g’nōō-bûr

Bad News

Obama is fleshing out his investment/stimulus plan.

All parties agree the public sector must invest now to bootstrap the private sector into growth again. We have not been able to loosen credit, so we are left with spending. George W. Bush himself was the herald of this present need. Those of us held by principle to balanced budgets must set that aside for now.

Stay Smart

The only thing budget hawks can do now is concern ourselves with determining which investment will bring the most return to the economy in the long run. What will end up creating billion dollar industries? What is a billion dollars? I worry that monetary terms cloud long-term thinking. Personally, I am going to school to increase my value to society, first. (Concern only about the pay-out reminds me of Nigerian con-artists and petty thieves…and designers of silly mortgages!)

I mostly agree with the investments that Mr. Obama lays out. But I think his vision is limited. We need a larger vision, that would create more value for society, in the long-term. I can’t think of a better way than raising standard of living.

Bigger Vision

Imagine the standard of living increase if energy sources did not increase in scarcity over time; if rare materials became non-scarce (after a large enough amount was unearthed or produced). Perpetual Energy and Perpetual Industry. That is my Bigger Vision.

The first task is the harder of the two. For a real hard-nosed physicist’s assessment of this task, see Dr. David MacKay’s Without Hot Air. A huge investment in new power plants, storage (bidirectional water reservoirs), and transmission will be required.

The second task requires mainly just that we admit there is a need for it. We need only to make implementable legislation incentivizing the design of products that enable complete recovery of their scarce or ecologically-harmful constituents.

Create an Acedemic-Industrial Complex

Both the perpetual energy and perpetual industry goals can be helped by technology. This gets back to the public sector spending decisions that we are confronted with.

While perpetual energy requires a huge investment in infrastructure, it can be almost reached with current technology (again, see Without Hot Air). Likewise, perpetual industry can be nearly fully implemented by legislation. However, both would be seriously helped by technological development.

This is where there is potential for multiple billion industries being created. Obama’s team should increase their vision. We need huge investment in basic research directed toward these goals. This money goes far. Scientists are cheap.

Perpetual energy and industry–U.S. industry–could create more wealth and quality of life than even semiconductors and the internet, which were, by the way, developed via federal fiat and investment. Not only that, but the achievement of these goals would be synergistic with our nation’s other goals.

I really try to keep my mental dalliances under control. I have a million projects I’d like to work on but I realize I have priorities. Then, something hits your fancy and you do some math in your head while in a traffic queue. And then, even though the thought is complete, you put a shine on it for the next 2.4 hours (1 deci-day) before posting it.

Here is my complete waste of time: a combination base-10 (metric) time / sort-of-base-6 (normal) time wall clock.

There are actually some cool things about a base-10 time system. One thousandth of a day, a milli-day, is equal to precisely 86.4 seconds. In fact, all the numbers on the clock are precise. Conversions aren’t difficult.

Also, the intervals are convenient to use. Consider the deci-day, one tenth of a day, equal to 2 hours 24 minutes. This is a good amount of time for productive concentration on a major project. The fact that one-hour meetings always end up taking exactly this amount of time shows it as the naturally maximum amount of time people can work on one thing without giving up. This is also the maximum length of time one ever really wants to sit for a class. Any more time crosses a pain threshold.

Likewise, the centi-day, one one-hundredth of a day, is an extremely convenient measure of time, consisting of 14 minutes and 24 seconds. The next time you’re busy with something and can’t get to another thing someone needs you to do, say “Can I call you back in a centi-day? Thanks!”

addendum:

I began to think that some of the base-10 units are close to normal units. So, I made up “metric” minutes, seconds, and hours, and added them to the picture.

A metric minute is just another name for a milli-day, and a metric second is 1/100th of that, or 10 micro-days. However, to make the metric hour closer to a regular hour, it has to be half a deci-day, not a full deci-day. There are 100 metric seconds in a metric minute. But since a metric hour is only half a deci-day, there are only 50 metric minutes in (my) metric hour.

Synergy: mutually advantageous conjunction or compatibility of distinct efforts.

Here is the full res and the source file.

“What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?”

There are wireless mice & keyboards, printers, and now there are even wireless USB hubs. Go ahead and buy them. But don’t count on me to smile when you ask me to fix them. Again and again. For 4 hours at a time.

The surest way to make something not work all the time is to make it wireless (if you can set it up to begin with at all).

If the set up and maintenance headaches don’t make you believe me, just wait till script kiddies pwn all your electronics. Wireless is like hanging network cables out your window for anyone who comes around to attach to!

Particle Physics Rap:

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 (per acre, per everything), 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. The numbers tell us that wind, the present renewable workhorse, is irregular, even though the wind is always blowing somewhere. (A familiar idea to physicists who send huge reams of data over the internet—even internet traffic, taken as a whole, has a wide range between lulls and spurts. The internet only works because with networks it is relatively inexpensive to build in huge overcapacity.)

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 “first-gen” 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!

Box = Roominess & Visibility

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 cargo bay. One of our requirements was that our 100lb black lab be comfortable in the cargo bay while passengers could sit in the back seats. The Matrix just barely met that requirement, but the old xB fully met it. When you have the 60/40 back seats down, no telling how much you could stack in this car. I predict this will be a worthy hauler in our next move. Frequently, I’ve had the seats folded down to let the dog put his head out the window, and just the huge floor spaces in front of seats easily consumed the bulk of my groceries. This is not a normal small car! 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.

Box = Less Weight = Less Gas

The first-gen xB’s 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.

2008 Box = Worse than the old one in every way

Don’t go out and get a new xB based on my raving, though. Toyota changed it in 2008 (”second-gen”) 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. They also killed some of the crazy visibility. Making it less like a cube removes some of the previously excellent volume-to-weight ratio. Oh yeah, in doing all this they increased the weight by 600lbs.

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 sort of better acceleration, which in my opinion is a ridiculous trade-off given today’s gas prices.

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, or the Nissan Cube’s (see below). 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/

But Wait, There Is Another

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.

Update:The Cube is Revealed!

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.

“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.