Author: Dave

Depletion

The other day I was shopping and noticed that my shaving cream seemed to be more expensive that I recalled it previously being, and it got me thinking about whether the cost was related to the current high price of crude oil.

Now most of the concern in the news relating to the high oil cost revolves about the flow on costs for petrol, jet fuel, and diesel (with the associated increase in transport costs for trucks, ships and trains). Not much mention is made of the other effects that scarcer oil reserves (with their associated high free market prices) will have.

Now my shaving cream has butane as the main propellant to get it out of the can, but Butane comes from oil (either directly or by “cracking” heavier hydrocarbons in the oil). Butane has many many other applications as well, from gas stoves to refrigeration, which would become more expensive as oil gets scarcer.

The other thing that people are often unaware of is that Helium (as in the gas, which floats those party balloons) is almost entirely acquired by extracting it from oil, and when our oil runs out so will our helium, which is a problem given how much we use helium for cooling things like the magnets in Medical MRI machines, in deep sea diving, in weather balloons, and in welding and other industrial processes.

Food for thought really.

Sans elektronique

Due to a series of mishaps I am without several of the electronic gizmos which would usually be referred to as “inseparable” from me, and it’s a mighty odd sensation.

Firstly my microphone on my phone has been playing up, meaning that I can hear people talking to me, while they can only hear a buzzing on the other end, so off it went to get fixed (under warranty luckily (and less that a week left on the warranty too – Score)).

Then I had a rather embarrasing episode where I tripped while undressing and stood on my PDA, cracking the screen, which also meant that it needed dispatching to the repair centre (although no warranty this time – D’oh).

All in all it has left me very disconnected from the electronic world, and with unnervingly light and empty pockets.

Will Wheaton = funny

I read this article the other day which was an interview with Will Wheaton (who if you are old enough and geeky enough to remember, played young Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation) about what he’s doing now, and it was really really funny.

If it hadn’t been for NASA…

My friend James often sings this little ditty that goes “If it hadn’t been for NASA I’d at least have stood on Mars”.

It almost always pops up whenever we are talking space exploration, with James claiming that NASAs beaurocratic nature has been and continues to be a restraining and inhibiting influence on humans space exploration, and me defending NASA and reminding him of all NASAs successes over the years.

Recently however the situation has become so rediculous that I find it impossibly hard to keep up my usual defense of NASA and it’s culture.

NASA has become so fixated on sticking with flying the (frankly ancient) space shuttles, while at the same time being morbidly unwilling to allow a launch if there is any concievable risk to the vehicle and crew.

The result of this is that they are jepordising continued manned space flight out of fear of public and political opinion, and the sad fact is that their delays may ultimately end up being just as harmful to their public image as any accident. The space station will stay unfinished (remember when it was going to have a 6 man crew and extensive science capabilities…), they will get beaten back to the moon by China or the Europeans. They will fail, ironically because they are afraid of failure.

Same old tired rhetoric

The new Harry Potter book is only days away from being released, and already the same old boring stereotypes are coming out with the same old boring rhetoric about what a bad influence Harry Potter and his love of witchcraft and wizzardry is, and how the books promote un-Christian ideals.

It really is rather tiresome. It also seems rather pathetic really. If [insert your religion of choice here] is really that good and inviting and all embracing, then they have nothing to worry about, but to me the wails and castigations from the pulpit just indicates that a little work is needed to make [you faith of choice] more accessable and relevant to today’s youth in today’s world.

Differentiation

As I have commented on and whinged about before, I find myself yearning for more from life. I keen for more adventure. I desire to be more significant. I loathe the notion of dying as nothing more than a piece of unnecessary punctuation buried unread within the tomes of history. I want to be a tome (or at least a paragraph).

I watch TV, I read books, I play games, I see movies, and they always leave me wanting to take up swords, or guns, or fists, or armies, and fight the valiant fight, right the myriad injustices, and make of myself a leader and a hero. More than just a man.

At this point it is interesting to note that while my mind rales against my mediocrity, my mundanity, and my lifes predictable sustainability, my brain points out that the very uneventfulness of my life has seen me already outlast the average life expectancy of humans only a few hundred years ago, and sees me in good health, with food on the plate, a house to live in, and all the commodities and conveniences that a stable, structured (and inherently boring-enough-to-make-you-cry) society affords.

(But sometimes that predictability and convenience really is quite spectacularly depressing)

They’ve got it all wrong

I’ve never thought about it before, but it occurs to me that someone got it all wrong when they were naming a couple of things.

Firstly we have to consider undies. This is of course a common and perfectly reasonable contraction of the term “underwear”, which also makes sense, given that is worn under your other clothes.

The problem arises however when you consider that (on women at least) the undies go over the overies (OK, I’m corrupting the spelling there to support my argument, but hopefully you understand where I’m coming from).

So which is it. Are the overies over, or are the undies over, and if the undies are over the overies how do we reconcile that so that it doesn’t break my brain when I try and think about it too hard…

Seemingly unkillable

I flicked through the MTV music awards last night in time to hear something really disturbing.

Mariah Carey was performing live on the show, on the basis that she currently has the top single and album on the US charts.

I had always assumed that she was a one album wonder, but she seems to be remarkably adept at being a one album wonder again and again and again. What are we up to now? Like, the fourth incarnation or something like that..

I can only conclude that either she is either sleeping with all the right people (again and again and again) or else she must be onto like her 4th or 5th deal with the devil…

Infestation

Our flat appears to be being somewhat invaded, however it isn’t something that at all warrants complaining about.

Whereas other people get ants, who get into everything and steal your sugar, or spiders who sneak around trying to give you a fright (like George, the huntsman spider who lived in my flat in second year for a while (he was kinda cute, friendly, and utterly harmless, so I let him be)), we are being invaded by geckos, which I just think is cool.

(I should probably mention at this point that we do have ants and spiders too, but the ants only ever show up in ones and twos in our bath tub, which is hardly exactly an invasions or even an annoyance, and we have a few daddy longlegs spiders in the top corners of the front room, which I personally feel is just being ecologically responsible, as they take care of any bugs that wander in doors, and otherwise leave us alone, meaning we generaly don’t have to worry about bug spray)

Anyhow, we don’t really get many geckos in NZ and so having them wandering around our flat (presumably just as a part of a larger exploration of the neighbourhood) seems pretty cool, and I think Simone derives quite some amusement at my excitement whenever I see a gecko scampering up a wall or across a door.

I suppose we’ve all got to have our eccentricities (although I had thought that I had already filled my quota before this all started…..)