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The Unfamiliar Sensation of a Vibrating Car

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday I drove the petrol car for the first time in a while. I did it for two reasons. The first is that I didn’t feel like waiting five hours for the car to charge. Especially since it was cold, and rain was predicted. I also drove the petrol car because I wanted to run the engine and charge the battery, rather than letting it gradually degrade, from lack of use.

In the process I felt an unfamiliar sensation. The sensation of a car vibrating as I drove it. The sensation of a noisy car, with the sound of the engine running. It got me to think about future generations of children, who may never get into a vibrating car.

Future Generations Will be Unfamiliar with Vibrating Cars

Imagine, several years from now, when almost everyone has an electric car we will be familiar with linear acceleration with no gears, no noise of engines. It will just be a smooth ride. The culture shock between being in a diesel car and a petrol car was already pronounced. Now, with electric cars, the sensation will be even greater.

Recharge as You See Family and Friends

Out of curiousity I checked the price of an energy refill at a recharging station near where someone lives. It’s 50 centimes per kilowatt of power. That’s about twenty swiss francs to refill a 42 kilowatt battery to full, from completely flat. In practice a car should be much higher than that, so the price for a charge, whilst you have coffee or dinner would be smaller.

The Primitive Petrol Car

It’s funny to see how primitive a petrol car feels after three or four weeks of using an electric car. Acceleration feels more sluggish. It vibrates, it’s noisy. Its driving assistance is more primitive. Slowing down doesn’t regenerate power. It just feels like a different era.

The Freedom of Petrol

If I had a power socket in my garage driving electric cars would feel liberating because as soon as I get home I could plug it in and charge the battery, in anticipation of my next drive. As things are now, I can’t. As a result of this driving the petrol car felt liberating. You have “unlimited range” in a petrol car. You refill every 800 kilometres. The one drawback is that refilling a petrol car costs 2 francs per litre, so 80-100 francs per refuelling. Spending 100 CHF per week is not a freedom. Neither is paying 20 CHF per 200 kilometres. If you refill fast electric cars cost the same as petrol. If you recharge slowly electric cars are cheaper.

And Finally

I look forward to a future where children have never been in a petrol driven car. Electric cars are comfortable to drive and manoeuvre and they are easy to charge, once you have an electric plug. I look forward to a future where cars are driven by driver assistance rather than human beings. With driver assistance you supervise the car, and it does the rest. You look for dangers, and you’re ready to act, but it takes care of the tedious part of driving.

Children that have never been in a petrol car will see electric cars as normal, and think nothing of the limitations. Electric cars are quiet and clean, compared to petrol cars. I look forward to a future where electric cars have become the norm.

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Limited Bandwidth and Twitter
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Limited Bandwidth and Twitter

Byrichard

Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.


At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.


Eventually bandwidth and data plans improved and increased, especially with the arrival of the iPhone, but blackberry users had lived in the future for years beforehand.


Twitter benefited from the iPhone, and it was favoured over Jaiku, so it won, but Jaiku offered everything that Twitter took years to offer, in turn.


That twitter has only a third of a million users tells you about the niche that it has, and the use cases that it fails to provide to its users. Medium was spun off from Twitter and others a blogging variant. Facebook, Reddit and two or three other solutions offer web forum style websites.


Twitter lost its niche back in 2007 when it went from being a network of friends of friends, who come across each other, and talk between each other to a hashtag driven, celebrity following mess. It’s when I read this vox article that I thought of the topic.


The web of today is mature. Everyone, or almost, has a smartphone and uses the web for information and staying in touch. Bandwidth is unlimited for many. What we need is not another twitter. What we need is a local, social web, where people that are in the same village, town or country, chat together. For too long the web has been about talking with people thousands of kilometres away. We need to progress towards a local social web.

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Sharkwater – a documentary worth watching

Byrichard

Sharkwater – A documentary worth watching.

If you have one and a half hours of free time I recommend watching this documentary. It discusses the anti-whaling work by the Sea Shepherd, the work it did to combat long lining around the Galapagos and it touches on the shark finning mafia and corruption.

The documentary also looks at the public perception of sharks. It shows that they are not the dangerous animal that they were thought to be until recent history. The film ends with a shot of the narrator free-diving with sharks and being perfectly relaxed. At one point he says “sharks are so sensitive that they can feel your heart beat, if you are calm they will stay but if you panic they will flee”. I paraphrased his exact words.

Another theme that is explored in this documentary is the food chain. He mentions that plankton absorb a lot of Carbon dioxide and that with the overfishing of sharks the ecological balance will be ruined as the apex predators are lost. He pushes strongly for the conservation of shark numbers. We are familiar with the current Save our Sharks movement.

This is an interesting investigative documentary about the economy surrounding shark finning and why it has a negative impact on the food chain. If the documentary was updated it could look at the economic viability of shark tourism that has grown in recent years. Sharks, in some places are more valuable alive than dead. If you don’t have time to watch the entire documentary then I recommend that you watch the last thirty to fourty minutes.

A River Runs Dry, Wood builds a Natural Dam and Corn Grows Eratically.

A River Runs Dry, Wood builds a Natural Dam and Corn Grows Eratically.

Byrichard

When rain becomes a treat you get used to looking at rivers that are running drier and drier with every passing day. The river pictured below is so low that you see the river bed in many parts. It’s a meter or more below it’s usual level. Imagine being a weather forecaster during a drought. Today it will be dry and sunny, as it has been for a few seasons.



In periods of heavy rain the water reaches to the tree roots currently covered in moss. At the moment they are high and dry. In another part of Switzerland some people decided to empty a pool into a local river. It didn’t explain why or how. The water was chlorinated and it caused fish in the river to die and they will now be fined.


One of the consequences of the lack of rain is that branches and logs that fall into a river bed have a tendency to accumulate for months at a time. When the rains finally come they serve as a means of transporting all that wood down the river until it gets blocked. As in the example below we see that two or more logs that got jammed across the river blocked smaller branches and detritus from getting by. They piled up and now we have the natural wood dam/mess.


River built dam
River built dam


Over my walks I have looked at corn, out of curiousity and for a long time everything looks normal, until one day you come across the condition we see below. This is called Corn Smut apparantly. scroll down that page. There are plenty of interesting names for corn ailments.


Corn smut
corn smut


When you go on your daily walks look around you. See what unusual things you spot, and document or take note of them when you do. Nature is interesting. Keep attentive.

European Walks and Bike Rides
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European Walks and Bike Rides

Byrichard

Today during my walk I noticed a sticker on a sign for EuroVélo.com. I don’t know how new the project is but I had not paid attention to the URL before. I like the idea of a European Network of Cycling Routes. I don’t need to capitalise these words. I just did, for some reason.



During my walk I was listening to two podcast episodes of a single podcast about hiking the AT and other hikes in the US. It’s interesting and it makes us want to travel to the US to try these walks. The drawback is that A) It requires travelling to the US and getting a visa for long enough to complete the challenge and B) We have plenty of walking and cycling trips in Europe to enjoy, and best of all they should be quieter because fewer people think about using these routes, for now.


The Route EV 17 starts at the source of the Rhone and then heads through Switzerland through France and onto Nimes or Montpellier, whichever destination you prefer. It bifurcates around the Lac Léman so you can go either on the French or the Swiss side. The French side might be shorter and differently busy.


The beauty of cycling rather than walking is that you can cover bigger distances in less time. The drawback is that you may be on dangerous roads. I hope that the roads are chosen because they are safe. I want to try some of these projects.


For a size comparison. Switzerland has 65,000 kilometres of hiking paths, and EuroVélo, so far, has 90,000 kilometres. The cycling is growing every year, and with time it may become a normal way for people to spend their holidays. People will go on cycling road trips, rather than driven.

Electric Car Charging
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Electric Car Charging

Byrichard

For a few weeks I have access to an electric car. This is an opportunity to experience what it’s like to have a car that you recharge, rather than refuel. I ran the car from one hundred percent down to fourty percent before charging it. It gave me a charge time of 11hrs.

A Normal Plug

I’m using a normal plug, rather than a dedicated car charger so the charging time is much longer than it would be with a specialised charging option. I didn’t expect such a long charge time. I expected it to take two or three hours.

Cars Spend Their Lives Parked

Although a charge time of eleven hours, or nine hours sounds long it isn’t, when you consider that a car would be parked for nine hours if someone was commuting to work, and twenty hours per day when under normal use. Under such circumstances charge time doesn’t matter, because the car is parked most of the time.

Plugs Are Not Standard for Parking

The issue is not that charging takes twelve hours. The issue is that I don’t have a plug in my parking spaces at home. It’s because of this that the charge time gets in the way. When a car is left to charge whenever it’s parked it never discharges so fully, so the charge time is reasonable. It’s because I couldn’t plug in the car, to top up the charge that it takes so many hours now.

A Shopping Trip

For a trip to the shops and back the car used a theoretical two percent. Two percent is nothing. That would take minutes to charge not hours. In this circumstance the car is cost effective.

The Battery Hog

I drove a journey three times. The journey takes twenty percent, ten percent per direction. The result is that I discharged the battery to fourty percent. I plugged it in to charge for two or three hours but that only charged what I had spent in getting from A to B, not to recharge from A to F. I need three times the charge time if I want to fill in the charge deficit.

Motorway Inefficiency

Contrary to popular belief the energy hog of motorways doesn’t come from the speed at which you drive, but from accelerating regularly. If the car you’re behind is at eighty kilometres per hour on the motorway you need to accelerate to one hundred and twenty not to slow down the fast lane. You’re wasting a huge amount of energy because people don’t drive at a constant speed on motorways. In a petrol car it takes minutes to refill a fuel tank. In an electric car it takes hours.

On the motorway I am tempted to drive at one hundred, and attempt to keep a steady speed, rather than accelerate and slow down. When I slow down I recover some charge but I still waste more due to people’s inconsistent driving styles.

Don’t Deplete the Battery

If you’re driving an electric car, and you don’t have a car charging port make sure that you don’t deplete the battery. Going from 80 percent to one hundred percent can be done in a matter of two or three hours, but getting from thirty two percent to one hundred percent takes ten to twelve hours.

And Finally

My problem is not with the electric car. Quite the opposite. I love the idea of an electric car and I am happy that I get to play with one for a few weeks. My frustration is with the lack of charging options in my own garage. If I had a normal plug in my garage I could charge my car at home. We don’t need dedicated car charging ports. We just need a plug so that we can charge our cars, as if they were mobile phones or laptops. With this simple option an electric car could be charged with ease, overnight, without overloading the building’s power supply.

Happiness and Social Media
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Happiness and Social Media

Byrichard

It is the turn of the Washington Post to discuss whether people are happier after leaving social media. As with every other article I have skimmed on the topic it discusses addiction and more without discussing the reason for which social media might be bad for one’s mental health. 


Remember that social networks, discussion groups, and collaborating with people in different rooms, countries, timezones is normal, and has been for decades. What makes social media different from other social networks is that social media is algorithm and profit driven, rather than community centric. 


As I skim through this article I see discussions about self-perception, bullying behaviour and more. What I see is not a commentary about social media, but rather a commentary on the cruelty of normal people on the social web. As I like to say, the problem with social media is that the bullies we used to spend time on the web to avoid, have made their way onto the web. The web is now as unpleasant as meat space, as some called it. 


The article discusses body image and instagram but there’s something that people forget, or never experienced. Instagram was a photo sharing app, between friends and friends of friends. We didn’t share images of ourselves, or if we did it was because we were at events together. Seesmeetups and tweetups were events where we would have photos of ourselves, with others. If we posted images to instagram they were of landscapes, travel and more, not individuals. Body image didn’t even come into it for us. 


I left Myspace because the community left, I left Jaiku because it shut down. I left Google+ because it shut down. I left Facebook because it became filled with adverts and reminded me of the life I wanted but didn’t have. I left Instagram for almost the same reason, but also because I was seeing adverts, without feeling human connections with humans, anymore. 


I left Twitter for political reasons. I don’t like what Musk stands for, but I also hate what he is doing to the platform. 


People love to speak about social media as if it was addictive, and as if it was bad for mental health. They are missing the point. The point is not whether social media is healthy or unhealthy, because at the end of the day it’s just people socialising. If they were in a bar or pub we’d think nothing of it. If they were on a balcony or in a garden we’d see them as just socialising. People have lost sight that social media is a group of friends socialising. 


They think that social media is about likes, views, about re-shares and more. It isn’t. It shouldn’t be. Social media is a network of friends of friends, and to leave the network is to leave behind that network of networks. 


Twitter, Facebook and Instagram destroyed that network of networks, and now they’re trying to fix what they broke, whilst blaming what they broke on personal weaknesses, like addiction. Being social, as I have said for decades, online, is not addiction. It’s normal socialising via a different medium. 

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