Example—You head underground to take a Manhattan subway from midtown to the lower west side. Upon exiting the train at the desired stop, assuming you’ve made it that far, you now have the task of spatially re-orientating yourself and choosing the proper course to your destination, all while minimizing time spent deliberating and avoiding damaging blows to the illusion that you know where you are and what you’re doing.

Figure 01 – Overview (notice cracked-out follow-walker)

Figure 02 – Come to grips with the massive problem you are about to face (avoid conspicuous expression if possible)

Figure 03 – Real-time awkwardness avoidance

There are a variety of variables that need to be optimized

• Maintain posture, expression, direction, and pace such that it appears that you know exactly where you are going
• Mentally create and navigate spatial models and estimate probabilities that you should be heading in a direction other than the current heading
• Minimize time and distance lost if you determine that a course change is necessary

If deciding to change course—bailing on your current direction—it must be inconspicuous. Abruptly doing a 180 degree turn could create substantial awkwardness for you and those around you—that would be downright reckless. The awkwardness factor increases with the amount of time spent in close proximity of other walkers, and especially if you have exchanged casual remarks with anyone around you.

Here are some strategies:

1. Wait until you come to an intersection or crosswalk, and then cross the street to head the other direction. If the next opportunity to cross is too far away, you may try to cross right where you are
2. Walk around the block
3. Find a lamp post, doorway, other object to lean against until those who were walking in your proximity are out of range, and then you can resume walking (in the opposite direction) without anyone noticing your change of direction
4. Pull out your phone and make it seem like the person giving you directions is a total idiot. Broadcast the idiocy by shaking your head, rolling your eyes, and throwing your hands up in disbelief
5. Use a newfangled 3D pedestrian navigation app for your smartphone, but be careful to frequently check for obstacles lest you smack into a lamppost, turning vehicle, newspaper box, or other walker while staring dumbly at your phone

This is the CURRENT PROCESS:

This is what they COULD DO:

To what extent are they running the email, snail mail, and faxes through recognition software and statistics & charting software to summarize the contents of incoming correspondence? I hope that Mr. Kelleher is providing some additional info in addition to hand-selecting a few letters.

Wordle grabs his last five posts from his RSS feed, and with some help from Excel, we can create some more tailored views of His Wordliness. Guy, I tried following you on Twitter but your stream is so voluminous that I couldn’t see my other dear friends!

Proper Nouns

Words That Appear Only Once

Top 20 Words

Top 75 Words

http://www.wordle.net/
Images created by the Wordle.net web application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

The mass on either side of a chemical reaction must balance, so I thought to myself, “If a gallon of fuel weighs 6 lbs, where is the other 13 lbs coming from?”

Well, it turns out that the additional weight is from the 21 lbs of oxygen that your car sucks from the atmosphere to burn that gallon of gas! Your car also spits out one gallon (8 lbs) of water in the process. 21 lbs of oxygen fills about four phone booths (~250 cu. ft.), and 19 lbs of carbon dioxide fills about two and a half phone booths (~150 cu. ft.). If your fuel economy is 25 mpg, then the above quantities occur every 25 miles you drive.

Here’s a simple mass equation:
C8H18 + (25/2) O2 = (8) CO2 + (9) H2O
hydrocarbon + oxygen = carbon dioxide + water

Basically, each Carbon atom broken from a fuel molecule grabs two Oxygen atoms from the air, and every two Hydrogen atoms grab one Oxygen atom from the air. Breaking these bonds yields heat energy.

Is this surprising to anyone else?
Disclaimer: As this not my area of expertise, I make absolutely no guarantees regarding the accuracy of this very simple example. The real-world process of combustion involves many variables.

From the same guys that brought us the “Giant Pool of Money“, another ultra-simple explanation. This time, it’s the quandary that the big bad banks, taxpayers, and U.S. government currently find themselves in, with a dollhouse analogy and a simple balance sheet to introduce the concepts.

This chart shows that on a 1,000 mile trip, a U-Haul truck running on gasoline will emit 2,774 lbs of carbon dioxide, while some other truck running on diesel fuel will emit 2,798 lbs. On this trip, the U-Haul will emit 24 lbs, or a whopping 0.8%, less carbon dioxide! Aside from questioning the comparison of a gasoline truck to a diesel truck, this difference is so tiny (less than one percent) that its meaning is quickly swallowed up by any other variables in the system (age of truck, miles per tank, driving habits, fuel cost, total energy efficiency, weather). The glaring offense is the fact that the other truck’s dark cloud of smoke appears to have nearly three times greater area than the lighter U-Haul cloud. So, visually, the chart implies that U-Haul emits 60% less, while the dubious numbers show that the difference is less than 1%; this is a visual distortion of extreme proportions. Mysteriously, a trip of 999 miles or 1,001 miles yields a difference of only 23 lbs.




Now let’s zoom out for a reality check. Does a truck really emit 2,800 pounds of carbon dioxide on a 1,000 mile trip? 2,800 pounds seems high. A brief search points to the EIA emission coefficients, which suggest that burning a gallon of diesel fuel emits 22.4 lbs of CO2. Assuming 10 mpg on a 1,000 mile trip yields 100 gallons burned. Apply the coefficient and you get 2,240 lbs of CO2. So, that number is close enough. As strange as it seems, mixing a gallon of fuel (weighs about 6 lbs) with oxygen, and then burning the mixture does produce about 20 lbs of CO2. This is because each carbon atom freed from a fuel molecule hooks up with two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere to form a CO2 molecule. The hydrogen in the fuel also hooks up with oxygen to form water. So my guess is that the math could look like this: 6 lbs of fuel + 24 lbs of oxygen = 22 lbs of CO2 + 8 lbs of water.

Check out the excellent data attribution line — “All numbers are estimates based on averages from various reliable sources.”