Blogs

This morning I remembered why I never use the Vancouver Ontario Street cycle route - it is littered with death traps. No not the type that you may have seen in the recent Jones movie, I am talking about the invasive species introduced from the UK called the North American roundabout. It can generally by discerned by the motorists driving through it at break neck speeds; one may also identify it by the pieces of broken bicycles and / or cyclists strewn about in various states of disrepair.

If you use the Ontario Street bike route you must have a death wish. I think that Main Street - though you do have to be wary of door prizes in certain areas - is actually far safer for cyclists. I for one feel that rather than being segregated to the back of the bus, in the name of safety cyclists should be using the proper road ways, pissing of the car driving, climate changing commuters.

At any rate, one can see in the lovely animated gif, care of the Wikipedia article, that vehicles entering the roundabout yield to those already in the roundabout - be them cars, bikes or hover boards. What that means here in North America is that when entering the roundabout you give the right of way to those on the left unlike a regular stop sign.

Maybe we just need more magic roundabouts?

After a relative leveling off of atmospheric methane levels, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released new figures indicating that there has been a large rise in global atmospheric methane levels over the past year. While certainly not a trend, it is something to keep an eye on. Atmospheric methane, coming from cows, landfills, forests, and melting permafrost, does last long in the atmosphere - thus the recent leveling off - however, it causes about 25 times more warming than carbon dioxide!

It is a bit of a change for me to be posting about environmental issues on my Nitobi blog but I think it is about time - particularly since my PhD is in solar cell physics.

Forget about climate change, oil is the new and old black. That old black has just hit a new high on supply troubles.

We can do everything we want to reduce our climate changing, ice melting, and chaotic weather making actions but depleting oil is also a real concern.

So not only do we have to worry about a warming world but also decreasing fuel for that warming. I think this is an appropriate post to be making from Dallas no?