This article from the Energy Bulletin site discusses how the world's coal reserves (as opposed to resources) are probably a lot less than people believe they are, and how this plays into the idea that Peak Coal may have already passed...

1. Red Bull showed that they can run a reliable car at least part of the time, and you can't do better than a 1-2.
2. Mark Webber lost the race at the first corner. Knowing him, he will be pissed off.
3. Not only is Michael Schumacher currently looking ordinary as a driver, but his team is looking ordinary at car preparation. Retiring with a loose wheel nut is not the sort of thing a 7 time WDC is going to find impressive...It is my belief that Michael will retire at the end of the season, if not before. Part of the challenge for Michael is that he has been retired for 3 years, and in that time the drivers forgot all about the "Schumacher Effect". Now they see him in their mirrors and think "hmm it's a Mercedes" not "oh no it's Schumacher..."
4. Fernando Alonso may have performed the best feat of driving around a car problem since Michael Schumacher's famous podium drive in a Benetton that only had one gear. He could not take the right lines through slow corners because of his downshift issue, yet he still was fast and competitive until his engine failed.
5. Ferrari may yet run into the same issues as Red Bull did in 2009 with engine limits. Stefano Domenicali has admitted since the race that Ferrari has reliability issues; both Saubers also suffered from engine problems at the weekend. Alonso's engine from Sepang is presumably no longer usable, which makes 3 engines used already. The FIA Technical Delegate report shows that both Ferrari drivers are at the bottom of the engine use league table with 3 engines used each (although engines usually have to do at least 2 races each, with some doing 3). Let's hope that we don't see Alonso curtailing running and using "old" engines later in the year.
6. Both HRT cars made it to the finish, and even beat one of the Lotus cars. Geoff Willis has been saying not-very-complimentary things this week about the build quality of the car, but to have both cars finish is a big step for the team. The big question now is whether Dallara, having built a slow car, wants to work with HRT (and presumably Willis) to make it a lot quicker.
7. Not many spectators in the circuit overall at Sepang. That is a magnificent circuit, but selling F1 in emerging countries is always going to founder on the reality that the folks in the street have neither the time nor the money to patronise race circuits.
8. Lewis Hamilton can drive the wheels off a car when he has to.
9. Williams looked very slow today, according to both drivers and the stopwatch. That car needs an upgrade - and fast.
10. Apart from the removal of outboard mirrors because it became obvious that designers were using them as an aero device, the teams are apparently going to meet again to discuss how to improve "the show". A pity that the idea of a really hard race tyre is not on the agenda, but apparently the return of KERS is to be discussed. I have to assume that a standard KERS unit will be proposed, otherwise we will see the cost base rise again, which conflicts with the "cost cap" script of a year ago, and may send one or two of the new teams running for the exit.

The real challenge in all discussions about regulations is that they will be dominated by designers and engineers from the teams, who have pre-conceived ideas about concepts, and also need Something To Do. I am starting to think that the FIA needs to cut back on the "consultation" and form a wider-scope working group like the OWG and, if necessary, buy a couple of older cars from the teams (or borrow a GP2 car or two) and test new concepts. Then the FIA should simply define the new regulations and start the clock on their implementation. They did this in 1982 when they abolished underwing tunnels, ending the "ground effect" era, and while the teams complained at the time, they soon adapted. The FIA also needs to remember that any piddling target like a 50% reduction in downforce will be insufficient. Teams are extremely resourceful when it comes to aero. The OWG should have aimed for an 80% cut in downforce.

1. Jenson Button can look after a set of tyres very well.
2. Lewis Hamilton spent most of the weekend behaving like an immature brat. Booked for dangerous driving in a road car, eliminated from qualifying in Q2, and then whining petulantly over the radio because the team had put him on a two-stop strategy...somebody needs to get through to him and convince him that being a tosser is not likely to result in any more championships. Maybe he also needs to be forced to read "How To Make Friends And Influence People"...
3. Two races, two mechanical failures for Sebastian Vettel...is there merely a correlation between the departure of Geoff Willis from Red Bull last Summer and the sudden reliability issues with Red Bull, or is this a causal relationship?
4. Mark Webber spent most of the race behaving like a driver trying too hard
5. Although we have only had 2 races, there is next to no sign of the blinding speed that Michael Schumacher used to be able to deploy in Formula 1. Two races, two finishes behind his team-mate. If Michael cannot start to out-qualify and out-race Nico Rosberg in the next 2 months, we may have to accept the end of the Schumacher era. in fact, if he fails to achieve that, I would not be surprised to see a Schumacher retirement after the German Grand Prix and a return to racing for Nick Heidfeld
6. Sauber has some sort of issue with its rear wing support
7. Manor/Virgin looked like a bunch of amateurs with their admission last week that the fuel tank on their car is too small. This will be expensive to fix, requiring a revised chassis.
8. HRT getting Karun Chandok to the finish line is huge for a team with no pre-season testing. Now where is Geoff Willis currently working?
9. Sauber has a structural issue with their front wing support
10. After just over one season, the "new" aero rules have been totally circumvented by the teams already. Sophisticated double diffusers, bargeboards all over the place...the cars still look butt-ugly and overtaking is still extremely difficult. The OWG target of 50% was laughable. They should have gone for 80%.

On the subject of overtaking...this article in Pitpass explains why a focus on aero changes is totally misdirected. A major component of an anonymous F1 engineer's proposed solution is deceptively simple:

All that is required is a tyre specification that is hard. Really hard. Really, really, really hard. REALLY HARD! A tyre that is not capable of fully transmitting the drive of the most powerful engines, the braking force of the best brakes and the aerodynamic grip so carefully authored by geniuses armed with banks of computers. Moreover, a tyre so hard that it cannot shred and shed itself into tiny balls inevitably winding up on the track surface either side of the racing line and rendering the 'off' line route required to overtake as undrivable. As a benchmark, think in terms of a tyre that offers about the same degree of grip on a dry circuit as the present wet option offers on a damp one.

This suggestion certainly makes sense...I remember in the mid 1980's, proposals were being floated in CART to reduce horsepower, since constant development had taken engine horsepower into the 800+ bhp range. Mario Andretti and other leading drivers objected, stating their firm opinion that a reduction in horsepower would actually be dangerous. The current cars, loaded with downforce, were, they contended, actually too easy to drive, which was allowing mediocre drivers to set good times in qualifying, even if they subsequently failed to perform well in most race situations, which then converted them to dangerous moving chicanes in races. Nothing was done about the horsepower issue, and the racing did not seem to suffer.
The suggestion also makes sense from a personal experience perspective. I was once driven around the Stowe Circuit at Silverstone by Darren Manning in a Caterham Seven. This is an open-top sports car with close to 300 bhp, but this car was fitted with narrow-track hard Yokohama tyres. I had a very good view around most of the circuit through the side windows, as Darren constantly worked to prevent the car from snapping out of line every time he applied the power or tried to change direction at speed.
Any time that there is too much grip (be it mechanical or aero or a combination of the two) cars will look like they are driving on rails, and there will be limited opportunities for overtaking. In the F1 ground-effect era, the massive amounts of downforce being created by underbody tunnels resulted in cars that seemed to have no tendency to snap out of line. The cars were effectively underpowered, and the only time you got the impression that they had any vices was when watching the turbo cars, whose peaky power delivery and throttle lag resulted in them getting sideways under power occasionally. A well-sorted Cosworth car looked to be running on rails.
As Frank Dernie noted in email discussions with James Allen recently, the change of regulations in 1983, with the abolition of ground effect, did not in itself lead to any increase in the amount of overtaking. Much of the lost downforce was simply recovered by the use of big ugly wings front and rear, and the tyres were still as sticky, so the overtaking picture hardly changed.
One final comment: reversing the grid will not change anything, unless points are awarded for qualifying. Absent any incentives to quality well, the fast drivers will simply sort their cars in free practice and then sandbag in qualifying to make sure that they start at the front. We will definitely need a 107% rule then...

Via another commentary site:

Has is way, we will have time to travel, just not the funds. Now that he has his ObamaCare, next to be fallen by his mighty ax is the Shuttle Program. TX still have cessation from the US? I know Gov. Perry there & 11 other Governors are planning on trying to prove that he broke the law. In my opinion he broke the law by never producing a certified birth certificate. Guess he won't be driving in FL after 2012 because they require your birth certificate to get a license, even to renew it. XOXOXO

The people that sent us this email live in Titusville FL, just across the bay from the Shuttle Launch Facility. They may be connected to the shuttle program (although as you can see, the email makes no mention of any connection, so this is a total guess on my part).
The first thing you have to do with one of these emails is a lot of head-scratching...after doing that for a while, this is what I wrote as a response.

Ok..where to begin...
1. The reality is that the Shuttle program has been a technological partial success, but a total financial failure. The original cost projections were for $25m a mission, 4 orbiters capable of 150 missions and a launch a month. The final cost per launch (even when adjusted for inflation) is many times that, the turnaround period is closer to 4 months per orbiter, and the remaining orbiters have not even gotten to 100 missions. The Shuttle could not compete with commercial satellite launch services (one of its original objectives), and so all of the costs fell straight off of NASA (read: taxpayers) bottom line. Worse, 2 orbiters have been lost due to poor governance by NASA, which they tried to cover up in both cases. Richard Feynman's account of his time on the Challenger Shuttle inquiry panel is worth reading, it shows how flawed the whole decision-making process and risk assessment process was for the Shuttle program. He also explains that the reliability issues for the shuttle stem from the fact that it was conceived as a political, not an engineering project. NASA needed something to do after Apollo. Frankly I am surprised that the program has lasted so long. As Burt Rutan has showed, you can do sub-orbital exploration for a modest sum of money if you do not have a quasi-government entity running it. I'm not pretending that anybody can build a re-usable space vehicle for modest sums. The sheer oomph required to get into orbit will always make that an expensive undertaking. However, the Shuttle technology is 40 years old, and we could probably do a lot better if we start over at a future date.
2. The idea that the individual states can refuse to implement the HCR legislation is an interesting one but one that has a flimsy legal basis. The commerce clause in the Constitution has never been interpreted to deny the validity of legislation properly passed by Congress that does not fall foul of other constitutional provisions. It is my belief that the resistance to the enactment of HCR will last until the GOP starts getting electorally hammered by voters denied the benefits of HCR, or people begin leaving those states, whichever comes first. If Texas tries to delay the implementation of HCR, I will leave the state. There is an enormous amount of big talk coming from the GOP about repealing HCR and resisting its implementation, but my reading of the legal blogs shows that most of that resistance has little in the way of a substantive legal basis.
Despite the jolly bloviations of Gov. Perry, Texas will not secede from the Union. A buffer country with Mexico, with 4800 miles of borders, deprived of all US defense support, forced to carry a pro rata share of $12t in debt...how is a country like that going to survive? Let's get real.
3. Barack Obama applied to run for the Senate, which requires evidence of citizenship. He applied to run for President, which also requires evidence of citizenship. He was sworn in (twice!) by the chief Justice of the USA. Prior to that he was democratically elected as President, and none of the opponents tried to claim that he was ineligible. In this kind of situation, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof rests with people claiming that he is not a natural-born citizen. To date, nobody has produced any substantive evidence. Every single document produced that purports to show that he is not a natural-born citizen has been shown to be an inept forgery. Worse still, many of the people claiming that he is not a natural-born citizen cannot even read the law. Anybody born in the United States is by definition a natural-born citizen. It does not matter where their parents came from. President Obama does have a birth certificate. It has been certified by state authorities in Hawaii, where he was born. Nobody has proved that the certificate is a forgery. Quite honestly, this is a BS wild goose chase being pursued by people who believe that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president. I would be more impressed if people simply admitted that, instead of continuing to tilt at windmills. Watch for the martyrdom of Orly Taitz, who has already been fined $20k for wasting the court system's time by providing legal arguments that, according to lawyers whose blogs I read, are so idiotic that a first year law student would be bounced from college for writing them.
(deep breath) I have received more than one comment in the last 48 hours to the effect that the passage of HCR (your use of the word "Obamacare" is merely the repetition of a rhetorical cheap shot, a slogan in lieu of an argument) is the end of Civilization As We Know It. It is not. The USA spends 14% (at least) of GDP on healthcare, and has worse metrics than many other countries, including Canada (which, the last time I looked, had a government-funded healthcare service). The US has the best healthcare technology in the world, but one look at the cost and the metrics shows that the delivery mechanism is dysfunctional. If you are happy with a country with at least (conservative estimate here) 30 million uninsured (including Mary, who is unemployed and cannot really afford to get sick right now), then you are really saying that you are OK with the USA having the sort of levels of coverage more normally associated with a Third World country. For crying out loud, Costa Rica, where Rush Limbaugh claimed he might go to live if HCR passed, even has a government sponsored healthcare system...I don't know about you, but I think the country I live in should have slightly higher aspirations...
We have a problem right now in this country, when elected representatives are recieving death threats and the FBI is having to warn bloggers and Twitter users that threatening the life of the President may be a felony. Quite simply, a lot of people have become way too overheated and need to cool down. I lost several friends after 9/11 because I refused to buy into the knee-jerk reactions that prevailed at the time along the lines of "bomb everybody who disagrees with us". I am seeing similar sentiments being expressed by opponents of HCR. It is not pretty, and it does not fit my definition of American behaviour. I expect to lose some Facebook friends over this, but I will not back down. A lot of the current apocalyptic yelling and screaming I am reading is not rooted in reality. HCR is not the end of the world. I was more worried by the wholesale abrogation of Constitutional rights post-9/11. Those rights are still abridged via the PATRIOT Act, but I see little interest in that from many of the people going into low earth orbit over HCR. As a libertarian, I regard those kinds of issues as far more dangerous to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even better...I had my citizenship interview this morning in Dallas, and I shall shortly be sworn in as a citizen, after which time I will have the vote, and can really start causing trouble...

Later!

If the people that I sent this to follow the standard pattern of other people whose emails I have comprehensively replied to, I will not hear from them again. Somehow people who write rants like this react badly to being forced to confront facts and evidence presented as arguments. As we can see, authoritarians who were hoping for the failure of Congress to pass a health care reform bill are really really upset that one has been passed, and the amount of hyperbolic rhetoric out there is mind-boggling. If I believed a fraction of it, I would be buying seed, stocking up on guns and ammo and hunkering down for the arrival of the Socialist Thought Police. Cognitive dissonance is a painful thing to behold and have to deal with, which is where a lot of people currently seem to be.

via Dispatches from the Culture Wars...police in Carrollton attempted to cover up the use of excessive violence during an arrest by trying to prevent release of their own video records...talk about treating the population with contempt...sheesh.

After reading about a particularly nasty and obnoxious bunch of people whose main leisure aim in life appears to be to harrass people going about their lawful business (just not the kind of lawful business these jerks think should be lawful)...I am striking Amarillo from my list of places to spend any time in. It is fairly clear from reading accounts of the harrassment that these jerks are perpetrating that local law enforcement has no real interest in reining them in. That being the case, I shall rein in my visiting and spending in and around Amarillo. I shall reconsider when the city of Amarillo comes to terms with the reality that intolerant bigots like these folks cannot be allowed to harrass people continually without negative consequences, and that the appearance of tolerance makes Amarillo look like it is tacitly supporting both the objectives and the tactics of this group.

I closed on a house in Duncanville TX on 26th February. Instead of buying a "project" I went for a house in excellent shape, in line with my approach to eliminating sources of anxiety in my life.
While ferreting out information about mortgages, during a rather silly spat with my mortgage lender over provision of financial information (they seemingly wanted to know almost the entire inner workings of my UK finances, which I considered to be intrusive), I came across "The Compleat Ubernerd" by the late Doris "Tanta" Dungey. A great source of everything you ever wanted to know about the mortgage market, and in line with the old saying that you really don't want to know what goes into politics or sausage, there is a lot there you may wish you had not found out about...

...is a long-standing tolerance and acceptance of tax evasion.
As this article at Bloomberg explains:

Apostolis Rigas took his Opel sedan for a 220-euro ($354) service at a repair shop in northern Athens. When he asked for a receipt, the price jumped to 260 euros as his mechanic would have to declare the income and pay tax.
“There’s no taboo about this,” the 23-year-old student said in a Feb. 2 interview. “Tax evasion helps support families, but it’s not good for the Greek state.”

Leave it to this economist to spell out the elephant in the room:

“What distinguishes Greece from the rest of the pack is the extent of tax evasion,” said Michael Massourakis, chief economist at Athens-based Alpha Bank, the country’s third biggest-lender, in a Feb. 5 telephone interview. “If you don’t attack tax evasion you don’t have the moral authority to cut spending.”

My own personal anecdotal example: when I went on vacation in the Greek Islands, it did not take long before I noticed that many buildings seemed to be incomplete, with the base pillars for an additional floor disturbing a flat roof for the existing 1 or 2 floors. However, it was also clear that many of these buildings were decades old.
When I asked the owner of a bar we frequented on vacation about this, he explained that it was a tax dodge. Once a building is complete, a tax is levied on the building; however the tax is not levied if the building is not completed. House owners would therefore have an architect draw up plans for an additional floor on a house before the house was built. When the house was built they would have the builder put the base supports in place, so that they would be able to report the house as incomplete. Voila! No tax liability. My travels in Crete and Skiathos showed that this dodge is endemic; most buildings are "designed" to be perpetually incomplete.

The problem with cracking down on tax evasion is that it is a centuries-old tradition:

...public anger in Greece taps into a tradition of tax evasion-as-protest against nearly four centuries of rule by the Ottoman Turks that ended with Greek independence in 1829, Massourakis said. Even for those who pay, colluding with tax-dodging of taxi drivers and bar-owners is still considered a form of solidarity.
“If this was a friend of mine he wouldn’t give me a receipt and I wouldn’t ask,” Rigas said. “I’m not so sure they’ll succeed.”

The massive budget deficit that has pushed Greece to the edge of bankruptcy is challenging enough, but a bigger challenge is how to modify a national culture that sees tax evasion as normal and even honorable.

A nice summary of the various resentments that fuel authoritarian populism in the United States in 2010...

In which he explains, among other things, why the current GOP campaign of obstructionism on legislative ideas from the Obama administration is perfectly sensible from their perspective, even though logically it is a hypocritical pile of cack...
As Lakoff explains, discussing GOP hypocrisy over Medicare program spending:

The highest conservative value is preserving and empowering their moral system itself. Medicare is anathema to their moral system — a fundamental insult. It violates free market principles and gives people things they haven’t all earned. It is a system where some people are paying —God forbid! — for the medical care of others. For them, Medicare itself is immoral on a grand scale, a fundamental moral issue far more important than any minor proposal for “modest cost savings.” I’m sorry to report it, but that is how conservatives are making use of real reason, and exploiting the fact that so many liberals think it’s contradictory.

I disagree with Lakoff on his point somewhat. I know the GOP position is hypocritical and totally contradictory. Ditto the stunning GOP hypocrisy over stimulus funds, where politicians who voted against the whole stimulus package are now falling over themselves to obtain (and claim the credit for) stimulus funds directed to their districts or states. Anybody with more than half a functioning brain can deduce this. However, as has been pointed out by many other folks, politicians almost never score highly on their ability to be shamed when inconsistencies between their words and deeds are pointed out. Their normal response is to act like they never heard anybody pointing this out.
However, Lakoff once again returns to one of his favorite themes about framing:

Every time a liberal goes over a conservative proposal giving evidence negating conservative ideas one by one, he or she is activating the conservative ideas in the brains of his audience. The proper response is to start with your own ideas, framed to fit what you really believe.

I always remember Frank Zappa's testimony in 1986 before the PMRC, where he essentially ignored all of the "protect the children" framing of the (incredibly stupid and dangerous) PMRC proposals to label music with what was considered "explicit content", and also added in his own significant dash of ridicule. He also debated proponents of PMRC on "Crossfire" and once again ignored their framing, instead substituting his own derived from the First Amendment. More recently Jesse Ventura destroyed proponents of torture by blowing past their "ticking bomb" scenarios and other frames and focussing on the blunt realities that (a) torture is illegal under US and international law, and (b) torture is useless for obtaining useful information. Once again, he simply steamrollered the frames of the questioners and substituted his own. This is the approach that progressives and libertarians need to be taking when facing the sort of pernicious framing that regressives and authoritarians engage in - a mixture of different framing and ridicule where the ideas and philosophies being expounded deserve it.