Kevin Drum writes a bit about John McCain’s proposal of a $300 million prize for developing a new battery technology for electric cars. What this makes me really wish is that Marie had a blog, because, as a chemical engineer who just received her PhD working on fuel cell catalysts, this is right up her alley. I hope that she or Jeff will pop up in comments and say smart things. And be kind if I say anything dumb.

But at the least I should be able to avoid saying anything as dumb as McCain’s battery-prize proposal. Not that I don’t like batteries, mind you! But if someone were to invent a better one they’d already be poised to make a huge amount of money through its commercialization. Offering prizes for innovation isn’t always a terrible idea — for pharmaceuticals with a limited market of potential users it can make sense due to the huge costs associated with developing and testing a new drug. But everyone in the developed world needs better energy storage technology, and they need it right now. And while it’s important to make sure your new batteries are safe and robust (e.g. they don’t explode too much), that’s still much easier and cheaper to do than it is to conduct a set of double-blind human trials. So sweetening the pot is unnecessary. Anyone who has a good idea about how to build a better battery is already working on the problem.

The other thing to mention is that Drum’s concern over lithium is probably misplaced. Lithium’s great, and a ringer when it comes to batteries. A cell’s energy density is largely determined by the electrical potential between its anode and cathode — the bigger the gap between them, the better. And as you can see from this chart, electrode potentials don’t get much more negative than lithium.

But it’s got its problems, too. Lithium wasn’t incorporated into mass-market batteries for a long time because of its tendency to catch on fire when exposed to air or charged too quickly. And lithium batteries still tend to dramatically lose capacity about 18 months after they roll off the assembly line, mostly without regard to how hard they’ve been used. Both of those problems have and continue to be addressed by brilliant electrochemists, and the lithium polymer batteries we use today are fairly miraculous. But it would probably be a mistake to think that lithium technology will get dramatically better than it currently is.

It’s also worth noting that not all hybrid or electric cars use lithium batteries. In fact, I don’t think many currently do at all — the Prius uses nickel-metal-hydride, a less efficient but longer-lived chemistry. It would just be too expensive to replace the batteries on lithium’s lifecycle. So worries about peak lithium should be tempered with the realization that we can make batteries out of other stuff, too.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t need a better battery. No-combustion vehicles are where everyone agrees we need to go, but they have much more significant battery requirements than hybrids. They have to charge and discharge faster and more completely, both of which are tough on batteries. And they need to provide more total power, too.

Right now the problem looks pretty tough. There are two promising technologies, though. First, nanotechnology and the unbelievably vast electrode surface areas it provides are making ultracapacitors look more and more viable. These devices will never be able to store as much charge as a battery, I don’t think, but they can be charged and discharged very quickly and may not suffer the age-related effects that plague chemical cells. From what I’ve read, they also tend to be built out of less environmentally objectionable materials. As I said, this is no battery replacement, but it may make different kinds of vehicles possible — say, one that’s inductively recharged every few miles by a plate embedded in the road. Or they may just replace the battery’s buffering function in hybrids, and ease the charge/discharge speed problem in EVs.

The other technology is, of course, fuel cells. Marie tells me they’re again falling out of favor, funding-wise, as their recent renaissance falls back in line with a century-long track record of failure to reduce cost and fragility. But it seems inevitable that we’ll have to revisit the technology — there’s just no better way to safely store lots of energy in a vehicle than with hydrocarbons or some other hydrogen-donating chemical system (I’ve heard some sort of ammonia pellet system suggested, too). And if you’re going to store your energy as hydrocarbons (which isn’t to say it has to be pumped out of the ground, of course), fuel cells are the most efficient way to turn it back into usable power.

That’s my understanding of the situation, anyway. Hybrids seem likely to stick around for longer than many people suspect, I think. Electric vehicles may be great for getting around towns, but I think people are going to balk the first time they try to use the A/C and realize just how many watt-hours they’re spending, and how few they have with them on board their petroleum-free car.

It was a busy weekend, one filled with baseball-watching, party attendance, delicious kitchen adventures, videogame acquisition and a screening of the better part of D.E.B.S. thanks to Logo (they’re sexy female high-school-aged assassins who can’t be stopped — except, perhaps, by the charms of equally sexy arch-villainess Lucy Diamond). But along the way I also managed to conquer my technical problem du jour: getting transparent proxying with URL rewriting working under OpenWRT.

Those interested can read about the associated trials and tribulations here — it proved to be a just-tough-enough nut to crack. Those not interested can click here and scroll down to see how this particular technical configuration can be put to mildly hilarious ends. All in all a pretty satisfying experience, and one that’s left me considerably less intimidated and more impressed with OpenWRT than I expected to be. One weekend is about the right amount of time for a geeky challenge.

For some reason I perpetually forget about the existence of IronGeek.com except for a couple of times every year when it rises, Brigadoon-style, to the level of consciousness. I wish that weren’t the case; there’s a lot of great stuff on the site. Anyone interested but not well-versed in the security field (i.e. hacking) would do well to check it out.

The most recent bit of interestingness is this video explanation of DNS spoofing via Ettercap ARP poisoning. For some reason I had gotten it into my head that ARP poisoning only worked on wired ethernet networks. But it seems that’s not the case, opening up a great deal of potential for hilarious coffeeshop mischief.

The Wii Twilight Princess hack (which I wrote about here) was killed by the system’s most recent update, received this week by all Wiis connected to the internet.

The industrious hackers of the net have already figured out a workaround, though. Apparently Nintendo’s fix is targeted to Twilight Princess, and scans for the specific corrupted save files that enable the hack. That’s already an encouraging sign — there are almost certainly similar vulnerabilities in other games, and if Nintendo is tackling the problem in this piecemeal approach it means that the homebrew scene is unlikely to ever be thwarted for long.

But the specifics of the update are even more cheer-inducing: apparently there are some bugs in the update code which, when exploited in tandem, make it possible to continue using the TP hack. Hurrah!

All of this is comes from hackmii.com (via Hack a Day — yes, again), which seems to be home to some of the web’s foremost Wii reverse engineers.

I’ve been thinking of something like this for a while now. And I’d still like to build it — but maybe not one this big. A Hall Effect sensor, cellphone vibration unit and glove should just about do it, I think (although given my general ineptitude I’ll have to integrate a microcontroller, I imagine). The main holdup is an unwillingness to commit to buying the parts — I’m not sure what kind of Hall sensor I need, and they turn out not to be as inexpensive as I’d thought.

Besides, I’ve got another project slowly coming together. But perhaps I’ll bug the Dorkbot guys for advice once I’m done with that. In the meantime, it’s great to see more of these things actually being built.

(Via the MAKE::Blog)

John Allison reviews Chinese Democracy.

Via Catherine comes MyBikeLane, an effort to document (with license plate annotation!) drivers’ lack of respect for bicycle lanes. This is a subject dear to my heart as, during my twice-daily commute through Thomas Circle, I often keep myself bitter/amused by pondering how unimaginable it would be for a driver to be ticketed for violating the space defined by the bike lane.

Thomas Circle is a hotbed of bike lane atrocities. Putting such a lane on the outer edge of a traffic circle is a bad idea to begin with: you’re inviting cyclists passing through the circle to cut directly in front of vehicles leaving it. Without the bike lane those cyclists would presumably join the regular flow of traffic, making them a lot more likely to be noticed by drivers.

But it’s not just a problem of design. Drivers have no respect for the lanes, and unless they’ve noticed a biker in sight are all too happy to drift into them, whether from wanting to turn less sharply, a desire to pass stopped traffic or simple carelessness. Fair enough — I’d be looking for a shortcut if I was stuck on 14th at rush hour, too. But given drivers’ general awfulness at noticing bikes, there really can be no middle ground: they need to stay completely out of what few lanes we’ve been given.

Perhaps most mystifyingly, a hotel located on the Southern edge of the circle has helped itself to ten feet or so of the bike lane, setting up white traffic cones in it, presumably to save themselves a spot for their valet service or something similar. Bad enough that they feel entitled to do this — but white? The color of every miscellaneous marking on the road? A color perfectly suited to blending into the gray background noise of the street? Who would make a traffic cone white?! An idiot, that’s who. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve already creamed one of those asinine cones, thankfully without injuring myself in the process. Next time it happens I’m taking the goddamn cone home with me.

Anyone who hasn’t should go check out Dan Koeppel’s op-ed about our impending bananaclysm in the New York Times. I bought Koeppel’s book for Emily a while ago (she likes bananas!) and wound up reading it myself — it’s good! Since then I’ve been walking around, using every opportunity I can find to ask, “Did you know that [fascinating fact about bananas]?” To which the answer is invariably “Yes, actually.” But it’s still an interesting book.

Marriage-induced name changes! Everyone’s blogging about it, so allow me to briefly chime in with my brilliant, completely foolproof solution to the problem. First, everyone keeps their name when they get married. That seems kind of obvious. Second, male children take the father’s last name and female children take the mother’s last name.

In this way each parent gets to preserve their family name, giving it to offspring of the gender that said parent secretly believes to rule (at least relative to the inescapable truth that the other sex droolz). Yet nobody has to mess around with hyphens! And, as an added bonus, if the practice ever became popular we’d soon have distinctly female and distinctly male surnames, which I think would be sort of neat.

More practically, of course, less-than-total adoption means that this would disadvantage female names. But that’s all the more reason to embrace and fiercely espouse my crackpot idea immediately!

WHOOPS: How heteronormative of me! Obviously this wouldn’t work for same-sex couples. In that case, I suggest alternating kid-by-kid, with first dibs going to the winner of an American Gladiators-style obstacle course. Or, failing that, rock-paper-scissors (3 out of 5).

This is pretty neat:

Explanation here. Also via Hack a Day.