Compare and contrast these two things:

In this video about the new Oakland Bay Bridge:

http://baybridgeinfo.org/media/video/inside-bay-bridge#.T0ExRBzU-_E

the presenter, Bart Ney, says

"...this is going to be a gem that will live for 150 years"

"...all of this rebar you see coming up through this wood falsework is for the column that sits underneath the structure, it's basically what supports all of this"

"...there's a tremendous amount of steel in our concrete bridges here in California"


Now in this:

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/17/147047553/concretes-role-as-a-building-block-in-history

NPR Science Friday interview Robert Courland, historian and author of "Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World's Most Common Manmade Material", says this:

"the steel that's in reinforced concrete, which gives it its tensile strength, also dooms the material to a very short lifespan. Steel-reinforced structures, particularly those exposed to the elements, like I say, for instance, a freeway bridge are - will eventually corrode. The rebar will eventually rust, and as it rusts, its diameter expands by something like four or five fold. And then it destroys the concrete around it while it is being destroyed by the rust. And so that's why concrete structures only last between, say, 50 and 125 years because of rebar corrosion"

"so we really need to stop building with steel reinforced concrete, because we just have to demolish and rebuild the structure every 75 - 100 years"

Oh dear.

It seems that, despite all my resolutions and promises, I can't get back into the habit of regularly posting on LIveJournal.

What has happened since last time I posted?

A work colleague, who was the same age as me, died quite suddenly.

And some other stuff, none of which seems important right now.

Our Christmas gift of a Roku player has unexpectedly given me access to much more Heavy Metal than I've been able to listen to in my day to day life, which improves my emotional well being a little.

Well, I can't think of anything worth writing about, I just wanted to post something.

A couple of years ago a friend of ours was dog-sitting for us. Our dog, Olive, often doesn't eat all her food at once. We have to be very careful of ants here, so our friend had the idea of putting Olive's food bowl in a larger bowl of water to stop the ants getting to it.

Today we observed a column of ants heading to the food bowl and assumed that, as sometimes happens, Olive had drunk the "moat" dry or left a piece of food outside her bowl.

When we looked closer we saw that the ants had learned to swim.

I had intended to be in bed early tonight, but once again I'm up late reading online comments and journalism about what's happening in England.

There needs to be a lot of discussion. Unfortunately those in a position to make any changes seem content with attending to the immediate solution of getting 'em all locked up.

I agree that people arrested for committing crimes need to be tried and sentenced accordingly, but that alone will not do!

What desperately needs to be addressed is the cause of the emotions behind this behaviour.

This needs to be addressed as soon as possible, because such deep and massive societal changes as are necessary will take decades to effect, and all the while it is put off the problem worsens and the more destruction will result. As long as the problem is ignored and swept under the rug people with nothing to lose and no vision of the future, who have never been given cause to learn how to be any other way, will continue to do whatever it takes to feel like they have some control over their lives and vent their frustrations, and in turn this will cause increasing anger, frustration, and ultimately violence from the victims of their actions.

If the government doesn't take this seriously and put some serious work into making a better country then the UK will continue to decline into something that I barely dare contemplate.

Driving to work this morning I was brought to tears by the news reports of destruction, looting, and arson in dozens of locations in my home country, England.

This evening, watching videos of the crime spree online, I felt emotional again. I felt despair for the situation that, in hindsight, seems to have been growing for years. I felt sorrow for the people whose property was smashed, stolen, and burned down. I felt empathy for the angry people who felt let down by the government and the police forces, and who felt a need to take to the streets themselves to defend their community the same way people were doing over a thousand years ago. I felt pity for the perpetrators who are ostensibly violent amoral unthinking criminals.

These people, mostly teenagers but many adults, are doing things that should normally be socially unacceptable. Without excusing their criminal actions we must understand WHY they are violent amoral unthinking criminals.

I feel pity for them because there seems to have been some fault or omission in their education, their upbringing, and their understanding of their involvement with society.

Some quotes:

From this video by a brave reporter: http://youtu.be/sXcI-NL3Tro
"We're getting our taxes back" - from a girl who didn't sound old enough to have paid income tax.

From this BBC news video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14458424
"It was good though, it was good fun" "It's the government's fault" "Conservatives" "Yeah, whatever, whoever it is" "It's the rich people, the people that have got businesses and that's why all this has happened, because of the rich people, so we're just showing the rich people we can do what we want" - from two girls who had been drinking looted booze all night and were hopeful that it would continue the following night.

These people don't seem to understand that a lot of the people with businesses and wealth came from the same beginnings as themselves, and got where they are through hard work and dedication. How has this concept been lost to a whole generation and how can we come back from this?

It's late and I'm tired and there are more videos to watch in horrified fascination.

Sociologists must be having a whale of a time.

By the wonders of the internet I am listening to Tom Ravenscroft on BBC radio 6 from my living room in California, some length of time after his show was broadcast over the airwaves in the UK.

Ravenscroft was John Peel's actual last name, and Tom is his son.

I only recently realised that Tom has a radio show and was excited to listen to it, especially as I have particularly been missing his father recently.

For those unfortunate enough to be unaware, John Peel played music on BBC radio from before I was born until his death in 2004. He was renowned for playing a huge variety of music, championing new music with an unmatched enthusiasm, and having an extraordinarily charming, avuncular, yet gruff and curmudgeonly personality. I fell asleep listening to his late night show once or twice a week, every week, for years.

As one would expect of someone raised in a house filled with, probably, a greater range of music than could be found anywhere else in the world, Tom Ravenscroft seems to have inherited an enthusiasm for all kinds of music and it's really good to know that this sort of stuff can still be heard on national broadcast radio. I was worried, when John Peel died, that non-mainstream music would be nudged off the BBC one DJ at a time.

Listening to Tom speak is the strange part. Although I suppose it isn't outside the realms of possibility that he had been coached to be a lot like his Dad on the air, I doubt that anyone at the BBC would have gone to those lengths. More likely is that Tom, entirely naturally, has inherited a lot of his Dad's verbal mannerisms so I constantly hear echoes and ghosts of John Peel. The difference that makes it so strange to listen to, though, is that John Peel was much older than me and was, to much of his audience, a kind of uncle or grandpa figure. Tom Ravenscroft is somewhat younger than me and... ...I really don't know how to explain the strange experience of hearing those very particular and personally meaningful verbal mannerisms (remember I frequently fell asleep listening to John Peel with headphones in my dark bedroom late at night) spoken in such a youthful voice.

I haven't heard Tom play anything at the wrong speed yet though.

I've been trying to recreate the eclecticism of a John Peel Show on Pandora.com by entering all the artists I can remember hearing on his show. Unfortunately it tends to get stuck on one musical genre. Here's a (shortened) link to the station if you want to give it a go:

http://is.gd/zMSz2W

Obviously it'll never be like listening to a John Peel Show as there will never be anything played at the wrong speed, and there will never be John Peel's warm, comforting, irreverent voice between the tunes.

We use our computers every day like we use our cars.

Most of us don't know much about how our computers work, just like a lot of us don't know much about how our cars work.

We wouldn't expect our cars to run smoothly for ever if we never took them to the mechanic for a service and an oil change every few months.

There should be places where we computer users take our computers to get them serviced by knowledgeable professionals two or three times a year. That sounds like something sensible to me. I would pay, perhaps, $30 or $40 a couple of times a year to get my computer serviced, and I would expect them to try to persuade me to buy certain software or hardware upgrades now and then, and they would have to convince me of the importance of this, and sometimes I would be persuaded, and sometimes I wouldn't.

We recently returned from a one-night camping trip on Mount Diablo.

While I was there I was able to relax and watch nature (while trying to ignore the background noise of loud families camping from huge trucks with electric guitars and keyboards and cooking equipment some people would be lucky to have in their permanent home).

I saw beautiful and interesting views and didn't photograph them.

I started one book, decided I didn't like it much, and started another without feeling a need to tell everyone about it on goodreads.com.

I thought lots of things without sharing all these thoughts with everyone on twitter and facebook.

I actually had my phone turned OFF for most of the 24 hours or so that we were there.

I remembered going camping as a teenager/young man. I would plan my route, my food, and where I would stay ahead of time. Then I would carefully pack my backpack, take a bus and a train to my start point, walk for several hours, then pay the farmer or whoever owned the campground £5 or £10 and set up my tent, cook my food, and settle in for the night. Maybe, if there was enough daylight, I might walk down to the local village shop if there was one within half an hour's walk, and buy some local produce. I did all this without a mobile phone, without a car, without the internet.

It was, and still is, nice to get away.

I feel like I'm saying this for the millionth time, but I really need to take control of my life.

Depending on when you start measuring from I've been an adult for about twenty years, almost half of my life so far. I have made little to no progress towards doing any of the many things I have wanted to do over the years.

I was never a shining example of health and fitness, and have always had intentions of getting into shape, but the longer I leave it the more difficult it gets.

I have been working for over fifteen years. The jobs I have had have not been unpleasant on the whole, but neither have they been particularly inspiring or fulfilling. I believe it should be possible for me to find a job doing something I enjoy. I want to be excited to go to work every day. If I work for another twenty to thirty years I believe I have time to do that.

I want to learn to fly, I want to learn lots of different art and craft techniques, I want to learn languages, I want to learn how to drive lots of different vehicles, I want to learn, or re-learn, mathematics and physics and chemistry and lots of other things.

I really need to pick up the pace. All I've done so far is repeatedly get into debt.