JamesSlusher.com

Via kos, this story hits all my little buttons.

It’s the story of Johnathan Goodwin, a 37 year old cat from the Great State of Kansas, who is making biofuel cars that stomp the living daylights out of the dinosaur-powered stuff out there today.

He makes Hummers (and other monstrous vehicles) that get better gas fuel mileage than my hybrid does and put out about 600 horsepower. Here’s a money quote:

Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!

That totally rocks. And I want one.

He made an Impala that runs on biofuel that kicked the mess out of a Lamborghini. Yes, you read that correctly. Lamborghini. Just watch it.

Okay, I want one of those, too.

I have become very, very serious about recycling lately. It is quite sad, and somewhat embarrassing, that though I’ve bragged many times on the North Augusta recycling program, I’ve never actually participated in it.

Until recently, that is.

I just woke up one day and decided that what I was doing was shameful. They give you the recycling bags for free. You don’t have to separate anything but big cardboard boxes. Everything else goes into the bags. There was no reasonable excuse not to participate.

They include in each roll of bags a list of all the things they want you to put into them. It breaks down like this:

• Clear and brown glass
• Aluminum and steel cans
• Newspapers and magazines
• Any plastic bottles with #1 or #2 on the bottom
• Pasteboard (cereal boxes, 12 pack drink boxes, etc)

Okay, well that makes up about 1/2 of everything we had been tossing. Half. HALF.

Good god, what have I been doing? I apologize to my kids and all future generations for all the waste I have so cavalierly generated. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Ever.

You should think about it, too. How many soda cans do you toss? How many cereal boxes, 12 pack boxes, bottles, etc? How many opened green bean (pork and beans, corn, whatever) do you throw away? I’ve thrown away way too many. And I’m not doing it anymore. I hope you will join me.

This earth is the only one we’ve got. Take care of it. And if you are wondering, there are alot of other things you can do, too.

Minutes ago I saw this headline on Yahoo News and then on Wired News:
S.C. hopes to lead hydrogen economy.

I am so thankful that South Carolina is determined to lead in a tech field. I would like to see South Carolina become determined to lead in every tech field. And lead in tech education, too. That would be the way to take the state forward.

This is what junk science looks like. It’s been more than a dozen years since I took any test design classes or did any tests of statistical significance, but I’m going out on a very short limb here and saying that this is garbage.

They took a sample of 29 women aged 18-20 and have generalized their finding to “women”. That’s an incredibly small, homogenous sample to be making those kind of sweeping generalizations. I might even accept 200 women aged 18-30. Maybe. I’d have to run some numbers to know for sure if it is significant or not.

And I especially love this quote:

While Maestripieri guessed it might have something to do with “a more rounded face, a gentler face,” Roney said the answer might be found in the expressions on the men’s faces.

This is where it really turns to bovine excrement. Let’s take a dubiously constructed set of data and extrapolate out grossly general conclusions.

Now those answers are qualified with “guessed” and “might” but it is still irresponsible for a serious scientist to wildly speculate. I would like to take this moment to remind these “scientists” that if you didn’t specifically measure it with a significant sample of data, there are no conclusions to be reached. Period.

Goofballs.

I have long been an advocate of non-fossil fuels. I think that diminishing and/or eliminating our dependency on oil will be good for everyone, everywhere. A group of kids in Philedelphia built a bio-diesel car on their own. And these weren’t the star students, either. A couple of quotes from the article:

“We made this work,” says Hauger. “We’re not geniuses. So why aren’t they doing it?”

and the money quote:

Kosi thinks he knows why. The answer, he says, is the big oil companies.

“They’re making billions upon billions of dollars,” he says. “And when this car sells, that’ll go down — to low billions upon billions.”

Those kids are smarter than people are giving them credit for.

Wired News has an article about scientists trying to get commercial amounts of hydrogen from algae. I find it fascinating. I think that sort of thing is the way to go. Fuel from renewable resources.

Considering that the way insulin is produced is very similiar, I’m all for this sort of thing.