omenti

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

normal?

About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal.  That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them,  who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that.  Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.

 

Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy.   We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve -  "normal" distributions.  Height is the usual example.   A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall.  This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails.   Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short.  A few readers happen to be very tall.   Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary.  It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.

 

In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly.  The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit.  Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified.  Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster.  Skilled pilots were making lethal errors.    A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist.  Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation.  Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements.  Not a single real pilot was average.   The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.  

 

Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies.  All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies.  Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats -  I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools"  We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success. 

 

Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or  running shoes?  Why are some people excluded from the made world?   Who makes the designs?  What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough?   Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?

 

"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve.  The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is. 

 

What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others.  Some are forgotten and even warehoused.  How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues.  I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience.   Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct?  With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid.  Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction.   Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many.  How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity? 

 

 

your local replicator

minipost

I thought we were past the hype stage.  3d printing has been around for about three decades and has undergone a couple of "gee-whiz - this is the next PC .. the next Internet" hype stages.  Recently a friend mentioned a futurist was pushing it and a few other technologies as a way out of many of our problems.  It has it's place, but in the grand scheme of things it's still very much a niche player.  Once you get past prototyping or technically difficult shapes you run into the fact that it offers a limited palate of materials, is usually much more expensive than other techniques in volume and often comes with environmental and health issues. 

 

I've been playing with it as a hobbyist for about fifteen years.  I like making things and some shapes are too complex to use conventional tools.  It's fun to play with so give it a whirl if you like making.  Rather than buy a printer go with a service bureau.  Good printers are probably too expensive to justify and you don't want the noise and sometimes toxic fumes in your home. If you have some money to burn spend it on a computer controlled laser cutter or CNC milling machine...

 

The reasons why it's unlikely you'll be printing things at home rather than buying them in the next decade or three would fill a book.  Instead here's a book recommendation that will give you background and is one of those fun references almost no one has heard about.  Making It, Third Edition by Chris Lefteri.  It's aimed at designers who want to learn about manufacturing processes, but is highly readable detailed over 100 production processes at a high level.  It gives a sense of the importance of materials and dealing with scale and budget constraints.  

 

The practical openings hanging automated making are equally interesting.  Clothing is an area that could be huge.  I've written about it a few times and good progress is being made.  It also turns out to be interesting as it has great socio-economic issues.

 

Real innovation is rare.  A fun way to spend a day over the holidays is go to your library and go through Popular Mechanics and Popular Science magazines from the 50s and 60s.  These are excellent illustrations of technologies being hyped. You'll see a couple of things that worked out and hundreds that didn't.  At the same time they give a sense of how popular, and perhaps necessary, building skills were around the home then.

 

a candidate for urban and suburban mobility

I have a serious interest in how we get around.  Currently the tech press seems entirely focused on car sharing and self-driving cars as THE FUTURE™, but those approaches are problematic.  I've spent a fair amount of time highlighting those issues, but rather than drone on for pages and pages I'll recommend a new book from a friend - Elements of Access by David Levinson .. essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of cities and suburban areas.  It's non-technically, fascinating and humorous.  From the about:

 

Transport cannot be understood without reference to the location of activities (land use), and vice versa. To understand one requires understanding the other. However, for a variety of historical reasons, transport and land use are quite divorced in practice. Typical transport engineers only touch land use planning courses once at most, and only then if they attend graduate school. Land use planners understand transport the way everyone does, from the perspective of the traveler, not of the system, and are seldom exposed to transport aside from, at best, a lone course in graduate school. This text aims to bridge the chasm, helping engineers understand the elements of access that are associated not only with traffic, but also with human behavior and activity location, and helping planners understand the technology underlying transport engineering, the processes, equations, and logic that make up the transport half of the accessibility measure. It aims to help both communicate accessibility to the public.

 

Bike sharing is currently experiencing explosive growth in urban areas around the world.  Bikes are very efficient in terms of density - you can put a large number of cyclists on bikes on the street - and energy use.  About eight years ago I measured the cycling energy expenditure of a friend at a little better than 1,000 mpg_e at a shade over a constant 13 miles per hour.¹  An added benefit of cycling is it is good for your health (assuming your path is safe enough) - good enough the both the Netherlands and Denmark factor cycling into their healthcare cost structure as a benefit.   In Northern Europe they've been integrated as an import element of transportation.  Infrastructure, laws and the public accommodate and encourage cycling and it's dovetailed into other elements of transport - bike to the commuter train and then to your office.  But there are issues.

 

First is most people don't ride long distances.  Even the Netherlands, with the highest bicycle use in the world, reports about 76% of commuting trips are less than five kilometers (figure about three miles) and fewer than one percent are longer than 15 km (about 10 miles).  There are many reasons: bikes are too slow/ trips take too long, hills and winds, the weather, long trips and long term use are hard on the wrists, back, shoulder and crotch. 

 

The electrically assisted bike or ebike solves many of these problems..  The speed can be up to twice as fast and hills and wind are much less problematic.  You feel like superman (or woman) on one. They're quite addictive and set to be hugely important in areas that have the right infrastructure - safe path, clueful motorists, parking and charging locations, traffic calming and so on..  not difficult technically or expensive, but change is often difficult. So ebikes are great, but they still have problems for many parts of the world.

 

There are niches where electrically assisted velomobiles could come into play.  Currently the only places you're likely to spot one is the Netherlands, Belgium or  Germany.  They usually have three wheels and a recumbent riding position and have an aerodynamic fairing.  I've seen four in the US - three were made by amateurs and one was a Dutch import.  I tired one and that proved to be an eye-opener. 

 

It was homemade, human power only and very heavy at a bit over forty kilograms. The body rattled and it configuration really needed a suspension.  But wow was it fast!  A human delivers about a hundred watts to the pedals to a bike during light commuting - about the same as what it takes to keep you alive (your brain takes about 20 to 25 watts).  Up to about six miles per hour most of the drag on a bike (or velomobile) is rolling resistance - tires against the ground.  Above that and air resistance becomes more important dominating around 15 miles per hour.  If it takes 100 watts to go about 13 mph, it takes about five to six  times as much power to go twice as fast (eight times as much power to overcome the wind).

 

Now here's something critically important -- the power needed to overcome air resistance goes up as the cube of your airspeed.  A bicycle or ebike has a drag factor nearly fifty times as great as a velomobile.² The homemade design I rode was "dirty" compared to modern velomobiles, but was still probably thirty times better than a bike or ebike.  That made an astonishing difference.  Once rolling, cruising at twenty five miles per hour was easier than fifteen on a bicycle.  

 

Velomobiles are difficult to get up to speed.  Stop and go driving is far from fun.  But the problem vanishes with electric assist plus,  in stop and go  riding you can recover much of that energy using regenerative braking.³

 

Properly executed they offer some protection from the elements and storage space for a few grocery bags.  In cold weather you don't need a heater because you're pedaling away at with about 300 watts of waste heat (a human pedaling a bike is about 75% efficient) - more than enough to heat a small enclosed volume.  In the Summer you can use the motor more and open the lid.  And you can run on the order of a hundred of them with the same amount of energy your family car needs.  It would place a very small load on the grid... so low that no changes would be required.

 

There are issues with infrastructure as they're larger than bikes. You're not going to sling one over your shoulder and carry it up to the office.  It may be they're more useful for longer commutes and suburban use.  You can fit about six of them in the parking space necessary for a car.  Currently non-electricxs are handmade and go from $5,000 to $12,000 - about the price of a high end road bike.  In moderate production that could quickly drop below $4,000 even with electric assist.  

 

The most interesting e-velomobile I've seen is the eWAW from a small company in Belgium. It has a carbon fiber roll cage/frame, very light weight (33 kg with motor and battery) and a very low center of gravity for cornering and stability.  It has a tiny 250 watt motor and a lithium ion battery about three times as big as what's in your laptop.   It will go nearly 100 miles on just battery power.   All of these numbers could be improved, but it's quite impressive as is..  Improving the breed would be a great project for a mechanical engineering class.  Back of the envelopes suggest it could be very safe under 30 mph assuming calmed traffic - potentially safer than a conventional bike.

 

It wouldn't be the best first for all areas .. nothing is.  The US is particularly unfriendly to cycling, but I wonder how this would work in the many cities with populations under 100,000 that often have large areas with 25 or 30 mph speed limits? 

 

Cities are beginning to realize curbspace is some of their most important real estate and I think part of the mix to deal with traffic in the future is to take into account the area a vehicle takes up when figuring out how to charge for road and parking use.  Bicycles are set to capitalize on this. I'd had discussions with two cities in the EU that are thinking in terms of banning cars from city centers and relying on bikes, and in one case, velomobiles, as important elements of access.   It is likely the future will not play out as tech writers suggest it will.

 __________

¹ She isn't an ideal case.. she's very tall and the bicycle had upright handlebars giving her a lot of projected surface area.  Here's an earlier bit on bike efficiency.

² The coefficient of drag or C_d multiplied by the area facing the oncoming air.   On a bike the C_d is 0.8 to 1.0 and the area is about a square meter.  On a velomobile the C_d is generally under 0.15 and the projected area is about a third of a square meter.  You can push much lower.. the human powered land speed record car - the Canadian Eta - has a C_d of 0.03 and an non athlete could easily power it to normal legal highway speeds in the US.  I wrote about it earlier. 

³ Turn the motor into a generator slowing you down and charging your battery.

 

... so excited that they just start farting out light

Years ago one of the neighbor kids, probably about 11 at the time, asked me what fire is.  Sometimes frustrated parents point their question-rich kids at me.  The answer came immediately:

 

fire is what happens when atoms get so excited, that they just start farting out light

 

He cocked his head bit and he gave a  look that managed to combine skepticism with delight.  

 

 Questions are wonderful. The trick is to give a sort of accurate answer that doesn't rely on jargon or experience that the questioner might lack.  Ideally it will stir up a bit of curiosity.  Unfortunately jargon is hard to avoid and even simple terms can be a problem in any field.

 

The terminology problem is a serious issue in communicating the natural sciences. Bedrock explanations can be confusing unless you've devoted a good part of your life to them and the expert considers them easy.   Too much of the  terminology used in physics  - power, energy, quantum, theory, hypothesis, model, significant, natural, data, information, and entropy to start with - have very different meanings to non-specialists.   It is an area where I tend to struggle. 

 

Communicating science is damn hard.  I've become a  fan of better education - that a variety of approaches are appropriate and perhaps even necessary. Lectures and videos often fail because they answer questions before they arise and fail to engage deeply enough.  The printed word and pictures can ignite the thought process, but creating something that is interesting and entertaining is tough.  The best approaches seem to be multidisciplinary with different media types augmenting each other.   

 

A few days ago a strong recommendation for a Kickstarter comic book project on entropy,  I'm not a big comic book fan, but sometimes the right story, artwork and science come together at an accessible level..  

 

They're using artists with real comic book experience, a seasoned writer and a physics consultant who knows a bit about entropy.  I haven't seen the full physics approach but a friend with a Physics Nobel has and gave his seal of approval.   Before writing this I passed this by one of Sukie's friends who does comic books and illustrated children's books for a living.  He liked it a lot.  It will be about 140 pages ...

 

I'm in

 

There are only a few days left and they may not make their all-or-nothing goal, so sign on if you like the idea...   Entropy is widely understood making it a great choice.  If you permit, I'll ramble a bit.

 

A few of you love mechanical clocks.  The quintessential clock has a pendulum swinging back and forth. One of the first things you learn in high school physics is how to compute the period of a swinging pendulum.  Conveniently, at least for small oscillations on the Earth, a quarter meter long pendulum completes its cycle in about a second.   Size matters.  A grandfather's clock is slower still and a Foucault pendulum is majestically slow and it measures the turning of the Earth.    And for fun, why not express your height in terms of the period of a pendulum of the same length?¹

 

A clock of any sort measures the passage of time - a rather curious thing because it only flows in one direction from the past through the ephemeral present and into the future.  This arrow of time tells us the past is not the same as the future.   Completely obvious and hardly worth mentioning except it's connected to some of the deepest questions that exist.

 

When Newton discovered Newtonian physics, the still incredibly useful tool chest we use to describe most of the motion we encounter, there was a bit of a puzzle.  The equations work equally well going backwards in time.  So does quantum mechanics.  Physics at the smallest scale is time invariant.  But that's contrary to what you and I observe.  Outside of our dreams and science fiction we can't go back in time.

 

Entropy is the fly in the ointment.  Roughly speaking it's the measure of randomness, sort of a disorder, in a system.   Take a cup of coffee and a glass of milk.  At the level you and I observe them each is orderly.  Coffee is mostly uniform coffee and the milk is uniform milk.  Each is a low entropy system.  But mix a bit of milk into the coffee and you get wonderfully beautiful and mathematically complex swirls.    You have increased randomness in the system.  It has a higher entropy and by themselves the milk and coffee don't unmix. 

 

As time moves forward the total entropy of the universe increases.  This turns out to the why the past is separated from the future - why causes precede effects - why living things age.  The comic book should tell you more about this.

 

Curiously if you isolate a system and play around with it you can avoid the impact of entropy.  Adding energy to a closed system is one trick.  But a pendulum is very simple.  What if we made a perfect pendulum..  one in a vacuum (no air friction) and with a perfect bearing.  It's motion would be reversible.  Could you make a clock with hands that went backwards?

 

 
A clock is just a machine that turns the motion of the pendulum into a mechanical motion that moves the clock's hands  Tear one apart and you find a nifty little thing called an escapement - a wheel with asymmetrically pointy teeth.  The pendulum is rigidly connected to a two armed piece called an anchor.  It's motion allows the wheel to turn easily in one direction and effectively blocks it in the other.  If the clock was "perfect" the wheel could move the other way just as easily, lifting up and over and local time could move in either direction.

 

You have some of your coffee and let your mind wander.   There's this noise...

 

tick tick tick tick tick

 

That's the clue.  A tooth on the wheel hits the anchor and vibrates transferring a tiny bit of energy to the air making the ticking sound we perceive.  The metal also heats up a small amount.  The heating of the metal and air increase entropy.  The tick of the clock increases the entropy of the Universe a tiny amount.  

 

And there are curious puzzles.  Just after the Big Bang the early universe was very orderly... why?  Early on it must have been like a perfect pendulum or any other system that can move either way in time.  But it didn't and you owe your existence to it.

 

Max the Demon vs Entropy of Doom may be fun.  I hope it makes it's goal.  

 __________

¹ If it's swinging through a small angle you can easily show the period ~ 2Pi(L/g)^1/2, where L is length and g is local gravitational acceleration. If you're six feet tall it works out to a shade over 2.7seconds.  

__________

Recipe corner

 

Produce is currently spectacular.  I have a deep love for real tomatoes.  Here's a sandwich that marinates a bit.  It was spectacular with great tomatoes and would be awful with what you find in February.   This is just a rough outline so improve!

 

Gooey Tomato Sandwich

 

Ingredients

 

° a pound of ripe tomatoes..  go for heirlooms of a variety of colors. you deserve it.

° 2 garlic finely mined cloves

° 1 tsp capers

° 3 tbl extra virgin olive oil .. the good stuff here

° 2 tsp red wine vinegar

° some red pepper flakes'

° a dozen or so fresh basil leaves 

° a few fresh parsley leaves  (or substitute whatever)

° a really nice fresh baguette or similar fine white bread

° salt and pepper (a good finishing salt is appropriate)

 

Technique

 

° cut the tomatoes into thick slices or whatever shape you want.  Put them in a bowl and season with a bit of salt and pepper

° add everything else except reserve some of the basil and all of the parsley. Toss and let it rest for about ten minutes 

° split the baguette.  Spoon the mixture and it's liquid onto the bottom half of the bread.  Now sprinkle the parsley and reserved basil and replace the bread top.

° cut in to an appropriate number of pieces.. four is about appropriate here.

° cover with a clean dish towel and wait an hour before serving to let everything soak in.

 

 

 

making things and change

Twenty years ago an anthropologist in my department was studying the relationship between teenagers and technologies - specifically how they adapted to new technologies quickly sometimes developing novel uses not seen by the inventors.  She observed that although adults assumed the kids had some natural deep knowledge, in fact the teen models of how the technologies worked was paper thin and often wrong.   The skill was a facility to use the technology.  They were effectively technology idiot savants.  

 

In a way we are all idiot savants with technology.  On the desert island none of us could build even the simplest integrated circuit from sand, let alone something as simple as a steel knife.  Civilization is built on accumulated knowledge with deep knowledge necessary for making being mostly narrow and isolated.  Understanding how and where production methods can be used is essential in any kind of manufacturing. How would you go about making Saran Warp?  How about a glass bottle? Where would hydrodynamic machining be useful?  What are the variations of forming sheet metal?  How do production techniques scale? When do you invest in an entirely new technique?   Making It: Manufacturing Techniques for Product Design by Chris Lefteri is a terrific book.  It isn't very deep - a page or two for a few hundred techniques, but Lefteri's explanations and illustrations are very clear and give a sense of what might be appropriate for a wide variety of products and scales.  As a bonus you'll probably be the only person in your circle who knows about jiggering and jollying.  Go for the 2^nd edition physical book.  The ebook is a disappointment.

 

Which brings us to Tesla.  It was suggested I say something about the 'revolutionary' Model 3 given the fact that about 350 thousand people gave Tesla a thousand dollar interest free loan in exchange for a place in line for a car that hasn't been publicly tested and probably won't be produced in any volume until well into 2018.

 

I don't consider any of the Teslas to be revolutionary.  I don't mean to take anything away from them - their cars are among the best in the world and they've managed to built an incredibly strong aspirational brand.  If you want to make a car in low volume and don't worry too much about cost or making a profit, you can take a route similar to that of the Roadster ..  buy a roller from an established company (Lotus), bolt on an electric power train assembled from off-the-shelf components, bolt on a body and focus the engineering on something that would surprise people.  None of this is easy, but it can be done a few dozen engineers, a few years of hard work, good timing and the right financial backers.  In fact a similar approach is used by many of the few dozen boutique supercar and hypercar makes.  

 

The Model S was an exercise in understanding limited conventional production.  Again there is no innovation (other than perhaps the sales model, but that exists outside of the US).  There were teething problems, but they managed to keep their well-healed customers delighted and focused on performance that is desirable to that nice.  It gives you the ability to build a nearly five thousand pound car that can accelerate nearly any Ferrari or Porsche - although it can only keep up this power level for a very short time before blowing through the battery's charge.  The choice to follow a conservative path was prudent - mixing in innovation would probably have killed the company.

 

Musk has stated his goal is to get other car makers to go electric for the environment.  A noble goal and the other makers will go electric by themselves, but I doubt many people buy Teslas for being green.¹  They're buying the brand.  With the Model 3 the company has to figure out volume production and profitability.  Somehow the plant tour managed to impress the reporters, but it appears to be a rather conventional, albeit new, metal stamping facility.  It can be done - there are several existence proofs, but there are also more than a few failures.  

 

Transportation is enormously complex and has defined the layout and nature of our cities and suburbs.  Commuting takes an average of about an hour out of our day.  Some people are excited by the changes coming with self-driving cars, but general use is quite a way down the road.²  The size and energy use of a car is current fairly rigid and inefficient.  To innovate transportation you need to do something besides the powertrain as that just leaves you with a functionally equivalent vehicle.  Real change is most likely to take place in how cars are made.  After all, the last major innovation in the US came from Toyota in the 70s with high quality vehicles made using just-in-time production and enabled and educated production workers. 

 

Most cars are built using unit-body (monocoque) construction.  Metal is bent and welded together to form a structure that replaces the older technique of bolting a body to a rigid frame.  With proper design both techniques can produce safe vehicles, but unit-body is cost effective only with very large production runs.  A set of dies to make a model goes for about $450 million and has a lead time of over two years.  A maker tries to stretch out a design's life to recover the initial die cost. And this is just for one type of metal. Ford spent something north of two billion on their aluminum F-150.  They'll probably be under a half billion on the next design change, but the material change was a big one.

 

Small production runs still use welded steel frames and increasingly some form of composite construction like carbon fiber.³  There are many ways to do this, but they've been slow and expensive.  The best car production lines have a dwell time of about a minute - no production step can take longer. Carbon fiber has one step that, cure time, that is often measured in days.  Until now that is.  BMW has it down to about five minutes with the i3.  Five minutes corresponds to about 250 cars per day or something around 80,000 per year.  I'd wager five minutes will drop over the next decade.

 

The video (a tip of the hat to Horace Dediu for pointing it out) interviews Sandy Munro, principal at the legendary automobile fabrication cost analysis firm of Munro & Associates on their tear-down of the BMW i3.   They're famous for aircraft and automobile costing analysis - completely tearing down something not only to understand what went into it, but how it was made.  Sandy calls the i3 the today's Model T.  They've torn apart several hundred vehicles and this is the one that blew their minds.

 

BMW's composite tooling for the i3 is costs a third to a quarter as much as conventional unit-body tooling.  It should be quicker to bring a new model on line and you don't need to build a million units to recover your cost.  On the other hand it doesn't scale past 80,000 units per year, but perhaps the design flexibility offered by an electric vehicle offers to make a much wider range of vehicles better targeted to user needs and regions.   BMW mentioned that Apple visited for talks.  It isn't clear where the discussions went, but almost certainly i3 production technique was the central topic.

 

In a decade imagine a smaller electric car (the i1?) that has a top speed of under 35 mph and is only used in an urban environment as part of their transportation infrastructure.  Some European cities are talking about excluding gasoline cars from downtown regions.  Paris' Sunday without cars was wildly popular.   Highly constrained driverless cars will be possible in five to ten years depending on city and how strong new traffic flows can be enforced (think China and a few European cities).  They'd use much less energy to get around and pollution released in the city is little or nothing.  A city like Paris might buy a large number as an extension of their transit system - or perhaps companies would compete.    With maintenance and a modular electronic and battery design they might have a service life exceeding 30 years.  Something like this might be a plausible early major step towards autonomous vehicles. 

__________
¹ An electric car is a rather poor use of resources if your goal is reducing carbon emissions in the short term.  Given the current mix of electric power generation and localized distribution some parts of the county an electric vehicle is currently counterproductive.  But the advantages, other than limited range, are huge and it makes sense to support early production as the generation mix will hopefully become cleaner with time.  It will take awhile as fewer than ten percent of the fleet is replaced every year.  When unsubsidized prices cars with a 200 mile rang appear there will be an issue with battery production and charging facilities.  All of that will sort out, but production ramps rarely align in complex technologies.

Would I buy a Model 3 or a GM Bolt?  Perhaps.  I've driven several electrics and although I'm impressed none of them currently meet my needs and budget.  We tend to buy cars thinking about the three standard deviation uses.  The sort of thing that makes people who rarely haul things buy a large pickup.  We only have one car, but a 200 mile range certainly covers 99% of our driving.  We could rent for the outliers.  But we'll see...  

If you really want to be green that is a different conversation...  Some of the most cost effective strategies aren't obvious.  

² There will be limited use on clear and low density freeways fairly soon which will probably be followed by restricted very low speed urban use - probably beginning in China in five to ten years. What most of us will see is an increasingly smart car that helps us with the task of driving.

³ Composite covers an enormous range.  As a teenager I made composite model airplane wings with styrofoam/balsa structures.  Carbon fiber usually refers to a carbon fiber reinforced plastic. Lots of flavors, but CFRP - carbon fiber reinforced plastic - is a common variation.

Bicycles point to some of the most interesting CF construction techniques and CF bikes are now the norm in the over $2k class of road bike.   I don't like the ride quality compared with some of the more exotic steel and titanium frames, but that's just personal taste.  There is no arguing with the fact that carbon frames are lighter weight.

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no recipe today, but a comment on energy

 

If you divide the energy used by the country by population you find that the average American uses about 14,000 watts of power around the clock.  An electric range element on high takes about 1,500 watts - so think about almost 10 of them running constantly - that's what the average American uses.   Multiply that by the hours in a day, week or year and you get the energy used for the period.  I've attempted the calculation from the bottom up.  It turns out to be impossible to do accurately - you have to account for the embedded energy in stuff you buy the food you eat and even that used by government - but  with a few assumptions you get in the ball park.  I can account for a rough average of 14 kilowatts and Sukie and I have reduced our individual consumption to about 6,500 watts each.  Europeans tend to be in the 5 to 7 kilowatt range, so our household is sort of European.  It hasn't been easy and it would be very difficult to go lower.

 

Going vegan saves about 500 watts.  Adding 10,000 air miles adds about 1,000 watts.  (think of 15,000 miles of flying as turning on an extra electric element on a range and leaving it on constantly). Using Uber adds as the average Uber car only has a passenger for a bit more than half of the miles driven, plus urban Uber users are statistically shifting from more efficient mass transit.   Upper middle class people tend to go well over 14kW each.  Note I've avoiding talking about how that energy is produced.

 

Now think about the 14 kilowatt level. The back of the envelope way of looking at it is ~ 125,000 kWh of energy a year (a year is a bit under 9,000 hours).  If your electricity is 10 cents a kWh that's $12,500 a year.  Of course electricity is more expensive at the residential level and a bit cheaper at the industrial level.  Plus much of the energy is in the form of hydrocarbons which are less expensive (coal is a couple of cents per kWh).  In any case energy costs are often hidden, but are non-trivial.

  

its a material world

5:25 am - excellent!

 

I brush the last of the snow from my coat and switch on the lights before taking my seat.   A few minutes of silence and then a door opens and closes reverberating for about three seconds.  The clicking of shoes echoes through Warner Hall as she makes her way to the bench.  A minute of preparation and then the Praeludium in G by Bach fills her space and mine.  I sit back and shut all but the Bach from my mind.

 

She is doing an excellent job until - rats.  Bach derails and I sit up in my chair looking around.  A female shout fills the space reverberating for about three seconds

sh*tttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt!

She goes back a few bars and dances through the problem smoothly.  Now a piece I don't recognize, but it is still clearly Bach until about 6:55.   Her shoes and coat go on and steps click to the door in the distance.

 

And a little magic as a female voice is softly singing Bach.

 

A door opens and closes.  The reverberation is about three seconds and then silence. Time to switch off the amplifiers and make some hot chocolate before getting to work.

 

She was an organ student in Oberlin and I was in a special room in New Jersey where we were working on the reconstruction sound fields.  A special seven microphone array had been installed in the hall with a computer handling compression mixing and compression in realtime.  The bitstream made traveled Eastward to our room where a reasonably convincing illusion of the Hall's sound space was created.  We had created a virtual acoustic reality.¹

 

Pipe organs - the old mechanical 'tracker action' organs - may have been the most sophisticated technology of the middle ages.  Oberlin's Warner Hall organ is a wonderful Flentrop that is ideally suited for Bach - a fact that partially determined where the array went.  Listen to a performance.²

 

The construction of modern tracker action organs hasn't changed much in a half millennia.  Each make has its own special alloys for pipes and techniques that are specific to each company and even to a master builder.  The sounds from the metals and woods of the pipes have distinctive signatures that come from voicing by golden eared experts who reason with the material in quest of perfection.  

 

I have a habit of taking a few weeks at the beginning of each year to learn a bit about something new.  The idea is to get to the point where I can ask questions that aren't completely foolish.  By the end of the two weeks I always feel I know much less about the subject than when I started, but this is sign of progress.  It is a bit like learning a few phrases  in the language of a country you're visiting.  Even if people speak perfect English they appreciate that you've tried.  That becomes a starting point if you want to learn.  

 

Several of these mini sabbaticals have been guided by designers and craftspeople.  Those who know fabrics, metals and woods at an intimate level.  There are amazing properties that we usually don't think about.  How can you put an edge on a knife, how does concrete work, what happens when you bend metal, how do metals influence flavor?  How do you tune the exhaust note of a sports car?  How do you build flexibility and stretch into denim?  Some of this is well studied. Much of it isn't.

 

There is an effort to move beyond STEM education by adding the arts - STEAM or STE[A]M education.  It often involves sensors, lights and some computing power with a few companies appearing to supply and inspire experimenters.    A few brilliant bits have emerged from people like Iris van Herpen and Björk, but most of it is - well - learning and part of a transition  Design languages will emerge and now is probably an exciting time to get involved.  The beauty is that it encourages people to acquire the skills it takes to make things - something that is missing from most K12 programs.³

 

The Maker community is a starting point if you're interested in the intersection of the physical world and technology (mostly computing).  While a great hobby and even a business opportunity for some, I see a path to something deeper.  Most of us are idiot savants with the technology and stuff that surrounds us.  Perhaps this is a path to an evolution of our education that embraces the past and the future and recognizes art and science as active partners with engineering.   Computing and networks are important, but so is the material world and understanding how we relate to it.

 

A goal is to bring together people with a wide range of expertise and create new classes of materials and designs.  Clothing that adjusts itself to local temperature and humidity while remaining comfortable and perhaps even having a wonderful 'feel' and movement.  New ways to make proteins in during cooking to create entirely new flavors.  Building materials that repair themselves.  Fabrication processes that allow individual expression while being inexpensive enough for average people.  Tools and designs that encourage people to add to the design rather than just  consume.  

 

The sky is the limit.  The problem is finding the right spark with enough constraints that collaborations begin to reverberate.  But that is another story...

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¹ There were a number of other experiments in shared acoustic VRs and sound field reconstruction for conferences.  

² The Oberlin Conservatory site has a link to an organ concert in Warner Hall that was covered by the public radio program Pipe Dreams.  Worth a listen!

³ Make: magazine is a good resource.  They're mostly focused on male-centric STEM (mostly T and E) projects, but Make: Volume 43 Feb/Mar 2015 has sections on clothing and wearables.  Adafruit is very woman friendly with supplies and projects to get someone going.

Making It by Chris Lefteri is a brief but excellent book detailing a few dozen techniques and an introduction to the different technques used at a variety of production scales.  Get the 2^nd edition!

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Recipe Corner

 

What happens when you have a can of plum tomatoes and some coconut milk.  Very easy and a nice area for experimentation

 

Tomato Soup with Coconut Milk

 

Ingredients

 

° 2 tbl olive oil

° 1 large yellow onion - chopped

° 1 celery stalk - chopped

° 1 carrot -chopped

° 2 garlic cloves- minced

° 28 oz can peeled plum tomatoes - real San Marzanos are a bonus!

° 2 cups vegetable broth, unsalted preferred

° coconut milk (the stuff in the cans, not the dairylike drink)

° salt and pepper to taste

 

Technique

 

° heat the oil in a pot to a medium heat

° add onions and reduce the heat a bit. Add some salt and reduce the onions until soft.

° add the carrot and celery stirring every now and again for about five minutes.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute.

° pour in the stock and tomatoes, bring to a boil and then cut to a simmer and cover.  Cook for about a half hour

° salt and pepper to taste

° stir in about a half cup of the coconut milk.  (a full cup may be even better)

° serve

 

 

digging in a bit deeper

 

42

 

It was Jean's birthday last week.  When I know someone's age I sometimes send a few examples of where the number comes up.  There was the beautiful Orion nebula M42, a musical based on a street in New York, the atomic number of molybdenum, the critical angle that describes where a rainbow appears and, of course the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe and everything.¹  Jean liked the rainbow as anyone should, but today it occurred to me that 42 was a term in an interesting sequence.

 

In number theory there is a set of numbers where the sum of the inverses of the prime divisors plus the inverse of the number is equal to 1.  Not many numbers have this property, but a few do

 

    2  the prime factor is 2:  1/2 + 1/2 = 1

    6 the prime factors are 2 and 3:  1/2 +1/3 +1/6 = 1

    42 the prime factors are 2, 3, and 7:  1/2 + 1/3 + 1/7 + 1/42 = 1

 

Jean's year...

 

The next few terms are 1806 and 47058 which you can verify for yourself, but after that the numbers grow rapidly.  

 

Neil Sloane is a friend from the Bell Labs days who loves integer sequences - as a passion he built and maintains the world's archive of them - OEIS.  I typed in a few terms and there was my sequence - primary pseudoperfect numbers.  So Jean - your age is the third primary pseudoperfect number.  Possibly a catchy tshirt?

 

There are an infinite number of integer sequences - some are incredibly useful and others incredibly obscure.  Math doesn't have a requirement that sometime be useful.  It is nice if it is beautiful and deep, but application to the world is for others to worry about.

 

If you hear the phrase mathematical sequence you probably think about the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and so on.  The sequence is defined by F_n = F_n-1 + F_n-2 where F₁ = 1 and F₂ =1.²  There are any number of beautiful mathematical properties associated with the sequence and it is often used to describe some constructions in Nature - the patterns of seeds in a sunflower, the spiral of waves,  even the breeding of rabbits.  My eighth grade math teacher loved the sequence and pointed out that the ratio of adjacent terms gets closer to the golden ratio as the series progresses.  For him the golden ratio (φ) was deeply linked to beauty in nature and art.  I remember writing out the first twenty or so terms and taking the ratio watching it slowly move towards 1.6180349...  (it didn't get that close in the first twenty terms).

 

For a several years I thought the Fibonacci sequence defined φ.  Then I saw something and could ask a deeper question.  Here's a start.  Pick a couple of random numbers - for simplicity make them positive integers. Add them and then proceed using the rule X_n = X_n-1 + X_n-2 .. related to the Fibonacci sequence, but you are providing your own seed with the random numbers.  So if I picked 1435 and 3956 the third term would be 5391, the forth would be 9347 and so on.  Do this at least a dozen times and then take the ratio of the last term and that immediately preceding it.  Cute, eh?  If you program you may want to make a simple program that shows the convergence.

 

Now I want to do a bit of math, but the tools to write equations that will render on the range of browsers are awful - so I'll get out a pen and sheet of paper.  Nothing sophisticated, so don't worry.

 

 

Any two integers used as a seed will produce a sequence that converges to the golden ratio.  The Fibonacci sequence is an interesting subset of an infinite number of such sequences.  Math rules. Just play and questions can lead to insight.  Some of these are seen in Nature, but most of the Fibonacci relations are fairly weak.  Oh well...

 

For fun consider Friedman numbers ...  numbers that can be written as a mathematical expression using the digits of the number and simple arithemetical opertions like brackets, +, -, *, / and ^. 

 

25 = 5²

121 = 11²

125 = 5⁽²⁺¹⁾

125 = 21*5

 

many many more.  Some preserve the order of the digits and are called nice Friedman nub:

 

127 = -1 +2⁷

6455 = (6⁴ -5)*5

 

repeating digits are fun

 

99999999 = (9 + 9/9)^{9 - 9/9} - 9/9

11111111111 = ((11 - 1)¹¹ - 1*1)/(11 - 1 - 1)

 

Other than simple 4 digit and smaller numbers I have found very fewon my own, but they have a certain cool beauty.  Check this one out - not only does it have one of all of the digits from 1 to 9, but it is nice.

 

268435179 = -268 + 4^{(3*5 -1^7)} - 9  (note my text editor doesn't allow double superscripting, so I use a power sign)

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¹ If you haven't read or listened to Douglas Adams' wonderful The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy just drop whatever you're doing, get a copy and enjoy.  My favorite version is the BBC Radiophonic play studio recording - your library may have it or you can check the normal places - ahem.  I can't listen to 'The Journey of the Sorcerer' from the Eagle's One of these Nights album without thinking about it.

The quick summary of the number is a group of hyper-intelligent beings build Deep Thought, a special computer designed to come up with the answer to the ultimate question of life, the Universe, and everything... Deep Thought cranks away for about 7.5 million years and gives the answer ---  42.  Of course the hyper-intelligent beings didn't know the question.  Getting at that required building the Earth...

² I'm keeping the convention you probably learned.  In modern usage the sequence starts with 0, so F₀ = 0 and F₁ = 1.

 

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Recipe Corner

 

I had to have some corn soup.  This is a modification of an old recipe I've been using - you can literally make it a heart stopping dish with heavy cream, but the recent version omitted it and was just fine.  It would be better with fresh sweet corn, but this is December and I used a good canned variety.  You might want to think about a garnish if you are serving this.  Roasted corn with cayenne, basil, ...  any number of garnishes would work.

 

Corn Soup

 

Ingredients

 

° olive oil (about 2 tbl)

° 1 bunch leeks, sliced thin

° 2 carrots, chopped

° 3 cups of corn

° 4 cups vegetable broth (homemade is best - unsalted is always the way to go)

° 1/2 cup white wine

° 1/2 tsp cayenne papper

° 1 tsp cumin

° 1 bay leaf

° kosher salt

° freshly ground black pepper

° 3/4 cup heavy cream if you dare

 

Technique

 

° heat a glug (maybe 2 tbl) olive oil over medium heat.  Add the leeks and carrots and sauté until tender.  Add corn and continue to cook until tender/

° Add the wine and bring to a simmer.  Cover and cook until the liquid is almost completely reduced (8 minutes for me) Add the broth and bring back to a simmer.

° Season with the bay leaf, cumin, cayenne, salt and pepper.  Simmer for at least 30 minutes to allow a flavor to develop.

° Remove the bay leaf and purée in a blender or (better) with an immersion blender.  

° Check the seasoning.  If going for a rich soup add the heavy cream here and return to simmer.

° Serve and possibly garnish

 

elements of style

Thomas Jefferson had the reputation of an extreme bibliophile, but was forced to make choices 'only' reading about 7,000 books.    Ben Franklin had a similar information challenge and both men were unable to fully respond to their mail.  They lived at a time when it seemed like a powerful and well connected mind could have a deep understanding of general knowledge, but that was an illusion.  Information growth had become too great for single humans to manage and it had become necessary  to construct filters and trust the filters of others.

 

Today we have something of an information explosion.  Physics occupies a tiny percentage of humanity, but is sometimes citied as an extreme example of information processing.  Single particle physics experiments generate information at over 100,000 times the rate it can be stored.  A carefully designed hierarchy of filters known as triggers identify relevant information and throw away the rest.  

 

Although not as dramatic as a particle physics trigger, most organizations have developed a series of filters - some are carefully considered while others are poorly understood.  We might think of our social and work interactions to be well understood, but in reality they are poorly understood making it difficult to model.¹

 

Our senses are even more overloaded - we live at the bottom of an information well that our brain partially samples and heavily filters to create an illusion, albeit a rich one, of reality.  We tend to trust these personal filters, but careful science shows we are easily deluded and caution is necessary.

 

Filters are central to our relationship with the natural, cultural and machine worlds.  Companies like Google, FaceBook, and many others build filters that may not be aligned with the user interests and it is usually impossible to understand what these filters are.  Some focus on adding value to advertising and attempt to drive consumption and perceptions about our place in culture.  The difference between fashion and style presents an interesting example.  

 

Fashion is the relationship to the external.  It is how you mix and match predefined pieces to show you are part of a larger tribe that is constantly in motion.  It can be expensive or cheap, but is ephemeral.  It allows you to distance yourself from yourself and blend into a cultural tribe.  It is 100,000 people wearing the same jeans, shoes and a tshirt that proclaims 'I am an individual'.  

Style is the relationship to the internal. It is about your sense of self, your identity, your perception of who you are. It is a process of introspection where you ask what is in here and reflect that in what you wear.  The emphasis is on the person rathe rather than popular culture and social norms.  It requires a good sense of self.

 

Jheri and I have an ongoing conversation on the difference between style and fashion.²  With her permission I quoted her definitions from a very long letter describing her continuing journey finding her personal style.  Her body type is unusual enough that nothing fits off the rack.  She described her experimentation with fashion during her teenage years as learning about 'hats, scarves and cheap costume jewelry' as well as what looked good on her friend.  By the time I met her she was having clothing modified, but she was also searching out pieces that expressed her in one way or another.  Pieces that would last a long time.  Her closet is not deep, but her look can be striking and reflects her personality and image of herself.  The image is some out of season boots that were slightly damaged.  The calf width was too large, but she saw something and figured out an usual way to wear them.  She also made a great coat from an old horse blanket that gets  compliments in Paris and Milan.

 

Her definitions refer to clothing, but  could describe anything that becomes part of how we see ourselves culturally.  Recently some of us been talking about distinctions between fashion and style in mobile and wearable electronics down to their user experiences.  The social image you present using a mobile phone in public to the 'naturalness' of the user interface of a device.  There are interesting links to the increasingly divergent paths Google and Apple are taking.

 

Both companies have hired people associated with the fashion industry - Google for the Glass and Apple for a variety of positions.  Jheri works in the industry and is familiar with a few of the Apple hires by reputation.  She notes they deeply understand the difference between style and fashion.  A nimble company can add a fashion layer if they have a good control of design, but going deeper and focusing on style is more difficult.

 

An interesting emerging between the two companies is user privacy (not security, although that is related).³  Neither model is universally aligned with the needs of all users.  People say privacy is important, but most people don't place a high value on it and few understand its implications.⁴   The service they receive is sufficient compensation.  Apple is moving to a higher privacy model taking advantage of a natural alignment as their users are their customers.  The Apple ecosystem requires tight hardware and software integration and is perceived as valuable to many Apple customers - enough that they are willing to allow Apple to have high profit margins.  This division will become even more important as we connect to the things around us - it is just beginning to get interesting. 

 

Filters are a huge issue and are at the heart of our developing computer mediated interactions with each other, machines and information.  We are not having a robust public discussion on the filters stand between us and information and who controls them.  It isn't clear if we will have a discussion and if transparency and control will exist - even in small corners of our world.   This is a big thing - I don't know if it is the next big thing, but it has major implications.

 __________

¹ Trying to understand social filters and develop new filters and even relevant replacement filters is the job Google, FaceBook, OKCupid and other social platforms attempt.

² Style and fashion are often assumed to be the same.  Jheri and others in the industry make the distinction that appears in her definitions.  It would be too diverting to launch into a deeper discussion than the sketch applied here, but the sociology and implications for consumption are fascinating.  

³ A long discussion that would be diverting.  It is important to understand the distinction between security and privacy and  social, hardware and software architectures associated with privacy.

 ⁴ It's Complicated by danah boyd is an excellent introduction to teenage privacy constructs.

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recipe corner

 

Bagel Topology

 

Topology is the study of shapes.  If you have a rubbery coffee mug, you can reform it into a doughnut.  A flexible sheet can't be made into a sphere...  lots of fun things.  

 

It turns out you can cut a bagel and make linked halves.  

 

I learned about this in grad school and have made more than a few over the years.  The trick is to find a very solid bagel and use a good knife.  Make sure you don't stab yourself! - A friend was going to have her cello master's recital, but managed to stab herself cutting bagels during the reception before the concert.  She couldn't play for over a month.

 

This video is much better than any drawings I could make.  

change with be electrified but it will trickle out over a long time

Bob and I would sometimes get in a family car and drive to the top of Gore Hill just to see if we could coast back down the hill to the river.  It was a bit tricky with his dad's old Chevy working better than our family Falcon.  The Chevy was a bit more aerodynamic.  To minimize rolling resistance you would pump the tire pressure up to as much as you thought you could get away with.  Cheap retreaded snow tires in cool weather worked much better than Summer tires.  Early Sunday mornings with little or no traffic and a day with no headwind (strong winds from the West were cheating too).  Turn onto the on-ramp, scan for traffic and the police, clutch-in, shift to neutral and turn the engine off.  

 

We made it twice, but there must have been thirty or forty attempts.  Pure fun.  There was also the ride to Choteau.  It took you through a bit real prairie, a Hutterite colony, fields of hops,  and brought you close to the edge of the Bob Marshall Wildness (know to locals as 'The Bob').  The draw, of course, was Choteau's first traffic light and driving the sixty or so miles from Great Falls to find the next red light was a quintessentially teenage activity in the day.

 

A few decades ago a central coming of age event for many teens in the US was getting a driver's license.  The family car, if you could borrow it, represented  freedom.  Kids with their own cars had status.  Training for the car culture.   As danah and many others have documented, teens were allowed a greater freedom of place and there were places to go.¹  Local malls, parks, even mindless joyrides with friends.

 

While there was real freedom for teens and  families on vacation, the current reality of driving is different.  Cars with over four hundred horsepower and the ability to reach sixty miles per hour in under five seconds are shown driving in fantasy regions that don't exist for most of us. Driving has become a burden and millennials appear to be coming to grips with reality more rapidly than their elders.

 

In the early days of the automobile driving was hallenging to the point of adventure.  Roads were terrible and breakdowns were common.  Mobility was greatly improved and there was the prospect of a changed life.  Madison Avenue figured out how to romanticize the potential with Ned Jordan and the Jordan Motor Company.   Folklore has it that he saw a beautiful woman racing her horse by the train on a trip through Wyoming. He asked the conductor where they were and heard: Oh, somewhere west of Laramie. He penned an ad for the Jordan Playboy which was published in The Saturday Evening Post. I seen it cited as a watershed moment for associating a product with romance rather than the product itself.

... the text of the ad (if it is difficult to read)

Somewhere west of Laramie there’s a broncho-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. 

 

She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome.

The truth is--the Playboy was built for her.

Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race.

She loves the cross of the wild and the tame.

There’s a savor of links about that car--of laughter and lilt and light--a hint of old loves--and saddle and quirt.  It’s a brawny thing--yet a graceful thing for the sweep o’ the Avenue.

Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale.

Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.

 

That brings us to today.

 

There has been a lot of speculation on the future of cars with speculation on electric power being made necessary by global warming along with advanced like driverless vehicles.  But change comes slowly to the automobile industry - especially when there are new technologies, usage patterns and even notions on what is romantic.

 

Tesla may seem to be at the forefront, but I would suggest they are just making a large and spendy American car.  A very nice car, but an incremental improvement on what the current state of the art.   It isn't particularly green unless you  have a very green power source - wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear.  It may be a beautiful ride that can take you a few hundred miles between charges, but it is nearly two and a half tons of vehicle and physics tells you a automobile's usage pattern is not efficient if you are moving a lot of mass around.²  Of course the tailpipe emissions of an electric are a big plus and a certain status attached, but this is not an innovation.³

 

Currently there are about a billion cars on the road. In areas where usage is close to saturation there is  a great deal of resistance to change even though the need for change seems clear. Infrastructure is expensive to change, new manufacturing processes are difficult to scale, regulations are difficult to adjust and, perhaps most of all, people have a deeply routed idea of what a car is.

 

Change seems much more likely in the next billion cars that will mostly go into the developing world.  There are also some interesting niches where automobiles have reached their limits and have lost much of their practicality - dense urban areas.

 

Google recently announced a new prototype of their self-driving car.  Previously they've modified existing family cars and have driven them mostly in suburban environments.  There are several important points.  The areas where this can be used are tightly constrained - it has a 40 km/h speed limit, about 25 miles per hour.  That means passenger crash protection is much cheaper and lighter.  The car can be very light - perhaps 500kg or so in final form.  This, combined with its top speed and a reasonable range means you could get away with less than ten horsepower. It is a plug-in electric.  At this weight in common urban driving patterns the battery could be  small and the drive train would probably be less expensive than a conventional high efficiency internal combustion engine.  Maintenance of a pure electric vechile  is much lower than that of a conventional car and lifetimes can be much longer.  Finally the self-driving only nature of the car means, combined with a dense urban area, means it is practical to go to a car sharing ownership model.  It is likely companies or local governments will own and maintain the vehicles.⁴  You'll just buy the transport you need.  Think of it as a more efficient and less expensive taxi.

 

Google loves to show off their exploratory work and it the publicity appears to be part of building and maintaining their mystique.  They're hunting for new businesses that will take them beyond peak growth in search and ad revenue.  There are many possibilities and they're throwing a lot of darts at the wall.  This is one of those darts. It seems reasonable to me that we could see small sized electric self navigating cars in a few urban and even suburban environments in the next three or four years.  Moving to the North American notion of what an automobile's job is happens to be much more complicated and will wait much longer.  

 

There will be a lot of competition in this area as a dozen other companies have projects investigating the same space.  The megacity car for developing countries is likely to be the growth path for automobile companies - you've know some of the names, but it also seems likely there will be major players that aren't building cars at this point and may not exist yet. The history of technology suggests that the people who work on technologies that eventually become major innovations rarely are those who dominate the innovation stage.

 

I've burned up my hour without saying much about the efficiency of electric versus internal combustion power trains, how mass and aerodynamics get involved and why physics may dictate where change first appears.  Fodder for the next post.

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¹ Much has been written on the increase in the structure of teenage lives.  It is a core theme in danah boyd's new book  It's Complicated, which is a must read for anyone interested in the sociology of computer mediated communications.

² If you really want to optimize your carbon emissions there are many other uses for your money than buying an electric car given the cost differential.  Better to reduce your driving and flying, insulate your home, and so on.

³ Tesla is working on two potential innovations.  One is breaking the dealer-based car sales model in the US and the other is the widespread use of stationary batteries to augment a slightly smarter grid and allow a much greater penetration of intermittent alternative energy sources.  

⁴ I have problems with the term 'sharing economy' and only use it to give a general idea of how this might happen.  Many models will probably be tried and there is a good chance the best model for New York City would be very different from Madrid or Shanghai.   Rather than write something on 'sharing economy' I'll link to a piece by Susie Cagle... I'm roughly in her camp.

 

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 Recipe Corner

 

To own a dish you need to make it a lot - perhaps dozens of times so you can understand how it works as ingredients change in taste and freshness as well as discovering some new tricks.  One of the dishes I love is an afghan lentil soup that tried to equal that of a few restaurants.  I like it better than any of the restaurants now.  

 

The key ingredient is the dried sour plums.  You can find them in major cities like NYC, but I use Fastachi in Boston as a reliable mailorder supplier.  Dried sour plums are one of those revelatory ingredients that can kick off some interesting experiments.

 

 Afghan Red Lentil Soup with Sour Plums

 

Ingredients

° 4 tbl  extra virgin olive oil

° 2 medium-large yellow onions minced (it is a bit different and also good with red onions)

° 6 large garlic cloves minced

° 6  cups water (may need to add more)

° 2 cups red lentils (cleaned!)

° 1/2 tsp red pepper

° 1 tsp turmeric

° 16 dried sour plums - a good source is Fastachi  

° non-iodized sea salt to taste, after freshly ground black pepper to taste

Technique

° saute onions and garlic in olive oil until the onions are golden

° add water, plums, spices and salt and bring to boil

° cut heat to medium and add lentils and stir

° cut heat a bit more and cover

° cook 40-45 minutes - stir regularly and add water as necessary

° puree it and season to taste (it can take a lot of black pepper and it is important to note that black pepper ages quickly)

° serve with a warm, crusty bread.  The soup does improve with time.