In this case, I'm referring to the McCain camp's response to Barack Obama's suggestion that Americans make sure their tires are kept properly inflated. They accused Obama of being ignorant of energy issues, but in typical fashion, they are wrong. Most cars on the road have under-inflated tires. Each 1 psi of under-inflation loses about 0.4% fuel efficiency. Most cars are 20% under-inflated. (You can also maintain your air filter. More information on the EPA's site.)
The amount of oil saved if America were to properly inflate all her tires would significantly exceed the entire production of all new offshore drilling, and drilling in ANWR, combined. Moreover, it would happen immediately (within weeks, or however long it takes Americans to check and inflate their tires). Not 10 - 20 years (which is how long we'd have to wait for new oil drilling production to come online and ramp to full capacity).
Another place where you can improve fuel economy is driving slower, and accelerating more gently. I don't know about you, but I like driving fast and accelerating hard. But if I could see what my actual fuel economy was, I might think twice. I might ease up on the pedal a little bit. Some people might ease up a lot.
Which brings me to my idea: the government can mandate that all new cars and trucks sold in 5 years must have fuel economy gauges. Many new cars already have them (and some, like Mercedes & BMW, have provided them for decades). The gauge should be on all the time (many today are buried in the pages of the trip odometer), and needs to show at least a couple of moving averages: one spanning a few days, one spanning a minute or two. You could get fancier, by making a prediction on when you will next need to visit the pump (in days & hours). Also, the computations need to be the same across the entire industry, so that automakers can't fudge it, and so you can compare vehicles. They need to be treated the same as odometers, in terms of legal requirements for accuracy and precision.
This one would take a few years to implement, but will have return in much less time than drilling, and will come at a much lower price. It will be resisted by the auto makers who will whine that the requirement will put them out of business. But that's all bullshit. The BOM on a good display should be less than $50 in production quantity, and the R&D is trivial (these things are not rocket science; the hardest part will be the ID, and they're doing that already).
Conceivably, the government could even give some of the tax breaks it gives to Big Oil over to Big Auto to help implement the gauges.
I'm sure the republicans will side with Big Business Auto and never allow it, or water down any such proposal until it's useless. After all, such a change would reduce oil consumption (virtually for free), and we can't have Big Oil making less money. Fucking republicans. Assholes.
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The vision is something like this (although I may not bother with the upper cabinets; we'll see):
I realize what you'll see below doesn't look anything like that, but it will. Someday.
I spent a good five hours (and $280) at Sawdust Shop cutting the pieces for the carcasses of 1.5 workbench-cabinets. I've partially assembled one of them tonight, but I'm done for the day. I'll finish it in the morning, and hopefully make some real progress on the carbs.
Here's a wide shot of the left half of my garage. You can see the beginning of the pedestal near the back wall.
The completed pedestal. I was originally going to just hang the cabinet-workbench from the wall, but the expert at Sawdust Shop convinced me to build a pedestal. This will support much more weight more effectively:
Here the three walls have been screwed in:
A closer view of the pocket screws:
The rear nail strip is fasten to the carcass with pocket screws:
Here's more detail on how the pedestal sits under the cabinet. The floor is pretty heavily sloped, so I will have to shim things up. The wall seems to be plumb, though, which is good.
I rested the top nail strips and work surface on top. Tomorrow I'll glue and fasten them down properly, but this gives you an idea of how it'll look.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
| Qty | Product Volume | Bounding Box Volume | Efficiency | Overhead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 227 g (8 oz) | 210 ml | 538 ml | 39% | 61% |
| 170 g (6 oz) | 150 ml | 454 ml | 33% | 67% |
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.
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):
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.
]]>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.
Watch this:
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
Not all Americans suck.
The article says he hasn't admitted to actually joining the church, so maybe I can rationalize it that way.
Feh.
Update: Maybe he's okay after all, claiming not to be a Scientologist.
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See the official site for more information.
(By the way, I'm writing this entry using MarsEdit!)
]]>So I enter an online chat with Comcast technical support, and I am told that once I have been blocked, it is impossible to be unblocked. I am told the same thing by the second-tier support person. They refuse to escalate my request any further. They tell me to switch to port 587.
So I contact the California Public Utilities Commission, only to find out that cable service is not under their jurisdiction. They suggest I look on my Comcast statement for a number to call. Sure enough, buried in the middle of the bill, is a cryptic line with contact information in my city.
I call the number, and a very nice lady from the city supervisor's office answers. She tells me that they only regulate Comcast cable TV, and not broadband, but she puts in a call to her Comcast government representative (Cynthia Gomez), who calls me back a little while later.
Ms. Gomez gives me the number to Comcast's "Customer Security Assurance," 856 317-7272. There, Edgar tells me he can remove the port 25 block, but that I should switch to port 587, and that if I am blocked again, it will not be removed. He also suggests that I check SenderScore where I can see that my IP address has been placed on a couple of blacklists, including SORBS and 510 Software Group.
It is interesting to note that they're treating my IP address as if it were statically assigned.
I don't use Windows, but I'm wondering if my wireless network has been compromised.
The problem with changing port numbers is that it is, at best, a temporary solution. Especially for an ISP like Comcast, with millions of subscribers, it won't be long before the spammers determine what the new port number is (it is readily available on Comcast's website).
The Comcast CSA tech referred me to SenderScore. SenderScore claims they have not seen enough email from my IP address to make a determination, but shows that my address is on two blacklists. According to 510 Software Group,
IP address 24.4.xxx.yyy is listed here as 24.4.79.222.comcast.net misc.spam.If you are not running a mail server on 24.4.xxx.yyy, this listing should not affect you in any way, and you should ignore whatever source told you that this might be a problem.
The misc.spam group is mostly (but not entirely) composed of entire addresses blocks that have a) sent spam here, b) have consecutive or missing reverse dns, and c) have no customer sub-delegation via either the controlling RIR (ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, APNIC, etc) or an rwhois server referenced in the main RIR records.
In particular, 24.4.xxx.yyy has reverse dns of c-24-4-xxx-yyy.hsd1.ca.comcast.net. Since your domain name does not appear as the last components in any of those reverse dns names, that needs to be fixed first. Any email sent to the address at the top of this page will be ignored until that is fixed.
In my opinion, the following comment also applies to static ip addresses, where the provider does not actually identify the user of that ip address by domain name.
So, it appears that Comcast is using external blacklists to determine if I should be blocked, but I'm on the blacklist because of Comcast's own misconfiguration.
More news as events warrant.