Cool Kids use Apple Laptops

I spied a couple of Apple computer ad placements last week. One was in the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (on Netflicks) and the other in a 30 Rock rerun. A few days ago I spotted DotEarth blogger, Andy Revkin with a Mac computer in his lap.

In the first two cases, the video producers were being paid to prominently, yet subtly, display the Apple logo.

Not the case with Andy's display of the logo. It was this marketing that successfully convinced him to pay significantly more for a laptop that not only does not perform any better than any number of its competitors, but also has access to less third party software.

Of course, we are all manipulated in this way to one degree or another every time we buy a car or any appliance for that matter. Is there really any difference between a Chevy and Ford pickup? Suggest that to an F-150 owner and you will be told otherwise in great detail.

Ironically, six minutes into this video of the Wrigley Lecture Series you will find the not-so-subtle original ad for the Macintosh computer.

What do Apple placements have to do with environmental issues? Revkin is shown above attending a seminar about human behavior as it relates to acceptance of climate change. One of the presenters insists that we have to understand how easy it is to manipulate our subconscious and even presents two ads to make his case, all the while Andy is sitting on stage with his Apple logo ablaze.

I'm old enough to remember when the Macs first arrived. As an engineer I had been using personal computers at work to crunch numbers. They required the user to type in commands to tell it what to do. The idea of clicking on icons had not arrived yet.

For example, if you wanted to save a file you had to type in the correct code to tell the computer what you wanted to name your file and where you wanted to store it (C drive, floppy drive, etc). These commands were translated into actions by the disc operating system (DOS), which was originally developed by IBM but was eventually bought by Bill gates and marketed by his company, Microsoft.

A friend of mine bought one of the first Macs because she (to this day and just recently) describes herself as a technophobe. Typing in DOS commands was not her cup of tea. There was no internet, and like most early personal computer owners, she really didn't have a use for it other than as a word processor. However, before they became ubiquitous, owning a personal computer was a status symbol. Having one you could actually operate was icing on the cake.

The early success of the first Macs was based on their ease of use (icons that you could click instead of typing cryptic computer language commands).

When Microsoft copied the icon idea the Mac quickly lost its advantage although the myth that they are easier to operate (even though they no longer are) persists to this day. I know two grandmothers who bought Macs for that reason but later bought PCs after dealing with the myriad problems that crop up from the lack of compatible software.

For a while Macs were being looked upon by many as over-priced computers for retirees and other technophobes still thinking they're easier to use, which was only true for a short time, long ago. Macs had become the PC of choice for dummies the technically challenged.

I could predict pretty accurately who owned Macs by how technically challenged they tended to be. But that's changing fast.

Apple has been working hard to overcome that image by promoting them as status symbols this time around. You can hardly buy a more expensive laptop. Surely you must be getting something for all of that money, and if you haven't noticed, all the cool kids (like Tina Fey) use Macs. Macs are transforming into the PC of choice for the cool kids. Witness the adds where the cool guy (the Mac) makes fun of the nerd (the PC). The nerds are getting the tables turned on them by the cool kids ...as always.

I was recently chatting with a guy who actually programs for a living. I was taken aback when instead of telling me that he's a Unix user and that he wrote his own browser code, he told me that he owns a Mac. This guy was a stereotypical computer nerd--pear-shaped, pony tailed, wearing black t-shirt, pants, socks, and shoes. The shirt even said "I'm not slacking off. My codes compiling." Maybe he was a poseur, or maybe Apple's efforts are paying off.

We are wired to want to be like the cool kids, and marketers know it.



Update: Recently ran into this one while watching Kick-Ass on Netflicks. Maybe Apple placements have become a fad among film makers?

Update: Read this well-written blog article on the passing of Steve Jobs:

It’s not worth getting all hot under the collar about how closed down and un-hackable modern Apple hardware is, but it is worth noting those attributes: they’re simply a consequence of the purpose of modern Apple hardware, which is not for you to learn how electronics work or learn how to write programs or come up with interesting new ways of doing things (or even interesting new things), but simply for you to play around. They’re toys. No-one ever got hot under the collar because their Barbie Doll wasn’t fully user-serviceable; it’s a toy. If you want a toy, by all means, buy one. If you don’t want a toy, buy something else. (Again, Apple computers are still quite usable as computers, and I understand those who find Apple computers meet their practical computing needs, but throughout Apple Phase 2, they’ve only ever gone in a more toy-like direction, never back the other way.)

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

Leaf or MiEV? Which should I buy?

According to this website, Nissan is about to start taking reservations again.

Beginning May 1, Nissan will reopen reservations to selected US customers who were registered before April 20, 2011 in states currently selling the Nissan LEAF™ (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington).

Following this early-reservation period, reservations then will open to the general public in those launch states. More details to follow soon regarding other markets.

It will cost me $99 (which is refundable if I don't buy a Leaf) to get in line to purchase one. Before actually purchasing one at a dealership, I'm expected to spend another $99 to have a Nissan approved electrical contractor send an electrician to my home to tell me what it will cost to install one of their 240 volt, $700 chargers in my garage, which will require a dedicated circuit similar to that used for a clothes dryer.

Mitsubishi is also now taking reservations for its MiEV electric car. However, they want a $299 refundable reservation fee, which they claim will apply to the purchase price of the car (but I suspect the MSRP has already been jacked up by that amount so don't think you're getting a deal). They are waiving the $99 electrical inspection fee for the first batch of customers to sign up. I also doubt if they will be using the same electrical contractor as Nissan.

So, anyway, I ponied up for the MiEV and will also pay to reserve a Leaf on May first. I need help deciding which one to get.

I would rarely need to drive beyond the range of either car and because we are already a three car family (wife and two driving children) I can always use one of the other cars for longer trips.

My youngest daughter thinks it would be dumb to pay an extra $5,000 to be able to haul a fifth person about twice a year.

I test drove a Leaf and was very impressed. My biggest concern about the MiEV is range at highway speeds. The official ranges given are for a mixture of city and highway. Note that the Leaf has a much lower drag coefficient. This means it will get better mileage at high speeds than the MiEV.

But in all seriousness, that would only mean driving a regular car about half a dozen more times per year if I chose the MiEV. For two car families, the range difference is largely irrelevant, and for one car families as well come to think of it because you never want to stretch your electric car to its limits.

Before Mitsubishi dropped their price below that of the Leaf I could see no reason to buy it instead of a Leaf. Why pay more and get less of everything? Although, that logic hasn't stopped Smart car owners. Maybe they should change the name ; )

I also wonder if people will spring for the Leaf just because it has better performance in the same way people spring for a Prius over the Insight?

Which should I buy?

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

Parsing The Nuclear Cost Argument

Photo courtesy of Siovene via Flickr

Mining the moon for minerals is not likely to be profitable. This explains the dearth of debate on the topic (and the fact that there are no moon mines).

If, as the latest anti-nuclear arguments insist, nuclear energy is also not profitable, why are we debating the topic? In reality, nuclear generated electricity has proven to be profitable, otherwise, like moon mines, they would not exist.

Unlike moon mines, there are lots of nuclear power plants planned as well as currently under construction and many hundreds already humming along producing gargantuan amounts of affordable low carbon electricity.

Nuclear cost arguments are largely academic because we don't get to pick what the market decides to build. If investors don't see a reasonable potential for profit, they won't invest in nuclear ...or solar, or wind.

The cost argument against nuclear generated electricity is a chain with two missing links:

1) Wind and solar, especially with a super grid to make them feasible, are also more expensive than coal and require government assistance in the market. The cost argument against nuclear is equally applicable to wind and solar.

2) A renewable grid capable of lighting two coasts and everything in between every night is an untested hypothesis.

I'd rather see nuclear join forces with a renewable grid to defeat King coal, which would work, no question about it. Not sure it's smart betting our children's futures on an untested hypothesis.

Try to keep in mind that an argument in favor of nuclear generated electricity is not an argument against other low carbon forms of energy. Obviously, there are many economically feasible, mutually beneficial ways to make electricity depending on circumstances. Here in the Pacific Northwest we are presently idling wind turbines and giving hydro power away. That does not mean that hydro is the answer to the world's energy needs. We will need a mix of energy sources.

Thanks to the Internet, the old arguments against nuclear power have come under scrutiny and they are not holding up very well. For example, the scare tactic of exaggerating the dangers of radiation has just joined the discredited arguments about waste disposal and bomb proliferation thanks to environmental journalist George Monbiot's article titled:

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all

Amory Lovins, a major figure spearheading the nuclear cost argument, used this radiation scare tactic just a few weeks ago in an article posted on Grist:

Nuclear-promoting regulators inspire even less confidence. The International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 2005 estimate ...of about 4,000 Chernobyl deaths contrasts with a rigorous 2009 review of 5,000 mainly Slavic-language scientific papers the IAEA overlooked. It found deaths approaching a million through 2004, nearly 170,000 of them in North America. The total toll now exceeds a million, plus a half-trillion dollars' economic damage. The fallout reached four continents, just as the jet stream could swiftly carry Fukushima fallout.

Riiight. That "rigorous review" he mentions was not so rigorous. Read what Andrew Revkin of the New York Times had to say to a commenter who was parroting this argument:

You may have missed that bit of journalism where Monbiot contacted the New York Academy of Sciences, which said it in no way endorsed or peer-reviewed the book (noting that no one else did, either). And his citation of that review that strongly challenged its conclusions. Perhaps you have another source for the 970,000 deaths? Here's the relevant section of Monbiot's piece:
Like John Vidal and many others, Helen Caldicott pointed me to a book which claims that 985,000 people have died as a result of the disaster(14). Translated from Russian and published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, this is the only document which looks scientific and appears to support the wild claims made by greens about Chernobyl.

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves its figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases – including many which have no known association with radiation – were caused by the accident(15). There is no basis for this assumption, not least because screening in many countries improved dramatically after the disaster and, since 1986, there have been massive changes in the former eastern bloc. The study makes no attempt to correlate exposure to radiation with the incidence of disease(16).

Its publication seems to have arisen from a confusion about whether the Annals was a book publisher or a scientific journal. The academy has given me this statement: “In no sense did Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences or the New York Academy of Sciences commission this work; nor by its publication do we intend to independently validate the claims made in the translation or in the original publications cited in the work. The translated volume has not been peer-reviewed by the New York Academy of Sciences, or by anyone else.”(17)

With the old arguments beginning to crumble all around them, nuclear energy critics have been rallying around the newer cost argument.

If there were mines on the moon producing a significant amount of our minerals you could argue about their costs but there are no mines on the moon. There are a lot of nuclear power plants producing a very significant percentage of the electricity generation on this planet at very affordable prices and these power plants have the lowest environmental footprint of any power source.

As the cost argument begins to crumble (more cost efficient and safe nuclear plants are built), critics are expanding it to include the length of time it takes to build a conventional nuclear power plant--as if it won't take a long time to build a renewable energy grid.

It took years to design and build the Nissan Leaf. If your car were custom designed from scratch like a typical nuclear plant of today it would have cost you tens of millions of dollars.

Standardized nuclear power plant designs could be built fast and cheap as was done in France, which gets over 70 percent of its power from nuclear.

For more thoughts on how nuclear could be used to help renewables defeat King Coal read:

The Nuclear Enhanced Renewable Grid (NERG)

Reframing Nuclear Power as an Ally of Renewable Energy

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

Is it wise to exclude nuclear from the mix?

Click to enlarge

I borrowed the above image from another blogger, who borrowed it from another, who ...

This chart puts into perspective the magnitude of what we face. Now ask yourself, is wise to exclude a low carbon energy source like nuclear from the mix?

Look at those threads that represent wind and solar. To eliminate oil we need to greatly increase the electrification of transport, which means generating even more clean electricity. Note that most biomass goes to industry, which means that it is mostly the burning of waste wood chips at places like sawmills etc. The thread that branches off of that is corn ethanol and 70 percent of the energy in a gallon of corn ethanol comes from fossil fuels.

Think about it.

Nuclear Reactor May Kill 192,000 Annually!

Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Oh, wait a minute. I got that wrong. I meant ethanol reactor, not nuclear reactor.

From a paper published in the spring 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons--the official journal of the AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons):

Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels production over 2004 levels would push more than 35 million additional people into absolute poverty in 2010 in developing countries. Using statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Indur Goklany estimates that this would lead to at least 192,000 excess deaths per year, plus disease resulting in the loss of 6.7 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per year.

Source: http://www.jpands.org/vol16no1/goklany.pdf

While tens-of-thousands of grossly inaccurate and wildly sensationalist headlines about a single nuclear power plant that caused not a single radiation related fatality after being hit with a 36 foot high wall of water and magnitude 9 quake circled the globe ...200,000 poor people quietly die from malnutrition--annually.

How do you prevent a profit driven media from competing for readership with an ever-escalating arms race of sensationalist headlines? The damage done by the lay press probably matches that of the quake.

Journalists like George Monbiot with the courage to stare down reality, along with the Internet and comment fields, may save us yet:

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

The double standards of green anti-nuclear opponents

And this from IstockAnalyst:

"We have to be aware that as long as the government is mandating using these food sources for fuel, despite the fact that there is still grain that comes out as a by-product, that is going to be a large demand that's not going away," Noonan says.

Meanwhile, global grain supply fell about 2.5% short of demand this year, says George Lee, the manager of the CF Eclectica Agriculture fund. As a result, with demand growing at about 2.5% a year, the harvest needs to grow by 5% next year, which he says is a big number compared with historical data. "