03.26.08
the horror
the horror
03.25.08
paranoia
Don’t you hate it when you’re really paranoid about something for no good reason?
Don’t you especially hate it when the thing you’re paranoid about actually happens?
…
In other news, my car got stolen today. 5% relief (I was right!), 10% calm (It’s insured), 85% WTF (fuck fuck fuck).
03.19.08
the carbon footprint of walking
Saw this post over at Freakonomics; it’s clearly meant to stir up a little debate.
The pertinent quote:
Tierney writes:
If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.
Clearly, he’s undercalculated the energy consumption required in manufacturing a cup of milk. The dairy farm used metal tools. One must add the full energy and emission cost in mining and smelting ore. Also the resources used to raise miners, steelworkers, machinists, farmers, milkers, and drivers, including parenting, schooling, clothing, food consumed, and all of the related industrial bases to produce those. Also the base of infrastructure used to produce, store, and transport that milk. Don’t forget the milk jug either. Yep, that required the invention of plastic, so that jug represents billions of dollars worth of research and a legion of chemical engineers. Also the petroleum extraction infrastructure to provide feedstock for the plastic factory.
I’ve done some rough calculations on a napkin here, and I’ll upload my figures as soon as I can find a scanner. I estimate the resource cost of that cup of milk to be around 19 years worth of Brazil’s GDP, and a pollution cost generally equal to a minor meteor impact on Yellowstone National Park. Clearly, it is cheaper to drive.
03.17.08
I been tagged.
By pushmedia.
Lessee, the rules:
Grab the nearest book, go to page 123, 5th sentence, and post the next 3 sentences.
It was a bugger, but there you were. It was a dog thing.
He whined when the ring of dark shapes closed in.
From The Fifth Elephant, by Terry Pratchett.
Oh, and tag five people. I had a few people in mind, but that Ambrosini jerk got to a few of them first. That leaves… Joe, and maybe The Synchronizer.
03.13.08
a true wordsmith
Personally, I’d eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
-Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series.