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Linux users unite!

Went to my first meeting of the new Charleston SC Linux Users Group today (join the mailing list if you want to participate and learn more). It was a small group with 8 people at the meeting (3 I know already). On the agenda were a group mission statement, what to do with the website, commercial ideas for raising awareness and a couple of short presentations on Ubuntu Studio and PGP/GPG.
Seems like a good group of people enthusiastic about getting the Linux/FOSS word out to people.

You don’t have to be a total Linux/computer geek to join. Even if you’re just interested in finding out more about FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) feel free to join us at the next meeting!

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Stupidity in the news

There’s stupidity in the news every day, but I usually don’t see it in what little news I read. Yesterday seemed to be a day for me to encounter an unusual amount of it.

Just to show that idiocy in the legal system isn’t the sole purview of the US legal system, there’s this headline from Quebec: Court quashes dad’s grounding of 12-year-old daughter.

A father plans to appeal after a Quebec court ruled that he didn’t have the right to punish his 12-year-old daughter by barring her from a school trip.

And if that’s not enough, Senators approve anti-spanking bill.

Bill S-209, which needs House approval to be made into law, proposes to eliminate Section 43 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which allows parents, teachers and caregivers to use reasonable force to discipline a child and correct their behaviour.

Srsly. W. T. F.

And in my home town of Edmonton, city councillors are, IMO, making some very short sighted decisions about the iconic electric trolley buses that have ferried people through Edmonton’s downtown for decades.

After gliding quietly along Edmonton streets for 70 years, the city’s fleet of trolley buses will be taken off the road for good, city council has decided.

Why are they going away? Because a bean counter somewhere has projected that over the next 18 years, the fleet of electric buses will cost $100M more to maintain than replacing them with diesel or hybrid buses. That’s a little less than $5.6M/year. City Council probably fritters away twice that much on other things. The trolley buses are efficient, quiet and non-polluting (yes, their electricity comes from a fossil-fuel burning power plant, but it’s also generating the power that goes to your house at the same time) compared to diesel hybrids which, while producing less emissions than a regular diesel bus are still nonetheless spitting out pollution.

Where do you suppose gas/diesel prices are going in the next 18 years?

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Gallons/mile

Ran into a Science Daily article about some research done at Duke that suggests specifying fuel efficiency in terms of gallons per mile instead of the usual miles per gallon may help people understand better how fuel economy changes as the numbers change.

the current standard, miles per gallon or mpg, leads consumers to believe that fuel consumption is reduced at an even rate as efficiency improves

most people ranked an improvement from 34 to 50 mpg as saving more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 18 to 28 mpg, even though the latter saves twice as much gas. (Going from 34 to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons; but from 18 to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons).

These mistaken impressions were corrected, however, when participants were presented with fuel efficiency expressed in gallons used per 100 miles rather than mpg. Viewed this way, 18 mpg becomes 5.5 gallons per 100 miles, and 28 mpg is 3.6 gallons per 100 miles

I wonder if the researchers realized that this is how fuel economy has been specified in most of the rest of the world for years (albeit in terms of l/100 km).

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Running stalled

My lunchtime runs have been stalled a bit for the past week mostly because of being busy and working through lunch.

I’m actually finding it not so bad running on the outdoor track of the Wellness center. Sure, it’s hot as hell and I’m dripping in sweat before I even get started, but most of the time there’s a breeze for at least part of the circuit. Even with the heat, the actual running bit has been relatively easy.

The hard part, perhaps not surprisingly, is just getting out to the Wellness center in the first place. Just thinking about stepping out into 30C+ and a bajillion % humidity is enough to sap the life out of you. Finding the motivation to step outside is definitely not easy, but one of those things I just have to force myself to do. Not a lot of shade on the walk over to the Wellness center either, which makes finding the motivation to go doubly hard.