On Everything is Wrong

Yes I stole the title of today's post from the title of a song by Moby. But here are the recent news items I have been tracking, starting with the local and moving outward.

1. Do not trust police. During the recent G20 convention in police went completely overboard arresting nearly everything that moved. The police detained people for hours, laid false charges (that were subsequently dropped without explanation), and assaulted innocent bystanders. Of course a personal favourite, they incorrectly employed a World War II era law that was intended to protect industry in Ontario against Nazi sabotage, when this issue was recently brought up by the Ontario Ombudsman, a police spokesman vilified the Ombudsman on the radio.

2. Police cannot be trusted with weapons. So it turns out Tasers can kill people, Taser International does not say so on their website, as of yesterday, but there are all sorts of lists of people who have died while getting tasered. And I am not just talking about Robert Dziekanski. I am frankly of the opinion that Tasers should be handed out to protesters at major conventions so they can protect themselves from the police hoodlums who seem to do more damage than the protesters. Someone should remind these brutal thugs that if protecting my rights means disobeying the Canadian Charter then I might as well not have a charter of rights at all!

3. Oil prices are going right back to the place that started this horrible recession we still have not recovered from. There are a lot of economists out there who seem to think Jeff Rubin is completely wrong, but I do not understand how these economists can possibly explain where the next hundred years of cheap oil is going to come from. The fact is, we have run out of easy to find and access oil, now we have to look under thousands of feet of water, and then miles of clay under that, or look to tarry gunk in the subarctic, just to meet current demand. Meanwhile every year existing production drops by 5% because of depletion, yet we still have not found a way to power our economies without this goo.

The eternal city of Rome was founded, according to legend April 21, 753 BCE, it was sacked seven times. Ultimately, most historians would be inclined to agree the empire itself came crumbling down on September 4, 476 when the Germanic chief Odoacer forced the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus, to abdicate. Rome as an ancient seat of power lasted 1230 years, how long will our little empire last?

Note content in italics in the paragraph above quoted directly from Wikipedia.

On Physics and Driving

As a cyclist I don't much like rain, it's cold, it makes my sweet ride dirty, (and being that I am both vain and anal a dirty bike is simply a bike that needs to be brought into the house for a good proper cleaning that ought to take at least 8 or 10 hours). But one good thing about a bike in the rain, the narrow (23mm wide) tyre slices through water and has plenty of grip.

Cars are a different matter. Tuesday I was driving to work in what I would call white knuckle driving. The rain was coming down in buckets and the expressways had some pretty hefty flooding. The roads felt slick and I was sure the car was going to spin out somewhere, yet all around me the motorists on the parkway were roaring along at a million and six miles an hour (well more like 10 to 20% over the posted limit).

I think this is a good place to review what happens when a car tyre is on a wet road. Water builds up in front of the tyre. A narrow bike tyre does not have this problem, and since bikes go slower than cars, the water has time to migrate around the tyre, which is more than I can say for the car. As the car roars along a lip of water in front of the tyre forms, if the car then accelerates just the tiniest bit the car can literally jump onto that lip and now the car is said to be hydroplaning. That is to say, the car is now floating on the surface of the water, there is zero contact between the rubber and the road.

I guess I should not be so surprised, after all these are Toronto drivers we are talking about. Sigh.