Link Banana

If, like me, you had no idea what melamine is or why it was such a bad thing to find in Chinese milk, I suggest this Tech.view column (for that, and a whole lot more):

Melamine is used to make durable work-surfaces for kitchen cabinets and bathroom furniture, and is formed into heat-resistant jugs, bowls, dinnerware, and other household items. To be accurate, such products are made not from melamine, but from melamine resin—a thermosetting plastic produced by combining melamine with formaldehyde.

… Melamine itself is a different matter. In low doses, it is non-toxic; its so-called LD50 (median lethal dose) is on a par with table salt. But should it be combined with a closely related chemical called cyanuric acid, the resulting compound (melamine cyanurate) can cause fatal kidney disease. Melamine cyanurate is widely used as a fire retardant.

In a thorough summary of the basics of hybrid auto technology, The Economist’s Tech.view column sees a future that may favor less-efficient (but cheaper) mild hybrids over “stronger” ones like the Prius.

The complexity and cost of such drive-trains has made many in the industry think twice about strong hybrids. Mild hybrids like Honda’s may offer only modest fuel savings, but they are considerably cheaper to make. Selling for less than a Toyota Prius, the new mild-hybrid version of the Chevrolet Malibu has been a runaway success, despite having only 2mpg better fuel economy than a conventional Malibu.

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist thinks that the time is ripe for disappearing ink (or erasable paper) to replace the old-fashioned kind:

But once we’ve finished with the hard copies, they are often dumped in the recycling container, rubbish bin or even shredder. In a survey of its own printers, copiers and waste-paper bins, Xerox found that two out of five sheets printed were used only once and then discarded after a day.

That seems an awful waste. It takes around 200,000 joules of energy to make a sheet of paper. The average office worker in America prints out 1,200 sheets a month. The energy consumed in manufacturing that amount of paper—not to mention the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the process—is equivalent a 100-watt light bulb burning for a month.

Pundits reckon over 15 trillion pieces of paper are printed annually around the world—a figure that is expected to grow 30% over the next ten years. To feed our appetite for paper, whole forests have to chopped down. Surely it would be better if we could reuse our paper—in short, stick it back in the printer or copier rather than trash it.

I’ve heard a lot in the last year about how the growing distribution of video and other big files over the internet will effectively kill the thing. The Economist’s Tech.view columnist is not sold on the idea:

While neither the DSL nor the cable companies have beefed up their local connections as fast as the internet backbone operators have boosted their capacity, there’s still enough bandwidth over the last mile for current traffic. And soon there will be a whole lot more—at least for Verizon, Sprint and even Comcast.

The Economist’s Tech.view columnist makes the interesting point that if diesel powered cars really do take off in America, we’ll all end up with much too much petrol (gasoline).

It doesn’t help that the catalytic crackers used by oil refineries in America are optimised to produce as much petrol as possible—typically about 50% of every barrel. Diesel accounts for only 15% of the rest, with the balance used to produce heating oil, jet fuel, heavy fuel, liquid petroleum gas, asphalt and other products.

Refineries in Europe and elsewhere tend to use hydrocrackers that produce 25% petrol and 25% diesel. They would like to produce more diesel than they currently do, but that would mean producing even more petrol than they need. At present, they export their surplus to America.

So, if America switched to diesel cars in a big way, the Europeans would be even more awash in unwanted petrol than they are today, and might have to dump it elsewhere or even idle some refinery capacity. Either way, the global price of diesel would soar still further.

I do wonder what, if any, place biodeisel deserves in such an analysis.

Perhaps I’m alone in this, but I’d never thought that there was anything wrong with the way innovation is done. The Economist’s Tech.view column begs to differ:

But innovating the way industry does today—where problems go in search of solutions—is putting the cart before the horse. We should be doing it the other way round: finding the problem to which a known solution is an ideal answer. Matching inventions, discoveries and other bright ideas to problems this way would brilliantly streamline the process.