Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
The Prime Minister of Japan says there’s a need to restart two reactors for the livelihoods of Japan. This was bound to happens since fossil fuels cost and there’s not enough alt energy in place that’s willing to be adopted. This brings up a better discussion of what can really replace nuclear power? What are people willing to sacrifice and vote for? Bummer for the locals of the Ohi Plant, but that’s how things are going to work at the moment. (Business Week – Ohi Reactors)
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Asian Americans and mental illness. This is important and lesser known. Yes, it’s a post that is Debbie Downer on a nice saturday, etc, but in the end, you can’t just hide these facts and situations. It’s happening to someone you know, you just don’t know it. “This plays into a surprising statistic among Asian American women. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Asian American women aged 15 to 24 have the highest rates of depressive symptoms of any ethnic or gender group. The CDC reports that young Asian American women have the second highest suicide rate among their age group – the same goes for Asian American women over 65.” Great work (KALW – Depression)
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Busted and why didn’t the dinosaur bones get checked out beforehand? It sold for near 1.1 million and now it’s an issue of who gets this? Will it go back to Mongolia and be placed in a museum? Will it just get poached again? “We have pulled a lot of them out of the ground and seen a lot of others come out of the ground, and in our professional opinion it is from Mongolia,” said Mark Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who began working in the Central Asian country in 1990. (Fox News – Tarbosaurus)
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Invasive species are coming. It’s like Aliens, at least for the affected species that it’s hurting. As interesting as floating objects may seem, they’re actually harmful. “The dock, torn loose from a fishing port on the northern tip of Japan, was covered with 1.5 tons of seaweed, mussels, barnacles and even a few starfish. Volunteers scraped it all off, buried it above the high water line, and sterilized the top and sides of the dock with torches.” (Knoxnews – Invasive)
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Tru Nguyen works at Giant Robot and we’re proud to say that she is a public transportation rider. From the KCET website Tru Nguyen, 27, Retail worker How do people react when they find out that you don’t even have a license? People reassure me that driving is easy and it just takes getting the hang of. My sister likes to say that if it were hard then there wouldn’t be so many stupid people driving on the road. A couple of people have told me that they can’t believe that anyone walks in L.A. but in my opinion drivers just act like there is no such thing as pedestrians. Do you want to learn to drive? Not particularly, I only got my first driver’s permit last year. I’ve been meaning to schedule driving lessons but it isn’t a priority of mine. On the other hand, my siblings got their permits and licenses as soon as they were old enough. Meet my friend Tru from college! How do you think your life would be different if you owned a car? I’d have more flexibility regarding where I can live and work. When I moved last year, I wanted to be within a 30-45 minute bus ride of work with no more than one transfer if necessary. This meant I had to dismiss certain neighborhoods to live in. Getting home at night can be an obstacle since some buses run less often or change their routes at night. If I had a car, things would be easier if I wanted to drive somewhere on a whim or had an emergency.When I travel less familiar routes and neighborhoods I have to do a fair bit of planning so I don’t become stranded. It is a nice way to get to know the lay of the streets. It amazes some of my friends that I know the downtown area and Chinatown so well, but I’ve been taking long bus rides there since college (was an hour from UCLA/WLA) to check out bars to party or restock my Asian groceries. I’m no help in finding freeway on-ramps or remembering which streets are one-way there though. What’s great about being carless in Los Angeles? When I am on the bus I love watching the neighborhoods change as I ride through them: glossy boutiques and fancy iron gates give way to cozy ethnic storefronts and everything in between before I am swallowed by the soaring buildings of downtown, and eventually, even those give way to strip malls. I feel like I see more of the city rather than being forced to go around it by taking the freeways. You used to be able to see a little bit of L.A.’s character in the old murals along the freeway but many of them have been painted over rather than maintained. To me, the freeway is just a crowded expanse of asphalt bracketed by sound dampening walls. When I’m on foot in the neighborhood I can focus on...
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