This afternoon on the shareandenjoy instance, someone pointed out this wired article, saying hybrids ain’t as fuel efficient as we think. In the ensuing conversation, biodiesel was brought up, and it occurred to me that I knew less about this than a variety of other energy alternatives, so I started looking into it.
Looks like the basic technology takes oil, as in vegetable oil or animal fat, and processes it with ethanol or methanol to produce something that has about 80-98% of the oomph of regular diesel. There are a number of obvious and inobvious advantages. When one area doesn’t have enough fuel, it can devote more of its land to farming the bio-diesel crops. Less with the international shipping of crude or refined oil. In the steady state, it recycles the CO2 that the engines produce back into more fuel. Bio-diesel releases far less polution than fossil diesel. The current infrastructure for diesel can be used for bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is already being mixed with diesel in some places, and working fine.
Diesel cars, like the the VW Golf, already exist.
I saw the uncensored nick berg video. Drives the event home rather clearly. I don’t think I’ll be watching it again. It makes me rather sad. I mean, granted, he was an idiot to be wandering around a warzone anti-american terrorist haven looking for work. But your life is a rather high penalty for idiocy. And he’s not the only one who’s been paying that price, sometimes with even less cause.
On the guardian website, I’ve run across the sort of thing I haven’t seen at all in my browsing of american websites, a review of Arab reaction to the killings.
I have an assload of books to sell. Many of them fantasy books. I went down to “The Other Change of Hobbit”, and chatted briefly with the proprietor. Turns out he reads this (Hi! =) journal. And that The Other Change of Hobbit (fantasy/scifi bookstore, some of the stock used, much of it new) may not be with us for much longer. Which is kinda sad, I rather like the spot. But I haven’t purchased much there. Cursed tight budget. =/ He also suggested a few bookstores in Minneapolis to check out.
And a few local used bookstores to try hawking my wares to. I’ll do that, also considering ebay/craigslist options. And for my rpg book collection, the endgame, if the proprietor would be interested. Almost all the books I intend to keep are packed into boxes. Going through and pitching stuff and selecting clothing to donate should be another big agenda item.
Finally, I managed to bruise myself on a trampoline. They look like tiny hickeys in a tight grid on my back. I have
RPG books
So, when I had a friend in high school decide he was throwing out all of his fantasy and RPG books because he decided he needed to get that out of his life, I offered to hold on to them for him in case he ever wanted them again. About a year ago he decided he did, and called me, and I let him know that they were still at my parent’s house, and since he was living in the same town, he could go pick them up. And he did.
I don’t think Jen will let me take all of your fiction books, but I can probably talk her into letting me store your extra RPG books. Plus, Minnesota isn’t so far from Chicago, so you could come visit them if you get lonely. If shipping them out here is prohibitive let me know and I will see what I can do to assist.
Re: RPG books
Thanks for the offer.
I’d already sold the books by the time I saw your comment. Well, a good number of them. I still have the better part of one boxful of them that I was already planning on shipping. Most of what I dumped was ad&d 2nd ed stuff that I never really liked. And the rest of it was largely stuff I never even read. For instance, I kept a copy of the priest’s handbook, because I liked it (I had two, don’t ask me why). There were a couple of things, most notably Feng Shui, that I’m a little sad to not have anymore, but nothing really worth the shipping.
I’ll probably be posting a complete listing of the books I’m seeking to shed sometime soon. Speak up if something catches your attention. =)
Speaking of Change of Hobbit, I found out like you the bad news but from a LJ comments exchange here
http://www.livejournal.com/users/calbruin/41885.html?thread=46749#t46749
Bitchy post redacted. It wasn’t really meant as a public thing anyway.
It looks like you’re trying to sprout wings!
Well, gymnastics is like trying to fly, and experiencing repeated graceful failures 😉
Hybrids are funny things. First off, most cars are susceptable to weather changes. Cars get the best mileage around 70F, usually. My old aspire got about 34 mpg in the late spring and early fall, and 28 mpg or so in the dead of winter. My civic hybrid showed a similar fluctuation. When I bought it in late october, I was routinely getting 40+ mpg, which dropped to the mid 30s in the winter.
They also take a while to learn how to drive. Things like riding the brake (but not too hard), accelerating hard to kick the electric assist in, then coasting, and keeping an eye on the current mpg indicator to get a feel for what works well and what doesn’t all take time to learn, since it’s pretty different from how we’re taught to drive.
When I’m driving highway, and averaging 70-80 miles per hour, my hybrid will only get 40ish mpg. However, driving to work on back roads in the morning, where I average around 40 miles per hour over a 30 mile trip, I get 50+ mpg. Hybrids are really tuned to perform best at 40-50 miles per hour over relatively flat terrain.
But regardless of what you actually get, hybrids will pretty much always get more miles per gallon than any other car you could be driving. That’s a win.
DiPietro says most drivers will get between 75 to 87 percent of the rated mileage, with individual variations based on driving habits and traffic route
That sounds about right.
However, my regular ford focus didn’t get its published mpg either.
The thing that embarrasses me are the rumors I keep hearing about the first-model-year geo metros getting anywhere between 45 and 62 mpg. (I don’t quite believe the 62, but at sufficiently high speeds, my cars performance should approach that of a geo metro, or at least of some tiny 3-cylinder-engine car)