Why just oil?

I heard a few more of those people pushing the belief that oil is spontaneously generated in the earth and will never run out. None of them really say what needs to go down there in order to get crude oil, but apparently they think it’s a very quick process. From what I’ve heard some of them say, oil really isn’t a cycle where stuff goes down becomes oil and comes back up again. It apparently is just created. Why are there so many people thinking that oil is limitless? If I were to say that uranium is continously being replenished in the earth and we’ll never run out, people would think I’m nuts. The price of uranium has shot up greatly with more reactors coming online. It’s a very important resource. If anyone were to claim that there’s a conspiracy here, nobody would believe them.
We’ve also been pulling copper out of the ground for ages. We keep using it in a lot of things. Nobody is claiming that we’ll never run out of copper. The price for that has shot up quite a bit too. Enough that people risk themselves to steal high voltage power lines to sell as scrap metal. Should we scream conspiracy about this as well?
There’s always biological material going into the earth, but if this process was a quick process, oil would litterally be everywhere. We’d be pulling vats of crude oil out of places like pompeii instead of finding empty pockets where people were burried under volcanic debris. Every swamp would have oil slowly bubbling up to the surface. The empirical evidence doesn’t support this theory. Oil tends to be concentrated in regions, so there needs to be a couple of conditions needed to produce oil. Most of the matter seems to be reabsorbed into circle of life, but some still manages to detour for a while. Specially so when we burry stuff in landfills. We’ve only ever gotten methane and a few toxic substances out of those though, which are all fairly typical of decaying matter. Longer chain hydrocarbons are completely absent though.
Yeah… my mind is pretty scattered right now, organization in this post sucks.

The Pains of Recycling

Some people don’t like recycling because it costs money instead of bringing in money. Other people don’t like recycling because they think it’s troublesome. Well, I’ve got a new one to add to the list.
The way recycling is handled here is actually pretty reasonable. There’s a fair number of recycling facilities around the city placed at various locations that people go to anyway, like grocery stores. Toss your recycling into the appropriate bin and away it goes. It’s a bit of an extra step to get it out there, but compared to the cost of sending trucks all around the city, I like it.
Yesterday when I went, they were in the process of emptying the bins. I recycled some glass, followed by some newspaper then it was time for cardboard. Cardboard was on the end, so I stood there for a moment to figure out where to go. There was someone working there trying to clean up the area, which was a complete mess. All the bins were full and people just left stuff where the wind could blow them around. After spotting the tag I walked over and mummbled, “Ah cardboard here. Looks a little full.”
The guy looked over at me and said, “Leave that on the ground and I swear you’ll be sorry.” I looked at him funny for a while and he added, “And you’d better pick up that paper that you dropped.” So I looked behind me, and yeah there was a mess but none of those papers were mine, I was being falsely accused. I also had no intention of littering and I was being threatened. So I turned and started to walk away. Then he changed his mind about me and told me that if that’s all the cardboard I had, I could just toss it in the truck.
I understand being angry because people made a mess of your work place, but still, lashing out at random people is inexcusable.

Fear and Hype

I find it totally understandable that people would think that costal property values would plumet if melting ice had the capacity to do what some of the global warming extremists claim that it can. However, I find it strange that this is used as an argument to down play the significance of global warming when property values in places like San Franscico and Shanghai are holding. San Franscico has a history of being decimated by earth quakes. There’s also a lack of emergency preparation there. Westerners typically aren’t as familiar with the issues around Shanghai, but the whole city is built on unstable ground. Some buildings have sunk almost an entire floor in the past hundred years or so. It’s also sinking unevenly. There’s buildings that you used to walk up a few steps to get into and since the building weighs more than the road, you now walk down a few steps to get into those buildings. Some of buildings are also starting to lean a bit because one side is heavier than the other. Knowing what we know about these areas now and knowing what sort of buildings will be built in a major city, I don’t think anybody in their right mind would want to start a city in those places. Property values remain high and despite all logic, the corellation between property value and risk doesn’t really seem that significant.

Where’s the Outrage?

I heard an on-star commercial on the radio and thought, gee, here’s a system that tracks the locations of cars as well as their operating status. It can also exert some amount of control over them. The locking and unlocking of doors seems to be the main thing. This all sounds fine and dandy. Where are all the usual privacy people jumping up and down worried about people knowing where cars are? People scream about all sorts of invasion of privacy issues and oppose all sorts of seemingly innocent things all the time. Why is nobody worked up about on-star?
Maybe it’s time that everyone just stepped back for a while and really thought about why certain things scare us. Tracking my car, not scary. Tracking my cell phone, not scary. Being able to get into my car, well, if someone really wanted to get in, I’m sure an ax would take out the window without difficulty. You can do that without an accomplis.

Information for RC Aerial Photography

I recently came across something called The Aerial Photography How-To Book, which is marketted as the definitive how-to book on getting started in the RC aerial photography industry. $50 for an 80 page book on “marketing tips, ideas, and quick start hints.” There are a few sample pages on-line for people to preview. The first one is page 12, which seems to be part of the basic introduction. Basically, the entire page can be summarized as, “if you aren’t familiar with photography, learn that shooting in auto mode doesn’t always produce the correct results.” Page 23 is the next one, the header is about the size of the aircraft and can be summed up as saying that larger aircraft have more potential for damage and greater liability. There’s also a brief paragraph at the bottom for selecting electric vs combustion engines. Still fairly introductory material in my view. Page 30 is an entire page on turbine engines and there’s a picture in the middle dividing the page. I’ll disagree with layout a bit here, the picture neatly divides the page into two columns, having lines go from one margin to the other with a break in the middle makes things a little difficult to follow. The information is once again what I would deem to be a very general level. Some camera triggering techniques are discussed on page 39 as well as a brief discussion on the benifits of a video ground link. Unfortunately, nothing is shown in good detail. The last preview page is 50 and it basically says to have a business plan and pick a good name.
Strangely enough, the table of contents isn’t one of the preview pages. That probably says the most about what’s covered in the book.
Thus far, the book has recieved some pretty good reviews. People like it. Personally, I feel that the content is at a fairly introductory level and likely not very useful. I’d love to see what the book says about the design of weak joints to minimize potential damage and repair time, how mounting a camera affects aircraft stability, and vibration damping. The table of contents isn’t available, so whether or not any of those concepts are even covered at all is a mystery unless I feel like wasting my money on it. There’s only really two things going for that book, it’s seems to be the only resource with that specialization and it’s written at a level that anyone can understand.

Configuring Opera

Opera remains my favoriate web bowser and today I installed it on yet another computer. For the most part, all the settings came the way I wanted them. there was one thing that I had to change though, and that was the ram cache settings. I only have 16mb of ram on this machine, so that’s something I have to turn off. This machine is a little slow. I can type stuff and it takes a while for the text to appear, but it all gets there. Anyway, I’m glad I don’t have to sift through thousands of extensions to find the features I want. Add on capabilities are a good idea, but lets face it, basic functionality really needs to come be bundled.

Turning Language into Religion

I had to check this a few times to make sure I heard it right. In a discussion of why there is so much religious tension in the world, Mandarin China somehow joined a list of various Islamic countries, and Hindu countries. Last time I checked we had a bunch of people in China speaking Mandarin and there’s a bunch of Mandarin speaking people around the world. There aren’t really any worshippers though. Unless I’m missing something, it simply isn’t a faith, it’s a language.

Mathematics vs Reality

I’ve started going back to observing the Creation Vs Evolution discussion for a while. Mainly, I’ve been reviewing attempts from religious groups to refute evolution. Every once in a while I come across something that I just simply know is wrong being passed off as truth. This particular instance just happens to be the Coriolis effect and it’s influence on the direction that water drains in different hemispheres of the earth. I was told that it showed organization and provided proof that there had to be a god. This is just a popular misconception. Granted, if we crunch the numbers, consistant results will be produced. This is mathematics.
The Coriolis effect is real, we can measure it, we can see it’s influence. I’m not trying to deny the existance of the Coriolis effect. However, anyone who’s studied fluids or spent a lot of time studying the draining of liquids will know that no matter what hemisphere you’re on any given container can drain in either direction. This is reality.
Of course, mathematics is never wong, it’s just that nobody bothers trying to calculate reality, only a simplified version of reality. A real container of water has all sorts of currents flowing in it. If you look closely at the edges of the containers, there’s water going up and down in small waves. The water is not static, it sloshes around. Some vibration remains that never exactly disappates. The earth is also not a completely stationary surface, it shakes and vibrates and moves around. If we were to attempt to calculate actual reality on something like an sink or an olympic sized swimming pool, we’d find that the real world influences, that are usually left out because they’re simply too complex, have much more influence than the influence of the Coriolis effect.
No matter what mathematics says, what happens in reality is, well, real. When the math disagrees, we simply haven’t answered the right question.

Spam and Visitors

I find it interesting that the blog stats say that I’ve recieved 830 total views and my spam filter says that there have been 482 spam comments that have been filtered out. I could be wrong about this one, but assuming that someone has to actually load a page before leaving a spam comment this means I’ve had 830-482=348 actual visitors and somewhere around 58% of my visitors are spambots.
Of course, if I’m wrong and the spam bots can somewho get to me without page counters going up, which is a bit of a scary thought, I’m still getting more than one piece of spam for every two visitors. I suppose I should take heart in the fact that I’ve gotten a few meaningful comments from strangers who’ve just wandered by.