It’s too late for you now, you poor suckers, but you should be sorry if you missed Spencer‘s virtuoso performance at Transformer last night. Iron Man vs. the Imperialists expanded on his Prospect essay of the same name, and managed to not only make me feel self-conscious about my pathetic knowledge of 20th century American history — which is perfectly normal, and something that happens pretty much any time someone mentions a historical event not explicitly depicted in a Simpsons episode — but also made me feel self-conscious about my limited knowledge of comic books, which is not something that usually happens in places that aren’t the internet.

But I didn’t mind, because Spencer was engaging, funny and had an interesting argument to make. And, more importantly, I didn’t mind because it’s inspiring to see a friend deploy an impressive set of skills toward a whimsical end.

On that note: I can’t boast any impressive skills myself other than wide-ranging dilettantism, but my co-presenter on Saturday certainly can (PDF). So come see us tomorrow at Transformer Gallery and learn a thing or two about microcontrollers and why they’re about to escape the realm of geekery and enter into the mainstream hobbiest’s arsenal. 2pm, on the same block as Whole Foods.

I’m now hopelessly late with this, so I’ll try (and fail) to make it brief. On Friday Ryan discussed D.C.’s ban on overhead “catenary” wires, which would be necessary for electric streetcars. Apparently you can’t use an electrified sunken rail in cities that have to salt their roads — there are corrosion issues. Unfortunately, changing the law to allow overhead wires would require congressional involvement. Ryan mentions a company that’s pushing a technology providing for the wireless transfer of power from the street to the streetcar, allowing the system to be sealed and immune to salt. It sounds like a pretty clever solution. But that doesn’t make it a good one.

Like a transformer, this technology works through induction, converting electricity to magnetism and back again. In a normal transformer you have a core of some sort — picture an iron ring — and you’ve got two wires, one for input and one for output. These get wrapped around the core like in this picture. Send alternating current into the input wire and its wrappings will generate a magnetic field, which will be conducted along the core, which will excite electrons in the other wire’s coils and generate an output current. If you change the ratio of windings on the input and output coils the voltage will change, too, which is a very useful thing to be able to do. As you might imagine, transforming energy from one form to another in this way isn’t perfectly efficient (although in large, well-designed units it can be very close to it). Some electricity is lost to heat, which is why those heavy old wall-wart adapters — heavy thanks to their iron cores — tend to be warm to the touch after they’ve been plugged in for a while.

Newer “switchmode” adapters use a different technique for changing voltage levels. This method doesn’t require an iron core, which is why they can be so much lighter and smaller. Strictly speaking, transformers don’t need the iron core, either. The problem is that they’re much less efficient without one — which brings us to inductive power transfer and the streetcars. In this case one coil is sitting in the street and one’s sitting in the streetcar. The core, such as it is, is made of air, which is terrible at guiding magnetic fields, and gets ever-more terrible the further apart the coils are — this is not a useful technique for moving power anything but very short distances.

The point of all this is that you’re going to be wasting energy if you try to move it around wirelessly. Worse, it’s going to be more expensive to build the system to do all this than it would be to just make the connection with wires. It’s not as if inductive charging hasn’t been tried in the marketplace: some early electric cars used inductive paddles to charge, and various efforts are intermittently made to provide magical laptop-charging desks. But aside from electric toothbrushes — which, as the previous link notes, can afford to waste some energy if it lets them stay watertight — there just aren’t that many applications where choosing a more expensive, more wasteful way of transmitting energy makes sense.

And I have a feeling that the same will prove to be true of streetcars. Wikipedia cites an 80% efficiency number from an experimental bus system developed in 1990. That was a while ago, but it’s hard for me to imagine that the situation has gotten that much better — or that real-world applications could match the performance of a system in a closed test track. It’s going to cost more money than catenary wires, and you won’t be able to get your coils very close together on hilly streets, so your electricity bill is going to be 10% or 20% more than it would if you used direct conduction. It would be a shame to let an accident of bureaucratic history make this engineering choice.

I didn’t go downtown this morning. Getting anywhere even potentially worth being seemed to require a very early start, and although Becks‘ promise of a delicious pre-inaugural spread was tempting, I opted out. I’d gotten up before dawn the day before in order to catch a flight, making me even less inclined than normal to wake up early. Instead I woke up around 10, made some coffee and french toast, then plopped down in front of the TV. Honestly, I think this was the way to go.

I did head out on my bike around 1, though, to see what things were like around town. I made a rough circle down to Chinatown, over to Freedom Plaza, up Fourteenth, across U, then back down Eleventh. The verdict: there are a lot of people here! They all seem excited to bustle about and enjoy the historic occasion, but there’s no comparison to the emotion that flooded the streets on election night. I guess for that sort of joyousness to spread to the daylight hours we’d need to be transitioning from an even worse president than Bush to an even more trailblazing and exciting one than Obama. Like, say, a resurrected Freddie Mercury succeeding a two-term Palpatine administration. Well, fingers crossed!

You’ll be glad to know that I took some crappy pictures with my iphone:

Gallery Place was ground zero for nonsensical Obama paraphernalia, including this plumber’s truck with photos of the new president plastered on it. Despite the street being closed, a cop yelled at me for stopping my bike to take this photo, and then again when I took five seconds to begin moving. Ah, officiousness.

Fourteenth had stalls set up, but aside from folks queued to get into the perimeter around the mall, it wasn’t too flooded with people. It was pretty fun to bike through the closed streets.

There’s an Obama ice sculpture outside of Ben’s. And yeah, the line still goes down the alley:

MOST EXCITINGLY: I’m pretty sure I saw Matthew Lesko walking down my street as I returned home. I mean, okay, it could have been someone else. But whoever it was, he was wearing a leather jacket emblazoned with question marks, pants with question marks on the back pocket, a question mark hat, and ludicrous shoes (which seem likely to have also involved punctuation symbols of one sort or another).

Hey! The City Veins got nominated for a Wammie! That’s kind of awesome. Nice work, fellas.

I think Charles has this just about right:

I am predicting that in a year the New York Times will write one of those irritating “look, things sometimes happen outside of our city” articles about DC theater/art scene. They will attribute the increase in quality to Obama.

Let’s talk about Metro’s recent decision to eschew Google Transit. This is a topic about which I have a small amount of inside knowledge, actually. At the end of August I wrote to WMATA’s CTO, Suzanne Peck. I talked about some of the projects I’d done with WMATA data and expressed my affection for the agency. I explained that I was frustrated by the limits of the data available on wmata.com, and I requested a meeting. I received a response almost immediately (even though it was 11pm or so — a good sign in a CTO!). She thanked me for my interest, complimented me on my projects and directed me to Victor Grimes, her deputy, whom she instructed to meet with me.

I met with Mr. Grimes a week or two later. He was cordial but not too interested in what I had to say about opening up WMATA’s data: according to him, the situation was well in hand. WMATA was already on its way to integrating with Google Transit. There were just a few lingering problems.

To discuss those properly, we first need to talk briefly about Google Transit. The heart of Google’s system is their GTFS format — this stands for Google Transit Feed Specification, and it’s quickly become an industry standard. It’s not too complicated: basically a GTFS feed consists of a bunch of comma-delimited files with names like “routes.txt” and “stops.txt”, which all get zipped up into one file and placed on the transit agency’s website. You could open these up in Excel if you wanted. Google sucks this data down once a week or so, processes it and displays it within their own systems — but a transit agency doesn’t have to worry about all that. They just need to make sure they get their GTFS file right, and that Google knows where to find it. Many other systems have adopted GTFS, and a lot of them make the data available to the public, not just to Google.

The frequency with which Google picks up the GTFS data was an issue, according to Mr. Grimes. Google wanted to do it about once a week; that wouldn’t cut it for Metro, he said. WMATA updates its data daily with bus detours, route changes and the like. It sounded like this had been worked out, though, and Google would simply arrange to pull the data every day.

The second objection involved the display of fare information. Google Transit couldn’t manage this, apparently. The format does make allowances for transferring fare information, but for whatever reason it wasn’t up to the task of handling WMATA fares. That was fine, though; users could just be directed to the RideGuide website if they wanted to know fare information.

The final hurdle was bureaucratic. The various jurisdictions that make up Metro had to sign off on the release of the (already public) data. Last I heard, Maryland was the holdup. But Mr. Grimes thought this would be resolved soon. The GTFS dataset and Google Transit functionality would be released around September 23, he said.

Well, that didn’t happen. I gave it a week, then wrote to ask what had happened. Here’s the last I’ve heard, received on October 10:

Anyway, the Google/WMATA transit integration project has come to a stand still for reasons I can’t explain, but I expect things to get back on track in the near future. We are having a meeting to discuss our participation in the Google transit initiative next week and I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Presumably that meeting didn’t go very well. We Love DC spots WMATA’s explanation — it comes in the form of a FAQ page put online yesterday, seemingly in effort to control the fallout surrounding their decision to ditch Google. Here’s the meat of it:

1. Google could not guarantee accurate and up-to-date Metro trip information and could not provide Metro fare information. Metro’s own Web site provides near real-time travel and fare information to viewers.
2. Many transit providers in the region are not part of Google Transit so Google’s Web site viewers could not get a complete and accurate picture of their transit travel options in the Washington Metropolitan area when they use Google Transit. Metro has partnered with all the local transit providers in the Washington region to provide up-to-date and accurate information for Metro’s Trip Planner. The Trip Planner factors in other area bus and rail providers, such as Fairfax Connector, DASH, ART and Ride On, and their schedules and fare information when giving customers travel options.
3. Metro and Google have not yet come to acceptable terms regarding licensing agreements, which put Metro at a greater legal liability. Google is a for-profit company while Metro is a taxpayer subsidized public agency. Google wanted Metro’s transit data at no cost and wanted the transit agency to open itself up to greater legal liability. Given financial constraints, Metro officials are exploring whether there is a way for the transit agency to generate revenue in such a partnership.

I think we can safely dismiss the second point — hearing about the ART bus might be nice, but it’s hardly a sufficient reason for scrapping this project. Based on my conversation with Mr. Grimes, I also think point one is probably a red herring. Those limitations were known in August, and they weren’t considered show-stoppers then. I suppose Google may have ultimately decided that they couldn’t support a daily GTFS update, but this seems very unlikely to me — the Metro system is big, this technical problem is small, and enough people would find this integration useful that I’m sure they’d find a way to support it. I suppose point one could also be interpreted to mean that WMATA was insisting on some sort of service level/data accuracy guarantee that Google couldn’t or wouldn’t provide, but insisting on such a point seems a bit unreasonable.

So that leaves us with point three, which basically boils down to: Google needs to cough up some dough. I’m actually a bit more sympathetic to this idea than you might expect. “Google Transit Feed Specification” sure sounds like a proprietary format. It’s easy to imagine a bureaucrat with sign-off powers seeing that and saying, “Wait a minute. We’re doing all this work for a private enterprise and they’re not even paying us for it?” Google is an awfully helpful company, but presumably it’s offering transit information because it makes them money (or at least supports their brand). WMATA’s in perpetual need of cash; there’s no reason it should be giving Google freebies.

But this misses the larger point. GTFS may be unfortunately eponymous, but it’s an open format. Exposing schedule data in useful ways should be part of WMATA’s mandate — the current system of bulky PDFs used for bus schedules is downright inexcusable. I don’t particularly care whether WMATA lets private firms like Google use its data for commercial ends, but it should certainly grant noncommercial rights to the public.

THIS JUST IN: More from Mr. Grimes:

Yes, there is still an issue between WMATA and Google regarding the licensing agreement. However, we are in continuing discussions with Google and looking at other options for making the data available in GTFS format not only to Google but to others who have requested the information. You are correct in that much consideration has been given to this effort and it is not over. I will let you know as soon as a decision has been made regarding the direction WMATA will take to provide the transit data in GTFS format.

Also, via DCist the Examiner confirms that this is really about money. Well, good. WMATA should put the GTFS dataset online under a Creative Commons noncommercial license, and Google should cough up the $68k of online ad revenue that WMATA’s afraid of losing. Lord knows they’ve got the money.

FURTHER: One of Ezra’s commenters points out that Google Transit isn’t actually all that great. I’m not that familiar with it, but I’m not too surprised — it’s a hard problem. But even if Google can’t do it, someone else can.

Also: it’s worth mentioning that the real payoff here is for buses. Figuring out how to ride the train is dead simple; the bus, not so much. Right now it’s easy for people to read the PDF bus schedules, but hard for them to figure out what the schedule means (or which schedule is the correct one); these difficulties are reversed for computers. If WMATA releases the GTFS dataset, riding the bus could become much easier for a lot of people.

Alright, enough of this “saying nice things about employers” nonsense. That’s not what the internet is about! It’s about complaining, goddammit. So let’s do some of that.

To wit: the YMCA. Man, I really like the YMCA. I grew up going to one with my family; once I moved into the city I joined the National Capital Y pretty quickly. It’s not the cheapest or best-appointed gym out there, but I find the atmosphere congenial. Everything’s old: from the unused wall nozzles that powered pneumatic equipment back in the day; to the inch-thick layer of paint on the walls; to the patrons themselves, who wander about the locker room naked while endlessly discussing squash (whatever that is). The skeptical, tentative, ever-inconclusive conversations among themerely-fiftyish men offer a glimpse into the bureaucratic lifestyle that’s hard to find anywhere else. It’s not exciting, but it’s an essential part of this city, goddammit.

But they’ve invited my wrath. Two things. First: when I signed up, they corralled me into some sort of reverse direct deposit business. I hate doing these things because I’m paranoid about giving companies the keys to my checking account. And hey, guess what? I got a letter from the Y, and I (somewhat improbably) opened it, and they had decided to help themselves to an extra $25 or $50 or whatever. Times are tough, you know. They were sure I wouldn’t mind. They just took it out from the larger wad of money, I probably wouldn’t even notice, and besides they needed it for cigarettes so they could smoke with the seniors at lunch.

This left me feeling rather cross, and the reaction from the folks at the front desk (“it’s only $25″) only buttressed my righteous indignation. But further indignities laid in wait.

Kickball. They’re hosting kickball again this winter. Not that I remember them ever having done so before, but the signs in the hallway claim they did. Perhaps we have always been at war with kickball; I don’t really know. I do know that this fills the hallways with clots of drunk or soon-to-be-drunk assholes, who whoop and don’t get out of my way even when I say “excuse me” (admittedly through gritted teeth and a facial expression designed to drive the observer to suicide). It’s a bad situation, and if you ask me, pretty disrespectful of the Y’s dues-paying members, all of whom detest the kickballers.

I should say: I know people who play kickball who I like very much. That’s the social scene they found themselves in, and so they play kickball. I can’t fault them for that. Hell, my ancestors owned slaves — we’re all victims of our milieu. Further, I understand perfectly well the need to invent flimsy social pretexts to justify increasingly worrying levels of post-graduation alcohol consumption. But most people don’t conduct their writing workshops or networking events or connoisseurship rituals in the hallway leading to the fifth floor weight room — that’s the key difference, I think. Kickball has got to go.

The combination of the two is especially galling. Kickball’s awash in money — you can tell because the idiots responsible keep trying to sue each other. This is a for-profit enterprise that’s wormed its drunken way into my quasi-charitable dues-based fitness club. And yet on top of the imposition-for-cash, they also need to steal from me? It’s a bit much. The first time I run into people playing flipcup in the locker room I’m going to wind up killing somebody.

I haven’t really followed the local sports media much over the past couple of years. The last time I regularly checked in, Wilbon was still handling quite a bit of the paper’s Redskins columns, and it was clear that he was intensely bored by it. A professional disdain for home team jingoism and fatigue from the formulaic but necessary cycle of columns that a bad local franchise necessitates combined to produce columns that were mostly about how much he hated writing them.

I figured the turnover since then would have improved things, but holy crap is today’s Mike Wise column a piece of garbage. It’s like he was having a competition with his colleagues to see how many sentence fragments he could get past their editor. Also, take a moment and contemplate the horror of the phrase “and who this team really cannot get the ball enough to”. Is it possible to write that clause any more awkwardly? Did anyone even read this before it went to the presses?

I realize that many sports reporters get bored with sports. That’s probably inevitable. But it’s still a pretty cushy job — show at least a little effort.

HMM: Charles tells me that he thinks Mike Wise ran a triathlon on the day that he had to write that column. If so, its quality is a bit more understandable. Presumably his editor was similarly indisposed (boxing match?).

You’ve already seen this, but for the record: Brian has emerged victorious, as he inevitably must in a world that still clings to some shred of sanity — or, at the least, aspires to dignity.

Impressively, over 221,000 votes were cast for Brian. That’s one out of every four District residents, and about a hundred thousand more than were cast in the city during the 2006 election! Truly, this represents a mandate. A mandate to continue being hot.

ALSO: An impressive showing by runner-up Jeff Young. One to watch for 2009! I think this kid’s got a big upside.

Interesting developments on the Logan Circle listserv! Apparently the new Shaw library has been going through a design process since January, at which time residents were shown this design:

They liked it! But now months have passed, and somehow the project has changed into this:

It certainly looks, um, more… frugal? Maybe those who know something about architecture will be able to defend it on the merits. I don’t know anything about these matters, but I can see how some might think the earlier, prettier design is less interesting. Or maybe the second one really is the trainwreck it appears to be.