29 Mar 2007
Continuing from my post yesterday…
The electric vehicle doesn’t come without its limitations. The researchers described their challenge as answering these questions: “How far, how long, how much?” As in: How far can I go on a single charge, how long does it take to charge, and how much does this thing cost?
How Far: With the best battery technology out there there’s enough to almost go from Seattle to Portland and back on one charge. Lower cost batteries can still get you to Tacoma and back. In other words, it’s enough for your everyday commute, but it’s not going to scale to a road trip. For that you’d want a separate vehicle (or maybe do something like FlexCar). Which means an electric vehicle not a comprehensive solution for your all your transportation needs, instead it’s something that will satisfy the common case (daily commute, shopping, etc.).
How Long: The numbers here vary wildly depending on the battery technology. Nothing is going to be as quick as pumping gas is today, although some of the non-linear recharges get pretty close (something like 80% charge in 10 minutes). But this is offset by the fact that you could charge anywhere there’s electricity: home, work, wherever. You’d want charging stations for longer trips, but in your normal routine you could go indefinitely without having to divert to a fueling station (which depending on your viewpoint makes it more convenient). We’ve all become used to plugging in our cell phones every time we come home - it’d essentially be the same thing with your car.
How Much: Definitely the cost is going to be higher as long as these are specialized hand-built automobiles. The real question is how much they could come down in mass production. And I haven’t found reliable data on that yet. But as a hand-crafted vehicle (about 4 per day) the GM EV1 cost $40,000 (without subsidy). Which isn’t a cheap car, but neither is it an overly expensive car. With manufacturing improvements it seems that could come down a decent amount. But regardless, you have to ask yourself if the bottom line is what’s important about moving to electric vehicle technology, or if it’s something else.
Which is the real question, isn’t it? What’s the motivation?
It can’t be to find the most convenient and economic solution. That criteria leads us to where we are today. That logic will also lead you to live off of McDonald’s and Top Ramen. No, the motivation has to be to find something that’s better in the long term. And that’s almost never the easy way. There are certainly compromises we’d have to make to adopt this technology. But in my opinion they’re reasonable compromises, given the benefits.
Anyway, check out the movie. It was well presented and definitely promotes some discussion :)
28 Mar 2007
This past weekend I watched Who Killed the Electric Car? (links: NetFlix, Wikipedia). And I’m having a hard time categorizing my thoughts, primarily because I have so many of them. I may have to break this up into multiple posts, so bear with me.
Coming into this I couldn’t claim to know much about battery electric vehicles. I intuitively know that producing energy in a dedicated facility that feeds the power grid seems a lot more efficient (both in economy and in environment) than having to produce power in a space and weight constrained vehicle (i.e. via the internal combustion engine). Seems obvious. I also can guess that employing a non standard technology on the complexity of an automobile is going to be more expensive until the economy of scale kicks in when components get mass produced. But beyond that I didn’t know much.
I had no idea that California had implemented a zero emission mandate in the early 90’s and that multiple major car manufacturers had actually rolled out consumer quality electric vehicles (complete with recharging stations). This wasn’t pie in sky - this was real technology available today (or rather, a decade ago). And the whole thing got scrapped (quite literally), for completely dubious reasons.
I liked how the film explored multiple possible suspects for this failure, and in the end deemed most of them guilty. This wasn’t some over the top Michael Moore pathos where the root of all evil is Charlton Heston: it was far more reasonable. Which in the end made the movie all the more effective, because you didn’t feel like you were the target of emotional bottom feeding. The movie did conclude leaving me feeling disappointed - not with the film but rather with our society as a whole. It angers me that we are so obsessed with convenience, and so resistant to change, that we’ll cannibalize progress.
I’m not prone to conspiracy theory, but you don’t have to be to understand the sketchy behavior by the automobile manufactures and oil companies. Because honestly their behavior makes sense. They’re out there to preserve their profits. The oil companies would suffer greatly if we pursued truly alternative automobile energy options. The car manufacturers have less to lose, but change is risky business and they are content with how much they own of the pipeline. It makes sense for them to be a little wary. But their behavior is borderline criminal. And I’d be more skeptical of a documentary’s depiction of this if it weren’t for previous infractions on the part of the accused. Fool me twice…
But overall I’m most frustrated with our inability as a society to suck it up and realize that our way of life is unsustainable and that we have to make some changes. No one wants to make a compromise. We’re all content to live out our life and leave the barren wasteland to our descendents. Which is bullshit. It’s our duty as citizens and consumers to demand better for ourselves. Better food that doesn’t make us fat, better entertainment that doesn’t make us stupid, and better transportation options that keep us breathing for many generations to come.
22 Mar 2007
This last Friday I caught Bitter Sweet at the Triple Door. I first heard the band up on Zune Arts, which if you haven’t seen yet you should totally check out - there are a lot of cool animations up there. Bitter Sweet’s debut album, The Mating Game, is really solid; varied, yet cohesive. I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard that one of the Bitter Sweet duo was also one of the founding members of Supreme Beings of Leisure. There’s a lot of similarities in the grand instrumentation and the quality of the vocals (although it’s a different singer).
Anyway, when I spotted the poster that said Bitter Sweet would be at the Triple Door, I was pretty excited. The Triple Door is a great venue: super classy with excellent food. It’s a great place to go if you’re really interested in listening and won’t mind not being able to dance. Bitter Sweet has a lot of funk in them, so they didn’t really fit into that “sit and listen” bucket most of the time, but I was busy munching on tasty schezwan green beans so I didn’t really mind.
I had a good time at the show, but I have to say that Bitter Sweet is a lot better in the studio. The actual band is only two people. This performance had six people. The actual required instrumentation of most of their songs is more on the order of ten or more. It’s hard to get into a performance where almost half of what you’re hearing is prerecorded. Which you would think would keep the integrity of the songs up to the quality of the studio recordings, but it didn’t. The show had a very rough start with the levels being way off and the tempo being rushed. They found their stride a couple songs in, but it never quite had the impact of their fine tuned studio recordings. You may just think I’m a stickler for production, but generally I actually prefer the grit of live performances. I spent a lot of the show watching the added musicians to try and figure out what they were actually contributing to what I was hearing. I never did figure that out, partially because the show was just so darn short. Bitter Sweet really needs to cough up another album to fill out their sets. I may sound pretty critical of the performance here, but I was happy to support the band and I’d snatch up any second album in a heartbeat.
Apparently I would have been better off never having heard that debut album before coming to the show. A friend that we (the already initiated) invited to the show had never heard the band before. And she promptly bought the album the next day. So if you had never heard how good the band was in the studio, apparently that show rocked.
16 Mar 2007
Played on PC
I held it off as long as possible, but at last I have hit level 70 in World of Warcraft (TBC reviews: GameSpot, GameSpy). I had no interest in rushing the journey from 60 to 70 because I knew that the returns diminish pretty dramatically after you hit the level cap. It’s likely that Blizzard has handled it better this time around, but it’s a fundamental limitation of this kind of game that at some point the content thins out and they have to string you along with a decreasing time/value proposition. So I’ve absolutely taken my time to smell all the flowers as I’ve strolled through The Burning Crusade.
The quality of content added in this expansion is undeniably of a higher quality than what was previously available. The quests are more interesting, the zones flow better, the rewards are more diversified, the instances are more streamlined… everything’s just plain better. This is true not just of the new Outland 60 to 70 content, but also of the new 1 to 20 content for the two new races: blood elves and draenei. Leveling a new character through the first two zones is a much deeper experience than it used to be. Unfortunately then you get dumped off in the old stuff for the next 40 levels. Which leaves sitting here with a level 20 blood elf, thinking “do I really want to go through all that again?”
Meanwhile back in Outland, my level 70 druid has a similar dilemma: how do I want to spend my time at the level cap? For me the game is all about the locations. So in the meantime the answer to my question is easy, as that of the seven zones in Outland I’ve only really cleared out five and a half of them. Plus there are fifteen instances on your way to 70, and I’ve only visited six of those. On top of that there are the more hardcore ones that require uber gear, but I recognize that I’ll likely never see those. So from where I am now I’m just going to keep doing what I have been doing: solo questing through the zones, grouping up to do an instance every now and then, and occasionally doing commando style solo runs on the instances that previously owned me so that I can convince myself that I’m a badass.
I don’t feel like I’ve hit the wall yet, and I’m optimistic that when I do I’ll realize it and have the self control to just stop and go play another game or something. My achievement point addiction and WoW addiction will continue to battle it out, striking some sort of tenuous balance. And then when my crack-riddled psyche needs some rest I can flail around like a crazy person with my Wii. Problem solved.
12 Mar 2007
Played on Wii
Warioware: Smooth Moves (GameSpy, GameSpot, GameFly) is my fourth contact with the Warioware series. And it feels like all the previous iterations were just building up to this one. It arrived on the GBA. Multiplayer was added when it was ported to the GameCube. When it hit the DS it brought a more intuitive set of controls. And then it revisited the GBA to experiment with motion controls (which is the one title I missed). And now it’s here on the Wii, and the Wiimote makes it the best yet.
Warioware has always been crazy, and there’s a group of people that have always found it appealing. But bringing the whole experience to life with the motion controller makes it far more approachable. Seeing some ambiguous one-word explanation and being expected to press a button or do something on the D-pad just wasn’t that intuitive. But physically shaking that banana or turning that key is obvious. In the past, multiplayer with Warioware was a brutal matchup of those who knew the games and those who didn’t. But the gap is much narrower with Smooth Moves, making party style multiplayer viable after only a quick introduction.
I’ve said before that I want my games to be more exciting than reality. Warioware shows the exception to this rule. The microgames are generally the most mundane tasks imaginable (like vacuuming or sharpening a pencil). But throwing a set of these tasks at you in disorienting rapid succession somehow makes that all okay. And mixing those in with more fantastic tasks like throwing shurikens at impeding ninjas or lasering down giant monsters can’t help but make you smile.
The one complaint I have with Warioware is that although the controls are more intuitive they’re decidedly more flakey. There are times when you tweak out the sensor and miss a round even though you were doing the right thing. And if the game were less fun this would be really aggravating. But before you have a chance to really get mad a new game is coming your way and you’ve forgotten all about it.