Happy Fishnet Friday 2009!

Flip by ~Nwelmaer

Flop by ~Nwelmaer

Clown by ~Nwelmaer

In other news, hat tip to Mitchell for this find...
Climate Babes: hot action against climate change

I Should Have Stayed Home

Monkey Gone to Heaven

When I was a kid I would get anxious, comforted or nonplussed by certain numbers. Some primes particularly scared me, i.e. 13, 23 and 43. Other than the number 3 or 36 I wasn’t all that comfortable with anything involving a 3. Now, I can’t explain how I developed these weird superstitions. Perhaps some of it was absorbed from TV or something. I felt 777 was a good number that bodes well. Lou’s 3 monkeys post combined with the Dow reminds me of a classic I’ve posted here before.



If God is 7 maybe He will save us?
Sherman McCoy (NSFW) doesn’t seem to think so.
I had a Kaluha. And I realized that I… like you, my friends… don’t need no fudge-factor first-order-approximation God no more. He is no use to us. Let us take one step towards the Übermensch and not invoke such silliness in our thoughts any more.

There was a guy
An underwater guy who controlled the sea
Got killed by ten million pounds of sludge
From New York and New Jersey

This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven

The creature in the sky
Got sucked in a hole now
There's a hole in the sky
And the ground's not cold
And if the ground's not cold
Everything is going to burn
We'll all take turns
I'll get mine, too

This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven

Rock me, Joe!

If man is 5
If man is 5
If man is 5

Then the devil is 6
Then the devil is 6
Then the devil is 6
Then the devil is 6

And if the devil is 6
Then God is 7
And God is 7
And God is 7

This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
This monkey's gone to heaven
12 more Monkeys!


BREAKING NEWS UPDATE: Scorched-Earth Monday brought to you by Wagga! Woohoo!

Rather than drive today, walk...

Hat tip to Wagga for this find!

Vegetarians Taste Better

Half-naked women or free gas, which gets your attention more?
So, how can PETA use high gas prices and a concern over global warming to advance a meat-free diet for all? How about through the Lettuce Ladies? As you can probably tell from the picture above and the gallery photos below, Lettuce Ladies are, well, ladies who wear not much other than lettuce to attract attention to a messsage. In this case, the message is that eating a pound of meat creates the same wear and tear on the environment as driving a Hummer 40 miles.
This week, the idea was to have two Lettuce Ladies stand at a Lynchburg, Virginia BP gas station during lunch and tell drivers that by switching to a vegetarian diet, drivers could do more for the environment than they could if they switched from a standard car to a Prius. (It's dependent on a person's annual driving details to see if that statement is true or false, but there's no question that limiting our intake of modern megafarm meat is a move in favor of the environment). The two Ladies handed out Tofurky sandwiches and gift cards for free gas.

Hat tip to Wagga for this find!

Do you think those following a loosely vegan diet also taste better?

Scary Corn

Scary Corn by ~bushijutsu

Hat tip to Wagga for this find:

Jon Markman at MSN Money doesn't hold back when he says "Corn-based ethanol production is sure to go down as one of the greatest mistakes ever in U.S. energy policy." It's even more provoking when he writes "replacing fossil fuels with corn-based ethanol would double greenhouse gas emissions over the next three decades. The studies show that switchgrass, an alternative to ethanol that's more weed than plant, would boost emissions by 50%."The problem isn't with the cars, the problem is with what it takes to grow the biofuel in the first place. Clearing the land, harvesting, and refining the crops, plus the loss of forest and wild lands and habitats, amounts to creating a carbon footprint worse than fossil fuels. According to the Science article which, admittedly, posits an extreme scenario, it would take 423 years to even out the carbon debt if Indonesia's peat lands were converted to palm oil fields.
More from Science magazine declares ethanol worse for the Earth than fossil fuels

Algae-based ethanol seems to be a far more sensible solution.

Algae Networks of the Future

Algae Tower housing clusters at downtown

Algae Aquaculture and Tower zone at downtown SF Bay waterfront

Hydro-Net, by San Francisco architects IwamotoScott, who spoke last year at BLDGBLOG's San Francisco event, has been making the rounds lately, popping up on all sorts of architecture and design blogs – but rightly so: it won first prize in the History Channel's recent "City of the Future" competition, and it offers up some fascinating urban re-design ideas...

...Leading me to ask: Does architecturally reimagining the surface of the earth mean that one is inherently Heideggerian? The landscape is extended, no longer serving as mere ground, or foundation, but structure.

Excerpted from BLDGBLOG's Network Hydrology

Is it true Dick Cheney Butt Fucks Animals in Wyoming?

Yes, Virginia Google Searcher, it is true.

The gray wolf has been trying to reclaim its place as alpha predator in parts of Idaho and the Greater Yellowstone Region ever since 65 members of this endangered species were reintroduced in the 1990s. The wolves are doing too good a job, perhaps.
Under pressure from another alpha predator, human hunters (along with state officials eager to keep hunters happy), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has changed a rule in a way that has wildlife campaigners howling.
The complaints are not about the section allowing someone to kill a wolf attacking, say, a dog or livestock. It’s the part about states and tribal governments having the right to allow greatly expanded killing of wolves in “non-essential” populations where local officials determine that wolf packs are taking too big a share of deer and elk herds also coveted by hunters.
In a news release, the Fish and Wildlife Service said the states needed more flexibility to allow them to “manage” and “remove” wolves (euphemisms for shooting them) where their predatory skills are too effective.
“The states have done an excellent job managing wolves, and this revision will provide the extra flexibility they may need to manage wolves for some time in the future,” said Jay Slack, acting regional director for the service’s Mountain-Prairie Region, in the release.
The Sierra Club complained bitterly today in its own release, estimating that the action could result in the killing of all but 600 of the approximately 1,500 wolves in the region.
“If we call open season on wolves now, we could soon find ourselves back at the starting line. It’s a tremendous waste of taxpayer dollars,” said Sierra Club representative Melanie Stein. “Deer and elk populations are thriving in this region. There’s absolutely no reason to begin slaughtering wolves, other than to please a handful of special interests. This is another example of politics trumping science in the Bush administration. Federal and state agencies are tripping over each other, and our wildlife are suffering as a result.”
Local governments have been pressing for the change for awhile, and in the rural West, the right of humans to dominate nature is as deep-rooted as the laws of physics. Kirk Johnson of The Times filed a fine piece on wolves and the changing West earlier this month. [UPDATE 1/25: The above sentence was written in haste. There’s no geographic constraint to the human tendency to try to dominate the wild. The East did it long ago. Humans in the Amazon are still at it.]
As human populations expand, there’ll be ever more such clashes between human interests and those of wide-ranging wildlife, whether in the Serengeti or Wyoming.

Howling Over Federal Plan to Expand Wolf Killing - Check out the video while you're there.

Thankfully there's at least one sweet, sane person in Wyoming.

Ethanol from Garbage!

garbage by ~miss-vomit
What a great idea!

DETROIT — General Motors (GM) says it is investing in a fledgling company that claims its secret process could be able to make ethanol from waste in large quantity as soon as 2010 for $1 a gallon or less, half the cost of making gasoline.
Bill Roe, CEO of 18-month-old ethanol maker Coskata, says the company's process uses bacteria developed at the University of Oklahoma and existing gasification technology to generate 99.7% pure ethanol, plus water. He says the method should leapfrog cellulosic production, which has been seen as the next step from today's ethanol production using corn.

GM won't disclose its investment, but Roe says it's enough to make Coskata "a speed-to-market play. I don't think most people saw this coming," he says. "Most talk about cellulosic ethanol is futuristic."

Coskata's process can use garbage, old tires and other waste, but Roe says wood waste probably will be used at first because it's available, cheap and easy to handle.

More from General Motors finances ethanol maker Coskata

Hat tip to Wagga for this find.

In other news, January 13 through 19 is Slow Down Week.

Energy Recycling Vehicle

I came across this intriguing Japanese streetcar powered by a lithium battery via Groovy Green. It converts 70 percent of its deceleration energy into electricity that is then sent back to the battery. Plus it recharges in under a minute.

The above diagram is from Japan's RTRI site. Too bad we don't have anything like RTRI here.

In other news, I am quite offended by a recent search term that pulled up this illustrious corner of the blogosphere: blogaboutablogaboutablogabout.blogspot.com ... aka a crappy bollywood blog

Nonetheless, I've added it to the blog description above.

Mapping on the Run, Kafka Tattoo and Database Art

It used to be that updated editions of world atlases mainly tracked the shifting of borders and changes in the names of cities and countries determined by politics, diplomacy or war.

The surface of the planet itself was a relatively constant template in the background. You could render it in more detail with, say, better satellite data, but the basics didn’t change much.

Now, though, the accelerating and intensifying impact of human activities is visibly altering the planet, requiring ever more frequent redrawing not only of political boundaries, but of the shape of Earth’s features themselves...

The Metamorphosis.

Database Art.

In other news, I enjoyed this favorite word thread.

Paintball for Jesus

MARIPOSA -- This is a mountain town where there's a Bible verse painted over a pizza parlor door and a local politician keeps a cardboard cutout of John Wayne holding a Winchester rifle in his office as proof of fealty to the NRA.

But a proposal to bring "Paintball for Jesus" to public land has some people riled.

"I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something in my upbringing as a Methodist, but Paintball for Jesus? God help us all. Seriously, this teaches bad habits of shooting each other," said Mariposa County Supervisor Brad Aborn, 71, the John Wayne fan who is a former Vietnam War Navy helicopter pilot....

...Church members have prayed over the issue and decided not to give up, despite initial resistance.
"It's just a matter of educating people about the world of paintball and our intentions," said Tomerlin, the youth leader.
In the proposal, New Life makes a point to say all other churches would be invited and included.
"So now we're going to have the Methodists shooting at the Catholics?" Aborn asked rhetorically. "What about the Presbyterians? There's not a Presbyterian church up here. How are the Presbyterians going to be represented in the paintball finals?"
Members of the church's youth group recently e-mailed supervisors, inviting them to a game of paintball so they could experience paintball personally.
"Good Lord," said Supervisor Dianne Fritz. "I'm 57 and fat. I'm not going to run around dodging paintballs."

What about the Lutherans? Don't they get to play too? Check out Paintball for...Jesus? for the complete article. Apparently there is a Christian Paintball Players Association you can join if this interests you. I wonder if there's a Paintball for Buddha Association...
What about Paintball for Radical Islamists?

Hat tip to wagga for this find.

In other news...

...Blogs are still reverberating, but Mr. McIntyre, Dr. Hansen and others familiar with the initial data revisions are clarifying what is, and is not, at issue.
One thing not in question, Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen agree, is the merit of shifting away from energy choices that contribute heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Mr. McIntyre said he feels “climate change is a serious issue.” His personal preference is to shift increasingly to nuclear power and away from coal and oil, the main source of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Mr. McIntyre and Dr. Hansen also agree that the NASA data glitch had no effect on the global temperature trend, nudging it by an insignificant thousandth of a degree.
Everyone appears also to agree that too much attention is paid to records, particularly given that the difference between 1934, 1998, and several other sets of years in the top 10 warmest list for the United States are so small as to be statistically meaningless...

Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight

Now, I need to stop surfing the web in pile ignore mode and return to those damn boxes.