Steven Engelhardt

My preferred airfare search engine, especially for international flights, is ITA Software’s Fare Shopping Engine. The month-long search is especially useful if your dates are flexible.

I’ve also heard good things about QIXO.

Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford with this infamous sentence:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

To honor this noxious piece of writing, the San Jose State University invented the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which contestants must “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” Here are some of my favorite entries from the 2006 contest results:

She looked at her hands and saw the desiccated skin hanging in Shar-Pei wrinkles, confetti-like freckles, and those dry, dry cuticles–even her “Fatale Crimson” nail color had faded in the relentless sun to the color of old sirloin–and she vowed if she ever got out of the Sahara alive, she’d never buy polish on sale at Walgreen’s again.

Christin Keck, Kent, OH

The cold, cynical wind molested the auburn tresses of the fair damsel clinging to the steel of the rail trestle, from which vantage point she could see that it was a long way down to where she would land if she fell, which, given the velocity she would attain and the unfriendly pavement leering up at her, added to soft tissue’s low tolerance for sudden impacts, would be a very bad thing.

Pat Hricko, Nicholson, PA

“Send a message back to Command Central on Earth and ask for their advice, which we will be able receive immediately even at this great distance, thanks to the ingenious manipulation of coherent radiation through a Bose-Einstein condensate and the bizarre influence of the Aspect effect, which enables us to impart identical properties to remotely separated photons,” Captain Buzz told the feathered Vjorkog at the comms desk, “and tell them our life-pod is going to explode in eight seconds.”

Christopher Backeberg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

As Johann looked out across the verdant Iowa River valley, and beyond to the low hills capped by the massive refrigerator manufacturing plant, he reminisced on the history of the great enterprise from its early days, when he and three other young men, all of differing backgrounds, had only their dream of bringing refrigeration to America’s heartland to sustain them, to the present day, where they had become the Midwest’s foremost group of refrigerator magnates.

Dick Davis, Circle Pines, MN

To counterbalance yesterday’s rather dismal post A Tank Of Gas, A World Of Trouble, here is an article from The Oil Drum which explores the technical viability of nuclear energy: Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?. The optimistic conclusion:

Technically, there appear to be no show stoppers for a considerable expansion of Nuclear Power throughout the world. It is a low carbon energy source with abundant fuel supplies. The technology works and has much potential for improvement.

A short excerpt from journalist Paul Salopek’s Pulitzer Prize-worthy article A Tank Of Gas, A World Of Trouble:

What are the hidden costs of America’s imported oil? The answer is complex. It may ultimately be unknowable. But this hasn’t daunted the likes of Milton Copulos.

A tenacious economist with the National Defense Council Foundation–a right-of-center Washington think tank–Copulos spent 18 solid months poring over hundreds of thousands of pages of government documents, toiling to fix a price tag on America’s addiction to global crude. He parsed oil-related defense spending in the Middle East. He calculated U.S. jobs and investments lost to steep crude prices. He even factored in the lifelong medical bills of some 18,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq as of March. (About $1.5 million each.)

Copulos is a highly respected analyst in Washington. And his exhaustive findings flabbergasted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this spring.

The actual cost of gasoline refined from imported oil, according to Copulos?

Eight dollars a gallon.

Salopek, Paul. “A Tank Of Gas, A World Of Trouble.” Chicago Tribune 29 Jul 2006.

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.“

On Saturday, July 1, the Wall Street Journal ran the article Will You Be Able To Retire? which tries to answer the question “Is my retirement savings on the right track, or not?” The most interesting part of the article is a graph which provides savings and debt targets based on age, reproduced here:

In some cases, the debt targets appear overly optimistic. Using their figure of a $100,000/year salary, this means that one’s total debt should be around $200,000 at age 30. Considering that in April, 2006 the median price of a house in Orange County was $628,000¹, I don’t see too many young, recent home buyers from that area hitting that target.

Regardless, this graph gives a useful metric to see whether you are on track for saving for retirement.