Peak oil not quite yet and natural gas a cushion

I haven't been updating this blog for quite a while but I certainly was surprised

that the price of oil crashed so hard last year and I wish I had started

trend following before then!

I still think that oil will be getting short of supply in the next few years, but the

recent huge discoveries of natural gas should be an alternate energy

source that we can rely on as oil declines and before solar hydrogen and other

long-term technologies take hold.

I'm also interested in the electric cars coming out in 2010, especially the

Nissan, Mini and Aptera models. (Anybody reading this who's test-driven

an Aptera, please post!)

Restaurant Review: The Capital Grille, Seattle

My Lovely Wife and I stumbled into the Minneapolis incarnation of this steakhouse chain and had a lovely evening. The food was excellent and the service understated and effective, and we happened in on a night when a string quartet was playing selections from Baroque (my L.W.'s favorite) to the Beatles.

We were thus very interested when we heard that a Seattle Capital Grille had opened and tried it earlier this month.

The food was excellent, even better than I remember from Minneapolis. I had a very flavorful tenderloin prepared perfectly and L.W.'s salmon was also delicious.

The service, however ... was fawning and incompetent. I don't like being fawned over when they know how to do it, much less to come back to the table from washing my hands to find the waiter trying but failing to refold my napkin on the table. I stood there for seconds until he finally got it the way he wanted it and left; I don't think he ever noticed me.

They do have a slick "free" valet parking service, some kind of parking help probably being necessary on the busy stretch of 4th Avenue downtown Seattle where they are. Free in quotes because I couldn't see not leaving a tip, of course.

We'll go back in a few months to see if the service has improved ... the food was enough of a draw that I'll have to try it again.

The Capital Grille, Seattle, 1501 4th Ave at University. 206-382-0900. Reservations available on Opentable, my favorite way to make restaurant reservations.

Update: Precision Class Starts May 1 2008

Hi All,

I finally am scheduling the Precision class I mentioned earlier. Class will
be 8 Thursdays beginning May 1 (no class June 12 as I'll be out of town),
location TBD (probably Issaquah or Redmond (WA))library according to
student locations.

The fee is $20, with all proceeds split between a local food bank and the
ACBL program to encourage junior bridge.

Want to know more? Call me 425-369-8286 or email me!

A note on audiobooks and Catherine Asaro

I had started to post this list of books for my friend Jeffy a few months back but got distracted and didn't get it done.

I have been audiobooking (mostly via Audible and Ipod) for a couple of years now. I always thought that since I'm such a reader I wouldn't get much out of listening to a book being read.

Instead I find that it's a different experience, and valuable in that I find myself
willing to audiobook books that I never get around to reading. Also I find that I
respond more emotionally to audiobooks than to reading the same book. I thus speculated that if I responded to an audiobook it would be likely that my Lovely Wife Kate would enjoy reading the book. And it has worked out that way.

I came across Catherine Asaro in going through Nebula winners. I started with her Primary Inversion and progressed through other "Skolian Empire" works The Radiant Seas, The Last Hawk, Ascendant Sun, and The Quantum Rose (which won the 2001 Nebula), all in audiobook form, and I enjoyed all of them.

I bought Kate these for Christmas (2007) and she's been devouring them. Success!

I also enjoyed audiobooking another Nebula winner, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio, and reading its sequel Darwin's Children. The two books are on Kate's stack to try next. I'm not sure she'll like them as much as she's liked Asaro, but I'm hopeful.

You've no doubt noticed that I use 'audiobook' as a verb. I just don't see another way to do it ... I "listened to" that book? That doesn't capture it!

Peak oil: a movie, 2 websites, a disaster preparedness diary

I am visiting my aunt in Virginia this weekend and took the opportunity
to watch A Crude Awakening ... Nothing much new here for anybody who's read several of the books on this subject, but well done and possibly a good whack on the side of the head for anybody you can't get to read a book. Mentions the 1970's gas lines as a warmup for what's coming next, which I think hasn't been done enough. Mentions but soft-pedals the reduction in our ability to support the current 6.x billion without oil; it's realistically downbeat but not a dieoff clone.

One of the talking heads in the movie runs a website Life after the oil crash, where I found a republication of an outstanding disaster preparedness blog posting by a guy who calls himself AlphaGeek ... the original being better formatted and more readable than the republication. Originally posted in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and with some broken merchandise links, but
still oh-so-relevant. Not particularly peak-oil related, but there are plenty
of other disasters to prepare for ... and in any event my view of the peak oil
phenomenon is that it's likely to be a fraying of the fabric of industrial
civilization that makes us poorer and makes disasters and disruptions much
more likely over time rather than being a Katrina-like disaster itself.

Finally, a site with stunning graphs of the oil peak, as well as a lot of
other relevant info ...

Precision Class: let me know if you're interested!

Hi All,

I'm planning to teach a class on the Precision system (see 'about one club' below)
sometime soon and would like to know if you're interested. I probably will teach either at Eastside Bridge Center in Redmond (though I don't have their permission yet, so this is entirely speculative at this point) or nearby, possibly in a meeting room at the
Redmond library.

If you're interested please email me or call me: 425-369-8286 and I'll try to schedule the class starting in February or early March 2008.

About 'one club'

I've recently (the last 2.5 years or so) resumed playing contract bridge,
a game to which I was introduced at age 8 or so by my mother. I've played
now and then over the years, but had never tried duplicate bridge, the form
played in bridge clubs and in tournaments, until 2003.

As you may know, a hand of contract bridge begins with an auction in which
the 4 players compete to name a trump suit. There are only a very few legal
words that can be used for these bids. There are therefore many different systems
for assigning a particular meaning to a particular bid.

The bidding system most often taught to beginners in the U.S. and elsewhere and
thus the system known by most of the players one encounters in the U.S. is called
"Standard American", or SAYC, for Standard American Yellow Card.

This system is rather "intuitive" in that one is supposed generally to "bid what
one has" -- clubs if you have clubs, etc., with few artificial bids (for example,
a bid of 3 clubs meanning a good hand in spades to go with partner's spades).

The problem with SAYC is that it's less descriptive and has more "holes" (situations in which there's no good bid) in it than do more sophisticated systems. The most popular extension of SAYC is called 2/1.

2/1 can and does work for players who adopt it, but I prefer a different system
based on an artificial strong one club bid. Typically this system is known as Precision; the variant I've been playing with various partners around Seattle and suburbs is abstracted from a book called Precision Today by David Berkowitz and Bret Manley and is described here.

The Precision advantages:

(1) strong hands come up more often (16+ HCP) than
in 2/1 or SAYC, which typically use an artificial strong 2 clubs at 21 or 22+ HCP.
There's nothing like looking into your hand with 16 points and hearing partner open 1 club -- you know immediately you should very likely be in a small slam. This is much harder to figure out in those other systems.

(2) You can often arrive at a lower-level contract than you could with 2/1:

Opener: 1 club (16+)
Responder: 1 diamond (artificial negative, 0-7 pts.)
Opener: 1 heart (5+ hearts, natural)
Responder: pass


Often you have to get to the 2 level with this sort of hand in the other systems.

(3) Lower-level club players (199ers & below) sometimes find Precision intimidating,
and even higher-level players sometimes find it difficult to defend against.

(4) Finally, all "one-level bids" (1 diamond, 1 heart, 1 spade, 2 clubs) show
a limited range of 11-15 HCP. You don't have to do extra bidding to figure out
what partner has when she opens 1 heart.

I've bought probably 10 copies of the Precision Today book and have been greatly
enjoying playing it with various partners. If you're reading this and would be interested in a Precision class I would possibly be interested in putting one together to teach in Bellevue or Issaquah ... let me know!