Do you like rap and particle physics? No? Well, it’s not your blog:

The doodle of a physicist (regarding the energy problem, a physicist’s doodle is better than a layman’s in depth analysis) trying to find the maximums and minimums of possibilities in a problem. The problem is Sustainable Energy. The book is full of bad news, given our huge energy consumption.

To sum up, it will be very difficult to cover even half with renewables. We consume thousands of years worth of prehistoric bio-fuel every year. With modern bio-fuel, we are limited to burning one year’s worth in one year. Solar, wind, and tide offer somewhat better return, but still not enough to match our consumption. We may have to cover the deficit with nuclear until fusion is (maybe) cracked, or we learn to live with less. The intermittency of most renewables is also tackled. (Coal and natural gas are both able to exactly match demand. Wind, the present renewable workhorse, is irregular, even on a large scale.)

It’s still in beta, but it’s already a massive tour-de-force of hard renewable energy data and analysis.

WithoutHotAir.com

If you read this, you will be energy-crisis smart. Or, smarter than almost everybody else presently is.

I just got an 8inch 500Mhz Celeron Fujitsu Stylistic LT C500 tablet and GPS antenna. They’re for my newly acquired travel/family car/truck, a 2006 Scion xB. The tablet fits perfectly in the unusually-laid out dash. Figured it would be funner to use a full x86 PC for GPS and MP3s than buying individual units…I’m beginning to wonder if I was wrong…

But anyway, this is an ideal car. More space, less gas! Hurrah!

The car is 5 feet tall, almost cubic, actually causing an optical illusion where you think the ground clearance is sub-standard. I was worried the front skirt would hit parking place stops and curbs, but it doesn’t. The height also gives you insane leg room. Slide all the way back; you won’t even think about hitting the guy in the back row. The height also lets you stack stuff high in the narrow cargo bay, or stack things high in the chasm that appears when you have the 60/40 back seats down. The front seat backs can also fold back into the back seats so the passenger can have a lounge chair, or so two can sleep at a rest stop.

The 1.5L engine is from the Toyota Echo. When it’s put in this larger car it gives 26/31MPG (new EPA; 30/34 old EPA) (all my EPA stats are for automatic transmission). That’s worse than Corolla / Yaris / Versa / Fit / Civic, but better even than Matrix and everything else, not to mention anything else this spacious. You won’t notice how small the engine is. Most of the time, the light weight of the car (the cube shape again helps by minimizing hull weight), and the great visibility, makes passing fun. I’ve had no problem throwing this thing from a stop into tightly packed 40mph traffic in my morning commute.

Don’t go out and get a new xB based on my raving, though. They changed it in 2008 so that now it sucks. They decreased the height (they made it less of a cube). They did make it a little longer, but only in the hood. Despite having similar overall volume, you have less space. Decreasing the height gets rid of the phenomenal legroom and some of the cargo room. Making it less like a cube removes some of the previously excellent volume-to-weight ratio.

As if that weren’t enough, Toyota increased the engine to the 2.4L Camry engine. This decreases MPG to 22/28 (new EPA). This is the same size engine as in the RAV4, and Honda CRV and Element, but they are much larger, and able to go off-road to some degree. There are no benefits to offset the lower MPG of the new xB, beyond the obvious better acceleration, which is made ridiculous by today’s gas prices. Besides, I don’t want a boxy sports car. I want another xB!

Toyota has destroyed the amazing qualities that made the xB the xB! And I’m not talking about the queer appearance, I’m talking about all the wonderful things that you see after you get past that. I think Toyota must not have focus-grouped anyone who actually bought the old xB when they pondered what to change in the new xB. If they had, they would have made something totally different than the new xB and more like the old.

Maybe they would have simply made the hood shaped a little less like a trunk, to increase MPG and decrease the car’s arse-facedness simultaneously. No need to elongate the front, just play with the shape in the wind tunnel a bit. It doesn’t have to look like a brick to match the rest of the car. Instead it should do what little it can to ameliorate the aerodynamic drag challenges imposed by the rest of the car. The Element’s styling could be borrowed from here. Also, if they really needed to, they might have upped the engine, since Toyota’s 1.5L Echo engine has been customised for the Prius only now. But instead of jumping to 2.4, they should have picked the 1.8L Corolla engine. Maybe they’ll rewind and do these better changes for 2010? One can hope.

At least a couple of people agree with me:

• http://s.wsj.net/article/SB118428633736565356.html
• http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/scion-xb-2/

Still, there is another hope in the efficient cube concept, in the form of the Nissan Cube. That is, if Nissan doesn’t increase the engine too much when they bring it to the U.S. shortly. The Cube actually came out in Japan 4 years before the xB, so the original xB copied it, not the other way around.

My Ubuntu experience keeps getting better.

This month, I finally moved my main dual-core AMD64 machine to Ubuntu, because I realized I was going to want to buy 4GB or more of RAM. (The currently prevalent RAM, DDR2 is so cheap it makes it more worth upgrading your whole rig than buying more of the old DDR (”DDR1″) RAM; that’s the only reason I now have a dual-core machine). But, to use 4GB or more, you need a 64 bit kernel, which means you have to get Vista, or move to Linux.

Of course, I didn’t want to go through the trouble of pirating Vista, so I finally updated the install of Linux on this machine so I could start using it again. I installed Ubuntu.

In 2 nights, with the help of Google and Ubuntu forums, I got my dual-screens working, World of Warcraft working (on Wine), virtual machines running XP and others (for my virtual LAN–multiple VMs is why I wanted so much RAM in the first place), and of course Urban Terror and Unreal Tournament 2004. And it would have only taken one night if I hadn’t been waiting for Warcraft updates.

But the coolest part was Compiz in Ubuntu. I had seen this before on my laptop, which is amazing, because my laptop only has shared memory video, based on the Intel 830M chipset. By default, Ubuntu has 3 Visual Effect setings: None, Normal, and Extra. The Extra setting is all well and good, but I found out later there were many more cool effects availaible if I installed the full control panel for Compiz. Check out just some of them.

I took my rig to a LAN party last weekend, and every Mac and Vista person there had to admit that my GUI 3d effects were not only superior, but totally un-called for. We’re talking running 3 games and 2 movies, and throwing them around the screen while they’re moving like so many live-texture-mapped frisbees.

Heres how to do it:

1. Have the right video card:

   This is weird. As I said, the onboard Intel shared memory video solution on my 1.2Ghz laptop actually works. I don’t know about anything prior to i830M, but i830M works, which means anything higher should also work. That by itself means Compiz will work on a lot of computers that Aero will consider unacceptable. Don’t ask me to explain it. I heard a couple of Xorg guys give a talk, that was mostly over my head, where they mentioned some really convenient things that the Intel shared mem designs open up for them; maybe that’s why it works. As far as Aero not working, Microsoft just sucks.

   Also, I know that many, but not all Nvidia chipsets work. Some of the heatsink-less mobile solutions don’t have enough oomph. I have it running on an old TNT2 Ultra 64MB, 5200FX, as well as 6200LE and 8400GS cards.

   As far as ATI, I hear you need something better than or equal to the first original Radeon.

2. Install Ubuntu 7.10 (or 8.04. It’ll be out in 2 weeks!)
3. If you’re using ATI or Nvidia you may have to install “Restricted Drivers” (look for it in the menus). Intel video hardware won’t need this, because Intel is cool.
4. Now if you have the right drivers, you can go to System-> Preferences-> Appearance-> Visual Effects and enable the Extra effects. Some of the cool effects and their hotkeys installed by default are:

   – zoom in and out with Windows+ScrollWheel,
   – zoom out to see all workspaces with Windows+E,
   – do the Aero-like window switcher with Windows+Tab, etc.

   To do more, install the full Compiz configurator.

I heard this guy on NPR’s The World program. Good news: We know we can totally change our industrial complex in a matter of months — because we’ve done it before. Bad news: It took Pearl Harbor to make us do it. Here’s the talk. Here’s Lester Brown’s latest book.

And George W. Bush killed him. Were Buckley to arrive on the scene today, the nominal leaders of the conservative movement would decry him as a pinko liberal hippie wimp. Conservatism is eating itself.

In other news, three heavy foreign policy hitters of the old GOP guard have held a nuclear anti-proliferation summit. Too bad the counsels of such brilliant men as these are worth nothing to this White House. Again I say, conservatism is eating itself. Hopefully it hasn’t already totally eaten American preeminence and security.

“Intellectual property” is a silly euphemism. Maybe if we were honest about what it is, then society would more readily be able to make it better? Just an idea.

OK, you might say I have too much time on my hands. Really, though, there is an odd symmetry to the map. Look at the highways. And I hadn’t played with the GIMP in a while. (The colors, of course, do not actually correspond to geographical team affiliation.)

There aren’t many clear paths toward energy independence. Every option has costs that must be considered.

We’re hoping to find a biofuel that doesn’t waste more energy than it produces, cause forests to be razed (some of which are better at removing CO2 than fuel crops, not to mention their other benefits), make food more expensive, require problematic fertilizers, or compete for scarce water. Biofuels present no lack of challenges.

The ‘hydrogen economy’ is looked to with misty, hopeful eyes. Yet it doesn’t anwer our problem. Hydrogen isn’t a source of energy, since we can’t very well go out into interstellar space and harvest it. We have to free it from water or hydrocarbons, requiring more energy than the raw hydrogen can give back. So, hydrogen is just like a battery or high voltage power lines, storing energy or moving it from place to place, but in many ways worse.

Nuclear and small-scale nuclear are promising fields, and should continue to be researched with considerable investment. But only the most arrogant deny the dangers of nuclear waste material and proliferation of even dirty, small-yield weapons material and know-how.

Consider the less-hyped renewables, wind, geothermal, and wave/tidal. There is potential here, as well. Wind power continues to grow in use, a mostly reliable source of power. Geothermal is promising but requires a great deal of research into placement and design of each plant. Wave and tidal power are being explored, with many different approaches being taken, and may one day be our top energy producers.

Finally, solar power is often vaunted. No wonder–it seems so natural to go to the ultimate source of most of our energy and skip the middle men. We found the photovoltaic effect, transmuting light straight into electricity. But we haven’t found inexpensive materials or processes with which to make photovoltaic cells.

Solar thermal seems to be less elegant than photovoltaics, yet it has advantages as a power plant technology. Heat can be concentrated on a large scale and stored in molten salt or other media for electricity production at night. The drawbacks are that plants should be located in high-light desert areas and power must be transmitted to usage areas. However, this need is met by current high-voltage transmission technologies. What is required is the investment to build new transmission lines to solar thermal sites. However, once one plant has been built and proves viable, more plants can be more or less duplicated right next to the first one, since desert areas are vast and often uniform

Please read the links in the paragraphs above and see if you agree with me that society’s investment should, at this moment in time, be concentrated on solar thermal.