Understatement

This story, about a possible revitalization of Nickel-Hydrogen battery technology, makes a crucial oversight that should be pointed out.

Evidently some startup has reinvented an old technology, Nickel-Hydrogen batteries, to be more mechanically robust, and have between 1/2 to 2/3 the energy density of Lithium Ion batteries. I'm not sure if this claim is actually true, or if their NiH2 batteries are commercially viable, but if they are, this could be fairly interesting. Unlike Lithium Ion batteries, NiH2 batteries can be charged and discharged tens of thousands of times without becoming significantly degraded.

The article points out that 1/2 to 2/3 the energy density would translate to reduced range for electric vehicles, such as the Chevy Volt - instead of 40 electric miles, you would only have 20 to 30. But the author forgot that fully 45% of the Chevy Volt's battery capacity is not used! Because Lithium batteries can only be cycled fully a few hundred times before losing much of their capacity, the Volt carries around twice as much battery as it really needs. This extra capacity "babies" the Volt's battery, so that instead of charging and discharging from 100%-0%-100%, the Volt goes from 85%-30%-85%, which greatly increases the lifetime of the battery. So, a chemistry with effectively unlimited charge cycle capacity would allow downsizing the battery significantly, which could cancel out the reduced energy density.

There may be other reasons why the NiH2 batteries won't end up working for electric cars, but the energy density problem, at least for Extended-range electric or plugin-hybrid vehicles, seems not to be an issue. Too bad the authors of this article didn't think that through.

Tar baby

I've been listening to NPR recently, and I really enjoy their lengthy investigations and discussions about interesting topics. Of course, it's still hard to cover a topic completely on the radio, and so things inevitably have to be left out. As a conservative, it's always interesting to me to notice exactly what NPR chooses to omit from its lengthy in-depth coverage of important issues.

Today was a great example: NPR covered Ted Kennedy's death nonstop, with special emphasis given to his vacant senate seat. The seat can't be filled by appointment with the laws as presently construed in MA, since it must be filled by special election 5 months from now. Of course, this would mean depriving the senate of a (D) Senator during a crucial period, which is cause for great hand-wringing. NPR repeated a soundbite several times from Deval Patrick (the MA governor), which said that it would be unjust to deprive Massachusetts of one of its senate seats during such a crucial period. Much discussion was devoted to the people who could run for Kennedy's seat, Kennedy's final request that if someone were appointed to take his place in the interim (assuming the laws were changed), that appointed person would not run in the special election to take his place for good, etc.

However, with all this coverage, NPR didn't find it interesting to mention how MA got in this mess, which I believe is a very interesting story in its own right. Like most states, MA provided for vacant senate seats by having the governor appoint someone until the next election. However, during Kerry's run for president in 2004, MA was governed by an (R): Mitt Romney. This could have lead to an unthinkable situation: Romney could have appointed a Republican to fill Kerry's seat if Kerry won the presidency. To avert this disaster, the MA legislature changed the laws to make them "more fair": vacant seats could only be filled by special election, 5 months after the vacancy was created. Now, of course, this law, created for completely partisan purposes, has backfired, since Obama is going to need every vote he can get to pass his agenda, and the law is reducing the number of Democrats in the senate. Accordingly, I expect the MA legislature will simply revise the law, as quickly as possible.

I agree with this - while the MA legislature is revising the law, why don't they just be honest and make the law state that senators from MA must be from the Democratic party? That way they won't have to change the law back if ever (horrors) a Republican were governor again.

Interesting story, no? I would love to be a fly on the wall when NPR was discussing their coverage of stories like this one. I would like to find out if they decided not to run this part of the story out of overt and considered bias, or whether the bias is just so ingrained that it's automatic and subconscious, making it completely obvious to everyone that matters that this part of the story is superfluous to any useful thorough challenging investigation of deep important issues.

In any case, this whole mess is greatly entertaining.

The real gender inequity

I've been thinking often about gender issues recently - I have a couple of posts brewing but don't want to post them until they're ready. Until then, here's something to think about:

80% of American jobs lost in this recession have been lost by men. Eighty percent!

The current gender unemployment gap (8.0 percent for women, 10.5 percent for men) is the worst in the history of labor department records dating back to 1948.

College graduates in the US, by gender, are now at 58% female, 42% male.

Add it all up: empirically, men are being oppressed. Happy Fathers Day!

Gandalf's vision of the Tree of Life

The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was one of those events that leaves an indelible stamp on our culture. Take these Book of Mormon posters, for example - they are heavily inspired by LotR, like this one where have Lehi looks like Gandalf holding one of the palantíri. On the plus side, I like fantasy imagery, this artwork at least seems new to the BoM illustration scene, and at least it gets kids thinking about scripture.

However, there's something that bothers me just a little with the cultural references here. It strikes me that drawing these kind of connections between scriptural characters and fictional characters might move our concept of scripture towards the fantasies being referenced, which seems to undermine the idea that these scriptures are historical rather than imagined. Along that line, it's interesting that all these posters include dates for the BoM at the bottom - perhaps the dates are supposed to counterbalance the fantasy imagery by making things more concrete? Would any of you consider posting one of these?

Faith & Justice

We've recently had two weeks of talks in church about Grace. In fact, 'Spoza gave an insightful talk on Sunday about how faith in God's Grace spurs us to action, and Lynette gave a thought-provoking talk on how the enormity of God's Grace defines our relationship with God.

So I guess that's why this picture (earlier the lead picture for msnbc.com) struck me - the idea that "Faith Demands Justice" is particularly foreign to me right now, since I've just had two weeks of eloquent reminder that my faith prominently rejects Justice, in its place offering Grace. Could anyone help me out here - what perspective could lead one to proclaim that "Faith Demands Justice"?

One possible idea - perhaps it comes from Eastern traditions. I'll have to ask my Buddhist friends whether the doctrine of Karma (& Reincarnation) leads to the idea that faith demands justice. Any other thoughts?

Real world fuel economy

One of the reasons we got our Mazda5 was because it was relatively fuel-efficient, especially compared to other minivans. The EPA rates the Mazda5 at 21/27, which is 13% better than the 2009 Honda Odyssey with cylinder deactivation, and 17% better than the 2009 Toyota Sienna. Of course, real world fuel economy is notoriously variable, and so it's important to examine real world data as well. With that in mind, here's our data from this trip. Overall, we drove 1916 miles and averaged 24.6 MPG. Most of these miles were driven with a 16 cubic foot cargo box attached to the top of the car, which adds a lot of drag and noticeably lowers fuel economy. We also traveled faster than the EPA fuel economy tests - on the open roads of Utah and Nevada, the cruise control was set at 80 mph, which lowers observed fuel economy further. I'm very happy to pay a few more dollars to get home a few hours earlier, especially with three small children in the car... =)

We attribute the two low mileage legs of our journey to some very heavy winds during a large storm in Nevada - with a big box on the roof, the car had to fight hard to maintain 80 mph despite all the buffeting.
The two highest mileage legs of the journey had quite a few trips around the Salt Lake area, without the box on the roof (since it could stay at our in-laws' house), and driving at 70 mph instead of 80. So it looks like the 27 MPG highway rating is fairly realistic.

Leaving the Berkeley bubble

Yesterday I was a little fragile, a little peevish and petulant. I'm on vacation, so I should be enjoying myself - which made me even more upset. What was making me so irritated?

While driving around, 'spoza and I had a little conversation, trying to get at the source of my irritation, and I think she found it: leaving the Berkeley bubble is confronting me with the hard fact that millions of people choose to live differently than I'd like to live.

The good people of Utah, speaking generally and not specifically, like living large. Large houses, large cars, large portions of food. Acres and acres of anonymous McMansions, hermetically sealed by covenant-compliant white plastic fences. Wide roads packed with king cab pickup trucks on stilts. Restaurants which pride themselves on maximizing caloric value per dollar. Design and forethought seems to be much less important than quantity.

The frustrating thing for me is that when we moved to Berkeley, I vowed not to become a Berkeley snob, and now I find I've started to become one. Berkeley-ites, when they discovered I had just come from Utah, were very dismissive. They implied that I must be overjoyed to have escaped oppression and mediocrity when I left Utah. In Berkeley, it's almost axiomatic that all the people living in flyover country are insipid and narrow-minded, as opposed to the accomplished, internationally experienced Bay Area.

The truth was that I was very happy living in Utah. After having lived so many places growing up, I pride myself on my adaptability - I've enjoyed living in the Mojave Desert and Siberia, in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin, even in the ruthless, unrelenting sun of Los Angeles (ok, so maybe LA was my least favorite place to live. =) So I interpreted Berkeley snobbery as Bay Area parochialism. I still think that the Bay Area tends to make people rather parochial, despite its pretensions to internationalism. But the difficult truth is that I really like a lot of things about Berkeley, and I've started taking it for granted. I like living around people which value the environment, and understand that bigger is not always better. I like restaurants that serve me moderate portions of exquisitely crafted food. I like seeing ZENN neighborhood electric vehicles on the roads. I like walking to Trader Joe's.

It's hard to be confronted with so many square miles of sprawling evidence that other people don't value these things, and I think that's what made me so irritable yesterday. I'm reexamining my prized adaptability - could I really be happy living here?

Ironically, I was lifted out of my funk by large quantities of anonymous pizza - it was a great value, only $6 for a pizza and a prodigious order of breadsticks, accompanied by all the HFCS I could stand. And right now I'm relaxing on an enormous couch inside a gargantuan house with enough square footage to lose my glasses in thousands of different ways. There is a certain mindset from which I could enjoy all of this. Perhaps that's what really irked me. =)