The USS Quad Damage

Since I moved a few weeks ago I’ve been without internet access. Partly because we don’t have unwired but mostly because the new estate we’re living in has that stupid fiber optic and copper hybrid telephone system.

On the plus side we have a brand new awesome house with a room just for the pool table which you totally have to check out sometime in the future.

I’m 175cm tall, and weigh roughly 80kg. My BMI is slightly on the overweight side. My “rest” heart rate is close to 90bpm. It may be a bit less, since I measured this when I got home from work, but I wasn’t doing anything strenuous when I measured it. This is on the high end of normal, contrasted with a triathlete friend of mine whose rest heart rate is close to 30bpm.

I went out for a short walk around the area. There are many roads around where I live which have a pretty steep gradient, between 25 and 30 degrees. When walking up these hills my heart rate can jump to around 190bpm. I think I need to have my heart at around 160 – 170 bpm for effective exercise. The main thing here is that 160bpm is eminently maintainable, and actually pretty easy, exercise wise.

Jogging is almost out of the question in this area, since the ground is bumpy, and the region is very hilly. Even if you could keep from tripping over in the middle of the night while walking, I don’t think it’d be easy to run up the hills. Then again, one of my housemates does it, so it must be possible.

I’d like to attempt to run around an oval again. A while ago when me and my brother were trying to make a habit of it, I could jog 3 laps. I should start again. Hopefully I’ll get to a point where I can jog 30. Tennis is also something that’s been missing from my recent life. I feel I need my brain to be active or else my body won’t follow, and there are few sports which are interesting enough. I was having a good time with tennis.

I’m concerned about my heart. Like my Civic, the engine that drives me is high revving, but unlike the Civic, I don’t hold out hopes for it running for long unless I do something. Hopefully with a bit of self control regarding diet (something that’s quite hard when you go home to a mum who wants to spoil you) I may be able to get to a place where I’m feeling healthy.

Rihanna is subtitled with “good girl, gone bad”. Why is that supposed to be appealing? You wouldn’t do it with food: “Good cheese… gone bad!”. You wouldn’t really do it with anything. Why the hell is that sort of shit fly with women? Since when is “bad” “good”? Rhianna – like listening to music… but somehow ending up with Herpes…

Conclusion: Bad girls are bad. End of story.

With climate change at the fore of many people’s mind’s, and cars being one of the biggest contributing factors to climate change in an average family, diesel is now being touted as one of the more fuel-efficient choices one can make. Diesel engines can take about 20% less fuel than a comparable petrol engine, and are increasingly being found in smaller cars. Added to much smarter engine designs, diesels are gaining popularity. However, two things concern me about diesel powered vehicles, and both of those concerns are tied to what comes out of the arse-end of the car.

As Trevardy put it, even with the new engines, diesel cars will often still leave a plume of black smoke when taking off at the lights. This got me thinking, for the 20% less fuel you use, do you actually put out 20% less greenhouse gases? If you look at the european emission standards, we can see that diesel cars indeed have different standards to petrol cars, and in some cases the levels for diesel engines is greater than that for petrol engines.

However, we can see that if we simply take a sum of both greenhouse gases (Carbon Monoxide + the Nitrous Oxides) we get more of them in petrol cars (around 20% more, interestingly enough. Petrol, I guess, predominantly emits CO and Diesel the NOxes). So, if CO is as bad as, or worse than the equivalent weight of NOx, Diesel cars on Euro IV emission standards are actually better than the equivalent Petrol cars. However, if the NOxes are about 1 and a quarter times worse than CO, then the petrol cars are about even (or better than) an equivalent Euro IV Diesel. I guess it’s probably a wash from my analysis, just make sure whichever car you get is Euro IV compliant.

Secondly, in a recent episode of catalyst exploring micro particles that a school in the inner city is exposed to, the conclusion ran along the lines of “the levels for micro particles are below what the maximum recommended levels are, with the exception of spikes when a truck drove by.” That is to say, the exhaust fumes for a (large, truck-based) diesel engine generated far more micro particles (which cause many serious health issues) than the predominantly petrol engines on our roads.

Note that the Euro IV standards mention particle matter, which is the micro particles I’m talking about here. I would say that petrol probably doesn’t emit much PM, since there’s no amount written under Euro IV, however, under the proposed Euro V standards, it shows petrol as having a maximum amount of PM. Whether that’s for consistency with Diesel or whether petrol does actually put some PM out there, I’m unsure. Having said that, I’m fairly certain that Petrol engines must not put very much particle matter into the air, and that limiting the amount of PM for diesel implies that the designers of diesel engines need to be careful about PM. However, I guess 0.025 g / km is reasonable.

In conclusion, when getting a new car, make sure it meets Euro IV emission standards. Taking less fuel doesn’t really mean much otherwise.

A fairly popular area of the site is where our icons lie. People tend to click those icons fairly regularly to find out more about us.

I haven’t written anything useful or interesting in there. Please edit your pages (in the admin section of the site, click “pages” and then write stuff in there) to give whatever information about yourselves that you want. I’ll try and improve mine in the near future.

I don’t know whether this happens to many people, but it’s happening to me. Every converation I’m having seems like one I’ve had already. It moves in predictable ways, and many times I don’t really feel bothered to complete my sentences, or even the conversation. It must feel like I trail off or something.

I learnt something about wisdom, though. Knowledge is like knowing something is going to hurt. Wisdom is having felt the pain. I can tell someone that it hurts, but I can’t tell them how. There are no words. More and more of my life is driven towards wordless ideas. It’s like I’ve maxed out my knowledge and I’m heading towards wisdom.

And I find it in the strangest places, and in the most beautiful and terrible ways…

Seems Gyms are just like software vendors, especially MMORPG’s.

See 10 things your gym won’t tell you

Take for instance these.

4. “Our trainers don’t know what they’re doing.”

Kinda like how GM’s and other representatives of the company don’t know anything or how to help you.

5. “We won’t let you quit.”

They let you quit but you lose everything you’ve worked for in an MMORPG. Gym’s being unable to remove your newly aquired fitness, fat loss and muscles apparently just keep on charging your credit card.

6. “Be sure to read the fine print on our contract.”

Just like an EULA :(

9. “If your wallet gets lifted, it’s not our problem.”

If someone breaks into your acccount and steals all your stuff Blizzard don’t give you back all your stuff. They give you back some but not all. I mean really who’s it hurting and they’d have everything logged so they know what you lost.

10. “Go ahead and sue; you’ll never win.”

More EULA type crap limiting liability to nothing.

Sadly I wasn’t aware of the situation regarding gyms when I posted my parody of MMORPGs as gyms.

There’s such an abundance of people who have absolutely no scientific knowledge what so ever on facebook. So it’s so freaken easy to pwn them.

For instance one person thought that Quantum Physics proved The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know!? both movies about how Quantum Physics can be used in conjunction with your own thoughts to get what you want.

I mean really. WTF?!

There’s also the always fun Christians.

Like this guy on the Jesus thread in the Australia network who I can only assume thinks that the Miller-Urey experiment only worked because there was some life associated with the experiment even those the experiment was done in an isolated and sterile environment. Thus meaning life acts as a catalyst around water vapor, electricity and gasses similar to the composition on an early earth. Even if said life has no contact while said gasses are forming organic compounds.

I assume that means that life radiates some sort of aura/radiation which probarbly means it can be detected and tested.

It’s kinda sad really that we exist in a modern western society and there’s people whom don’t understand how science works.

Kuro5hin is a pretty good website, even though despite the quality of writing the content is pretty low-brow. It’s like all the seedy types from Craigslist and Something Awful congregated to start a community blog. However, it tends to give (sometimes) useful insights into a world I’m unfamiliar with. A lot of the time I regret reading these articles, thinking things like “I really didn’t need to know about 80 year old pick-up artists. I think I’m going to be sick on so many levels”.

Recently I read an article about Miss Teen USA on Kuro5hin, specifically Miss Teen South Carolina, who when asked a relatively simple question turned into a malfunctioning ELIZA bot. The arguement goes a little something like this:

• What happened is completely natural,
• Just like when Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield ear and everyone flipped out, because
• Boxers are violent, and behind the veneer of propriety they’re really just brawlers.
• Beautiful women are stupid, because behind the veneer of propriety the competition is really about “hot chicks”.

This makes me angry for two reasons. First, I used to do a martial art (which Nathan still does, I think), and I never thought it was about hurting others. In fact, the atmosphere was always positive, and about taking care of each other, and trying to improve ourselves physically and mentally. Despite the fact that during sparring, sometimes we got physical, the intention wasn’t to injure, but to play. I’d compare it more to a sport than violent activity.

So if Rugby and Chess are about being bloodthirsty, then sure, so is boxing. After all, things get heated in Rugby as well, and fights break out, but they’re clearly outside the rules. Chess too, is about killing, but ultimately, the game is still a game, just like Rugby, just like boxing.

The second reason is the assumption that just because someone is beautiful, they’re stupid. More specifically, just because someone’s physically attractive, they must be stupid. This isn’t like D&D where you get a certain number of stats and overall everyone’s the same. Some people are attractive and intelligent. Shocking, maybe, but true. At the very least, there’s no way to prove that the physically attractive are stupid, and I don’t think there’s any strong supporting evidence either.

The “game” of “Miss Teen USA” tries to optimise on both intelligence and phyisical attractiveness (it may do so badly, but then rules-wise soccer is a complete waste of time as well). I don’t think Miss Teen SC won that competition, even though she may have done everything else right. I’m also pretty sure there’s plenty very intelligent, physically attractive women in South Carolina who merely didn’t enter Miss Teen SC, so this noob won out. We should be outraged (at least, laughing), just like when Tyson bit of Holyfield’s ear.

As Sunny has said in a comment a while back my name is the most popular search result which directs people to this site. It’s kinda weird and cool at the same time.

I was looking at my flickr account and took notice at the most viewed images on my account. It seems for some reason the most popular image on my account is a picture of houses out of my bedroom window.

And because I still can I took another picture today at the same angle, zoom, etc,...

As a side note both pictures are only reduced in size. There is no cropping or anything else. I may however take another one tomorrow morning so the lighting is similar.

It’s also kinda sad that I took my most popular/viewed picture within 48 hours of buying my camera. Not only that but it only took a single attempt.

For an encore I’ve decided that I’m going to spend 20 minutes writing something about m-theory. No wait a self “help” book and send it to Oprah. I’ll be Rich!