The Green Philosopher blogs

Causal Domain Shear

2008-11-05T11:02:08-08:00

Causal Domain Shear: The tendency for distinct and completely seperate "causal domains"(groups of things linked by cause and effect relationships) to influence one another through tenuous or temporary relationships.

So it's happened...

2008-10-19T10:28:05-07:00

So it's finally happened to me. I've been lured out of an environmentally friendly lifestyle and into an 80 mile a day commuter lifestyle. OK, so lured is probably the wrong way to put it, I'm was terrified by what I learned about our economy over the last year so I started looking for a full time job instead of trying to run my own business through a greater depression cycle. And that's what we're really entering, a greater depression cycle. And this time, like the last time, it's fundamentally about too much debt.

Most people I know who follow the economy assume that the central cause of our economic instability is based on the huge amount of bad real estate debt out there, and yes that is part of it. Unfortunately it's only a very small part of it, just the tiny spark that has started a fire on banking sheets across the globe that will bring to light the enormous amount of debt that has crept into every aspect of the modern economy. It's almost comical how many businesses, across the globe, run their operations on borrowed money. And with how razor thin the actual cash reserves of modern businesses are (with very few exceptions), these businesses that are built on credit will begin to fail as the credit becomes unavailable or the interest rates on the loans rise directly cutting into the business profits. It kinda snowballs from here on out.

And the government responses have been patently ridiculous. You can't solve a debt based problem by piling more debt on the people whom the economy depends on to keep it moving! That's just absurd!

So I feel lucky that I was able to secure a job that not only is a near perfect match for my skill set, and has me working with a great team, but a job that will also actually benefit from the early years of this greater depressive cycle. Both my wife and I should be relatively unaffected by the early years of this catastrophe, and hopefully we'll be able to prepare enough to rough out the later years. But achieving that relative security has required that I compromise some of my environmental values, which really hurts. I really enjoy trying to live as efficiently and conscientiously as possible, and I've had to work hard to convince myself that an 40 mile commute is worth it.

So I guess you could say that I've been busier than usual, but in a good way. And for the time being, this blog will be less about environmentalism and more about technology and computing, just so I don't offend myself with the hypocricy of preaching what I cannot practice.

My Brain Hurts

2008-09-28T09:06:32-07:00

So, I'm going to complain to the ether, so if that's not your thing you can stop reading now.

My brain hurts! So with a load of new responsibilities I have to get my PHP coding skills back up to par, learn Adobe Flex and at school I need to learn MIPS assembler and architecture. So of course my brain hurts. The PHP part is pretty easy, I've done some coding in it before. It's a nice language with tons of useful functions and lots of alternate syntaxes. The API I'll be coding PHP with, Drupal, is very clean and very nice architectually. So in all it's kind of an ideal high level language and API combination to be working with. Except...

PHP is too flexible with the syntax! There are too many alternative ways of writing simple structures, this makes reading other peoples code a nightmare! The only programming language I've encountered that is anywhere near as difficult to follow is PERL. It's just frustrating, and annoying and really just shouldn't be allowed to happen. Such as how you show "not equals" in PHP, which can be either "!=" or "<>". So if most coders write it like this "!=" but the one guy who coded the module your auditing writes it like "<>" you may totally miss the logic at first until in your head banging fits you realize that there are two very different ways to write the same thing. Or like writing the 'and' operator as either "and" or "&&", they both mean the same thing, they just look very different. And it's not that such alternatives symbols are difficult to learn, it actually makes it easier to learn, but its very difficult to read. It's as if I replaced the word "the" with the symbol "#", it's not something that will stop you from reading a document:

(example from slashdot)

# heads of some of # most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, #y all seem to agree, and #y say it's a problem with # US business model, or # lack #reof.

Even if you can figure it out, it slows you down, because you now have to carefully scan each symbol and translate in your head. If there was only one symbol for the word "the" this wouldn't be the case.

Now Flex on the other hand is beautiful and elegant, what with it's MXML markup and all. I seem to be speeding through the basics and intend to incorporate some of it on a site of mine in a short matter of time(still not sure why work wants me to learn it though).

What really makes my brain hurt the most is doing MIPS assembler after working in these high level languages all day. It seems like some times my brain simply comes to dead stop and refuses to process registers and bit fields. Maybe it's time to just audit the MIPS class and focus on the high level languages for a little while?

An aptly named game

2008-08-05T14:21:21-07:00

I named the game "carnage" and aptly enough it does seem to be turning out that way, although it is definitely my own carnage. I should know better than to trust misleading user names.

Boy do I feel rusty, it's been many years since I last played...

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4 4. h3 Bxf3 5. Qxf3 Nf6 6. Be3 Be7 7. Nc3 O-O 8. O-O-O Qc8 9. dxe5 Ne8 10. exd6 Nxd6 11. Nd5 Bd8 12. Bc5 Re8 13. Bc4 Bg5+ 14. Ne3 Bxe3+ 15. fxe3 Nxc4 16. Rhf1 Qe6 17. b3 Ne5 18. Qg3 b6 19. Bd4 Ng6 20. Qxc7 Na6 21. Qb7 Nb4 22. Rxf7 Qxf7 23. Qxf7+ Kxf7 24. Rf1+ Kg8 25. e5 Nxa2+ 26. Kb2 Nb4 27. c3 Na6 28. g4 Nc5 29. Rf5 Nh4 30. Rg5 Re6 31. b4 Nd3+ 32. Kc2 *

[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2008.08.02"]
[Round "1"]
[White "jpwarren00"]
[Black "iknowlittle"]
[Result "*"]
[WhiteElo "1200"]
[BlackElo "1277"]
[TimeControl "1 in 1 day"]

The Service Economy Myth

2008-07-18T06:33:10-07:00

Ever wonder why the dollar is in a steady decline? Ever wonder why so many foreign corporations and companies own so much American property?

It's really quite simply because we have ceased to be a producing nation. Not that we are not very productive, very busy, very hard working. It's just that we no longer produce very much physical material for all of our hard labors. This is not to say that our exhaustive intellectual property or managerial and IT service isn't worth anything, it has value, in it's own way.

But here is the problem: all this intellectual property, managerial whatnot and IT services, you can't eat them, you can't wear them, they will not quench your thirst, they will not power your machines. They are luxuries.

Can you build a country's economy solely on luxuries?

Yeah, I didn't think so either.

The service sector should be just that, a sector, it shouldn't even be a majority sector if we want a strong and fruitful economy. If we want an economy that concentrates wealth into our country and it's citizens, it has to produce real main stream products, not luxuries. As we saw in the 70's and 80's the manufacturing sector of our economy could not compete very well against foreign manufacturers. This is the normal give and take in the system, but in the US there is a problem with the corporation system and the government. Nothing serious was done to keep the manufacturing sector afloat. We did not raise tremendous tariffs on imported manufactured goods and direct that money into manufacturing R&D. Nope, we just started importing more manufactured goods, first from Japan and then China as they became more industrialized. And of course how did we paid for all these imported goods? Well let's just say it wasn't a fair trade, we definitely did not exchange our manufactured goods for theirs. We paid for it with the accumulated wealth of a nation that was once the undisputed industrial world leader. We paid for it in dollars, which now that it's not based on any metal reserve system is more like stock in the American government than any sort of real currency.

It's not that we couldn't make major changes to the corporate system that rewards the quick buck over the long term investment. It's not that the government couldn't use tariff money to run large and risky research programs that would make our manufacturing sector competitive again.

It was just easier to outsource our manufacturing economy. Kind of like how it's easier to import oil than develop alternative fuel sources...

So all that news that we've been hearing over the years about how “our economy is becoming a sort of service economy” has been a lie, what they we're really saying is “our economy is failing, so we're going to tell you it's becoming something better so you don't panic!”

But,

in truth,

without an economy based in manufacturing,

or an economy based in exportable energy commodities,

or an economy based on any sort of basic human need instead of luxuries,

our economy is a lie.

Just like the cake...

Today I saw hope for the world.

2008-07-09T19:33:58-07:00

I went into a public library to quickly check the weather at a public terminal and what did I see on the desktop? Openoffice.org and a couple of GPL applications.

At first I stopped thinking about the weather. Could it be? Is the local government possibly adopting, at even this peripheral level, "open source software"?!?

Maybe we won't all die a Roman death, unaware that we squandered all our resources until it was too late.

Maybe we do have some hope for a bright future...

Pros and Cons of the impending change in energy infrastructure

2008-07-01T13:03:49-07:00

Portable Energy Type	Pros	Cons
Biodiesel	Nearly equivalent power density to normal diesel Only minor changes in distribution infrastructure are needed Only minor changes in current diesel systems are needed	Agricultural basis creates competition for human food sources Diesels in the US are a minority
Ethanol	Good power density (80% that of gasoline[roughly]) Only minor changes in distribution infrastructure are needed Conversion of gasoline systems is not straight forward but is possible	Agricultural basis creates competition for human food sources Substantial expense for upgrading existing gasoline engines Enhanced agricultural/organic technologies needed to completely replace petroleum
Battery/Electric	Adequate battery systems exist for most commuter needs Very cheap mileage if charged on grid power Zero emissions Very low maintenance	Very high initial cost of systems and conversions Completely inadequate infrastructure in place, could take generations to change Battery technology is not an adequate replacement for many current transportation applications
Hydrogen/Electric	Superior power storage to currently used technologies “Safe” emissions Very cheap mileage if hydrogen is hydrolyzed from water with grid power instead of refined from hydrocarbon sources	Technology is not feasible yet Infrastructure is almost non-existent Storage technologies not mature yet
Bicycle/Walking	Very cheap mileage Makes for a fitter nation Improves quality of life	Infrastructure is seriously sub standard in the US Limited effective mileage does not match current population density distribution in US Transport applications are limited by personal fitness

Because whether you believe in it or not, the era of cheap oil is over. All remaining reserves are harder to get, harder to transport or harder to refine, which boils down to higher prices from here on out. And while many well off Americans and our contemporaries may be able to afford the rising costs of portable energy in the near term, what happens when gasoline and diesel keeps rising in cost? Can you afford $20/g gasoline? Right now the poor in America are really suffering from the rising cost of gas, but it's really only a matter of time before the middle class begins to buckle. How will you collect your food and sundries when your daily work commute is already breaking your budget? What options do you have once you can no longer afford to drive to and from work?

Loudoun county school bus drivers, my biggest bicycling safety concern

2008-06-13T12:53:59-07:00

Normally when you see a school bus on the road you usually quitely remember the times of your youth spent riding in school buses. Or at least I used to think these things. Now that I bicycle everywhere that I used to drive to, when I see a school bus I start emergency planning. You see the only drivers that have ever come close to endangering my life are public school bus drivers. They consistently pass when it is dangerous to do so and have run me off the road a half dozen times already. I've even had one driver try to tell me it was OK that she ran me off the road because I was moving to slow (the fact that I was 100 yards from a red light didn't seem to matter).

Now this bothers me for several reasons. First off this means that a public institution is creating my biggest daily safety concern. And secondly, how the hell are school bus drivers getting their jobs without knowing how to deal with slower vehicles! I mean you would think that a job as resoponsible as shuttling our children would require that they have an above average knowledge of the laws.

Anyway, I complained, and hopefully it's not just going to fall down an administrative black hole.

A busy three weeks

2008-06-05T06:42:34-07:00

So, for about the next three weeks I'll be very busy finishing up a compressed Biology class, so the posts are going to be few and far between. But I do intend to add some more functionality to the site (which requires much less time than fact checking my posts). So for the most part I'm just going to post some links to news I'm following.

For instance...

China could be facing their own economic beast from the post peak oil world, but their government price controls hide but do not solve the higher energy prices. This is similar to what I explained earlier how the “Gas Tax Holiday” is form of corporate welfare that hides actual market prices. In China this is a similar reaction that keeps pump prices low with money taken from the governments tax budget. This leads to monetary devaluation and market inflation.

also...

So the report on climate change that the Bush administration delayed for 4 years came out and concluded that current climate change is “very likely” caused by humans. This interests me for the correct language use rather than the conclusions it makes (which have been well known for several decades). You see climatology, like all other sciences, is incomplete and will most likely remain that way unless we find a way to travel back in time and study the history of climate change directly. And grand predictions like linking global climate change to specific causes are never 100% certain as long as the science is incomplete. But, that doesn't mean that the conclusions are too flimsy to be acted upon. In that sense using the term, “very likely”, is a very, very strong statement, one that should be acted upon by all reasonable means.

The Swaying of Public opinion.

2008-06-01T15:07:13-07:00

So, it's happening. Ever so slowly as people begin to realize that the rise in gas prices is the beginning of a climb in prices of everything, literally everything, that people buy. So I guess we've answered the opening question of this blog, “When does it hurt?” It hurts at about $4 a gallon, it hurts when general prices of all sorts of daily commodities jump %20 in just a few months, it hurts when the costs of basic foods jumps over 35% in less than half a year.

Of course this is also too late to intervene without some serious ramifications. It's funny how even now with an emergency of global proportions at our doorstep, the press is just beginning to say, “Hey! There might be something to this whole peak oil thing after all.” I mean, there have been very smart and very respectable people talking about the future of energy and peak oil for a very long time. The whole Hubbert's peak theory, the basis of the peak oil theories, thing was brought up in the 1950's and first proven accurate in the early 70's, we should have done serious sou searching back then. Since that time the theory has been used to accurately predict production peaks of many different countries, again each time we should have looked deeply at where we were going at started planning a way to divert disaster.

But we haven't, and if you look at the history of government support of alternative energy products you'll see a repetition of small investments followed by budget cuts where these projects are the first to be cut. It would seem that the lies of the oil industry lobbyists have been well accepted by the political powers that be. And they really are lies, there really is no way to pretend like the energy experts in the industry didn't know that there were serious long term implications to running a society off of a limited resource. I mean Marion K. Hubbert, the founder of peak oil theory, was an oil industry geologist. It would seem that the oil industry was in league with the tobacco industry in figuring out how best to screw over the American people for a profit. And while it would appear that the American people will suffer heavily, they will not be the worst effected.

It is really the poorer countries of the world that will suffer the heaviest. It will be the countries where the average citizen spends 50% of their income on energy sources, be it food or fuel, where the greatest suffering will occur. Of course as the amount of income that US citizens spend on energy rises above the current 20% we'll be too panicked in our own little world to pay attention to or even think about trying to help out the marginalized billions who are starving and fighting over the ever decreasing amount of energy resources.

Boy, I could rant forever on this kind of stuff. I really don't like the direction our country is going. And really don't want to have to struggle through a depression caused by an energy crisis. But more and more it looks like that is exactly what's going to happen.

Slavery, a modern way of life

2008-05-28T08:27:04-07:00

No, I'm not talking about people as “technical” property, or chattel slavery, as in ancient Rome, the old Confederate States or modern Chinese slave shops. I'm talking about your average Joe and Jane living in suburban America, Canada, Australia or Great Britain, etc, who's life, work and holdings are owned by parties other than themselves. What I'm talking about is similar to wage slavery, but without the pressure of poverty or starvation, it's like wage slavery but combined with massive levels of consumer debt. It is definitely indentured servitude, and much more like outright slavery or wholesale human ownership than any sort of real freedom. The scary thing about this condition is that it is openly encouraged by society, that people sell themselves to asset holders for what is little more than trinkets and shiny bits. That people's natural drive for status symbols and want for convenience is enough to warrant entry “by choice” into a condition of slavery.

The debt is the scary part of the bargain, the trinkets and shiny bits, are dangled like the proverbial “carrot before the donkey”. But in this case, you Joe/Jane worker, are the donkey and the stick holding the carrot elongates through a process called, interest. You may think you own your status symbols, but if they were purchased with credit, you probably don't own them at all. If you think about the property the average suburbanite actually owns in full, it is usually little more than some clothes, some kitchen wares, a car and some odd consumer electronics. For many suburbanites, even that was bought on credit, and may not be fully owned yet. So even though you may be able to stand on the lawn of your bank owned house and feel the sense of ownership, that monthly payment you make to the bank says something quite different about who actually owns it. But if you want to keep feeling like you own it, keep showing it off as you symbol of status you will have to keep paying the bank every month.

So how do you pay the bank every month? By selling your labor of course, which in essence is completely acceptable. Not everyone has what it takes to run their own business, but they may have skills or other resources that someone who does run a business is willing to pay for. In prosperous economic environments there are very few negative elements to this sort of lifestyle, you work, you eat you get a home to live in that you may one day call your own and you may even get a fair deal of time with which you can play and blow off the stress of working all week. Which is really just a sort of indentured servitude, eventually you'll get your house and other stuff if you just keep working and paying for 20 years or so. It's when the economic environment gets rough that this lifestyle begins to really look more openly like slavery.

Take for instance the current housing market in the United States, houses sold a few years ago will never be worth the amount that was borrowed to pay for them. And when I say never, I mean never, suburban properties will become unfeasible as the global energy crunch worsens and they will never have the value they had just a few years ago. So what is the lender to do? Well they either keep working to pay off the debt, or they default. Now the social pressures for avoiding default are massive, no person in this society will easily accept a move from owning all the status symbols, trinkets and shiny bits to owning few or no status symbols and greatly reduced trinkets and shiny bits. In choosing your living space it may actually make more sense to rent close to where you work, but the social pressures of modern society will make many people(most in the US) think it is actually a better idea to “buy” far away.

This very human pressure to maintain status, or social pecking order, is apparently all it takes to keep people slaves to their credit holders. You now must work to pay off a debt that cannot be justified by the final reward. What is worse, is that too many people are working to pay off over valued debt objects, then it is quite possible that the value of the work itself needs to be reevaluated. Such reevaluation of the value of labor must correspond to what that labor produces, that's real world production, not debt production. So, in the instance of the house, the debt is corrected for real world value and the wage is determined to be overvalued since it would actually buy much more house that it currently is paying for. Of course, if the value of your wage drops, things get even worse.

Of course you are not strictly tied to any one job. You are not forced to live in your suburban home. You are not forced to drive an SUV 100 miles a day to work and back. You are free to move about at anytime and change any of the specific conditions of your life. That is, as long as you make sure to satisfy your outstanding debts first. You can move anywhere in the world, and your credit rating will follow you. The chains are not made of iron, they are made of numbers.

The reality of this “credit slavery”, is tied to the economic prosperity of the society in which it occurs. The better the economy the less apparently bad this slavery is, the worse the economy the more the slavery appears to be bad. This is particularly concerning because the impending energy crunch will dramatically undermine the global economy and specifically it will have a dramatic impact on the US economy because of how energy hungry our economy is. Compound that with how widespread credit slavery is in the United States and you'll have our future. It may be completely acceptable to sign a 2 year salary contract right now in the US, but what happens in the future when it's a minimum 10 year contract with dynamic wages and massive credit penalties for breaking the contract? It's not so hard to see widespread slavery in forms far worse than they currently are here in the US in the none to distant future.

The difference between "In Cycle" and "Out of Cycle" carbon.

2008-05-25T10:30:09-07:00

So this is a part of the environmental mechanisms connected to global desertification, oceanic acidification and global warming that the conventional media has done little to educate the public about. That is that there is a natural carbon cycle of which carbon dioxide and methane are a normal part of our ecosystem's normal cycles. And that there is the release of long sequestered carbon, from fossil fuels, that is not a normal part of our ecosystem's cycles.

It starts with photosynthesis, when plants use sunlight to transform water and carbon dioxide into sugar(food). This process mainly uses atmospheric carbon dioxide and ground water to produce sugar and as waste products it releases oxygen. When we as humans then consume plants for their sugars, our normal cellular respiration breaks down the sugar releasing the carbon as carbon dioxide, which we exhale back into the air. This is part of the normal carbon cycle, by normal I mean that the natural environment has a host of mechanisms to keep this balanced and moving through a cycle.

As a secondary process to the normal carbon cycle, some of the carbon is utilized in cellular compounds that will decompose with the cell. A fair deal of this carbon will return to the atmosphere as well, via decomposition. But some small bit of it might be trapped underground, sequestered, and leave the cycle. Which is good, because this slow loss of carbon is offset by volcanic activity which occasionally releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide and methane(among other compounds) into the atmosphere.

This is the way things should happen.

Unfortunately the way things happen now with fossil fuels is that all the carbon that has slowly been sequestered over hundreds of millions of years is now being released very rapidly into the atmosphere. This is “Out of Cycle” carbon, and it is really bad.

“Why,” you ask, “is it so bad if there are all these natural systems to turn carbon and water into sugars?”

It's bad, because it upsets the balance. Previous to the use of fossil fuels the earth had achieved a sort of long term parity with the amount of carbon released from volcanism and the amount of carbon sequestered by the ecological carbon cycle. The earths systems simply do not have the capacity to deal with so much “Out of Cycle” carbon emissions, they are simply overwhelmed. To compound the problem we, as modern humans, have been destroying the environment at an amazing rate, and in so doing destroying the very buffers that would normally attempt to counteract a rise in carbon. So by dumping so much “Out of Cycle” carbon in the atmosphere, and then destroying the natural systems that utilize and sequester that carbon, we are accelerating two types of impending global catastrophes, global warming and global desertification.

In the last three decades we have just begun to pay the relatively small early costs for hundreds of years of this practice. I think it is unlikely that we as a people will be able to avoid paying higher costs in the future, but as individuals, there may be something you can do to insulate yourself from the impact of these costs.

A note to those who may take up regular cycling.

2008-05-23T14:33:52-07:00

I actually didn't cycle today as everything I had to get out and do was less than a mile away and the weather was perfect(70 degrees F and sunny). So instead I just walked, pushing my daughter in the Bob. And I noticed, far more new people, cycling than I've ever seen out before, which is great.

But, most of the new people I saw cycling where using the sidewalks. This is something that is actually pretty dangerous, more so most of the time than riding on the road. You see sidewalks are designed specifically for pedestrians, who move at 1-2mph, even joggers typically don't break 6mph. Which is slow enough for pedestrians to be able to safely negotiate passing and emergency collision avoidance on a 3' wide path. But even a casual cyclist will travel 8-10mph, and a cyclist moving at a good cruise will achieve 12-20mph. At those speeds the sidewalk is dangerously narrow for a bicycle, there simply is not enough time or room to safely pass pedestrians and other cyclists.

To be fair, there are a lot of roads in the suburban environment that are also fairly dangerous for cyclists where the sidewalk might be a better choice. But realistically to be safe on a sidewalk a cyclist needs to slow down to less than 6mph and be much more alert than you would be on a street. Did I mention sidewalk designers don't care about blind turns either?

Also I can understand the trepidation some new cyclists may have about navigating in auto traffic. It is surely intimidating, especially if you haven't broken the 100 mile mark since taking up riding again (basically the 100 mile mark is roughly when riding will start to feel like second nature again). So while I don't encourage cycling on the sidewalk, if you feel you need to just keep it slow and be careful.

The net result of misplaced blame

2008-05-20T20:04:07-07:00

Popular culture appears to be slowly jumping on the green bandwagon, even as the necessity of personal sacrifice becomes unavoidably apparent. And I find myself in constant position of explaining the deeper implications to simple things. Such as, Just the other day I was talking with my youngest brother, who is seventeen years my junior.

The topic was biodiesel, and he was quick to explain to me that I shouldn't be considering biodiesel because using it is causing starvation in other countries. But, it's not really US citizens using biodiesel that is causing food shortages in particular. It's market pressure from many different angles that is making food increasingly expensive that is causing food shortages in other countries.

Buying a gallon of gasoline for $4.00 is doing just as much as buying a gallon of biodiesel made from corn in pushing up the cost of food in Egypt(for example). A willingness, or the force of social addiction, to pay such high prices for portable energy, has a ripple effect on the very foundations of the food market. Four dollar a gallon gas means the petroleum used for fertilizers that are the true power behind modern agriculture gets more expensive, so farmers have to raise the prices to cover their overhead. And what is worse is that there is a market ripple delay...

For the price of food this year is based mainly on the cost of petroleum based fertilizers last year, and however much the cost of fertilizer was speculated to rise this year. And by all accounts, most markets did not correctly predict the rapid rise in the price of petroleum this year. So the while the grain prices this year are high, they may not be high enough to compensate the farmers for higher fertilizer prices for next years crop. So unless the current spike in prices rapidly reverses itself, many farmers across the globe will have to raise their prices even higher next year to cover the additional cost. That's not even counting further speculation of even higher prices, based on the failures to predict this years petroleum prices.

So just about anything you're willing to pay more for that depends on oil will further push the market into an exaggerated climb that will starve the poor of the world who can no longer afford the petroleum based staple food crops. Biodiesel does not deserve anymore attention for this problem than bottled water, gasoline, sneakers, SUV's, anything plastic or any other thing that depends on gasoline for it's production (which is just about everything in the United States and much of the world).

These are the first market fluctuations of “peak oil”, it can and most likely will get worse. Don't shift the blame to possible solutions, accept that our societies addiction to petroleum is the problem.

Would you ride a bicycle around the globe?

2008-05-18T19:10:18-07:00

So I haven't written much lately as I've become addicted to the journal of a touring bicyclist who is working his way around the globe. Now this might not strike most people as a very interesting kind of journal to read, but it is true modern adventure. Victor Weinreber has basically invested all of his money in his bike, his camping gear and an expense account to travel around the globe by bicycle. He starts off crossing the country once, just to warm up, and then he'll travel from San Francisco to San Francisco the very long way. It's an amazing running journal he's keeping up, a journey that is so alien to most modern living. And his running journal and photos on crazyguyonabike.com is one of the best I've read in a long time.

I'm inspired, but I have a full time commitment with my family, so I'll enjoy his journey vicariously through his journal.