Category: Technology (Page 4 of 5)

Electric cars aren’t a done deal.

WSJ: Automakers get into mining.

WSJ: Automakers get into mining.

When General Motors began outlining plans in 2020 to fully switch to electric vehicles, it didn’t account for one critical factor: Many of the battery minerals needed to fulfill its plans were still in the ground.

“I remember seeing a report from our raw-materials team at the time saying, ‘There is plenty of lithium out there. There is plenty of nickel’,” said Sham Kunjur, an industrial engineer now in charge of securing the raw materials for GM’s batteries. “We will buy them from the open market.”

GM executives soon came to discover how off the mark those projections were, and now Mr. Kunjur’s 40-person team is scouring the globe for these minerals. 

“Why Magical Thinking isn’t Whimsical” or “No Shit, Sherlock” would also have been serviceable titles for this article. 

If 3 million cars are sold in the US each year, and each car needed a 100 pounds of lithium for the battery, that’s 300 million pounds of lithium needed each year.  That’s a shitload.  Before we switch to electric cars, someone should be thinking this through.

Those cars also need a shitload of electricity.  The US doesn’t have a lot of surplus generating capacity and we build a new nuclear power plant about every 10 years.

Not paying attention to the basic requirements prior to a big policy shift isn’t a clever way to induce technical advance.  It’s a way to insure that the general population will live a life that is needlessly frustrating and expensive. 

Electric school buses might make sense.

Electric school buses  may actually make sense.  Electric cars aren’t a good solution for most people because they take a long time to recharge and lose range quickly in cold weather. 

When I started at North Royalton a couple of decades ago, I forwarded information to the administration about a government program to subsidize the conversion of school buses to natural gas.  The district had some capped natural gas wells, so this could have been a great opportunity. 

Are we finally entering an era of electric school buses?

It appears that way: A growing number of school districts are upgrading their student transportation with electric buses. The Biden-Harris Administration has paved the way for electric school buses with resources and funding. 

School buses have tons of room for batteries.  A school bus has two steel beams for a frame, with the body resting on top.  Batteries could easily be nestled between the beams.  District maintenance garages would have access to 220 V charging, or even 480 V 3 phase power.  Home owners may not have 220 V available for a charger, so are looking at 8 hours for a full charge.  Not convenient.

Bus drivers have fixed routes, so running out of a charge isn’t likely.  Transportation for field trips and athletic events could be a concern.  A wise district would consider retaining a number of diesel buses for those uses.

Heating uses a ton of energy.  There is no way around that.  Engines produce waste heat, so heating the passenger compartment isn’t an issue.  For an electric vehicle, getting stuck in traffic in the Winter could end the trip.  For student pickup, buses are generally on surface streets and the entire route isn’t likely to challenge the vehicle range.

The rest of the article dwells on stupid stuff.

Electric buses also provide a smoother, better ride to and from school; fewer vibrations on the bus mean lower body fatigue for students and drivers.

Nobody cares about that.

A quieter ride means children are more likely to arrive at school with a calmer headspace, ready and eager to learn.

Or that.

Electric fleets give back more energy than they consume during the day, and each electric bus has enough charge to provide electricity to four to six homes for one day.

I can’t tell what that is supposed to mean.

A mindset shift. While electric buses cost more, this should be viewed as strategic long-term investment for the betterment of our communities.

That’s a problem.

Electric buses doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but the articles proposing that approach should be more realistic, rather than just throwing in everything the author can think of.  It makes me think they are lying about something.

Ozempic for weight loss

When my doctor tells me that I need to lose weight, I could tell him that I’ve tried 6 meals per day, 1 meal per day, eat early, eat late, low carb, low fat, joined a gym, bought an exercise bike, and everything else.  I don’t tell him that.  Instead, I say, “No shit.  Unless you want to write a script, let’s move on.”

My doctor is about my age, used to wrestle for St. Ignatius and knows what’s up.

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China’s Shenzhou-15 astronauts conduct secretive second spacewalk

Brave or reckless astronauts to take second EVA wearing spacesuits made in China.  I won’t even buy batteries or saw blades from Harbor Freight.  There is no way I’d go into a near absolute vacuum at 3 degrees above absolute zero in a Chinese spacesuit, unless I had no other choice.  Communist China may not have given them any other choice.

Side Note:  I always liked that the Russians are called cosmonauts and are from Star City.  Kind of poetic.   In Mandarin, what are astronauts called and did they invent a new character to represent “astronaut”?  Or is it a sequence of characters, like “man turtle bubble”

Everyone needs a Bluetooth headset.

You should buy a Bluetooth headset like this.  During the disastrous remote learning of 2020,  I made frequent use of this headset.  I did quite a bit of testing with different equipment, and for the price, this is a good value.  The noise cancelling was effective at cancelling out ambient sound, but the fidelity isn’t great.  Your voice will be clear, but missing higher frequencies.

As you may know, I can go on.  A bluetooth headset is a great way to have a lengthy phone conversation while walking the dog or picking up around the house.  For under forty bucks, why not?

I don’t use those anymore.  I listen to audio books all the time and need hearing protection while I cut the grass for a few hours or use the chain saw.  I use the 3M headset because it is robust enough to take some abuse and only blocks loud or impulsive noises.  The sound quality is good for me, and the microphone is decent for phone conversations.  I wish I’d spent the extra ten bucks to get the version with the boom mike.  That would handle ambient noise better.

 

Books you don’t own.

E-books aren’t your books.

E-books aren’t your books.

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

You don’t own anything that is automatically updated or resides in the cloud. 

My policy of turning off automatic updates on my computers has surprised some tech-savvy friends.  Sure, there are security reasons to update a computer, but for the most part, updates never help you.  I manually update VLC to accommodate new media codecs, but that’s about it.  

Windows 11 doesn’t have the option to decline automatic updates.  The result is that the functionality changes in noticeable ways.  I used MS Video Editor to make instructional videos all through the Covid remote learning disaster.  I needed it recently, and found that it was gone and was could be replaced with MS ClipChamp.  I had other software available, so didn’t comply.

Google Docs and other cloud-based storage companies have considered making your own objectionable content unavailable.

Our technology is really astounding, but you can’t become complacent.  If you rely on streamlined cloud storage, online services or software that magically handles everything, your life is great, until it isn’t. 

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