But first . . .
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JUSTICE STEVENS
Sunday, John Paul
Stevens – a hero to liberals and progressives – turns 88. The
implications of this overwhelm any frustration we may feel over the continuing
primary contest. (Trust me, it will
end; we will have a great nominee; the nominee who doesn’t win will strongly support the one who does.)
Senator McCain is
firmly on record hoping to see Roe v. Wade overturned and wanting to appoint conservative
Justices.
Please: give $25
or $50 – or $500 – in honor of Mr. Justice Stevens’ birthday so we have the
resources to win . . . stanch the rightwing slide of the
Judiciary . . . and give Justice
Stevens the option to retire, if he ever wants to.
We owe him!
And now . . .
CHECK OUT THE AIR CAR
This
eight-minute video showcases two prototype cars that run on compressed air, one from an
inventor in Nice, another an inventor in Melbourne. I totally don’t get it, of course. (How can there be so much power in compressed
air? Why is it so cheap to compress
it? Doesn’t it lose oomph as you let it
out to run the motor? What if you pumped
the pressure too high and it burst? Why
did I major in “Slavic Languages and Literatures” instead of “science?”)
One viewer noted that the
air in compressed air is not fuel, it’s a battery. That much I
get: Some other fuel, like coal, powers the generator that makes the
electricity that powers the compressor that pressurizes the tank . . . which
then stores that energy until it is released.
[Suggestion: Why not start
by getting all the world’s lawn mowers to run this way and work up from there? No one expects a quiet lawnmower.]
SUPERCAPACITORS – AND WHAT ALL THIS MEANS
TO YOUR OIL STOCKS
Here’s
some more encouragement: supercapacitors will capture
a great deal of currently wasted energy.
Again, I understand virtually none of it, except to say that, now that the world seems finally to have
focused its attention on the problem, we’ll have it largely solved in the next
couple of decades. (Getting from
here to there may not be pretty.)
Yet I’d be surprised if oil ever became cheap again – it
has too many uses. (Remember when the
Shah said oil was
too valuable to burn? “There
are more important uses for oil than burning it to produce energy, for God’s
sake!” Remember when there was a Shah?)
Yes, we will eventually wean
ourselves off fossil fuels; but all the while, at least for the foreseeable
future, we’ll be burning 80 million barrels of cheap-to-extract oil into the atmosphere (give or take) every day. So the supply will
continue to diminish – by 80 million barrels a day! – and
by the time we need it only to make Saran wrap, there may be just enough left. So the price may remain high even then.
An (admittedly imperfect) analogy could be
wood. Once our species’ only source of
fuel, it keeps getting replaced by other materials – whether by coal (for heat)
or plastic (for deck chairs) or pixels (for paper) – and yet keeps getting a
little more expensive, outpacing inflation.
AND SPEAKING OF TECH BREAKTHROUGHS
Remember, for all
our considerable problems, Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of
technological progress over the next
50 years that will be 32 times as astonishing as over the previous 50. Imagine, a
decade from now, memory so intense
that an iPod can hold 3,500 feature-length movies. IBM seems
to be racing along exactly that track.
At around which time, I hope, a tiny Google chip could be injected in my
arm, programmed to lodge just where it needs to in my brain.
Who could lose a
bar bet, or forget a phone number, ever again?