Several folks wrote to me about the column on ethanol, in every case (surprisingly) to agree with my conclusions.

I mentioned a study by Argonne National Lab that said (to quote the column, not the study), “using ethanol instead of gas can reduce greenhouse gases by 35-46%.”

Michael Quanlu Wang, the author of that study, wrote in (!) to say that his study was not necessarily about corn ethanol.

He also pointed out what he felt was an error:

Yep, my mistake. I screwed up the math — I turned momentarily dyslexic and wrote 26.1 pounds in my notes instead of the correct 21.6.

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And Jim Hargan wrote in to say some nice things and to point out that a very good thing about ethanol is that it doesn’t contribute to global warming. Yes, burning ethanol produces carbon dioxide, but the corn used to make the ethanol takes the carbon out.

Well said, and a good point!

[This blog entry was turned into my USA Today column of Feb. 20, 2004.]

According to a CNN article, “Researchers say they have produced hydrogen from ethanol in a prototype reactor small enough and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars.”

The article goes on to get people excited — here, at least in prototype form, is a small, inexpensive device that can produce hydrogen from ethanol so people can power their homes with hydrogen. Neat!

But wait.

First, ethanol doesn’t grow on trees. Well, not exactly. It’s commonly made from plants like corn. Lots of corn. LOTS of corn.

Specifically, it takes a little more than 26 pounds of corn to make 1 gallon of ethanol, according to a study at Cornell.

An acre of land can yield about 7,100 pounds of corn — that’s about 328 gallons of ethanol per year. So you would need a lot of acres of corn to make the ethanol. (According to the folks at HowStuffWorks, you would need half an acre of corn just to power a single cross-country drive in a Toyota Camry.) That’s acreage that requires water, pesticides, herbicides… you get the idea. (It’s also acreage that’s not growing food.) And yes, making the ethanol from the corn takes energy, too.

So when you think about it, although hydrogen power sounds great, the reality is very different. We’d need millions of acres devoted to growing the plants which we’d have to convert to ethanol before converting them to hydrogen to burn. That’s a lot of wasted energy and a lot of wasted land.

(Oh, and the CNN article says at the end, “The cell could produce 1 kilowatt of power, nearly enough for an average home.” Um, wrong. Most homes need in the range of 4-5 kilowatts of power — more if they’ve got central air or electric heat.)

It seems like election officials in Florida just aren’t the brightest lights in the night sky.

Get this: According to an AP article, the Florida Department of State has said that, if a recount in necessary in the next election, ballots from electronic voting machines don’t have to be recounted.

In other words, they’re saying that “Nothing could possibly be wrong with electronic voting.”

Uh-huh. As if you would trust someone from Florida to tell you what does and doesn’t work when it comes to voting.

The officials go so far as to say that these electronic voting machines don’t need to produce a paper ballot. People who cast votes with them need to trust that the machines work perfectly.

This is just plain wrong. The Florida Department of State either does not have the facts, is choosing to ignore the facts, or does not have the collective intelligence to understand the facts.

Electronic voting machines do have problems. They miscount. There are software glitches. There are significant questions still being addressed about the security of the machines. (I wrote about these things on my site, and I wrote about them in USA Today.)

It’s one thing to say they’re going forward with these “e-voting” machines. It’s quite another to ignore the obvious needs for a paper copy of ballots — a copy that will ensure that votes are counted properly.

Blind faith in these machines is foolish, dangerous, and wrong. Period.

From USA Today:

“I canceled AOL last year because of all the spam I was receiving,” adds Lisa Carito, 42, of Cincinnati. She got about 25 to 30 junk e-mail messages a day. “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

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Some perspective: She got 25 to 30 a day and “couldn’t take it.” I — and I bet anyone who owns a domain name — get upwards of 200 a day.

Correction:

A couple of people wrote quickly to point out that the actual inventor of the graphical user interface was Doug Englebart, who also gets credit — along with the team at his Augmentation Research Center at Stanford — for creating the first mouse.

This is particularly annoying to me as I just read an article about the guy and the history of his NLS (oNLine System) — a precursor to the World Wide Web.

Grr.

OK, I just have to say this. I keep seeing comments on the Disney movie “Miracle,” about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team — the one that won the gold medal. And they talk about how the U.S. beat the Russians (or Soviets, to be accurate) and won the gold.

The Americans did not beat the Soviet Union to win the gold in 1980.

They beat Finland to win the gold.

They beat the Soviets in the semi-finals.

Just had to set that straight. Not that beating the USSR wasn’t a huge deal — it sure was. But let’s keep our facts straight, shall we?