Its a... They are boys!

Pictures to follow, but the 3D ultrasound is conclusive, they (twins remember?) are boys, Joshua Dyson and Zachary Alexander.

And in other news Iran is threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, if they did that 20% of the World's oil would not make it to market, mostly in East Asia. Military expectations are that if Iran were to close the Strait it would take the American's something between a few days and a month to reopen it. Economic expectations are that if the Strait were closed the price of oil would spike from about $100/barrel to about $150/barrel.

On personal updates and other things.

In reviewing my previous post, I noted the Saudis have declared that in order to maintain a desired level of social services they feel that the desired price of oil ought to be about $100 (US) a barrel I went on to note that their previous target price was $75. One thing I neglected to mention, the Kind of Saudi Arabia is not exactly known for it's first rate social services.

In other more personal news, regular reads may not know that Lesley left me. Actually that woman left me some time ago, since then I met someone else and got married. Now Mrs. Cole and I, well really Mrs. Cole, I just help out here and there, are expecting little ones, not a little one, but twins! I think I've got a picture around here...

Of course when I found out twins were in the picture I remarked that we'd need a bigger house. The ultrasound technician said that's what every father who finds out he's about to have twins says, a new house and a new car. Anyway last night I watched a rerun of Top Gear where James May is reviewing some Land Rover and at first I thought it looked kind of cool and has a modest four banger diesel. Then I realised, that Range Rover's got less internal volume than my Jetta, probably gets way worse milage, and honestly, I'm never going to drive across Death Valley, at least off road across Death Valley, so what's the good of such a silly machine? I will get a bigger car, I think a diesel A3, it's a hatch back pretty good on the comforts and great on the milage. Of course most importantly, as a soon to be father, it's got a great saftey rating. (For reference, here is the NHTSA web site.)

Actually the NHTSA never rated the A3, but the similar A4 got five stars. By contrast my Jetta got four or five stars depending on where the crash happened. The only Land Rover rating I can find is for a '96 Range Rover, the NHTSA only tested front impact on drive and passenger and it only got three out of five stars. (Side impact was unrated, but I will bet it wouldn't do well.)

But back to the wedding, I won't bother with the wedding photos, but I will throw in a link to some pictures we took from Florida just before the wedding.

One day in Florida it was very cold, about seven degrees Celsius, my future mother-in-law thought it would be funny to go for a walk on the beach in winter attire. She had left Toronto just a few days earlier in the middle of a snow storm. I took some pictures with the zoom lens from her apartment (she's a snow bird).

The apartment is about 2km south of the Kennedy Space Center, the tour guide, (of course I took a tour!) was saying that KSC is America's space port, I never thought of that previously, space port, sounds like something out of Star Trek, but it's actually true, KSC is a space port. Weird to even think that, anyway here are the pictures.

On Big Vehicles

I am still driving a bazillion miles to work every day. (Readers you can start to feel sympathy at your earliest convenience.) But one thing I have to gripe about, truckers and the trucking industry. I personally pay about $20,000 a year in income tax, now some of that money goes to help keep unemployed Newfoundland fishermen on unemployment insurance, some goes to build subways... (excuse me Le Metro in Montreal), and some goes to build highways here in Ontario, highways that seem to be flooded with poorly maintained trucks.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying trucks are the bane of my existence, they just come pretty damn close. They need forever and a million miles to accelerate to highway speeds (causing traffic disruptions for miles behind them), they need just as long and far to decelerate, they are unstable, in the winter the top of the trailers are covered in snow and as a result leave a mini snow storm for the sorry sods stuck behind them. All too many truckers are very reckless with their vehicles, tail-gating and not allowing others to merge or change lanes and for kicks from time to time a whole wheel will just fall right off at speed on the highway and collide with another car three lanes over, going the other direction! (Killing the driver.) Then the industry will circle the wagons and call it a freak accident and say there is nothing that can be done about it. (Hint guys, as an amateur bike mechanic I'll tell you what the fix is, grease your lug nuts and use a torque wrench.) Then people get to wonder why there are so many highway fatalities.

Speaking of big vehicles, I found the following on the Globe and Mail web site in the drive section:

The shortcomings of the SUV genre have been well documented in works like Keith Bradsher’s High and Mighty – The Dangerous Rise of the SUV. Bradsher’s book shows how SUVs conquered North America thanks to an odd confluence of consumer demand, flawed government regulation, and short-sighted corporate policy (SUVs were hugely profitable for car companies).


Engineers were confounded by the popularity of SUVs, which are designed around an odd set of parameters – they’re too heavy, they have too much frontal area, and their height makes them unstable. But automotive purchase patterns are determined by a number of forces, and the strangest one of all is human nature. Author Malcolm Gladwell noted the psychology of the SUV market in a 2004 New Yorker story: “... internal industry market research concluded that SUVs tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.”

Its a funny thing the SUV as a concept. I was speaking with a co-worker of mine who is a major auto enthusiast, he is in the process of building a car from parts using a Ford 1969 Mustang body with a big block V8 (I think his engine will have something in the neighbourhood of 350 cubic inches or about 8L of displacement, naturally aspirated). Obviously this guy loves his cars, and trucks, he has a Ford F-150 for use as his family (wife and two kids) and daily commuting vehicle, that Mustang will be his track day car.

From reading my blog, I would expect that he and I would disagree about many things, actually we don't. I am not so sure the F-150 makes much sense as a commuter but the engineering behind building a car, espeically one designed to be absoultely the fastest quarter mile (400m) finisher I have to respect. (Building it naturally aspirated means that while it will have an incredible quater mile time it's city fuel economey will be apalling, but at least it will be a lot less maintenance than say a 2L VW Touareg with a turbo charger.)

Anyway one day while talking with my co-worker, about cars, he mentioned that the SUV was the dumbest idea in automotive engineering. We concluded that it was a pickup truck chassis with a hatchback body on top. Now for non-engineers what this means is, well a truck chassis is designed to be very stiff and not very stable, but very cheap - after all it is assumed that truck drivers are more careful and have more weight to lug but do not mind driving slower. A hatchback is designed to be faster (than a truck) and have a higher centre of gravity than a conventional car. Combine the two and you have the worst of both worlds. A very high centre of gravity on a very stiff frame (even the so called 'crossovers' need a stiffened chassis) with a huge cross section to the wind. Net result, unsafe at any speed and pathetic fuel economey.

Furthermore, just becuase the engine has the latest in fuel saving measures, turbo chargers, fuel injection, and so on, the bottom line is, there is only so much energy that can be usefully converted from the potential chemical energy in octane into forward motion on the road. In fact I can even assert that for every four joules of chemical potential energy the classic internal combustion four stroke engine will only get about one joule of foward energy. (You want better fuel milage, ride a bicycle.)

On a related note, I heard on the news yesterday, the Saudis have delcared that in order to maintain a desired level of social services they feel that the desired price of oil ought to be about $100 (US) a barrel, their previous price was $75 (US). I also recall that in 2000 (12 years ago) it was $24 (US). Factoring in inflation and the fact that the US dollar, actually thanks to the disaster in Europe we better compare the green back to the Chinese RenMinBi (Yuan), so lets see in 2001 $1 (US) was about RMB 8.28, whereas today $1 (US) is about RMB 6.29. Thus the US dollar has allowed (by the Chinese) to decline by about 24% while the price of oil has gone up by over 400%. Now let's assume inflation from January 2000 to today averages at about 3% per year, inflation over 12 years would be 42.58%, thus what cost $100 (US) in 2000 should cost $142.58 (US) but factoring in the decline of the US dollar lets chop another 24% off, so $100 (US) in 2000 becomes $176.80. Thus if the Saudis liked oil at $24 (US) a barrel in 2000 they should like oil at about $42.43 (US) a barrel today.

The fact is the Saudis have always liked a low price of oil, it keeps the addict (America and Western Europe) hooked on their cheap smack. I suspect the real reason Saudi Arabia is letting the price of oil go up is to give the appearence that they still have some control over the price of oil. Currently a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Light Sweet closing at Cushing OK will set you back $101.20 and a barrel of Brent North Sea crude will cost about $111.19.

I guess the moral here is SUVs are the ultimate symbol or reckless excess in an enviornment that is rapidly running out of the good stuff. An interesting aside, the following article links oil price volatility to the rise in political partisanship.

On Internal Cables

A couple weeks ago I went for a ride, what else is new, on my newest Roubaix. (Pictures to follow). She is very pretty but during my ride I had a lot of trouble upshifting to the 53 chain ring from the 39. I took the bike, hereafter I'll call her Abby, to Malcolm who tightened up the front deraileur for me. (The problem with this bike is, due to internal cabling and the way the original store set her up - they didn't bother to install the barrel adjusters - getting the front deraileur set correctly requires a very skilled hand, in other words, Malcolm.)

Anyway when I got Abby home I set to work on her, Malcolm noticed, with nothing but eyes that Abby needed a new chain. (According to my Park Took chain checker, the wear was at 0.50% or still good.) Trusting Malcolm over a $50 tool that never really did show wear correctly, and the fact that I do have over 3000km on the chain, I tossed my old chain and when I did I could see that the front deraileur cable was unwinding. I had a new task for myself, strip Abby, right to her BB30 bearings, lower the stem a little (the bars were high), replace the bars (I had just bought a pair of Easton EC90s). Swap out her dura-ace shifters and rear deraileur for SRAM Red (I like SRAM shifting more than Shimano) and naturally, replace the cables.

Okay all of the above is pretty standard stuff, except Abby's cables are, as I noted, internally routed. You want the definition of a pain in the rear end, try routing internal cables. Malcolm told me that on old steel frames one would sometimes see guys who had, over the course of their bike's life replaced pretty much every component except that rear brake cable because fishing that cable is so damn difficult. Thankfully, for me, Abby is carbon fibre, so I had a few dandy little tricks I can employ.

First to get the gear cables from the top of the down tube to the bottom bracket I used four items:

1. Fishing line
2. electrical tape
3. A twist tie like the kind that come with small electrical appliances to wrap the electrical cord (those ties are smoother, less friction, than the ties that come with garbage bags)
4. A very powerful magnet (I used one from an old server hard disk drive). SCSI and SAS hard drives seem to have the most powerful of all the hard drive magnets. (Luckily I'm in IT so I get access to lots of hard drives.)

Alright, if you haven't already figured out how I made things work, remember Abby is carbon fibre, not steel. Still not sure? Well first I taped the fishing line at one end to the bars, at the other end of the line I taped the fishing line to the twist tie. Then I inserted the tie into the hole at the top of Abby's down tube and used the magnet (on the outside) to guide the tie to the hole at the bottom of the downtube. Then tape the fishing line (at the end by the bars) to the gear cable and guide the gear cable by pulling the fishing line. (Although in retrospect I should have put off pulling the new gear cable until I had finished running all the fishing lines, also masking tape is cheaper and would probably work just as well, if not better, than electrical tape.)

Now the hardest line to run was for the rear deraileur and this line runs the length of the chainstay, that is from under the bottom bracket all the way to the rear drop out. Now using magnets here is quiet a bit harder. Sure Abby is carbon fibre, but the rear drop out as well as the area surrounding it, in fact the entire join from the chain stay to the seat stay, is metal, I think steel. Ultimately what I did was take an old gear shifting cable, some electrical tape, fishing line and my trusty tie wrap. I used the gear cable to shove the fishing line with tie wrap and electrical tape in from the wrong end - the drop out end - and drive the fishing line forward into the chain stay far enough to clear the steel drop out. Once I could feel the tie wrap with the magnet I used the magnet to draw the tie wrap forward to the hole at the bottom bracket (a very narrow hole at that!) A little bit of the tie wrap would expose from the hole and then using a plyer I was able to pull out the tie wrap and fishing line.

A confession, first I took Abby to my local bike shop and asked them, after several frustrating hours, to do that final run of the rear deraileur cable, but by the time I got Abby back on the stand at home the cable fell out. So I did have to learn the hard way how to route internal cables.

As for the rear brake cable, that was actually very easy, push the cable through the top tube from the hole near the stear tube, once the cable is near the hole near the brake, just use a magnet to bring the cable up and close to the hole. Use a folded tie wrap to loop around the cable at the brake end and push from the stearer tube end while pulling up on the tie wrap. (Sorry if I had a third hand I might have taken some pictures of this step.)

In Computing the most difficult programming task is writing an Operating System, probably the context switches, (hint: push all the registers, interrupt, return from interrupt, pop all the registers) are the trickiest bits of programming. I've heard the for a pianist Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto is probably the hardest piece of music to play. Having routed internal cables, well they aren't the Rack 3, and they sure aren't a context switch on an x86, but damn they were tricky. Maybe next time I'll just take Abby to a bike shop, yeah - as if!

On Driving

There was an interesting article in Velonews. I think Charles Pelkey (The Explainer) is great. But I really liked the image, Space Taken by 60 People. It turns out that image is all over the Interlink Net thing-a-ma-jigy.

I am still, shudder, driving to work. I cannot stand the drive. Recently at a dinner with my parents my father said that several employers have relocated from the 'burbs to the city because the young people live in the city and do not want to drive to work. I asked my dad if he could pass that memo on to my employer. (Actually I have a number of complaints about my current employer, not the least among which is the drive to work.)

Mind you the drive home, at least I go against traffic, the disaster that is Toronto highways at rush hour, ouch! By six in the morning the inbound roads are clogged, just bumper-to-bumper stop and go, with cars, hardly moving at all. And by three the outbound roads are just as bad.

There is a fix for two issues here, one is Toronto's structural budget deficit of about $350m~$400m the other issue is the traffic. Road tolls, passing the money collected directly to transit and road repair, thus relieving the city of two massive line items from the budget. Enough pussy footing around this issue I say, it's time Mister "end of the war on the car" Mayor Rob Ford did something that required courage and enacted road tolls, and not just on highways, arterial roads too.

Here is how I see a system working, first bring back the hated vehicle registration tax of $60/vehicle/year. (That's about $60m in the city's books.) Then every person that pays the tax gets an E-ZPass transponder that works in both Toronto and the North Eastern US (see so you can go drive to say, Boston and you get to by-pass the toll booths on I-90). Now, make the vehicle registration tax more palatable, when you get your transponder, and every year thereafter the city credits your E-ZPass account with $60.

Okay, so we've got about a million cars with E-ZPass transponders and then we open it up to everyone who lives in the 'Burbs, they can also obtain an E-ZPass from the city and register it and all that, or they can get one from the Niagara Bridge Authority, but the point is everyone has the option of getting an E-ZPass, so it's fair. Next if you drive into the City of Toronto and do not have a transponder you pay a flat say $12 per weekday or $10 on Saturdays and $8 on Sundays and Stat Holidays to drive in the city for the day. (Use automated Toll collection, perhaps photograph licence plates, like on Highway 407.)

Now for motorists who have a transponder their licence is not photographed (or if it is by accident, because the licence is registered the photo is dropped by the OCR system when the image is received for processing.) Instead, at every major intersection (and highway interchange) in the city the transponder is recorded. For every, say kilometer the motorist drives they get a bill for perhaps ten cents, to a daily maximum of say, $8 on weekdays, and $4 on weekends and holidays.

Other considerations, well there are rental cars, rental car agencies would have to collect the tolls on behalf of the city, but that is trivial. There would also be people from out of town who drive in and stay for several days, well they might have say, a New Jersey E-ZPass, in which case they'd get the same billing as a Toronto resident (if they kept their car parked in the hotel, the transponder would not pass any major intersection so there would be no bill for that period.) If the out-of-towner had no E-ZPass, and drove in on a Friday and did not leave until Sunday then they would get a bill for $12 on Friday, $10 on Saturday and $8 on Sunday summing to $20 for the weekend. (Clearly both entering and exiting the city would have to be tracked for non-transponder based systems.)

Obviously the whole thing would have to be very carefully controlled to ensure the privacy of the motorists is respected and the security of the IT infrastructure is maintained but there are millions of cars that drive in the city every day. If the city collected an average of say $5/day times perhaps a million cars, over a 365 day year the city would collect $1.8bn, use perhaps $100m for maintaining the system, spend perhaps $400m on road repair, that leaves $1.3bn for building new subway lines, every single year. Within just a few years the city won't be collecting much in the way of road tolls because we will have the most remarkably effective subway system ever.

Isn't that a better way to get around?

More On Peak Oil

I am planning, if the weather cooperates, on going for a nice bunch of bike rides. In the mean time, just some statistics that really make me wonder if urban sprawl was worse than just a really bad idea.

According to Jeff Rubin Peak Oil is not so much a supply issue, it's a problem of price. We cannot get oil cheap enough to use for energy. But according to one of the people who posted a response it is a lot worse than that. (I will have to validate this data, so take it with a huge grain of salt, but...)

To paraphrase:

In 1930 humanity was drawing from the ground about 2 billion barrels of oil per year with an average EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) of about 100 to 1. Hence the amount of net energy available to humanity from oil was then of about 1.98 billion barrels energy units. (US Government figures indicate that one barrel of oil generates about 5.8 million BTUs).

In 1970 humanity was drawing from the ground about 17 billion barrels of oil per year; however, this oil came from more difficult wells to access with an average EROEI of about 30 to 1, thus total net energy was about 16.3 billion barrel units.

In 2005 humanity was drawing from the ground about 30 billion barrels of oil per year with an average EROEI of about 15 to 1. Hence the amount of net energy available to humanity was then of about 27.9 billion barrels energy units.

Looking forward now, Alberta tar sand oil has an EROEI of 1.5 to 1. Ultra deep water oil may not be much better, if it is even positive. The BP Macondo (Deep Water Horizon) well has shown how much technology was stretched and the newly found ultra deep water oil reservoirs off Brazil are much deeper and will be much more difficult to put into production. Furthermore, Arctic oil is at the moment only a dream because there is still a moving ice cap during the winter in that region). As for shale oil, like for shale gas, one will be lucky if its EROEI is even positive.

Many people who would know these things, for example, The Chairman of TOTAL, among others, have publicly stated that humanity will be lucky if it can reach an output volume of 100 million barrels per day i.e. 36.5 billion barrels of oil per year.Hence at some point in a not too distant future, humanity’s oil production will reach 36.5 billion barrels per year with an average EROEI of about 1.5 to 1. When that happens, the amount of net energy available to humanity from oil will only be of about 12.1 billion barrels energy units.

Thus we can see our total available energy in the not so distant future will be quiet a bit less than we had in 1970. Yet we still have to drive as far, and now India and China are on stream. Recall that in 1970 there was no outsourcing to India and China was in the middle of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. As a society we really have to start diverting funds from highways and auto manufacturers bailouts. Time to build more rail, more bike lanes, and critically, more transit infrastructure. The fact is, we cannot continue down our present course, while the numbers I cited above may be way off the mark, I'm sure we can all accept that we cannot continue with business as usual for all that much longer. We can either keep running until we run headlong into an impenetrable wall, or we can begin the transition away from fossil fuels.

On Crazy Motorists

I have to drive to work these days. I do not much like it but probably until next spring (when I will try to ride at least a couple times a week) I will be driving every day. At the best of times, the drive is very stressful. I leave super early each morning just to avoid the worst of the traffic. The best part, I live in the city for many reasons, one being, so I don't have to drive! Only I am working in the 'burbs so I guess I kind of do have to use the car. This morning there was a lovely accident on the highway, of the four lanes, two were closed. One of the guys, a really over weight, long beard, looked like he belonged in the Hells Angles type, in the accident was leaning against his car, apparently uninjured watching the cars crawl by. I would guess that one fat man caused several hundred million dollars in lost productivity and wasted fuel. Good job fatso!

Anyway I was watching a new episode of Top Gear last night. Clarkson and May were reviewing electric cars. After they discussed the high cost, up front, the cars were about thirty thousand pounds, then there's the short life span of the batteries (three to ten years depending on how well the batteries are treated) the short driving distance, the long recharge time and so on. Ultimately Clarkson suggested that petrol power was much better for cars, at which point Hammond asked what happens when the oil runs out. Of course the guys started waxing on about the joys of hydrogen powered cars.

Okay, lets get something straight here, hydrogen as a power source of fuel cells, is really potential chemical energy, that gets is potential energy from some other source. Typically we get hydrogen from breaking down natural gas, except natural gas is a fossile fuel that is also going to run out. We can get hydrogen from water, by electro-chemical seperation but where does the electricity come from? The Fukushima Daiichi power plant?, Chernobyl?, Three Mile Island? Okay, I know, Wind Power, only where will we put all those wind mills?, there's a lot of NIMBYism when it comes to wind power, and what happens when the wind doesn't blow? Or what about Solar? What happens when the sun doesn't shine? Coal? There's lot of coal in the world... do I need to spell out the problems with coal?

The bottom line is the days of the single user automobile are numbered, ten years from now there won't be bad traffic going to work becuase I don't think there will be anyone driving to work on a daily basis. Fuel for automobiles is already expensive, just watch the price of oil, we are still in dream land when it comes to the real price of our wasteful ways. Only here's another thought? How will we eat when fossile fuel fertilizers are too expensive? And the act of trucking the food from the farms to the cities, how will we eat? How will we stay warm in winter? I don't know the answers to any of those questions, I suspect because there is no good answer.