Americans are flinching under gas prices hovering around $3.00 a gallon at the pump. We talk about conspiracies, oil company hoaxes and take it as a bitter pill. But we don't change our consumption all that much, statistics show.

The fact is, we enjoy some of the lowest petrol prices in the developed world. Our gas tax is the lowest in the world. Foreign Policy website gives the world cost per filling a 13.2 gallon tank in this graphic. We're the sixth cheapest and most of the cheaper gas prices are in countries that subsidize the cost of gas.

Read the article, which also has a chart showing gas consumption worldwide. The U.S., no surprise, is first, by a whopping margin: 346.3 millions of gallons per day. Tiny Japan at 41.8 gallons per day is second and China is already third at 35.0 million gallons per day.

These staggering statistics may make you think twice about grumbling about the price of petrol at the pump. It could, and probably will, as time goes by, be worse.

And here's something else to think about: We drink more than 7 billion gallons of bottled water a year--which costs more per gallon than gas! Disposal of plastic bottles and the cost of fuel and other resources consumed in the manufacture and distribution of bottled water takes a huge toll on our environment and economy. So much so that the Mayor of San Francisco, a city which boasts a high quality of tap water, has plans to cut off city funding for the bottled water supplied to the city government buildings, and is encouraging restaurants to stop serving it as well.

In addition to city departments, all city concessions, city-funded events and functions in city buildings will be prohibited from using city money to buy bottled water by July 1. By Dec. 1, all city departments located on city property must switch from bottled water dispensers to dispensers that attach to taps or water pipes and use water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park.

...

In 2005, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa ordered city agencies to stop buying bottled water for employees after the media reported that the city had spent nearly $90,000 on it. At the same time, the city water agency was financing a $1 million ad campaign praising the virtues of what came out of the tap.

This made the national news this week, with the expectation that other cities will follow. Story here.

Happy guzzling!

"What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists?
In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."

Adam Cohen quoting Woody Allen in, not an Arts & Leisure piece, but an Opinion piece, of all things, in today's New York Times.

In Sunday's N.Y. Times there is an amusing article, Get with the Program, on the software that novelists use to keep track of labyrinthine plots and dozens of interrelated characters.

I personally think this is unfair. How many times have I had to back-page to reconnect a name or a place in a long novel? How badly does that deflate the experience of burying myself in a good book? It's not just my encroaching OBS (Old Biddy's Syndrome) it's the complexity factor in today's "triple decker" fiction. But I still love it and read it voraciously.

Software strategies supposedly replace the fabled corkboard & index card method that post notepad/pre-computer novelists used, pushpinned strings diagramming plots and character development to weave a tangled web. I too hark back to the typewriter days, where you'd type an entire page over to get one sentence right and by the time I finished a 2000 word article, the whole desk, heck, the whole office, and when I lived alone, the whole apartment was an archipelago of paper notes in piles.

I have used outliners forever, and for everything, but their limitation is that they are two-dimensional; I've had to supply the third and fourth dimensions from memory or coincidence. And that's for the non-fiction I mostly write. But like most writers juggling book proposals, I'm toying with fiction, it's dallying with with me, and this article appealed to the software jockey that's bonded to my inner novelist.

I did find out about one amazing piece of software of which I was not previously aware, Microsoft OneNote, a program more commonly used by businesses, which allows you to combine text documents, e-mail, images, spreadsheets and video and audio material into one searchable document. Imagine that!

I love reading and writing about the process of building a piece of writing, structure being everything (other elements being present; character, wit, ambiance, eloquence). So structure can only bind. But without it all else is, if not lost, too hard to bother to find. For an experienced writer, structure occurs in synapses but the article does give at least one stunning example on how neural nets can illuminate, if not the process, the flaws.

And I loved the tag graf:

In the end, these computer programs may offer helpful frameworks, but they can’t substitute for talent and imagination. Nor can they foster what Orhan Pamuk, in an interview with The Paris Review, called an essential tool of the trade: a commitment to being alone in a room. Which perhaps explains the market for another kind of computer program one that puts your Internet connection on a timer so you can actually get some writing done.

Oh, yes, that would be helpful, of course, sure, right. But not on my computer! Er, uh, well, logging off, gotta get writing now, bye bye.

I like to think about the worlds beyond our world, the expanse and unimaginable beauty of unseen realms that we can now see. What an extraordinary gift it is to encounter such a treasure, to understand how little we really comprehend and of what singular majesty we are a small part.

This is Reflection Nebula in Ophiuchius, Credit & Copyright: Takayuki Yoshida from Astronomy Picture of the Day

Why does this starfield photograph resemble an impressionistic painting? The effect is created not by digital trickery but by large amounts of interstellar dust. Dust, minute globs rich in carbon and similar in size to cigarette smoke, frequently starts in the outer atmospheres of large, cool, young stars. The dust is dispersed as the star dies and grows as things stick to it in the interstellar medium. Dense dust clouds are opaque to visible light and can completely hide background stars. For less dense clouds, the capacity of dust to preferentially reflect blue starlight becomes important, effectively blooming the stars blue light out and marking the surrounding dust. Nebular gas emissions, typically brightest in red light, can combine to form areas seemingly created on an artist's canvas. Photographed above is roughly four square degrees of the nebula IC 4603 near the bright star Antares toward the constellation of Ophiuchus.