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Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
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2:16 pm - This is Hilarious
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Okay, I kind of have to post this: And yes, I know that there are speed walkers who are real athletes blah blah blah. I don't care. The commercial is funny.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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1:11 pm - From Cow to Fuel
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So in a world in which oil has probably hit its Hubbert Peak, the world's energy makers are nosing around for new means of fueling the vehicles that keep the world moving. Filling our gas tanks full of corn may not have panned out, but there are other options. Like, for example, a planned Nebraska facility to turn 22 million pounds of tallow (i.e. Beef fat) a week into biodiesel. It's a win-win situation: consumers eat delicious, lean meat, and the fat that was taken off of the cow carcasses can go to fueling buses, locomotives, and trucks, some of which move said cows. Hooray for a brave new world of cars that run on cow!
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(comment on this)
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| Sunday, July 20th, 2008
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10:12 am - Why I Love Biographical History
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From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Boniface of Savoy:The experiences of twenty years of incessant travel no doubt explain why one of his many bequests was money to build a bridge over the Rhône on the road between Savoy and France. I like to imagine a bishop who, on every trip to Savoy from England, after going through the headache of getting a ferry for his entourage, would think, "You know, someone should really build a bridge here." In the end of his life, I guess he finally figured that if he didn't get it done, no one would and thus the bequest.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Thursday, July 17th, 2008
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1:36 pm - And I Would Like to Have the Power of Telekinesis by 2018
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| Thursday, July 10th, 2008
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9:38 am - Unsung Heroes
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There are various people who keep us safe and secure who get little credit--cops, firefighters, and soldiers. But at the end of the day, they do get a decent amount of recognition for keeping things running. There are other folks, though, whose work is just as if not more important but who get even less recognition. Last June, flooding damaged great swaths of farmland in the Midwest, threatening to even further exacerbate the global food crisis. After the flood waters receded, though, the farmers in the afflicted lands pulled out all the stops to mitigate the damage, replanting like crazy, and so the result has been that the damage was much less severe than it might have been. In addition, this year's wheat harvest is going to be one of the best in years. So I just want to pause and remember the unsung heroes of the plains whose efforts in the face of a rising global food crisis may keep millions away from starvation next year. Thanks, farmers.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
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8:51 am - England Again
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The English are apparently too polite to remark upon a 31-year old man doing pull-ups in a children's playground. And I should probably return to work.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, June 19th, 2008
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5:11 am - While I Wait
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So England's great. I'm now sitting here in the reading room, waiting for Arundel 365 adn Additional 22041. Waiting... Waiting...
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(comment on this)
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| Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
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8:47 pm - Proof Positive of the Existence of God!
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| Monday, June 9th, 2008
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6:37 pm - To England!
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So, I'm off to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland a week from today. If there's anyone on my friends' list who'll be in the UK when I am and would like to get together for whatever reason, drop me a comment or e-mail. My dates are: 17 June to 21 June--London 22 June to 28 June--Cambridge 29 June to 6 July--Oxford. Somewhere in there I'm also going to include a day trip to Rochester, and, if I can at all find the time, I'd dearly love to visit Lincoln, but I just don't think that's happening this trip.
current mood:  excited
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(comment on this)
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10:44 am - Where do they find these people?
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This is not a parody. Well, not a parody saving the fact that all of Mark Morford's columns are an extended exercise in self-parody.
current mood: Appalled
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
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2:53 pm - Muqtada Atari
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So I was reading a profile of Muqtada al Sadr in the Washington post today. Two things struck me: One is that he has a great fondness for video games, and the other is that he was at times noted for eating a dozen falafel at a time. So one of the most bedeviling figures in Iraq today is basically a guy whose preferred recreation is playing video games while eating everything in sight. There's something about that that I simply can't add to.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, May 26th, 2008
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12:41 pm - A Photograph from Ramadi
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| Sunday, May 25th, 2008
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5:44 pm
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As bad as the fighting between Obama and Clinton got, they never resorted to massive firefights that brought in foreign powers, airstrikes, and artillery bombardments. So when Clintonites and Obamans engage in a war of words, it's much less menacing than Iraq's Shi'ites. As the dollar falls and gas hits four dollars a gallon, we are seeing changes afoot in both the U.S. economy and how we get energy. In Medicine Bow, Wyoming, ground has recently been broken on a plant that will make gasoline. Unlike your average oil refinery, though, this plant will be making gasoline out of... coal. That's right, we're seeing the first stirrings of a world in which our cars run on coal. But since this synthetic gasoline will be more expensive than that of the late 20th c., we're going to be seeing an increase in technology whereby cars, locomotives, and delivery trucks use the energy normally lost from braking to vastly increase fuel efficiency. So an 80-year old technology is going to use coal to power our cars, but the cars will themselves use fearsomely high-tech engines to get the most energy possible out of this gasified coal. Meanwhile, as long as we're talking about coal, what industry in the U.S. is growing by leaps and bounds? Is it IT, software, or the service industry? No, it's steel. With a falling dollar and improved technology, U.S. steel is selling not just in the States, but throughout the world. The papers have just been filed to build the first new steel mill in the U.S. in close to four decades. Steel mills and coal together with astounding levels of technology that would have boggled the mind of a steel mill worker of the 40's or 50's. Everything old is new again as we move on into our steam-punk future.
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(comment on this)
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| Thursday, May 8th, 2008
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7:46 am - Problems with Bringing Your Cell Phone into Combat
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There's something grimly amusing about this story. A soldier in Afghanistan was in a firefight and accidentally pressed a button on his cell phone that called his parents. They heard about three minutes of a firefight on their voicemail. It seems like a bad idea to have your cell phone on in combat. Suppose, for example, you're laying an ambush. It would ruin it to have your phone go off at an inopportune moment.
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, May 2nd, 2008
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11:47 am - A Sad Day
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Carlos Yu is no longer blogging and posting on shwi. This is a sad, sad day.
current mood: Wistful
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, April 28th, 2008
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10:17 am - The Final Humiliation
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You take what was once the mighty wolf, and then gradually breed all spirit out of it. You then take the poor animal, cut off his testicles, and have it used as a fashion accessory. What more humiliation awaits this poor canine?
The puppoose.
Maybe our civilization doesn't deserve to survive.
current mood: Agog.
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(6 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, April 25th, 2008
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8:40 am - Laser Cannon!
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So, as most people that I have excitedly bugged about this know, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency is in the process of building the airborne laser. The airborne laser is a laser cannon mounted in a Boeing 747 which will shoot down Iranian, Pakistani, North Korean, etc. nuclear missiles in the "boost phase," i.e. when the missile is a slow, easy to hit target. The Missile Defense folks have had enough setbacks that they're being very slow and cautious in how they go about this. But they've finally assembled the laser in the airplane, and sometime next year will fly it around and test fire it. But of course, my thoughts on this laser are more ambitious, viz... We now have a working laser cannon. We also have an international space station. The next step rather suggests itself. We don't need this laser cannon mounted on a Boeing 747, we need to have it mounted on the International Space Station. Pointing outward.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, April 24th, 2008
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7:34 am - A Thought on the Christian Faith
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| Sunday, April 13th, 2008
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10:50 pm - I Wonder
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What would a romantic comedy written by men and for men be like? Not "for men" in the sense of having the level of humor seen in early Adam Sandler, but "for men" in the sense of "not obviously targeted at heterosexual women."
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, April 4th, 2008
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3:23 pm - Far From the Singularity
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So I have a Latin Textual Criticism test on Monday. Because I and others in the class do not yet read Italian, we used Robarts' translation service, and had them run two chapters of Giorgio Pasquali's Storia della tradizione e critica del testo through a translation program. Folks, we are a long, long way away from Robot overlords. And, much as I love ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) autopope's stuff, there's no Singularity coming for a while if a machine can't translate a language as simple as Italian into comprehensible English.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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cynical
