Green Cars...

Many people are attracted to either all-electric or hybrid cars because they believe they are helping the environment by doing so – they are “green” cars.  There are other reasons as well, but for many buyers of “green” cars, their green-ness is the major factor.

However, when you take into account the additional carbon footprint and other pollutants produced in the manufacture of both hybrid and all-electric cars, and the indirect carbon footprint and pollution increase from all-electric cars (because they're recharged with electricity produced most often in a non-nuclear power plant), then they don't look quite so green.  Over the average lifetime of a green car, both the carbon footprint and the pollution are worse than the average gasoline-powered car – and there's nothing on the horizon that would change that.  Massive conversion of power plants to nuclear or fusion power would help a lot, but that's not very likely.  Massive conversion to wind or solar doesn't work because there is no known way to store power produced during the daytime for use at night.  Lithium mining is notoriously polluting and energy intensive, but no replacement technology for lithium-ion batteries is even in the laboratory, much less in production.

None of this information is a secret, nor is it hidden or hard to access.  Do a little googling and you can find all you want.  Green cars are a myth (albeit a popular myth!).  They really should be called brown cars.

Bjorn Lomberg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) has a nice summary of this in today's Wall Street Journal)...

A Triumph of Form Over Function...

The side-mounted rear-view mirrors on our new FJ Cruiser are roughly rectangular in shape, mounted with the long side vertical (usually the long side of these mirrors is horizontal).  Debbie and I both immediately noticed the poor vision to the rear, especially when compared with our Tundra trucks. 

With a little analysis, it's easy to see why.  I won't bore you with the trigonometry, but...with the driver sitting 30" from the 5.5" wide left mirror, the field of vision is only about 10° wide.  On our Tundras, with their 8.75" wide mirrors, it's about 17° wide – definitely a noticeable difference!

So today I installed some wide-angle “blind spot” mirrors on both sides of our FJ.  These are from ICU, and they use mirrors made of glass (most of these sorts of mirrors are made either of plastic or polished metal, both of which get roughened surfaces quite quickly).  

A driver's-perspective view of the left mirror shows how much this improves the field of vision.  My rough estimate is that I now have a 40° field of view, a vast improvement over 10°

If we drive with these for a while and still don't like them, I may commit FJ sacrilege: install big-rig style tripod mirrors on both sides.  Those mirrors are hell on the drag coefficient, and would probably drop our highway mileage significantly, so I'm hoping I don't have to resort to that.  One other possibility occurred to me: cameras installed on the mirror mount (perhaps on the bottom of them), displaying on screens over my head.  That might work as well.

Why did the FJ designers make such a wacky choice for the mirrors?  The only reason I can think of is that some designer thought the vertical mounting looked better, and didn't care what that choice did to the driver's visibility.  We curse this designer daily...

Does Repitition on the Internet Make It True?

Via friend and reader Doug W., who points out, tongue-in-cheek, that “Of course, this kind of issue has no relation whatsoever to the climate change debate”...

What Old People Do for Fun...

Grasshopper Makes a Record High Hop...

It jumped 263 feet!

But this isn't your momma's grasshopper:

Benjamin Franklin on Daylight Saving...

Nearly every time I read some of Benjamin Franklin's writings I am surprised by his wit and humor.  I need to read more :)

Here's a snippet from a long letter he wrote advocating the adoption of Daylight Saving time:

An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light; and I imagined at first, that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.

I looked at my watch, which goes very well, and found that it was but six o'clock; and still thinking it something extraordinary that the sun should rise so early, I looked into the almanac, where I found it to be the hour given for his rising on that day. I looked forward, too, and found he was to rise still earlier every day till towards the end of June; and that at no time in the year he retarded his rising so long as till eight o'clock. Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early; and especially when I assure them, that he gives light as soon as he rises. I am convinced of this. I am certain of my fact. One cannot be more certain of any fact. I saw it with my own eyes. And, having repeated this observation the three following mornings, I found always precisely the same result.

Yet it so happens, that when I speak of this discovery to others, I can easily perceive by their countenances, though they forbear expressing it in words, that they do not quite believe me. One, indeed, who is a learned natural philosopher, has assured me that I must certainly be mistaken as to the circumstance of the light coming into my room; for it being well known, as he says, that there could be no light abroad at that hour, it follows that none could enter from without; and that of consequence, my windows being accidentally left open, instead of letting in the light, had only served to let out the darkness; and he used many ingenious arguments to show me how I might, by that means, have been deceived. I owned that he puzzled me a little, but he did not satisfy me; and the subsequent observations I made, as above mentioned, confirmed me in my first opinion.

Do read the whole thing...

To Space and Back...

Read all about this here...

Karzai Accuses U.S. of Colluding with the Taliban...

This morning I read that Afghan President Karzai just accused the U.S. of colluding with Taliban ($WSJ) to persuade the Afghan public that they really needed foreign forces (which are, of course, primarily American) to stay past the announced withdrawal date in 2014.  The specific accusation is that the U.S. “coordinated” the Taliban suicide bombings in Kabul yesterday.

I caught myself in a very uncomfortable moment as I read, when I realized that I was actually considering that Karzai was telling the truth.  Ordinarily I'd have dismissed such as statement as the delusional ravings of a hard-pressed foreign politician frantically searching for a scapegoat.  Not this time.  I'm not saying that I believe Karzai is correct; in fact, I still think that's very unlikely.  But...I'm keeping an open mind about it.  Should some actual evidence surface, I'll be paying close attention. 

Why this change in attitude?  It's really very simple: I have absolutely zero faith that the Obama administration's actions are guided by America's interests.  I am persuaded that only their own interests guide their actions.  If they thought colluding with the Taliban would help them, I have no doubt they'd find a way to justify it to themselves.

I am saddened to find myself thinking this way...

The Greek Letter π and Gravity...

Consider the following formulae:

π² ≈ 9.87
g ≈ 9.81 N/k

The constant g is the gravitational constant, for the force of gravity at the Earth's surface. 

The two numbers are very close.  I'd have dismissed this as pure coincidence, but in fact it is not.  Fascinating!

Two Government-Dependent Progressives on an Escalator...

The Phony Recovery...

Whenever a politician tells you that our economy is recovering, remember this graph.  We won't have a real recovery until the employment-population ratio gets back up above 61% or so.  Any politician who tells you otherwise is lying.  Or as Mark Twain would say, they're opening their mouth (as the only thing likely to emerge is a lie)...

Chinese Junk Takes Out Russian Satellite...

Space junk, that is – not a ship.  This prognosis pretty much sums it up:

It is not immediately clear whether the satellite is merely wounded or completely incapacitated.

Oops...

“Magic” Sand...

An entertaining demonstration of hydrophobic materials:

Cows Are the Answer!?!

Via Watts Up With That, this awesome TED talk by Dr. Allan Savory.  He shows how people on five continents have reversed desertification by increasing grazing – contra decades of “scientific” grasslands management...


His big insight was realizing the role that wild herds of grazing animals played in the ecology of natural grasslands.  Their mechanical reduction (trampling) of grass provides mulch, fertilizer, and water – perfect conditions for the next generation of grass even during a dry season.

Awesome!

Nobody Texts Dog...

Quote of the Day...

From Mark Steyn's current piece on the drone debate:

The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t.

If the fertilizer reference escapes you, Mr. Steyn is referring to the Taliban's homemade bombs, which use ammonia-based fertilizers mixed with oil as their explosive...

This Probably Means I'm a Bad Person...

...but I thought this was very funny :)

Flying Pig Moment, Legal Department...

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, justifiably notorious for its progressive-leaning rulings, must have missed its meds: they've just ruled that agents at border crossings cannot search digital devices (such as phones, laptops, etc.) for no reason at all.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been asserting its right to do just that, leading many organizations to counsel that travelers not carry these devices with them.  DHS has also cited, numerous times, that the mere existence of an encrypted file is suspicious – a plainly absurd assertion in this day and age.

Someone please hide those meds!  This kind of Ninth Circuit I could learn to admire!

Best Debugging Story Evah?

Well, a candidate, maybe.  Awesome?  You betcha.  It involves Forth, TTL, microcode, and an oven.  What could possibly go wrong?  :)

(Many) More Solutions to the Three-Body Problem...

When I first read the title of this article, I thought it was referring to a different (though related) problem: computing the course of a satellite (one body) through a two-body system (such as the Earth and the Moon).  When I was a kid first learning about space travel, this was a notoriously unsolved problem.  Instead of the usual sort of mathematical solution to this problem, navigators at NASA resorted to finite state models to solve the problem.  Later on (in the '70s, if memory serves me right), mathematicians did develop equations that solved that particular three-body problem, but systems with more bodies (like Jupiter and Saturn) remained challenging, and were still normally solved with finite state modeling.

But this article is about a different sort of three-body problem – stable orbits of three-body systems.  Similar, and still interesting, though...