Ellen Wallace
Guzzlers don’t want green cards
"Hummer bummer" is the way Ad Age in the US describes General Motors sagging sales of Hummers, those gas guzzlers that nobody seems to want in the new America of $4 a gallon for gas. GM last week hinted it might want to get rid of the road monsters that were such a hot item just a couple years ago. The article is mostly about that sad state of affairs.
But wait! Halfway down the page we learn that the rest of the world still wants Hummers, it seems. Read on: "In 2006 Hummer sold 71,524 vehicles. In the first five months of this
year, Hummer sales slid 36% to 14,086. In May alone, GM reported Hummer
sales [in the US] plummeted 60% to 1,843 units." Meanwhile, they rose 34% elsewhere, compared to a year earlier, to over 4,000 units sold in the first four months of the year. Must be the cheap petrol we all buy here. Tucked even further down the page is who might want the Hummer business if GM gets rid of it: India and China. Who do we blame, the buyer or the seller or both, when it comes to environmentally unfriendly consumer goods?
Nuclear storage gaming
Over in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the US government is making a home for Roadrunner, the world’s fastest computer, at 1,000 trillion operations a second. Roadrunner was built by IBM for the US Department of Energy, using technology designed for video games. Its job will be "to help ensure that the US nuclear weapons stockpile is safe and reliable without nuclear testing, by running complex nuclear weapons calculations that give scientists critical data." I have mixed feelings about this. Maybe gaming is more useful than I thought and nuclear weapons less dangerous than I thought, or maybe we’re all just kidding ourselves.
Most useful web site of the day
This from a non-scientist (me): www.batteryuniversity.com. It starts with "Basics every battery user should know," and I’ve already learned something because I thought batteries should let you remain blind to their virtues and faults, never mind how they function.
GenevaLunch, 9 June 2008.
Filed under: Politics
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