Author Archives: DMZ

Car versus Bus carbon emissions

I came across something online that claimed that diesel buses emit 200x the pollution of a normal passenger car. I looked into this, read some studies, and it’s not true.

The average vehicle on the road emits ~1# of CO2/mile (it’s higher for light trucks, lower for cars, but it works out quite well). I looked up some testing data, and a late-90s diesel bus on low-sulfur fuel (no trap, none of the new cool technology) puts out ~6.4# CO2/mile.

So an older diesel bus = about six cars, CO2-wise.

Caveats:
– There’s a lot of variance in how much pollution an individual bus generates
– This doesn’t account for the relative harm of the pollution generated by the different vehicles, and there’s a case to be made that the buses should account for non-CO2 products

But as a range… there’s just no way it’s 1-to-200.

Top Twenty-Five Non-English films

I was reading this fine Jim Emerson post on Scanners about Edward Copeland’s cool project to vote on the best non-English films (post, the 122 nominees who made it, link to the final ballot)

So, in the spirit of things, I worked up a list, but it went way over. When I cut it down to one film per director, I had twenty, and that seemed a reasonable list. (I cut a bunch of other Woo/Kieslowski/Miyazaki films). My tastes run to the enjoyable craziness of a Kung Fu Hustle over the Seventh Sign, which is clearly a sign that I’m a dork.

In rough order of awesomeness:

Red, Kieslowski
Seven Samurai, Kurosawa
Kiki’s Delivery Service, Miyazaki
Drunken Master 2, Chia-Liang Liu
The Killer, Woo
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee
Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo
Run Lola Run, Tykwer
La Femme Nikita, Besson
Fucking Amal (or “Show Me Love”), Moodysson
Kung Fu Hustle, Chow
Das Boot, Petersen
Man on the Train, Laconte
Running Out of Time, Zahn
Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang
Metropolis, Lang
The 400 Blows, Truffaut
Intacto, Fresnadillo
Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein
Battle Royale, Fukasaki

Yes, Battle Royale’s on there.

(Red is, btw, the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life.)

Summits of Bothell ride

Joel and I went out and did the Summits of Bothell ride today – it’s about 38 miles… and 3800′ of climbing. That’s not a typo. The ride’s great: they do a good job with support and everything, the food stops were really well stocked, the people were great, and the route, though it had some bumps I’m not sure any route could have avoided them: Bothell’s under crazy construction, the roads are torn up all over the place. Joel described it as “Chilly Hilly without the crowds” which is an apt description.

If you’re into climbing-heavy rides, I totally recommend it. Low, low gearing recommended though. I’ve got a triple up front, but my gearing in back is really narrow, and I was pretty screwed once the grade got too steep.

Random notes:
It rained for the first hour. Riding in the rain sucks. Riding up steep hills in the rain sucks more, because if you lose traction, you’re screwed. Descending hills is no fun, either, because your brakes don’t work and if you lose traction, you’re roadkill. When that lifted, the ride got much more enjoyable.

Enjoyable, on any climbing-heavy ride, is relative.

I have climbing power in short bursts: when I can get up out of the saddle and tear into a hill, if it’s short enough I rock out. These weren’t those kind of short hills. I’m in pretty reasonable biking shape, and I still got my ass kicked.

There were two hills in particular: the second one was so steep (and my chain derailed three times at the bottom, forcing me to abandon my three lowest gears)(that really hurt) that I felt like I was going to throw up on myself and then pass out for a good stretch. Then there was another that, had there not been a side street where I could pull off and circle for a couple minutes recovering, I think I wouldn’t have made it up.

We finished and I felt great, loaded up the bikes, drove home, and I almost fell over trying to get out of the car: in the ~20m car ride, my legs got together, decided that they were no longer needed for propulsion, and shut down in protest. I could barely wobble around the house ten minutes later.

Copy protection: training users to not buy or pirate games

I buy my PC/console/etc games, largely because I know that as the world’s constructed, the people who produce games I want to play need money now, in the same way I know that if I don’t buy some band’s album, or go to their concerts — yeah. I feel good that I have my NOLF boxes kicking around, and Full Throttle, and whatever.

The problem with this is that it totally sucks, especially on the PC. You get stuck with Star Force or whatever installed, and when I run a game I bought, sometimes they scan my system and complain about other programs… it’s a hassle, and it makes me not want to buy them.

I pre-ordered Bioshock, for example, and it asked for the serial number. and it kept rejecting my serial number. I had to go through and figure out which ambiguously printed letter/number was which. What kind of total crap is that, when they can’t forsake 0/O I/1 or at least print them so that they’re easy to differentiate?

Plus, it includes SecureRom, which means it fucks up my machine generally. AWESOME. THANKS.

Meanwhile, there’s a ton of pirated versions already out there. So the choice I’m presented with each time I consider buying a PC game, really, is:
– Buy, have to install malware with the game, figure out what software I have on my computer doesn’t work with that species of malware, probably tweak my anti-virus/firewall software, get treated like a criminal, or
– Be a criminal and pirate it

Really? That’s the choice you want me to be making? Seriously, they’re training legitimate buyers to go online, find the cracks, and use them on software they bought. Did they think that through? That all the people who go through that will make the same decision next time, instead of thinking “As long as I’m downloading the pirated version anyway, maybe I should get it first…”

Crazy. It’s just crazy. The game’s pretty sweet, if you’re curious, though it’s super important to get a high frame rate and update to the beta drivers if you’ve got an nVidia card: it’s way, way too hard to play otherwise, to the point where it’s not even fun.

“I love your little monkey.”

“If I may offer you some advice, Anshinnal,” he said, “taunting the crow is a really poor idea.”

My last story at Clarion West, I wrote a fantasy story about an assassin with painfully heightened senses forced to fight in daylight out of desperation. I spent a ton of time on the world and the dynamics, the sweeping conflict he’s caught up in, the economics of a slavery economy, and most of that ended up torn out to make deadline and focus on the story at the heart of it.

It’s been two weeks, and I still don’t know what to do with it. Putting the larger world in means I’d be running at novelette size immediately, while trimming it down seems like an even more painful cut.

Top Four Bands of All Time

As Rated by Space Taken After Ripping from My CD Library*
—
1. Sonic Youth (906 MB)
2. Mogwai (800 MB)
3. They Might Be Giants (591 MB)
4. Modest Mouse (554 MB)

It’s interesting to think about — I think much of the ranking is how well they compress. I am, as you might guess, extremely particular about how I rip my CDs. It’s all high-bitrate-ceiling VBR, and it looks like Sonic Youth/Mogwai are chock-full of information that requires a lot of information to convey, as well as having long songs.

iPhone collaborators

(spurred by seeing these things all over the place in San Jose)

I don’t understand why Apple made the iPhone deal with AT&T, since AT&T is – and I’m just going to say this the company rightly most notorious for giving the worst people in the federal government an extra-legal spinal tap into our communications systems as part of project so massively unconstitutional and, almost certainly, abused, that lawsuits by the ACLU and EFF can’t even penetrate the protective layers of paranoia that protect it from disclosure.

I don’t understand how good people, especially good techies who are aware of the EFF’s existence and know the massive implications of this whole thing, would let this happen — that the massed distaste of Apple’s employees wouldn’t have managed to derail it. I’ve worked at places where managerial “let’s spam people!” projects are ruthlessly undermined by people with integrity, and I thought more of individual action.

Maybe they were afraid. It’s a statement on our times that that could even be a valid explanation… but there it is.

Which brings me to the other thing: the success of the iPhone is a massive error of forgiveness:
If you utterly screw us over, we as techies will forgive you if the object swung before us is shiny enough.

Just pondering this makes my stomach do flips, and I start to feel like I want to throw up.

I’m a nerd that spent years in cellular, and I love what Apple’s doing. I’m fascinated seeing someone finally put together a phone interface that doesn’t suck, that melds different functionality in a way that at last makes sense. But I won’t buy an iPhone.

AT&T won’t see another dollar in my life unless it’s drawn involuntarily from me. But I’m obviously not in good company. How many people have contributed to EFF and bought an iPhone? How can the early adopters, the people how are most eager to see the future, see the beauty in the gadget and not the ugliness inherent in their purchase? How can people camp out, looking forward to a product that won’t happen, and not see what happens when privacy comes at only at the discretion of the least ethical credentialed federal agent? How can you spend money to be guaranteed that your every communication through that device is being monitored?

I don’t understand.

Search and Replace

I was looking through wedding toasts online as I continue to stress about my weekend, and I found this one . It cracked me up for an entirely different reason than the rest (they’re generally laughably bad): in going through and changing all the instances of the bride’s name to “Jill” — but without looking twice at it, so it’s within words, and if you’re paying attention

extreJaney

is obviously “extremely” so going in reverse, the bride’s name is Mel. There’s only one instance of the reverse, though (“All I can say is full Jims to Jane for never complaining once…”) but I can’t think of what name would be pluralized as applause.

Still — folks, search and replace can sometimes give away as it obscures. Be careful out there.

My Clarion Five

I wrote five new stories at Clarion West. In order, they are:
Nature and Applicability of Incompleteness in Marketing and Domestic Contexts. Wooo!
Earth in the Future is Earth in the Past. I like this a lot, but it needs some quality rework.
Single Incident Study of Modern Training Programs Competing Against Genetic Doping in High School Athletics (aka “King”). Here’s Clarion for you: it’s hard to me to believe I wrote this, I like it so much.
Making a Killing. Near-future heist setup. Nice concept, needs connective tissue. Could be expanded into a book.
Marks. My try at fantasy. I don’t know what to think about it still.

And I rewrote Archipelago almost entirely in week one: the Word diff shows ~80% new, which doesn’t mean I at least rewrote the sentences and scenes as I went.