Reality-Based Engineering

More On Green Cleaners...

Yahoo! is getting in on the act...maybe they need to clean up before Steve Ballmer and Rupert Murdoch come walking through with white gloves to see how much dust there is??

As an aside, here's our previous green posts and to a local paper's article on green cleaners...

And here's another yahoo article about smarter, "I shoulda thought of that" engineering...

Labels: chemicals, effluvia, engineering, green

posted by jimboses @ 9:32 PM 0 comments

Green Energy Future

This article brings up a point I've always tried to make about emerging technologies and small businesses - or even large businesses (BP Solar LLC, for example) is this: they're widgets. You've got to build things with metal and rivets and cogs and such. This means manufacturing jobs. This means people are employed implementing this tech, and not at WalMart or other Big Box stores, so they're much higher-paying, non part-time minimum wage stuff that we've been forced into by the progeny of Sam Walton.

Green tech, whether it be in fuels (ethanol, solar) or in envoronmental remediation (better SOx and NOx scrubbers) is the next small-business wave and will only help by actually improving our manufacturing base instead of shipping it to fucking China. As a point of reference, when President Hu of China was in the US this past year, he stated in a press conference that 90% of what USED to be manufactured in the US of A is now manufactured in China. That's a huge change in the balance of power. We just dont make enough stuff here in the US. Go Green!

posted by jimboses @ 12:53 PM 1 comments

Engineering Post - Honda's Green Philosophy: "We Don't Get The Hummer"

I like when I can actually write about engineering in the context that I have created with this blog - in this instance, hard design projects that make a product better - and not just aestetics, either...This is a solid article which explains strongly how companies CAN be more than just a capitalist money accumulation device to enrich itself and the richie-rich - they can have a philosophy of design and engineering. Frankly, projects like this would be fun because you've got to push the design limits at the time and start by saying "why not?" The quotes below are stolen from DailyKos' "Bill From Portland Maine". Except for this one which I took directly from the article, which I just love:

Toyota and Nissan have large SUVs to compete with Detroit's big boys. Could Honda ever bring itself to develop a hulking SUV?
We don't get the Hummer, we just don't get it. There would not be a lot of motivation within Honda to develop the Hummer. We would be saying we could make it lighter, we can make it have better fuel economy. But in the end, it's certainly not a Hummer. It's closer to a Pilot. So we're at cross-purposes with a vehicle like a Hummer.

---------------------------------------------

[Newsweek's] Keith Naughton: Honda worried about gas mileage when gas mileage wasn't cool. Why?
Baker: Everyone at Honda views being in a company as being far more than just turning a profit. It's not that we're poor businessmen, but I think everybody at Honda is fired by the dream of creating great products that are the most efficient in their class.

How difficult was it to engineer the MDX to meet Honda's stringent mileage standards?
I'll never forget it. I was a rookie leading this MDX team. We'd done the research and we had an efficient package. But when we pitched our business plan to the board of directors, Mr. [Koichi] Amemiya, who was in charge of North America, his No. 1 comment was: "It should be more green." I made the mistake of saying, "But sir, nobody cares about the green issues." And he just smiled and said "I know."

Does your research now show that people care about gas mileage?
If you are talking about large SUVs, yes, they are giving some lip service to fuel economy. But that is sort of a "here today, gone tomorrow"-type phenomenon. The point is not that customers demand it or don't demand it, because that's absolutely not the viewpoint of Honda. When you are a philosophy-driven company, you don't ask the customer if they agree with your philosophy.

Toyota talks about every car being a hybrid someday. What do you think is going to be on our highways in 10 and 20 years?
We would love to make 100 percent hybrids. Obviously, there are huge challenges, but it would be a perfect embodiment of the Honda philosophy. In the longer term, you want to move to a carbon-free type of mobility. So we are determined to lead in fuel cells.

But developing an affordable electric-fuel-cell car seems ever elusive. Will we ever get there or are we trying to crack the wrong nut?
We've got fuel cells on the road right now. At Honda that's the equivalent of the moon shot. We absolutely pick that as a challenge. Can we guarantee there will be 32 percent of Hondas that will have fuel cells by 2013? No. But there is a huge commitment to fuel cells.

posted by jimboses @ 12:03 PM 0 comments

A few things [bumped]

I dig Obama. Loved his speech on Wright and racial wrongs.

I feel like Hillary would make a thoroughly capable president, in a political and organizational kind of way, but I feel that we need today the kind of inspirational president that we would have in Obama to stimulate the public's engagement in the coming years of transformational projects.

I've been interested to see how much the people working on Green Jobs initiatives entwine their Green with so much of what they call social justice and pathways out of poverty. They lobby not only to create programs to put the skills needed to solve regional energy challenges into the hands of local workers, but to make sure that those would-be workers have the support they're going to need, given their often troubled circumstances.

[RBE note - I added tags on Apr 1]

Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, economy, energy policy, engineering, ethanol, green, Hillary Clinton, peace, Spending

posted by Gumbinator @ 10:09 PM 1 comments

Friday Quick Hits

• Olbermann's happy that his Special Comment blast was no permanent damage done
• What is this about Obama and some sort of issue that Jewish Americans have with him? Dont get it...
• Obama releases all his earmarks for his entire Senate career...he had previously given out his FY2008 earmarks on his senate site...in 2007!
• Happy PI day!
• Dubya strips a Ford-era oversight committee of much of its independence and power. Dink.
• I had thought for sure that I posted something about ethanol, specifically how it's only got about 2/3 of the available energy per gallon as compared to gasoline, but I cannot find it (I did, however, find these posts on being green in general). Anyways, two posts about using methanol as a fuel alternative, and a respectable person who knows chemistry who debunks that possibility
• If you really like baseball minutae, check this out!

Labels: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, effluvia, energy policy, engineering, ethanol, global warming, green, Hillary Clinton, Jewish, science

posted by jimboses @ 11:38 AM 0 comments

Green Future: Thermodepolymerization

A Gumbinator blast-from-the-past!

Labels: energy policy, engineering, global warming, green

posted by jimboses @ 2:27 PM 0 comments

McCain and Taxes

Yeah, uh, I remember him hammering W on taxes during the 2000 debates in South Carolina (and so do others here, you can search for more here )...so, here's a JedReport montage of McCain's tax ideas...sounds like Obama's ideas to me, peeps...



And, here's the exact money quote that recall from that debate that made me proud, at the time, to vote for him in the Mass primaries:

I want a balanced approach. A working families tax cut—Governor Bush has 38 percent of his tax cut go to the wealthiest one percent of Americans—pay down the debt, Social Security and Medicare. If we're going to save Social Security, we've got to take a bunch of the non-Social Security surplus, pump it into the Social Security system, because we all know that it's going broke. If we do that, then people can then invest part of their own payroll taxes in investments of their choice. The difference between Governor Bush's proposal and mine is that I put a whole lot of money into Social Security, Medicare and paying down the debt. He puts a whole lot of money into tax cuts.... Because we'd lay this obligation on another generation of young Americans—$3.6 trillion. At town hall meeting after town hall meeting, I have average Americans stand up to me and say to me, Senator McCain, all these years of running deficits, we've accumulated this debt. We're paying more interest—as much interest, almost, on it as we are in spending on national defense. We ought to pay down that debt, and not saddle the next generation of young Americans with it.... Look, Alan Greenspan just recently said we shouldn't have these massive tax cuts like Governor Bush is proposing. We should pay down the debt. But working families need the tax cut.

The green highlighted text is what I recalled clearly from the debate, but note what I highlighted in red...the $3.6 trillion debt he alludes to in the 2000 debates is, sadly, a low projection but a heckuva lookahead by McCain at the time. And, per this bonddad post from this morning, here are the debt loads carried by the USG at the end of each fiscal year of the Bush administration:

09/30/2001 $5,807,463,412,200.06
09/30/2002 $6,228,235,965,597.16
09/30/2003 $6,783,231,062,743.62
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50
09/30/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23
09/30/2007 $9,007,653,372,262.48
09/30/2008 $10,024,724,896,912.49

We've added $4,217,261,484,712.43 to the debt...so, actually, McCain was closer (numerically, at least) than I thought!!

[update oct30] A good journal entry about historic tax rates.

Labels: 2000 Elections, 2008 Elections, dubya, John McCain, South Carolina, taxes

posted by jimboses @ 2:18 PM 0 comments

Supernovas Are Cool

This composite image provided by NASA Wednesday Dec. 3, 2008 of the Tycho supernova remnant combines infrared and X-ray observations obtained with NASA's Spitzer and Chandra space observatories, respectively, and the Calar Alto observatory, in Spain. The image shows the remnant of a supernova that was observed in 1572 by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. The explosion has left a blazing hot cloud of expanding debris (green and yellow). The location of the blast's outer shock wave can be seen as a blue sphere of ultra-energetic electrons. Newly synthesized dust in the ejected material and heated pre-existing dust from the area around the supernova radiate at infrared wavelengths of 24 microns (red). Foreground and background stars in the image are white.

Labels: effluvia, energy, science, space

posted by jimboses @ 1:17 PM 0 comments

Home Grown Green Philosophy: Simple Cleaners

Like your grandmother used to use - vinegar, water, baking soda, to go along with the newer formulated cleaners that use citrus (probably d-limonene) as their basis.

Labels: chemicals, climate change, economy, effluvia, engineering, environment, fluid properties, global warming, Masachusetts, media, RBE

posted by jimboses @ 11:54 AM 0 comments

Yahoo!s Top 100 Green Vehicles

Dominated by hybrids & foreign vehicles from Honda and Toyota

Labels: automobile, engineering, environment, green, Honda, Japan, mileage, press, Toyota

posted by jimboses @ 8:32 AM 0 comments

City Of Worcester Living Up To 2010 Green Energy Promise

City Manager O'Brien submitted a plan yesterday to keep Worcester on track to get 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010.

Let's hope they keep it up.

posted by jimboses @ 12:37 PM 0 comments

Welcome To "The Gumbinator"

I've invited one of my close friends to contribute to my blog, and in aligning with my practice he shall use a nomme de guerre - gumbinator (chances are he's none of these guys).

Seeing as that over the past few months I've essentially used this as a personal RSS aggregator and not done much with actual blog POSTING, my hope is that adding another voice from a person who takes a different look at events than I do will lead to a more dynamic environment here and, hopefully, a more thoughtful presentation of events which will lead to, well, more lengthy posts and a also lead to a conversation - even if its a two-way conversation! ;o)

Welcome aboard!

We'll be changing the green signature section to the right to something more appropriate to a two-man effort v. my [previously] one-man show.

posted by jimboses @ 10:41 AM

Engineering Post: Toyota's Green Philosophy

Building on my previous post about Honda and their writeup in Newsweek in June, Toyota has made announcement that they want 25% of their worldwide sales to be hybridized vehicles by 2010 which translates to 1 million hybrid vehicles. They estimate that this will mean 600,000 vehicles per year in the US of A to achieve that goal. While that's a heckuva challenge - they want 10 new hybrid models by 2010 - the more a technology is ubiquitous, the more accepted it is, and the CHEAPER it becomes. I'm glad to see Toyota step up to the plate. And by 2010 the critics can be silenced...and the hesitant - like me - can stop being hesitant. When it comes to technology, I naturally like to stay slightly behind the curve instead of being the first to have something new.

posted by jimboses @ 2:37 PM 0 comments