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The Christmas spirit struck today at the GeekTieGuy household. Here are a few pictures of the Lego Christmas trees I built.
Merry Christmas!
Here are some pictures from a Barnes & Noble store in San Jose, California.
We went to participate in the costume contest. My younger daughter dressed up as Ginny Weasly, hair colored red and all. Alas, she didn’t win anything. We thought her costume was pretty creative. Nothing store-bought. All materials found around the house.
Anyway. On with the pics:
Line around the corner
Getting the books from storage to behind the counter
Yes, the line goes all the way to the left side of the picture.
People were standing in line for wristbands that gave you a specific time window after midnight to come back in. When we left the wristbands were for a 5 AM slot. We’ll just wait until later in the morning when things will have died down a bit, presumably. Yes, we’re hooked too…
It was a perfect time to check out the AT&T store across the street. No line for the iPhone today… I had plenty of time to really check out the iPhone’s UI and user interaction. I found several things that bugged me after just a little while. But I also found several things that are pretty cool. Not worth $1200 over 2 years cool, though.
We hung around after the costume contest for a bit, and ran into a family sharing Potter Puppet Pals videos from YouTube on their Apple laptop. My daughter had made friends with one of the girls in that family during the costume contest.
My wife said it was one of the more bizarre things she’s experienced. I wouldn’t go that far, but it was certainly interesting.
I just got back from an amazing trip to the Grand Canyon. This was my first time going there. We chose the North Rim, partly because of a magazine article we’d read recently. The North Rim has about 10 times fewer visitors than the South Rim, which suits our style very well. The views from the North are quite spectacular, too.
The most amazing thing was that we got to experience the solitude and majesty of the canyon all by ourselves. Here’s how you might be able to do it too: Drive to Point Imperial such that you arrive a half an hour before sunset. We arrived right at sunset, so we missed the best light for taking pictures. If you stay half an hour to an hour after sunset, you may find that everyone else leaves because of the lack of picture-taking opportunities. You’ll hear the wind rush through the trees, see bats and swallows flying about to catch insects, and you’ll be able to sit down on a bench quietly and just be.
And you can get some nice pictures, even after sunset:
This is something I’ve had stuck in my mind ever since I read the book “Stuff: The secret lives of everyday things” (or was it “Natural Capitalism”? I’ve lent out both books right now).
Take a wild guess at how much of the energy in the gas you put in your car actually goes towards transporting you. Don’t be afraid to lowball it. Write it down.
How did you go about it? Did you use the fact (which is fairly common knowledge) that car engines are about 30% efficient? Good. But 30% is not the answer. Did you pay attention to how the question is worded? “Towards transporting YOU”?
How about idling, energy lost in the driveline, energy lost on powering accessories in the car? With all that, about one-eighth (12.5 %) of the energy reaches the wheels. Around half of that heats the tires, road and air that the car pushes aside. That leaves about 6% or so applied to moving the car forward. When you figure in that your mass compared to the car’s mass is about 5%, that leaves less than one percent of the energy in the fuel for transporting YOU. Let’s be generous and say it’s actually one percent. Here’s a little visual of that number for you:
That’s a scary waste in my book.
Here’s more to make you think: A friend of mine, Stan King, did some calculations based on a discussion we had at a recent simplicity circle meeting at our house. I had wondered how bicycling compares to driving in terms of energy efficiency. He took on the task of figuring it out. When you convert the amount of energy needed to bike a mile and convert that to the car’s miles-per-gallon equivalent, riding a bicycle has a “miles-per-gallon” of about 650. That number makes hybrid cars pale in comparison.
When you consider that 99% of the energy in the gas is wasted on things other than transporting you, the passenger, riding a bicycle has a “miles-per-gallon” of over 6500.
Compared to that, hybrid cars seem almost like stone age technology.
This is the thinking behind our family’s decision to stick with one car, even though it creates some inconvenience. It’s also why I bike to work practically every day.
And just so you won’t think I pulled these numbers out of thin air, there’s a Wikipedia article that states a 653 mpg for bicycling, which matches Stan’s number well. The calculation on the efficiency of cars can be found in this article by Amory Lovins from July 2006. The journal this was published in can be downloaded here (3.17 MB PDF).
Doing some research for an illustration I wanted to post on this blog, I typed the following search terms into Google: aluminum can volume. What do you think a search like this would bring you? Try it out yourself. You’ll be as surprised as I was.
It’s this:
Almost every result talks about how much energy is wasted when you don’t recycle a soda can! It’s the equivalent of filling the can halfway with gas and pouring it out. If that idea won’t make you think more about recycling aluminum cans, maybe this calculation will:
Half a soda can is 6 oz. A gallon has 128 oz. So 21.333 empty cans thrown away equal a gallon of gas wasted. My car has a tank capacity of about 15 gallons (I think). So it would take 320 non-recycled cans for me to waste a tank full of gas. My car can travel about 300 miles on a tank of gas. I certainly don’t want to waste energy like that. Especially energy coming from our dwindling oil reserves. We’ll need that oil for lots of other things besides burning it for transportation. For example, most plastics are based on oil, and I wonder how many cool and wonderful gadgets and gizmos (needing plastic enclosures and parts) we won’t be able to produce in the future if we run out of oil. Pardon the digression.
Anyway, now I’ve used my illustration and even given it a little surprising Google story to go with it.
