Archive for the ‘rant’ Category
A water-powered car!
Wow. Tonight is just a treasure trove of car-related stuff for me to point and laugh at. 
I’ve heard of stuff like this before, but I’ve never actually seen plans. Behold: “PRELIMINARY PLANS TO RUN YOUR CAR ON TAP WATER!” (emphasis most emphatically not mine).
Of course, we all remember how easy it is to show that this won’t work, right?
(Bonus points for the student who thinks to ask the designer why the water vapor coming out of the tailpipe can’t simply be condensed and used again.)
The sentence I love the most, though, is this one:
If you test it out, though, do as the writer suggests and use an old car that doesn’t represent a loss of value if you can’t make it work.
In other words, if you can’t make it work, it’s your fault. After all, they “know by personal experience that the technology is sound.”
Look up “irrelevant” in the dictionary…
…and you might find a link to this CNN story.
I know a lot of people think this guy is awesome, but he apparently believes that a battery-powered car in the year 2008 with the following properties “could change the world”:
- based on a 1959 Lincoln Continental convertible, a car that’s over 19 feet long and originally weighed over 5000 pounds (and almost certainly weighs more as a battery-powered electric)
- has eaten over $120,000 of money to convert to its present state
- acceleration control is a knob in the back seat
- brake is on the passenger side
- a 12-mile test run which almost ended in a collision is considered a milestone
I don’t have a problem with rich people having fun with their money or chasing windmills, but this story is phrased as if we are expected to believe that this car is going to create a revolution in electric automobiles. I honestly don’t know whether the person who wrote this story for CNN is pandering to Young or making fun of him.
When I could (theoretically) buy one of these for $109,000, how does this story have any relevance at all? I don’t blame Young for his apparent delusion. I blame CNN for passing it off as real news.
Why Hydrogen Won’t Save Us
For a long time now, I’ve been fairly annoyed with the media and political hyperbole surrounding the future use of hydrogen. Most of the attention I’ve seen seems to revolve around the (admittedly worthy) advances in the devices (fuel cells, mostly) that help us convert hydrogen into energy for use in cars, consumer devices, etc. That’s great as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole story.
Consuming the hydrogen is only one piece of the puzzle. Not only must the hydrogen be stored, transported, and distributed (no easy feat given its form as the lightest of gases), but we have to figure out how to produce it in quantity. That’s the piece I see left out of the discssion most often. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s an energy carrier. It’s not something we mine out of the ground. We have to make it. Currently, the most efficient (cheapest) way to make it in quantity is to use a process called steam reformation to make it from natural gas. Why not just burn the natural gas? You’re gonna release the carbon one way or another. Electrolysis of water sounds attractive, but where do you get the electrical energy to do the electrolysis?
Slashdot pointed me to an article on the Popular Mechanics web site that I think does an excellent job of outlining the challenges and unanswered questions that come between us and developing hydrogen as a true alternative to gasoline and other fuels. It’s by no means an exhaustive scientific study, but it does something I haven’t seen before: it provides estimated numbers on the various costs involved in getting the hydrogen from various sources. Specifically, it estimates the resources and costs necessary to meet Bush’s goal of using hydrogen to replace fossil fuels in all passenger cars by 2040. It’s not really a completely fair chart. It doesn’t take into account some future breakthrough in technology, but what it seems to indicate to me is that the goal depends on such a breakthrough.
By the way, what it also underscores is that we use an IMMENSE amount of oil to power our cars. I will freely admit that I’m probably a bigger fan than most of acceleration. One way or another, though, we as a nation are going to have to figure out how to cut our energy consumption. My current hypothesis: it will happen when energy finally gets expensive here. $3.00/gallon gasoline sounds bad, but we haven’t seen anything yet.
So, what am I trying to say? I think research and development on hydrogen power should continue. We may find that breakthrough (controllable fusion with a net positive energy output, making electrolysis practical, maybe?). In the meantime, though, I’m just tired of politicians making political hay claiming that they know how to save the world using hydrogen. The truth is we don’t know how to get there yet.
Jobs & Weblogs
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. The story behind it is a bit old now, but I’m just now feeling motivated enough to actually write it up.
Here’s the fundamental question behind this post: why are people surprised when they are fired for bad-mouthing their employer and co-workers on their web sites?
“Dooced” is a pretty common term in the blogosphere these days. For anyone who doesn’t know its meaning and/or etymology, the Wikipedia entry gives a pretty good high-level summary. Last month, the media latched onto another case of a woman getting fired for roughly the same reason.
So, here’s how I view this. My employer as an entity has absolutely no good reason to concern itself with my life outside of work, and that includes this web log. However, part of the reason for that is that this web log has absolutely no reason to concern itself with the details of my experiences as an employee. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I’ve considered that it might be okay to share specifics of my work in this weblog, regardless of whether or not I name my employer or the people in those accounts.
To me, what it boils down to is this: whatever my “typical” readership is, this web log amounts to public media. Google indexes this site quite thoroughly. Anyone who publishes a web site and doesn’t know about the Wayback Machine at archive.org REALLY needs to go there and search for their own URL. Look up URLs for sites that are years-dead. Go try it. Look up “http://www.eng.ua.edu/~jmcclure/”. Scary.
My point… I don’t care how crafty I think I am, the web is a public medium, and there’s enough information out there to connect the dots between me, my job, and any comments I make about my job on my site. Given that, how can I expect my employer not to protect itself in that situation, and unless there was clear discrimination (based on the legal definition, which doesn’t include the right to bad-mouth my employer) how can I expect to have any recourse or right to complain?
It’s like duct tape, except it’s not
An AP report on CNN.com mentions that the shuttle astronauts are thinking about using duct tape to hold on a troublesome jet pack that caused problems during a space walk yesterday. I was all ready to cue the obligatory jokes about duct tape being able to fix anything.
Except, it’s not duct tape. Quoting the article:
The spacewalkers hope they can use Kapton tape to hold the backpack latches in place when they make their next spacewalk on Wednesday. The tape is like duct tape but slippery and able to withstand both frigid cold and fiery hot temperatures.
Bwah? We use Kapton tape at work occasionally. If you’ve ever seen it, you’ll realize that quote is a bit like saying, “Sand is like sugar, but darker and able to resist dissolving in water.” In other words, Kapton tape resembles duct tape in that it comes in rolls and has an adhesive backing. That’s about it.
I know it’s a silly thing to post about, but there’s something to be said for not stretching the facts just so you can get a catchy headline.