My Gorram Frakking Blog

PG&E Claims Nuclear Power is Climate-Neutral

In my most recent PG&E energy bill, there’s a little insert labeled “Power Content Label.” It breaks down PG&E’s power mix by type, with 22% of the power coming from nuclear sources. On the pie chart, that wedge is green, which, according to the legend, means it’s “climate neutral or renewable.”

As it turns out, that’s incorrect. Nuclear power requires refining uranium ore to produce nuclear fuel. According to the Lean Economy’s Guide to Nuclear Energy, “Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise,” and:

Uranium enrichment uses large volumes of uranium hexafluoride, a halogenated compound (HC). Other HCs are also used in the nuclear life-cycle. HCs are greenhouse gases with global warming potentials ranging up to 10,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

There are more shortcomings of nuclear power. I encourage you to read the whole Guide.

Comcast Block Port 25, AGAIN

I moved into a new house, got a new Comcast account for my internet & cable, and not four weeks later, they had blocked port 25, for exactly the same reasons they did it before.

I called the number again, and Eric was very competent and agreed to put in the unblock request. He also helped me to understand why Comcast suggests using a port other than 25. It’s not as ineffective as I had thought, but I still don’t think it’s worth the invconvenience.

His reasoning goes like this: By blocking port 25, they prevent most spamming viruses from getting to open relays that typically run on port 25. Even if the virus is updated to use port 587 (Comcast’s suggested port), Comcast’s mail server requires authentication, and so it won’t be able to send (of course, if they hijack your local Mail client, none of that will matter).

Now, if open relays start appearing that listen on other ports, then it won’t matter.

The real problem is this: Comcast claims that they had reports that spam was being sent from my IP address (at the time it was assigned to me), but they won’t tell me anything about these reports. Now, I’m certain no spam has gone out from my house. My wireless network is locked up tight, the access logs don’t show any unauthorized accesses, and I’ve never run Windoze, so there’s no way I got one of those viruses. So, the report must be in error. But I have no way to track that down.

Hopefully, thought, I’ll get unblocked. And maybe the FCC’s point of view will eventually prevent them from blocking port 25 after all.

Customer Service Experience

Before remembering that I had written an entry about this problem (which had the info I needed), I tried using the regular Comcast online chat customer support. The first time I called, they insisted this was a permanent block and there was nothing I could do to remove it. That, of course, wasn’t true. This time they tried to pull the same shit, and after explaining to them that I was able to unblock it before, she said no, now it’s really permanent. As it turns out, it’s not.

I also have been trying to get a PIN number, so that I can get online access to my account. The agent could only give it to me if she called my Comcast Digital Voice number (a service I have but don’t use because it makes my bill cheaper). She couldn’t even call the number listed on my account (which I do use).

Here are a couple of photos showing our conversation (their stupid chat client doesn’t allow copy-and-paste):

Grocery Store Products Coming in Smaller Quantities?

I went grocery shopping today at the Safeway in Milpitas, CA. I noticed a disturbing trend: product packages are getting smaller. My first thought was that they’re trying to keep the sticker shock down in this era of rising prices (when I asked the checker about the sizes, he said something similar). But for at least three products I buy on a semi-regular basis, the boxes are getting smaller. And just in case you think it’s my imagination, Consumerist.com regularly reports on the Grocery Shrink Ray.

Breyer’s ice cream now comes in a 1.42 l container; previously it was 1.66 l. Lucerne (Safeway’s brand) yogurt comes in 170 g cups; previously they were 227 g. And I couldn’t find the Kellog’s cereal I’ve been buying lately in the 473 g box, just a 340 g box.

Of these three products, I can only accurately compare the price of the yogurt, because Safeway still had a few units of the larger package on the shelf (and I threw away my past receipts). They were listed as $0.142/oz for the smaller size, and $0.106/oz for the larger.

What’s Wrong with This?

I generally hate marketing, but I’ve been saying, recently more often, that what I really hate is being tricked into buying something. I don’t like large-print low prices accompanied by small-print associated fees. I hate being nickle-and-dimed. I believe in itemization of costs, and price transparency, but don’t attempt to lure me in with anything but the final price of the basic product (in a reasonably usable configuration).

That aside, there’s something more ridiculous going on here. The general consensus is that food prices are going up because energy prices (specifically, fossil fuel prices) are going up. I don’t have hard data, but I suspect that’s a fairly accurate assumption. Part of the price we pay for the food we eat is the cost of shipping it from the manufacturer to the store shelves, and that takes fossil fuels; if the price of oil goes up, so does the cost of shipping, and so does the price of our food.

Now consider that most packaging has a certain amount of overhead associated with it. That is, if I take some number of cups of yogurt or tubs of ice cream and stack them in a box, a certain amount of the space in that box is wasted—it’s the space between the individual containers. Even the cereal box, which can pack very efficiently, has space wasted inside it. Generally, the wasted space associated with packaging doesn’t change in proportion to the usable volume of the packaging. Usually, as packages get smaller, more of that package’s boxed volume is wasted.

For example, the 227 g yogurt container is 80 mm in diameter and 84 mm tall, and holds about 210 ml of yogurt. The smallest (idealized) box that can hold that is therefore 80 mm × 80 mm × 84 mm, or 538 ml, 39% efficient. The 170 g container is 80 mm in diameter (same as the larger) and 71 mm tall, and holds about 150 ml of yogurt. Its bounding box is 80 mm × 80 mm × 71 mm, or 454 ml, 33% efficient.

Hopefully you can see where I’m headed. Oil prices pushed up food prices. Marketers, fearing that this would discourage sales, reduced the actual quantity of product sold so that the price tags wouldn’t appear to rise, but in so doing reduced the packing efficiency of the product. Now they have to make more trips to ship the same amount of product, exacerbating the problem (and wasting precious resources in the process). Not to mention the fact that I now have to go to the store more often, and my electric-motorcycle-to-be will likely not be the vehicle I take. And how much did it cost to retool all those factories?

The problems of packaging efficiency aren’t new. Never having done this exercise before (measuring yogurt cups), though, I never realized how egregious it really is. 33%? Surely we can do better than that. And if Safeway shipped their product in electric trucks powered by the Sun and wind, well, it would be just that much better.

Jupiter and the Moon!

I managed to take this photo of Jupiter by holding my Sony DSC-T1 digicam up to the eyepiece of my Telescope. Not bad, if I do say so myself (and in comparison to my past attempts!).

If you look very closely (try clicking on the image to get the full-rez version), you can see a blurry moon (of Jupiter) to the left.

Here’s a shot of the Moon (Earth’s Moon):

California High Speed Trains Projects—Not as Cool as It Could Be

I got spam from California High Speed Trains identifying me as a business leader (clearly I’m on a mailing list somewhere). The information on the website is sketchy. It’s really just trying to convince visitors that high-speed rail is a good idea.

But I’m watching a video produced by KQED Quest. From what I can gather, they are not planning to build the awesome maglev train used in Shanghai. It looks like conventional electric rail, with a supply wire hung above the track. The video also shows more conventional trains running on the same tracks. In all, pretty lame.

The Shanghai Maglev technology (developed by Transrapid) is superior in every way. The track is typically slightly elevated, preventing wildlife from having their habitats cut in half. It needs no structure above the track, making it much more attractive. It’s much quieter, because there is no mechanical contact between the train and track. For this reason, the ride is also smoother, and faster (430 km/h vs. 354 km/h for the proposed system; the maximum design speed is 550 km/h).

Japan also has a maglev train, but their approach is different. The trains must roll on wheels until reaching a critical speed, and require more power. It also requires superconducting electromagnets.

The California project is expected to require $42 billion and take 12 years to implement. It’s a pity it won’t be state-of-the-art when complete.

Mostly Success with iPhone firmware v2.0

Earlier I discovered a post on Gizmodo telling me how to download the 2.0 release and manually install it. After a harrowing 30 minutes while I feared I was going to lose my photos and notes, and another 15 minutes syncing all my music & videos, I finally got it all back to where it was. (Note: be sure to back up your phone first. If you manually update it, the backup and restore doesn’t happen. The Backup command has moved to a contextual menu on the iPhone in the left column.)

I grabbed a couple of free iPhone apps, and installed them. Then I bought a few more apps, and when I tried to sync, iTunes reported errors like:

The application “Poker” could not be installed because the application could not be found.

Huh. I figured it was because there was not enough free room, but after deleting The Incredibles and trying again, I kept getting the same error.

I finally decided to power-cycle the phone, and quit & relaunch iTunes. As I write this, I’m watching the sync progress. It seems to be working. Not sure what the actual problem was.

Electric Motorcycle Project

I’ve decided to convert my old motorcycle to electric. This involves ripping out all the gas-related parts, and putting in an electric motor, batteries, and associated control electronics to make it all work. I’ve started a new blog for the project, go check it out:

Electric Motorcycle Conversion Project