National Geographic dedicates its April 2010 issue to a single topic in Water: Our Thirsty World. Many of the articles and photos are available online. Worth checking out.

At the National Bike Summit this week, Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced what he calls a “sea change”, with the dryly-named: Policy Statement on Bicycle and Pedestrian Accommodation Regulations and Recommendations.

The League of American Bicyclists is calling it “simply the strongest statement of support for prioritizing bicycling and walking ever to come from a sitting secretary of transportation.”

It includes a set of recommendations for state DOTs and communities:

• Treat walking and bicycling as equals with other transportation modes.
• Ensure convenient access for people of all ages and abilities.
• Go beyond minimum design standards.
• Collect data on walking and biking trips.
• Set a mode share target for walking and bicycling.
• Protect sidewalks and shared-use paths the same way roadways are protected (for example, snow removal)
• Improve nonmotorized facilities during maintenance projects.

I’m guardedly optimistic. Recommendations are great, but meaningless without carrots or sticks.

Don’t know what kind of automated search-and-replace produced this snafu. Apparently, Google can coin a new word via typo, and then it starts to crop up all over.

View Larger Map

I wanted a simple function that works like CONCATENATE, but is simpler to use on a range of cells. If you want to join the contents of cells in A1 to D1, you’d need:

=CONCATENATE(A1, B1, C1, D1)

That’s kind of a pain. With this custom function, you can type:


=JOIN(A1:D1)


Better, no? You can also use an optional separator, e.g. if you want a comma-separated list. Here’s the code, to paste into a VBA module in Excel:

Function Join(rng As Range, Optional sep As String) As String

'Kind of a more sophisticated concatenate

'because it works with a range of cells, and it can use an optional separator

'loosely based on Python's join method for arrays

Dim cell As Range

Dim str

For Each cell In rng

  If Not IsEmpty(cell) Then

    str = str & cell.Value & sep

  End If

Next cell

 

'Strip off the trailing separator

str = Left(str, Len(str) - Len(sep))

 

Join = str

 

End Function

I had read rumors that it was coming soon. Today Google launched “beta” version of a bike route planner. Bicycling is now one of the 4 choices for directions, after Driving, Public Transit, and Walking.

http://maps.google.com/biking

You can add an overlay of bike routes by clicking “More” at the top right of the map. I can’t find a legend, but it looks like dark green is a bike route, green is a bike lane, and dotted is a signed bicycle route at least for Oakland.

The route-finder seems reasonably smart. On this trip, from my old place to the Temescal Pool, Google instantly calculates the route that it took me about a month and several tries to decide was the best. It avoids big hills by taking Linda Avenue, which cuts through a notch in the hills, and minimizes the time you spend on Broadway with its traffic.

A few problems are immediately apparent. The walking trails around Lake Merritt are not really suited for bikes, nor are they identified as bike lanes by the City of Oakland, nor in the East Bay Bicycle Coalition’s map. I suspect that many, many users will contribute corrections, and with Google’s ability to “release and iterate”, these problems will get slowly fixed.

This press release was published over a year ago by Philanthropy in Action, but contains a lot of useful information: The Worst (and Best) Way to Pick a Charity This Year. It tackles the myth head on that the best nonprofits are the ones with lowest overhead, that spend most of their revenue on programs rather than overhead. While it’s appealing to simplify everything to a single number, it’s not much use in evaluating a charity’s effectiveness.

While the idea of sending money “straight to the beneficiaries” is tempting, nonprofit experts agree that judging charities by how much of their money goes to “programs” is counterproductive. “Achieving a low overhead ratio drives many charities to behaviors that make them less effective and means more, not less, wasted dollars,” says Paul Brest, President of the Hewlett Foundation, and co-author of Money Well Spent.

Experts cite many reasons that focusing on an overhead ratio is the worst way to choose a charity:

· It tells you nothing about the impact the charity has on people it’s trying to help
· It discourages charities from investing in tools and expertise that would make them more effective
· The rules for determining overhead costs are vague and every charity interprets them differently
· Accounting experts estimate that 75% of charities calculate their overhead ratio incorrectly

Last year, the Pacific Institute published a major report on the impacts of climate change and sea level rise to the California coast. We concluded that many of the impacts of climate change are inevitable, and that communities need to begin planning for these impacts now. The costs of doing nothing were higher in every scenario we analyzed. That’s why I’m encouraged to see initiatives like this one in Palo Alto.

Adapting To Climate Change:
Preparing Palo Alto for Inevitable Impacts

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 – 7 to 9 p.m.

Lucie Stern Community Center, Community Room
1305 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, CA 94301-3349

Free admission—Doors open at 6:45 p.m.

Climate change is happening. We must do everything possible to minimize its severity by reducing our use of fossil fuels, but we also should begin preparing ourselves for the changes ahead. In Palo Alto we can expect an increased risk of flooding, water shortages and wildfires in our foothills.

How can we prepare for these impacts?

Former Palo Alto Mayor Peter Drekmeier will identify some of the challenges ahead and measures we can take to reduce the local impacts of climate change.

Following Peter’s talk, attendees will be invited to divide into small groups to discuss the issues presented.

Sponsored by the Community Environmental Action Partnership (CEAP); Questions? pa.ceap@hotmail.com or 650-424-9633.

Co-sponsors: City of Palo Alto, Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce,Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, Canopy Trees for Palo Alto, Avenidas, Acterra, Committee for Green Foothills, Palo Alto Online, Palo Alto Weekly.

 

There is so much misinformation out there on western water issues, it’s nice to see some decent coverage. KQED did a nice job giving an overview of the current water issues.

A couple of quibbles. They did not do enough, in my opinion, to show just how much environmental destruction has been caused by water development. California has had more species go extinct than any other state, and these are mostly a result of how we have altered the waterscape.

Second, while I have sympathy for family farmers that have been hurt by water cutbacks, many of the farms on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are owned by large corporations. The real problem is that the amount of water we’ve allocated exceeds the amount of water that’s available in many years. Since these farms hold “junior” water rights, they are the first ones to lose their water during a dry year, or when a judge finally decides that the Endangered Species Act is worth enforcing.

And, lastly, despite the ominous-sounding prognostication of one farmer, allowing a few fields to go un-watered will not lead to the end of the world or $50 lettuce. There are plenty of other places in the state, and in the US, which are perfectly capable of growing lettuce.

Via an email from a friend who is trying to figure out how to eat well with a toddler in the house: Health vs. Pork: Congress Debates the Farm Bill from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

This is old news; the article discusses the re-authorization of the Farm Bill in 2007. I like this graphic from the article, because I think it makes a lot of complicated information very clear. Ever wonder why that 2 liter bottle of soda only costs 79¢? Government nutritionists are telling us to limit our consumption of meat and sugar, yet another branch of our government does everything it can to make sure they remain dirt cheap.

Much has been written in the last few years about how the food industry, marketers, and corporate agri-business has colluded to sell us more and more empty calories, and the devastating impact it’s had on our health and our waistlines. Witness such titles as:

• The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite by David Kessler
• Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and other titles
• Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back by Michele Simon

We know now that the Farm Bill is bad for our waistlines because it encourages the production of a lot of cheap food without much nutritional value. Well, it turns out it’s bad for the environment too.

Subsidies for certain crops encourage environmentally damaging practices — growing cotton in California’s San Joaquin valley would not be profitable without for price supports from the federal government. In a free market, without government intervention, farmers would not be growing cotton, which requires large amounts of water and chemical inputs.

The result is un-economic water use that kills fish by taking water out of rivers and estuaries where it belongs, and pollutes the environment with pesticides, fertilizers, and selenium.

So, we collectively, through our tax dollars, are helping finance environmental damage that would not occur under a free market. We should be angry, and demand that Congress pass laws that cease to encourage the excess production of commodities that are ruining our health and the environment.