Someone took my advice ... before I gave it.

Perhaps if I'd had the presence of mind to do a little more research before penning my post on what we need in cars, I'd have seen this example of a company thinking ahead:

We simply took a standard BMW Mini One, discarded the engine, the disc brakes, the wheels, and the gearbox. These components were replaced by four of our electric wheels, a lithium polymer battery, a large ultra capacitor, a very small ICE with generator (so small it almost fits alongside the spare wheel), an energy management system and a sexy in-car display module.

As you may remember my conception was that there should be one electric motor per wheel, no mechanical drivetrain, with power reservoir in the form of a battery. I did not consider the importance of supercapacitors in acting as a very short term rapid power sink and source.

Perhaps this is the time to mention a few things about the piston engine used in most cars and trucks. Its problem is that it isn't a very good machine for driving cars and trucks. That's why there are clutches and gearboxes, so that we can maintain driving conditions within the power band and not stray too near the 0 torque of 0 RPM. Furthermore, to provide the acceleration we desire they have to have a lot of power left in reserve, rarely used, and this makes them large and heavy. Electric motors have none of these drawbacks. They have plenty of torque from 0 RPM and can rev much faster than is usual for petrol engines. As such they can drive a car from stationary right up to a very reasonable top speed usually governed only by the rev limit. The only problem with them is that, obviously, the electricity has to come from somewhere. Trains and trams can receive power directly from the grid, but cars trucks and motorbikes will not be fettered by centralised power distribution. Therefore they must store electricity in some sort of battery or have on board electrical generation. Hydrogen fuel cell technology creates electrical power directly from the fuel, but it is also possible to use the old fashioned piston engine to generate power via a typical magnet and coil generator. Given the difficulty of storing hydrogen, and the expense of its componentry, and the fact that the petrol engine is here now and has the benefit of a hundred years of research and development and the monumental pile of research cash flow it has experienced due to the sheer number of cars produced, I believe it is the right tool for the job. Turbine engines would be more efficient in every way, but they are significantly more costly and given the expense already represented by the necessary electronics it seems to me that turbine powered consumer vehicles are perhaps beyond the reach of the average man.

The Mini mentioned in the story has a 250cc two-stroke engine, which seems odd since they're trying to prove that you can use this technology to save the environment and two-stroke engines have very dirty emissions. This does follow the principle, though, that you use a classical internal combustion engine to extend the range of an electric car, given that batteries do not yet provide the range of a petrol tank. I firmly believe that they never will. It will always take longer to recharge a battery than fill up a tank of petrol or diesel or, perhaps, one day hydrogen. We will never be able to store enough energy in them to consider pure battery power as an energy store for consumer vehicles, especially those that drive all the time, like trucks and vans. Some form of fuel will always be necessary; to think otherwise is silly. Removing and replacing batteries at some sort of battery swap station is also silly. That's going backward in techonological terms. When horses were all we had you had to change them when they were worn out, now they are talking of doing the same with batteries? How stupid. The average man will never go for it, so it will fail, no doubt in my mind about that.

So until the fuel cell becomes a cheap enough power source, we will be left with some sort of petrol- or diesel-electric system, and that is fine with me.

9/11 Conspiracy Theories

The Americans love a good conspiracy theory. It's been their major export for some decades now, so when the 9/11 attacks occurred the cynical could have placed safe bets on the emergence of a fresh series of conspiracy theories about the events of that terrible day. I'm not going to try to answer all the hair-brained stuff that's come to light from dark corners of the internet - that has been done much more comprehensively and expertly than I could do, but I do want to talk about some of the things the conspiracy theorists have right and wrong.

The origin of conspiracy
I think the conspiracy theories are very significantly influenced by the convenience that the attacks afforded the US government, particularly Dick Chainey. In all times of great tragedy there are those that abuse it for gains in power or status or money, or all of the above. Those that capitalise on the events for personal gain are perfect fodder for the conspiracy theorists' delusions - after all, the gains are great, so they had motive to cause these events. In the case of 9/11 the invasion of Iraq is particularly glaring. To this day I don't know the motivation for doing it. By comparison, invading Afghanistan was perfectly logical (Bin Laden was a Saudi) and a measured response (more than 8000 civilians dead and counting) to the 9/11 attacks. I can only assume that it was galling that in 1991 they couldn't actually invade and they wanted to make up for it, combined with a perceived need for the oil security. If so, it's just about the most expensive oil ever bought, since it has cost at least $3 trillion, which is short to write but it's a truly catastrophic amount of money, and if anything it's a gross underestimate since many fine young men have suffered severe and permanent physical and mental trauma, and of course a fair number have been killed in action.

Leaving aside the legitimacy and pointfullness of the war, though, it's a great "motive" for the 9/11 theorists to cite. Apparently the desire by some to go to war was so extreme that they would go to enormous lengths to make it happen, even orchestrating a terrorist attack. Here follows some conspiracy theories and my generalised rebuttal.

Controlled demolition
For me, this one pretty much takes the cake in terms of implausibility. The American government secretly wired a building in the middle of their greatest city with explosives? The explosives were not set off by the massive shock of a heavy jet hitting them and the resultant jet-fuel fireball? And they worked perfectly, just at the moment the towers were starting to fall?
and someone was watching, waiting for the perfect moment to set them off even though the buildings might easily have collapsed anyway? This gets a full 5/5 flying saucers. There are some outstanding facts that are hard to explain for the "conventional" school (i.e., the buildings came down because they were hit by heavy jets and exposed to extensive, raging fires) but 9/11 is a unique event, so there are bound to be some facts that are hard to understand. A mysterious fountain of sparks that looks suspiciously like thermite is one example. Unfortunately quite a few "experts" have gone on record as saying that it was controlled demolition. I'm all for academic freedom, but these guys are missing a trick: THE BUILDINGS WERE HIT BY HEAVY JETS. Stress concentration is one thing I see not mentioned by any structural or materials engineer who goes for the controlled demolition theory. When combined with fire, it's obvious to me why these buildings failed while no other steel structure has ever collapsed due to fire. A significant amount of the supporting structure had been wiped out asymmetrically. This would seem to cause a torque on the whole building around where the plane hit, and combined with the effect of heat lowering the yield stress of steel ... like I said, obvious.

Aircraft autopiloted into WTC
This is as daft possibly even dafter than the one above. The terrorists were in the cockpit. They had taken flying lessons. We have lots of documentary evidence for both of those facts. So why is it that someone would insist the planes were guided into the WTC by their autopilots which had been remote programmed? I'm not saying this is impossible, but on a scale of 1 to 5 UFOs it gets 4.5 for sheer brain shutdown.

United 93 was quickly removed/shot down by missile
This is one the conspiracy theorists have right. The wreckage from United 93 was removed very fast - at the moment of impact, in fact. By an enormous jet fuel fireball. The circumstances of its crash were unlike most aircraft crashes. Most aircraft crashes that happen on land are what you might call a severely botched landing. The pilots try to land or mitigate the crash so lose altitude slowly if possible and come in parallel to the ground. Tragically, the evident struggle in the cockpit of that plane caused the controls to be manipulated in such a way that the plane made a hard right bank - I'm guessing a rudder hard-over, which would be consistent with someone kicking indescriminately if they were struggling - and then went nose first into the ground. Such an impact is unusual in that there is a lot of force acting directly on the airframe, causing it to shatter into much smaller pieces than normal. The concomitant fireball would send these pieces right out of the park. The sheer number of witness accounts make this one a fairly watertight case so I give it 4.5 crop circles out of five.

In a sense all of these conspiracy theories are the same. It's always the government or "they" - forces within the government - that is doing it to its own people. And in a sense they have it right - all governments do terrible things to their own people, especially in this current age of unprecedented power over their people. But conspiracy theorists also miss the point. Airing conspiracies with house of cards levels of documentation is not going to convince people en masse - indeed, a lot of sites propound a whole swathe of conspiracy theories, some legitimate concerns, and others complete bunkum, and in doing this play into the hands of any forces that genuinley want to keep certain information out of public eye. The best place for a true conspiracy is among half a dosen fakes. That way no one with an ounce of common sense is going to believe any of it. In that way there is conspiracy hegemony: either you believe all the conspiracies (if you have taken leave of your senses) or you believe none. To give serious thought to any conspiracy automatically moves you in to the conspiracy camp and gives your word the same weight as someone who still believes in aliens, so few people would do it.

Conspiracy theorists' credibility problem derives from their ignorance of Ockham's razor and Hanlon's razor. Combine this with sources that themselves are not credible (some have reasonably scientific methods but also point to other conspiracy sites or known conspiracists) and cherry-picking of evidence, and you have total loss of credibility. The only difference between an investigative journalist and a conspiracist is that one is a lot more rigorous. In short, conspiracists suffer from insufficient skepticism and rigor. Until and unless they get their act together there's little chance that any genuinely concerning things they report will ever become known before it's too late to do anything about them.

The other major problem with all of these conspiracy theories is they fail to draw attention to the civil liberties that were considered basic human rights before the attacks but have since been eroded or destroyed. New powers were granted the government, just as new powers were granted Hitler during crises, and these powers were mostly used to repress ordinary citizens, although the rhetoric was about protecting the public from sleeper terrorists and the like.

I always cringed when Bush said something like, "They hate us for our freedoms." From day one I knew that couldn't possibly be true. No one attacks someone else just because they have more liberty. The reasons for the attack are complicated no doubt, but they tend to boil down to a reaction to American imperialism. Speaking of liberty in this way debases it by making it a pretext for treading on the liberties of foreigners in the middle east and the people at home. Governments around the world have proved that Bush's retoric has a place: we the free people can say of most governments that, "They hate us for our freedoms."

Miss World

While I'm here, I'll just share a little something.



Yep, that's Miss Iceland and she won the pageant in 2006 I believe. This is actually just me playing with the coding. Just thought I would do it with some style.

Yeah, long absence

Yeah, long absence but now I'm back. Ever since exams finished twenty days ago I've been having various amounts of fun in various ways.

One of them is a little prgram called fractal explorer. It's very fun to zoom and zoom and zoom until the computer runs out of decimal places. This is made possible by the rather odd fact that some fractals, namely Julia sets and the Mandelbrot set, amongst others, have infinite complexity, so you can keep zooming and never run out of detail. However, the computer only keeps, oh, 16 decimals I think, so eventually things get blocky. Fractals are a world of colour and form though. Recommended

Big news here is the election. It's only a state election so it doesn't mean all that much, but we all like to do our bit. I'm doing my bit by actually working in a voting centre. It's situated in Millgrove, a little town outside Melbourne but it might as well be on the Moon. My task will be to guard the ballot boxes from the legions of terrorists, respectable politicians and nimrods waiting outside in the peaceful streets, who would like to mess with the results. My title is "Ballot Box Guard" or BBG, which in my language stands for "beastly, bottom-feeding Ger-man". Essentially I will have to sit there all day. I will, however, guard the ballots with my life - democracy is worth a few lives anyway, but I will be powerless to act in an effective manner if the voting centre is hit by nuclear, meteorite or air strike.

I have also been developing my musical talents. Not as an instrument, but as music reading. I had no idea what the little bs and #s were, so now I've found out what they are and how it all works. I'm still learning though.

It's over ...

Exams are finally over, have been over,m in fact, for a week. It's been a good week.

I've embarked on a sort of self education program, with no limiting factors or guidelines. I'm learning a bit about music (sheet music) and I found a website that has some basic Icelandic on in from which I'll learn all I can before buying a book. Needless to say trying to find an Icelandic language school here in Australia is like trying to find water on Mercury.

I've been playing computer games a little bit, but not much actually. Been keeping busy with other stuff. I'm entering all the tunes from our Psalm book into Noteworthy Composer so I can learn them and hear what the parts sound like etc.

Another thing I've been busy with is my university course structure. It's apparently going to be quite a big problem for me to have done an MTE unit instead of MSC, even though it's the same thing. I still don't know what the ultimate outcome will be but one possible future includes me having to do five subjects next semester, and that does nothing for my motivation to go back to uni.

A book I've recently read was on the biography of Richard Feynman. It was a superb read (Genius, by James Gleick), and had a few genuinely clever momnents of humour. So much so I feel like reading it again and writing them down. This is the book that's reinspired me to take education seriously. At the moment I'm reading Chaos, by the same author, which is a history on the origin of Chaos Theory. After/during that I'm also reading "The Biblical Basis for Modern Science" which is probably less dull than it sounds and has extreme relevance to me, even if its stance on creation is flawed.

Busy busy

Been a while now. Lots of stuff has happened. I sort of started to go out with a girl, but then ended it because I couldn't give the relationship the attention it required, and I was not as happy about it as I should have been. Oh well. Poor girl.
I have also given plasma once more, which was OK, except that it hurt a lot when they removed the needle. I hate the little wound that you get from giving blood, but I love doing it, so no way I'm stopping. Plus I have naturally high iron so it is healthier for me to give it than not. Plus it apparently acts as what has been termed a "low-level stressor" and as such increases lifespan. Other low-level stressors include jogging or other strenuous excercise, caloric restriction (otherwise known as a near-starvation diet) and getting sick. Hooray for the low-level stressors!

Boring boring boring

That's my life at this stage, at least to other people it must be. Nothing exciting happening. The Monash Philharmonic society are having their Spring Concert on Saturday and I want to go but I haven't bought any tickets yet. Need to find a nice girl to take. Today I'm at home bludging and getting some backlog done. I've recently started playing Dungeon Siege again, so that takes up a bit of time. I'm at 11 hours now, which is probably about half way. I've missed gaming action. Haven't really done any for a while.

The other thing is that my parents arrived on Saturday, not Friday, which means I completely wasted a trip to the airport. Oh well.

Latest

I can't help thinking that I'll use that particular title about fifty times in by blogging life, but hey.

Today I stayed home from uni. I had an assignment due and I overslept so I just decided to splurge. And I did too. Last night I was very tired - I almost couldn't stay awake at 9:30 - so I went to sleep then and woke up this morning at 10.

It is two hours until I leave for the airport to pick up Mum and Dad. I'm very happy about seeing them again, even though I haven't really missed them. So naturally I've spent the last few hours cleaning up the house.
I also got my Placebo CD in the mail today, so I've been listening to that.
Jeane's been around playing with her horse. The school has ostensibly hot holidays but she had to go in for two periods to get back in track with chemistry. I love Roger ...