X Prize: Electric Vehicles-Two, Biofuel Vehicles-One

The $10 million dollar X Prize was split between two electric car designs and a design that runs on biofuel (E85) called the Edison 2.

In the above video the Edison 2 is hyped by the guy who bankrolled it. He tells us the main reason the wheels stick out is to enhance crash safety. Actually, they stick out for stability and aerodynamic reasons as they did for the defunct Aptera and the popular Cessna 172 aircraft. To be more accurate, they are hoping the wheels will also act as a kind of bumper, unless the car striking you from the side happens to land between the wheels.

When you cut through the hype, there isn't really anything new about the Edison 2. Take a deep breath and ask any mechanical engineer worth her salt, "If allowed to compromise crash safety, acceleration, payload, and cost (a low-weight body costs more than a steel body), and if you bolted a modified single piston turbo charged motorcycle engine running on a high octane fuel using exhaust gas recirculation to reduce pumping losses to a very light aerodynamic body, would you get great gas mileage?"

Her answer would have been, "Duh?!"

The marketability of a car having these compromises has always been the only unknown, and remains unknown. And because the Edison 2 can't run on regular gas, you would be stuck looking for gas stations that sell E85 (assuming you could buy one of these cars today).

Every story written about this prize tells you that the Edison 2 gets 102 MPGe (although most laypersons have no idea what that means). Robert Rapier took the time to look at the formula for calculating MPGe and realized that the Edison 2 would only get 73 miles on a gallon of E85 (73 MPG). Confused? Well, I don't really blame you. You can download a spreadsheet to verify Rapier's epiphany "here".

To put this in perspective, an ordinary Prius gets 50 MPG running on E10, and it's a five-passenger, mid-sized hatchback, with power windows and air bags all over the place. And unlike the Edison 2 (assuming you could buy one of these cars today), which is not capable of running on regular gas, you would not be stuck looking for gas stations that sell E85.

Corn ethanol can't ever provide more than about 10% of our fuel. If it were all converted into E85, about one in ten gas stations could carry it. But the vast majority of available ethanol is blended into our gas already at much lower percentages, so in reality, only a fraction of a percent of gas stations will ever sell E85 (an 85 percent blend).

This is not a flex fuel car. It is a car optimized to run on a fuel that is not readily available (E85), which is kinda dumb for more than one reason, and it would actually get worse mileage if modified to run on gasoline. I am a big fan of smallish, lightweight, aerodynamically clean cars like the Edison 2 but would never buy one because of the fuel it burns.

If I had a choice, I would not use a fuel that exacerbates the negative ramifications of agriculture (corn ethanol). Few people understand the scale and scope of the damage being wrought by our global need to provide ourselves with food, fiber, and housing (agriculture). Adding fuel to that demand is just not very smart.

Had the MPGe formula taken into account the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of the fuel it uses, the Edison 2 would likely have been eliminated at the get go.

Put an electric drive train in it and I may reconsider, even with the additional cost and more limited range.

Click here--to see a list of articles and to subscribe to future posts or subscribe by email:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

People Will Believe Whatever They Want

Science--One, Chiropractor Assn--Zero



Here is Penn explaining why he used the term "baby twisting motherfucker" in a short clip in defense of Simon Singh back when he was first being sued by the British Chiropractic Association. [Update--the original video was removed, possibly under threat of a lawsuit? I've replaced it with another one. Hang in to the end to see the snails]

From Wired:

Losing the case would have cost Singh both his reputation and a substantial amount of his personal wealth. Such is the state of science, where sometimes even stating simple truths (like the fact that there’s no reliable evidence chiropractic can alleviate asthma in children) can bring the wrath of the antiscience crowd. What the British chiropractors didn’t count on, however, was Singh himself. Having earned a PhD from Cambridge for his work at the Swiss particle physics lab CERN, he wasn’t about to back down from a scientific gunfight. Singh spent more than two years and well over $200,000 of his own money battling the case in court, and this past April he finally prevailed. In the process, he became a hero to those challenging the pseudoscience surrounding everything from global warming to vaccines.

Wahoo! Haven't been this elated since a judge smacked down the Intelligent Design fruitlogs.

On the other hand, this is a struggle that can't be won. Self-deception is built into our genes. From an article by George Monbiot where he vents about the stupidity of his fellow environmentalists:

"...each of us exists in our own world of meaning, constantly at risk of being shattered by inconvenient facts. If we acknowledge them, they can destroy our sense of self. So, to ensure that we won't be "overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know", we shut them out by lying to ourselves."

Evidence plays a small role in what we choose to believe. The ubiquitous belief in an afterlife is all the evidence needed. If we are going to find a way out of the global warming trap we will have to find a way to do it without wasting all of our energies trying to get the public to read, understand, and accept science. In any case, that isn't a scientist's job.

You can lead a horse to water ...

A case in point would be an excellent article over on Class: M called "An elegy for the oceans."

It's about ocean acidification caused by high atmospheric CO2 concentrations. I may not sleep well tonight. It seems to me that the public might accept ocean acidification as evidence for the need to do something about CO2 emissions. Warmer winters and slowly rising sea levels just don't put the fear of God into most people. Could this aspect of global warming have an impact? Probably not. The vast majority of Americans would very likely find a way to blow it off, assuming there was a way to get them to read anything as boring as a science blog. If we lose the oceans, the game is over.

Click here--to see a list of articles and to subscribe to future posts or subscribe by email:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Adirondack Adventure--No Bats, One Rabid Fox

In the above Animal Planet video, a man tries to defend himself from a rabid fox ...with a loaf of bread.

I just spent a week with my family in a cabin on the shore of Brant Lake in the Adirondacks. While walking along a main road we were met by a guy walking up his driveway with a 2 x 4. He said that a pregnant woman had just been bitten by a fox with rabies. She had to hit it with a paddle to get it to let go of her leg.

He graciously loaned me his 2 x 4 for the rest of our walk. I found fresh Fox scat on the road.

The next morning there was fresh fox scat a few feet from our cabin door. A Google search found this article:

Woman attacked by fox near Brant Lake

This got us to wondering how long a rabid fox will live once it reaches this late stage in the disease. Not long I think because I did not see any fresh scat for the rest of the week.



I also didn't see any bats. The insects were still there, banging on the screen door under the porch light but there was not a bat to be seen, anywhere. Coincidentally, two papers in the August 6 edition of Science discussed rabies transmission from bats to other species, and the potential for white nose syndrome to cause extinction.




No shortage of bullfrogs in the wetlands.

Click here--to see a list of articles and to subscribe to future posts or subscribe by email:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

A Lapdog To Go With Your Laptop

Photo courtesy of D.C.Atty via Flickr

One commenter in an article at Grist about the advantages of lapdogs (which capitalizes on the tried-and-true technique of using cute dog pictures) describes how his pet cats and dogs help to create a biodiversity dead zone around his farm, which is what most dogs and cats were originally bred for--to help us obtain food and protect property (usually from other hominids). Today, one could argue that most of these breeds have become parasitic, serving only to induce endorphin releases for their owners.

If it is cruel to trap wild animals in zoos, then why isn't it equally cruel to trap dogs bred to hunt and herd in houses and yards (private zoos). That is not the environment they were human-evolved to thrive in. Lapdogs, on the other hand, were bred for that environment.

One of my neighbors has two purebred dogs that are so ugly I wish they would train them to walk backwards.

The smell wafting off their backyard on a sunny day is ah, not very pleasant, and they are the norm, not the exception. Where I live the streams contain so much fecal bacteria that the city sometimes has to close beaches for safety. The source is primarily the runoff from backyards like my neighbor's. Pets legally bypass the waste treatment facilities we humans created to protect our environment and health.

Reading the comments below this Grist article I am amazed at the alternative realities expressed. People who "adopt" rescue animals are called angels, placing themselves on pedestals for extending the lifespan of a domesticated animal.

There are now foster home programs for these animals to deal with the volume.

I am bombarded by millions of dollars worth of ads on television by animal welfare organizations, while human beings starve to death. Bottom line; starving people don't give us warm fuzzy feelings.

I was chatting with a homeless women not long ago about her pet dog. She told me that she preferred dogs to people and would rather see a person put down than a dog (after accepting my charity).

George Monbiot has two recent articles where he muses over our innate ability to self-deceive--build realities that suit us:

The idea that you can feed Manhattan with crops grown in a skyscraper is the craziest of my allies' many miracle solutions

For deniers, politics beats the science.

Click here--to see a list of articles and to subscribe to future posts or subscribe by email:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Saddles To Replace Seats In All Electric Cars

[UPDATE 9/12/2010]
Picture above from Gas 2.0. Beautiful example of good marketing. But to tell the truth, it would be more accurate to have a whale hug the Leaf owner.

As I write, I'm watching the above video of a test drive of the Nissan Leaf (you can right click on the video to watch the full sized version on YouTube). Also see this article about the Leaf by Todd Woody over on Grist, and this one by Sami Grover at Treehugger. Today, car dealerships make most of their money from car maintenance, which is why electric cars will spell the end of a lot of car dealerships and car repair shops. They will also shrink the car industry in general.

This will result in the loss of jobs--but only in the car manufacturing and repair industries because it will free consumer dollars up to invest in other things, like solar panels to charge their electric cars. Same thing happened to saddle makers and if they had a lobby as large and powerful as the oil and corn ethanol lobbies, we would probably have government mandated saddles instead of seats in our cars today.

On the other hand, an industry may spring up to convert used cars to electric if a standard motor, controller, and battery pack can be purchased by third parties.

And for all of you Luddites, the used batteries will be too valuable to throw away and they also don't require the mining and smelting of nickel.

Click here--to see a list of articles and to subscribe to future posts or subscribe by email:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner