There was some considerable danger that today's column would focus, in part, at least, on bemoaning the phenomenon of public scapegoats and sacrificial lambs. It is not that I am not still annoyed by the public pillorying of otherwise venerable and even, in some cases, phenomenal, men and women for their mistakes, errors in judgment, or simply refusing to go along with the prevailing winds of social or legal sentiments. It was, after all, less than a century ago that the forces of commerce and occasionally medicine (crude though it was all those decades ago) were hawking the benefits of cocaine, morphine, diacetylmorphine (heroin), and nicotine (an "aid to the digestion" and thus the after-dinner cigar or cigarette). Social conventions and laws to back them up, now make all these illegal. That annoys me too. Perhaps I am over-sensitive, but it is age induced sensitivity. It is not easy to grow up in a culture that finds cigarettes the height of fashion and sophistication, only to be thrust into the anti-smoking environment prevalent today. Don't get me wrong. I am a "recovering" smoker of more than a few years standing now, but I resent that they changed the rules on me. I now feel guilty whenever I get a nostalgic feeling for times when I enjoyed a cigarette. But I am not talking about public humiliation for cigarette smokers, I mean actual criminal prosecution and sometimes incarceration for transgressors or worse yet, economic ruin. Such an incident happened recently at Turner Television's Cartoon Network division. The head of that network was, in effect, forced to resign over the scandal of the guerilla marketing campaign for one of their cartoon shows.
Resigning in disgrace over placing highly visible, highly recognizable (at least to cartoon network viewers) signs touting a cartoon show hardly seems like justice. The heart of the matter was that whether or not anyone did anything at Turner Television to mitigate the overblown kafuffle, the City of Boston's law enforcement and a vast array of bureaucracy behind them managed to create a panic over the "discovery" of one of these advertising devices under an elevated segment of freeway. The so-called "discovery" was many days after the device had been put in place, flashing lights on it notwithstanding, nor the presence of identical devices around Boston and 9 or 10 other cities where no such panic had ensued.
Media sensationalization of the incident (it isn't news it if isn't important, right?) turned a lot of ignorance on the part of Boston's PD and safety officials, added to what had to be pure paranoia, into a bill that was reported to be worth almost a quarter of a million dollars in public services. For one traffic tie-up? Well, that's what they said. The publicity to Turner's Cartoon Network was worth many, many, many times that amount based on the number of times that the name of the cartoon show was mentioned in national and local media in the aftermath and untangling of blame. And that is not to mention some ridiculous charges that should have been nothing more than "creating a public nuisance" against the marketing nerds who put together the local campaign.
I will not mention the name of the cartoon in question because that is what caused me to have a change of heart on this particular instance of nailing the executive's hide to the wall. The electronic device was a minimalist few dozen pixels that depicted a character giving "the finger" to the world. The attitude and style of the cartoon on television is not just irreverent, but rude and disrespectful. Based on what little I managed to learn about this cartoon, I think the executive in question should have been fired for failure to quash it rather than seeking to expand it. Hey, I'm one guy who thinks that Saturday Night Live needs to get some huevos back into their political and social satire, but there is a mean-spirited quality in a lot of youth oriented humor in recent years that I find really off-putting. This program, to the extent that I managed to catch a few glimpses, seemed to fall into that category, and I really wish that adults, young adults in particular, would see the need to take responsibility for the kind of programming they are feeding the world.
The flip side of this stupidity is that the Boston PD and local officials need to get a clue. How high does the low intelligence quotient go that no one recognized the symbol, that no one was aware that there were numerous of these devices around the city in plain view, and that even after it had been removed and blown apart with a water cannon, that there was no threat to public safety from these devices which have been described as barely more sophisticated than a child's "Lite-Brite" toy. Once again the state of education in the country is glaringly insufficient if no one supervising the folks on the street could muster the analytical skills and basic intelligence to put the brakes on this over-reaction, and rather minor inconvenience to the public.
Okay, maybe I am over-reacting. Let's move on.
Between paragraphs I just overheard someone say, "Orson, your ex-wife is a homicidal rapist and your mother is straight out of 'I Claudius'." On that scale of troubles, I guess we all have plenty to be grateful for, although admittedly the "person" I overheard was a character on ABC's "Desperate Housewives". But lest I start sounding like a claque for ABC, I should point out that I am looking forward to a new series from one of my favorite television producers, David Kelly, whose latest venture appears to be destined for the Fox Network.
On the biofuels front I ran across a British writer, Chris Rhodes, whose views are well written, and intelligent, though I do not always agree with his assessments. You might want to look into some of the columns on his "Balanced Energy" column at this site. He tends to be a little pessimistic for my taste, but he has some interesting things to say.
Reporter John Cook, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer also has a negative outlook in discussing the prospects of bioethanol. He says, "Put another way: If every acre of corn in the country were used for ethanol, it would replace only about 12 percent of our oil consumption." He further goes on to cite some math in support of this presumption, "...the Energy Department, ... has called for displacing 60 billion gallons of gasoline with ethanol by 2030."
"To do that, Michael McElroy, an environmental studies professor at Harvard University, wrote in an essay late last year, it would require harvesting crops on 225 million acres. In 2004, 73.4 million acres were used to harvest corn in the U.S., which represented 23 percent of the nation's total cultivated land, McElroy said."
Clearly that math says it can't be done. Although Mr. Cook's article is centered on a company called "Targeted Growth" that intends to enhance crop yields from the field, the real answer, of course, is in a greater diversification of sources for biomass from which we can develop fuel alternatives.
One company now producing biodiesel, or more correctly what they call "BioOil" is Vancouver, British Columbia based, Dynamotive. They have a fast pyrolysis process that takes only 2 seconds to vaporize and condense biomass into their "BioOil" product. Unfortunately the caloric content is not great. They have successfully shown the product's viability in heating boilers and various other combustion conditions, but with a density nearly 50% higher than #2 Diesel, and only about 19 MegaJoules/Kilogram (as compared to #2 Diesel at 45.5 MJ/Kg) for HIGH heat value. That is not even 50% of the energy content of diesel, and still well below Ethanol at about 26MJ/Kg although not much below methanol. Also low heat values, used in most places are usually about 10% lower, when exhaust steam energy is not "zero'd out" by condensation back to liquid form. The product falls far short of viable vehicle fuel, especially since their published analysis shows 20% moisture by weight. Diesel engines in Volkswagen's don't tolerate that kind of water content well. On the other hand, theoretically at least, since they are getting this product from plain old 10% moisture content sawdust (and claim that they can use sewage biosolids too) it should be possible to further refine this kind of product, at least to the point of removing most of that water, simply by a high quality, high speed centrifuge, such as those from Kyte Centrifuge who not only produce centrifuge equipment specifically for the biofuels industry, but also resell and refurbish used equipment from other vendors. Dynamotive also has made some significant progress, or so it sounds, in making inroads into the Chinese market. That could make for an exciting future for this company. I hope to hear more about them soon.
love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
