Windows Phone 7 and Škoda 120

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Microsoft is releasing Windows Phone 7. As they show in The Season of the Witch, it's time for a phone that saves us from our phones. I agree with that even though the ad doesn't clarify how Windows Phone 7 is supposed to achieve this goal. But it's fair because the ad says nothing else about the system, either. ;-)



Let me point out that I am not a witch or anything you've heard. I am you! ;-) But I haven't metamorphosed into you because I am a witch! :-)




From our Czech viewpoint, what's remarkable about the Microsoft ad above is the crashed car that appears at the very end, around 0:52. It's Škoda 120, the last model (except for Škoda Favorit) that the Czechoslovak carmaker produced before the fall of communism. You will probably get a Škoda 120 as a free gift when you purchase Windows Phone 7. If you need to double its value, fill the tank. :-)

I suppose that when Microsoft was shooting the ad in the French streets, they just didn't have enough money to buy (and deform) a wreck of a Renault or a similar brand, so Škoda was the best choice for their limited budget. :-)

When I was 13 or so, I thought that Škoda 120 was the 2nd most beautiful car in the world after Mercedes 190D. My and our aesthetic sense has significantly changed during the last 25 years. I wonder what kinds of vehicles will look pretty to us or other people in 2035. Can it be predicted?

I still like Škoda 120 in some sense but it's not among the top cars anymore. Mercedes 190D surely looks too blocky to me today. But it's pretty clear that making the cars rounder can't be the universal recipe for progress when it comes to cars' beauty. After all, if this were the case, you could make the perfect car - a ball - as soon as today. ;-)

But even some excessively aerodynamic cars don't look too attractive. They may have too little visual structure. It's OK if different pieces of the car visually co-operate but it may be bad if they become completely indistinguishable and inseparable. There may be some optimal compromise in between.

Do you think that this aesthetic sense of ours is objectively given? Would people in 1985 agreed that the 2010 models are prettier than the 1985 cars? Or did we have to evolve our perception? Do the perception and the models evolve simultaneously, influencing each other along the way? Or were the ugly features of the old models given primarily by their technological limitations?

And when we like some very old models - e.g. very old trains - is that because of some "compassion" in our appraisal, or do we really like them? If we genuinely like them, why don't companies produce much more stuff with retro design? Do we subconsciously appreciate that the technology of the previous centuries was a part of Nature?

I don't know the answer to these interdisciplinary questions in which psychology overlaps with engineering.

John Snow buys Chrysler for $7.4 billion

Cerberus Capital Management whose current chairman is John Snow, the former treasury secretary, bought 80% of Chrysler for $7.4 billion.



In 1998, Daimler-Benz bought the brand for $37 billion but a decade of losses followed.




Meanwhile, the Chrysler building remains the tallest brick building in the world.

Cars: grams of CO2 per km

Today, the European commission proposed to ban cars that emit more than 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer since 2012. The Czech Republic is a car superpower - 850,000 cars were produced in 2006 - which is why they care. They estimate that the price of a new car could jump by $1500-$3500, depending on the unknown price of new technologies. Škoda, joke no more, joined Audi in driving Volkswagen's profits. If the eurobureaucrats introduce the caps, Škoda will probably relocate its production to its Russian or Indian plants.

Older (1997) and (slash) recent (2005) average emissions of cars from various companies are:

• Fiat - 169/139
  
• Citroen - 172/144
  
• Renault - 173/149
  
• Ford - 180/151
  
• Peugeot - 177/151
  
• Opel - 180/156
  
• Toyota - 189/163
  
• Kia - 202/170
  
• Škoda - 165/152
  
• Seat - 158/150
  
• Honda - 184/166
  
• Mercedes - 223/185
  
• Hyundai - 189/170
  
• Volkswagen - 170/159
  
• BMW - 216/192
  
• Volvo - 219/195
  
• Audi - 190/177
  
• Mazda - 186/177
  
• Suzuki - 169/165
  
• Nissan - 177/172

You can easily sort them by CO2 in 2005 - essentially by quality. ;-) Volvo, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Mazda, Hyundai ... Renault, Citroen, Fiat. In other words, the proposal of the European commission is to destroy the good carmakers and preserve the others. If accepted, the policy will become a new example that jokes often become reality. Around 2000, the following joke was circulating:




This is what the European citizens want in Europe:

1. Swiss salary.
2. Luxembourg taxes.
3. German car.
4. British home.
5. Spanish girls. (wow!)
6. French wine.
7. Italian food.
8. Czech beer.
9. Austrian mountains.
10. Danish administration.
    

And this is the EC's proposal for a new Europe [originally: after the monetary union]:

1. Czech salary.
2. Swedish taxes.
3. Spanish car.
4. Greek home.
5. German girls. (ugh!)
6. Irish wine.
7. British food.
8. French beer.
9. Dutch mountains.
10. Italian administration.

Concerning the point 5) above - if Sabine reads it - let me emphasize that I didn't invent the joke. ;-)

Battle of Antarctica

As Wikia explains, this battle takes place in the air above the continent of Antarctica on Earth between humans, using X-302 fighters✈ and the Prometheus (X-303)✈, and the forces of Anubis.



Note that Prometheus designed by Roger Pielke and humans in general are represented by the IPCC climate panel. On the other hand, Anubis is one of the most powerful and evil Goa'uld in history. Goa'uld are bad guys and parasitic beings that take over hosts such as humans and that came from the P3X-888 planet. You should now ask:

What the hell is he talking about?

Well, sorry that it wasn't clear so far. I am talking about the same battle that Bob Ferguson aptly named

• food-fight over alarmism among the consensus.

Just like in the case of the Catholic Church and Protestants, the environmentalist church of consensus is going to split. Everyone in the church agrees that there is a 100% consensus among all experts but unfortunately two equally strong groups of experts disagree what the consensus says.

Figure 1: The authors of IPCC who are completing their document in Paris are completely free and can obey all standards of scientific integrity. They are not being intimidated at all by an eco-activist organization that has attached a banner to a rather well-known tower. ;-)

This disagreement emerged because of the IPCC AR4 report whose summary will be released on Friday, after four days of secret word-by-word editing. The main point of disagreement is Antarctica. See

• The Observer (of the Grauniad fame)
• Associated Press (IHT, Boston Globe etc.)

There are two groups of experts who face each other. Various Anubis' experts have

• denounced the IPCC report as misleading
• said that the report fails to give the right ✭impression✭ about the CO2 effect on Antarctica
• said that the IPCC neglects the gorillas
• said that the prediction of the IPCC is obviously not the full story because ice sheet decay is something we can't (even) model now but we ✞know✞ it's happening

I agree with Bob that the second sentence above is really characteristic of their movement. The goal of a scientific report is apparently to "give the right impression". The statement about gorillas comes from an Ohio State Anubis' expert and another Anubis' expert, MacCracken of The Neverending Story who used to lead the U.S. government reviews of the IPCC reports until 2001, has fired off a letter of protest because of the gorillas (Greenland and Antarctica deserve this name as the key reservoirs of ice).




The IPCC report is going to say that Antarctica won't see any significant difference even if CO2 levels continue to grow. In fact, Antarctica has seen some cooling and increased precipitation is raising the total amount of ice mass on this continent, as the IPCC report also mentions. The frequent readers of this blog also know that Greenland has cooled down in the last 70 years, too. Its ice mass seems to be increasing there as well, by 6 centimeters per year - see this paper in Science.

These facts are not good enough for Anubis (it's one guy equipped with some forces, as Stargate junkies surely know) who wants all continents, including Antarctica, to obey the consensus. Antarctica must go catastrophic, too! It's time for Antarctica to come in from the cold and join the warming world. If you think that the joke in the previous sentence is so absurd that no alarmist would ever write such a thing, read The Independent. For a sentence with an arbitrarily small "epsilon" of intelligence, there exists a "delta" of people who will say such a sentence seriously. The smaller "epsilon" is, the more likely their opinions will be published in nationwide newspapers. ;-)

The early version of the IPCC report calculated that the sea level will increase by 5-23 inches by 2100. Because the authors of a Science paper published this month obtained a much "better" result - namely 20-55 inches - they will probably complain, too. The 55-inch people include Stefan Rahmstorf who has received 1+ million dollars for alarmism so far. How could IPCC include such inferior numbers and betray the consensus by a factor of four or so? ;-) Isn't the very job of the comrades at IPCC to suppress people who are less alarmist?

William Connolley who is something in between Anubis and humans has joined the humans in this battle. He argues that one of Anubis' experts - William's boss Chris Rapley, a famous advocate of a significant population reduction to fight the climate change - hasn't even read the report and he mixes apples with oranges, for example lower troposphere with the mid-troposphere. Needless to say, most journalists will fight on the side of Anubis and Kraken so it can be quite a ➷battle➷. :-)

The Anubis' critics point out that the IPCC is a "conservative body". Who could have thought? ;-) We report, you decide.

A related war

German car industry finally realized that they are one of the targets of the eco-attacks. They would have to fire about 65,000 workers if the new CO2 limits promoted by Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner, were accepted. At least this is the calculation of the German environment ministry. CSU politicians and the carmakers' trade union have called to stop this madness urgently. S.O.S.

The boss of Porsche warned of an impending business war between Germany on one side and France with Italy on the other side because of the latter countries' support for mad plans to regulate CO2 and destroy German luxury carmakers - and especially because these two countries produce worse, carbon-poor vehicles. "It is an attack on BMW, Mercedes, Audi and ourselves [Porsche] ... This is a business war in Europe. We will fight," Mr Wiedeking told shareholders. For Porsche and others, this is indeed an existential war against the eco-crusaders.



While the luxury carmakers and their cars - especially 911 Turbo above - are the most endangered species, the chiefs of all German carmakers have strongly urged the EU commission to withdraw the plans to force the manufacturers to reduce CO2 emissions of new cars sold in the EU to 120 grams per km by 2012. This includes BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, Opel, and Volkswagen. The German leaders are split on the issue. Economy minister Michael Glos and Günther Verheugen whom Central Europe knows as the commissioner for EU expansion oppose the regulation plans. German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) supports Dimas' plans. Gabriel also does everything he can to undermine Glos' plans to sue the EU commission.

The Washington Times have described the forced Europe's economic suicide.

Update - cars

The proposal to regulate car emissions in this brutal way has been delayed indefinitely on the same day when this posting was written.

Chevrolet Volt

Click the picture for more. News from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit (click for more):



Chevrolet Volt can run for 40 miles on its lithium-ion battery before a small gasoline motor kicks in and recharges the battery. It is very quiet so it can quietly kill many people with bikes.



The car is also known as Chevy Joule/Coulomb or Chevy Watt/Ampere. Particle physicists call it Chevy 10^-9 GeV/e and it is known to quantum gravity experts as Chevy K where K is a pure numerical constant in Planck units.

General Motors used to be the number one carmaker in the world. However, this spot is gonna be seized by Toyota, a company that plans to produce 2,500 copies of Toyota Matrix M-theory in 2007. Volt may be a modern enough answer to M-theory from GM. But what about Cadillac Matrix String Theory?




If you believe peak oil, the system of Chevrolet Volt is not good enough for you. Instead, you should invest $117,000 to buy a Venturi Astrolabe with these nice :-) solar panels. It can run up to 110 km/hour.



Finally, if you think that all these electric car fans are somewhat insane, you may prefer an ordinary car. What about Mazda Ryuga? It is a flying car.

See News.Google.COM.

Toyota Matrix M-theory

It's a nice model, isn't it? In fact, it's a Matrix model. ;-)



Figure 1: Matrix M-theory. Click the picture for a review.

A reader has pointed out that Toyota will offer a new model of Toyota Corolla for 2007 whose name is

• Toyota Matrix M-theory (official pages of the car)

See Google. "Q" has also proposed that after Matrix M-theory, Toyota could also produce Toyota Matrix String Theory so that I would earn a few bucks. ;-) Those who think that there is something wrong with science that should be changed are preparing a competing model,

• Trabant Not Even Wrong,

also known as "The Trouble with Trabant."

Flying cars from string theory

Our colleague Song Yoo-geun, who is eight years old, has finished his elementary and high school in 9 months, instead of 12 years. He just joined a college near Seoul and impressed the professors by his explanation of the Schrödinger equation. His next goal is to work at CERN and develop flying cars based on superstring theory.



Because Song does not like to communicate with ordinary adults too much, his father has explained that Ramond-Ramond or Neveu-Schwarz-Neveu-Schwarz forces are able to compensate gravity as a consequence of supersymmetry, which makes flying BPS cars float in the atmosphere.




The Reference Frame wishes Song good luck with his project. :-)

GM to produce hydrogen cars

General Motors is planning to produce and sell a lot of hybrid cars - in which the burning gas recharges an electric motor. Today, however, GM also signed a $88 million deal with the Department of Energy to build 40 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and to improve the technology. Shell Hydrogen LLC will provide them with five Hydrogen gas stations across the U.S.

• CNN about GM and Hydrogen

Note that the hydrogen motors are based on this fascinating chemical reaction:

• 2 H_2 + O_2 -> 2 H_2 O

An amazing feature of this reaction is that it does not involve carbon - the element that has recently been identified by the "progressives" as the ultimate source of evil (such as the so-called global warming as well as life itself). The hydrogen fuel cells have been used by the astronauts from the very beginnings of the space program in the 1960s, and the barriers that have always prevented this technology from spreading to the car industry and elsewhere were always economical in character. It is about 4 times as expensive to produce hydrogen. My friend George has a rather informative description of the situation at the web page of his house:

• WH about hydrogen fuel

I can imagine that it will become cheap to produce hydrogen and this clean technology will dominate in 10 years or so. Nevertheless, it is still easier for me to imagine that these projects will remain a fancy and overly expensive demonstration of the hypothetical possibilities - and further progress will be based on conventional motors that produce CO_2.

Fuel for 15 USD a barrel

Gindy has lots of interesting, inspiring and reasonable texts on his blog.

• http://gindy.blogspot.com/ ... (fuel)

This particular article is about fuel that may be produced as cheaply as for 15 dollars a barrel - from organic waste such as turkey guts. And it seems to be environmentally friendly - well, pollution created from burning the fuel has always been the most serious challenge of similar approaches. The technology seems to mimic the actual processes that led to the natural creation of fuel. You may read more about this possibility here:

• http://news.nationalgeographic.com/ ...

This article appeared a year ago, and therefore they still presented the price as being 10 dollars a barrel. It seems that the factory in Carthage, Missouri, is now running at 80 percent of its capacity, as you can see if you read the interview with Brian Appel, its CEO and a skillful manager who seems to know what he's doing:

• http://www.heise.de/ ...

Appel expects the new plants, which should also produce diesel fuel for powerplants in 15-20 minutes, to process the beef. They are working on a variation of the technology that could be used in the cars; this also requires a modification of the motors, something that the Big Three works on, too.



The people who blame the US for producing more CO2 than others - and who want to "punish" the US by the Kyoto-like protocols and similar anti-growth bureaucratic regulations - don't realize (or perhaps don't want to realize) that it is the same United States that is the most likely place where the new technologies will be (and already are being) discovered and realized in practice.