NYTimes ♥ GM

The New York Times ran an article today about GM's enormous fuel-cell behemoth, a hydrogen-powered SUV.

Like other fuel-cell cars, the Equinox generates electricity from a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, with no smog-forming emissions or greenhouse gases.

Of course, they don't mention where the hydrogen comes from: fossil fuels, notably natural gas, which is burned:

CH₄ + O₂ -> CO₂ + 2H₂

That means that carbon dioxide, CO₂, a greenhouse gas, is emitted to produce the fuel. (The other common source is coal, which is much worse.) The car doesn't emit it – that's taken care of already. And, as a matter of fact, the somewhat inefficient intermediate step of going to hydrogen means that this car burns 30% more fuel than a vehicle that runs directly on natural gas. But you won't see that anywhere in the article, since the Times is too busy making mouth love to a major advertiser.

Granted, hydrogen could be produced through solar or wind power. Someday, maybe, when and if government decides to subsidize that instead of petroleum extraction. It just isn't currently. But to read the Times, you'd think these things were powered by environmentally beneficial fairy sparkles.

Freebird

Today Statistics Canada released new census reports, and the Globe and Mail published a set of interviews with immigrants. One recent refugee from Myanmar living in Newfoundland had this to say:

"I feel very safe. It's freedom," she says. "It's a nice place. I'm not afraid anywhere. I'm not afraid [of] any soldier but Burmese. I still [feel] like a freedom, like a bird fly in the sky."

That and the rest of her story sure puts my bitching about tasers into perspective. What a wonderful place I live, where that's the worst that happens.

SF belongs to the boomers

The SFWA kopyright kops kerfuffle is back in the bloglines again. The details are engrossing and terribly boring, combining the contemporary debate on free speech and free society and the desire to maintain outmoded business models: whether the SFWA should be forward-looking or repeat the mistakes of the RIAA and MPAA. Copyright vs communism. Intellectual property vs creativity. The past vs the future. Yes, all of that. But really, it just illustrates the divide between people who still actually write stuff, and those who are living off work they (or somebody they used to fuck) did thirty years ago.

See, Science Fiction^® belongs to the boomers. They grew up with it first, and by sheer weight of numbers, they own it. They control the meaning of the words, which they have cemented in a museummausoleum where the corpse of the genre rots behind glass. SF is dead, and although some new work exists which might seem to carry on its tradition, it really doesn't matter because if it wasn't written by a baby boomer, it is most unlikely to be blessed by the anointed ones. [For some reason they like Neal Stephenson. And some nanotech. But that's it: it's like nothing has happened since 1985 otherwise.]

The new generation would like to make science fiction be about the future, or at least be an engaging commentary about the present, but the boomers haven't wanted anything at all to change since the early nineteen-eighties, and they're not about to let go now. They hold title to the trademark "SF" and they're not giving it up without being lowered into the crypt (and probably not even then).

Steampunk has escaped the deadly SF label; the rest of the genre's refugees need to build their own brand beyond the reach of the zombie corpse of SF, and abandon the corrupt institutions which shamble on, destroying any chance of a future. The boomers are never gonna let it go. It's dead, Jim.