London trains and London bombs

I spent a couple of summers in London as a kid, and oddly enough that’s the city where I learned about living with terrorist bombs, and also the city where I learned to fear trains.

This was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Irish terrorist campaign was in full swing. Everywhere you looked there were signs advising you to report abandoned objects, not to accept packages from strangers, etc. People there were used to it but as a teenager from Southern California I found it both exotic and terrifying.

But that’s not how I got my fear of trains. In the summer of 1980, my father and I were waiting for a train in the Tube station near our place. There was a woman next to me, dressed for the office and carrying a purse and a sweater. I turned to my father to ask him something, the train arrived, and I heard screaming. When I looked back there were her shoes, and her purse, and her sweater neatly folded on top, but no woman. She had jumped in front of the train.

I remember getting on the bus to continue our day while the train was shut down. Every time the bus went over a bump I thought it was a body.

Ever since then, I’ve stood a good long way away from the tracks when I’m in a train station.

F List Trim.

It feels a little dumb even mentioning this, but experience has taught me that it’s worse not to do so.

I trimmed the list. This does not mean that I am not your friend; that you are a bad person; that I have hated you for years; or that I won’t sit with you at lunch. It probably means one or more of:

  1. You are an RSS feed.
  2. You don’t exist any more.
  3. It makes no sense for me to show you my protected entries because I’ve never interacted with you, even one little time.
  4. It makes no sense for me to have you on a list of people to read because you’ve never said anything in this community, even one little time.
  5. I have hated you for years. Just kidding!
  6. You removed me from your own list and it made sense for one of a number of reasons to keep that symmetrical.

If you’re one of these people and it bugs you and you want to yell at me or ask me what the hell, please email. Thanks! Unless you don’t exist or are an RSS feed.

NO DORKY, SUPERFICIAL, SHAVEN FREAKS!

She wants frollocks.

i’m not expecting anything of this but figured it might be worth a shot. anything is worth a try, i can only learn from my mistakes! i’m 23 and am just looking for some fun, i love to try new things and meet new people. however it seems difficult to meet likeminded people in the ‘bubble’. I’m not looking for a ‘LTR’-but if that happens then that’s great, nor am i looking for someone whose brain resides, uh not between his ears… so if there is anyone who’s just looking to meet for fun that might-that’s MIGHT- lead to frollocks then i’m up for it. no Asians, no scrawny, no pierced, shaven, tattooed bikers, no old perverts, in fact no perverts period, no drugaddicts-past or present, oh and please try and be vaguely goodlooking! Thanks!!!

Two words: goatse opportunity.

I’m sitting at D’s right now and there’s a tech guy here installing things. A 37″ flatscreen LG monitor is up on the wall with the root@localhost prompt. There are driver messages all over the screen. He looks sad. It’s like a trip back to 1996, when everything was done by hand. Apparently the mode lines aren’t quite right.

Soon this will be one of those scrolling news/sports/ads/bullshit things on the wall; the others have them mostly already. It’s not nearly as bad as a TV, though.

Linux kernel 2.6.10 on Redhat Fedora core release 3 (Heidelberg). ATI driver. Ça ne marche pas. I wish him luck.

At the shrink’s

The bipolar lady having a bad high, the worried mom, and her disgruntled and possibly insane 16 year old boy all just agreed that we preferred silence to KOST 103.5. “Soft Jams”, Faith Hill’s song from “Pearl Harbor”, and the Phil Collins version of “You Can’t Hurry Love” make psych patients something something.

I switched off the radio to general approval.

Biofuel not worth it?

via ScienceDaily, from a new Cornell study. Everyone knows that the ethanol subsidy is just a farm subsidy, but it’s sort of depressing to see data that makes biodiesel generally look like a net loss. If it takes more fossil fuel to produce the biodiesel than we get out of it, we’re taking a step back.

Ethanol And Biodiesel From Crops Not Worth The Energy

ITHACA, N.Y. — Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

“There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,” says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. “These strategies are not sustainable.”

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:

  • corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  • switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
  • wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:

  • soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
  • sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

more details