Great site - thanks mom!

I know not everyone is apt to spend $20 on this but I couldn't keep the money in my wallet when I read what this site does.


You pay them $20 and they basically remove you from all junk mail lists. That's it, plain and simple. Not only that, they pull you off of catalog lists as well (unless, say, you tell them that you actually WANT 3o copies of the Victoria's Secret catalog every week - because 6 or 7 per week makes sense, you know, but 30? Really?).

This, to me, should OF COURSE be a free service but who would offer it? I guess advertising falls under the "bastardization of free speech" category and, as such, there's not much to do about it besides having recycle days. Still, I find it very disturbing that I can't simply generally opt-out from useless, wasteful, ineffective marketing campaigns. I hate spam and I hate telemarketing but there is nothing worse, in the marketing sphere, than having a pile of coupons and catalogs that go from tree to manufacture to post office to my house to the trash. I find that MASSIVELY agitating and, as such, will gladly pay to stop it coming to my house.

Please, please sign up for this service... $20 is very little and the impact is very important. Also go here...

https://www.optoutprescreen.com/

...and opt out of all those ridiculous pre-approved credit-card notices. This helps keep you secure (no more pre-approved applications floating around) and gets rid of another chunk of mail. It is free and run by the government which is how it should be. It stopped all of my credit card offers (besides the ones from my current company... what the heck?).

Ooooooooo I love it!

This is what I'm talking about! I WILL do this someday when I have a garage and more than 12 minutes a day of free time.

From Ecomodder (a site I will be checking in on a lot going forward):

What do you get when you cross a Geo Metro with an electric forklift, a golf cart, and a bunch of used batteries? You get a ridiculously inexpensive, home-built, street-legal electric car.

So cool... and a Geo Metro none-the-less.


I'd quote more but you can just click the link and read the original. 3 posts in a couple days and I'm POOPED!

Discrepancy

I don't usually post items about human-interest stuff but this literally made me sick...

Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt

From here:

It was lunchtime in one of Haiti's worst slums, and Charlene Dumas was eating mud. With food prices rising, Haiti's poorest can't afford even a daily plate of rice, and some take desperate measures to fill their bellies. Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau.

The story only gets worse...

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Imagine if our food went up 20% in a month or two. Are we headed for that?

Food prices around the world have spiked because of higher oil prices, needed for fertilizer, irrigation and transportation. Prices for basic ingredients such as corn and wheat are also up sharply, and the increasing global demand for biofuels is pressuring food markets as well.

GROWING OUR FUEL IS NOT GOING TO WORK, PERIOD.

What contributes to MPG?

MPG Increases and Decreases Explained

If you are a member of this blog, you certainly have heard a lot about miles per gallon. Maybe I'm talking about triple-digits, maybe I'm complaining about single-digits, maybe I'm talking about my own mediocre numbers. Whatever the reason, if the discussion is about sustainable transportation then the concept of energy efficiency will inevitably surface.

It is fairly simple to point at a big es-yoo-vee and say "yup, low MPG." Most of the time you will be right but what about the mid-sized sedans? The compacts? The sub-compacts? Does same size mean equivalent consumption? You might be surprised by what, exactly, makes up a miles per gallon figure.

I wanted to make my GTI have a little better MPG so I looked into what I might be able to fix or change. Here's what I learned.

There are two different numbers to consider

When you look up the figures for a car, you're going to see two figures (well, three including the "combined" number): city and highway. Here's mine, taken from fueleconomy.gov:


Big difference, right? That's actually a pretty significant gap between the two compared to other cars.

It's good to keep in mind that hybrids are the opposite of this: great mileage in the city but less on the freeway. This is because hybrids benefit from stop and go (it recharges their batteries through regenerative braking) and not so much from cruising long distances (no chance to use the electric motor).

So why the discrepancy?

Why are the numbers so different?

In my quest to find the biggest change I could make on my car to make the biggest difference in miles-per-gallon, I stumbled onto a great article at Tirerack.com. My first idea to raise my efficiency was to change the tires to low-resistance ones. I had seen on many a concept car that they came with tires that were manufactured with a rubber compound that contributed less friction to the whole mess of driving dynamics. Tirerack explains low-resistance tires:

A tire's rolling resistance does affect fuel economy...[low rolling resistance] tires are often designed with a priority on reducing weight and rolling resistance and are molded with slightly thinner sidewalls, shallower tread depths and use low rolling resistance constructions and tread compounds.

Is goes on to summarize, entirely, everything I have an will say in this post in one useful sentence:

A vehicle's fuel economy is the direct result of its total resistance to movement.

Hot damn! It's like Physics all over again!

Inertia is (according to Cutnell & Johnson's "Physics") "the natural tendency of an object to remain at rest or in motion at a constant speed along a straight line." It goes on to say that the "mass of an object is a quantitative measure of inertia." Basically, without some kind of force (generated from some kind of energy output), a banana or a mountain or, I don't know, a car won't move if it it not moving. If it is already moving, it will continue in that direction until some kind of force stops it. Park a car in neutral on a flat spot of pavement and car no go. Push it (calories used from your output), start it up and hit the gas (joules from the gasoline), or stick it in the middle of a hill (good ol' gravity) and now the car is going.


Now, on the freeway, put your car in neutral and what happens? It keeps going but it will eventually stop. Breaking the laws of physics? Nope, just being acted upon by resistance from the wind, your driveline (transmission, etc), and tires.

That's the science, here's the specifics.

MPG on the highway

Unless you're in a hybrid, you're going to find higher miles per gallon as a default. That is, of course, unless you're doing an average of 100MPH every day on the freeway but switch back to Dr. Jekyll on the surface streets. Either way, there are different forces at work on the freeway. Tirerack, again, explains:

Overcoming inertia no longer plays an appreciable role in the vehicle's resistance during steady speed highway driving. For those conditions it is estimated that driveline friction is about 15%; air drag is about 60% and tire rolling resistance represent about 25%.

Keep in mind that we're talking about "resistance to movement" so we're not including engine size or driving style though these both play a big part.

As you can see, air drag is a huge component of freeway MPG. This is a good thing to know, especially those who might have a roof rack on their cars year-round. This also explains why your efficiency goes down as your speed goes up. the faster you go, the most air drag you will need to deal with.

Take-aways:

Reduce drag by removing unnecessary extrusions (roof racks, spoilers, mirrors, antennae, stickers, etc)

Keep your driveline in good shape by staying up on maintenance and replacing brake pads that are making noise continually (these are good things to do regardless)

Look into low resistance tires if you're in the market (stay tuned for more information on this)

City dwellers?

MPG in stop-and-go

Stop-and-go conditions (the kind where you stop and then go... repeatedly) are a totally different bag of beans. Back to Tirerack:

During stop-and-go city driving, it's estimated that overcoming inertia is responsible for about 35% of the vehicle's resistance. Driveline friction is about 45%; air drag is about 5% and tire rolling resistance is about 15%.

To explain: overcoming inertia is getting the vehicle off of its haunches and going. This is, by definition, going to be greatly affected by the weight of the vehicle. Big cars and trucks need big engines to get their big masses going.

Driveline friction, here, clearly makes a much bigger difference than on the freeway. Air drag, unlike on the freeway, is basically nil and the effects of your tires are even less.

Take-aways:

The less you carry around in your car, the better. Ditch the useless crap in the trunk, replace your 4 twelve-inch subwoofers with a pair of tens (please), and lose some weight.

City drivers should be more vigilant about their tune-ups (for many reasons).

Averages

If you average about the same city and highway, here's how the figures break down (simple averages):

Inertia: 17.5%
Driveline friction: 30%
Air resistance: 32.5%
Tires: 20%

Now you know! Stay tuned for more information on tire resistance!

Highlights

My inspiration to write is fairly low right now so just a quick update on things and a few highlights...

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This kills me:

it turns out, the greenest thing about paper bags is the way people perceive them. Because they seem more natural, people think they're better for the environment. Well, it's a damn shame, but they're wrong.

Whole Foods' moving over to 100% recycled paper is actually going to be worse for the environment.

Creating recycled paper, it turns out, is a much more energy-intensive process than creating plastic bags. That's why grocery stores prefer you take the plastic. Plastic is also much easier to ship, as it takes up way less space in packing, and they weigh far less per item of shopping you take home with you. And while we might worry that all that plastic is coming from foreign oil, the amazing thing is that even with all the billions of plastic bags we use every year, they constitute about 0.03% of our oil use in the U.S.. Obviously not the most pressing problem we've got.

Frustrating because of the perception dissonance but a good thing to know regardless.

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Speaking of getting things in perspective, watch this space:

www.eyesofatexan.com

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Speaking of Josh projects, check out my updated lens:

www.squidoo.com/joshisjosh

And my website under construction:

joshcanhelp.com

Big things! and also reasons why I have been able to blog as much.

Also check out the Young Forest Martial Arts Academy website... my first web site!

www.yfmaa.com

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Back to the grin, more soon for sure!

Entoo da feu-chah

I might just like this because of it's acronym, LAPCAT. This pic is, of course, computer generated:


It's basically a hypersonic beer can (mach 5 speed and no windows).

From Inhabitat (of course):

Not too far in the future you may be able to travel that entire distance in less than 4 hours - emissions free - thanks to an amazing hypersonic hydrogen jet project called LAPCAT. LAPCAT standsfor Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie, and is funded by the European Space Agency. This type of hypersonic jet would put the Concorde to shame with it’s speed, and the best part is that it would not be powered by the typical fossil fuels, but instead by a much greener hydrogen alternative.

That about sums it up. There is, of course, the usual criticism about where the hydrogen comes from but those are so BORING.

The concept is basically a turbine jet engine that benefits from ram-compression, which is essentially air being smashed into the intake. If you're going really, really damn fast, you don't really have to worry about injecting oxygen, you simply use the rushing air in front of you.

From the LAPCAT site:

The Space Shuttle punches through the atmosphere as quickly as possible on its way into orbit, but the LAPCAT project is focusing on an aircraft that would remain well within the Earth's atmosphere throughout its flight. Whereas the Shuttle uses the thrust of its engines to fight the force of gravity, a hypersonic vehicle would use the aerodynamic lifting force generated on its wings and fuselage. This vision of sustained hypersonic flight requires air-breathing engines, which are highly efficient because they scoop oxygen from the atmosphere rather than from an onboard tank.

My take? It's completely conceptual right now which is uselss for the time being but I really like this concept... much more than the some of the car concepts I've seen. This overcomes two big hurdles: air travel time and the green factor of the jets themselves (leaving the generation part to be answered]).

My personal take? From the comments section (me):

I hate flying and I hate looking out the window at the wing/engine/ground. Doing everything you can to shorten my trip AND helping me avoid eye contact with what is around me is the biggest favor that the airline industry could do for me. Yay for supersonic beer cans!