Faster Cars and Smellier Air

I used to be a big fan of the Washington Metro Rail System. Years of delays, crowding, appalling customer service, and even accidents changed that. Certainly, inadequate funding has been at least as much to blame as mismanagement.

Luckily, there have been recent indications that things may be on the mend. These include ground breaking on the Dulles line, the installation of a new, platform-level public address system that riders can actually hear, and the successful handling of huge-gantic Inaugural crowds. So I’ll try and mute my grumbling about the 50 minutes I spent on the phone the other day (hopefully) transferring the balance from my dysfunctional SmarTrip card.

Here’s one Metro-related item that I will not attempt to mute my grumbling about: I hate this Chevron ad!

I am generally skeptical of conspiracy theories. I’m inclined to think that GM & company were just stupid rather than that they “killed” the electric car. But I’ll be danged if this sign doesn’t look like it actually seeks to discourage readers from buying a hybrid electric car. The guy is holding his head in despair! Oh, hybrid cars are manifestly inferior and weak. But I will at least consider getting one.

That’s ridiculous. Hybrid cars are awesome! They look great, get great gas mileage, perform awesome, run quietly. Oh yeah, and they won’t mortgage the next generation’s inheritance.

This holiday season, I received two books describing how we can help the environment.

The first one, the New York Times’ green book, was a disappointment. The celebrity vignettes were well-intentioned, if at times bizarre (William McDonough and Cameron Diaz?)

Some of the advice in this book isn’t very good. Take the following travel tip:

Unfortunately, the impact of tourism on the environment is more complicated.

As any trail designer will tell you, concentrating visitors in certain areas can actually be good for the environment, because it limits overall damage. Similarly, it hurts the environment less to ride the teacups at “overexposed, overcrowded” Disney World than it does to ride an airboat through the environmentally sensitive Everglades.

But you can also visit the Everglades without particularly hurting the environment, provided you stay on the boardwalks and paved paths. In fact, you might become so enchanted with the amazing bird, alligator, and otter populations that you are moved to reduce your environmental impact upon returning home.

What’s more, income from legitimate eco-tourism empowers some communities to avoid unsustainably harvesting their natural resources!

We generate pollution everywhere. In a densely-populated city, the larger shared buildings waste less heat. Destinations are closer together, so we don’t have to drive as far. That means less pollution, not more.

The chapter on school advises:

These numbers sound fishy to me, but let’s assume they’re right. Let’s further assume that no one ever walks or bikes to the library, which has minimal environmental impact.

I’m all for the Internet, but do we really want to discourage kids from using the library? The Internet is a gigantic but profoundly non-authoritative source of information. Information published in books has to pass a higher threshhold of quality and suitability.

Electronic books are great, but the availability of titles remains limited. And e-book delivery platforms are still pretty expensive.

In order to function as citizens of a participatory democracy, it is imperative that we remain well-informed. Without resources like libraries we wouldn’t be able to cope effectively with the challenges that affect our environment.

Then the chapter on work goes on to give this contradictory advice:

And the final fifty-one pages of the book are, you guessed it, references to Internet data servers! Why pulp trees to print web addresses that will already be out of date when the book is published? Why not set up a single web site, include the URL at the end of the book, and maintain links to everything from there?

Clearly, there is work to be done improving the energy efficiency of Internet server farms. Instead, the authors of the green book would have us to communicate and read less! Unless we’re using the Internet to avoid a trip to the library.

It is unreasonable to expect that we should stop living our lives to help the environment. Ultimately, the whole point of environmentalism is to enrich our lives by securing the wonder of nature for ourselves and our descendants.

The book’s saving grace is a page on which Will Ferrell recounts the “limitless joy” that driving his electric car to the hazardous waste facility affords him. For my money, they should have let Ferrell write the whole book.

I’m glad to say that I really did enjoy Living Like Ed, A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life, by Ed Begley Jr. Ed is the real deal. His book is full of great information, much of which I had never read anywhere else.

First off, Robert Reich has just written much of what I wrote here on Tuesday, but way smarter. Here’s hoping this guy gets a prominent cabinet position.

Next, this weekend’s Green Festival at the Washington DC Convention Center. If nothing more, it was great to see so many people show up in the name of living in harmony with the environment… even if some of it did involve holistic vegan Yoga massage.

I got to meet William McDonough at a book signing (not sure whether his bow-tie was biodegradable) and talk to several solar contractors. I was pleased to see The Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Anacostia Watershed Society were there to represent.

One group that was new to me was The Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington DC. These folks brought a Prius modified with a kit to permit recharging by plug, without gasoline. It was neat to see and hear about one of these things first-hand.

Another interesting attendee was Burr Technologies. This company is trying to assemble computers that use less power, primarily by the use of more efficient power supplies that can be passively cooled, without resorting to a fan. In the same vein, this month brings the news that researchers at Penn State have made progress with the use of electrocaloric plastics for high-efficiency electric cooling, which would be perfect for computer chips. Having grown disenchanted with “Sleep Mode”, I think these folks may be onto something.

Start Me Up?

Computers have to load instructions into memory when first starting up. This process can take a long time. As Peter Gibbons learned in Office Space, the same is true for shutdown, when your computer has to clean-up open resources.

Well-intentioned engineers came up with Sleep Mode as a solution: instead of turning a computer off, just dump the system state to the hard drive, power down most components, and reload the state later, if needed.

Unfortunately, sleep mode hasn’t worked out so well. Even today, many non-Mac laptops struggle to wake when opened, presumably a consequence of poor software/hardware integration.

But even systems that wake up successfully when roused by an operator have come smashing up against a broken abstraction of the Network Age.

A “server” is any computer that provides services to another computer. When most clients were little more than screens or teletypes, this was a useful distinction. Today, it’s often hard to distinguish the server from the client. If you stream downloaded television shows from your desktop computer to a set-top box, or sync your calendar from your desktop to a mobile device, which machine is the server? And what happens if that “server” happens to be asleep when you need its services?

Efforts to address this, like Wake-on-LAN mode, have not seen wide adoption. So maybe the better solution is to reduce the computer’s energy footprint all the time.

Heart-felt congratulations to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the United States of America, and the Earth.

Audio I recorded from the celebration in downtown Washington DC at 2:34 AM Wednesday morning.

Government is not perfect. But properly managed, it can harness our collective genius in times of challenge.

Government investment brought us the Internet, put us on the Moon, and built a system of trails and highways that reach from one end of this country to the other. New investments like these in energy technology can save us from global climate change and from our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. The money we spend will also put Americans to work and help jump start our stalled economy.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy

It’s Election Day in the United States, everybody. Let’s do this.

The invention of a successful new machine takes hard work and brains. It usually also requires lots of capital. This typically comes from investors whose involvement is predicated on the expectation that they will be able to exploit the machine exclusively for a period of time. Easier said than done!

I’ve been reading a book about experimentation with steamboats in the early United States. It’s pretty dismal stuff, and kind of a nice counterweight to all the upbeat inventor success stories I have read before. Historical Biography selects for winners, but sadly, history itself is replete with losers.

Apparently, a federal patent office overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction isn’t unique to our era. Patent Office troubles plagued the inaugural generation of American steamboat experimenters. Without them, a successful steamboat might have been achieved earlier, and we might have stood on stronger commercial footing in our ensuing conflict with Great Britain.

It seems to me that those of us in consumer software development should be glad that compilation to byte or machine code provides our work with some degree of protection outside the expense of a formal patent. But we still have to worry about somebody else obtaining one on flimsy grounds and coming along to clobber us. I’m not sure that I’m against all software patents, but a lot of them sure seem to have been granted for ideas that I don’t consider novel.

Josh has a new article up about “spacediving”. The enormous speeds we ordinarily associate with atmospheric re-entry result from de-orbiting. If you just go straight up and straight down, re-entry speeds are reduced to the point where spacediving ceases to be impossible and becomes merely gonzo-stupid.

Proceeding from this premise, the beryllium heat shield on Alan Shepherd’s Freedom 7 Mercury Spaceship must have been fairly over-designed. Freedom 7’s non-orbital, ballistic trajectory reached a top altitude of 187 kilometers (116.5 miles). If you dropped an anvil from this height through a vacuum, it would hit the ground at about 1,755 meters per second (5,758 feet per second.) Of course, in Earth’s atmosphere the anvil would reach terminal velocity before achieving this speed.

15 minutes and 22 seconds after blast-off, Freedom 7 splashed down 486 kilometers (302 miles) from its launch pad. That corresponds to an average Eastward velocity in the same ballpack as our idealized anvil — about 527 meters per second (1,730 miles per second.)

Cringely has a surprising article this week about the use of giant kites to harvest electricity from the wind. The hardest part of flying a kite is launching it, and I’m a little hazy on how they plan to get these monsters off the ground, where the windspeed is modest. But the proponents think they can generate electricity for the game-changing price of 0.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Forget windmills, this price beats coal. Reportedly, the Google People are involved, which suggests this is science fiction rather than fantasy.

It’s gratifying to see somebody draft aerospace engineering to fight global warming. I’m reading an interesting book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, which suggests that efforts to reduce global poverty can also help combat global warming. The conventional wisdom says that economic progress will result in more industry and therefore more pollution. The authors of Break Through argue convincingly that nations must escape poverty before they feel secure enough to focus on environmental issues and expend the kind of resources necessary to really secure rain forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors advocate a new Apollo project (again with the aerospace engineering!) to jumpstart large-scale clean technologies that we can share with them and, of course, use ourselves.

I’ll keep riding my bike to work, but this is good stuff.

Josh Bell from the old neighborhood has written an interesting article about Ride-Sharing over Facebook.

Time to start yet another social-networking account?

I was finally able to participate in Bike to Work Day this year.

There were a respectable number of bikes on the road, a few of which were operated by old folks who appeared to be in better shape than I am in.

As expected, there were also inconsiderate and clueless automobile drivers. And for some reason, Georgetown seems to be their Mecca. One behaved as though my bike and I were invisible, changing into my lane and forcing me to get out of the way to avoid an accident. On the way home, I was parked in the right lane at a stop light when a taxi cab driver behind me, in apparent frustration that I occupy volume, started honking.

But I received my free bagel and T-shirt. I self-actualated. It was a good time. Outpacing cars and trucks on a bicycle is always exhilirating.

So how many of us will be biking to work Monday?

If you look at commuting time, biking is by far my fastest route to work. The important factor isn’t the distance between my home and my office, but between my office and the gym. In my case, it’s about four city blocks. A little on the long side, but doable. I’d need to get better at getting ready quickly in a locker room environment, where I have to observe time-consuming protocols that aren’t necessary at home. It’s sort of like elevator-etiquette, but naked.

Since I’m currently commuting by subway and not by automobile, I suspect that the benefit to the environment of switching would be modest. I guess if enough riders made the change, it would relieve crowding and might make the subway more attractive (or less unattractive) to automobile commuters. Of course, extra trains and better schedule-keeping would accomplish that, too.

If nothing more, Bike to Work Day is valuable because it promotes dialogue, and reminds us that that we have alternatives.

Let’s review some recent prioritizations we appear to have made as a society.

Are we losing the ability to prioritize? Or did we ever have it?

Matt tells the charming story of how he once was given a long list of tasks to complete at work. He asked his boss to rank the tasks in terms of importance so that he could prioritize the work. His boss proceeded to write “high” next to every task.