We begin this week with some science stupid from Britain:

• Speed bumps to get new role as a source of green energy (Guardian.co.uk)

As we all know, Formula One teams are getting ready to deploy KERS — Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems — in anger for the 2009 season, and Corsa Motorsports is doing the same in ALMS (with Peugeot Sport perhaps bringing a diesel-electric hybrid to Le Mans this year).  Oh, and I guess Toyota has some road car that people like.  The point is, cars are massively inefficient devices for changing velocity.  Internal combustion engines generate linear force — and a lot of heat — by burning fuel vapour in air.  They convert that linear force into torque by levers and cranks — which, since they incur friction losses, also produce heat.  The driveline components — flywheel, clutch, transmission, differential, CV joints, wheel hubs, tire beads, and contact patches — all waste more and more of that precious energy by turning it into — you guessed it — heat.  And once we’ve overcome all this entropy to get the car moving, we’ll eventually piss it all away to get the car stopped by — wait for it, now — clamping static calipers onto spinning discs and turning it all into heat!

You might’ve guessed by now that I’m a fan of KERS, which — vastly simplifying — uses a generator charging a bank of batteries to produce a braking force in much the same way that engine braking works when you downshift without blipping the throttle.  So when I saw this headline (hat tip: Coyote blog), I was cautiously optimistic.

Well, you all know how optimism turns out.

“Green” speed bumps that will generate electricity as cars drive over them are to be introduced on Britain’s roads. The hi-tech “sleeping policemen” will power street lights, traffic lights and road signs in a pilot scheme in London that could be rolled out nationwide.

[...]

Peter Hughes, the designer behind the idea, said: “They are speed bumps, but they are not like conventional speed bumps. They don’t damage your car or waste petrol when you drive over them – and they have the added advantage that they produce energy free of charge.”

Stop right there.  Let’s have a look at this “free of charge” business.

The ramps – which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size [...]

[...]

A spokesman for Ealing council in west London confirmed that £150,000 of funding had been secured for the scheme: “The money is there for the scheme in 2009-10,” she said.

Where’s this Hughes fellow come from where £150,000 counts as “free of charge”?

An engineer who formerly advised the United Nations on renewable energy sources[...]

Oh, that explains it.

So how do these things work, anyway?

The ramps [...] consist of a series of panels set in a pad virtually flush to the road. As the traffic passes over it, the panels go up and down, setting a cog in motion under the road. This then turns a motor, which produces mechanical energy. A steady stream of traffic passing over the bump can generate 10-36kW of power.

We can ignore the journalistic dumbworms here and focus on the thermodynamic dumbworms instead.  (Dumbworm treatment can be very selective.)  So, we have a bunch of panels in the road.  A car tire hits one of the panels, pushing it down and “setting a cog in motion” (see “friction”, above).  Of course, we also have a reaction force from the panel acting on the car tire.  This acts through the tire on the hub (converting some of the tire’s kinetic energy into heat), through the hub and suspension on the car’s springs and dampers (more kinetic energy turning into heat), and thence on the car’s sprung mass.  All of this either disperses the car’s forward momentum or acts against it.  How can the driver reclaim that momentum?  By turning fuel vapour and air into heat — and, incidentally, into torque at the rear wheels.

And yet we are to believe that, in Hughes’ words,

It is not only green energy; it is free energy

Unless you’re paying for the gas, of course.

Lest I seem unsympathetic, I will admit that these electro-bumps might be no less efficient than standard speed bumps as far as converting a car’s kinetic energy into entropy… but those who abuse thermodynamics the way Hughes and The Guardian just did should be nailed to chairs in a 100-level Physics classroom and not permitted to leave until the entire faculty has beaten the stupid out of them.

——

Speaking of waste, I give you government:

• ID cards are here – but police can’t read them (silicon.com)

The first UK ID cards have already been issued – but no UK police officers or border guards have any way of reading the data stored on them.

Currently no police stations, border entry points or job centres have readers for the card’s biometric chip, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) revealed in response to an FoI (Freedom of Information) request by silicon.com about the £4.7bn identity cards scheme.

Given the options of paying for an ID card scheme that cannot be used — as above — and paying for an ID card scheme that can be used efficiently, I’ll take the former every day of the week.  Nonetheless, this does make me unhappy.

——

And while we’re on the subject of intrusive government, I give you the PRC’s “internet cleansing” campaign:

• Porn censors target nude renaissance art (CBN.com)

After shutting down 1,635 websites and 217 blogs in the first month of its Internet crackdown, Chinese censors have expanded their anti-vulgarity campaign to include great works of art.

As Under the Jacaranda Tree reports, one art-loving blogger received a message from Douban.com informing him that the photos under his “Renaissance” file had been deleted because they didn’t comply with Douban’s policies. These offensive photos, were simply various photographs of Renaissance art that was just a little too risqué for the sensibilities of China’s censors.

(Bonus dumbworm points for the errors in that last sentence.  I guess the “new media” doesn’t need editors.)

How do you mock that?  Seriously, how does one cruelly exaggerate for rhetorical effect a policy that classifies Renaissance art as porn?

And while we’re at it, has anyone seen John Ashcroft lately?  This sounds like the sort of shit he’d pull.

——

Finally:

• Education minister’s blog littered with spelling mistakes (Telegraph.co.uk)

Oh dear.

A political blog written by Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, has been found to be riddled with spelling mistakes.

The Labour MP’s website was also found to contain typing errors and grammatical oversights.

The mispellings of Mr Knight, who was educated at Cambridge University, include “maintainence”, “convicned”, “curently”, “similiar”, “foce”, “pernsioners”, “reccess” and “archeaological”.

Mr Knight, who is responsible for raising education standards, also clearly has problems with the “i before e, except after c” spelling rule taught to primary school pupils.

He spelled “achieving” and “received” incorrectly.

Bonus points for dumbworm irony; that highlighted linked word above is from the article, not from the subject’s blog.

Of course, now that I’ve complained about “new media”’s lack of editing standards and about political bloggers fucking up their spelling and grammar, I’ve pretty much guaranteed that this post will contain an uncorrected misplaced homophone or something similarly embarrassing.  I’ll leave spotting my mistake as an exercise to the reader (after an extra editing pass).