Saving Energy By Fighting Friction

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Saving Energy By Fighting Friction is becoming big business, with estimates that resistance may burn one-third of the world’s power:

Chemical giants such as DuPont and BASF, leaders in the $40 billion lubrication market, are developing new polymers and low-friction plastics for car engines and airplanes. And design shops, like Rumsey Engineers of Oakland, Calif., are installing — you guessed it — fat pipes. The company recently used them to double the efficiency of the air-conditioning system at the Oakland Museum. “We cut friction in half,” says company President Peter H. Rumsey.

Designers in the battle against friction draw lessons from the streamlined forms of plants and animals. One team at Mercedes-Benz, for example, has modeled a concept car on the smooth-swimming form of a boxfish. The “Bionic” car slices neatly through strong winds on the open highway. Better aerodynamics leads to cars that get 70 miles per gallon of gas, according to Mercedes, 30% more than a standard design. The opportunities for savings are even greater in trucks. When they’re rolling at highway speeds, they burn two-thirds of their fuel just to overcome the drag of wind. Researchers at Georgia Tech report that streamlining truck design could reduce this drag by 12%, saving 1.2 billion gallons of fuel per year in the U.S.

The nanotech players focus mostly on new substances. ApNano Materials makes chemical spheres called fullerenes, each one so small that several billion scarcely fill a single teaspoon. When blended into traditional motor oils, these balls leave a smooth film several atoms thick on the metal they touch. Tests by Israel’s technical institute Technion show that they can reduce friction by as much as 50%. ApNano founder Menachem Genut says his fullerenes will be available as an additive in name-brand fuel oil within a year.

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The Art of the Gimmick

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Diana Ransom looks at The Art of the Gimmick:

When a young couple getting married in Boston last November spotted rain, they weren’t upset a bit. That same day, Richard Berberian, owner of Elyse Fine Jewelers in Reading, Mass., where the couple purchased their engagement and wedding rings, was doing what he calls “the happy dance.”

Six months earlier, Berberian had started a sales promotion that called for a full refund of the price of a couple’s engagement and wedding rings if the National Weather Service at Boston’s Logan International Airport reported at least half an inch of precipitation on the couple’s wedding day.

To limit his risk, Berberian had sought out prize insurance, which took about six months to find. “It is very difficult to insure a program like this,” he says, largely because the payout hinges on nothing more than the weather. But from that one fateful day, the couple got back the $13,000 they paid for their rings and Berberian — who didn’t have to pay anything besides roughly $1,300 for the insurance premium — won an impressive amount of publicity, including a front-page story in the Boston Globe and numerous television reports. Thanks to the promotion, the four-year-old business now “sells three to four more engagement rings a month,” he says. “At about $11,000 to $14,000 a pop, that’s a lot of money.”

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In SimCity, Carbon Counts

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

In SimCity, Carbon Counts:

Electronic Arts’ SimCity is one of the best-selling PC games of all time. Its obsessively detailed model of how urban centers evolve is so realistic that, along the way, it has become a teaching tool for urban planners. The latest version, SimCity Societies, due out on Nov. 15 for $49.95, includes global warming among the variables it uses to guide how players plan and manage cities.

For power, a player can opt for clean windmills or solar, which cost more and have limited output. Or they can go for coal plants, which are cheaper to build but pollute heavily and lower residents’ happiness. Having more cars and fewer buses boosts emissions, too.

Over time, rising CO2 levels can trigger big catastrophes, such as droughts or heat waves, as well as subtler shifts like increasing rates of illness.

None of that is too terribly different from older versions of the game, but this is a new twist:

Real-world oil giant BP sponsored the game’s energy systems. So when players build a renewable energy facility, these sport BP’s yellow-green sunflower logo. Coal plants do not.

Posted in Business, Games, Technology, Urbanism | No Comments »

Tangerines per Gallon

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

A few months back, Elizabeth Edwards talked about the importance of buying locally-produced foods and said that she would “probably never eat a tangerine again,” because of the carbon footprint of transporting the fruit to North Carolina.

I’ve discussed the localvore’s dilemma before, but David Foster goes so far as to calculate tangerines per gallon:

Tangerines weigh about 1/4 pound each. As near as I can tell, the tangerines consumed in the U.S. come mostly from Florida, California, and Spain. There are four possible ways for them to get to market: truck, train, ship, and air.

According to the Association of American Railroads, trains move freight with an average efficiency of 423 ton-miles per gallon. The AAR also puts railroad fuel efficiency at 3–4 times that of trucking. I’ll use 400 tmpg for rail, and 100 tmpg for truck.

The Edwards residence is near Chapel Hill, NC. Let’s move some tangerines to his local store — first, from Florida. For this simplistic analysis, assume the shipment originates in La Belle, FL, which is 763 miles away from Chapel Hill — I’ll round it up to 800. So we have 8 gallons of fuel used per ton of tangerines, or 1000 tangerines per gallon.

If the shipment goes by rail, the TPG number will be much higher. The rail haul will consume only 2 gallons of fuel per ton, but I’ll assume 100 miles of truck shipment to get the fruit to and from the railheads, adding 1 more gallon. We’re now up to more than 2600 tangerines per gallon.

For West Coast tangerines, I calculate 266 TPG by truck and 941 TPG by rail.

But what if the Edwards tangerines come from Spain? We’re now talking ship or plane, and the fuel consumption estimates for these modes are harder to pin down. Combining estimates from several sources, I feel we can conservatively estimate 500 ton-miles per gallon for sea transportation and 7 tmpg for air freight.

According to an analysis from 1998, virtually all U.S. tangerine imports from Spain come by sea. So let’s ship the Edwards tangerines from Valencia and bring them in at Wilmington, NC. This should be about 5000 miles, consuming 10 gallons per ton, and haul them 160 miles to Chapel Hill, for another 2 gallons. Result: 666 tangerines per gallon.

If the tangerines do go by air — which seems unlikely — then fuel consumption from Valencia to Charlotte will be about 714 gallons, with another gallon for trucking to Chapel Hill. Result: 11 tangerines per gallon,.

So, it seems likely to me that the Edwards family is getting somewhere between 400 and 1000 tangerines per gallon. (Truck from Florida, blended truck/rail from West Coast, or ship from Spain.) Worst case — air freight from Spain — they’re still using less than a tenth of a gallon per tangerine consumed.

It’s interesting to compare these results with the “local” case. Suppose that a miracle occurred and tangerines began to grow in North Carolina. Even then, though, it’s doubtful that there would be tangerine groves adjacent to the Edwards place. If the tangerines are raised by a farmer 60 miles away, and he brings 500 lb of them to market in a pickup truck getting 20 mpg, then he is using 3 gallons of fuel each way — 6 for the round trip — which equates to 333 tangerines per gallon. This is worse than truck from Florida, worse than rail from California, and worse than ship from Spain. Obviously, the numbers for the local alternative would improve — a lot — if we assume that the pickup truck is actually filled to capacity, or nearly so, but that’s not always easy to do under conditions of small-scale production and distribution.

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Democracy at Home

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Peter Berkowitz reviews Michael Mandelbaum’s Democracy’s Good Name: The Rise and Risks of the World’s Most Popular Form of Government, which examines the promise and peril of universal suffrage:

Until recently, at least by historical standards, democracy had a bad name.

In 1787, when state representatives gathered in Philadelphia to craft a constitution to replace the ineffective Articles of Confederation, democracy was identified with direct rule by the people and was considered a recipe for instability and injustice. In Federalist 10, James Madison rehearsed the conventional wisdom, which maintained that in a democracy “a common passion or interest will, in almost every case” seize a majority and impel it to tyrannize the minority.

“Hence it is,” Madison observed, “that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

But also in The Federalist, on the basis of a new “science of politics,” Madison defended the unconventional conviction, embodied in the recently drafted Constitution, that the proper organization of government institutions could capitalize on democracy’s virtues, contain its disadvantages, and thereby render it an ally of liberty.

By enlarging the republic and multiplying the number of interests and thus reducing the impact of any one of them; by using schemes of representation to filter and refine the people’s preferences; by separating, checking, and balancing governmental powers; and by further diffusing power among federal and state government, the Constitution did go a long way toward taming democracy’s wayward tendencies. Two hundred and twenty years later, the nation has vindicated Alexander Hamilton’s hope, expressed in the first installment of The Federalist, that America would prove to the world that individual freedom and democratic self-government belong together, and that together they represent a universally desirable form of government.

The not-so-obvious point:

To understand democracy’s rise and its current golden reputation, he argues, it is necessary to appreciate, as even learned commentators seldom do, that “what the world of the twenty-first century calls democracy is, in fact, a fusion of two political traditions that, for most of recorded history, were not only separate and distinct from each other but were seen by virtually all those who took an interest in politics as entirely incompatible.” This fusion of liberty and popular sovereignty, or rule by the people through free, fair, and regular elections, produced “a hybrid political form” that has proved remarkably resilient.

Neither of the two component parts alone provides all the goods that we have come to associate with democracy. Absent either, democracy as we have come to know it is unthinkable:

Liberty belongs to individuals; self-government to the community as a whole. Liberty involves what governments do, or, more accurately, what they are forbidden to do — they are forbidden to abridge individual freedoms. Self-government, by contrast, has to do with the way those who govern are chosen — they are chosen by all the people. Self-government therefore answers the question of who governs, while liberty prescribes rules for how those who govern may do so. Liberty refers to the way the machinery of government operates, self-government to the identity of the operators.

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Gaze ‘key to facial attraction’

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Scientists have confirmed that gazing is one key to facial attraction:

The study used pictures of male and female faces which had been subtly digitally manipulated.

In one picture, a woman might be looking straight at the camera, while in the next, a tiny adjustment meant she would be looking marginally to the left or right.

The difference was so small that it was not immediately obvious to the viewer.

However, after these pictures were shown to 460 men and women, who were asked to rate them for “attractiveness”, it became clear that it was having a pronounced subliminal effect.

In some pictures, there was an eight-fold difference in ratings between the “straight to camera” and averted gazes.

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Japan, Ink

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

In Japan, Ink, Daniel H. Pink looks inside the Manga-Industrial Complex, where amateurs self-publish comics known as dojinshi — and the big publishers let them use their popular characters, under an implicit agreement, or anmoku no ryokai:

However, because permitting — let alone encouraging — dojinshi runs afoul of copyright law, the agreement remains implicit: The publishers avert their eyes, and the dojinshi creators resist going too far. This anmoku no ryokai business model helps rescue the manga industrial complex in at least three ways.

First, and most obviously, it’s a customer care program. The dojinshi devotees are manga’s fiercest fans. “We’re not denying the viability or importance of intellectual property,” says Kazuhiko Torishima, an executive at the publishing behemoth Shueisha. “But when the numbers speak, you have to listen.”

Second, as Takeda put it at Super Comic City, “this is the soil for new talent.” While most dojinshi creators have no aspirations to become manga superstars, several artists have used the comic markets to springboard into mainstream success. The best example is Clamp, which began as a circle of a dozen college women selling self-published work at comics markets in the Kansai region. Today, Clamp’s members are manga rock stars; they have sold close to 100 million books worldwide.

Third, the anmoku no ryokai arrangement provides publishers with extremely cheap market research. To learn what’s hot and what’s not, a media company could spend lots of money commissioning polls and conducting focus groups. Or for a few bucks it could buy a Super Comic City catalog and spend two days watching 96,000 of its best customers browse, gossip, and buy in real time. These settings often provide early warnings of the shifting fan zeitgeist. For instance, a few years ago several circles that had been creating dojinshi for the series Prince of Tennis switched to Bleach, an indication that one title was falling out of favor and another was on the rise. “The publishers are seeing the market in action,” Ichikawa says. “They’re seeing the successes and the failures. They’re seeing the trends.”

Taking care of customers. Finding new talent. Getting free market research. That’s a pretty potent trio of advantages for any business. Trouble is, to derive these advantages the manga industry must ignore the law. And this is where it gets weird. Unlike, say, an industrial company that might increase profits if it skirts environmental regulations imposed to safeguard the public interest, the manga industrial complex is ignoring a law designed to protect its own commercial interests.

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MIT sues Gehry, renowned architect of daring $300m Stata Center

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

MIT sues Gehry, renowned architect of daring $300m Stata Center:

The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls and radical angles. But soon after its completion in spring 2004, the center’s outdoor amphitheater began to crack due to drainage problems, the suit says. Snow and ice cascaded dangerously from window boxes and other projecting roof areas, blocking emergency exits and damaging other parts of the building, according to the suit. Mold grew on the center’s brick exterior, the suit says, and there were persistent leaks throughout the building.

The suit says it cost MIT more than $1.5 million to hire another company to rebuild the amphitheater, with new bricks, seats, and a new drainage system.

Ah, modern architecture!

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Marathon Challenge

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

The latest episode of NOVA features a Marathon Challenge, in which they take ordinary people and prepare them for the Boston Marathon. Inadvertently, but effectively, it argues against marathon training.

The Team NOVA runners start their training with a VO2max test, and most of them score quite poorly — but the one fellow who ran in college still has a “superior” score decades later. Aerobic capacity has a tremendous genetic component, and training delivers dramatically diminishing returns. After almost nine months of rigorous marathon training — versus his usual pick-up soccer on the weekends — his VO2max increases just 8 percent. It’s only the sedentary members of the team who increase their VO2max by 20, 30, or 40 percent.

More interesting to the average American though is the fact that the members of Team NOVA do not lose weight. In fact, they don’t lose fat or increase muscle either. Marathon training has no effect on body composition. The only member of the team to show any improvement in body composition is the woman who recently put on 75 pounds before starting training, and she loses the weight by dieting and getting up at 5:00 AM to do a fitness boot camp every morning.

If we weigh these meager benefits against the stress fractures and other injuries from training, it doesn’t look like marathon training makes sense for most people — certainly not as much sense as, say, soccer.

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Cloned Beef (and Pork and Milk): It’s What’s for Dinner

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Cloned Beef (and Pork and Milk): It’s What’s for Dinner:

The reason cloning makes economic sense isn’t that ranchers will sell the actual clones for food. The idea is to sell their offspring. Artificial insemination and semen-shipping have made breeding for optimum genetics a highly profitable business. The owner of a champion bull can charge top dollar for its breeding services or its descendants. Eventually, of course, that animal will get too old to reproduce. But if you clone it, you can keep that revenue stream open. Clones can be bred just like their progenitors, spreading those popular qualities further into the gene pool. “Part of the value of cloning is that you’re buying something with unique genetic potential. It’s almost like brand identity,” says John Lawrence, an extension livestock economist at Iowa State University. “In many regards it’s less risky, because you can say you have a proven animal.”

Today, it costs about $1,500 to raise a naturally conceived dairy heifer from conception to breeding age; it costs roughly $17,000 to clone a cow. The figures are about $200 versus $4,000 for hogs. (The price drops if you make multiple copies.) But with natural or assisted reproduction, roughly 5 to 10 percent of all females and 50 percent of all males bred for better genetics don’t inherit their parents’ best qualities and must be sold at a loss, as “salvage” animals. Cloning, on the other hand, almost guarantees the high- fidelity replication of desirable traits. So the clone of a champion bull has higher downstream breeding potential than, say, that bull’s brother. If the original bull was a good breeder, then the clone’s semen sells for more and its offspring are worth more. For hogs, the numbers add up fast: Through artificial insemination, one boar can impregnate 400 sows a year, yielding about 4,000 piglets. But if that boar was cloned from a proven superior male, its progeny will be worth about $6 more per piglet in “improved feed conversion, growth rate, survivability, and meat quality,” says Russell of ViaGen. “So a $3,000 investment in cloning can create $24,000 in added value per year.”

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The Subjectivity of Wine

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, discusses The Subjectivity of Wine:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded,” while the vin du table was “weak, short, light, flat and faulty”. Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

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Behind Enemy Lines With a Suburban Counterterrorist

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

Wired goes Behind Enemy Lines With a Suburban Counterterrorist:

Rossmiller developed her remarkable talent for chatting up terrorists after September 11, when she started going into online forums and cajoling valuable information from other visitors. She has passed along numerous case files to federal authorities. Her information has led US forces abroad to locate Taliban cells in Afghanistan, discover a renegade stinger-missile merchant in Pakistan, and help another foreign government identify a ring of potential suicide bombers. She has also assisted in nabbing two domestic would-be terrorists and seen them both convicted of felonies: National guardsman Ryan Anderson received five concurrent life sentences, and Michael Reynolds, convicted in July and awaiting sentencing, faces a similar fate. Timothy Fuhrman, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Salt Lake City office, says Rossmiller was “instrumental in the successful outcome of those cases.”

Rossmiller succeeds by exploiting a fundamental flaw in al Qaeda’s famously decentralized organization. The absence of a strict hierarchy makes it pretty easy for a cunning person to mix among the terrorists. So she poses as a potential al Qaeda soldier looking for like-minded comers. She creates multiple characters and uses her older and more respected personae to invite the new ones into private forums. There are other self-taught counterterrorists like her, but they tend to translate and discuss, lurk and report. Rossmiller works the terrorism boards as if she were playing a complex videogame. Her characters come complete with distinct personalities and detailed biographies that are as richly conceived as any protagonist on an HBO series. She keeps copies of everything, time-stamps files, and takes screenshots. She has an Excel spreadsheet that details the 640 people with whom she has had contact on these boards since 2002.

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George Washington and Guy Fawkes Day

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Andrew Sullivan discusses George Washington and Guy Fawkes Day, citing these orders from General Washington from November 5, 1775:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope–He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

(If you’re not familiar with Guy Fawkes Day, might I recommend reading V for Vendetta?)

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Barbie Becomes an Authentication Device for Pre-Teen Friendship

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Barbie Becomes an Authentication Device for Pre-Teen Friendship:

At last, a USB security token for girls!

Pre-teens in Mattels’ free Barbie Girls virtual world can chat with their friends online using a feature called Secret B Chat. But as an ingenious (and presumably profitable) bulwark against internet scum, Mattel only lets girls chat with “Best Friends,” defined as people they know in real life.

That relationship first has to be authenticated by way of the Barbie Girl, a $59.95 MP3 player that looks like a cross between a Bratz doll and a Cue Cat, and was recently rated one of the hottest new toys of the 2008 holiday season.

The idea is, Sally brings her Barbie Girl over to her friend Tiffany’s house, and sets it in Tiffany’s docking station — which is plugged into a USB port on Tiffany’s PC. Mattel’s (Windows only) software apparently reads some sort of globally unique identifier embedded in Sally’s Barbie Girl, and authenticates Sally as one of Tiffany’s Best Friends.

Now when Sally gets home, the two can talk in Secret B Chat. (If Sally’s parents can’t afford the gadget, then she has no business calling herself Tiffany’s best friend.)

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Goodbye to All That

Monday, November 5th, 2007

In a piece on the ideological divide between Left and Right, Andrew Sullivan says, Goodbye to All That:

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war — not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a momentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade — but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war — and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama — and Obama alone — offers the possibility of a truce.

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