No Easy Answers

You must have been a good teacher in your day if you can  make me laugh about math after all these years. We had one like that at Gage Park, Mrs. Hradek. I think I mentioned her before but you didn't remember her. I especially liked the way you made the connection of long division with original sin. I never thought of it that way before, but what you said makes a lot of sense. Trig was suppose to make sense too, and I think it does if you stick to the practical trig like surveyors use, which is all I would have needed for forestry. Funny, I liked the theoretical side of geometry, but that part of trig left me cold.

I seem to remember that they did have a "trig machine" back in those days, the slide rule. I didn't have any luck with that either. There's something about small things close together that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around. It's not a vision thing, it has something to do with the way my brain processes information. If I drop a screw or other small piece of hardware on a variegated surface like grass or gravel, I usually can't find it. I know about where it should be, but I don't see it. My hypothetical wife, on the other hand, seems to have a natural talent for that sort of thing. If I can tell her what the object looks like, and about where I think it is, she sees it right away. Then, when she points it out to me, I can see it too. After I have seen it once, I can look away, look back at it, and it's still there. The hard part is seeing it the first time.

I wouldn't necessarily have had to work for the government if I had gone into forestry, I could also have worked for one of the big timber companies which, come to think of it, wouldn't have been all that different. I didn't find this out until later, but I could also have been a forestry consultant. Those guys typically work for a university extension service, but they can also set up a private practice. What they do is evaluate a private forest and advise the owner how to manage it. They can also assist with timber sales and things like that. I met a couple of guys like that at a forestry seminar for small land owners, and they seemed like interesting people. One of them came out and looked at my place, although that particular one did work for a commercial operation, I think it was Georgia Pacific. It was from him that I learned that the timber on my property has little or no commercial value, but that it would provide me with hobby work for the rest of my life.

When I said that the hydrogen was consumed, I didn't mean destroyed, I just meant that it got used up and you had to refill the tank, just like you do with regular gasoline or diesel fuel. The reason I said that was because you had said that hydrogen fuel cells didn't really produce energy, they just converted it from one form  to another. Now that I think of it, all forms of energy are like that. Electricity generation converts mechanical energy into electricity, and a gas engine converts heat energy into mechanical energy. So what was your point?

Getting back to the bio fuels: You mentioned, and I have heard before, that it takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn than it takes to produce gasoline from crude oil. While that may be true, it always takes some kind of energy to produce any kind of energy. While the production of ethanol might not be as efficient as the production of gasoline, if you made enough of it you could start using ethanol instead of petroleum products to produce more ethanol. Even if it's not that efficient, it would get you away from the fossil fuels into a renewable, and thus sustainable, energy source. Well, carbon is still carbon, but this way you would be recycling the same carbon over and over again instead of releasing carbon that has been sequestered for millions of years.

That's kind of what I'm doing heating my house with wood. The carbon goes up the chimney into the atmosphere but, next summer, the trees that are still growing will suck the carbon back out of the air. Since the trees are growing faster than I am burning them up, my carbon footprint is negative, at least as far as home heating is concerned. I once considered generating my own electricity with a wood burning boiler, but I didn't know what I would do with the excess heat in the summer. Anyway, I sent away for a catalogue, and it would cost more to set up the system than it cost to buy the whole house in the first place. I suppose that, if burning wood was all that efficient, everybody would be doing it, and we would eventually run out of trees. You know, I'm beginning to think that this energy thing, like the poverty thing, is more complicated than it appears at first glance.