Is coal to fuel cars too good to be true?

Interesting article. It currently takes 1,000 megawatts(!) of energy to produce 160 gallons of fuel. A process that's been refined for almost as long as we've been driving cars that converts coal into liquid fuel produces the same amount of gas but requires 350 megawatts.

Great savings, neh?

Neh.

It does nothing to reduce greenhouse gasses and doubles the amount of CO2 being released.

So, lower fuel prices for the cost of more CO2? Doesn't seem too good of a deal. But it could be a good bridging technology to keep cars on the road while other fuel/automobile technologies come to market. I wonder if they could make an improved catalytic converter-like device that could be a move effective CO2 scrubber, but then you get problems with the Sontarans (if you're a Doctor Who follower).

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/coaltoliquids.html

FAA: "You can't handle the truth!"

Every day I eat my breakfast 200 yards from a pelican who'd like nothing better than to put its beak through my brain!


Sorry, been a little ill of late and my brain is always weird. And when you're weird, who better to channel than Jack?!


Anyway, after that flight went down in NYC from birds taking out its engines, the FAA said it was going to release bird strike data. Now they're saying they won't. They say: ""The complexity of the information warrants care with its interpretation; releasing this information without benefit of proper analysis would not only produce an inaccurate perception of the individual airports and airlines but also inaccurate and inappropriate comparisons between airports/airlines," the FAA wrote March 19 in the Federal Register."

Well, I have to agree with them, at least partially. It would be easy for a layperson to misinterpret the data and draw some pretty stupid conclusions. But there's also an awful lot of aviation engineers and wildlife management specialists who would love to see these data sets who would otherwise absolutely love to see this data.

But here's the scary part: "The number of strikes annually reported more than quadrupled from 1,759 in 1990 to a record 7,666 in 2007."

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/faa-says-public.html

A slightly involved story, but I think it has a good punch line

(and our KFC now has its own WiFi!)

A kerfuffle arose recently over the refund policy on the iTunes store for people who write programs for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Developers get 70% of the sale price, Apple keeps 30%. If you carefully or creatively misread the contract, it looks like, in the event that someone returns an app, Apple charges the developer 100% of the app price, thus raising the concept that a concentrated effort could result in huge charges against small developers.

If the contract is read further or if you actually talk to people who sell apps in the iTunes store, it immediately falls apart. Apple does a chargeback against the developer for the 70% that they received, the person returning the software gets 100% of what they paid, and Apple eats the credit card transaction fees.

So there's no real reason for a kerfuffle. But that didn't prevent lots of joyous rectal haberdashery on Slashdot, resulting in this truly brilliant post:

"After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science and openly sodomising iPhone developers in the city square of Palo Alto, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil(tm) as a corporate policy [today.com].

"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole."

"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my 'spreading good cheer' laugh. Really.""

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/28/0143249&art_pos=4