Archives for category: technology

California Street Cable Car at Night

The prestigious California Street Cable Car whisked us to the top of Nob Hill

On Sunday, Rob and I went into the time machine known as Nob Hill. We took the California Street cable car up to the Fairmont hotel, and then walked over to his apartment and used the rotary phone (yes, you can still use rotary phones). We had to take this adventure at the beginning of the month after he had bought a new transit pass but before his old one expired. There was no way I was going to pay $5 to ride the cable car three blocks.

Feel like you need a rotary phone of your own but you don’t have a land line? Have I got the solution for you. A rotary phone with a slot for the SIM card from your mobile phone! Okay, so maybe this is the equivalent of having a horse pull your Prius around town, but what’s more satisfying than slamming down a nice heavy phone when a telemarketer wakes you up on Saturday morning?
me on a rotary phone

The author enjoying an old-timey phone conversation

I read this article while I was at the gym today and was very impressed by the advances that have been made in recycling in recent years. While you often hear that it is inefficient to recycle and that it is actually worse for the environment than not recycling, this study by the Technical University of Denmark and the Danish Topic Centre on Waste refutes these claims by looking at an array of 55 life-cycle analyses and 200 scenarios to compare recycling with other disposal methods. They found that in 83% of all scenarios that included recycling, it was indeed better for the environment.

This article also explains how recyclables are sorted when they are all in the same bin and how aluminum is plucked out of the stream of trash despite it’s non-magnetivity. I always wondered about that (click on “read more” at the bottom to find out the secret).

I was thinking about the environment before I went to the gym because Monday is Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers around the world have pledged to write about the environment. Now I have to think of another topic for Monday because I couldn’t wait to post this one…
read more | digg story