The somewhat irreverent automotive program Top Gear, with its opinionated hosts, generally does a pretty good job of bashing wienie cars with electric motors, but James May in a recent episode offered a different opinion. He had the chance to test drive the Honda FCX Clarity and film a report with guest Jay Leno. The FCX Clarity is the hydrogen fuel cell car being test marketed in California (the only place) by Honda and is perhaps the future of “motorcars.” (just keeping the British flavor)
The fuel cell provides power to electric motors which provide enough power to create about 130 HP and can push the four door Honda to 100 mph. Interestingly Mr. May offers a pretty positive review of this electrically powered car — quite the surprise from someone who is a bit more interested in performance oriented cars powered with an internal combustion engine. In this episode, Mr. May travels from the UK to Los Angeles, California and puts the Clarity through its paces below.
According to a WSJ article in Monday’s paper, the Chinese company BYD is demonstrating their new F3DM which runs off batteries today. This “EV” can be charged from a regular electrical outlet and will be marketed to cab operators and other potential fleet customers. They plan to have their all-electric vehicle in showrooms in China by the end of the month according to the companies executives. Interestingly they also plan sell the car in the U.S. — and as early as the second half of 2010.
The car is primarily electric but is a “real car-sized” vehicle. The BYD’s F3DM also has a small gasoline engine that is used to generate electricity if the battery runs dry, strictly for recharging. Some people question whether the leap to electric cars makes sense in China, in part because most of China’s electricity comes from “dirty” coal-burning power plants.
According to the article, China’s government intends to support the electric vehicle push through research-and-development subsidies for auto makers and tax breaks and other incentives for consumers. They also plan to build battery-charge stations and other public infrastructure but haven’t commented on how much the Chinese government will spend.
Lost an entire post last night and figured I had better look at the new “dashboard” for WordPress a little bit more carefully.
I’ll include a photo from my Treo on this test post using TwitPic (FYI — they just started a blog today) as I headed into Red Lobster to have dinner with my daughter (yes, that’s her VW TDI).
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Fox News will debut a new program at 9PM EST, entitled “Hannity” featuring radio and TV personality Sean Hannity as the solo host. The program premieres January 12th and will include a panel with three studio guest. This “Great American Panel” is said to include a conservative, liberal and “X-factor” guest. One the the more interesting segments being proposed is a “Hate Hannity Hotline” … no doubt this will be a popular segment.
Sean’s co-host Alan Colmes announce that he was leaving his current position on November 24th and there have been a variety of polls asking who should replace the left leaning Democrat. Most polls indicated that viewers preferred Sean Hannity to go solo rather than bring on another liberal voice. Polls listed several popular guests as possible Colmes replacements, yet the final decision was to run with just Hannity. (Besides his radio and co-hosted television program, Sean Hannity has also been hosting his own weekend program call “Hannity’s America.”)
Cedarville University announced Wednesday that they will begin enrolling students in the fall of 2009 for the Dayton Ohio area’s first school of pharmacy. Fall freshmen will enter the pre-pharmacy program and enter the pharmacy graduate program which is scheduled to open its doors in 2012. The university plans to spend $20 million to build the new school and could possibly house the university’s nursing school program indicated Marc Sweeney, the newly named dean of the school of pharmacy, when talking to a reporter from the Dayton Daily News.
Cedarville is a conservative Christian university and is located between Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati and Ohio Northern University‘s schools of pharmacy. According to Sweeney, “Colleges have typically had to turn applicants down because there are not enough spaces across the region and across the nation” and he believes there is a need for another pharmacy school. Others familiar with pharmacy schools and hiring pharmacists, including my wife, are not so sure since the supply of pharmacists currently graduating will soon be sufficient to fill the number of employment opportunities. The year 2012 is being talked about as the year that the number of graduates will be sufficient for the number of jobs; time will tell.
A study in the online journal of the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, reports that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks. The study by Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight which is almost as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.
According to the article, growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year and the spent ground often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply.
To verify it, the scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel.
The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable than traditional biodiesel due to coffee’s high antioxidant content, the researchers say. Solids left over from the conversion can be converted to ethanol or used as compost, the report notes. The scientists estimate that the process could make a profit of more than $8 million a year in the U.S. alone. They plan to develop a small pilot plant to produce and test the experimental fuel within the next six to eight months.
For those of you on the Apple Macintosh computer, one of the better screen capture utilities/web services it Skitch.com. The downloadable application allows for a wide range of editting functions along with a variety of embed codes for web forums or blogs. I found the interface a bit cumbersome, but suspect that in time I will learn to like the interface. Since I spend most of my day runnng Windows (unfortunately Vista) on my laptop, a few hours on Linux and ONLY another few on the Mac, I can say that Skitch is the most complete all in one capture utility I have found. It is great way to capture and email/post “chunks” of webpages or screen content found on the Internet or ones own computer. Give it a try if you are using the Mac.
Cedarville University
