AMD buys BIODIESEL, Speech UNrecognition, Tame Congress-Tell the Party-NoVote-NoSupport

How do You spell BIG in Biodiesel?

In case you didn´t notice, "growing" energy is just another form of agriculture (even if it´s actually "aquaculture"). And who is BIG in agriculture? Yup, same players as usual. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) which has businesses in 60 countries and annual sales exceeding US$69 BILLION, recently announced that they were acquiring an oilseed processing plant in the Czech Republic. The description of the plant in Olomouc, Czech Republic is that it is, "an oilseed crushing, refining and biodiesel plant that produces oil and meal for the food, feed and energy markets," according to the FoxBusiness article that carried the news. If you needed any clarification on the business encompassing biodiesel as a general rule, the company capsule description in the press release also contains the phrase, "products for food, animal feed, chemical and energy uses." The fact that ADM is not yet the size of ExxonMobil doesn´t mean it will remain so as the energy commodities of the future shift.

All of which leads me to a contrarian (or at least relatively skeptical) view of a recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) (funded by governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations, most of which are members of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). Their conclusions include that despite over increases in rainfall, that climate changes will likely result in both, "short-run crop failures and long-run production declines" because of changes in precipitation patterns. While, admittedly, you can have more rain in the form of typhoons and hurricanes that dump most of their moisture content out at sea, and still have long term and severe droughts like those in parts of Texas, these predictions run for over 40 years, which is to say that they project these events as far away as 2050. They also call for what they term, "massive" additional investments to offset the effects of these changes to the extent of, "aggressive agricultural productivity investments of US$7.1–7.3 billion are needed to raise calorie consumption enough to offset the negative impacts of climate change on the health and well-being of children." Obviously they are not talking about American children, whose calorie problem is that they are consuming too many for the lack of physical activity they engage in, and thus are falling more and more into the obese and morbidly obese categories before they graduate from high school. But clearly their assumptions must be flawed in a number of ways.

Not that I have become so blasé about money as to think that a "mere" billion is pocket change, but by the same token, when considering items of worldwide scope, US$7 billion seems less than adequate to face down the problem. It is, as we have just seen, merely 10% of the annual sales of ADM alone. If the problem is real and worldwide then the cumulative financial clout of all the world´s nations should deliver a heavier blow. US$7 billion might be a good start on a few clean water projects, but hardly enough to solve child hunger that is being swelled by climate change, if, indeed their dire projections are correct in the first place. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, assuming that in all of 40 years, yet to come, the entire world will neglect and ignore the problems of climate change, fail to adapt to changes in weather patterns, and fail to respond to issues of world hunger, especially in light of the recent upturn in "hope" and world cooperation as noted and emphasized by the choice of President Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize of 2009, is to take an unnecessarily dark view of possible outcomes.

Taming the Wild Consumer

The problem with any marketing situation is that you either have to have a product that conforms to the way your customer wants it to work, or is used to it working, or you aren´t going to have a massive wave of consumers beating a path to your door. It is NOT true that, "If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door." I can build a better mousetrap that kills the mouse by microwave, cooks it to the point where it is nothing but ash, and never has to be emptied, so no messy mouse corpses are faced by squeamish housewives (or become playthings for rambunctious rugrats). But will that be a hit product being unwrapped at this holiday gift giving bonanza? Not likely. It will be a forgotten patent gathering dust on the USPTO shelves for decades to come. Consumers don´t want to have to plug-in their mousetraps, they want to be able to put them "anywhere", and they are frankly rather unlikely to find the smell of roasted rats and mice a savory enhancement to mealtime odors.

The point of all of that is not that my imaginary mousetrap is actually a superior design, but rather that I have several products designed to be a method of capturing input from my voice and turn it into text on this computer. My problem is that no matter how fast the computer, no matter how much capacity the RAM chips have, no matter the operating system it never seems to get "good enough" to be worth the trouble. The "trouble" in my case at least, and therefore I suspect that some version of this is true for many of us, is that I can´t have my computing the way I like it, and have my voice recognition work too. I´ve been using voice hardware and software since the early 1980´s. Hoping to make my reputation as a computer consultant and quite likely my fortune as well, I took on a project to apply voice recognition to a plain old IBM PC-XT (actually this was an IBM clone built by Mitsubishi) that ran at a mere 8 Megahertz, had a grand TOTAL of 640 kilobytes of RAM and ran under a DOS operating system (actually I was using a version of DOS called "DoubleDOS", which actually allowed for two tasks to run in partitions of that 640K of RAM, which was very advanced and sophisticated for the time). The opportunity was HUGE, voice recognition for entry of Chinese ideographic characters on the PC screen (there was no simple keyboard method of entry at that time, it took up to 10 keystrokes to enter a single character). There were already systems for "word recognition" in English, but although "my" system might have worked perfectly well switching from "graphics" mode in and out of "character mode" of video display (in monochrome), it would have taken a patent violation to allow the Chinese character video cards to do what they needed to do in order for it to work. My result was 6 months of hard work and a modest investment down the drain. But the point was that with that comparatively crude operating system and extremely modest (by today´s standards) hardware, voice recognition was possible on a PC system 24 years ago. Yet, today, I still want all my multitasking, multi-windowing software running on my 64bit dual core Intel processor running a 2.8 gigahertz with a gigabyte of RAM, and it still takes several minutes to load the software on startup, and then it contends with my VOIP software over control of speakers and microphone, interferes with the MS WORD keyboard handler (and my keyboard shortcut handler) and still gets about 4% errors. Then all of those misrecognized items have to be corrected manually because the system so often fails to recognize its own error correction commands.

If that sounds like "whining", that is because it IS the sound of whining. I could use this software very nicely if I was willing to give up the computing environment I have evolved into expecting from today´s personal computer. If I was to, for instance, drop all other programs and multi-window quick switching, avoid loading the communications software, and use a simper word processing program like Wordpad or Notepad (with the contents to be later transferred to MS WORD, or OpenOffice Writer for grammar checking and spell checking) it could work with a high degree of accuracy for me. I am just not willing to go that far to get the software to do the job.

Maybe voice recognition software has to go through yet another generation to achieve the speed of execution necessary, and the compactness of operations before it will be "ready-for-prime-time" computing. Or maybe it just needs better packaging. No, not a better box, or manual, I mean "packaging" it in RAM. If the whole think loaded and ran from a "RAM disk" (actually a high speed "thumb drive" USB drive) and developed a better method of arbitrating "who" has input control priority, the voice input or the word processor´s spelling/grammar correction, it just might finally get there. [Are you listening Ray?]

Sometimes You´ve just GOT to DO THE WORK

You have no doubt heard by now that President Barack Hussein Obama has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Some say it is premature, that tangible results have not yet been achieved, but the Nobel Prize Committee says that he has already been an inspiration toward nuclear disarmament, and more peaceful relations between Western and Muslim nations. The change in "tone" alone in international relations has been fairly remarkable, and worthy, they think, and I think, of this acknowledgement.

But my story of voice recognition software making little if any progress in the last 25 years, despite even my own efforts, is intended as a cautionary tale that expecting someone else to "fix it", is not sufficient for something that it really important to you. In this case I am referring to the legislative crisis in the areas of both healthcare insurance reform (and medical tort reform) and in energy legislation as well. It is not enough to merely place these matters in the hands of our elected representatives (in the general sense, meaning both representatives in the House and our senators in the Senate). Too many of them are putting their own self-interest ahead of the interest of their constituents. In many cases they have seen, or hope to see, more support from the healthcare industry directly into their re-election campaigns than from the voters (or certainly than from any one voter). At this time, as I said in an email to the White House this week, it is time to bring to bear on those Democratic Party members of both House and Senate who are opposing the "public option", the one element that will FORCE health insurers to compete on price and to hold healthcare costs down, the full weight of the Democratic Party, itself. That is to say, that even though the party also benefits from contributions from healthcare sources in financing the re-election efforts across the country, they can also threaten to withhold both organizational (bodies) and financial (dollars) support from any would-be candidate in the future who did not support the best interests of the people of America by supporting the "public option" in the Obama guided healthcare insurance reform legislation (in both houses). If the incumbent members think they can finance their campaigns on healthcare company contributions alone, without support from their local party, they will doubtless be sorely surprised.

Therefore, I urge anyone reading this to not only write, call and email your federal representatives, but also to contact your local party leadership, the behind-the-scenes folks who run the Democratic Party organizations and offices in your area, and suggest to them that they insist that your representatives "get in line" with the President´s plan for a truly non-for-profit healthcare insurance program. Without it most of the rest of healthcare reform will be just more hot air in the Washington weather report.

Biodiesel "In" in Flint?

The Flint Journal, a Flint, MI newspaper reports biodiesel may help rescue "Buick City" the long abandoned General Motors Buick plant in Flint. Although it also has some issues with ground contamination liability which has yet to be resolved (remember, GM went through bankruptcy recently so I probably is not going to be held liable for prior bad deeds in the pollution of the site) about 200 acres of the massive plant that used to employ some 20,000 autoworkers may become a transfer point from rail to truck (and vice versa). That transition, in itself, is a step in the right direction in terms of the "energy efficiency" efforts of the federal government´s energy policy. Hauling freight (even with the weight of containers or "truck-tainers"/truck trailers) via rail is significantly more fuel efficient than on-road freight. Secondary investors are proposing to also make it a major shipping venue for soybeans and soy products, including processing soybean oil into biodiesel. (For that matter, of course, biodiesel could provide some or all of the fuel for the locomotives involved.) Considering that the initial investors seem to have about US$25 million in equity lined up to invest in the project, and that the Flint Journal reports that EPA estimates are in the range of US$19.5 million in site cleanup costs, there are still some significant hurdles to overcome. But I am reporting this partly because it is exactly the kind of multi-faceted, self-reinforcement of integration of purposes and industries that needs more thought and more effort everywhere. Let´s look at just a couple of the steps a little closer to illustrate my point.

Michigan´s second largest industry (as you may not know, I didn´t) after autos is its agriculture. Some 2 million acres or more of soybeans are grown in Michigan each year. Short of building some exotic "pipeline" to collect the soybeans from the fields, some trucking is necessary, but getting that into larger bulk than single trucks is an immediate economy of scale on fuel. Exports can, easily enough go via the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway to anywhere in the world. Domestic uses, however, might have to go via truck the entire journey if not consolidated in a rail-to-truck transfer point. But in this instance, not only does the transfer point become the end-point of transport for soy processing into meal, but also the oil that becomes biodiesel (or salad oil) has arrived at a bulk shipping point as well. Further reducing the carbon footprint of the transportation (over and above not delivering soy to a pressing plant then moving the oil to a separate biodiesel processor), bulk shipping of biodiesel via rail is again more economical than if by road, but even better if one of the major consumers is the railroad itself, such that again the transportation from maker to end-user has a zero carbon footprint as far as diesel fuel used by the locomotives is concerned. It is a small step. It is a small percentage saving, but if we all take into consideration matters like this whenever possible the net result can be huge and hugely important in making and keeping biofuels economically competitive and even attractive.

Stay Off the Crank

In the last few years one of those "breed" of action hero movie stars has distinguished himself above most. Okay, there have been a couple, not including Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (although he does have a certain charm in comedic roles), but definitely including John Cena (star of "The Marine" who is actually an actor of some subtlety. But the one who has generally attracted my attention because he usually delivers a hour or two of action entertainment is Jason Statham who came to prominence, largely, from his starring role in The Transporter, but reinforced the following year through his role in the major studio release of The Italian Job. Our lad has been busy, appearing in some 18 films in the last 7 years but one to avoid is Crank 2: High Voltage. It´s first 15 minutes are filled with action all right, but the attitude of the film makers toward women, Asians, Mexicans are just distasteful beyond tasteless. It is filled with gratuitous violence, which was to be expected in this type of film but even though the utter implausibility of the plot premise (whatever it really was) in which some low-life replaces Statham´s character´s heart with an artificial one with a faulty (plus he smashes it up a bit) and short lived power supply necessitating another fever paced action plot, just might have risen to the level of mildly entertaining, it didn´t. Actually Crank was pretty much just as bad but by the time you´ve seen it all once, it really doesn´t feel like it is necessary to go through all THAT again. Therefore my advice is, forget it! Don´t even waste 15 minutes watching the start of the movie as I did. This is definitely something for creatures of lower intelligence (no one above reptile IQ need apply).

Happy Thought

There are any number of things in my life that I would like to be happening at a more lively rate than they are. The swelling from my operation is fading, but still uncomfortable. My taste buds still sour everything I eat, although a lot less severely than the first few days out of hospital. (Can you imagine my horror after having tonsils out that chocolate ice cream tasted TERRIBLE?!! It was a "lingual" tonsillectomy, which means that the taste buds on the rear of the tongue were being damaged/removed. Fortunately vanilla bean flavor ice cream was still acceptable, or I might have been pounding on the surgeon´s door asking for my money back.) Business pursuits lag far behind where I expected them to be, and therefore some of my more humanitarian goals still seem very far away. But I was reminded recently that nothing succeeds like persistence. Did you know that Niagara Falls was originally rather small and over 7 miles downstream from its present location? It took about 12,600 years to get where it is, but the effect of the water on the rocks is relentless.

According to the most recent discoveries, we have been evolving for 4 million years now. I remain optimistic that it won´t take us nearly that long to get to be a genuinely admirable race of beings. We do have to remember to forgive easily and cherish everyone. One planet, one people. That´s the rule.

Although it would be fun to find another planet and expand that to, "Two planets, One People!", wouldn´t it?

Love and warm wishes,

Sincerely,

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

http://daochienergy.com