I didn't end up being needed at the restaurant on Saturday, and I was offered Monday off from the bakery, which I jumped at. So we had Saturday evening, all day Sunday, and all day Monday available. And we did....
Mostly nothing.
And it was wonderful. I finished up Perlstein's After the Storm and started on another collection of Chomsky. Thanks to a quick jaunt to the library, I have Perlstein's Nixonland on deck followed by Pournelle's Exile - and Glory and Niven's Fleet of Worlds that I purchased with a gift card. Debbie has been burning up about three books a day. I figure at the rate we've been going so far in 2008, we will rip through 250+ books by the end of the year. I think that's a record even for us. We also watched several movies: Batman Begins (which we own), Definitely, Maybe, Fools Gold, and I Am Legend (all Amazon UnBox rentals). And I caught up with a week of Internet reading. So not a bad weekend in terms of productivity. Maybe "nothing" isn't really accurate. More like nothing that involved us moving from the couch.
Meanwhile, reality intrudes in the form of another bank failure, and concern grows that the federal agency that insures deposits will run out of cash before this is all over. But, hey! Gas is "only" $3.53.
In other energy news, at least some on the internet are very excited about Nanosolar putting every coal and nuclear power plant out of business. Small problem; as many point out continuously, indirect sun in the morning, evening, and the six months of winter in the higher latitudes doesn't produce much power; there isn't much sun when it's cloudy, and even less at night. While ground-based solar may well become important for peak loads during the daytime (running all the air conditioners in Phoenix at noon, for example), I will predict that ground-based solar will never be a major contributor to base load. Now, roll up a bunch of those panels and shoot them up to geo-stationary orbit....
And people are starting to figure out that burning food is stupid, but burning weeds (or, in this case, algae) may make sense (you will have to scroll down a bit to get to the part about algae). Algae yields very high amounts of vegetable oil per acre, which can be burned in diesel engines.
Well, after I post this and update the Currently Reading and Recently Read lists, it's back to Chomsky.
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2 comments:
Chomsky the linguist or Chomsky the activist?
I guess the answer would be "both." This collection of essays has had one on linguistics and four on Vietnam and Watergate so far. I'm only about one-third into it.
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