By the Way

This has been active for awhile but I keep forgetting to mention it. If anyone's still typing in the address, either fetalminds.com or josephcerra.com will now land you here.

Advice From Strangers

A friend forwarded the following email to me and asked what my opinion was.

Maybe we can keep a few cents in our pockets.

TIPS ON PUMPING GAS (Good information)
I don't know what you guys are paying for gasoline.... but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $3.50 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money's worth for every gallon..

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline in San Jose , CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.

Only buy ! or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the afternoon or in the evening....your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role.

A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

When you're filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3) stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some of the liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you're getting less worth for your money. One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the! exact a mount. Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up--most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some of the dirt that normally settles on the bottom.

Hope this will help you get the most value for your money.

DO SHARE THESE TIPS WITH OTHERS!

My first thought is that it's a hoax. Kind of a pointless one, like a chain letter in disguise. There are a couple things that these types of emails have in common, which makes me suspicious of this one. The introduction itself starts off badly. It begins with the assumption that you don't know the person who originally sent the email. It gives personal details of the sender to give it more authority. It works well for chain letters, but it's an unnatural thing to do when you email the people in your contact list. Then email also ends with a request to send it on to other people. Generally I assume that increases the chance that an email is bogus by about 30%.

My favorite place to check the authenticity of an email, is Snopes, which researches urban legends and these types of chain emails to find out if there is any truth in them. I found a similar version of this email there, which currently has a status of undetermined and says that research is in progress. It also says it was collected in February of 2007, so this email is fairly recent, and already has multiple versions. I'm not much of a fan so far, but even if the entire background is fictitious, the tips themselves might be good, just to help spread the email around, since that is the point.

Tip 1: The temperature/density of gas can make a significant difference
I first heard this tip four or five years ago when my boss sent me to a "How to be an empowered woman in the workplace" seminar (don't ask). While it's true that things expand when they warm up, generally that expansion doesn't amount to much. I decided to try and figure out the mechanics myself, and according to The Properties of Petroleum Fluids, Petroleum: Its History, Origin, Occurrence, Production, Physical and Chemical Constitution, Technology, Examination and Uses, some chart I found, and this calculator; the most generous numbers show that 10 gallons of gasoline heated from 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 80 degrees will net you 10.222222 gallons of gasoline. So at three dollars a gallon, that would be a saving of 66 cents, on a day with a 40 degree swing in the temperature. Not what I'd call significant, but it's more than I expected. I also have no idea if that math is correct or not, I may be mixing my measurements. Feel free to toss a container of gas out into the snow overnight to double check me.

(Update: A slight correction to the math is located here)

Tip 2: Don't fill up when a delivery is being made
This is another one that sounds like it has a grain of truth to it. I suppose it's possible to test this one if I collect samples from the pump during & after deliveries and compared them. Feel free to start without me. I can tell you from personal experience working at a gas station that I was never asked to crawl down into the gas storage tanks and clean them out. I did on occasion drop stuff down there that didn't belong, like snow, leaves, and G.I. Joe's though.

Tip 3: Gas evaporates faster than you can imagine, fill up more often
Tip 4: Pump your gas slowly, so it doesn't evaporate
The other tips kind of contradict each other. I also found a tip from Howstuffworks that recommends not keeping a full tank, so you aren't lugging around as much weight. I'm also pretty sure that pumps don't have a "vapor return" in order to gather up gas fumes, but they do have one designed to turn of the pump when your tank is full (half way down).

None of these tips sound harmful in any way, so feel free to follow the ones that make sense to you. If you really want to conserve gasoline though, your best bet is still public transportation, or car pooling.

It Begins

Wearable Robot

The RIAA: Still Run By Idiots

This article from ars technica shows how little progress has been made on the digital copyright front. Basically, the RIAA, now famous for suing teens and grandmothers, is still sticking to the extreme position that taking a CD that you own, and saving the music to your hard drive, for your own personal use, is illegal. This seems to imply that, well, pretty much anyone that owns a computer, and has put a music CD in it, is a criminal.

Which is funny, because that's what I've come to think of the music industry as. I was actually on their side in the beginning. All the Napsters, and Groksters were obviously illegal. I could sympathize with the trouble caused by the spread of some very inaccurate information about copyright and fair use that was used to justify these acts. However, so far the best the music industry has been able to come up with to combat the problem, is hacking your computer. The Sony case is the worst example, but many implementations of Digital Rights Management have essentially been unauthorized modification of a computer system. Hypocrisy tends to annoy me.

It seems like the entertainment industry has no intention of working on a solution for the problems with copyright, and their inability to keep up with the mediums that copyrighted works can be made available in. This argument really hasn't changed since 1984, just the technology. Here we are in December of 2007, and dare I use the phrase "broken record"?

There seem to be some serious problems here that refuse to go away. Is the idea of victimless copying so anathema, that a revision of the concepts of ownership and license is impossible?

All The News I Wasn't Posting About Last Month

Weather forecasts, soon to come with liability.

The online comic Achewood cracks me up. I think this comic captures it's unique brand of humor well.

Giant scorpion.

Gravity can turn the sky into stripes. Who knew?

Apparently, we're hard wired to pay attention to scared faces. I know when I walk into a room, my attention is always drawn to the one that's screaming.

Science still thinking about energy, promises to call.

I am intrigued by the idea of online glasses.

If You Happen To Know Any

I found a fairly good description of introverts. You may find it informative.

What's In A Name

A number of people I know are looking for new names for new people, and I thought I would offer some suggestions. Not in an actual name, but that they take into account how a persons name can impact their life. There's also alphabetic discrimination, but I doubt I'm going to convince anyone to hand out a different surname.

Also, I would like to take this opportunity to state that I think double barreled last names are stupid. If there is a hyphen in your last name, I am likely to ignore everything after the hyphen, to express my displeasure. It's not that I think people should conform to tradition, I just think it's bad math. Allow me to demonstrate how name hyphenation will destroy the human race in five generations.

Generation 0: Sanity
People have one last name. Sometimes they make up new last names, this is politely not mentioned. Some eccentrics have multiple middle names, this is tolerated, since any number of middle names can easily be ignored. However, patient zero, the name extremist, who we will refer to as John Doe, decides together with Jane Smith, that they will change their surnames to Doe-Smith. This mutation turns out to be dominant, and is passed on to their children.

Generation 1: The Double Barreled Generation
The danger signs are ignored, and Jacob Doe-Smith marries Lucy Johnson-Williams. Their name becomes Jonson-Doe-Williams-Smith. Their children, weighed down by their own names, begin to suffer from chronic joint pain, and pretentiousness.

Generation 2: The Names Are Marching Four By Four
Beginning to sense what is on the horizon, some citizens attempt to replace the name between each hyphens with only the first letter of each name. Sadly, most last name combinations of this generation spell filthy words. While hilarious, the plan is abandoned.

Generation 3: Octogenamians
Unable to tell how closely Zimmerman-Donaldson-Forest-Smith-Johnson-Torres-White-Doe is related to Donaldson-Johnson-Smith-Doe-Forest-White-Zimmerman-Torres, a noticeable jump in inbreeding is detected by genealogists.

Generation 4: Allow Me To Introduce My Friend Clarence Harris-Jackson-.... You Know, He's Not Worth It
Feature films are now 20 minutes, with 100 minutes of credits. At camps everywhere, children are unable to write their names on their clothes & lunches. Streets and buildings are no longer named after people, leaving nothing to strive for.

Generation 5: The End of Days
With names like Smith-Johnson-Williams-Jones-Brown-Davis-Miller-Wilson-Moore-Taylor-
Anderson-Thomas-Jackson-White-Harris-Martin-Thompson-Garcia-Martinez-Robinson-Clark-
Rodriguez-Lewis-Lee-Walker-Hall-Allen-Young-Hernandez-King-Wright-Lopez, official documents first two pages are now reserved for "PRINT NAME" boxes. Due to the number of typos, paper consumption is grossly underestimated. Rampant deforestation, and the high percentage of the national budget spent on phone book subsidies bring both the economy and the environment to a swift and brutal collapse. As the human race reverts to primitive and violent behaviors, people are no longer able to finish calling out their lovers names before being executed by raiding parties, and thus are unable to reunite in heaven. Everything sucks a big one.

Leviathan

Another talk from TED, on the history of violence. This ties in with a book I'm currently reading, The Pentagon's New Map. There are some themes here that I will probably return to at some point.




Steven Pinker: A brief history of violence

Time To Replace That Birthstone Jewelry

Pointing out flaws in Astrology is not exactly groundbreaking, but I found this amusing. Livescience has a list of what your zodiac sign really is, based the modern star and sun positions, and an explanation of why the constellations change position over time. There is also a link to an page that is suppose to let you check your specific day and time of birth, but it was horribly broken when I tried it.