We have a hot tub!

Hot tub at Ant Hill Co-op. Rochester, NY. February 19, 2006. Photo by Girts Folkmanis.

This morning more than a dozen Ant Hill Co-op members, friends, relatives, and poor blokes off the street who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong timevolunteered or were volunteered to help move a 900 lb object thirty miles on what may have been the coldest day of the year. We began with a pancake breakfast, involving blueberries and chocolate chips. Then we drove out to the location of the hot tub in a three-car caravan. When we first attempted to lift it, despite a dozen people giving their best, it didn't budge. It was frozen to the deck. A little maneuvering and we got it up and onto a trailer. The ground frozen solid, we were able to drive the trailer right into the back yard for easier loading. Our hot tub now sits in the driveway here at Ant Hill Co-op, awaiting preparation of a suitable foundation in the yard a few meters away.

Now I just need a windmill to power the thing.

Harbec Plastics

Bob Bechtold and a student group. Harbec Plastics. Feb 2006.

On Friday I toured Harbec Plastics with Rob, Nate, and about seventeen people from the Engineers for a Sustainable World (formerly Engineers Without Borders—name changed due to trademark dispute or certain realities about H-1B visas? you decide) chapters at UR and RIT. The place was incredible! The owner, Bob Bechtold, started out as a machinist, then went into business for himself. A hop, skip, and a jump, and he owns a highly successful multi-million-dollar plastic injection molding company based outside of Rochester, near the suburb (and Xerox hometown) of Webster. When I first ran into the man at the beginning of the tour, I immediately got a good vibe from him. But he turns out to be even awesomer than I ever expected.


Bechtold's factory is a playground of energy efficiency technologies. The Charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory style tour (Rob won the factory!) started out with his 250 kW electrical windmill, which was awesome enough. That's why we'd gone to visit, anyway. Then he showed off the company's fleet of high-efficiency vehicles: two priuses, some other hybrid vehicle, an electric one, and, my personal favorite, a mark I diesel Volkswagen Golf converted to run on compressed natural gas (!).

tråkig läxa

This homework is so boring, it fills me with rage.

"Determine the principal values and principal directions of the symmetrix matrix ..."

I KNOW HOW TO FIND EIGENVECTORS DAMNIT.

the future

Countryside of southern Sweden. Skåne, Sverige. May 12, 2002.

In the early summer the Skåne, the southernmost region of Sweden, is brilliant yellow with the flowers of rapeseed. Rapeseed is grown for its seed. Its seed is desired for its oil. In the United States, rapeseed is better known as Canola, a particular variety invented (bred) in Canada; the name is a contraction of "Canadian oil, low acid". So what you see being grown here is cooking oil. But now a growing use of rapeseed oil is for conversion into biodiesel, to replace the nonrenewable petroleum-based diesel fuel used in cars and trucks. So what we really see here is a power plant. Wind Power. Solar Power. All wrapped into a sweeping, bucolic landscape that's nice to bicycle through.

One question I have about biodiesel is whether it could possibly be sustainable, in the following sense: is it even possible to grow enough plants to meet the demand for diesel fuels? Is it possible to do so while also feeding everyone, considering that the fuel oil crops will displace food crops? (I've read that there have been promising trials in using algae to produce biodiesel, which presumably wouldn't require so much arable land.)