GM and the lightest element

General Motors is forging ahead with plans for hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles by introducing the experimental Sequel concept, which is a completely functional cross-over type SUV. It looks good and is by far the most advanced and usable fuel cell vehicle I've seen. I'm impressed with both the capability and overall execution of the car; it actually looks (both in pictures and specs) likes something I could and would drive. The major hurdle still in front of this vehicle (and perhaps the only real problem perplexing the engineers for the last few years) is cost. I'm sure the current Sequel would have to sell for the price of a small house in order to turn any profit, so finding cost effective ways to manufacture and sell it at a competitive price will determine its fate. You may wonder about the infrastructure for dispensing hydrogen, and that's a serious problem. The Autoextremist has reported that the "oil companies" estimate the price of equipping every gas station in America with hydrogen capability to be $12 billion. They put this in perspective as only half the price of the Alaska pipeline. With that thought, I'm in agreement with The Autoextremist on this one: "eminently doable."

In another smart move, GM is also pledging to build and lease 100 fuel cell vehicles, based on the Chevy Equinox, to customers in California, New York and Washington, D.C. This is more impressive than their Sequel, being a real world application of their technology rather than a one-off piece of technological art. The only issue I see that they overlooked: I don't live in any of those markets.

Sequel coverage:
Autoblog 1, Autoblog 2, Autoblog 3
Autoextremist

Fuel cell Equinox fleet coverage:
Autoblog
Autoextremist

"We torture."

I'll repeat that, as Mr. Sullivan requests, because it is painfully true. Check out this video posted on The Daily Dish of Matt Lauer asking the President about our "alternative methods of extracting information." It seems to me our President thinks "waterboarding", and other like techniques, are not torture, or at least are "within the law," and should be used on detainees. If this weren't the case I'm confident the President would say so; all Matt gets are clumsy evasions and ridiculous sound bites.

Also, I'll second that call for three cheers for Mr. Lauer. I'm not much of a TV news guy and know little about him, but for today he's my favorite reporter. Keep it up Matt and you might win a convert back to the TV fold.

The tragedy cannot be removed...

...from Steve Irwin's death, but we can remember and appreciate all that he did. A moving veneration: The Thundering Positive Energy of Steve Irwin

The view from CNN

Anyone who thinks about the Iraq war at all should read this piece in the Washington Post. I'm not entirely sold on the current direction of the whole mess, i.e. remaining engaged at the current troop levels, but if the sentiments of the Iraqi leaders in the article are correct, perhaps that is what must be done. As much as I hate the dimbulb "cut and run" label that has been applied to anyone who wants to keep our young men and women alive by getting out, the idea might be correct and perhaps, as the piece points out, the only solution is time. But more time means more dead, and that's not something to be papered over with bravado and hubris. I'm really tired of this mess, and the lame, childish Republican sound bites about the war are starting to get under my skin (I know, just now starting?). And the Democrats, oh the Democrats; the sound bites don't get any better over there. I think I'd gladly vote for anyone who stopped talking to us like we're all twelve years old.

Very very cool

Take at look at this article; apparently Ferrari F1 team members are using their crazy fast pitstop skills to help sick children. Thus from now on I must consider it my duty to buy Ferrari and support this work. Helping these kids is worth any price.

Quote of the day

"You cannot deny this gorgeousness, you can only hope to handle it."

-Get Fuzzy

Tesla!

Thanks to Autoblog's exhaustive coverage (here, here and here), I now have a new car to drool over. The Tesla Roadster is a fully electric supercar (as fast as a Porsche 911 Carrera S to 60 mph), in the spirit of a Lotus Elise, that will sell for approximately $80,000. It goes 250 miles on each charge, recharges fully in less than four hours and looks fantastic. I may not have the 80 grand to lay down on a hedonistic machine like this, but if I did and was so inclined, I can't think of a good reason to buy anything else. For starters, it's right in the running with every other car for this price, and it does all its work silently. To me, that's as cool as the symphony from a Ferrari's pipes. Moreover, there's no reason any sports car of this caliber should travel more than 250 miles from home without being trailered. I'm sorry, but highway miles on a Lamborghini just don't make sense. But most of all, $80,000 for a sports car of the traditional persuasion is, well, boring; been there, done that (metaphorically, of course). It's high time to try something new.

Top 6 percent baby!

Check this out, apparently I'm in the minority of bloggers; I don't primarily preen rhetorically for my electric audience. You could say I'm a bit political (though my contributions are so often lame, I excuse myself from this class). That puts me firmly in the technology and spirituality sections, making up 6 percent of all bloggers. The top 6 percent, of course.

Materazzi

By now everyone knows and has spouted off on how the World Cup ended: Zidane is insane, Italy won but must now face charges of scandal and what exactly did Materazzi say? But what no one has mentioned, and which I guess doesn't make much of a news story, is that Materazzi was the key Italian player in every one of the three major events in the final: he "fouled" a French player to set up Zidane's penalty, he leaped over Vieira to head one into the net and, of course, he managed to get under Zinedine's skin, possibly winning the game for Italy by sidelining the legend just before penalty kicks. To my mind it's crazy that one guy had so much impact on the game in such disparate and unlikely ways.

(Update: Someone else did notice.)

jEdit, force quit and the world's most advanced operating system

Recently I've been looking for a good text editor on OS X (as XCode just didn't seem to cut it), specifically to write numerical simulations in Fortran. Since this isn't one of the mainstream languages for computer programmers, and I like a usable GUI, it was a bit difficult to find a really suitable one. It had to have customizable syntax highlighting, but beyond that I didn't need much. Browsing the ol 'net I found jEdit, a sleek Java based text editor that claimed to work with Fortran and also be customizable. From the beginning it worked great on my Mac (OS 10.3.9), except for one simple but really annoying bug, which I will get to in a minute. jEdit works great with Fortran, is simple but meets my needs, looks and works the same across platforms (since it is Java based) and has numerous plugins. My favorite is jDiff, which graphically compares two files and shows the differences.

The bug, however, still remained. What would happen is this: after using jEdit for awhile, with the Mac OS plugin installed and set to put the jEdit menu bar in the OS X menu bar (as is usual with Mac applications), the menus would cease working, essentially disabling the program (I hear jEdit might work from the command line in this state, but that's still not acceptable behavior). I would have to force quit and relaunch the program, with the potential for losing some work. But, through the magic of the internet I found a solution. It turns out the problem is not jEdit but OS X. The world's most advanced operating system (at least version 10.3.9 with Java 1.4.2) has a bug in Java. Turning off the option to put jEdit menus in the Apple menu bar seems to fix everything, and I'm back in love with jEdit. A simple fix, but to me, a mere engineer with little real programming knowledge, it was a bear to find.

Quote of the day 2

Bob Lutz (once more cribbed from AUTOEXTREMIST) in response to a recent Thomas L. Friedman New York Times column (which politely starts: "Is there a company more dangerous to America's future than General Motors?"):

"In an email to The Detroit News, Bob Lutz, GM Vice Chairman, said that Tom Friedman, 'is so 'over the top' that it borders on psychosis.' Lutz said his hope 'is that the majority of Americans, not being extreme liberals, and harboring a deep-seated distrust toward the media, will see his piece for what it is: the product of an unusual, but not altogether well, mind.'"

Quote of the day

"...and others of his ilk who share Friedman's laughable, Detroit=Bad, Toyota=Good mantra, and who would have us all driving flatulence-powered clown cars made out of balsa wood, hugs and a smile, if they had their way - with Toyota emblems on them, of course."

The AUTOEXTREMIST himself, Peter M. DeLorenzo. Who else?

"...an entire herd of reindeer was rendered sterile."

You learn basically nothing about the Bugatti, but this is the best review I've read yet.

Taxing "excess profits": bad

Check out this argument for not applying an "excess profits" tax to oil companies. I'm no economist, but the points made seem reasonable and dovetail with my initial reaction. Moreover, despite being economically unsophisticated, it seems I had some idea of "user cost" rattling around my head. Truly I have a dizzying intellect.

"...there is not a sniff that the goalkeeper can do..."

Who says "useless theoreticians" never produce practical work?

Strategic Oil Reserve

No, not that one. Which not filling, by the way, seems a little disingenuous considering that during the last gas price "crisis" just a year or two ago, President Bush said that tapping the strategic petroleum reserve would do no good in lowering prices. Unless oil goes in much faster than it comes out, I don't see what has changed. But I digress...

My real point is about ANWR and any oil that may be had off our continental shelf. Many (generally on the right) have called for drilling in one or more areas to help ease our reliance on foreign oil. This would supposedly bring prices down and national security up, all with a minimal sacrifice in caribou. Now, I'm all for low prices and high security, but I wonder if the caribou lovers haven't done us all a favor by thwarting any attempt at harvesting these oil reserves. I'll try to explain.

Currently, gas is cheap in the US. Relative to previous years, that statement is absurd, but relative to the rest of the world and in the grand scheme of things, it's painfully obvious. One need only take in the proliferation SUV's to see that the screw of gas prices isn't too tight on most of us yet. Moreover, until recently we had much of the oil market to ourselves. If we wanted oil, there it was getting dusty on the shelf just waiting to be bought. There were few other major oil buyers (Japan, sure, but let me get to my point...), so OPEC could cut production to get at us (in turn cutting their sales), but that was about it. Now, we're faced with two giants in the marketplace, India and China. All of a sudden it's like the day after Thanksgiving at Best Buy. If the oil supply had risen and become more secure, maybe our old habits could have continued in the face of these behemoths, but it hasn't and they can't. Thus we come to our current rising prices and tenuous national security.

So how does caribou hugging help us here? I submit that the current time, and certainly the preceding time, are not as bad oil wise as what is to come. In fact, I expect they are a brisk walk on a cold day compared with the mountaineering that is to come later. India and China's economies are only going to up-shift as time goes by, and though India seems pleasantly friendly and may work with us on energy policy, China is a polite acquaintance at best (though one we do an amazing amount of business with, but again I digress). Had we tapped into our local oil deposits previously, or if we do so now, they'll be used up quite fast. Our current oil use is astounding, and I believe these deposits are not much in the face of the American consumer. Once they're gone, what then will we have to fall back on? Running the last major oil deposits we have dry to keep gas at $2.50 a gallon so we can have our 12 mpg SUV and flat screen TV is not intelligent. In fact, buying all the cheap oil we can from whoever is selling it now (while still minimizing our use, by the way) almost seems brilliant, if it weren't inadvertent.

Why so brilliant? Because we invested on the ground floor, and now we have the ability to get out: advance our technology and cut our oil consumption. India and China are looking at serious problems if their oil consumption ramps up as expected because they'll be denied the cheap energy we've feasted on for so long. We won't ever be able to fully cut our oil use (at least not soon enough for my crystal ball to see), but we will reduce it. And, if the oil supply finally ends up in the hands of nuclear mullahs and South American communists bent on our destruction, that oil reserve under the caribou's feet is going to look pretty good.

The one problem with my plan for world domination? Timing. It's not like the two tanks in your SUV; we can't just switch from one oil source to another with a quick turn of a knob. Harvesting this oil takes years of planning and preparation, and not knowing the quality and quantity of the oil there makes planning for its use even harder. Still, I think we may be glad at our "fortune" if we find ourselves really in need. I'm sure if the time comes, many politicians will take credit for this ingenious move, and if any have already that's news to me and I'd love to know about it. But, though I love to be right, I hope an energy crisis never descends that causes us to see this "strategic oil reserve" the way I've been advocating. Here's to hoping...

"...because it is Iran."

My thoughts exactly. Not that military intervention is the right path right now, but equating the US, France, Israel and, yes, even India having Nuclear weapons with Iran possessing them is quite nearly suicide.

(via Sullivan)

Iran, the Bomb and the End of the World

I can't believe what I read in this article, though it seems to come from a reputable source. Does Iran (their government, in any event) really want to end the world? Are they really preparing for the downfall of the US, stopping at nothing until the "West" is annihilated? If so, that turns every idea of engagement with this regime on its head. Now, I do suppose if we made life in Iran good enough, there wouldn't be anyone left to support a radical government, but that's just a nice way of implementing regime change.

I must say though, as a point of confession, that it gave me a twinge of pride when President Bush was described as an "aberration" to be waited out so Iran can continue on it's path down Armageddon Lane. Our President may hire clods for FEMA posts, but at least he has done something right to garner that kind of response. I hope the next president continues in this tradition (and guts FEMA). Right now, my money is on McCain to fill this vacancy, but there's still a lot of time before that die is cast.

Ha Ha!

Monkeys! Ha Ha!

(Merry April Fool's Day ya'll.)

Dust to Dust

Finally, a study that looks at the overall environmental impact of automobiles has surfaced. (Thanks to Autoblog for dredging it up.) This article seems to confirm my hunch that hybrid environmental savings aren't all their touted to be. However, as some commenters at autoblog have noticed, these environmental costs will change as demand for hybrids increases. I agree it is likely that soon the environmental costs of hybrids will be essentially equal to their less technologically savy brethren. But only equal? That doesn't sound like the hybrids the world has come to know and love. I thought these things were supposed to be saving the earth.