Do the Math

Monday, September 29, 2008 by Dick.

Lordy Lordy™. Do the math, people.

Oh.

Wait.

It isn’t math. It’s simple arithmetic.

Under the subject line, A Bail Out Plan That Works, I’ve been subjected to about 14 repeats today alone of the following bright idea:

I’m against the $85,000,000,000 bailout of AIG.

Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in “We Deserve It Dividend.”

To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+.

So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00.

My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a “We Deserve It Dividend” …

It goes on from there.

I’m all for giving $700,000,000,000 to individual Americans in “We Deserve It” dividends (as long as it’s your money) but do the math, people.

85 billion dollare:	$85,ØØØ,ØØØ,ØØØ
divided by 200 million peeps	2ØØ,ØØØ,ØØØ
=	$425 per person

Maybe we should put the $85 million into our elementary schools instead of Wall Street.

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And speaking of Wall Street, the yahoos in Congress blocked the bailout today (September 29, 2008).The DOW is down about 777 points, the largest one day point drop ever. Anybody want to guess how many Congress Critters are buying stock right now because they know, absolutely know, the market will soar when the package passes.Wouldn’t you? After all, we’re talking more than 10% right now for a few days “work.”

I love politics. It is so enriching.

Congress wants to make sure nobody on Wall Street gets rewarded for this mess. Do you suppose we could take away Congress’ parachutes and severance?

Lordy Lordy™.

Posted in Stupidity, Banking, Society, Politics & News, Dick's Dumps, Random Access | No Comments »

RIP, PL

Monday, September 29, 2008 by Dick.

I don’t care what “they” say at funerals. Losing a family member or a close friend is not a cause for celebration; it’s a time to fill up the hole left in our lives when all we have are memories.

Paul Newman wanted to be remembered as a racer who supported his habit by acting. He died last Friday at 83 after a battle with cancer.

Darn it, that’s like losing a friend who really made it.

We feel that way when a popular actor dies. We invite great actors and writers into our homes and our thoughts and our lives in a way we would never do with an acquaintance down the street. We often spend more time with them and they stay in our memory longer than people we work with or even our real life friends.

“No, it IS losing a friend who really made it,” my real friend “Lido” said. “You just hadn’t seen him in the last 32 years.”

Well, sort of. We had more of a relationship with PLN than he did with us. See I started driving race cars a year or so after he did. We drove the same tracks at the same times but rarely in the same class. We rubbed elbows and he even helped push my car in the pits. We shared a favorite track (Lime Rock) where he ran some hot laps just this past August. He was always a better driver than almost anyone else I know.

But he would have known me in Nomex, not in street clothes. I would have known him anywhere.

The Oscar-winning actor was intensely private in public but he never played the part of a celebrity at the racetrack. He didn’t play any part there. He was not just there for his good looks. He was a driver

P. L. Newman drove Bob Sharp’s Datsuns in SCCA and in the under 2-liter Trans Am but he won his first race at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut in a Lotus. I may have driven that race in what was then my E-Production TR-4. I went on to muddle about in Camaros in A-Sedan and GT-1 although I came back to the Triumph a couple of times and even drove a Lotus Formula C. He went on to drive B-Sedan, C- and D-Production, and GT-1, a Porsche 935 at LeMans, an assortment of Corvettes, and a Mustang in GTS at the 24 Hours of Daytona.

“If he had started younger,” Bob Sharp said, “he would have been World Champion.” He was simply that good a driver.

It has been a bad year for racing. Phil Hill, our only American-born Formula One champion, died in August. Watkins Glen founder Cam Argetsinger died in April. Jimmy Stewart, who carried the Scottish flag against Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorne and Juan Manuel Fangio and who inspired his little brother Jackie to go racing, died in January.

I don’t feel the same sense of personal loss about them. See, I didn’t know them.

Paul Newman was one of the good guys. My c.1974 race at Bryar (now New Hampshire Motor Speedway) was red flagged and the entire pack was diverted to sit in the pit lane. The pack inched forward but pit lane was pretty flat where I sat and I couldn’t get the Camaro to roll without starting the engine. Race cars don’t have fans and don’t idle well so no one wants to start one without reason. He was walking through the pits at the time. He grabbed a couple of other guys to push me along. It’s what everybody did.

“Can you send me that picture of you guys at Pocono?” Lido asked me.

Lido would like that photo because I was driving his car while he babysat millwrights rebuilding a chemical plant in Houston in 1976. I’m not sure anyone took any pictures although perhaps my dad did. He took a lot of photos over the years. I’ll send it if I can find it. I don’t think the car would have been in the background, though.

My whole family had come to the race. PLN was also there, driving. He won that race as well as an SCCA national D-production title that year. I introduced him to Anne and to my mom in the paddock. He stood and talked to these drooling women for quite a while, easily. That was my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary which put my dad in that “how do I top this” kind of spot.

Those are some of my memories of a genuine nice guy.

Posted in Death, Big Thoughts, Arts, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Pelletized - II

Monday, September 22, 2008 by Dick.

Who ever thought we would celebrate oil going through $100? Crude prices have dropped close to 40 percent since shooting the moon at prices near $150 a barrel on July 11. In other Nymex trading, heating oil futures fell 7.12 cents to $2.72 a gallon, while gasoline prices dropped 10.04 cents to $2.461 a gallon. Natural gas for October delivery fell 8.7 cents to $7.29 per 1,000 cubic feet.

Anne’s hot flashes are so bad that she thought Global Warming was her fault and Al Gore keeps following her around.

I rather wish we could bottle that.

Oil is still waaaaay too expensive to burn.

We also have no cattle barn from which to bottle methane. The ground water heat pump presents too many obstacles to install this year. Coal is too difficult to use here. An outdoor wood furnace gives up too much heat to the outdoors and makes us slog through the snow in the middle of the night. That means we’ve decided to buy something that burns wood pellets.

Is a pellet stove really cheaper to run?

Pellets cost not less than $199/ton. The average is about $250 and the highest I’ve seen so far is $300. Pellets give up 24,500,000 BTU/ton. Most pellet stove makers advertise 75-80% efficiency although I used 70% in the spreadsheet last week. The numbers work even at 60% .

Oil will still be there as a fully automated backup, right?

Oh, yeah.

No matter what we do, I’ll either leave the existing oil fired boiler or upgrade the oil fired boiler. A pellet boiler would either be an add-on or have its own oil burner as a backup. The heat pump is more difficult because I can’t reliably get its transfer liquid hot enough to run our baseboards and its power draw would be more than I have generator capacity for during a power outage.

There must be a catch.

The downside to a pellet stove or furnace is its need for electricity. Unlike the wood stoves we rely on now, a pellet stove has two or even three fans and an auger without which there is no fire. If the power goes out today, we can crank up the wood stoves and keep from freezing, If the power goes out when we have a pellet something and an oil-fired boiler or an electric heat pump, we lose all our heat.

There is also the little matter of loading pellets by the ton.

What’s the Bottom Line?

I don’t know how to justify a pellet furnace on cost alone. The models I’ve found would heat the entire house at a capital cost two to four times that of a pellet stove and the savings fall in the diminishing returns category.

So. We’ll continue using the oil furnace as back up. The Vigilant, a wood stove now in the great room, will move to the living room. A pellet stove gets installed in the great room. Just as soon as I find one.

I narrowed the pellet burning field down to a few reliable products with automatic operation that runs on a thermostat, multiple heat settings, and cast iron construction. I have investigated Brosley, EKO-Vimar, Harman, Pinnacle, Viessman, and Woodmaster pellet furnaces as well pellet “parlor” stoves from American Energy, Bixby, Bob England’s Stove Works, Enviro, Harman, Hearth and Home Technologies, Pelpro, Thelin, and Whitfield.

The Harman PB-105 furnace or Harman Accentra stove at the top of my list are sold out until late next Spring.

I’ve chased stoves and furnaces from dealers in places wood burning appliances don’t sell nearly as well as they do here in New England. That search has yielded no furnaces and darned few stoves. I thought about going a little farther afield, like Florida or Arizona except Florida and Arizona probably don’t burn coal or wood because they think the economics of transporting the solid fuel is against them.

That brings us to an interesting fact.

Last year, we burned about 5 tons (10,000 pounds) of oil plus a couple of tons of firewood. If we switch to coal, pellets, or chunk wood, we will burn about 7 tons of coal, or 7 tons of pellets, or 7 tons of firewood.

Next time, I’ll tell you all about which pellet stove we bought and how I installed it.

Posted in Heating Issues, Seasonal, Random Access | 5 Comments »

Pelletized - I

Monday, September 15, 2008 by Dick.

I’ll send $5,313 to Saudi Arabia this winter. I’ll receive $720 back in ExxonMobil dividends.

There is an inequity there and it bugs me.

I am pugnaciously–perhaps pathologically–parsimonious so I decided to do something about it.

Let’s start with the facts. That $5,313 check I will write won’t all go to Saudi Arabia. Some of it will go to Hugo Chavez. Some will go to the shipping companies and the refineries and the distributors. Some will end up in the pockets of speculators who drove the market to nearly $150/barrel. And some will stick locally because I do, after all, buy my oil from a local fellow who has taken care of us, winter and summer, for 30 years.

As an aside, I’m hoping the foreign oil speculators discover what the holders of junk mortgages already know.

We have already done (some of) the things one is supposed to do when one lives in a leaky old farmhouse on the 45th parallel. We have storm windows. We have insulated. We have turned down the thermostat so far that even the neighbor’s cat is cold and he has a fur coat. We burn as much firewood as one can put through a Vermont Castings Vigilant. We still burned more than 1,200 gallons of dead dinosaurs last year and the Old Farmer’s Almanac says this year is going to be colder.

I’m an engineer so I made a spreadsheet before I did anything else.

Cost to Heat North Puffin House
Sorted Alphabetically
Fuel Used
Fuel Type	Fuel Quantity		$$ Cost	Efficiency
Coal	6	Tons	$1,947	75%
Corn Pellets	442	Bushels	$1,435	60%
Electricity (Air Heat Pump)	13,531	KWHr	$1,488	225%
Electricity (Ground Heat Pump)	9,226	KWHr	$1,015	330%
Electricity (Radiant)	30,446	KWHr	$3,349	100%
Natural Gas (condensing)	113,314	Cu Ft	$1,976	89%
Propane or LP Gas (condensing)	1,298	Gallons	$4,276	87%
Oil (Current)	1,250	Gallons	$5,313	60%
Oil (”mid-efficiency”)	882	Gallons	$3,750	85%
Wood	8	Cords	$2,332	50%
Wood Pellets	6	Tons	$1,817	70%
Sorted by Cost
Fuel Used
Fuel Type	Fuel Quantity		$$ Cost	Efficiency
Electricity (Ground Heat Pump)	9,226	KWHr	$1,015	330%
Corn Pellets	442	Bushels	$1,435	60%
Electricity (Air Heat Pump)	13,531	KWHr	$1,488	225%
Wood Pellets	6	Tons	$1,817	70%
Coal	6	Tons	$1,947	75%
Natural Gas (condensing)	113,314	Cu Ft	$1,976	89%
Wood	8	Cords	$2,332	50%
Electricity (Radiant)	30,446	KWHr	$3,349	100%
Oil (”mid-efficiency”)	882	Gallons	$3,750	85%
Propane or LP Gas (condensing)	1,298	Gallons	$4,276	87%
Oil (Current)	1,250	Gallons	$5,313	60%

We already knew that our current oil burner needs to be history. It is 30 years old, inefficient, and not likely to heal itself. I could simply swap it out for a new “mid-efficiency” oil burner, but the bottom line isn’t much better. Propane or LP Gas is not enough better to pay for the conversion, especially since its pricing here is so volatile.

OK, then. We’ll look at the good choices from best to worst.

I would have loved to install a ground water heat pump but there are a few kinks to work out. Kink #1: no one in this area sells and services them yet and I don’t have time to dig the ground loop myself. Kink #2: It does draw a lot of increasingly expensive juice and losing our heat each time we have an ice storm is a serious worry. Saving 80% is a real boon, though, so we’ll hang on to that idea.

To burn corn pellets requires a pellet furnace or stove and the ability to handle bulk fuel. It also means taking the food out of the mouths of the cows I eat, so I simply won’t consider that one.

An air heat pump works a lot better in Florida than in Vermont. The worry about the increasing cost of drawing power from the grid and of losing our heat with each ice storm remains.

Wood Pellets are a pretty good choice. The furnaces and some stoves are automated so they keep running (or stopping) when we stop paying attention or leave the building, just like a regular heating system. And the operating cost looks like it’s pretty good.

I grew up in a house heated with coal. That was before the advent of “clean coal” and it wasn’t. Coal is harder to find here, more expensive, and harder to use than pellets. That’s out.

There is no natural gas in northern Vermont. Yeah, yeah, Vermont has lots of cows but I haven’t managed to get the pipeline hooked up from Jack’s barn down the road.

Solid wood remains a good choice. No electricity needed. Local harvesting. Reasonable cost. Unfortunately, it is still less efficient than other wood burning equipment and it is much more work for the homeowner.

Plugging in electric radiant heaters has all of the other grid-based disadvantages plus relatively high cost. That’s out, too.

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Next time, I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about buying a pellet stove in 2008.

Posted in Heating Issues, Seasonal, Random Access | 3 Comments »

America’s Best Colleges?

Monday, September 8, 2008 by Dick.

“It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem,” Malcolm S. Forbes said a few years ago.

Hana R. Alberts, Michael Noer and David M. Ewalt, writing for Forbes Magazine, have published “an alternative” to the quality report that U.S. News & World Report has long issued about American higher education.

It is not the best ranking system I have seen.

Darn it. It could have been.

Malcolm S. Forbes died young, about 18 years ago. As an interesting (to me) aside, he was born on my grandfather’s birthday, August 19, but the same year my parents were born. As far as I know, my family and his had nothing else in common although I did read his magazine. Mr. Forbes published Forbes Magazine which his father founded and his son now runs.

He was graduated from Princeton University, active in politics and community, and strong-willed about his magazine which he grew large.

Despite the shallowness of the college report, I suspect the aphorism rags to rags in three generations will not apply to the Capitalist Tool Forbeses.

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity’s big idea seems worthwhile at first glance. Ranking the profs, career success, costs, graduation rates, and student recognition are all pretty good tests. Too bad their methodology fell apart at the starting gate. The group of mostly college students at CCAP gathered data from 7 million student evaluations of courses and instructors in a non-scientific, online, “inmates rating the asylum” poll site. That’s a quarter of the grade. Another quarter comes from Who’s Who listings. I have a Who’s Who listing along with a few million other Americans, so I’m pretty sure that’s not a great qualifier. Maybe they should use Wikipedia listings.

I find it interesting that Cal Tech is ahead of Harvard and that my mom’s alma mater, Swarthmore, is well ahead of Yale. Not to mention the fact that Dartmouth offers free tuition but is way down on the list.

OTOH, ya gotta ask yourself How does one really choose a school? I ended up at Stevens Institute of Technology almost by accident. I looked for schools that had belly button design. Webb didn’t accept me. Stevens did. Forbes ranked them number as either 127 or 565. Stevens is a Top-10 engineering school.

I taught in Vermont Colleges for several years. I even survived student rankings. With that caveat, I never thought that students should be allowed to design a curriculum even when I was a student and I have always believed that student ranking of teachers is too much Entertainment Tonight and too little NASA Tech Briefs.

Come on. Students go to school for one of four reasons: get out of the draft, get out of the house, get out of having to work for a living, OR TO LEARN SOMETHING. I can accept a student’s appraisal of courses or teachers after, say, long enough in the workplace to apply what was learned in school and to judge whether it helped her or hurt him.

Let me pose that as a question: Who do you want removing your appendix? The surgeon who has done it a few hundred times or the pre-med student who has read Appendectomies for Dummies?

At least Forbes recognized that “the sort of student who will thrive at Williams might drown at Caltech, to say nothing of West Point.”

That said, Forbes also believes that “these rankings reflect, in a very real way, the quality and cost of an undergraduate education at a wide range of American colleges and universities. And when families have to make a decision with a six-figure price tag and lifelong impact, we think they deserve all the information they can get.”

Pfui. I reckon that when families have to make that six-figure decision, they deserve better information than this. Here are the top 10 questions I would want answered plus a couple of extras:

Personal Questions
• Does the curriculum match what I need to learn?
• Do the instructors teach in a way that matches my learning style?
• Is the program rigor too much (or too little) for me?
• Does campus life help or hinder my growth?
• Will I find help from other alums in my chosen field?

Statistical Questions
• How much will it actually cost, net?
• What kind of job will I get upon graduation?
• Does my education stick me in a single track or can I branch out into whatever interests me as I grow?
• How much do employers and peers respect my school?
• How many freshmen wash out? How many graduate

Then, much lower on the list, come two questions CCAP asked:
• How many Nobel Prizes and MacArthur Genius Grants has the faculty accrued?
• How many Rhodes and Fulbright scholars come from the undergrad program?

Posted in Teaching, Society, Lists, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Throw Da Bums Out, IV

Monday, September 1, 2008 by Dick.

The theme of this series has been the need for some loose cannons in politics. The Democrats (almost) have one as a V.P. candidate. The Republicans (almost) have two with John McCain’s surprise pick of Sarah Palin as his V.P. candidate. More than anything he has done in the last decade, that shows he still has a maverick streak. Despite the fact that James Garner will always be Maverick.

That’s a good thing. We need a loose cannon running for President, darn it. After all, the President sets policy, not the Vice President. The President writes pardons, not the Vice President. The President vetoes bills, not the Vice President. The President gets the glory and the barbs, not the Vice President.

I doubt it is enough.

Every candidate–incumbents included–since 1792 would have you believe he is an “agent of change.”

Candidates who want to “change the system” don’t want to change the system; candidates who want to change the system actually want their own policies implemented in the system. A true loose cannon doesn’t care about the system. A true loose cannon will subvert the system and find a way to get some real work done.

Change.

I am no longer a Republican Town Chair (political parties organize committees at the township level to nominate candidates, refine platforms, and get people elected) mostly because I now vote in Florida but also because even in liberal Vermont the Republican party has gotten too impressed with its dogma and not impressed enough with accomplishing anything.

I really may join the Librarian party.

Did you know there are more Library card carriers in these United States than there are card carrying Repuglicans and Demodonkeys combined?

Not only that, the Librarians are mostly willing to stand up to those who would erode our liberties by making us declare what we read. I may feel compelled to tell you what I’m reading but I hate being compelled to tell you what I’m reading.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States…” A Librarian taught me that.

So what offices most worry us?

Remember the five basic responsibilities of Government. That means the next president needs to (1) teach the kids, (2) build the roads, (3) share knowledge and (4) encourage growth, and (5) keep other people including the government itself from robbing or nuking us.

(1) In the wake of the current “No Child Gets Ahead” program, none of the candidates is talking much about schools. A loose cannon in the Oval would surely understand that today’s first graders will pay my children’s Social Security.

(2) In spite of the epidemic of bridge collapses none of the candidates is talking much about roads. A loose cannon in the Oval would see there is a better way to fix the roads than “borrowing” from the transportation tax revenues for the general fund.

(3) Sharing knowledge has slipped from everyone’s radar. Every administration has tried to restrict information flow, whether about government action or scientific data. A loose cannon in the Oval would see that each good, open, scientific program has moved us from rolling stones on logs to rolling Rovers on Mars.

(4) Encourage growth? The dirty secret of the economy is this: the rate of invention, the rate of production, and actual income have all fallen, year after year after year. Popularly quoted statistics show only that our population and inflation have both grown. In fact, the population has doubled since 1950. More people mean more stuff but the rate of making stuff isn’t keeping pace. A loose cannon in the Oval would see that putting people to work is far better than talking about how it’s all working.

(5) Every American has heard about the pork-barrel spending^H^H^H^H, er, the “Omnibus Spending Plan.” Doesn’t that sound like the diesel fuel spreadsheet for a public transit company? There is no spreadsheet in it. Did you know the last 40,000-page Omnibus Spending Plan was bigger than Thomas Jefferson’s entire library? A loose cannon in the Oval would see there is a better way to spend my money than with an Omnibus Spending Plan.

I’m back to Paris Hilton.

If Ms. Hilton joins the Librarian party, I’ll vote for her. Heck, if she gives us a 30-second lesson in economics, I’ll vote for her in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, the Librarians are all whackos who keep trying to shush me.

The only other choice is to vote for me at DickHarper.com/campaign . Keep trying. The site is very popular and very busy in this campaign season and it may time out.

Posted in Throw Da Bums Out, Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »