Newfish update - weekend plans - links
The fish hasn’t figured out to look up for food yet. I give it food, and it only notices the food when it starts getting waterlogged and falls to the bottom of the tank (water pitcher). It’s kinda cute. I trained my other fish by tapping the top edge of the tank when it was feeding time. I’m not going to do that with this one — I want to see if he’s smart enough to figure out when it’s feeding time through visual cues only.
Weekend plans: tonight I’m going to a GCF pizza/bowling night with Peggy, then tomorrow we’re leaving early to go down to Jon Doane’s wedding. I’m coming with three camera batteries and 640 megs of compact flash card goodness (thanks Keir and Corey!) Then I’ll stick all of the pictures in the “Please edit me!” queue, along with the pictures I have of Eric and Sarah’s wedding, Green and Laurel’s wedding, and Lee and Kim’s wedding. Gotta finish that photo organizing software I’ve had in the works for months now.
And now, random links:
- Things like this make homeschooling increasingly attractive. How can anyone think that kind of crap helps anything?
- “Huge Commerce Clause decision” Eugene says, and I’m inclined to agree with him. Basically, the Ninth Circuit ruled that homemade machine guns cannot be regulated by Congress, because there is no interstate commerce issue, so Congress has no right to legislate against them. So much crap gets justified under the commerce clause that any restriction on the commerce clause is a step in the right direction. Note that this has nothing to do with the second amendment: any state can outlaw homemade machine guns if it wants. The beauty of it is, the logic behind homemade machine guns is rather similar to that of homegrown medical marijuana. As long as it’s being constructed in the home, not transported across state lines, not intended for sale, and not a direct substitute for anything a person could buy legally, it looks like Congress can’t regulate it. If this is indeed the case, I look forward to the government making a jackass out of itself by claiming that pot is a direct substitute for expensive anti-nausea medications and therefore can be outlawed on a federal level.
- Great analysis of Kasparov vs. X3D Fritz, game 2. (K made a truly horrific blunder — my first thought was “OMG, vote him off the human chess island!”)
- Interesting Economist article about American exceptionalism. And before my liberal friends all have heart attacks, “American exceptionalism” is “a phrase coined by Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-19th century to describe America’s profound differences from other nations,” and not necessarily a value judgement.
- If I’m reading this article correctly, a company has basically figured out a way to turn… well, shit into shinola: “‘There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil,’ says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant.” The process is called thermal depolymerization, and works on anything containing carbon: agricultural waste, turkey offal (the first large scale plant is about 100 feet away from one of Butterball’s largest turkey slaughterhouses), plastics, even tires. Back in the 80s, this guy asked himself why it takes the earth millions of years to produce crude oil, and he figured it was because the earth was pretty random about how and when it decided to apply pressure and heat to the raw materials. After getting funding, he developed this two step process of heat and pressure that thermally depolymerizes whatever polymers there are laying around. The two stages of the process need to be controlled for whatever the inputs are; plastic bottles need a different process than turkey guts. What comes out the other end depends on what goes into the front end, of course. It’s ultimate recycling for plastic bottles though, 100 pounds of plastic bottles produces 70 pounds of oil, 16 pounds of clean burning natural gas, 6 pounds of carbon solids, and 8 pounds of water. The process is 15 percent efficient, so they just pump the natural gas that’s produced back into the machine. My favorite raw material: PVC. PVC is bad, it doesn’t recycle easily and if you burn it, it produces lots of nasty dioxins. But throw it into the magic thermal depolymerization machine and out comes oil and hydrochloric acid, which is has industrial uses and is relatively non-toxic compared to dioxins. Amazing! Screw fuel efficiency if this catches on, but emmisions controls may have to be made stricter. On the other hand, why would you need coal burning anything anymore? Just run the coal through the oil machine! Medical waste? No problem, thermal depolymerization decomposes things at a molecular level, so everything that comes out the other end (65 pounds oil, 10 pounds gas, 5 pounds carbon and metal solids, 20 pounds water) is completely inert.