Fuel costs are negligable

I am a big optimist when it comes to space travel. One of the big reasons can be explained by the fuel costs for a SpaceX rocket which is only $200,000. This is pretty remarkable, a $55,000,000 mission and only 0.4% of that price is fuel.

On a per pound basis, the cost of fuel to get to orbit is about $10 a pound. This means that all the rest of the cost is hardware or employees. As spaceships become reusable the hardware costs could easily drop by a factor of 10, and a factor of 100 or even 1000 is plausible. All it would take is a ship which could go to space, land, refuel, and launch again without needing to do much other than refuel. As for the labor costs, most of that will ultimately be reduced by better robots and computers. So a cost of $100 a pound to get to orbit is not that implausible and lower may even be achievable. At that price a trip to space still costs about the same as a nice car. 

City Ventures Development in La Habra

Continuing with my plan of being a pesky neighbor, I sent this letter to the planning department in La Habra to encourage them to go along with a new development which is being proposed. 

                The City Ventures development is exactly the sort of project La Habra needs so that it can create a decent downtown. While the Civic Center and Church site is better for the city than the office building site, both are a huge improvement over what we have today and should be encouraged to proceed as quickly as possible.

                The best part of this development is that it is high density housing within walking distance of a lot of underutilized commercial space. It will bring hundreds of customers to the area bringing it new life. At slightly greater than twenty homes per acre, this development is high enough density to encourage a vibrant walkable neighborhood. It might be possible to fit a few more homes into the development but under no circumstances should that number be reduced. La Habra needs all the new housing it can get.

                Another encouraging feature is that the design includes large number of three story townhomes. This type of construction makes very efficient use of space and should be encouraged across La Habra.

                If only one of the two options is to be chosen, the superior option is the civic center and church site. Not only does it bring twice as many new homes to La Habra, but it uses land unlikely to be used for a better purpose. The office building site would be better used for a large mixed use building with apartments on top and retail fronting La Habra Boulevard.

                Surface parking is a low value use of space which should be discouraged. This project does a reasonable job of avoiding excessive use of it, but thought should be given to relaxing the city parking minimums or putting the parking in a parking structure to free up space for more homes.

                More thought should also be given to ensuring a walkable design. There are several Cul-de-sacs in this proposal. Those are fine for cars, but really interfere with pedestrians by increasing the walking distance to nearby destinations. A grid of pedestrian paths should be created by installing paths between adjacent streets anywhere a cul-de-sac is present. This is particularly true for the office building site; Pedestrian paths to La Habra Boulevard, and Euclid Street are needed to ensure that residents can quickly walk to nearby businesses.  On the Civic Center site, pedestrian paths are also needed to reduce walking time to the Library and to connect the cul-de-sac near the corner of Euclid and Florence to Euclid Street.

Ebola

I ignored the talk of Ebola until a few days ago. Ebola has been famous for being really deadly, but really quick to burn out. Because the virus is so deadly, it typically is easy to find. Once doctors find patients they must only keep them isolated for a few weeks before they are either dead or no longer contagious. Close contacts can be monitored so they do not spread the disease much should they get infected. It seemed to me that this new wave of Ebola would follow that model.

The stories from Western Africa are getting pretty scary though. The disease has been destroying the medical teams which fight it, and few volunteers can be found to fill their ranks. Since two of the cases which have been treated outside Africa resulted in a nurse being infected, I just don't see how Africa has a fighting chance. There are probably another three months where a big international effort could bring the situation under control, but exponential growth will soon make even that sort of intervention implausible. The most likely outcome is that the disease will kill millions before it is brought under control.

Ebola still doesn't seem like a threat to any reasonably run country though. Even in Liberia, an average case of Ebola only infects one or two other people. In America, we could easily isolate cases quickly enough for the average case of Ebola creates less than one new case. Only a major terrorist attack or a mutation making the disease much easier to catch could make this disease scare me as much as car accidents.

List of native plants in the yard

I often find I forget what I have grown. Old blog posts have proven great for solving this problem.

Since I am trying to save and donate seeds it is important I remember what I have grown. Here is a list of all the shrubs and perennials I currently have in the ground. Three are endangered species, another two are listed in the Inventory of rare, threatened, and endangered plants in California. A few more are common in the wild but are not often commercially available.

Achillea millefolium
Amorpha californica
Asclepias eriocarpa
Asclepias fascicularis
Brodiaea filifolia
Dudleya lanceolata
Eriogonum fasciculatum foliolosum
Epilobium canum
Eschscholzia californica var. californica 
Funastrum cynanchoides var. hartwegii
Gambelia speciosa
Grindelia hirsutula
Justicia californica
Isocoma menziesii
Lepechinia fragrans
Mahonia nevinii
Maurandella antirrhiniflora 
Mimulus aurantiacus
Monardella linoides sp vinimea
Penstemon centranthifolius
Peritoma arborea
Ribes aureum gracillimum
Salvia apiana
Solidago californica
Thalictrum fendleri

iNaturalist

I decided to try another nature submission app other than Calflora. The one that seemed the next logical choice was iNaturalist. Today I submitted identifications of about a dozen insects living in my backyard. 

For plants in California it is inferior to Calflora as a submission tool. The lists Calflora develops make it really easy to quickly input every plant you know on a site. However once you submit, the iNaturalist app has a much better system for people to check your identifications. For example when I misidentified an ant, someone came back to me within minutes pointing out my error.

Book ratings

I decided that it is time to update my book list. I have stuck with a hard criteria of keeping old ratings the same and only adding new books. In a few cases I am sure I would have moved things around, this is particularly true with some which I rated highly nearly a decade ago. However I maintained that whichever my first review stands since I am likely to forget good things about a book I read so long ago.

No books got a 1 or 2 stars. This bugged me for a while but it makes sense because most of the books were non-fiction on subjects I am interested in. It is much less hit and miss than when reading fiction. Science fiction and fantasy are full of series which start off well, then have a horrible book meaning it is much more likely I will give them a 1 or 2 stars.

Only one new book got 5 stars, The Last Rhino. I suspect that is a problem of higher standards. Several of the books which were rated 4 stars were better than The World is Flat or Stumbling on Happiness. None was as good as Surly you're Joking Mr Feynman! Guns Germs and Steel,  Green Metropolis, Outliers, in Defense of Food or the Black Swan though.


5 Stars
The Last Rhino
Green Metropolis 
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
For the Love of Physics
Triumph of the City
Hyperion (4 book series)
Song of Ice and Fire series books 1, 2, and 3
Antifragile
Energy for Future Presidents
The Black Swan
Made to Stick: Why some Ideas Survive, and Others Die
In Defense of Food
Kabloona: Among the Inuit
Guns Germs and Steel
The Solar Fraud
A Case for Nuclear Generated Electricity
The World is Flat
Surely you're Joking, Mr Feynman!
The Omnivore's Dilemma
The Tipping Point
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead(book 2 Ender's Game)
Predictably Irrational
Blink
Stumbling on Happiness
Beyond Oil
Atlas Shrugged
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Outliers
The Glass Castle

4 Stars:  
Wizard - the Life and Times of Nikola Tesla
The Sixth Extinction
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
AC DC the Savage Tale of the First Standards War
The Mushroom Hunters
Mission to Mars
The Hunger Games Series
The Better Angels of Our Nature
Wool
Galactic North
Death by Black Hole
The End of the Suburbs
The Double Helix
Falling Upward
Einstein His Life and Universe
Benjamin Franklin
Galactic North
Four Fish
Agent to the Stars
Powering the Future
House of Suns
Lions of Kandahar
The Invisible Gorilla
Dark Elf (3 book series)
1491
Gang Leader for a Day
Uranium
Quantum - Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality
Rama (4 book series)
At Home
Song of Ice and Fire Books 4 and 5
Stranger in a Strange Land
Ender's Shadow
Sword of Truth Series Books 1 and 2
Earth Abides
The Alchemist
Disc World (40 book series, I have got through perhaps 30 of them) 
The Invisible Man
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Eragon (4 book series)
Relationship Cure
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Animal Farm
American Soldier: Audiobiography of General Tommy Franks
The Republic
American Gods
Darwin's Radio
The Father of Spin(biography of Edward Bernays)
Sleeping with the Devil
The End of Oil
Linked
The Art of the Long View
The Wheel of time(11 book series)
Harry Potter(7 book series)
Team of Rivals
A Scanner Darkly
The life of Pi
The Kite Runner
I am America(and so can you)
Collapse
Freakanomics
Thud
Don't Lets go to the Dogs Tonight
A decade of Curious People, and Dangerous Ideas
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
The Know it All
Our Inner Ape
His Dark Materials (3 book series)
The Origin of Species
Starship Troopers
Sway: the irresistible pull of Irrational Behavior
Altered Carbon
Anansi Boys
Snow Crash

3 Stars  
Wicked Plants
This Immortal
When Oil Peaked
Napoleon's Buttons
The Disappearing Spoon
The Most Powerful Idea in the World
Traffic
The Education of Henry Adams
Wicked Plants
Packing for Mars
Powersat
The Left Hand of Darkness
The World Until Yesterday
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
History of Western Philosophy
Call of the Wild
Shannara (long series I got three or four books in then stopped)
The Dark Tower(7 book series)
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
The Bear and the Dragon
The Soul of Battle
Slaughterhouse five
Prey
A Man in Full
Fast Food Nation
The Case for Democracy
The Bottomless Well
Microtrends: The small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes
What Happened

2 Stars
The Sound and the Fury
Sword of Truth Series Books 3 through 12
The hero with a Thousand Faces
Fahrenheit 451
Death of a Salesman
Revolutionary Wealth
The World of the Ancient Maya
The Warning
The Ancestor's Tale
On Bullshit
Flow
Status Anxiety
Alexander the Great and His Time
Neromancer

1 Star
Tomorrow's Energy
Are Men Necessary?
Xenocide(book 3 Ender's Game)

Over 1500

Calflora has stopped telling me how many entries I have made. I can only see the most recent 1500 submissions.

I didn't realize how unusual this was until I looked at how many plants other people were submitting on their observation hotline. My submissions look to be something like 20% of the total number for the last few months. There are a surprising number of plants where I am the only one who has submitted an observation with a picture. For example: Sphaeralcea ambigua, Cylindropuntia ganderi, Agave deserti, Funastrum cynanchoides, Larrea tridentata.

I also brought the California Native Plant subreddit from about 30 subscribers up to over 150.