Falling US Demand for Oil

Bloomberg.com: U.S. Retail Gasoline Falls to $3.85 a Gallon. From the article:

"Gasoline prices retreated along with inventories, which have fallen 3.6 percent since July 18 to 209.2 million barrels, the Energy Department said August 6."

"U.S. gasoline demand fell a 15th consecutive week, as motorists cope with high fuel prices by driving less..."

Congratulations, America. You have done it -- you've managed to drive down prices by driving less. Now that the prices have reached a more reasonable level, you may resume wasting gas again.


On a related note, there are more and more articles being written now about the demographic inversion of American cities [poligazette.com] -- the more affluent parts of society used to move as far away from cities as possible, but in some cities, the general trend is for them to move back in (gentrification). Is this a real movement, or are we just setting ourselves up for another housing boom/bust cycle?

And on another related note, prices for new and used SUVs have been decimated, because no one wants to buy them [nytimes.com].

Image of traffic from respres' Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

NBC and the Olympics

• I haven't been watching the Olympics coverage on TV. None of it. I appear to be the only person who is still bitter and angry about how horrible the coverage of the last Olympics was... You know, how many commercials they showed, how they would string you along, telling you that a particular event was going to be televised next, only to show an hour of crap before getting to the event that everyone wants to watch. I'm sick of it. I would rather not watch any of it, and just follow the results in the news.
  
  Here's someone who agrees with me: NBC has ruined the Olympics [russellbeattie.com]. From the post:

  "While trying to watch coverage tonight with my six year old son before his bedtime, we were bombarded with commercials EVERY 5 MINUTES. I timed it on my watch..."
  
  "NBC focuses on the same handful of athletes over and over again despite the 400+ in Beijing from the US alone. Yes, it's great Phelps is awesome. We fucking get it, now shut the fuck up about it already. And the general ignorance of the commentators about other countries, the lack of any coverage of those countries, combined with the mindless US-only coverage is insane."

  NBC can take their Olympics coverage and shove it right up their asses.


• The Big Picture has some incredible pictures during the fencing competition [boston.com] at the Olympics. I used to fence sabre in college, so these pictures are especially interesting to me because they remind me of a forgotten era of my life.

Mogo Presenter Mouse

I recently got to use someone's Mogo Presenter Mouse [newtonperipherals.com]:


Now I want one. It's a wireless mouse that stores (and recharges) in a laptop's PC card slot. It has a small kickstand that allows it to sit surprisingly comfortably in the hand when used as a mouse.

They have a two-button version and a scroll-mouse version. The scroll-mouse version (the X54) is designed to be used as a presentation tool (allows you to navigate through a presentation), and it even features an integrated laser pointer.

Spice Labeling

If you look for spices in our cupboards, this is what you will see:


We don't have one of those new-fangled spice racks, and I prefer to have them hidden away anyway. But the problem is that you can't really read the labeling on the sides of the containers. For one thing, all of the containers would have to be turned in the right direction. And for another thing, each container blocks the view of the label on the next container.

Heimlich finally got fed up with having to lift up each and every container (thus performing a linear O(n) search) to find the spice that she wanted, and she wrote the name of the spice on the lid with a magic marker. It is so much faster to find the one that we want now (I suppose that it is still O(n), but with a smaller constant?).

Why don't they label the lids from the factory? We can't be the only people having this problem.

Maybe this post should have been labeled, "Kitchens of the anally-retentive"...

Whole Grain White Bread

I'm always trying to tweak my diet to be a little healthier. The latest part of my diet that is under attack is the bread. I eat a massive amount of carbs, most of which consists of bread (but there is also a lot of rice in my diet). I probably eat around 1.5 loaves of bread per week.

Years ago, all of the bread that I ate was white bread. I grew up eating white bread, so it was really difficult to switch to anything whole grain. A few years ago, I switched to alternating between eating loaves of white and whole grain wheat. Now I'm trying to switch entirely to whole grain breads.

A friend recently told me about a new product out on the market: whole grain white bread [usatoday.com]. The idea is to have the nutrition of a whole grain bread, with the texture and taste of a white bread.

If you go out and try to buy this type of bread, you have to look out [cbsnews.com], because many companies try to fool you into thinking that a loaf is whole grain when only a small percentage of the ingredients are whole grain.

We are trying out a local brand right now (as many of the competitors, such as Wonder, haven't made them available in our area yet). So far, the loaves seem like they are a step in the right direction, but maybe they're not quite there yet. From the texture, you can still tell that it is a whole grain bread, but at least the taste isn't so harsh.

Fuelly

Matt Haughey [wholelottanothing.org] and Paul Bausch [onfocus.com] have started up Fuelly [fuelly.com], which is a website that allows you to share and track your car's fuel mileage, among other things.

They just opened their doors to the public last week, and apparently, it has started to take off.

I actually have been tracking the fuel consumption in my daily driver (and using Matlab to plot the statistics), so I can see why people would want to use this kind of service. If you are looking for a new vehicle, you can get access to a database of real-world fuel consumption by owners of that vehicle (albeit the data may be skewed, because Fuelly users will probably be more fuel efficient than average).

The reason that I have started to track my fuel mileage is because there are several things that I would like to measure (being a scientist), such as:

• Is there a noticeable impact on fuel economy when I change my engine air filter?
• Does my car do better with certain brands of gas than others (as I suspect that it does)?
• There is certainly a temperature-related effect on fuel economy, as lower ambient temperatures absolutely cause lower fuel efficiency numbers. But what is the relationship? Linear? Asymptotic?

In tracking my own data, I notice that the measurement of gallons of fuel is the largest source of uncertainty. The underlying assumption in these measurements is that if you fill your tank to the top every time you refuel, you will know how much gas you consumed in the miles that you have driven since your last fill up.

However, the gas pumps don't always fill your gas tank up to the same level. And if you "top off" your tank, you totally will throw the measurement off. My data once (erroneously) showed that I achieved 45mpg over one tank in my non-hybrid car (which is unrealistically high), because the gas station I went to didn't fully fill up my gas tank. And then on the next stop, where my gas tank did actually get filled to the top, my fuel economy dropped precipitously. Maybe there needs to be a way in Fuelly to add an asterisk to data that is questionable.

Image of Fuelly stats from mathowie's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Secret Agent Driving Experience

My sister sent me a link to a great gift idea for all of those car nuts: Secret Agent Driving Experience [excitations.com].


From the description of the driving school:

• "...grab hold of the wheel and test your limits in the same training programs used by professional special forces, SWAT teams and protection agencies and learn to nudge your adversary into a spin at high speed without losing control of your own vehicle!"


• "Learn to thwart vehicle assaults, break through barricades, do a reverse 180, and outrun the bad guys at 100 mph"

That looks like a ton of fun! This reminds me of those crazy police chase videos where the police try to use the fish tail maneuver [google.com] to spin out a fugitive's car. This is the kind of driving school that I dream about.

Picture of drifting car from jepoycamboy's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].