It is all electric, runs on 6,000 cells of Lithium Ion battery (essentially the same cells that are in a laptop). It accelerates to 60mph in 4 seconds, and has a range of about 200 miles. It’s wildly exciting to ride in.

A fillup takes 3.5 hours of 220V at 70A, which is 15kW x 3.5 hours or 54kWh or about $5 of full-price electricity at Northern California prices (about $.10/kWh). (In practice, you’d get a special night-time rate that is cheaper.) That comes to about 250Wh/mile or $.025/mile.

Compare that with a fleet average vehicle getting about 25mpg. With California gas prices at $3.50/gallon, that’s about $.14/mile, or nearly 6 times more expensive (and that “fleet average” vehicle certainly won’t accelerate like the Tesla!)

Here in California, that electricity is probably produced by natural gas - that generates about 650 g of CO2 per kWh of electricity generated (source: UK goverment report), which gives the Tesla a footprint of about 125 gCO2/mile.

Compare that with a “fleet average” 25mpg car burning gasoline, generating 8800 g CO2 / gallon burned (source: EPA), which translates to about 352 gCO2/mile.  In fact, a delicately driven Prius getting 60mpg is roughly equivalent.

But the good news is that with 10 square meters of solar panel, you can generate enough solar power to drive your Tesla 200 miles per day with zero (first-order) carbon output!

More broadly, developing expertise in electric power storage and automotive drive trains opens the door to leveraging future more efficient electricity generation opportunities, such as hydroelectric, wind, industrial PV, or even nuclear power for personal transportation.

Offline Photos

I have been using Picasa II for a while now, and it’s missing one really key feature: if some of your photos go offline (e.g. they are on a removable disc), they are removed from any collections they are in. This is unfortunate if you have been building long-term cross-shoot collections of favorites, or photos by category. Keywords can partly substitute, but don’t allow for ordering or naming the whole collection. Lightroom claims to maintain records of offline photos in it’s database; we shall see.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I am frustrated by lack of documentation on keyboard shortcuts. I found this reference on the Adobe Labs website, but it’s demonstrably incomplete. Please comment if you have other shortcuts to add, and I’ll edit them into here.

Handling XMP

In Picasa, picture titles or captions are written into a JPG file; they are read by Lightroom, although it isn’t trivial to get them to show up. If you check the metadata in the right panel (you have to scroll far down in the default layout), you’ll see the titles shown there (under the field called “caption”, not “title), and they can be made to display in slideshows, etc. However, if you edit the caption, the revised data is stored in a different format.

If you leave “Automatically Write Changes into XMP (Preferences > File Management)” unchecked, then apparently the caption is only recorded in the lightroom database; checking this box does seem to make LR record the change into the JPG file, but in a separate XML segment that isn’t read by Picasa, Exifer, or the Windows XP property viewer. And worse, checking this box apparently causes LR to rewrite all the files on your hard-disc. Not quite what I had in mind.

Anyone know whether there is a keyboard shortcut to move focus to the caption entry field? It’s tedious to mouse and click the field for each photo. Also, does anyone know how to enter a caption in a mode other than library grid mode?

Key points:

• Silverlight enables cross-platform development of rich media apps that will work on both Mac and PC.
• Silverlight will include a cross-platform version of Microsoft DRM that works for Macs.
• Silverlight should make installation and setup of rich media apps simpler and easier for the consumer.

Catch the video at here, first link “Ray’s Keynote”, about minute 30.

Launch Screen

Movie buffering within a few seconds.

Traditional play control bar with timeline and trick-play controls.

Showing the volume control.

Showing the chapter navigation bar.

Showing the Extras interface with movie details.

Showing the Extras interface with other movie recommendations.

Showing the Extras interface - ready to invite a friend to share watching.

Receiving an invitation to watch together with a friend.

My daily commute by car is 15 minutes on the highway each way. I drive a reasonably efficient car, so I’m going to call that 1 gallon of gasoline.

The alternative is to ride my bicycle 19 miles each way.

How many additional calories will I need to consume to cover that distance? The trouble is, power is dominated by wind resistance, and varies with the square of wind speed, which makes the answer quite variable. On sites like CPTips, we can find equations and tables for this. I’m going to use my 20mph cruising speed (on the flat) and come up with 750 kCal per hour. Conveniently, 19 miles with a little hill takes a little more than an hour, so I will assume 750 kCal each way, or 1,500 kCal round trip.

How much oil is used in producing the food I will eat to power than ride? I’m still looking for appropriate sources, but I’m hearing numbers like 100 Billion gallons of oil is used annually in production, packaging, and delivery of US food. Assume 300 M people, consuming 2,500 kCal/day, 365 days / year, and you get 0.4 gallons of fuel used for 1,000 kCal of food.

The oil used to produce the food I will burn commuting to work is about 0.6 gallons, compared with 1 gallon to drive the same commute.

The metabolism of that food will add a little more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere too - but I suspect it will be negligible compared to the fuel costs.

Capital Costs

I really should take into account the carbon footprint of the fixed-cost of the car too - not just the marginal fuel consumption. Again, I need sources. Assuming the energy required to make, distribute, and maintain my rather typical car is about 2,000 gallons equivalent, and that car now has nearly 200,000 miles, conservatively, I need to add an additional 0.01 gallons per mile, or 0.3 gallons of fuel for my commute.

The equivalent for my bicycle is harder to determine, since while the bicycle is much smaller, it also won’t get used for nearly as many miles. For argument, lets assume 25% of it’s $2,000 price tag was energy - or say 200 gallons of oil, and it will last for 20,000 miles. Amazing - that comes to the same 0.01 gallons per mile, or about 0.4 gallons of oil just to own the bicycle for a 40 mile round-trip!

Laundry

If I drive to work, I’ll wear my work clothes in the car.

If I ride my bike, I’ll use at least one set of bike clothing per day, perhaps two on a hot day. That probably translates to a load of laundry once a week, or perhaps 0.02 gallons of fuel equivalent (in carbon footprint). [Need sources]

Health Benefits

But won’t I win much bigger with the health benefits of cycling instead of driving?

On the positive side, I’ll be leaner, with lower blood pressure and cholesterol and all the other benefits of regular exercise.

On the negative side, once every 18 months I would have an injury accident, if the stats are to be believed, and perhaps once every 10 years a serious accident. How many days of carbon emissions savings from bicycling are used up when the ambulance and firetruck rush to the scene, and in fixing my broken leg or worse? I have no idea how to quantify these impacts.

Musings

I am disturbed that cycling has a carbon footprint apparently so close to driving; if I drove a Prius, it would appear, first order, to be more carbon-efficient than cycling!

One key observation is that if I weren’t riding my bike to work, I’d probably be finding some other way to be active (and hopefully healthy?), so I might as well at least use the effort to save a car trip.  This is probably the best counter argument to the argument to drive…

References

200 kWh/year to run 392 laundry cycles per year ~= 500Wh per load or ____ carbon footprint.