Right as I got to Samira to meet lyceum, I got a mystery call. Turned out to be from some Comcast employee (exec?) in Pennsylvania, who'd seen my earlier LJ complaint, and was calling to see if he could help. That's kind of neat. Not as neat as an actually smooth changeover system, but still.

Samira buffet: still tasty. Best parts for me are the chicken -- especially fatty skin bits that have fallen off bigger pieces -- and the cucumberish salad. For the first time, I saw smaller chuncks of chicken in with the fried pieces, yellow mild curry things.

Real sunken continents! Zealandia and Kerguelen.

Administration claims immunity to the 4th Amendment. Can I start talking about traitors yet?

Pharyngula coins an acronym: SIWOTI syndrome.

Article on the farm bill and a (foo) Dakota family that avoided the temptation of subsidized corn.

There may be a bottleneck in building top quality nuclear reactors. Unlike a_steep_hill, I don't see that as a good thing.

Me on how I'd be happier if a lot of "science fiction" was called something else. Or if I thought of space opera as its own genre, not a flawed subgenre of science fiction.

59% of US doctors favor national health insurance.

I could do better, but something I wrote about why I like the Exalted setting.

A one-way mirrored public toilet

Ancient Mideast water delivery and storage and air conditioning tech.

There's an awesome picture of where our energy comes from and goes, here:
http://trinifar.wordpress.com/2007/07/23/high-carbon-economy/
Also has another picture, with numbers (though not indication of non-fuel uses of oil, as the first one does.) It's shocking how much is lost as waste. It looks like we could more than double our available energy -- especially in transportation -- through conservation!

Of course, physics may get in the way; I assume a lot of that waste is dictated by the thermodynamics of Carnot heat engines. Oil could be used more efficiently in central plants, perhaps, but transporting the electricity isn't lossless... though it looks better than burning in cars.

And what, New Yorkers were said to use one-third of the American average per capita?