The Binary Circumstance

I recently learned about hypermiling, a collection of driving techniques for increasing the mileage you get in your car and wondered what it would do for the mileage on my 2007 Ninja 250R which already gets great mileage.

On this last tank, I didn’t do any hypermiling techniques for the first 100 miles but used them for the second 100 miles. After 206 miles, it took 3.04 gallons of gas (at over $4./gal!) to fill it up. That comes out to 67.7 mpg. That seemed like an improvement over what I usually get which has been around 65 mpg for the same type of city and island driving. The next tank will be a better test. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t come in over 70 mpg.

There are several places along the normal routes I take that are perfect for coasting. Coasting cuts the RPM down to the idle speed rather than the 3-5K RPM which register on the tachometer when I’m in gear. I am also getting better at coasting into traffic lights. On the three-mile trip into town, I estimate that I can coast for over a mile of it. There are also several opportunities for coasting on the way back.

I don’t do things like turn off the engine to coast or at traffic lights. I mostly just coast when there’s a nice stretch of downhill in front of me and it’s safe to do it.

I’m also trying it on my truck which gets terrible mileage. It will be a while before I know what those results are.

UPDATE 6-20-2008: I just put some gas in my 250 Ninja after traveling 225 miles, mostly on the island and in the city which is not where it gets the best mileage. It only took 2.7 gallons to fill it which comes out to just over 83 mpg which is by far the best mileage I’ve ever gotten on it. I usually get 65-70 around here.

This past weekend I took a trip in my truck and clocked just under 23 mpg. Much of the trip was through the mountains where I would not expect to get very good mileage with all the uphill stretches. Of course, there’s a lot of downhill as well but in the mountains I didn’t coast in neutral although I did coast. I prefer to let the transmission do the braking rather wearing my brakes out on long downhill stretches. I did check my tires before I left and since one was quite low, I’m sure that helped as well. I just didn’t push it and tried to keep the RPMs below 2000 no matter how fast I was going. The best mileage I’ve ever seen in the truck before was 20 mpg.

So implementing the most basic hypermiling techniques seemes to have added about 15% to my truck mileage and about 23% to my Ninja 250 mileage, under the driving conditions I experienced on my most recent tanks of gas.

In this YouTube video, Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest who likes to preach like a black preacher, rants about white entitlement and Hillary Clinton at Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church. (This clip is longer than what I’ve seen on TV.) Obama has denounced the comments, as one would expect.

Something tells me this message will not help to unify America. Just a hunch.

The Obamas reported something like $4 million on their 2007 tax return, mostly from his books. Some of us “entitled” white folks won’t make that much in our entire lifetime.

The Obamas have since resigned their 20-year membership in Trinity United Church of Christ.

Since I just wrote about StarGaze which features pictures from the Hubble space telescope, I enjoyed this article about the Hubble’s most recent revelation.

The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday.

Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter — the protons and neutrons that make up atoms — but there also is an even larger amount of invisible “dark” matter.

Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

It’s amazing what science continues to reveal about our universe. No religion has ever built anything like the Hubble telescope.

If you would like to get your mind off of self-important politicians and the nonsense that they spout to win elections, I would highly recommend StarGaze: Hubble’s View of the Universe, a DVD that consists of awesome pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope set to music.

I found it necessary to watch it twice, because when the subtitles are displayed, I wasn’t focused on the pictures. But to really see the pictures in their full glory, it helps to turn off the subtitles. The subtitles have a lot of interesting information in them, so they are well worth reading. The are available in several languages.

The main menu didn’t come up when the DVD started playing. I didn’t realize that there’s also a voice-over narration on the DVD which allows you to see the pictures without having to read subtitles. To select the voice narration, I had to do into the audio selection menu, selecting “English narration” from the subtitle menu just gave me subtitles. I thought this was a shortcoming of the DVD.

The film is only about 50 minutes long and gazing at the universe through Hubble’s eyes really puts everything that happens on this planet into perspective.

It also makes you wonder how anybody could think that the Biblical story of creation has any truth to it. If the Hubble is collecting light from billions of years ago, how could the universe have been created just a few thousand years ago? When you see on the unfathomable vastness of the Universe, how could any human think the whole thing was built for him?

The film is available from Netflix:

NASA’s Hubble Telescope focuses its lens on amazing celestial images in this captivating documentary, which puts viewers in the astronomer’s seat. The star of the film is Hubble’s astounding footage of galaxies, supernovae, stars, planets, gaseous clouds, nebulae and other out-of-this-world sights, accompanied by a narrative detailing Hubble’s history and NASA’s mission to use the telescope for documenting cosmic events and objects.

It can also be purchased from Amazon.com.