Feedback: Which part of 'partial zero' don't we get?
05 April 2013
Caption (Image: Paul McDevitt)
Which part of "partial zero" don't we understand?
READER John Cleveland is puzzled. His new Subaru car proudly declares itself to be a "Partial Zero Emission Vehicle" (PZEV). "Not being a great mathematician," he writes, "I've spent way too much time sussing out what quantity of greenhouse gases might be in a part of zero."
He is not the only one who is confused. "What does Partial Zero Emission Vehicle mean?" asks one post on the Ultimate Subaru Message Board. Another comments: "That's like being 'a little bit pregnant'."
Feedback wondered whether mathematics was the correct discipline within which to tackle this problem, and immediately suspected that we were in the presence of lawyers. And we were right. It turns out that a PZEV is defined precisely – in the lawyerly sense of that word – under California vehicle emissions regulations, which have been adopted by several other US states. A PZEV is a vehicle that "meets SULEV tailpipe emission standards, has a 15-year/150,000-mile warranty and has zero evaporative emissions". SULEV, in turn, stands for a "Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicle," which must be "90 per cent cleaner than the average new model year vehicle". And "cleaner" is defined... somewhere.
The practical upshot appears to be that manufacturers get regulatory brownie points for making cars that do not evaporate unburnt fuel, which would contribute to smog. This partially supports John's conclusion that: "However the maths works out, we must have helped part of the whole environment."
Feedback would have continued our research in an attempt to quantify that "part of" and to work out what any of this has to do with greenhouse gases: but our invoice for overtime at the going rate for top US attorneys of $1000 an hour has unaccountably been turned down.
Our barely surprising headline of the week comes from a press release from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden: "Adults with ADHD commit fewer crimes when on medication"
Millions of elephants may help us
ELEPHANTS continue to provide assistance to those who want to achieve a better understanding of exactly how big very big things are (Feedback, 6 July 2012). Lisa Giblin tells us about an article in the April edition of US magazine Mother Jones entitled "Life of P" and subtitled "We're running out of phosphorous – and that's bad news for anyone who eats food."
"The Environmental Protection Agency," the magazine reports, "estimates that central Florida already houses nearly 1 billion metric tons of phosphogypsum [a radioactive waste product of the phosphate fertiliser industry], and 32 million metric tons are added each year – the equivalent of the 'combined weight of approximately 6.4 million elephants', as an EPA document helpfully notes."
"Helpful indeed!" comments Lisa. "When measured in elephants, I can truly picture the size of the problem."
A category error in sleep disturbance
CALLOUS quote of the week comes from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority, in a report entitled "Proposed methodology for estimating the cost of sleep disturbance from aircraft noise". The report states that "the science is not robust enough to monetise the cognitive impairment in children at this time".
Surely they are taking the name "science" in vain here. Should that not be "the philosophy is not robust enough to decide whether cognitive impairment in children has a monetary value"?
Real excitement in cake decoration
READER Sarah Longrigg was interested to come across hyper-dimensional cake decorators in the Betterware catalogue.
A page on Daisy Plunger Cutters in the Cake Decoration section of the online catalogue asserts that we can "create stunning sugarcraft flowers and daisies in minutes with these sugar paste cutters".
"Why buy?" the page asks, rhetorically, and gives its answers, such as the product being "safe for children to use". It gives the cutters' measurements, which are given as "4 × 1.5 × 2 × 3 × 3.5cm." So they are 5-dimensional, which is quite unusual, and may provide extra-dimensional crannies in which children can get irretrievably lost.
What does food contain?
"EIGHTY-THREE per cent of Europeans believe food contains chemicals," according to an article on ingredientsnetwork.com that summarised the results of a Eurobarometer survey commissioned by the EU last autumn. "What do the other 17 per cent think food is made of?" asks Philip Crichton.
Warning of the week
"WHO would have thought that?" was Galen Ives's reaction to the label on the lamb hotpot he bought from a Cross Country Trains buffet bar. It warned: "Caution: Once heated the contents will be hot."
Ye olde vintners online
FINALLY, the delightful gift that Laurie Mansfield received from her son last Christmas had one slight drawback. When she tried to sign up for the gift – a voucher for the Wine Gang's monthly tasting report at thewinegang.com – she was informed that an "error occurred" and that "we were unable to proceed with the sign-up confirmation for the following reason(s): this voucher expired on December 13 1901 at 21:45.52 British time".
Source: www.newscientist.com
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