Monday, April 28, 2008

An interesting thought about fuel economy...

I was talking with a co-working today about fuel economy and he illustrated to me how our way of looking at fuel efficiency is fundamentally flawed. We get excited when something like a Prius hybrid car gets 45 mpg. I have a Civic which is comparably sized to the Prius and it gets in the neighborhood of 35 mpg. So, the Prius, which carries a hefty fiscal penalty up front, will get me a little better mileage over the long run. However, my Civic really doesn't burn all that much gas based on how much I drive, so any increase in efficiency wouldn't really save me all that much money.

The true measure of efficiency should be consumption. Think of this:

2 pairs of cars.
The first pair of cars consists of a car that gets 12 mpg, and one that gets 500 mpg.

The second pair of cars consists of a car that gets 16 mpg, and one that gets 50 mpg.

When asked, most people would say that the first pair is more efficient. After all, the one car get 10 times the mpg of the other. However, when you do the math, the results aren't intuitive.

When each car is asked to drive 500 miles, they burn the following amount of fuel:

First Pair:
500 miles @ 12 mpg = 41.6 gallons
500 miles @ 500 mpg = 1 gallon
Total Consumption = 42.6 gallons of fuel

Second pair:
500 miles at 16 mpg = 31.25 gallons
500 miles at 50 mpg = 10 gallons
Total Consumption = 41.25 gallons

As illustrated by this example, maybe GM's strategy of improving the efficiency of their big burners like the new hybrid Tahoe is superior to Toyota wringing a tiny bit more efficiency out of its already miserly subcompacts.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Untimely Inclement Weather Reports

Trying to watch a TV show that is constantly being interrupted with inclement weather reports is really annoying.

Trying to watch that same show a week later on Tivo is downright infuriating.

I tried to watch The Office and My Name is Earl just now, and both shows were entirely pre-empted by the NBC weather schmuck going over the same info over and over and over for the entire hour that I Tivoed. She suggested that you can watch the episode on Hulu.com, instead. Great, instead of seeing it on my bigscreen in HD, I get to watch it in super crappy resolution over streaming video.

So, fine, I'll just watch Eli Stone. Oh wait, it turns out the first 15 minutes are nothing but a weather report telling me the same thing that I can figure out by getting off my butt and looking out the window. About 30 minutes in, they flash a message across the screen that we can watch the show in its entirety at 3:10 AM. Now, Tivo is great at appearing to shift time, but it can't actually go back in time and record a show after the fact.

When will networks get their heads out of their butts and realize that people have DVRs and also that if they wanted to know about the weather, they will tune to the Weather Channel (or the 3 other HD network-run all weather stations), or open up their web browser and get whatever information they want.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Patent Bending

There's a new show on the Science Channel called Patent Bending. The premise of the show is they dig up old patents for outlandish devices and try and make them work.

I had high hopes for the show, although it was mitigated by the appearence that the show is an obvious attempt to capitalize on the Mythbusters' recipe for success. Unfortunately, those hopes were in vain as the first 10 minutes of the first show only served to illustrate that the producers of the show made horrible, horrible casting choices for the show's lead.

The show led off with a design for a golf club with a 12GA shotgun shell in the face so that you can get some extra drive in your game. The show took an immediate wrong turn when they started discussing using compressed air in lieu of the shotgun shell. What's the point of digging up a old patent if you're immediately going to disregard the basic design element of it?

During their exploration of compressed air as an alternative to the shotgun shell, they went to a paintball store and talked to the owner about the technology behind paintball guns. When the store owner discharged a shot of compressed air, the show's "star" that seems to wear nothing but sleeveless shirts dived under the table like a little girl. The rest of the people in the room immediately started laughing at him, but it really just struck me as sad. This was further compounded when the same guy fired a flare gun into the air to illustrate Newton's law, and reacted like a little girl shooting a canon.

I had Tivoed two episodes but only made it through the first few minutes of one before being disgusted by the apparent lack of manhood of one of the hosts and deleted both of them.

It's a shame, really...