I’ve been invited to speak at the Atlanta Science Tavern on 13 June, 2012. I’ll be speaking on “Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas.” You can sign up to attend here.

One of the triggers for this talk was a BMW advertisement promising a hydrogen engine that “produces near zero emissions. Which means the exhaust produces water vapor, not carbon dioxide. So it reduces pollution and greenhouse gases and lessens our dependence on imported oil.”

That’s just silly, and I’ll explain why.

There are more silly ideas out there, most of them referenced by this Scientific American cover article from September 2011 on “How to Get All Energy from Wind, Water, and Solar Power by 2030.”

This is a deeply flawed (and dangerous) vision, but it’s attractive to a lot of well-meaning environmentalists. We’ll explore why it won’t work.

Bio:

Stephen Fleming is Vice President of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech, responsible for economic development and entrepreneurial support. He’s a GT graduate who has been a Bell Labs physicist, telecom exec, and successful venture capitalist before returning to Georgia Tech in 2005.

References:

http://www.businessweek.com/autos/content/may2006/bw20060505_260847.htm

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

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My iPhone 4S home screen as of April 2012

It surprises people that, as a well-assimilated Apple fanboy, I didn’t buy the first generation iPhone. I was in the store on launch day, I had one in my hand, my credit card was burning a hole in my pocket… and I left without one. I used my Treo for nearly another year until the 2nd generation iPhone (confusingly named 3G) was released. I wasn’t waiting for the faster network connection or for the GPS chip, or cut-and-paste, although those were all nice. No, although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I was waiting for the App Store.

Remember, I was coming from years in the Palm ecosystem, where third-party apps were a key part of the experience. I was utterly reliant on a couple of them (in particular, an RPN calculator… having been converted to the RPN Way by HP calculators in my youth, I simply cannot use “normal” calculators without an Enter key!). So the first-gen iPhone had lots of promise, but it wasn’t ready for me yet. Web apps looked interesting, but until developers got hold of a native SDK, I kept my money in my pocket.

Once the App Store was announced, I knew I was hooked. In fact, I bought my first iPhone app on July 10, 2008, the night before the iPhone 3G was released… yes, I had that much faith in Apple (and James Thomson, author of PCalc) that I spent ten bucks on an app without hardware that I could run it on!

And, although I didn’t know it, I was participating in an interesting experiment in app pricing. In the early days, I bought several apps for $9.99 or even more. Soon, those apps found their prices cut to $6.99, $4.99… or they were abandoned entirely. A few apps hovered about the magic ten-buck point, but most were driven down by the competition from free and 99¢ apps.

Lots of people have blogged about the race to the bottom, and I have nothing useful to add there… except that I never hesitate to buy a paid app if it looks like it does something I need, or even want. I’ve spent more than the price of that first iPhone in the App Store at this point, and I don’t mind. Software developers gotta eat, and I don’t mine supporting them with a couple of bucks here and there.

Of course, sometimes the app turns out to be less polished than I hoped, or buggy, or just doesn’t get updated when needed. So I wind up buying a lot of apps, experimenting with them, and letting them languish in a rear page, or delete them from my devices entirely.

People are always asking me “So, what apps should I get for my iPhone/iPad?” That’s hard to answer, since I don’t know your needs or your budget. All I can do is give you a list of the apps that I use, many of them daily, and frequently after downloading and trying a lot of competitors. (I think I’ve bought fourteen calendar applications, and I shudder to think how many Twitter apps. I’ve settled on what I think are the best.)

I’ve blogged about this before, but that was almost a year and a half ago (and again two years before that, which was even before the iPad)… and things change.

So, here’s my list of my favorite iOS (iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch) applications, as of April 2012. Click on any icon for a link to the official App Store description.

• Productivity
• Apple iWork Suite
• e-Books
• News / Information
• Photography
• Navigation
• Utilities
• Fun and Games

Productivity

	Free	both
Calendar	I’ve tested fourteen Calendar applications (paying up to $20 each for the privilege). With iOS 5, I’m back to the original built-in Apple Calendar. It’s not perfect, but it works. I don’t use the iCloud calendars; I juggle thirteen Google Calendars. Apple’s app makes a decent front-end to Google, but it’s faster than any other Google-compatible calendar and—critically—it’s always there. Other calendar clients just wander off into the weeds and stare at their navel occasionally.
	Free	Universal
Zenbe Lists	There are a zillion to-do list applications out there. This one keeps a position on my home screen for one fundamental reason: painless syncing from the cloud to multiple devices. The real-world use? My wife and I can share a single grocery list (and Home Depot list, etc.). If one of us goes shopping alone, we’re sure we have the most current version. I don’t understand Zenbe’s business model in giving this away, but I’d miss it if they stopped.
	$2.99 (each)	iPhone and iPad (separate apps)
Tweetbot	I don’t know… is Twitter a “productivity” app, or an “anti-productivity” app? Probably a little of both. What’s definitely not productive is downloading and testing twelve different Twitter clients. I’ve done that, so you don’t have to. Lots of them are good; some are very good. For my money, Tweetbot is hands-down the best of the bunch… on both the iPhone and the iPad. Pay for them separately; it’s worth it. You’ll never use the native Twitter client (or—ugh!—the Web interface) again.
	$5.99	iPad only
Noteshelf	Ever since Steve Jobs assassinated my beloved Newton 2100, I’ve been looking for a device that will allow me to take notes in a meeting. (And, yes, the Newton’s handwriting recognition was good enough to do that!) Typing is the wrong approach. But Jobs hated styluses, so the Inkwell character recognition software that’s buried inside of OS X has never been enabled for iOS. Which is sad, because the iPad has approximately a gazillion times the processing capability of the Newton! So I’ve tried a double handful of note-taking apps for the iPad, looking for something to replace my stacks of Moleskine notebooks. Nothing does handwriting recognition effectively yet (sigh), but Noteshelf is the best-of-breed in capturing digital ink. You can even send its images off to Evernote to do OCR if you want to. You’ll need a stylus, of course. I’ve bought ten of those. Currently, my favorite is the pricey Jot Flip, but even cheap $4 imports do the job. Tastes differ. Try to find a friend with a drawer full of styluses (no one stops with just one) and try before you buy.
	Free	Universal
SimpleNote	I can’t count the number of keyboard-based note-taking apps on the iOS platform. I love SimpleNote because it’s as simple as advertised. Doesn’t try to be all things to all people, but it’s a quick, easy, legible way of writing myself notes, and accessing them on other devices, including my desktop. And they’re a Y Combinator startup! I give them $12/year for “Premium” service, even though the free version meets all my needs.There are multiple desktop clients available to sync with SimpleNote’s server; I use JustNotes for the Mac, but others work as well.
	$1.99	iPad only
iA Writer	This one is iPad-only. Some of the design decisions in this app drive me crazy. But I love it for two reasons: The gorgeous custom font, Nitti Light, which is the most legible monospace typeface I’ve ever seen to on the iPad. And maybe it’s my teletype heritage, but I compose better in monospace. The expanded keyboard with cursor keys (yippee!) and other controls that may offend Steve Jobs, but which lighten my load every time I’m composing text. SimpleNote works well by staying out of my way for a few sentences at a time. If I’m typing more than half a page on my iPad, I want to use iA Writer.
	Free	Universal
Evernote	Theoretically, Evernote could replace both of the above apps. I find it too “heavy” to use for cranking out quick notes to myself, and the UI doesn’t match iA Writer for longer text. Where Evernote shines for me is in taking photographs (I’m particularly guilty of photographing the covers of books I want to buy) and OCRing them in the background so that they become searchable text. I suspect some low-wage English-speakers in India or China are chained to their workstations to type whatever they read in your photos, but I honestly don’t know. Synchronizes with an equally powerful client on your Mac or PC (or on the Web). There are paid options available if you turn out to be a heavy user.
	$9.99 (free trial available)	Universal
PCalc	As I said earlier, I waited to buy an iPhone until PCalc was available. I use it every day on my Mac, and now I use it every day on my iPhone. Gorgeous implementation… not a slavish recreation of my beloved and still-operational HP-15C (although those recreations exist; I’ve bought them) but a rethinking of what’s necessary in an RPN calculator and what can be hidden. (Oh, yeah, there’s an algebraic mode, too, but I’ve never paid it any attention.) Multiple “skins” available to get the appearance you’re looking for. Comparatively expensive for an iPhone app, but worth it. Pay the man. He deserves it.
	$4.99	Universal
PowerOne Financial	If I run into a calculation that’s too complicated for PCalc but not complicated enough to open a spreadsheet, I usually reach for PowerOne. It’s a distant descendant of the RPN calculator I used to use on the Palm, but vastly more powerful with customizable worksheets (things like Time Value of Money where you can actually see all the variables, not just stuff them into the stack like an HP-12C). My only complaint is that the interface is ugly; I wish Infinity Softworks would implement custom skins like PCalc did.
	$14.99	Both (single platform versions $7.99)
1Password Pro	I use a new randomly-generated password for every Website that I visit. So I need a secure place to keep them. After using SplashID for years on the Palm OS, I paid for both 1Password and SplashID on the iPhone. After a long period of using them in parallel, I settled on 1Password. Frequent updates, and a great Mac client that syncs automatically over Wi-Fi and integrates with Safari or Firefox on your desktop.
	$1.99	iPhone only
Favorites	Simple speed-dialer that sits in my Dock and lets me dial or text my most frequent contacts with one touch. Does exactly what you’d want it to, and nothing that you wouldn’t want it to. Probably overpriced but, seriously, can’t you afford two bucks?
	$4.99	iPad only
ReaddleDocs for iPad	I’ve said before that ReaddleDocs for the iPad is reason enough to own an iPad, and I still believe that. The ability to carry thousands of documents in a slim searchable slab has changed my life. Rather than having folders upon folders of paper printouts, I just forward any attachment (PDF or Microsoft Office… probably others, but those are the ones I care about) to my Readdle email address, and sync just before walking into a meeting. I’ve sold several iPads with this app. Good Reader has similar functionality, but until someone comes up with a better user interface (which, honestly, wouldn’t be difficult) or better customer service (which would be hard!), I love Readdle and use it every day.
	$4.99	iPhone only
ReaddleDocs	Readdle Docs for the iPhone synchronizes to the same cloud storage space as Readdle Docs for the iPad. It’s a less compelling experience just because of the inevitable limitations of the smaller screen. Where I’m likely to open a spreadsheet on my iPad and pass it around a conference table, I’m not going to do the same with my iPhone. Nevertheless, it’s nice to occasionally have access to documents when I don’t have my iPad with me, and Readdle serves that niche nicely. You have to buy them separately, which is an odd choice on the company’s part; I wish they sold a Universal version for 2/3rds the price of the two apps sold separately. Maybe someday.
	$4.99	iPad only
ToDo for iPad	How many to-do applications are available for iOS? Certainly dozens, probably hundreds. Most of them are pretty interchangeable. ToDo by Appigo is different. First, it’s gorgeous… someone really sweated the details on the UI, and it shows. Next, it integrates well between iPhone, iPad, Web (via Toodle-Do), and other services. Finally, the developers seem to pay attention to how people actually work, rather than trying to shoehorn us into “Getting Things Done” or any other system. I like it.
	$4.99 (free trial available)	iPhone only
ToDo	Bought as a companion to the gorgeous iPad version above, but really good enough to be bought just for the iPhone. Nicely done.
	$4.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Instapaper	What Readdle Docs does for attached files, Instapaper does for Web pages. Ever get into “tl;dr” (Too Long, Didn’t Read) mode when reading the Web? Instapaper solves the problem. Install a bookmarklet in your browser (desktop or iOS device) and, whenever you get to a page that’s too long, click “Read Later.” Instapaper magically figures out the part of the page you want to read (meaning, not the ads and the blogroll and the other cruft) and sucks it into the cloud. Sync your iPad, and all those articles wind up in local storage, so you can read them at leisure when waiting for a haircut or whatever… no network connection required. Beautifully crafted, obsessively supported. You need this app.
	$4.99	Universal
Consistency	This app is for repetitive tasks that need to be tracked, but that you don’t need to schedule on your calendar. Example: I need to oil my bicycle chain once a month, but if I’m a week early or a week late, it’s no big deal. Consistency is brilliant for things like that. I used to use the desktop version of this app and I like the idea a lot. I was pleased to find it available for the iPhone, so I bought it without doing my research. I’m mildly astonished to find that it doesn’t use iPhone notifications (badges, dialogs, sounds). And I’m disappointed that there’s not a “cloud” option to sync lists between my iPhone and iPad. I’d pay a modest amount for that.Considering it hasn’t been updated in years (Yoo-hoo, Sciral! There’s this thing called iOS 4 iOS 5; you might have read about it!), I guess we have to treat this app as abandonware. A shame, really, since I don’t know of anything else that works precisely this way.
	Free	Universal
WordPress	I don’t blog a lot away from my keyboard, but it’s nice to be able to fix a typo or approve a comment while on the go. After a rocky start, the WordPress app has matured to a solid client on both iPhone and iPad. If you have a WordPress blog (self-hosted or on WordPress.com), you need to check this out… at least until MarsEdit for iPad ships.
	Free	Universal
Skype	I don’t use Skype a lot, but it’s nice to have for that occasional international phone call. And it’s a nice multiplatform chat interface that most people will either have, or be willing to install. The iPhone client works well, and it’s free.

Apple iWork Suite

	$9.99 each	Universal
Keynote —– Pages —– Numbers	These three get special treatment. Keynote, Pages, and Numbers together form Apple’s iWork suite… originally for the desktop, and redesigned to launch with the iPad. I have my issues with these three apps, but they’re still worth the money. First off, they ought to be named “Keynote Light,” “Pages Light,” and “Numbers Light”… Apple did a good job of focusing on the 80% of features that everyone really needs, but sometimes one of the 20% they eliminated will really bite your project in the butt. In particular, I keep running into limitations with Keynote (master slides, complex animations, fonts, and complex groups) that badly break certain of my slide presentations. Next, the process for getting documents from the desktop version of iWorks applications into and out of the iPad Apps is just hostile. It takes about ten steps, none of which intuitively leads to the next. This is very “un-Apple” and I hoped that iCloud would fix this, but it’s just not ready yet. But, for now, if you think that having iWork on your desktop and on your iPad means you can edit the same document in both places… you’re wrong. You can create a document on your desktop, export it to your iPad, and (most) things will work… but if you make changes on your iPad, you need to export it back to your Mac as a new document. No synchronization, no audit trail, no acknowledgement of cloud-based workflow at all. Ick. All that being said, it’s really cool to walk into a room carrying just your iPad and a VGA dongle, and running the whole presentation from your touchscreen. Major ego boost.

E-Books

	Free	Universal
Kindle	I’m one of those weird people who bought a Kindle after buying an iPad. Different screen technologies, different use cases. I love them both. We’ve bought a lot of books on Kindle, and it’s great to have them with me wherever I go… including the amazingly-capable screen on the iPhone 4/4S. Synchronization is painless, and the feature set is more than adequate.
	Free	Universal
Stanza	Oddly, the best e-book reader on the iPhone or iPad is made by Amazon, but it’s not Kindle. It’s Stanza. Formerly a standalone company (Lexcycle), Amazon bought the developer in early 2009, and I was terrified that it meant the death of this superb application. But they released an iPad update more or less on schedule, did a full-blown Lazarus after iOS 5 broke the app, and have clearly not abandoned the product. It’s a better reading experience than Kindle, with a more mature set of interface options (it’s been around longer!), and it integrates into a wide variety of paid and free e-book sources. I tend to want to buy everything that Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books publishes, and Stanza makes that painless. Maybe too painless. Hook it up to Calibre on your desktop, and you can easily see how I have over 300 books on my iPad.

News/Information

	Free	iPhone only
The Weather Channel	Another of those ecological niches where I’ve downloaded at least six free and paid apps. The Weather Channel isn’t just the hometown team here in Atlanta; I think they’ve built the best app. (There’s a paid upgrade, but I haven’t felt the need to buy it.)
	Free	iPad only
WSJ	I gave up on my dead tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal years ago, but I missed it. Now I don’t miss it anymore. The first release of this app for the iPad was absolutely terrible, but they’ve iterated rapidly, and the current version is great. Everything you need so that you’re no longer sitting there looking stupid when someone asks “Did you see the article on such-and-so in the Wall Street Journaltoday?” Now, if they’d just get rid of their obsession with fully-justified typography. Hint: Ragged-right looks better on narrow columns!
	Free (with paid print subscription)	iPad (iPhone version also available)
The Economist	I used to be addicted to print magazines… at one point, I was receiving over 50 per month. (I read fast. Really, really fast.) The Internet killed that little habit, and now I enjoy letting print subscriptions lapse, but one that I never hesitate to renew is The Economist. The iPad version is gorgeous and, if you have a paid print subscription, you get the entire magazine online every week. It downloads to local storage so you can read it on the plane without Wi-Fi. Perfect!
	Free	Universal
AJC	Sadly, the local paper has seen better days… a 50% drop in print subscribers will do that to you. And now that it’s moved to Dunwoody, the Atlanta Journal Constitution seems to be becoming the “North of I-285 Journal Constitution.” But there’s no substitute for the AJC when you want to find out about a local city council meeting, or the schedule for the Peachtree Road Race. (And their Twitter accounts are great!)
	Free	Universal
Flipboard	Flipboard is a Twitter client, but it’s also a lot more. It scrapes multiple services (your choice) and reformats stories into a customized online magazine. Beautiful UI; this is the simplest way I know to kill time while feeding my brain, as long as I have a Wi-Fi connection available.
	$2.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Regator Premium	Another hometown team (Decatur, Georgia), but with a national reputation. Regator hand-selects blog feeds from your topics of interest and presents them in a constantly-curated collection. This is where you’ll find those stories that’ll never make the New York Times… or, occasionally, where you’ll find big stories before they make the New York Times.
	Free	Universal
TED	TED has been called “the new Harvard.” I don’t know if I believe that, but the TED talks are extraordinary. Their self-description: “Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world. TED presents talks from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends.” I don’t usually have the patience for videos or podcasts, and I wish TED had a text transcription but these are good enough to be worth an exception.

Photography

	$1.99	Universal
AutoStitch Panorama	Can’t get everything you want into the camera frame? Take multiple photographs and stitch them together into a (vertical or horizontal) panorama. Better UI than Photoshop on your desktop, and it runs on your phone! We really are living in the future.
	Free	iPad only
SmugMug	I have set up picture-sharing free accounts on Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Ofoto, and probably others. But I cheerfully pay for a SmugMug account because it’s just better. My only complaint is that not enough other apps integrate with it, I guess because of the smaller user base… but those users are vociferous fans, and include many professional photographers who use SmugMug galleries in their day job! The iPad app is a delightful way to browse through your photos and show them off to others.
	$3.99	iPad (iPhone version also available)
Photogene	It’s not Photoshop, but it’s amazing. The range of photo manipulations you can perform on a handheld device would have been dismissed as impossible only a few years ago. I’ve downloaded lots of photo utilities, but this is the one I keep launching when I need to fiddle with a photo. (Wonderful fact: if you’re on Wi-Fi, photos taken with your iPhone can be edited on your iPad within seconds, due to the magic of iCloud. So don’t be that guy holding the iPad up to your face… you look like a dork.)
	$0.99	Universal
ColorSplash	A one-trick pony, but what a cool trick! Convert your photos to black-and-white, then “paint” the color back into place for selected regions. Great user interface, and you wind up with striking photos to save or share. Yeah, you can do this in Photoshop, but not as easily, and not nearly as enjoyably! Spend the buck.
	$0.99 (free trial available)	iPhone only
JotNot Scanner Pro	Another one-trick pony. Take photos of documents (receipts, business cards, or full-size sheets of paper) and JotNot will square them up and crank up the contrast to make them surprisingly legible. I’ve emailed people photographs of documents rather than finding a fax machine, and it worked beautifully.

Navigation

	Free	Universal
MotionX GPSLite	A surprisingly good free navigation program. All sorts of downloadable maps, with waypoints, tracks, and more.There’s an HD version available for the iPad that’s even prettier.
	$39.99	Universal
TomTom USA	I have a standalone Garmin GPS that I like, but I can’t imagine buying another one. TomTom works without a network connection (important in rural Georgia!) to give you turn-by-turn navigation based on an internal database. (Which is enormous, by the way… you need more than a gigabyte free on your device to install this app.) Good user interface, with all the bells and whistles you’d expect, and a few you might not.
	$5.99	Universal
GoSkyWatch	Go outside at night. Look up. What the heck is that star? With GoSkyWatch, you have a planetarium inside your iPhone. Point it at the sky, and you can instantly figure out “Oh, that’s Vega! Cool!” Uses the accelerometer
	$0.99	Universal
Star Walk	Both StarWalk and GoSkyWatch are now universal applications, running on iPhone and iPad. Maybe it’s just my personal experience with the apps, but I tend to default to using GoSkyWatch on my iPhone, and StarWalk on my iPad. StarWalk is utterly gorgeous… a few missing features, but you won’t care. Usually three bucks, on sale today for a buck. Buy it.
	Free	Universal
Google Earth	Possibly the greatest toy ever. If you’ve used it on your desktop, you’re still not prepared for how utterly magical (hat tip to Steve Jobs) it is on an iPad. It’s free. Why haven’t you downloaded it?

Utilities

	$0.99	iPhone 4
Flashlight	I have no clue how many flashlight programs there are for the iPhone. The earliest zillion of them just turned the whole screen white. This was the first of a new generation that lights up the (incredibly bright) LED of the iPhone 4 camera flash. Sucks up your battery if you leave it on too long, but it’s brighter than those keychain flashlights, and you always have it with you. There are free ones out there, but this one is nicely done and well worth a buck.
	$12.99	Universal
PrintBureau	Perhaps the most misnamed app in the iTunes Store. Yes, it manages printing… I can print directly from my iPhone or iPad to my wireless inkjet printer. (Apple has AirPrint. PrintBureau works with more printers.) But it also handles cloud storage, and acts as a Wi-Fi hard drive, and has an email client, and probably makes julienne fries. I can’t keep track of everything this app does, but it’s a heck of a lot more than printing. (To print, it runs a helper app in the background on your Mac or PC, which is irritating, but it doesn’t take too many resources and has never crashed my Mac.)
	Free	Universal
Dropbox	Two years ago, I wrote “Apple, will you just buy Dropbox and put iDisk out of its overpriced misery?” Well, iCloud has killed iDisk, but Dropbox is doing just fine after turning down Steve Jobs’ offer. As far as I can tell, Dropbox has become not only the default cloud-storage service for iOS devices, but is darned near the file system that iOS tries to hide from you. What’s the difference? iCloud syncs your data (for apps that support it), Dropbox syncs your files (ditto). Normal people would probably be content with iCloud. I need both. Integrates seamlessly with your desktop (at least on the Mac; Windows and Linux versions exist, but I’ve never used them). A great way to move files back and forth, to make backups from your portable device, to share files with other people, whatever. I pay them for the 50 gig option, but normal humans should be satisfied with the free 2 gigabyte storage.
	Free	Universal
JungleDisk	I back up all of my Macs to JungleDisk, all the time. My files live safely on Amazon’s S3 servers. If someome steals all my computers, I’ll be angry, but I won’t be out of business. (Yeah, I have the ridiculously-long S3 keys printed out in my fireproof safe.) The iOS app lets me browse and manage those files… including occasionally pulling down a new version of a presentation that I forgot to move to Keynote for the iPad. Amazon S3 isn’t free, but the JungleDisk app is.

Fun and Games

	Free	Universal
Pandora Radio	What’s there left to say about Pandora? All the music in the world, streamed to your device, free, and in (to my ears) great quality. The only drawback was that you couldn’t run it in the background, but that’s been fixed by iOS 4.2. This ought to be burned into the ROM of every iDevice in the world. (And every dashboard. Luckily, the Chevy Volt plays Pandora seamlessly when your iPhone is plugged into the USB port.)
	Free	Universal
Netflix	At first, it was just cool to manage my Netflix queue from my iPhone without firing up a Web browser. Then they implemented streaming, and changed the world. Watch thousands of movies and TV shows on your phone or iPad, connect it to an external TV set, pause and pick it up later… yep, this is exactly the way it’s supposed to work. No wonder Blockbuster is in Chapter 11. Or that we disconnected our cable TV service, and don’t miss it.
	Free	Universal
SoundHound	Whenever you’re out somewhere and hear a song and wonder what it is… run SoundHound and give it a try. If there’s not too much background noise, it’s amazingly accurate at identifying prerecorded music, and will instantly show you lyrics and a link to buy the song in iTunes. They claim to be able to identify songs that you hum or sing into the mike, but I’ve had pretty poor luck with that. There’s a paid version if you use it frequently, but the free version seems adequate for most needs.
	$4.99	Universal
Myst	It’s back! The game that sold a lot of color Macintoshes (yes, kiddies, Macs used to be black and white) migrated to the iPhone in fine form. The same puzzles, the same music, and the same backstory that we obsessed over back in 1993. (I basically spent a week over Christmas that year solving Myst.) It’s arguably even better with a touch interface. There’s not a separate iPad version, but the graphics look fine in 2X mode. (Warning: the app is huge, so make sure you have a gigabyte free before purchasing it.)
	$1.99	Both (enhanced iPad version available)
Romi	If you’ve ever played Rummikub, you instantly understand Romi. If you’ve ever played a rummy card game, you’ll understand in about thirty seconds. Nice interface (needs custom skins, though) and intelligent gameplay. Excellent execution for two bucks. The iPad version is identical except for higher-rez graphics.
	$1.99 (free trial available)	Universal
Word with Friends	I was so excited when Electronic Arts released Scrabble for the iPad! I bought it immediately, and it played exactly like the cardboard version. Exactly. There was a cool feature where you could “flick” tiles from your iPhone/iPod Touch to the main iPad screen, but basically, you needed to be sitting around a table with the other players. So, for four players, you’d be using $1300 worth of electronics to replace a ten-dollar board game. EA (and Hasbro/Milton Bradley) managed to miss a technological revolution named “the Internet.” Newtoy — a tiny company in McKinney, Texas — did it right. They published a modified version of the Scrabble board (to avoid copyright issues, I’m sure) and connected it to the Internet. Now you could play a Scrabble-like game with friends or strangers anywhere in the world… and asynchronously, so you didn’t have to try to coordinate schedules. If you’re both online, you might complete a turn within seconds; if not, the next turn might be hours or days later.Absolutely brilliant, absolutely addictive, and an absolutely wonderful way to spend time. There’s a free version with on-screen ads, but send NewToy two bucks. They deserve it. Update: Zynga, the Farmville people, bought Newtoy and promptly hit WwF with an ugly stick, then doused it with a bucket of evil. I still use it, but Zynga sucked all the joy out of it.
	$1.99 (free trial available)	iPad only
Words with Friends HD	Same feature set as the basic version, but even more beautiful (and easier to play) on the big screen. Again, a free ad-supported version is available but, if you play as often as I do, it’s worth two bucks. (My screen name is ‘stephenfleming’; feel free to challenge me. I will crush you.)
	$19.99	iPad only
Acid Solitaire	I bought this set of three solitaire card games during a brief promotional sale for five bucks. I know $20 is a lot for an iPad game, but it’s beautifully done. I’ve experimented with a few other solitaire games from other developers, but I’m glad I have this one to play. (My wife developed carpal tunnel syndrome from AcidSolitaire… you have been warned!)
	$0.99 (free trial available)	Both (enhanced iPad version available)
Angry Birds	Saving the best for last! This is the most expensive dollar I ever spent… I’ve spent over thirty hours playing this game, which, at my loaded labor rate, it…. (mumble, mumble, mumble) a lot of money. You know the drill… you use a slingshot to fire various kinds of birds at fantastically-unlikely “forts” protecting evil pigs. Silly. Instantly accessible. Difficult to master. I’ve gotten three stars on every level (including the sequels, Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Space), and all the golden eggs, but I tend to get compulsive. (Which is why I usually don’t play computer games!) The iPad version has better graphics and it easier to play, but accomplishments on the iPhone don’t unlock higher levels on the iPad (or vice versa). Similarly, Apple’s GameCenter treats it as a completely different game, so achievements on one platform won’t translate to the other. I bought both, but found myself playing more on the iPhone just because I always had it with me. I hope Rovio fixes this someday, once they finish wallowing in their Scrooge McDuck money room!

This turned into an absurdly long blog post (over 9,000 words), but I hope it’s useful to someone. Avoid “tl;dr” and try it in Instapaper!

And for those who have plowed all the way to the end… a screenshot of my iPad home page, to show what I really use. Click to embiggen. I like the out-of-focus Ramblin’ Wreck as a background. Go Jackets!

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First, we found him exploring the electric car corner of the auto show: two Volts, one Tesla Roadster, an original Honda Insight, four Nissan Leafs (Leaves?), and a Prius that has been hacked into becoming a plug-in hybrid. He posed next to Cissa’s brand-new Volt, and answered a few questions that we had (details below).

Later, we went indoors, where Bly spoke about the Chevy Volt. Micky is an experienced and accomplished speaker. He spoke for over half an hour with no notes, and I suspect he would have done just as well without his PowerPoint slides also.

Takeaways

Some possibly-incoherent notes typed on my iPhone while Bly was talking:

Bly leads a team of 3000 engineers; 1800 in Michigan, and 1200 around the world. The Volt, and its follow-ons, are a major investment by General Motors, and he claims that electrification is “redefining the automobile.” This isn’t a skunkworks or hobby project. This is GM’s major bet on transitioning to building cars that are not 100% dependent on petroleum.

Gasoline-powered cars have made a lot of progress. According to Bly, in the last 30 years, tailpipe emissions have been reduced by 99%, mileage has increased by 130%, and safety has increased by 70%. The average car today has 30 onboard computers to optimize performance. But there are political, technical, and economical reasons to move away from internal combustion and mechanical systems to electric and electronic systems. World petroleum demand would require bringing six new Saudi Arabias online by 2030, which isn’t going to happen.

General Motors is a big believer in the Volt architecture. Bly made a big point of emphasizing that the Volt is not a “plug-in hybrid”… it is an “extended range electric vehicle” (EREV). (Please have any religious wars over terminology elsewhere, not in my Comments section.)

Low-light photo of one of Bly's PowerPoint slides. Sorry about the quality.

Batteries are lousy. And “gasoline is an amazing substance.” The very complex, very heavy, very expensive, very state-of-the-art battery underpinning the Volt stores the equivalent energy of one gallon of gasoline. General Motors evaluated 155 suppliers and tested 60 different battery formulations before settling on their partnership with LG Chem. In his words, “There are liars, damned liars, and battery suppliers.”

To bring the battery pack into production, GM built the largest battery testing facility in the world. He showed some great pictures (which I didn’t capture well with my phone) of batteries being tested on fire, underwater, and when being rammed into concrete barriers. The Volt batteries aren’t perfect, but he claims they’re the best ever placed into a production vehicle.

He tackled the NHTSA issue head on. “255,000 cars catch on fire in this country every year. One Volt, after being intentionally crashed and then left for three weeks without following published safety procedures, caught on fire. If you had been trapped in that car for three weeks, you’d have died of starvation or thirst a long time before you were threatened by fire!”

The 1.4 liter engine in the Volt eliminates range anxiety. He used the example of driving 1300 miles from Detroit to West Palm Beach. In a Corvette (he has seen not only the next Corvette, but the next next Corvette!), it would take two days, with an overnight stop in North Carolina. In a Chevrolet Volt, it would take the same two days… the first 40 miles on battery power, then the remaining 1260 miles on gasoline. In a Nissan Leaf (or, to be fair, a Chevy Spark) pure electric, it would take about 18 days! “With the Volt, there’s no need to change your life around your car.”

He finished by saying “We’ve had some really crappy TV commercials” but that the current owners of Volts were almost bizarrely happy with their cars. In his summary, he stated without hesitation that “In ten years, all of us will be driving some sort of electrified vehicle: hybrid, EREV, or pure electric. All of us.”

Questions & Answers

Bly then went on to handle a surprisingly lengthy, detailed, and wide-ranging Q&A session. He obviously already knew about the March sales figures (which turned out to be a record-setting 2289 Volts sold, double February sales and nearly four times January’s disappointing 609 units), but he couldn’t talk about it before the formal announcement two days later.

Why doesn’t GM have a small diesel engine?
To meet current emissions requirements, you need a chemical factory strapped to the back of a diesel engine. Emission control adds about $10,000 to the cost of a diesel vehicle, and it just doesn’t make economic sense for small cars.

Will the Volt architecture be extended to other vehicles?
Absolutely. The Cadillac ELR is nearing production. GM has already shown a minivan based on the Volt platform in Shanghai, and other models are in development. But you probably won’t see a full-size SUV built on the Volt EREV architecture anytime soon. Doubling the battery pack would cost too much.

How much will it cost to replace the Volt battery in 10 years?
We don’t know. (Major points for honesty!) But lithium cells are driving down the cost curve much faster than we thought possible. In 2008, Li-Ion energy densities were $1000/kilowatt-hour. Now, it’s $500/kWh. And the Department of Energy projects $200/kWh by the year 2020. So, in ten years, your current Volt’s battery will be replaced with something better and 80% cheaper.

What happens when you put a Volt into a landfill?
GM is already working with “second responders” (a new phrase for me) to prepare for scrapping volts. One of the leaders is the unfortunately-named Toxco. (Seriously. Would you name a company “Toxco”?)

What’s it like to travel with a Volt?
Hotels are already advertising to attract EV owners with conveniently-placed electrical outlets for charging. A few are installing 240V “Level II” chargers. In response to a follow-up question, GM has no interest in subsidizing those Level II chargers. Micky believes in a free market, and figures that market demand will convince the hotels to do this themselves. “GM makes cars.”

Won’t the gasoline in the tank get stale?
The Volt went back to a sealed steel gas tank to prevent vapor escape of volatile fractions. Even if your driving stays within electric capacity, the engine will start every six weeks just for maintenance purposes, to burn off some gasoline and to keep the parts lubricated.

Does the Volt qualify for single-occupancy use of HOV lanes?
Yes. Indeed, it just got qualified for HOV use in California… and the Prius just got kicked out!

Why isn’t the body built of carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber works well for race cars. For a production car, it’s still terribly expensive. And the nature of carbon-fiber layup leaves you with 30-40 percent scrap material that cannot be recycled. Waiting for a breakthrough, but for now, they’re minimizing weight with metal, not composites.

What about the Better Place model of swapping fully-charged batteries?
It won’t work. “Shah Agassi (CEO and founder) is a friend of mine” and the idea sounds good, but it’s impossible to scale. The cellphone industry sells 500 million batteries a year, and no one has figured out how to make those interchangeable yet. Cars will take longer. The logistics and economics of warehouse-sized battery-swap facilities add up to a business case that just doesn’t work. (Smugly, I note that I came to exactly this conclusion in my blog post in October 2010.)

What ever happened to the hydrogen fuel-cell “skateboard” design?
The HyWire concept has a lot of promise, and Micky’s team “looked at it for the Volt, but went a different direction.” It’s great for weight distribution, not so great in crash protection. He’s very skeptical about hydrogen in an automotive environment. “We will not be shipping a car that uses cryogenic fuel.” (Ahem. More smugness here and here.)

Is there enough lithium in the world to build all these batteries?
Lithium is being be mined in Bolivia, Brazil, Afghanistan, Russia, China, India, North Dakota, and Canada. There are known supplies equivalent to building 50 million Volts… and we hope to have that problem! Those taking lithium medication have no need to worry.

Will all these plug-in cars shut down the national electric grid?
The grid can currently handle 100 million plug-in vehicles. Again, GM hopes to have that problem!

Upcoming Goodies

In sidebar conversations before and after the presentation, I learned a few more bits and pieces to look forward to in future Volts.

My biggest disappointment with the car is the lack of a sunroof. Bly said “Not in the 2012 models.” The clear implication is that we’ll see it in 2013 models…

Also in 2013, Volts will have body-colored roofs as an option instead of the all-black roofs today.

The USB port will provide a very slow trickle charge to an iPad, but not enough for the iPad to admit it, so the display says “Not Charging.” Later this summer, there’s a fix coming so that new cars will double their output current. Existing Volts will be able to get the new circuit as an upgrade.

He understands the frustration with requiring the stereo to be turned on if you want the nav, climate, or energy status displays. A fix is coming. Cissa also demonstrated how, with long fingernails, it’s necessary to rest your hand along the top row of buttons to get the angle right, so she’s always pressing “Climate” or “Auto” by accident. He agreed that there needs to be some sort of shelf or lip there.

We talked about having the center screen be a full AirPlay client (so that iPhones or iPads can mirror their display over Wi-Fi). They’ve made it work in the lab, but have serious concerns about driver distraction and safety.

Trivia

Turns out that after pressing the remote “Unlock” button twice (to unlock first the driver’s door, then all doors), holding down the button lowers all the windows. Nice for cooling off the car on a hot day. It’s probably in the manual, but I didn’t know it.

No way that I would have known this, but the first 1000 Volts have slightly different screen displays, including showing the VIN number on screen.

Conclusion

Micky Bly is clearly a helluva, helluva, helluva engineer, and I’m glad that Georgia Tech can claim him! I appreciate all the time he spent on campus, and his endless patience and good humor in answering our questions.

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But I also read “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” by Bob Lutz, who knows more about the automobile business than anyone alive… and who proudly declares himself to be the father of the Chevy Volt. And I read his defenses of the Volt against right-wing smears here and here and here.

And I saw that the NHTSA ended its Volt safety investigation by stating that “no discernible defect trend exists.”

And I saw that the Volt (under its European badging as the Opel Ampera) just won European Car of the Year… the first American car ever to do so.

And, as an engineer, I like the idea of plug-in hybrids. As I’ve stated elsewhere on this blog, I don’t think pure electric vehicles make sense for most people. Not now. Maybe not ever. But plug-in hybrids eliminate “range anxiety” while letting you run 100% electric for short trips around town.

So I was rooting for this awkward underdog of a car, but wasn’t really involved. But, through an odd series of circumstances, we found ourselves with a Chevy Volt as a loaner car last week while Cissa’s car was being repaired.

It’s a great car.

Not “It’s a great car, considering it’s electric.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you’re an environmentalist.”

Or “It’s a great car, if you want something to put your Obama bumper sticker on.”

Just… “It’s a great car.”

First Impressions

First, it’s a real car. Not a golf cart, not a wannabe like the egg-shaped fiberglass GEMs that are best used for parking enforcement, not a barely-satisfactory vehicle like the General Motors EV1 of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” fame. (I rode in an EV1. Trust me, you didn’t want one.)

From the outside, the Volt looks a lot like the Chevrolet Cruze. There’s less of a family resemblance in the interior, but the American-designed Volt inherits the Cruze’s headroom and legroom. I’m 6’4″, and I’m completely comfortable sitting in it; I can even cross my legs in the passenger seat. By comparison, I cannot sit in a Prius, even a Prius V, for any length of time… my head pushes against the roof, and my knees are up against the dashboard.

The Volt dashboard is a bit overwhelming at first. There are two iPad-sized screens; one in front of the driver, and one in the middle stack. Even though the middle one is touch-sensitive, it perches atop 38 hardware buttons (maybe to avoid comparison with BMW’s much-reviled iDrive). It all takes a little getting used to. Knowing that normal humans are not going to read a 424-page owner’s manual (plus a 108-page navigation supplement), Chevy thoughtfully tucks a 16-page summary into the glove box. You should read that; you’ll learn some things.

(I read the big books. But I don’t claim to be a normal human.)

Driving the Volt

The Volt comes with wireless keys and pushbutton start, which I personally think is a solution in search of a problem, but all the cool kids are doing it, so….

But when you punch the big blue button, the dashboard breaks out into a kaleidoscope of images, the stereo makes a Star Trek “powering up” sound… and then SILENCE. The car is ready to drive, but the engine hasn’t started. And, unlike the Prius, where the engine starts by the time you’ve merged into traffic, the Volt’s engine won’t start for 30 or 40 miles.

Originally, the Volt was positioned as a series hybrid (as opposed to the Prius, which is a parallel hybrid). Series hybrids are a logically-simpler architecture, where the drive wheels are driven by an electric motor, and an internal combustion engine is used only as a generator to charge the batteries. (And the electric motor can “run backwards” to charge the batteries when braking or coasting.)

Series hybrids aren’t new… every diesel locomotive is designed this way. Ferdinand Porsche built series-hybrid automobiles over 100 years ago. But it’s hard to get all the pieces working right in a package smaller than a locomotive… so hard that even GM relented and settled for a mixed design where the gasoline engine helps drive the wheels at highway speeds. (But, from personal experience, I can testify that the Volt will happily cruise above 80 mph with the gasoline engine off. Um, I think I just used a public forum to confess to breaking the law. Oops.) But, even so, the architecture of a series hybrid is so much simpler that I have to believe they’ll dominate hybrid cars in the future. (Here are some other plug-in hybrids: a gaggle of Fisker Karmas. They cost more.)

Separately, the Volt is the first mass-produced plug-in hybrid. That means exactly what it sounds like: you can plug it into the wall socket to charge the batteries. A Prius gets all its power from burning gasoline in its own engine; it just does so more efficiently than many other vehicles of similar size and weight. The Chevy Volt can do that too, but it can also get power from your local utility… meaning you don’t spend money on gasoline.

In our first week of driving the Volt, we travelled 221 miles and burned half a gallon of gasoline.

Of course, we had to pay for electricity. But Georgia Power can generate electricity a lot cheaper than your Prius can. In fact, you can sign up for a time-of-day pricing plan where you pay 1.25¢ per kilowatt-hour. “Your mileage will vary” but the Volt gets about 5 miles per kWh, meaning you’re paying Georgia Power 0.25¢/mile. (Read that carefully. Not 25 cents per mile. A quarter of a cent per mile.) Looked at another way, ten cents of electricity at cheap overnight rates will run your Volt for 40 miles.

At today’s prices, ten cents of gasoline will run your comparably-sized 36-mpg Chevrolet Cruze about one mile.

40:1 ratios get my attention.

So why aren’t we all driving electric cars? Because we still don’t have decent batteries, even after billions (and billions and billions) of dollars of R&D. The very best pure-electric cars have only 100-mile range, even under optimum conditions. And when your battery is dead, your car is dead. And it’s dead for a long time. You can’t just hitch a ride to the corner gas station and trot back with a five-gallon jug. You’re in for a close encounter with a tow truck, then a long charging period at the nearest charging station, wherever that may be. Which is why pure-electrics like the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Roadster, and others are just oddities. Range anxiety.

Plug-in hybrids eliminate range anxiety. If we want to drive to Savannah, we’ll drive to Savannah, and buy some gasoline along the way. When we get home, we’ll plug it back into the wall, and go back to electric-only commutes around town. Right now, we’re using the regular 110v charger that comes with the vehicle. That takes 10 hours to charge the battery, so it’s basically an overnight operation, which works fine for us. For additional geek points, I’m thinking of installing the optional 240v charger. That runs off the same sized circuit as your electric clothes dryer, and that charges the vehicle in 4 hours. I can’t actually think of many circumstances in which that would make a meaningful difference in my life, but…. “MORE POWER!”

And, yes, I’m perfectly aware that, in Georgia Power’s service territory, I’m driving a coal-powered car. Two-thirds of the electrons pumping through that cable came from burning the fuel of Satan. But 21% of that power came from nice clean nuclear plants, and that percentage will rise when the Plant Vogtle expansion comes online. In sane countries like France (and I can’t believe I just typed that phrase), 80% of electric generation comes from nuclear power, which means things like cleaner air and prettier countrysides. In the meantime, don’t fool yourself into believing that any electric vehicle will do a lot about CO2 emissions. (Electric cars will reduce particulate emissions, since Georgia Power can afford expensive stack scrubbers that won’t fit on your car.)

Back to the Volt: in one of those unsung-but-painful behind-the-scenes advances, most major electric vehicle manufacturers (including BMW, Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Renault, Tesla, and Toyota) have signed onto the SAE J1772-2009 standard, meaning you can have a single cable that fits into every one of those cars. Imagine if public charging stations had to have GM plugs and Toyota plugs and Tesla plugs, and… ouch. The Volt even puts a nice LED flashlight into their plug so you can easily connect the cable in the dark. One of those nice touches which convinced me that a bunch of smart engineers in Detroit finally got the chance to build a car the right way, not just the cheap way.

Other Impressions

What all the specs don’t convey is the spooky silence of driving the Volt. Since the engine doesn’t kick in until you’ve driven forty miles (which, for Midtown denizens like us, can mean days and days of electric-only operation), you get used to wafting down the road in complete silence. There’s even a funky “Pedestrian Friendly Alert” on the turn signal, just to let people know you’re there. (I’ve always thought cars should have two horns: one to say “Hi, here I am!” and another to say “YOU IDIOT!” The Volt, finally, does.)

Unfortunately, you can’t enjoy this silence with the windows down. Anywhere above neighborhood speeds, lowering a window creates a weird fluttering pressure variation that makes you feel like a helicopter is hovering overhead. I guess that, after all those wind tunnel studies, it was a tradeoff that GM decided was worth making. Disappoints me, but I’m a fresh-air fiend in my car.

And you certainly can’t enjoy the silence with the sunroof open… because there is no sunroof. This is my biggest complaint about the car, actually. I guess the mileage zealots decided that having a sunroof open would play hell with fuel efficiency… but couldn’t they have put in an immobile glass panel? (With a sunshade, of course.) Wouldn’t have weighed more, wouldn’t have affected aerodynamic drag at all, and would have made the interior seem much airier. Two model years after introduction, Chevy shows no interest in a sunroof. Maybe they’re still planning to pave the roof with solar cells, but I haven’t seen that, either. Sigh.

The center stack system demonstrates a lot of development effort. The touchscreen navigation and climate control are far superior to the Toyota interface (we cross-shopped multiple Toyota and Lexus models). It comes with a trial subscription to a traffic information service that worked well in Atlanta; no guarantees about rural Saskatchewan.

Ditto for the well-thought-out iPod/iPhone interface… which lets you play your tunes, charge your phone, and access other apps, all at the same time. (By comparison, the Toyota iPod interface just freezes the iPhone screen… and scrolling through your playlists requires dozens of pokes at the dashboard touchscreen instead of the Volt’s fluid scrolling with a physical dial.) You can record 30 gigabytes of CD music to the built-in hard disk, which is nice. It even lets you pause live radio (just like TiVo) with a 20-minute buffer. That’s cool.

Bluetooth integration with your iPhone is flawless.

The only weirdness is that GM’s engineers apparently decided that, if you ever want to have any center-screen function on, you also want to have the stereo on. So if you just want to silently watch power flow from your battery to your wheels and back again through regenerative braking, you have to twist the volume knob to zero. That’s silly. (Maybe I should put an MP3 of John Cage on repeat.)

And, bizarrely, the thing plays DVDs. Only while you’re parked. Apparently, this is a big feature in Japan and Europe (where you can play them while driving). Here in the U.S., I can’t imagine a circumstance where I’d say “Hey! We’re home! Let’s pop in a DVD and watch a movie here in the garage rather than walking fourteen steps to our big-screen TV!” Ah, well, it doesn’t hurt anything.

The backseat is… habitable. It’s definitely a four-seater car, because the ginormous battery tunnel runs down the center of the car. No way to put a fifth person in back, even in a child seat. Great cupholders, though.

The hatchback is big enough for a trip to Costco, not big enough to move all your worldly possessions. (Unless you’re Andrew Hyde, but he’s nuts.)

Other nits: No rear-window wiper. Definitely noticeable during pollen season. I assume it was nixed for aerodynamic reasons. There’s a very low air dam in the front bumper which scrapes our driveway. Aerodynamics again. No spare tire (although there’s a sealer/inflation pump). Weight savings. All engineering tradeoffs that I’m sure were vociferously debated in the GM Design Center. I might have made different decisions, but I’m sure these weren’t made casually. The car is too well thought out.

Finally, the Volt lease comes with free OnStar… and a nifty iPhone app that lets you remotely monitor the battery, gas tank, tire pressure, and even lock/unlock the doors and honk the horn. Major geek points. Why can’t all cars do this?

Financial Terms

In general, I don’t like leasing unless you can write it off on your taxes. I don’t even like making car payments. I buy cars for cash. But, with the Volt, things are just too fuzzy. First, the car costs too damned much. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but $45,000 for a four-door sedan that doesn’t have a Maserati or Bentley badge just bugs me.

From a PR standpoint, the misreporting of the NHTSA tests has been a nightmare. And, politically, the GOP attacks aren’t helping. GM just stopped the production lines for five weeks due to weak demand. (Way to kill off American jobs, guys! Proud of yourselves?) If the worst happens and GM pulls the plug on the Volt, what’s a used one worth in five years? Zero?

Technically, no one knows what years of heavy use will do to these lithium-ion batteries. We know they’ll lose capacity; the only question is “How much?” And there is happy handwaving about repurposing used Volt batteries for electric-grid power balancing, but that may or may not happen. So what’s the residual value of a car that’s half battery when the battery is half-depleted? I don’t know.

So there are just too many uncertainties for me to write a check for this car. Luckily, GM is way ahead of me, and is offering a heavily-subsidized leasing option. It’s widely advertised as “$2500 down, $350/month.” Of course, that’s for a stripper model without the fancy nav system and backup camera and all the other toys that you really want. And it doesn’t include taxes and all the silly fees that the U.S. dealer network insists on charging. But it’s still a great deal, and I wish more people knew about it.

Taking the Plunge

After a week, our loaner car needed to go back home… and we realized that we would miss it. Cissa’s 2003 Pontiac was getting a bit tired after years of noble service, and it was time for a new car. We spent a few evenings shopping the competition, and finally decided that a Volt needed to live in our garage. Our loaner had over 4000 miles on it, and black leather seats. (Chevy really pushes the black leather. Apparently, none of their engineers have visited Georgia in the summer.) But we found a white car with beige leather seats and all the toys at Superior Chevrolet in Decatur… where the Internet sales manager happens to be a friend of mine from high school! To his credit, he’d noticed some of my Twitter posts about the Volt and emailed me pictures of the one on his lot… which led directly to the sale. (Daniel Hudson, (770) 595-5624. Tell him I said hi!)

(Yes, the huge stickers on the side are removable.)

We got a good deal, and we get a warm fuzzy feeling from supporting not only all the assembly line workers, but all the engineers and marketers and corporate managers who have put their butts on the line for this car. I think it’s a major step forward, and I’m proud that Cissa is going to be driving one. I hope you can look past the jokes and consider buying leasing one for your family as well.

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You have to admit, it is a good way to hook someone into a conversation!

In 1981, Osheroff was the wunderkind of Bell Labs. He had just won one of the first MacArthur “genius awards,” and was widely reputed to be in line for the Nobel. (Which he didn’t win until 1996. The wheels grind slowly sometimes.)

And although we worked in the same building for a few months, we never met until yesterday.

In 1981, I was co-oping at Bell Labs in Atlanta, and trying to line up my assignment for the summer. Based on advice from several mentors (remember, I thought I was going to be a physicist!), I applied to Osheroff’s lab for a summer position in Murray Hill, New Jersey. And he turned me down.

(For good reasons. All my experience was in optics and waveguides, and he was working with Helium-3 and Bose-Einstein condensates. Other than being a good lab monkey, I wasn’t bringing anything special to the table.)

I wound up getting a different assignment, with a different scientist, and I hated it. I was good at the work. (Well, except for that time that I turned the wrong valve on the vacuum pump and sprayed lubrication oil into the vacuum chamber. Bob: I never admitted it, but that was me.) And the work was interesting. But it was incredibly solitary.

I’m not an extrovert (Myers-Briggs INTJ), but I spent entire days that summer when the only words I spoke were with the women working in the cafeteria line. That’s when I realized I didn’t want to be a physicist. I went ahead and got the degree, but knew I wanted to move out of the lab into the real world. If I’d been hanging out with a future Nobelist and the brain trust (and budget!) he’d assembled at that point, I probably never would have left the field, and I’d have continued on to get my Ph.D. in physics.

Which would have been a mistake. I think would have been a middling-to-good physicist, but probably not a great one. Instead, I wound up doing a lot of things: in the last thirty years, I’ve been paid to be a software developer, laser designer, field engineer, product manager, corporate trainer, marketing exec, salesman, general manager, entrepreneur, author, venture capitalist, board member, investment banker, consultant, angel investor, public speaker, adjunct university faculty, commercial landlord, and now academic bureaucrat and economic developer. And I’ve met innumerable great people along the way, and have (I think) changed a few other lives for the better. I doubt I would have made as many connections — or had as much impact — extending the decimal places in a laboratory measurement.

Garth Brooks got it right: “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”

Thanks, everybody. And, thanks, Doug, for turning me down.

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I own fourteen stylus-based notetaking apps for the iPad. (Yes, I’m obsessive. Trying to recreate my long-lost Newton experience.)

I love Noteshelf for the iPad, but there are some parts of the user experience that could use some work.

This post is aimed at Fluidtouch tech support. Fingers crossed!

System Preferences

You have page and notebook preferences, but I want to have system-wide preferences as well. Specifically, when opening a new document, I want to be able to have my default:

• zoom on/off (for me, always ON)
• magnification level
• left-right zoom split
• pen size/color

Personally, I never plan to write in the top half of the screen, so I dislike setting all this up every time I create a new notebook.

Managing Notebooks

When creating a new notebook, I always want to give it a name. The cursor should be pre-selected into the “Title” field with the keyboard ready to type.

I’d like a way to quickly switch back and forth between multiple notebooks.

I’d like a way to easily and intuitively move pages back and forth between multiple notebooks. Think split-screen Norton Commander.

Pen settings should be saved with notebooks.

Zoom Editor Changes

In the zoom editor, there should be a button to jump the editing rectangle to the top left corner of the page (see mockup below).

The zoom rectangle should snap to zoomed lines on stationery. In other words, if the rules are 36 points apart, the zoom rectangle should only move vertically in 36-point jumps. And there should be a button to jump up one line (see mockup below). Think “Snap to Grid” in a drawing program.

Finally, the “New Line” button in the zoom editor is by far the most common target in that vertical row of buttons. According to Fitt’s Law, it should be bigger (see mockup below).

The zoom level should be a slider, or at least have more granularity… I think 2.75x would be perfect.

The page-forward/page-back arrows in the split bar are too small.

Pen Behavior

I want to be able to set pen sizes independently for the three colored pens (in my case, 1-point black, 2-point blue, and 5-point red would be perfect).

There should be a way to use the eraser for one motion, then have the pen instantly snap back to whatever I was using before. (Example: writing in blue ink, select the eraser to clean up a glitch, then I’m writing in blue ink again).

Infinite-Length Pages

Why should an infinitely-expandable notebook be limited to A4-sized paper? False skeumorphism (I love that word!). I would like a page to scroll as long as I want, only switching pages when I manually create a new page. Basically, when I’m writing, I want to *keep* writing, and not be nagged with the irritating little minutiae of creating a new page, getting the zoom box in the right place, and regaining my stream of thought. I want to be able to keep writing!

Handwriting Recognition

Exporting to Evernote doesn’t cut it, and I’m worried about confidentiality anyway. Until Apple enables Inkwell for iOS… license Phatware!

Cutting and Pasting

Need to have a non-rectangular selection option for cut/paste.

I always seem to miss the last step in committing a “paste”… rethink?

Icons

I find the collection of icon stamps completely useless. First, because it doesn’t work in zoomed mode, so it might as well not exist.

Second, if I’m willing to drop out of zoom mode (and I’m not), I don’t want to scroll through five pages looking for one that I want. I want the initial two-row drop-down to be a “favorites” tray where I can place the two dozen icons that I want to use 99% of the time, and have those instantly accessible when I hit the smiley-face. If I want something else, 1% of the time I’ll hunt around in the “More” pages.

Paper Templates

There should be an editor for new paper templates… either built into the app, or downloadable on the iPad. I’d even pay another buck or two for it.

I want to edit the right-hand margin of a template… in other words, how close do I have to get to the right-hand edge of the screen before I automatically get moved to the next line? The existing red-dotted-line is way too close to the edge; I want to move it out a quarter of an inch.

Bugs

Sometimes when navigating around, the zoom rectangle in the top half of the page gets completely obscured. That should be impossible.

Future

I bought an iPen from Kickstarter… haven’t received it yet, but I hope it meets expectations. If so, I really hope you support the API! I’d hate to have to switch to another notetaking app.

I hope this list is useful… obviously, I use the app a lot, or I wouldn’t spend this long making suggestions to improve it!

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Car and Driver is the latest enthusiast rag to hop onto the hydrogen bandwagon with their article “What the H?” in this month’s issue. I wrote this letter to the editor but, since I doubt it will be printed, I’m reproducing it here.

Editors,

I’m sorry to see that you’ve bought into the hydrogen hype (“What the H”, Jan 2012). Hydrogen fuel cells make for nice demonstration projects, but will never be a meaningful part of the national transportation infrastructure.

Why? First, there are no hydrogen wells. You have to create it, whether from water electrolysis, biomass gasification, or natural gas reformation. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that’s always going to take significantly more energy than you get out of burning it in a fuel cell. In this sense, hydrogen is just a bulky, expensive, and occasionally-dangerous battery.

Second, hydrogen is incredibly hard to work with. It can’t be transported or stored easily. Standard tools, fittings, tanks, and materials become brittle or leaky. Yes, aerospace companies have solved these problems for rocket engines, but not with parts you can buy at Pep Boys.

Finally, hydrogen is the opposite of dense. Whether as a liquid or a pressurized gas, a hydrogen tank contains only a fraction of the potential energy represented by an equal-size tank filled with liquid hydrocarbons. That’s a fundamental physical limit, and can’t be improved by smart engineering.

If you want to burn hydrogen in your car, the best way is to attach your hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms… and make gasoline.

Thanks for the otherwise-great issue!

Stephen

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Today, I was fortunate enough to enjoy lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, his wife, and their son. (Yes, this is the author of “The Black Swan” among many other accomplishments.) It was an utterly indescribable experience. The best I can do is:

Conversing with Nassim is like conversing with a swarm of butterflies. A swarm of glittering, hyper-intelligent cyborg butterflies. Who aren’t quite sure whether to take over the Earth or migrate to another star system.

In a ninety minute lunch, here is a (possibly incomplete) alphabetical list of the topics we discussed:

• Aerobic exercise
• Angel investing
• Apple laptop design
• Aramaic mistranslations in the Bible
• Asian Silk Road
• Asset allocation
• Battery chemistry
• Best airlines to Abu Dhabi
• Carbohydrate consumption
• Early (1st-6th century) Christianity
• Electric cars
• Elon Musk and SpaceX
• Groupon IPO
• History of jet engines
• Islamic fundamentalism and Lebanese society
• Islamic tolerance/intolerance of alcohol
• Litigation and litigators
• Lost Legion of Rome
• Misunderstood links between science and technology
• NASA politics
• Neurological damage and recovery
• Option pricing
• Poetry of Omar Khayyam
• Risk clipping
• Rocket design
• Teaching birds how to fly
• Undersea treasure hunting
• Wernher von Braun

Taleb has an amazing habit of saying a sentence or two that should rightfully be the subject of an entire conversation (or university lecture)… then, before the surrounding humans have absorbed that thought, leaping to a completely different topic and doing it again. And again.

I like to characterize myself as “a mile wide and an inch deep”… I know a little bit about a lot of different things. This is a man who is a mile wide and a mile deep. I’m going to go re-read his books. Slowly.

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Once again, I’m honored to have been asked to speak in the Space and Science tracks at Dragon*Con.

Dragon takes over downtown Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. It’s enormous. All the public reports of attendance are wrong… they admit to “40,000+” but that’s low-balled to avoid fire code problems.

But for those of you who don’t know, there is a wing of the Hilton reserved for the few hundred attendees who are too geeky for DragonCon… and that’s where the Space and Science tracks are. (Plus a couple of others, like Skeptics, EFF, and Podcasting.) Yes, when most normal humans would be going in search of Princess Leia bikini models, we’re learning about astrophysics and nuclear power plants…

Anyhow, I’m on three times this year:

What’s in the Labs at Georgia Tech?
Friday, 2:30 pm, Science track

Enter the Commercial Space Age
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Space track
with Michael Mealling

NASA Goes Commercial
Monday, 11:30 am, Space track
with Michael Mealling, John Bradford, A.C. Charania

I hope those of you attending can drag yourself away from the (admittedly incredible) entertainment programming and cross the pedestrian bridge from the Marriott to join us in the Hilton. My sessions are during family-friendly hours (i.e., not Saturday night), so bring your kids. Have a great con!

PS, for those who asked: My incredibly popular and thought-provoking talk on alternative energy (“Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas“) was apparently vetoed by Science track management this year as being insufficiently respectful to prevailing opinions, even though I filled the room last year, and there are empty slots on the schedule. C’est la guerre.

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Some of you are too young to remember the Model 100. I travelled with one of these bulletproof boxes for years, starting in 1984. It ran forever on AA batteries. It had a full-size keyboard for touch-typing. The acoustic couplers would connect you to CompuServe or your corporate mainframe at 300 bps over anything… hotel phone, pay phone (remember those?), and probably a barbed-wire fence. I loved it. So did a lot of people; Radio Shack sold 6 million of them.  It became standard issue for foreign correspondents and other road warriors.

One drawback was the display: big, clearly legible LCD dot-matrix, but limited to 8 rows of 40 columns. That was a bit cramped, but I wrote multiple-page memos on the thing. I even claimed that it helped me focus.   

Today, I spend most of my time on the road using my iPad. Computationally, it’s not even in the same universe as the Model 100. But, if I need to type more than half a page or so (this blog post, for example), I’m likely to rotate my iPad sideways and fire up the superb iA Writer.

One of the features of iA Writer is an optional “focus mode” that removes all framing and dims everything but the last few lines. I feel like I’m using my Model 100 again.

iA Writer is five bucks on the iTunes App Store. Whether you use the focus mode or not, its a great tool for banging out text. And, like everything else in the iOS universe, it syncs with Dropbox. Go buy it. (If you’re one of those people who complains about $4.99 productivity apps being “overpriced,” then we can’t be friends any more.)

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