Sound and Fury

Dark Knight rocks. Rocks!

I saw a matinee. I almost wish I'd paid full price. I actually forgive them for the twenty minute pre-feature infomercial (just this once). It was that good.

It is everything it should be. It is very, very sad that Heath Ledger died; he was astounding as the Joker.

Ok, this locavore thing is getting out of hand. Really. It is.

You do not need to build skyscrapers with farms in them, so city-dwellers can have extremely local produce, and play farmer. It's dumb. And it will most certainly not save energy.

If you live in the city, and want to grow produce, get a window box.

Farming (of any sort) has two essential inputs: sunlight and water. In a high-rise, you'd have to pump water (at a cost of around 1.5 J/Lm), and you have to use artificial lighting (at an output efficiency of around 12%, for florescent). On a normal farm, the light is free, and the pumping costs low or non-existent.

Truck transportation is mind-bogglingly energy efficient. Newer semis get 6-10 MPG towing tens of thousands of pounds. And trucks are less efficient than trains or ships. It is entirely possible that driving a Prius to the grocery store and back consumes more energy (on a per pound of cargo basis) than the rest of the transportation chain combined, even for foreign-grown goods. It is certainly worse on a per pound-mile basis.

I'm reading Un Lun Dun by China Mieville right now. So this is especially surreal: the Philippine presidential body-guards are apparently carrying very sturdy umbrellas as weapons. They don't stop bullets, but it appears that you can split a watermelon with one fairly easily.

Carrying spiked clubs at eye level indeed.

No claims are made w.r.t. their effectiveness as a smog deterrent.

I went rafting with a bunch of friends on Sunday. It was awesome.

On the way out to the White Salmon river, we saw a very large smoke plume where Mt. Adams should have been. At first, we were concerned that Adams may have erupted. It's a volcano, after all. And the Cascade range has been a bit unquiet of late.

We dug phones out of the trunk (we weren't wearing them, as we weren't intending to carry them onto the raft), and googled a bit. We decided that the lack of USGS coverage indicated that it wasn't an eruption. So a forest fire, or a really weird cloud formation.

It continued to grow as we approached, in a decidedly un-cloud-like manner.

When we got to the raft guide parking lot, we gathered from others that it was a forest fire that had probably been smoldering for several days, and had chosen today to burst forth.

But, it was far enough away not to worry about.

So we rafted. This was my first rafting experience.

I was surprised at how physically undemanding it was. Mostly, we just floated downriver, with the guide actively steering us with her paddle.

Paddling mostly consisted of short 1-3 stroke bursts in small groups, though at the end, the water was really slow, and we had a headwind, so we had to paddle to make progress.

Staying in the raft wasn't terribly difficult either. You just jam your feet in place.

Then again, the river was very full, which means that most rocks are submerged. That may have made the whole thing considerably easier.

It was a lot of fun. It sounds like the group I went with is going again at the end of the summer, when the water is lower. I'll be interested to see how different that is.

It appears that when I changed email providers, the notification messages I used to get when someone commented got lost. I've fixed the issue, and published all the non-spam back comments.

Sorry about that. I feel really bad about it.