Adventures in Onionism

The California legislature released some details on the proposed water bill. I can't honestly claim to know enough to properly evaluate this proposal, but I'm pretty skeptical--I don't want the state to spend more on projects like this unless they're willing to raise taxes to pay for it it, and I don't want new dams. I like that urban users will be forced to conserve, but I'd like to see that agricultural and industrial users have to do the same.

I didn't bring my camera to the SF One-Day, but somebody took a ton of photos, and some had me in them, so I made a small gallery on flickr .

Nope, those remains were not those of Everett Ruess .

I ran 95.5 miles at the SF One-Day. Thanks for the e-mails and texts, and mad props to EK and SH for doing a few laps with me. More later, perhaps. Good night.

I kind of really hate this. 67 laps.

I hurt. Terry gross, toe socks and new shoes don't fail me now! Email sys back up.

56 miles in 12 hours. Now comes the hard part. All i need is 15 min miles. Dinner sometime and much love are on me if you come out for a couple laps.

E.mail sys down. Sun going down. 9 hours 42 laps. Can i keep it up? Don't sleeping!

Oh, and if you happen to live in Siberia or Indonesia and want to call me during the middle of the night, that'd be rad too.

From 9am on Saturday the 24th to 9am on Sunday the 25th, I will be running (jogging at best, really) in 1-mile loops around around Crissy Field in SF. Come join me for a few laps (you'll definitely be able to keep up, don't worry) or use this link to send me an e-mail which the race directors will print out and hand to me in real time. You can also see live hourly race updates. Jokes, college football updates, or any other light-hearted material to keep me from going insane would be much appreciated, especially during the night.

There's an NYT article about how some ultrarunners have their toenails removed. That one sentence is basically all there is to it. Back to your regularly scheduled programming. [Thanks to AS for the link]

I bought a kayak on Friday. Specifically, a Perception Eclipse Sea Lion. It looks like this one , except mine doesn't have a rudder. I got it used for $300 from the UC Aquatic Center at the Berkeley marina. Then I promptly ordered $500 worth of accessories from REI and Sierra Trading Post (spray skirt, wetsuit, paddle, paddle float, bilge pump, car carrying kit). That's a lot of money, but it's cheaper than a half-way decent bike (I've been thinking about a Trek 520, Jamis Aurora, or Novara Randonee touring bike for a while, but I guess I'll hold off for now). Two things that I pretty much knew, but which were strongly impressed upon my mind immediately upon purchasing: (1) kayaks are really long and fit neither in the bed of a Ford Ranger nor through a normal hallway, and (2) owning a kayak necessitates owning a car. I guess I'm fine with that since I can currently accommodate both of those issues. I decided to buy it because the UC aquatic center closes f...

There's an article about packrafting in the NYT. There's only a paragraph or so about their history or Roman Dial or rad stuff folks have done in them, however. Speaking of rad things people have done in them, Erin & Hig's book comes out in a couple weeks. Or read their blog . Yes, I'll probably buy their book (and a packraft) soon.

A UC Berkeley professor and a UCLA-trained professor will share the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics . Thanks to the Scandinavians for filling in part of the state budget cuts.

I ran Firetrails 50-miler yesterday. Did I mention how boring I thought this race was last year? Yes, I did . Actually, knowing what to expect, it wasn't so bad in that respect, and instead I had a cold, did not train, and had really bad tendonitis preventing me from bending my right knee and causing me to walk for several minutes after leaving a few of the aid stations. I got to the Redwood Gate 15-mile aid station in 2:45, 15 minutes faster than last year, and I hit the turnaround at 26 miles in 4:55, but the worst knee pain was on the way back. Once I knew I wasn't going to beat last year's 9:52, I took the last three miles easy and finished in 10:20. I had fun, and the schwag from this race is great. Except I was pretty sure my collection of purple shirts was adequately sized at zero, but I guess not.

Some like to claim that while we have to subsidize public transit, highways pay for themselves via the federal gas tax (currently 18.4 cents per gallon). I don't think that is accurate . This episode of Fresh Air lays out a pretty good case in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan. It's a little (lot) disconcerting to hear one of the best journalists covering the region say that Kabul would fall within six months of a US withdrawal. But will 40K more troops win it? Bill Maher posed an interesting question: when has a general ever said he couldn't win a war with more troops? Thinking back to these 1 , 2 Fresh Air pieces from earlier in the summer, I'm reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz describes the impossibility of winning against a ruthless enemy--how do you compete with an enemy who, after you give people vaccinations, goes around and chops off any arm that has a needle hole in it? Is it possible to convince residents we'll be there long...

A research idea just came to me in a dream. In the dream I came up with a research idea that more hurricanes would lead to fewer Appalachian Trail hikers. I called this thru-hiker that I barely know to see what he thought about the idea and whether he thought I'd be able to get the number of annual thru-hikers from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters in Harpers Ferry (Why have place names so often dropped their possessive apostrophes?) He wasn't so stoked on the idea, which got me a little bummed out, so I switched from hurricanes to to the snowpack. Then I woke up, and my first thought was "regression discontinuity based on arbitrary cutoff in the Sierra snowpack." There are a couple problems, however. First, I haven't yet found a policy that actually has a fixed snowpack cutoff. But I assume there is one, and if you've ever heard of one (if the rainfall/snowfall reaches X inches a year/month/week we do Y) please let me know. Second, if it's ...

What Bob Herbert has to say about my school: "Something wonderful is going on when a school that is ranked among those at the very top in the nation and the world is also a school in which more than a third of the 25,000 undergraduates qualify for federal Pell grants, which means their family incomes are less than $45,000 a year. More than 4,000 students at Berkeley are from families where the annual income is $20,000 or less. More than a third are the first in their families to attend a four-year college." Read the full article . Seriously (Californian) people, can we please repeal Prop 13, eliminate the 2/3 budget super-majority requirement, and fund public education?

This weekend I did a run involving bushwhacking and barbed-wire in Tilden, went swimming (after realizing I suck at swimming during a dip in Donner Lake this summer, I thought I better get in shape for my upcoming trip to Indonesia), and went sea kayaking. I rented from the UC Aquatic center and went from Berkeley marina to Emeryville marina and back. I got chased by a harbor seal for a good chunk of it. You might think that would be cute and fun, but they have solid black eyes, and I could think of nothing but Arrested Development season 2 episode 12 . There's still an old Perception Sea Lion Eclipse kayak for sale; I'm thinking I might buy it next weekend, but I'll have to see how much the paddle, wetsuit, skirt, paddle float, and bilge pump would cost first. (Renting is pretty cheap, but you're not allowed to leave binocular sight, so that puts a damper on things.) I watched some of the Cal game from Tightwad Hill. Horrible. I got free tickets to the 49ers game. Gre...

Some magazine (The Washingtonian, which I'm sure is absolutely free of regional bias) says my high school is the best .