The Yin Blog

I moved to the right state!

Because of Halloween trick or treating, I didn't get to see all of the Oregon-USC football game, but what I saw, including the end, was plenty satisfying.  It's hilarious to think that the USC football team has not won in the state of Oregon in four years now!

Sleeplessness, state by state

This CDC study looks at sleeplessness rates by states.  Oregon does pretty well, with only 8.8% of the population reporting insufficient sleep for 30 out of the past 30 days.  (That's pretty severe, every night?!?)  I don't know about other states that also have a low incidence of this problem, but for me, it's soothing to hear gentle rain thumping on the skylights at night.  I think Eddie Rabbit had it right: I love a rainy night. 

We're #3 (but we should be #1)!

Forbes has ranked the 40 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas in terms of safety, and Portland comes in at #3.  The top five are Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, Portland, Boston, and Seattle. 

While MSP certainly has a good claim to the top spot, Forbes uses a pretty weird methodology.  All of the metro areas are ranked ordinally in four categories (violent crime rate, traffic fatality rate, workplace fatality rate, and natural disaster risk).  The ordinal rankings are then added together, and the lower the overall score, the better.

So, first of all, the ordinal ranking can obscure big differences between seemingly close metro areas.  In crime rate, for example, what if the per capital crime rates (per 1000) are something like #1 (1.1), #2 (2.5), and #3 (2.6)?  The simple ordinal ranking doesn't take into account how much better #1 is than #2, and how trivial the difference between #2 and #3 is.

Second, what exactly is "natural risk disaster"?  The West Coast areas get slaughtered in this category, with Portland the least bad at #25, then San Diego (#26), and everything else in the 30s.  Presumably, this is anticipating major earthquakes or something, as well as wildfires and mudslides in southern California, I guess.  But it seems awfully weird to be making 1/4 of the ranking based on something that you can't really estimate with precision.

Even if you could, what's the death toll from earthquakes?  Focusing just on the Los Angeles & San Diego areas in the last 50 years, the only quakes with fatalities were the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which caused 72 deaths, the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake, which killed three people, and 1971 Sylmar temblor, which killed 65 people.  (I'm not counting ones like the 1992 Landers quake, which did kill three people, but none in the L.A. or San Diego metro areas.)  So, that's 140 people over 50 years, or less than 3 per year.

Granted, ~3 per year on average is greater than that you'd expect from, say, tornados, but the risks posed by natural disasters like earthquakes seem miniscule compared to traffic fatalities and violent crime.  In Los Angeles County, there were 168 murders, 233 rapes, 1910 robberies, and 5148 assaults reported in 2008.  Granted, L.A. County is not the same thing as L.A. metro area, but that only means that we'd expect even more violent crimes in the latter.  In short, the number of deaths via violent crime in L.A. dwarfs that caused on average by earthquakes.

And it's not as if L.A.'s violent crime rate is off the charts -- it's ranked #21, so just one spot above average.  Yet, the ~3 earthquake deaths (on average) per year is weighted the same as the 168 murders in 2008 in terms of significance, even though violent crime actually carries more than 50 times the numerical weight in reality.

I think the same criticism could be made about workplace fatalities.  The number of people who die in workplace fatalities can't be that high compared to violent crime or traffic, so equating the ranking in this category with that in any other is also silly.

Now, if you focus on the two categories that seem most significant to me -- violent crime and traffic -- and re-rank using Forbes' criteria (in other words, still summed ordinal rankings), the new top 5 looks like this:

1. Portland (#1 in crime, #5 in traffic); total 6

2. San Jose, CA (#2 in crime, #6 in traffic); total 8

3. Seattle (#3 in crime, #8 in traffic); total 11

3. Boston (#10 in crime, #1 in traffic); total 11

5. New York (#11 in crime, #2 in traffic); total 13

I have to admit, I am quite surprised to see Boston and New York do so well, but I guess my impressions of Boston are colored by a 1987 visit where I nearly got run over 5 times in 30 minutes as a pedestrian, before I learned that the drivers didn't think pedestrians had the right of way.  And my impression of New York is pretty much colored by the movie "Escape from New York" . . . .  Anyway, seeing the relatively smaller Pacific Northwest cities and San Jose atop the list does make some sense to me!

Living without a fridge

Around the time I was deciding whether to move to Oregon, I read a story about a trend among some Oregonians to give up their refrigerators(!).  The theory is that a refrigerator is one of the biggest energy eaters in a house.  You can replace a fridge with frequent trips to the supermarket, a small freezer for ice, and a cooler for milk, etc. (kept cool with ice from the freezer).  Of course, whether this is actually a carbon reduction depends, I guess, on how much gas (if any) is used for those frequent supermarket trips.

Anyway, it seemed kind of crazy to me, but now I'm going to get to experience it.  We decided to replace the old fridge in our house with an EnergyStar model that will also provide chilled and filtered water and ice, etc.  Even better, an Oregon state entity, Energy Trust, was willing to pick the old fridge and give us $30 in the process for improving our energy use.  However, both Energy Trust and the appliance store would only give 4 hour pick-up/delivery windows, and we couldn't risk having the new fridge delivered before the old one was taken, so we scheduled the pick-up for today (Friday) and delivery on Monday.  In retrospect, it would've been better to have those pushed off to Monday/Tuesday, but oh well . . .

So this morning, we cleared out the freezer in the fridge and stashed all that in the upright freezer in our garage.  The remaining perishables went into a big camping cooler with blocks of artificial ice.  Fortunately, the nearest supermarket is just a mile away.

In the meantime, we're going to live like Oregonians!

Why is it 100+ degrees in Oregon?!?

It's always been sunny in Portland when I've visited, but I fully expect to get my share of gray, overcast days.  What I didn't expect was that it would be in the high 80s or hotter just about every day we've been here, including today's 102 degrees.  True, we have central air conditioning in our house, but apparently the air compressor isn't strong enough to cool the entire house.  The downstairs is nicely chilled, but the upstairs is still very warm. . . .

On the road from Iowa to Oregon, part 1

At 5:15 am on July 10, the morning that our movers were arriving to load up our stuff for our move from Iowa to Oregon, I finally gave up on packing and woke up my wife, who'd gone to bed at 3 am, so that I could get a couple of hours of sleep.  I don't know about others, but the observation in our moving guide that people underestimate how much time packing takes . . . it was certainly true for us.

Fortunately, the movers came prepared with enough bodies to help with not just loading but also last-minute packing, and that evening, my wife and two boys and I hit the road in our minivan.  Stop no. 1 was West Des Moines, past the boys' bedtime, but not unreasonably so.

On day 2, we drove from West Des Moines to Kearney, Nebraska, coincidentally staying at the same hotel that my wife and I had stayed at seven years ago when we moved to Iowa from California(!).  Along the way, to entertain my older son, we played the game of spotting different state license plates, racking up a total of 22 of them.

On day 3, we made it to Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Some highlights of the day included a stop at a Burger King for lunch, where there was an enormous gathering of motorcycle riders.  (I'll post a picture when we get settled in.)  They were the Patriot Guard, there to mourn Sgt. Duffy, a local young man who had been killed in Iraq recently.  We also stopped at Cabela's, which is like REI for hunters.  Like the Second Amendment?  You'd like this store.  We spotted another 11 new state license plates, including Alaska.  (No Hawaii yet.)

And on day 4, we arrived in Rock Springs, Wyoming.  Wyoming is a pretty state, but man is it sparsely populated.  Once we left Laramie, it was just barren. . . .  I mean, it makes Iowa along the 80 look overdeveloped!  And that's where I am right now.

7 years of separation(s)

I was just thinking today about how 7 years seems to be a defining period for me going back a ways now.  I finished college in 1988 without much of an idea of what I wanted to do for a career.  7 years later, I finished law school in 1995 with a very clear idea (become a law professor).  7 years after that, I started teaching law here at the University of Iowa in 2002.  And 7 years have passed since then, and now I'm about to move on to teaching law at Lewis & Clark Law School in Oregon.  Pretty coincidental . . . .

Signs of the end of TiVo?

As I've blogged before, I absolutely *love* my TiVo . . . .  But I'm afraid that I see signs of the end of its viability as a company.

With my move to Oregon less than a month away now, I've been getting utilities set up.  For water, gas, electricity, and garbage/recycling, there was no choice, but for telephone/Internet/TV, it was basically between Qwest/DirectTV or Comcast.  (VerizonFiOS is available in parts of Portland, but apparently not where we're going to be living.  Boo.)  From doing some research online, it seemed like the choice came down to Qwest's being cheaper but possibly slower online and definitely more frustrating on customer service, compared to Comcast's higher expense.

Anyway, the part relevant to TiVo is that both Comcast and DirectTV apparently scramble their signals, so you need their unscrambling boxes to watch anything.  This is great for them, since they can sell you their DVR service, but it looks to be pretty bad for TiVo, which can't do the nifty "season pass" recording and all the other smart stuff it's known for.

From Iowa to Oregon . . . not so economically happy?

According to this economic happiness survey, I'm going to be moving from the #2 state (Iowa) to the #50 state (Oregon).  Hmm . . . .