Matsu’s World: The One Less Traveled

Yes, today for the first time in my life I paid $4 (US) for a gallon of gasoline. It was actually $4.05 per gallon.

Those of you who live in the same area that I do will wonder why I paid that much since most gas stations are selling regular unleaded gas for only $3.85 or $3.90 (at most). Well, I drive a Mistubishi Galant and the model I own has a V6 engine, which requires the high octane super unleaded gasoline. And, for now, the cheapest price I could find today was just over $4 per gallon. That is the most I have ever paid for a gallon of gasoline.

I guess I’d better get used to it. Or, more accurately, I’d better get used to paying a lot more than $4 per gallon as the price is expected to continue to rise throughout the summer. In fact, we may even see $5 per gallon of gas by August. Ugh! That will be almost twice the price I paid for a gallon of gas a year ago.

My friend Bert insists that the price of oil is being driven up by the weak United States dollar. He argues that if the value of the U.S. dollar were to go higher against the other currencies in the world, then the price per barrel of crude oil could drop as low as $80 (it is at an all-time high of $124 per barrel right now). I don’t know if I really understand that or believe that he’s right, but I would sure like to see it happen just the same. I won’t argue or complain if it does.

This is an interesting sign. Can you guess which year this sign will appear?

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This morning during an informal coffee break at work (well, it’s Friday so it was during the donut break) I mentioned the recent release of all of Charles Darwin’s works online by Cambridge University. That seemed to be news to the group of people I work with so I thought I’d post the information here for them to easily navigate to information about this new online content.

If you want to read about the project and the release of Darwin’s work, check out this Wired magazine article.

Or, you can just go straight to the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online and begin reading digitized copies of his many writings.

The past week I have been alarmed by the increasing number of news reports and stories on the Internet that talk about the global shortages in grains (rice, corn, and wheat). The price of fuel certainly will not help this situation as more and more grain products (primarily corn) are used for bio-fuels instead of food products for human consumption.

I fear that this is just the tip of the iceberg as the shortages are expected to get a lot worse and fuel costs will continue to rise. It’s easy to predict that food riots will increase across the globe. Wealthy nations must do something to help alleviate this growing problem.

This week I watched this ABC Primetime report about the life of Dr. Randy Pausch, a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

At 46 years old Dr. Pausch received news that he had terminal cancer and was given only 3 to 6 months to live. About one month later, he gave his last lecture about his life, dreams, and information on how the audience should live. Since then, a new book has been written about how he has spent his last days living life to the fullest and being an inspiration to many people on how to live and demonstrates how one might deal with a terminal illness.

Below is a Wall Street Journal video interview of the author of the book and is a good starting point to get the background information about the life and expected death of Dr. Pausch.

If this has piqued your interest and you want to see for yourself what everyone has been talking about, you can see the recording of the Last Lecture below.

You might want to visit Dr. Pausch’s website for additional information and videos. Once you are there, you will also find updated informaiton about his current health condition. As of the this week, he is still alive.

Yes, the city where I live still publishes and distributes free phone books to every household. My phonebook is actually two phonebooks. A regular size (8.5 inches by 11 inches) and smaller (half-sized) phone book. The larger one includes almost 500 white pages and over 900 yellow pages. That’s a lot of pages. And, if they wanted to save cost or natural resources by using the reduced book size, then they should not have included the full-sized phonebook with the smaller one. I’m not sure what they are thinking.

According to this MSN article, in America more than 650 million phone books were published last year (the U.S. population is only 300 million people) creating up to 1 million tons of waste. I don’t even want to think about how many of them are never used, ever. Most people under 40 never use a phone book. What do they use to look up a phone number? The Internet, of course! But that’s the point of that article.

Since phone books are costly to produce and are paid for by advertising the readership will determine how much longer they will be around. If it is not worth advertising in phone books, then the ad revenue will dry up and eventually the publishers of phone books will cut back the production and distribution.

So, what are young people using phone books for these days? Simple, phone books have become props for YouTube videos. Here are two such videos…

This first YouTube video is a type of European Mythbusters episode testing the myth that two phone books that have the pages shuffled together like a deck of cards can’t be pulled apart.

This second YouTube video demonstrates how to tear a phone book in half with just your bare hands. Yes, it can be done!

So, that is what phone books are used for by young people.

You may want to hang onto your old phone books because they may be worth something as an antique or museum piece. This website is dedicated to old phone books. If you don’t want your phone book or no longer need that old one from five years ago maybe you can send it to them instead of a landfill.