I've heard a lot recently about solar power and it occurs to me that nearly all of the power we consume is ultimately solar power. The sun shines, heating up the earth, causing the warm air to rise and cooler air to rush in to the lower pressure area. This wind turns turbines. When the warmed air cools, it's moisture condenses and the rain falls, powering hydroelectric plants. Rain causes plants to grow; over time, those plants decay and turn into oil or coal and produce natural gas.
So whether the power is photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric, coal, oil, or natural gas - it is all ultimately solar energy. And as such, all ultimately renewable.
What we call "renewable" is simply a distinction in the time line. The sunlight that we use to make electricity today will still be there tomorrow, as will the wind. The rains will come again eventually, and as long as the plants keep growing, coal, oil, and natural gas will eventually be replenished - although it supposedly takes eons to do so.
The only non-renewable energy supply we have is nuclear. This energy is simply harnessing the decay of fissionable materials, and the energy density of radioisotopes is incredible.
Ironically, the non-renewability of nuclear fuels is a moot point; their effective life is on a par with the expected life of the sun, so as a race, we will run out of nuclear fuel when we run out of all of the other energy sources - that is, when the sun goes dark.
In my opinion, going green is a good idea for conservation, but it makes no sense in terms of energy production. Fossil fuels are the 'battery' - the long-term storage of solar energy. These will be depleted eventually. We do need to move to other forms of energy before that happens. And we ought to consume no more energy than the sun provides, just so that we can be good stewards of the Earth - unless we use nuclear.
So I vote for nuclear fuel. It is the only truly non-renewable fuel, but it is the one that gives us energy without slowing down the wind, holding back the waves, or shading the deserts. If managed properly, there is no environmental damage; spent fuel can be returned to the depths of the earth that it came from originally, doing no more damage than it did before it was extracted.
Ironically, nuclear is the greenest of the green.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Who do I sue?
On August 31, 1976, the US Patent office issued patent #3978481 for an "Anti-collision vehicular radar system."
Just 30 years later, Volvo announced an automatic braking system that is planned to be available in the 2011 production models. Toyota and Mercedes are also working on systems to put on the brakes if the driver is about to hit something. In the case of Mercedes, this will be included in an option costing drivers on the order of $3500.
Why am I looking to sue someone? Because it should not take 30 years to start the work on making cars safer. Automobile manufacturers spent a ton of money to make collisions more survivable. Crumple zones and air bags have made cars much safer in spite of the use of more lightweight materials. (Watch this video of a 1959 Chevy Bel Air hitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xwYBBpHg1I.)
To be fair, there were a raft of automatic braking system patents issued in the 90s, after the expiration of #3978481. So perhaps using the figure of 30 years is a little disingenuous - after all, the technology of the 70s wasn't all that robust compared to the technology of the 90s. So perhaps I should only be lamenting the inaction of automobile manufacturers for 10 years.
Still. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded in 1980, and was pretty well known in the 90s. Auto makers have no excuse for not knowing that drunken drivers were a problem. And since there were patents on collision avoidance systems already in place, I would expect that the development would have started by at least 1990.
Does it really take 20 years to bring a technological idea to market? The History of Airbags shows that between the patent for a "sensor and safety system" in 1968 and the first commercially available vehicle equipped with airbags in 1973 was a span of only five years. I will concede that it took until 1998 for the federal government to mandate airbags in all vehicles, so there was a significant gap between "first available" and "universal."
Where are the insurance companies? Over 15,000 people die of alcohol-related accidents each year. In my own case (the only one that I have reliable information on), the various life, automobile, and liability insurance companies paid me a combined total of well over a quarter of a million dollars. Multiply that by 15,000 and you certainly have enough motivation for the insurance companies to get on the phone to the auto manufacturers and nag them to do something more than just add airbags.
$3,750,000,000 is closing in on 4 billion dollars every year that it costs us to let the driving drunks continue to kill people. Social efforts have cut the death toll to a little over half what it was in 1982, so progress is being made... but not fast enough. Social engineering cannot overcome basic human nature, but technology can take control away from impaired drivers.
Before there were cars, there were drunks. But a horse knew how to get home, even if the driver was "three sheets to the wind." And horses are smart enough to avoid a collision with another horse. Let's make our cars as smart as we can - and maybe, someday, they can take us home when we are sleepy, drunk, or otherwise unable to do it by ourselves.
I applaud Volvo, Toyota, and Mercedes for working on automatic collision avoidance systems. GM appears to have shelved it's work in the late 90s. Now that "we the people" own a controlling interest in GM, perhaps we can get them to renew their research and start building safe transportation systems rather than just flashy status symbols. (Of course, it would help if the buying public was smart enough to select "safe" over "pretty".)
So, let me know the best way to make cars safer. Should we sue the insurance industry? Sue the auto makers? Or just keep doing what we are doing - suing the drunk drivers to try to make a buck after they have killed a loved one?
Or maybe suing is not the answer. Maybe the auto manufacturers will start including collision avoidance systems if enough people just ask for them. Perhaps insurance companies will offer significant discounts for people who drive cars that are so equipped.
Either way, let's get the word out there, shall we?
Just 30 years later, Volvo announced an automatic braking system that is planned to be available in the 2011 production models. Toyota and Mercedes are also working on systems to put on the brakes if the driver is about to hit something. In the case of Mercedes, this will be included in an option costing drivers on the order of $3500.
Why am I looking to sue someone? Because it should not take 30 years to start the work on making cars safer. Automobile manufacturers spent a ton of money to make collisions more survivable. Crumple zones and air bags have made cars much safer in spite of the use of more lightweight materials. (Watch this video of a 1959 Chevy Bel Air hitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xwYBBpHg1I.)
To be fair, there were a raft of automatic braking system patents issued in the 90s, after the expiration of #3978481. So perhaps using the figure of 30 years is a little disingenuous - after all, the technology of the 70s wasn't all that robust compared to the technology of the 90s. So perhaps I should only be lamenting the inaction of automobile manufacturers for 10 years.
Still. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) was founded in 1980, and was pretty well known in the 90s. Auto makers have no excuse for not knowing that drunken drivers were a problem. And since there were patents on collision avoidance systems already in place, I would expect that the development would have started by at least 1990.
Does it really take 20 years to bring a technological idea to market? The History of Airbags shows that between the patent for a "sensor and safety system" in 1968 and the first commercially available vehicle equipped with airbags in 1973 was a span of only five years. I will concede that it took until 1998 for the federal government to mandate airbags in all vehicles, so there was a significant gap between "first available" and "universal."
Where are the insurance companies? Over 15,000 people die of alcohol-related accidents each year. In my own case (the only one that I have reliable information on), the various life, automobile, and liability insurance companies paid me a combined total of well over a quarter of a million dollars. Multiply that by 15,000 and you certainly have enough motivation for the insurance companies to get on the phone to the auto manufacturers and nag them to do something more than just add airbags.
$3,750,000,000 is closing in on 4 billion dollars every year that it costs us to let the driving drunks continue to kill people. Social efforts have cut the death toll to a little over half what it was in 1982, so progress is being made... but not fast enough. Social engineering cannot overcome basic human nature, but technology can take control away from impaired drivers.
Before there were cars, there were drunks. But a horse knew how to get home, even if the driver was "three sheets to the wind." And horses are smart enough to avoid a collision with another horse. Let's make our cars as smart as we can - and maybe, someday, they can take us home when we are sleepy, drunk, or otherwise unable to do it by ourselves.
I applaud Volvo, Toyota, and Mercedes for working on automatic collision avoidance systems. GM appears to have shelved it's work in the late 90s. Now that "we the people" own a controlling interest in GM, perhaps we can get them to renew their research and start building safe transportation systems rather than just flashy status symbols. (Of course, it would help if the buying public was smart enough to select "safe" over "pretty".)
So, let me know the best way to make cars safer. Should we sue the insurance industry? Sue the auto makers? Or just keep doing what we are doing - suing the drunk drivers to try to make a buck after they have killed a loved one?
Or maybe suing is not the answer. Maybe the auto manufacturers will start including collision avoidance systems if enough people just ask for them. Perhaps insurance companies will offer significant discounts for people who drive cars that are so equipped.
Either way, let's get the word out there, shall we?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
You are what you eat
Four years ago, I went to the emergency room with abdominal pains. When a guy my age staggers into the ER clutching his chest, there is no waiting in line; they immediately hook you up to the machines and make sure that your heart is still going. After some diagnosis, they discovered that I had a cancer of the gallbladder. I spent four or five days in the hospital after the surgery, and today I can happily praise God for four years free from cancer. My last checkup was just two weeks ago.
I noticed an interesting thing while I was recovering from that eleven inch incision. The pain killers changed the way my thought processes worked. Intellectually, I was able to stand aside as an observer of my own body and see how I could accept and believe things that I normally would have dismissed. It was an interesting experience.
How we think is a matter of chemical processes in the brain. When we are depressed, certain areas of the brain show patterns of higher or lower activity levels, so things like depression can be measured by medical equipment. But does it end there? What sort of chemical influences are we getting in our daily activities?
When I was in sixth grade, there was not one training bra on any of my eleven-year-old classmates. I was already interested in such things, so I paid close attention, casting furtive glances when I was pretty sure I would not be caught. That was 1967, in Golden, Colorado. Flash forward 40 years and look around - you may notice a lot higher percentage of nine-year-old kids with the telltale lines visible across their backs. To be honest, I am not looking at young girls for the same reasons I was back then - now it is an intellectual curiosity. What has changed in 40 years that has the girls hitting puberty so much younger?
I am not the first to notice this trend: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11483799 and http://www.center4research.org/children11.html - but I followed a different logical path to my conclusion.
Fifteen years ago, I started working on a project to reduce data from the USDA down to a few select cows so that a client could sell embryos to farmers at higher prices. The goal was to improve the Holstein breed of dairy cattle. Over the ten years that I helped Dave convert the data, I saw that the top milk producers doubled their output. Holsteins now give much more milk than they used to give.
I remember my grandfather telling that a guy showed up at his farm and offered to buy any cows that were past their prime as milk cows. He said he was a buyer from McDonalds looking for cheap meat for their hamburgers. My grandfather did not have dairy cows, but he was amused that they would be looking to buy older and tougher animals. Old cows make lousy steaks, but acceptable hamburger, I guess...
So I put three things together:
1) Cows are being selectively bred to have bigger udders and give more milk. They are better natural estrogen producers.
2) Fast food restaurants are buying up these higher-estrogen cows for hamburger.
3) Americans eat more fast food now than they did 40 years ago.
Could it be that the natural estrogen in the meat survives cooking and digestion and ends up stimulating our daughters to begin to mature earlier? If so, can it also be said that today's boys are less masculine than they were 40 years ago because of the same ingestion? Or did I just make that last part up?
Chemicals enter our bodies through several sources - the food and drink we consume, the water we bathe in, and the things we inject through the skin. This last one is the troubling one - because the immunizations that we are now required to have each include "adjuvants" - trace amounts of chemicals that enhance the effectiveness of the immunization, or that are left over from the serum creation process. The most common adjuvants are based on aluminum. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T3R-3VCK957-2
Trace amounts of aluminum have been tested with no noticeable effect - but a lifetime of flu shots and the raft of immunizations required to attend school probably have a cumulative effect.
I don't really have any firm conclusions about immunizations, other than that I've heard that autism is non-existent among populations that do not get immunized, like the Amish. But after hearing anecdotal evidence for so long a time, a pattern begins to emerge.
It looks to me like we really are what we consume, bathe in, and shoot up. I guess I had better watch what I eat...
I noticed an interesting thing while I was recovering from that eleven inch incision. The pain killers changed the way my thought processes worked. Intellectually, I was able to stand aside as an observer of my own body and see how I could accept and believe things that I normally would have dismissed. It was an interesting experience.
How we think is a matter of chemical processes in the brain. When we are depressed, certain areas of the brain show patterns of higher or lower activity levels, so things like depression can be measured by medical equipment. But does it end there? What sort of chemical influences are we getting in our daily activities?
When I was in sixth grade, there was not one training bra on any of my eleven-year-old classmates. I was already interested in such things, so I paid close attention, casting furtive glances when I was pretty sure I would not be caught. That was 1967, in Golden, Colorado. Flash forward 40 years and look around - you may notice a lot higher percentage of nine-year-old kids with the telltale lines visible across their backs. To be honest, I am not looking at young girls for the same reasons I was back then - now it is an intellectual curiosity. What has changed in 40 years that has the girls hitting puberty so much younger?
I am not the first to notice this trend: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11483799 and http://www.center4research.org/children11.html - but I followed a different logical path to my conclusion.
Fifteen years ago, I started working on a project to reduce data from the USDA down to a few select cows so that a client could sell embryos to farmers at higher prices. The goal was to improve the Holstein breed of dairy cattle. Over the ten years that I helped Dave convert the data, I saw that the top milk producers doubled their output. Holsteins now give much more milk than they used to give.
I remember my grandfather telling that a guy showed up at his farm and offered to buy any cows that were past their prime as milk cows. He said he was a buyer from McDonalds looking for cheap meat for their hamburgers. My grandfather did not have dairy cows, but he was amused that they would be looking to buy older and tougher animals. Old cows make lousy steaks, but acceptable hamburger, I guess...
So I put three things together:
1) Cows are being selectively bred to have bigger udders and give more milk. They are better natural estrogen producers.
2) Fast food restaurants are buying up these higher-estrogen cows for hamburger.
3) Americans eat more fast food now than they did 40 years ago.
Could it be that the natural estrogen in the meat survives cooking and digestion and ends up stimulating our daughters to begin to mature earlier? If so, can it also be said that today's boys are less masculine than they were 40 years ago because of the same ingestion? Or did I just make that last part up?
Chemicals enter our bodies through several sources - the food and drink we consume, the water we bathe in, and the things we inject through the skin. This last one is the troubling one - because the immunizations that we are now required to have each include "adjuvants" - trace amounts of chemicals that enhance the effectiveness of the immunization, or that are left over from the serum creation process. The most common adjuvants are based on aluminum. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T3R-3VCK957-2
Trace amounts of aluminum have been tested with no noticeable effect - but a lifetime of flu shots and the raft of immunizations required to attend school probably have a cumulative effect.
I don't really have any firm conclusions about immunizations, other than that I've heard that autism is non-existent among populations that do not get immunized, like the Amish. But after hearing anecdotal evidence for so long a time, a pattern begins to emerge.
It looks to me like we really are what we consume, bathe in, and shoot up. I guess I had better watch what I eat...
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Rules for the sake of rules
Some rules are necessary. For example, driving on the right (or left) side of the road, or driving at a certain speed. I think that in general, most rules promote safety and encourage an orderly and efficient society.
Other rules, however, are just there because we've always done it that way. For a guy to be dressed in "business attire" requires wearing a tie. Why is that? The tie is purely for adornment, it's true purpose lost in antiquity. We have to do it just because we've always done it.
Actually, the purpose of the tie is not lost in antiquity. In the sixteenth century, tobacco in the form of snuff was finely powdered and snorted much like cocaine. This of course caused the nose to run. The handkerchief was required so often that it became convenient to tie it about one's neck. Soon, non-snuffers were emulating this fashion, using lacy and elaborate cravats. Gradually, the necktie evolved from a snot rag to a purely decorative noose. Today, nice ties can easily cost half a day's wages and you don't dare blow your nose on them. And in some workplaces, you don't dare show up without one.
Most meaningless rules - like "you must wear a tie" - once had a purpose. Some rules never had such a purpose; they were implemented simply as a means of controlling other people. Rules like "Do not wear white after Labor Day" and "Keep your elbows off the table" are fine examples of micro-management in action; there is no universal physical law that enforces these behaviors.
At least traffic laws have a point: Keeping people alive. Some people can yammer on a cell phone and still pay attention to the road - others simply cannot. Some people have fast reaction times, others have slow reaction times. So what is safe driving for one driver is dangerous for another. The purpose of traffic rules is to provide a "lowest common denominator" approach to public safety. Set the speed limit where there is enough time for the slow-reaction-time drivers to still miss the rear end of the fast-reaction-time stoppers, and you have prevented an accident.
Speaking of driving, have you ever wondered why the driver that you are tailgating slows down when you get close to his back bumper? For me, the problem is vision. I cannot see the road ahead clearly when my rear-view mirrors are glaring with your headlights, so I slow down to the speed where I can drive safely with limited vision. If you back off a bit, I can see better and feel safe driving faster. Of course, if you honk, I'll slow down an extra 20 miles per hour just out of spite. After all, I'm doing the best I can in an uncomfortable situation. If that's not good enough, go around.
Meanwhile, my rule for the day is "hang up the cell phone and drive." If you have good reaction time, talking on the phone reduces that to mediocre reaction time. And if you are mediocre to begin with, yammering causes your reaction time to degrade further. And very few people increase their following distance to accommodate this degradation.
So hang up and drive. It's not just a rule for the sake of making rules.
Other rules, however, are just there because we've always done it that way. For a guy to be dressed in "business attire" requires wearing a tie. Why is that? The tie is purely for adornment, it's true purpose lost in antiquity. We have to do it just because we've always done it.
Actually, the purpose of the tie is not lost in antiquity. In the sixteenth century, tobacco in the form of snuff was finely powdered and snorted much like cocaine. This of course caused the nose to run. The handkerchief was required so often that it became convenient to tie it about one's neck. Soon, non-snuffers were emulating this fashion, using lacy and elaborate cravats. Gradually, the necktie evolved from a snot rag to a purely decorative noose. Today, nice ties can easily cost half a day's wages and you don't dare blow your nose on them. And in some workplaces, you don't dare show up without one.
Most meaningless rules - like "you must wear a tie" - once had a purpose. Some rules never had such a purpose; they were implemented simply as a means of controlling other people. Rules like "Do not wear white after Labor Day" and "Keep your elbows off the table" are fine examples of micro-management in action; there is no universal physical law that enforces these behaviors.
At least traffic laws have a point: Keeping people alive. Some people can yammer on a cell phone and still pay attention to the road - others simply cannot. Some people have fast reaction times, others have slow reaction times. So what is safe driving for one driver is dangerous for another. The purpose of traffic rules is to provide a "lowest common denominator" approach to public safety. Set the speed limit where there is enough time for the slow-reaction-time drivers to still miss the rear end of the fast-reaction-time stoppers, and you have prevented an accident.
Speaking of driving, have you ever wondered why the driver that you are tailgating slows down when you get close to his back bumper? For me, the problem is vision. I cannot see the road ahead clearly when my rear-view mirrors are glaring with your headlights, so I slow down to the speed where I can drive safely with limited vision. If you back off a bit, I can see better and feel safe driving faster. Of course, if you honk, I'll slow down an extra 20 miles per hour just out of spite. After all, I'm doing the best I can in an uncomfortable situation. If that's not good enough, go around.
Meanwhile, my rule for the day is "hang up the cell phone and drive." If you have good reaction time, talking on the phone reduces that to mediocre reaction time. And if you are mediocre to begin with, yammering causes your reaction time to degrade further. And very few people increase their following distance to accommodate this degradation.
So hang up and drive. It's not just a rule for the sake of making rules.
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