1. Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, out in paperback Tuesday. Our MR book forum on it was here.
2. The $10 microscope, via Chug.
3. Will failed British banks come back as mutuals?
4. "Gallons per mile" is better than "miles per gallon."
5. Recovery and sectoral shifts.
Litres per kilometre in Europe, ordinarily.
Did you notice how a publicly funded scientist, in a strange loop, produced intellectual property for a university, which was licensed to a single firm, resulting in a gag order?
I believe that prior to say 1980, publicly funded science would have led to publication and perhaps several companies jumping in to extend the invention for the market and as their own intellectual property?
I think we’d lost something, and it might even be related to the Participatory Fascists meme now in vogue.
So the reason the USA has such bad fuel economy compared to the rest of the world is, once again, the US refusal to adopt the metric system.
Using litres/100 kilometres means that Europe, Japan and even Australia get better information than you.
This is the second time today that I though what Obama needs to do is introduce an “imperial units tax” as being the best way to fix up your country.
Related to fuel economy: you can really get a hybrid owner’s blood boiling by calculating the actual gas savings vs. a similar non-hybrid. At 12,000 miles per year, the gas savings are almost guaranteed to be less than the larger monthly payments (trading a Suburban for a Prius doesn’t count).
The gallons per mile is technically correct, but ignores the desire to have a big number mean better.
There are exceptions (golf scores), but they are a small proportion of the general effect.
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Sean P is particularly correct because a lot of Prius owners aren’t big drivers (lots of Priuses in our bicycle club).
I think I would have said a commentary on the numeracy of our species, David. x hits us in the gut differently than 1/x in this case. I think Detroit knows that, and the EPA knows that, … which tells us who’s winning.
Read the story odograph.
As part of obtaining licensing deal from Cal Tech, the company required that it remain anonymous. This isn’t nefarious, or even particularly unusual. It’s all up to the negotiations between Cal Tech and the unnamed third party, and is entirely above board.
The invention itself is fully disclosed and described to the public: CalTech filed a patent after all. Incidentally, other companies could well be filing additional patents on the basic technology. Neither now, nor prior to 1980, would that give them right to market products based on these patents however.
The lengths some will go to introduce fringe theories is rather ridiculous.
Tim, I think you missed my point, and the alternative narrative. When a project is majority funded by tax dollars, why isn’t the result placed in the public domain (published without patent) as I believe was the norm earlier in the last century?
One of the early rules in the Constitution was that government could not hold copyright or patent, but we seem to have corrupted that by passing IP to intermediary holders-for-government.
I don’t believe we are getting the best results here, as tax payers. The fruits of our investment are captured by a variety of entities, first. But also we fractionalize ownership and restrict usage in the ways described previously at MR (IIRC) in a review of The tragedy of the anticommon
Log makes reciprocals agree, but it’s less useful than either. If people can’t find 1/(t/x + (1-t)/y) in their heads then they certainly aren’t going to calculate log(te^x + (1-t)e^y).
In all the comments on the $10 microscope, how come no one mentioned the underlying very revolutionary invention itself?
I’ve been waiting to make a comment about the invention. Could this make instant at home blood testing a possibility? You get home from the bar, forget the condom, the camera phone already confirmed that you’re both disease free and on birth control. That sounds like a revolution.
http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm#calculating
After following the links on the website I got to the mpg vs gpm calculator (from Duke U) which has a statement noting that for every 100 gallons of gas you consume, you produce appoximately one ton of CO2 emissions. I asked the professors who put up this site how do 600 pounds of gasoline (100 gallons at 6 lbs per gallon) produce 2000 lbs of emissions. They referred me to the url above which links to the EPA website. It still seems wrong to me, but I am not a chemist/physicist and do not understand how this is possible.
Is there anyone out there with more chemistry/physics knowledge who can answer this? These numbers are quoted all over the place and I find it difficult to grasp that 1 pound of anything can produce more than its mass in waste when burned.
Perhaps they’re a talking about “CO2″ equivilents. Unburned/partially burned fuel and impurities produce more potent GHGs than CO2. It’s a common practice to convert the expected GHG effect into a CO2 equivalent amount.
And perhaps they consider anything over half a ton to be about a ton.
Litres per kilometer?
I prefer to express my fuel consumption rate in square meters. Or hectares. Or acres, just to be a pain
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