Blizza Blizza

The local TV station ran a “tip” tonight just before a commercial break in the 11 o’clock news, which I’ve paraphrased here:

Buy gas in the morning or late in the evening. Pumps dispense gasoline by volume, not by density, so you get more gasoline when the liquid is cooler.

This seemed a little bit preposterous to me, so I did a little figuring. According to the first reference I could find on Google, the volumetric coefficient of thermal expansion of gasoline (at 20 °C) is about 0.000950 °C^-1. In other words, one cubic metre of gasoline expands 950 mL if you increase the temperature of the gasoline from 20 °C to 21 °C. Assume the expansion is fairly linear, or that the coefficient remains fairly constant, within ¬±10 °C or so (Gateco Oil’s MSDS for unleaded regular says the boiling point is just under 30 °C).

A typical passenger car has a gas tank capable of holding around 15 gallons, or about 57 L. For the sake of argument, let’s say the temperature of gasoline stored in tanks 3-4 metres underground is subject to just as much fluctuation as the surface air temperature (a dubious assumption at best, but we’ll give the news crew the benefit of the doubt). Let’s be generous and say the average overnight low in the summer is about 10 °C (50 °F) and the average daytime high is about 30 °C (86 °F), a 20-degree swing. (We’ll ignore the fact that regular unleaded would be boiling at that temperature. Remember, we’re being generous here.)

In that situation, 20 °C * 0.000950 °C^-1 * 57 L gives us a ΔV of about 1 L, or just over one-fourth of a U.S. gallon. At $3/gallon, that means we got ourselves about 90 cents of free gas by tanking up at the crack of dawn, or about enough gas to drive our typical passenger car eight miles down the road.

Under more realistic circumstances — say, a 10 °C temperature swing (which is still huge considering these tanks are three metres or more underground and that the temperature of the Earth remains essentially constant over a 24-hour period at any given depth below about one meter) — your typical car gets a whopping 45 cents of free gas. If you have a smaller tank than our “average” 15 gallons, the savings is even less.

The only possible way this “tip” could be useful is if the station stores their gasoline above ground and you have a gas tank the size of a KC-10.

Dave says this is a massive conspiracy theory to sell more Krispy Kreme doughnuts by encouraging people to fill up in the mornings. I can’t say that he’s wrong.

West Palm Beach authorities arrested Rush Limbaugh this afternoon on an outstanding warrant for “doctor shopping” so that Mr. Ditto could get multiple doctors to prescribe him more painkillers, his addiction to which his 2003 entrance into drug rehab apparently didn’t cure.

Public service announcement: Virtual Crack is 100% safe. Rush would do well to take note of this fact. Crackhead.

Today’s award goes to Neal Stevenson, who sold his car to a 16-year-old for $150 worth of coke and then reported it stolen.

Both Neal and the 16-year-old dealer are now in jail. ‘Nuff said.

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

A team of Dartmouth College researchers has come up with an incredibly cool-sounding way to remove ice from windshields, refrigeration coils, etc.: they send a rapid pulse of electricity through a thin film on the surface of the windshield (for instance), causing microscopic and instantaneous heating of the surface, which breaks the bonds that ice forms with the surface. This allows the ice to slough off, and sure as heck beats the windshield heaters or alcohol sprays currently used on most commercial aircraft. Goodrich, the aerospace supplier, is working on an application of the technology in commercial jet windshields.

I wonder how long it’ll be until Cirrus or Columbia incorporates this into a new aircraft…

Since Lee just tagged me with this little Wikipedia meme and I’m a sucker for history, I figured I’d join in.

This is an interesting exercise for anyone who wants to learn a little more about world history, but it’s also food for thought: to most Americans, a birthday is a very special personal holiday, yet the event of any given individual’s birth is staggeringly insignificant in the harsh light of the thousands of years of recorded human history.

On August 12, all of the following happened:

In 490 BC, the army of Athens (Greece) defeated an invading Persian army at the Battle of Marathon, an event that later gave rise to the Olympic running event by the same name. According to Herodotus, some 6400 Persians gave their lives (in stark contrast to fewer than 200 Athenians) in the failed attempt to conquer those portions of Greece that were not yet under Persian control. Had the Persians won the battle, the development of Greek — and subsequent Western — civilisation may have been delayed several hundred years, or not happened at all, an idea first put forth by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, who famously claimed the Battle of Marathon to be more important to British history than the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Languishing in captivity in the Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam in 1883, the last known quagga on Earth died. The extinction of the quagga, a zebra-like animal that was found in great abundance on the South African plains in the late 1700s, was the second major human extinction of an African species (the first being that of the dodo in Mauritius some 250 years earlier).

In 1985, Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crashed into Mount Ogura after a catastrophic loss of the vertical stabiliser and subsequent loss of control, killing 520 of the 524 souls aboard in the worst single-craft air disaster in history. (The Tenerife disaster, which involved two 747s, remains the worst aviation accident to date.) The Boeing 747SR had sustained a tail strike some seven years previous and the repair, effected by Boeing, used only one row of rivets where two were called for. The failure of the bulkhead caused the vertical stabiliser to detach from the aircraft and also severed all four hydraulic systems, leaving the aircraft with only engine thrust for directional control. Many of the JAL staff, as well as the Boeing mechanic responsible for the faulty repair, committed suicide as a result. In a similar incident some four years later, Captain Al Haynes managed to land United Airlines Flight 232, a DC-10, in Sioux City, Iowa, after total hydraulic failure using only the two remaining engine thrust levers (the number two engine, in the tail, had catastrophically failed and caused the situation) for directional control, probably saving the lives of the 185 survivors.

I share a birthday with several people of at least minor historical significance, but the two that most jump out at me are Erwin Schrödinger and Richard Reid.

Schrödinger, born 1887, was one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century. His contributions to the field of quantum mechanics are virtually unparalleled. Perhaps his most famous work is the Schrödinger equation, although he is probably better-known among the general populace (particularly those with less than a Ph.D. level of physics knowledge) for his thought experiment involving a cat, a vial of poison, and a black box.

Richard Reid (born 1973) is better known as the “shoe bomber”, and is the individual you can thank next time you find yourself standing in line in your stocking feet at the airport, wondering when the TSA wand-wavers are going to realise you pose no threat to your fellow travelers. The response to his attempted terrorism is emblematic of the reactionary defence philosophy put forth by Homeland Security and ignores the fact that such organisations as Al Qaeda are unlikely to strike by the same means twice. A reactive defence is no defence at all.

Finally, my birthday shares a day with the anniversary of the death of the English novelist Ian Fleming, best known as the creator of the archetypal Cold War spy, James Bond. To date, Fleming’s most famous character has spawned 20 “official” films (along with two unofficial films and a TV movie) and almost singlehandedly turned both Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan into household names. (The franchise also virtually destroyed the career of Timothy Dalton, who has done nothing remarkable since his second and final Bond film, “Licence to Kill”, in 1989, though Dalton’s interpretation of Bond was critically well-received.) This coming November will see the release of “Casino Royale”, the 21st Bond film and the first starring new Bond actor Daniel Craig, based on Fleming’s first Bond novel (published 1953).

Since my blog-circle contains many of the same folks as Lee’s, I doubt I’ll be able to pass the torch to five people, but Eric, Raena, and Wes all seem like they’d be pretty interesting candidates for a bit of discussion here.

Can I get a forecast for Hell please? I’m particularly interested in the temperature for the next few days, because I just saw this as the lead on a story:

The Tigers remain the American League’s only unbeaten team following tonight’s 5-to-2 victory over the Texas Rangers.

Followed closely by:

Detroit’s Chris Shelton pushed his major league-leading home run total to five with a two-run drive.

I know it’s April and all, but still. Four-and-oh ain’t a bad start for a team that hasn’t seen four games above .500 in something like 10 years.

UPDATE:

The Tigers knocked off Texas again tonight, this time by a 7-0 score. The aforementioned Chris Shelton is now batting .700, and the Tigers are 5-0 for the first time in 21 years. Dare we hope?

CNN takes the honours with this headline:

New rings found around Uranus

…

While Uranus had been known to have inner rings of neutral color, the newly discovered outer rings show color contrasts

Ew.

A Ypsilanti woman made a trade three weeks ago that she now regrets: she traded her father’s minivan for crack.

I wonder what the going street price is, in bags of crack, for a 1995 Mercury Villager. Anybody?

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

Our bass-ackwards neighbours to the south in the Hoosier State (motto: “We don’t know what a Hoosier is either”) have, after 30 years of holding out, begun to observe daylight saving time, in a manner of speaking. Perhaps the most telling quote from the article is this:

Martin County Commissioner John Collins, who works in construction, said he personally would be satisfied with either time zone. But he is frustrated that residents and visitors will need to study a map to figure out the correct time.

Please, John, explain to the rest of us how this is any different from the current (well, now “former”) situation:

Under state law, most of Indiana has ignored daylight-saving time since the early 1970s.

The result has been a patchwork of time zones, with 77 counties observing Eastern time but not changing clocks; five on Eastern time unofficially observing daylight-saving time; and 10 on Central time that observed daylight-saving time.

Collins sums things up — past and present — quite appropriately by saying “It’s a mess.”

A mess, indeed.