President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful. “We do not torture,” Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.

Here’s the source.

And unless you’ve been living in a self-imposed media blackout, you know of the recent revelations that, in fact, we do torture.

The CIA used a widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress on Tuesday.

“Waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was the first time a U.S. official publicly specified the number of people subjected to waterboarding and named them.

Here’s the source.

And then in recent Senate hearings, the legal advisor for the military claims he is “unequipped” to answer a hypothetical question about water boarding. You’ll have to watch it yourself to get the full flavor, it’s short at just over 1 minute.

There seems to be some confusion in the Bush Administration about what constitutes torture and when the borderline behavior is acceptable. To them, I propose this: If there’s a question about the relative nature of a practice being deemed torture, the people who are charged with making the call should be subjected to the practice firsthand. Since many of them are eye-for-an-eye christians anyway, this would be appropriate behavior.

In the meantime, I say to the humans who inhabit this country who are still capable of rational and independent thought, let’s not reprise this for four more years.

People are making all sorts of claims about energy efficient lighting, I’m one of them, having systematically inventoried, evaluated, and replaced incandescent lighting with compact fluorescent lamps in June, 2007. In fact, one of the most popular entries ever to appear in this blog was titled “Want to get $3,500?” which talks about the inventory, method, and expected savings of replacing standard lighting with energy efficient lighting. With seven months of data available, I thought it was time to check expectations with reality.

Here are the headlines:

• Total kwH saved: 920
• Total $ saved (electricity bill): $299.18
• Total lightbulb burnout replacement $ avoided: $42.00
• Equivalent tree impact: 48 trees planted

In seven months, we’ve recovered the “real $” investment in replacement lamps just with the savings in the monthly utility bill and lack of bulb replacement from burn outs. It was a great theory in June, it’s even better seeing it in reality in February. The chart below shows the actual electricity consumption change over time. I’ve got data from January of 2006 (so a full year of incandescent bulbs) and the first 6 months of 2007. The bulbs were replaced in the third week of June, 2007.

Now kwH reduction is interesting, but absolute cost reduction is king. I mean, sure, we all want to to things that help the planet, but when you can combine that with a real measurable economic impact, that’s even better! The actual electricity charges are listed below for the same time period. You might notice that September was a funky month, it’s due to a large-scale data storage test I was conducting here at the house and it almost ate the entire months savings, yikes. You can affect these numbers with activities like that.



One important thing to note about the cost savings on the monthly electrical bill, PG&E penalizes consumers rather stiffly for what it considers to be excessive use of power. Meaning the rates graduate from the base consumption of around $0.11/kwH to $0.32/kwH as the top tier rate. The lighting change is displacing kwH charged at the higher rate in our case, so if you choose to do this, make sure you understand how much you’re paying per kwH because it will affect your results.

Three other items of note: before the CFL bulbs, I was replacing about 1.5 incandescent lightbulbs per month (~$4 cost for the bulbs that would blow) – I’ve had zero replacements thus far in the CFL era. We haven’t had a break or replace situation, so cleanup and recycling hasn’t become an issue yet, to me this is still harder than it needs to be as I’ve had to dig to find places that will accept these bulbs post-use. It’s important to handle them properly as there is a small amount of mercury in the bulbs (with over 80 installed, it’s still far less than the amount of mercury in old of the old, small thermometers to put the risk in perspective.)

Finally, we have had one adjustment with respect to lighting, the 20 second or so “warm up” period. When the bulb is switched on, it goes to about 70% of illumination. Within 20 seconds, it’s up to 100%. At first, this is a little disconcerting, but I don’t think we even notice any more. The quality of the light is equivalent or better than the incandescent bulbs – it’s warm and full spectrum (choose your CFL’s carefully, I prefer the Philips brand for light quality and warmth.)

Convinced to make the switch yet? If you do, please leave a comment to let us know how it went. More data is better.

Vulcan Geothermal company has put forth its vision for a “green gigawatt” by tapping into the rich geothermal resource of the Basin and Range province largely located in north and central Nevada. What makes this different than any other approach? They’ve done a great job of characterizing resources across the range with most likely outputs, not only of their portfolio of geothermal prospects, but across the region. They’ve also taken the time to include other renewable sources like wind and solar thermal when considering transmission upgrades.

We applaud the bold vision that Vulcan has articulated at the G3 Plan site and look forward to seeing this vision moved toward reality as the multitude of developers with prospects in this general area work to bring their respective plans to fruition. Note to the Vulcan staff, it would be a good idea to have your website work with industry standard browsers like Firefox, this Internet Explorer only stuff is bush league, your vision deserves an open access professional touch. It might be worth a small investment to make that so…

Mitt Romney has decided to leave the campaign trail after losing 2/3 of the Super Tuesday states and seeing John McCain vault into the position of front-runner. Thus the “I’m more conservative than you” discussion can end, because it’s clear that with Huckabee and McCain who has that crown. Good luck Mr. Romney, and next time, don’t market with foam ‘mitts’, it was cheesy and ineffective.

That leaves McCain, Huckabee, and Paul in on the Republican side and Obama, Clinton, and Gravel in on the Democratic side.

Forget Super Tuesday, yesterday was Wacky Wednesday, the day that the top tier college football program have their recruits for the incoming year sign letters of intent to play football in exchange for a free university education. At least that’s the theory.

The pundits are widely hailing Alabama, Notre Dame, and Miami of Florida are considered to be the top-3 classes this year with the schools accepting letters of intent from 33, 23, and 33 recruits respectively. The thing to know about this is: no school can have over 85 players on scholarship at anytime and no school can place more than 25 players in a single year. Another significant thing to understand is that these ratings are projections on how the athletes will perform, about half of the highly ranked recruits don’t reach their projected potential. Finally, these are 17 and 18 year old kids, most of them don’t have their heads screwed on straight and will do wacky things as a result.

The net of all this information? These rankings and all the hoopla about rankings don’t mean squat. It’s a publicity stunt to garner attention and traffic to the media outlets that cover the game plain and simple. Don’t believe me? How does a team like Wisconsin pull in top-30 ranked classes each year and routinely win 10 games a year? The answer is simple, they recruit athletes that fit into their system and culture, and they do a great job of developing the players. I’m continually puzzled by the fascination with recruiting, more important is player development and the “fit” into the philosophy and system.

That being said, there are two unusual recruiting stories this year. A player in Nevada was allegedly offered scholarships to several DI schools and had a selection “ceremony” at his high school. After the publicity that came from it, the schools said “now, who are you?” I’ve heard multiple accounts about this, either the student staged the whole bizarre event or was scammed by someone posing as officials from a school or schools, either way, it’s out of the ordinary.

The other involves top quarterback recruit Terrelle Pryor – highly coveted as a Vince Young-like player. He was all set to announce complete with ESPN coverage and decided not to decide at the last minute. This has caused huge consternation in the fan bases of schools he was considering. My belief is he’s trying to find the right fit, he wants to be sure, and he’s taking advice from sources of information he trusts. But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he did something like committed to a non-named school to play basketball (he’s also a star basketball player.) Let’s give the kid some space people! Let him have some peace to make his choice. Can you imagine being 17 years old and having reporters call and text you incessantly wanting to know if you made your mind up yet?

Finally, welcome to the Buckeye Class of 2008. There are 19 members and you can get all the details at Bucknuts. It’s a great class that fills many needs, particularly on the defensive and offensive lines. I look forward to seeing you play on Saturdays over the next few years.