The pitch that came with General Motors’ hydrogen-powered Chevy Equinox during a demonstration on campus Sept. 10 was not so much for the car as for the “hydrogen economy.”

The car itself is impressive, but it’s only a prototype. To put such vehicles on the market will require building a whole new infrastructure in parallel with our current system of distributing gasoline and diesel fuel. If it works it could reduce pollution, offering a way to move people and goods with home-grown renewable energy. But there are a lot of ifs and gotchas.

The Equinox is a hybrid electric vehicle in which the gasoline-driven generator is replaced by a fuel cell. Instead of exploding fuel to produce motion, fuel cells chemically combine the fuel with oxygen to produce electricity. If the fuel is a hydrocarbon like gasoline or ethanol, the exhaust is carbon dioxide and water. Along with the fact that we already have too much carbon dioxide around, we don’t yet have good fuel cells for hydrocarbons — although the Cornell Fuel Cell Institute is working on it. A fuel cell running on pure hydrogen exhausts only water.

GM has about 100 of these prototype cars on the road right now, being lent out to consumers for three-month trials and placed in a few high-profile locations like Jay Leno’s garage. According to Daniel O’Connell, GM’s director of global field service for fuel cell vehicles, GM hopes to sell the production version of the car based on performance — the electric engine is zippy — and economy. The Equinox is a small SUV that will get 45-50 miles on the hydrogen energy equivalent of a gallon of gas, at a predicted price of $3 a “gallon.” O’Connell says the SUV configuration was chosen to appeal to families. Critics have grumbled about the choice of an SUV, but if Americans are going to keep driving such vehicles they might as well come in more energy-efficient, less-polluting versions.

One catch is that the only practical fuel cells for hydrogen use platinum as a catalyst to separate the protons and electrons in hydrogen atoms. Platinum is expensive, but O’Connell says that’s not a problem, pointing out that  the fuel cell uses only a little more than you find in the typical catalytic converter. Impurities in the hydrogen can gum up the works; fuel cells used in spacecraft have to be rebuilt after every mission. The fuel cell in the Equinox, O’Connell says, would have to be overhauled after about two and a half years, when the platinum would be recycled. Cornell researchers are working on ways to alloy platinum with other metals to use less of the expensive stuff, and are testing other materials to find something that would replace platinum altogether. They are also working closely with GM to improve the fuel cells they’re using now.

The next question is, Where do we get the hydrogen? O’Connell envisions a world where we make hydrogen by electrolyzing water with electricty from renewable sources like wind and solar. Of course we’re not making enough electricty from renewables now to even make a noticeable dent in what we’re getting from hydrocarbon-fired and nuclear power plants.

Some worry about a fire hazard — the “Hindenburg syndrome” — but O’Connell claims hydrogen is safer than gasoline. If a crash ruptures the tank, hydrogen dissipates rapidly into the air instead of spreading across the ground. QB is reminded of the demonstration in Chem 101 where the professor filled soap bubbles with mixtures of hydrogen and oxygen and then touched a flame to them (with a *long* stick). Pure hydrogen went “Foof!” Hydrogen with just a little oxygen went “Pop!” and an even mix of hydrogen and oxygen deafened the front row in 200 Baker. A hydrogen tank rupture in the presence of a spark would probably be a “Foof,” but a very exciting one. Ruptures would be unlikely, O’Connell claims. “We’ve shot guns at the tanks,” he says. But we note that GM has a program to train first responders to deal with hydrogen vehicles.

And finally there’s the distribution problem. O’Connell says there are now about 70 hydrogen fueling stations around the U.S., mostly in major cities, and GM is working to get more set up. In the ideal hydrogen economy of the future, O’Connell visualizes one out of three current gas stations becoming a hydrogen station. Until then travel between two hydrogen-ready cities might work, but with a range of about 150 miles on a full tank, the Equinox is not yet an SUV to take into the Colorado Rockies, or maybe even the Adirondacks. But it seems a good way for fleet users to reduce their carbon footprint. Cornell is considering using such vehicles for its own fleets, which would mean setting up our own fueling station. For commuting, it might be better to wait for the technology to arrive in smaller vehicles with even higher fuel mileage. The ideal might be a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt, running all-electric around town and turning on the fuel cell a few times a year to visit Grandma.

As usual, the summer months have waned too quickly, and (our beloved) Cornell students are back in the swing of their educational endeavors. For Quad Blogger and the rest of the townies, it also means the end of easy parking at: Wegmans, various spots around campus and, most notably, in and around Collegetown. You know what I’m talking about — the areas down both sides of College Avenue, Bryant Avenue, Eddy Street and the coveted 24-hour parking along Linden Avenue.

Those of us who have to drive into work every day spend a lot of time careening through these streets searching for a space, only to end up parking somewhere that might as well be in Newfield.

S’Okay. QB understands that students need to park in Collegetown as much as the rest of us do. Call it QB’s unwavering hope in a socialist utopia, but for all that’s sacred, PLEASE PARK CORRECTLY. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time with a vehicle in Collegetown must know the unholy, red-faced fury of coming upon a perfectly good space that’s being eaten up unnecessarily by a wayward, bad-mannered parker.

None of this should be taken to mean we’re assuming it’s the students alone who are the offenders. But with Collegetown now jammed to the brim with cars, it seems worthwhile to point out a few rules of etiquette surrounding parking:

1. Park as close as is legally possible to the end of a driveway. We note an egregious violation of this rule here:

A full two feet of precious space could’ve been saved had this parker pulled up closer to the driveway lip.

2. Similarly, pull up to the arrowed signs that say “No parking anytime” (beyond this point, as specified by said arrow) as close as is legally possible. In fact, cheat a little, and pull the nose of your vehicle a few inches beyond the sign. No one’s going to ticket you for that, as long as you’re substantially behind the sign, and some thankful person will come along and find a space behind you where there wouldn’t have been one otherwise. This person did not do this. It is hard to tell from the picture, but there is NOT enough room left for someone to park in front of this car, either:

These rules are very simple but very effective. Let’s all do our part. By the way, all of this goes doubly when the snow hits.

The injured racehorse that Cornell vet school employee Molly Copeland lovingly adopted and nursed back to health is moving on to the next stage of his life, and it involves a lot of lady horses.

Copeland, whose relationship with the ex-racehorse was chronicled here, has sold Watchmon to a reputable farm in Brazil. There, Watchmon will be stood at stud (bred) with up to 65 mares, with the hope of his fast-galloping bloodline to be passed down to a new generation of winning racehorses. Yes, Watchmon, you are headed for some good times.

The polite horse with the extra-gentle head-butt and leathery lips is leaving us. As much as Copeland would’ve like to keep him, the upkeep and bills had become too much for her. It is a difficult parting.

But as is often the case when good people do good things, there’s reason to rejoice. When Copeland first adopted him, she had dreamed of using his stud fees for a charitable cause.

Her dream has come true, although not quite in the way she’d imagined. Copeland has selected a charity that helps children, and she plans to donate to it a generous portion of the money she’s received from the sale of Watchmon. She wanted to give it all, but the charity insisted she keep some of it to help recoup some of her costs.

Talk about a bittersweet ending.

In the wake of protests against the development of the Redbud Woods area into the University Avenue parking lot in 2005, then interim President Hunter Rawlings gave his support to an ad hoc committee on transportation and sustainability at Cornell.

Daniel Roth was the graduate student representative on that committee, which was charged with “envisioning a more environmentally responsible transportation system at Cornell,” said Roth, who is now Cornell’s sustainability coordinator in the Office of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability.

As part of their work, Roth and other committee members, such as David Lieb, Cornell’s assistant director of tranportation services, conceived of the idea of a carshare program for the Cornell campus, based on a similar model that was being considered at EcoVillage at Ithaca, a cooperative housing development on West Hill in the town of Ithaca.

Roth, who was working on his master’s in adult education, said he quickly saw the potential for carsharing beyond the campus and into the entire region.

Roth and Lieb, working with a steering committee composed of representation from institutions like Cornell and Ithaca College, municipal leaders, planners and interested community members, hosted a Carshare Summit in January 2006 with speakers from carshare programs in Boulder, Colo., and San Francisco. The summit and much of the work of the committee was financed through the Cornell Office of the Provost, via the ad hoc committee on transportation and sustainability.

An implementation committee was formed from that summit, and today many of those members constitute Ithaca Carshare’s board of directors, said Roth. For a list of the directors, see the Ithaca Carshare Web site.

Roth eventually left the group to finish his master’s and graduated in January ’08. He said that while he envisioned a carshare program for the community at large, he was thinking about his own environmental footprint when he came up with the idea.

“I got working on this because I wanted to use a carshare program,” Roth said. “I wanted to change how I used transportation.”

Roth now lives in downtown Ithaca a few blocks from Seneca Street, where one of the first of the local carshare’s fleet is parked in its pod, ready to go.

Just going over some entries in QB’s personal logbook documenting the Great Cornell E-mail Crisis of 2008 …

Scene setter: Cedar Rapids had its flooding, the nation’s stock markets faltered, common folk called their bankers to secure fuel loans and the search for the nine spotted ladybug was launched in earnest.

Up on the hill far above Tiny Town, the skeletal crew who hold this vast land grant enterprise in its place while the willywaws of progress hurl cowpies at us right and left during the summer months [Ed. Hildy – make sure he rewrites this sentence we’re not in the Outback] were faced with a crisis of cyber proportion …

QUOTE HERE:
A high-level Cornell staffer speaks: “On Monday morning I got a phone call from Jack who works in a cubicle on the other side of the office – A PHONE CALL, I COULD HEAR HIM TALKING – he wanted to know if the division meeting for July was going to include fresh fruit or just a box lunch with a cookie because if one or the other, then he wasn’t going … It took me five minutes after he rang off to realize who he was … ”

Prior to these reports QB had been noticing strange doings on Eudora, who is generally a very well-behaved lady.

To wit:

Sunday, 15, June 1800 hrs, outgoing mail, response: “Error X5O-11ZIT/CARP … most exalted domain name not responding … your sad butt has been kicked out of this postoffice box …”

Sunday, 15 June, 2106 hrs: “… Idiot! Use IM to send buddy latest link to stupid YouTube stunt… Oh, by the way, you were bounced off Facebook … ”

Monday, 16 June, 0831 hrs, outgoing mail, response: “Wake up and smell the shizzle you unlucky piece of dog meat. Only those elite with Top Secret Code Red postoffice box platform have access to this service …”

By Tuesday, June 17, the worker bees at CIT posted an announcement in wee print saying that indeed the Cornell community was having e-mail difficulty but there was no cause for alarm for in fact it was just a bad patch, not to worry, a storage system failure and they were working with the vendor 24-7 [note: vendor not Louie’s Lunch Truck, something mysterious called “Sun Microsystems”) doing things that cannot be printed here because you simply would not understand …

At this point QB went into emergency response mode. Grabbing a geologist’s hammer (apologies to the geologist but these are difficult times), QB trudged downhill and chopped out of the friable cliffside debris along the east shore of Cayuga where the Norfolk-Southern line hauls in coal and returns with carloads of salt [Ed. Note – Hildie please ask him to stop writing these damnable run-on sentences …] several tablets made of Llenroc … Returning to his office he began to compose messages in his finest Helvetica Narrow using flint as a writing utensil (we were out of chalk in the office supply cabinet. An e-mail had been sent but … ).

WRAPPER: In the long run we all got to know each other a little better.

Chatting across the campfires dotting AOL Instant Messaging boards in the space-time hollow we accept as normalsphere Cornellians everywhere somehow “adapted” to life as it once had been, long, long ago, when we actually “languaged” one another.

Of course there were losses, some irredeemable. An apparently hilarious LOL Cat video was down by the time QB got the link. And the following email text message, five days after the meltdown that must’ve been sent Sunday at the precise time of the crash: “Hey I’m here in this Arkansas swamp ‘n’ I swear I seen a bird what looks just like that woodpecker ya’ll been after but i gotta hole in my boat …”

The remainder of the transmission was garbled and there is no return address. The attached jpeg image, too, vanished.

Provost Carolyn (Biddy) Martin, who is leaving Cornell this summer to lead the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gamely answered a question about the origin of her nickname during a telephone press conference May 28, the day her new appointment was announced.

“I grew up in the rural south, and in my family all of the women for several generations are named Carolyn,” Martin said. “Each of us has a nickname beginning with ‘B.’ I had a brother who was 13 months older.”

“My father was a cookie salesman, prior to the advent of large chain stores. He came home one day and asked where the ‘biddy baby’ was. My mother’s nickname was Boolie, but I had to go with what I had.”

Amid the accolades heaped on Robert Richardson during a symposium in his honor was a comment from Charlotte Kuh of the National Research Council, a division of the National Academy of Sciences: “I would like to clone the Bob Richardsons of this world.”

Not for Richardson’s contributions to low-temperature physics, but for his ability as a teacher, the enthusiasm he communicated to his students to help them continue to pursue new ideas. “The more scientists and engineers we have, the more innovation we will produce,” she explained.

Along the way she dropped the thought that most elementary-school teachers aren’t well-equipped to teach science. QB has noticed, and not just in the lower grades. QB painfully recalls a high school course called General Science taught by a fellow who believed rockets moved by pushing on the air behind them.

Kuh urged that we educate potential teachers in science. Good luck with that. The late Professor Jennie Farley once remarked that when someone says “I want to work with people,” it is code for “I don’t want to take math and science.” Far too many elementary-school teachers – and not a few at high school level – seem to have chosen that option. That’s not likely to change.

Here’s a suggestion: Most elementary schools have roving music and art teachers who visit each class for a few hours a week. The community believes that these are disciplines children should be exposed to, and more importantly, the community recognizes that not every classroom teacher is equipped to deal with them. So let’s agree that scientific literacy also is an essential part of a child’s education, and let’s admit that not every classroom teacher is equipped to impart it. Let’s put a local Bill Nye in every school, coming around to explain conservation of energy, genetics, acids and bases, electricity and magnetism, Newton’s laws of motion and maybe even a few hints about the wondrous way mathematics can represent reality.

Kids who grow up with that will be less likely to think rockets go by pushing on the air, and they might even make intelligent decisions about global warming when they get elected president.

QB has now told the joke backwards — oops. Here’s the joke: What’s the first thing an English major says after graduation? Or something like that. So funny. Forgot to laugh.

Having graduated from Cornell as an English major, one might guess that QB was once on the receiving end of these jokes. Given that, it was something of a joy to read coverage of an English Club panel on career advice for English majors. QB would’ve loved to hear some encouragement like that during the long, hard winters at Cornell, wondering what the bleep I was going to be doing after graduation.

I eventually figured it out, and though I’ll never be a Miley Cyrus billionaire, QB is more or less satisfied with where things ended up.

You see, it’s only with a little hindsight that I’ve realized what I gained from my education at Cornell. I remember feeling my brain actually aching, what with all the great thinkers around me. I wasn’t worthy. I wasn’t worthy. My professors made me stretch my mind, made me uncomfortable, challenged me to hold 30 concepts in my head at once.

And what better privilege is there than to be forced to read ALL THE TIME? Now, with a full-time job, QB longs for the days as an English major, when reading and writing WERE my full-time job (albeit an expensive one).

After writing your 19th 20-page paper you become a really good typist. And while you’re at it, some of your better professors teach you how to make your arguments stronger, your phrases clearer, your diction less muddied.

Ah, but despite the joyful memories, beware, Young Potential English Majors, of the faux erudites. They’ll be planted in your classes like land mines, waiting with their puffed-up heads and insufferable commentary to dominate class discussion, every day. They obviously were never the subject of ridicule on the school bus (that usually teaches you a lesson or two). The worst are the poets who sniff at peer editing during Verse Writing.

But it was a small price to pay. My advice to you, if you do become an English major: Do the reading. Start the papers early. Go to office hours. Get to know your professors. Enjoy yourself. And be humble — you’re really not that great a writer.

Retired General Anthony Zinni insists that he’s not going to get involved in politics. Yet the former chief of CENTCOM’s message to the next president of the United States won’t make a damned bit of difference if shouted from the sidelines.

In his April 15 talk “The New World Order” Zinni continued to perform the role of prophet as he did prior to the invasion of Iraq. He implored the next president to, essentially, wake up and smell the New World Odor. He trotted out the post-Soviet Union buzz term “capacity building” — a recycled bit of international aid jargon that is getting lots of play these days.

He implored the next presidential administration to streamline its bureaucracy, cut senseless spending on pork projects, re-vive NATO, transform the military, reinvigorate diplomacy, end cronyism and … in short, sounded like Barack Obama: Great ideas — for someone running for office or swimming in a Washington think tank.

The “chief” difference with Zinni’s exhortations is that the man has walked his talk. A brief scan of his resume should send those who would be king scattering to the four directions. His more than 40 years of military and diplomatic service includes two tours in Vietnam, deployments to the Mediterranean, Caribbean, the Western Pacific, Northern Europe, South Korea, Okinawa and Germany.

He has participated in presidential diplomatic missions to Somalia, Pakistan and Ethiopia-Eritrea; and State Department missions involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and conflicts in Indonesia and the Philippines. He’s been wounded three times and the fruit salad on his military dress speaks of 37 unit, service and campaign awards, topped with four stars.

He is that rare combination of raw experience, native intelligence, realist and idealist, capitalist/humanist, a liberal conservative armed to the teeth with facts gleaned from direct participation in the rough and tumble world: He is the Anti-Cheney.

Any presidential hopeful would be a fool not to either partner with him or place him in high office. As a Secretary of State he would be the anti-Rumsfeld, super-enriched Rice.

So it was too bad that Zinni dismissed the suggestion that he is short listed as a running mate by one or another presidential hopefuls as “rumor” and that he will stick to his guns and not dabble in politics.

Too bad because the type of individual and group leadership Zinni is calling for doesn’t exist outside of a few decent people who, like himself, understand exactly what it will take to bring the New World Disorder to order.

Also, Zinni is affable, even funny. He tells a good, engaging story — and he has a few great ones. Like the time he and several other one-star generals were sent to Berlin for a briefing on what their future respective missions.

It was an entirely pro forma exercise. Except for one little thing: The Soviet Union collapsed almost overnight as they arrived.

“Gorbachev threw in the towel and the Soviet Union didn’t so much implode as it sort of fizzled out,” Zinni said.

So there he was in the center of the center that no longer held. The rules went out the window and the standard military briefing no longer applied. “They didn’t know what to tell us,” Zinni said of the chiefs of staff in Berlin. “Everything was in chaos.”

Unsure of what to do with Zinni and company, a derring-do Army second lieutenant offered to take the group for a ride into East Berlin.

“Can we do that?” the one-star generals asked.

“I don’t know,” replied the lieutenant. “Let’s find out.”

He commandeered an old Volkswagen bus that Zinni said looked like a relic from the hippie days and the group drove past Checkpoint Charlie, that legendary forward post of the free world, and, to everyone’s astonishment, “nobody was there.”

They proceeded past the facade of East Berlin, a “Potemkin village” that barely disguised the truth: East Germany was much as it was after WWII: buildings were pock-marked with 40-year old bullet holes, people rode vintage 1950s bicycles or drove dirty, smelly cars — “it was like entering a time warp,” Zinni said.

The ever-adventurous Army lieutenant suggested they visit the Russian garrison, and upon arrival the former Soviet soldiers “did not know whether to shoot us or salute us,” said Zinni. The Russians were in complete disarray and appeared to Zinni as so many “zombies.” Their world had completely changed and they were uncertain of whether or not they even had a home to return to.

On the way back to West Berlin, the driver produced a sledge hammer and the generals all took a crack at the Berlin Wall, causing little damage, but gathering some valuable chips of stone and concrete.

From that point forward, Zinni watched the old order unravel and the new world order, whatever it was going to be, take shape in surprising ways. He went to buy a new car from his Chevy dealer only to find the dealer had switched to Hondas, which were manufactured in the U.S. while Chevies were being assembled in Mexico. Suddenly there were mass movements of people; China and India emerged as economic super powers; suddenly everyone had cell phones and laptops and people were making a million bucks on the market. And then came Sept. 11, 2001, and the world changed again.

America’s military was never busier than after 1989 — failed or failing states emerged in the Middle East, the Balkans, Somalia, East Africa, Southeast Asia and we were poorly equipped to handle it all. U.S. leaders, Democrat and Republican, defaulted to a one-trick pony kind of diplomacy: Let a storm brew into a crisis and then throw the military at it.

Zinni also is one of the few people QB has heard talk of the future of Iraq realistically: There will be no clear cut victory and by necessity we will have to stay involved there, militarily and politically, although perhaps not to the extent we are now. When briefing the Senate prior to the invasion in Iraq, which Zinni adamantly opposed, he pointed out that the days of America coming back from war seemed to have ended a long time ago. Think of Korea: we’re still there.

Listening to the retired general was like taking a fast hard ride on a crazy-making machine: More change has been packed into the past 20 years than seems imaginable. Can a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama make sense of it all and prove worthy leaders?

From QB’s perspective: Perhaps. But they will need Anthony Zinni’s sense of the new world order to do it.

It was a curious newsweek what with that whacky dust-up with the guv (until Monday) and that Kansas woman who adhered to her toilet.

But nothing prepared QB for news of the stick-up job at Louie’s Lunch Truck on March 12, as reported in the March 14 Daily Sun. The suspect was apprehended not far from the scene, and there is little humor in it. QB knows that nothing is sacred. But sacred and “scared” are just a typo apart.

The suspect is alleged to have pointed a gun at truck owner Ron Beck and said something to the effect of “make me one with everything.” The suspect then fled with several hundred bucks, apparently unaware how weak the dollar is against the Euro.

Praises to alert lunch truck employee Parker Imrie ’07, who gave chase and identified the getaway car and reported it to Ithaca Police. The latter, who do not suffer stick-ups gladly, nabbed Jacobs and his buddies before they got far from campus, much less out of city and over the county line. Schuyler County line, in this case.

The perp is reportedly from Hector, a Schuyler domain. It’s a place QB knows best for its national forest, a few wineries, farms, Big Johnson’s road house and a center for philosophic study that’s drifted into deserved irrelevance. Now QB also will know Hector, should the charges stick like a Kansas toilet seat, for this jackanape’s lawless cupidity.

(Pssst – Hector, unlike so many upstate N.Y. towns, is not named for a mythological Greek superstar or city state. You know, like Hector-Trojan-prince-and-hero-son-of-Priam-and-Hecuba, etc., etc. Nope. Hector is named for Hector Ely, one of the sons of the founding fathers of Hector. No saying Hector himself wasn’t named after Hector the Greek. One never knows.)

That the Cornell campus is viewed as easy pickins for some clown willing to drive almost 40 minutes to play bottom feeder with a hot lunch wagon does not surprise me. Even with gas prices being what they are.

QB can think of many places in Schuyler County where that kind of behavior will get you shot in the stomach. The per capita income for the town was $19,601 according to the 2000 census. About a tenth of the families in Hector and about 12 percent of the general population were below the poverty line. Nineteen percent of those were under age 18 and more than 6 percent of those were age 65 or over.

So an aspiring criminal mind in Hector must seek his fortune elsewhere. And where else but a place running a $4 billon capital campaign, a place so many see as a wealthy shining city among the 17 continguous counties for which it serves as primary employer? An open campus at that?

“I got three woids for yez,” a gravelly voice must’ve whispered. “Loo-weez Lunch Truck. Dat’s where dey keep all d’cabbage.”

Our aspiring felon listened to that voice of improvidence. He struck at Louie’s Lunch on North Campus, under the mistaken impression it was a Capital Campaign Brinks truck brimming with solid gold hot dogs, as opposed to being what it is: a small businessman’s livelihood.

And remember this: While there is certainly some wealth here on the hill, Ithaca ain’t no El Dorado.

More outdated census data then: In 2000, the per capita income for the city of Ithaca was $13,408. About 13 percent of families and 40 percent of the population were below the poverty line, including 22 percent of those under age 18 and almost 12 percent of those age 65 or over.

Granted, Ithaca has a much bigger population. But who knew we were, reportedly, hurting as much or more than Hector? Of course, since 2000 there have been boom times here (and there) … Still.

Next time some crumball with a piece comes here looking to make a quick buck, I hope they check their facts first. You’re more likely to wind up with a fistful of foodstamps or a crumpled Ithaca HOUR for your efforts.

And those capital campaign funds? Not liquid.

So. Good thing this Louie’s Lunch business ended on a better note than a lot of other news this week, the stock market included.

Kudos to Beck, Imrie and the IPD. Long live Louie’s Lunch!