I don't really care about Terri Schiavo. I know that I should care, in the same way that I should care about murders and injustices everywhere, but I find it very hard to get exercised about Schiavo herself. There are so many distractions: I have to work on taxes; we've underbilled for the month and only have one day to catch up; and I'm finally reading Quicksilver, and Hell, I went to Easter Mass -- doesn't that count for something? Evidently not enough.
But then I look at my daughter, and I wonder if the Schindlers worried, when Terri was not yet two, that someday they would fight a protracted legal battle against her husband, each claiming to represent her authentic wishes. Thirty years ago -- I'm sure they didn't. But I wonder about it, and try to imagine being in the Schindlers' position.
Or even in Michael Schiavo's position. I have a more cordial relation with my in-laws than he did while Terri was still walking around, but it could certainly happen that I'd feel myself obliged to carry out my wife's wishes (which have been clearly expressed but not in writing) while being opposed by her parents.
There is so much misery intrinsic in the case that I wonder why so many strangers and outsiders (I must include myself in this group) feel the need to add to it. Is it because we fear that we will be pressed into acting in a case like this? And not particularly in the role of Terri, since as the estimable Brer Fox writes:
Do whatever's cheapest / easiest / makes you feel better, I won't care, I'll be dead. And if my lack of a living will creates havoc on an international scale? Well, that's too bad, I guess, but I will still be (quite literally) unable to care.No, it's not Terri's role that I worry about filling. As in a passion play, the role I want to avoid -- and yet the role I know I deserve -- is Pilate's
I have to admit that I'm not sympathetic to the arguments regarding federalism and the sanctity of process. As many others have pointed out, federalism and process were used to justify slavery and segregation; and it does not seem unconservative to me to claim that human rights should trump states' rights. But again, conservatively, I do not see the need for urgent action here; a simple federal clarification of the process for resolving disputed right-to-die cases would help in the future.
Nothing is going to help in the present matter. Except perhaps prayer.
Can I tell you something? You, my stalkers, my two regular readers, and all the search engines out there? I'm uncomfortable talking about it, as it seems excessively Baptist, but at Easter, I prayed for all the sorry people involved in this. Yea, for Michael, and for the parents, and for all them all. Even including Terri, though she seemed to need it least. And it did help; anyway, it helped me.
I know, I know, it sounds like a bad joke, but there is one. I've skimmed some of it, but I don't think I'm getting it, whatever it is.
I can tell you why anarchists drink herbal tea, though: because proper tea is theft...
Toshiba has a press release hyping a new lithium battery, which they promise to commercialize in 2006. The big news seems to be the recharging time, which seems nearly physically impossible given that EVs take all night or weekend to charge. But is it?
First of all, the slowness of EV fueling is mostly a myth. Even lead-acid batteries, which are the slowest of all chemistries used, can get topped up to 20% SOC in 5 minutes. The limitations are things like thermal control. That's pretty fast, though, corresponding to a rate of about 2 C (double the battery's capacity each hour). This is higher than most lead-acid battery manufacturers recommend, although evidently you can get away with it for awhile if you're careful. Other fast charge companies are Posicharge (which seems to do 0.6 C) and Minit-Charger, both aimed at the industrial market. A typical manufacturer peak charge rate specification is 0.4 C, which is still enough to get you back on the road after a stop for coffee. Actually achieving these charge rates for a large battery requires a fairly powerful charger, however, which is expensive, so mostly EVs have made do with slower fueling. And finally, to have a truly long and happy life, lead acid batteries like to get fully charged every once in a while, which really does take eight plus hours.
Other chemistries do better. The nickel-cadmium reaction is endothermic, so charging the battery cools it. It can be charged at several C, up to 70% SOC. Nicad charging is more energy efficient when it's faster, too. (Nicads also like to be fully discharged, making it the most abuse accepting chemistry. Too bad cadmium is so toxic.) NiMH also requires about 1C charging.
Lithium seems to normally be around 1C, though Kokam has some material talking about the behavior of their RC batteries up to 5C. So what rate is this fancy new battery, full of nano-magic? In one minute, it's supposed to get 80% charged, which corresponds to about 48C. Very fast, about 10x the rate of anything else (except maybe ultracaps), but only 10x faster. So maybe it's possible. Being able to do it at low cost and with a long lifetime may be the hard part, lots of things work in the lab.
David Bernstein in The Volokh Conspiracy:
I'll be bold enough to predict that we are at or near (within a few months) of a market top now. And if you don't believe me, my dad sold off his REITs this week!
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Happy Easter.
I've read that NYT Magazine article -- found it on Mark Shea's blog a few years ago. Here's my post on the subject.
I just read this Florida Probate Court decision authorizing the removal of the feeding tube. I guess I would still be happier if a jury had been convened, but it's certainly possible that the Schindlers would have had the right to demand a jury trial, but declined to exercise it. In any case, I can see that due process has been observed.
I'm still concerned that the court is willing to take hearsay evidence as a substitute for a written living will, but I suppose in the absence of a written will that's all one has. Still, I'm sure I have made similar off-the-cuff comments -- either out of a desire to be nice to someone whose relative had just died/been unplugged, or else out of my then-convictions. And I would like to go on record now as EXPLICITLY REVOKING anything I may have said or written previous to this date that might be construed as a living will. (That should hold 'em until I get the papers signed.)
At any rate. It is Easter. "I am the resurrection and the life", said the Lord. There are all sorts of sarcastic things I can say at this point, but I'm trying to avoid that.
It got warm enough (5 C) to try a no-pedal ride till the battery gave out. Starting voltage 26.4, decreasing performance over the ride (first time up the hill 21.6 km/hr, second time 21.0). It went for about 18 min total, 6.65 km, 21.1 km/hr average till it cut out going up a hill. 24.7V final. This is pretty much totally unacceptable, something like a third of what I would expect. I think it's time to declare the battery pack toast.
In some ways, it's a classic pairing. She's the passionate old South belle, he's the cool Northern rationalist. Both are smart, serious, and successful. And they meet under, um, adverse circumstances. I think it'd make a great Hollywood movie.
These are both real people. Harriet McBryde Johnson is a disability rights lawyer and lobbyist in NC, sharp, severely disabled and devastatingly effective. Peter Singer is a bioethics professor at Princeton, whose moral calculus prohibits eating a hamburger but accepts offing babies and adults whose remaining functionality don't make the grade. Naturally, he's fairly controversial, and Johnson's group, Not Dead Yet, substantially disrupted Princeton on the occasion of his hiring. (And yes, Johnson has weighed in on Schiavo in Slate, a nice piece, but not the one I want to talk about.)
And they have met, face to face. The story I want you to read is Unspeakable Conversations, written by Johnson, published in the NYT Magazine. It's a wonderful, very personal piece, full not only of her philosophy, tactics, and life, but also of the evolution of her relationship with Singer. The intensity of emotion is there from the beginning. "Should I shake hands with the Evil One?" He turns out to be a nice guy, but weren't the SS officers also nice, went home and played with their kids?
For the movie, of course, you'd have to Hollywoodize it. They fall in love, get married, natch. It's a chick flick, raising big moral themes and playing in the art houses, so it's got to have a sad ending. Maybe work takes them apart, as she goes off to Washington as a political appointee, and he takes up with some floozy undergrad. Doesn't matter how you end it, it'd be a great story.
While riding a bicycle, the rider balances and steers through feedback from (along with sight) the motion sensors in the inner ear. There are in fact three separate motion sensors: one tracks side-to-side balance, one front-and-back, and one for spin. The front-to-back balance is most sensitive, because that's the one used to keep you from falling on your face while walking. However, front-to-back is irrelevant on a bike, because you face forward, and the wheels maintain front-to-back balance, and you must use side-to-side balance for control. If you'd like to control using the best receptors, there are two choices. One is to put the wheels side to side, and use the fine front-back receptors for speed control, like the Segway does. Another is ride sideways. In other transportation modes with a choice, this is usual. Eg., you can face front or sideways on a surfboard, but it's much easier to balance facing sideways, with the best receptors aligned with the difficult axis. On snow, skiing use side-to-side receptors for turning, whereas snowboarding uses front-to-back receptors, and which sport carves better turns?
So, why not a bicycle which is ridden sideways? All good ideas have usually been done, and this is no exception. Photos, both geeky and nongeeky, below the fold:
Geeky:
SidewaysBike
Not geeky:
Dirt Surfer
What I find impressive about the Dirt Surfer is what they leave off. No steering control: bikes mostly steer by leaning anyway, so with a little bit of trail to ensure that the front wheel stays aligned with the direction of travel, you don't need handlebars. No power: you either walk or take a lift to the top of a hill, attach a kite (seems natural enough for extreme sports freaks), or an electric motor. Later versions do have brakes, if you can grab the handle while crouching, but you can also just jump off or wait for the bottom of the hill, like skiing. Looks like fun.
Another reason to oppose mandatory living wills is that they are just plain hard to write. The last time the Schiavo train wreck was crashing through the media, I looked up the applicable laws, and sat down to do my good duty and write one for myself. After I'd spent an hour or so developing my philosophy of life and end-of-life care, and starting to realize how much research would be required to actually set out what I'd want done in various circumstances, some more interesting or important activity came up and it got set aside. The problem is not just that I feel certain that I'm going to live forever, or at least a long time anyway, nor that my opinions are likely to change over the years. The big problem is that such a document is irrelevant unless your mind and person are permanently destroyed, are effectively (though not quite legally/medically) dead, never to return. The purpose of the document is to tell your survivors what to do with your dead corpse. Do whatever's cheapest / easiest / makes you feel better, I won't care, I'll be dead. And if my lack of a living will creates havoc on an international scale? Well, that's too bad, I guess, but I will still be (quite literally) unable to care.
The right thing from a policy perspective is to ensure that there are reasonable defaults, with some procedures and case law surrounding how to deal with the difficult cases. That was my other problem -- once I understood what the default was, I was perfectly happy with it, and felt no need to modify it. There are areas where the defaults are so dreadful that the law effectively bans the default (US estate law eg), but I don't think this is one of them.
Today is the last day of our non-vacation vacation. We are flying back tonight.
Sunday afternoon we met with a lot of college friends and had wine, fruit and cheese in the courtyard; then we grilled chicken and sausages. It was so yuppie I could die; and yet it was so... appropriate. I guess age, such as it is, has finally happened to us.
The next morning I was reading work emails on the laptop while my daughter played on the floor. After about fifteen minutes, I couldn't take it anymore: I picked her up went to the park where we kicked the soccer ball for a good hour. It was just too beautiful a morning to waste on work.
Of course, an hour later, a client's mail server was having problems.
Apparently there are six inches of snow at home. Bleah. I think I'll go back to the park.
I can't really say that I don't care about the Terri Schiavo thing, but I don't have a clear opinion either.
That aside, I was not at all pleased with Bill Hobbs' suggestion:
And I would like to see Congress pass and the President sign a second law - call it the Terri Schiavo Living Will Act of 2005 - that would require all Americans age 18 and up have a signed, notarized, legal living will, and update it every five years. The law also would require courts, doctors and families to follow the directives of a patient's living will without deviation.
Might as well call it the Terri Schiavo Estate Attorney's Full Employment Act of 2005. Why would this be needed? Most people die without the need for a living will -- why should the government force everyone to get a living will? Just to prevent another national media circus? Furthermore, which section of the Constitution or federal law empowers Congress to require every adult to prepare a living will?
I would suggest instead a change to federal law such that in the absence of aliving will, the guardian for an incapacitated person would be allowed to file a civil petition for euthanasia, and a jury verdict be necessary to approve it.
This would address my main concern, which is that I want the power to end a patient's life to rest not with the spouse/family, not with the state, and very certainly not with the doctor or insurer. Ideally, of course, the decision should rest with the patient through the patient's living will. But in the absence of the patient's clear wishes, I would like to see the decision to euthanize approved by a body of disinterested jurors. After all, it takes a jury to impose capital punishment; why should it be any easier to end an innocent life?
So, I'm shopping for new batteries, given that I'll need them pretty soon. Price is relevant to the engineering side too, particularly since battery costs dominate EV running costs. I got very excited when I realized that the small size Kokam lithium polymer cell is just about the right size to fit in my battery case, except that it's very thin. There's enough room (I think) to put 8 cells of the 11 A-h size in series (29.6 V nominal) times 3 in parallel, for a total of 33 Ah. That's about triple the capacity of my lead-acid battery pack, with very good power and less weight than the original. Price is the kicker: ProEV, an SCCA electric race car sponsored by Kokam, gives this formula for price in US dollars: 1.4*(cell capacity in A-h)*3.7V, which works out to about US$1400 for my ebike pack. Ouch! New lead acid batteries will cost about C$80, much much less. But they don't go as far, or for as many cycles. So how do they all compare, apples to apples?
Here's a table:
| Chemistry | Wh/USD | Wh/l | kg/l | Cycles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PbA (T105) | 15.5 | 106.9 | 2. | 300 |
| PbA | 4.3 | 104 | 4.4 | 300 |
| NiMH | 0.90 | 298 | 300? | |
| LiIon | 1.2 | 174 | 1.4 | 500 |
| LiPoly | 0.71 | 390 | 3.0 | 500 |
| H2 @ 150 bar | 405 | 1 | ||
| Gasoline | 14000 | 9700 | < 1 | 1 |
Short summary: lead acid is cheapest battery, even if you have to replace the pack more often, but for six times the price per km, you could go four times as far with lithium polymer.
It's not as simple as that, though. My "Watt-hours" are based on nominal capacity, where the batteries are discharged slowly, over 20 hours, a so called C/20 rate. You get less capacity if you use them harder, and how much less depends on the battery. Lithium polymer is quite good at high rates, conventional lead-acid not so good. Eg., for a 12 A-h rated SLA, I'd expect to get only 8.4 A-h out if discharging it in an hour (a 1C rate), a fairly plausible rate in ebike use. Cycle life is all fairly approximate, I've given life at 80% DOD. The Lithium ion prices seem pretty good, less than I expected, only triple lead acid. On the other hand, they aren't nearly as good as lithium polymer in terms of volumetric energy density. (The look pretty good if you care about weight, but lithium polymer packs the same energy into the same weight into less volume.) They are ThunderSky cells, with prices from importer Metricmind, made in China, who recently announced a 50% price increase. It's that development thing again. So every number in this table could be substantially off.
If you're comparing cost to gasoline, I think only lead-acid is competitive (about 50% less, according to a long-term Connecticut study done at 90's prices), though NiCd may be also, since for the extra cost you get vastly increased cycle life. I'd guess LiIon would cost more, though it really matters how long your cells last, and what price you pay for gas. Still, LiIon is good enough to build a car with a 200 mile range (Steve Green's Jester), and lithium polymer could do substantially more again. If you believe that lithium polymer prices can go lower, and their longevity increase, then you'll be excused for wondering what the fuss about fuel cells is.
Added. The PbA energy density is maybe a little high. One sources quote 40 Wh/l, which seems low. The specs on 13 Ah Hawker Genesis give 64 Wh/l at C/1, 88 Wh/l at C/20, and some NREL presentation uses 75 Wh/l for PbA, 100 for NiMH, so this is consistent. The NiMH spec I added is based on a C$4 2500 mAh 1.2V Energizer AA.
I added the Trojan T-105, which is a very cheap 6V golf cart battery, of a conventional flooded design, used in eg PV and boating. These numbers are again C20, and you have to need a 220 A-h battery.
Via Instapundit, here's ThreeBadFingers with a transcript of a talk given by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He comes across (to me!) as straightforward and funny, and he clearly explains his philosophy of Constitutional interpretation. There's also an undercurrent of begging for help -- almost as if he's saying "Don't force on me this job of making moral decisions; I didn't come here to do that. Give me a court full of originalists and we will fairly interpret the text of the Constitution and laws, and take back the moral aspects of lawgiving -- put them in the legislature where they belong!"
Here are my favorite quotes:
Though I’m a law and order type, I can not do all the mean conservative things I would like to do to this society. You got me.
The Bill of Rights is devised to protect you and me against, who do you think? The majority. My most important function on the Supreme Court is to tell the majority to take a walk.
What a calm and sensible fellow that Eugene Volokh is. First, he puts forward his belief that criminals who commit particularly heinous crimes should be executed in a particularly heinous fashion; then he responds to his critics with calm and reason; finally he publicly retracts his original position and credits the critics who changed his mind.
I'm perpetually torn on the question of capital punishment. On the one hand, it disturbs me that capital punishment is something the US has in common with states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. When I was in Lithuania I visited the former KGB headquarters, now turned into a museum/research facility for people who are looking for traces of their missing relatives. At that point I was completely viscerally convinced that capital punishment should be abolished in the US.
But on the other hand, when I look at individual cases where capital punishment has been applied -- like McVeigh or Kaczynski or even the Rosenbergs -- I have to concede that capital punishment is sometimes appropriate. And if I were on a jury for one of those cases, I would probably decide for capital punishment.
But I still don't like the idea that there is an employee of the state whose job title includes "executioner." And I am pleased that Eugene backed away from his initial position in support of adding another title to that -- "torturer". I don't think it belongs in our society.
This week had last EV1s being crushed, and a fuel cell motorcycle being announced. The turning of a tide?
There were a couple interesting points in the article, eg questions as to whether GM could legally crush a vehicle on which taxpayers have paid an incentive. The idea is the taxpayer is buying something, a public good in avoided emissions which they will receive over the life of the vehicle, so premature scrapping of the vehicle destroys something that the public has already paid for. Seems like a good argument against incentives, better to just tax emissions. There was also more shots fired in the argument over how many customers there were. I have to admit that I believe neither side in the battle. GM's arguments for scrapping the rest (safety, reliability, liability, availability of spares) would apply just as well to a '55 'Vette, yet somehow GM never felt the need to collect and crush all of them. And the EV1 is, by all accounts, a quite nice example of a vehicle based on lead-acid technology. Acceleration and handling like a Ferrari, fast enough for the open highway, gas up free for life, decent range (for an EV). There were mistakes, eg the inductive charger paddle, which certainly looks cool, but you can carry a lot more current through a metal-on-metal contact, which is important if you want to gas up quick. The styling is also questionable: if you're going for sports car performance and parameters (2 seater), you should probably look and be priced like one. The Venturi avoids these problems.
Fuel cells, I dunno. That bike isn't on the market, it's just a prototype, and it's certainly not the first prototype fuel cell two-wheeler (Aprilia, Honda, ...). Fuel cells would be nice if: you've got lots of hydrogen, and found a way to store it, and you somehow got the cost down to less than that of my house. Advocates assure the public that prices will soon drop, and perhaps they will. But to me, a fuel cell looks a lot like a battery, except that it's made out of platinum, and battery prices certainly don't drop by 50% every year like silicon chips. Plus they are underpowered (note the 1 kW fuel cell on a 6 kW bike, except that the 6 kW sustained bike can eat twice that for short periods under load), so you need batteries anyway.
If you like the concept, though, they aren't that hard to build. If you want to build one yourself, start with a battery electric bike. Buy an Etek off of Ebay (~$300), it's a clone of the Lemco used in the bike in the article. The controller will be maybe $1000. Batteries will depend on your donor bike, your expectations, and your budget. It'll be < $1000 for lead-acid, up to something like 10x for lithium. Add a fuel cell later to slow charge your batteries. Or add an ICE generator.
My understanding is that a fairly specific set of conditions is required to make oil. Oil comes only from oceans, other organic carbon deposits, such as peat bogs, turn into coal. The conditions required include climatic (hot and wet), so that there's large biological productivity. Local geology and hydrology is also important. It has to be deep, but near land, and in a trapped body of water without deep circulation, so that bottom conditions are anoxic to prevent decomposition. Or something like that, and parts of this picture may be controversial, I don't know enough to know. Still, think Norwegian fjords, except with a tropical paradise at the surface, and that's the picture I have. This isn't sufficient to turn into oil, it's still got to get buried in the right kind of rock at the right depth for the right length of time and get trapped under the right kind of cap rock, but you've got to start this way to get a chance, and the picture is specific enough to exclude anywhere that currently exists. At least, that's my understanding.
As for citations, the source I can find quotes Klemme and Ulmishek (AAPG Bulletin 1991) for deposition vs. time, a webified summary of which is available here. This is mostly gibberish to me, but see Fig. 1. I also ran into this, written by the (retired) chief geoscientist at ExxonMobil Exploration, if you want to know what (at least one dude in) Big Oil thinks about Peak Oil. (Short summary: sure to happen, could cause geopolitical / environmental / economic / security disruptions, and go ahead and invest long-term as if high prices will continue.) Added: reviewing my original words in the light of above, "no oil whatsoever" is probably overblown, and needs some kind of mealymouth footnote, like "which could turn into an economically viable reserve, or not much anyway". Indeed, that's probably all Sam was saying...
It's working, anyway. I feel impelled to post more because Brer TFox is posting:
and there is in fact no oil whatsoever being deposited right now.
What's your source on that? Cause if it's the same people (i.e., mainstream geologists) who claimed that continents don't move only 45 years ago, I don't accept that as an authority.
I would accept "the amount of oil currently being deposited is unknown but probably quite small and almost certainly less than the amount of oil being extracted." But really none?
TFox has a nice post two down about the US current account deficit. I was recently thinking about this in connection with Canada's removal of the foreign-content cap on RRSP's.
An RRSP is a flexible, tax-deferred savings/investment account available in Canada. You can put in up to 18% of your income (up to a cap of $15.5k), and that contribution becomes exempt from income tax. The growth in the account is tax-free, but withdrawals are taxed as income.
Until this year, there was a restriction on how RRSP funds could be invested. Up to 30% could be invested in "global" content, while the remaining 70% had to be invested in Canadian content. Typically people would choose GIC's (a kind of insured certificate of deposit) or bonds, but "Canadian" could include Canadian-managed clone funds which reproduce the behavior of foreign equity funds (plus a fee). But now that's all changed.
I figure it like this: the 70% Canadian requirement was intended to pump up investment in Canada and thereby cause Canada's economy to grow. But since many people were investing their CanCon conservatively, banks were looking for nice safe loans to park that money in. And there's only so many houses and McDonald's franchises to finance. Interest rates have been low and are staying low, and I believe this is caused in part by the large pool of RRSP money looking for low-risk borrowers.
The total amount held in RRSP's in 2003 was $340 billion CAD (source). So with the cap removed, the $240 billion CAD is now free to find a home anywhere in the global capital market. Let's suppose that all of it goes to the US, into index funds that track the S&P 500.
The investment must be balanced by a current account deficit or else by increased US consumption of Canadian goods and services. And it's the latter possibility that I think the Government is banking on. Their previous strategy of forcing direct investment in Canada through the RRSP foreign-content cap failed: banks were unwilling to lend the money to economy-growing businesses. The new strategy is to allow Canadians to buy foreign investments (which will incidentally drive the Canadian dollar lower) to make Canadian products more attractive to foreign consumers, so that Canada sees demand-driven growth -- this instead of trying to force capital-supply-driven growth.
Good for them. And, incidentally, good for me -- now I can put all of my RRSP in Berkshire.
I'm working my way through a long David Foster Wallace article in the
April Atlantic on the life and times of an AM talk radio host. Aside
from the truly wacko typography (parenthetical notes inside footnotes
inside of footnotes, all laid out with Kandy Kolored Acid Koolaid
hyperlinks like a Javascript mouseoverfest gone crazy), it's fairly
entertaining. Though some of the observations seem
trite (it's politically conservative! they're in it for the money! they let the interests of the public trump the
public interest! Omigosh!) there are some interesting points. Eg., one
of the reasons for the particularly crystalline politics of talk radio
hosts is that it's a job requirement. It's not just that liberal talk
radio, whatever that might mean, were it ever to exist, would be so
boring that no one would listen. It's also that a host must keep up a
steady stream of monologue, on any subject of the day, with minimal
preparation, with no pauses, stuttering or normal verbal tics, without
being overly repetitive and maintaining an internal consistency and
narrative flow. It's very hard, and would be entirely impossible if
factors like research, balance, shaded nuance, or anything other than
instantaneous moral clarity of response was required.
It brings back memories of years ago when I used to listen to Rush
Limbaugh, when he was at the Clinton era peak of his greatness. (Is
he still alive? What would he talk about, now that Republicans control
the House, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court?) I'd
have him on the clock radio alarm in the morning. I'd tried music, but
I'd just sleep through it. I'd tried NPR, or whatever the local
alternative college station was, but that would just put me back to
sleep should I by chance happen to wake up. (Mmm, there may be some
problems, but the world is basically full of nice, thoughtful people,
who are working hard to make it a better place... They don't need my
help, not today...) Rush, on the other hand, could get me going. Every
morning, he'd be having another coronary over the latest atrocity on
Pennsylvania Avenue, and I'd sit up stock straight, screaming. WHAT!
THAT'S NOT TRUE! YOU LYING SACK OF.. wait, where am I? What time is
it? It's just Rush, turn him off, time to go. From the station's point of view,
this is just great. They don't care why you listen, just that you do.
More stimulating talk radio.
There's an interesting piece in the NY Times Magazine on the current account deficit, which leads nicely into today's announcement that the 2004 deficit, $666 billion (smirk), is the largest ever, up 25% over 2003, the previous record holder. Current account deficits are related to trade deficits, the difference in the amount of stuff (cars, oil, everything sold at WalMart) the US buys from the rest of the world (ROW) and the stuff ROW buys from the US. Trade deficits are normally financed by investment flows, eg. the large trade deficit with Japan due to their car makers taking over the US market starting in the 70's or so was financed by the Japanese buying up things like all the real estate in NYC, and later by building factories in the US (Honda, the largest US motorcycle manufacturer). In the 90's, it was the US stock market that was the favorite of the world, and the US appetite for foreign goods was nearly matched by foreigners appetite for US dot coms and telecoms. If not matched by investments, then a trade deficit turns into a current account deficit, where goods going into the US are paid for only with US dollars going the other way. Note that the ballooning of the current account deficit occurs right after the market crash. This is all right for awhile, as central banks like US dollars, because they've replaced gold as a storehouse of value for central reserves. However, there's a limit to how much reserve you need, particularly if you start to get nervous about how good a storehouse of value a currency is, given those trade and current account deficits. South Korea sparked a mild panic last month when they announced they were cutting dollar purchases by their central bank. (This is noted by the article too. It states, incorrectly, that the panic stopped when they denied the announcement. In fact, the clarification only stated that they were just slowing new purchases, not selling off their existing reserves. Yet! Still, it stopped the slide in trading.) The biggest and most complex situation, though, is China.
China maintains a fixed band of 8 renminbi to 1 USD, which is maintained, in light of the current account deficit, by massive USD purchases by the Chinese central bank. Why would they want cheap currency? Well, the Chinese economy is expanding at ~20% per year, developing very fast, mostly due to a fantastic export market driven by cheap currency. They still have an incrediblly large number of rural poor, however, so they have a long way to go, and want to keep this up for awhile. The only downsides for them are that US goods and services are too expensive for Chinese consumers (but they should be buying local, anyway!) and their central bank is filling up with soon-to-be-nearly-worthless American pesos. That's mostly an accounting issue, though, and the Chinese banking system is so screwed up that overaccumulation of US dollars could well be the least of their problems. Eventually, the relative currency values will renormalize, and Chinese stuff will no longer be cheap.
Japan did this too: the first imported Japanese cars were cheap junk. It's not that Japanese engineers are worse, but when you're competing on price, you engineer for cheap. Then they became good and cheap. Soon the currencies flopped, and now Japanese cars are good and expensive, with valued brand names.
I can already see the beginnings of this process at work in China. If you're making something cost-sensitive and transportable for the US market, you don't even think about making lots of it unless you can make it in China (or maybe India). As a consumer, I'm starting to become familiar with Chinese brands in areas I'm interested in. For lithium-ion batteries for vehicles, eg, Thundersky has a reputation for good value, though the capacities aren't quite as good as rated, and reliability is an issue. Valence, a US company, had a design win for the new liion Segway, but they'd better build a plant overseas if they want to compete in volume. For lithium polymer, perhaps the most promising technology, the name is Kokam, a Korean company. For complete electric scooters (the slow motorcycle kind), Peugeot has had a single model (powered by French Saft NiCad batteries) for awhile, but EVT in Taiwan is expanding their line, patenting their technology, and exporting all over the world. If you want a titanium frame road bike, there are ones more expensive than Habanero cycles, welded by Chinese aerospace engineers, but it's doubtful that they are any better.
Given this vision of the future, what should individuals do? Buy stock in Chinese companies? Unfortunately, protections for minority investors are quite weak in Asia as compared to the US (one of the reasons for the popularity of the US stock market), and in China, foreigners are not allowed even that. (There is a funny money "B" exchange just for foreigners, with even weaker protections.) Direct investment in China, even for professionals, is both difficult and risky. No, the only thing to do is buy Chinese made stuff.
ObEBike: Fresh snow == no go. I'm still impressed by the disconnect in reliability expectations and outcomes. Yesterday, I had a complete power failure on the ebike, 90% of the way to work. A car that only got you 90% of the way to work would be totally unacceptable, and require pushing/towing, repairs, hours out of your life, etc. After my previous car stalled in traffic twice, (it even restarted!) I had it junked for $50. Reliability is very important. On the bike, a total power systems failure resulting in being exactly 5 minutes late. I guess that's one advantage of a parallel hybrid -- redundancy.
None of this is controversial. There's some debate over exactly when global oil production will peak or has peaked, and some debate as to what (if anything) should be done about it. I don't think the exact date of peak has much significance, as it will be lost in the noise of oil price fluctuations, lies and restatements (up and down) of reserves, spare capacity, etc. Some alarmists believe the reduction in energy usage will only be accomplished via a forced massive population crash, while some optimists believe free markets will efficiently manage a smooth seamless transition to other energy sources, perhaps transported around as hydrogen. For some value of "smooth", this is no doubt true, but market theory provides no assurances that transitions can be accomplished with any given level of disruption. Some foresight, leadership and planning will be required.
The original article accepts at face value Bush's self-constructed simpleton myth, and complains that he (the Texas oilman) just doesn't understand how important energy is. Really? And why, then, is the US in Iraq? Even liberals accept that it's about the crude (dude). The geological poker game has given most of the world's remaining easily extracted crude to Saudi Arabia, rich, despotic and deeply corrupt, native land of bin Laden and 17 out of 19 of the 9/11 hijackers. #2 is Iraq, which until recently was run by a delightful fellow known as Mr. Hussein. In the light of peak oil, Iraq may be seen by history and a wise and cheap investment into putting a major resource into stable democratic hands, helping to insure that the riches of the last drops of oil don't go to making the world a more dangerous place. It may be a long shot, it may have been handled incompetently, and it may take a decade or more, but hopefully Iraq will be stable enough to help smooth the transition at about the time Saudi is falling apart. And that will be a real mess, no doubt requiring significant armed intervention (against a thoroughly modern force, equipped with the finest US military hardware sold by Jimmy Carter, among other peace lovers). And wars are incredibly energy intensive. Just ask Germany during WWII, who had to become an early innovator in coal liquefaction via the Fisher-Tropsch process.
ObEBike. Kid biked to school with me following -- elementary school kids were very impressed with the motor etc. One asked "Do you need to pedal first?" Astute question, since in some places, that's a legal requirement, though Canada elected to allow either pedal-first or power-on-demand with a cutoff if brakes are applied. I'm not sure how I'd fit that cutoff, my bike was made before that law was written. Temperature -7 C, 27.7 before departing. 24.9 on arrival. Cut out well before arriving, total trip time 35 min. I'm starting to understand bike paths. They can't be thought of as thoroughfares for 30 km/hr vehicles on their way to work, but rather more like a trail map. If you go more or less over here, you'll probably be able to find a way to get over there, but don't expect it to be easy. I tried riding off-road for the high traffic bit. Much slower (especially since power had cut out) and bumpy, but maybe a win anyway. I'm starting to understand the popularity of full-suspension bikes.
Added. -8 C return, 30 min, 24.8 final, seemed fast till end, no problems.
It's a bit cool this morning, about 0 C, and the batteries had started out cold, instead of being brought out after storing indoors, neither of which is good for their performance. In endurance EV racing, people even preheat their batteries before a race. Initial pack voltage was 26.5. My goals this morning were to arrive on time, relaxed, and clean, and I'd chosen a slightly different route.
Total trip time was 27 minutes, driveway to bike rack, and while not entirely relaxed, I'd spent less time dicing with traffic. Unfortunately, that was near the end of the trip, and the batteries didn't seem to want to help much at that point. The motor cut out while gunning it up the last hill after arriving at work. The final voltage (after coming inside) is 25.1, a little higher than before, but colder batteries show higher voltages at the same SOC.
I previously wrote that the batteries can dominate the running cost of an EV. To that add, at least for a simple vehicle like my bike, they can also dominate the performance envelope. The voltage and power drops as the battery is discharged, and since simple electronics can't increase the voltage seen by the motor above that shown by the battery, the top speed and torque at any given speed deteriorate. The solution is to either put up with it (using deteriorating performance as a kind of battery gauge), design the vehicle around the worst case performance of the battery pack (i.e. oversize the battery pack), or find a way to let electronics buffer the way power is delivered. They already do that, usually using pulse width modulation to cut the voltage for the amount of power desired, but increasing the voltage is more difficult. I don't even know if it's possible to do efficiently. Finally, increasing the power beyond what the battery can do requires violating the first law of thermodynamics.
Addendum: still 0C on return, strong headwind. Good news is that the gearing was perhaps about right, the bad news is that the battery didn't make it all the way home. Was able to nurse it along at about half throttle, trying not to trigger the cut off. 24.6 V in the end.
The obvious question, and I certainly hope the answer is, "not as fast as it will when I put the new gear on". Still, it'd be nice to know, so yesterday I took my GPS and set out to find out.
I tried for a bit of control over conditions. I found a reasonably straight section of bikepath, about 330m long, which didn't go up or down more than a meter or two (or three, the GPS could never make up its mind). I pumped up the tires, topped off the battery, measured the temperature (a cool 5 C), and scowled at the wind. I did flying starts, and used the GPS to measure average speed over the course while not pedalling. To try and adjust for the wind and slope, I averaged runs going in both directions, and also tried it both with and without the lights on, to see if that made any difference. To add one more measurement, I took the battery voltage after every run. As far as aerodynamics, I was wearing bulky street clothes and sat upright. So how did it do?
The average of the averages, over all the round trip runs, is 25.0 km/hr, std 0.4, with a max of 25.3 km/hr. If I do statistics against voltage and lights, I model a top speed of 25.6 +- 0.3 km/hr at 26.0 V with no lights, losing 0.4 km/hr for turning the lights on. At 24.0 V, this drops to 24.3 +- 0.5 km/hr. Lights do make a difference, as does the state of charge.
I discovered one more disturbing thing, though. At the end of the session, as I was starting what was to have been the last run, the motor cut out. I can't tell you what I was thinking, because it was more or less unprintable. This is the kind of behavior that caused me to buy a new motor in the first place. The motor was cool, so it's not heat. Some debugging showed that rebooting fixed the problem, and the motor could be reliably started at no / low load, but would reliably fail at high load. Now we're getting somewhere. I managed to get a voltage reading under load (I'm starting to want one of these or these), which showed that, though it might read > 24 V no load, the battery could drop to 22 V or below. I saw 21 V before the motor cut out. What I suspect is happening is that the controller sees the low voltage, and cuts out, to protect a battery pack from damage due to over discharging. In my case the voltage drop is due to too high an internal resistance. Another way to say it is that the batteries were effectively fully discharged, after only 6 km of actual use!
We'll see if it goes away with a fully charged battery, but I suspect that the motor is fine (who knows maybe the previous one was too), and the culprit is the old batteries. The solution is to baby these ones and start looking to replace them.
I don't think this can strictly go under "Daily Bible Study", so I won't file it there, but I too can be influenced by religion. Eg., I just found this tract whose commanding vision is certain to change my life.
Now I just need to figure out how to pronounce all those words... "Ph'nglui mglw'nafn Cthulhu, R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
So the new bike has now been out for 2 actual trips, displacing, oh, perhaps several milligrams of greenhouse gases, assuming you don't count all the CO2 expelled by puffing and swearing. The first was a short round trip at night, where I learned that full-looking fenders can still leave your shoes soaked and splattered, and the second one to work today. The pack started out this morning at 26.4 V, and ended (after 10 km in 30 min at around 5 C) at 24.9. I'm paying some attention, because I'd like to figure out how bad the condition of the batteries are. They don't have many cycles on them, probably less than a dozen out of an expected life of 300 or so, but they are something like 5 years old at this point, which is I think fairly stale even for a properly maintained battery. Battery packs need to be thought of as perishable commodities, not capital investments, which can be a little frustrating if they dominate the running cost of the vehicle. 24.9 V corresponds to ~75% SOC according to Battery University, so maybe they are okay.
Today I learned that:
- Top end gearing on the motor is not really adequate. At top speed, pedalling hard, the motor was unable to contribute much if anything. This is a safety thing: the faster you go, the fewer cars need to pass you, and the more patient they will be. Good thing I have a higher gear ready to put on.
- Motors don't create additional stability on wet ice on sidewalks.
- Everything needs to be tightened. Years of neglect followed by a few crashes will do that.
- I arrived late, tired, and dirty. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Maybe tomorrow will be better.
Higher voltage systems are the other way to get higher speed, since (for a given motor) the voltage must overcome the back emf which is proportional to the rpm. 36V systems are common in ebikes and scooters, and 72V isn't unheard of. Higher voltage also cuts the current at the same power, which reduces the copper loss I^2 R which is the main loss in the motor. The first generation Prius ran at 144V, and the second generation runs at 700V, so the advantages of higher voltage in EVs seems to be appreciated. The disadvantages include safety, something not yet well developed in EVs. It's not that gasoline is safe, but everyone is used to the risks and knows how to handle various kinds of accidents. It will take time (and lots of racing) to develop this collective knowledge and experience for EVs.
No, I have not developed a new personality.
I invited my friend TFox (no relation to Terry Fox) to blog on this site. As you've probably already noticed, he cares about energy conservation and electric vehicles far more than I do, and I think it would be fair to say he's more liberal than I am on most issues. Overall, a good acquisition for sambal.org -- welcome to our corporate family!
Well, there's a big gap in my chart; I haven't done this since March 1. Oh well -- at least it's a rolling year-over-year thing. Within about two or three years I should have hit all of it.
Here's the link in case you're following along at home.
Matthew 13 - the parable of the sower. A strange story, because Jesus flatters the apostles, or else gives them a strong but very gentle rebuke. Anyway, the sower's seeds may fall:
I'm somewhere between 2 and 3, I guess.
Then: Leviticus. And apparently I missed all the exciting stuff about mixing different kinds of fibers, because today we have Leviticus 17-18: animal sacrifice and sexual rules.
Leviticus 17 is simple: sacrifice your animals to Jehovah, and don't drink blood. And if you eat roadkill, you must wash your clothes and bathe, and then you will be unclean until evening.
Leviticus 18. I see the influence of the oral tradition here -- "The nakedness of X, shalt thou not uncover. She is X; it is X's nakedness." Lays down the basic incest taboos: mother, sister, granddaughter, half-sister, blood aunt. Then some commonsensical (as opposed to blood) rules: father's brother's wife; son's wife; brother's wife. If you sleep with a woman, her daughters and granddaughters are off-limits. Don't marry your wife's sister while your wife is still living.
Skip down to Leviticus 18:22 and we get to one of the more contemporarily interesting passages in the OT: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." The most straightforward gloss of this translation is a blanket prohibition on homosexuality, of course. Various people argue that this is a ban on male temple prostitution, since this is in the context of things which the Canaanites do (like sacrificing babies to Moloch). Or a ban on homosexual rape -- I believe you have to attack the translation a bit to make that case. But in the context of chapter 17 -- where a man's allowed relations to various women are defined and relations to other men are completely ignored -- I think it's prety clear that (male) homosexuality in general was frowned upon.
Why anyone would use a 4000-year-old oral tradition from a herding culture to inform contemporary moral decisions is another question.
"The Floating Pyramid" was the title of a lecture by Gary Evans, teacher of the only econ course I ever took in college. I don't think I ever really understood what Evans was saying, or at most 50% of the time, but I do recall this one metaphor.
He said that the Los Angeles area real estate market was a floating pyramid: just about the only way to buy a house in LA was to have just sold one. There are two groups of people: those who own property in LA, and those who don't; and it's relatively rare for people to move between these groups.
This leads to a disconnect between the market for LA real estate and the rest of the market. If living in LA is very important to you, it doesn't much matter what your house is worth relative to the rest of the economy if the only way to realize that value is to sell it and move. To this extent, the fluctuations in the LA real estate market are independent of the rest of the economy.
I was thinking about this because today I saw an ad in the back of the local rag (Santa Monica Daily News) for 0-down, 100%-interest mortgages. The ultimate in financing your speculative real estate deal. What the owner gets, presumably, is the appreciation that comes from positive fluctuations in the market.
But who gets the negative fluctuations? Suppose a property that was worth $300k before the recent run-up in LA real estate is now purchased for $700k with a 0-100 mortgage. The "owner" puts nothing down. The first bank puts up 80% or $560k at about 4%. The second bank puts up the remaining $140k at about 7%. Now the market drops back to normal and the house is maybe worth $350k. The owner is under water by $350k, and the first bank -- the one with the first mortgage for only 80% of the total "value" of the property -- is under water by $210k. And the owner is still paying nearly 3k in interest-only payments which is about double what his neighbor pays in rent.
In that situation, there's nothing to stop the owner from declaring bankruptcy and walking away. Remember that the owner has no equity to lose.
I think I now understand why people are so exercised about Fannie Mae.
So what did I do about the missing master link? I offered a reward, next time my kids were helping me with the bike. One spotted it immediately, dived for it, knocking the bike over, which then punched a hole in the wall. If it was (evidently) so easy to see, I'm a bit confused as to why I couldn't find it, after looking much harder. Still, I was delighted, and so was the rewardee. Win-win all round. I love market-based solutions.
One of the virtues of electric vehicles is their inherent flexibility. Electricity is a very nice form to move energy around, and simple electric machines can be configured act as both motors and generators, with reasonable efficiency, size, cost, and reliability. As electricity becomes more integrated into vehicles, it will allow different design choices to be made. Here's one:
Imagine an electric transmission bicycle. The foot pedals power a generator, and the wheel is driven by an electric motor. This is what a car guy would call a series hybrid, which in a car would mean an internal combustion engine driven generator, and electric motors for the wheels. The advantage in a car is that the ICE can be tuned for maximum efficiency, and electric motors are very efficient compared to ICEs which need to function under varying loads. The series hybrid dominates in rail transportation, where it's known as the diesel-electric locomotive. If you consider the physical layout of a recumbent bicycle, one advantage is obvious: most recumbents need a long, ungainly chain drive, which an electric transmission could replace. There are more advantages: no fussing with gear changes, a small battery would allow load averaging, so you could keep pedalling at a stop light then launch using stored power, regen braking, use as a stationary exercycle, etc. These have actually been built, by Andreas Fuchs, who later started Autork to commercialize similar concepts. The disadvantages are pretty obvious too: 70-80% is fairly good efficiency for a motor or generator, 90% is excellent, and the electric transmission pays twice, once in converting mechanical power to electric, and again to convert it back. A well-adjusted chain drive, on the other hand, is around 98% efficient. Since bicycles are low power, and the only way to get more power is by changing the operator, efficiency is very important.
Okay, fine, so maybe that's not such a good idea. What else can you do with electricity? Two wheel drive is another application of the design flexibility. All-wheel drive is becoming increasingly demanded on cars and trucks, for reasons of handling and traction, but is even more important on a two wheeled vehicle, which starts out less stable. Unfortunately, it's also considerably more difficult to implement on a two wheel vehicle, because there's no easy way to arrange a transmission. It has been done however, both with a mechanical transmission in the Rokon motorcycle and hydraulic systems commercialized by Yamaha (the 2-Trac) and KTM. The disadvantages of these choices are fairly clear, though: the Rokon has no suspension (a serious failing on an off-road machine!) and turns the power off when you turn the wheel, and if you thought electric drive had efficiency troubles, hydraulic is far worse. That's acceptable for an overpowered motorcycle, like the high end dirt bikes KTM and Yamaha sell to professional racers, but not for a bicycle.
So, how do you get both efficiency, full suspension and AWD in a bicycle? Simple enough. It looks like a regular bicycle, with a chain driving the rear wheel. The rear wheel, however, has a hub generator, similar to the hub motors put on power-assist bikes and the hub generators used in high end generator driven bike lights such as those sold by Peter White. The front wheel has a hub motor, too, and in between them is a controller which monitors the relative slip. When the rear wheel starts slipping, the controller takes power from the rear and drives the front until they are the same (or less than 5% rear relative slip, eg). The back emf on the rear acts as a kind of ABS, braking the rear when it starts to slip. You can't slide the tires unless you're sliding them both at the same time, and there really is no traction to be had anywhere. When you have adequate rear traction, though, which will be most of the time, power gets from the pedals to the road through a highly efficient chain, there will be no load on the generator, and careful design should be able ensure low residual drag. If you want front wheel drive only, just transfer all your weight to the front and pedal hard. As compared to a power-assist bike, there is no battery, which encompasses most of the weight and trouble of a power-assist system, as well as a good deal of the cost, there is no limit on range, and the two hub electrical machines need only be fairly low power, 100-200 W perhaps, because each only has to handle half of what the rider can put out. As a bonus, even high-power lights are a cheap and easy add-on. While not free, the added wholesale cost should be less than $500, perhaps much less, which would be entirely acceptable for a high-end mountain bike.
I'd thought I was fairly well prepared. I'd had a month or so after ordering before the parts arrived, so I'd gotten all the greases and lubes I thought I might want, and had taken everything apart, ready to put back together with the new bits. The parts still hadn't arrived, so I built a lighting system for it out of Chinese driving lights from Wal-Mart ($19.93) mounted with grounding clamps ($2.49 each). Dual MR11 bulbs, 12 V 20 W, wired in series for the 24V battery. It's a lot of light for a bicycle, but it's small compared with the motor, and I want oncoming traffic to not only notice I'm there, but also wonder what's coming at them. By the time I'd taken the old motor completely apart, just to contemplate the interior and wonder what might be wrong with it, the new stuff arrived.
I had a choice to make first off. I'd ordered two things: new motor, and new gearing kit. The idea of the change in gearing is to trade off low end torque for higher speed, which I thought would be a good idea for commuting in traffic. So did I want to try just bolting the new motor on first, an easy job, and see if everything worked and go from there, or did I want to do everything at once? I'm an optimist, I chose the latter. The new pinion fit on the old shaft, I got the order of washers, ring clips, and spacers correct after only five or six tries and repeated consultation of my notes and the kit instructions, everything fit. I worked slowly and carefully, greasing things nicely, torquing the bolts firmly in sequence, sure that I wasn't going to be inside again for a long time. One last piece: the chain.
The new gear is bigger than the old gear, so my old chain is too short. No problem, the kit came with a tiny piece of chain (one and a half links) to extend it. Put them on, put on the master links, and we're done! Well, it's kind of slack, actually. Really slack, it sags more than an inch in the middle. And yes, a slack chain can carry power, I turned it on just to see if the motor worked and could spin the rear wheel (it did), but it flapped around everywhere. Not really acceptable. A little thought and consulting the instructions showed that the extension was not supposed to be the right length, rather it was just a converter, so that you could add an odd number of holes to the chain. You're supposed to remove links from the old chain, add this piece plus a second master link to make it work. Okay, so how do I do that? And without damaging the rest of the chain? The instructions were mum, just referenced more instructions on the seller's web site. I tried prying a link off with a screwdriver blade, but I couldn't even get it in. I came in, put the kids to bed, and looked to the web instructions for enlightenment.
After treatises on the mathematics of chain length adjustment, I found the part I was looking for, how to remove links. It said, more or less, "There are a variety of ways to do this, and the method selected should depend on the skills of the mechanic and the capabilities of the shop." Oh, c'mon! I have no skills, and my shop has no capabilities. Couldn't you at least mention one of them, so I could go try and aquire some skills and capabilities?
At this point, it's getting late, and I'd like a functional bike. I decide to punt on the new gear, and go with my old chain (hope I didn't damage it too much trying to rip that link off!). I strip everything apart, put the old pinion on, put it all back together, feed the chain through. Now just put on the master link, and I'm done.
At this point, I realize that while I've taken it apart a number of times, I've never put the chain back on. The chain is tight, and one side of the chain has about 2mm of clearance away from a plate. To avoid trying to assemble the clip etc there, I'm certain that I need to get the main part of the link inserted from that side. Nowhere works. I succeeded before because the chain was loose. No way of holding the link and chain works. No way to loosen anything. I'm starting to wonder if it was ever together.
Now the inevitable happens. I drop the link. Ting! Instant fear. I'm sure another one could be aquired, somehow, but I don't know how, and if I pick it up immediately it'll be right here... or here... Jeez, wasn't I going to clean this place up before I started? After a long search, reality begins to dawn. I didn't hear it hit the ground because it lodged itself inside the housing of the pinion gear I'd just assembled. With squinting and a flashlight, I even convince myself I see it, but poking, shaking, and spinning the gear don't dislodge it. There's no hope. I have to take it all apart again to get the master out.
At this point, I'm no longer working slowly and carefully. But at least I'm getting lots of practice.
Unbolt everything, unscrew everything, pull it out and... not there. Nope, not there. Hm. Good to know, I guess, at least I won't be wondering whether it's in there. And back together it goes, after having eaten yet more of my life.
So what now? Well, there is one more master link, the one I need for the kit. The kit's useless at the moment, so let's use that one. And forget about putting the link in from the low clearance side, put it in from the easy side, and getting the plate and clip on from the hard side is, while not easy, at least possible. And it works! Amazing.
Hi, I'm TFox, and I'll be your guest blogger today, and from time to time.
I'm working on my electric bike. Electric bicycles are perhaps the most efficient form of individual transportation possible. (Bikes are pretty good too, and good exercise, but the human machine isn't nearly as efficient as an electric motor, and the energy costs in farming the food the human machine eats are quite high.) Every few years, some visionary or inventor realizes this anew, and starts a business making them in mass, feeling certain they will take the world by storm. Clive Sinclair, EV Warrior, Lee Iacocca's EV Global, Ford's Th!nk, Wavecrest, Segway (similar, but can't be pedalled). Unfortunately, most transportation consumers don't want maximally efficient transportation, and the few who do already have a bicycle. So they all go out of business, meaning their products will soon be in liquidation. I bought my bike from Total EV, a venture started by an electric power utility who decided that electric vehicles, sold over this newfangled internet-thingy, made the perfect complement to their existing electric business. They later reconsidered, and I ended up with a cruiser-style bike, with battery and motor, made by Currie.
Unfortunately, it never worked well. It was just kind of slow. And to me, there's no point in a motor if it can't take you as fast as you'd pedal anyway, if you weren't on a bike that weighed 16 tons. Also, it was unreliable -- the power would just cut out, leaving you to pedal the monster home. (Easier than pushing a dead car home, though, at least it has pedals.) Worse yet, it was ugly. A shiny chrome curly cruiser is just not me. But well, maybe the nice-looking bikes didn't require a liquidation sale to move.
So I've been trying to address these issues. I bought a new motor, which should not only work but also have a bit more power, and threw in a pinion replacement to up the gearing, so the power will end up taking me faster. It finally arrived, and I tried installing it this evening. How hard can it be? It's just a bicycle, right?
I was breaking up ice on my front sidewalk this afternoon and spent the time thinking about North Korea pulling out of the six-way talks and announcing that they have nuclear weapons. I know. Busy day, huh?
Anyway, my conclusion was that they must be crazy up there. Because they have at most 4, maybe five nukes that can maybe just barely reach LA; and we still have ninety bazillion nukes. Kim Jong Il must be crazy to think we're not willing to use them; or else he's forgotten about that whole cold war thing which rested on our willingness to get into both a conventional and a nuclear war against a superior force....