Elephant Diaries: Zombie Fiction Edition

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A bit of dystopian fiction from my young friend Kelsey, with a loving nod to our disappearing past:

“But those were on paper once, you can’t be that sure”

“It also isn’t one of those papers.”

“What? But that means it’s…okay, you’re right, it’s old. But how old?”

“Dunno”, you say, “dates missing. But it looks like a local daily, so you can guess.”

“Oh, wow, that’s positively a relic.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what’s it say? Any good places to buy a bike? Perhaps a decent crossword?”

“No. It’s got content. Here.”

Click through, because you really have to check out the excerpt he chose from the decrepit old yellowed thing, which has an, umm, familiar ring to it.

How Many People Saw the Rose Parade?

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Two decades ago, while a young reporter for the Pasadena Star-News, I convincingly debunked the official claim that a million people show up in person to see the Rose Parade. It took about five minutes of simple arithmetic to show that it was impossible*, and my colleagues and I then attempted to estimate the real crowd size by doing actual crowd counts.

From some random newspaper:

Pasadena, Calif., police estimated that more than a million spectators came out for the Rose Parade….

From the Star-News:

Hours after seeing off the turbulent, historic year that was 2008, hundreds of thousands of spectators lined the streets of Pasadena on Thursday…. (emphasis added)

Thanks, Larry!

* the simple calculation

  1. Parade route 5.5 miles long, or approximately 30,000 feet.
  2. Imagine a line of people standing shoulder to shoulder, each occupying 1.5 feet (people generally don’t stand that close, it’s a bounding scenario). A single line of people down one side of the parade route, then, is 20,000 people. Down both sides of the route, 40,000 people.
  3. 200,000 people in grandstands, leaves 800,000 people standing along the streets and sidewalks.
  4. To get to 800,000 people, the crowd needs to be 20 rows deep.
  5. The typical Rose Parade crowd (I reviewed a lot of photos to confirm this) is rarely more than 5 to 7 rows deep, and is always more loosely packed than my 1.5 feet constraint.
  6. Tweek the variables however you want (people in buildings, etc.). There’s simply no way to get to a million people.

The Long Emergency, Postponed

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Sooner or later the neo-Malthusians – those who grasp the fundamental difficulty posed by exponential population growth in collision with a fixed resource base – will turn out to be right. The problem is that, thus far, they have repeatedly turned out to be wrong.

Today’s example comes (via Tyler Cowen) from a piece by Graham Stewart last year in the the Times of Some British Place. It recounts a discussion from London learned man William Stanley Jevons a long, long time ago of Peak Coal:

In his work of 1865, The Coal Question, the distinguished economist cautioned that we had become wholly dependent on the finite resource of coal. Indeed, some calculations – based on the increasing rate of extraction and the geological analysis of how much coal remained underground – suggested that Britain could run out by 1900.

At this point, Jevons maintained, the economy would literally run out of steam, reducing Britons to a medieval standard of living. The cost of shipping coal from elsewhere in the world would be prohibitive and, in any case, the leading geologists calculated that other countries would quickly exhaust their stocks as well.

Sunset Canyon

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Sunset Canyon is quite possibly my favorite mile of cycling in Albuquerque:


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If you like to climb (as I do) and you’re stuck in town either because of time constraints, or because it’s winter, there are a series of short, steep, lovely climbs on the neighborhood streets that make up the Sandia Mountain Foothills. Cyclists call them “the fingers”. My favorite finger has always been Sunset Canyon.

It’s a lovely old neighborhood that reminds me of the South Laguna beach neighborhoods of my childhood, draped on the cliffs between the Pacific Coast Highway and the ocean. Folks who live in the neighborhood are always out walking, and the climb is so steep (7 percent grade average) that I’m generally riding slowly enough for a “hello” and a second round of social exchange before you pass them.

For a bonus, a little street called Hidden Valley turns off in a southerly direction right as you’re starting up the climb. And if you’re a real beast (pardon the pun), Paseo del Puma one block to the north of Sunset Canyon is one of the steepest climbs you’ll find anywhere, a real leg-burner. I generally wait at the bottom while my more fit friends climb it.