www.intermod.org

We were headed to Mainz where all the Campbell/Conrad families were gathering. We drove with aunt Renate from Munich to Mainz on the A9 and A3 autobahns, passing through Nurnberg and Wurzberg. Chris got to drive Renate’s small Mercedes C180 hatchback once we cleared well out of Munich, but was limited to 160 KPH (100 MPH) because of the winter tires she had on the car (or so she claimed). Even at 100 MPH, faster cars were blowing by us — literally, our car would rock when passed by the fastest. The road was surprisingly free of the anticipated holiday traffic so it made for good driving.

We arrived in outside Mainz (Hechtsheim) to join up with the extended family (20 people, to expand to 30 by Christmas day) at the home of Aunt Gisela and Uncle Helmut, and also the new home down the street of cousin Andreas (Winny) and his wife Marianne. In the late afternoon we took the streetcar down into Mainz to go on a Sektkellerei (sparkling wine cellar) tour at the Kupferberg sekt factory. With commentary generously in English, the tour guide led our large family group down into the subterranean caverns lined with filth (that’s not filth, that’s useful fungus!) and filled with fermenting bottles. At the farthest reaches of the tour were some Roman caves over two millenia old. After the tour was a sekt tasting with five different glasses with varying degrees of flavor, dryness, sugar, etc. We learned much and enjoyed drinking with our friends more and more as the tasting wore on.

Our third and last day in the Munich area started with a car tour of Munich sights courtesy of Renate, ending at the Hofgarten and the Pfaelzer Weinprobierstube, right on Odeonsplatz across from the Feldherren memorial. More traditional Bavarian fare was shared among us for lunch (including a roasted dumpling dish), and then we did some more Christkindlmarkt spelunking. We went to one market that was a medieval-themed one –sort of like our cheesy Renaissance Fairs in the States, but, like, in the correct country and with actual antiquities in the surroundings. Some of the booths had animated puppets portraying traditional German fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Pope and the Snowman…

Then it was back to the car for a quick trip out to the huge Nymphenburg Palace and then on to a family gathering in the suburbs at Sabrina and Marcy’s home.

Sabrina and Marcy live on a huge plot of land in a ~100 year old farm house out on the rural edge of Munich. Sharon brought a toy for their dog Casey and Renate’s cat Sasha (Sasha originally belonged to Chris’s mom Monika’s, and was whisked away to live with Renate in Munich after Monika’s death in 2006). Sabrina said that we should bring the toy inside before nightfall or the “little foxes” would get it and take it to their dens. (We think she meant ferrets.) Sabrina also keeps several rescued degus. Lucky girl!

Sabrina prepared an amazing meal of roast duck, fish and shrimp, risotto and mashed potatoes with sauted truffles. Much champagne and beer was consumed. We were then delivered back to the Munich apartment for deep sleep.

Took a train an hour east to the Chiemsee / Chiemgau area, where we met up with Chris’s uncle Andreas to be escorted on a whirlwind tour of the area. After lunch with Andreas and his wife, Monika, we headed off. We passed through the tiny town of Mietenkam (where Chris had spent time as a teenager) and the slightly larger town of Grassau on our way into the Alps, on the hunt for snow. Andreas said we must have a “real winter” and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Alas, wherever we went we found just steady rain that had washed away any remaining snow, and so we headed deeper and deeper into the Alps. Reit im Winkl, Ruhpolding, past Salzburg and into the Austrian Alps … finally in Obertauern we got past (above?!) the rain and into heavy snow … three feet of it! We trudged through the ski town to a favorite restaurant of Andreas’s where we had a traditional fare — a soup with dumpling and meatball, and a pastry dish called Kaisersomething.

Then we headed back down out of the Alps and into Salzburg to explore the city there a bit. More Christkindlmarkts and impossibly old architecture, and finally we stumbled completely randomly on … a Krampus/Perchten parade! This is an ancient Alpine tradition that occurs around St. Nicholas day and is a way to punish bad children and ward off evil. Sharon had resigned herself to missing the Munich event, but there was one happening in Salzburg that we completely lucked into! Sharon took a zillion photos and is still beside herself! Exhausted and thrilled, Andreas then took us to get some gluhwein from a nearby restaurant that had been first established in 803 (not 1803, 803).

A quick drive back on the Autobahn in Andreas’s Phaeton and a short tour of Traunstein where Andreas’s electronics company, Municom, is based and we were back on the train to Munich and soon back in bed.

We had an uneventful 9 hour flight, which Chris passed watching Wanted (fun eye candy), Ghost Town (rom/com that was actually enjoyable) and Hancock (predictably dull Hollywood product) on the seatback video system. Sharon smartly slept so she could arrive at 8am as if nothing had happened.

After arriving in Munich and meeting up with Chris’s aunt Renate, we headed over to the apartment of cousin Connie and her boyfriend Holger for a nice German lunch (sausages, cold cuts, cheese, bread, champagne, beer) followed by some wandering around the cobble-stoned city. We went to some Christkindlmarkts and saw sights like the wildly baroque Asamkirche and the bleached white intricacy of the Theatinerkirche. It was cold and drizzling but we stayed warm with roasted chestnuts, and occasional gluhwein stops (hot spiced wine) — or better yet, feuerzangenbowle. We collapsed into bed early in the evening to catch up on missed sleep. Renate was kind enough to let us stay in her apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse area while we were in town and she spent the nights out at Sabrina (her other daughter) and Marcy’s home on the edge of Munich.

On Friday we depart for a trip to Germany and Paris.

We’ll fly direct to Munich, where we will spend 3 days with relatives exploring the city and the area. Then we all head up to Mainz where the entire extended family (~20 Germans and ~10 Americans) is gathering for a reunion over Christmas.

Then we spend a day in Annweiler, a small town that I spent a year in as a teenager.

Then we’ll take a series of trains to Paris, including a TGV bullet train, and begin 3 days of our patented whirlwind touring technique of that city for the first time. On Tuesday the 30th, we fly from Paris direct back to Atlanta.

I don’t know how much time we’ll have to post here, but we’ll try!

[Depending on how you reached this post, to see the next post you either just scroll up OR click on a link at the top of this page. The link to click on will be to the RIGHT of “Main” above — in this case it’s titled “Germany / Paris: Sat Dec 20th”. Click on that to see the next post …]

When my mother passed away two years ago, I had to take on the role of executor to handle her estate. Going through her finances, I was quickly struck by how much and how often she had been donating to charities. She was a hard working and successful health professional, but not wealthy by any means. Yet month after month, year after year, she donated regularly to causes that she cared about, and not modest sums either.

So, in 2007, I decided it was time for me to step up and start getting more serious about charitable giving. I’ve donated to various charities in the past, and I’ve given a lot of my time to various efforts, but with the success in my own career it really was time for me to get going with this. And so I embarked on a year of analyzing various organizations and spreading out the donations through the year.

After a year I’ve settled on the seven organizations below, most of which are tied to a general theme of helping the third world develop sustainable and free societies.

I’ve got these in a loose order — from most interesting to least. You’ve gotta check out the first few. They are exactly what I had in mind when I started looking for charities to give to.

KickStart is an organization that develops simple technologies to solve third world problems, and then gets those solutions into the field via novel method: they sell them at cost to local people who create profitable businesses around the technology. The most common product is a foot- or hip-powered water pump, but they’ve also designed and fielded a soil brick press and a cooking oil press. They’ve really thought this through, from laying out basic design criteria for new products to explaining why they sell instead of give away. A donation to KickStart is not a handout to the third world, it’s a step in building a functioning society.

Kiva is an organization that manages micro-loans. Micro-lending has been in the news a bit over the last few years — for one, Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Kiva’s online mechanisms allow you to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. You might be helping a garment worker buy a sewing machine so that she could work on her own, outside of the confinement — and abuse — of a sweatshop. You might be helping a farmer open and operate a produce stand. And after the loan is paid back (in about a year) you can then loan to someone else. Personally, I just donate to Kiva to support their internal operations, so you can do that if you don’t want to get involved in making loan decisions. They certainly have lots of compelling loan opportunities though!

The Union of Concerned Scientists is an organization that lobbies government, pressures corporations and educates consumers on various environmental issues. Junk science has really had the upper hand in the public sphere for a long time, it needs to stop, and I believe UCS will be instrumental in that turnaround.

The Planetary Society lobbies for space exploration, with an emphasis on unmanned probes like Cassini, the Mars Rovers, New Horizons, etc. I spend a lot of my personal time keeping up with this stuff (including via their radio show / podcast and via Emily Lakdawalla’s awesome blog) and continued funding for exploration is important to me.

Amnesty International lobbies for human rights, especially for that of political prisoners. Obviously they are very well known operation, but I believe strongly in what they do, so I donate to them even though they already have tons of funding.

Similarly, Doctors Without Borders is a well known charity, but they also mesh with my interest in improving third world conditions.

Engineers Without Borders is similar to DWB in that they go to third world locations and help build infrastructure. They mean well, but after one year of membership I’ve found them frankly to be rather disorganized. Which is itself is pretty funny, or sad, considering they are engineers. It seems to be a very young organization, and it appears that they are focused primarily on getting US students to work with US professionals on projects in the field. Certainly they don’t put out the glossy PR like all of the other orgs above do. But I can’t help it, I’ve got to give them a chance.

As this tax year winds down, please take a look at the above charities and consider becoming a member.

I don’t usually write about politics here. There are probably few things as tedious and banal as someone else’s political opinion. But I want to write down how I feel, if for no other reason so that I can come back later and think about how my opinions have changed.

So, with that caveat in place, here’s a few random thoughts:

I recently re-watched The Smartest Guys In The Room (more info including a preview), a documentary from a couple years ago about the Enron collapse and how the energy market got distorted by deregulation and manipulation. Within Enron there was complete corruption and utter contempt for public values; they rapidly liquidated the Californian treasury under the guise of deregulation, and fleeced their own employees out of $2 billion. (Note that this started under the Clinton administration, which plays to the old argument that both parties are bad for consumers and the middle class, but I think the last 8 years have clearly put the lie to that one.) One thing that’s remarkable about all this, and the recent crisis on Wall Street plays to this as well, is that it was only when wealthy investors and corporations started getting harmed that suddenly these became crises. Here in the state of Georgia we fought for legislation to stop predatory lending 5 years ago, and people were getting absolutely screwed 5 years ago, and those protections were quickly rolled back a year later at the behest of the financial industry. Now we’re awash in sub-prime loan defaults and suddenly it’s a big problem because the wealthy investor class is affected?

History will judge this Bush administration harshly, despite the partisans’ protests to the contrary. Even conservatives have been dismayed. I mentioned Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Nine in an earlier post about the Supreme Court and links to coverage. Here’s a passage where he describes Sandra Day O’Connors disgust with Bush, in the context of the political gaming that occured around the Terry Schiavo case in early 2005:

… To her, the Schiavo case marked only the latest outrage from the extremists who she believed had hijacked her beloved Republican Party. The hiring of John Ashcroft, the politicized response to the affirmative action case, the lawless approach to the war on terror, and the accelerating disaster of the war in Iraq all appalled O’Connor.

With the apparent collapse that the neocons have brought upon their party, it’s interesting to note a double standard. In 2002 and 2004, we had endless handwringing about whether the Democratic party was dead. Now we have the pendulum swinging the other way and yet nobody is claiming that the GOP is dead. So much for liberal media bias.

In the past few weeks, as the impact of the Palin pick has set in, it’s been quite entertaining to read columns by conservatives arguing that the GOP is a complete disaster and has abandoned whole chunks of the country. David Brooks calls them the party of the past and for the stupid. David Frum refers to the “rump”, the only part left after everyone else has left. Kathleen Parker skewers Palin. In that I see some hope that maybe we are starting to come out of the Dark Ages of the last 14 years, of playing to the base, use of wedge issues and splitting the country.

Speaking of wedge issues, Hillary on the ticket would have been a dream come true for Republicans. Nothing would have made them happier than to have her, because she’s a red meat motivator for their base, no question about it. And she would have continued the toxic tone of the last 14-16 years — a country rendered in two and campaigns that focus on what separates us instead of what unites us. Sure, negative campaigning works, but what’s the result?

Unfortunately we can look forward to another few months of speculation and positioning on whether Hillary will be in the Obama cabinet. I hope she won’t be. Obama needs to make a clean break with the politics of the past 16 years. There’s so many good people that he can get to serve with him, why play into the haters hands with a Hillary pick? Let her be a force in the Senate.

I still believe that the November 2004 election was this generation’s principal watershed event for our country. At the time I sincerely expected that there would be a 70/30 landslide rejection of Bush and his administration’s horrible policies, and I was completely wrong. The 2004 election legitimized the Bush presidency; the Bush cronies had spent the previous 4 years showing that “compassionate conservatism” of the 2000 campaign was a Big Lie and had been doing everything precisely against the interests of 95% of the electorate, and yet they still got voted back in. Two years later we at least got Congress out of their hands and the six years of bleeding stopped. But the precedent has been established: the electorate can be goaded into voting against their own interests. Objective truths no longer matter in a world of 24-7 news networks and endless talk radio opinionating. And this is why I really would not be surprised if McCain actually won after all of this.

John McCain is weak. By allowing the Bush/Cheney/Rove political hacks to take over his campaign and sully his reputation, he has shown that he would be dominated by his advisors just like Bush was. I’m tired of having a weak president who can’t think for himself and stand up for his own principles. John McCain was a decent, honest politician who has now allowed himself to be steered into the mud.

John McCain is reckless and would be a shaky hand, not a steady hand, on the tiller. He has chosen a chaotic management style for his campaign, and what we need right now is an administration that is focused and organized for the purpose of rebuilding this country as efficiently as the Cheney machine dismantled it.

I believe Obama will bring bipartisan compromise back to Washington (and end the neocon’s stranglehold on the dialogue), and that starts with running a campaign that doesn’t demonize the opposition, because they’re going to have to actually work with the opposition next year. The Obama campaign has not wallowed in Palin’s effort to ban books or belief that dinosaurs and human coexisted or the hypocrisy of her daughter pregnancy. They’ve stayed on the topic that she’s fundamentally unqualified for the job. And they’ve stayed on the topic that McCain is now just another tool of the Republican machine.

On a completely different subject, I believe that we’ve enjoyed an increasing sense of cultural unity over the last few years, especially in the art/music underground, because there’s been a common enemy in Bush. Those days will be behind us when Obama takes office, because the Left will be split, just like it was during the Clinton years. The sense of unity (unified against Bush and blatant corruption) will give way to infighting and handwringing and internecine politics as people disagree on Democratic policies; the old arguments of “the Dems and Repubs are two sides of the same coin” will rear their heads again, with little attention paid to shades of grey that do in fact differentiate the parties. I fell for it in the late 90’s and I won’t do it again. Republican politicians are not working in your or my interest; Democratic politicians are at least trying.

I spend a lot of time working with and using open source software. Open source is a powerful concept — it says that you can basically tinker with a software and make it work better for you. To me it means that, over the long term, the market will evolve better and better software, and that we all will benefit from that refined software. Open source is starting to take hold in the arena of voting machine technology, and it can’t happen fast enough. But I really hope that it will take root in the legislative process itself, specifically the concept of revision control. Did you know that the actual language of legislation, how particular clauses, is not tracked? Congressmen can simply slip in language via backroom maneuvering and then claim ignorance when their buddies get a windfall from the government or a loophole in the tax code. There’s a movement afoot to track the process of writing legislation the same way we track software code — with a source code management (SCM) process. SCM simply tells you what language was changed when. We don’t have that, and that’s a form of sunshine that we desperately need on our laws.

The GOP has been leveraging electronic voting machine technology to steal elections since 2002; Dems need to win by margins large enough to beat the cheat percentage, or expose the cheating in the process of losing. I’m not sure which will happen on Nov 4th, and I worry about the Bradley effect.

I believe that Obama is the best choice in this election, but that doesn’t mean I agree with everything he says. Telecom immunity? Lock em up. Detroit bailout? Let em fail. Offshore drilling? Don’t yield one more inch to the oil industry, they’ve got their decades of windfall profits and their time is now over. So don’t snark at ME every time you find something laughable in an Obama statement, or worse, want to pick on some position of the Democrats in general. The GOP’s failings completely dwarf any problems I have with Obama or the Democrats.

Money has completed corrupted our government, and frankly I had given up on that a long time ago. However I see a glimmer of hope in the fact that Obama has repudiated PAC and lobbyist money.

Assuming Obama wins, it’ll probably take about 3 weeks for the right to settle back into their comfortable position of sniping about how the Democrats controlling Washington have ruined everything. One can only hope that we can at least dig ourselves out of this mess (again) before they sweep back into office and start digging back down. This is why I hate the rhetoric of “change”, because it’s just going to boomerang back on them once they take office. I don’t want change, I want an end to corruption and a transparent government. I realize that an Obama administration may not deliver all those things to me, and I’m bound to disagree strongly with some of the things they decide to do, but at this point anything will be better than the Republicans.

Finally, I leave you with a graphic that I saw on the web somewhere over the summer. I made a few bumper stickers out of it; let me know if you want one. The point isn’t that Obama is not worth supporting, and it’s not just naked cynicism; the point is to recognize that no one candidate is perfect for any one person, and when your candidate makes a disappointing move, like supporting telecom immunity, you should step back and look at the bigger picture.

I am a Supreme Court junkie.

I lamented the retirement of Linda Greenhouse. I perk right up when I hear that a report from Nina Totenberg is coming up on NPR, and actually have an autographed picture of her. Wait, maybe it’s aging SCOTUS analyst hotties that I’m actually jonesing for! Every June I pore through the news looking for analyses of the crush of decisions that come out at the end of the term.

At its best, the SCOTUS represents the highest form of philosophical debate in this country and probably the world. At its worst, it reveals the role that politics plays in distorting moral decision making.

I’m in the middle of Jeffrey Toobin’s book on the Rehnquist court, a court that included an 11 year stretch without a change in the lineup. It takes the old conventional wisdom (Thomas is an isolated crank, Kennedy’s the swing vote, O’Connor is the pragmatic center, etc.) and goes much further, really fleshing out who these people are and how they think. Although he still does judge Thomas rather harshly, as a ghostly, underqualified and ultimately pitiful presence on the court. [update 12-Nov: Finished the book. Alito doesn’t fare well either, and from that you might draw some partisanship on the part of Toobin, but I think he’s balanced and he certainly shows affection for moderate conservatives like O’Connor. A great read!]

The 2008-2009 term started this week. Here are some useful resources:

www.scotusblog.com

www.scotuswiki.com

PBS NewsHour Supreme Court Watch

New York Times Supreme Court coverage

Dahlia Lithwick’s Supreme Court Dispatches at Slate

But for a down-and-dirty raw data view, the best is probably:

The Oyez Project — countless resources, but most amazing are their audio recordings, with synchronized transcripts, of the oral arguments. For example, here’s the oral arguments in Boumediene v. Bush from Dec 2007, the case that upheld habeus corpus. And here’s Neal Katyal’s argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Scalia wisecracks! Breyer maneuvering! Oh my!

2010.

Maybe as soon as Fall 2009.

Virtually every car maker is now talking about coming out with an electric vehicle, and soon. And I mean every one, including makes that haven’t had much of an enviro profile up to now — GM, Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, all making announcements recently. Now, certainly, a lot of this is just PR to catch the wave and attract bailout money (and more on three specific models below), but it does seem like 2010 will be a watershed year for electric vehicles. One could debate whether “2010” means “calendar year 2010” or “model year 2010”, but by late CY2010 I am certain that electric vehicles will be all over the news, and all over the dealer lots.

I last bought a new car in 2000, and I keep my cars for 10 years, so I’m due in 2010. Technically I’m due in early 2010, and frankly I can’t wait (ladies and gentlemen, if Consumer Reports’ repair database says that a make/model is unreliable, you better believe it). But I probably will be willing to wait until late 2010 if there are indications that the right model is coming.

I’m prone to obsessing about upcoming purchases, so I basically prohibited myself from really studying electric / hybrid cars until I was 2 years away from the next purchase. Which meant that starting last spring, I started keeping up with car news. There are a number of news feeds that I keep up with now:

• CalCars news
• Hybrid Cars
• The Truth About Cars

That last one is the most prolific, and the most bewildering. The Truth About Cars (TTAC) takes no prisoners in their treatment of the auto industry, especially the US industry, and it’s interesting to be able to read this insider info without the polish, or kow-towing, that you’d get in Car And Driver or The Detroit News. They’re quite opinionated over there at TTAC, to a fault, but in between the blowhard editorials by owner Robert Farago you have lots of juicy insider info, usually days or weeks before the mainstream press gets around to it (or doesn’t). There’s also Jalopnik and Autoblog, but I don’t have the time to figure out which one has the tone and coverage that best suits what I’m looking for. I’m already looking forward to the day when I buy the car and can stop keeping up with this firehose of data.

Electric Car Myths

Any discussion of electric vehicles has to start off debunking some myths.

Myth #1: With an electric car, you are just transferring the point of pollution.

Let’s take the worst case, an electric car powered 100% by the dirtiest coal power plant. In that case, it turns out that you will emit 70% LESS carbon dioxide for any given distance traveled. A large power plant is simply far more efficient than the little portable gas engine in your car. [source: http://www.evworld.com/evguide.cfm ]

And realistically you won’t be in the worst case most of the time — you’ll be drawing power from cleaner sources than the dirtiest coal. In the BEST case scenario you can charge using solar energy from your roof. That is just not even possible with a fossil-fuel solution. An EV turns “can’t” into “can”, as in “I CAN drive using clean energy if I want”.

Myth #2: Anemic performance

This myth has some legs to it. Batteries don’t have nearly the energy density of gasoline, so you’re starting with a disadvantage right away. Car makers shave every ounce they can from the car’s weight (thus improving the power/weight ratio and thus performance) anywhere they can, and that includes the drivetrain … and the battery! So you just have less energy to start with. But electric motors are inherently more efficient at converting energy to motion than internal combustion engines, and fast electric cars do exists (see Tesla and the NEDRA). This myth is rapidly being busted.

Further, you can actually argue that electric vehicles have better performance. Unlike internal combustion engines, electric motors have full torque even at their lowest speeds. In a series hybrid, the gas engine simply doesn’t ever directly interact with the driveshaft, but is instead used to power a generator. So you will always get that nice torquey response.

Myth #3: Poor range

Yup, a pure electric vehicle is going to have a lot less range than a regular car. Which is why hybrids are so popular. You still get the efficiency of an electric, but with a gas tank for the long rides. Most of my driving is 10 miles or less, so having the gas capability for the occasional long trip is fine.

My Own Desires

– I have to be able to plug it in to charge it. Period. I am not interested in hybrids that merely improve gas burning efficiency. I want the option of not using gas at all. Note that I’m not excluding gas/electric hybrids here; I just want to be able to plug it in and use the cheaper and more efficient energy from the grid.

– performance — I would never be happy with the geriatric wheezing of a Prius; I need a car that leaps off the line and can be thrown into corners; this will probably be the toughest criterion to meet.

– instant throttle response — electric cars have fundamentally different drivetrains than gas combustion engines. Regular gas-engine cars need multi-speed transmissions because of the gas engine’s limitations. Electric motors have wide RPM range and torque across that range, so it’s possible that there won’t be a transmission at all (like the Tesla) or it’ll have a CVT. It’ll be sad to give up my stick shift, but as long as I still have the instant throttle response, I’m happy.

– series hybrid only — no cheating, no letting the gas engine drive the wheels directly; gas engine should only generate electric power for the motors and hopefully some battery charging; also known as a “range-extended electric vehicle” (REEV).

Specific models

Chevy Volt

This is the one that’s getting a ton of attention in the press, and has lots of mindshare, and it’s all about politics. GM wants a bailout ($25B, $50B, $75B, oh my!) and they’ve rushed this electric hybrid into view as proof that they have a plan for the future. It’s a huge fraud, but they’ll likely get what they ask for, because it’s also election season, and there’s an awful lot of swing votes in the rust belt. [see note below about the timing of this post]

The Volt concept vehicle had everyone excited (personally I thought the sightlines from inside would be awful, worse than an Audi TT) but then GM got real and came out with … a dull econobox. Maybe in person it’ll look better, and maybe I’ll warm up to it, but right now I’m not enthusiastic. Plus it’s a GM, which is a huge black mark in my book.

In the Volt, a gas engine powers a generator which supplies electric power to the electric motor; this is a serial hybrid design instead of a parallel hybrid like the Prius, and that’s what I want. I want wheels driven by electric motor, period. The latest word is that the Volt’s gas engine / generator will indeed drive the electric motor but not charge the battery. That’s too bad but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker for me. However, all this rumor mongering does illuminate the fact that this is all vaporware.

Nice little review from ArsTechnica (Oct 2008)

Toyota Prius

I’m NOT talking about the models on the streets now, which are the 1st and 2nd generation models. The 3rd generation Prius will be a plug-in, and as of Aug 2008 the word is that Toyota bumped it up from a 2010 to a 2009 model, meaning it’ll be out earlier in 2009, and thus will be the first major PHEV to market. That’s going to steal a lot of thunder from GM’s Volt, and it’ll be a far more mature (read: reliable) solution than GM ever could pull off, so look forward to some serious GM propaganda whenever that Prius does come out.

Paul Niedermeyer of TTAC said this in Aug 2008 regarding Toyota’s plans for battery technology: “Toyota sees Li-ion as a step towards higher capacity (air) batteries. But they’re covering all the bases, keeping NiMh in production for low-cost hybrids, and Li-ion for the plug-ins. The real point here is that the cost effectiveness of Li-ion plug-ins is going to be terrible, unless gas more than doubles in a few years. Toyota feels that serious EV’s and plug-ins will require the new battery tech before they can really take off, unlike GM, Tesla and Fisker, who are banking all on Li-ion.”

I seriously doubt that Toyota can come out with a Prius that will appeal to me on performance and styling, but they’re the 800 pound gorilla in this market and can’t be ignored.

Tesla Roadster

Ah, Tesla. Nerds swoon over Tesla. It’s the ultimate geek fantasy car — all-electric, looks and drives like a Lotus, great brand name. For years now Tesla’s been running the PR machine, promising near-supercar performance and decent range in an electric car. But they’ve taken f-o-r-e-v-e-r to get to market, and as of right now they’ve delivered about 15 units yet burned through massive amounts of funding. Turns out that there are lots of nerds with lots of money who are so smitten by this thing that they’ll throw their investment cash at the company just to be associated with it. I’ll admit to idly fantasizing about spending $109,000 for one of these. Especially after reading glowing reports like this one.

Here’s a great Fortune article with a behind-the-scenes look at what happened within Tesla (Elon Musk vs Martin Eberhard, transmission troubles, etc.)

And keep an eye on TTAC for the latest inside scoop via their Tesla Death Watch.

A few comparisons

Comparison of Toyota Prius PHEV (3rd gen) and Chevy Volt:

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-great-hybrid-showdown-chevrolet-volt-vs-toyota-prius/

Comparison from Nov 2007:

http://www.diyelectriccar.com/blogs/2007/11/six-major-preproduction-electric-vehicles-compared.html

and commentary on the above from the Slashdot crowd at the time (some insightful, some not at all):

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=4&mode=nested&sid=367453

Other media coverage

And in the past month or so, PHEV coverage has really picked up in the mass media, to the point where I can’t keep up:

CBS’ 60 Minutes feature: “The Race For The Electric Car”

New York Times Magazine cover story on clean energy solutions driven by the private sector

CNN story on aftermarket plug-in conversions

EV-World comparison of PHEVs and series vs parallel hybrid discussion

Electrical infrastructure

Looking for somewhere to invest your money?

Think about what kind of impact large-scale adoption of EVs would have on our energy infrastructure. Currently we use petroleum (tankers, pipelines, trucks, gas tanks) to move that energy around.

If energy coming into this country via petroleum (joules) is to be replaced by electric power generated natively (sticky energy, as Andy Grove puts it), then there is going to need to be a massive upgrade in the power transmission infrastructure, and infrastructure that is already buckling. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 was ultimately traced to an Ohio company’s failure to do even basic maintenance on their transmission lines, and the failure of FERC to enforce standards. (By the way, California’s 2000/2001 blackout problem was due to market manipulation by Enron and the like, not lack of infrastructure. Blackouts in December? Come on.)

July 2008: General Motors is teaming up with 30 utilities in 37 states and with the Electric Power Research Institute to develop a charging infrastructure for electric cars: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9996348-54.html?hhTest=1

Ethanol and Hydrogen

Ethanol-based solutions are simply out of the question. Ethanol production is a wildly negative energy process, so if you’re using Ethanol you’re actually making the environmental situation worse. Sure, you’ve reduced dependence on foreign problem, but that’s only half the problem we’re trying to solve here.

So why do why have ethanol-based solutions? Here’s Bob Dole in 1996, as legislation was being crafted to support (read: fund via taxes) ethanol production and distribution:

“There are 21 farm states, and that’s 42 senators. Don’t waste any more of our time or your time telling us it’s a bad idea, because they’re going to do it.”

Fortunately, that was in 1996, it’s now 12 years later, and some common sense has seeped into the national brain and the bloom is off the ethanol rose. John McCain has stuck to his guns and remains against ethanol subsidies, which considering he’s flipped on just about everything else means that the ethanol lobby is weak. Thank God that’s over, at least in the horrible corn-based energy -negative form that we’ve seen it. Perhaps sustainable ethanol production will arrive and mature in the form of switchgrass or something, but for now it’s just nothing more than a talking point.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are interesting, but at this point they are still an academic exercise, for several reasons. One, there is no hydrogen distribution infrastructure in place, and two, high pressure tanks to hold enough H2 don’t exist. But even if those logistical problems got solved, the truth is that a fuel cell process is still one third as efficient as a purely electric process (for illustration, see these slides from Martin Eberhard: 1 2 3 4). And this even holds true for ethanol, diesel, etc. — if you’re set on using any form of flammable liquid, then use it to generate electricity and then power the car, since that’s twice as efficient as burning it directly in an IC engine (slide). Electric generators and motors are simply far too efficient to pass up.

Wrap up

In the last couple months this topic has received a lot of attention from the mainstream press, especially with the soaring gas prices and Detroit’s we-have-electrics-we’re-not-dinosaurs push for a bailout. But I’ve been mildly interested in this for over a decade, and seriously looking into since this spring.

So, there’s the state of the market as I see it in September 2008. This is just a snapshot in time, and some of what I’m saying above may be outdated by next week, not to mention next year. But by this time next year (2010 model year start) we should be seeing some new models actually appearing on the market, and I’ll start looking at things like battery warranties, driving performance, electric power costs, etc.

Moving to an electric vehicle changes “can’t” to “can”, and I’ve now decided to personally change “could” to “will”.

Hopefully by no later than the end of 2010. Mark my words!

[note: I’m publishing this in late November but backdating the post to September. I’ve been collecting info into this post for a year, and had this post pretty much ready to publish in Sept, but then didn’t actually do it. I have NOT been keeping up with the news on this front since Sept; in fact I’m aware of some developments that have taken place since then that modify the above slightly. Alas, all I have the time for right now is to just go ahead and publish this. Sometime next year I’ll come back around with a Part 2 update.]

Space Shuttle Atlantis is sitting on the pad and scheduled to launch on October 10th to the Hubble Space Telescope on a “servicing mission”. This will be the 5th and likely last servicing mission to Hubble, since the shuttle is due to be retired in 2010. As usual, NASA last week conducted their press briefings on this mission, 30 days prior to launch. The briefings included the usual information about the mission, the crew, the scheduled spacewalk work, etc.

In addition to those briefings typical for any shuttle flight, they conducted a “science briefing” to explain what the work of this servicing mission was going to do for the scientific capabilities of Hubble. The purpose of the mission is primarily to A) replace two instruments with new and improved models, and B) attempt repairs of two other instruments. The science briefing was primarily to explain what the new instruments were going to do for science.

In the briefing was an all-star cast of astronomical scientists: – Ed Weiler, NASA administrator – David Leckrone, Hubble senior scientist – Robert O’Connell, committee chair for one of the two new instruments – James Green, principal investigator for the other new instrument – Heidi Hammel, scientist representing users of Hubble

Each of them made a short speech and then the rest of the briefing was turned over to questions from the press. I would encourage anyone with even a fleeting interest in science or astronomy to take the time to download and watch the entire briefing, as it is truly fantastic stuff they’re talking about, and these guys do a great job of explaining it to regular people. Certainly science could use a bit of a pep talk after weathering the last 7 years of the Bush administration’s hostility to science and objective truths.

In particular, the last person on the dais, Dr. Hammel, give an impassioned 10-minutes speech on the impact of Hubble on science and indeed on culture. It’s an astonishing and beautiful statement on where we are in astronomical science and where we may be headed if this shuttle mission goes as planned. I’m surprised the press room didn’t erupt in applause when she finished.

Dr. Hammel’s speech starts at the 38:50 mark in the first half of the briefing that I’ve linked below. If you don’t have time to watch the entire 90-minute briefing, at least watch her 10 minutes.

download page for first half of briefing download page for second half of briefing

Update 13-May-2009: Sadly, I see that the above download links no longer work. I have not been able to find the briefing on Youtube, and the repeat briefings from a couple weeks ago did not include Dr. Hammel. FORTUNATELY, I did find most of Dr. Hammel’s speech incorporated into a nice 5 minute video right here. Please check it out!