The Leopard's Limb 08/19/11 (leftovers, off-topics, Facebooking, etc.)

Good AM, folks! Today is Miss Stepstab's 17th birthday. So far, she has been a teenager that parents dream of raising. When one has a stepdaughter whom her dad tells her she's going to church too much, one can be safely sure the teen-raising is on the right track.

Gasoline from sawdust
The National Science Foundation reports of technology that enables gasoline to be refined from sawdust, with 45# of sawdust making 1 gallon of gasoline (a gallon of gasoline weighs about 5.5#). As I have mentioned elsewhere, gasoline can also be made from switchgrass, a more sensible method than using corn for alcohol. Using sawdust, switchgrass, or even corn, uses carbon that is already part of our environment rather than freeing carbon from underground, which results in more atmospheric CO2. The article is a bit technical, but not beyond the abilities of this group of posters.
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=121256&WT.mc_id=USNSF_1

Unions, again
O. T.: thanks to your history lessons, I am now cursorily familiar with RJR and unions. Obviously, they have had a effect on the compensation of RJR employees. However, my concerns are over the subordination of individuals' Right to Choose, supposedly so beloved by liberals, to the power-grabs of unions. That carries on to unions' use of members' dues to purchase trained political seals to further union hacks' personal political agendae. And onward to the Obama Administration's effort to block Boeing's use of a non-union plant in Charleston.

As I have said earlier on several occasions, people have a right to hire agents to represent them in business dealings. Echoing my comments above, my major concern is how the agents in this instance come to represent those employees. If unions acted as if they believed in free and unfettered choice and would confine themselves to sensible collective bargaining, I would pretty much dismount from my soapbox. I still would not like the organizations, but that's another matter.

Word watch
He v. she: I stand instructed, and will dispense with "he/she." Re using generic "she" instead of he: I buy series of lectures on various subjects, mostly scientific, from the Teaching Company. I note that some of the profs who teach these "courses" will identify a generic scientist as "she." One prof, Dr. Richard Wolfson of Middlebury College, goes a bit further. In depicting the Earth while describing General Relativity or AGW, his graphic display presents us with Africa facing us, rather than North and South America, which is the usual display for us Western Hemisphere types.

Press pussyfooting
O. T. made reference to "politically correct fools" in academia. PC isn't limited to ivy-covered halls. The press also falls prety to prissy pussyfooting. An NPR reporter described a Berlin summer phenomenon, that of leftist troublemakers setting automobiles on fire, supposedly to protest high housing prices and other consequences of metropolitan living. The reporter described them as "leftwing activists with a taste for arson."

"Taste for arson"? Well, open up a bottle of reisling and let it breathe while I light up this BMW, mein Herr.

The press has also been reluctant to properly identify the murderers who set bombs off in marketplaces and mosques, calling them "militants" or "insurgents."

Out of gas
Speaking of insurgents, Libyan rebels have taken the last refinery that was under the control of Khadafy's forces. This is promising. A T-55 tank probably gets no more than a mile to a gallon at best, so the mobility of the murdering crackpot's army should decline fairly quickly as fuel tanks empty.