Sambal

I’m not the only one to think this. The NY Times recently printed a review of the new Panasonic Oxyride battery, an alkaline disposable which is claimed to last 1.5-2x longer than regular premiums. The journalist not only did some tests, but actually called the manufacturer when they didn’t live up to the hype. They laughed at him and his attempts at testing, but did explain some of the complications of trying to do it right. Keep reading, and you can laugh at mine…

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Justin Lemire-Elmore thinks so, and I finally got around to reading his paper. Bicycles in general are very good: wheels, minimal non-cargo weight, and relatively low speed minimize rolling and aero losses. One might think that adding a motor would only make things worse. However, a bicycle pedalled by a human still requires energy, but that energy comes from the food they eat, and food is not produced very efficiently. So the question is whether the energy costs of making and charging the battery etc. are more or less than the energy costs of making the food the bicyclist needs to eat.

The bottom line is that all battery types outperform food, because so much energy goes into food production in modern Western farming. Food production is so inefficient, producing 1 calorie of food per 7 calories of fossil fuels consumed, that I wonder whether conventional bicyclists even beat cars! Lithium, due to its light weight and high charge efficiency, is best. Lead acid is worst, despite having the lowest energy costs of production, due to relatively low cycle life and transportation costs. One can quibble here. He uses a “real-life” cycle life for lead acid, but a manufacturer’s spec for lithium ion. Worse, for transportation costs, he assumes air freight from the far east: reasonable for expensive lithium batteries, but implausible for heavy lead-acid batteries. In this analysis, initial transportation accounts for a substantial majority of the total lifecycle energy cost of lead-acid, so this isn’t trivial. Finally, and he does discuss this, nothing forces the bicyclist to eat conventional, high-energy input food. Bicyclists on a strict organic vegetarian diet can equal or beat the electric bike. But that’s what it takes.

Here’s a nice little EV conversion, John Wayland’s 1972 Datsun 1200. The range isn’t so good, only a quarter mile, but it gets there pretty quick. Under 13 s at over 100 mph makes it the fastest street-legal EV, and it beat a built 375hp modern Camaro V8 to get there. The story makes, um, interesting reading. Drag racing breaks stuff, and high power electrical equipment, unlike ICEs, has an annoying tendency to break into a shorted, full power condition.

Anyone interested in this stuff who’s near Las Vegas could go to Wicked Watts, the first event in the 2005 NEDRA season, this Saturday at the LV Motor Speedway.

I don’t know much about this inquiry thing. I’ve carefully preserved the purity of my mind by avoiding clicking on any questionable links, doing Google searches, or reading the full text of newspaper articles looking for revealing hints. Nor do I have much respect for the Slashdot-style “information deserves to be free” mentality that seems to motivate US violators of Canadian publication bans. Canada ought to be allowed to decide that the public’s prurient interest does not outweigh the accused’s right to a fair trial and the public’s interest in getting the accused into jail. Other countries do similarly: Germany, for historical reasons, is concerned about Nazi memoriabilia, in France, champagne better be from Champagne, in Quebec, margarine must be the traditional white, etc.

Still, I was pretty shocked to see, on page 3 of the major city newspaper, a highlighted sidebar with an apparently complete, fully functional URL at which the illicit information could be obtained. There’s no question that linking to the information in an online publication is in violation, and I find it difficult to imagine a judge finding that simply because a URL was printed on paper, rather than on a screen, it’s somehow okay. I assume that management made a business decision that any illegality would serve to sell far more papers than it would cost. To avoid legal issues, I won’t name the city or the paper (but it rhymes with “urinal”, smirk smirk).

A strange corollary of the publication ban is that although the Gomery Commission is pursuing contempt-of-court charges against a Canadian news site for linking to Captain’s Quarters, publishing the name of the news site being charged could violate the ban. So they’re not naming it in mainstream media or on the sites of careful bloggers.

These people want to give Dalton the old Gray Davis heave-ho. And I have to admit they picked a photo of Dalton that’s quite Gray-like. Their manifesto:

Dalton McGuinty must be recalled for breaking his promises and governing with contempt.

Dalton McGuinty promised not raise our taxes. In his first budget he raised our taxes and fees 50 times!

Dalton McGuinty promised not to bring back the healthcare premium. He did so less than a year after getting elected!

Dalton McGuinty promised not to cut from our healthcare system. He did so earlier this month!

Not to mention he’s an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet.

Since I don’t rely on my website to make a living, here’s an actual hyperlink to the Captain’s Quarters blog entry discussing the publication ban.

Even if the current government were to fall, I think the Liberals have a good chance of forming the next government. Yes, again. Canadians enjoy their reputation for liberalilty and I don’t see them electing the Conservative party to power anytime soon. And what would the Conservatives do but be mildly authoritarian, just like the liberals.

Y’know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see one party here in Canada that was committed to establishing a rule of law, a separation of powers, and maybe some individual rights (let’s start with free speech) which were actually honored by the government.

I’m not holding my breath.

…and the debate rages on, RangelMD vs. CodeBlue, for example. The pictures are interesting, even though I don’t have nearly enough years of the right kind of school to referee the discussion. Hopefully the courts had access to physicians who had actually seen the patient in person.

Am I the only one troubled by the patient privacy issues here, HIPAA and all that? I haven’t heard about that very much. Do dead people still have a right to privacy? (A serious question, I don’t know!) Or the spectre of physicians offering judgements about a patient they have never seen, something that’s happened a lot to Terri? Several Canadian doctors recently had their licenses permanently revoked for this. (You were wondering how Internet pharmacies operated, perhaps?)

Had a failure yesterday. It’s convenient if the battery box is easy to remove, so that you can charge it elsewhere, but also resistant to tampering by curious passers-by. The Currie solution is to attach it to the bike with a security bolt. This consists of a thin bolt with a funny rounded triangular hole which fits its special key (that’s the “security” part), and instead of threads, there’s a tee which rotates a quarter turn into a locked position with a bit of a soft click. That’s the “quick release” part. It’s not a great system, and in fact the battery fell off the bike the very first time I tried to install it, but it did seem to work okay.

Well yesterday, I headed out for actual transportation (instead of collecting data), and as soon as I hit the road, the battery box dropped out of the frame, skittering across the asphalt being dragged by the power wires. Right in front of neighbors, too, who helpfully offered me sympathy and a ride. What happened is that the rounded triangular head had progressively stripped, enough so that it could no longer torque the bolt tight, but not so much that the key slipping in the head didn’t feel like the soft click of the bolt engaging.

It’s a bad design, and I’ll have to do some surgery to replace it, but the bike won’t work without the battery (well it will, actually, but that kinda misses the point), and the battery needs to come with the bike, which requires the battery case actually remain attached to the frame. Details, details…

I’ve never been to New York, but I’ve been led to understand that there’s some sort of a large cathedral there. St. Paul’s? Anyway, apparently there isn’t, or else the staff were all on vacation. Not to mention the Papal Nuncio in Washington, the Vatican, and 60 million American Catholics who all must have been unreachable when the New York Times published its obituary of the pope:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

(Thank you, Powerline)

Now I’m looking forward to the death of the New York Times, so I can use that line myself: “Need some quote from supporter.”