schrödinger's dog

One Wheel Good

Here are two amazing trailers from movies about one of the world's foremost Mountain Unicyclists, Kris Holm. The movies are One Tired Guy and Into The Thunder Dragon, and are about 4 or 5 MB each. The latter was filmed on a trip through Bhutan.

For the uninitiated, riding a unicycle on flat pavement is "fairly difficult". Riding one on rough ground is "very difficult", and doing the things they do is "off the charts". I think I'll stick to pavement for a while.
Jim on 10.23.04 @ 07:14 PM ET [link]

hop hop

I've finally learned to hop on my unicycle! I did 25 hops in a row today. It looks kinda silly but it's fun. The secret, it turns out, is to stand up -- something that normally goes against your natural instincts on one of those contraptions.
Jim on 10.19.04 @ 08:40 PM ET [link]

Flush

I went for a tour of the the Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant outside of Boston. It was a huge, amazing place. They process 370 million gallons of sewage on a typical day. If there has been a lot of rain, they occasionally need to process over a billion gallons a day.

But what caught my attention the most was how recent all this is. Up until 1967 they used an old steam pump to pump all the Boston sewage directly into Boston Harbor. I can almost remember 1967. At that point they installed some less than adequate treatment facilities, but still dumped the result into the harbor. It wasn't until the 1990's when Deer Island opened that this stopped. The outfall is now pumped into the ocean 9.5 miles offshore.

The resulting effluent from Deer Island is not technically potable in the US (though it would be in many third-world countries) but it is legal to swim in. The solids from the plant are made into fertilizer and sold in garden stores.
Jim on 10.09.04 @ 05:31 PM ET [link]