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Here’s what I believe will be the case, following my injury.
I’m not going to ride a bike for a long time.
I’m going to atrophy from my left hip down.
I’m going to get sore and strong from using crutches.
I’m going to become more flexible as I learn to put socks on my extended rigid leg.
I’m going to itch.
I’m going to do a lot more reading, drawing, and homework.
I’m going to get some cabin fever.
I’m going to gain a new perspective.
I’m going to be challenged.
I’m going to try to maintain as much independence as I can.
I’m going to apologize profusely for inconveniencing others.
I’m going to depend on friends.
I’m going to learn how many kind, generous, and caring people surround me.

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Here’s where I stand.

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This is the short version:

Yesterday I crashed my bicycle while riding back downhill towards Chico from Paradise. My injuries would likely have been much worse had I not been wearing my helmet. I was given a ride to Enloe Medical Center where X-rays revealed I had fractured my left patella (kneecap). Luckily, the orthopedic surgeon doesn’t think my knee will require surgery, but I will have to wear a full-leg cast for the next 8-12 weeks. I have a positive outlook and know that things could have gone much worse.

This is the long version:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Upgraded Wordpress to v2.5 tonight, can you smell the freshness? Cheers to frequent improvements on free software. I think I migrated the site over properly, but let me know if anything looks screwy.

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Every day of class in my Science and Human Values class, a group of students informally presents a topic pulled from current events that is supposed to be relevant to the course. So far, of the dozen or so groups that have presented, almost half of them have been on the subject of alternative energy, specifically alternative fuels. Last thursday I heard this gem:

Biodiesel is great because, um, you get more energy from the fuel than you put into growing it, and it takes less energy to make than it takes to make oil.

Now maybe I didn’t quote my pensive peer perfectly, but a lot of what I hear is along the lines of 1) biofuels will cost less at the pump, 2) the storage and transportation issues that keep the sale of biofuels restricted to the agricultural heartland will quickly be dispensed with upon the arrival of Technology, 3) biofuels will somehow avoid the pitfall of being a resource that will (at best) increase in availability arithmetically, while demand for energy continues to grow geometrically, and 4) what we run our cars on will make or break global warming.

In comparing the efficiency of biofuel sources like palm-oil or switchgrass to petroleum, it’s often overlooked that oil (and coal for that matter) aren’t actually sources of energy, but rather stores of it. Ancient biomass is heated and compressed under the Earth’s surface, and over period of geological time it forms fossil fuels. The energy in this original biomass came from the sun, and the energy made available by biofuels comes from the sun too. Unlike fossil fuels, plants convert sunlight to chemical energy on demand with energy costs that give us a positive return, while the formative process of fossil fuels is completely obscured by history.

As good as this makes biofuels sound, they’re not going to satisfy the increasingly savage addiction we have to fossil fuels. In general biofuels aren’t as energy-dense as fossil fuels, and it seems they may require much more effort on our part to refine and process. But we must remember, both of these fuels are merely stores of solar energy, not sources.

Andrew C. Revkin, of the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog recently posted on the topic of solar energy as the best and last answer to energy demands, quoting Daniel G. Nocera, chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“All scientists ultimately believe solar has to be the answer,” he said. On Thursday, he laid out his “big idea” as a formula: “If you take sunlight plus water, that equals oil plus coal plus methane.”

One of the most interesting parts of Nocera’s presentation at the Aspen Environmental Forum was his predictions for energy consumption over the next half-century.

Dr. Nocera said human activities, in energy terms, right now are essentially a “12.8 trillion watt light bulb.” Our energy thirst will probably be 30 trillion watts, or 30 terrawatts, by 2050 with the human population heading toward 9 billion.

Finding other options is a huge challenge, he added. To illustrate, he provided one hypothetical (and impossible) menu for getting those 18 additional terawatts without emissions from coal and oil:

- Cut down every plant on Earth and make it into a fuel. You get 7 terawatts, but you need 30. And you don’t eat.

- Build nuclear plants. Around 8 terawatts could be gotten from nuclear power if you built a new billion-watt plant every 1.6 days until 2050.

- Take all the wind energy available close to Earth’s surface and you get 2 terawatts.

- You get 1 more terawatt if you dam every other river on the planet and reach 30.

As he summed up, “So no more eating, nuclear power plants all over, dead birds everywhere, and I dam every other river and I just eke out what you’ll need in 40 years.”

Then he turned to the sun, his research focus, which bathes the planet in 800 terawatts of energy continually. “We only need 18 of those terawatts,” he said. But the current level of investment in pursuing that energy, he said, isn’t even close to sufficient.

Check out the rest of the post here.

While I think Nocera may have overlooked the capacity for satisfying our needs with less energy through higher efficiency, ie Negawatts, I agree with his long-view approach to energy demands. Ultimately, yes, the sun is the root of almost all energy on our planet. If our energy demands continue to grow unabatedly, we will exceed the relatively quick-fix provided by fossil-fuels. Other options like wind, biofuels, geothermal, tidal, and nuclear power generation will surely help, but they too are limited in their capacity. For the demanding class 1 civilization solar really is the grandaddy of energy sources.

Instead of a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, I want solar on every roof and bikes in every bungalow. Either that or a Dysonsphere.

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Tried to get to bed before 2am, recorded this cover of a Stars song instead. Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.

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As little as I draw, I really like pens. I am pretentiously preferential in my pen predilections. I often excuse my inability to draw regularly on having very specific tastes in pens. In the same way I am growing enamored with typography without doing any printing (or even that much writing!).

My inclination for inking implements is heavily (if not entirely) influenced by comic artists I like. Dorothy Gambrell of Donation Derby and Cat & Girl internet fame is certainly at the top of the list of artists-I-would-steal-the-hands-of, but I can’t discount George Herriman of Krazy Kat or Lucy Knisley. They all have a line quality and style I’ve decided I will emulate as much as possible. Sue me.

The last time I saw my brother he gave me a pen. He’d been playing around with felt tipped pens and water-based ink, and recommended to me the Paper Mate Flare. I pulled the unassuming pen from my desk cup today to jot down a quick note, and quickly found myself really enjoying it. I remember he mentioned that he would dilute the ink by dipping the felt tip in water, and then draw outward spirals as the ink slowly darkened again.

I don’t like how long it takes the ink to dry to the point of being un-smearable, even when it hasn’t been watered down, but I’m a big boy and I can keep my meaty hands off of fresh lines if I try. The line weight is only the slightest bit heavier than that of a Pilot G-2 07, and the stroke is a bit more consistent with not as much ink blotted when the pen is lifted from the paper (unless of course you’ve been dipping the Flare in water, but that’s to be expected).

I do like the softer feeling of the Flare’s felt tip as opposed to the G-2’s ball point, and the ability to easily play around with gray tones is appealing as all get out.

So here’s me pretending to be a pen snob, and here’s me actually being someone who should try to draw more.

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I just finished watching Sigur Rós’s film Heima. Part rockumentary, part surrealist Icelandic travelogue, part music video; it’s a beautiful thing.

In 2006, having toured the world over, Sigur Rós returned home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland. Heima is a unique record of that tour filmed in 16 locations across the island, taking in the biggest and smallest shows of the band’s career. ‘Heima’ is a 97 minute documentary feature film including songs from all four Sigur Rós albums alongside previously unreleased material.

Sigur Rós’s undeniably atmospheric “slow motion rock music” gives elegance and poise to the simple, the mundane, and the unadorned. Heima applies the same romance of the common to the chronicle of a band playing small shows in small towns to small crowds.

Get it, watch it, and do what you will to support people who make the world a more breathtaking place.

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This morning I took a taxi from North-East Portland to the Greyhound station in the North-West downtown area. My boxed bike fit snugly into the trunk and the bearded leather jacket and bowler hat wearing driver sang in french for the whole ten minute ride. I spent the next thirteen hours on a bus Southbound to Chico. My boss Steve called when I was about half an hour away and offered me a ride home from the bus station, his kids giving me easter candies when they arrived in his sun-bleached pickup. Today was a sunday well traveled.

When I unlock my apartment door for the first time in almost a week, nobody is there except for a cat. Not the cat belonging to one of my roommates, but a new one almost identical in markings save for her massive yellow eyes. Should I name her?

Chairmen Meow sits in my window and focuses her twin eye-beams on any who would challenge her.

I think Chico is a great town for me, for now. I’ve got a job I really enjoy, working with people I respect and genuinely enjoy the company of. I’m taking classes in a field I find interesting and am set to take more advanced courses at a university held in high-regard for its achievements and efforts in sustainability. I’ve made friends with some very kind, intelligent, endearing, admirable, and exciting people.

But in nine weeks I’ll be half-way towards graduating with a BA in Philosophy. Two more years and I’ll be a graduate of California State University, Chico. I’m sure by then my roots will have sunk even deeper into the rich brown soil of the central valley, but from where I stand now I don’t think I’ll want to stick around.

I made a list of pros and cons for moving to Portland, and it’s hardly balanced.

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I was playing around with Tumblr tonight, it’s a pretty cute little app. For shits and giggles I set up an account to try it out, and the result can be found here.

Tumblr is pretty appealing for a few reasons.

First off, it’s DEAD simple to use. I feel like I could offer it up with the most minimal guidance to someone who wanted to blog but didn’t care for mucking around in the guts of the internet. I’d say it’s even easier to use than the Blogger platform, just because of the minimal design and super simple/friendly UI.

Speaking of design, the backend experience is quite well polished. The ‘dashboard’, what you see when you want to post something new to your Tumblr page, is layed out clearly with a central focus on your previous posts, and big clear buttons lead to other features.

Tumblr offers a few methods of posting, which I’ve sampled below. There’s basic text posts like this one, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video posts. These different varieties of posts determine which fields you fill out when posting something new, and they make it really easy to present a wide range of content.

When designing my own blog this kind of partioning of content felt like on of the larger aesthetic hurtles. I’m still not completely satisfied with my Sights, Sounds, and Et Cetera categories, but it works for most of what I publish. Tumblr’s solution is great if you don’t want to spend too much time introspecting your own format of postings. Tumblr also offers tagging for posts, but it’s within the ‘advanced options’ field at the bottom of each post-authoring page.

One of Tumblr’s features that really interests me is the ability to easily create group blogs. I’m a member of a few mailing lists, and I think some of them could benefit from Tumblr’s simple this-is-something-cool-I-found template. It wouldn’t be very hard at all to get together a couple of people with common interests and internet connections to create something akin to BoingBoing, but with any manner of subject matter.

I think Tumblr has a lot of potential to reach potential-bloggers, thanks to it’s balance between simplicity and capabilites. Cheers to free and well-designed web services that make sharing easier.

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