Re: Comment

First off, thanks so much for the comments. Now to address two of them:

"P.S. We all know you flout copyright law on a regular basis so don't go telling us about the virtues of following laws cause they're laws."

There are two distinctions to be made here. The first I already said in my post. "If the U.S.A is a legitimate government" now the longest standing idea behind out government, found in its officially endorsed and distributed textbooks, is as a "governing body, for the purpose of undertaking economic endeavors too great for individual companies (phones lines, roads) and the general protection of all." Now making roads, and making rules for the protection of its citizens on those roads is clearly within that definition. Driving laws, therefore, are acts of a legitimate government over its constituents. real ground level good old laws. Copyright law just isnt. Copyright laws may be legitimate. I'm not sure. I'm not really sure. In any case, as you said, my flaunting of copyright law is just that, flaunting, I spend a lot more time actually talking about it and trying to change it than I do abusing it. (i have watched three movies in six months.) It's my own little form of civil disobedience and I hope to affect a change. If you think you can show that driving above the speedlimit is safer and we would all be alot better off for doing it by all means, go for it, convince the people and it will happen. that brings me to the second distinction. there are some laws that have inherent corruption in them. not to say all of these laws are corrupt, just that there is a place for somebody to benefit from them unrightfuly. speed limits are not these laws. nobody anywhere benefits by making you drive slower. the speed limit was set after a careful examination of how it would affect human life (ok, fuel efficiency comes into the question but the people making the laws do not benefit from that) Driving faster kills people. thats the basis for a very legitimate law.

"getting there on time is not a smaller convenience! It is the only purpose of driving! Otherwise I'd walk, cheaper and healthier."

Getting places on time is obviously not an argument for breaking the law. If you leave on time you can get anywhere on time while following the speed limit. if the other case worked you could just as easily argue that stealing money is legitimate if you need it to buy food. working is the responsible way to get money. managing your time is the responsible way to be punctual.

And i suppose it is true that stealing is an acceptable way to get food (a necessity) when no other option is available and you steal from somebody who will suffer no abject harm from it (aka, has more than enough food) although it would still be better not to steal food. on the other hand the only case i can think of where necessity is a motivation for speeding is when life is on the line. by all means, if you have a woman with birth complications or a person bleeding to death speed away. other than that, i think the argument is false.

" you've got way too much time on your hands...."

The funny thing is that I don't. I wrote that blog last night (well this morning) at about 3:30AM. I just find it easier to just write these things down and then be able to sleep. Really i think i just think about useless things too much.

Look to the right

I added links to friends blogs. which is fairly limited right now.... because i dont read much online.

IRON MAN!

Ive been saying that this would be awesome since the first preview came out almost a year ago. But ironman is out and its the best reviewed movie of the year.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/iron_man/news/1725305/
Nick saw it last night and said that the audience was applauding in the middle of the movie.

Followup to Random thought #1

Wayne Gerdes can get 180.91 mpg out of an insight.

Yes, I’m shamelessly using this mans hobby to vindicate my relentless endorsement of FOLLOWING THE DRIVING LAWS. Because, I suspect that the fact that I have pointing out to people that breaking the driving laws (For example: exceeding the legal speedlimit) is

• illegal. And, if the USA is a legitimate government, immoral
  
  
• endangers human life

has had absolutely no effect. On the other hand, I suspect that if I can convince people, even just hint to their subconscious, that they might save money, then they will change their driving habits.

For those of you who don’t get a chance to read that article here are the highlights.

The author of the article gets DOUBLE the standard MPG on almost any car.

Here are a few thoughts from me, either found in this article or others, on how to save gas:

1.) Drive slow (the author of the article never exceeds 50mph but just following the speedlimit would help a lot (not to mention its safer, and LEGAL). The faster you go (and especially the faster you accelerate) the less efficient your engine gets with its gas. Also, when you go faster you waste more fuel slowing down for curves and other cars.

2.) Don’t leave junk in your car. one heavy item in your car over the course of a month (say a case of water that you don’t need, or a 50 pound bag of dog food you just haven’t taken out yet...) can add up to a lot of extra gas. (Weight*amount driven=gas loss) Try to minimize the weight, if you cant, try to minimize the amount of driving you do with it.

3.) Don’t try and rush a light, just time yourself. Stopping kills mileage. If the light is red try slowing down as early as you can and as little as you can so that you don’t have to stop before it turns green again. The article cites a study that found quick acceleration and fast breaking on average only cuts drive time by 4%, that is really not worth it considering how much fuel you shoot out the back of your car uncombusted when you slam on the gas.

4.) Sadly, air-conditioning and driving with your windows down both guzzle gas. Either one is about the same. Air-conditioning pulls power off the drive-train of your car, sort of like having extra weight. but driving with the windows down isn’t any better, it turns the nice millimeter honed areo dynamic exterior of your car into a big hole-filled drag fest, end result is that it costs you gas either way.

5.) Treat your car nice. Late oil changes, underinflated tires and poor engine maintenance hurt mileage.

6.) Lastly, Hating that big truck driver in front of you is just plain silly. big trucks like that make a positively huge rift in the air, basically you can "draft" (ride in the slipstream behind them) from a much longer way back than normal cars. Which is very good news, because tailgating is a flagrant disregard for human life. In any case, driving behind a big truck lessens the amount of work your car has to do, saving you gas mileage.

*Edit*
7.) Acceleration takes the greatest amount of gas, so if you can park downhill you can save noticeable amounts of money just by letting gravity take its course. Also, think about this, if accelerating burns the most fuel, and backing out of a parking space involves accelerating, breaking, accelerating, breaking, accelerating breaking ect... parking so that you can just pull forward could really add up over the course of a month or two. Think of it this way. If you can park so that you can get in the car and roll down hill when you want to leave every day (at work for example) and you manage to do this five days a week, saving maybe 5 cents a day (1.25% of a gallon of gas.) over the course of a year you would have just "earned" 13$. the people who really save are the ones who find dozens of things they can do each day like this imagine having $150 a year more money for driving just a little differently.

Random Thoughts

My mind, as my blog might indicate, usually doesn't run in what would be considered a strait line. This usually manifests itself in the completely unrelated nature of most my posts. Tonight, its going to come out in the unrelated nature of these five bullet points.

• This guy is crazy: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/king_of_the_hypermilers.html

• People spend way to much time celebrating Christmas (don't get me wrong, Most of my fondest memories of family and friends involve the times around Christmas, i mean as a religious holiday) Not that Christ's birth is insignificant but we boil it down to nice comfortable societal symbols of worldly good.... quaint little towns, young spouses working hard through there early years, laughing babies. These may be iconic, they even have their own special "good" attached to them, but we missed the part about the incarnation. if were too busy thinking about Christs arrival in terms of human things, parents, birth, ect... what happened to the absolutely amazing unhumanly human nature of the incarnation? God becomes man... and we focus on where he was born.

• Replies on my blog are always appreciated (emails are too, but its nice when you can post something on here)

• There is a critical flaw in our concept of "protecting" our laptops. We throw them into a nice big cooshy bag. While this does a decent job of protecting them from scratches and especially those little jostles that walking always entails, it does another very undesirable thing. It insulates them. Heat is probably your batteries worst nightmare. Li-Ion batteries especially (and there is a 99% certainty that this is the kind you've got.) can't stand heat. one high heat minute (aka, use your laptop for an intensive task on battery power, like watching a video, throw it into your bag and zip it into the nice little insulutive bubble.) and your battery life will almost certainly suffer. I want to see designers take this into account, its not hard to incorporate mesh into a laptop case, even padded mesh. If not, at least a warning would be nice, most computer users have no idea how there battery works.
  

• The dignity of running away is proportional to how scary the thing is behind you.

And thats more or less my thoughts for the evening. Valete.