Leading Critics

Ok, found a couple of guys who apparently are leading the critique against Ethanol.

Q&A on Ethanol Issues

Interesting points... I think his major issue is using only Corn to produce Ethanol, which I believe is not required.

This paper attempts to rebut the position that it takes less energy to make ethanol than one gets out of it. I hope that's not true, but I'm certainly not in a position to judge myself.

This is another pretty good summary article: UC scientist says ethanol uses more energy than it makes A lot of fossil fuels go into producing the gas substitute

Maybe I'm misunderstanding... does E85 Ethanol = the Ethanol that is described above?

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More on E85

Here's a presentation Vinod Khosla gave on the subject... interesting stuff:

Vinod Khosla E85 Ethanol Presentation via Selling Wheels

Boy, I've search around for a few minutes, and I can't even find anything that REMOTELY has a problem with E85, other than claims that "Big Oil will not support this" (can someone point me at proof of that)? Is this really everything it claims or is it too good to be true? Will you be able to use E85 ethanol in power plants & factories (which make up 1/3 of all pollution)?

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E-85 Ethanol

Very interesting story on E-85 Ethanol on Dateline (the only reason I remotely trust it is because Vinod Khosla backs it).

MSN Video Thumbnail
Play this video on MSN Video

What I really really really want to know is whether or not you save more energy/oil/money/etc producing it than it costs to make it. I know that they mention it as part of the story (they said something along the lines of "10 times the cost to make it", but that seems ridiculously positive), but give me the data!

The other thing they talk about is how "big oil" is against it. Man, are they short sighted on this one. They already have the infrastructure, start using it! If they're not careful, a small set of firms could come along and start offering their own stuff in parallel and completely demolish the oil companies.

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One more error found!

Oh I love it when I come upon someone else doing the same thing I am when it comes to errors. And because he did, I was able to find the answer to my problem quickly! There has to be a way to index this stuff effectively. Anyhow, here's what I searched for:

http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2005/06/markup-compatibility
is.not.a.recognized (on MSN)
And the answer was what I was looking for is here... Not only that, the quote after the text was an absolutely perfect description of what I needed to know to know that it was the right link. let's hear it for MSN.


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Searching for the Unsearchable

Searching for the Unsearchable

Boy, this took a long time. A REALLY long time.

I needed to find out a little bit more about a specific tag in ASP.net. Specifically, the '<%' tag. So why not just drop it in a search engine? All the major search engines block searching for this kind of text. It's an incredible pain.

Fortunately, I was lucky enough to find a term that was always associated with this (in this case databinding) that helped me search for it. After browsing through about a million websites, I finally found someone who had the same problem. Let me hand it over to Tone's website.

http://tonesnotes.org/2004/06/16/aspnet-code-block-mystery

It's remarkably hard to search for syntax like "<%=" if you want to find something that speaks about the syntax rather than all the pages that use it.

I ran into a case where apparently identical code blocks in the same .ascx file were being treated differently. One was expanded and the other was treated as a literal.

The problem ended up being that a "runat=server" attribute had been added to the element with the failing code block.

A normal inline ASP.NET code substitution block uses the syntax <%= … %>.

ASP.NET databinding uses the syntax <%# … %>.

<%@ … %> is WebForms syntax. One of the following must follow the @: Page, Control, Import, Implements, Register, Master, MasterType, OutputCache, Reference

<% … %> executes a block of inline code.

<%= … %> does a Response.Write of the value of inline code.

<%# … %> does data-binding

<%$ … %> is used for configuration file substitutions

Thank you Tone!

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Note To Self: Read Becoming Strangers

Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean

Interesting concept for a book, where two marriages (one of middle aged people and one of elderly people) are examined in great detail, specifically looking at whether or not they stayed together due "to habit and a long-ago promise, or because of some stronger bond." (Christina Schwarz) The tracing the singular seed of victory (or downfall) back to is source gives me endless fascination. Tying this examination to a relationship and how it turns out makes the subject even more intriguing.

Simple Displays of Complex Data

I love how simple this:

Graphical Representation of the U.S. Budget

makes this:


Full disclaimer, it does not include off-budget spending, such as the $100B spent on Katrina relief and lots of others.

I once worked with a guy who spent six months doing this for his large corporation. Though he really provided a lot of visibility into how the business worked, my biggest problem was that it was that hard to envision before. I suppose there may be problems in the world that really are that hard to understand that making a graph can make all the difference, but they're a lot rarer than most people claim them to be.

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