I'm feeling ranty!

I'm at work. I'm into my 11th hour at work. Now, those who know me know that I'm absolutely commited to putting in a full eight-hour day and then going home. However, there's a deadline Monday I have to hit because I'm going out of town for a week starting Tuesday, and there are still bugs not to mention a major crisis for a deadline tonight, so... here I am. Not doing what I want to do.

I'm currently waiting on a code review. I can't leave until it's done, and it's not even a sure thing then. Meanwhile, I'm reading through the news and I see the Faith and Freedom Network hails the Senate's resolution affirming that the motto of the United States is still "In God We Trust," and they claim that "The reason it was adopted was becaus it embodies the essence of America from its very inception." If that was true, why wasn't that our motto for our country's first 180 years? Fuckwads.

Senator Brownback gloats over the failure of the Embryonic Stem Cell Research Act and says the act wouldn't have helped matters anyway because "there are very few embryos actually available for research." Yeah, all 240,000 embryos per year in cryo that get thrown away are just not acceptable for research. Moron.

On the other hand, in what must be the most stunning turn-around of the year, Christianity Today magazine demands that the Department of Defense recognize a Wiccan soldier and put a pentacle on his headstone. "Although our country was founded on a Judeo-Christian base, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood that religious freedom was for everyone, not just Christians. The only way that freedom can prevail for Christians is for Christians to stand up and fight for the minority beliefs and religions of others." Wow.

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"Dear Mr. Johnson
By order of the Food and Drug Administration, your penis has been recalled".

Industrial Dust To Dust

There's a scene in one of my more recent stories where Belle reveals Misuko's economic naivete by taking over responsibility for the economic future of the starship Chance Lifter. One of the things she discusses that confounds Linia is the "dust to dust" concept: how much it costs to make the ship, how much utility it's expected to produce over its lifetime, and the final cost of its disposal.

CNW Marketing Research took the time to figure out what the energy cost per mile of owning most of the popular cars on the market really was: how much it cost to design, build, drive, and finally dispose of an automobile. One of the perhaps arguable points is the lifetime, but they're taking from the manufacturer's own literature. Toyota admits that the average Prius will last 100,000 miles, whereas GM states unequivocally that the expected lifetime of a full-size truck is 300,000 miles.

The report is now available. And the outcome is heretical: the Toyota Prius, because of its plastic and composites construction, costs so much to manufacture and recycle that it is twice as expensive and environmentally damaging to own and operate than a Hummer. The best car to own is a Scion XB, followed by the Ford Focus and the Toyota Echo. The Honda Civic Hybrid has 20% non-recyclable components, whereas the Honda Civic has only 10% non-recyclable parts. The Hummer, because of its expected 300,000 mile lifespan, gives much more utility before it's almost entirely steel body goes to the recycling plant than the plastic Escape with its 100,000 mile lifespan.

The report is 450 pages and I've only read the summary, so I actually have no idea if their data collection is valid, what algorithms they've used, and what assumptions they've made. But these are serious considerations to be taken into account while lusting after the Tesla Roadster. The internal combustion engine has been around for more than a century, and we've learned how to extract as much efficiency out of one as we possibly can. The same cannot be said for electric cars yet, and while I applaud people trying to push the limit of the technology with consumer dollars, we should not kid ourselves that we're doing the planet a favor yet.

Beautiful and Tragic

There are few things sadder than having a beautiful woman sit across from you on the bus, only to have her ruin your first impression by horking out a huge loogie onto the floor and then shoving a freshly stubbed cigarillo into her mouth. She had perfectly smooth, utterly black skin and a very expertly braided head of kinked cornrows, and when she answered her cell-phone she answered with a stream of unashamed obscentities that revealed way too much about her excessively ordinary love life and her miscreant boyfriend's immanent deportation from the United States.