Towse: views from the hill

June 6, 2007

"I didn’t know how the book would end."

Filed under: news — Towse @ 5:57 pm

Graying duo keep passenger in check – The Boston Globe

Hooray for graying geezers.

Hayden’s wife of 42 years, Katie, who was also on the flight, was less impressed. Even as her husband struggled with the agitated passenger, she barely looked up from “The Richest Man in Babylon,” the book she was reading.

“The woman sitting in front of us was very upset and asked me how I could just sit there reading,” Katie Hayden said. “Bob’s been shot at. He’s been stabbed. He’s taken knives away. He knows how to handle those situations. I figured he would go up there and step on somebody’s neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn’t know how the book would end.”

May 2, 2007

Conspiracy theories ‘r’ us

Filed under: news,travel,woowoo — Tags: , , — Towse @ 10:01 pm

Read it and weep.

4/29truth.com

e.g. Did Arnold Know?

Here is a hypothetical timeline of events:

4:02 highway collapses
4:05 Governor receives phone call
4:20 Showered and dressed (assume 15 minutes and that he shaved in the car)
5:08 Arrive at site after 48 minute drive @ 100 mph
5:13 Press conference starts (assume 5 minutes to get it going)
5:33 Press conference ends and site tour begins (assume minimum 20 minute press conference. Note that Schwarzenegger, Newsom, and Dellums all talk and these are politicians talking.
5:48 Tour of site ends (assume 15 minutes).

Yet the photos clearly show it’s still pitch black during the entire press conference and site tour, i.e. much earlier than the hypothetical timeline above. How could Schwarzenegger have arrived at the site any earlier? The answer is that the he knew what was planned.

Except, of course, that Gavin’d been down in San Diego at the state Democratic gathering and had to handle things at that end, get a briefing, make statements, give a speech and then return home.

The photographs of the scene that included Gavin and Schwarzenegger were taken during the tour that took place the evening of 4/29.

Another favorite?

“G-A-Y” is spelled “429″ on a standard American telephone. The attacks occurred only 8.5 miles from the notorious Castro Street homosexual district. COINCIDENCE?

’nuff said. Has to be a spoof. Or some very dim bulbs.

April 29, 2007

The driver hailed a taxi which took him to Kaiser Hospital, Oakland

Filed under: news — Tags: , — Towse @ 9:46 pm

Had a note from our beast wrangler about “news” and how it would affect her drive over here the next time we went on a trip. She guessed she’d have to use 101.

News?

I checked online and found that 250 yds of the MacArthur maze interchange leading to the Bay Bridge collapsed this morning after a tanker truck loaded with 8600 gallons of unleaded gasoline on its way to a gas station in Oakland lost control and overturned at 3:40 a.m.

The driver got out of the truck under his own steam and walked to a nearby gas station where he grabbed a taxi which took him to Kaiser Hospital, Oakland. Kaiser later transferred him to the burn unit at St. Francis Hospital, here in San Francisco, where he’s being treated for second degree burns. And that’s it! That’s the extent of injuries!

Alas for the roadway, though, the truck didn’t do as well. After the driver got out, the truck exploded. The firemen got the fire out by 5:50 a.m. but by then the fireball had burned so hot (in excess of 2000 dF) for so long that the steel in the roadway softened and twisted, the bolts holding the concrete failed and the structure collapsed.

MAP

We keep wondering what will happen if something happens to that bridge. 270-280K people a day use the Bay Bridge to get from here to there or vice versa. Well, here goes. A wakeup call. It could’ve been worse, a lot worse.

Luckily, the bridge is intact. You can get across the bridge but once you get to the east end its roundabout detours to get where you want to go if you usually take the pieces of freeway that were damaged and getting onto the bridge to head west is also a problem. There are alternative routes that are usable. BART is adding more cars. ACTransit is advertising its bus service. Traffic will be hellacious.

Update: Will Kempton, CalTrans, says that the two roadways that are damaged carry approximately 30K vehicles a day each. Even if your route isn’t compromised, you’ll be stuck in traffic caused by those whose routes are.

Update2: Schwarzenegger sez free rides! tomorrow on all transit. BART sez FREE PARKING IN THE BART LOTS! His nibs sez, “Who’s going to pay for all this?”

What a mess. It will be months before the busted parts and the parts that may have been weakened can be rebuilt and usable.

What a mess.

News. Pics. Video.

KCBS coverage
Chronicle coverage
NWZCHIK checks in

February 26, 2007

Not all Second Life $$ are made in Linden $$ and then converted …

Filed under: news — Tags: — Towse @ 5:33 pm

CBS announced today that it has entered into a strategic partnership with The Electric Sheep Company as part of its plans to increase its presence on Second Life and other online virtual worlds.

Electric Sheep is a New York-based creator of virtual-world content and has worked with CBS (nyse: CBS – news – people ) to launch Second Life communities for Showtime’s The L Word and for Star Trek, which is owned by CBS Paramount. The company also created a TV ad for the CBS sitcom Two And A Half Men that ran during the Super Bowl earlier this month. Electric Sheep’s other clients include Viacom’s (nyse: VIA – news – people ) MTV Networks, Time Warner’s (nyse: TWX – news – people ) AOL and Major League Baseball.

continues

February 22, 2007

News! Cocoa may improve brain blood flow

Filed under: life,news,science — Tags: — Towse @ 3:45 pm

One of the sessions I missed at AAAS was a session Sunday titled, “The Neurobiology of Chocolate: A Mind-Altering Experience?”

Harold Schmitz of Mars, Inc. co-organized the symposium. Mars, Inc. happens to be sponsoring research into why chocolate is good for you and how they can make it even better. (Heard of CocoaVia?) I’d spent time in a session a few years back covering similar and/or earlier research on the subject. This session covered recent research including a presentation by Ian MacDonald (University of Nottingham Medical School) on “The Effect of Flavanol-Rich Cocoa on the fMRI Response to a Cognitive Task in Healthy Young People.”

Yee haw.

Luckily, there were science writers in the audience to suck it all up for me. CNN reports: Cocoa may improve brain blood flow

Sunday, I was elsewhere — in an all-day seminar on Virtual Worlds which included papers like “Comparing Mental Health Applications Using Individually Administered Virtual Reality and Second Life: Conceptual and Ethical Issues” from Skip Rizzo, USC, and “Virtual Publics: Youths’ Lives in Emergent Social Worlds” from Danah Boyd at UCB.

John Lester (AKA Pathfinder Linden) at Linden Labs organized the seminar. Linden Labs, just down the hill from me, is the creator (are the creators?) of Second Life, which I messed around with playing with after a panel at the Commonwealth Club that we attended last December.

I finally signed up yesterday but with my computer’s hiccupy-response to requests to turn and move and change the color of my coat, my experience wasn’t optimal. Problems with scaling? Problems with my computer? I’ll try again later today and see if I get further.

Sorry I was to miss out on the latest scoop about cocoa, but the Virtual Worlds seminars were crack.

[Thanks for the cocoa link, Sam]

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