DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I had an opportunity to drive a 2004 Prius hybrid last week. I was renting a car for my periodic commute; the staff at Enterprise surprised me by having a showroom-fresh 2004 Prius gassed up and ready. It had 00060 miles on it. The kick-panel speakers were still covered with plastic scuff guards.

The Prius is the first car I’ve ever seen that comes with a quick-start guide — a small tear-off sheet giving startup instructions. Starting the car is different enough from every other car I’ve ever seen that the clerk at Enterprise had to walk me through it.

Check out the key. It provides a subtle break with reality as you know it. This plastic, electronic key looks like the remote doorlock and trunk control of a more traditional car. In fact, the engineers at Toyota essentially built the car key into the remote control. The result says, This is not your father’s Oldsmobile. And thank goodness for that.

The key device, which is about the size of a small box of wooden matches, slides into a slot in the dashboard. The next step in starting the car, according to the quickstart guide, is to press the POWER button. I had to laugh — this car boots up. I really enjoyed pressing that button.

Startup is silent, except for a beep or two and a quiet sighing as various systems come on-line. The gasoline engine starts up five or ten seconds later, almost as an afterthought. In a few cases I’d already begun driving.

The shift mechanism has been re-imagined. There’s a short lever on the dash that provides electronic shifting between Neutral, Forward and Reverse. Putting the car into Park requires pressing a separate button, which seems clumsy but works fine.

One of the nice features of the car is the set of controls on the steering wheel. One group contains all the necessary stereo controls: volume, track, source. Within minutes I was able to manage the stereo without taking my attention away from the road. A second group provides climate controls. This is a surprisingly useful feature. The buttons are marked with slight bumps and indents, enabling blind operation.

Sitting in the middle of the dashboard is a multi-function LCD touchscreen. The default view shows the “Energy Monitor,” a representation of the powertrain. Animated lines (like Photoshop’s “marching ants”) indicate the flow of energy. For example, when driving up a steep driveway, the gas engine powers the wheels. Coming down that same driveway, the gas engine is idle (or off), and the wheels power the electric motor, which stores the surplus energy in the battery. The genius of the Prius is in efficiently switching among these various modes to conserve energy, reduce gas consumption, and reduce emissions.

At the bottom of the screen, a calculation of the vehicle’s gas mileage at the current instant is displayed; it ranges from about 7 MPG (when I floored the accelerator from a stop) to 99 MPG (on any flat or downhill road).

This “Energy Monitor” screen is fascinating. It’s a driving hazard, there’s no question. New Prius owners should have someone else drive them around until the urge to stare at the screen can be managed.

Beyond the whizzy graphics, it provides a huge benefit: it reinforces good driving habits. Because the Prius recycles momentum as electrical power, it is important to slow down gradually rather than stomp on the brakes at the last moment. Coasting is another high-MPG strategy. Accelerating gradually, ditto. The instant-mileage meter keeps a sort of score on your driving habits. If you drive senselessly, your mileage will suffer. This is of course true for every vehicle on the road; the difference here is that the Prius lets you watch it happen.

In a previous article, I mentioned that some Prius owners report mileage far below EPA estimates. I was very pleased to see that I could not reproduce those damning numbers. I drove about 150 miles, beginning on rural highways, then the interstate, then city streets, more highways, and then office park-ways — a ridiculous, life-draining commute, the sort of commute society could sentence people to for lifestyle crimes — and at the end of the day the car had averaged 53.9 MPG.

I didn’t have to calculate that figure; one of the control screens on the LCD provides a trip odometer and trip mileage calculator.

Once underway, the Prius drives like any other modern car. Acceleration is smooth. Transitioning from electric to gas power is imperceptible, although if you’re paying attention you might feel a vibration as the engine starts.

The car won’t win a street race with, say, an old Camaro, but unlike me you’ve probably outgrown your desire to do smoky burnouts at every residential intersection. Oh, OK, I have too. Really.

Braking felt slightly weird. During my commute I had three semi-emergency stops, due to insane Bay Area traffic and my unfamiliarity with the car’s brakes. I had the sense that braking pressure increases non-linearly with pedal travel. That is, I think the Prius’ braking rate accelerates as the pedal is depressed. In any case, I’m sure I could get used to it, but I’d have to recommend that new owners drive even more defensively than usual.

All in all, I enjoyed driving the Prius, and I realized an immediate financial gain, in that I spent less on gas than I normally would for such a commute.

Moreover, as I sat in stop-and-go traffic for an hour on the way home (welcome to Marin County), and the Prius’ gas engine shut itself off, I realized the promise of hybrid technology. Every car around me was spewing carbon monoxide and toxic chemicals into the air, but my Prius burned nothing and spewed nothing. Every hybrid on the road reduces rush-hour pollution. This has an immediate positive impact on the health of the people in traffic and of everyone who lives nearby. It also helps prevent, erm, going to war to secure future oil supplies. It simply makes more sense.

(Click for more of my Prius articles.)

In the, err, vein of RealAge, Harvard University offers Your Disease Risk, an online survey designed to highlight risk factors for any of five diseases: cancer, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis, and stroke. (Hat tip: Bim)

Also provided are Nine Ways To Stay Healthy and Prevent Disease. Sure, these are common sense, but then again 61% of adult U.S. residents are overweight… so maybe these are really uncommon sense.

Disease is a societal as well as personal challenge. Your government pays an enormous amount of money to treat the sick, even the sick who through dangerous lifestyle choices brought their disease on themselves. Sample statistic, from the American Diabetes Association:

[T]he nation spends $13,243 on each person with diabetes, compared to $2,560 per person for people who don’t have diabetes.

Artificial Intelligence researcher Steve Grand on Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

Asimov’s laws are about as relevant to robotics as leeches are to modern medicine.

Speculative fiction has fed science for years, but apparently not in this case! The full article is here: Movie tests Asimov’s moral code for robots

There is a new website dedicated to the exploration of Asimov’s Three Laws: 3 Laws Unsafe.

The first thing that has to be said about Asimov’s I, Robot is that it is not the same story as the new Will Smith movie of the same name. Rather, the movie is “suggested by” the book (quoting IMDB).

I believe I, Robot was the first science fiction book I read, over 20 years ago. I re-read it once in college, and again last week. It hasn’t aged as well as I expected. Or, maybe I haven’t aged as well. In fact that’s certainly the case.

The book isn’t a novel so much as a collection of short stories tied together by a sketchy narrative. The short stories are presented as recollections of famed “robopsychologist” Susan Calvin, in the context of an interview at the end of her career at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. Some of the stories are more successful than others.

Asimov can be credited with one of the great science fiction inventions of all time: the “Three Laws of Robotics.” Three simple sentences outlining a robot’s behaviorial rules gave Asimov a framework for tons of fiction. In this collection, Asimov seems to have sat down with his Three Laws and consciously extrapolated strange situations that would follow from rigidly-logical adherence to them.

In the best of the stories (“Evidence”), a political candidate is accused of being a robot. His opponents’ attempts to prove their case, and the candidate’s responses, provide a master class in political staging and image handling. The story is as relevant today as when it was written in 1946.

All in all, this is an easy and quick read, and serves as a good introduction to the Three Laws of Robotics. Also, it’s a classic. It serves as a good introduction to the genre.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

Last Fall, the auto club’s VIA Magazine ran an article about Vancouver, British Columbia. The first paragraph grabbed my attention:

For the last five years, Vancouver artist Kent Avery has spent his weekends stacking stones on the English Bay waterfront… Avery hops down off the seawall and begins to tug and lug, setting one rock atop another until he has engineered a Dr. Seuss skyline of improbable teetering obelisks, sometimes more than a hundred of them, precarious sky castles three, five, 12 rocks tall. Eventually, the incoming tide knocks them all down and Avery starts over. He leaves a tip jar on the wall beside a notebook of facts and photos. [The] book boasts, “It’s all about balance!”

Regular readers of this site may recall my penchant for creating stone sculptures. But mine are lame compared to Avery’s. I use flat stones because they’re easier to stack… whereas Avery finds the round and oblong ones and stacks them improbably on end. Check out this photo from Mike Whybark’s gallery.

During our recent visit to Vancouver, I made sure to seek out Kent Avery and his mastery of balance. We parked in the southwest corner of Stanley Park and hiked north, clockwise around the park. I quizzed every pedestrian, flapping the VIA article: “Have you seen this man?!” Everyone I asked had seen the sculptures, but not that day. It seems Avery had vanished like his ephemeral art.

I believe we found the area where he works, though, so we set about creating a few sculptures of our own. For the first time I tried to do this the hard way — I found a round stone and stood it on end on a boulder. Then I surprised myself and stacked another one on top — although not on end, alas!