Typical Tech Movie

I’m watching bits and pieces of Stealth. There’s a scene where Jessica Biel (be still my beating heart) has trouble in her fighter and ends up ejecting over North Korea. Before she does, she breathlessly gives her lat/lon position over the radio. Now, these are planes that send, back to the commanders on the carrier, real-time, high-fidelity video of the pilots, along with biomed telemetry, and who knows what else. Why wouldn’t they already know exactly where she was?
Did I miss the part where her systems were knocked out and didn’t work? Guess it’s lucky that the radio still did.

Government-mandated Standardized Economy Gauges

In typical fashion, republicans attack good ideas, even ones they have no legitimate basis for discrediting. Just to make the other guy look bad.
In this case, I’m referring to the McCain camp’s response to Barack Obama’s suggestion that Americans make sure their tires are kept properly inflated. They accused Obama of being ignorant of energy issues, but in typical fashion, they are wrong. Most cars on the road have under-inflated tires. Each 1 psi of under-inflation loses about 0.4% fuel efficiency. Most cars are 20% under-inflated. (You can also maintain your air filter. More information on the EPA’s site.)
The amount of oil saved if America were to properly inflate all her tires would significantly exceed the entire production of all new offshore drilling, and drilling in ANWR, combined. Moreover, it would happen immediately (within weeks, or however long it takes Americans to check and inflate their tires). Not 10 – 20 years (which is how long we’d have to wait for new oil drilling production to come online and ramp to full capacity).

Economy Gauges

Another place where you can improve fuel economy is driving slower, and accelerating more gently. I don’t know about you, but I like driving fast and accelerating hard. But if I could see what my actual fuel economy was, I might think twice. I might ease up on the pedal a little bit. Some people might ease up a lot.
Which brings me to my idea: the government can mandate that all new cars and trucks sold in 5 years must have fuel economy gauges. Many new cars already have them (and some, like Mercedes & BMW, have provided them for decades). The gauge should be on all the time (many today are buried in the pages of the trip odometer), and needs to show at least a couple of moving averages: one spanning a few days, one spanning a minute or two. You could get fancier, by making a prediction on when you will next need to visit the pump (in days & hours). Also, the computations need to be the same across the entire industry, so that automakers can’t fudge it, and so you can compare vehicles. They need to be treated the same as odometers, in terms of legal requirements for accuracy and precision.
This one would take a few years to implement, but will have return in much less time than drilling, and will come at a much lower price. It will be resisted by the auto makers who will whine that the requirement will put them out of business. But that’s all bullshit. The BOM on a good display should be less than $50 in production quantity, and the R&D is trivial (these things are not rocket science; the hardest part will be the ID, and they’re doing that already).
Conceivably, the government could even give some of the tax breaks it gives to Big Oil over to Big Auto to help implement the gauges.
I’m sure the republicans will side with Big Business Auto and never allow it, or water down any such proposal until it’s useless. After all, such a change would reduce oil consumption (virtually for free), and we can’t have Big Oil making less money. Fucking republicans. Assholes.