Hybrid Cars

There’s a saying that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but in the case of Hybrid vehicles, this definitely is not true. We are all aware that there are concerns about our global, insatiable thirst for fossil fuels (to run our cars primarily), and that we are harming the environment with the resulting emissions. Hybrid vehicles are here to answer that call.

Purely electric cars never really caught on because they required massive batteries that required long charging periods, and they had a limited range which prevented drivers from going any great distance. They were also not particularly powerful, and definitely not sexy. Hybrid cars have been cleverly designed to marry traditional internal combustion engines with electric engines, and although details differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, they all work in pretty much the same way. The first vehicles to appear with Hybrid drive trains were the Honda Insight and the Toyota Prius. GM now also produces hybrid trucks, and all the other major manufacturers all have plans to introduce hybrid models in the next year or two.

The “cake” is that these vehicles get exceptional gas mileage; the “eat it too” is that they are very low emission vehicles, and they are also quite sporty and powerful. Here is how it works: Hybrids tend to work as electric cars in the city for stop and start driving tasks, and the combustion engine starts only when the battery is getting depleted, or when extra acceleration is needed. The nice thing about Hybrids is that you can benefit from the electric motor power and the internal combustion power simultaneously when needed. Another interesting feature of Hybrids is that they don’t idle when stopped, as traditional cars do. This is a great “eat it too” feature of the cars. I found one government website that estimates that 2/3rds of US vehicles are driven in urban areas, and time spent idling is 18% of total urban drive time. The US department of Energy estimates that if all vehicles were shut off when they normally idle, the US would save 20 billion gallons of oil per year; this also would translate to an annual savings per car/owner of $300 per year in gas costs. It would also contribute to reduced emissions, a big concern right now.

Another interesting feature of the Hybrid cars is the regenerative braking systems they employ. Traditional brakes use friction brakes, which produce heat energy, and this heat energy is merely dissipated into the atmosphere and not captured or utilized in any way. Regenerative brakes, however, utilize the electric motors that drive each individual wheel, and when braking is needed they become generators; the resulting energy is captured and used to charge the battery cells in the vehicle. How smart is that?

Hybrid cars cost about $2000 more than their combustion counterparts, but the savings in fuel costs can be recovered within 5 years, so the manufacturers claim. Many countries will pay a tax credit to Hybrid owners (see http://www.hybridcars.com/tax-deductions-credits.html for more info), so here again we can have our cake and eat it too.

There are a few celebrities that have become hybrid owners - They include Ted Danson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, Billy Crystal, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Donny Osmond, among others. I have noticed some taxi companies are starting to use Hybrids for cabs in Vancouver. I wouldn’t be surprised if Hybrid becomes the de facto standard in the next decade or so. Soon we all will be driving them.

Keyboards and their Qwerty History

Ever wonder about the seemingly random arrangement of the keys on a common computer keyboard, better known as the QWERTY keyboard? The QWERTY arrangement of keys was actually invented with the idea of slowing typists down – but why? Before the personal computer age, if we were using any type of keyboard with letters and numbers on them, we were using a typewriter. For those familiar with the mechanical operation of the older typewriters, each key on the keyboard actuates an arm (called a typebar) which literally swings up and strikes the page. As typists became more proficient, they were soon typing beyond the practical design parameters of the typebar design, and the arms were colliding and getting tangled with each other. In order to separate frequently used letter combinations and common letter pairs, these pairs and combinations were set farther apart, effectively slowing down the typist. The original QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes, who also happened to invent the typewriter, in 1868. The design was later adopted by the Remington Arms Company, who bought the typewriter patent from Sholes, and then later sold it to The Standard Typewriter company. The Remingon name remained on their typewriters, and their typewriters continued with the QWERTY keyboard layout.

So this raises the question of why we continue to use the QWERTY layout with our computer keyboards; we are no longer burdened with the mechanical typebar problems, so why should we continue with an obsolete keyboard design? There are two reasons; the first is familiarity: any typist over 35 probably learned to type on an old-fashioned typewriter in high school, and that means that an overwhelming majority of us adapted our keyboarding skills to the PC. Consequently, the cost of retraining the typists to a new layout would be astronomical. The second reason is that the QWERTY design was intended to balance the use of both hands, to eliminate the situation of having too many one-handed words, such as “stewardess” (left-handed word) and “monopoly” (right-handed word). If you happen to be a touch-typist you will notice that most words require the fingers of both hands. In this sense, the QWERTY layout remains as a good design.

And so we continue to use a design that was originally intended to cope with a mechanical design which has long since disappeared. There have been many other proposed designs but none have really caught on, perhaps the best known is the Dvorak keyboard layout, which claims to be more efficient but in reality is seldom seen.

What I personally find surprising is that the modern computer’s Voice Recognition capabilities are not more often exploited by non-typists as an alternative input method. Any computer with Office XP offers the use of voice, and other brands of Voice Recognition software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking are available. Perhaps the general public don’t know that the feature is available, or maybe, like me, they are just trying to find a place where nobody is talking.