Cellulosic Ethanol

In order to produce cellulosic ethanol all you need is a plant. The structural material a plant creates to support itself is cellulose, which is essentially a complex sugar. Using enzymes to break down the plant's cell walls into sugars then fermenting the sugars is the extremely basic explanation for how cellulosic ethanol is made.

The primary reason starch-based (corn and sugar cane) ethanol is easier is that the corn seeds are already fairly simple sugars and the methods to turn them into fermentable sugar is much simpler and cheaper.
But corn-based ethanol can only utilize the seed of the corn plant. Cellulosic ethanol can utilize the entire plant.

Interestingly, some of the most ideal plants for cellulosic ethanol are grasses, which have a high ratio of cellulose to mass. And they're cheap.

Here's my list of reasons that this is awesome:

1. CO2 emissions from the fermentation process are much less for cellulosic ethanol than for corn-based ethanol.

2. Tillage of soil to plant corn crops release large amounts of CO2 trapped in the soil, and switchgrasses are perennial, which means once planted tillage never need happen again.

3. Native species can be used. Why plant some genetically engineered freak corn when you could get ethanol from all-natural native plants that restore the native habitat.

4. Grass farming is much cheaper and easier than corn farming, and grasses (especially native) are far more resistant to local weather conditions. Also, many insects that wreak havoc on corn crops have no effect on grass.

5. Corn farming causes soil erosion. Grass farming actually decreases soil erosion.

6. With an abundance of native grassland areas, the government could reduce or end the CRP management policy, saving the tax-payers billions. (34,500,000 acres at 170 bucks an acre = 5,8 billion dollars a year.)

7. Mathematically, we could actually end our use of petroleum based fuel. Switchgrass production, at peak, could eventually produce enough oil to fuel the current U.S. fuel consumption. In 2007 fuel use actually dropped. Even better!

8. Corn-farming is creating a condition where there is a total lack of genetic diversity amongst all plants. If a bacteria or virus started wiping out corn, it could take out all corn because little or none of it would be virus-resistant. Switchgrasses could be planted in a mixed bag (read: hundres) of various native grass species, and when one grass suffered from illness, the other species could easily fill the void.

So I'm excited to see the Dems jumping on the cellulosic bandwagon. Although I don't agree with ethanol mandates and ethanol subsidies, this rests entirely on the fact that corn-based ethanol benefits literally no one except corporate corn farmers.
Cellulosic ethanol could free us from foreign oil, decrease CO2 emissions, increase U.S. wealth, increase native populations, and decrease fertilizer and genetic engineered crop use.

But the main reason I love this is that normally technology and cars and fuel clash violently with the natural world. Here's a solution to the fuel crisis that involves cutting-edge technology - that actually encourages returning farmland to native plant growth. Imagine a shining ethanol plant, sitting in a field, surrounded by thousands of acres of tall-grass prairie. Now that is what I call harmony.

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A rare, kind word of praise for the Republicans

I have spoken out and written about the Second Biggest Folly in American Energy History, and how it appeared from the start to be nothing more than a smoky mirror congressional P.R. stunt to say "You hate high gas prices? We'll we're doing something about it, re-elect us please."

I am of course talking about the massive, massive ethanol subsidies this nation has created in the last 10 years. I continue to state as I always have that corn is a crappy ethanol source compared to sugar cane and the entire U.S. ethanol industry would completely collapse without the government subsidies.

I have noted before that ethanol makes up an inconsequential amount of our fuel resources and that total conversion of America's farmland to ethanol production would only cover the fuel needed by this nation for 25 days.

I have also mentioned that ethanol destroys engines when used in greater than 10% concentration. E85 vehicles are able to handle it, but all small-engined vehicles, lawn-mowers, atv's, motorcycles, etc. find ethanol toxic to their internal components.

Thank you, finally, GOP, for agreeing with me. As noted on page 30 of the GOP 2008 Platform:

The U.S. Government should end mandates for ethanol and let the free market work.

YES!

Unsurprisingly, the Republican Senatorial incumbents and candidates from the northern plains states are highly against this reversal of policy. Could that be because their states have reaped a fortune over the last 7 years from corn prices skyrocketing? Or is it because they genuinely think that ethanol is a way to break our energy dependence on foreign oil? I'll let the reader decide.

Here's what the DNC platform had to say about ethanol:

We'll invest in advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol which will provide American-grown fuel and help free us from the tyranny of oil.

Even the democrats now basically agree with me. They are acknowledging that starch-based ethanol (corn, sugarcane, etc) will not work, but cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass is much more efficient a producer of ethanol (once mass-production is utilized).

Why do I love this plan? Well, imagine the entire Great Plains blanketed by the original tallgrass prairie that originally was there. Imagine thousands and thousands of acres of cropland converted to highly-profitable grasslands. I can't even express how great a plan this is...oh heck the easiest way is with a whole seperate post.

Here's the Biggest Folly in American Energy History since I left that unanswered above.

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Philosophy in a Mountain Dew

I had no idea before but today I noticed that my 20 oz. Mountain Dew bottle is a source of infinite wisdom.
Besides supplying the brain-altering surge of caffeine and sugar that puts me in a near-hallucinatory frenetic state (and subsequently renders me catatonic 2 hours later), it also boasts unique and wonderful information on the outside of the bottle: nutritional information, a "best by" date, a mysterious recycling code number, and the obvious brand label.

However, as I twisted off the cap, I was dimly aware that I might just be the "1 IN 8 SCORES: Buy (1) 20 oz., get (1) 20 oz free!" Woohoo! Unfortunately when I twisted off the cap I found I was not the winner, all I saw was "Please, try again."

As disappointing as this is, its a far cry better than Coke contests, where the outside of a Coke bottle claims by twisting off the lid you could win any number of great prizes. Twisting off the top of a Coke bottle reveals something like this:

75xv9
11z7b

As though by drinking Coke products you suddenly become fluent in a strange WWII army code and you can find out if you won. The truth is its all a not-so-cleverly disguised attempt to force you to log on to their website, www.mycokerewards.com, and enter personal information so they can sell your soul information to advertisers and make a secondary revenue. So by "entering to win" usually all you are winning is a full mailbox.

But I digress. The point is, I got to thinking about that Mt. Dew lid and it's taunting "Please Try Again" and I came to the conclusion that by and large that's some of the finest advice I have ever been given. Although I don't normally go looking for advice on the underside of Pepsi products, well, there it was.

We as humans are inherently failures. We learn to walk by standing up, taking a cautious step, and falling. Then we try again. And again. And eventually we are sprinting. We take classes and (with a few exceptions) make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Maybe I misdefine us when I call us failures, because failure implies the endgame is one of non-success. What I mean to say is that we are a creature that by and large practices doing a thing unsuccessfully many times before it is eventually accomplished with success.

This differs from most other animals, for example housecats. Ever watched a cat sit there, twitching its tail as it ponders something, then in a blur it bounces upward and performs a highly acrobatic jump which involves three or four different bounces before casually landing on a perch? How many times did the cat practice that move? Probably none, and it probably got it right.
Or think about a squirrel jumping from tree to tree...it doesn't miss that branch very often.
So we as a species are uniquely prone to fail. Not total failure, just individual failings that stack up until they are crowned by a single success.

So this Mt. Dew lid, though its message was completely innocuous, reminds me what we all should remember: when you mess up, please, try again.

And never forget: 1 in 8 scores.

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Black Holes (Funding and Literal)

Next week the Large Hadron Collider starts smashing particle protons, an event that some believe will cause the Big Bang Lite, and in an instant we'll have solved all the world's problems by ending the world.
The Large Hadron collider cost an estimated 6.4 Billion Euros (up to this point) and it's primary goal is to prove (or disprove) the existence of the Higgs Boson particle. For those of us who don't know what the Higgs Boson particle is, its basically particle physics answer to the great question "Why does a tiny proton have mass?"
Unfortunately for Particle Physicists, discovery of the Higgs Boson particle will in no obvious way benefit mankind in the foreseeable future. However, it will answer one of the fundamental questions about physics, and tie up the Standard Model of Physics.
Which leads to the problem. How will physicists convince their governments to fund ridiculous particle accelerators in the future if the LHC successfully answers the last great question? Several physicists who are involved in the LHC were interviewed last year in Science magazine. They suggested they hope the LHC doesn't find the Higgs Boson, becuase if it does they will essentially be out of a job. They are concerned that without the potential for a major discovery, they'll have no footing to fund their super-super collider, and the super-super-super collider after that.

Let me assuage their fears. The Fermilab accelerator has not had a major discovery since its finding of the "Top Quark" in 1995. However, they had no problem securing $320 million dollars for funding in fiscal year 2008. Then they complained that they weren't getting enough, so Congress earmarked another 29 million as an add-on to the current Iraq spending budget for the year. There are approximately 1900 employees at Fermilab. 350 million dollars divided amongst 1900 employees comes out to around 184,200 dollars per employee, many of which are graduate students and post-docs. I wasn't making 184,000 dollars as a grad student, then complaining to Congress for more, while producing no major research breakthroughs for 13 years...

Anyway, the LHC comes online next week and some believe the particle collisions might produce micro-blackholes that could destroy the earth and solar system. And although the physicists who believe this acknowledge it is a low-probability, the major study that found the LHC was safe was funded and produced by CERN, the company in charge of the LHC. That's like a used car dealer saying "oh hell yeah, this car has a great engine. You can trust me, I'm not biased."

The LHC is sponsoring a live webcast of the first particle collisions. There may be a small contingent of physicists going "I told you so" as the webcast shows swirling, bright energetic lights appear, then mysterious high-tech gizmos being sucked into a vortex, then the camera going dead.

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Detroit (Tokyo) Muscle

As I am working on rebuilding my little Honda Tin-Can (from my fender-bender) I am wondering how far I should go in the maintain and rebuild process.

I spent my lunch break reading about the legendary 71 Plymouth Belvedere GTX, the car owned by my father back in the early 70's. I didn't know much about this car, other than dad would always go into that weird, radio-announcer bass and go "4-26 hemi...the most powerful engine blah blah blah" and I'd tune the rest out.

But as I wandered today through my rambling thoughts and wikipedia articles I came across a weird regulation in the Nascar rules that state that 427 cubic inches is the "maximum allowed displacement" for a regulation racing engine. Apparently the 426 hemi took first, second and third at the Daytona 500 soon after they were introduced, and other companies (Ford, Chevy) successfully got it banned for a year before its "stock" parts were widely distributed to the public and it was allowed again. To this day the regulation stands, the 427 cu. in. engine is as large as it gets. And suddenly I remembered my dad's ridiculous rants about his old car.
Could it be, I asked myself, that my dad actually knew what he was talking about and had the ultimate, most bad-ass car ever?

Further research revealed the truth, the 426 Hemi produced way more than the 425 HP that Plymouth claimed, but in order to keep insurance rates low (and sales high) that is what they advertised. Further, only 720 GTX's were sold with the 426 Hemi, and to this day it remains an extremely valuable collector car. And of the 720 GTX's made with the 426 Hemi, only a few were 71's, as the production level was way down that year.
It's quite possible my dad had one of the rarest, most valuable Plymouth cars in company's history. Today a 71 GTX with a 426 Hemi is so rare (30 known to exist) they each have their own name and sell for $250-500k.
And my dear old dad sold the GTX and bought a Vega.
When I mentioned that story to a co-worker, he about flipped out. Apparently he spent his 20's (in the 80's) rebuilding late 60's, early 70's Detroit muscle cars. When he found out my dad had a 71 GTX with te 426 Hemi he was blown away. But it was the downgrade to a Vega that really caused him to gasp.

I never really understood how valuable the 71 GTX my dad had was until today.

And so it makes me wonder about my own car: that little, dinged up, tin can, Honda Del Sol that looks like the runt of the Honda litter. Similar to the GTX, the Del Sol was a novelty car built by a major automaker during its heyday. There were slightly less than 75,000 made between 1993 and 1997. Today approximately 1/4 of those remain on the road. In the next 20 years they'll fade into history. Could it be that I should cling to my little Del Sol, or god willing, fix it up?
It has crossed my mind that someday people may go "remember the days when cars didn't look like jellybeans?" And there will be that spiffy little Del Sol under a canvas in my barn, and I'll drag it out and fix it up and when I drive it down the road people will openly gape in admiration for a day when you actually had a fuel-injected single overhead cam engine that didn't talk to you and discuss its feelings.
And maybe, just maybe, some other person my age will feel sufficiently nostalgic and offer me 45,000 dollars for that little car, and it'll be theirs, so they can drive it around and remember how great it was when Tokyo Muscle ruled the streets.

I guess the problem is when I pull up to a dealer to get a new car the dealer will offer me a few hundred bucks for the Del Sol (my dad got 300 bucks for his GTX)...but its worth more than that to me, and 30 years from now it may be worth a lot more, to me and to someone else.

Especially if I swap in a B16 engine, turbocharger, add sway bars, put in a stage 3 clutch...

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This is my rifle, this is my "gun"...

This one's for fightin', this one's for fun...

Apparently Sarah Palin (and John McCain in May 2007) is a backer of "abstinence-only education."

For those of us who don't know exactly what the hell that even means, here's John McCain's take: "Sen. McCain believes the correct policy for educating young children on this subject is to promote abstinence as the only safe and responsible alternative. To do otherwise is to send a mixed signal to children that, on the one hand they should not be sexually active, but on the other here is the way to go about it. As any parent knows, ambiguity and equivocation leads to problems when it comes to teaching children right from wrong. Sen. McCain believes that there are many negative forces in today’s society that promote irresponsible and dangerous behavior to our children. The public education system should not join this chorus of moral equivocation and ambiguity."

For me the problem with a politician arises when I get mixed signals. Gov. Palin is a strong supporter of gun ownership, a lifetime NRA member, and a strong supporter of gun safety education. I just don't understand how a person can want to empower young people to understand how to use and avoid harming themselves and others with guns, but want children to not learn how to use and avoid harming themselves and others with "guns." Obviously, I'm talking about sex here.

McCain and Palin seem to be saying that it is good and right to teach children the following:
"Here's how to load a gun...insert the shell into it, cock it, point it at the target, and fire. Be sure to never point the gun at another person, becuase if the gun is loaded, it could accidentally go off and you could seriously hurt them. Also, you should never point an unloaded gun at someone either, becuase...how sure are you that it is unloaded?"
They are saying as far as guns go, "don't kill anyone, but here's the way to go about it."

However, its not okay for children to hear:
"Here's how to have safe sex. Insert...etc etc...blah blah... Be sure to never have sex without protection, or you could get pregnant. Even coitus interruptus can lead to pregnancy, because...how can you be sure no sperm got out early?"
Because it's not okay to say "don't have sex, but here's the way to go about it." Somehow that's a mixed message, unlike the gun safety message.

If you want your kids to not get pregnant, spend less time trying to tell them not to have sex. Young adults thrive on rebellion. Instead teach them to value their bodies and minds and the sacredness of the act so that they willingly choose not to have it until a time when they are mature enough to handle the consequences.
That is how hunting works. Gov. Palin agrees that you teach a young person the sacredness of hunting, of wild game, and of the importance of legally hunting to conserve the wild game herd for your children and your children's children. By teaching children how important it is to hunt during the legal season, and about the sacredness of the wild game you are hunting, you prevent offseason poaching.

I guess I'm trying to make two points here. One is that hunting and gun safety is just like sex safety and you can't expect young minds to somehow grasp the nuancal differences between the two when you teach them that they are somehow fundamentally opposite...but yet the same.
And two: no matter how good gun safety is, no matter how good hunter education is, there are still accidents. Accidents that would be far greater in number if we didn't teach our kids how to properly handle the guns in the house. Same goes for sex.

Abstinence-only sex ed is a pipe dream. Pre-marital sex is just as prevalent (though actually safer and less pregnancy inducing) as it was 20, 30, and 40 years ago. We just have better news coverage of it now. There wasn't Fox News 30 years ago pumping near-maniacal ultra-conservative agendas to us 24/7 back then.

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Sarah Palin, Grandmother at 44

Apparently McCain's VP choice has a pregnant teen daughter.

Pregnancy out of wedlock is a touchy subject for me, believe it or not. I am highly supportive of anyone who thinks it through and decides to keep their child. If your child is something you want and you aren't afraid to accept the responsibility of being its parent, then keeping the baby is the absolutely most wonderful thing you can do in this whole world. On the other hand if you are a scared 16-year-old with no one to help you, then I support your ability to think about (and freely decide without legal interference) what is best for the baby.

Anyway, it is hard not to judge McCain's running mate, Mrs. Palin, because her daughter is pregnant. It's so much easier to say "wow, what kind of a mother? What kind of a household is it that this teenager needed that physical affirmation from her boyfriend? What kind of household raised a girl who acquiesced to sex? Much less sex without birth control?"
But it is not fair for us to judge her solely on the acts of her children. No parent can truly control their child. You can do your best for them, but (especially as they become numerous) eventually you'll have to let them out of your sight and hope their internal compass keeps them true. So it's not Sarah Palin's fault she'll be a grandmother at 44.

...OR IS IT?

I know three things about Palin right now, and forgive me for not reading all about her before I write this, but background on her is inconsequential to this entry, so I got most of my info on her from msnbc in five minutes.
1. She's young physically and politically. It has been pointed out that the amount of time McCain has spent running for president exceeds the total amount of time Palin has spent in politics. As we all try to figure out why McCain chose her, I'm sure we'll all come up with our own theories (or happily recycle the theories of our mentors). My theory is that she will help McCain shore up any allegiances amongst the conservative wing of the GOP while stealing a few Clintonites. My other theory is it was a "bold move" and the McCain team just wanted someone to say they did something other than attack Obama. "This week McCain took a break from attacking Obama and took the bold move..." It makes it sound like this is all planned ahead of time.

2. Her husband obviously thinks he is Napolean Bonaparte. See the image associated with this story.

3. She's like, crazy pro-life and junk. This may be just something people are latching onto, but it seems like an awful lot of people are repeating it. And so here comes my worry: can a political candidate who is pro-life let her daughter have an abortion? I don't care whether Mrs. Palin thinks abortion is right or wrong, she's not the one that is pregnant. But as a paranoid delusional person that I am, I have to ask myself if Gov. Palin's daughter really had a say in the matter. And that worry scares me because I'd hate to see someone putting their politics before their family.

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