DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I planned to post photos from Wired Magazine’s NextFest, but as it turns out I’ll only be able to show you one: the ticket line.

We arrived at 2pm. We saw two ticket lines of depressing length. But it was a nice afternoon, so we waited.

After 30 minutes we were near the front of the line, maybe 10 minutes from the ticket booth. We noticed that a third line had formed to the right — another ticket line? No, because everyone in this new line held a ticket in their hands. I followed the new line to its head at the front door of the exposition hall. This was the line to get into the show!

It was huge. Everyone who had been ahead of us in the two ticket lines was now in one (very) long line to get into the building. The staffperson at the front door said that they’d reached the building’s capacity; due to safety regulations, they could only allow new people into the show after other people left.

This meant we weren’t waiting for a short process like a ticket-purchase transaction. Rather, we were waiting for 500 people to leave the NextFest. We might be standing in the sun for another hour.

So we bailed. Between parking (a 15-minute task) and walking four blocks (another 10 minutes) and waiting in line, we’d invested nearly an hour already, only to learn that an event about future technology, put on by self-proclaimed futurists, can easily be bogged down by lousy capacity planning and poor crowd control.

The Straus Dairy has 270 cows, each of which produces about 120 lbs of manure every day. That’s 5900 tons of manure per year. To put it in perspective, a typical cow produces 6.5 gallons of milk per day — or roughly 52 lbs of milk, if we assume that milk (like water) weighs 8 lbs/gallon. The point is that dairy farms produce 2.3 times as much manure as milk. You could even say that milk is a byproduct of the process of manure creation.

What do they do with all that crap?

The Straus family found a great answer: the dairy installed a 75 kilowatt biogas generator, aka “methane digester.” The synergy is amazing:

• the methane digester saves the dairy $5000 per month in energy costs — it will pay for itself in three years (and then, like my photovoltaic array, make free power for a long time)
• the system consumes tons of greenhouse gasses emitted from the decomposing manure. According to the Chron article, “naturally occurring methane is a potent greenhouse gas, estimated to be 21 times as damaging to the ozone layer as carbon dioxide.”
• the system “strip[s] 80 to 99 percent of organic pollutants from the wastewater” generated at the farm. (Read about the effects of agricultural runoff on the fishing industry.)

But wait, there’s more — “The Straus project is the first of 14 methane projects to receive matching funds from the California Energy Commission.” This means there are 13 more similar energy systems under construction. That’s the best news I’ve read all week.

California assembly bill AB 1967, the California Marriage License Non-Discrimination Act, “would define marriages in California as a civil contract between two persons, allowing same sex couples access to the same rights and responsibilities of marriage as heterosexual couples in the state” (according to the legislation summary from the bill’s author, Mark Leno).

The issue is wildly contested, as you can imagine.

Benjamin Lopez, a lobbyist for Traditional Values Coalition, said foes of same-sex marriage weren’t taking any chances, despite forecasts that the bill won’t get very far this year.

“We are marching on, ready for a complete showdown,” said Lopez, who missed the hearing in order to prepare a mass mail campaign against the bill. “We’re stopping at nothing to kill it.”

I can only imagine the junk mail piece his group is designing. “Beware the gay invasion!” It will show the US flag, and cite threats to the principles on which America was founded, I’m guessing. God is an American.

Had Lopez attended the hearing on this bill that he’s so hot to destroy, he might have heard the startling new evidence from the Williams Project (which is “the nation’s first think tank dedicated to the field of sexual orientation law and public policy”). According to their new study, titled (apparently by someone who spent more time studying Stats than English) The Impact of Allowing Same-Sex Couples to Marry on California’s Budget:

Allowing same-sex couples to marry in California will result in a net gain of $22.3 to $25.2 million each year, for the State budget.

Lopez, predictably, dismissed the study.

“It’s a matter of who you’re going to believe. Are you going to believe a professor on a liberal campus who wants this garbage crammed down the throats of Californians?”

Well, if you ask me who I’m going to believe, I’d want the choices spelled out:

• a lobbyist with the ethically repugnant “Traditional Values Coalition,” which claims homosexuality has roots in Marxist ideology?! Even more ridiculous, the TVC published a document claiming “many of the strategies used by homosexuals to bring about cultural change in America are taken from Hitler’s writings and propaganda warfare manuals.”
• a Harvard Law graduate and UCLA law professor with a history of donating time to the HIV/AIDS community, working with a “think tank” whose founding principle is to be “independent and non-partisan.”

With all respect to the lobbyist, I’m definitely going to have to go with the “professor on a liberal campus” on this one. I disagree that anything is being crammed down my throat — my mouth is closed, preventing stupid shit from flying out unannounced. Perhaps that’s a lesson lobbyists everywhere can benefit from.

What the heck is a ‘liberal campus’ anyway?

The best line I’ve seen in the newspaper this year:

I nod and leave, thinking: “I’m on a lube run for a porn movie.”

This is a must-read: Porn 101 — A beginner’s class sheds light on a low-budget, down-and-dirty industry thriving behind closed doors.

Automobile crash test results and safety ratings can be researched at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Click the “Vehicle Ratings” link to access a form where you can search for specific models.

Our old Golf, it turns out, offers only “marginal” protection against frontal impact. Good thing I never drive it.

My Kawi isn’t listed. Presumably it wouldn’t fare very well either.