Energy Thoughts

"When demand for oil and coal increases, their price goes up. When demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down." - Al Gore, 2008-07-17

http://www.epa.gov/oms/rfgecon.htm says:
113500 BTU per gallon of gasoline

1 BTU = .293 watt hour
1 gallon of gasoline = 113500 BTU = 33.26 KWh

My electric last bill came out to: $.21 / KWh
$6.98 per gallon of gas in electric equivalent.

Except that car engines are terribly inefficient and relatively little of the BTU heat energy of gasoline is actually used in motion. Batteries and electric motors are probably much more efficient (but I don't have a good guess really how much).

Broken Bicycle

Friday night my front tire exploded. The good news is that I wasn't riding
it at the time. It was just sitting there parked outside the Davis Sq JP
Licks. I think everyone within thirty feet stopped and looked around for a
few seconds trying to figure out what happened. It sounded just like a
balloon popping, except much much louder. I didn't figure out where it had
come from right away and was looking around for a car tire or something.

After a couple failed attempts to find a nearby bike store that would sell
me a 16" and 20" by 1.95" wide tire set for my front and back wheel I wound
up ordering them off the internet. Now I guess I'll continue to be bikeless
a few days until the tires get here.

This seems to be happening a lot in the last six months. Maybe it's because
my bike has crossed some magical age threshold where everything starts
breaking. I bet it'll be the shifters next.