Richard Oppenheimer's Blog: April 2007

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Crossing the line....

I was almost as pleased to see my 360 degree feedback site finally reach the first page of google.com as I was when Patrick (my son) called me up to say he had achieved an A* in his maths GCSE. His achievement like mine had taken a lot of hard work over many months.

So now we can relax and watch Dr Who.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Purring Pussies

These days apparently even cats have holidays. If you're looking to get shot of your cat for a while and the neighbours won't feed it anymore because you've fallen out with them then check out Baird's Cosy Cats in Penrith. OK - I know, it's a long way to go if you're in Cornwall but if you're in Cumbria then it might be worth checking it out.

So what's in it for me? Nothing except that I put the website together and it would be nice if someone looked at it!

Thursday, April 05, 2007

Greening the airways

Anyone who thinks that today's airliners are little more than carbon copies of the first airliners like the Comet and the Viscount to hit the skies in the 1950s would be exactly right. According to an article in New Scientist aerodynamics in civil aviation is pretty much a sunset activity. Current wisdom is that the current generation of turbo-fan engines is about as efficient as it's ever going to be.

New airframes would require radical research which is unlikely to be undertaken by the ultra conservative civil aviation industry and would only be undertaken in the interests of military aviation which clearly has other agendas than saving the planet.

Biofuels are unlikely to provide the answer either as like for like the volume of biofuel required to travel a given distance is much greater and the range of the aircraft would be much reduced.

Of course – there are innovative designs on the table – generally the work of dedicated amateurs without the resources to do anything about it. The aviation business is slowly waking up we are told, but don't hold your breath – it will probably be 30-40 years before we see anything really new.

In the meantime we're going to have to get used to flying a lot less.

Big Oil and the Electric Car

I always thought that electric cars were novelties with the sole use of avoiding Congestion Charges. Not so apparently if you are to believe the story of Chevron-Texaco and their electric car.

The biggest drawback to the electric car has been its limited range: one charge lasted around 60 miles, then the car stopped. So the distinguished engineer Stan Ovshinsky created a battery that could run up to 300 miles at 70mph on a single charge - enough to get from London to Scotland, and make the car extremely popular. The oil company Chevron-Texaco bought the technology. It has not been seen since.

Why? Why would a string of corporations turn down cash and scrap a potentially extremely profitable techology? Isn't that contrary to everything we are taught about how market economies work?

The oil companies had an obvious interest in stopping an alternative to fossil fuels. There is $100 trillion of oil left in the earth, and they plan to mine it - even if doing so will make the planet uninhabitable. Anything that could divert that cash away from them is a threat to be crushed.

We have never needed the electric car more than we do now. But for reasons that can only be explained by our crazy market economy it looks like being mothballed in the vaults of Chevron-Texaco for some time yet.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Some techie stuff....

Richard Oppenheimer's Blog