Under a Gibbous Moon

Apparently, this is going to become something of a regular series. Everytime I get a new email from NCC NOW, I can expect another trip into stupidity.

Could you find the greatest happiness of your life after being fired, going through a divorce, and learning you have a serious illness? Best-selling author of “How Starbucks Saved My Life” Michael Gates Gill did, and he shared his remarkable story at NCC

Starbucks you say…

Don’t be afraid to try a math problem. No one is going to die or get hurt if you get it wrong!

See, this is what happens if you spend to much time at Starbucks. A short list of disasters caused by wrong math:

• Conversion errors doomed the Mars Rover.
• Last year, a math error cost the state of Maryland 31 MILLION dollars.
• A fuel miscalculation caused Air Canada Flight 143 to run out of fuel mid flight.
• After construction plans were changed, no one bothered to rerun the math, killing 114 people.
• Another calculation error kept a Patriot missile from intercepting a Scud during the First Gulf War, killing 28 soldiers and wounding another 100.
• A failure in an inertial reference calculation caused an European Space Agency Ariane 5 to explode forty seconds after take off.
• Bad math in calculating concrete and ballast requirements led to the sinking of Sleipner A offshore oil platform
• The flood walls and levees in New Orleans were built and maintained using some shady math leading to catastrophic failure during Hurricane Katrina.

This is hardly and exhaustive list, but I would like to point out that math is serious business and it would seem this Michael Gates Gill is not familiar with what he’s talking about. Not a great person to have come and talk to your students.

In an article in Slate, William Saletan tries to make the case that prohibiting people from donating blood based up certain criteria (he specifically uses homosexuality) is outdated.

Unfortunately, his arguments are terribly off base. He says that since all blood is now tested then it doesn’t matter if HIV positive people donate. He then goes on to say how safe the testing is since it’s error rate is somewhere around one in a million. Since approximately sixteen million units of blood are used each year, that means approximately sixteen people will have their lives irrevocably changed because of this stand.

If these sixteen people isn’t good enough, let’s do simple math. It costs money to draw blood. Donors must be screened and then you have to pay someone to draw the blood. Then the blood has to be tested and stored. Of course, all the juice and cookies aren’t free either.

Simply put, allowing high risk people to donate just increases these costs. The reason their high risk is that statistical odds are that more of their blood will have to be dumped (and therefore all the collection and testing money wasted).

What the author fails to realize that these prohibitions are in place not on bigotry but on an acceptable cost/benefit ratio.

This is a truly fascinating read. This paper explores how dueling and the threat of dueling formed the basis of creditworthiness in the days before credit checks. To sum it up, a person was only as good as his word and if someone claimed he wasn’t he had to defend his word or no one would do business with him. Puts the whole “defending one’s honor” into perspective.

Hat Tip: Schneier on Security

WARNING – THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS MATH AND BIG NUMBERS – YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

Recently, upon reading several articles dealing with the upcoming release of a variety of electric vehicles (EVs) onto the market I noticed that nobody was discussing a critical point: Where was all this electricity going to come from. Electrical power is, after all, a finite resource. With all the gasoline that is used in the United States, I wondered if there was enough production capacity to meet the demand of a large scale deployment of EVs.

I had no idea of the answer to this when I first started. Indeed, I initially assumed that the reason I saw no discussion on this is that there wasn’t a problem to begin with, but I wanted to see the numbers for myself. So, without further ado, here is what I found. All statistical data is based upon currently available figures (2007).

First, I needed to find out how much energy is consumed by gasoline powered vehicles in the United States. I found that approximately 390 million gallons per day¹. Gasoline has 34.8 megajoules (10⁶) (MJ) per liter or about 131.7 MJ per gallon. So with this, 390 million gallons of gasoline has about 51,363,000,000 MJ or 51.363 petajoules (10¹⁵) (PJ) of energy. To put that into terms of power production, I found that 3.6 MJ is equal to one Kilowatt-hour (KWh) of energy². Therefore, 51.363 PJ equals 14,267,500,000 KWh or 14.268 Terawatt-Hours (10¹²)(TWh).

The next step is to compensate for lost energy due to idling. It is estimated that 3.8 million gallons of gasoline is wasted in the United States by an idle engine⁵. This is approximately 1% of daily gasoline usage. Taking 1% from 14.268 TWh leaves us with 14.125 TWh.

Also, gasoline engines do not convert 100% of the available energy into useful work, they are about 30% efficient in converting energy into work³. Therfore, out of 14.125 TWh we actually will use 4.234 TWh.

Now, for the United States electrical generating capacity. The United States generated 4,157,000,000 MWh in 2007⁴. For comparison purposes, I shall move the decimal point so it reads 4,157 TWh. Dividing that by 365, I came to a daily average of 11.389 TWh.

That puts the replacement energy needs at approximately 35% over the current energy output. From 2006 – 2007, United states electrical output increased by 2.3%⁴. In the highly unlikely circumstance of no other growth in demand for electrical energy, it would take over 15 years to completely replace our gasoline fleet with and EV one and most likely it would take decades longer than this.

This leaves us with an undesirable time table for either removing dependence on foreign oil or reducing greenhouse emissions (assuming the ability for a rapid migration to renewable electrical production).

With this data, the conclusion that I have come to is that EVs are not a viable large scale alternative to gasoline powered vehicles. Due to limitations in electrical production they will only be able to fill a niche role for many more decades.

References

1. Petroleum Basic Statistics http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

2. Kilowatt Hour http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt-hour

3. Engine Efficiency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency

4. Electric Power Annual http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html

5. Anti-Idling Primer http://www.thehcf.org/antiidlingprimer.html