But Then Again, Just Putting Gasoline In It Might Cost You More Then Having Bodywork Done Someday…
Today I just paid nearly seventy bucks for gasoline. And that was at the Costco gas station where the price is about 25 cents a gallon less then it is most other places. That amounted to just a tad under twenty-one gallons: About sixteen gallons for the car, and another five in the spare gas container I bring along so I don’t have to make the drive to Costco as often.
According to the owner’s manual, Traveler has a 17.43 gallon tank with a 2.11 gallon reserve (that probably works out to some nice round figure in metric…), and I’d run Traveler’s tank down to the last 1/8th. The fuel reserve warning came on around the 1/8th mark, but as I only had to put a bit less then 17 gallons in I’m not sure where they’re drawing the line at the reserve, unless there’s almost a half gallon of it that doesn’t get filled when the gas pump clicks off, which is possible. Anyway, figure since it’s a Mercedes when the gauge reads empty it probably means it.
The rising cost of gasoline is of course, why this all matters to me. The more gas I buy in one go at the Costco, the more I save because I have to figure in the gas I use getting there and back. It’s about eleven miles, so figure about four-tenths of a gallon spent, in order to buy gas at twenty-five cents a gallon less then the local stations charge. At 3.26 a gallon, which is what the Costco gas cost me, let’s say that’s a buck-thirty I spend going to and from Costco. I paid sixty-eight dollars for twenty-one gallons. Around here that would have been about 3.50. So my bill would have been 73.50. I saved five and a half dollars. Subtracting the buck-thirty it was only 4.20 I saved. But that’s another gallon and four-tenths if I use the local price per gallon. Or another way of looking at it, is I get about an extra forty miles. In a year’s worth of local driving, I reckon looking at an extra two-thousand miles roughly, but depending on all the slop in my figures it might be closer to fifteen-hundred. But I have to practically empty my tank before I refuel, to see that kind of savings. If I don’t do that, and I can’t always it just worked out that I could this time, I don’t see nearly that much savings. If I refuel at the half tank mark, the drive to Costco and back eats up the amount of money I saved buying it there.
I’m going to keep on doing this for a while, and watch the numbers, but you know…it might not be worth my doing this, even at twenty-five cents a gallon less.
The powerful winter storm system that swept across Central Europe this weekend nearly caused a massive air traffic disaster on Saturday in Hamburg. A Lufthansa jet struggled through 90 kilometer-per-hour (56 miles per hour) crosswinds on its approach into the Hamburg airport. After skidding dramatically across the runway in an aborted landing, the plane’s pilot opted to take off once again.
I’d have to say that was a good decision…
Video: SPIEGEL TV
Okay…when I go out to the Open Source Conference in Portland again this year…I am definitely driving. My brother wants to see my new car anyway…
Travel experts at the Gay & Lesbian Travel Pavilion at the world’s largest tourism fair have said the a new niche market for heterosexuals has emerged.
"Apart from gay and lesbian cruises, we have noticed a clear rise in hotels and resorts that are not only gay-friendly but targeted mainly towards gay men.
"Straight people are, in most cases, allowed to stay, too. The magic word is straight-friendly," said Robert Kastl, Managing Director of Publicom GmbH, the organisers of the Pavilion.
ITB Berlin, the world’s largest tourism fair, is being held in Berlin from March 5th to 9th.
He claims that destinations that have already established a gay-friendly image are increasingly putting their bets on explicitly gay and lesbian events, which are open to heterosexuals too.
"The range of special travel products has increased and even within the gay and lesbian travel market we are noticing more and more diverse sub-niches," says Kastl.
The reason I prefer to go to gay friendly places while on vacation is because it’s nice to be able to actually relax and let my hair down and enjoy myself and not have to worry that some asswipe is going to bash my skull in to prove how manly he is and/or much he loves god. But what I would really like is to be able to enjoy a mixed and diverse crowd of folks who all get along and just want to have a good time wherever we all happen to be.
You have to figure that a heterosexual who goes to a gay friendly resort goes knowing that they’re going to be in the company of gay people and will likely find themselves witnessing PDAs between same sex couples, if not being the recipient of a cruising glance or two themselves. If they’re the sort that doesn’t faze then far as I’m concerned I’d love to share a vacation space with them. Be really nice to, at least for a few brief vacation days, imagine you’re living in a world where being gay (and for that matter, the color of your skin, or the country you’re from or the specifics of your religion) is no more an issue then the color of your eyes or your hair. It’s hard to believe in that world if everyone around you is the same…even if that sameness is something you need to make you more comfortable. Especially if, actually.
Yet Another Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
As I write this it’s a sheet of ice out on my front porch and sidewalk, and street. We got some sleet that turned into freezing rain here in Baltimore city. And if the city got it for sure the suburbs did too. So when you hear them report that Maryland extended its polling hours this election day because of bad weather, they weren’t kidding.
I’d rather have three feet of snow then a eighth of an inch of ice. If it’s like this tomorrow morning I may have to take the day off. You can’t even walk to work when the streets and sidewalks are iced up.
So some guy is tinkering with magnetic motor design, when suddenly his magnets go flying everywhere around his workshop. He thereupon concludes that he’s invented a perpetual motion machine.
First…let’s review: The three laws of thermodynamics are:
The total energy of a closed system neither increases nor decreases.
The entropy of that system always increases.
The temperature of that system cannot ever reach absolute zero, because entropy cannot decrease.
That last one is a little tricky, but visualize it as, the heat has to go somewhere and it can’t go from a colder body to a hotter body.
It all began back in 1985, when Thane Heins, having studied electronics at Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec, started thinking about how magnets could be used to improve power generators.
…
Heins tinkered away, making what seemed like good progress, until one day in early 2006 he stumbled on to something strange. As part of a test, he had connected the driveshaft of an electric motor to a steel rotor with small round magnets lining its outer edges. The idea was that as the rotor spun, the magnets would pass by a wire coil placed just in front of them to generate electrical energy – in other words, it would operate like a simple generator.
The voltage was there, but to get current he had to attach an electrical load to the coil – like a light bulb – or simply overload it, which would cause it to slow down and eventually stop. Heins did the latter, but instead of stopping, the rotor started to rapidly accelerate.
"The magnets started flying off and hitting the wall, and I had to duck for cover," says Heins, surprised because he was using a weak motor. "It was like, holy crap, this is really scary."
…
Days later, Heins realized what had happened…
Uh, oh…
…The steel rotor and driveshaft had conducted the magnetic resistance away from the coil and back into the heart of the electric motor. Since such motors work on the principle of converting electrical energy into motion by creating rotating magnetic fields, he figured the Back EMF was boosting those fields, causing acceleration.
But how could this be? It would create a positive feedback loop. As the motor accelerated faster it would create a larger electromagnetic field on the generator coil, causing the motor to go faster, and so on and so on. Heins confirmed his theory by replacing part of the driveshaft with plastic pipe that wouldn’t conduct the magnetic field. There was no acceleration.
"What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy," he says.
Ummm, probably…not. At a guess, the current he was trying to overload the rotor with shorted back into the motor causing it to spin faster. The plastic pipe after all, could not conduct electricity either. But I’ll leave it to the engineers to explain some day, if this guy ever tries to sell his idea to investors. Look…the fact is that people have been trying to invent perpetual motion machines for millennia and the reason why they never work is because the very fabric of this universe just doesn’t function that way.
There’s another way of expressing the three laws:
You can’t win.
You can’t break even.
You can’t leave the game.
I’ve always found it more then a little amusing, that at the heart of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there is a perpetual motion machine. It’s really amazing how often the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps free-the-marketplace right tries to get its free lunch.
I’ll bet White Castle never thought of this. Supposedly you warm the can in boiling water and then just pop it open and eat. Here’s some snapshots posted over at Something Awful, taken by a guy in Germany who tried one out…
Note that they sell for a mere Euro 3.95, which currently works out to about $5.87 as I write this. Just the thing for your urban apocalypse survival kit. It comes with the usual mix of condiments apparently. But just in case the tiny little pickles aren’t to your liking, there’s always this…
Yes…what goes better with Cheeseburger-In-A-Can, then Pickle-In-A-Can!
Take that McDonalds. Looks like the U.S. is loosing the junk food war. Damn. And that was the one thing I thought the rest of the world could never do better then us.
…taken just a few moments ago while I strolled around the area by my hotel just before dawn. And brought to your computer through the magic of digital photography and the World Wide Web. Seriously…an old friend of mine called me on his cell phone late last night as he was driving south through Wilmington Deleware, and there I was chatting with him on my cell phone while I was strolling around U.S. Route 1 in Key Largo and you have to appreciate that we both grew up in an era when telephones had wires connecting to them to the wall and a long distance call to just the next state over was a lot of money, and there we were chatting to each other with little devices that just fit in our pockets, he in Wilmington and I in Key Largo. And we haven’t really lived all that long.
I’m taking a holiday break with my new car, and we’re driving south, hopefully to enjoy a warm beach somewhere before winter really sets in here in Baltimore. So posting will be lite and random, but may include some photos.
Enjoy your holidays. Have fun…eat recklessly…make the ones you love smile…
Via Slog… Geeze…if you want to see what the end of the world would look like…the island of “Gunkanjima” is probably the place to go…
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Wow. Check out the photos. Man…my cameras and I could have a grand old time there…
Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
Yes, yes…it looks like New England is getting clobbered right now. Yesterday NOAA was calling for freezing rain this morning here in Baltimore, but the freeze line had apparently moved north by late last night and right now we’re only getting our usual miserable cold wet drizzle. Good thing it’s not cold enough for snow though, or we’d be getting socked in too.
P.S.: I hear you had a very severe cold snap out there recently. Temperatures plummeted all the way down to…thirty-eight, was it? It must have been awful having to…you know…put on a jacket or something…
Somedays, it is my profoundest wish that the one true god turns out to be some refrigerator that washed ashore on some remote island in the pacific. And that nobody but the natives there, and there alone, worship.
Visualizing this made me smile. It gave me the warm fuzzies somehow. The creator of All That Is embodies one day as a refrigerator and washes ashore on some lost and out of the way island, where it’s venerated by the natives there…and by them alone. What a completely goofy…and yet evocative image that is…
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
After Mitt’s wee tirade on religion the other day I found myself presented with a torrent of LDS history crossing my screen, some of which I’d never heard of before. A hat? I’m sorry…a hat? And this man is bellyaching about secularism being an invented religion???
Anyway…reading the LDS story of Elohim and his spirit children who live on a planet circling the star Kolob, it crossed my mind that you can tell which religions were founded after the invention of the telescope because they always read like bad science-fiction novels (praise Xenu), whereas the ones founded before the telescope read like planet earth is at the center of the universe, with a somewhat ambiguous heaven floating above it.
I think at the moment that Huckabee has it cinched in the heartland, and if he doesn’t get the nomination the base is going to be very, very upset.
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