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Quote 03 from "The Bottomless Well"

Here's a quick statement of one of the big points of The Bottomless Well:

What most of us think about energy demand is even more wrong. Our main use of energy isn't lighting, locomotion, or cooling; what we use energy for, mainly, is to extract, refine, process, and purify energy itself. And the more efficient we become at refining energy in this way, the more we want the final product. Thus, more efficient engines ... lead to more energy consumption, not less. [pg. xxiii]

I call this the charity model of energy: most of the money we donate to charity is used to garner more donations to charity. Energy works the same way.

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Quote 02 from "The Bottomless Well"

The Bottomless Well points out that the affection that people have for renewable energy is out of proportion to their contribution to the economy:

Renewable fuels, by contrast, made no visible dent in energy supplies during this period [1979-2002]. About a half billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity were produced from solar power in 2002, or about 0.013% of the U.S. total. Wind power contributed another 0.27%. [pg. xix]

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Phil Gramm Quote on CEO Pay

I don't like McCain, but I'd sure be happy if he brought ex-Senator Phil Gramm along for the ride:

... Wall Street bankers make tens of millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses each year. How would he justify these fat pay days? "It's simple," he lectures, sounding very much like the Texas A&M economics professor that he was in the 1970s: "In economics, we define labor exploitation as paying people less than their marginal value product. I recently told Ed Whitacre [former CEO of AT&T, who retired with a $158 million pay package] he was probably the most exploited worker in American history because he took Southwestern Bell, which was the smallest of the former Bell companies, and he turned it into the dominant phone company on earth. His severance package should have been billions."

Read the whole thing.

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Quote 01 from "The Bottomless Well"

The Bottomless Well is full of factoids about energy use and consumption:

Appliances, air conditioners, refrigerators, and light bulbs grew 30 to 50 percent more efficient in the interim [1979-2007], but all that saving notwithstanding, we still managed to almost double our total consumption of electricity [pg. xvii]

This shouldn't surprise an economist: more efficient means cheaper means more use.

It seems to surprise everyone else though.

There's more:

... The reserves in [Oklahoma] fields were assessed at 125 million barrels in 1969. Yet in the next quarter century they yielded 4.5 billion additional barrels. [pg. xvii]

Again, not very surprising to economists who understand that the proven reserves of food in the fridge won't last the family till the weekend.

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You Can't Make This Up: Mexican Gas Price Control Edition

Mexico's government owns Pemex, which is the major producer of crude oil in Mexico.

To mollify the masses, the Mexican government subsidizes gas retailers to lower prices at the pump.

Except that Pemex (and Mexico as a whole) doesn't have enough refinery capacity to make enough gasoline for the whole country.

So ... get this ... they sell crude oil to the U.S. at the going rate, buys back gasoline at the going rate (about 1/3 higher), and then knocks over 40% off of that price to sell to consumers.

Taxpayers foot the bill.

Read the whole thing - they're now banning Americans from buying gas in Tijuana because they've figured out that it is worth the trip.

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Book Review: "The Bottomless Well"

Fascinating reading and provocative thinking, even if you don't agree with it; this is what you will get out of The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills.

This book is very different from the typical anti-environmentalist book. There are no he said/she said arguments. There is no whining about how unfair everything is. There is no hyperbole.

The ideas are unusual though. I can't say I agree with them all, but they definitely have got me thinking in different ways about power, energy and fuel.

It's worthwhile reading just for the basic idea that we spend most of our fuel budget making a small amount of high-quality energy: you can't run a PC off of a wood fire.

It also has made me more of a supporter of electric power in general. I used to think this was all about moving smelly, dirty combustion away from people who spend too much time being clean: all those Priuses in LA are powered from coal strip mined in the Rockies and burned closer to the mine than to the driver. But, they emphasize that the great thing about electric power is our ability to fine tune it to provide exactly the energy that we need where we need it.

I highly recommend it: most thought-provoking non-fiction book I read this past year.

Quotes to follow in the days ahead ...

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Helpful Social Security Tutorial

Why do you only contribute to social security on the first $100K or so of your incomes?

Who thought that up?

Why is social security one of the most "regressive" taxes we have?

Walk through it in this piece - it turns out it's regressive only because we don't measure the money people get out of the system.

I don't usually like Lawrence Lindsay's pieces, but the first half of this one was pretty good. The second half is Obama trashing.

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The Growth Grade for 2008 I

The final estimate of real GDP growth is now in for the first quarter of 2008 is in at 1.0%.

Even though it is time for pluses and minuses, that grades out as a D on my preferred grade scale, and as a C on my college student grade scale.

Definitely a couple of lousy quarters: 11th percentile this time around and 9th last fall.

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Quote 36 from "The Other Path"

I wrap up my posts on DeSoto's The Other Path with a cautionary note about how to administer the polity and the economy:

But to do so, the state must bring a swift, efficient system of justice within the reach of the entire population. Instead of controlling the economy primarily by regulations, the state should do so, after the event if necessary, through the judiciary. The state would thus be concerned less with administering resources and more with administering justice to ensure that laws are respected and that abuses do not go unpunished. [pg. 250]

That kind of sums up the problem with McCain and Obama (and Clinton): they all want to regulate activity before it takes place rather than adjudicate the problems afterwards.

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Some Easy Geometry for Thinking About Glass Crystals

The idea that glass forms crystals that are 5-sided in 2 dimensions, and icsosahedral in three isn't very useful for most people trying to understand why glass does what it does.

So, let's work in 2 dimensions.

Think about this like tiling a floor - the formal name for this is tessellation theory.

It's easy to tile a floor with squares. It wouldn't be too hard with rectangles either.

The reason for this is that if you put two squares next to each other, the 90 degree angle in the bottom right of the left one, and the 90 degree angle in the bottom left of the right one, join together to form a 180 degree angle - a straight line. Continue that across the floor and you've got a good start on covering the whole floor.

It turns out you can also do this with certain triangles. Right triangles are easy: no matter what the size, you can stack two of them to get a rectangle, and off you go.

Equilateral triangles will also work - you just alternate them right-side-up and upside-down. If you put 3 of them together this way, you get a regular trapezoid, because in the middle of the bottom of the trapezoid are three 60 degree angles that add up to 180. You could also tile a floor with rhombuses formed from putting 2 equilateral triangles next to each other.

You can also cover a floor with hexagons (anyone who played board wargames will tell you this). The problem is that you need half hexagons on the borders. Think about it: if you take the top half of one hexagon, and put the bottom half of another one next to it, they will fit together perfectly. This is because regular hexagons can actually be broken down into 6 equilateral triangles, with each face of the hexagon the base of a triangle pointing inward.

The reason all of this works is a theorem from plane geometry that the interior angles of n-sided regular polygons are given by 180 times n-2 divided by n. For an equilateral triangle this works out to 180 times 1 divided by 3 is 60. For a square, it is 180 times 2 divided by 4, is 90.

In order to cover a floor you have to be able to get r of those angles to add up to 180 (where r is an integer). So, we have:

180r(n-2)/n = 180

r(n-2) = n

So, we can cover a floor with equilateral triangles because:

3(3-2) = 3

Same for squares (this shouldn't be surprising because they can be made out by combining triangles):

2(4-2)=4

You can even get an idea of why you need half-hexagons to cover a floor with them since 3 times (6-2) does not equal 6 (but it does equal 2 times 6).

More importantly, this tells us why pentagons won't work since:

r(5-2)=5

Does not have an integer solution for r.

So, in 2 dimensions, glass sort of acts like a Tetris game in which the shapes are not built out of squares but out of pentagons. You can probably envision that this means there will be a lot of empty spaces left between shapes.

It's harder to visualize extending this to 3 dimensions, but the basic point follows that there will be "holes" in between the crystals within glass that just aren't there in other solids. Since there are holes, there will sometimes be movements of crystals from one spot to another to fill those holes - thus the liquid properties of glass. Alternatively, those spiky crystals won't move much no matter how many holes there are - thus the solid properties of glass.

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