| In the news... |
[Dec. 31st, 2006|10:19 pm] |
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| |  uncomfortable | ] |
I found this news article recently that talks about Draconic and quotes me... It's kind of disturbing in its coldness and I don't like attention from the public... but it's kind of interesting so I thought I'd post it.
Here's a copy, in case the link disappears:
( Story ) |
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| Woot! |
[Nov. 8th, 2006|07:18 pm] |
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Democrats take control of house for the first time in 12 years (gaining 28 seats!).
Democrats take majority of governorships for the first time in 12 years.
Democrats take control of senate (almost certainly)
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld anounces resignation.
House representative Nancy Pelosi from Califorinia will be the first madam speaker in U.S. history.
'Richard Pombo, who led a crusade to kill the Endangered Species Act and called the Environmental Protection Agency "jackbooted thugs," is out of a job.'
Maybe now we can impeach Bush and Cheney? *drool*
It could only be better if Schwarzenegger hadn't won as CA's governator... and if prop 87, the gas tax to fund alternative energy, had passed. But prop 84 passed, which funds a lot of environmental stuff, including building an educational nature center for The Children's Nature Institute, the organization I work for.
I like this article: World reaction: Democratic win welcomed
The thing that bugs me is that I read that historically, in the second term of a president's office, house control shifts by an average of 31 seats towards the opposing party. Apparently people always find something to get mad at the president for and decide "it's time for a change". So was this inevitable? It makes the country seem so wishy-washy. Americans don't seem to stand for anything in particular, they just get disgruntled at the problems of the day and hope the other party will do a better job. I don't like to think this will just happen again in 8 or so years if Democrats gain control of all three branches.
Environmental defense is urging me (and friends) to e-mail Nancy Pelosi urging her to take meaningful action on global warming, because time is running out (we had a record-shattering 95 degree day here in SoCal yesterday).
In other news, I'm poised to go flying again this weekend. I'm going to do the first hour of the FAA Wings program, which is three hours of flight training and a seminar in lieu of a biannual flight review. It works out nicely since I haven't flown in 3-4 months so training is timely, and I need to ride with an instructor at the new airport I'm renting from anyway before they'll rent to me, so the first hour of training had to be paid for regardless. I'm a little bummed though that my original flight instructor is moving up to central CA to train for a little while longer and then becoming a commercial captain, so I might not see him again. But it's good for him, since teaching students can't pay the bills, and he said I could call any time. |
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| This kind of sickens me... |
[Nov. 1st, 2006|10:03 pm] |
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Flip-flop Schwarzenegger is leading by a great margin out here in CA just because he's been acting like a moderate and endorsed a global warming bill. This a few months after he personally introduced a slew of special propositions that were all anti-education and anti-environment and they were all voted down. People just forget what he's done and figure he's had a change of heart? He'll just go right back to his old tricks after he's elected. I don't see how people can be so blind.
Then I get this from democrats.org:
Here's how the Republicans are trying to win this election:
President Bush himself is trying to scare voters with ridiculous claims, saying that "terrorists win and America loses" if Democrats were to take control of Congress.
In Missouri, Michael J. Fox recently appeared in a heartfelt ad for Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, criticizing the Republican incumbent's opposition to stem cell research. The GOP smear machine immediately attacked Fox and McCaskill, with Rush Limbaugh even suggesting Fox was faking his symptoms of Parkinson's disease in the ad.
In Tennessee, the Republican Party ran racist ads aimed at dredging up some of the worst racial prejudices imaginable. The ads attacking Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford, who is African-American, show a scantily clad white woman beckoning to him. The ad is so bad that some TV stations are refusing to run it, and non-political companies have fired the Republican consultants who made it. The RNC refused to denounce the disgusting ad, despite a public outcry.
In California, one Republican campaign took a page from the national GOP playbook, which calls for suppressing minority voters at every opportunity. The campaign sent a false and deliberately misleading mailing to Hispanics in the district that threatened jail time for any immigrant -- legal or not -- who tried to vote.
Ugh.
At least prop 87 is narrowly ahead in the poles, despite constant TV ads funded by oil companies denouncing it. I prey the house and/or senate will regain a democratic majority when all is said and done. Check out moveon.org and their big push to help make that happen. They've got a lot of good ideas. |
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| Eagle's first flight |
[Oct. 20th, 2006|10:34 pm] |
When I was around 13, my best friend got into flying RC planes. I was excited to join him, and I bought my own plane kit. It's called the Eagle 63, and cost $60, probably one of the cheaper kits. In reality it was just a bunch of sheets of balsa wood, some dowels, and a couple plastic and metal bits in a big flat box. Some of the balsa sheets were pre-punched, while others had to be sawed out using paper diagrams and cutouts. I remember the whole process taking for-ev-er... At least a month if not more of spending most evenings after school in my room gluing and cutting and whatnot, creating a gigantic mess.
I was very proud of it when it was finally finished, and I got it completely ready to fly, but I was afraid to actually fly it, because I figured I would crash it. I was also very shy and afraid to go out and ask anyone to train me to fly it. I would think that if I'd gone with my friend, I would have been able to use him to do the talking, but for some reason that never happened... I think it might be because he crashed his plane and didn't get to fixing it, actually. In any case, with my fear of destroying all my hard work combined with shyness and how far the field was, I didn't get to flying it.
I think I eventually sold the engine to my friend because I wanted money for something else, but I kept the plane with me for all this time. Next time the RC flight bug hit me was when I was about 26, when I saw those RC gliders flying at the beach nearby (there's a LJ about it awhile back). I built myself a glider and got a remote for it that I knew could also be used for a gas powered plane (the original remote I'd gotten when I was 13 was no longer certified for use under newer radio rules). At some point I also got a new gas engine and ran it for awhile to break it in, because Royelle got excited when she found out I had a plane, but we still didn't go fly it.
When we moved to the valley, I noticed little planes flying around a park that isn't too far away from us. We went out there one weekend and watched helicopters flipping inverted, spinning as if out of control. The sky was filled with a dozen small planes, some doing crazy acrobatics. A few sleek jets were taken apart on the tarmac, and I overheard that they often get only 20 minutes of flight followed by two hours of maintenance. One that looked like a fighter jet was eventually prepared and took off like a rocket, sounding like a real jet and making streaking low passes down the runway followed by straight-up shots into the sky. It was pretty amazing to be there.
I wrote down numbers to call for flight training, but Royelle was more bold, asking around and eventually locating a guy who said he would train us for $5 a flight. Not too bad... except he figured we'd take 30 flights to learn. We thanked him and headed off. Later on, Royelle called a number I'd written down for a free flight trainer named Skydog. He turned out to be very cool. He's been flying for 20 years, always teaching for free, even when he was homeless. Maybe a little too much dedication, there? He must really love it, though, cause he's at the airfield for hours on most days.
We set up an apointment to fly, headed out, but we got too much gas in our engine so it shot out the muffler and then it wouldn't start. It was very frustrating since we'd started it the day before, but soon we realized the nose cone was broken and we couldn't use the electric starter motor that pushes against the cone to spin the prop fast. Thus we tried to start it by flicking it by hand. After an hour, we gave up and flew on Skydog's trainer. It's a small white plane that's kind of touchy in the air, hard to keep straight. It felt a lot like my red glider, which is also unstable and hard to keep straight, so my glider flight experience certainly helped. "I thought you didn't know how to fly?!", Skydog commented. Royelle and I practiced flying circles around the runway, trying to line up with runway center from high above. It's rather hard to do, since you can't see the runway and the plane at the same time.
We came back the next day with a new nose cone and had to run the electric motor against it for quite awhile before it started. Mostly the engine seems to flood too easily and then you have to roll it backward to get some fuel out, or disconnect the fuel source and roll it forward. The ironic thing was this was Fri the 13th. All these years I'd worried about my plane crashing, and I go and fly it first on Fri the 13th. I've never in my life had anything bad happen on a Fri the 13th, and in some ways I like to thumb my nose at silly superstitions, so it was actually a good day. If Fri the 13th really has any power to make bad things happen, it is simply in its causing us to dwell on and expect bad things, thus drawing them to us. I did not expect bad things.
I was thrilled to see the plane take off, watching it bank and fly. Soon Skydog let me take over, and I found it to be very stable and easy to fly, especially compared to that smaller plane from the day before. Skydog says he thinks the Eagle series are probably the best trainer planes due to their stability. Once again, I flew circles, getting a little lower this time. Skydog didn't seem to want me getting too low, though I wanted to get closer to the runway. I let Royelle take over and she flew the same sorts of patterns. Then the fuel ran out and skydog yelled "dead stick". I have no idea why, since the "stick" (the flight controls) are still very much alive, you just don't have engine power. You'd think I might have freaked out at this point, but the plane looked well under control so I just trusted him to handle it. He did a great landing and the plane was fine.
( Pictures of the first flight )
Since then we've gone flying three more days. I was making lower passes on the second day, but we had to wait forever for our radio channel 38 to be vacant and we didn't get to fly very long. He had us cut power to idle and "float", which shows how good the plane is at gliding slowly. It made me feel I could have landed it without much trouble, but we had to go. On the third day I practiced real approaches to landings, flying very low. Then it was Royelle's turn. She made a sort of landing, but it bounced and nicked the prop into the ground, stopping it. We had to go shave off a piece from the other side to even it out.
When it was my turn again I went around a number of times until he said I could try landing it. I made my first landing without too much trouble, taking off again immediately, doing it again, and then let Royelle take over because it was almost dark and I knew she wanted to get a proper landing down. She did it with ease and that was that.
We went out again today and were landing constantly. I was probably getting a little too zealous as I had the plane coming right towards us a couple times and another time it headed right towards another guy near the end of the runway. It's tough, cause you're watching the plane and you can't see someone standing way off ahead of it, but I had it banked away from him quickly and it ended up looking more funny than anything as he ran off the other way. =) But, of course, you have to take safety seriously, cause those propellers could certainly hurt someone or damage a car.
Anyway, it's great fun and easier than I would have thought. Flying gliders first helped a lot, of course. It's great to finally get that plane doing something. I've gotta resume flying the big planes next, which is something I let lapse as we moved. Until next time... |
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| Maintenance |
[Aug. 12th, 2006|09:11 pm] |
I was with a college friend a few weeks ago, and he's like "It's cool when you call... you're so low maintenance. We won't speak for months and then we'll talk and it will just be like no time has passed." That's really what I want with people, because I can't spend all day chatting online. I don't have time. I often won't see people for a long time. Most people drift away and get cold because of that. At the very least, most people are very unpredictable, warm one day, cold the next... and the coldness really bothers me. I realize that I rarely am willing to page someone I think is more than 25% likely to be cold, and so those people just drift away even more. The few I trust not to be cold are rarely on, so it's easy for me to feel lonely when I'm desiring company.. I sometimes reach out to new people, but I know that 95% of the time they will end up being those high maintenance types too, and that most won't really be warm to me anyway without a lot of work that I don't have time to put in. So the risks seem far greater than the rewards, and I feel paralyzed.
Maintenance.
I hate maintenance. Anything I have to do too often is very annoying to me. At work I will try to automate all the recuring tasks as much as I possibly can, so they're very quick to accomplish or done automatically.
I bet my personality type is not as rare as it feels like it is... because those like me will not be around online enough to provide maintenance, or ask for maintenance. When I really think about it, there are a fair number of people I trust to be affectionate towards me if I see them and contact them... it's just that, like me, they're rarely on, so we rarely collide.
I don't know what the point of this is... I mean I don't see a solution. But it's something that came together in my head tonight.
I have Elly with me, and that makes me happy. We live together now.... again. I was searching for something more while we were apart, but it always came back to that same issue of inconsistency and maintenance. Elly has always stayed close to me, like those few others I so rarely see. I still wish I had more of them, or saw them more. Sometimes I still get lonely, but not nearly so much as before.
Tekaril said something interesting a few weeks ago. He said I interact in groups through someone. I don't like parties or group things if I feel like the outsider. But if I go with someone I'm close to, then I'm a lot more social and comfortable. Tekaril said it's a common thing, esp with INTJ personalities. Again, I'm not quite sure what to do with that knowledge... but I've been a lot more social since I can take Elly places. |
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| Environmental Defense |
[Jul. 1st, 2006|12:49 pm] |
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There's a couple great new ads created by the Ad Council, the same outfit that created Smokey the Bear, Friends don't let friends drive drunk, Take a bite out of crime, etc. They made the ads for free, allowing Environmental Defense to cover the costs of distribution. I think they're pretty powerful, and it's amazing when a big organization thinks this is a problem worth donating so much to address. I've heard the LA Times has also been running a lot of stories recently about global warming. For the first time, environmental issues were near or at the top of the list of things the new candidates for CA governor were talking about in their commercials. I think there is momentum building at last. We need to keep it going. |
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| An Inconvenient Truth |
[Jun. 26th, 2006|05:55 pm] |
This Sat, we went to see a free outdoor screening of Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It was an amazing experience. They said to arrive 2 hours early, yet there were hardly any seats left when we got there 2.5 hours early. When it finally got started, a couple people talked and then Al Gore came out and spoke for a few minutes, getting a standing ovation from the whole courtyard which was packed full. LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa came out briefly and mentioned his 4 year plan to get LA on 20% renewable power, pointing out that cities and states across the country are leading the way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even if the feds are ignoring the problem. After that, Gore's friend Bon Jovi and Richie Samora came out and jammed four songs, followed by the movie. I think it was really well done and should be very convincing even to skeptics. I know a lot about climate change, but the movie still had a few points I'd never heard, including 160,000 years worth of ice core atmospheric samples showing that CO2 has never been anywhere near as high as it is today, and a meta study of the 928 scientific papers published so far that relate to global warming, none of which deny its existance. The climate is changing for the worse far faster than most scientists predicted, but movies like this give me hope that people can come to understand and fight for change despite all the disinformation put out there by those who want to keep the status quo. Countries have worked together to solve the problem of CFCs, and it can happen again if enough people get on board. I highly recommend the movie. You can find showings and things you can do to become carbon neutral here.
Hmmm, I wonder if this freak storm that shut down federal buildings might wake up some of the politicians. |
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| Hope in the energy crisis |
[Jun. 11th, 2006|03:59 pm] |
I was listening to NPR's environmental podcast, and they have a series of stories about alternative energy sources for the future. Some are rather depressing, like the notion of mountaintop removal to get at oil shale, using new methods to process it into oil at $30 a barrel. In one sense, these ideas alleviate my concerns about "Peak Oil" being a huge problem anytime soon, or even in my lifetime (there's far more oil shale in the US than there is oil in the middle east). But in another sense, if we keep on burning oil long after the liquid oil is depleted, that's going to make global warming that much worse.
So, here's the hopeful part. A canadian firm has demonstrated the viability of turning grass into ethanol using a process that is ten times more efficient than our corn to ethanol production. E85 is a fuel made of 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent traditional gasoline, and it can be burned by a growing number of vehicles. In fact, you can even retrofit many existing vehicles to use it. The biggest problem has been efficiency in getting it, with a big debate over whether you actually spend more energy than you get out of corn based ethanol production, especially if you consider having to mitigate all the adverse environmental impacts of corn farming. The new canadian method uses a kind of fungus originally discovered eating away fabric in Vietnam. It has the ability to break down strong bonds in grass and other plant fibers to produce ethanol. If it really is ten times more efficient than corn ethanol production, it sounds to me like a viable replacement for oil, and the global warming impacts are zero because the carbon that is released by burning the ethanol is the same carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere to create the plant that yielded the ethanol.
Ironically, the oil shale and grass ethanol technologies were both pioneered in the 70s during another oil price spike, and have been simmering on the back burner all this time waiting for oil prices to rise enough to make them viable alternatives. Even wind technology is picking up momentum. I wonder what else might be out there waiting in the wings, unnoticed. "You'll have innovators and entrepreneurs and people trying ideas that may seem sensible today or may seem way out. But out of that whole soup will emerge some new ways of doing things," - Daniel Yergin |
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| Lizards are funny |
[May. 19th, 2006|12:01 pm] |
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Now that it's summer, almost every time I go out of the office, lizards scurry away as I walk. Yet a lot of them will move to a safe distance and look at me, doing "push-ups", which is a territorial display. So today I'm walking out to the shed, and a lizard is right in front of me, trying to stare me down, doing push ups. I point the shed key at him and go "Oh, yeah?!" and he instantly hides behind a wall. Then there's a baby lizard on the step up to the shed, and I go awww and watch him. Strangely, he runs a little closer to me, about a foot from my foot. I watch, and the original lizard appears from under the shed, near my foot, and starts doing push ups. Then a third lizard appears, near the other, hunching his back and raising his tail as if to look bigger. They're only six inches long, whether they puff up or not! I think maybe they're displaying to eachother, but they're all looking at me. So I smile and watch them for awhile. As soon as I move, they all run away, of course. Guess I showed _them_! |
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| Peak Oil |
[Apr. 3rd, 2006|08:57 pm] |
I've been thinking about peak oil, searching around, and finally found this... It's sort of positive, but more than that, it's real. It's not about peak oil, but peak everything. No source of energy or physical resource (metal, water, etc) can grow forever. Even the sun will eventually burn out. I've felt for a long time that the lifestyle so many live is a dream, or at least a passing phase... that money and growth and inflation and the idea of investments that grow and give you money to retire on don't really make sense. Like the world is based on a great pyramid scheme that will come crashing down sooner or later. But I've never seen it put so well into words and reasoned with such simple arguments as here:
http://www.energybulletin.net/3800.html
The seven key points:
1. We will never again be able to get sufficient growth of the economy to eliminate or even markedly reduced unemployment. NAFTA, GATT, and Clinton's hope of growing the economy to solve unemployment is doomed to failure.
2. The promise of competing in the global economy is a hoax perpetrated upon the working and unemployed people of this country because over time a nation needs to buy and sell overseas in roughly equivalent amounts.
3. All attempts to reduce the deficit, balance the budget or pay off the national debt are futile. The deficit and the national debt represent the subsidy the government has paid in its attempt to keep growth and unemployment at the level of social tolerance.
4. The steady state economy into which we are being inexorably forced implies an interest rate of zero.
5. An interest rate of zero (as Hubbert explains) means the end of the money system. We are being forced to completely rethink our cultural ideas about how to organize our economy and distribute purchasing power.
6. Increasingly desperate means will be used by those who think we can continue to have business as usual.
7. The proposals of Negative Population Growth should be implemented immediately.
There are probably more points than that, but that's a good start. The truth seems so simple, and yet so hard for most people to accept. An entire generation or more knows nothing but growth. Human life spans are just too short... There's no perspective. The only thing I really fear are those increasingly desperate means used by those who think we can continue to have business as usual... Those means are what could destroy the world we've been given. Can enough people gain perspective in time?
I happened to notice one thing that looks like it could be a move towards a steady state economy... Or at least a form of currency based on something tangible, with a clearly finite supply (is that the same thing?). Ithaca Hours, a currency used in Ithaca, New York, is based on exchange of man-hours of work. Seems like New York has a lot of things right, surprisingly. The city design was voted best large city in the country for dealing with rising oil prices. LA was #19... not so great, but not so bad either. |
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