Science and Technology
Sep. 20th, 2007 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaI've actually been doing some more science this week, now my photocatalyst rig is functional; I have to work out what things to run in it and at what concentration and other general parameter-fettling. I started out using methylene blue because our existing experiments use it and it tends to be a default for the field, despite irate papers by experts pointing out how rubbish it is and wondering why everyone still uses it. I suspect this is because people find the papers using MB as a standard method before they find the papers explaining why it's rubbish. Now I've read both but it was still pleasing to follow the path, to try out methylene blue and have it display yet another variety of its rubbishness and so prove that it's not worth bothering with, and there are plenty of other detectably colourful things out there to use instead which aren't half so pants so now I'm onto trying those. Today it was Rhodamine B, and while that works well on initial testing, it has the minor downside of being pink.
I mean really pink, like fluorescent at the stronger of the concentrations I'm using. As a powder in a jar it's green and at stock solution strength it's much more red, as you can see in the flask in the middle, but regrettably at the various working concentrations, it's undeniably and almost offensively pink. The aim of the science is to destroy the pink, though, which helps.
Meanwhile, I was standing at a bus stop in the rain last night having had a nice pint or three, including one in the Cittie Of Yorke that I've been meaning to go in for ages and was pleased to discover is a Sam Smiths pub, when I lit upon the illuminated bus shelter advert for the Toyota Prius, complete with the pseudo-technical advertising guff and mpg figures in the small print at the bottom. I knew its mpg was said to be a bit on the non-special side compared to what the optimistic might expect but bloody hell. The combined cycle mpg quoted is 65.7, and looking into it just now it seems many users reckon that's a bit optimistic and it's more like high fifties. I mean, EH? Why does that mean the Prius is exempt from the London congestion charge when my TEN YEAR OLD PEUGEOT 106 gets something like the mpg they quote, ie, BETTER mpg than that reported by actual Prius users, without all the masses of extra manufacturing, servicing and eventual unrecyclable waste implicit in having a car with two engines and a shedload of batteries? I suppose the idea is that the Peugeot is pushing the practical thermodynamic limits of what efficiency you can get out of a car of conventional configuration, whereas lighter batteries and better load management/power distribution will make hybrid cars even more efficient given further development, but it irritates me that the Mayor of London has joined in with encouraging people to buy a car that is essentially a vanity purchase. Because actually lighter batteries and better load management are about all you're going to get by way of further improvement in the hybrid idea; electric motors are a mature technology, are already stupidly efficient and aren't going to suddenly significantly improve; regenerative braking and general battery charging is tolerably inefficient and you can't beat the thermodynamics if you also want to be able to use the petrol engine to drive wheels instead of being a dedicated generator - people laughed at gas-turbine-generator, electric-motor cars but at least that was a crack at really rethinking something. The Prius is no more than a tweak of the basic car idea, and even improvements in the weight of all the heavy extra gear will just get offset against extras elsewhere, heated seats or airbag number nineteen or some other pointless feature that people who are suckers for the whole Prius idea in the first place are going to be seduced by. Not that small tweaks in weight even count for that much when what you're essentially doing is trying to propel one or more heavy bags of water at high speeds, in a vehicle whose aerodynamic optimisation has to make endless concessions to driving position and visibility and whether Gran can get in and out and where the shopping goes. Look at the Smart car; there they've made a trade-off in the amount of shopping and extended family you can get in it, and in return got the same efficiency as the Prius without any extra faff and with far better use of energy and materials - now that's yer actual design in action. 98% of the restrictions on the development of the Prius are the same as the restrictions on any car, and the rest is small advances in materials technology and power management skirmishing with the laws of physics and mostly losing. It's a dead end. When the real alternatives start becoming available, its anachronism will abruptly become clear; it'll get dropped like a hot potato and suddenly there'll be all these unwanted Priuses around that'll have to be something more like decommisioned than scrapped. Oh well, never mind, eh? On with the science; in some small way I might be helping bring down the cult of the Prius.
I mean really pink, like fluorescent at the stronger of the concentrations I'm using. As a powder in a jar it's green and at stock solution strength it's much more red, as you can see in the flask in the middle, but regrettably at the various working concentrations, it's undeniably and almost offensively pink. The aim of the science is to destroy the pink, though, which helps.
Meanwhile, I was standing at a bus stop in the rain last night having had a nice pint or three, including one in the Cittie Of Yorke that I've been meaning to go in for ages and was pleased to discover is a Sam Smiths pub, when I lit upon the illuminated bus shelter advert for the Toyota Prius, complete with the pseudo-technical advertising guff and mpg figures in the small print at the bottom. I knew its mpg was said to be a bit on the non-special side compared to what the optimistic might expect but bloody hell. The combined cycle mpg quoted is 65.7, and looking into it just now it seems many users reckon that's a bit optimistic and it's more like high fifties. I mean, EH? Why does that mean the Prius is exempt from the London congestion charge when my TEN YEAR OLD PEUGEOT 106 gets something like the mpg they quote, ie, BETTER mpg than that reported by actual Prius users, without all the masses of extra manufacturing, servicing and eventual unrecyclable waste implicit in having a car with two engines and a shedload of batteries? I suppose the idea is that the Peugeot is pushing the practical thermodynamic limits of what efficiency you can get out of a car of conventional configuration, whereas lighter batteries and better load management/power distribution will make hybrid cars even more efficient given further development, but it irritates me that the Mayor of London has joined in with encouraging people to buy a car that is essentially a vanity purchase. Because actually lighter batteries and better load management are about all you're going to get by way of further improvement in the hybrid idea; electric motors are a mature technology, are already stupidly efficient and aren't going to suddenly significantly improve; regenerative braking and general battery charging is tolerably inefficient and you can't beat the thermodynamics if you also want to be able to use the petrol engine to drive wheels instead of being a dedicated generator - people laughed at gas-turbine-generator, electric-motor cars but at least that was a crack at really rethinking something. The Prius is no more than a tweak of the basic car idea, and even improvements in the weight of all the heavy extra gear will just get offset against extras elsewhere, heated seats or airbag number nineteen or some other pointless feature that people who are suckers for the whole Prius idea in the first place are going to be seduced by. Not that small tweaks in weight even count for that much when what you're essentially doing is trying to propel one or more heavy bags of water at high speeds, in a vehicle whose aerodynamic optimisation has to make endless concessions to driving position and visibility and whether Gran can get in and out and where the shopping goes. Look at the Smart car; there they've made a trade-off in the amount of shopping and extended family you can get in it, and in return got the same efficiency as the Prius without any extra faff and with far better use of energy and materials - now that's yer actual design in action. 98% of the restrictions on the development of the Prius are the same as the restrictions on any car, and the rest is small advances in materials technology and power management skirmishing with the laws of physics and mostly losing. It's a dead end. When the real alternatives start becoming available, its anachronism will abruptly become clear; it'll get dropped like a hot potato and suddenly there'll be all these unwanted Priuses around that'll have to be something more like decommisioned than scrapped. Oh well, never mind, eh? On with the science; in some small way I might be helping bring down the cult of the Prius.
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Date: 2007-09-20 10:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-20 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-21 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-21 04:13 pm (UTC)And I'm sorry, my first thought when I saw the photo of the experiment was "PINK!!!"
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Date: 2007-09-23 01:57 am (UTC)Anyway, it does seem like they're going to rather a lot (http://www.cleangreencar.co.nz/page/prius-transmission) of trouble to make sure the engine's still mechanically connected to the wheels. Seems to be some psychological clinging to outdated social models in there somewhere.