In Response

Looking at one of my previous posts you would probably like to know that good things happened in the world and iTunes will now be only providing DRM free music. 

It’s ironic that the comic was posted and within a month of it, there was no more DRM on iTunes.  You should note though, that if you decide to start purchasing music on iTunes that they’ll learn things about you.  Things like: what music you listen to, how often you load it to your iPod, how many times you have listened to it, how many people in your neighborhood listened to it, etc…

So stealing for some of us may still be the only option, but DRM free is a good step in the right direction.

Just In Case You Were Interested

On The Power Consumption of Cars

There are a lot-o cars in the world at last count. According to the current statistics there are enough cars in the US for every man, woman, and child in the US to drive a car.  With the rapid development of the 3rd world the number of automobiles in the world is likely to geometrically increase over the next several years.

Taking a look at the power consumption of cars should be a very important task for me and everyone. So the first major analysis is going to be of the amount of energy that goes into the creation and running of a typical motor vehicle. This analysis is going to take into account several things that aren't normally accounted for in quick analyses of products.

Here is a quick list of the things I intend to review:

• Cost of manufacturing.
  
• Cost to transport the car from the factory.
  
• Cost to create the fuel, and the fuel storage system in the case of batteries and in other cases.
  
• Cost to run the vehicle based on the average driven millage in the United States.

Cost is going to be defined as the ‘energy’ cost for the vehicle.  I’m going to break it down into work or Joules for those of you that are interested.  That way everything will be on a level playing field and we can compare apples to apples, instead of ourang-outang to amoeba.

All Electric Cars

So, I got to thinking because of a wonderful piece that I heard on 'Talk of The Nation: Science Friday." The particular episode that I'm interested in was a piece about the viability of plug-in cars, or all electric cars. You can review the article here. During the show there was not a lot of time spent analyzing the actual cost of every car in the US being powered by purely electricity. Since I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm going to try and quantify those variables and see what it would really cost the US in electricity to power the nations automobiles.

Obviously this experiment is going to have some caveats. For example, no time soon will there be freight going by purely electric means. This means: Trains, Trucks, Cranes, Construction Vehicles, Mining Vehicles, etc. So to limit the scope of understanding, I'm going to look at purely consumer, what I'm going to call, "Point-A to Point-B" cars that are meant for personal transport only. The last assumption is the destruction of SUV's because all-y'all that are still driving SUV's are not eco-friendly and this analysis will assume that we're all going to simpler cars. We can analyze in the future what it would take to power such a vehicle, but that is a paper for another time.

I guess that is good to get things started. I'm going to make this the first post for this series of posts and look at the research with further posts. I will combine all the posts into a final white paper at the end but I want to track the progress of research with cataloged posts.

TTFN

"powered by purely electricity" should be "powered purely by electricity"

nations needs an apostrophe - Comments from Brett 'The Defender' Ship

Why Linux Wins

This was pointed out to me on xkcd by a friend of mine. Linux always wins... Long live SUDO.

Animaniacs - A Geography Lesson

One of the favorite cartoons that was on Saturday morning cartoons was Animaniacs. As I grow up I realize how well it was written and how much humor the didn't necessarily write for kids. This though is a geography lesson that they put on the show every once and while. It is very good and I enjoy reliving my childhood.

Brainman

This is a documentary about Chris Tammet. He is a savant living in the UK. (Follow the link to learn more about that word.) He has the ability to do multiple powered numbers in his head, as well as learn languages very fast. In this documentary he learns Icelandic in one week. If you have 40 extra minutes, give it a watch.