Jul 30 2009
Global climate change, war, the economy – progress in all three of these things depend on innovating America’s energy demand to sustainable and acceptable levels, then exporting that innovation to the world before somebody else beats us to it. Tied to this is water conservation, and the need integrate stellar power – solar energy, wind, [...]
Jul 29 2009
When Galileo Galilei composed his treatise on cosmology, collecting his own many observations of the natural world into a coherent argument, he chose to present the work as a dialogue among three men. One of them, Salviati, spoke for Galileo, and the other two (Sagredo and Simplicio) represented the voices of other parties, such as [...]
Jul 28 2009
(Written on July 20-21)
The folks at the Honda dealership were quite nice, and were fairly fast in diagnosing the problem with the air conditioning. The bottom line: we’ll be in debter’s prison by tomorrow, but our air conditioning will work, by God. The parts won’t arrive until tomorrow morning, so we’ve taken the chance [...]
Jul 27 2009
(Written on July 19, 2009)
We started our second day with a decent breakfast and a quick and early departure from Bakersfield. Jodi chatted with the desk attendant, and noted how long we had to wait for the cold tap water to actually get cold. We had postulated that this was because the water was stored [...]
Jul 26 2009
(Written on July 18, 2009)
After days of preparations for the move to Texas (weeks, really, including selling and eventually giving away furniture), we were finally on our way. We watched as the last of our belongings were loaded into a moving truck before we said goodbye to friends and neighbors. Our red Honda civic zipped [...]
Jul 11 2009
In its report on proposed funding for high energy physics, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations subcommittee targeted a removal of some of the LHC funding from the proposed budget. The exact language in the report was,
“The Committee questions the increased investment in Large Hadron Collider [LHC] support when the timing of the restart of [...]
Jul 08 2009
Michael Pollan’s name keeps popping up. This past week, I listened to his excellent discussion on one of the local radio forum programs. As the author of several popular books on our relationship with food, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” [1] and “In Defense of Food”, he has become the de facto spokesperson for the movement [...]
Jul 04 2009
This was a very fun 4th of July. I started the day with birthday wishes from my mother-in-law. I was happy she called, but I was also very tired and realized that I was up, and that making it through the day would be no fun until I got more sleep. I met a friend [...]
Jul 01 2009
In a world where mobile internet is becoming as available as air and water, I think it’s time to enforce the same standards for internet as for air and water. When a place offers wifi for free, they ought to be required to provide a minimum of quality internet service (e.g. a target minimum latency [...]
Chirp, a microblog Going Up Alleys The Perils of the Ice Queen
