Free* power from slow currents

Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman have both blogged about VIVACE, a new power-harnessing technology that aims to generate wattage from slow-moving water currents. Neither of them went the extra mile to find a helpful picture or YouTube for their readers, though. How much do I love my readers? Enough to Google feverishly until I come up with gems like this:

The device looks quite simple, and I’d guess that the environmental impact of having a zillion of these underwater would be less than a bunch of turbo-prop looking things… but I wonder how they’d deal with algae and seaweed growing up around the moving parts?

Vivace -- vortex power!

Anyhoo, I like the idea, and I hope next year’s trial is successful.

Cracking down on chronic batterers

I saw this headline in the P-I today, and actually went online trying to find it. It’s not very easy to find articles 12-18 hours after they come out, but I tracked it down.

The gist of the article is that the Attorney General’s office (yes, that’s Rob McKenna), is actually looking at considering a history of domestic abuse as part of sentencing guidelines, instead of mostly ignoring it as they do now. The article doesn’t talk much about the task force or the etiology and treatment* of domestic abusers, but instead goes through the criminal history of one guy who has been charged 8 times but has never gone to prison. For example:

Early in 2007, Overby started dating another woman and they moved into a Woodinville apartment six weeks later. They argued on their first day together and the woman said he slammed her into the coffee table and stepped on her neck until she “almost passed out,” according to court records.

At work we’ve been talking about whether the US is more sexist or racist, and I think the answer is that we’re more sexist; 30 years ago people got all mad about how car thieves weren’t being sent to prison if they had a criminal history, so the laws got changed. But domestic violence is barely mentioned in polite circles, and men are implicitly given the right to do whatever they like to “their property” at home. I think we’re so far from genuinely seeing women as equal to men that we don’t even know what it would look like.

* Speaking of which… I have no idea if sending domestic abusers to prison actually does anything to deter them, or ameliorate anything at all. What little I know about this stuff tells me that by the time abuse is happening, it’s a thorny problem to untangle and fix. So the solution is… ask some public policy professors! It’s their job to figure out what policies actually decrease domestic abuse rates, what works in other countries, what doesn’t, how much it costs, what the downsides are, etc. Sure beats the hell out of asking Sarah Palin what she thinks Jesus would recommend.

Dual-purpose post: Mark Kleiman and a strict Obama

I’m still not feeling awesome, so I’m gonna kill two birds with one stone and then go have breakfast.

Bird 1: You should get to know the blog of Mark A. R. Kleiman. He’s a public policy professor, and I’ve been going to his blog for the past year or two. He studies drug and prison policy, mostly. One of my hobby horses is that most of the decision Americans make are basically made in a fact-free vacuum; the media is next-to-useless as a means of understanding the world, blogs aren’t much better, water-cooler conversations are horrifyingly wrong and the church is beyond wrong.

What’s Uncle Vinny’s magic pill? Public policy professors! They think, read, ponder, and then actually do research to demonstrate how policy choices actually work or fail in the real world. It’s where science interacts with politics.  So! Check out his blog from time to time, I think you’ll like it.

Bird 2: Specifically, read this article he posted today about Barack Obama and his ability to lecture crowds in a way that other politicians wouldn’t be able to pull off. Kleiman isn’t always a sober-minded policy analyst; sometimes he slips into sheepish Obama fan-boy mode like I do. I think a lot of parents know in their hearts that they should turn off the TV and spend more time with their kids. I think they might nod knowingly if some politician harped on the point, and they might resolve to go home and do better. I think they might feel more inspired if some politician was proposing policy that would improve the odds that they and their child could have success. But it takes a unique politician (and orator) to get people excited about working hard and participating in their child’s success.

OK. Both birds are dead, now I can go have breakfast.

But, Obama supporters are so, like, insubstantial, ya know?

Watch this video, where a camera guy starts pestering an Obama supporter for specifics, and then watch this video, where the supporter does a pretty goddam riveting follow-up.

MPG nerd trivia: What happens when you add a mile of highway?

I popped in on Sightline’s open house last night and took their Cascadia sustainability quiz. I did OK, but came up pretty stumped on a couple of questions. One of them asked “How much extra CO2 gets added to the atmosphere per year when you add one lane-mile of new highway?” The choices ranged from 0 to 100,000 tons of CO2, but I don’t think in terms of tons of anything except when measuring my devotion to Marisa Tomei.

So this morning I set out to do a little Googlage and get myself knowledgable about weighing CO2.

• Step one: How many miles per year for the average US vehicle? About 12,000.
• Step two: What’s the average MPG for a US vehicle? About 24.
• Math! Eeek: 12,000 miles/gal / 24 gal = 500 gallons (Nerd tip: Always include the units.)
• Step three: Fun chemistry trivia from the US government! One gallon of gas weighs about 6.3 pounds, but produces 20.3 pounds of CO2. Chemistry is cool. So our 500 gallons of gas = 10,175 pounds of CO2, or 5 tons per vehicle per year.
• Step four: 100,000 tons / 5 = 20,000 vehicle’s worth of CO2 per year per mile of new lane.

I’ve left the 5 tons/vehicle/year in bold above. That’s the thing I think I’ll try to remember when thinking about climate change. (My output is less, but even 1.5 tons is a lot.)

Footnote: The question might have been about roads, or highways specifically, I can’t remember for sure. Also, I’m sure there are tons (ha, ha) of qualifications I should make to the numbers above, but I just wanted to get a quick estimate. ZOMG, the EPA has a more elaborate paper on this topic, and they come up with pretty similar numbers: 4.8 to 5.5 tons per year, depending on which fuel economy estimates you use.

Marisa Tomei footnote: I resisted the urge to add a photo to this post.

HOOOLY CRAP! Update. I just found the question from last night, and it goes like this: “For every lane-mile of new highway built, how much carbon dioxide will be released over the next 50 years?” Jeez, that’s a hell of a different question, and it shows how out of touch I am with carbon numbers.  20,000 vehicle-years divided by 50 years is 400 cars…. that doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me. I’m not a pro at thinking about traffic issues (surprise!), but the CO2 argument doesn’t seem particularly scary when thinking about new roads. Of course, there are plenty of other awesome reasons to avoid new roads in favor of mass transit, densification, etc., I just wouldn’t put this one at the top of the list.