Day: June 13, 2020💾

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Drove out to Five Rivers

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I ended up driving 🚘 out to Five Rivers. I wanted to make sure I was could get that important code update uploaded to the blog.

I also need to go grocery shopping later on as I still haven’t bought any food besides milk since getting home from camp on Wednesday night.

I feel disappointed with myself as I normally walk out here. And I had ambitious plans for the day – for a while I thought about camping in the lean to at Harvey Mountain and also about Schodack Island State Park but neither happened. My stomach has been feeling a bit weak and I’ve been a bit achy – probably in part because my pantry has been so bare but also because I didn’t sleep well last night despite being in bed before nine.

Big blog bug fixed

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So I fixed a major bug in my Indefinate Loader script, which was causing the blog to load too many images at once, causing the whole blog to slow down, especially on slow internet connections. It took a lot of digging, the bug wasn’t apparent but it should be fixed now. Also fixed a rare bug that occasionally caused web pages to not load properly. I tell you, being a blogger and writing your own code at times can feel like a full time job. 🐞

Will Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam No Longer Carry Guns?

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Will Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam No Longer Carry Guns?

Some good news for Bugs Bunny: Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam will lose their rights to bear arms in the updated HBO Max version of the beloved “Looney Tunes” cartoon series, according to a recent New York Times interview with the showrunner.

Reports in the Times and other U.S. news outlets in June 2020 about a ban on “Looney Tunes” characters using guns prompted queries from Snopes readers seeking confirmation whether or not the claim is true. It is.

“Looney Tunes” have found a new home on HBO Max as a series of shorts that will feature much of the same violent shenanigans despite eschewing guns, with Fudd attempting to get that rabbit using other methods. The animated children’s series that originated as a series of short film features in the 1930’s started streaming on the platform on May 27, 2020.

In an interview with the Times, Peter Browngardt, who also serves as the executive producer of “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” said: “We’re not doing guns … But we can do cartoony violence — TNT, the Acme stuff. All that was kind of grandfathered in.”

The high cost of low grade coal

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Lignite and climate change: The high cost of low grade coal

Thirty-two years ago, my interest in the oil price shocks of the 1970s took me to the University of California at Berkeley to study energy. That same year the Liquid Fuels Trust Board was established in New Zealand. The Board clearly saw lignite as the country’s future source of transport fuel. However, because lignite is poor quality coal, extracting energy from it creates particularly high emissions of carbon dioxide. My concern about this is not new. Twenty years ago I co-authored a report called Transport fuels in New Zealand after Maui – lignite on the back burner.

It now looks as if lignite is making its way to the front burner. Two companies, state owned enterprise Solid Energy and the L&M Group, are proposing to mine lignite in Otago and Southland and convert it to diesel. In addition, Solid Energy is proposing to make two more products from lignite: the nitrogen fertiliser urea, and briquettes (made by drying out lignite into a better form of coal) primarily for export. Using lignite for generating electricity is another possibility.

The foundation of this report is a set of carbon footprint calculations for these four uses of lignite – diesel, urea, briquettes, and electricity. These calculations are presented in as open and transparent a manner as possible. I ask those who may question these calculations to be equally transparent.