Range Anxiety

We were being told, incessantly, that Tesla has some "secret sauce" as regards drive train efficiency, that it is "lightyears" ahead of competition, or, by those using less hyperbole, at least three, more likely five or more years of development. Some attributed this to Elon Musk's magical powers, others merely to almost complete vertical integration with tight control over design and manufacture of every last bolt, connector and cable tie.

Something sounded fishy: I am quite familiar with engineering of some German companies, and it looked barely imaginable that they would come up with efficiency half that of Tesla. And, guess what: they don't.

Edmunds, one of the guys who, allegedly, find you the best car deal, whether you are buying or selling it, went and tested actual efficiency and range of many electric cars on the market. While their testing procedure is not fully documented, it seems to be close to that what EPA cycle attempts to simulate. The results are what we suspected all along: Teslas consistently perform poorer than EPA figures would suggest, most others quite better. Is Edmunds' testing procedure such that it in some way disadvantages Teslas, or is this a case of "friends in high places", or Tesla is somehow manipulating test procedures in a way reminiscent of VW & Co's Dieselgate, or is everything just a fluke, I don't know and won't try to speculate. However, see for yourself: much maligned Porsche Taycan (admitedly, Tayycan 4S, not the top of the line Turbo S) actually achieves a hair (five miles) longer range than Tesla Model S Performance

The article with the results is here.

(Spoiler: Audi e-Tron is a hog.)

LGM or not?

For readers (if any) younger than, say, 50, LGM stands for Little Green Man, an old tongue-in-cheek name for aliens. (Later green transformed to gray, but I digress).

The "provocation" for this post was an article by Ethan Siegel Watch: Harvard Astronomer Mansplains SETI To The Legend Who Inspired Carl Sagan’s Contact. The title says it all, but I will let you judge for yourself how obnoxious the astronomer from the title actually was (spoiler_ pretty much.)

Anyway, the astronomer in question is Avi Loeb who made quite a name for himself recently for claiming not only that 'Oumuamua, an extrasolar object discovered whizzing through our system four years ago, might be, but is of artificial, alien origin..He is about to publish a book on the topic, gives interviews left and right, and does not quite stick to Sagan standard saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (Let's leave the philosophical and epistemological discussion of the "standard" aside, shall we?)

As for evidence, I recommend this video by prof. David Kipping of Columbia's Cool Worlds Lab, with which I happen to agree (spoiler: the only really unusual property of the interstellar visitor is its very variable luminosity):

But, let's focus on the "extraordinary claim" part of the question. Is claiming "look, aliens!" (or, more in line with the jargon, "look, technosignature!") a legitimate thing to do?

As a great fan of late Iain Banks I was first to see artifacts of The Culture as mysterious things occulting the extremely variable Tabby's Star. I did root for 'Oumuamua to fire up its engines braking aggressively and enter high Earth orbit. I still kind of hope that the signal coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri does contain encoded message.

But, those are hopes and wishes. How high, or how low on our ladder of "possible explanations" should aliens reside?

Before you put them as high as Loeb does, remember "God of the gaps" argument so often used by naive Biblical-literalist creationists. "I don't understand this, therefore God". Replacing "God" with "aliens" does not make the argument any better.

Consider how we discovered pulsars: when Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered an extremely regular extraterrestrial radio-signal in 1967, she and the co-discoverer Antony Hewish named the signal only half-jokingly "LGM-1" and sat on the discovery for quite some time. However, subsequent observations of other similar signals led astronomers to dust off already pretty old hypothesis predicting existence of rapidly rotating neutron stars, and the pulsars entered the everyday lexicon.

Had Burnell (who was knighted for her work, but did not share the Nobel prize for the discovery of pulsars - back to one of the topics of the article I cite at the beginning) and collaborators stayed with LGM "explanation", we would perhaps be a better (or, OTOH, more paranoid) society now, but would be poorer for one whole branch of astronomy.

So, much as I would have preferred that GCU Arbitrary decided that Earth was worthy of contact, aliens are the very extraordinary claim (not in principle, but in every particular occasion) that should only be the fallback when everything else is exhausted.

Tango Delta Nominal!

So, the Perseverance rover and its flying companion, Ingenuity helicopter have arrived to their destination in Jezero crater safely. The ~$3bn mission now starts for real, but the most nerve racking moments are over.

Just a word to people who think that this kind of expenses is a waste of money when "there are so many more pressing problems here on Earth", as they usually say. Of course there are, but the total mission cost can buy two launches (without payload) of SLS (a.k.a Senate Launch System) at best, if it ever gets completed, or one and a half B-2 bombers the manufacturing run of which was cut short after only 21 or 22 examples, instead of 100+ planned, so that another wasteful program could be initiated; it is about 0.6% of the costs of for all practical purposes failed F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter" program, or less than 0.5% of various form of subsidies fossil fuel industry receives every year in the US alone (exact numbers differ depending on what you count).

So, yes, there are pressing needs of humanity everywhere, but there are far better places to take the funds for them from than this magnificent undertaking. 

Jezero

Strange as it can seem to some, Martians don't speak English, and English is not the official language of Mars. So, when International Astronomical Union named the crater bearing traces of an ancient lake after the Bosnian town of Jezero (meaning "lake" in many Slavic languages), it is decent to try and pronounce it in a way somewhat resembling the original. Doing otherwise is parochial.

So, dear Americans, try saying YEZ-ə-roh  ("y" as in "you", more or less, and no traces of "oo" at the end).

For those who are not IPA-challenged, it is  /ˈjɛzəɹo/ - 'y' in 'yes', 'e' in 'dress', 'z' in 'zoom', 'er' in 'letter', 'o' in 'code', approximately. But just switching that first consonant from "jazz" to "yes" will do.

BTW, Neretva delta that used to feed the Martian lake billions of years ago is named after a river also in Bosnia and Herzegovina, flowing briefly through Croatia before emptying into a lush, fertile delta and then Adriatic.

Incidentally, one of the hosts of NASA webcast of the Perseverance (nee Mars 2020) landing is named Marina Jurica. That last name is almost certainly from somewhere in former Yugoslavia (it is pronounced "'Yoo-ri-tsa", to use "English respelling" - stress on the first syllable, short vowels), so she should know the correct pronunciation. The fact she did not use it means that NASA official policy is to pretend that English is the only language in the world, indeed in the Solar system, if not the Universe.

Some would call this "American exceptionalism", Again, I call it parochialism, and not only Americans are guilty of it.

Grrrr!

Blogger's Preview feature is pretty much useless! What is the use of preview it it (obviously) uses a different style sheet than published posts ?!? This especially pertains to paragraph breaks and spacing, as well as, pretty often, blockquotes.

It could have been worse, but...

 A very good YouTube video on Capitol riots attempting a farcical coup d'état in efforts to install Agent Orange as benevolent dictator for life or something got me thinking. Nothing good will come out of this. Well, Biden is a great improvement over the clown preceding him, as his first weeks in office show, but one of the results will be (are, actually) more of surveillance state and less freedom of expression and other personal freedoms.

There is no good authoritarianism. Beware of this!

Here we go again...

I was just reading an article on Aeon, an eZine (or whatever) that describes itself somewhat pompously as "a world of ideas" where one can occasionally find insightful material, with which I did not agree at all. I immediately went for "comments" section ,and found none. 

So, I remembered that once upon a time I had a rather poor excuse for a blog. (That one was inspired by my six months consulting stint in Paris.) Why not continue it, placing my future rants there?

I found out that the ancient theme applied there is not really supported any more, and new ones have more bells and whistles, anyway, so I made a new one (this) and imported old content, sentimental as I am.

In the meantime, while playing with the new site settings, I almost forgot about the article that got me so excited. We will come back to it, eventually, maybe...