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.

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.

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.

Hyattsville residents are generally up on Hyattsville, but none of us like the mosquitos. Mosquitos aren’t just annoying, they are also big-time disease vectors.

When I lived in Tampa, the problem was addressed by periodically spraying the heck out of everything. I remember hearing the helicopters and running to my car before I was lacquered with sticky Malathion.

Is there a more environmentalsome answer?

When I bike home from work at dusk, I often am delighted to see bats swoop down alongside me on the Northwest Branch Trail to gobble up bugs with admirable precision.

Could our bat friends provide the solution to the mosquito menace? I think it’s time to install a bat house and see.

I just ordered one on eBay… I’ll keep you posted.

In different bat-related matters, the editors of tmbw.net, the otherwise cool They Might Be Giants wiki, remain unpersuaded by my arguments that the lyrics of The Deranged Millionaire refer not to “The Genome of Bats”, but rather to a baseball team called The Genova Bats. Starting my own They Might Be Giants wiki seemed excessive, so I decided to post here, instead.

Bike commuting involves a lot of inventory control. At a minimum you need water, a light, batteries for the light, and a fix-it tool. If it’s hot out and your commute is any real length, you’ll need clothes and toiletries. And you may want a map, GPS, gym membership card, towel, chain lube, rags, emergency pump, sun block, tire patches, something to read… it can quickly get out of control. If you’re wearing bike pants, you may not even have pockets for your wallet!

It’s generally hard to protect bike luggage from would-be thieves, so you want to be able to remove and put it back easily.

It has taken me a while to arrive at a configuration that really works. A rack is essential, but I’ve found panniers and baskets to be unwieldy.

I attach a top pack to my rack. For heavier loads, I hang laptop bags from my rack with carabiners. I find I can carry a surprising amount of stuff this way, so much that I have to make sure to distribute everything evenly to keep from becoming unbalanced at low speeds.

Bungee is useful so long as you don’t get carried away with it. I often use it to provide some extra securing for my top pack. That also permits me to tuck my U-shaped bike lock away on top of it.

Backpacks are okay, too, if you keep them light and it isn’t very hot out. I avoid messenger bags… I find them hard to balance and they can strangle you if overloaded. Even fanny packs can hurt you over time if consistently overloaded.

I am pleased to report that all the human trash-talkers of human-powered lawn mowers are wrong.

We just picked one up and it’s awesome. The rotary blade is coupled to the wheels and spins around as you push. Since there isn’t a power plant on board, they are much lighter and consequently easier to operate than conventional mowers.

Gasoline-powered lawn mowers try to cut through stray branches, lawn gnomes, etc. Since a human-powered mower stops automatically when not in use, it’s safe to leave the blade exposed. If you hit something other than grass with a human-powered lawn mower, you simply reach down and remove it.

Consumer-grade gas-powered lawn mowers are probably the least energy-efficient devices commercially available today. So it’s all the stupider that they mess up our atmosphere pretty much for nothing.

Concurring opinion at Treehugger.com

Administrative note! I’m renaming the blog from Jeweled Battleshorts to Faster Cars and Smellier Air (another Douglas Adams quote) to better reflect the Environment-oriented nature of many of my recent blog postings. I’ll probably be deleting or retconing some of the more extraneous previous entries to bring them better in line with that theme.

I’ll also put up a more appropriate icon as soon as possible.

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.

I now commute by bicycle, partly because it’s fun, but primarily to limit my greenhouse gas emissions.

I’ve only recently started thinking about the fact that I always change out of lanes when I can’t keep pace with the prevailing speed of traffic. However, if I see a red light or a stopped car ahead, I typically have continued on in that lane with the understanding that I’m not reducing overall traffic throughput.

Unfortunately, this seems to preoccupy many automobile drivers behind me. They apparently cannot bear to be going any slower than physically possible. They will often elect to switch out of their lane (or switch partially out of their lane), speed up, pass me, switch back, and then slam their breaks on when they realize they are about to smash into the right side of a garbage truck.

I presume that they didn’t notice anything beyond my bicycle intruding on their fundamental human right to (briefly) change their position with respect to the positions of other objects at a large rate.

Aside from being dangerous, these irrational drivers are wasting fuel. So from now on, I resolve to switch out of my lane if I can’t keep pace with the car behind me, regardless of overall traffic throughput.

I am intrigued by all these little, split-second decisions our minds make, often without conscious direction. For example, I have gotten really good at catching fumbled objects. I marvel at it because I know how hard it would be to teach a computer the same trick.

Earlier this year, I read Jeff Hawkins’s interesting book On Intelligence. Hawkins believes that the ability to recognize patterns and sudden departures from them is central to intelligent action. He goes into great detail describing the sophistication of sensory perception. Hawkins further believes that our minds accomplish this through the application of an as-yet undiscovered, high-level, invariant mechanism.

What if Hawkins is right about the centrality of patterns, but not about the mechanism? What if intelligence is little more than the ruthless application of a zillion simple edge-detection and flood-fill algorithms?

Perhaps I will start treating Photoshop with a little more respect.

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.