Gadgetopia

Formula 1 Racing to Go Hybrid from 2009-2013: This is neat from both a geek perspective and from a competitive perspective.

The biggest difference between KERS and a regular battery-electric hybrid is that KERS stores recovered waste energy in a rotating flywheel. Instead of converting waste energy into electricity and than back into useful energy again with an electric motor, KERS simply transfers the kenetic energy to a ~5kg flywheel in the F1 car’s transmission. The energy stored in the flywheel can then be used by the driver by pushing a “boost” button.

The “boost” button will align F1 with all those racing video games I played in the 80s. Drivers will need to “charge their boost” — I wonder if they’ll get a little progress bar which will grow as they earn boost back. Think of the fun n trailing driver will have coming up behind another driver who is out of boost.

Seriously — this will be an absolute riot on the track.

Kite-Assisted Cargo Ship Successfully Completes Maiden Voyage: We discussed the idea of a kite-assisted ship a few years ago here. Well, a ship has actually made a trans-Atlantic voyage assisted by one of these kites, and the results were wicked good.

During its time at sea, the kite-assisted ship traveled a total of 11,952 nautical miles. During the time that the kite was deployed — which lasted anywhere from a few minutes to up to 8 hours — it pulled the ship with up to 5 tons of power at force 5 winds — a relief of more than 20% on the ship’s engines. Projected onto an entire day, this performance by the “Beluga SkySails” represents savings of about 2.5 tons of fuel and more than $1,000 a day.

Major Brian Shul: "I loved that jet": A sentimental article from an SR-71 pilot about what may be the greatest aircraft ever built.

After several agonizingly long seconds, we made the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean. ‘You might want to pull it back,’ Walter suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly. I pulled the throttles to idle just south of Sicily, but we still overran the refueling tanker awaiting us over Gibraltar.

I saw an ad for this thing on tv tonight; the Wilcraft ice fishing rig. “Because trucks don’t float.”

The ad aired during the Kent Hrbek Outdoors Show, and made me laugh out loud. I mean, a purpose-built $10,000 buggy made for rapid deployment for… ice fishermen?

Roll this bad boy off your trailer, drive out to your favorite spot (using your GPS, of course), drop the bottom down on the ice, pop up the tent top, drill a couple of holes and you’re in. Hear about a hot spot somewhere else on the lake? Pull in the lines, drop the tent top, lift the bottom, start the engine, and you’re off in seconds flat. Thin ice in between the spots? No problemo. This baby floats. If the snow is deep, all you need is the optional Track System; next best thing to a snow cat.

I think some people have just too much time & money on their hands. How long until we see photos of a redneck-built version, made from a jonboat and an old 4-wheeler? Or maybe that came first.

New boat aims to make SEALs’ travels less painful: Apparently, Navy SEALs get their butts kicked by the delivery boats that get them to shore.

Fighter jet pilots are subjected to forces up to 10 times the pull of gravity, but the Mark V has produced forces upward of 20 Gs slamming against waves, said Lt. Damon Shearer, senior medical officer of Naval Special Warfare Group 4.

Soon after the vessel went into service, the Navy began getting reports of injuries.

Though it responded by installing shock-absorbing seats, there continues to be a problem with back, neck and joint injuries that occur over time […]

The Navy has engineered a new boat that runs smoother through the waves. Who would of thought that ride quality was a mission critical issue?

Passenger jets get anti-missile devices: Interesting to see this happen. It seems they’ve been talking about it since 9/11.

Tens of thousands of airline passengers will soon be flying on jets outfitted with anti-missile systems as part of a new government test aimed at thwarting terrorists armed with shoulder-fired projectiles.

Someone made an argument some time ago that airports should have anti-missile systems, not airplanes. A 747 cruises at 37,000 feet, while a Stinger has an effective range of about 15,000 feet, so there’s a relative short period of time on takeoff and landing when a plane will be in danger.

You know those annoying waits sitting in the left-turn lane waiting for an opening in traffic? Someone at UPS has been thinking about it, and how that affects the bottom line.

The company employs what it calls a “package flow” software program, which… maps out routes for every one of its drivers, drastically reducing the number of left-hand turns they make (taking into consideration, of course, those instances where not to make the left-hand turn would result in a ridiculously circuitous route).

I don’t know if this would help any of us save fuel on our daily commute or running errands, but when you’re talking about 95,000 big brown trucks running all over the place all day every weekday, it adds up to big big savings.

NT Times article, via the always neat Neatorama.

Caparo T1 - First Drive - Motor Trend: The Caparo T1 is coming soon. It promises Formula 1 performance in a street legal car. This is what 0-60 in 2.9 seconds is apparently like:

And then. Then. Then my world explodes, and I can’t swear to the accuracy of the following. All mental bandwidth is used in controlling the unfolding storm, rather than in recording it.

The acceleration is far, far beyond anything from the exotic establishment. Enzo? Carrera GT? No, this is another order - and I never get near the 10,500 redline.

Not quite crazy enough? The Barabus TKR claims 0-60 in less than 1.7 seconds. Of course, it’s currently a one-off, though they’re hoping to sell 300-400 a year.

For the budget-minded, you can build an Ultima GTR for less than $50K and supposedly get 0-60 times of around 2.5 seconds, depending on what engine you decide to drop in it. Your 0-100-0 tests are for wimps — let’s see what 0-200-0 looks like, shall we?

Or, you can do like I do: spend $60 and drive them in Project Gotham Racing 4.

Gas guzzlers get new lives — as tire-smoking hybrids: Neil Young turned his 1959 Lincoln into a bio-diesel hybrid.

The Lincoln’s new electric engine will power the car and when it begins to lose juice, Young will simply flip a switch and the car will run on biodiesel fuel until the electric motor is recharged. “A 19-foot-long car, the longest car ever made at its time. Two and half tons, the heaviest car at its time,” Young said, “And it can get 100 miles to the gallon, not 10 miles to the gallon.”

Young renamed his car Linc-Volt, and is making a movie about the transformation, which he hopes to release next year.

It apparently costs about $40K to do this, so it’s not for everyone. Here’s the Web site of H-Line Conversions — the company that does them

Is GM’s Green Tech Better Than Toyota’s?: Very interesting — you wouldn’t expect the likes of BMW and Mercedes Benz to look at GM for licensed technology. Watch them spin this off like they did OnStar.

[…] GM, once a laggard in fuel efficiency technology, is making its nemesis Toyota […] take notice by starting a new and legitimate rivalry for the next generation of hybrid trucks and SUVs, as well as plug-in vehicles. Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW all opted in 2005 to adopt GM’s hybrid technology in a four-company venture, rather than to license Toyota’s hybrid hardware.

I also read that, at the L.A. auto show, GM showed off its hybrid Tahoe and a hybrid Escalade that got 21 m.pg. city. Now you can be big pimpin’ with an eco lean, yo.

Driving Tips from GM’s Milford Proving Grounds: Nate True from Gear Live was in my group during the driving skills course at Milford last month. He had an HD video camera, and he produced this great video of what we did that morning.

In the very beginning, when he’s talking and Buick Lucerne screams away in the background — that’s me behind the wheel. Man, I loved that car.

There’s more video of me spinning the Impala. Thanks, Nate, for that really flattering footage. I appreciate it.

Finally, there’s some great footage of the Stabilitrak demo I discussed. It really shows how valuable it is in an emergency maneuver.

They say everyone has a dark side. I found mine a few weeks ago. It turns out that it’s only about three inches of pedal travel away.

You see, the latest Corvette has massive block of power sitting directly under your right foot. Push it down hard, and a unholy wail fills the cabin, blotting out the rest of world and shifting your field of view into fast forward.

After doing this for a while, it seems a little…evil. A little…abusive, maybe? But you just can’t help it. It feels so good. So…right. The Vette begs you to abuse it. It invites you to flog the hell out of it with wild abandon, and it just keeps bouncing back for more.

Approaching the car, you half-think it’s going to be complicated, like a high-maintenance girlfriend. It is, after all, a legendary sports car, and they all come with baggage, right?

But it’s not like that. The Corvette is a dream to drive. It’s the friendliest, perhaps most practical sports car on Earth. It’s like your favorite drinking buddy grew four wheels and a stick shift.

I’m a big guy, but I fit in the Vette perfectly. It starts easily, the clutch is as light as any car I’ve ever driven, and it pulls away smoothly from a stop. It has so much power that you really can’t screw it up. It will gladly idle along in first gear without any pedal input and without stalling.

For 2008, the engine has been bumped up to 430 horsepower. The result is this huge well of go-juice at any point in the RPM range. Put your foot down and the world turns into a blur. The powerband is so broad that it doesn’t matter how fast the engine is turning — the Vette is ready at any speed. Sixty miles per hour comes up in 4.3 seconds.

The first part of the course GM laid out for us was a cone-demarked twisty section on a huge asphalt pad named Black Lake. The Vette rocketed down anything resembling a straightaway, braking easily and surely for the corner, then blasting down the next straight.

(To approximate this without an actual Vette, alternate flinging yourself against a wall, shooting yourself from a cannon, then falling off the roof of your house. Repeat in rapid succession.)

The cone section exits the asphalt to a backroads “driving conditions” course with pre-worn roads full of the requisite potholes and uneven surfaces. The Vette’s suspension is stiffer than most, but it still handled everything with aplomb. There was just no rattling it. Shoot down a straight, brake for a corner, accelerate through it, then put your foot to the floor and the next corner screams toward you.

After the backroads the course merges back onto the asphalt in front of a quarter-mile of glass-smooth surface with nothing on either side. They may as well have put a sign somewhere that read “dragstrip.”

About the third time through the course, I got the idea that I could hit triple digits down this section from a standing start. Blasting through the gears, the speedo in the heads-up display couldn’t keep up. It was swallowing numbers four and five at a time — 83, 88, 93, 97. It hit 101 just as I banged into fourth gear with nothing under my right foot but floorboard and with the engine wailing away like a banshee.

(I did this again on the next run but I missed second gear. The Vette deftly avoided any drama — the rev limiter kicked in and the pedal went soft until the engine shaved off a couple thousand RPM. No harm, no foul. Thank you sir, may I have another?)

On the fourth or fifth time through the course, I became determined to rattle it. You had to be able to get it crossways, right? Combine that much power with twice as much stupidity, and physics should take over. I was sure of it.

The Vette has a bonehead filter consisting of traction control and adaptive braking. It will automatically apply the brakes and modulate power to keep all the wheels spinning in the right direction.

Undettered, I shut this off. I was determined to drift it around a sweeping 180-degree corner. No such luck. The display told me I was pulling a full G-force laterally, but the tail never moved. I gave it more power but it just accelerated and cornered faster, to the point where my left shoulder was bruising against the door panel. But the tail never twitched out of line.

I was beaten.

The Corvette was a popular car that afternoon. It never sat empty for longer than it took to switch drivers. It spent a four-hour stretch being mercilessly abused. Returning to the paddock each time, it reeked of clutch smoke. After the first hour, the front wheels went dark with brake dust and little flecks of rubber were kicked up on the panels behind the rear wheels.

All throughout, it never flinched. Despite making a dozen really crappy drivers look like Michael Schumacher, it pulled, braked, and cornered just as strong on every run.

Even now, in my mind, it’s idling in a dark garage right now thinking, “Is that all you have? Come on, Deane. Let’s go.”

I’m more than a bit behind on my reports from the GM Blogger Junket, but I’m going to try and catch up here. I’ve already written about the Milford Proving Grounds in general, and about the Advanced Driving Techniques course we went through in the morning.

Next up: lunch. And more cars.

Lunch was catered into a small building on the edge of Black Lake. It was about what you’d expect from the biggest company in country — a palatial buffet. In attendance were the engineers of GM’s Hybrid program, as well as some of the design engineers.

I was happy to sit next to one of the guys who designs the interiors of the cars. In the corner was a new Malibu LTZ, sister car of the Saturn Aura. So I immediately marched him over and showed him the trim piece that an Aura I rented in Chicago used to assault my hip whenever I climbed into it.

Additionally, we had an interesting conversation about what size person they design for. Turns out they design for the 3rd to 97th percentile of human heights. Anyone under or over that is so rare and would require such drastic changes, that they’re sort of out of luck.

Anyway, lunch was the just the first buffet. I love food and all, but the second buffet was waiting right outside the doors to the building. It was a paddock of about 30 brand new GM cars and trucks. Keys in the ignition. Exit to the test track clearly marked.

I was the first one out of the building.

The cars were lined up neatly in rows, grouped by manufacturer. There was a good cross-section from every GM nameplate, as well as a handful of Saabs.

I went up and down the rows for about three hours. They had us set up on the “Driving Conditions Course” (see the aerial photo), which took eight or nine minutes to get around.

So you picked a car and drove to the exit point where a guy with a clipboard wrote something down (no idea what). He’d hold you here until the car in front of you got a ways out, depending on the difference in cars. If you were in the Vette, you had to wait a bit longer to give the car in front more lead time.

All in all, I drove perhaps 20 different cars. Mostly the sports cars. My notes:

Ponitac Solstice / Saturn Skye
Too. Damn. Small. I’m six-foot-four, and no amount of fiddling with the seat adjustment was going to fit me in these things, which is too bad because they drove well and the turbo versions were awfully quick (260 h.p. in a roller skate will do that).

Sadly, any enjoyment of the performance was pre-empted by the wind trying to slice the top of my head off. And if I drove it with the top up, my head hit the roof. Tragic.

Cadillac CTS and STS
They had about seven different models and combinations of these two there. They were all absolute dreams to drive. A bit less power than I would have liked, but they drove beautfilly and had every creature comfort you could think of.

The STS is larger and rolls around a bit in the corners — your traditional “big ‘ol Caddy.” In one of my trips in the STS, I found a XM channel devoted to movie soundtracks. I spent 10 minutes jamming to the “Crimson Tide” theme music. It was somehow fitting.

(Just outside the paddock was a 2007 Cadillac CTS-V. I would have loved to have driven this, but it was the designated “chase car.” The CTS-V is a CTS with the 400 h.p. LS-1 dropped in sideways. I’ve driven one in Sioux Falls before — they’re something else.)

Saab 9-5 Aero
Woof — this car was a blast. It had a turbo V-6 and a six-speed in the body of a station wagon. Great little sleeper rocket. It handled great and would plaster you back in the seat when you put your foot down and the boost came up. I drove this one two or three times — it was that much fun.

The interior was a little austere in the Scandinavian tradition, but I stopped caring the first time it tried to rip my head off.

(Note: the above picture is poor. The Saab I’m discussing is the red one, partially obscured.)

Saab 9-7X Aero
This is an SUV based on the TrailBlazer platform. What gets more interesting is when you drop a 390 h.p. motor in it — a detuned version of the Corvette engine. It was beautfully appointed and went fast-ish. It had a lot of power, but it still had a lot of weight to move around.

In the end, I missed the point — you’re not going to get something that big to go fast enough to make me want to buy it for the speed. And without that, you’re just paying a lot.

Chevy Corvette
Hold your horses — we’ll talk about the Corvette at length tomorrow…

Here’s an interesting fact I finally broke down and looked up today —

I wondered what percentage of U.S. oil consumption could fit in one supertanker. The answer was a little scary.

As of 2004, the U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels of oil a day, according to the CIA. For some perspective, China is second at just 6 million barrels a day.

Supertanker capacity varies, but Wikipedia says most carry about 2 million barrels. The largest tanker in the world is a ship we’ve talked about before — the Jahre Viking (now called the Knock Nevis). It carries 4 million per day.

So, it takes 10 “normal-sized” supertankers to supply the U.S. with oil for a single day. Yikes.

GM’s Milford Proving Grounds is a weird place. It’s a massive automotive testing facility — two miles by three miles; 4,000 acres.

Contained in it is a driving enthusiasts dream come true, and — I imagine — an automobile’s nightmare. There’s about every conceivable method and facility with which to test a car’s mettle.

Continuing this series, Milford was the place GM took us to drive their 2008 lineup. We were mainly confined to a massive asphalt pad called “Black Lake,” (here’s an aerial photo to help you gauge the size of it) but we had to drive through a large section of the facility to get there.

Driving through it, its the road signs that give away the purpose of the place. These are from memory, so they’re not gospel, but the gist is clear.

• “7% grade. Test traffic to the right.”
• “Salt water trough”
• “Weathering bay”
• “High speed testing in progress. Merge with care.”
• “Hz = m.p.h / 3” (referred to the frequency of a series of grooves cut in the road surface)

It resembles a military base in the sense that it a little self-contained city with all sorts of odd buildings, all nicely labeled. The view from Google Maps gives it all away, and I took the liberty of screen-capping it and annotating it with what I remember from my experience.

Annotated aerial photo of the Milford Proving Grounds

Driving from one end to the other, there are some fascinating sights.

• We passed over what looked like a standard interstate overpass. Except that the road under it was steeply banked, and a pair of yellow Corvettes was passing under us at a grossly illegal speed.
• Every once in a while, you’d see a car covered with tape in a criss-cross pattern to disguise its lines. Alternately, the back half of it would be covered with black canvas, or duct-taped plastic.
• At one point, sprinklers suddenly rose out of Black Lake and started watering down the surface.
• The Driving Conditions course (see the annotated aerial) was filled with real-world obstacles and hazards. A dead giveaway it was all made up: the railroad crossing with tracks that stopped about two feet off the road on either side.
• There was a sloped section of concrete in one spot with various surfaces on it which varied in viscosity. Lots of skid marks hinted at the carnage that had taken place there over the years.

The whole thing was surreal. There was a distinct, “Yeah, let’s try that!” vibe about the place, like some engineers just sit around all day and think up ways to break cars.

I got the same feeling from some of the instructors at the Advanced Driving Skills course we took in the morning. These guys go nowhere at half-throttle. Gotta get across 100 yards of asphalt? Better do it with your right foot on the floor. Cars don’t stand a chance in this place — it exists to beat up cars, and the inhabitants are apparently encouraged to do so.

We were told that the cars from the skills course are “put down” after they’re beaten up too much — they’re taken to the crash testing lab and run into walls at high speed.

Somehow, that fits.

As I mentioned in a previous post, GM flew me out to Detroit this week to take a run at their 2008 lineup. I flew out Tuesday night, and stayed all day Wednesday at their Milford Proving Grounds — essentially a 4,000 acre obstacle course for cars (the Proving Grounds gets its own post tomorrow).

I won’t gulp down this whole thing in one post, so indulge me this week — I think I have four separate things to write about here.

Here goes —

The morning of my day with GM was consumed by an “Advanced Driving Skills Course.” I have no idea why they wanted us to do this. Some guesses: (1) so we didn’t wreck the cars later in the day, (2) to demonstrate GM’s technology, or (3) just to show us a good time. In the end, it accomplished a little of all three.

There were about a dozen of us, so we separated into groups of two or three and took turns at five different events stationed around a massive patch of asphalt filled with orange cones.

The Skid Course

We first hopped into an Impala without any rear wheels. In their place where two outrigger-type wheels on swivels (pictured above). These were initially locked in a north-south direction, just like the actual rear wheels would be, but they could be unlocked at any time, leaving the back end of the car essentially frictionless.

We had to drive towards a set of cones, then turn to the left or right to go around them. At the apex of the turn, the instructor pressed a button which let back end of the car start to whip around.

The idea here was to learn how to “catch” a skid. The old advice holds true: steer in the direction of the skid. Put another way, steer in the direction you want to go.

A few things here are important and overlooked.

1. You need to steer a lot. I tend to steer with one hand, and this wasn’t enough. You have to turn the wheel hand over hand, often to opposite lock.

2. The first fishtail is easy to catch. What you’re not ready for is when the backend of the car comes back around. That’s when everyone had a tendency to spin.

3. You will go where you look, so don’t look into the skid. Look down the road into the horizon. That’s where you want to go.

I’m ashamed to say my experience in South Dakota winters did nothing for me. I was spinning that Impala like a top. It was embarrassing.

High Speed Maneuvering

There wasn’t much point to this except to get us used to reacting quickly at high speed. We boarded a jet black Impala SS, and accelerated towards a set of cones (and we did accelerate — that Impala went like a scorched cat). At the last minute, our instructor would give us a direction, and we had to steer around the cones.

It wasn’t too hard, but we were going about 50 m.p.h. and had about 20 feet to react. Do the math.

I did learn that you have to look where you’re going and make sure you turn hard enough. At that speed, you’re not mentally inclined to turn very hard. You’re subconciously afraid of upsetting the apple cart, so you try to clip the apex and you end up eating cones. You really need to guide the car all way into the center of the lane you’re trying to get to.

Backing Up (my name, not theirs)

I have to say it — this one was a bit lame. They give this course to some teenage children of GM employees, for whom I imagine this comes in handy, but it was fairly boring for me.

We had to back up a Silverado through some cones using a combination of all the mirrors. Not hard, but I did learn to pick a spot on the tailgate of the truck, aim that at something behind me, and keep the two lined up, like the sights of a gun.

Anti-Lock Braking

This one was just like the high-speed maneuvering, except we got to mash on the brakes. The idea was to get us used to working with ABS, instead of against it.

We took a half-dozen runs down the course in a Northstar-powered Buick Lucerne (which is the fastest Buick I’ll ever drive, I’m sure). At the last minute, we had to manuever around the cones, and then back into our own lane. This necessitated braking, or you’d never make it back around.

My Nissan Altima has ABS, but I don’t think I’ve ever had to really use it. I was pleasantly surprised with it — even at high braking pressure, the car was totally steerable.

In fact, on the last run, my instructor told me to “panic” and hit the brakes as hard as I could. I complied, but I could still completely steer the Buick around the obstacle and back into my lane while bringing it down from 50 m.p.h. to almost a complete stop in what felt like about 80 feet. The stop was violent, but controllable.

Stabilitrak

This last one was an demonstration by the instructors. They had two identical Buick Lucernes, but one was rigged with a switch to shut off Stabilitrak.

Stabilitrak is GM’s name for their stability control system. What it does is detect the yaw of the car — the difference between the direction it’s turning and the direction it’s traveling. If the difference is too much, too fast, it assumes you’re in trouble and starts applying the brakes to specific wheels to bring you back under control.

So we jumped in the non-Stabilitrak Lucerne and went rocketing down the strip. The instructor “whip-sawed” the car — yanked the wheel hard to the left, then hard back to the right, to force the car into a fishtail. It worked, and we got tossed around like rag dolls.

We swapped cars (into the one with Stabilitrak) and did the same thing again. To be honest, I couldn’t tell much difference in the Stabilitrak-equipped Lucerne from inside the car — it just went so fast.

However, after my run, when I was watching others from 100-yards down the track, it was obvious that the car without Stabilitrak was in a lot more trouble than the other one. It had a tendency to whip back and forth three or four times, while the Stabilitrak Lucerne went once then was brought under control.

(Just to make sure I’m not shilling too hard here — Stabilitrak is the trade name for an “Electronic Stability Control” (ESC), first pioneered by Mercedes Benz. Most manufacturers have their own implementation of it — the Wikipedia page linked above lists all the names used to describe it.

In the United States, ESC is required to be on all new cars for the 2012 model year. GM is apparently trying to beat the mandate by a year and have it on all 2011 models.)

So, the morning was both fun and educational. I did learn a thing or two, and it gave me a chance to do things I could never do on a public street. Essentially, we were allowed to get ourselves in trouble, then try to get ourselves out of it.

I have a 13-year-old that’s going to be driving in a few years, and I’d love for him to take a course like this. Even if you don’t master anything, you start to get a feel for how a car reacts at the limit and what you can expect.

Even when I was tearing down the strip in that Lucerne waiting for the instructor to fishtail it, I was fairly calm because I had been doing much the same thing all morning. Had I been driving, I would have been in a better position to do something about it.

This ought to create some interesting debate; LS9, a San Carlos, CA, based company, has developed a method of producing crude oil using genetically engineered bacteria. And it doesn’t take millions of years, like the old-fashioned natural method.

LS9’s designer bacteria eat ordinary agricultural feedstocks, then excrete hydrocarbon molecules of any length and molecular structure the company desires; hundreds of different hydrocarbon molecules can be produced by “programming” the DNA. The crude oil would then be refined in the usual way, producing gasoline, jet fuel, diesel fuel, or any other petroleum-based product, just like the real stuff.

Testing continues, including plans for a pilot plant to be built next year to see how it works on a larger scale. Within 3 to 5 years, LS9 hopes to be manufacturing & selling not only the synthetic bio-crude, but also an improved biodiesel fuel.

What will be interesting is how this development will be received in the green community. My guess is they won’t like it much; while it sounds Earth-friendly, with crops being grown to feed bacteria (helping to offset the carbon output), a new source of oil leads to lower (or at least stabilized) fuel prices, which leads to continued use of internal combustion engines, which leads to stressed out tree huggers.

via a TechnologyReview.com article

Panamera: Two years after we first mentioned it, spy shots of the Porsche Panamera — the “four door Porsche” — are starting to come out.

We can now clearly see the smooth integration of the rear wing into the Panamera’s sloping rear hatch and the spoiler that lifts and extends outward from the base of the backlight glass. How very Mercedes SLR of you, Porsche. Still looks like it was hit with the elongated ugly stick.

I don’t think it looks that bad.

Motorists steamed over ‘hot fuel’ losses sue oil titans, retailers: When it gets hotter, gas expands. Ergo, you get less gas at the pump for the same amount of money.

Predictably, someone is suing.

The price of gas has been based since the 1920s on a formula that measures a gallon of gas when it is 60 degrees, according to court papers filed by motorists.

According to industry and government standards, a gallon of gas at 60 degrees measures 231 cubic inches. Consumers buy 231 cubic inches of gas per gallon, regardless of its temperature, so when gas expands in the heat, the amount of energy put out per gallon declines.

I wonder how much this is offset by how the temperature fluctuations affect the performance of your car. At colder temperatures, air is denser, so engines perform better. This means one of two things:

1. You have to give the engine less throttle to get the same acceleration, thus saving you gas.

2. You just spend more gas because your engine injects more fuel to compensate for the denser air.

So, the “hot fuel” problem at the pump is either all or partially canceled out, or it gets worse. I know, I know — I’m helpful.

Pentagon shreds F14s to keep parts from Iran: The U.S. is very concerned that parts from our retired fleet of F-14s might find their way to Iran.

“There were things getting to the bad guys, so to speak,” said Tim Shocklee, founder and executive vice president of TRI-Rinse Inc. in St. Louis. “And one of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits.”

The Defense Department had intended to destroy spare parts unique to the F-14 but sell thousands of others that could be used on other aircraft. It suspended sales of all Tomcat parts after the Associated Press reported in January that buyers for Iran, China and other countries had exploited gaps in surplus-sale security to acquire sensitive U.S. military gear, including F-14 parts.

And where did Iran get the Tomcats?

[…] Iran is the only country trying to keep Tomcats airworthy. The United States let Iran buy the F-14s in the 1970s when it was an ally, long before President Bush named it part of an “axis of evil.”