Bruce Sterling, 7pm today

At the U Bookstore:

Using As You Like It for a guide, the Hugo Award-winning science fiction author predicts the future through the seven stages of humankind, offering compelling insights on some of the most controversial issues facing us today, including genetic research, the greenhouse effect, and bioterror--­and how these issues will affect us.

(The newspaper listing said 2, not 7; 2 did seem unfortunate for the employed people, but I'll be elsewhere at 7 tonight.)

pictures: trees and mosses, trees and driftwood

pictures of trees and mosses
Green Lake, 1/03


pictures of trees and driftwood
Discovery Park, 1/03

SUVs

Vicious TNR article inspired by Keith Bradsher's book. Some tasty bits:

Eventually a federal bureaucrat decreed that an SUV with air conditioning, leather seats, and other suburban amenities becomes a truck if it is "capable of off-highway operation." The test of this, in turn, became whether the vehicle is tall enough to provide ground clearance. So Detroit made the early SUVs very tall, to be assured of the pollution-control exemption.

In the 1970s, as the rules of the Clean Air Act took force, federal mileage standards also went into effect. An asterisk in the rules specified that they did not apply to vehicles in excess of 6,000 pounds gross weight (vehicle weight plus maximum load). This asterisk was intended to keep the miles-per-gallon (MPG) rules for regular cars from affecting real trucks, since at the time there were no ordinary vehicles with a gross weight in excess of 6,000 pounds. But early SUV manufacturers realized that if they beefed up the suspensions of their products to reach the 6,000-pound mark, they could evade mileage restrictions.

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