Repost Compost for Earth Day

I wasn't paying attention. Earth Day is today. If I would have thought of this before, I could have done something awesome. Instead, here are some reposts related to the Earth and energy. They have been sitting for a while in my post-compost, so they are nice and smelly.

Most of these deal with Earth-type stuff and energy.

Rotation of the Earth as an energy source. What if we could some how use the rotational energy of the Earth? How much would we have to slow it down to get something useful?

Solar Powered motorcycle - possible? There was this story about an electric motorcycle that is recharged by solar cells. How far could you go in a day with this? (spreadsheet calculations included).

Which saves more gas - turning off daytime running lights or slowing down? That pretty much sums up that post.

Chevyvoltology 101. So, the Chevy Volt is this plug in hybrid car. There were some questions that came up - how many equivalent miles per gallon would it get? See, the problem was that they were trying to calculate the miles per gallon for when it was in the city and not using gas. Well, what about miles per dollar? What about CO2 per mile?

How much gas could we save by removing drive throughs? Some estimations and calculations here.

How much would free energy cost? There was this news story a while back about this grocery store that installed these speed bumps that would transfer kinetic energy of cars into something to be used by the store. How would this work? Could you get this to power the whole store?

Charging an electric motorcycle with wind power. There was this electric bike called the Killacycle. They claimed it could be recharged in 4 minutes and it could be recharged by wind power. Could it do these at the same time? (recharge by wind in 4 minutes)

More like this

I just realized that something has been bothering me. It is this KillaCycle - the electric zoom-fast motorcycle that I posted about previously. It clearly is super fast. However there are two claims that seem iffy. It can be recharged in 4 minutes. It is recharged by wind power. It may be…
What's the deal with the Chevy Volt? Well, obviously, it is a cool car. A plug-in hybrid. The problem is in how to quantify its efficiency. Normal hybrids (the non-plug in type) have only one type of energy input, gasoline. The Volt can take gasoline or electricity input. This makes it…
Another electric motorcycle post. (Here is the post on the wind-recharged drag racing motorcycle) This new one is a solar powered motorcycle. The site claims that the bike can go 50 miles on a full charge (from Gas2.org). This is easily possible, but how long would it take to charge with normal…
Here's a quick bit of obnoxious bad math. I saw this myself in a link to an AP article via Salon.com, and a reader sent me a link to the same story via CNN. It's yet another example of what I call a metric error: that is, the use of a measurement in a way that makes it appear to mean something…