The Airplane is Not Normal

The discussion in my brain first started with Geez of course, but it goes something like this:

Me: "Wow, we really are dependent on fossil fuels, it's going to be a death trap for our society."

Other me: "I'd really like to travel to France next summer."

Reader: "Wha?"

The more I think about the more I realize that it's true, we are going to have to get used to the fact that we will not be able to take long haul flights for granted. Geez: "The airplane is not normal. So re-adjust your sense of normal. You'll be in good company." And by that they mean 80% of the world, which will never fly - not once in their entire lives. And it seems it's not only Geez talking about it.

Now people will say: "Oh, but tourist travel is only 5% of the world's carbon emissions." I don't care if it's 1% folks, its the luxury of luxuries to fly for pleasure, that's the point. It seems so very wasteful. So it's time to de-motorize your soul.

And I mean de-motorize it.

Now people will say: "Oh, why don't we just take boats instead?"

Guess what? Boats are just as inefficient for transporting people as airplanes. At least right now they are. Until someone comes up with some new hydroplaning trans-atlantic superboat, I guess we're just stuck vacationing within driving or biking distance.

Gass Guzzling... mmm. Gas.

After reading a random quote in Geez magazine about how one intercontinental flight uses up all of one's carbon emission quota for a lifetime, I thought I'd look into comparing energy efficiency in transportation. A somewhat disorganized wikipedia article helped direct me by way of a link to a somewhat hard to read website. What I found was quite interesting. I'll highlight it for you:

• First of all, read his little lecture at the top of the page. I for one, agree.


• Secondly read this:
  

  "Passenger-mpg will vary dramatically based on vehicle occupancy, as vehicle efficiency generally varies little with passenger load but passenger-mpg is directly proportional to passenger load"

  ...which is to say, the more passengers you have in your vehicle, the more efficient it will be.
  


• Diesel buses are not much more efficient than a Toyota Prius. However, once you put urban service transport on rails (i.e. a trolley bus or streetcar or subway, each with regenerative braking), it's more than triple the efficiency.
  


• Using average occupancy, an airplane is only about 10% less efficient than a Prius. However, if you loaded up your Prius with 5 people and drove across the country instead of all of you flying, you'd be 4 times more efficient than if you all flew.¹
  


• Again, using average occupancy, a high speed electric train is almost 4 times the efficiency of the Prius. And if you loaded the Prius and drove long distance, you'd be about 70% the efficiency of the train.¹ Too bad we don't even have high speed electric trains on this continent.


• Mopeds and motorcycles are not nearly as efficient as I thought that they were. Especially when you consider that they can only transport one person (maybe two).²
  

All this points to the fact that not only is mass transit way better than individual transportation (when it's done right), but that in order for it to be better, it has to be used. Which means we have to encourage people to use it. Higher gas prices maybe?

And then there's the ultimate, the Ghandi of all forms of transportation: the bicycle. You can't find a more efficient way to get around. I guess it's time to get me one of those.


¹In both of these cases, I'm comparing to the bus and plane as if they are still at average occupancy - basically I'm assuming that you can't personally affect the occupancy of mass transit.
²Except if you live in a country like the Dominican or Indonesia, where for some reason you are allowed (if not encouraged) to pile your entire family and livestock and household belongings on to your 50cc moped.

I wish every band was this cool

The White Stripes. I don't own any of their albums, but I think I just might go out and buy them all after reading this article. Not only are they mysterious, and write and perform great music with only two instruments, but they care about their fans. So awesome.

Note: You may need a subscription to view the article. If this is the case, put "Jack and Meg go back to school" into Google and try clicking on the second link (or the "Cached" link) .

Hey, so it's been a while

As demonstrated by the above figure, I haven't been keeping up with this whole blogging thing lately. Someone mentioned in a comment recently that my lack of posting has brought into question my intelligence. I'd like to think that the two are disconnected enough that I don't have to quit my job and start selling ice cream or something because my engineering skills have diminished so far that I can't even remember how to calculate headloss through a pipe just because I haven't posted crap on the internet in a few months.

In all seriousness (or at least in a little more seriousness), I'd like to also think that my presence in the blogosphere hasn't disintegrated. Those of you with blogs that I follow know that I'm a regular commenter, as much as I can at least. Hopefully some of my comments have been mildly intelligent.

So enough about proving my intelligence.

I've discovered recently that I'm a major procrastinator. Okay, okay, so I haven't discovered this really, I've known all along. But with schoolwork it was always different. If I left stuff until the last minute, I would just bear down and work for like 24 hours straight until it got done. But now I am actually at a desk in some semblance of regularity, which forces me into work mode 7.5 hours a day (at least). Which means that I'm forced into non-work mode the remaining hours of the day. This is great on one hand, because it means that I'm free to do what I want with that non-work time. But it also means that I actually have to work for the those 7.5 hours a day. It is actually really hard for me to do that. Especially when the work I'm doing is boring.

Which brings me to this whole topic of boring work, which I'd like to break down into two main questions:

1. Should I really expect my career to be "fulfilling" and "rewarding" (and therefore not "boring"), or is it just reality to say that "work is work" and I should just get on with making money?

2. How much of what I define as boring is really just my perception of the work?

My own random comments regarding these questions:

I'd like to think that all my education hasn't been for nothing. If work is just "work" than why didn't I stick to fixing vacuum cleaners or finish carpentry?

I am realizing that I may be among a generation of people that are stuck with this "burden" of living up to our parents' expectations that the world is at our fingertips and our potential to find satisfying careers is limited only by our imagination and dreams. Holy crap. That's some kind of life to live up to.

I do find myself in a place of lack of motivation sometimes (as in motivation to get up in the morning, motivation to actually work while I'm at work, etc). But I realize that in most cases it is a matter of motivating myself first, and then once I get going on a task, I find myself more apt to continue to be motivated. Hence the perception question - work may seem more boring from the outside, but if you are a self-motivated person, you won't find that work boring once you are doing it. Problem is, I'm not a self-motivated person.

Let me know what you think. If you're still out there...

Water Water Water

From a weird incident in California, to the ranting of David Suzuki, the world is going crazy over water.

I had heard that you can die from a water overdose, but I wasn't sure that you could do it without some heightened level of perspiration. A few marathon runners get sick from diluting their bloodstream at almost every major marathon, which is why a lot of marathon organizers are promoting sport drinks now.

Bottled water: the bane of every municipal environmental engineer. Several of my colleagues refuse bottled water, especially when they go to municipal meetings. I agree; it seems hypocritical to be served bottled water while at a meeting in a water treatment plant. Suzuki is right, our water is cleaner and safer to drink than it ever has been, especially after disasters like Walkerton and Milwaukee. The MOE and the EPA in the US have way more stringent limits for the controlled chemicals and bacteria that come out of your tap than the bottled water companies have to follow. As stated in this wikipedia article, a lot of bottled water is in fact municipal (tap) water that may or may not be further purified (Dasani, Aquafini and others are examples of "purified" tap water).

I really like the initiative that some municipalities have taken in selling their own bottled water to raise awareness. The level of purification that happens at the municipal level, and the amazing quality of water that you get out of your tap virtually for free, is taken for granted by most North Americans. I can't find any articles to show you, but the Region of Halton has a portable water bottling machine that they take around to community events in the summer. They hook it up to a fire hydrant, and bottle and sell the water for cost. I think it's like 4 cents a bottle.

Now that's not to say that the water out of your tap will taste perfect. There will almost always be minerals and organics in your water, some of it picked up along the distribution system of pipes that lead to your tap. And then there's chlorine. Without it, we'd be living in constant fear of disease. But some people don't like the taste or odour of it. So get a Brita filter. The activated carbon in your Brita will remove 99% of the chlorine in your water. Just remember to clean you Brita jug every once in a while, or at least rinse it with chlorinated tap water. Because without the chlorine, you're no longer getting that protection from viruses and pathogenic bacteria - who knows what might be growing in there after a couple months.

I enjoy knowing at least a small amount about drinking water as a result of my career. I'm just scratching the surface. Who knows what I'll have to say about all this in 5 or 10 years?

Footprint, MAH, Gold

"Ah ha!" you exclaim as you read the rest of this post. "Nathan has finally gone crazy."

After preaching at my church, I had a friend forward me an article in The Toronto Star about the WWF's recent report on the ecological state of the earth. Canada ranks 4th in the world in terms of average "ecological footprint"; that magic rating system used to describe the relative amount of resources one consumes.

I decided to take the test myself:

CATEGORY	GLOBAL HECTARES
FOOD	2.6
MOBILITY	0.9
SHELTER	0.4
GOODS/SERVICES	1
TOTAL FOOTPRINT	4.9

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.7 PLANETS.


As you can see, I need some work, especially on my food consumption. Almost all of the food I eat is pre-packaged and shipped from somewhere far away. However, to quote Nicholas Klassen formerly of Adbusters Magazine "I'm downright Ghandian by North American consumption standards." I think half the trick is to not consume more as life goes on, and the salaries bloat. We could do more. Buy local produce. Buy fresh baked bread. The ironic thing is that a lot of things that are probably good for the global ecology actually cost more. So much for spending less. Any other suggestions?

--

Speaking of spending less, I'm loving the amazing things that people like Adbusters and Make AFFLUENCE History are doing. www.makeaffluencehistory.org seems to be broken lately, so I googled and found http://globalaware.net/affluence/, which seems to be the same people. At any rate this is cool, if not funny.

--

I recently left my toque in a hotel in Ingersoll, and so I had to call them and ask them to ship it to me. On the Purolator slip it says "Full name: Nathan Smergold". I always thought that Smergold was a more common name than Sherwood.

Preachy

I don't want to be preachy. Ever. But I was asked a few weeks ago if I would like to speak in church. So last Sunday (the 22nd) I got up in front of my church in St. Catharines, and I spoke on something that's been on my mind for a few months. Okay, okay, maybe more like a year.

Anyways, some background info can be found in two of my previous posts: one in January, and one in June. The articles found linked in the post in January are basically the basis for the first half of the sermon. The second half comes from my readings in Geez magazine. And from interactions with certain people over the last year.

So if you've got 45 plus minutes to burn, and you don't mind listening to a bad recording of my voice (I think it's like 16 kbps), check it out.

Nathan, Oct. 22 2006.

Follow along in my notes, they may or may not help. You'll notice I did a bit of additional thinking aloud in the audio.

Here's the slides I showed to the church; again, may or may not be helpful. In the notes you'll find highlighted parts - this is to denote the location of a slide.

Enjoy. And post a comment if you have one. Let me know if I was preachy. (I was, I know it.....)