I like my cars with a hitch. I have a small utility trailer that I use to haul garbage, furniture, cinder blocks, firewood, and other stuff that I don’t want inside the car or that does not fit inside the car. Over the years I found the trailer-car combo much more efficient than owning a truck. However, it is not easy to find a place that will install a small Class I hitch to a car. “We don’t do cars” and “we don’t install hitches” is all you hear.

Well, I finally gave up and ordered a hitch for the Jetta from an etailer – eTrailer.com – and installed it myself. It cost me $150 for the parts and 2 hours last Sunday afternoon. Oh – and it gave me a great reason to buy a nice drill, because I had to drill 4 1/2-inch-holes into the body of the Jetta. The whole operation went well, and the hitch works great, now. And I also have a much better understanding of why no one wants to install these hitches.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pimentel, a long-standing critic of the energy efficiency and sustainability of biofuels, gave a lecture at Duke last Tuesday. I was not able to attend, but the biofuels community in the Triangle is abuzz with reactions to the event. Everyone I heard talk about it was rather under-whelmed. Pimentel came across as unconvincing and inconsistent.

Lyle from Piedmont Biofuels about Dr. Pimentel:

He was a rambling old man. The slides in his power point presentation were not consistent or powerful. He traveled through different energy measurements, sometimes metric, sometimes American, sometimes BTUs, sometimes kilocalories. And he provided a strange mixed up message that was virtually incomprehensible.
On the one hand he faulted over population for the earth’s demise, and he struck me as someone with a genuine interest in conservation. On the other hand, he offers nothing but coal as a fall back position for dwindling energy reserves.
“Burn it while we still can,” was a common refrain. Forget biodiesel. Make liquid fuels from coal. Shrug.
He offered a forty five minute lackidasical trip through a hundred numbers and measurements, none of which are supported by any other energy balance research. His numbers are at odds with Argonne National Laboratories, the National Renewable Energy Lab, the USDA, and the DOE.
He seemed alone on a whacko fringe, like someone who might enjoy an evening with the cold fusion folks, or perhaps the handful of global warming skeptics.
Energy Blog: Pimentel Tonight

Too bad that the work of this rambling old man produces headlines in the national news that reflect badly on alternative fuels.

Hunter of DKos is on fire – here’s a sample, read his entire rant in response to me right-wing whining about Tom Delay’s legal trouble:

Welcome to the world of the politics of personal destruction, you tubthumping, chin-jutting, Bush humping gits. Welcome to the nasty and partisan world that Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and a legion of insignificant lowest-rung toadies like yourselves nurtured into fruition daily with eager, grubby hands, and now look upon with dull-faced faux horror.

I know you hate me, and anyone else to dares disturb the thin strands of alternate reality in which George W. Bush is an intellectual giant, Saddam really was responsible for 9/11, the economy is getting better by the minute, and we capture the most very important members of al Qaeda on a weekly basis.

But here’s some advice. You’d better start hating me more. This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I’m beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the seeds and shat upon them.
Daily Kos: Bush Supporters of the Far Right: Cries from the Lake of Fire

Wow – Hunter says it all …

With his bare hands an Australian surfer fought off a shark that thought he was lunch – the BBC reports:

“He was just sitting on the board waiting for the next wave… and it just hit him from underneath and knocked him off, then actually just took his board and was dragging him and he had to pull his leg rope off to actually get away from it,” paramedic Dean George told local radio.

“It came back again so he pushed it away with his hand,” Mr George said.
Man fights off five-metre shark – BBC News, 26 September 2005
(emphasis mine)

Wow! A five-meter-shark (15 feet) with his bare hands!

Except that when you follow this story south, the story actually changes. The South African Independent reports:

Australians marvelled on Monday at the valour of a surfer who fought a four-metre Great White shark and survived with only a few gashes to his legs.

Josh Berris, 26, had his death-defying moment on Sunday at Kangaroo Island near Adelaide.
Surfer tells of birthday battle with shark, The Independent Online, South Africa – September 26 2005.
(emphasis mine)

OK – a four-meter-shark (12 feet) – that’s a really big shark!

Look at this story from Australia (where the incident happened):

The surfer, 26-year-old Josh Berris, suffered lacerations to both legs after being attacked at a renowned seal breeding area off the island about midday (CST) yesterday.

Mr Berris put a hand in the shark’s mouth to push it away during the attack, which happened while he was surfing with four friends near Cape du Couedic on the island’s south-western tip.

Two of his friends dragged an injured Mr Berris from the water and pulled him onto rocks at a cliffbase, before climbing up steep cliffs to make an emergency call from a nearby ranger station.

Mr Berris remained in stable condition in Adelaide’s Flinders Medical Centre today.

Witness Dave Dowie said the shark, more than two metres long, circled around its victim after the initial attack.
Surfer survives shark attack, News.com.au (AAP story) – 26-09-2005.
(emphasis mine)

OVER TWO METERS! More than 6 feet! That’s still a big shark. But it is funny how the shark grew as the story travelled North …

The Discovery Institute does not like all this fuss?! What are they worried about? Isn’t god on their side?

A twist in the case is that a leading proponent of intelligent design, the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, removed one of its staff members from the Dover school board’s witness list and opposed the board’s action from the start.

“We thought it was a bad idea because we oppose any effort to require students to learn about intelligent design because we feel that it politicizes what should be a scientific debate,” said John G. West, a senior fellow at the institute. However, Professor Behe, a fellow at the institute, is expected to be the board’s star witness.
In Evolution Suit, a Web of Faith, Law and Science – New York Times

Or maybe they are worried that they haven’t got their science story quite worked out. If Stephen Meyer’s paper on “Intelligent Design” is supposed to be their science story, ID is toast.

Das politische Frankenstein Monster starb sofort, als man die Zutaten ins Reagenzglas verzweifelter Machtpolitik zusammen mischte:

In dem Punkt waren sich die Spitzen von Grünen und Union einig: Nett sei es gewesen, dass man überhaupt einmal zusammen saß. Das war fast alles, was die Sondierungsrunde der drei Parteien heute als Ergebnis vorzuweisen hatte. Die Jamaika-Koalition ist passé – zumindest in dieser Legislaturperiode.
Sondierung: Union und Gr�ne beerdigen Schwampel – Politik – SPIEGEL ONLINE – Nachrichten

Ja – grosse Überraschung!

With creationism and “intelligent design” in the offensive across America, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial has the potential of becoming another Scopes Monkey Trial – the famous 1925 trial that allowed the state of Tennessee to keep anti-Darwinism statutes on the books. Only this time the roles are reversed. In Kitzmiller v. Dover parents and students, with the help of the ACLU, are fighting to keep creationism out of the science curriculum in Dover, PA.

Aided by the American Civil Liberties Union, 11 parents of Dover, Pa., schoolchildren have filed a federal lawsuit against that town’s school board, accusing it of violating the principle of separation of church and state. The school board requires that at the beginning of the 9th grade unit on evolution, teachers are supposed to read a statement to a biology class: “Because Darwin’s theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The theory is not a fact…Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.”

Science teachers balked and many Dover parents were angered as well. The plaintiffs are asking the court to void the intelligent-design policy in the class.
WSJ.com – Scopes, 2005: ‘Design’ Theory Faces Legal Test

Why not mention ID in biology? Because if creationism gets a foothold in the public schools, the religious right is going to demand that the astronomy teacher has to talk about how Galileo might be wrong and the pope might be right, after all, that the earth is the center of the universe. Then they are going to require that geography teachers teach the “scientific theory” that the earth is flat.

The middle ages never happened in America. The religious right is determined to change that.

During the years I lived in Stuttgart, I remember several occasions when construction workers found unexploded bombs from WWII. But this recent discovery of a piece of Nazi-era legacy is uniquely horrifying, and within an easy bike-ride from where I lived:

Remains believed to be from some 30 Jews forced into labour by the Nazis during World War Two have been found by construction workers at Stuttgart airport.

The skeletons were found on Monday near the entrance of a U.S. military airbase which borders the airport, the Stuttgart prosecutor’s office and the Baden-Württemberg bureau of investigation said in a joint statement.

Medical checks suggested the bodies were buried around 60 years ago and were possibly the remains of Jewish prisoners from the nearby Echterdingen labour camp who had starved to death in late 1944 and early 1945, the statement said
Reuters AlertNet – Mass WWII grave discovered at Stuttgart airport, Sept 21, 2005

I know the airport quite well, and I was vaguely aware that there had been a labor camp. To hear about this mass grave, though, is chilling. To my generation, the Holocaust is history. Important history, but history that belongs into books and museums. Human remains covered in dirt resurrects this history from its dusty pages and make it stare at you with hollow eyes and a tired, tortured grimace. No, we’ll never forget.

Remembering a tireless fighter for justice and human dignity:

Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi Hunter has died in Vienna at the age of 96, the Simon Wiesenthal Center announced today (September 20th).
“Simon Wiesenthal was the conscience of the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the International Human Rights NGO named in Mr. Wiesenthal’s honor, adding, “When the Holocaust ended in 1945 and the whole world went home to forget, he alone remained behind to remember. He did not forget. He became the permanent representative of the victims, determined to bring the perpetrators of the history’s greatest crime to justice. There was no press conference and no president or Prime Minister or world leader announced his appointment. He just took the job. It was a job no one else wanted.
SWC News Items – Simon Wiesenthal Center

More proof that saving the planet can be quite fun: the new Mercedes concept car “Bluetec Hybrid” is based on the new S-Class, and, as it is a diesel, it should run just fine on biodiesel.

A number of European automakers came to the hybrid party at the Frankfurt auto show, simultaneously arguing that diesel powertrains are a more efficient answer to fuel economy concerns.

DaimlerChrysler AG brought the two technologies together in a concept car called the Bluetec Hybrid. Claimed to be the cleanest diesel in the world, the “mild hybrid” S-Class-based concept marries a 3.5 liter V-6 diesel with an electric motor for stop-start use.

Mercedes says the Bluetec design is being tested in fleets and will meet stringent California emissions standards that have kept manufacturers from selling diesels in that state.

Diesel versus hybrid battle rages in Frankfurt – 09/16/05 – John McCormick / Autos Insider

In Europe a diesel/electric luxury car on biodiesel should work fine, but in the US this concept may cause some heads to implode.

Update: BlueTec is a technology used by Mercedes to reduce emissions of fossil-diesel engines. The German Mercedes-Benz website has a marketing piece on BlueTec. They inject ammonia into the hot exhaust to neutralize the carbon-oxides inside the catalytic converter. This should work with biodiesel, too.

Und jetzt? Der Deutsche Wähler hat ein klares, deutliches “Ähh – weiss ich nich!” ausgesprochen. Die Deutschen Politiker saufen Wahlsekt statt Realitätswasser und erklären sich rundherum zum Sieger. Frau Merkel knirsch mit den Zähnen (macht die eh immer) and erklät den Sieg, Herr Schröder grinst (macht der auch immer) obwohl Rot-Grün verloren hat.

Die Polit-genies haben sich während des Wahlkampfes so in die Ecke geredet, dass wenn die jetzt alle ihre “mit denen nie” Versprechen halten wollen, muss dann halt nochmal gewählt werden. Zunächt sehe ich nur Verlierer, kaum Gewinner:

• Rot-Grün ist abgewält
• Merkel’s CDU/CSU ist noch unpopulärer als Stoiber’s CDU/CSU!!
• Die FDP hat zwar alle neune gekegelt, aber auf Kosten der CDU und verliert wahrscheinlich die Regierungsbeteiligung, wenn es eine Elephantenhochzeit gibt
• Die Grünen stagnieren und, wie gesagt, Rot-Grün ist abgewählt
• Stoiber verliert sogar in Bayern an Popularität!
• Der Wähler/Fernsehzuschauer, weil sie sich dass ganze Geschwätz der Politiker und Kommentatoren anhören muss.

Gewinner?

• Schröder hat noch nicht ganz verloren: seine Taktik ging (fast) auf und er angelt nach einer Elephantenhochzeit, in der er für eine Weile Kanzler bleibt und in aller Ruhe zusieht wie sich die CDU selbst zerfleischt
• Die Linke hatten natürlich nichts zu verlieren, aber auch nichts wirklich zu gewinnen

Hier ist meine Lösung Deutschland wieder regierbar zu machen: die Mauer wieder aufbauen, aber nicht zwischen Ost und West, sondern zwischen Nord und Süd. Oder, sogar besser, der Anschluss Bayerns and Österreich.

O’zapft is! at the mother of all beer orgies, the oohmpah fest to end all oohmpah fests. With two mighty strokes the mayor of Munich drove the tap into the barrel of beer and handed the first beer to the Ministerpräsident (Governor) of the Free State of Bavaria. The natives went wild! Especially the Japanese, American and Australians in lederhosen, rearing to go native in pools of beer and piles of greasy haxen.

The Munich Wiesn – aka Oktoberfest – is open for business, and business they mean. Last year 5.9 million visitors drank 5.5 million liters (1.45 million gallons) of beer and ate 89 oxen. The beer price is up, again, at over 7 Euro ($ 8.50) per liter! The Wiesn supports 8000 full-time employees and another 4000 temps.

Now, allow me to get this straight: The Cincinnati Oktoberfest is not anywhere near the second-largest Oktoberfest in the world. At roughly 500.000 visitors they get an honorable mention. And I seriously doubt that Uncle Al’s and Capt. Windy’s hokey pokey is the World’s most annoying performance either …

Which of Germany’s largest Volksfest events is the largest is a matter of great contention and serious dispute. The rivals Munich Wiesn and Cannstadter Wasen have been going head-to-head for as long as I can remember (not that I ever really cared). Years ago, when I lived in Stuttgart, neighbouring Cannstadt proudly claimed to beat Munich by a couple hundred thousand visitors, but both events only relied on estimates. When the Cannstadt organizers did an actual tally, they came out way below their estimates, and never published the figures. Currently, they claim 5 million visitors annually, independent estimates for last year were 3 million visitor in Cannstadt.

Thursday morning I got an email with a hyperlink to a CNN story about a German scientist making biodiesel from dead cats. Turns out that the clever reporters from Reuters picked up the story from the German tabloid Bild (picture a merger of the Weekly World News and USA-Today) about the company Alpha-Kat, and how they supposedly turn cat-carcasses into fuel. CNN then posted the story.

The fact is that the Alpha-Kat guys actually work on a pressure-less, catalytic process for thermal depolymerization (TDP) to produce biodiesel from ANY kind of garbage. The US company Changing World Technologies operates a TCP plant that turns dead turkeys into biodiesel (using a different TCP process).

And the KAT in Alpha-Kat’s company name refers to the KATalyst they are using for their process – not the kitties … but don’t try to explain that to a Reuters reporter who is reading BILD!

However, you can certainly use dead cats for this process, as well as dead turkeys, rats, skunks, reporters, dogs, care bears, cane toads, teletubbies, TV-anchors, slugs, leeches, etc.

Anyway, I just saw that CNN/Reuters pulled the original story and re-posted a modified version in an attempt to get the facts straight. Now they actually bothered to talk to the guy … instead of just regurgitating the Bild story.

Another great example of quality journalism.

Hurricane Ophelia is pounding the North Carolina coast, and looking at the comments in Jeff Masters Wunderground blog, some of the residents of the Outer Banks are getting a bit nervous. They might be in for 10 hours of 70MpH winds. The N&O’s blogwatch has more.

Are there creationist penguins? Suppose you’re a bird that cannot fly and that has to waddle 70 miles from the ocean to the nesting grounds through minus 50 degree snowstorms – barefoot – or scooting on your belly to take a turn standing for months in minus 50 degree snowstorms, balancing your one egg on your bare feet to keep it from freezing. Now suppose a creationist tells you that, yeah, God made you like that, that God, the intelligent designer, decided it would be great to make up a bird that cannot fly and that has to waddle 70 miles from the ocean to the nesting grounds through minus 50 degree snowstorms – barefoot … if you were that penguin, what do you think you would tell that creationist where he can stuff his “scientific theory?”

Are the creationists adopting the emperor penguin as their mascot? They appear to be all excited about the movie March of the Penguins because it proves to them that there is a god.

At a conference for young Republicans, the editor of National Review urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy. A widely circulated Christian magazine said it made “a strong case for intelligent design.”
March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder – New York Times, 9/13/05

The creationists are completely nuts. March of the Penguins is a fine documentary, but it proves nothing beyond that emperor penguins are exceptionally tough birds. The movie does way too much anthropomorphising of these birds. They are birds; they have teeeeeny brains. This is not about love, dedication, or monogamy. It’s about a bird that occupies a very specific niche in nature. Penguins are not very smart, and I doubt they have much in the way of complex emotions like love. And they reproduce with a different partner every year – that’s hardly monogamous. Yeah – they are cool birds and tough survivors, but their existence offers no more evidence of a god than male nipples* or crop circles.

*) Laura’s point

The US government has deployed heavily armed mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm to patrol the “streets” of New Orleans. Armed mercenaries patrolling a US city on behalf of the US government? That seems like a very disturbing precedent to me. The mercs are a bit surprised, too:

“This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States),” a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. “We’re much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq.”

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as two weeks ago.
Overkill in New Orleans, AlterNet, 8/12/05

Other players, who are making “a killing” in Iraq, are now getting busy in new Orleans, too:
Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of talk today. Silence and reflection would be better …

Vultures – vultures, everywhere. They are circling New Orleans and the rest of the devastated Gulf Coast. The no-bid contractors like the employer of Vice-president Cheney are vying to snag juicy reconstruction contracts:

From global engineering and construction firms like the Fluor Corporation and Halliburton to local trash removal and road-building concerns, the private sector is poised to reap a windfall of business in the largest domestic rebuilding effort ever undertaken.

Normal federal contracting rules are largely suspended in the rush to help people displaced by the storm and reopen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have already been let and billions more are to flow to the private sector in the weeks and months to come. Congress has already appropriated more than $62 billion for an effort that is projected to cost well over $100 billion.

Some experts warn that the crisis atmosphere and the open federal purse are a bonanza for lobbyists and private companies and are likely to lead to the contract abuses, cronyism and waste that numerous investigations have uncovered in post-war Iraq.
In Storm’s Ruins, a Rush to Rebuild and Reopen for Business – New York Times, 9/10/2005.

Two reports on National Public Radio chronicle the government response to Hurricane Katrina (via DKos Diary). The second report in particular highlights the disconnect between the reality on the ground and the proclamations of Bush administration officials, like Chertoff and Brown. The most shocking aspect of that disconnect is that Bush required Louisiana officials to cede control over the recovery effort as a condition for ordering other state’s National Guard units to assist them. This, while New Orleans is flooded and almost half of the Louisiana National Guard personnel is stationed in Iraq, and with them just about all their heavy equipment, boats, generators, trucks, etc.

• Katrina Timeline: Unexecuted Plans: report about the efforts of local government officials in Louisiana to prepare for the effects of a catastrophic Hurricane
• Katrina Timeline: Misdirected Aid: report about the problems obtaining and coordinating aid in the aftermath of the hurricane

So now that the recovery effort is in the “capable” hands of the Bush administration, instead of the local and state officials, guess who gets to dole out billions of dollars worth in reconstruction contracts? Yeah – the same people who doled out billions of dollars worth in reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Can’t wait to see who is getting those contracts…

Recently, I had a little rant about how silly it is to consider creationism a scientific theory, even under the guise of so-called “intelligent design theory.” When I read Stephen Meyer’s ID paper, I realized, after I stopped laughing, that some may be taken in by Meyer’s scientific mumbo-jumbo talk. Even with no clue about the scientific terminology he throws around, it was clear to me that this paper is complete bogus. Meyer purports to challenge evolution with the argument that Darwin’s heirs cannot explain everything in this world, only to then turn around and propose that some “intelligent designer” of whom we know nothing and have no evidence, is a better scientific explanation for life on earth.

An experience-based analysis of the causal powers of various explanatory hypotheses suggests purposive or intelligent design as a causally adequate–and perhaps the most causally adequate–explanation for the origin of the complex specified information required to build the Cambrian animals and the novel forms they represent. For this reason, recent scientific interest in the design hypothesis is unlikely to abate as biologists continue to wrestle with the problem of the origination of biological form and the higher taxa.
“The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories” – Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (volume 117, no. 2, pp. 213-239)

As laughable as this is, it is commendable that Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry took the time to systematically pick Meyer’s treatise apart. They come to the conclusion that Meyer simply does not understand very well the science he challenges:

There is nothing wrong with challenging conventional wisdom — continuing challenge is a core feature of science. But challengers should at least be aware of, read, cite, and specifically rebut the actual data that supports conventional wisdom, not merely construct a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down strawmen, and tendentious interpretations. Unless and until the “intelligent design” movement does this, they are not seriously in the game. They’re not even playing the same sport.
Meyer’s Hopeless Monster – Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 117(2):213-239 – by Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry

Let me make one thing clear: I have no beef with folks who believe the Good Lord created the world in seven days and said it was good. No problem – I have my own creation myth, too. But do I pretend my creation myth is anything but a myth? Do I force it down the throat of students in science class? Even if I could – I would not! But Meyer’s pseudo-scientific polemic is part of a movement to advance the agenda of the reactionary theocrats who would like to turn back the time to the “good old days” when all bowed to the lord, everyone knew his place, and witches and heretics burned at the stake.