Runaway Trains and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

There's a great song by Soul Asylum called Runaway Train, but it wasn't about this! Yes, you read it right. In a surprise bid for freedom, a Docklands Light Rail train escaped its operator at West India Quay station and went for a ride. Naturally, being the DLR and English, it dutifully came to a peaceful ending at Westferry where the train awaited the return of the operator. For the uninitiated, the DLR operated in London.

In news that is far less funny, I wish to bring your attention to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. While humorously named, it's decidedly less funny. You can read a story over at the San Francisco Chronicle about it. To sum it up, this collection of plastic is formed on land where a piece of plastic floats into a sewer, follows the storm drain to the ocean, then makes its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas. The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons -- floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

People just don't realize our planet can be broken, and it's on the verge right now. Yes, we're destroying our own planet, the only place we have to live. If it's not global warming, it's pollution. Talk about people shitting in the own backyard. Sad.

Weird Large Numbers and Other Miscellany

This excerpted from Josh's blog-thingy with his permission.

I was playing with some numbers the other day wanting to see what kind of data it would take to texture a model of the entire planet in 1′x1′(1 sq. ft.) photographs of the Earth’s surface with your average 7-mega-pixel camera. The numbers may be screwy, but here’s what I got: There are 1,597,675,918,771,730 (quadrillion) sq. ft. of planet Earth x 2 MB (average 7.1-mega-pixel JPG) 1 sq. ft. photograph = 3,195,351,837,540,000 (quadrillion) MB (megabytes), or 3.2 ZB (zettabytes), with 1 zettabyte equaling 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes, or approximately 1.2 sextillion (21 zeroes) bytes, or 4,564,788,339,342 (trillion) compact discs, or 679,862,093,093 (billion) DVD movies, or 6,390,703,675 (billion) average 500 GB external hard drives, or roughly one of these 500 GB hard drives for every person on the planet. 1,597,675,918,771,730 (quadrillion) 1′x1′photographs.

I found the fact that he did this fascinating (A) because it's really interesting (B) because it shows he's got even less of a life than me, and (C) the numbers are enormous. Any comments should be directed to his blog. You should surf over and read the whole thing.

Also, if you're a pet owner, please read this before you feed your animal any more food. There's a recall on a number of brands that may cause kidney failure in your dog or cat.

I'm sick and can't talk. My voice has gone AWOL. I'm sure I'll get over it, but I hate being sick. My mother must be a natural blonde who doesn't listen based on my conversation with her moments ago.

I'm trying to pawn off my tickets to tonight's hockey game but have found no takers so far.

I went to Publix, where shopping is a pleasure, and it damn near wore me out. I think I'm home for the rest of the day (and night).