My Head is About To Explode

My buddy is doing a great job taking notes and sorting out the facts in regards to the nuclear plant emergency at Fukushima (I'll also link to a great forum thread with actual scientists posting about Fukushima and Nuclear Plants on Ars Technica - hoping to steal a bit of Google traffic away from idiots for them).

If I hear one more "environmentalist" talk about shutting down nuclear power, I'm going to go apopletic. Here are the facts:

  • We use energy. A LOT of energy.This number is going up, not down.
  • ALL power sources have upsides and downsides. ALL OF THEM.
  • Coal spews more nasty shit into the air (!!) than a nuclear plant PRODUCES (in contained vessels) during its lifetime - including radioactivity.
  • "Moving everything to solar/wind/hydro" is a nice pipe dream but 20 years off before such a move would not shut down our economy due to the 4x cost per watt.
  • Even if you evened the price per kWh tomorrow, you still have 20 years to build the new plants all over the world (let alone, new grid and battery tech to support night time generation).

In short, shut up.

Airport Boarding In Nerd Central

I just went through security in San Jose and caught this awesome sign.

Let me show the zoomed in sign -

I love the fact that there are two assumptions here:

1) You are expected to have a laptop. There is absolutely no assumption that you could not not have a laptop.

2) Based on the ordering of the notices on the sign, removing your laptop is the most important thing you have to be worried about.

Ah, the valley.

The True Value of the Marshmallow Video

I'll be the five millionth person to post this, but it is adorable.

I love this, and do completely believe the studies that say those that are better at delaying gratification do better over in life (relationships, money, pursuits, etc). However, I think the real failure here are that there are too many people in life who go through, and struggle for a little bit, eat it, and then think badly of themselves, or sorry they didn't get that second marshmallow. I bet that people who made a snap decision, ate it and never looked back would be far happier (and probably equal the success of the delayers) than the people who live in some miserable in-between state.

The Graph of My Free Time

I just noticed that chart in this new theme there on the right that covered the number of posts I've had over the years – I can't believe how productive a blogger I was in 2005 – that's very nearly a post a day. I wonder if I could ever get back there with the options for microblogging. Usually a blog was a pent up summary of everything I felt about a subject, but microblogging kind of lets that steam off every 10 minutes or so.

When Seven Wounds To The Head Is Just Not Enough

Nasty, brutish and not that short

 

Very cool article in The Economist about the actual history of medieval warfare (via Kottke.org).

 

But my favorite tidbit in the article comes from something not at all related to warfare:

Bone grows in response to strenuous muscular activity, particularly if exercise starts in childhood. For instance, the serving arm of a professional tennis player has as much as a third more bone in it than his non-dominant arm.

What a cool stat. 

It's Over People

I guess humanity had a pretty decent run of it. It was good, not great, but I think it's time we called it a day. The object of our undoing? The Quadrocopter.

I (for one) welcome our new Quadrocopter overlords.

Beating the Common Cold

Here’s the news on that – you can’t. I don’t care what you say or do, what recipe has worked for you in every time you’ve had a cold since you were five, you cannot beat it.

However, to minimize the pain of the symptoms, here’s a recent story I heard which covers your best bets:

Take two single ingredient drugs every 12 hours, at the start of the scratchy, continue until symptoms are clear

  • Ibuprofen/Naproxen - Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory, helps to easy the feeling of malaise, cough, sore throat.
  • Anti-histamine - first generation, make you drowse, Benadryl or Chlor-Trimeton, take care of runny nose

Plus:

  • Salt water gargle - to relieve sore throat
  • Lemon mint throat lozenges - to relieve cough

NOTE: these do not make you better but help you feel better while you're sick.

Congrats to the Giants

For the first time, since 1954, the Giants are World Champions”. I was really impressed with them, most of all because they had real character to their team, instead of just being a bunch of thuggish caricatures of what giant freak baseball players would normally look like.

The thing about it, though, is that while the White Sox and Red Sox were genuinely REALLY old records to win, the Giants already had some success as a franchise, so I’m not quite sure why everyone was so longing for this win.