January 28, 2008 - Back to work. I managed to have a light lunch today, consisting of a bowl of soup and some chipotle roasted peanuts. On the way home from work, I stopped at Frida's Bakery on Ulmerton Road. I was impressed. This place is similar to a Panera Bread, except with a lot more cakes and pastries, and everything looked a lot fresher. I got the idea to come here from Anna. She said they had flourless chocolate cake. I got a slice of that, and a mouse layer thing. Both were delicious. For dinner I had a few slices of pizza, after the dessert. Ellie and I went to visit her grandmother in the hospital after dinner, and then came home for our last night with the dogs before their neutering. On another topic, I've been hearing and reading a lot of discussion on global warming. Everyone wants to pick 1 of three sides. Either they think humans are causing the temperature of our planet to rise (which would theoretically cause the ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise), they think that we have no impact on it and that the world just has cycles it fluctuates between, or they don't know anything about it and don't really care about learning more. From a thermodynamic standpoint, though, you can't argue with the fact that the long (LONNNNNGGGGG) term result is going to be the entire universe converging on absolute zero. Locally to our solar system, we have two major factors of thermodynamics to consider. The sun, and the earth. The sun is basically a humongous nuclear explosion that is going to take a few hundred million more years to complete. So the sun as it explodes, has a fairly consistent amount of heat output, but it does vary, just as if you had a fire burning in a fireplace. Next you've got our planet, which is in a much more stable state, rather than the nuclear explosion the sun is in. The earth has an inner core of energy that is very slowly dissipating its energy into the vacuum of space, but at the same time is being hit with the heat from the sun. It is in a delicate balance of heat loss to space, and heat gain from the sun. Because of the size of our planet, it takes a whole lot of temperature gradient to really influence our temperature one way or another, but the general long term trend is going to be down. I'm going to stop here for now, and come back on a later date, as this is already dragging on.