ectoblog.com

When I was a kid I wondered whether I’d turn in to one of the guys I read about, guys who ordered hot toddies in cherry-paneled rooms. Guys who smoked meerschaum pipes or large cigars while waiting for the butler to bring them the toddies warmed to the proper degree. It was a possibility, like being a race-car driver or an astronaut was a possibility. It was a possibility the way anything’s a possibility to a boy who reads and imagines.

Just today, years later, I decided, even though I never did turn into that kind of guy (‘Huh.’), that I wanted a hot toddy. Or at least an Irish coffee, which always sounded, well, pretty good. Real things get done and real decisions get made over hot toddies. Or days of yore get affably re-imagined through warm, moist prisms. I just had a hankering.

So I stopped off on the way home at a Slidell convenience store I’ve been to that I know sells the crucial hot toddy and Irish coffee ingredients, and what’s more, sells them in the aisles so you don’t have to stare at the proprietor for any length of time while trying to make what is for me an out-of-the-ordinary decision, one I was put up to by the likes of meerschaum-smoking detectives from books I read long ago. I’m talking about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, of course; they put me up to this, put me up to it very specifically.

So I’m looking at all the whiskeys and whiskys and gins and rums in large bottles sitting in the aisle shelves, thinking, “My, that’s a lot of alcohol. Far too much for a toddy.” I pulled something called Old #7 off the shelf (which I could tell was superior toddy-makings because of the price), then put it back. It was too much of a commitment, especially for a beer drinker such as myself. I started toward the coolers, deflated, when I saw another whole row of toddy-makings behind the counter, over the proprietor’s head. These were much smaller than what I’d been looking at; I guessed about a fifth the size. Yes, pretty close to a fifth.

So I confidently told him I wanted a fifth of Old #7, there behind you my good man. And chop-chop! Hot toddies await the successful conclusion of this transaction!

He looked at me with fairly well-disguised contempt (at war with himself over whether he wanted more to make money from an imminent economic transaction or to delight in belittling the man who obviously fell off a turnip truck, then got hit by another turnip truck passing the other way) and directed my view back whence I’d come; “Those are the fifths over there.”

Needless to say, I was caught. Red-handed! My ignorance flopping around on the floor like some sort of half-hearted flopping thing. And the raft of liquor drinkers milling through the stacks suddenly stopped to look at me more closely. There was Skinny Pete and Smoking Joe, cornering the gin market. Delilah carting her wine out to her Impala, who missed a step but kept going since she didn’t want any trouble. Franklin Forsythe; Ed; Wall-eyed Sam, the baker man; they were all there.

In short, the ruse that I was a spirits drinker from way back, like everyone else in the store, of course I was, it went without saying, was exposed by my lack of knowing the first thing—the first thing—about the ethnography of the liquor people. And I think I truly dumbfounded them. Here was this, what, forties? fifties? …old guy who had somehow gotten old without knowing what a fifth of liquor looked like. How could this be? Where is he from? Why is he here? Who had put him up to this?

I fully understood how freakish I must have looked to them. Like the Elephant Man, if the Elephant Man didn’t know how to buy booze. But did I leave the store, tail between my legs, trunk swinging like all get-out, with no toddy ingredients, never to be seen there again? I certainly could have. That would’ve been pretty easy. It almost happened.

Here’s what really happened: “That’s a fifth over there? I don’t want that. it’s too venti. Venti! I’m looking for grande, the middle one over there, no, not the tall one, I know it’s tall; the tall one to the left. Grande is that one in th-, yes, that one. That’s the one! Whew! Thank you. And a pack of Marlboros in the box. No, not the 25’s, the, the, yes those. How much is it all? Here you are and a good day to you.”

Was I triumphant? No. No I wasn’t. I was the Elephant Man. But in the end, I did have a hot toddy of my own creation this evening. And I’m fully confident I can return to the same store and speak Starbucks to them and they will at least eventually give me what I want, with more a vague sense of unease than bald contempt. So call it a draw.

You know how it’s said that a hybrid gets better city mileage than highway mileage because 1) the gas engine shuts off when the car is stopped, and 2) because of regenerative braking? That’s gotta be bullshit, and here’s why:  an object in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton, law-giver.

For example: say you’ve got your Prius cruising along at 40 mph. You see the light up ahead turning yellow, so you slow to a stop. Yes, the regenerative braking is recovering some percentage of the energy the car put into accelerating to 40 mph, but it’s not recovering 100% of that energy. In fact, a website I went to today (since navigated away from and lost) rates regenerative braking as delivering between 5 and 10% of a hybrid’s fuel economy (which translates into some unknown but less than 100% efficient energy conservation). In other words, if the stoplight hadn’t been there, the Prius would’ve continued merrily along at 40 mph without losing any energy to braking.

Second, at the stoplight, the Prius’ engine shuts down for the wait. Yes, no fuel is being used at the stop, but on the other hand, no mileage is being run up either. It’s a wash. But, you say, when the light turns green and the Prius accelerates back up, most of that acceleration is accomplished by the electric motor before the engine kicks back on; there’s your savings!

Im gegenteil mein freund!  The electric motor is solely charged via the gasoline-powered engine. Yes, in the several seconds after the stoplight, the energy is taken from the electric motor, but at some point down the road, that energy has to be replaced by transferring it from the gasoline engine back to the electric motor’s battery, with some concomitant loss of energy during the transference. Newton.

So why are hybrids touted to be so much more efficient in the city than on the highway? It just don’t add up. It just don’t add up. My guess (and it’s just a guess, albeit an incredibly educated and insightful one) is that it has everything to do with average speed and wind resistance. My guess–educated, insightful, and of an overall incredible nature–is that if a Prius were tested on the highway (meaning no starting and stopping) at an identical average mph as that achieved in city driving, its mileage would be significantly better than what it could achieve in the city, owing to reduction in wind resistance (from that at normal highway cruising speed to that at 40mph) and Isaac Newton. Because speed increases linearly, while the amount of energy necessary to overcome wind resistance increases exponentially (several of my brain cells swear this is a true statement based on graphs they remember seeing long ago, and that’s good enough for me).

Insightful, you say? Incredibly educated? Darn tootin’.

In sum: it’s obvious and goes without saying that a hybrid gets better gas mileage in city driving than a non-hybrid because of its ability to shut down its gas engine from time-to-time, as well as its being equipped with regenerative braking. But given the same average speeds (admittedly not going to happen) in highway vs city driving, a hybrid does not magically pull energy out of a hat to become somehow more efficient in the city than it is on the highway; the only reason that a hybrid achieves “better fuel economy” in the city is that, at average city-driving speeds, wind resistance is much less of a factor than at average real-world highway speeds. Therefore, the commonly-understood, commonly cited, but wrong, assumption that a hybrid’s better city mileage versus highway mileage arises from some laws-of-physics-defying aspect of stop-and-go driving is an often-parroted but chowder-headed massive misunderstanding of what is really going on.

And that’s the way it is, this eleventh of January, 2010. Courage.

You know how scientists and historians are liable to liken the total time civilization has existed versus the total time the earth has existed to “the blink of an eye?” At the drop of a hat? I’ve always taken their word for that. I mean, why would scientists and historians lie to me, or be so sloppy that they screwed up on such a common comparison? They’re not typically liars and slobs. But I, for no other reason than I’m here in Miami with time to waste, decided to actually check that comparison. You lucky, lucky people!

First, I want to make it clear that I believe I’m the first one to check this comparison ever, in the history of the world. I realize that’s a powerful statement, but a 50 second Google investigation leads me to believe it’s true, and that’s good enough for me.

Second, to even make sense of the “blink of an eye” statement as a comparison, I realized I needed to know what unit of time the blink was being compared to. I mean, you can’t just say “civilization is to blink of an eye” as “age of the earth is to blank” without providing options for “blank.” That would be thoughtless and cruel. That would also get you a vicious, well-earned beating at an SAT exam if you were proctoring the test.  So I had to apply a little common sense to this. What biological process would a scientist or historian pair with “the blink of an eye” when trying to stun the reader with how really big the time difference is  between  the lifespan of civilization and the lifespan of the world? What biological process could they use? It’s, of course, a gigantic differential, a geological one; no one’s disputing that. At least no one near enough for me to reach out and slap some sense into. In the end, the only thing that seems reasonable to put up against that huge disparity is the human lifespan. And I think that’s a reasonable conclusion for any non-slappable person, especially when I can now word it like this: “civilization is to blink of an eye as earth’s lifespan is to human’s lifespan.” See how pleasing and SAT-ish that looks?

Third, now that I’ve identified my terms, the only thing I have to do prior to figuring out if I’m being lied to is to rigorously define these terms, viz: 1)time-length of civilization, 2)time-length of eye-blink, 3)time-length of earth’s existence, and 4)time-length of human life:

1. The length of time civilization’s been around depends on your definition of civilization. That doesn’t really apply here, of course; I don’t personally care what your definition is. My definition depends only on googling “when did civilization begin?”, clicking through to 2 or 3 different sites that appear the least bit relevant, grabbing some numbers, adding those numbers up, then dividing by the number of numbers added. Civilization’s been around for 7,000 years.

2. Wiki-answers answers “How long does it take to blink an eye” as if the question were about how much time humans go between eyeblinks. That definition had never occurred to me. It seemed, in fact, like bullshit. On the other hand, it also seemed like one of those things that was obvious to everybody else in the world, yet I had somehow managed to get wrong for decades. Luckily for my sanity, searchengineguide.com timed an eyeblink at about a tenth of a second, which conformed to my previous thinking, so wiki-answers is indeed a-bursting with bullshit.

3. If I’d approached the age of the earth in the same way as I approached the age of civilization (1 above), I would’ve had to arrange for some mechanism with which to throw out the Jesus-freak estimates. Instead I relied on high school and college textbook memories of this amount of time that are so ingrained in me that I could probably access those brain cells before I access the ones that tell me how many legs a tripod has. And then I arbitrarily added 500 million to come up with the answer: 5 billion years.

4. 75 years, because I’m all agreed that that’s about what it is.

That settled, I was able to mathematically describe the comparison:

(time-span of civilization)/(age of earth) = (time to blink an eye)/(human lifespan)

or, filling in those statements with the rigorous numbers from above,

7,000yrs/5 billion years = 0.1 second/2.36682 billion seconds

(where 75yrs = 75yrs x 365.25days/1yr x 24hrs/1day x 60min/1hr x 60sec/1min = 2.36682 billion sec).

So, canceling out the units and typing out the zeroes to make my work look more impressive, we have 7,000/5,000,000,000 = 0.1/2,300,000,000, or

7/5,000,000 = 1/23,000,000,000, or even

1/714,286 = 1/23,000,000,000

which we can finally see is utter bullshit.

Therefore (or, if we spent an extra 2 minutes googling it up, and we did, ” ∴ “), the entire span of human civilization is 5 orders of magnitude larger than the blink of an eye, if by “orders of magnitude” I mean what I think I mean.  In other words, my friends, the metaphor is a lie.

To be accurate–and scientists and historians are nothing if not accuracy fetishists–they pride themselves on it, they live for that shit–the metaphor should really be phrased something like this: “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which, in geological terms, is around 32,000 blinks of an eye” (computation available upon request). Or if that doesn’t float their boat, “Civilization began 7,000 years ago, which is like everybody in Tupelo, MS, blinking at once, provided 4,000 of them are on vacation at the time.”  Granted, the phrase has become kind of verbose and pitiful, but I didn’t make this bed, and I’m not the one who has to sleep in it.

In conclusion, “Beeyatch.”

The Tempest (Joel Achenbach, Washington Post, May 28)

Gray’s crusade against global warming “hysteria” began in the early 1990s, when he saw enormous sums of federal research money going toward computer modeling rather than his kind of science, the old-fashioned stuff based on direct observation.

It’s stuff like this that makes me pay less attention to someone who has important things to say. Gray is the guy from Colorado or Utah or somewhere who forecasts the number and severity of hurricanes every year with canny accuracy. I say that because it’s hard to find studies that describe how accurate his forecasts are. I don’t doubt they’re out there, but they’re hard to find.

I did find some raw data from ‘83-’96 at faqs.org, so I took a calculator out and went to town. Because I’m bored, that’s why! Anyway, over that timeframe, Gray does come out ahead of frank guessing. His prediction of seasonal “named storms” is on the same side of the 40-year mean as the actual observed number 83% of the time. His “hurricane” prediction numbers are on the same side of the mean 69% of the time, while his “intense hurricane” prediction comes in at 71% for his June numbers, and 100% for his August numbers.

Since I had to do that myself, it beats me whether those numbers are any good when compared to other meteorologists’ numbers. Judging from the hype, I suppose they are, but it’s very hard to verify that. What I’m saying is that, since I believe him to be a bonehead when it comes to the evidence coming in about global warming, I’d be more comfortable considering him an over-hyped bonehead about what he’s famous for. I can’t do that comfortably because apparently no one who knows more about numbers than I do–just about anybody–has analyzed his predictions in comparison to both chance and other forecasters.

A TV reporter asks Gray a key question: “What if you’re wrong?”

“We can’t do anything about it if I’m wrong. China and India are going to burn fossil fuels.”

In other words, he thinks it’s too fucking scary to think about, and if he thought about it he couldn’t do anything about it anyway. And he doesn’t want anyone else to think about it either. So shut up.

Bonehead.

PistolWimp – AYDS: America

I remember this commercial. I don’t remember it being so funny. And I guess the weird and irritating use of the word “question” to preface a question has been around longer than I thought.

I tried to find out what happened to Ayds, but I failed. The closest I could come was this NYT article saying that Jeffrey Martin Inc had sold the candy to Dep Corporation, and that Dep was “seeking a new name for its product because publicity about the deadly disease AIDS is hurting sales.”

The CEO of Jeffrey Martin Inc, a guy named Martin Himmel, went on to sell Gold Bond Powder (a product that is somehow linked to BC Powder, bumpkins, and hayseeds in my mind) to some other corporate entity in 1996 (link). Which was quite a feat, as Martin had been dead for five years (link).

I’m sure it all makes sense.