Rotundus.com

What might it look like?

Hand sanitizers as Agent Orange?

" Alcohol-based hand sanitizers kill many bacteria, viruses and fungi, but they don’t selectively target pathogens. They kill a wide swath of the microbial life on your hands, including little-understood non-pathogenic species. For an ecological analogy, think of using Agent Orange to kill a couple weeds."

A wage cut for Alberta's future

Basically it's a piece arguing that nearly all additional revenues seen by the Alberta government in recent years have gone towards public sector employees without any real increases in services - "In 2000, Alberta public service pay consumed 25% of expenditures of $20.8-billion. By 2010, that had risen to 45% of $38.9-billion."

Why wasn’t it women and children first?

Did the women and children first policy on the Titanic cost lives (including the lives of women and children)? The primary historical example of this policy was the a military transport HMS Birkenhead in the mid-nineteenth century. How well did the policy work there? "Some women did not want to go on their own — they had to be torn away from their husbands, carried over to the bulwark and dropped over the ship’s side." Achievable on a military vessel perhaps, but not so effective on a cruise ship.

Be It Resolved

"...the people with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can." There's a reason why I try to avoid keeping chips / chocolate / cookies in my house, although when they occasionally do invade I can't say that my self-control is that great.

A couple of months back, LA Magazine did a piece looking at the costs of parking and why mandating current minimum numbers of parking spaces for a building might be a bad thing.

“For 5,000 years,” says Cole, “we built cities around people, and they worked well. For 50 years we’ve built them around the parking lot—a ridiculous use of land, of money, and an intrusion into the intimacy of human scale. Now we’ve painted ourselves into a corner

How much parking actually gets used?

Willson plotted a case study to gauge whether parking requirements connected to reality. He chose ten office parks and discovered that their peak occupancy rate was around 56 percent. Twice as many parking lots had been mandated by cities than was actually needed. “I interviewed the planners and the developers,” says Willson. “The planners would say, ‘It’s not our fault—the developers want that much.’ The developers would say, ‘We thought the planners knew what they were doing.’?”

Using a natural experiment in which county employees working in a particular building got free parking while federal employees had to pay produced some interesting results:

"... 72 percent of county workers drove to work alone but 60 percent of federal employees carpooled, took public transportation, or even walked. These were workers in the same professions, driving to the same location." When forced to pay a practical value for their parking, drivers were twice as likely to carpool—traffic congestion was halved, carbon emissions were halved.

The impact of parking lots on downtown life was also intriguing. If you have time to read the article look at the comments on San Francisco vs. LA in parking requirements for a theatre hall and the impact of this on the nightlife in surrounding areas.

One other tidbit I found particularly interesting was the cost to build different types of parking structures:

Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space.

Is something costing $140,000 worth, e.g., $5/hour to rent on a short-term basis?

In which I fix my girlfriend's grandparents' wifi and am hailed as a conquering hero

I was amused.

Seaweed biofuel could become alternative to oil, coal

"A newly engineered microbe can do the work by metabolising all of the major sugars in brown seaweed, potentially making it a cost-competitive alternative to petroleum fuel, said the report in the US journal Science." ... I'll believe cost-competitive once I see it, but sounds interesting at least. They estimate five times the productivity of course and not interfering with food production (unless you happen to like eating it with your sushi).

What goes on in the mind of a sniper?

A surprisingly interesting read - a bit of an unexpected topic from the BBC.

Why McDonald's In France Doesn't Feel Like Fast Food

Apparently the French didn't quite surrender to American eating habits despite it being McDonald's second biggest market.