flog

http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qmeanelisha.html

And last but not least, always recast the trivial struggles of your daily life as a pitched confrontation between God and Satan (with you on the side of the most holy god, of course). It makes it much easier to justify your evil actions.

Oh, I guess it never hurts to also imagine yourself as a member of a minority beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyrrany of evil men.

my laughs migrated out into the air.

straight outta menswear

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/mine/project.html
Haha, mutations drive the evolution of creationist lies.

Another aspect of this practice is that these "quotes" are widely passed

around and used repeatedly by creationists, while neither bothering to 

check the original source nor giving any indication that they are taken

from secondary sources. This is shown by the fact (as can be seen in a 

number of these cases) that there are errors that can and have crept into

these quotes or their citations which are then propagated by other

creationists when they are copied without attribution. (Ironically, this

is the same type of "copying error", i.e. mutation, that can be used to

trace phylogenetic histories of populations.)

  

Well, my WVO experiment turned out to be something of a life saver. I'm currently on a fool's errand of trying to calibrate each tickmark on the Rabbit's fuel gauge to a particular number of gallons of fuel burned (the method is fairly messy, but I tally the number of miles on the trip odo for each tickmark and then after fill-up extrapolate the number of gallons a particular tickmark/mile mark stands for by dividing by the average MPG for that tank - I only have 1 dataset at the moment, but after about 5 fill-ups I'm going to do some statistical magic to make my assumptions legit).

Anyway, when I left work on Friday, I was on tickmark 14 (that is 2 marks from the bottom of the gauge). I had hit 560 miles on the trip odo when the fuel gauge hit tickmark 16 and was at 566 miles by the time I got to work in the morning. The owner's manual says that I have a 1.2 gallon reserve. So, I figured I either have about a gallon of diesel left (more than enough to get home) or practically none left (in which case I'm fucked after I leave Darnestown, MD) depending on where VW decided to measure the "reserve" from. I needed to get 45 additional miles out of this tank of fuel to get home to the fueling station in town.

I only got 28. I noticed that I was losing power going up a hill just before Dickerson, so I downshifted into 3rd, but still no power. Fortunately, there is a pull off area at the top of the hill, so I put on my hazards, pushed in the clutch and coasted to the gravel. The car stalled shortly before I came to a stop. My geekish ways saved me from the predicament that my geekish ways got me into, though. I dumped the 2.25L of WVO+PowerService into the tank and after cranking about 3 times to purge the air from the system, the Rabbit started right up. I was hoping not to run the Rabbit on the mixture straight, but rather to dilute it with about 10 gallons of diesel, but what was I going to do?

It's worth noting that WVO exhaust smells almost exactly the same as biodiesel exhaust, which I didn't expect for some reason. A lot of people claim that the smell is reminiscent of french fries, but I've never seen it. The smell is distinctive, though. I was able to go the additional 13 miles to get home on the WVO and then fill up with 10.8 gallons of diesel. Including the WVO, I went 605.3 miles on 11.3 gallons of fuel (53 MPG).

Ha, you gotta love SMTP humour. And, believe it or not, there's even a CafePress storefront where you can get all your EHLO crap.

The EHLO verb and SMTP extensions.

20 days until the 9 year anniversary of my first Usenet post. I think gopher was still kicking back then, but the http revolution had already stomped on and burst gopher's nads by that point. Anyway, I fancied myself a bit of an intellectual back then.

  From: Beowulf's Full Legal Name 

  Subject: Quantum Mechanics and Epistemology

  Date: 1996/08/27

  Message-ID: <32239842.5E29@erinet.com>#1/1

  X-Deja-AN: 176849954

  content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

  organization: EriNet Online 513 436-1700 (Voice)

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  newsgroups: sci.physics

  x-mailer: Mozilla 2.02E-KIT  (Win16; U)



  Having recently read an introductory book on the history and some of the

  theory of Quantum Mechanics, I couldn't escape the conclusion that QM has 

  serious epistemological implications if taken seriously.  Can someone 

  post any books, papers, or home pages that discuss this topic, the 

  epistemological considerations of QM, in detail.

  -- 

  -=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=--=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-

   - What are we going to do?  It's all been said.  No new ideas -

   - in the house, and every book has been read.  U2, Acrobat -

   -   http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/1517/luddite.html     -

  -=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=--=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-=*=-

I had a brainstorm this evening when Shannon was perplexed about what to do with the left over vegetable oil from making dinner. I had about a liter of PowerService Diesel Fuel Supplement sitting in the garage that I haven't used in a couple of months (I prefer to use the PowerService DieselKleen in the Jetta).

What are the problems with running WVO in a diesel? Removing the water that gets in it when the fry cooks clean the grills, filtering out the particulate matter (i.e., dead bugs, left over fries, boogers), and keeping the fuel viscous. The first didn't apply with my home WVO because I hadn't mixed it with water at all. My oil wasn't all that dirty so filtering through a few coffee filters ought to do the trick enough for my fuel filter to do the rest. Number three was the intriguing one. PS Diesel Fuel Supplement is intended as a winter additive to prevent gelling and contains a nominal cetane boost.

So, the question is, will the anti-gel properties of the PowerService additive keep the oil viscous? And will I kill the Rabbit by putting in the 2.25L mixture of 50%/50% PS and WVO? I suspect I won't and I can pretend that I live in an ecovillage. I love getting work out of trash.

I re-signed up for sigamp. I don't know why.

You've been burned by my
lighter. And my lighter is
held down by my thumb.

My buddy told me about an episode of "30 Days" he thought I'd enjoy since it featured VW diesels for a portion of it. I'm not generally at all interested in reality TV. I prefer the fake reality that I immerse myself in to escape from the reality of being a responsible adult human person to be fake, but if it's about VW diesels, how bad can it be.

Anyway, two grossly wasteful New Yorkers spend 30 days living in a little eco-village trying to see how the other half (well, really it's about 0.1%) lives.

Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage is an experiment in wasting not, wanting not, and recycling your own shit. From what I could see from the show, it looks to be a really cool project where the 30 or so people there seek to live completely off the grid in as sustainable a manner as possible. They're all vegetarians because domestic cultivation of meat is "inefficient" (just accept it, ok, no explanation is needed nor given). They drive all diesel vehicles running on biodiesel (during the run of the show, they converted their 98 VW Jetta TDI to run on waste fryer grease (WVO). They shit into a bucket, cover it in sawdust and then use it for fertilizer. They buildings they live in are all left over structures from when the farm they live on was in use and they are insulated with mud and straw. The only electricity is that which can be gotten from solar panels. Overall, it is quite intriguing and there are some clever ways that waste is recycled to a useful purpose.

The Dancing Rabbit denizens intend the ecovillage to be the proverbial light on the hill, showing how sustainable living is possible. The irony is that the low-tech/no-tech lifestyle practiced at the ecovillage, while sustainable is not scalable. Can you imagine trying to compost all of NYC's shit into humanure? Let alone trying to eek out enough lettuce and carrots to feed all those millions of people. DR style living in a concentrated urban center is a sure recipe for anarchy. A number of the admirably clever efficiencies the DRs make use of are necessary strategies for overcoming the overwhelming inefficiencies in other areas of their lifestyle.

But, there is yet another irony. Because the failure of the Dancing Rabbit lifestyle only serves to re-iterates it's primary point. Modern Western society isn't sustainable, due in part to inefficiency but also due to the sheer numbers of humans there are. We've been breeding like fucking rabbits and we've reached a point where we require technology to not only sustain ourselves for the moment, but eventually to bail ourselves out of the mess we're in. Being an alarmist and catastrophist, I prefer to think of the day when disease or war undercuts the foundations of technological society and reduces our numbers back to a level manageble by DR style living. Those shiny, happy people who prefer to find solutions to problems will point out that it's just as likely that we will find new, efficient sources of energy and new technologies (mechanical, computational, and agricultural) to make more efficient use of that energy. Either way, I commend the Dancing Rabbit eco-villagers not just for their choice of automobile, but for actually having the balls to do something about something they believe in strongly.