from the dept of I know how he feels

This made me laugh.. out loud.
Dude, I feel your pain.

Enthralled by the spectacle of decay..

Before he died George Carlin gave some interviews in which he basically said that his perspective changed when he stopped caring about the outcome of events, and just took humor and or pleasure in the grotesque way those events would unfold.

Now it's not clear to me, if you have people or things in this life that you care about, that it is possible to become completely detached from the world, and not be vested to some degree in the world at large (even if it's because you don't want your pet puppy to be mutilated and eaten by bands of rampaging zombies). Now to be fair, he did say that his stance might very well be the result of a brokenhearted idealist turned cynic.

But I have to say, speaking for myself, that viewing the world through such a jaundiced eye makes for a much less stressful life. Things are going to hell in a hand-basket, in a spectacular way, and nobody in charge seems to give a flying rats ass.

The Bible says that "The love of money is the root of all evil", and these greedy bastards are trying to take us all down, rejoicing in the distruction, viewing each and every thing that happens as some kind of business opportunity. Even Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, was never so pernicious.

There is a line in Battlestar Galactica, where Adama says "We never asked ourselves whether we deserve to survive.". I used to think we did, and were worth saving. Now, I'm not so sure, and I'm beginning to think Nero might have had a point. My reason for living is now just to be here to witness it all.

Still if we do deserve redemption, the only way we will achieve it is to act decisively, and to understand that there are some things more important than money.

Dear SciFi Channel.

Enough with the bloody holiday Twilight Zone marathons already. 3 fricking days !!

The thing is, you guys have enough of a vault to do some interesting holiday programming, but it's this lack of imagination that's the reason your network mostly sucks. If it wasn't for Galactica (which ends this year), Stargate SG1 (which you cancelled, and won't allow to continue on another network) and Eureka I wouldn't even watch. And don't get me started on the EC-fracking-W, or the lameass made for TV movies.

Hell, until the writers strike, the USA channel was doing just as much interesting SciFi as you guys with Dead Zone and the 4400.

All I want is for you to raise your standards. Just a little.. Is that too much to ask ?

More on Oil and Engines

I guess the implicit part of my previous posts is that diesel engines tend to be much more efficient than corresponding gasoline engines, with many diesel cars able to reach high 30's/low 40's mpg, as opposed to the mid 20's mpg for gasoline engines.

It's clear that if we are to adopt agrofuels, then diesel seems to be an easier step in that direction. The only issue for drivers seems to be the need for that visceral feel caused by great acceleration, and in some cases auto manufacturers have addressed that problem to a significant degree, so that most drivers will be happy with the acceleration they'll get. This is already true in Europe, the home of the no speed limit autobahn.

Fiddling while Rome burns..

I saw this story on Huffington Post. Apparently a lot of us have been taking the stimulus checks from the IRS, and have gone to get ourselves stimulated in other ways as apparently many internet porn sites have experienced 20%->30% growth (yes I get the joke), in what is usually a quiet period for the market.

As a nation, we are such a bunch of adolescents. And no-one is going to clean up after us. Just remember that.

The New Oil

One thing Oil companies are very good at is Chemical Engineering, or the construction of large plants to deal with the production of basic raw materials and fuel from crude oil, and this would be a critical advantage in the future against smaller silicon valley funded startups.

It occurs to me that the biggest problem in adopting algae and similar methods for creating biofuel is in scaling production to a point where single factories can produce hundreds of thousands of barrels of bio-diesel or bio-gasolene per day, on a managable footprint of land. So if the Oil companies want to maintain their monopoly, and continue to leverage their stranglehold on distribution, this would seem to be a way to do it.

The issue they have is the same one Google faces with it's data centers, which is to find a cheap and plentiful source of energy (and water in the Oil companies' case). Once they have that, the problem that remains is how to build the worlds largest still, and how to dispose/reuse their waste.

Furthermore, it is critical to the future of the Oil companies that they both behave and are seen to behave as good corporate citizens. What they means in a practical sense is oil/gasolene price stability. $4/gallon isn't a problem per se, given that most of Europe pays twice that. It's that we went from $2/gallon to $4/gallon in under four years, and that price "shock" has been the disruptive factor.

No sympathy for the car companies.

I reading this post and it occurs to me that all of Detroit's problem rest at their own feet. We all saw this coming.

It's clear that with just a little planning, Ford and the others would have been able to shift factory production from SUVs to smaller, more compact and efficient vehicles. And remember, these are multinational companies, and in those foreign already sell models that would more than meet the market demand for more economic vehicles. European standards for emissions and crash worthiness are far more stringent than in this country, and everybody with the exception of the British and the Irish drive on the left, removing *any* need for reengineering in the drivetrain.

The real problem is that the big Three got greedy, trying to maximize the per unit revenue on their automobiles. They spent their time complaining about emissions and efficiency standards instead of paying attention to the market, identifying opportunities and thinking longterm. Toyota did all that, and is now poised to dominate the market.

The solution for Detroit is clear:

1. Accelerate R&D, and segment vehicle design into stages. It costs a lot to put a new car into production, but much less to do the design work. It's clear that making sure they had some "dry powder" ready to go would have benefitted them
   
2. Invest in supercomputing technologies, and do more in the way of design automation and exploratory design. This speaks to 1) but Detroit's designs are *stale*. Virtual prototyping is an imperative.
   
3. Update Computer Aided Design methodologies.
   
4. Engineer factories to be capable of flexible. multi-model manufacturing. In particular, allow for efficient short-run builds. Do this, and if a model becomes popular, it should be straightforward to scale up production.
   
5. Spend more on engine and powertrain R&D, and focus on efficiency.
6. Bring the design to market cycle down to 18 months or less.

Detroit complains about the unions, but in truth, management's relationship with the unions has always been feudal and adversarial. The Unions have two primary goals: preserve jobs and preserve wages and benefits, in that order. Provided management doesn't rub the unions noses in the shit, as they have in the past, by awarding themselves large bonuses while laying off production line workers, they should be able to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement.

Relative equality of management and production line workers, more than TQM, Taguchi methods or the like, has always been central, imho, to Japan's superiority in the automobile business. It's clear that in Japan, decisions are made to benefit the company as a whole, and it is considered highly dishonorable for one group to benefit from the misfortune of another. Somehow, Amercan management doesn't seem to have that ethical clarity, and it has cost those companies dearly.