Had a meeting last night where the topic of so-called "ethical investing" arose. The idea is, you're a good person, so you wouldn't want any of your money going to help support any bad thing. And it's pretty easy to start listing all the bad things you'd want to avoid, though everyone's list will be different. Then just avoid those things, right?

This stuff drives me crazy. It's not just that the list is unstated, or stupid, or ineffective, or invalidly applied in the case at hand. Or that the people are complaining aren't the ones whose money it is, or that precious time and energy of the organization is being wasted, instead of trying to accomplish the presumably worthy goals of the organization. No, I think it's the puritanical nature of the entire exercise, this ideal of living in a state of holiness, disconnected and disengaged from the society in which we live. It's not that ritual purity is new or rare, it's present in radical religious and political movements since, like, forever. Nor is it that it has no appeal for me. I think I just like to try to be a bit self-aware of when I'm indulging, and spend most of my time in the world.

I shared my experiences with attempting to get to work in an ethical manner. Cars, as we all know, are polluting, require rapidly depleting liquid fossil fuel, whose acquisition kills people in a wide variety of far-off lands and supports terrorist regimes. Buses ditto, except for nastier-smelling pollution, and stealing time which ought to go other places. Bicycles are fun, and steal less time than buses, but probably consume as much fossil fuels as cars. (The very nearly literal sense in which I'm consuming fossil fuels when sitting at the dinner table continues to bother me.) My electric bike runs off of grid power, which hereabouts is mostly coal, still fossil, still depleting (though it'll last longer than oil), but pretty high impact on pollution and warming. I could campaign for nuclear, but even if I succeeded it'd be ten years before a plant could get built, and enviro-wackos would still complain, though coal likely releases more radioactivity than nuclear. I could buy a PV solar panel, $800 for one which would power the bike, according to the salesman I talked to at Earth Day. Even then, I ought to evaluate the impact of producing that large sheet of high purity silicon. Not to mention figure out what the salesman and panel producer are going to do with the money they earn, who knows, perhaps I wouldn't approve...

I wasn't kidding when I said this stuff drives me crazy.

One interesting facet of purity laws is their focus on cleansing. In other words, on restoring purity once the violations occur. It's as if they universally realize that adherence to such laws is impossible, and instead focus on regaining holiness after inevitable infractions. Perhaps the environmental / social justice movement could do more here. After using a disposable diaper, how to regain purity? If you pair 100 shares of Talisman with 100 shares of Whole Foods Market, are you good? Can you drive an SUV, if you've bought a TerraPass bumper sticker for it, and are thus carbon neutral? These questions are difficult, and there are no central authorities to rely on for answers. Radical Islam has this problem, too, with competing mullahs all offering their own edicts.

Actually, ethical investing wasn't my only contact with ritual purity yesterday. A coworker decided to help out by washing up the coffeepot. By taking it into the lab. And using the cleaning supplies for the laboratory equipment, sponges, etc. Big no no. Cross contamination is a worry in both directions, and unfortunately, the protocols for recovering from the sin aren't well described in Leviticus.

The last two great auction houses compete for a $20M art sale based on a single round of RPS... great storytelling from the NY Times. The loser would do well to contemplate a serious text and the strategies of advanced computer players before again dismissing it as "a game of chance".

Interesting tidbit about RPS: by the rules, it cannot be played for fun, there must be something at stake. To satisfy this rule, most serious competitions are "for honor", although the right to auction $20M in art would also suffice.

First you forget your gloves.
Then the wind picks up.
Then it starts to hail.
Then the battery cuts out.
Then the chain falls off.
And then you arrive.

Still, I rode to work five days last week. And the bike generates interest: to people under the age of six or over the age of 65. Tra la la...

Awhile ago I'd bought a new sprocket to install on my motor, the purpose being to up the gear ratio a bit. EV enthusiasts often rave about the flat torque curve of electric motors, but that's only true at low and moderate speeds. If you're supplying the motor with a fixed maximum voltage, there's a fixed maximum RPM that the motor will go, and the motor will provide zero torque at that RPM. Near that maximum, the available torque declines linearly. If you hook the motor to the wheel with a fixed ratio, as my bike does, you have the least torque available at the highest speeds, which is kindof a bummer since that's where the greatest drag is. It's not a problem if you have enough assistance at the speeds where you need it, but I was able to outpedal the motor at top speed, resulting in no assistance. Since the point of the motor was to go faster than I could by myself, this was no good. Thus, the new sprocket, to put the no load RPM above the achieved top speed.

I finally got it on a couple days ago....

...after two hours of swearing, mostly at the chain. Yes, it goes noticably faster, and in the way that matters, too: total trip time is now about 25 min, instead of 30. It sucks more power, of course, but that's the point. It wasn't supposed to increase energy efficiency, in the miles-per-gallon sense, but to use more energy, in exchange for a higher quality of life. The only question is whether it's efficient enough to make it to work without the batteries cutting out. Yesterday was fine, it cut out just as I was rolling into work (perfect!), but today was a problem, due to high wind. We'll see about the trip home.

Peter "Listening to Prozac" Kramer has a new book out, which is excerpted in the NYT Magazine. He talks about depression as disease, pure and simple, perhaps chronic, sometimes fatal, but without spiritual, artistic, or moral overtones. Familiar stuff to anyone who frequents the NYT, they print so much stuff on depression that I'm seriously concerned about the mental health of their editors.

I was recently asked if I was depressed. And it's true, in the past week or two I have found myself with an unexplained ineffable melancholy, a tristesse, suffusing my thoughts and feelings. It's moderate, seems most prominent midmorning and midevening, does not interfere with work or home, and wouldn't seem to require clinical intervention. Ignore it then. Still, it's odd.

I think I've figured it out, though. I've been riding my bike to work, ripping along without adequate eye protection. My eyes protect themselves from the wind by watering. So, every day, I arrive at work and return home again having essentially cried lightly for half an hour. And somewhere in the bowels of my brain an ancient circuit tries to account for this purely physical phenomenon by providing a post-hoc emotional explanation, and getting the arrow of causation wrong. Actions define attitudes, as every first year social psych student knows.

So over the weekend my son and I bottled the first batch of wine I've made. Well, not the first, technically, if you want to count the balloon wine I tried, based on the bottom recipe at the link. In my case the juice was Safeway generic concentrated grape juice (not even the premium store brand!), and it was not a balloon but a latex glove for an airlock. Hey, it's what we had around. The glove worked very nicely, too: once fermentation started, it stood up and waved "hi", then drooped once the action slowed. I stored the result in pop bottles. It was never really drinkable, though a few glasses got consumed, and the rest went down the drain once I realized that it was starting to get worse.

This batch came from a kit, the cheapest one available. All sources (friends, Usenet, wine store experts) recommend adding lots of bulk aging to cheap kits, a month minimum, six months better. I compromised on a couple of weeks, having held off with samples from the dregs after various rackings. At this point, the result is surprisingly drinkable, if watery. My wife says it has less of the "dead animal" bouquet that was prominent at previous samplings.

It's been an interesting experience so far. I've learned lots of fancy wine terms, like "ullage", "breakage", and "spillage". I got a lot happier about my wine once I started thinking about it as homebrew. There was a cartoon illustration on the siphon I purchased (after yet another bout of "breakage" using borrowed equipment) showing a happy hairy guy cheerfully starting his siphon by mouth before bottling his homebrew. He wasn't concerned about contamination, nor whether the resulting beverage exactly matches some commercial product, and if he got a bit toasted while bottling, hey, bonus. Homebrew is cheerful, kinda cheap, and a little bit alternative. And popular in many areas, not just alcoholic beverages. The personal computer industry was started by homebrew. Off-grid power. DIYers have put more electric cars on the road than GM ever did. Home schooling. Home birth. Home and car renovation and repair. Et cetera et cetera...

What will the impacts of anthopogenic greenhouse gas emissions be? Who will bear them? What are the costs, what are the alternatives, both of avoidance and remediation, and what will those cost? Most importantly, from a policy perspective, how should we think these problems? How can we set up systems which will actually result in some reasonable outcome? I'm glad that nice smart people seem to be working on the problem, so I don't have to.

Other things I'm not reading that I feel like I ought to:

• The Millenium Assessment: 4 years, $20M scarce UN dollars, thousands of experts, zillions of volumes. It's... millenial.
• Alan Greenspan on the energy outlook, and its impact on the economy.
• Personal Cars and China In case the "keep China poor" scenario doesn't work

Stuff I'm reading that I probably shouldn't:

• Pinole Creek Greatest hits.
  
• and lots of other things besides.
  

My question is, of course: are these people all going to hell?

During the last US presidential election, I put some skin in the game on one of these online betmatching sites. It was actually very useful, in a psychological sense. Once my money was on the line, unfocused partisan umbrage was immediately replaced by cold calculation of portfolio impact. I managed to neither win nor lose much, however, and the big bet (would some skanky offshore website actually pay off when asked) came through, so I was happy.

I'm still chewing on the transportation efficiency thing. This isn't necessarily productive, as it's easy to go crazy trying to figure this stuff out in the abstract. (It's also easy to get things badly wrong, like an early report that electric cars would emit 60x as much lead per mile as a conventional car burning leaded gasoline. Even were the numbers valid, are all "emissions" equal? Lead particles in the air, ready to rain down into the drinking water, seems different from the occasional fully encapsulated battery ending up in a well-maintained modern landfill.) It's also unnecessary from a policy perspective. You don't need to best answer to set policy, just a way to price the positive and negative externalities, so that those costs can get included in the prices paid by consumers. Let the invisble hand work out the optimal compromises.

Still, even if I want to do the calculation, I'm not sure how to do it. There are so many large uncertainties. Does it really make sense to charge the bicyclist for food energy? After all, perhaps they would normally have driven their SUV to the gym to work out for an hour a day had they not been biking, making their personal energy expenditure neutral. Do increases in exercise, at the margin, always lead to increased food consumption? In increased food purchasing? Human physiology is more complicated than mechanical engines, and it's easy to imagine physiological states where increased exercise leads to decreased consumption. Does increased food purchasing lead to increases in production, or simply less waste as farmers produce all they can in any case? Are we interested in energy costs at the margin, under current conditions, or in some ideal Kantian centrally-planned state where everyone is making the same choice? You've got to answer all of these before generating an answer. Still, I bet the Lomborgians would love any calculation (no matter how valid) that showed bicycling to have a bigger environmental footprint than driving an SUV.

ObRide: Through rationing power usage to be kind to the battery, I made it all the way to work yesterday, and home again too. 25.3 final there, 25.5 final back. I felt like I was outpedalling the motor during the hard parts, though, resulting in no assist. Just can't win.

...liberal bloggers actually do hang out with serial killers.

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...

I too have tried testing my batteries by seeing how long they run lights, with the results above. The colors are three different tests, solid lines are the voltage under load, dashed lines or dots are with the lights off, and the duration has been converted into Amp-hours output assuming that the lights have a constant resistance and produce exactly 20W at 12 VDC. The horizontal line is 1.75 V/cell, the number you're not supposed to go below without risking irreparable damage to the battery. There's an initial squiggle, which is the so-called "surface charge" coming off, and a long curve until the voltage falls off the end. I suspect very little additional charge can be gotten out even draining it to 0 V/cell, so I tried to stop where I was supposed to. The gap between open and closed circuit increases as the pack is discharged, showing increased internal resistance.

Really noticeable here is the difference between the black and green lines (first and third run) and the red line (second run). The first time, I measured open circuit voltage by turning the lights off, measuring the voltage, and turning them back on again. This would be fine, if the battery were actually an ideal voltage source in series with a resistor, but it's not. In fact, the voltage creeps up over seconds after the load is removed. So the second time, I waited two full minutes for the voltage to recover before measuring OCV. And, to ensure good data, I took a lot of points, one every 15 minutes, at least. So the battery got a fair bit of rest. While this time didn't count for getting current out, it did allow the battery to do much better than without it. Effectively, the average current drain was lower, leading to more capacity, though perhaps complete rest is even better than just a lower average. Who knows. You can see a similar effect in the green run, where there's a long break at around 7 A-h during which I took a few OCV points. When the load comes back, the voltage takes quite a while to come back down to where it was before, and if you squint at the lines, it seems clear that the break allowed more total energy to be extracted from the battery. It's this kind of thing that leads people to doubt the first law of thermodynamics.

The average of the green and black runs gives 8.7 A-h capacity, at C/7.7, which is around 80-85% of spec for this drain on a low end 12V 12 Ah SLA battery such as the Kung Long WP12-12. I've read that batteries are usually discarded when they reach 80% of new capacity, which seemed odd to me. 80% of a battery ought to still be worth 80%, right? However, it's just one sign of aging. Things like the internal resistance are also going up, so that the voltage under the same load at the same state of charge gets worse. Couple that to drive electronics which cut out at a fixed voltage to protect your oh-so-valuable battery pack, and you can't get even your 80% out.

ObRide report: I'm now attaching the battery pack with a bolt and wingnut. It works fine, except for having to stop and retighten them every couple of minutes. Now that its capacity is proven, the battery is working fine too, except for cutting out just when it's most needed. And yeah, it was windy today, too, but I'm getting tired of that excuse. 24.9V final.

Added. At least it made it home. Final voltage, 25.5, 27 min.

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.

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."

I tried the no-pedal ride it until it quits range test again. Temperature 1 C, pack started at 26.4 V, tires were pumped to 77 psi. It went 9.43 km in 23:17, 24.1 km/hr avg, lowest speed on the hill was 22.0 km/hr, 21.9 km/hr. This is 40% more than last time. I have no reasonable explanation for the increase. It was colder, and I was pedalling less. The battery pack has received a couple of deep discharge cycles with the lights, but that ought to (if anything) reduce its capabilities. There was less snow on the ground, however, and perhaps the tires were more inflated, and who knows, perhaps the wind was different.

It is clear that "range" is a fairly poor metric, because of its variability. The usual recommendation is that an EV should be speced have double the range that seems needed, not just to accomodate this variability, but also to accomodate changes in plans and to keep the average depth of discharge down.

Odometer on my compact: just turned 200,000
Advertised gas pump price: C$0.899 / liter
Cost of filling up my car: C$35
NYMX crude, Apr 1, 2005: $55.71 / barrel
Crude, 1980, in 2005 prices: $90 / barrel
GDP spent on gasoline, 2004: 2.1%
GDP spent on gasoline, 1980-81: 4.5%
GDP spent on gasoline, for Goldman Sachs $50-105 crude prediction: 3.6%
US gas prices in that scenario: $4 / gallon

Goldman Sachs made some news and drove up oil prices by predicting a $50-105 trading range for oil for the next few years, essentially saying that current prices are low. And they are, historically, inflation adjusted. The analyst is saying that if oil prices are going to be constrained by demand (i.e. no sudden new supply appearing), this is where they will need to go before Americans in the aggregate start to conserve. They've done it before, they can do it again, but it will make current prices look cheap.

Goldman, however, the world's largest energy trader, is no doubt long oil, so take their public pronouncements with a grain of salt.

Updated: calculated a gasoline %GDP from here, which gives 2004 GDP as 11,735B, "gasoline, fuel oil, and other energy goods" as 244.9B. That'll include diesel burned either in transportation or heating, but not "electricity and gas", which is a separate item. Another interesting tidbit: MSFT wrote a special dividend in 2004Q4. This dividend is large enough to affect the national accounts!