All posts by Chris

sunny isn’t nearly so interesting anymore

Economics

You know the myth: “Housing prices in San Diego are so high because everyone wants to live here.”  It’s depressing if you want to buy a home, but it turns out it just isn’t true.  We’ve been losing more people than we’ve gained over the last four years, and it started just about the time housing prices started going up.

Catherine MacRae Hockmuth of Voice of San Diego has an interesting take on it:

…a society in which only 9.4 percent of the population can afford a median-priced home is not a healthy society. The situation is bad for businesses who struggle to attract workers whose money will stretch much further in places like Dallas or Atlanta. And before you offer up San Diego’s mantra — But then you have to live in Dallas or Atlanta — consider that people who live there like it well enough and they don’t have to do financial gymnastics to own homes there.

So here’s the question: since there isn’t an influx of people driving housing prices up (at least here), and if it’s not due to rising wages or inflation, then what’s the real cause?

Congratulations, SpaceX!

Space, Technology, Uncategorized

SpaceX, which I’ve covered previously, successfully launched its Falcon 1 rocket yesterday.  The launch wasn’t without incident — there was a problem with the second stage after launch, and the first launch attempt was aborted at the last second — but the results were deemed enough to justify launching commercial payloads later this year.

On the latest flight, the second stage did not achieve its full speed, again because of an early shut down of the engine, this time because the vehicle began an unexpected roll.

Mr Musk said he thought this problem should be easy to fix once flight engineers had analysed the data.

“The launch was not perfect, but certainly pretty good,” he added.

“Given that the primary objectives were demonstrating responsive launch and gathering test data in advance of our first operational satellite launch later this year, the outcome was great.”

I personally see this as a huge success, because they were able to launch, reach space, and test their operational capacity.  Besides all that, they were able to make fundamental improvements to their launch platform in a single year, while still targeting that $7-million-per-launch figure.  Congratulations, SpaceX, and we can’t wait for the next stages!

four years

Community & Activism, Iraq

I’m too lame wiped out to post anything today, but Ame sent along a compelling plea:

Today is the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war. There are vigils tonight and, yes maybe they don’t make much difference, but maybe they do. I chose to believe they do. Plus, it gives you a chance to be around other people who also think this whole thing is crazy. Please join me in going to one tonight if possible. Yes it’s short notice, but what the hell.

If you can’t, take a moment to acknowledge where we are, four years into this war:
View: an update and a video on my site (Pixel Lava)
Do: Register at MoveOn and get involved

Kind regards ~ Ame

P.S. If you can make it to the vigil tonight in San Diego, it’s at 6pm at the corner of 6th and Laurel. Bring a sign and/or candle.

So go forth. There are signs that we can finally put an end to this idiocy, and every little bit counts.

actor + neocon + southern + candidate = scary

Politics

Is it just me, or does the phrase “Fred Thompson Considering A 2008 Run” give you some heebies and a few jeebies? Granted, I’d never heard of Fred Thompson before reading that article, but let’s go over the vital stats:

  • actor in a popular television drama
  • ex-senator from a southern state
  • thinks the ‘surge‘ is just peachy
  • has all his wedge issues lined up
  • fundraiser for Scooter Libby’s defense

So he’s fully bullet-point ready to be the PNAC candidate. Or am I just paranoid?

I’m going to MIT

Academia, Education, Technology

…well, to their OpenCourseWare site, at least.  According to a recent article in Information World Review:

The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.

Seriously, though, this is quite a boon.  The site contains syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, reading lists, and sometimes even videos of lectures.  It doesn’t mean that students in Kansas can get an MIT education from a computer, but it does mean that teachers in Kenya can teach using an MIT-level curriculum and materials.

MIT started the site in 2001 as a pilot program, but at the time all the talk was about how to charge students for distance learning and restrict materials to those who paid.  Now the materials are being licensed under Creative Commons, and MIT is presenting them as a gift to be shared instead of a revenue source.

Now to find a few month-long chunks of free time in which to actually use these gifts…