gwax’s rumblings

I’ve been dumping acetone into my truck’s gas tank for a while now and I’m happy to report that it appears to be harmless to the truck: no unexpected explosions, no stalling, no loss of power, nothing negative. I can definitively say that the acetone has not decreased my fuel efficiency, but I can not yet say if it has increased my efficiency at all. I’m going to run a few more tanks with acetone after I get back to Concord and my driving habits stabilize (drive to Cambridge, drive back, repeat a bunch). After I get a solid baseline of Concord to Cambridge runs with acetone, I’ll do a few tanks without acetone and see if I can notice a change. In the name of science I will make a point of getting gas at the same gas station as much as absolutely possible.

I started my testing with 1/4 cup acetone per 15 gallon tank (~1.3oz/10gal), using acetone from a 1 gallon container of pure acetone that I bought at Wal-Mart for the purposes of this experiment. Using the same acetone, I stepped up to 1/3 cup acetone per 15 gallon tank (~1.8oz/10gal) and continued to have no problems. I’m planning to step up to 1/2 cup per 15 gallon tank (~2.7oz/10gal) before I start doing my real data gathering. I may go up to 2/3 cup per 15 gallon tank (~3.6oz/10gal) after I get some solid evidence to support the effectiveness of acetone as a fuel additive.

It looks as though Microsoft has decided to capitalize on their ownership of FASA Interactive and the rights to all FASA based video games. Production is underway on a Shadowrun game for the Xbox 360 (related articles here and here and elsewhere). It looks like Microsoft may have found a way to convince me to buy an Xbox 360 or, at the very least, get under my skin about it. God I hope this game doesn’t suck.

It turns out the US Navy has been training dolphins to help protect ships and kill terrorists. That the military has been doing this is news to me and I think it’s incredibly keen, albeit ethically questionable. On top of the keenness of trained dolphins, apparently some of the dolphins have been outfitted with toxic dart guns; how metal is that? Now, you might be asking where the lambs come into this whole thing, and to get into that we need to ask where the Navy’s been doing this research? Turns out the research was being done in good old Southern Louisiana. What with all that Hurricane Katrina stuff going on down there, there’s some concern that some of the armed dolphins might have escaped and might accidentally shoot unsuspecting divers and surfers. Escaped military dolphins with toxic dart guns; this is almost as good as “sharks with friggin’ laser beams on their heads”.

The joys of work have presented me the opportunity to discover the wonders of plastic. These are two photos of a plastic shipping air bag that I skewered with all the sharp writing implements I could find around the office. The bag managed to maintain its air pressure and ability to stay inflated even with all them pencils and that pen in it. I was quite surprised overall.

I don’t know whether to get on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 bandwagon and it’s not because they both look great, it’s because neither of them stands out. I swear, it’s like a modern election. I’m pleased by my Xbox because of its incremental graphical improvements since my Dreamcast and because of some of its wonderful games but I don’t think there’s been anything terribly revolutionary since the NES. The video game industry has been stuck in a rut of incremental improvements and minor new gameplay features. The Xbox 360 is turning more into a PC, which aggravates me because I already have a PC and I don’t like the idea of a modular console. The Playstation 3 makes me think of a movie industry parallel, sequels tend to turn out great, sometimes better than the first but the third in a series usually tends to go downhill: ignoring a few decent trilogies, look at the Terminator, RoboCop, Predator and other movie series; why don’t you do something new instead of the same thing again. However, looking at Nintendo, a company I’ve ignored for years, we see something kind of interesting; I just watched the teaser trailer for the new Nintendo Revolution controller and I was completely wowed. The Nintendo Revolution controller looks like a completely new approach to video games; during the first few moments of the video I thought it was just another cutesy thing like most of what they’ve been doing but by the end I was completely agog. The segment of the video where a guy seemed to be using the controller as a sword practically had me drooling. I’ve got to say, if Nintendo can pull off the sorts of things that trailer suggests, I may become a die hard Nintendo guy like Sherv and Sam.

Last Tuesday my truck’s odometer read 33333 as it hit 133,333 miles (it has no hundred thousands digit) and I took a photo of it. Sure it probably wasn’t safe taking a photo of my dash while driving, but I’m ok and with 3 being my faorite number, it was worth the risk. I have included the photo for your pleasure, the thumbnail links to the full image. It would have been nice if I could have gotten 133,333.3, but there was too much glare and the photo didn’t come out. I’m pretty surprised at the quality my phone put out on this one and completely unsurprised that the photo 0.3 miles later didn’t turn out at all.

Also the post title is a Final Fantasy VII reference.

Shake the hand of the man who invented the sandwich.

I’ve finally gotten around to doing a full workup of my Wordpress theme so as to provide a style more in line with the style that I use on my homepage and also to bring my blog up to XHTML 1.1 compliance. Being only one man, I haven’t been able to do a complete QA workup of the theme so if you see anything that looks wrong, doesn’t work on your browser (I’ve tested Firefox 1.0.6 and IE 6.0 under Windows XP some) or doesn’t validate to XHTML 1.1, please let me know so that I can fix it. Beyond that, I’ll try to find any problems that I can.

Also, I’ve decided to stop using nested comments and to get rid of the comment preview box because I was the only person using the nested comments and the live preview box didn’t work well enough for my tastes.

Avast, me hearties! Fer ye that do not know, today, September 19th, be International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Enjoy the day whilst ye can, fer she be but once per year. Yarrr!

I’m a big fan of the board game Go. It’s a game that I learned how to play from my father many years ago. Like Chess, Checkers, etc. there’s no element of chance in the game so it’s entirely about strategy and skill. Go has very simple rules but an incredibly high level of open-endedness (wikipedia’s Go page estimates there being about 10^[number of possible Chess games] possible Go games). The level of incredible open-endedness and abstract nature of the game makes it very hard to write computer programs capable of playing Go any better than an amateur (as opposed to Chess programs, which are comparable to grandmasters). However, the inability of people to make good Go playing programs doesn’t bug me much because I am an amateur and so it serves as a good way for me to practice. One such Go playing program is the freely available GNU Go. GNU Go is currently better than me by a decent bit but I’m slowly working down my handicap and increasing the board size. GNU Go is text based, so if you prefer graphics, you might want to get PANDA-glGo, which can be used as a GNU Go frontend or an internet Go program. Anyway, Go is an excellent game and GNU Go is a decent program.

On Friday, I came to discover that one of my truck’s sparkplugs was disconnected and, likely, had been for the three months that I’ve owned the thing. I reconnected the sparkplug and it’s been running smoother and without the backfiring that I’d grown accustomed to. Needless to say, adding another cylinder is going to change the fuel consumption characteristics of my truck so now I’ve got two independant variables contributing to my mileage, which will change the way my science works. I will figure out a way to account for this and get back to you eventually when I figure out what, if anything, the acetone does.

What surprises me most is that I’d been driving the truck for about 3 months and the disconnected sparkplug had gone completely unnoticed by me.

Today is the 6^th birthday of the Sega Dreamcat. The Dreamcast, which I have often hailed as one of the best video game systems of all time (probably second only to the SNES), was released in the USA on 9/9/99. So, Happy Birthday Dreamcast, you’ll always hold a special place in my heart.

Earlier today, I read on the internet that you can use acetone as a fuel additive and get better gas mileage from your car. Now, since everything on the internet is true or, at least, I don’t really care if I accidentally break my truck in the name of science, I dumped about 3oz. of acetone into my mostly full tank of gas. I’ll let you know how things turn out after a tank or three for statistics. According to http://smartgas.net, who seem to have looked into it a bunch, adding 1-3oz. Of acetone to 10 gallons of gas will give you up to 30% better mileage. I’ll keep you posted.

Drive-Ins are making a comeback (as an underground guerilla movement). Guerilla Drive-In movements are apparently popping up all around the country. The idea is, basically, some guy drags a movie projector and a radio transmitter to a place with a nice wall and shows a movie. The place where the movie will be shown is predetermined and people are informed by mailing list, website or any other if-you-know-where-to-look method. To view a movie, you show up at the specified place and time and tune in to the movie’s radio station. Santa Cruz Guerilla Drive-In seems to be the first, most popular or just most well known group running Guerilla Drive-Ins and they have links up to a number of other similar groups in other parts of the country.

As of yet, there does not appear to be a group running Drive-Ins in New England (specifically Eastern Massachusetts) but if I find any, I’ll let you know. Or, if any of you hear of any or decide to start one, drop me a line and I’ll come watch and maybe help out.

For that matter, if I can get my hands on a high luminosity projector, I will personally obtain everything else that is needed and found a Guerilla Drive-In for Eastern Massachusetts. (Anyone want to donate an old, working projector to the cause?)

Saw the orthopod again today and got my first does of good news with regards my shoulder. Apparently the chip in the bone is small and in a non-critical spot and my glenoid labrum is only minimally damaged. The orthopod said that I probably have a greater than 50% chance of not needing surgery and that I can stop wearing the sling as comfort permits. I’m supposed to start physical therapy soon and that should slowly get my shoulder working again. As for now, I’m allowed to use it as much as I feel comfortable so long as I don’t carry any heavy loads with my shoulder or do anything extreme. Even though there’s still a chance of my needing surgery, getting out of the sling and being told that chances are better of my not needing surgery makes me incredibly happy.

It may be a little limited but I have two arms again. [Insert exclamation to non-existant higher power]!

I have a number of thoughts about this whole Katrina wrecking New Orleans thing:

• I’d like to extend my utmost sympathy to those directly affected by this disaster.
• theodicy
  n : the branch of theology that defends God’s goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil
• Where the Hell, is the National Guard? Isn’t it their job to help out in situations like this? Oh, that’s right, they’re in Iraq trying to get us cheap oil. Guess what doesn’t matter when our refineries at home get wrecked: cheap crude oil. Or was it trying to protect our people from danger, because Katrina is killing more Americans than the Iraqis are.
• Our President is not taking this seriously enough
• I wonder how long it will be until New Orleans exists again.
• Hippo’s blog has an interesting idea about repairing communication infrastructure quickly in disasters like this.
• I hope the death toll is lower than expected.