Firstly, a new invention on the market that looks like it could be fun if you can afford it. Mclaren electric bike. I ride a bike around Brum and I was playing with my sat nav from my old car and it does "bycycle routes" but the sat nav does not chart the canal systems which I think it should as they are the flattest most convient enjoyable way to get around the city on a bike. Bikes all round are less stressful in the city if you can't stand the speed cameras, parking tickets, high insurance costs and crap flow of traffic keeps you fit too.
I thought the interior design of the passport looked rather like someone had cut up pieces of their own pubic hair and scattered it across the pages of the passport before printing but apparently it is called "threading" and it is one of 14 security features incorporated into the new passport design to make it more difficult to make forgeries (and perhaps less desireable all round). Whatever next...
I like this guy. Creatively love the over the top stupid hip-hip and scenes of animals attacking each other in Africa. Very solid video part. Try to only bring you the best but I am having to rely on my own taste... Crazy Kids. How can you not love skateboarding? I actually can't imagine my life without skateboarding being a part of it and that would probably come as a shock even to people who know me quite well. I fucking loved skating.
Here is Geoff Rowley demonstrating this new P2 board thing they've bought out. It sounds like a good product from what I've seen and it's true.
When you buy a wooden board it is hit and miss. For example I bought a Santa Cruz board off a chinese woman in LA and it was fucking useless with no pop and I picked up a Chad Muska deck one time and it just made you skate so much better because it was so responsive and elastic in the way it kind of bended and had a lot of spring in it.
I think releasing a consistantly better deck might well improve modern day skating so thumbs up. Geoff Rowley is a strange one isn't he. What a hard way to make a living. crazy m**** f****.
I wasn't totally crap at skating. I remember I got a round of applause once or twice.
The secret to skateboarding is that some tricks feel good, they just feel right, like spot on. And those are normally the one's that look good to watch too.
I think there is a quote I would like to reference from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that quote being, "quality is a feeling"
Speak of the devil here is the Japanese showing off.
I think skateboarding would go against the Buddist religion beacause not being violent in Buddist philosophy doesn't just apply to not being violent towards other living things but even inanimate objects like how you put down a tea cup or slam a door so skateboarding would be straight out the window. There is even a train of thought in Buddism that you should avoid violent thoughts because it is unclear to what extent the action of thinking is in fact an action... if you can get your head round that. Ommmm
"The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home- yea, I'm always at Om."
Eden Ahbez was one of a group of poets that used to hang out with James Dean in New York in the early 1950s. I don't know anymore than that, heard it about it on the radio. There's no business like show business like no business I know...
That's really beautiful poetry isn't it? Well I think it is anyway. Just get so much of that stuff off radio 2,3 and 4.... even BBC world wide service too if you can get it. I'm a big fan of the radio.
I just wanted to say how thankful I am that a sat nav for push bikes has been made since this blog and competitors to the "GO CYCLE" electric bike have been made too.
Come to think of it I was in Sainsburys the other day talking to the shop assistant about how I make my own Irish soda bread. She was saying to me it's such a difficult skill to get the hang of she doesn't try it and Sainsburies don't sell it.
Couple of months later Sainsburies are selling Irish soda bread and Irish potato bread. It's nice to have a voice.
This train is amazing. Magnetically levitated train. Some people think that they made the pyrimids using this kind of technology as I remember in the book from Atlantis to the Sphinx. Maybe they thought better of continuing to use the technology? The Maglev Train.
blah, blah, blah....(can't believe I actually read that book)
Anyway, the train certainly was a good idea. Expensive but definately an impressive piece of kit.
I suppose if it ran through a vacuum tube (which is quite feasible/possible) and there are no moving parts you would think it would be quite low maintenance running within a controlled atmosphere, it wouldn't rust, it wouldn't depreciate in value and would be a good long term transportational investment. Presumably able to carry more people than an airplane, more regularly, more quickly using less fuel.
Security would probably be a problem, terrorism and the like unless you tunnelled the thing deep under ground but if you did tunnel the thing deep under ground earthquakes would be a problem. Certainly across the atlantic.
.... there is a GPS system available for bikes made by Garmin which has been around for a while and apparently you can plan routes on one of these things but not a sat nav to speak of.
If people knew about steam engines they never would have made canals. If people knew about the internal combustion engine they may never have made loads of train tracks and if people knew how to do this "mag lev" thing across continents they may never have made so many airplanes.
I used to sit at a CNC machine plasma cutting pieces of titanium for Rolls Royce jet engines 8 hours a day to the macrometre and it's not much fun I can tell you now but it's got to be done and there will no doubt be someone else sitting at that same machine in 20 years time doing exactly the same thing unless we try doing it another way. That's all I'm saying.
Hello, Bob Burnquist brings the kind of Monster Energy I like to the table and a "heaven is a halfpipe" attitude to boot on this weeks episode of Carpool with Robert LLewellyn.
I don't think you should expect anything more from Bob Burnquist other than that he is one of the best skaters in the world. Everything else is just his conscience talking but essentially he's a skateboarder and his thing is skateboarding.
Brazil sounds like an amazing place. All their street lights/traffic lights run off a massive hydroelectric damn and apparently all their fuel is bio-fuel. They've just (about 10 years ago) discovered the largest off shore high depth oil field on earth. Maybe 100 years worth of petrol or something for the entire world.
The Brazilians are a beautiful people who have embraced green technologies and fuels in a beautiful way. The rest of the world should hang it's head in shame.
The down side of bio fuel is that it is made from soybean plant oil. "Slash and burn" across South America creates space to grow soy crops.
Soybean crops produce chicken feed and soy oil is used to make bio fuel. Also slash and burn creates land for cattle to graze on. The West consumes most of these products through food sold in companies like: KFC, McDonalds, Sainsburies, M&S, Wallmart, etc...
It is estimated Brazil is the 4th largest producer of green house gases from burning rainforests alone to create land for: soybean production, grazing and some subsistance farming.
The long and short of it is there were (yearly average) 160 parts per million of carbon dioxide 100 years ago and now there is (yearly average) 360 parts per million at present increasing the heat capacity of our atmosphere with associated effects. This concentration will continue to increase until we change our ways.
Renewable energies that do not interfer with current carbon capture systems (ie/rain forests, wooden things and fossil fuels) are the only way forward to maintain a healthy sustainable atmosphere upon which life on our planet depends.
HOW WAS OUR ATMOSPHERE FORMED I HEAR YOU ASK AND WILL WE ALWAYS BE ABLE TO BREATH AIR?
Oxygen currently makes up 20% of the atmosphere. 209460 parts per million and you might think to yourselves, I'll be alright, that's loads.
Well, firstly our atmosphere was created by "out gasing" of volcanoes. Oceans were formed from a massive out pouring of H2O and other similer oxygen based gases. When the earth was cool enough the steam turned to liquid.
There was still no oxygen (O2) present. Then, first aided by partial break down of water by uncontrolled UV rays, 1% oxygen was produced into the atmosphere.
Then organic matter freed up the rest, 20% of our atmosphere to be oxygen.
Oxygen still constitutes half of the earth's crust in mass and most of the mass of water.
In theory we could have no oxygen in our atmosphere at all which is quite scary.If we burned everything with carbon and hydrogen compounds in it i think I'm right in saying? Don't know, but I'm going to post this anyway as food for thought...
One third of the nitrogen we eat in food is extracted from natural gas and the atmosphere by way of the "Haber's Process".
Basically every molecule in organic matter needs a nitrogen atom and to increase nitrogen's natural occurance in soil we use fertilizer. No natural gas equals no fertilizer which equals no food.
Making the fertilzer to grow bio fuel uses almost as much energy as can be derived from the fuel itself. ie/ it would be more efficient to just use the energy from burning natural gas as a power source than try to grow anything.
Plants are 10% more efficient at growing because of CO2 increases in the atmosphere.(source: The Times)
..... I don't care I'm posting this. Keep reading this stuff.
The point I'm making is that the production of fertilizer uses alot of energy.
Natural gas (methane) is added to water vapour and super heated to be broken down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
Air is pressurised until it liquifies and then fractionally distilated to get liquid nitrogen.
The two gases are then pressurised together and heated with the catalyst of iron to make amoania NH4.
This is an absurd amount of energy put into synthetically creating nitrogen for the proteins in the food we eat. That's why fertiliser can be used as an explosive.
The point I'm making is that even our food isn't sustainable, how fucked up is that!?
I'm not 100% sure about those last couple of posts. Borderline bollocks. Obviously manure and human waste is used to fertilize so I don't really know....
This guy sums up everything discussed above and concludes we need to grow food locally and organically again and he does use the word "absurd" to describe our current situation also.
Speaking just before our financial system crashed he anticipates this crash and a need for change which we have chosen to ignore.
I read in "The Times" that the only thing organic farming sustains is poverty and starvation in the third world but this bloke thinks otherwise.
We need to remember Terrance Mc Kenna's advice that it is our duty to inform ourselves because no one else will and that culture is not your friend.
The concept behind central heating is that it warms the air only but as we need air to breath we ventilate houses and so heat is constantly lost as air is released from a building.
passive houses use a heat exchanger so as warm air leaves a building it warms the incoming cold air to retain heat. a passive house relies on extreme insulation and an air tight house to work effectively. Obviously if you're too warm in the summer you open a window.
another fundemental concept is a large ulltra thermally efficient triple glazed window being fitted to the south side of your property (if you live in the northern hemisphere) which will warm your house in the winter by way of the warmth of sunlight entering the building and dispersing slowly at night.
alot of people have to make the choice between food or heating these days (where I live certainly) so this idea is a definite winner on the heating bill front.
It is a compulsory legal requirement in many European countries as of 2011 that all new house builds must meet "passive home" specifications.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/gocycle-electric-assist.php
ReplyDeleteFirstly, a new invention on the market that looks like it could be fun if you can afford it. Mclaren electric bike. I ride a bike around Brum and I was playing with my sat nav from my old car and it does "bycycle routes" but the sat nav does not chart the canal systems which I think it should as they are the flattest most convient enjoyable way to get around the city on a bike. Bikes all round are less stressful in the city if you can't stand the speed cameras, parking tickets, high insurance costs and crap flow of traffic keeps you fit too.
A sat-nav specifically for cyclists please.... china/japan?
ReplyDeleteAlso a bit pissed off with the freecycle website. Tend to find people don't reply to enquiries. Haven't had a single reply yet.
ReplyDeleteThe new british passport is a sign of the times.... COMMENTS PLEASE
ReplyDeleteI thought the interior design of the passport looked rather like someone had cut up pieces of their own pubic hair and scattered it across the pages of the passport before printing but apparently it is called "threading" and it is one of 14 security features incorporated into the new passport design to make it more difficult to make forgeries (and perhaps less desireable all round). Whatever next...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG-qv7LQQ5I
ReplyDeleteI like this guy. Creatively love the over the top stupid hip-hip and scenes of animals attacking each other in Africa. Very solid video part. Try to only bring you the best but I am having to rely on my own taste... Crazy Kids. How can you not love skateboarding? I actually can't imagine my life without skateboarding being a part of it and that would probably come as a shock even to people who know me quite well. I fucking loved skating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfYMAr7mCc4
ReplyDeleteHere is Geoff Rowley demonstrating this new P2 board thing they've bought out. It sounds like a good product from what I've seen and it's true.
When you buy a wooden board it is hit and miss. For example I bought a Santa Cruz board off a chinese woman in LA and it was fucking useless with no pop and I picked up a Chad Muska deck one time and it just made you skate so much better because it was so responsive and elastic in the way it kind of bended and had a lot of spring in it.
I think releasing a consistantly better deck might well improve modern day skating so thumbs up. Geoff Rowley is a strange one isn't he. What a hard way to make a living. crazy m**** f****.
I wasn't totally crap at skating. I remember I got a round of applause once or twice.
ReplyDeleteThe secret to skateboarding is that some tricks feel good, they just feel right, like spot on. And those are normally the one's that look good to watch too.
I think there is a quote I would like to reference from the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that quote being, "quality is a feeling"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMUXPRTx-k
ReplyDeleteSpeak of the devil here is the Japanese showing off.
I think skateboarding would go against the Buddist religion beacause not being violent in Buddist philosophy doesn't just apply to not being violent towards other living things but even inanimate objects like how you put down a tea cup or slam a door so skateboarding would be straight out the window. There is even a train of thought in Buddism that you should avoid violent thoughts because it is unclear to what extent the action of thinking is in fact an action... if you can get your head round that. Ommmm
"The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home- yea, I'm always at Om."
Eden Ahbez
Eden Ahbez was one of a group of poets that used to hang out with James Dean in New York in the early 1950s. I don't know anymore than that, heard it about it on the radio. There's no business like show business like no business I know...
ReplyDeleteThat's really beautiful poetry isn't it? Well I think it is anyway. Just get so much of that stuff off radio 2,3 and 4.... even BBC world wide service too if you can get it. I'm a big fan of the radio.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYQEl0Hh9IE&feature=related
ReplyDeleteThis is quite an interesting clip of Geoff Rowley shunning Jake Phelps posted by "super kill yo self".
I don't really know if there's much room for celebrity in Skateboarding. Geoff Rowley is the working man's skateboarder.
Keeping the pound strong!
ReplyDeleteI just wanted to say how thankful I am that a sat nav for push bikes has been made since this blog and competitors to the "GO CYCLE" electric bike have been made too.
ReplyDeleteCome to think of it I was in Sainsburys the other day talking to the shop assistant about how I make my own Irish soda bread. She was saying to me it's such a difficult skill to get the hang of she doesn't try it and Sainsburies don't sell it.
Couple of months later Sainsburies are selling Irish soda bread and Irish potato bread. It's nice to have a voice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weWmTldrOyo
ReplyDeleteThis train is amazing. Magnetically levitated train. Some people think that they made the pyrimids using this kind of technology as I remember in the book from Atlantis to the Sphinx. Maybe they thought better of continuing to use the technology? The Maglev Train.
Make the train run through "vacuum tubes" to reach 3500km/hr as only drag is wind resistance.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIwbrZ4knpg&feature=related
One man's harrowing account of what's to come in 2012....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCxWUkaar5k&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_fresh+div-1r-5-HM
blah, blah, blah....(can't believe I actually read that book)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the train certainly was a good idea. Expensive but definately an impressive piece of kit.
I suppose if it ran through a vacuum tube (which is quite feasible/possible) and there are no moving parts you would think it would be quite low maintenance running within a controlled atmosphere, it wouldn't rust, it wouldn't depreciate in value and would be a good long term transportational investment. Presumably able to carry more people than an airplane, more regularly, more quickly using less fuel.
Security would probably be a problem, terrorism and the like unless you tunnelled the thing deep under ground but if you did tunnel the thing deep under ground earthquakes would be a problem. Certainly across the atlantic.
Won't say anymore than that.
.... there is a GPS system available for bikes made by Garmin which has been around for a while and apparently you can plan routes on one of these things but not a sat nav to speak of.
ReplyDeleteIf people knew about steam engines they never would have made canals. If people knew about the internal combustion engine they may never have made loads of train tracks and if people knew how to do this "mag lev" thing across continents they may never have made so many airplanes.
I used to sit at a CNC machine plasma cutting pieces of titanium for Rolls Royce jet engines 8 hours a day to the macrometre and it's not much fun I can tell you now but it's got to be done and there will no doubt be someone else sitting at that same machine in 20 years time doing exactly the same thing unless we try doing it another way. That's all I'm saying.
micrometer not macrometer. And I'm lieing, I really enjoyed working for Rolls Royce, good people. Just like the idea of this maglev thing.
ReplyDeleteI think this is what they call in the trade "pissing gold".
ReplyDeleteHello, Bob Burnquist brings the kind of Monster Energy I like to the table and a "heaven is a halfpipe" attitude to boot on this weeks episode of Carpool with Robert LLewellyn.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/user/carpoolUK#p/u/0/4-2PWpS5q4M
I think Bob has maybe lost his mind a little from all those bangs to the head.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you should expect anything more from Bob Burnquist other than that he is one of the best skaters in the world. Everything else is just his conscience talking but essentially he's a skateboarder and his thing is skateboarding.
ReplyDeleteBrazil sounds like an amazing place. All their street lights/traffic lights run off a massive hydroelectric damn and apparently all their fuel is bio-fuel. They've just (about 10 years ago) discovered the largest off shore high depth oil field on earth. Maybe 100 years worth of petrol or something for the entire world.
The Brazilians are a beautiful people who have embraced green technologies and fuels in a beautiful way. The rest of the world should hang it's head in shame.
The down side of bio fuel is that it is made from soybean plant oil. "Slash and burn" across South America creates space to grow soy crops.
ReplyDeleteSoybean crops produce chicken feed and soy oil is used to make bio fuel. Also slash and burn creates land for cattle to graze on. The West consumes most of these products through food sold in companies like: KFC, McDonalds, Sainsburies, M&S, Wallmart, etc...
It is estimated Brazil is the 4th largest producer of green house gases from burning rainforests alone to create land for: soybean production, grazing and some subsistance farming.
The long and short of it is there were (yearly average) 160 parts per million of carbon dioxide 100 years ago and now there is (yearly average) 360 parts per million at present increasing the heat capacity of our atmosphere with associated effects. This concentration will continue to increase until we change our ways.
Renewable energies that do not interfer with current carbon capture systems (ie/rain forests, wooden things and fossil fuels) are the only way forward to maintain a healthy sustainable atmosphere upon which life on our planet depends.
Sorry Brazil, still shit...
HOW WAS OUR ATMOSPHERE FORMED I HEAR YOU ASK AND WILL WE ALWAYS BE ABLE TO BREATH AIR?
ReplyDeleteOxygen currently makes up 20% of the atmosphere. 209460 parts per million and you might think to yourselves, I'll be alright, that's loads.
Well, firstly our atmosphere was created by "out gasing" of volcanoes. Oceans were formed from a massive out pouring of H2O and other similer oxygen based gases. When the earth was cool enough the steam turned to liquid.
There was still no oxygen (O2) present. Then, first aided by partial break down of water by uncontrolled UV rays, 1% oxygen was produced into the atmosphere.
Then organic matter freed up the rest, 20% of our atmosphere to be oxygen.
CO2 + H2O + sunlight = organic compounds + O2
or
6 CO2 + 6 H2O + photons → C6H12O6 + 6 O2
(or simply carbon dioxide + water + sunlight → glucose + dioxygen)
Oxygen still constitutes half of the earth's crust in mass and most of the mass of water.
In theory we could have no oxygen in our atmosphere at all which is quite scary.If we burned everything with carbon and hydrogen compounds in it i think I'm right in saying? Don't know, but I'm going to post this anyway as food for thought...
organic compounds + O2 = CO2 + H2O
...the nitrogen cycle.
ReplyDeleteOne third of the nitrogen we eat in food is extracted from natural gas and the atmosphere by way of the "Haber's Process".
Basically every molecule in organic matter needs a nitrogen atom and to increase nitrogen's natural occurance in soil we use fertilizer. No natural gas equals no fertilizer which equals no food.
Making the fertilzer to grow bio fuel uses almost as much energy as can be derived from the fuel itself. ie/ it would be more efficient to just use the energy from burning natural gas as a power source than try to grow anything.
Plants are 10% more efficient at growing because of CO2 increases in the atmosphere.(source: The Times)
..... I don't care I'm posting this. Keep reading this stuff.
The point I'm making is that the production of fertilizer uses alot of energy.
ReplyDeleteNatural gas (methane) is added to water vapour and super heated to be broken down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
Air is pressurised until it liquifies and then fractionally distilated to get liquid nitrogen.
The two gases are then pressurised together and heated with the catalyst of iron to make amoania NH4.
This is an absurd amount of energy put into synthetically creating nitrogen for the proteins in the food we eat. That's why fertiliser can be used as an explosive.
The point I'm making is that even our food isn't sustainable, how fucked up is that!?
I'm not 100% sure about those last couple of posts. Borderline bollocks. Obviously manure and human waste is used to fertilize so I don't really know....
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GyIhXNilcg&feature=related
ReplyDeleteThis guy sums up everything discussed above and concludes we need to grow food locally and organically again and he does use the word "absurd" to describe our current situation also.
Speaking just before our financial system crashed he anticipates this crash and a need for change which we have chosen to ignore.
I read in "The Times" that the only thing organic farming sustains is poverty and starvation in the third world but this bloke thinks otherwise.
We need to remember Terrance Mc Kenna's advice that it is our duty to inform ourselves because no one else will and that culture is not your friend.
I actually studied architecture at university and vaguely rememeber the concept of "U-values"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7f94HuSKOA&NR=1&feature=fvwp
The concept behind central heating is that it warms the air only but as we need air to breath we ventilate houses and so heat is constantly lost as air is released from a building.
passive houses use a heat exchanger so as warm air leaves a building it warms the incoming cold air to retain heat. a passive house relies on extreme insulation and an air tight house to work effectively. Obviously if you're too warm in the summer you open a window.
another fundemental concept is a large ulltra thermally efficient triple glazed window being fitted to the south side of your property (if you live in the northern hemisphere) which will warm your house in the winter by way of the warmth of sunlight entering the building and dispersing slowly at night.
alot of people have to make the choice between food or heating these days (where I live certainly) so this idea is a definite winner on the heating bill front.
It is a compulsory legal requirement in many European countries as of 2011 that all new house builds must meet "passive home" specifications.