Magic Spot Flowing

I was looking at a Netflix flier on M’s floor this morning and remarked “Funny they say that the plans start at 4.99 per month when the 4.99 plan really isn’t all that useful.” Then I thought, well, the 4.99 plan is 1 movie at a time, 2 per month. How often do I really exceed that? Right now I can have two out at a time, but I barely watch one per month on average. I do like having the choice of two movies, but practically speaking I don’t need the plan I have. Except that if I were sick or something, I’d want to be able to watch a lot of movies quickly. But Netflix allows you to change your plan pretty much whenever you want, I think (maybe not more often than once a month, but still). You can get an extra movie for a pro-rated amount of the next-higher plan for the remainder of the month, if you decide you need one.

As I was thinking about this, I made a connection to the complaint made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that the car has limited range (and the EV1, specifically, also had limited space). I tend to be confused people’s attachment to having a car that goes hundreds of miles and stores four people and a bunch of cargo when 90% of the time they go under 30 miles and carry one person and a tiny amount of cargo (a job that could easily be done by a bike, SmartCar, or other small vehicle). But here I am, making the analogous decision with my Netflix account.

I told this to M and he remarked that it’s a principle of system design: do you design for peak load, or average load? And there’s a definite desire to design and select for a system that handles peak load, so that the system never fails, even under peak circumstances. If you have the extra resources, why not design for peak load? It’s a psychological thing. We want the system that never fails, so that we can have just one system, and not have to think about having multiple systems, or cleverly designing the system to reduce peak load. It’s a sensible decision in many ways. It’s just that sometimes the consequences are not desirable.

Can we convince ourselves to accept peak restrictions so that the overall system can be more efficient? If my Netflix choice is any indication, it’s pretty hard.

The other thing I was thinking about writing about last night was Who Killed the Electric Car?. It’s a very depressing film in some ways, but very inspiring in others. My two favorite people from the film were Chelsea Sexton and Stan Ovshinsky. Stan is an inventor, some of whose technology was used in the EV1 batteries, and Chelsea was an EV1 specialist at GM and is now the executive director of Plug In America. Stan amazed me because he’s just been inventing stuff for ages, since the 1970s, and he’s still going strong. And Chelsea I liked because she was so enthusiastic and she didn’t let the destruction of the EV1s (and other EVs like RAV4 EVs!) stop her from getting involved with later efforts in electric vehicles.

But it is tremendously depressing that the electric car, instead of being part of the present, is a part of history. And it’s depressing, if not surprising, that the oil and car companies resisted making it viable and acted as if it wasn’t viable even when it appeared to be, and even more disappointing that California and the federal government let them get away with it. They skipped the viable electric technology in favor of investing in the boondoggle of hydrogen, which still isn’t remotely commercially viable. It’s astounding that a government can be so disingeneous as to say “Well, this technology that works, even though it has limitations, that’s totally impractical, whereas this technology that’s even more expensive and works even less well and can’t be marketed commercially, we’re going to invest in that.”

VTA recently outfitted a hydrogen fuel-cell bus. Do you know how much it costs to run?

The most glaring figure: Zero-emission buses - or ZEBs - cost $51.66 to fuel, maintain and operate per mile compared with just $1.61 for a 40-foot conventional diesel coach. They break down much more frequently, and replacement parts are next to impossible to order, according to the report.

CARB (the California Air Resources Board, the same board that killed the ZEV mandate in 2003) is still saying that they have no intention of changing their position on fuel-cells. Why, given the prohibitive cost? The little research I just did looking for electric operation costs yields estimates for electric operations that, while still more expensive, are not over 30 times as expensive, more in the range of 2-5 times.

To be critical, though, I think the EV1 and electric vehicles in general aren’t as much of a panacea as the movie paints them. As is mentioned briefly, electricity comes from power plants, many of which are still coal-fired, and coal also isn’t clean and sustainable. However, it does at least come from here, and not a politically unstable part of the world. And we have the option of switching to cleaner ways of running our power plants on our own initiative.

Staying with cars as a transportation device also doesn’t address what they do to land use, with more roads and more parking being a constant demand and eviscerating density in cities, or the dangers of speeding around in a 2000lb vehicle.

But still, I’d rather be in traffic with EVs than with today’s vehicles. And it looks like it still might happen…

It’s apparently been about six months since I posted any bentos, but I’ve either been lazy about lunch or lazy about photographing it, because I only found five that I haven’t posted. And three of them are not at all photogenic and consist almost entirely of food in varying shades of brown. Lunch doesn’t always have to look good to be tasty.

One of the foods in question is Kasha Varnishkes, which I’ve now made twice using the recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes. I was dubious about it the first time, and I’m still dubious about it now. It’s pasta (bowtie, varnishkes) and buckwheat (kasha), with slightly-browned onions. It strikes me as the kind of thing you love if you love kasha, or if you ate kasha varnishkes growing up when you were picky and hardly ate anything that wasn’t brown, so now even though you eat other things it tastes like comfort to you. I find it bland and a little weird from the buckwheat. On the other hand, it is good comfort food. I’ve been hungry today (riding 15 miles will do that to you) and didn’t have a lot for dinner, so I found myself craving more food, and I went straight for it, ignoring the hummus and Thai curry that are also in the fridge.

I was going to do the bento post on Friday but the pics aren’t on this computer, so it’ll have to wait. I’ve been cooking better lately, so maybe really tasty bentos will be making a more regular appearance soon.

Today was the first day of short-sleeve morning cycling this year. What a lovely day. And fewer people than usual tried to do stupid things on the road, as well.

I’m guessing I’ll need my jacket on the way home, because the sun will be going down. But by next week, with the early DST change, it may be the reverse.

I know I say that every season is cycling season and every day is bike-to-work day, but the spring and fall are really the nicest times of year for cycling, and I hope and intend to glory in them particularly.