Shakin' It Up with BioMass, BioMethanol, BioDiesel, Solar and GeoThermal at PowerGen in Vegas
Stafford Williamson
March 12, 2007
The other day, Sunday, I saw a courtesy extended that is rarely done, though perhaps not as rare in these particular circumstances. You see, as usual, I was watching George Stephanopoulos on his Sunday morning program, This Week. His guest was not actually a one-armed man but Senator Robert "Bob" Dole. When they met for this interview it was in the law library of Senator Dole's law firm's law library. Not everyone has even noticed that Senator Dole's right arm does not function well, but George's long experience in the never-never-land of D.C. politics allowed him to have the foresight to extend his left hand in greeting the senator. Because of the Senator's special circumstances, his physical limitation, it was a friendly gesture of accommodation that allowed both men to express a traditional greeting: one appropriate to the culture.
One might think that being on opposite sides of the "aisle" in congress, at least in allegiances, that they would not be so collegial. That is certainly not always the case. Just as lawyers who fight tooth and nail inside the courtroom, outside they may be tennis partners, or even married to one another, so it can be with politicians. Appearances are not always the whole of reality. I recall during a tour of the old ocean liner Queen Mary, now landlocked at Long Beach, California, as a tourist attraction, we were informed that in preparation for opening as a tour site, inspections of the huge smoke stacks of the proud old matron showed that there was more paint than metal left in most of them. Still, the ship looks magnificent. Not necessarily safe, but still impressive.
The odd thing about the left-handed hand shake is that I was taught it was a symbolic mark of kinship among the Boy Scouts organization. Only much later did I learn that it was actually a shibboleth, a test of "us" versus "them" specifically designed to exclude those who were not accepting of the British Imperialism in India. More specifically it was intended to exclude Moslems, or any race of people so unclean as to use their left hand as the primary instrument of toilet hygiene. Approaching an Iraqi Shia person with left hand extended in greeting would be an affront, which these days, given the ridiculous availability of weapons in Iraq might very well get you shot, even if you were a Boy Scout.
Fortunately gestures of good faith are the heart of diplomacy. The official US stance enunciated by President Bush is that we will not have discussions with Iran without a cessation of their nuclear enrichment program. (They have corrupted the pronunciation to be "nook you lar" in the Bush family for some reason, rather than "new clee ar" like the rest of the world says it.) Even more fortunately, despite appearances of a hardline stance on that policy, US Ambassador Khalilzad was in multilateral talks with Iran, Iraq, Syria and sat across the table from an Iranian official just last week. Diplomacy is good news. Verbal volleys are better than artillery volleys any day in my opinion. Democratic party pressure in Congress is having an effect. Whether or not they can pass legislation to force withdrawal of all US forces from Iraq by 2008, as is currently being proposed, is not the point. It isn't the Whitehouse that is getting nervous or showing signs that anything is different since the Democrats got elected to the majority of seats in both houses of Congress, it is the Iraqi's who are showing signs that they believe that they must take resolving their differences a more urgent priority and come to a peaceful coalition before the US forces disappear. Even Ambassador Khalilzad said it was a useful tool in discussions with Iraqi government officials.
Producer/Writer David Kelley's new series, The Wedding Bells, started on Fox last week. The series has Kelly's typical mix of charming characters, the Bell Sisters (Teri Polo plays Jane Bell, Sarah Jones is Sammy Bell, KaDee Strickland as Annie), a husband who is so buttoned down he makes appointments for bedding his wife, an ex-husband who is also "the fixer", played with boundless charm by Benjamin King. Pardon me if I have scrambled the cast, I've only seen one episode, but I'll be back for more. Oh, yes, Delta Burke had a guest role as mother of the bride, a hilarious bit in which she has one of the sisters bribe the rabbi to mention "Jesus" at least twice during the ceremony, and another facinating character, the Chef, Ernesto, played by Costas Mandylor, who also has more than a dash of smoldering heat under that accent.
I expect it to be no less of a wonderful fluffy diversion than was Ally McBeal, whose star, Calista Flockart's new show Brothers and Sisters is well worth catching too. For the more mature among us, the show, which also stars Sally Field and guest star Rob Lowe, is being Executive Produced by the former star of ThirtySomething, Ken Olin, and includes his wife Patricia Wettig as the villain of the village. (Okay, I confess, I just wanted to use the alliteration, because the "village" in this case it that global village of Los Angeles.)
Speaking of appearing and disappearing, starting this week is Raines, on NBC. The star is Gena Davis' former mate, Jeff Goldblum, and his character's visions of crime victims may be hallucinations or have some other explanation, but the whole thing looks like a cross between NBC's Medium, and USA Network's Monk. I expect that Monk's star, Tony Shalhoub may have gotten some hints on how to portray the obsessive type personality from prior Goldblum performances, or at least, if he had wanted to, he could have. Jeff should be a lot of fun to watch in this new series.
As scheduled, I spent most of last week in Las Vegas, attending the PowerGen Renewable Energy and Fuels conference (operated and managed by Pennwell, and sponsored by ACORE). ACORE stands for the American Council On Renewable Energy. The Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Center is a first rate hotel providing more than adequate convention facilities. The entire PowerGen conference only occupied the North section of their convention area, and that only on one floor. The exhibit hall was just one of the large ballrooms. I never got past the middle lobby to examine what the South half might be like, but it was a voluminous structure more like a traditional convention center, whereas the North portion is more in the style of any hotel's convention facility. I can see where it is an upgrade from the old Las Vegas convention center, adjacent to the Flamingo Hilton, but the venue itself was nothing much to write home about. It really is fairly well done, but perhaps I am somewhat jaded from the dozen or more trade shows I have worked myself, from Hong Kong and Beijing, to Sao Paulo, Boston, Dallas and Toronto.
For me the spectacular part was the participants. I met a lot a tremendously pleasant people. The presenters at the seminars were not all born performers, but every one I heard had something worthwhile to say. Okay, I grant there was one seminar that I characterized as "the tree huggers" that was part of the "track" (program) of seminars I thought most suited my interest that was more than a little hard to take. These folks were discussing how to set up yet another bureaucracy of a non-profit mutual interest group, as well as some of the fundamental, "join the movement, save the trees" kind of drum beating. I left that one after about 3 minutes. The good news was the bad news, because in virtually every time slot during the brief conference, there seemed to be more than one session that I would have liked to be able to attend. I couldn't, of course. I am not THAT schizophrenic, yet.
The sessions I did attend were marvelous, nothing short of enlightening, and well worth the time. If you think this sounds like a paid endorsement, it isn't, but I was there under the "flag" (or "hat", if you prefer) of a member of the media, because although I also have a small company that has an energy division, I was there to do research for this column. I came back with such enthusiasm that I feel like I want to tell you all about it right now. That would be impractical. There is just too much information for one column, so I will be doling it out over the next few weeks, if not a few months worth. I made a lot of new contacts, and as often happens, serendipity turns into synchronicity and deja vu all over again.
In this case, one of the very nice people I met in the lobby between sessions was one David Talkin, formerly of Bell Labs, now working for Google. He had an impressively broad knowledge of the energy field, from geothermal to solar. We had a lovely conversation, even though we barely brushed the surface on any given subject. When I "googled" his name today, I find that he was involved in speech recognition, a favorite topic of mine because I too worked in that field, at least briefly. I wrote an item for a Brazilian company about speech recognition in the film of the Michael Crichton story, Congo, (1995) the only time of which I am aware that I have had an original article published on the Internet in Portuguese. Back in the early 1980's that I had a project (in my own company) to integrate a multi-tasking operating system, this one was called, Double-DOS, and a Chinese Character video graphics board. The board had two complete sets of ideographic characters programmed into ROM (read only memory), and worked only on slow, original IBM PC's or there first innovative generations the XT models. Unfortunately, the video cards were an un-authorized clone of the popular Hercules Monochrome Graphics card, with one feature left out to keep from getting sued by the Hercules maker. It as the "light pen port", which, under this design, was the only way you could tell whether the video board was in text or graphics mode, so switching between the two, while theoretically possible, because impractical, scuttling my 6 months of work to get computers to speakers of all the Chinese dialects, without having to type elaborate coded sets of keystrokes. Looking back, I think I am glad that I chose to become a pioneer in speech recognition rather than space exploration. You really don't want to be six months into outer space when you realize you mission is going down in flames.
But I digress, as usual, when my real point, other than the fact that I enjoyed visiting with Mr. Talkin, was that David was there with a number of representatives of the Google company. I didn’t meet any of them, although he mentioned that if I looked I should see them around. He didn’t say why they were there, but it is an interesting tidbit of information.
But hope spring eternal, as it usually does in my column. I was much encouraged that extending a culturally appropriate gesture can help achieve results that might not otherwise have been possible. The story I heard at the Plug-In Partners booth on the exhibit floor at PowerGen RE&F was genuinely a delight. It seems that a member of the Plug-In Partners staff, who regularly represents the organization's platform of promoting development of "plug-in hybrid cars", cars that extend the range and significantly shrink the cost of gas/electric hybrids, met with some Oriental folks. It seems that, just coincidentally, she had learned shortly prior to the meeting at their headquarters in Austin, Texas, Marguerite had learned that the correct greeting for Japanese business people is to bow slightly and politely. She had learned too, that if the Japanese person is a male, it is considered correct, according to Japanese custom that a woman should bow lower than the man. In keeping with these protocols, Marguerite bowed, was bowed to, and bowed back, even lower. The Japanese delegation was apparently impressed. They were all smiles and very friendly and less formal immediately. She had made them feel comfortable. As Marguerite pointed out to me in the telling of the story, she was not tremendously pleased at the persistence of gender inequities in Japanese society, but it was the polite, and the right thing to do.
It seems, according to Marguerite that during this visit this group learned that Japanese car makers had not been receptive to the concept of adding a plug-in feature to their hybrid designs, despite more than modest success with the models they were producing for the North American market. After hearing the conservation story from Plug-in Partners, these gentlemen went back to Japan and carried on some further talks with auto makers there. It was only about one month later that Plug-In Partners heard from Toyota that they are now working on a plug-in version. A simple gesture. A remarkable result.
Okay, that’s fine, and I am genuinely appreciative that this may move some automakers to provide autos that are, overall, more energy efficient, but we need them to also consider that any traditional internal combustion engine should, from here forth, be “flex-fuel capable” to accept E85, and biobutanol (which it should be anyway, since you can run existing engines on it). Furthermore, we need to push vehicle manufacturers toward a policy that any diesel engine should also be suitable for combustion of biodiesel. I don’t necessarily mean low energy fuels, but the fact that biodiesel has slightly different basic characteristics than petro-diesel, should not void the makers’ warrantees, all the way to B100. I met a man who flies his airplanes on Methanol, and has flown jets on biodiesel mixes too. We are closer than you think, if YOU get behind the effort to push for these changes, you won’t have to get behind your car to push it to the pump.
Next time I'll have a remark or two about the remarkable Texan, Russell Smith. In the meantime, let us all hope that the gesture of US participation in the multilateral talks in the Middle East will grow and eventually bloom into fruitful discussions leading to peace in the region.
Love,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
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