Hodgepodge of thoughts, technical notes, and random observations

Here it is, plainly spoken:

I saw an article the other day that set off my peeve alarm when it discussed a plugin hybrid that got 100 MPG.  Now most everyone knows that MPG is Miles Per Gallon.  That means that for every gallon, you get 100 miles.  But since this is a plugin hybrid, many of those 100 miles are coming from the battery being charged from the grid, not the gallon - so its just not fair to count those miles in a MPG rating.  There are some ways to count kwH as gas equivalents - but no attempt was made to do this.  Again, the key point is that in a regular hybrid, the only energy input is the gas.  So MPG = MPG.  But with a plugin there is another energy source, so you can’t calculate a simple MPG from Miles traveled per gallons used.  Put another way, if I carried around a gallon of gas in an all electric vehicle - would that count as an infinite MPG car?

This article in the NY Times has several passages that I think illustrate why there are at least two phenomena that could be leading to a delayed impact of the current high oil prices.

First - There is an issue of the latency in large production quantities of both raw materials and finished goods.  Dow Chemical may make a batch resin, that then is made into luggage.  Each of these is made in relatively large production runs, then may be bought in large shipments.  Each of these steps adds a certain amount of time buffer.  Here is a quote from the above article

Costco’s profit was up in the first quarter, but James D. Sinegal, the chief executive, says he is “starting to be confronted with unprecedented price increases” for the merchandise that Costco buys to stock its stores. His first response has been to buy in extra large quantities so that he has stock on hand to carry him through subsequent price increases.

“We just made a big purchase of Tumi luggage,” Mr. Sinegal said.

So the 138 barrel oil prices are just making their way into some of the raw chemical materials now, they may take months before these higher prices reach the inventory of the luggage maker, and it may be months more before Costco has to buy another big shipment of the now much more expensive luggage.  We may watch oil prices hour by hour, or day by day - but the impact many highly processed complex products can lag quite a bit.

Second and perhaps a bigger issue is that companies, under the general impression that oil prices will be going back down, and in a highly competitive retail market, have decided to not pass on many of the energy cost increases, but instead have taken the hit in their own profits.  As profits were high at the start of the recent run up in oil prices, they could afford to be a buffer - but as oil prices stay high, and profits continue to shrink, they will have to pass on these higher energy costs.

Since last spring, the average profits of the nation’s corporations — from behemoths like Goodyear to small neighborhood retailers — have declined at an annual rate of nearly 6 percent, government data show.

If this rate continues, companies will HAVE to pass on the higher costs to maintain any profit, and then inflation, which has been hidden by this buffering has the potential to slam hard - on top of continued job cuts and decreased corporate profits (read stock prices), and the housing decline etc etc.  I guess you could label me a bear.

Wow - it doesn’t get much dumber than this article on CNN.  I know its risky to be on any side that is saying “This time its different”, as nearly everything is cyclical.  But cyclical and exponential trends can’t mix forever.  What people continue to not understand is that the problems of Peak Oil are not about remaining quantities remaining (either conventional or unconventional).  It is a problem of production (rate) and the quality of that production (light sweet vs heavy sour).

This clone of Apple’s keynote presentation program in the form of an amazing javascript website is darn impressive.

Just saw a couple clips of Google’s Android Phone OS.  There are some things that are cool and improved (like the unlock pattern code). But I’m a bit baffled by this feature:

So if you are standing on a street, what exactly is the point of being able to pan around and see what is right in front of you on your phone?  Now maybe around the corner is cool - but the compass part of that would only confuse you I think.

This video is pretty amazing animation in its own right, the fact that it takes place across buildings and walls makes it that much more amazing. If the artist wasn’t inspired by the animations of Bill Plimpton, I would be very surprised. Plimpton was a pioneer of this style of freakish random animation.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

NPR had a story this morning about recycling energy.  This is such a better area to be investing some research into over biofuels.  It demonstrates a fundamental understanding of what constitutes waste heat and thermodynamics.  One processes waste can be another’s source.  One of the examples they used, was if I recall 10 years old and it was simply placing a boiler over the ovens that make coal-coke (part of making steel).  This requires very high temps, and the electricity generated by this was 100MW.  To put that in perspective, most wind turbines out there are only 1-3 MW - so this one boiler was like a whole windfarm, and it was using energy that was considered waste product from another process.  Now this isn’t free energy, the original energy input into the coal-coke oven is HUGE, but at least you try to harness as much as possible.  Taking this a step further, you could take the waste steam out from the boiler/turbine system and heat oil which, if there were an infrastructure for it in the surrounding community, could be used to heat every house in the area.  The coal-coke oven is thousands of degrees, the boiler runs at hundreds of degrees, easy enough to get heated oil at 90-100 degrees to then heat housing with.  This is the energy equivalent of an eskimo eating every part of the seal and letting nothing go to waste, instead we are killing the elephant for the tusk.

NPR had a bit this morning on carbon offsets. IMHO these are a pretty poor way to address the problem of carbon output. Most of these credits go towards things like wind and solar power and often claim to help you be “carbon neutral”. These may reduce growth of carbon output, but they don’t actually help remove any of the carbon you spewed in the activity you took part in (and for which you are buying credits). Its mainly a guilt alleviator, and really just serves to enable people to not improve or better their behavior or lifestyle.

Think of it this way, would you support a murder offset credit, that let you kill someone, but then donate money to help starving children somewhere (who otherwise would die). In the end you may be “life neutral”, but you still did bad thing, and you can’t right it by paying someone to make you feel better. Extreme comparison for sure, but I think it is apt.

I’m sure this is going to circulate far and wide in the Mac blogging world, but it is worth giving it one more airing.  I can’t imagine how long this must have taken to get all the timing right: