April 2010 Archives

I recently sat in a meeting with a group of decision makers at a local university. They were deciding what improvements to make to their thermal distribution system. The tool that a large organization like this uses when deciding between two options for a large capital improvement expense is a Life Cycle Cost Analysis, or LCCA.

One of the people in the room asked me, the person who had done the LCCA, how environmental benefits of the project were figured in.

"Well, the university is currently paying for NOx credits. This project will reduce NOx emissions, so that cost savings was figured into the analysis."

"What about other reduced emissions?"

I shrugged. "While that might have some value to you from a marketing standpoint, no marketing analysis of green benefits was provided, and that is outside our scope, so there is no benefit given in the LCCA."

When we talk about cap and trade programs, this moment is what we are talking about. the moment where decisions are being made about energy projects. I don't know if the man I was talking to was able to put the following thoughts together, but I'm going to spell them out here.

There are already cap and trade programs around the country. Here's one in Texas - specifically, the one I referred to above, when I mentioned NOx credits. NOx - that'd be nitrous oxides - contribute to the formation of ozone in the atmosphere. The effect of high levels of carbon dioxide may be contentious, but nobody argues about the effect of high levels of ozone.

This cap and trade program is able to apply a specific dollar amount to the cost of the emissions. If you want to emit NOx, then you have to purchase credits on the open market. And the cap ensures that only a certain number of credits are available. This means only a certain amount of NOx will be emitted - and its an amount that can be reduced over time by reducing the number of credits available.

This allows the cost of environmental pollution to show up in an economic analysis of a project.

But no such mechanism for carbon exists. And despite all the incentives that exist for alternative energy technology, it turns out that not a single one of them applied to this project that would directly reduce fossil fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. Incentives are just the wrong tool to use to get energy efficiency projects implemented. The only way to reduce carbon emissions is to include the externality cost of these emissions into the cost of energy.

This won't be the first time I point out some foolishness on Tory Gattis' blog, and it won't be the last.

My proposal would be to scale back the core LRT network to connecting just the major job centers and destinations. That network would free up money by temporarily switching the North, East, Southeast, and (probably) Uptown lines to fast, frequent signature bus service.  They have relatively low ridership projections and are through neighborhoods with uncongested streets (except Uptown, of course, but it can ill-afford rail disruption on Post Oak) where buses work just fine for the demand. We can no longer afford speculative rail lines through uncongested low-density neighborhoods without major destinations, while hoping for long-term densification.

When light rail is going through an uncongested street, its a speculative rail line without major destinations. When light rail is going through a congested street, it can ill afford rail disruption.

See how that works?

Maybe this isn't technically a complaint about the iPhone, but rather a complaint about the iPhone Scrabble app, but its only a technicality, because an iPhone without Scrabble is like Lindsey Lohan without boobs*. Nobody wants anything to do with either.

Imagine what it would be like to play chess with Gary Kasparov standing over your shoulder. After every move he'd be scoffing and pointing out what you should have done and drinking vodka, and saying how you're stupidity has doomed us all to defeat at the hands of future armies of robotic chess pieces. It'd get old faster than... well...

Point is, games that were fun suddenly become not fun when every action you take is judged. So what possessed Scrabble to include the goddamn Tile of Judgment on their game is beyond me. Sure, once in awhile you'll get a nice smile from the Tile of Judgment, but more often then not he stares at you impassively, judging you, wondering what kind of moron doesn't realize the apparently useless jumble of letters in front of him actually spells "boehmite". A STUPID MORON, THAT'S WHAT KIND.

Fuck you, Scrabble Tile of Judgment. Fuck your little face.

*Seriously, this is a goddamn national tragedy. They used to be so full of promise. Now they just hang there sad and defeated.

For years, I was under the impression that Mexican restaurants as a group did a horrible job of rinsing out their dishes after washing them. How else to explain that every time I ate there, half the dishes tasted like soap? Not like a mouthful of Palmolive, but just a hint of soap. A soupcon of soap, if you will.

But that makes no sense! Everybody knows that Mexican food tastes best when eaten out of a filthy unwashed bowl. Much more authentic that way. So why would there be soap in it? Well, turns out there was no soap. There was cilantro. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE CILANTRO.

See, I have a genetic disorder, according to no less an of authority than Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. Yes, THAT Charles J. Wysocki. As my soon-to-be-filed disability application will attest, my disorder is called cilantrophobia, and is caused by a regressive gene that is tied to making cilantro taste like soap, as well as other debilitating conditions such as bleeding heart liberalism, an addiction to Converse sneakers, and other contributions to the outward appearance of being a hipster d-bag.

And I am so sick and fucking tired of all you cilantrophiles rubbing my nose in your so-called "delicious", soapy herb. Mmm, cilantro tastes so GOOD, why don't you like it, I want to put cilantro on everything so you have to pick it out! Why don't you just fill my salsa with dirt, with dirt out of the GARBAGE, because that's where your disgusting food is headed.

But don't take my word for it. Here's what Julia Child has to say about cilantro: "I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor." That's right, Julia Child, who I know nothing about except that she was so famous and awesome at whatever it is she did that she was played in some movie by Meryl fucking Streep, thinks cilantro is gross. So by transitive proper of Meryl Streep, SUCK IT CILANTRO.

If you're making your iced coffee with normally brewed coffee, you are a jive turkey.  But why switch, you may ask, if you're stubborn and set in your ways NOT THAT I'M DESCRIBING ANYONE HERE. 

Cold brewing coffee is so simple you will wonder why it took until 1964 for someone to think of it.  Take the coarsest ground you can get and dump it in a big pitcher of water at a ratio of 1:4.5 coffee to water.  Let it steep on a counter or fridge preferably overnight, but three hours works too, supposedly.  Filter the grounds out (this is one of the reasons you want a coarse grind).  Ideally you will have a mesh filter fine enough to handle it, but if not you can throw in a paper filter as well.  Now you have a pitcher full of flavor.  The only limit, quantity wise, is the size of your pitcher.

Now a word of warning, the coffee this makes is so smooth that you can easily just chug it straight.  It is delicious, and substantially less acidic/bitter than what you're used to.  However, this is also dangerous, because what you actually have is a concentrate that is about twice as powerful as normal coffee.  So if you pour yourself a giant mug you will be tweaking on the caffeine.  I'm used to the giant ones at Starbucks and one cup of this gives me a pleasant buzz.  However you can go easily up to 50/50 concentrate and milk (or water) and it will still taste just as much like coffee.  Throw a dash of blueberry syrup in there.

Also you can apparently use it as the base for your own frappucino style drinks but I've been too busy drinking it normally to worry about that.

You're welcome, gross Wikipedia harelip baby.

You're welcome, Boston*.

You're welcome, America.

*Harelip capital of the world, according to the casting director of Gone Baby Gone.

With electric cars soon to be flooding the market, the ways in which they will affect the energy and transportation industry are starting to come into sharper focus. First, a little horn tooting: back in August of last year, I said this:

Imagine this. You are home from work for the day with your electric vehicle plugged in in the garage. You've programmed your smart meter to charge the vehicle when electricity is cheap, and then discharge the vehicle back into the grid when electricity gets expensive. Your car battery has become the reservoir, and you make money while it sits there.  The demand for dirty-burning peaking generation is reduced and the cost of electricity drops. Smart grid technology makes this possible.

Last week, Ford and Microsoft announced this:

The companies said Wednesday at the New York International Auto Show that this is the beginning of a smart system that will help utilities and customers manage energy costs and electrical generating capacity.

"Manage electrical generating capacity" is another way of saying "We're going to use the storage capacity of your electric cars to make a shitload of money.
 

To understand why, think about how you use electricity. During the evening when you are at home, you've got the TV on, every light in the house on even though you are only in one room, the A/C blasting, maybe you are listening to your jambox. Then you go to bed and turn almost everything off. Let's say that in the evening you were drawing 2 kW of electricity, and when you go to bed you are drawing 1/4 of that. The electric company has to have at least 2 kW of generation capacity to meet your needs - they had to buy that equipment. But when you turn everything off, 3/4 of that capacity is sitting there collecting dust.

If you have an electric car without the Microsoft program, the car starts charging as soon as you get home. If it draws 2 kW while charging, you've doubled your home peak electricity usage. That means the electric company now needs 4 kW of capacity instead of just 2. And when you go to bed and your car is done charging, you are only using 1/8 of that capacity.

What the Microsoft program will do is let you plug in the car, but not charge it right away. It will wait until your electricity draw drops, and THEN it will turn the charger on. Now you are using the 2 kW of capacity the electric company installed to cover your needs while you are asleep.

In other words: without the program, electric companies need to spend money to expand capacity to cover your needs. But with the program, electric companies better utilize the equipment they have already purchased.

1. There is no way that my work emails will ever read less than having 50 new messages unless I go through and delete each one of them that I have ever gotten. Even though I've read them on another computer, the iPhone cannot figure that out and instead there will forever be a little red "50" hovering over my email icon unless I read each one.

2. And even if I go through and delete those 50, it will go back and download 50 older ones, and THOSE will be marked as unread. So I would have to go back and delete the thousands of emails I have gotten from work, one at a time, because there is ALSO no "delete all" button.

3. I never realized how annoying it would be to have a device that couldn't run multiple apps until I wanted to use my phone to listen to the Yankee game last night over the (super awesome) MLB app while also cooking dinner from a recipe I downloaded from my Epicurious app. I had to write down the recipe, with pen and paper, LIKE SOME KIND OF GODDAMN CAVEMAN THAT DOESN'T OWN AN IPHONE, so that I could listen to the dulcet tones of John Sterling. Because who could listen to John Miller and Joe Morgan for more than 3 seconds, right?