EyeOnTechnology

The Future's Uncertain, and the End is Always Near.

2010-02-24T16:17:58Z

Ice cliff, Barne Glacier, Antarctica Source: University of Washington

This entry's title is a line from Roadhouse Blues, sung by Doors lead vocalist Jim Morrison. I think of it every time I find someone making important decisions about what to do now based on what they think is going to happen in the future. Of course, such behavior is the closest there is in Zen Buddhism to a sin. Non-buddhists, in general, don't have any idea what a horrible thing it is to sacrifice what you have today in order to secure some reward in an imagined future, so they do it, and even feel proud of it.

Eeeyyyeewww!

A case in point is the perenially stalled movement to curb carbon emissions to avoid global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 claimed: "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal ... ." It goes on to detail a raft of dire consequences if we don't heed their warning, and make drastic changes to our lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

So, let's hypothesize a future in which governments of the world gang together, and force their citizens (remember, this is just an hypothesis) to conserve energy by, for example, installing gadgets that won't let you dry your clothes before 10:00 pm, drop your thermostats to, say, 65 degrees in winter and raise them to 80 degrees in summer. They mandate use of electric vehicles that won't go over 55 mph, and can't go farther than 30 miles before recharging (thus limiting personal travel to a radius of 15 miles), and many other good ideas.

Let's say that this goes on for two generations, or about 40 years, at which time the sky is clear and blue, and it's damn cold by anyone's standards. So, roughly 5 billion people have been miserable for forty years (that's one year for each of Ali Babba's thieves) in order to avoid a climate catastrophe that nobody knows would have happened, anyway.

Then, an asteroid falls on 'em and wipes 'em all out.

Is this good planning? Is it based on good science?

The answer to both questions is "No."

I'll leave as an exercise for the reader to figure out why it's bad planning. It is, and that's why the "Green" movement has been stillborn all these years. While everyone is willing to go along with the ideas that global warming is "unequivocal," that it's bad, and that something must be done. Nobody believes it enough to take action based on it.

It's bad science because of the use of the word "unequivocal" in the report summary.

No scientist worthy of the title would use the word "unequivocal." Any sentence containing the word, without a counterbalancing negative (such as in "No scientific theory is unequivocal."), is prima facie not a scientific statement.

On July 5, 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, a three-volume book that was the seminal work for the science of physics. Nearly three centuries later, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which, among other things, showed that Newton had, after all, gotten it wrong. He followed that up ten years later, in 1915 with his general relativity theory, which pointed out how Newton got it wrong.

It's now 95 years later, and we're still trying to figure out what's wrong with Einstein's theory. We know he got it wrong, we just don't know what's wrong with it. So far, it's the second most successful scientific theory of all time.

The honor of being the single most successful theory ever elucidated goes to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin turned the discipline of life science on its head by publishing a little tome entitled On the Origin of Species. It's now over 150 years later, and we still call it the "theory of evolution" despite its proven success. Scientists (the real scientists, not the pseudoscientists that creationists like to quote) realize that there's probably something wrong with it, but so far nobody's been able to get a whiff of what that might be.

In science, no statement is ever unequivocal. It's only the best idea we have at the time. So, if it's unequivocal, it's not science.

Why the Sky Isn't Falling

2010-02-17T18:04:44Z

Signs of global warming

A flurry (pun intended) of articles in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal prompted me to drop another post about the controversy surrounding climate change research and efforts to curb global warming. Readers who have followed my posts here and in the Ask Charlie blog I wrote for Control Engineering know that I'm no fan of the IPCC report upon which most of the current nonsense is based. It's not that I think that there's anything wrong with the basic thesis that dumping loads of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will likely ratchet up global temperatures, my problem is that so much of the so-called research, and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom, are prima facie so much politically motivated dreck (or to use the proper Yiddish spelling drek).

As I see it, there are two basic problems. First, the conclusions are based on a sophmoric physical model. Second, who ever said that higher global temperatures would be a bad thing, anyway?

The theory of global warming is based on a simple physical model - the greenhouse model - which is, in turn, based on the solid physics of radiative heat transfer. Specifically, it starts with the observation that the opacity of most atmospheric gasses is wavelength dependent. That is, while most of these gasses appear transparent to visible light, they are more opaque (sometimes very opaque) to infrared wavelengths.

So, the radiative power flux of sunlight, a large fraction of which comes at visible wavelengths, gets through the atmosphere to warm the ground. The warm ground tries to radiate that power back out at lower wavelengths (basically, the color temperature of sunlight is about 6,000 K, while that of radiation from the ground is about 300 K). The infrared, however, is absorbed by the dense lower atmosphere. Ergo, the ground and lower atmosphere, which are roughly in thermal equilibrium, get warmer. Increasing the density of the more infrared-absorbtive gasses, especially carbon dioxide, (so the theory goes) will necessarily increase the infrared absorbtion, and lead to higher temperatures.

We teach this model as an example in second-semester freshman physics. It's simple, easy to understand, and illustrates the mathematics of radiative heat transfer (which is what we're trying to do in freshman physics). The only problem is that the model is dead wrong. The real world is vastly more complicated. The difference is so extreme that any conclusions drawn from the greenhouse model are unlikely to correspond to anything in the real world.

One of the biggest problems is that meteorologists have known for decades that the weather system is chaotic. Weather patterns cannot be reliably predicted for a time scale longer than about a week. Weather, of course, is critical to radiative heat transfer, so asking a climate model that uses radiative heat transfer to predict anything beyond about a week is simply stupid. Other parts of the climate system are similarly chaotic, such as solar flux variability, making the prediction of future climate via computer models an exercise in futility. It is of academic interest, but of academic interest only.

Moving on to the second problem, who says global warming is a bad thing, anyway? The medieval warm period (look it up) ushered in an age of prosperity, cultural advancement, and generally really good times. It was followed by the the Little Ice Age, which brought with it famine, plague, and death. Who th' heck wants that?

Lessons from history, and prehistory uniformly lead to the syllogism:

cooler = bad;

warmer = good.

You do the math.

On Blogging ...

2010-02-08T17:36:52Z

First, I want to thank the large number of readers who have taken the time to add comments to my blog. I've been blogging for about three years now, and this is the highest volume of comments, and the kindest words in them, that I've ever encountered. It's very encouraging.

Second, I should apologize for being lazy about adding new posts. I've been busy with books. The third edition of my How-To book entitled How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop is coming out momentarily (it was supposed to be out in mid-January, but the publisher warned me it would be delayed at the printer). I have a collection of short stories entitled Shakedown Blues, which is just out. I'm also hammering hard and heavy on the keyboard with my first full novel, provisionally entitled Red. I hope to have Red out sometime in the second quarter of 2010. I'll have more to say about these books later in this post.

The main subject of this posting, however, is blogging itself. I've received multiple requests for advice about blogging. Now, I do not consider myself an expert. Lots of other folks have blogs that generate a lot more traffic than mine. But, I've been at it awhile, so here goes.

Blogging is basically another in a long list of publishing methods. It fills a niche between social networking, and professionally produced news websites. Professional journalists treat blogging as the online equivalent of newspaper or magazine editorial writing. That is, they commit to a regular deadline schedule, and write more-or-less to a set length. Usually, they draft the copy for their postings using a word processor (WP), such as Microsoft Word (I use the Open Source equivalent: OpenOffice Writer). They revise and polish articles extensively in their WP, and transfer them to the blogging software for publication. I do a final polish in the blogging software, where I can see what the final result will look like, and then hit the "publish" button.

Blogging software was developed a few years ago to make it easier for journalists, who are generally not web experts, to create copy for Internet publication. I believe the original idea was to make it possible for journalists to bang out short, highly formatted articles quickly. The folks who wrote the software imagined that writers would type their articles directly into the blogging software, skipping the word processing step.

That goes to show that blogging software developers had no clue as to how professional writers work. Professional writers start by spending a pile of time researching what they're going to write, so they know what facts they'll use, and have organized and checked them beforehand. By the time they pull out the electronic equivalent of a blank sheet of paper, they already have a clear idea of what the article will be about, what facts they will include, what will be their "lead" (which is the first few sentences designed to pique the reader's interest). They also have a pretty clear outline in their heads.

They then bang out copy based on that plan. The idea is to avoid writer's block by typing whatever comes into their heads, no matter how inane, confused, or inappropriate. Then, they go back and revise the article to make sure it's clear, concise, interesting, and complete. They especially try to weed out extraneous material that shouldn't have been included, anyway. Finally, they go back to check for typos, spelling errors, bad sentence structures, and so forth. All this work is best done using fully functional word processing software. Blogging software just isn't up to the task.

Once the writer is happy with his or her manuscript in Word format, he or she can transfer it to the blogging software. The blogging software provides, usually, a window for entering the title, and another for entering the text. It also provides a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) view of the posting as it will appear on the website, and some means of adding images.

Professional writers are all familiar with the effect that text seems different when seen in its final form. It's a strange phenomenon where, when you look at the final copy in a letter, magazine, book, or whatever, you always see things that you wish you'd done differently. Typos appear out of nowhere. Sentences that looked great in the manuscript seem clumsy in the final form, and so forth. So, professionals always look at a final proof of their articles as the readers will see them before releasing them on an unsuspecting world. Blogging software provides that opportunity.

Another thing blogging software does is pre-format the article. The writer doesn't have to think about where to put the ads, where to put the navigation bar, what type face to use for the title, and so forth. That's all done ahead of time by a layout designer (who might be the author some time in the past), and enforced by the software itself. The author only has to worry about the words.

Don't agonize over what blogging software to use. All the blogging software I've used, and I've used four different systems, does pretty much the same thing, can be used pretty much the same way, and produces pretty much the same result. For this blog, I chose MoveableType for its compatibility with Google AdSense. I wanted to run Google ads, so I made sure the blogging software worked well with them.

I do not, generally, design my own layout, or set up the software. I hired a professional team through my Internet service provider (ISP) to set it all up and make sure it worked. I then did some minor tweaking to the blog's look and feel. I could do that because forty years ago I made the commitment to learn computer programming, and fifteen years ago I made the effort to learn how to build websites using HTML (the programming language of websites), and seven or eight years ago I taught myself how to write PHP (a language folks use to control all the fancy databases and such needed for interactive websites). Tweaking blog formats is a dawdle after that.

Most bloggers, who don't have the programming background, just use the templates the blogging software provides. That's what it's for, anyway.

So, that's a rundown on what it takes to write a blog. To be successful, you should post at least two entries a week. More is better. The most successful bloggers post every day. Some even post more than once a day.

I find that my readers prefer longer posts. I know bloggers, however, who post a few lines once or twice a day. I feel they'd be better off on Facebook or Twitter, but that's just my opinion.

Changing the subject, I promised to provide a little more information about my books for those readers who might be interested.

For some reason, the third edition of How to Set Up Your Motorcycle Workshop was delayed. It was supposed to come off the printing press by 15 January, but still isn't out. You can, however, preorder it on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other online booksellers. A few collector copies of the first and second editions are also available online for exhorbitant prices. Most motorcycle hobbyists are familiar with the book, but I think it might be of interest to more general readers who just like reading my stuff.

Shakedown Blues is a collection of motorcycle touring stories written originally for enthusiast magazines. I think they'd also be interesting to more general readers who like reading about road trips. Stealing an idea from Herman Melville, I've embedded the stories themselves in explanatory chapters that would be of interest to general readers, and to folks interested in some of what goes on behind the scenes at national magazine editorial departments.

The novel I'm working on now, Red, involves a transcontinental motorcycle trip; a six-foot three-inch red head with a chip on her shoulder; a mysterious biker with apparently limitless resources and a Zen attitude; an evil step father; and a lost gold mine. The title refers to our heroine's nickname, which she got for the color of her hair, and those cute little freckles she has all over ... . The story includes elements of science fiction, a murder mystery, sex, a love story (or four), more sex, eastern philosophy, a look behind the scenes at the biker lifestyle, a peek into how engineers develop advanced technology, and some hair-raising adventure. Did I mention the sex?

It'll be out in a few months, if I ever finish writing the thing.

Why the Jobless Recovery Isn't

2010-01-12T20:07:06Z

Business cycles are driven by a macroeconomic feedback mechanism that has a multi-year cycle time. Employment is one of the last economic metrics to show recovery because the process starts with unmet demand for goods and services, and only ends with jobs.

In every economic downturn, Chicken-Little pundits squawk about how we can't have a sustainable recovery until employment figures show improvement. Any investor, and here I use the word "investor" in its broadest sense to include those who put resources to work, not just those who invest in stocks and bonds, who listens to this drivel is destined to fail, and fail disasterously.

Macroeconomics - the study of large-scale economic trends affecting an economy as a whole - is based feedback loops that drive business activity. These loops describe causal relationships between economic factors affecting business. For example, an increase in production levels generally pushes employment up. Each of these causal relationships involve a time delay. So, when production levels increase, especially from a depressed level, employment does not rise until production levels exceed capacity at the current employment level. This takes time, as does the process of hiring new employees.

These delays are what cause business cycles in the first place. If we use, say, buggywhip manufacture as a hypothetical example, we might say that it takes 18 months for the buggywhip business to respond to a sudden change in the overall demand for buggywhips. So, if New York City should pass a law banning motorized vehicles, so all the Yellow Cabs in the city had to be replaced by horse-drawn surries overnight, that would ratchet up demand for buggywhips. Because it takes 18 months for buggywhip manufacturers to respond, actual sales of buggywhips would not stabilize at a level reflecting the new demand until a year and a half later.

Business cycles occur because it is not possible for businesses to precisely meet demand. In the buggywhip example, assume that there are two buggywhip manufacturers in business at the time the New York law passes. They will both attempt to grab more than their fair share of the enormous new market. Part of driving sales is assuring customers that you can actually deliver the goods ordered. So, both manufacturers will expand production faster than necessary to just meet demand. In addition, during that first 18 months, it will be clear that the established manufacturers won't be able to meet demand. Outside entrepreneurs will see this as an opportunity to jump in to the expanding market, by starting rival buggywhip manufacturing operations.

The result is that some 18 months after the new law passes, worldwide buggywhip manufacturing capacity will greatly exceed demand. Inventories of unsold buggywhips will expand. Buggywhip prices will fall. Marginal buggywhip manufacturers will fail. Buggywhip production capacity will drop. By three years into the process, we'd be back to having inadequate production capacity to meet demand, and the whole thing would start over again.

Boom and bust cycles like that are not some aberration, or the result of faulty business strategies, or some market inefficiency that politicians can erase by passing laws, it's how things inevitably work. In fact, most complex systems, such as economies, consist of multiple such cycles that operate on multiple time scales. Basically, they're all chaotic systems, which is why long term charts of practically every economic indicator - from long-term jobs trends to prices for individual stocks - look like profiles of the Andes Mountains. They're all fractals, which is the pattern most often associated with chaotic systems.

Economic expansions, recessions, depressions, and recoveries are actually just business-cycle components. As any Taoist sage could tell you, whenever the economy is expanding, you know that a contraction is on its way. Similarly, a depression always presages a recovery. It's inevitable. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, when looked at from a longer perspective, just a particularly deep bottom of the overall business cycle. The huge expansion we experienced during the 1990s was, conversely, a particularly robust phase of the overall business cycle.

This latest contraction, which started about 2005, and will probably not completely play out until 2015, was another particularly nasty dip in the more or less regular cycle. It's as inevitable as the tide.

So, getting back to jobs data, and the usual panicky predictions of a so-called "jobless recovery," the reason employment data have not significantly improved is that it's just too early in the process for it to show up. Those who ask: "How can sales recover when employment is down?" simply don't understand how the business cycle works. Sales aren't driven by jobs, it's the other way around, with a significant time lag between.

Jobs are driven by production requirements. As any industrial engineer could tell you, production is driven by inventories, not by demand. Demand is an intangible that is very difficult to predict or measure. Inventory levels, on the other hand, are easily measured and better reflect a company's ability to sell the products it makes.

In the real business world, the first thing to recover after a recession is demand. It begins to recover when end users have had their belts cinched so tight for so long, that they have no choice but to by new stuff. Demand for food starts to rise, for example, when pantries start to look bare. It makes no difference whether the family bread-winner has a job or not, when there's nothing for dinner, somebody makes a run to the store. Even if you have to beg a cup of sugar from the neighbors, that sends the neighbors off to the store for more sugar, increasing the demand for sugar. Therein lies the disconnect between jobs and demand.

Demand seems to have hit bottom about six months ago. Since then, we've been working off inventory that built up at the start of the downturn, when production still exceeded demand. Next, production has to rise (pulled by further increases in demand) until it exceeds capacity at the present depressed employment levels. Only then will employment figures begin to rise.

Don't look for employment metrics to turn up until at least the end of the first quarter 2010. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that it's just too darn early.

Automation Industry Outlook Provides Holiday Cheer

2009-12-24T19:01:31Z

With the global economy generally in recovery mode, nearly half of respondents to a survey conducted by Control Engineering magazine in partnership with Morgan Stanley expect sales of industrial automation equipment to increase in 2010 Source: Control Engineering.

Over the next week or so, I hope to share with you results of studies pointing the directions we can expect technology trends likely will take next year, and in the decade ahead. The good news for Americans, and for many national economies around the world, is that the recovery is exactly on track. Yammering about "jobless recovery" and doubts over the U.S. economy's ability to expand until full employment returns simply demonstrate the commentators' ignorance of how economies work.

Garden variety depressions, which is what we've experienced over the past five years, take many years to play out. Calendar year 2008 saw the acute contraction phase, but things had been unraveling since late 2005. After a contraction, comes a bottoming, followed by an expansion phase.

Economic recoveries - that is the bottoming and expansion phases of a dip in economic activity - start with stock markets, which anticipate the turn around in general economic conditions by some months. The reason stock markets anticipate recoveries is that investment professionals, unlike media commentators, do understand economics, and recognize harbingers of business improvement long before the improvement happens. Just as meteorologists know that when days start getting longer, Spring is just a few months away, investors know that economic harbingers, such as inventory levels stabilizing at high levels, pre-announce changes in economic trends by several months, and stock prices rise as these investors put themselves in a position to capitalize on the new trend.

After stock prices hit bottom and begin to rise, we start seeing signs that the downward pressure on business activity begins to ease off. High inventory levels, for example, begin to drop. Productivity begins to rise as businesses streamline to cut costs. Later, these more efficient businesses begin reporting better than anticipated earnings on still-falling revenue. Still months later, revenues begin to rise as individuals and businesses can no longer put off purchases that have been delayed since the beginning of the downturn. More months later, employment figures, which conventional wisdom seems to think should lead the recovery despite the fact that it never happens, begin to recover as the productivity gains of a few months ago prove insufficient to meet the growing demand for goods and services. Finally, very late in the recovery, large capital investments, such as in real estate, reach their bottoms and start to recover.

At present, the U.S. economy, as well as that of most of the world, is recovering nicely. Trends in measures like corporate earnings are showing the correct patterns in the correct order and with the anticipated timing. Even the jobless numbers are tracking exactly as they're supposed to. Back at the end of 2008, when the depth of the dip became apparent, knowledgeable pundits were able to predict that the unemployment rate would reach just above 10%, which is just what it did, and begin to recover in late 2009, which it also has done.

By the way, don't listen to all that emotional drivel about some fictional "real" unemployment rate being something like 18% instead of the published 10% level. "The unemployment rate" is a real, clearly defined metric that we use to compare one time period with another. The "real unemployment rate" that Chicken-Little types yammer on about is poorly defined and very difficult to measure, so it's useless as an economic metric. It's only use is to give fear merchants something to shoot their mouths off about to their poorly educated audiences.

One extremely useful metric that can provide prescience about general industrial trends is expectations among industrial automation buyers and sellers about their purchases and sales (respectively) in the coming year.

To determine whether the market for industrial automation equipment was beginning to ascend from the depths of this latest downturn, or were destined to remain mired in the muck at the bottom of the pit for awhile longer, our friends at Control Engineering magazine in partnership with analysts at financial services leader Morgan Stanley surveyed participants in the industrial automation market. The reason to look especially at sentiment in this market is that factory automation is arguably the most important trend in industrial technology of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Early in the 20th Century, factory automation was generally non-existent. We (or more accurately, our ancestors) simply did not have the tools available to automate production facilities in any meaningful way.

By the middle of the 21st Century, on the other hand, we anticipate that factories will run essentially fully automatically. That is, there will be no production tasks that are not done by automated machinery. Humans will generally hold supervisory positions. There will be CEOs, managers, engineers, maintenance technicians, and such like, but the population of assembly line workers, for example, will drop to more or less nil.

So, unlike the situation a few decades ago, perhaps the best measure of industrial activity available at the start of the second decade of this century is the level of activity in the industrial automation sector. That is what the survey set out to study, and that is why it's the first thing we looking at as we peer into our crystal ball.

"I'm happy to report that the survey does, indeed, offer more than few rays of hope," wrote David Greenfield, Control Engineering's editorial director, when reporting the survey findings in his article entitled 2010 Global Automation Industry Outlook. "Overall, the findings appear to indicate that a bottom in the market has been reached, pricing is holding firm, and that customers remain loyal - all positive signs for global automation players."

Greenfield cited four key findings of the survey:

1. The automation market has already bottomed; modest growth will return in 2010;
2. There is no evidence of a price war in automation equipment;
3. There is limited differentiation between the spending outlooks for process versus discrete industries;
4. While highly cyclical, automation is a good business to invest in over the long term.

It is important to note that the second finding belies the fear that inflation might be a an immediate threat. Despite concerns over accommodative monetary policies around the world, this survey shows no sign of inflation's return in the immediate future. It's axiomatic that for inflation to appear, prices must rise. This survey of a significant sector of the economy shows no hint of rapidly rising prices.

Greenfield pointed out that the near-term trend in demand for automation equipment appears brighter than it did in early in 2009 because of the percentage of respondents expecting demand to increase, more budgets going up or staying level versus retreating, and increasing demand to replace aging equipment. In addition, pricing appears to be stabilizing in the near term. Few respondents expect to see prices fall, but neither are they expecting out-of-the-ordinary upward price moves by suppliers to help offset losses in the past year.

These results are exactly what we would expect at this stage of the present economic recovery. Pundits prophesying a double dip, an L-shaped recovery, or any similar pattern find no support for their views in this important economic indicator.

Healthcare Reform and the 95/5 Rule

2009-12-09T19:40:49Z

The dilemma with healthcare reform partly stems from our unwillingness to throw our neighbors to the wolves. Source: Selling Among Wolves.

The good news this week is the trend in healthcare reform. It looks like the U.S. Legislature is once again finding itself incapable of passing meaningful healthcare-reform legislation. If this trend continues, what we'll be left with sometime next year is legislation that makes just enough change to allow the President and Congress to claim a victory, but not enough to make any real difference. This is not surprising, since it's been the same story for every major effort taken up by the current crop of Senators and Representatives.

It's good news because it means the Federal Government will at least do no harm. Or, at least no harm that can't easily be undone in the future.

We actually can't fault Congress for failing in fact, even if they find a way to succeed in headlines. There's a basic flaw in our health care system that can't be fixed. It's actually a flaw in the philosophical underpinnings of our society: we are incapable of applying the 95/5 rule from systems engineering to many of our social problems. We're seeing it in healthcare simply because that's the part of our social infrastructure that has most obviously run into a brick wall.

The 95/5 rule, like many systems engineering principles, sounds precise and quantitative, but isn't. It belongs in the realm of fuzzy logic, which only a few academics, and practically nobody else, understands. Unfortunately, nearly all decisions human beings are asked to make must be made using fuzzy logic. Fortunately, the ability to do fuzzy-logic analysis accurately and at blinding speed is one of the human brain's greatest strengths. Even better, the recognition of both fuzzy logic's importance and humans' aptitude for it is growing rapidly.

The 95/5 rule is just one expression of the fuzzy proposition that, as progress is made in any cumulative effort, gains become ever more difficult to achieve. (To the fuzzy-logic mavens out there: I know I've not couched this proposition in any rigorous way, but to do so would require a lot of verbiage that only you and I would want to read. Everyone else would go away, and thus miss out on today's exciting episode.)

The rule is an extreme version of the more familiar 80/20 rule, which says that 80% of the effort must be expended to achieve the last 20% of the gain. Conversely, the first 20% of the effort generally achieves 80% of the gain. Stated more generally, and more accurately, the effort needed to make further gains increases roughly exponentially with the gains already made. More fuzzily: you reach a point of diminishing returns.

Use the 95/5 rule when you've already blown past the 80% level. The next stop, of course, is the 99/1 rule that says you'll need 99% of the already-expended effort to get the next 1% gain. We try not to go there.

How this applies to healthcare is the simple statement that the easy gains have already been made. The reason healthcare costs are rising so rapidly is that we are now trying to push healthcare well past the point of diminishing returns. The Quixotic goal is highlighted by Pres. Obama's stated goal of providing health insurance for every dang American regardless of their ability to walk through the woods without bumping into trees.

Basically, we're trying to keep medical progress moving along a linear track. Ergo, the cost is rising exponentially.

In a misguided attempt to "fix the problem," most of us have, instead, tried to fix the blame on a boogeyman: the health insurance system. The theory seems to be that, if we can come up with a clever enough formula for health insurance, the cost of healthcare will take care of itself. This seems to be the tack Congress is taking, and, thank God, it isn't working. The cost of healthcare is taking care of itself, alright; it's expanding to take over the Universe!

In future blog entries, I hope to take a look at why medical progress is hitting a wall, and why we're fundamentally unable to deal with the situation. By way of a preview:

Medical progress is hitting a wall because most of the medical conditions that killed off our ancestors have already been eradicated. That was the easy stuff - requiring only a half dozen millennia to complete. Now, all we have to do is the hard stuff.

Human society can't deal with the problem because our basic moral and ethical assumptions don't allow us to throw our fellow human beings to the wolves.

To be sure, I do not have an answer. Like almost everyone else on the planet, I'm not ready to walk up to another human being, whether a loved one or stranger, look them in the eye, and say: "You're too old/sick/feeble/whatever to live. Go die!"

I know a lot of people willing to consider it as a philosophical exercise, but not-a-one who could bring themselves to do it in fact. Well, except maybe some inmates of institutions for the criminally insane.

Therein lies our dilemma.

Getting Serious About Climate Change

2009-11-27T17:20:25Z

The 11 year solar magnetic cycle is associated with the natural waxing and waning of solar activity. On longer time scales, the sun has shown considerable variability, including the long Maunder Minimum when almost no sunspots were observed, the less severe Dalton Minimum, and increased sunspot activity during the last fifty years, known as the Modern Maximum. Source: Wikipedia. This figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde and is part of the Global Warming Art project.

During the 1970s, I conducted an (unpublished) meta-analysis of data Charles Greeley Abbot collected from various sources in the early 20th Century to look for cross correlations between his solar irradiance measurements, sunspot index measurements, and weather patterns in various cities. The meta-analysis showed a significant positive correlation between solar irradiance and sunspot data, and a partial correlation between them and the temperature data.

Abbot, like nearly all astronomers and astrophysicists of his time, firmly believed in a negative correlation between sunspot index and solar irradiance, rather than the positive one his data showed. He noted the partial correlation between sunspot index and temperatures, but his prejudice about the correlation between index and irradiance led him to reject the effect as spurious.

By the end of the 1980s, the positive correlation between solar irradiance variations and sunspot index variations had been confirmed by satellite measurements, overturning astrophysicists' previous view. This allowed partial explanation of historically observed climatic variations, specifically the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the latter half of the second millennium, by reduction of solar activity observed through anomalies in the sunspot index, specifically the Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton minima. This research strongly indicates that solar variability is also an important input to the climate system that is certainly not under human control.

Now, it is becoming clear that the climate system is highly complex, with multiple positive and negative feedback loops, as well as a large number of independent forcing inputs, only a few of which are under human control (see "Aerosols Cloud Climate Picture," Science News, v. 176, n. 11., pp. 5-6 for a brief synopsis). These are characteristics of a chaotic system

Paleontologists and geologists have pieced together a fairly complete, though not necessarily detailed, picture of Earth's climate over the 4.5 billion years of the planet's existence. This picture shows a chaotic climate capable of varying over a wide temperature range. On short time scales, weather patterns are now acknowledged to be chaotic, with a horizon of predictability on the order of a week.

Taken together, these bits of information lead one to the conclusion that Earth's climate exhibits chaotic behavior on all time scales. It is, basically, a chaotic system.

Now, let's look at efforts to control climate change. We are attempting to use a chaotic system (global politics) to harness a second chaotic system (social, economic, and technical institutions) to control a third chaotic system (Earth's climate), when not all the forcing variables (e.g., solar irradiance, geology) are in our hands, anyway.

This sounds like a fool's errand.

I suggest that we could much more effectively apply our energies to developing means to react to climate change that is inevitable, than to the fool's errand of trying to direct it. Climate change, in any direction, has both positive and negative affects. It would be far better to direct our efforts toward engineering social systems, laws, and technologies to take advantage of the positive effects, and ameliorate the negative effects.

Why Anyone Would Want to Map the Genome of a Pig

2009-11-04T22:22:21Z

In case you were waiting on tenterhooks, an international scientific team has decoded the DNA of the domestic pig. Source: Farm2Farm

Another one bites the dust! Today's issue of Scientific Computing Newswire broke the news that an international team of scientists has finally mapped the genome of the domestic pig. While thousands of fans of both genome mapping and domestic pigs have been waiting with 'bated (and some with baited) breath for this momentous breakthrough, some readers of this blog might greet this news with a resounding "Ho-hum."

Why would anyone have any interest in a map of Porky's genome, or, for that matter, that of any of the roughly two dozen mammalian species whose genomes have been mapped in addition to people?

There are actually a number of good reasons. The excuse given in the article for picking on the poor pig is that medical researchers use domestic pigs as analogs for humans when studying a number of diseases. "The pig is the ideal animal to look at lifestyle and health issues in the United States," said Larry Schook, a University of Illinois in Champaign biomedical science professor who led the DNA sequencing project. The Scientific Computing article says that scientists rely on pigs to study everything from obesity and heart disease to skin disorders.

Of course, the author also gave a nod to the mass-media H1N1 frenzy by speculating that it might help veterinarians come up with a vaccine to keep Porky from getting swine flu. You wouldn't want your favorite pig coming down with swine flu, now would you? It's bad enough that your parakeet died of avian flu, after your local river suffered a bout of west nile virus. These pandemics can be such a pain in the butt!

Anyway, the real reason we applaud mapping of Porky's genome is that the more we know about the genetic makeups of different species, the better we understand life science in general. Genomics has revolutionized a vast array of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology. Like all pure science endeavors, genomics provides insights that improve our understanding of issues far beyond what might be anticipated. Unlike many pure sciences, however, genomics results have often found immediate applications. Within months of cracking the human genetic code, for example, researchers had developed biochips capable of inexpensively screening for an array of genetic disorders.

So, while it's easy to make fun of mapping the domestic pig's genome, it really is research that we should applaud, and, more importantly, support unstintingly. Not only will your pet pig thank you, but future generations of humans, who achieve better health at lower cost will thank you as well.

Will 3-D TV be a Winning Technology?

2009-10-08T19:16:11Z

Stereoscopic imagery was of marginal value for photography in the 19th Century. Will it be of any more value for TV in the 21st? Source: Wikipedia.

Buried at the end of Section B (Marketplace) in today's issue of The Wall Street Journal was a one-sixth-page article (blown up to nearly a half page by an enormous photo of a pretty Japanese lady wearing the modern version of 3-D glasses) discussing the the hurdles 3-D television faces to becoming a commercial success. According to the article, television manufacturers in Korea and Japan (specifically, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Sony, and Panasonic) "... see 3-D as the next big technological breakthrough...." The article intimates that the technology's biggest hurdle is getting consumers to upgrade so soon after paying up for the transition to HDTV.

It fails to mention the possibility that the technology might turn out to be as useless for television as the proverbial enhanced mammary glands on a male Bos taurus.

True 3-D visual experience relies on solving the technical problem of presenting separate images to the viewer's left and right eyes. The two images must differ slightly to allow the viewer to subconciously solve the parallax problem locating the objects in the scene relative to the presumed camera position along the third spatial dimension (range).

An elegant technical solution became commercially available a couple of decades ago, when electron-microscope maker Cambridge Instrument Company introduced a scanning electron microscope (SEM) featuring a display system using circular polarization. Images for one eye were displayed using light with left-handed circular polarization while images for the other eye used right-handed circularly polarized light. The viewer wore glasses with circularly polarized lenses. The lenses on one side passed left-handed light, while the other passed right-handed light. Circular polarization has two advantages as a coding scheme:

polarization is, in general, color neutral, so full-color images can be displayed;
circular polarization is maintained during reflection and transmission of light, so the system is harder to accidentally spoof.

So, while the technical challenge is pretty much a thing of the past, there's a big issue with utility. You see, parallax is not the only way to signal range information. More importantly, parallax only works at short distances.

Because human eyes are necessarily spaced only a few inches apart (baseline). Other creatures may enhance parallax perception by mounting their eyes on stalks protruding from the sides of their heads, but humans obviously don't. This limited eye separation combines with the eye's finite angular resolution to restrict the effectiveness of parallax as a range cue to distances smaller than the order of 100 feet. In fact, other means of judging distance become more important at ranges beyond a few tens of feet.

Leonardo Da Vinci pointed out the importance of creating a 3D illusion by depicting distant objects as seen through an intervening mist. While he noticed the related illusion that objects appear magnified when seen through a fog, he missed (no pun intended) the explanation that the fog causes the brain to overestimate the distance to the object. It then solves the resulting cognitive dissonance by percieving a larger object located at the overestimated distance.

Walt Disney solved the problem of portraying distance on a flat screen in his 1942 film Bambi (not to be confused with Marv Newland's 1969 Bambi Meets Godzilla, which I couldn't resist linking to) by the simple expedient of introducing parallax while moving the assumed camera's point of view. He showed nearer objects moving more as the camera dollyed (moved along a track at right angles to the line of sight) than more distant objects.

Both solutions arise naturally in live-action video. These solutions become even more powerful when combined with the immersive experience of wide-screen HDTV.

So, adding parallax through circularly polarized stereoscopic projection gives a realistic 3D effect only for objects that are a few tens of feet from the camera. Anything farther away, and other range cues are far more important.

I haven't done the study, and I don't know if anyone else has, but it would be interesting to know what percentage of scenes in motion pictures or TV mainly include objects less than, say, 30 feet from the camera.

Widening the baseline to provide parallax for distant objects only makes them look like scale models. Source: Wikipedia

Photographers making images for the stereoscopic viewers popular in the late 19th Century were fond of creating cityscape views with points of view separated along a baseline many times that of human eyes. Nobody would percieve parallax when visiting the actual scene. All they really accomplished was to make the scene look like a miniature model, reduced in scale by a factor equal to the ratio of the camera baseline to the distance between the viewer's eyes!

Trying to enhance the stereo effect of video content by recording with an overly long baseline will have the same effect for TV. You'd make Jaws look like a 3 foot sand shark. The Grand Canyon would look like a drainage ditch.

In the final analysis, how much extra would you pay for 3D TV? How much would it enhance your enjoyment of sports, for example? If your sport is chess, it might do a lot. If your sport is, say, football, or baseball, or motor racing, or sail boating, on the other hand, not so much.

Whether 3D TV will be a commercial success in the long run has nothing to do with market-introduction timing, or whether folks have already gone through a recent upgrade to HDTV. It's about whether the marginal enhancement of their viewing experience is enough to make folks give a rotten dingo's kidney about it.

Ultrathin Flexible Batteries Power Disposable Electronics Revolution

2009-10-07T17:40:27Z

Printed carbon-zinc batteries are small, inexpensive, flexible, and disposable in an environmentally friendly way. Source: Blue Spark Technologies.

Truly successful technologies - those that achieve widespread commercial application - generally exhibit a number of characteristics. Chiefest among them is probably the ability to help humans do a lot of things that they would be doing anyway, but do them faster, cheaper, and more easily.

Automobiles, for example, did not make people peripatetic. People have been wandering around Earth's surface for hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of years. They've been doing it since long before the modern species homo sapiens developed. All the automobile did was up the cruising speed from around 2 mph to several tens of mph. Human behavior didn't change, they still like to go from A to B whenever they can come up with an excuse, the automobile achieved enormous commercial success by making it possible to do it faster, cheaper, and more easily. What pushed the automobile's success to the enormous dimensions it achieved was the fact that its advantages applied to almost everything people do, from enjoying an afternoon tryst to seeking out new worlds to conquer.

Ultrathin, flexible, disposable battery technology should have similar success. It seems like such a simple thing: use thick-film technology to manufacture carbon-zinc batteries on a flexible substrate. How hard can it be to manufacture a battery consisting of a handful of non-moving parts compared to the typical automobile's 3.7 kazillion moving parts? You make the things with a glorified ink-jet printer. What could be easier?

Well, it isn't all that easy to make the things thin enough, reliable enough, and consistent enough for commercial success. It's simple to imagine doing it. The Devil's in the details of doing it right. Only a few companies have managed it.

Blue Spark Technologies is one of them. In an article published in yesterday's Designfax online newsletter, Matt Ream, Blue Spark's marketing manager and an electronics engineer with 20 years of experience in high-tech electronics and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, reviews ultrathin battery technology and presents a cross section of applications.

He says that products using the company's technology rely on convergence of printed electronics and thin, flexible printed battery technologies. Printed electronics is the printing of electronic devices on common media, such as paper, plastic, or textiles, using traditional printing processes. Examples include programmable chips (ICs), RFID antennas and tags, printed displays, and thin, flexible batteries that provide a low-voltage power source. Ream goes on to report that industry analyst IDTechEx predicts that the market potential for printed electronics will grow to over $35 billion by 2018, while NanoMarkets predicts sales of thin film and printed batteries will grow to over $5 billion by 2015.

For product designers of low-voltage electronic products and systems, Ream says his company's 1.5-V printed carbon-zinc batteries offer multiple advantages over traditional button and coin cells, such as:

Eco-friendly, safe disposability, since they contain no lithium, mercury, or other toxic materials.
Small form factor, thin profile, and customizable shapes with a thickness range from about 430 to 700 microns (0.017 to 0.027 in.), and peak drain currents of at least 1 mA.
Lower production and integration costs because they are made using conventional printing processes, and can often be printed or mounted on the same substrate as other printed electronics.

Such batteries can be used in applications where integration of a conventional battery would be too complex and costly. Within limits, users can typically specify size and shape (linear and non-linear), overall voltage, storage capacity, and thickness -- all tailored to the application requirements.

In a CNBC interview, Gary Johnson, the company's CEO, and Michael Liard, RFID Practice Director for ABI Research, described the market potential for ultrathin disposable batteries. Basically, you can look forward to seeing the technology attached to, pasted on, or incorporated into all kinds of disposable items that you use every day. Actually, you won't know that you're seeing them. They'll sit there in the background making it possible to do faster, cheaper, and easier what you were going to do, anyway.

Electronic Signatures Go Legal

2009-09-30T15:04:48Z

John M. Facciola (left), United States Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issues the first digitally-signed judicial order.

Some years ago, the film Sneakers featured a voice-encoded door lock that required three keys for entry. First, the person desiring entrance swiped a magnetically encoded security card, and then said the phrase "My name is *****. My voice is my passport, verify me." The second key was the person's name substituted for the "*****." The third was biometric recognition of the person's voice as a match for a previously recorded voice associated with that name and key card.

It was very secure.

The main characters in the film had to go through all kinds of (improbable) shenanigans to duplicate all three keys so they could break in to retrieve the secret decoding device.

Very entertaining, but what has that to do with the impact of technology on society?

To find out, fast forward to 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration published 21 CFR Part 11 establishing criteria under which the agency would consider electronic records and signatures equivalent to paper records and hand written signatures. Twelve years later (1 June 2009), the FDA stopped accepting paper submissions for drug establishment registration and listing on the assumption that "moving from a paper-based format to an electronic system will improve the timeliness and accuracy of the submissions." Similar rules have been adopted by other U.S. government agencies.

You can see where this is going. As time goes on, more and more legal transactions will be sealed via electronic signatures rather than written signatures.

Most recently, John M. Facciola, United States Magistrate Judge, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued the first digitally-signed judicial order on 25 September 2009. This action is seen as transforming the manner in which orders are issued throughout the entire judicial system, according to a news release issued by the National Notary Association (NNA).

"The capability to digitally sign an order or other document should create in the people who receive it an assurance that the document was signed by the judge, and eliminate corrupt attempts to use forged, electronically created documents for improper ends," said Judge Facciola. "It is the next logical development in the transition by the court from paper to electronic filing that will keep the court's way of doing things consistent and contemporary with the actual practices of the society that the court serves," Judge Facciola added.

According to NNA, Judge Facciola received a digital certificate - an electronic identification credential used to sign electronic documents - after having his identification verified and authenticated by Elaine Wright, a District of Columbia Notary Public and Trusted Enrollment Agent. A Trusted Enrollment Agent (TEA) carefully verifies the identity of individuals applying to obtain a digital certificate prior to issuance. TEAs have been certified and background screened by the NNA.

"By utilizing a Trusted Enrollment Agent, parties relying on Judge Facciola's judicial orders can have confidence that his identity was verified for the digital certificate and that the orders were signed by the judge himself," said National Notary Association Chief Executive Officer, Larisa B. Gurnick.

Make the connection between a digital certificate and biometric identification, which is already standard practice in advanced security systems, and you see where this trend ultimately leads. Given time, we may all find that "My voice is my passport, verify me" is how we sign all of our legal records, which are increasingly becoming electronic.

The days when deals were struck with a promise and a handshake may be coming back. The difference being that the promise may be captured in an audio recording with the parties' voices constituting their legally binding signatures.

Cisco to Host Live TV Broadcast on Storage Networking Innovation

2009-09-28T20:18:17Z

Racks of Cisco Unified Computing Systems gear supporting 23 different labs at VMworld. Source: Cisco Systems

In previous blog postings, I've attempted to pique your interest in the rapid technological changes that are transforming the data centers that we all rely on. Very soon these changes will revolutionize how folks around the world will use the Internet and what they will be able to do with it.

You don't have to just take my word for it, though. Tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/29) Cisco Systems will host a live Internet TV broadcast and Q&A session to discuss its vision for Data Center 3.0 and how the company's core technologies and new solutions are mapping to its overall corporate business strategy. Best of all, you don't have to be anyone special to attend. The session will be distributed free to all. No registration required. Just visit the event URL at 10:00 a.m. PDT and select "Play" to launch the live presentation.

Presenters will include:

Rajiv Ramaswami, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group, will discuss how storage networking technology is evolving, including a glimpse at Cisco's future technology for storage networking innovation.

Ed Chapman, vice president of product management, Server Access and Virtualization Group, Cisco, will discuss how IT organizations are evolving their data centers with new protocols such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to reduce operating costs and simplify management. The presentation will include a glimpse at new technology being developed for unifying SAN and LAN networks in the data center.

Derek Masseth, Senior Director for Infrastructure Services at the University of Arizona, will describe how the university recently united its data center networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet to create a unified fabric. Masseth will explain the reasons for choosing this technology and the upgrade process, as well as benefits and cost reductions achieved.

The event will air Tuesday, September 29, 2009, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PDT. Attendees who experience difficulties connecting can contact support at (866) 614-0208 or (617) 778-9652. Phone support is available 30 minutes prior to and after the event, as well as during the videocast. Attendees may also submit an Online Support Request to CiscoTV_help@external.cisco.com or ciscotv_help@btci.com if necessary.

One-Day Conference to Explore Comparative Effectiveness Analysis and Health Care Reform

2009-09-14T19:41:08Z

Speakers to describe experiences of overseas healthcare systems.

"The primary purpose of comparative effectiveness research is to inform healthcare related decisions," according to Ted Buckley, Ph.D., Director of Economic Policy at the Biotechnology Industry Organization. While definitions of comparative effectiveness analysis methodology differ (Buckley lists four examples in his white paper The Complexities of Comparative Effectiveness), they commonly include three elements:

Comparison of one treatment to one or more other treatments;
Treatments compared are not limited to medications only;
Both risks and benefits are included in the assessment .

Comparative effectiveness analysis potentially enters the debate over health-care reform as both content and method. Specifically, the role of comparative effectiveness as a method of choosing between clinical options may be institutionalized as part of the reforms mandated. Also, as a decision-making algorithm familiar in the medical profession, comparative effectiveness analysis could be applied to choosing between different reform proposals. Indeed, with suitably chosen effectiveness criteria, the methodology could be applied to essentially any decision in any field, from what to have for dinner to global economic policy.

On 1 October, the Center For Health Care Management & Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine plans to present a one-day conference entitled Comparative Effectiveness: Lessons From Abroad. Sponsored by Kaiser Permanente and the California HealthCare Foundation, the conference program includes talks by expert speakers from Britain, Canada, Germany, and the United States on key issues facing the nation on health care reform. Conference organizers hope to provide a unique venue for dialogue among private and public sector leaders that will help to determine what the U.S. can learn from other countries in using comparative effectiveness (CE) analysis to improve health care quality and efficiency.

The conference is aimed at:

Physicians and nurses in administrative positions, physicians in private, group or clinical practice;
Presidents, CEOs, trustees and senior management in provider and insurer organizations;
Senior executives in pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech and other health care organizations who define strategy and policy;
Employers who deal with the problem of ever-increasing health care costs while attempting to increase employee choice; and
Government officials who define and implement health policy.

For more information contact Margaret M. Wong, Associate Director of the Center for Health Care Management & Policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California Irvine by telephone at 949-824-8474, or by email at mwong@uci.edu.

Yes, Virginia, RF technology can help you wage war on your neighbor.

2009-09-08T17:44:20Z

Anything repeated ad nauseum is annoying, even Grace Slick's classic White Rabbit. Source: Wikipedia

This morning I received the following email query (sender's name withheld to protect the guilty):

"I know what I'm asking is probably against FCC regulations and all, but I have this really obnoxious old man neighbor who blasts sappy classical music all day long. I am wondering what it takes to broadcast white noise or even better John Denver easy listening hits, the twenty feet up to his radio."

First, recognize that the phrase "sappy classical music" is an oxymoron. The word "classical" means the music (or anything else it is applied to) has been time tested to be of superior quality. The word "sappy" implies that an objective test would determine it to be of inferior quality. You can't have it both ways.

On the other hand, anything repeated ad nauseam is annoying. For example, I just went through a period of having Grace Slick's White Rabbit running through my head - the whole thing, start-to-finish, in order, endlessly repeated.

It took two weeks (because I really, really like that piece) for the thing to become intolerable, but it did. In the end, I had trouble getting to sleep because of it, dreamed of it when I finally got to sleep, and woke up to it in the morning. I finally had to spend a night in a karaoke bar to get rid of it.

But the answer to your question is: yes, it is possible to overwhelm your neighbor's radio receiver (assuming he's using a radio, rather than playing recorded music). It's called "jamming" and, as you surmise, is highly illegal. The trick is to first determine the frequency he's listening to, the modulation method carrying the signal, and the radio signal's field strength at his antenna's location.

If the radio station uses amplitude modulation (unlikely) or frequency modulation (very likely), you can (but should not) interfere with that signal. If it's a digital broadcast you have a snowball's chance in the hot place of effectively jamming it, though. In any case, you have an approximately 100% chance of getting caught.

To do so, obtain a white-noise source by amplifying the thermal noise naturally generated by, say, a 1,000 ohm resistor until it has a useful amplitude (1-10 Volts). That will require a voltage amplifier with a gain of a few thousand. The John Denver idea would likely be less effective, but would be easier to accomplish - just use the output from your CD player.

Then, build (you cannot buy without having a broadcast station license, which you would not get) a radio transmitter that will broadcast at the radio station's frequency using the same modulation method the radio station uses. The transmitter must put out enough power to create an RF field at least 2X greater than that of the radio station at the receiver's antenna. Pipe the noise source into the transmitter's modulation input, and turn the thing on. Finally, wait for the knock on your door from the FCC's Spectrum Enforcement Division. It should take a day or so for the complaints (you'll also interfere with everyone else's radio in the neighborhood, as well as your own) to reach the FCC, and then about 20 minutes for them to trace the interference to your door.

You probably don't have the requisite skills to do the job. The easiest way to get them is to go back to college and get a degree in electrical engineering with a specialty in radio frequency design. At that point, you'll have a very lucrative career beckoning, and won't want to throw it away by antisocial behavior involving RF electronics. Instead, you'll take the best offer, make lots of money, and move to a very nice suburban home where your neighbors will be better behaved.

In the short run, it would be better to knock on the guy's door and ask him to either turn the music down, close his windows, or get some headphones. If that fails, or if you don't want to be confrontational, call the local police and ask them to do it for you. That, after all, is what you pay them for. Disturbing the peace is illegal, too.

Alternative Fuels Set to Dominate the World - Eventually

2009-09-04T21:50:16Z

Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical for motor vehicles and aircraft. Source: Glenn H. Curtiss Museum

With all the hoopla about electric vehicles and "carbon neutral" fuels lately, it brings up the question of why gasoline and diesel became the dominant fuel choices for mobile power plants in the first place. There, of course, have always been alternatives. Everything from coal to spermacetti oil have been tried in the past.

Two canards are worth disposing of right away: the inertia and conspiracy arguments.

The inertia argument goes something like this: "We use gasoline and diesel fuel for light trucks and passenger vehicles because that's what we've always used." This idea has appeal only to those who know nothing about early automobile development. From roughly 1890 through as late as 1920, enthusiastic inventors tried to use essentially every kind of engine and every available fuel to produce a commercially viable horseless carriage. The only ones that proved technically and commercially viable were powered by gasoline or diesel fuel. Everything else flopped for one reason or another, and most alternative fuel vehicles flopped for technical reasons related to their engines.

The conspiracy argument (Isn't there always a conspiracy theory?) holds that big oil companies, like Standard Oil, persued nefarious means to sabotage development of any vehicles that ran on anything but the gasoline and diesel fuel they supplied. While corporate leaders in the early 20th Century would gleefully have engaged in such behavior, they just weren't up to it. First, their companies didn't carry that much clout until the boom in automobile transportation - powered by gasoline and diesel engines - grew them into the giants we recall. Second, no amount of chicanery can make a winner out of a clearly technically inferior solution.

That's an important point to keep in mind.

The reasons gasoline and diesel became dominant fuels are simple and technical: power, weight, and storage/handling.

As students of aviation development know quite well, the Otto-cycle piston engine powered by gasoline has an enormous power-to-weight advantage over every other engine type in the sub-500 HP range, with diesel engines running a close second. The only engine type that beats them today is the Brayton-cycle turbine engine. (No, not the "turbocharged" or "turbo" engine, which is really a hotted up piston engine!) Technical issues involving manufacturing make turbine engines smaller than about 500 HP hard to justify, and 500 HP is rediculous overkill for a passenger car or light truck.

Airplanes proved impossible until Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical. The same power/weight advantages make these engines technically superior for passenger cars and light trucks as well. (Note that Curtiss started out making engines for racing motorcycles and only later adapted them to aircraft.)

Storage and handling make gasoline and diesel fuels technically superior as well. They are both non-volatile liquids, meaning that if you pour them out into an open container, they'll hang around for a useful length of time. Though gasoline will evaporate on the time scale of minutes to hours (depending on the container's geometry), that's long enough to run it through an engine and extract the energy locked inside. Diesel will hang around even longer.

Methane, propane, butane, and the mixture commonly known as natural gas must be kept pressurized or they'll have an instant escape. The same, by the way, goes for hydrogen, which has a host of additional issues. Gasoline and diesel fuel's low volatility makes designing, building, and maintaining in-vehicle fuel storage systems relatively cheap and easy. The skills involved are those of any Medieval Gypsy tinker, not those of a modern refrigeration specialist.

Another storage advantage gasoline and diesel fuel have is the amount of energy packed into every gram of mass and liter of volume. Ten gallons of gasoline, which weighs a mere 60 lb, is enough to push a four-passenger car weighing over a ton a couple of hundred miles without stopping.

This, of course, is the Achilles' heel of electric vehicles. While electricity, being pure energy, takes up no space and has no weight, the equipment needed to safely contain the stuff in quantities practical for motor transportation very definitely takes up large quantities of space and has enormous weight.

"But," you say, "those arguments hold quite well for that darling of the alternative fuels community, alcohol."

What messed up the works for alcohol at the dawn of the 20th Century, and haunts it still today, is the fact that the stuff doesn't occur naturally. Until humans figured out how to harness the sugar-munching-and-alcohol-pooping potential of microbes, alcohol simply did not exist in useful quantities. Fossil oil, on the other hand, occurs in oceanic quantities just below the surface of the Earth's crust. Not only is it laying around practically everywhere, but it's just dying to get out. One of the biggest technical problems for those whose life's work is to get the stuff out of the ground and into your tank is keeping it from spraying out all over the place before they have a chance to capture it in a pipe.

True, the stuff that comes out of the ground won't burn in your engine without some refining. That process, however, mainly involves heating it until the oversize molecules jiggle apart into smaller units, which are easy to separate and grade into various useful fractions - which include gasoline and fuel oil.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is a whole lot more expensive to produce. It is so expensive that nobody has found a way make it economically feasible for motor fuel. The same goes for other alternative fuels. The folks who advocate hydrogen for use as a fuel, for example, have to deal with this disadvantage as well.

Basically, we've disposed of pretty much all alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles. What makes the alternatives unable to compete with them are the same things that made our ancestors choose them in the first place. They're simply the best choice by far among many alternatives.

No matter how committed the Obama Administration is, and how politically charged the debate about climate change becomes, alternative fuels just won't displace gasoline and diesel as motor fuels as long as the latter is readily available. It's like King Canute commanding the tide to stay out. All he accomplished was getting his feet wet.

Yes, alternatives will win out eventually, but not until we use up the available fossil fuels. And that will take many decades, yet.