Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
This is awesome news:
As the world’s first automobile manufacturer the inventor of “TDI” won with a diesel engine at the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans. The new Audi R10 TDI is powered by a completely new 5.5-litre, twelve-cylinder bi-turbo TDI engine which is extremely economical and quiet.
The Le Mans Prototype, with over 650 hp and more than 1100 Newton metres of torque, significantly exceeds the power produced by the majority of previous Audi racing cars; including that of its victorious R8 predecessor.
1100 Newton metres? Wow. Apparently the unprecedented power of a diesel race engine meant the transmission and gears had to be completely redesigned. Wonder what it’s fuel efficiency was relative to the gas engines?
CarList provides this insight:
One of the diesel engine’s biggest advantages is the low fuel consumption, especially at part-throttle and overrun. However, when compared to more classic circuits which demand a higher ratio of part throttle, the lower specific consumption will hardly be noticeable at Le Mans because the quota of full-throttle is almost 75 percent.
Well, that means effeciency is lower because of the style of driving, but when comparing apples-to-apples (the diesel racecar versus other racecars at 75 percent full-throttle) AS boss Dr Wolfgang Ullrich said the R10 will get several extra laps from a tank.
Audi revolutionized the modern engines in 1989 when it introduced the TDI design for diesel, as the TDI race site explains, and innovation has continued since then, spurred by government regulations:
Audi has constantly set new technical standards during the development of the TDI engines over the last 16-years. The current highlight is the Audi V8 4.2 TDI quattro with 326 hp and 650 Newton metres torque “one of the most powerful compression ignition engines found in a production limousine” and all this whilst complying with the EU 4 emission limits and with an average fuel consumption of 9.4 litres per 100 kilometres.
Can you find a US manufacturer with a similar success story? I can. They’re called Caterpillar and they too are innovating in response to government regulations:
As of the end of April, a total of 26 machine models are available! Each of these machines use Caterpillar engines with ACERT –Technology, the result of more than $500 million in research and development and more than 250 patents. The engines are compliant with the United States EPA Tier 3 emissions regulations governing off-road machines, which took effect January 1, 2005 for engines of 300 to 750 horsepower. Regulations for machines in the 175 to 300 horsepower range will take effect January 1, 2006.
If you think of regulations as a form of leadership based on moral conviction, then innovation is an obvious consequence, like landing a man on the moon.
Caterpillar engineers worked with approximately 125 variables to find the optimum balance. There are more than 10 million possible combustion combinations. Those engineers were challenged by the highly intertwined relationship of (1) reduced emissions, (2) engine performance, (3) fuel efficiency and (4) engine durability. Those are not necessarily complimentary objectives. Improving emissions, for example, can have an adverse effect on fuel efficiency. Their overriding goal is no different than the goal Caterpillar has had since its inception—to provide customers with the lowest owning and operating costs, and the lowest cost per unit of material moved.
Innovation is what Diesel always wanted for his engines, but Cat obscures the fact that reduced emissions is a direct result of government regulation that was spurred by scientific research and progressive groups who measured the external consquences of engine output.
Well, if I can’t convince Audi to ship me a new TDI, then maybe I’ll be driving a Cat soon. Or maybe I should wait for the Honda and Lexus diesel technology to arrive. What’s the matter with Detroit, or should I say Washington? Where are the American (bio)diesel passenger cars?
Edited to add: a Le Mans insider let me know that the TDI racecar engine is so quiet that you can barely hear it. While this offends some (traditionalists like the “roar”) I see it as another good sign. Why be noisy? Have you ever been in a major urban area without the noise of the automobile? Try it sometime (like early in the morning) and you’ll feel like you’re in a completely different (cleaner, healthier) city.
I was listening to a review of a new book about leisure and was amazed to hear that an author was trying to characterize the Beat generation as “lazy” by modern standards. Lazy? Unwilling to work? That’s a total misunderstanding of the social and economic situation in the post-Eisenhower north-eastern US.
Incidentally, this misunderstanding reminds me of the typical mistake made by dominant (conservative) groups when judging counter-culture movements.
Disenfranchisement and disappointment often turns young groups into non-believers. In other words, if you look carefully at Kerouac’s relationship with his family and his neighborhood, let alone the ethnic discrimination they experienced as French Canadians, you might just understand what it was like to take a walk in his shoes. Frustrated by a failure of your parents to improve their living after decades of back-breaking labor, and facing a lack of attractive opportunities, it seems a natural path to “drop-out” and seek experimentation/entrepreneurship/invention.
If you see a dead-end are you really going to charge forward with gusto? Even suicide bombers apparently have to believe in a rewarding afterlife to perform their illogical acts of self-destruction. Hope is a powerful thing, and prematurely or incorrectly judging someone lazy seriously undermine our ability to understand their hopelessness, or their hope to evade controls and achieve “unpredictability”.
The original punk movement had a similar economic theory, coupled with the more infamous social issues. They not only felt it was unreasonable to give in to a system that demanded their input but gave little or no reward, but they also rejected the notion that the individual should succumb to the predominant dress-code and behavior. The mohawk epitomizes the “you can try to ignore me and pretend that I don’t deserve your respect as a person if I look like the normal down-and-out kid, but this two foot pink mohawk demands your attention, no?”
So what can we take away from these movements? Certainly not that there are generations of kids who are “lazy” but rather that some amazing forms of innovation come from barriers to entry. More importantly, perhaps, is that if you do not anticipate the innovation (like a spillway supports a dam) you should not be surprised to see things spin “out of control”. Just because you don’t see/feel the barriers doesn’t mean they’re all around you, and so it’s best to find them, understand them, and help people prepare for them in a beneficial/supportive fashion.
Beat, but not down. For comparison, I often ponder another form of innovation in the late 1950s (finding self-awareness as opposed to challenging others’) epitomized by the Confessionals, like Sylvia Plath:
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
The Council on Foreign Relations has issued a report that has a stark warning for the White House. The authors say a dangerous precedent was set in the 2002 administration strategy, and it has therefore failed to establish a viable domestic (Homeland) security infrastructure:
The White House and Congress wrongly presume that market mechanisms on their own will provide sufficient incentives to provide the necessary level of security in the absence of decisive federal leadership and involvement. Security and safety are public goods whose provision is a core responsibility of government at all levels.
The report’s suggestion for a better path forward seem to be fairly straightforward. I mean when you include the phrase “as required by law” in your recommendations, you can hardly say anyone in government will be surprised to hear them:
- Quickly complete, as required by law, a national list of priorities for critical infrastructure. It is simply unacceptable that a list to guide federal spending and agency efforts does not yet exist.
- The White House and Congress need to stop talking about improving information sharing and hold government officials accountable for actually doing so. There is legitimate frustration among corporate security officers that talking with federal agencies is always a one-way street—companies generously give and barely receive.
- The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must strengthen the quality and experience of its personnel. One solution is for Congress to authorize the creation of a personnel exchange program that would allow industry experts and managers to take a leave of absence from their companies to serve in government while DHS employees work for companies in critical sectors.
- Congress and the administration should work closely with the private sector to establish security standards and implement and enforce regulations, especially in the chemical and transportation sectors where industry is seeking standards and regulations.
- Congress should establish targeted tax incentives to promote investments and rapid adoption of measures that will improve the resiliency of the highest risk industries.
“Stop talking about improving information sharing” is a funny and ironic point that belies a larger problem with the Bush administration. With a reputation for acting as though they are above or just craftily rewriting the laws to suit their purposes (e.g. Guantanamo) does Bush’s inner-circle of advisors think that their “free-market” approach to security has been effective anywhere in the world? Here is the write-up in the Wall Street Journal from 2003 regarding Iraq:
The Bush administration has drafted sweeping plans to remake Iraq’s economy in the U.S. image. Hoping to establish a free-market economy in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. is calling for the privatization of state-owned industries such as parts of the oil sector, forming a stock market complete with electronic trading and fundamental tax reform.
Execution of the plan — which is expected to be complicated and possibly contentious — will fall largely to private American contractors working alongside a smaller team of U.S. officials. The initial plans are laid out in a confidential 100-page U.S. contracting document titled “Moving The Iraqi Economy From Recovery to Sustainable Growth.” The consulting work could be valued at as much as $70 million for the first year.
[…]
For many conservatives, Iraq is now the test case for whether the U.S. can engender American-style free-market capitalism within the Arab world. In a February address, President Bush spoke of “a new Arab charter that champions internal reform, greater political participation, economic openness and free trade.” A new regime in Iraq, he said, “would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.”
Test case? It’s interesting to note that the article concludes with a warning from experts with real-world experience rebuilding Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR: “rapid privatization of state-run enterprises led to sharp disruptions in jobs and services, as well as rampant corruption”.