Driving tips

After driving vehicles for a number of years, there are some things that I think are worth passing on.

Look ahead!  Watch what is happening down the road a bit, don’t just stare at what is right in front of you.  Be observant of people waiting to turn left, so that you don’t get trapped behind them.  Watch for emergency vehicles, pedestrians, people backing out of driveways, anything that might affect traffic flow.  By being alert to what is ahead, you can avoid surprises and unnecessary delays.

Try not to get ‘boxed in’, where you have vehicles in front of you, beside you, and behind you.  Try to keep an escape path clear if something were to happen in front of you.

Don’t stop!  Well, sometimes you have to, but on many occasions, you can avoid coming to a complete stop.  Why?  Because starting from a complete stop requires more energy than accelerating from a crawl.  Plus, it puts more wear on the vehicle.  If you are coming up on a red light, slow down before you are up to the waiting traffic, then roll forward slowly.  At a stop sign, slow right down, look both ways, TWICE, then move through if clear.  You will not be stopped by the police for failure to stop if it looks like you came to a stop.

When the roadway is really rough, drive at the edge of the lane.  Try to stay out of the ‘ruts’, the most heavily traveled part of the lane, because the ride is rougher, you will have more resistance to changing direction, and hydroplaning during rain is more likely.

When you are driving in winter conditions, avoid the black part of the lane when slowing down, because it might be glare ice.  If you are having trouble stopping, try to get onto less firmly packed snow and ice.  Slow down well before you need to stop or turn, so that you are less likely to lose traction.

If you are driving a vehicle with automatic overdrive, switch it off in town.  It will try to engage at even 20 miles per hour, resulting in delays before accelerator pedal input takes effect, deposits building up in your engine, and reduced mileage after a while.  When you come to hill on the interstate, shift out of overdrive before you start up the grade, so that your engine will be turning over faster when the load increases.

If you are starting out from a stop sign or signal, turning right onto another roadway, look for pedestrians and bicycles before giving it the gas.

If you are on a hill, at an intersection, apply the handbrake to hold the car, then give it gas until the engine starts to lug down and release the brake.  This will prevent the vehicle from rolling backwards.

When stopping a vehicle with an automatic transmission on slick roadways, put the transmission in ‘neutral’.  The engine is trying to keep the wheels turning whenever the transmission is in ‘Drive’, and vehicles with lots of power accessories often have the idle set very high.  But all vehicles with automatics will be easier to stop if the transmission is in ‘neutral.’

Shift down going up steep hills.  Many automatic transmissions will not downshift until the engine is lugging badly, which is bad for it.  If it is a long, steep hill, turn off the air conditioning, as it puts additional load on the engine.  If you are having problems with the engine overheating, turn the heat up all the way, and crank the fan to the highest setting.  The heater will help to cool the engine.

Learn how to stop the vehicle with the emergency brake, by holding the button on the hand brake, or pulling out the handle for the parking brake while engaging the brake.  This is a back up system to the regular braking system, which will work even if you rupture a brake line and lose all the brake fluid, or if the engine stalls and you lose the power assist.  You must be careful that the brake does not lock in the ‘on’ position, so that is why you depress the button on the hand brake, or pull the handle out for the foot brake.

Check your mirrors every few seconds.  It is important to know what is going on around you.  If you are stopped in traffic waiting for someone to turn or to back out, watch your mirror.  If you see someone coming up behind you who does not look like they are going to stop, put your head back against the head rest, and get ready to stand on the gas.  Having your vehicle moving 1 mile per hour at impact will lessen the shock as compared to being at a standing stop.

Turn your lights on when driving on the highway.  It makes it much easier for others to see you.

Don’t drive with your left foot on the brake pedal.  You can brake with your left foot all you want, but driving with your foot on the pedal often results in your brake lights being on all the time, because the switch that turns them on activates after the pedal is depressed the slightest amount.  Having your brake lights on all the time is like having no brake lights at all:  People can’t tell that you are slowing down, and rear end you.  And it will be your fault.

Leave plenty of room between you and the car in front of you.  You may have superhuman reactions, but even they won’t help you if you are following too closely.  Back off, and watch what is going on in front of the car in front of you.

That is enough for now, I think.

 

Halloween plans?

Probably, if you intend on celebrating Halloween, you are making your plans.  What costume to wear, which party to go to, how you are going to get home, that sort of thing.  But there is another way of celebrating this strange pagan holiday, one which is much older than costume parties, Trick or Treating, and drunken brawls.

This is a good time to remember those who have passed on, the parents, grandparents, old friend, trusted advisor.  All about us, here in the Northern Hemisphere,  Autumn is taking hold, and the Life Force is withdrawing from the land.  So it is natural to think of the dead at this time of year, to remember them to others, to refresh our own memories, by reading letters, looking at pictures, listening to music.  Tell your children about your grandma, or uncle, and the things that you remember them doing.

And celebrate the fact that Nature is balanced, that there is some force which counter acts the incredible drive of the Life Force.  Because, without Death, there would be no room for new life, nothing for living things to eat, no change to make way for new, and possibly better, adaptations, mutations.

To many ancient people, this was the end of the year, when every thing hibernated, or became dormant, or just plain died, leaving behind eggs, or seeds, to great the next Spring.  This was a time of conservation of resources, because the long climb to when there will be food around is just beginning, with many months to survive.  After Halloween, people stayed indoors, and spent the few hours of light working on handicrafts, and thinking about the people that they loved, living and dead.

If you don’t feel inclined to go out drinking, or attending some huge costume party, remember that there are other ways of celebrating this ancient and strange (to us) holiday.

Midsummer Night’s Eve

We are just a few days away from the Summer Solstice.  June 21st marks the beginning of Summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and the longest day of the year.  This was one of the ancient sabbats, or celebrations, on the Wheel of the Year.  Because there is little work to do in the fields, and it is too early to harvest most things, people had time on their hands.  The weather was generally mild, so traveling was easy.  Thus, many towns had fairs or festivals, with vendors from distant lands selling exotic goods, and everyone had something to trade.

Soon, the days will begin getting shorter, even though Summer has just begun.  We are reminded of the natural cycles of Nature, which humans used to celebrate with each other.

Building a bridge to the other side of the sky

Way back in the 1960’s, the engineers at NASA realized that throwing away a huge rocket every time that they sent something or someone into space was poor publicity.  So they set about designing a reusable space craft, one that could land like an airplane at a regular airport.  The concept became known as the shuttle, or the Space Shuttle, and it was to be the next big step in space exploration.  The original design was very elegant, two vehicles that were very specialized.  One was a giant carrier wing, which would haul the orbiter on its back up to about 50,000 feet.  The orbiter was designed to reach an altitude of about 180 miles, where it could meet with true space craft, the kind that can never enter atmosphere.

This design was focused on making access to space routine, with launches that did not require complete perfection in every detail, and huge numbers of people.  Because the vehicle did not launch straight up, there were ways of aborting the launch that made safety possible without multiple redundancy in every system.  Going into space was to become as commonplace as flying across the country, which would bring the cost of sending mass into orbit down substantially.

Of course, all of this never happened.  The shuttle became victim of endless compromises and design changes, until it bore practically no resemblance to what had been originally proposed.  Launching straight up was selected over horizontal launching, an external tank had to be added, and booster rockets to lift the external tank.  The only part of the design to survive was the spaceplane configuration, so that the vehicle could land on a runway.

Instead of building a better shuttle to replace the one that we have, we are going to take a huge step backward, and build a step-rocket, which will be thrown away each launch.  And the vehicle will launch straight up, with all of the demands that it requires.  Even landing might have to be done the old fashioned way, in the ocean, which means Navy task forces being on station for days, waiting for a capsule to fall out of the sky.

The Russians already build a very good step rocket, which has been proven time and again.  Instead of duplicating that capability, I believe that we should spend our money on designing the space shuttle that NASA originally wanted, a horizontally-launched, two stage to orbit system with a fly-back carrier wing as the first stage, and an aerospaceplane as the second.  While that is being developed, we can hire the Russians to haul us into space.

Technologies not available in the 1960’s and 70’s would make it possible to build the carrier wing and the orbiter out of composite materials, which would make them lighter and stronger than was possible before.  These vehicles would be just for carrying people into space, not big loads of cargo.  That can still ride on old-fashioned rockets, at least for the time being.  If they don’t have to be man rated, rockets can be built fairly cheaply, especially if they are mass produced.

We currently have the most advanced space craft in the world.  Replacing it with a less advanced technology does not make any sense, when the only way to cut the cost of getting into space is to use the most advanced technologies.  As long as it takes hundreds of people and perfect weather to launch space craft, it will never become sustainable.

The dance changes tempo

So far, I am not aware of anyone acknowledging the fundamental problem behind our current economic woes;  We can no longer sustain the level of consumption that we have become used to.   Between the price of many commodities going up, and home values declining, we have to spend more than we earn to live in great luxury.  Yes, luxury.

We drive ourselves around in our own cars, so that we don’t have to be close to strangers.  Many of us stand under a shower of warm water for several minutes every day.  The lights always will come on when we flick the switch, there are no open sewers running near our schools, and the water coming out of the tap is fairly safe to drink, even though it became fashionable during the Age Of Excess to only drink bottled water.  The telephones almost always work, and most people fly on airplanes when they have to go somewhere.

By the standards of most of the world, these things are great luxuries, which even the wealthy cannot always afford, because they simply don’t exist in some places.  Yet we often consider them to be ‘rights’, which cannot be infringed upon.  We have the ‘right’ to drive our own car somewhere if we want to.  But there is nothing that says that we have the ‘right’ to gasoline whenever we want to go somewhere.  If we can pay for the fuel, fine.  But what if we can’t?

The costs of energy are rising, and not simply because of demand.  Generating plants are becoming harder and harder to get permits for, the grid that transmits the energy that is generated to where it is needed is on the verge of overload, and we need a whole bunch of new lines to move wind power to where it can be used.  Crude oil is no longer found by drilling a few thousand feet in sandy soil.  Extracting it can mean working in thousands of feet of water, and penetrating the Earth’s crust with holes several miles deep is becoming common as we search for new supplies of oil.

For our society to become economically sustainable, consumption of energy has got to be reduced considerably, possibly 50 percent.  That sounds like a huge undertaking, but we are so inefficient in how we use energy that it would be fairly straight forward.  The majority of structures in this country are poorly, if at all, insulated.  Simply bringing every building up to the highest possible level of insulation would result in huge savings,  as would putting solar panels on every roof.

But the automobile is the biggest culprit, and there is simply no way to make it cheap to push around a whole bunch of metal and plastic so that one person can risk their life to get where they want to go by themselves.  We will always have cars, but we will no longer use them all the time.  Instead, we are going to have to get used to riding public transportation when we are commuting to work or school.  But we will still be able to go where we want, when we want, when we can afford it.

If we can make what we already own more valuable by making it more energy efficient, we have invested our money into something that will create wealth, or money, as long as it is used.  But this wealth will be diffused through the economy, instead of being concentrated in the hands of a few, which might be why there is such resistance to changing the consumption of energy dramatically.  The oil companies will not make huge profits if we all start riding transit to work or school.

This will be a drastic change in the American lifestyle, but we are facing something worse than War.  We are dealing with the consequences of unbridled Greed getting its way for too long.  A lot of money was made, but the value of money is coming into question, because so much has been ‘made’ that just disappeared all of a sudden.  Real wealth is the kind that everyone benefits from, and which won’t just go away.  A bridge, a rapid transit system, a fiber optic network, insulation in every building, these are things that make all of us wealthier.

How do they do it?

Sometimes, I wonder how womyn cope.  Not only do they have to deal with all the things that Nature throws at them, like constantly changing bodies, recurring pain, and the menses, but they also have to deal with our society’s demands.  Unless boys are severely overweight, they usually don’t have many problems with body image.  For girls, their body image is about the most important thing in the world.

Being slim and well proportioned are often mutually exclusive, because breasts will not be large if the body has little fat.  But the hourglass figure is the ideal of nearly all young womyn, and plastic surgery while still a teenager is considered acceptable to enhance what Nature provides.  That cost is miniscule in comparision to what womyn spend on make-up over the course of their lives.  The so-called ‘beauty’ industry is a multi-billion dollar-a-year rip off, leading people to believe that beauty is only skin deep.

And womyn have to pay for those enhancing products from salaries that are usually smaller than men’s.  Not only that, but they are often expected to wear clothing that must be dry cleaned, an expense that is not compensated for in their wages.  Neither are manicures and hair-dos, both of which are considered essential for any management-level womyn.

Although one might think so, having a partner does not usually reduce the workload that womyn must carry.  In fact, a mate often adds more work to the daily routine of womyn.  And men rarely have to deal with age bias, being considered a marketable product well into their 60’s in professions where they appear in front of the public.  For womyn, age 40 often brings removal from the public eye, to be replaced by a 20-something with no experience.

Womyn surely must the stronger gender, because they have to deal so many more things than men.  Although great strides have been made in improving their lot, womyn still have a long way to go to achieve equality, and one of the most difficult challenges is to get men to change.  Becoming a female man does not mean equality, it only emphasizes the descrimination.  Getting men to express their feminine side is likely the only way that true equality will be achieved.  Any bets on how long that will take?

Why we need to get off of this planet

A lot of people think of space exploration as something which is done just for scientific research, without any relevance to their lives.  I have come to the belief that getting off of this planet is crucial to saving it.  Not from anything that we will bring back from space, but because of the change in people’s world view.

Even though I understand that the Earth is a small planet, dashing around the Sun at 66,000 miles per hour, it is hard not to think of the Earth as being endless, infinite, impossible to use up or to change significantly, no matter what we do.  Why is it hard not to think that way?  Because there is no other place in existence right now, where people live and work, and things happen that might be important to me, whether it be my girlfriend working up there or the discovery of diamonds in large quantities.

There is only one body in the Solar System that could be used to alter the human race’s perceptions about where it lives, and that is the Earth’s moon, Selene.  The Moon is the only place in all of space that looks like a place, because it has visible features, and it is not just a speck of light.  To know that there were people up on that disk in the sky would have a profound impact on most people’s thinking, I believe, because it will force them to accept that there really is someplace other than Earth.

This will be a form of evolution, I believe, because it will have substantial effects on our behavior.  Once the knowledge that we are all together on a little piece of rock hurtling through emptiness sinks in, how we treat each other is very likely to change from suspicion and fear to acceptance and trust.  The idea that we can expel billions of tons of materials into the atmosphere, year after year, with no effect whatsoever will become harder and harder to defend.  Sure, a volcano can dump hundreds, even thousands of times what we do into the atmosphere in one eruption, but there are not major eruptions every single year, year in, year out.

A sense of community never before experienced will begin to spread through the race, as we all realize that we are crew on Spaceship Earth, and that we all have a responsibility to each other to take care of the ship.  This is the only place in all that we can see, and we can see a long ways away, where we know that we can live unprotected by advanced technology.  (Some people would consider central heating and insulation to be pretty advanced technology.)  This is the only place where we can walk naked under the open sky, if we have the guts to do it, without freezing solid in a matter of seconds, being burned into a grease spot in a matter of minutes, or dissolving in an atmosphere of corrosive acid.

This is home, folks, for all of us, and if we mess it up, we have no where else to go.  The only way to get people to understand that is to go somewhere else, and show people that there is somewhere else.  Many intelligent people I have met have been amazed to learn that the Sun is a star, just seen close up.  All those little lights in the sky, except for 6 of them, are suns, which are just very, very far away.  The other six are Selene, Earth’s moon, and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  (Don’t quibble, you’ll just confuse things!)

Selene is the only one which is not  millions of miles away, which is why it is a visible disk, with surface features that we can see.  Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. is not very much larger than the Moon, and there are moons of Jupiter and Saturn which are bigger than Mercury.  But they are all very far away, if not in terms of distance, than in terms of how long it takes to get there.  Because the Moon is so close, we can get there in a matter of days.  Anywhere else is going to take months, or even years, at our current level of technology.

So I think that we need to get off of Earth in order to save it, and the only place that we can go where people will be able to conceive of it being another place is Selene, the Earth’s moon, because it is so close we can see it as a visible disk, with features.  If we succeed in saving the Earth by going to the Moon, than we will succeed in going anywhere in the Solar System that we want to, because we will mature enough to learn how.

We never saw the Earth until we left it, and we will never think of Earth as a place, just like other places, until we leave it.  If we cannot visualize the Earth as a limited, finite place, we are very likely to make it impossible to live here, because of our innate greed and desire for comfort.

Time to celebrate

If you live in the northern latitudes, you are probably noticing that the days are getting a little longer now.  It is only a few minutes difference from the time of the Winter Solstice, but it is more apparent now, after a few weeks.  This is what the Yule Tide celebration is all about, the light returning, bringing hope to people who face months of cold and hunger.

We can barely imagine today what it must have been like for our ancestors, who did not have Gortex or Thinsulate, who did not have windows with glass in them, and who did not have central heating.  Winter was one of the greatest enemies that our fore bearers faced, with its cold, and lack of food.  Even today, Winter can kill, but for people huddled around a primitive fireplace, with only furs to keep warm, freezing to death was a distinct possibility.  And hunger was a constant companion, because food had to last until more could be found.

This winter, freezing to death is not a likely end for most people in the United States, but the economy is bound up in ice.  And the sad part is, everybody wants things to go back to the way that they used to be, in spite of the excesses and greed that brought about the problems that we face now.  We are so addicted to material, worldly wealth that we don’t know how to cope without it.

Credit was almost unherad of just 100 years ago.  If a company could not afford to buy new equipment, it had to make do with what it had.  If people needed to buy a home, they had to put up most of the money.  Cars were bought for cash, and the government did not spend more than it had.  We have forgotten those times, aided by people who grew fat off of lending money out.  Now, we all want those days of quick and easy credit to come back, to make our lives easier again.

Instead, we are going to have to learn to live without credit, without the benefits of borrowing money at the drop of a hat. We have borrowed so much that it is going to take us years to pay off our debt.  In the meantime, we are going to have to get by with what we have, unless we can manage to save up enough to buy what we need.

In a time when hardship becomes widespread, and just about everybody is having to do without something which they really need, we would do well to cultivate the kind of wealth which cannot be taken away from us.  Spiritual wealth is all around us, in the willingness of a friend to help us out, or the outpouring of support from a community for a family suffering homelessness.  This has nothing to do with religion, or faith, but is the simple belief in one another that enabled the human race to rise above hunting animals and gathering grubs for sustenance.

The Yule Tide was a time of spiritual renewal, when people gathered together to share what they had, so that all would survive the winter.  We must learn from our ancestors the lessons of spiritual credit, of believing in one another.

What is that?

Even though most people pay little or no attention to the night sky, it is possible to be startled by a sight that can defy explanation.  A brillant object, sometimes even brighter than Venus, can be observed moving swiftly across the heavens.  It is not always visible, and disappears for weeks at a time, but, for as long as two weeks, it can be seen at least once a day, and often twice.  The first time I saw it, it freaked me out, because I could not imagine what I was seeing.  Since then, it has grown considerably, and I have seen it when it is quite brilliant.

What am I talking about?  The International Space Station.  Our outpost in the new frontier, 280 miles above the surface of the Earth, traveling at 17,500 miles per hour.  Right now, there are three people living up there, learning how to survive and be productive in an environment that is totally alien to humans.  They are the pioneers, breaking trail for the rest of us, making the first crude discoveries in the realm that we call outer space.

120 miles above our heads, no matter where we live, the Earth comes to an end, and space begins.  That is the altitude where we can orbit our home planet without immediately falling back to Earth.  That is the altitude where the atmosphere is so thin that it is hardly more than a good vacuum.  Earth is a speck of dust, hurtling through the emptiness, as it goes around and around the star that we call the Sun.  No where in all that we can see is there any place like Earth, although some people want to believe that Mars could be made into another planet where we could walk unprotected under the open sky.  If such a thing is to happen, it will be long after anyone alive now has passed on.

Most of what is out there is emptiness, bathed in powerful radiation, with no noticable gravity.  A hostile realm, where temperatures of 450 degrees exist only inches away from minus 250 degrees.  Whatever is in the sun gets hot very quickly, while whatever is in the shade loses it heat very quickly.  Practically limitless energy is there for the taking, as well as mineral resources that we use here on Earth.  Everything that we have here exists out there, except a gentle environment.  That we have to create ourselves.  Learning how to do so reliably is one of the goals of the multi-national program that maintains the ISS.

Hopefully, we will learn how to master this new frontier before we use up or destroy the only home that we have, the planet Earth.  For the resources of the Earth are finite, limited.  As more and more people enjoy a higher standard of living, the planet suffers greater and greater wounds.  Soon, there will be 9 billion of us here on Earth, competing for a slice of a pie that is getting no bigger.  Unless we begin to expand our sphere of activities off planet, that pie is doomed to shrink, not grow larger.

This is why the ISS is so important, because there the first steps are being taken to teach us how to live on other worlds, or in the vast emptiness between those worlds.  The only way that we can protect our home while still enjoying a standard of living like the one we do know is to expand beyond the confines of this one world, and begin using the resources of our Solar System.  Everything that we will need for any conceivable length of time exists out there, waiting for someome to come along and pick it up.

The biggest pyramid scheme ever!

Have you ever heard of a ‘pyramid scheme’?  One of those ‘get rich quick’ scams that work as long as new people keep entering the system at the bottom, pouring in cash, which is used to pay the upper echelons, instead of buying product, paying bills, or whatever.  The United States economy is starting to look like a pyramid scheme that is going bust, because the steady inflow of cash has finally come to an end, and people are demanding their money back right and left.  Where did the idea that investing is risk free come from, by the way?  When strategies involving billions of dollars have absolutely no provision for a downside, for shrinkage, for deflation, doesn’t that practically guarantee that the strategy is going to implode at some point?

Money that was owed people was lent out again, or put into a stock, in the hopes that it could make even more profit before it was paid back.  That can work once in a while, but when it is a constant practice, the bottom will fall out.  Investment used to be done with long-term goals, and no expectation of immediate returns.  Nowadays, Greed wants big payoffs the moment it lets go of its money, perhaps because there were so many positions to cover, and not enough cash.  And Greed will always try to cover itself before worrying about anybody else, even if that means pushing the whole system under.

As long as lots of cash was flowing through the system, the shaky deals, the hidden payoffs, the transactions kept off the books could all continue without much fear.  There was always somewhere to get the cash from on short notice to cover a position for a little while.  But with no cash available, there are so many positions being left open that the shell game is no longer possible.  Merely inflating the value of some transaction is no longer enough to offset the payouts that have to be made.  We have made so much money that we don’t have any anymore, because it was mostly an illusion.

There has been no fundamental or significant change in the means of production, the cost of materials, the productivity of labor, or the margin of profit, yet, somehow, a whole bunch of companies suddenly became worth a lot more.  We were counting the same dollar over and over again, pretending that each one was real.  Greed became the driving force in the financial markets, overshadowing sensible growth, honest returns, and sustainable profits.  For a little while, a small number of people made out like bandits.  But now, the rest of us are going to have to pay over and over again for the profits of a few.