Category Archives: Technology

Business, Technology

Why Does This Sound Familiar?

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Recently, a well known “celebrity” in the automotive field who is making a high mileage, revolutionary product declared, “… a long list of organizations,” including OIL COMPANIES and Wall Street short-sellers, that “want [us] to die.”

In the 1930s a Canadian inventor named Pogue declared that he had created a high mileage revolutionary product.  Mr. Pogue’s revolutionary invention was a gas vaporizing carburetor that would allow a car to travel 200 miles on 1 gallon of gasoline. All that was required was a simple swap of the standard carburetor with the Pogue device and any car would achieve 200 Miles Per Gallon.

Why don’t we see 200 MPG cars today? It’s been almost 90 years since this miraculous discovery.

The answer over the years is that one of the big American automobile manufacturers and BIG OIL COMPANIES bought Mr. Pogues miracle design and have suppressed it’s use so they could sell more oil. Even today, people still believe this conspiracy theory.  Break out the tin foil hats, folks.

Science time. Fuel vaporization is only a small part of an engines efficiency. The bigger factors of efficiency according to thermodynamics is Th versus Tc or “T-hot versus T-cold”. There’s a fancy equation to figure out thermal efficiency but in simple terms you want the combustion process as hot as possible and the expanding burning gas to become as cold as possible. An engine manufacturer needs to balance these two opposite requirements and make a product that actually works and doesn’t melt down. Again in simple terms the biggest factors of INEFFICIENCY is the heat loss through a car’s engine block and cooling system which are necessary to prevent the engine from destroying itself.  Try running your engine with out water in the radiator and see how well that turns out.  But SCIENCE and FACTS ruin a good conspiracy theory.  Bah humbug to science.  We can have 68 genders according to the wacky social justice warrior crowd even though SCIENCE doesn’t back that up.  So let’s just keep blaming BIG OIL for all the ills in the world.

So who was the automotive celebrity that stated recently that BIG OIL COMPANIES want his company to fail?

Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla Inc.

Culture, Technology

Alexa, KILL !

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  • A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  • A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Isaac Asimov’s “Three rules of robotics”.

I wrote in my previous post that there is a much more sinister aspect to “Keyless Killers“.

Infiniti, the automobile manufacturer, is showing how their cars have the convenience of remote starting using Amazon’s voice device, the Echo aka “Alexa”.  You can see how this works in the following video:

Infiniti has a step by step guide to set up their cars to use the Echo’s Alexa command to start their cars just by saying, “Alexa start my Infiniti QX-50”.  You can read the guide HERE.

Why is this “sinister“?

How about this murder mystery scenario?  A jilted ex-lover of our beautiful actress in the video sneaks up to her house, as she slumbers peacefully, and talks through the window saying, “Alexa start my Infinity QX-50“.  The car parked in her garage dutifully starts, filling her house with carbon monoxide, and beautiful actress never sees the sun rise ever again.  When the constabulary arrives to investigate, they find the car running and assume she must have been the one in five billion who left her car running, accidentally.  No signs of foul play.  No fingerprints.  No incriminating DNA.  Cause of death, accidental.  Case closed.  Jilted ex-lover thinks to himself, “Excellent!”.

Interestingly, as I previewed this post and played the video, my Echo heard the command “Alexa…” by the actress and lit up showing that it was listening for what it should do.  Kind of spooky.

Ain’t technology grand?

Business, Culture, Technology

Keyless Killer?

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My Dad brought to my attention a news story that people are dying because of keyless cars. It was from a New York Times article describing how people are leaving their cars running in their garages because the no longer need to turn a physical key to the off position.
As we all know, the Times is the queen of “fake news“, hence I needed to look at the numbers.

The story describes how “dozens” of people have been killed by the deadly assault keyless cars. The total number killed according to the story was 28 which is  4 more than TWO dozen, so it is technically “dozens“. That’s tabloid journalism for you, to make a click-bait headline.  Once again we need to delve deeper into the numbers.

Just as an aside, VEHICLES OF WAR don’t need KEYS to operate.  You can start almost all WAR MACHINES, tanks, humvees, MRAPs, personnel carriers, WITHOUT A KEY.  As a deadly keyless operation assault car, you can turn on and off a VEHICLE OF WAR without turning a physical KEY.  But I digress…

The “dozens” of people killed is over an 12 YEAR period. That makes the “death toll” a bit more than TWO per year. Not exactly headline news. “Stop the presses!  Breaking news!  Last year, two people were killed by because they forgot to turn off their car!  Oh the humanity!”   But let’s delve deeper.

The article says that 8.5 million cars sold annually have keyless operations. Over 12 years that would be more than 100 million assault cars with deadly keyless operations. For a back of the envelope analysis, let’s assume only half of those cars are running today (50 million cars), because some of the cars will have been crashed or have become inoperable.

Say that you park your car in the garage once per day. You need to drive to work, the store, school, whatever and return to the garage. That means with 50 million cars, the cars get parked AT LEAST 5 times per week.  With the 52 weeks in a  year, that gives us 13 BILLIONS opportunities to NOT shut off the car, per year. Over 12 years that would be 156 BILLION opportunities to leave a car running in the garage.

With 28 deaths and 156 BILLION parking cycles, the death rate is 0.000000018% !!!   For the betting folks, that’s ONE IN 5.6 BILLION.

Putting it into perspective, you are 300 times more likely to be hit and killed by a METEORITE.

BUT there is a potentially more sinister latent hazard that isn’t described by the queen of fake news. I’ll cover that in the next entry.