon) aquarium that I gave them six years ago when I moved to Cambridge. They've grown tired of fishkeeping after many years (I know Dave started about 1983 or 84) and just wanted it gone. Since I'm in Chapel Hill on a short-term basis I'll probably set it up initially (if at all) as a simple freshwater tank. (Also, I have concerns about the ecological impact of salt-water tanks and can't really afford marine fish anyway!)

We managed to get the tank and the stand in the back of my parents' Subaru Outback station wagon without an inch to spare.

I took exactly one photo on the trip, of Laura and Miranda, which I lack the ability to post right now since I don't have the right sort of USB cable with me. But I will when I can.

Dave and Laura are aspiring filmmakers who did a short documentary entitled Red State Blues. You can find out about the film and Laura's arty JiffyLux web project here.

I've been notified by email that my new Dell laptop shipped Saturday. Hopefully I'll have it before I leave for Chapel Hill on Wednesday, though that's not entirely clear.

Tipping Points

The more I think about this gas increase, the more I think we're at a critical tipping point. For the first time in my life I'm actually computing how much I'm paying for gas before I get in the car. And I'm seriously considering getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle than my Wrangler, even though I'm now a poor grad student.

Could we finally be arriving at the price that will break the back of the country's love affair with SUV's and (in rural areas at least) pickup trucks? I hope so. Unfortunately that would also likely put GM and Ford out of business, since trucks account for something like 150% of their profits last I heard. But the auto industry is nowhere near as important to the economy as it used to be.

There are now signs that energy prices are hurting in other ways. Yesterday Wal-Mart cited gas prices cutting into their customers' pocketbooks as the reason for their declining second-quarter sales. And while rising energy prices have had surprisingly little effect on inflation until recently, the consumer and producer price indexes were way up in July. Another tipping point?

Finally, the Iraq war seems to have reached a tipping point. War opponents seem to have found a champion in Cindy Sheehan, and it is becoming obvious even to many was supporters that there is no way to win.

Back in Asheville

Monday I finished packing up my stuff and drove from Morehead City back to Asheville, where I am spending a week with my parents before heading to Chapel Hill. I'll likely spend most of the time sorting through the stuff I left in storage, trying to figure out what I can take with me next week and what I need to find a longer-term solution for.

The drive was incredibly hot. Fortunately Asheville is in the mountains and is much cooler.

Gas prices have skyrocketed. I mentioned that last week I paid $2.39.9 for gas, which was 10 cents higher than I've ever paid in the past. Driving here on Monday I paid $2.48.9. Then in Asheville a day later (yesterday) I paid $2.63.9. In total that's a 34 cent increase in about a week. I had just gotten used to the idea of $35 fill-ups, but yesterday's was over $46!

In honor of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a serviceman who was killed in Iraq and who is camped out in Crawford TX outside Jackass' ranch during his vacation, I am adding Iraq fatality figures to my blog.

Iraq U.S. death count: 1858.
Since Jackass declared "mission accomplished": 1721

Finally Found a Place

I went to Chapel Hill again yesterday and finally found a place to live.

I saw two places. One was in Carboro, a little town next to Chapel Hill. Actually at this point they seem to have grown together, so it's hard to tell where one starts and the other ends. At any rate, my housemates there would have been two artists who didn't seem to be on such great financial footing. It was a pretty small place, a typical rental (read: dump), but would have been fairly convenient to campus. I'm turning it down.

The place I decided to move is a large and nice suburban house. Chris, one of the housemates, seemed very cool and is starting a job as a high school teacher. Patrick, who I haven't met in person, is in grad school in environmental engineering, I think. It's just inside Durham County, not as convenient as the other house to campus, but there's a park-and-ride for the campus bus not far away.

On the trip I paid $2.39.9 for gas, the highest I've ever paid by about 10 cents.

Economic Fallacy Watch

I normally like David Letterman, or at least find him preferable to the execrable Jay Leno, but he annoyed me the other night. He gave a guest a hard time based on a basic misunderstanding of microeconomics.

The guest was a sports agent, and after a few minutes of light conversation Dave started lecturing about rising ticket costs, implying that higher player salaries were at least part of the cause. The audience of course joined in, cheering Dave and jeering the agent.

The simple fact of the matter is that player salaries do not add one red cent to the price of a ticket. If you believe they do, then you haven't taken Econ 101 or haven't thought it through, or both.

Player salaries are what is known as a "fixed" costs. Fixed, that is, relative to the amount of product (tickets) sold. Salary costs are the same whether a team sells 2000 tickets during the season or 2,000,000. In fact virtually all the costs of running a sports team are fixed in this way. This is in contrast to a manufacturing business, for example. If GM sells more cars it must buy more steel. Steel is not a fixed cost.

Sports teams, like every other business, seek a profit-maximizing price and output level. In other words, they have a choice between selling a lot of tickets at a low price, or fewer tickets at a high price. The price they choose to set is the one that they believe will result in maximum profit. If you think they operate on any other basis, I have an excellent investment opportunity in a lovely bridge over the East River I'd like to talk to you about.

Now back to Econ 101. It is a simple fact that fixed costs have no effect on the profit-maximizing price. Since essentially all costs associated with running a sports franchise are fixed, you can view maximizing profit as maximizing the gate (ie ticket price times number sold). If the gate is maximized at $30 a ticket, then it's maximized at $30 a ticket. What you're paying your players doesn't enter into it. If you pay very little you'll make lots of money. If you pay a lot you may lose money. But whatever you pay your players you'll make the most (or lose the least) at $30 a ticket.

The truth of the matter is that ticket prices rise because, and only because, people are willing to pay it. Higher ticket prices as well as TV revenue line the owners' pockets, creating a situation where more dollars are chasing the same number of players. In other words, higher ticket prices result in higher salaries, not the other way around. The idea that higher salaries cause higher ticket prices is a fallacy that any freshman economics student should be able to spot.

News Media Stupidity Watch

Slate has a good article about another instance of news media hype, stupidity and incompetence here, in this case in relation to methamphetamine use and the causes of "meth mouth."

There's one thing I've discovered over the years: If you first hear about a "trend," a "craze," or a "crisis" supposedly sweeping society from a media source rather than personal experience, it's virtually certain to be bogus.

Never Mind

I've decided to go ahead and switch to a template with black text on a white background instead of the reverse. I used a black background originally because I thought photos look better on it, and I still do, but I think white text on a black background can be difficult to read if your monitor settings aren't quite right.

How Does This Site Look

It really sucks that the web has no standards for displays. I'm trying to figure out if this site is easily readable on most people's monitors. Please let me know if you can easily read the following at your normal monitor settings:

• The main text (ie this text).
  
• The excerpt from my profile (which starts "I am a PhD student studying...").
  
• The date above posts.
  

Also, let me know if you have a CRT or flat panel, and PC or Mac.

Classes

I've worked out a class schedule for fall:

MASC 106 Physical Oceanography
MASC 151 Fluid Dynamics
MATH 191 Scientific Computation I
MASC 205 How to Give a Seminar

MATH 191 and MASC 151 are both supposed to be very hard.

(UNC has a seriously wacky course numbering system. Undergraduate courses are numbered < 100, except when they aren't. I think they run out of 2-digit numbers, so sometimes they have to use numbers over 100 for undergrad courses, though all the above are graduate-level. MASC stands for Marine Sciences.)

I'll also be TA'ing for MASC 154 Estuarine and Coastal Marine Sciences, which is taken mostly by undergraduates in environmental science and technology.

There is some possibility that Geological Oceanography will be taught this fall, in which case my advisor says "there will be pressure" to take it instead of the math class. I plan to resist the pressure if at all possible, since I can take geo from the coast by videoconference if necessary.

Stuff I Didn't Know About: Ranch Dressing

Slate magazine posted an interesting article about ranch salad dressing here. Stuff I didn't know:

1) There really was a Hidden Valley Ranch, and ranch dressing really was invented there.

2) The secret to ranch's success: it's the calcium disodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate!

3) Alarming bit: Pizza Hut now sells pizza cut into "dippin strips" for dipping into ranch dressing.


Me, I prefer blue cheese if I want a dressing with about 1000 calories per tablespoon.

Chapel Hill Road Trip

I took a short road trip up to Chapel Hill this weekend, looking for a place to live for the fall. It was not a success. One of the other physical oceanography grads had a place that was a fantastic location, within easy walking distance of the department, but it was just too small and, frankly, too much of a dump.

In the process I discovered that it was a sales tax holiday for back-to-school, and remembered that I need to buy a laptop. I stopped by Best Buy but it was a zoo, so I decided to order one from Dell. In the process of researching the sales tax holiday on the web I found where Dell offers NC state employees a 12% discount, so I had that going for me too. The tax holiday and the discount together came to about $300, so I got a pretty hot laptop for under $1500. I do need to contact Dell's tax department to get that straightened out, though, because the web site ordering system wasn't aware of the holiday.

Heidi on the Patio

Heidi on the Patio
Originally uploaded by Mark Ciccarello.

One of the major shortcomings of small digicams like my Canon Powershot S70 is that performance at high, or even medium, ISO settings is really poor. Noise is extreme.

However, I've found that in black and white, noise doesn't look so bad. It just looks like old-fashioned film grain.

Furthermore, black and white film photographers have long known that grain increases the impression of sharpness of an image. Fairly blurry photos, like this one, which was shot handheld at 1/5 of a second, can actually look sharp because the eye has sharp grain to lock onto.

I'm starting to develop this arty style with my S70 of shooting in low light with the ISO set to 400 (as high as it goes). Exposures are long and there's plenty of noise, but that's OK in black and white, and the "grain" rescues the blurry image. If you wan this look with a digital SLR, you'll need a higher ISO, like 3200.

Generally speaking you should always shoot digital images in color and convert to black and white in post-processing via channel mixing. This allows you the same control post-exposure that color filters do at exposure time with traditional black and white photography. I don't always follow my own advice, though. I let the camera desaturate this one.

Back from Asheville

I got back from Asheville last night, having cleaned out the bunker. Since I don't have a place in Chapel Hill yet, everything's in storage. The weather in Asheville was nice and cool, a welcome break.

I took along a copy of Hammer of the Gods, the Led Zeppelin biography. I was hoping for a lot of juicy stories of appalling behavior, but there wasn't so much of that, at least for a group whose leader was sleeping with a 14-year-old model. Some things I didn't know:

1) Jimmy Page was even more of a guitar prodigy than I realized. He picked up a guitar for the first time at 15 years of age, and by the time he was 17 or 18 was known around London as a hot guitarist.

2) I knew Page spend the early/mid 60's as a session player, but didn't know he got rich doing it, while the rock stars on whose records he anonymously played had trouble making ends meet.

3) Starting a heavy blues/rock band was a marketing decision on Page's part. Cream had broken up and Jeff Beck's new group seemed unlikely to last, so there was a niche to be filled. Page and Plant's personal favorites: Joni Mitchell and Crosy, Stills and Nash.

Related Oceanography Fun Fact: the fish with which Led Zep road manager Richard Cole molested a groupie at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle was not a mud shark (Frank Zappa notwithstanding), but a red snapper.