The air transport system in the USA (and probably in most other countries as well) isn't a good answer to the question of how to move people around. I spend yesterday on three different flights, getting from the East to the West Coast. Including the "sleeping with one eye open" night preceding (I had to leave the house at zero-dark-thirty) and the completely-exhausted night that followed, some 36 hours were invested (hence available) to get me from there to here. Figure it's 3000 miles (close enough) -- net travel speed was about 83 mph. Given a good train system (and two nights in a sleeper), I could have made the same trip with lower resource utilization, greater comfort, and arrived much more refreshed than I am right now. And coast-to-coast is a scenario pretty advantageous to air transport. Only intercontinental and island trips seem to advantage air more.

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The light rail system in Portland seems pretty good. Took about a half-hour to get from the airport to downtown, at a cost of $2.30. The cars are oddly designed -- double-articulated to make tight turns, raised floor (about four steps up) at each end, odd seating patterns. But it sure got the job done for maybe 10% what a cab would have run me, and it was intuitive enough that a mentally exhausted stranger could use it without difficulty.

The stops are announced (automatically) in both English and Spanish. What surprised me is that (at least in Oregon) the Spanish pronunciation of "SW 170th St" appears to be "south-west a hundred and seventieth street". Somehow, I would have expected the language to contain its own words for directions, numbers, and strips of pavement. Who knew?

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The soap bar in my hotel room is very nice (aren't they all?), but the packaging got me thinking. "Contains 100% post-consumer paper". What does the "100%" mean? Not "made from 100% post-consumer paper", or "consists of ...", but "contains". My guess is that it means that the paper that's post-consumer is entirely so (post-consumer-ness being pretty much binary), while the paper that's not post-consumer isn't. So, how much of the paper has actually been used before is entirely unknowable. (Kind of like food packaging.)