Archive for October, 2006
Learning to Ride, Sunday
This is a continuation of a story begun in the previous entry. If you’re starting here, go back and read the first one first. Otherwise you won’t get all that drama I built up for you. 
Come back here when you’re done.
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Learning to Ride, Saturday
I have several friends that ride motorcycles, and I’ve been curious about riding for several years now. I finally decided to bite the bullet and see if riding is something I would enjoy and something I would be good at. So, this weekend I participated in a beginning motorcycle rider course. I finished up Sunday afternoon, and this seemed like a good place to let folks know how it went. Fair warning, this one’s LONG.
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What is beauty?
I don’t often post links here without a fair amount of commentary, but this one really doesn’t need anything added. I stole this one from a friend’s LJ post.
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.
Four Words
FINALLY I’m getting around to responding to Ashley tagging me for the “four words” meme. I fear it won’t be as interesting as she hopes, but here goes:
- frog - It’s funny how growing up out in the boonies of northwest Alabama, you learn what these little guys sound like in large numbers, but hear just a couple and it takes you a minute. Amy and I were sitting outside SAK Comedy Lab, where Patrick works waiting for the show to start, when we heard a weird sound behind us. It actually took me a minute to figure out it was about 3 or 4 frogs.
- blue - The color of the pants I was wearing last night when I managed to spill an entire soda on them, thus causing me to put them almost directly in the wash, with my Motorola RAZR still in the pocket and powered up. Doh! It’s drying out now. The battery is probably gone, but the phone itself might actually be okay. We’ll see. In the meantime it’s back to my old Nokia for a while.
- space - *shrug* I dunno. Something we actually look to have enough of this year for the people crashing here for Birthday Bash?
- ruler - Uncle. Complete blank.
Since most of my friends have been tagged already, and I’m too lazy right now to come up with 4 interesting words anyway, I’m going to be a bad boy and not pass this along. I know. I suck. We’ll all find a way to cope.