Category Archives: Idle Chit-Chat

I am BOMB

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Yesterday as I was riding to work I was making pretty decent time when I heard “on your left”, which is what courteous bicyclists say when they are passing you. I get passed pretty often.

“Good morning,” the guy said as he breezed on past. “Mornin’!” I wheezed back to the receding member of the Spandex Crowd. Just ahead was another cyclist, one I was actually overtaking, and the man who had just passed me did not wish that dude a good morning. Another data point in my current study of human nature.

You see, when I ride for an hour in the morning and again in the evening, it gives me plenty of time to ponder the loosely-knit fellowship called ‘cyclists’. Under that umbrella there are several varieties of cyclist, including but by no means limited to Asian grandfathers riding purple little girls’ bicycles complete with white wicker baskets (that is a very small group), heavily-laden commuters (I’m in that group), hispanic men on fat-tired cruisers, and at the top of the heap, there is the Spandex Crowd.

Soon after I started my bike commuting regimen, the local Bike to Work Day went off, and I saw cyclists of every description. I watched cyclists interact with each other (myself included – I am inscrutable even to myself), and I observed a few patterns.

For instance, there’s The Nod. It’s a little upward head movement passed between cyclists who make eye contact. I didn’t get nods from the Spandex Crowd. Not because they’re snobs, not at all, but because they’re riding. Their heads are down and they’re locked to their pedals and they’re not at some high-school mixer where you say hi to every stranger who comes close. Heck, the design of the bicycles they ride makes socializing more awkward.

There was one group, however, a subclass of commuter, with whom I exchanged many nods. I have dubbed them Bearded Overweight Men on Bikes, or BOMB. In the days following Bike to Work Day, the BOMB population slowly dwindled, until I rarely see another BOMB anymore. For a while I was a BOMB, now I might be the BOMB.

So how did it come to pass that a member of the Spandex Crowd wished me a good morning? I think it’s because he honestly wanted me to have a good morning. I think he also remembered passing me a few days before, and a few days before that. I think he said ‘good morning’ but also said, ‘Welcome to the brotherhood, Bearded Overweight Man on a Bike. I hope to pass you many more times in the future.”

I’m looking forward to it as well.

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E-mail Privacy

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Apparently, it is simply not possible for an American company to offer secure email. Sooner or later the United States Government is going to come knocking, and they’re not above judicial film-flams to get what they want.

Google doesn’t want your email encrypted, either. They want to read it and sell what you’ve written to advertisers.

But there’s nothing stopping you from encrypting your own email, except the inconvenience of getting your communication channels set up with your friends. Unfortunately, that’s still a PITA, especially for friends who cling to browser-based email reading.

My perfect world: every email is encrypted. There is no reliance on a central authority for the encryption. No email company or certificate authority that can be hacked or subpoenaed.

My perfect world may be a tiny bit closer to reality: Apple has announced that the next version of the Mac OS will have streamlined email encryption. S/MIME is already supported in Apple’s Mail app, but it’s not nearly as simple as it should be. If I were in charge, setting up your computer would automatically generate your own identity certificate, and every email you send would have it attached. With a single click anyone who got that email would set up a secure, encrypted email connection with you. And that would be that.

We’ll see how close Apple comes. But it gladdened my crusty old heart to see a big company at least talking about the issue.

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The Cost of Driving

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One of the justifications for my new bike was that in the long run it would save us money. But how much? How long will it take to recoup the large wad of cash I just jettisoned at the neighborhood bike store?

I spent a few minutes last weekend poking around on the Internet for help calculating the cost per mile I drive in the Miata. I found some sites that were helpful, and some that were disingenuous at best. They all come to a false conclusion after they do the math.

Let’s start with this site: The True Cost of Driving, which undertakes to find a per-mile cost that considers everything, including the economic impact of paving over stuff to accommodate cars. While I applaud the effort, let’s face it the numbers they use vary tremendously by where you live and are worthless without showing the math. Societal cost is really foggy. Important, but foggy. Apparently every mile I drive costs us all about a nickel for cleaning up accidents. And am I to take it seriously when it says that every mile I drive costs pedestrians and cyclists 1.4¢ for “barrier effects”?

Not mentioned is the value of the time saved by driving compared to alternatives. That’s why we drive. This assumes my time has value; arguable considering the amount of time I spent on this little research project. But if the time lost by inconvenienced pedestrians has value, my time should have value as well, and should be factored as a reduction in the cost per mile.

Almost all the calculators I found include the fixed costs of owning a vehicle in the cost-per-mile calculation. Makes sense; the cost of getting my car insured should be amortized over the miles I drive.

So then we have a cost per mile that includes those fixed costs. I can’t find the calculator page for the more level-headed AAA cost-per-mile estimator, but here it says the average is around $.60 per mile.

But here’s the problem: those same people who guided you through the calculation will turn around and tell you that you will save sixty cents for every mile you don’t drive. That is false. Your fixed costs are, well, fixed. It costs the same to register your car no matter how many miles you drive. Drive fewer miles, and your cost per mile goes up.

So, while recognizing that driving less will benefit society as well by a difficult-to-measure amount, how much actual pocket money do I save for each mile I choose a bike over a car? (Note: all the bicycle folks out there apparently consider each mile on a bicycle to be absolutely free, even the advocates who have $10,000 bikes or who have had insurance-funded knee surgery.)

I found myself going back to the drawing board. I know that with my older, smaller car, my out-of-pocket cost per mile will be lower than average, but maintenance is the big variable. I’ve saved a few hundred bucks doing some repairs myself, so if you don’t count the intangible value of my time, maintenance costs are under control — for now. There’s a clutch out there with my name on it.

I had a long, rather tedious paragraph here showing my math, but to summarize: fuel, mile-based depreciation, tires, maintenance, and “other” comes out to about 25¢ per mile in savings that go straight to my bank account for each mile I don’t drive. That’s a little over six bucks per commute.

The answer to “how long will it take to recoup the investment?”: a long time.

If driving less extends the life of my car by a year, however, then all these calculations are moot; I end up saving a ton of money. The cost per mile of my next car will be MUCH higher — at least for the first few years. Delaying that uptick in expenses is also money in the bank, but harder to quantify without a time machine.

Remember, 25¢ per mile does not include the cost of repairing (or adapting to) the harm I do to our planet for each mile I drive. I may well save the world as a whole more money than I save for myself.

Finally, if all this riding extends the life of my heart for a year (a reasonably likely outcome, actually), the savings go off the chart. But that’s a different sort of calculation.

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New Diet Plan

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Got to work yesterday and I was starving. So by lunchtime I had eaten all the food I’d brought for the day. Still hungry. So, I went out with friends and ate a second lunch.

Weighed myself this morning and I’d lost half a pound. The conclusion is pretty obvious: If two lunches can take that much off my waistline, imagine what three can do!

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So, the Bike

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I’m a hippie at heart, and not ashamed to be one. I’m also a cheap bastard. People seem surprised sometimes that a fiscal conservative can be a social liberal, but to me that spells ‘rational’.

I formulated a simple plan: get a decent-but-not-too-expensive bike, emphasizing durability over performance. After all, a heavier bike means more calories burned. Ride that bike to the train station each day, where a company-sponsored shuttle will scoop me up and take me through the worst of the traffic. A few calories burned, about 10kg of greenhouse gas avoided (minus the 100+g I emit while pedaling), and lower blood pressure when I sit down at my desk. Before long the bike pays for itself.

Well, unless you get big eyes at the awesome family-owned bike store and spend far more than you planned. I bought a really nice bicycle that cost more than I have spent on all other bicycles over my entire life. But dang, it’s a treat to ride.

For the curious, I got a Giant Escape 0, and paid thirty of the smartest dollars of my life for a cushier seat. After all the accessories (on-bike pump, home pump with gauge, helmet, water bottle cage, water bottle, big-ass lock with extra cable, rack, bags that attach to the rack, and I’m sure there was more) I was looking at more than $1300. It’s going to take a while to pay that off in savings.

In my defense, I could have spent a lot more. My “really nice” is another person’s eye-roller. No suspension? No disk brakes? Pf.

Greatest fear: plunking down all that lovely lucre and having my knee veto the whole plan.

I bought the thing on a Saturday, and rode it home from the store. I took a test trip Sunday to the CalTrain station and back, to get an idea how much time I should budget in the morning to get where I need to go. Monday and Tuesday I was a bicycle commuter, logging a sweet 13 miles each day.

My legs were pretty tired after four straight days in the saddle, and when I got up the next morning I recognized that I could ride, but that I probably shouldn’t. I gave myself a rest day. This is an offshoot of the “don’t be stupid” part of the plan.

On that topic, that day while driving to work I saw a kid on a bike do something stupid and get bumped by a car. He wasn’t hurt, but his front wheel didn’t work anymore.

Repeating the note to self: don’t be stupid. Left turns at large intersections are the most important times to heed that mantra.

I’ll leave my discussion of fitness apps for another day. There are a lot of apps. But if you’re into the whole social media thing, we can hook up at MapMyRide.com.

My knee has been quiet, but I try to remember to ice after each ride. I have an ice pack at work and more at home. I think the fact I forgot to ask for toe clips is actually good for my knee; the part that gets sore feels like it would be unhappy when I pulled up on the pedals. Unscientific, but if my knee is happy, I’m not changing a thing.

So now I’m three weeks in, almost 200 miles logged, butt and knee not complaining. I’ve driven to work four times, and ridden all the others. Ten more miles will go on the bike today, as I ride it over to Ye Olde Bike Shoppe for a free tune-up (and to buy some more accessories).

So far, so good.

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Fun with names

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My ride each morning and evening takes me through a sprawling cemetery. The other day I spotted a name on a headstone: Hai Du.

If I ever write a comedy with a wedding, Hai Du will be the pastor.

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Esoteric Programming Languages

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Most readers of this blog are probably familiar, at least by name, with some of the more common programming languages out there. This blog is brought to you courtesy of PHP, and then there are the seminal C and FORTRAN (after all these years, still king of the number-crunchers), the infamous COBOL, well-structured PASCAL, ground-breaking SmallTalk, Sun’s heavily-marketed Java and Microsoft’s counterploy C#, and newcomers like Ruby and Javascript.

There are a lot of computer languages. While there are some pretty striking differences between the above, they all have two things in common. They all involve controlling a computer by writing lines of code, and they were all invented to be useful.

There is another category of language that is not burdened by that second attribute. Useful? Pf. Not bound by the constraints of utility, the whole ‘lines of code’ thing often ceases to apply as well. These non-utile outliers fall under the general category of “esoteric language”, sometimes shortened (but not by me) to esolang.

While I have long been peripherally aware of this category of languages, in a small email discussion recently a friend of mine mentioned the language Brainfuck (sometimes written b****fuck to avoid offending people). Another member of the discussion linked to an amusing top-ten list of odd languages. I read the article and my brain started fizzing.

A programming language that is written as a musical score? Blocks of color that simultaneously convey quantity and program flow*? A program specifically designed to be as difficult as possible to write code in?

Some might ask, “why would anyone bother with such useless languages?” I don’t have an answer to that. I could go on about Befunge and the wire-cross theorem, or about Turing Completeness, but at the end of the day, I think it’s the same answer as one might give to the question “why does one bother writing poetry, when prose is so much clearer?”

Some of the languages are just for fun. INTERCAL (Compiler Language with No Pronounceable Acronym) set out with only one goal: to not be like any other language. For instance, since all coders have long been taught to avoid the GO TO command, INTERCAL instead uses COME FROM. And every now and then you have to say PLEASE. You don’t have to be a geek (but it helps) to enjoy this article about INTERCAL and Befunge (includes a Befunge program to generate Mandelbrot sets).

One can only read about esoteric languages for so long before one must scratch the itch and find a new way to write “Hello, World!” on a screen. I became intrigued by Befunge, a language that is not written as lines of code at all, but as a grid that a pointer moves around on, steered by >,<,^, and v characters. The program appealed to me for two key reasons: the characters the program cursor encounters can mean different things depending on which direction the cursor is moving at the time, and, even better, you can have the program alter itself by changing the characters in the playfield. So, here’s my Hello, World! in Befunge:


         095*0     v          0*59    <      
This 'Hello World' program is written  in Befunge, a
  language invented expressly to be as difficult to compile
  as possible.
 
 In fact, with this code, control flow  goes straight through
 this block of text and uses the p in  'program' as an instruction.

                                      +
v      g0*59       <                  1
     >                            "H",^
>:0-!|
v    <
     >                            "e",^
>:1-!|
v    <
                 > "0"+292*p >    "l",^
     > :6*9- :9`!|
>:2-!|           > $         ^
v    <
     > 7"0"+273*p                 "o",^
>:4-!|
v    <
     >                            " ",^
>:5-!|
v    <
     >                            "W",^
>:6-!|
v    <
     >                            "r",^
>:8-!|
v    <
       >                          "d",^
>:52*-!|
v      <

              v<
              " 
>:65+-        !|
              "
v  "error!"$   <
>:#,_         v

   restore the code to the starting state:
              > "2"292*p  "4"273*p @

Of course, it was absolutely required that the code alter itself at least once, and occasionally have the same symbol mean different things. This program is based on a counter, and when the counter is 0, it outputs an ‘H’. When the counter is at 1, out comes an ‘e’. ‘l’ is a little more complicated; after it matches the 2, the program does a little algebra (6x-9) to come up with 3, with which it then overwrites the 2 in the code. That way, on the next loop, when the counter is 3, we get another ‘l’, and the same equation replaces the 3 with a 9, ready for the ‘l’ in ‘World’.

In the language, ! means ‘not’. At the very bottom, this code evaluates the ! as ‘not’, which causes the program to loop around and pass through “!” (with quotes), turning what had been a program instruction into the exclamation point at the end of “Hello, World!” A nice little exclamation point on my program, as well.

I have now gone back and added an error message should something go wrong, but of course you have to alter the code to make an error actually happen, things being deterministic and whatnot.

You can watch the program execute in Super Slow-Mo with this Javascript Befunge interpreter. It’s kind of fun to watch the Instruction Pointer zip around the code. Paste the above code into the top box, click ‘show’, then click ‘slow’ below. I recommend setting the time to 50ms rather than the default 500.

Wooo! Big fun! While this language is nearly useless for actually accomplishing anything, I like the way you can make your code physically resemble the problem you are solving. A coworker mentioned writing a tic-tac-toe program with Befunge, and I immediately thought of building a program that is a grid of nine segments and the program alters the paths through the grid as moves are made. It would be awesome.

If I went back to college and majored in computer science, I could get credit for writing it.

In my wanderings, there was one program that completely blew my mind. You remember Brainfuck? There are only eight commands in that language, which makes it relatively simple to write an interpreter. An interpreter is a program that reads the code and executes the instructions as it encounters them, translating them from the (allegedly) human-friendly programming language into machine-friendly instructions for that particular processor. (Compilers do all the translating at once, before the program is executed, while interpreters do it on the fly.)

So here, ladies and gentlemen, is a Brainfuck interpreter, written in another esoteric language, Piet:

piet_bfi
(courtesy Danger Mouse — if I’m not mistaken, the inventor of Piet)

That picture right there? That’s a program, written in a Turing-complete language, that implements another Turing-complete language. (**)8-O (the sound you heard was my head exploding.)

______

* In Piet, you can write a program to calculate pi that is a circle.

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Let Go, [team]!

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In the U.S., fans in a stadium will often take up a chant follows a standard form. For my hapless favorite baseball team, it would go:

Let’s go, Pa- dres! – clap, clap, clap-clap-clap

Where the typesetting above indicates higher and lower pitch. In the case of the Padres, it works pretty well. The team name has the right number of syllables and a good hard consonant in the middle to kick the last syllable.

Last night I was watching a hockey game played in Minnesota. The name of the team is the Wild. Inevitably came the chant:

Let’s go, Wi- ld!

ld? The cheer finishes weakly. It’s still fun, and there are plenty of other teams with a similar problem, so at first I didn’t think much of it. But then I thought of the actual content of the cheer. “Let’s go, Bruins!” is a nice way to motivate your team, but in Minnesota they have a unique opportunity. The cheer says, “Let’s go wild!” That actually adds a new dimension. When they cheer, there should be a little wildness.

My humble proposals:

Let’s go WILD!

or, even better (or at least wilder):

Let’s go WIIIIIIIILD!,

warbling so the arena’s rafters shake with the sound of an attack by a horde of cartoon saracens.

Let’s go, Wild fans! Get wild!

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Time Capsule

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Before I left on the Homeless Tour, I put a bunch of stuff in a storage box. The assumption was that eventually I would have a home again, and I’d appreciate having stuff to get it started.

Ten years later, My Sweetie and I have unloaded that box into the photo studio, where now we must figure out what to do with an apartment starter when there’s no start needed.

Apparently, I anticipated needing lots of toys. Here’s a quick list of some of the items:

  • Volleyball net
  • 3 volleyballs (Indoor, outdoor, and spare, of course)
  • One golf shoe (the other was in my softball bag, which I’d pulled from storage previously, along with golf clubs).
  • various Velcro-based beach toys
  • Badminton set
  • Racquetball racquets and balls
  • Frisbees
  • Basketball
  • Ski boots
  • A set of (apparently) nice bocce balls.

I expect there’s more. The badminton set is pretty cheesy, a backyard-at-the-family-picnic sort of thing, while the volleyball net has been through a series of upgrades that rendered it pretty nice for a portable unit. I wonder if the sledge hammer is still in the bag.

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Zombies, Run!

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Bought a new bike this weekend, an event probably worth more than a mention in passing, but we’ll see about that. Naturally, when one buys a bicycle, one must also download the right bicycle app. I mean, come on.

While perusing the health and fitness apps I stumbled across one called “Zombies, Run!”. Mis-filed, I thought, but understandably so.

Except, get this: “Zombies, Run!” is a game all right, but you have to actually run to play! You go through a series of missions that involve running (or walking, or treadmilling – whatever your style is) and as you complete the missions you get stuff to save civilization and unravel the mystery of the Zombie Plague.

I’ve not played it, mind, but I think I’m going to spring the four bucks for rainy days when I need to get my exercise on the trainer, rather than on the bike. Not only is it a new approach to fitness, it opens up a whole new form of literature. Pretty sweet.

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Steroids in Entertainment

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There’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and steroids in particular, in sports. But while two of the major sports in the US get most of the attention, what is carefully NOT said is that steroids permeate the entertainment industry.

This entire episode is really an aside for a thought I was developing a while back: Superman does ‘roids. As steroid abuse became prevalent in sports, we the couch potatoes began to form an entirely different idea of what ‘ripped’ was, and the bodies of superheroes naturally had to live up to that ideal. Our heroes, even the fictitious ones from other planets, have been sporting ever-more-sculpted bodies, keeping up with Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno and all the other ‘roided-up bodybuilders of the ’70’s.

Today, while sports-related PED use gets all the press, other branches of the entertainment industry are desperately clinging to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The entertainment press has no interest in exposing steroid use among actors; infidelity and coke are mainstays of scandal but let’s not talk about how Actor X got so buff for his last movie. Scandal sells, but only the sort of scandal that perpetuates the Hollywood Myth. In a land of smoke and mirrors, only the smoke and mirrors are sacred.

That’s not to say that the sports franchises have come clean.

This is where the picture of Elmer Fudd sitting on a powder keg, fuse almost burned away, with his fingers in his ears and his eyes shut tight would be if it were legal for me to put an image like that here, and/or if my searches for such an image had borne fruit.

Take the NBA, for example. The leadership of the league will tell you that steroids are not a problem in their league. This isn’t based on any sort of science, or on a rigorous testing policy (testing in the NBA is a joke), but rather on the assertion that steroids don’t enhance the type of activities that basketball players do.

Um… say what?

Let’s imagine for a moment that we could jump in a time machine and go back to the ’80’s, and have a chat with one of the greatest basketball players ever to have donned a pair of sneakers. We know Michael Jordan is motivated by winning and pretty much nothing else. So let’s imagine what his answer would be if we told him, “there’s a chemical you can take that will allow you to jump a tiny bit higher, last a little longer on the court, and to recover more quickly from the inevitable sprains and bruises that are part of your game. It’s not exactly within the rules of the game, but you definitely won’t get caught.”

Michael Jordan had that choice. Knowing how driven he is to win, which choice would surprise you more, that he did or did not use steroids?

What a potential nightmare for the NBA.

I have to assume that the use of PED’s is also rampant in hockey. Since an individual star has the least impact in hockey compared to the bigger three sports, the does-he-or-doesn’t-he discussions are less common. A hockey player could juice up until he turned into a minotaur and commenters would say “that line has had some great shifts lately.” Over 82 games the performance boost would be measurable, but wouldn’t stand out so flagrantly. So I think it’s safe to assume that ‘roids are in use, even though no one talks about it.

Then there’s the sport-like entertainment product brought to us by the WWE, called, euphemistically, “wrestling”. You want to see what max-boost steroid use will do to a human? Look no further. Image is what they sell. Back in the day some of the biggest names in the ring were also big tubs of goo. Strong men, and passable actors, but hardly ripped. Now, take a moment to look at the headliners for the next WWE event. Pretty crazy, right? Everyone knows these guys do steroids. As long as no one talks about it too loudly, all parties are allowed to let things continue this way.

So why are we OK with these guys using steroids, but not the athletes in ‘real’ sports? The generally agreed upon reason to ban these drugs is to protect the health of athletes. But is the health of a baseball player inherently more valuable than the health of a pro wrestler? If health were the real reason, then outrage would be consistent across the entertainment industry.

And, you know? I can get therapies for my sore knee that professional athletes can’t. Does that make sense?

If not health, then what is the reason? Is it fairness? I think mostly yes. As the system stands, people willing to break the rules have an advantage over those who behave ethically. Particularly in my favorite country, the United States, that rankles. It sure bothers me. So ‘real’ sports, where there’s actual competition, try with varying levels of success to catch the cheaters.

Unless you consider the NBA a real sport. (It’s borderline for me.) There’s really not much effort to enforce their drug policy. They do have random testing, sure, but they can only test a player four times each year. After the fourth test, a player is off to the races. Even before that, the tests are easy to beat.

Interestingly, this continued state of denial, of not doing anything meaningful to police the use of performance-enhancing drugs, puts the NBA in a position to bring about meaningful change. Were I king of that league, I’d pass the following edict: People pay to see the top performers in our sport. We will provide that product. To maintain fairness, we’ll allow all athletes in our league to take whatever PED’s are legal in this land, and we’ll even provide responsible medical supervision.

Bickety-bam, prohibition is over. And while there will still be cheaters who do unhealthy amounts of performance-enhancing drugs, the advantage they gain by doing so will be diminished. And when your favorite athlete comes back from an injury more quickly, everyone wins. Seriously, how can it be a bad thing when someone gets well more quickly? There are some big-name athletes with shadows over them because of ‘miraculous recoveries’. They must have cheated, right? What kind of messed-up system makes recovering from an injury too quickly a bad thing?

So let’s put on our Goggles of Reasonableness and question the assumptions behind the prohibition of performance-enhancing drugs in sports. And while we’re at it, lets recognize a simple truth: We want to watch enhanced performers.

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I’m back!

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Well, more or less. The months-long grind at work is over, culminating with a swift kick to the professional groin as I missed my deadline despite working every waking hour (after a while I enforced a five-hours-of-sleep rule) for a couple of months, and even before that at least ten hours a day, weekends included, since January.

My apologies to those I’ve snubbed in the last while, especially those passing birthday wishes my direction. What I had planned as a glorious celebration of my half-century on this planet turned out to be a really shitty day.

I’ve taken a little time off from work since then, to get my feet under me, to get my health habits restored, and to generally feel human again. I still dream about the project, and find myself lying in the early mornings going through the solutions to some of the pending tasks on a project that no longer exists. It was so very close to being so very very cool.

The last few days I’ve managed to get a little bit of creative juice flowing, and perhaps soon I’ll be ready to write that retrospective on the last fifty years. April 2th (rhymes with ‘tooth’) has come and gone, but still deserves some observation. In the meantime I’ve got The Monster Within, which by God I’m going to see in book form this year if I have to publish it myself.

Next week I might be ready for human interaction again, so those I’ve been ignoring should be hearing from me soon. Thanks for your patience!

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If I Ran the Sharks Tonight

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I’d tell Calgary beforehand, and I’d put my fourth line on the ice for the first shift, as a gesture of solidarity. Tortorella is the best thing to happen to the Canucks for a while, but sending his troops in for an all-out brawl before the puck had time to hit the ice is going a little too far. Sure, he has to protect the Sedin sisters, but I think he could have found some balance.

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Just say No

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Google just asked to be allowed access to fairly low-level functionality on my computer. There’s a chance I might have benefitted from saying yes, but there was no explanation at all given for why the Goog should have that access. No value proposition whatsoever, just “Google wants to use the accessibility interface”. (That’s not the exact quote, which I now regret not saving.)

Honestly, I don’t even know how to prove the request came from Google. So if you get something like that, do like I did. Say no.

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One Damn Mile

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We all know that turning off lights in unoccupied rooms is not only economically smart, it’s good for the planet. Lightbulbs use electricity. Electricity costs money and its production harms the environment. Turning off lights is a simple win-win.

But here’s a thought experiment for you: How much does your car’s mileage change when its headlights are on? Is it even measurable? Even when your car is idling?

Let’s do some quick math. Based on sources I cite here, a gallon of gas is considered to be the energy equivalent of 34kWh of electricity (34.02, actually. You know this ridiculous false precision is the result of politics, but this is the number that MPGe is based on.) That’s the amount of energy needed to light 340 100-watt incandescent bulbs for an hour.

But to make the comparison fair, we have to factor in the energy required to get the gas into your tank, and the energy lost to bring the power to the socket in your wall. The math I used in the previous episode resulted in a gallon of gas requiring 5 gallons of gas to reach the pump (refining takes a lot of energy), while it takes 2kWh of additional electricity to bring you the 1kWh you burn. We then divide the gasoline energy by six, and the socket electricity efficiency by three, and that brings us to a slightly-more-honest conversion factor of 68kWh of wall-socket electricity per gallon-in-tank of gasoline. Let’s call it 70 to avoid any pretense of false precision ourselves.

That number will move violently depending on where your gasoline and electricity comes from. 70kWh/gallon is just some wild-assed number based on broad averages, but it’s a number less false than most.

Let’s say, to keep the math easy, that you drive a car that gets about 30 miles per gallon (most of us don’t). That comes out to about 2kWh per mile. Roughly speaking, all the lights in your house, on all night, is about the same as driving one mile in your car (if your car is relatively efficient).

One damn mile.

Unless, of course, you’ve converted to compact fluorescent and LEDs in your home. In that case one damn mile could light your house for a week.

Let’s look at things another way, as long as we have our calculators out. The question: how much energy do I save if I choose a car that gets one slim mile more per gallon?

Of course, that depends on how much you drive. But let’s say you tune up your car and inflate your tires and your mileage improves from 30 to 31. And entirely doable scenario.

We’re going to have to go to unsupported decimal points here, so the numbers that pop out are only valid when compared to each other.

70kWhpg/30mpg = 2.33 kWh per mile
70kWhpg/31mpg = 2.25 kWh per mile

Savings: 700 Watt-hours per mile

Improving your mileage from 30mpg to 31 saves about as much energy as you use burning a 70w incandescent bulb for ten hours, every damn mile you drive. Improving from 20mpg to 21 saves more than twice that. Have your checked your tire pressure lately? That simple act could mean a lot. All your other good-energy-citizen choices are dwarfed by your choice of car, and the way you maintain it.

The takeaway here is simple: Yes, please do buy energy-star appliances. Turn off the lights when you leave a room. Be smart. But don’t go the extra mile. Not in your car, at least.

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Thanks!