ectoblog.com

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.

David Attenborough – Wikipedia

Is there a more excellent 83 year old man out there?

Check out the “Favourite Attenborough moments” on the wikipedia page, and this:

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.”

Could Twitter’s Realtime World Blur Our Moral Compass?

Emotions linked to our moral sense such as admiration and compassion- awaken slowly in the mind, according to a new study from a neuroscience group show that emotions linked to our sense of morality are aroused slowly. The study was led by Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California.

This makes three different ways I’ve seen people try to make a cautionary tale out of this study. And this is one of the more subtle consequences of growing older: since I’ve seen this process several times before (the ‘new study of a particular process is abstracted to give a potential overall insight into why we’re fucked up’ process), and I’ve seen the process almost without exception sputter toward final inconsequence, I have become, if not scornful, at least indifferent to it. Is that wisdom? If it is, wisdom blows.

I miss the days when this sort of thing fired my imagination.

This meme is very similar (if not identical) to the one in which a fairly technical discovery in some particular scientific field is immediately seized upon by the media and extrapolated to construct a probable future in which wild, weird, new things become as common and important as the car or air travel or the cellphone. The media delight in telling us these things to the point that they will make one up if a ‘real’ one hasn’t come along for awhile.

Obviously, the fact of cars, air travel and cellphones indicates that, sometimes, the “probable future” actually happens. I’m aware of that. But by the same token, the fact that there are no personal submarines, no cures for cancer, no cold fusion, no teleporters, no huge starships trolling the asteroids for uranium and gold, no robot salad makers squatting inside kitchen cupboards, no cheap solar panels on every home, no healthy cigarettes, no fat pills, no telepathic communication–it makes it hard to pay attention when tidings of “the next greatest thing” worm their way into the popular consciousness.

Another similar if not identical media process is the one in which a particular thing happens (eg: USAir’s plane ditching in the Hudson after a birdstrike) which is so exciting that they are compelled, for awhile, to over-report other happenings that have even the slightest chance of producing the same outcome (eg: any birdstrike on any plane that forces the plane to return to the airport for a landing). Because I’m a pilot (and so through professional channels heard about many birdstrikes that required emergency landings that weren’t considered worthy of mainstream reporting until after the USAir incident) I know that these things happen all the time.

This new study shows that there is a difference in the speed that more and less visceral displays of tragedy matter to people.  That’s interesting: there are differences in the speed at which things matter. For example, seeing someone break an ankle elicits a response of compassion more quickly than seeing someone being told that her mother died. It’s an interesting study. But interesting psychological studies happen all the time. And because I was a psych major (and also because I’m a human being that pays a certain amount of attention to things that may impact my human being-ness), I know this new study should be interpreted narrowly until proven to matter more generally. That’s just the way it is. You can’t go from this study to a pronouncement on the moral effect of Twitter in one go and not sound like a shrieking ass, at least to experts. That’s just the way it isn’t.

The tricky part is knowing the difference between a carefully constructed hypothesis and the shrieking of an ass when the subject is not one you know well.  Years of being led to believe things were important that in the end turned out not to be very important have taught me to delay judgment on anything that isn’t already completely obvious. While that may be wise, it’s hard on optimism.

I know when things that happen in my areas of expertise are being stretched to fill a news vacuum. Birdstrikes and psychological studies happen all the time. They happen all the time. So where was CNN the thousand other times these things happened? I’ll tell you where CNN was: CNN was busy over-reporting some other goddamn thing that, since I’m not a professional sailor or bond-trader, I had no idea that they were over-reporting. So because I’m not an expert on everything, I am potentially duped by the media, day in and day out, to believe things are more consequential than they really are.

I know the media don’t do this on purpose. They don’t get up in the morning and say “Let’s over-report tsunamis today.” I know it’s just the lousy way things work. I know one of the functions of the media is to find whatever excitement there is in the daily crush of happenings in the world and offer it to the public, so that they can make money and continue existing. Or if there’s nothing really inherently exciting that day, to find the hook into something else that was exciting before and offer that. To blur potential and real if real doesn’t look like it will sell. I know all that.

Knowing that doesn’t make me happier. And one of the cardinal attributes of wisdom, I think, is that once you become wise to something, it’s very hard to become un-wise to it. In other words, I can’t go back to being optimistic about such things even if I wanted to. Wisdom is a jealous god.

I used to think that, given the choice, I would choose wisdom over innocence every time. Every time. I used to think that, given the choice, accurate knowledge of the probability that something is true is always preferable to ignorance of it. Do I still think that? It’s hard to say.

I guess I just wish wisdom wouldn’t trash optimism quite as thoroughly as it seems it has to do.

Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009 | Wired Science from Wired.com

On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple days later, days stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done.

Now the outlook is even more bleak for eager physicists who have already waited decades for the giant collider to come to fruition, after a week of tantilizingly successful beam operations.

The warm-up period and ensuing investigations will bump up against the LHC’s “obligatory winter maintenance period,” according to a statement today from CERN. This brings us into early spring before commissioning can restart.

Do I have to say that this is also exactly what we’d be told if something super-freaky had happened when they first turned this thing on, something so super-freaky that they’re afraid to turn it on again? “Obligatory winter maintenance period.” Good one.

Roman calendar – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The fact that we use the same month names as the Romans encourages us to assume that a Roman date occurred on the same Julian date as its modern equivalent. This assumption is not correct. Even early Julian dates, before the leap year cycle was stabilised, are not quite what they appear to be. For example, it is well known that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC, and this is usually converted to 15 March 44 BC. While he was indeed assassinated on the 15th day of the Roman month Martius, the equivalent date on the modern Julian calendar is probably 14 March 44 BC.

I’ve noticed that historians put a lot of effort into figuring out what day things really happened. Was Caesar assassinated on the 15th or the 14th? Was Washington born on February 11th or February 22nd?

The thing is, I’ve always thought historians were barking up the wrong tree on this. To my way of thinking, it really doesn’t matter what day something really happened; what matters more is what day people thought it happened. So as far as I’m concerned, George was born on the 11th because his mother and father, the attending midwife, and the Smith family down the road  all thought of the day as the 11th.

Here’s another example: say I was born on March 8th. Fifty years later a congressional proclamation changes the calendar slightly, and now I’m told I was born on March 4th. But I’ve thought I was born on March 8th all my life; I’ve said “March 8th” about ten thousand times, and I’m very familiar with how it sounds. March 8th fits me like an old shoe. Now you’re asking me to put this squeaky new shoe on, this March 4th shoe. Thanks, but no thanks. I wasn’t born on March 8th because that’s what a calendar said, not really. I was born on March 8th because that’s what we called the day I was born on when I was born on it.

The World Question Center 2008

A collection of essays from people who know things about things they thought they knew but later figured out they didn’t. For instance, I like Martin Seligman’s essay about the probability of ET because he basically independently came to the same conclusion I came to, but with the added distraction of being Carl Sagan’s friend.

Earthrace – The Boat

In March 2008, Earthrace will attempt to set a new speed record for a powerboat to circumnavigate the globe running 100% biodiesel, and with a net zero carbon-footprint, in order to increase awareness of the environment and the sustainable use of resources.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” While I don’t want to detract from something cool–I like it when cool things happen– this phrase is beginning to really grate. This boat has a 3,000 gallon fuel tank. A non-trivial amount of energy went in to making it in the first place. It’s only “net zero” because the company buys carbon offsets. I could make a Hummer or a Boeing 727 “net zero” doing that.

You know, if *everybody* bought carbon offsets to reduce their carbon footprint to “net zero,” we’d still have a problem. I don’t care how many trees you plant, a 727 still does what it does.

Before someone says that I don’t understand the concept behind carbon offsets, let me just say this: I understand it. It’s a wonderful way to roll around in your cake and then eat it. It’s a wonderful way to keep doing what you’re doing with a clean conscience. I *understand* that. You gave at the office. You adopted the skinny televised black kid in Ethiopia. What you didn’t do was leave your Hummer at home and walk to the grocery store.

“Net zero carbon footprint.” Jesus Christ. The phrase is about to become absolutely meaningless as every damn company piles on with its own product. It’ll be like what happened to the word ‘retarded’ when it leaked out into the mainstream; psychiatrists had to come up with some other word. A perfectly descriptive term, ruined by squatters.

When a can of coke is advertised as having a “net zero carbon footprint,” the retardeding of the phrase will be complete.

There are constraints written into the fabric of the world which we do not see but are nevertheless there. It’s fun to talk about planetary, stellar, and galactic civilizations as if we will inevitably progress to them; it’s fun. But where’s the evidence of civilizations that came before us? The universe should be lousy with their leavings, the inevitable shitpiles that gargantuan projects always produce. Of course, some say the reason we don’t see any of these things is that we don’t know what to look for. They say it’s like asking a marmot to find a contact address in Outlook; it’s something completely beyond its (and our) ken and ability.

I suspect that the real reason we don’t notice these stellar shitpiles and .pst files is that they aren’t there. I suspect that there are good, unknown reasons that make it virtually impossible for a civilization to spread much beyond where it originated.

A remote cam 70 feet in the air in Maine watches birdies sit and tweet and occasionally fly off. Baby birdies are in there, too; at least one was borneded this week.

Draft of climate report maps out ‘highway to extinction’ – CNN.com

“The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can’t be that stupid,” said Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy, who was a top author of the 2001 version of this report. “Not that I think the projections aren’t that good, but because we can’t be that stupid.”

Oh, I beg to differ, perfesser. We can easily be that stupid. The question is whether or not we’ll get lucky.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Eclipse set to be ‘best in years’

[Robert Massey, spokesman for the UK's Royal Astronomical Society] added that [the eclipse] was totally safe to observe and no protective filters were needed because the Moon would actually be less bright than during a normal full moon.

So, perfesser, what yer sayin is that I kin look at the sun without goggles r such, now, too, right? Am I hearin you right? Whyn’t yew mumbledy-peg eggheads make up yer minds already!

Nice work from Terry Jones if you have a spare 59m 04s.

CNN.com – Experts predict one more Atlantic hurricane – Oct 3, 2006
FORT COLLINS, Colorado (AP) — Hurricane expert William Gray downgraded his forecast for the 2006 Atlantic storm season again Tuesday, predicting one more hurricane, two more named storms but no intense hurricanes.

He also has an amazing 95 percent accuracy in predicting how many dumps he’ll take during any given day! His 11:30 pm “Daily Dump Forecast” is eerily accurate.

Bonehead.

Follow up to this and that.

CNN.com – Marijuana may stave off Alzheimer’s – Oct 5, 2006

WASHINGTON, (Reuters) — Good news for aging hippies: Smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer’s disease. New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function. Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana’s active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, can prevent the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from breaking down more effectively than commercially marketed drugs. THC is also more effective at blocking clumps of protein that can inhibit memory and cognition in Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers reported in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics. The researchers said their discovery could lead to more effective drug treatment for Alzheimer’s, the leading cause of dementia among the elderly. Those afflicted with Alzheimer’s suffer from memory loss, impaired decision-making, and diminished language and movement skills. The ultimate cause of the disease is unknown, though it is believed to be hereditary. Marijuana is used to relieve glaucoma and can help reduce side effects from cancer and AIDS treatment. Possessing marijuana for recreational use is illegal in many parts of the world, including the United States, though some states allow possession for medical purposes.

“Those afflicted with Alzheimer’s suffer from memory loss, impaired decision-making, and diminished language and movement skills” is funny, see, because pot does the same thing, only less permanently. Well, I thought it was funny.

The Church of the FSM

Ah, you’ve probably surfed through this site at one point or another. Regardless, I want this, the best of all possible graphs, sitting in my blog for when I need to look at it.

Scientists help bodies grow new organs.

A team of scientists and surgeons at a Melbourne hospital has developed a method of growing new organs within a patient’s body.

The article goes on to say that I’m not going to get a new liver or forearm next week. So it’s another false alarm.

I just want a little shot of amazing news to tide me over. Aren’t we due? I think we’re due. I think the last mind-blowing news was when the Berlin Wall came down. What was that, ‘90? And don’t get me started on amazing health news; it’s been a goddamn biblical drought around here.

You people have rested on your “We’ve eradicated smallpox” laurels for one hell of a long time. You need to get back to work! Cure cancer and heart disease already! I mean, Jesus! Look at the time!

Kloss Gibbon – Wikipedia

The Kloss Gibbon (Hylobates klossii), also known as the Mentawai Gibbon or the Bilou, is a primate in the Hylobatidae or gibbon family…The singing of the Kloss Gibbons is considered the most beautiful of all the gibbons’ songs.

It is my considered opinion that The Kloss Gibbon also is the tastiest of all gibbons, although that resolution wasn’t successfully passed at the last meeting of the Council of Gibbon Considerers.

On January 6, 2006, Henan Province’s Dahe Daily newspaper reported that the local police department was unable to take an ID photo of Ye Xiangting from Yelou Village in the Yangzhuang Township of Wugang City, Henan Province. No image of Ye Xiangting showed up in the computer photos, and there is still no clear explanation for the result.

Gentlemen, I think this is the real thing. Oh, I know I said that about the hungry Buddha boy in Nepal, the Jesus head in the loaf of bread, and the Mary in the cabinet. Also, there was the fiasco about the Rigellian spaceship landing on the white house lawn in ‘02, for which I apologize. And the thing about the shitting statue of Percival is just plain embarrassing now; sorry to all those I induced to leave their jobs, sell their worldly possessions, and follow the shitting Percival; I was wrong. But this; this one I have a good feeling about.

“The police station chief told the reporter they have encountered two similar cases. They are unclear about the cause and hope the experts can offer an explanation.”

Right, good job there, Kolshak. I’m glad you’re on the case. “Two similar cases.” Third world, what is wrong with you?

Speaking of turds, dinosaurs produced a lot of them. I’m sure the Smithsonian has drawers-full of coprolites stashed away in their attic.

The dinosaurs were prolific coprolite generators because there were no toilets in the Mesozoic era. So every turd produced by every dinosaur ever born had a chance to fossilize, sitting out there in the sun like that. You can’t say that about our turds.

In fact, I could almost number the turds I’ve manufactured that have the slightest chance of turning into coprolites. It’s certainly a low number; every one I’ve produced in the wild has been memorable, in that I remember it.

Which is kind of sad, really. Scientists eons from now will have scant chance of deriving any clues from my shit. That gives me pause. And it’s almost impossible that a turd of mine will be fossilized and under glass atop a velvety pedestal one day.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that one of my turds ends up under glass atop a velvety pedestal.