rantlust

Posted by jcaldera on September 15th 2006 in Auto, Cars, Humor, Life, Nature, Politics, Random, Rants, Roads, Society, War
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A couple of days ago, in my daily commute to work, in the usual company of fellow San Francisco commuters, with the usual boredom, one of the favorite topics came to the plate: dumb people (which of course is everybody that drives except whomever is in the car at that moment - no pun intended to my fellow bloggers and (some) acquaintances).

Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.

Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.

Ahh! the wonders of commuting.

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Posted by tafkap on September 10th 2006 in Nature
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Perhaps this is obvious to everyone else, but there is something about tidal energy that bothers me. We all know that tides come from gravity and the relative motion of the moon around the earth. ‘Obviously’ any tidal energy that we extract from this system is either taken away from the rotational energy of the earth about its own axis or the rotational energy of the moon around the earth (let’s ignore solar tides for now).
(Read more…)

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Posted by crewcut on July 13th 2006 in Language, Nature, Weather
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From my cubicle window, I can see rain pouring from a beautiful sunny sky. What is weird is that this unusual phenomenon of sunshowers is referred to in different parts of the world as the occurrence of the wedding of different animals.

Here’s a list of the animals used in various languages:
- Foxes - English, Malayalam, Japanese, Armenian, Italian, Portuguese
- Jackals - Hindi & Afrikaans
- Monkeys - South African English & Zulu
- Rats - Arabic
- Bears - Bulgarian
- Tigers - Korean
- The poor (not animals but…) - Greek
- Witches - Spanish
- Leopards - Various African languages

Is this more than just a coincidence?

(List compiled from Wikipedia & Google Answers)

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Posted by tafkap on July 06th 2006 in Nature, Politics, Science, Technology
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Boring. A movie should do the trick. Besides, much as I’ve enjoyed most of my day off sitting on my ass, I think I’ll walk down to the local Blockbuster, pick up a movie and burn a few calories on that three mile round trip.

I walked back with two movies in hand (Lost in Translation and Capote for the curious). Ah! The dog days of summer. How many birds can one kill with a single stone? Boredom, a cardiovascular workout, calories, energy independence and global warming. One man can make a difference.
(Read more…)

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Posted by papi on June 04th 2006 in Movies, Nature
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Watched the new Al Gore movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ last night. After a long, long time, I was in a theater for a sold-out show. My tendency to watch movies that are either off the beaten track or have long since ceased to make headlines means I’m usually surrounded by empty seats, just the way I like it. It was unusual to have so many people around, but once the movie started, none of that mattered. This movie was born out of a slideshow that Gore has been showing around the world for a few years now, which portrays some well documented relationships between carbon-dioxide emissions and global warming. None of this is new stuff, but slickly packaged with footage of various examples of warming across the world, the effect is chilling. In particular, some of the photographs showing the effects of atmospheric warming on the polar ice caps will make you sit up. Make the man president already!

http://www.climatecrisis.net

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Posted by anupcs on May 24th 2006 in Health & Fitness, Nature, Outdoors
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The above photograph shows a tick bite I suffered recently while hiking in the rugged Ventana Wilderness near Big Sur. The offending arachnid feasted on me overnight while I slept. The previous day, I had hiked a trail that wasn’t well maintained and I had to often go past shrubs and trees strewn across the trail. The tick must have latched on to me somewhere along this trail. I woke up to a stinging and itching feeling on my stomach. It didn’t take long to identify the culprit and I had the wife pluck it out. She did it so fast and with such force that the tick was lost to science for ever. The advice is to preserve the tick to identify whether it’s a vector of diseases such as Lyme disease.

Lyme disease is a tick-borne disease caused by a corkscrew-shaped bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi. This is only spread by the bite of an infected tick and never from person to person. The two species of ticks capable of carrying this pathogen are the deer tick found mostly in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, and the closely related Western black-legged tick in northern California and Oregon. Usually, the tick has to be inside you (meaning the head is inside with the body sticking out) for at least 36-48 hours before the bacteria can pass on to your body. If identified early, the disease is curable and a single dose of the antibiotic doxycycline can reduce your risk to almost nil. If left untreated, the results could be devastating.
(Read more…)

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Posted by anupcs on May 02nd 2006 in History, Nature, Travel
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A winery is an unusual location for displaying the largest specimen of crystalline gold in the world but there it was, in Ironstone Vineyards in Murphys, California. The 44 pound behemoth, known as “The Crown Jewel,” was displayed inside a glass case kept in a vault. The piece was mined on Christmas Day, 1992, in a mine near Jamestown in the heart of the California Gold country.

Between the onset of the California Gold rush in 1849 and 1880, several large masses of gold were found in California, none of which exists today. This makes the Crown Jewel the largest single piece of gold mined in North America since the 1880s. The above specimen, owned by the Kautz family (who also own the winery), is considered priceless in value.

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Posted by anupcs on April 26th 2006 in Books, Nature, Outdoors, Raves
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As a rat race victim, I often take solace in the mountains during weekend outings. Backpacking is one of my favorite activities… often with fellow rantlusters. Most of these outings are the two-day one-night variety. We normally head out early morning on Saturday to Tahoe’s amazing Desolation Wilderness and head back Sunday night. Our last stop in civilization is the Lake Tahoe ranger station where we pick up our permits. The ranger station has well-maintained restrooms among other things. So it’s often here that we conduct our proper morning rituals before heading out into the wilderness. For the next 36 hours or so, I try my best not to go for the big one in the woods. This is what Kathleen Meyer defines as “avoidance constipation.”

If words such as shyte, turd, crap, piss, leak, dump, defecation, stools, scats, dung, chips, pellets, number one, number two, tinkle, poop, poo-poo, doo-doo, load, excrement, etc., fill you with disgust, then read no further for what follows is some serious shit.
(Read more…)

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