Posted: March 23rd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: environment, visual | Tags: change, climate, disaster, earth, feedback, global, growth, guns, population, warming | No Comments »
A guy named Leo Murray has made a great animated short with the support of the Royal College of Art. It contains some clever visual executions of complex concepts. The video lives here but you can also view it at the bottom of this post.
This visual is brilliant–it sums up capitalism, more or less. See more examples after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: August 2nd, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: Uncategorized, environment, personal | Tags: auto, driving, money, saving, zipcar | No Comments »
ZipCar is proving to be quite awesome. We are constantly bombarded with useless new products and services, but here is one that actually adds value to my life. Imagine that.
This past two weeks, I’ve used:
- a Prius to get groceries and dinner
- a Civic to check out an apartment in SF
- a 328i to check out an apartment in SF and visit Golden Gate Park
- a Nissan Versa to get groceries and go up to Mount Diablo to check for some of this week’s meteor shower action
- a Honda Odyssey to move from Berkeley to a new apartment in SF
- a Mini to get back over to Oakland for a Saturday homebrew BBQ
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 20th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: environment, personal | Tags: car, sharing, zipcar | 2 Comments »
I signed up to participate in ZipCar’s latest promotion, The Low-Car Diet. It’s a 30-day challenge to give up your personal car and get around using any other form of transit, including, of course, the car sharing program offered by ZipCar. To begin my journey, I first drove my own car from San Francisco to Detroit, parked it, and promptly flew back west. Here’s my baby, the car that I gave up. It’s a 2001 Saab Viggen.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: March 7th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: environment, sketches | Tags: car, carbon, change, climate, combustion, dioxide, driving, emissions, fuel, global, warming | 6 Comments »
I recently read that burning one gallon of gasoline releases about 19 lbs of carbon dioxide.
The mass on either side of a chemical reaction must balance, so I thought to myself, “If a gallon of fuel weighs 6 lbs, where is the other 13 lbs coming from?”
Well, it turns out that the additional weight is from the 21 lbs of oxygen that your car sucks from the atmosphere to burn that gallon of gas! Your car also spits out one gallon (8 lbs) of water in the process. 21 lbs of oxygen fills about four phone booths (~250 cu. ft.), and 19 lbs of carbon dioxide fills about two and a half phone booths (~150 cu. ft.). If your fuel economy is 25 mpg, then the above quantities occur every 25 miles you drive.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: January 7th, 2009 | Author: admin | Filed under: environment | Tags: chartjunk | 2 Comments »
Wow! Talk about chartjunk!
This chart shows that on a 1,000 mile trip, a U-Haul truck running on gasoline will emit 2,774 lbs of carbon dioxide, while some other truck running on diesel fuel will emit 2,798 lbs. On this trip, the U-Haul will emit 24 lbs, or a whopping 0.8%, less carbon dioxide! Aside from questioning the comparison of a gasoline truck to a diesel truck, this difference is so tiny (less than one percent) that its meaning is quickly swallowed up by any other variables in the system (age of truck, miles per tank, driving habits, fuel cost, total energy efficiency, weather). The glaring offense is the fact that the other truck’s dark cloud of smoke appears to have nearly three times greater area than the lighter U-Haul cloud. So, visually, the chart implies that U-Haul emits 60% less, while the dubious numbers show that the difference is less than 1%; this is a visual distortion of extreme proportions. Mysteriously, a trip of 999 miles or 1,001 miles yields a difference of only 23 lbs.
Read the rest of this entry »
