A little standup comedy

Taylor Mali

Green Roofing and Externalities

I had heard a story on the radio while driving to work last week on green roofing,

Green roofs will have a waterproof layer, then a layer of something for the roots to grab onto and which can adsorb moisture. Often Sedium species are planted since they are very drought resistant--don't want to water your roof!

There was a situation in Boston where a large retail outlet had considered the use of a green roof, but decided against it on the grounds that the added expense wasn't worth it. There are a few nice things about a green roof: Heating and cooling expenses are less--especially cooling in the Summer, but the largest benefits are not gained by the property owner. The roof stores and uses rainwater, so this decreases the need for storm runoff capacity. The roofs look better and provide some cooling to the local area, so these things are nice for neighbors.

I am normally fairly libertarian and want the government to do as little as possible, but this is a good example of something local communities would be smart to promote. How they do so is critical: If they just mandate it, then new construction will take place in nearby communities without expensive regulations. If they totally subsidise it, they will quickly go broke. What they need are incentives which are just large enough that much (not all) new construction will use this beneficial technology.

I think it is largely uncontroversial that governments at all levels use their authority to promote things that are socially beneficial and discourage those things which are harmful. This is a more gentle form of power than simply having some things forbidden and others required. Take marriage for example: It is a socially beneficial arrangement--it results (most of the time) in children, and provides a stable arrangement for raising them. That there is a whole legal structure around it,- promotes and encourages couples to participate in it. All well and good.

I think that the above should be the framework considered when looking at expanding the definition of marriage to include types other than one man and one woman arrangements. Quite frankly, arguments which rely on some aspect of "fairness" are simply irrelevant. The question should be; will society reap a net benefit from this change?

The purpose of this post is not to opine on the social benefits or lack thereof involved in changes to our marriage laws, only to frame the profitable areas of debate on the issue.

Piped-in music at Marketbasket

I went shopping for a few grocery items Wednesday and noticed an old song on the PA system.

"Don't Pull Your Love" by Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds

It took me a bit of poking around to find the name of the song and who it was by. I remember hearing it a lot when I went to Whitworth Elementary School in Spokane, WA. Around once/month the whole school would go roller-skating at the near-by rollercade. They would play whatever the current hits were at the time and it was lot's of fun. So, the below song was a big fave of mine when I was in 2nd grade.

I'm not slow because I am old: I am slow because I am fat

The calorie counter from the previous post got me thinking...

I didn't run a lot of 10Km races when I was in High School, but I ran enough that I have a pretty good idea of the pace I would be able to maintain. I also remember what I weighed back then. If I punch in the data: When I was 18 I weighed about 125lbs and could probably do a 10k in a 6:05min/mile pace. This gives a rate of 938 cal/hour. From the previous post I indicate that my 7:11 pace and 150lbs translates to 933 cal/hr.

What this tells me is that my system (lungs, heart, liver, muscles & etc.) is capable of pretty much what it could do 25 years ago. I am slower because it takes more energy to haul-around the extra 25lbs I carry.

As a caveat; Spokane, which is where all of my running was done, is around 2,000 ft above sea level and the Boston area where I am now is less than 100 feet.

As an added note: This is all a moot-point, two ways. 1. It may be physically possible to loose 25 lbs, but I am not sufficiently motivated to do that. 2. My wife would kill me if I tried. She would say, "You are already too thin, I don't want to be married to a man who looks like a teen-aged boy"! etc.

My Carbon "footprint"

According to this calorie counter, I was burning 933 calories/hour in my last race. (150lb and 7:11 min/mile pace)

Table sugar (sucrose--which is a dimer of Glucose and Fructose) is 342.3g/mole and provides 3.94 calories/g. So, using high school chemistry:

(933cal/hr)(1g/3.94cal)(1 mole sucrose/342.3g)(12 carbons/mole sucrose)(44g CO2/mole)(1g/0.00220462262lbs)=0.816 Pounds of Carbon Dioxide per hour!

The race was only about 45 minutes, or 3/4 of an hour; so I generated about 0.6 lbs of Carbon Dioxide in the course of the run.

Note: I use the common form of calorie as applied to food, this is actually Kcal when dealing with chemisty. Also, for those of you in Metricland...0.6 lbs is just over a quarter of a kg.

Sweet Little Meenah...

She is kind of a cannibal.

She dug this up from somewhere, along with the top half of the skull--which I now cannot find--and she has been chewing on it and playing with it. Thing is, I am no zoologist, but it looks like a dog's bones. Not the kind they chew, the kind which provides them with a skeleton.

Update: I found the other half of the skull.

Blog comments curation--a blog

I came up with an idea for a blog today.

This blog (pecchia.blogspot.com) is a tiny little thing which exists to keep friends and family up-to-date with whatever is going on in my life and in my head. But there exist greater blogs, full of wit and learned thought: Ones with millions of visits per year and scores of comments per post.

The comments are often as good or even better than the posts which prompt them. The problem is that in amongst the gems is a lot of crap: Repetitions of arguments already made, off-topic thread jacks, side-jihads and a plethora of distractions. The idea would be to read through it all and then create a blog post which sums-up the ideas presented in the discussion. I think the most direct way would be to describe the flow of ideas as they occurred, but leave out the sniping and side-issues (unless they are interesting or funny). It would be kind of like Television Without Pity, except it would be recaps of blog comment threads instead of TV shows.

The kind of blogs that regularly have great comment threads are: Althouse, Just One Minute, and Megan McArdle. I am sure there are lots of other great ones, but these are the ones I look at.

Maybe one of these days if I really feel like writing but don't really have any idea that I want to share, I will choose a comment thread and try out this idea of mine.

The Internet Tubes are full of interesting corners...

Some time ago, possibly years ago, I came across an odd phenomina.

Amazon sells fresh milk.

Some people find this funny and have turned the customer review section into a hodgepodge of clever essays, poems and satire

Tuscan Whole Milk

Growing Asparagus

I have tried both in Vermont and Massachucetts to grow asparagus. All I have ever gotten are a few spindly spears that become less and less each year.

Today, I went for a walk instead of running and I found asparagus growing on the side of the road! Big fat spears were poking up through gravel and litter in a ditch.

Maybe I should plant some in whatever part of the yard is the most rocky and desolate. Then, follow-up by neither weeding nor watering

Bumper crop to come!

Happy Mother's Day Mom!

So this is why he doesn't wear a flag pin...

The flag pins only have 50 stars and this is clearly not fair and discriminatory to the other 7-10 states that don't get a star.

Getting ideas at the wrong time...

I have all these great ideas for blog posts, but I can't post them. They occur to me right when I wake up in the morning or just before bed. In the morning, I just don't have the time and at night I am too tired.

When I do have time to write, like after work, my mind has been distracted by work-stuff all day and I can't remember the cool stuff I was going to write about. Until just before bed time,-then I am too tired.

Rinse and repeat.

PS. This is not one of the cool subjects I refer to above.

Meenah

What's that sound?

Aha, who cares? The ground is always interesting to sniff at.

Tulips

Red fuzzy ones...

Delicate peach ones...

Dandelions

Just a field of wild dandelions--are there any other kind than wild?

Drink your fill Miss bee. These are about to get mowed.

Home Repairs: Part n of ∞

Yesterday, nicely timed 'till after my wife was done with the truck, the garage door broke.

I didn't get off from work until 8:00 last night so there was little consideration of fixing it then. Today I am off, so today's script writes itself.

The way garage doors work, there are two cables which connect between the bottom corners of the door and springs. The idea is for the spring to counter some of the door's weight. What happened to our door was that one of the cables broke right at the spot where it connects to the bottom of the door. What I needed to do was make a new loop at the end and secure it somehow.

What I did was take a couple of square inches of sheet metal (flashing) and wrap it around the new loop. Then I squished and crimped the metal with pliers. So far it works--time will tell if it is a durable repair.

Dinner Table conversation

Somehow our dinner table conversation got to the idea of which letters are the most used. The participants: Parents and three girls aged 11, 8 and 6.

Okay, we all know that the most commonly used letter is "E", what do you think is the second most common letter?

The girls shot out guesses;

"A", nope!

"S", no...etc.

Finally, Dahlia shot out, "T"? Yes!

Surenna:

"That's Not True"!

Tag mystery solved

So Meenah has had this grayish black stain on her chest for some time. Try as we might, we could not figure out what she was getting into to cause this discoloration of her white chest fur.,

All at once it came to me! Her tags, two of the three at least, are made of aluminum. This metal gives off a blackish oxide, so that is probably the culprit.

Her three tags are: One we got with her name and our phone #. Two, her rabies vaccination tag and three is the dog license. Interestingly, only the town license is made of high quality brass.

My Sunday Run...

Congratulations!

Nithin and Kerry's new baby boy, Rowan.