If You Rent a Car in France, Get The Insurance

Watching the footage from the riots in France, I figured that this car burning thing just kind of happened and then would stop when the riots stopped. Think again.

Even before the riots, car-burning had become a ritual gesture of criminal defiance in the suburbs. In the first seven months of this year, an astonishing 21,900 vehicles were torched across the country, up on the previous year.

21,900 vehicles in 7 months before the riots!! Yikes.

The numbers have fallen steadily since vandals burned 1,408 vehicles across France in one night on November 6 at the peak of the violence. Police say French youths burn about 100 cars on an average Saturday night.

100 cars on an average Saturday night??? Whoa Mamma.

So the rioting isn't over when no cars are being torched, it is over when the number gets down to just 100 a night. That is messed up. I guess torching a car is just part of a standard Saturday night out for the French kids.

But, on the bright side, doesn't appear that the French auto makers will be laying off 30,000 workers anytime soon.

Via Ireland On-line and the Economist

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Computer Program Accurately Picks Music Hits

In the digital media age, where people have a limited time to consume the goods, the key to improving quality of material watched is to have better filters to try and anticipate what you will want. This concept has been around for a while, but hopefully someday soon there will actually be software that can do a really good job of it. These guys are trying it on music.

After years of crunching data, Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it.

The response is so specific at times that it can forecast how a single will perform on the charts and spit out a review, guessing what words will be used to describe it, from "sexy to romantic to loud and upbeat," Whitman said.

The goal is to pinpoint trends in pitch, rhythm and cadence that are driving consumer spending habits. However, the MIT researchers believe they've taken the science to another level.

The MIT method, developed at the school's renowned Media Laboratory, also takes into account social responses to hit music that are fed into the algorithms.

Via Seattle PI

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Turning Coal to Liquid Fuel in Montana

Montana's governor is trying to sell a coal to fuel idea.

Coal-to-fuel conversion, which was practiced out of necessity by pariah nations like Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid, has been around for more than 80 years. It is called the Fischer-Tropsch process. What is new is the technology that removes and stores the pollutants during and after the making of synthetic fuel; add to that high oil prices, which have suddenly made this form of energy alchemy feasible. The coal could be converted into gasoline or diesel, which would run cars, or into other types of fuel.

With coal reserves of about 120 billion tons, Montana has one-third of the nation's total and a tenth of the global amount.

By some estimates, the United States has enough coal to take care of its energy needs for 800 years. The new, cleaner technology stores the pollutants in the ground or processes them for other uses.

It would cost upward of $7 billion to build a plant that could turn out 150,000 barrels of synthetic fuel a day, for about $35 a barrel.

Not quite clear what pollutants they are talking about and how exactly it handles them. But if they can do this in an environmentally sound way and create a barrel of synthetic fuel at $35 a barrel this is a promising idea. Up in Canada they will be processing their sand oil tar to create fuel, why we will be processing our coal to do the same.

via New York Times

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The Real $100 Computer

There has been all this talk about this $100 computer that some MIT dude thinks he can create and give it to poor kids all over the world so that the digital divide will go away. Good luck. These ideas that multiple times cheaper than existing technology always fail. We will see how long this takes to either a) become more expensive (which could mean subsidies) or b) fails outright. I knew this was a loser when Jim Cramer was on his show saying how big it is and then said the killer phrase "just imagine how a $100 computer changes things". Exactly. If this were real how could other computers sell for $1000, let alone $500 or $200?

As luck has it, just ran into an article on it here. Trust me, forget the hype this won't work like they are promising (though they did create some cool technology on it that I do approve of. Key quote: "The machine is expected to start mass production late next year". Yeah, we will check again next year and see what went wrong.

But then along comes a much more elegant solution. One that isn't being marketed as a way to fix the digital divide but rather is being sold as a toy to American children. Get rid of the screen and use paper. And sell it for $100. This is what China and the rest of the 3rd world ought to be buying.

Instead, the Fly is a pen - a fat ballpoint pen. (The company says that its focus groups found the term "pentop computer" infinitely sexier than "pen computer." Nobody ever said consumers are logical.)

The Fly is so fat because it contains an AAA battery, a computer chip, a speaker and, mounted half an inch from the ballpoint tip, a tiny camera. For all of its educational, interactive tricks, the Fly pen requires special paper whose surface is imprinted with nearly invisible micro-dots. As you write, the pen always knows where it is on the page, thanks to those dot patterns and the camera that watches them go by.

via New York Times also checkout the Wired writeup.

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I Vant to Drink Your Vatts

Most people assume that when they turn off the television set it stops drawing power.

But that's not how most TV's (and VCR's and other electronic devices) work. They remain ever in standby mode, silently sipping energy to the tune of 1,000 kilowatt hours a year per household, awaiting the signal to roar into action.

"As a country we pay $1 billion a year to power our TV's and VCR's while they're turned off," said Maria T. Vargas, a spokeswoman for the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program, which sets voluntary standards for energy use, and grants its ratings to the most efficient products.

There are billions of vampires in the United States, drawing more than enough current in the typical house to light a 100-watt light bulb 24/7, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, a research arm of the Energy Department.

I realized this when I pulled out my handy dandy Kill-a-Watt. The Plasma TV is a big gulper. Customers don't care about this because they aren't aware of it. One possible solution this article doesn't propose is to have electricity monitors built into houses so you could see exactly how much electricity each outlet is using.

via New York Times

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I Am We Part II

More love for the better 90% of me.

Jeremy K. Nicholson, a pioneer of metabonomics research at Imperial College London, has no doubt that bacteria substantially affect the way the body responds to drugs. "what determines metabolism is largely environmental: how stressed you are, what gut microbes you've got-that turns out to be incredibly important," he argues. For example, many species produce compounds that switch on detoxification enzymes in the liver, and certain microbial metabolites are necessary players in human metabolic pathways.

Yet another sign that this whole idea that once everyone has their genome sequenced we will be able to do personalized medicine is off base. Gotta know what is going on in the gut to understand how drugs will affect you.

"Remarkably, the first paper that enumerated human gut microbiota was published just a few months ago." says Jeffrey I. Gordon, director of the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Through genomic sequencing, the paper, by Paul B. Eckburg and his colleagues at Stanford University, estimates at least 400 species in our gut. Each species exists in different strains, multiplying the variation. In humans, microorganisms in the distal intestines may liberate at least 20% of calories by breaking down sugars into more digestible forms.

They didn't even know how many species of microbiota live in our gut until a couple of months ago? Too many scientists out whining about Intelligent design and how no one listens to them about global warming and not enough doing important research. Why did/does the scientific community not find this extremely important to improving human health? Plus, the future of energy is organic. We need the genomes of these little critters to make our ethanol, methanol, methane and hydrogen.

I want to be able to take a test and know how healthy my bacterias are. I wonder how far away we are from that day.

Also interesting that 20%+ of our calories are liberated by microorganisms. Wonder what it is they are digesting? Some type of starch or cellulose or fiber I would assume.

Via SciAm (those bastards want to charge you to read the whole article, sorry)

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I Am We

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.

More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too.

Think that "you" are "you"? Turns out over 90% of "you" are bacterial cells. That is amazing. We should see ourselves as gardens that need to be tended, rather than stand alone entities. Seems like everybody want anti-bacterial this or that and yet I bet hardly anyone realizes how much of "us" is "them".

Sidenote: bacteria derives from the Latin for "share a table for dinner" while anti-biotic means "against life" in Latin.

The human genome provides only scant information. The discovery of how microbes in the gut can influence the body's responses to disease means that we now need more research into this area," said Nicholson. "Understanding these interactions will extend human biology and medicine well beyond the human genome and help elucidate novel types of gene-environment interactions, with this knowledge ultimately leading to new approaches to the treatment of disease."

Really makes you wonder why more science isn't going in to understanding how these guys work. If I go to the doctor, how come he doesn't do tests to figure out how many and healthy the bacteria in my system are? How come he doesn't tell me what kind of diets help out my bacteria?

Any why isn't more emphasis going into sequencing the genomes of these bacteria? How many species live in our stomachs? How much variation is there between people? I want to know.

Sidenote 2: Did you know that you crap out DNA? I had no idea of that until this Freakonomics article on doggie doo. That should make it really easy to get the stomach bacterial DNA, huh?

Via Wired Mag

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Offset Your Airline CO2 Emissions

British Airways now allows you to offset the CO2 emissions created during your flight with an organization called Climate Care.

I have blogged before that all global warming hatred goes towards Hummer drivers and yet frequent flyers emit more carbon dioxide into the environment. A frequent flyer who flys 60,000 miles a year (12 round trip flights coast to coast) creates as much CO2 emissions as a Hummer driver who drives 12,000 miles in a year. Maybe instead of having bronze, silver and gold level of frequent flyers, they should have 1 Hummer at 60,000, 2 Hummer at 120,000 and 3 Hummer at 180,000. See how many people brag about their miles then.

Using the Climate Care Calculator, a round trip from San Francisco to New York (which covers about 5140 miles) creates .93 Tonnes of CO2 (or 2046 lbs for you non metric types). Climate Care will charge you 6.03 pounds (or $10.23 at current conversion rate) to offset this. So if you figure a $300 ticket, this is an extra 3% or a fairly small amount.

Carbon offsetting is based on the principle that we live in an interdependent world and carbon dioxide released by anyone affects everyone. Therefore instead of reducing the CO2 that you emit directly, you can reduce it somewhere else and have the same impact on the environment. This allows you to take the proverbial low hanging fruit, to find the cheapest way to reduce and lower your cost.

Luckily (or not depending on your perspective) there is a lot of low hanging fruit out there. Climate Care works on Efficient stoves in Honduras, Renewable Cooking in India, and Lightening the load in South Africa. The price Climate Care charges is 6.48 pounds/tonne or $10/ton.

I looked around and this appears very cheap. The EUA carbon market in the EU prices one metric tonne of carbon dioxide emissions at €22.65 ($26.60). Not sure why Climate Care, or some other arbiter (or me!) couldn't buy a tonne at around $10 and sell it for $26 on the market.

Bonneville Environmental Foundation charges about $28/ton for their green tags (see previous green tags post). They are using their money to help build solar and wind power plants in the US which apparently is more expensive to do then that renewable cooking in India.

I like this first step that BA is doing. It would be even better when you can go to Expedia and on checkout have an option to offset your carbon, right along with your rental cars and hotels.

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The Military-Video Game Complex

Tracking the feed from the Predator's camera, Rogers could see rubble where the safe house had been. He and a sensor operator on his crew watched a crowd gather to ogle the destruction. Then a white Dodge pickup rolled up with a .50-caliber heavy machine gun in the back. Five men climbed out, ran into the house, and returned to move the truck to a secluded alley. They began loading ammunition and arc-welding the .50-cal's mount.

Back at Nellis, Rogers wasn't limited to just assessing battle damage. He could also inflict it; his Predator was equipped with two Hellfire laser-guided missiles. Rogers, who flew F-15s (call sign: Smack) before switching to drones, radioed for authorization to destroy the Dodge. He got it.

"We left their truck one big smoking hole," he remembers. "My heart was pumping as we were doing our business. It felt just as real to me, however many thousands of miles away, as if I was sitting right there in that cockpit."

Rogers' Predator is one of more than 1,200 UAVs in the US military arsenal.

In a sense, Clark has been prepping for the job since he was a kid: He plays videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox and a PlayStation. When he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow UAV, the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way. "You watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It's pretty simple," Clark says. But this is real life.

As the Wired article describes, the lines between video games and war is blurring. We are now entering the era of the military-video game complex.

I don't understand why Spielberg felt the need to remake War of the Worlds. The movie the world needs right now is a movie which explores these issues. The movie we need is Enders Game.

Now it is possible for one of these drone pilots to be in the barracks playing a first person shooter on Xbox live where he is flying a drone and killing virtual people half way around the globe, then go to work flying a drone half way around the world on a computer screen and killing real people, then go back to the barracks to relax playing some more Xbox. The only thing that makes the second one feel real, is how you think about it. It begs the Matrix "what is real?" question.

If your network is good enough, and those boys in the military certainly have the money to throw at it, you can be flying the drones from anywhere in the world. So why be stationed in Iraq when you could be sitting in California? As Major Rogers puts it:

"Most of the time, I get to fight the war, and go home and see the wife and kids at night."

How strange is it to be flying a drone in Iraq and yet being physically located in California? To actively be participating in the killing of insurgents while having absolutely no chance of being killed yourself. "Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" becomes "Fight them over there while we are still living over here".

Talk about outsourcing a war. With bases in the US, Germany and Japan the military can now run drone missions 24 hour a day without ever having to let up.

I remember watching the aerial footage (wmv) of a drone(?) over Afghanistan as it is targeting and then bombing terrorists. It is a grainy black and white with a voice over. You know that it is real and so you have a slightly sick feeling in your stomach as you are watching these people killed. But, it is also easy to switch your frame of reference and view it like a video game forgetting about those people being real and instead feel a little glee as you see the stick figures blowing up on the screen.

The army now finds that new recruits have much better aim and eye hand coordination than previous generations due to all the video games they have been playing growing up. (I swear I read that somewhere a while back, but for the life of me can't find the link to it now. Darn you Google!)

From Engadget we learn:

When polled about their ideal method of control for missile guidance, a group of soldiers basically gravitated towards a highly familiar unit: the PlayStation 2 controller.

You go with what you know, right?

Video games are also becoming a major training tools for the military according to National Defense Magazine:

The Army also has incorporated off-the-shelf video games into vehicle crew training systems. A case in point is the use of the commercial tank simulation "Spearhead II" to train crews on artillery fire control, explained Jerry Speer, program manager at the ArmyÂ’s Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), in Orlando, Fla.

Spearhead, which can be purchased for about $30, was co-developed by Zombie Virtual Reality Studios and Mäk Technologies Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass. It is a tank game featuring multi-player capabilities via the Internet and simulation of mobility and combat interactions.

The game is being used to "drive the operational software of the Army's FBCB2," said Speer. The FBCB2 is the Force XXI battle command prototype software that Army units at brigade and below levels use for command and control in a tactical network. The FBCB2 trainer incorporates the scenarios used in the Spearhead game, Speer explained. "You can use this system in a classroom, to train the digital skills that are perishable.

And the military-video game complex goes the other direction as ABC reports:

The U.S. Army spent more than $4 million in taxpayer money to create a video game as a training tool, but gave itself no way to recoup its investment. When the game was a flop for training purposes, the game developers were free to market the product and rake in huge commercial profits at the stores. The Army got nothing.

Called Full Spectrum Warrior, the combat video game used official military battle tactics and doctrine and was supposed to help train Army recruits who had grown up playing video games, the so-called Xbox generation.

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When Lobster was Fertilizer

Demand for lobsters, for example, has evolved in a curious way. The armour-plated delicacy used to be super-abundant and dirt cheap, he says—so cheap that it was fed to inmates in prison and children in orphanages. Farmers even fertilised their fields with it, and servants would bargain with their employers to be given it no more than twice or thrice a week.

As the crustaceans became harder to find, canned lobster ceased to be profitable. Live lobsters, by contrast, grew in status as they became dearer. A meal that cost $4 (in today's money) in the 1870s cost $30 or more a century later. What was once a manure substitute is now a prized delicacy. What the lowliest servant once refused, the swankiest restaurateur now offers with pride.

As one who has always felt that lobster was overrated (and no comparison to the tasty goodness of Dungeness Crab) I find that pretty funny.

Via The Economist

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Those Undereducated Europeans

America spends around 3% of its GDP on tertiary education; the European Union only 1.4%. More than a third of Americans have degrees; fewer than a quarter of Europeans do.

Who knew that Americans spend twice as much as Europeans on college education and that we have more college graduates?

Via The Economist

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The Male Condition

Really interesting article by Simon Baron-Cohen about the difference between male and female brains and how it relates to autism. Read the whole thing if you get the chance.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own.

Our research team in Cambridge administered questionnaires on which men and women could report their level of interest in these two aspects of the world - one involving systems, the other involving other people's feelings. Three types of people were revealed through our study: one for whom empathy is stronger than systemizing (Type E brains); another for whom systemizing is stronger than empathy (Type S brains); and a third for whom empathy and systemizing are equally strong (Type B brains). As one might predict, more women (44 percent) have Type E brains than men (17 percent), while more men have Type S brains (54 percent) than women (17 percent).

With data like that it is not surprising that more men become scientists and engineers while women become teachers and nurses. It is not talent or aptitude per se as much as it interest, doing what you are best at and what is most natural for you.

This raises the question of whether we need programs to try and get more women as engineers? I would still probably say yes. If you assume all people with S brains would be good engineers, that would mean on average 23% of them would be women (17%/(17%+54%)). You would want to make sure that those with the skills and aptitude are not put off by the fact that they will be in the minority (and have to put up with a lot of S brain men). But we should not expect that women become 50% of engineers.

Likewise we should have programs that promote men as teachers and nurses as the men with the E type brains will be a minority to the women. We need to make sure they don't end up in a profession that wouldn't enjoy as much or be as good at simply because they want to do the same thing as their male friends.

According to what I have called the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, people with autism simply match an extreme of the male profile, with a particularly intense drive to systemize and an unusually low drive to empathize. When adults with Asperger's syndrome (a subgroup on the autistic spectrum) took the same questionnaires we gave to non-autistic adults, they exhibited extreme Type S brains. Psychological tests reveal a similar pattern.

Interesting to think of autism as extreme maleness. More goodness in the article, so follow the link below.

Via NY Times

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Self Driving Cars vs. Flying Cars

Alright, time for another Fat Knowledge "vs." battle.

Futurists seem to talk a lot about self driving cars and flying cars. I believe one of these will be common in 25 years while the other will always just be a toy for the extremely rich. In the audience participation part of this post, it is time for you to choose a camp right now. Ok, have you decided yet? No reading on until you have decided. Got one now? Ok, let see if you are right.

Flying cars will always be a toy for the rich, while self driving cars will become as common as cars are today. Here is why.

Here are the problems with flying cars. First, the gasoline issue. If you think Hummers are bad, flying cars will be much, much worse. There is no way you are going to be able to put a vehicle in the air for the same amount of energy you will use to roll it on the ground. A plane flying 100 people gets about 50 miles/passenger gallon. A bus carrying 100 people will get around 300 miles/passenger gallon. No way a flying car ever gets better or even nearly as good of gas mileage as a car. With the global crunch on oil, I don't see anyway we can greatly increase it with everyone flying their own car.

Second problem, where do you fly them? I see two ways to go here: either you can fly where ever you want or there are "traffic lanes", where you have to fly. If there are traffic lanes, what is the point of flying? You might as well be on the ground. If you can fly where ever you want, that seems scary. If these were popular think about how many of them would be in the air flying around. Now, not only would you have to watch for other flying cars in 2 dimensions but in 3. There are bound to be many more accidents with flying cars than regular cars. Would it be worth taking that extra risk to fly the car? I don't think so. But even as a non-flyer I would be in more risk. Everywhere I go I have to be careful of cars overhead that might get into an accident and crash land on me. Would anyone feel safe walking outside on a Saturday night with all the drunk flyers that you know would be out there?

Third problem, what happens when you run out of fuel, or if there is a mechanical problem that stops the engine? In a car you coast to a stop, potentially dangerous on the freeway, but in general not too bad. In the air, there are all sorts of problems. Will you be able to land right below you? What if you are over water? What if you are over people? What if you are up high?

Due to their increase in fuel usage and their increase in danger, flying cars will never be mainstream. Why are self driving cars the way of the future?

First, who likes driving in traffic? How great would it be to just get in your car, program it where to go and then sit back and read a book, watch TV, talk on the phone, or surf the internet? For those that commute an hour a day, that is a huge time savings.

Second, self driving cars will be safer than human drivers. We can already see where auto-pilots in planes are getting as good and maybe better than human pilots. It is only a matter of time before self-driving cars are better than humans. I know people will at first be afraid of entrusting their lives to a computer. But, people do it all the time with 16 year old drivers, and there is no way that they are safe. Giving up control is much more a psychological issue than a safety/risk issue. But, being able to use that time effectively will be a major reason to give up the control, plus the reality will be that the computer is a better driver. Auto companies have fears of litigation when they build them. But, if they can show that they are safer than normal drivers, it would be in the interest of the insurance companies to insure them. I know it sounds scary that people will be dying due to bugs in the software, but people are already dying by "bugs" in other peoples driving.

Third, the self driving feature in cars will become fairly cheap. This technology will follow the way of Moore's law and decrease in price exponentially over time. In 25 years I would think the self driving car option will be a $2,000 option. Just as air conditioning and radios have become standard issue, so will the self driving car feature.

Fourth, you can start to see the evolution/adoption curve starting to play out. First came the cruise control. Next, radar and infrared was added to see how close a car was to the one in front of it, so even on cruise control you won't hit the car in front of you. Then came the ultrasonic sensors so you won't hit anything when you back up. Then came the Japanese cars that will parallel park themselves. Now GM is using lidar in their Opel Vectra (not to be confused with ligers) that allows the car to tell if any cars are on the side of it.

So we have parking and driving on the freeway covered. We also have GPS and map software everywhere so figuring out how to get from one place to another is solved.

DARPA brought this all to the next level with their Grand Challenge. Last year no car was able finish the course. This year 4 were. This proves that cars can self navigate and avoid obstacles. And while the technology was impressive, it wasn't that impressive. The winner only used 7 Intel-based Pentium CPU's for the brains of the operation.

I see long haul trucking as one of the first places to use this (and possibly one of the first to go completely without any drivers at all). They are already expensive, they are used more hours out of the year than any normal car and if they can slightly reduce the number of accidents, or improve efficiency the upgrade will pay for itself.

5 years from now we have cars that have intelligent cruise control, can parallel park themselves, and can follow GPS instructions on high end cars. Basically they can more or less drive themselves. 10 years from now it becomes more common and possibly it is legal for a self driving car to run (as long as a driver is in the car).

So, there you have it. In 20 years, self driving cars will be as common as air-conditioning or the radio, while flying cars will be as rare as private jets.

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Ethanol and Corn

After writing this post on switchgrass and this one on Brazil and Ethanol on how I thought biofuels were the future, I came upon this article about a study by Tad W. Patzek that claimed more fossil energy is used to produce ethanol from corn than is produced in the ethanol. So I decided to bite the bullet and read his full report (.pdf) so I could better understand what he was saying and see if this would change my faith in biofuels.

The report was a bear. I can't recommend it to read. It was tough to understand where his numbers came from and how he was going from one step to another. And anyone who writes in a scientific report

Thus, the environment defined here cannot be dismissed summarily as the raving of a green lunatic.

(his italics not mine) makes me a little leery on the results. So I checked with some other sources (really easy to find tons of ethanol energy reports with Google) and I have a decent grasp on it now. For this post I will go with Mr. "I am not a raving green lunatic"'s numbers because I know where to find his numbers and all the reports are within 20% or so of each other.

There are lots of things that are worthy of discussion here, but I am just going to look at energy losses/gains (ignoring other environmental issues like soil degradation and by product gains like corn syrup and oil). I think it makes more sense to look at this in two parts: creation of the corn and turning the corn into ethanol.

1) Creation of the Corn
To over simplify this step: you take your corn seeds, use some fertilizer, take some energy from the sun and create lots of corn.

Energy inputs (fertilizer+diesel fuel) + energy captured from sun = energy in corn

27 GJ of energy inputs (fossil fuels of some type)+ 57 GJ from sunlight = 84 GJ of energy in corn per ha (hectare = 2.4 acres)

Brief Aside 1: How good is corn as a way to capture solar energy?
About 20 TJ/ha of sunlight falls over 120 days, so only (57GJ/20TJ=) .285% of solar energy is turned into starch. This certainly makes the solar cells 14% efficiency seem impressive. Extra energy is absorbed by the corn that is not turned into starch but still this only gets you to .7%.

Brief Aside 2: Would it make sense to go "organic" and not use fertilizer?
I guess this depends on how you look at it and what you are comparing to. It is safe to assume that the average corn yield in the U.S. has increased 5-fold over the last 70 years. For example, in Indiana (Nielsen, 2002), the average corn yield was 30 bushels per acre in 1930 and 156 bushels per acre in 2001. The steadily improving yield resulted mostly from the increased fertilizer use and better corn genetics.

Ignoring the corn genetics, the farmers are currently using about 10 GJ/ha of energy in fertilizers. But, their crop energy yield has gone up 5 times from 16.8 GJ to 84 GJ. So this "investment" of 10 GJ in fertilizer energy lead to (84-16.8=) 67 GJ in new corn energy. So I think the fertilizer is a good energy investment.

2) Turning Corn into Ethanol
To over simplify this one (a better explanation here), you take the corn starch, put it in big heated vats with yeast, get ethanol and some non-energy byproducts (corn oil, corn protein, corn syrup), and distill the ethanol to 96% purity.

From an energy perspective (sticking with our per ha reference from before):
84 GJ of energy in corn + 48 GJ in fossil energy = 70 GJ of ethanol

So in total here you are going from 84GJ+48GJ= 132 GJ and getting 70 GJ in return, or a loss of almost 50% energy.

The first part of this energy loss is that taken by the yeast as they ferment the glucose in the corn grain into industrial beer. This is about a 16% energy loss (84GJ of corn going to 70GJ ethanol).

Brief Aside 3: How does the biochemistry of fermentation work?
This page has all sort of neat information on the biochemistry of the transformation and here is the chemical reaction:

C6H12O6 (glucose) + 2 Pi + 2 ATP + 2 ADP--> 2 C2H5OH (ethanol)+ 2 CO2 + 4 ATP +heat + biomass

All that work, and all the yeast get for their trouble are two lousy ATPs. But, that is where the energy "loss" goes. They also estimate that:

Approximately - 95% of sugar is converted into ethanol.
Approximately - 1% is converted into cell material
Approximately - 4% is converted into other end products (other metabolites).
Some ethanol is lost from the wine to the atmosphere

The second part of the energy loss in this step is in the use of fossil fuels (mainly coal and natural gas). The fossil fuel energy to heat the vats and transport the fuel and other stuff (which I don't completely understand) takes almost 70% (48GJ/70GJ) of the energy that you get in the ethanol. Even if you assume that no fossil energy is needed to create your corn, this step still kills you. To make ethanol more viable there need to be serious reductions here.

Brief Aside 4: Can Genetic Engineering come to the rescue here?
One interesting idea is using a little genetic engineering to create better yeasts. Craig Venter and his boys over at Biological Energy Alternatives (IBEA), are looking into this (when he isn't traveling around to exotic locations, scuba diving and capturing and sequencing new species of bacteria).

This article has research creating a yeast that allows noncooking and low-temperature-cooking fermentation systems that have succeeded in reducing energy consumption by approximately 50%.


Total Energy Balance:
When you put the two steps together (per ha):
27 GJ of energy inputs (fossil fuels of some type)+ 57 GJ from sunlight = 84 GJ of energy in corn
84 GJ of energy in corn + 48 GJ in fossil energy = 70 GJ of ethanol

You get 27 GJ fossil fuel in creating the corn + 48 GJ fossil fuel energy creating the ethanol = 76 GJ fossil fuel inputs and 70GJ of ethanol output. You lose 76-70 = -6GJ or -6/70 = 7% energy on the whole thing. This number changes depending on what report you look at and what assumptions are used but even in best case scenarios only a 10% gain.

Brief Aside 5: What if you look at ethanol as a way of "driving on coal"?
Another way to look at this is that you are converting low value energy sources like coal and natural gas into a liquid energy that can easily be used in cars. In this way, it is similar to techniques that turn coal or natural gas into synthetic gasoline.
As this breakdown shows: 212,674 BTU of ethanol takes 137,750 BTU of Coal (64%), 28,547 BTU of Natural Gas (13.4%), and 30,000 BTU of diesel and gasoline (14%). The entire process doesn't create any energy but rather transforms coal and natural gas into a higher value energy source.

If you support energy independence for the US, you can look at this as a way of converting US coal into a fuel that Americans can drive. On the other hand, if you find coal to be dirty, cause air pollution, and give off more carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, then the idea of your "clean corn" ethanol actually being 64% dirty coal isn't so comforting.

Conclusion:
I had liked the idea of ethanol because I thought of it as a way to harness solar energy and turn into a liquid fuel to power our existing vehicles. Instead of collecting the solar energy with solar panels that would make the land an eyesore(and then somehow turn that electricity into a form that could be used in a car), we could dot the land with corn stalks.

Turns out that once you account for the fossil fuel usage to create ethanol very little (if any) of the energy is solar. Instead it is coal and natural gas. I can no longer be excited about ethanol, as it is currently being made from corn, from an environmental standpoint.

What would it take to make me like ethanol in the future?

If the distillation fossil energy could be cut in half (which seems very possible given the research into it), then the ethanol would have a positive energy balance of 27% and would capture 19GJ of sunlight energy per ha. It would go back to a way of harnessing sunlight for a portable fuel.

But, at 27%, or lets go 25% to make number easy, you would need 1/.25 = 4 times as much land to produce a given amount of energy. So the estimates I had before about how much land would be need to devote to fuel crops to fuel all the cars in the US in a sustainable manner would need to be quadrupled.

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Mortgage Deduction is Anti-Poor, Anti-Green

Pres Bush's Tax simplification team came back and suggested redoing the way that it works. For some reason Americans are in love with this tax break. Personally, I think it discriminates against the poor and the environment.

For all the talk of bolstering home ownership, said Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard, the mortgage tax deduction has done very little to help people into homes. He said the subsidy to taxpayers implicit in the deduction had varied widely over the last 40 years, going up and down with the fluctuation of inflation and interest rates. Yet home ownership over the period has drifted in a band of 63 to 69 percent. And home ownership levels in other affluent countries without such subsidies are generally no lower than in the United States.

Instead, what the subsidy has done is encourage people to build and buy bigger and more expensive houses. "The deduction increases the amount spent on housing," Mr. Glaeser said, "but it has almost no effect on the home ownership rate."

Bigger houses means anti-green. The larger the house the more negatively it affects the environment. They take more energy and resources to build and to heat/cool and maintain. Large houses are the SUVs of the housing market (hmm, would be interesting to compare the environmental impact of downgrading from a large house to a small house vs. changing from a Hummer to a Prius, ahh for another day).

Today, most of the mortgage tax advantages accrue to the rich rather than struggling first-time homeowners. More than 55 percent of the mortgage tax subsidy last year, according to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, accrued to just 12 percent of taxpayers with incomes above $100,000.

Low-income homeowners often do not claim the deduction, opting instead to take the $10,000 standard deduction available to families. Turning the deduction into a tax credit would equalize its value and make it available to more people on the lower end of the market.

And here we see that the tax discriminates against the poor. For all the yelling the Democrats did on Bush's tax cuts for the rich, where are they with this tax break which disproportionately favors the wealthy?

Via NY Times

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More Chickens the Cure for Avian Flu

Today's sign that God enjoys irony.

Today's flu vaccines are prepared in fertilized chicken eggs, a method developed more than 50 years ago. The eggshell is cracked, and the influenza virus is injected into the fluid surrounding the embryo. The egg is resealed, the embryo becomes infected, and the resulting virus is then harvested, purified and used to produce the vaccine. And if you want to supply the U.S. with flu vaccine, you have to break about 100 million.

In order to protect us from the chickens, we need --- more chickens???

Via SciAm

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1 Billion Hours of TV Watched a Day in the US

Actually it is a little more than that. In this article Nielsen Media Research says the average individual watches TV for 4 hours and 32 minuts a day. With the CIA putting the US population at 295 million, that gets us to 1.33 billion hours of TV a day in the US or almost 500 billion hours a year.

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Abortion Stats

The supreme court battle over Alito appears to be all about abortion. Any yet, the media does not appear to want to delve into this issue so that you can have an informed opinion. On TV you usually just get a nut job from the right debating a nut job from the left each throwing out their over simplified talking points of the day. Maybe this is because the issue hasn't really changed much in the last 30 years, so maybe they figure that people already know this stuff. Whatever the case, I found that I really didn't have a feel for how prevalent abortion is in the US, who has them and under what circumstances. And unlike so many of the issues in the culture war, this is a real issue that has major impacts on most American lives (as opposed to teaching of Intelligent Design, displaying the 10 Commandments, gay marriage, or whether Under God is in the Pledge of Allegiance).

So I was happy to find this blog post on this report (.pdf) to answer some of these questions. I would recommend reading the post or report (they are about the same and neither is that long), and I will just highlight a couple of points.

In a typical year in the US there are about 4.1 million live births, 1.3 million abortions, and 900,000 miscarriages. 21% of all pregnancies end in abortion, 14% in miscarriage, and 65% in birth. Put another way, more than 1 in 5 pregnancies end in abortion and when miscarriages are factored out, nearly 1 in 4 end in abortion.

1 in 3 American women will have an abortion by the time they reach 45.

For every 100 pregnancies in America, 52 were planned and 48 were unplanned. Among the 48% of pregnancies that were unintended, the percentage of abortions to live births is 54% to 46%.

Of the 46 million abortions that are performed in the world each year, 20 million (44%) occur in countries where the procedure is illegal and only 3% occur in the US.

And to take their numbers and analyze them further (and assuming I am doing my math right):

The average American woman has 1.8 children and .45 (1.8/4) abortions.

By the age of 45, 66% of women have had no abortions, 17% had 1, 9% had 2, 4% had 3, and 3% had 4+.

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Wal-Mart Announces Green Initiatives

Wal-Mart's chief executive is set to announce on Tuesday a set of sweeping, specific environmental goals to reduce energy use in its stores, double its trucks' fuel efficiency, minimize its use of packaging and pressure thousands of companies in its worldwide supply chain to follow its lead.

His goals, he said, are to invest $500 million in technologies that will reduce greenhouse gases from stores and distribution centers by 20 percent over the next seven years; increase the fuel efficiency of the truck fleet by 25 percent over the next three years and double it within 10 years, and design a new store within four years that is at least 25 percent more energy-efficient.

The company's environmental initiative includes improving energy efficiency at its 1,876 supercenters, which now consume an average of 1.5 million kilowatts of electricity annually, according to Tara Stewart, a spokeswoman for the company.

Mr. Scott said that as the largest buyer of manufactured goods in the world, Wal-Mart has the power to encourage its more than 60,000 suppliers to adopt environmentally conscious business practices.

If they follow through with this, that is some major good news.

But just when you are starting to like Wal-Mart they go and prove that they really are still dicks:

An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart's board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer's reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

Text of Internal Wal-Mart Memo In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years' seniority earn more than workers with one year's seniority, but are no more productive.

To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering)."

Jared Diamond's book Collapse points out how the oil companies had to clean up their act in order to be able to recruit the best and brightest out of colleges and grad schools. Likewise GE spends considerable effort in trying to recruit the cream of the crop and therefore need to make the company a place that young people are proud to work for. Hence college idealism actually impacts corporate behavior.

I have wondered if part of Wal-Mart's issues stems from the fact that they choose to promote from within rather than recruit from the nations best schools. Without the need to attract these students, they don't have to promote the larger social issues that are important to these students. So maybe the best way to get Wal-Mart to focus on these issues is not to attack them directly on it, but rather encourage them to hire more students from the top universities, which will get there in a round about way.

via NY Times 1 & 2

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Quick Monkey Facts

1) Chimpanzees are 6-7 times stronger than humans - (1) (2)

2) An adult gorilla's erect penis is about 1.5 inches - (1) (2)

Why is this important you ask?

Because you never know when you are going to rub a lamp and out pops a Genie. And as everyone knows from watching TV that Genies are very mischievous and always trying to get you to misuse your 3 wishes. So your Genie might ask you "would you like to be hung like a gorilla or as strong as a chimpanzee?". Being deceitfully clever, the Genie might even tell you that it is a freebie and won't count against your wishes (that's just how Genies roll). Without these quick monkey facts you would have bought into the media's propaganda that chimps are friendly little coworker buddies that barely have enough strength to hit the copier button and gorillas are testosterone laden beasts that beat the hell out of luggage. You would think this is a no brainer, and you would be screwed.

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Google Wants to Dominate Madison Avenue, Too

Interesting article on Google over at NY Times. A little long, but a good read. Here are my highlights:

This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network. By next year, Mr. Noto said, he expects Google to have advertising revenue of $9.5 billion. That would place it fourth among American media companies in total ad sales after Viacom, the News Corporation and the Walt Disney Company, but ahead of giants including NBC Universal and Time Warner.

Those are crazy numbers. Almost $10 billion in ad revenue and they are only a little over 5 years old. When I look at Google, I see a company that's success is based on two simple to explain things that were extremely hard to do right: the best web search (based on the idea of ranking pages based on how pages linked to each other) and how to put adds in with search results that were relevant and not distracting. And that is all you need to get $10 billion. But I didn't realize how good and complex the ad part is.

Google introduced its current system for determining which ad to show on which page late last year. It is a wonder of technology that rivals its search engine in complexity. For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user's Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements.

100 computers, 1 million variables! And yet, whatever I search on I always get the same: "Browse a huge selection now, Find exactly what you want today, www.eBay.com". I could do that with 1 computer and 1 variable.

And just like Ebay was able to come up with a model that created new middle class jobs as at-home merchants, so has the Google advertising allowed for the creation of new middle-class jobs as stay at home bloggers.

In addition to selling ads on its own site and on other sites that use its search technology, Google also places text ads on all manner of sites published both by professional media companies and by amateurs. Mr. Brin created this program in early 2003 after he became worried that the Internet crash would keep people from creating interesting Web pages for Google to index. This technology, called AdSense for Content, has made advertising on Google more attractive and provided the economic foundation for the rise of blogs.

So, what isn't to like about Google? How about the lack of transparency?

"Google is very opaque and bizarre to deal with," said Joshua Stylman, a managing partner at Reprise Media.

For a company that's first rule is do no evil, they should really think about how hard that is to do without also promoting transparency. To toss out 3 quotes (where really 1 would be sufficient):
Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off - Samuel Johnson

Corruption thrives where things are hidden - Joseph Stiglitz

Sunlight is the best disinfectant - US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Long term I just think that you need the check of openness and transparency to stop people from cutting the little corners that leads to more cuts and cover ups which leads to evil.

Their ads are old sold in a market system, but that market is not open at all to allow people to really understand how it works. Are people being over charged? Who really knows?

There is a growing sense that a significant number of clicks that advertisers pay for are fraudulent - made by competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets or by Web sites trying to bolster the revenue they get for displaying the ads. Google says it has technology to minimize what is called click fraud, but many people in the Internet business are skeptical that the incidence of fraud is as low as Google contends.

Google also "gives" ads away to nonprofits, which by putting them in competition in the market system with the paying adds raises the rates of all the other advertisers on the page (and allows a tax write off for Google). Of course, I don't know that for sure because the whole thing is secret, but from what I do know it appears that it works this way.

On the other hand, advertisers make their decisions on how much in total they have to pay and what the results are for that money. So even if competitors are faking clicks and nonprofits are causing the ads to be more expensive, since they are still buying the ads it must still be a good deal for them. Put another way, Google could get rid of these issues and instead charge more for their ads and the advertisers would be in the exact same spot.

Via New York Times

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