So, I was just reading that Honda won’t be mass producing hydrogen cars for about another 10 years. Anyway, I came across a link to Aptera and I am very intrigued.
I have to say, they are very odd looking… but 300 miles to the gallon on the hybrid electric model! Apparently the Aptera typ-1 will begin production late 2008 and can be reserved (by California residents only) for a mere $500. Final prices are expected to be around $26,900 for the electric and $29,000 for the hybrid electric model, both available only in white to start. I am very tempted to reserve one, but since I don’t know where I will be job-wise in year, I think it’s probably best to wait and see.
According the FAQs on Aptera’s website, the car is classified as an enclosed motorcycle, and as such, won’t require a front license plate, but also will not require a motorcycle license either.
I’ve been considering purchasing a hybrid Civic, once my current Civic bites the dust, but more and more, I don’t see the point. I mean, a hybrid Civic gets good gas mileage, but nothing fantastic (when you compare to Aptera’s stated 300 miles per gallon!). I am still not convinced that the production (and disposal) of batteries for hybrid cars is a lesser evil compared to reliance on gasoline and fossil fuels in general. Also, I really really want an Audi A5, which I am sure is just a gas hog.
It’s good to finally see some new car innovations. I know the Prius was remarkable, but it merely doubled fuel economy over the Civic, whereas the claims made by Aptera are almost 10x the gas mileage of my car!

For Christmas this year, my mom picked me up a copy of Stumbling on HAPPINESS by Daniel Gilbert. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that it was insightful and presented in a humorous and easy to read fashion, so I thought it would be interesting reading material.
According to the back of the book, Daniel Gilbert “describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions.”
The basic premise of the book is that while humans are the only creatures capable of imagining and making decisions regarding future events, the basic process by which we do so is flawed. As humans, we use our imagination and our memories of past events to predict what we think the future might be like, and we use this imaginary picture of the future to make decisions about what might make us happy.
This certainly gives us an advantage over your run-of-the-mill salamander or humming bird, both of which can only react to stimuli in the present remembered from past events. A bird, or anything other than a human being, cannot interpret or extrapolate future events from the past. The example in the book is of an insect that gets an electric shock while in a place that smells of tennis-shoes. The insect will learn to avoid areas with that smell, but they are not able to connect other things, such as the smell of ANY shoe, or perhaps, the guy with the shock gun to the shock, and therefore have very limited abilities to avoid future shocks.
According to the book, our imaginations are flawed in three fundamentals ways. First off, imagination has a tendency to fill in and leave out key details. When you imagine eating a twinkie in the future, you might imagine being very happy and feeling very satisfied after your twinkie. But what if this future twinkie eating event was just after a large meal? It might become less satisfying and you might be less happy as you feel your stomach bloat. Imagination fails to consider all features of a future event and absence of key details can lead to inaccurate predictions.
The second shortcoming of imagination is its tendency to color the future based on the present. Apparently we have a hard time imagining being happy while we are sad, or imagining being hungry when we are full. And this is why we tend to buy too many groceries when we shop on an empty stomach and not enough groceries when we shop on a full stomach. And if, at the end of a bad relationship, you’ve ever come to the conclusion that you were never really happy in the relationship, it is because our imagination (and our memories) have trouble recalling the past correctly. We tend to remember the endings of things and the unusual or rare experiences, which can be kind of frightening when you think about it. I don’t want to remember my whole life as being bad, or sad, or unremarkable just because that might be how yesterday or today went down!
Lastly, the final error of our imaginations is that we fail to recognize that an event will appear differently after it has occurred. This particularly concerns our tendency to rationalize events and our psychological defenses that kick in and tell us that a bad thing that just happened wasn’t quite so bad.
The book also talks about how our rationalizations and psychological defenses work harder to minimize a very traumatic or sad event, and not so hard for an averagely bad event in our lives. This, the author claims, is why you might forgive someone for cheating on you quicker than you would for not picking up their dirty socks.
The author goes into much more detail in these three areas, of course. But the final conclusion is that, instead of imagining and trying to predict our own future happiness, we would be better off to select a surrogate who has already had this experience and use their record of their actual (not predicted) happiness as a measure of how happy we would be if we were to have the same experience.
Perhaps one of my new year’s resolutions should be to imagine less and therefore become happier? Even after reading the book, there doesn’t seem to be a clear (and easily obtainable) way to improve upon our flawed methods of predicting our future happiness, but I certainly will be keeping my eyes open to see what pitfalls I might be jumping into by imagining the future.

I haven’t posted in forever, but this was too funny to pass up.
Hit the link, watch the YouTube video, and laugh your ass off.
Oh, and Happy Holidays!

Ray and I were watching a tv show called “The Ultimate Rock Climb”, a BBC show where Tim Emmet takes a woman who has never climbed before in her life (but always wanted to) on three “dangerous” climbing route — Commando Ridge in Cornwall to start, then Crackstone Rib in Llanberis Pass and ending with a sea stack climb of Old Man of Stoer in Scotland.
As I’ve only done bouldering, watching them trad. climb was very exciting. Ray has done some top roping and some bouldering, and we were both amazed at this woman climbing a sea stack after just a few days of climbing.
So, did some research, and it’s rated between VS and E1on the UK rating system. Turns out, I can boulder V0 to V2 rated problems. Then, after looking up a translation from the V scale to the Yosemite Decimal Scale (YDS, used in trad and sport climbing in the US) and then translating that to the UK scale… the stuff I’m doing in bouldering works out to be as hard and/or harder than the Old Man!
Here’s a picture of the Old Man of Stoer:

Now, Ray and I are pumped to learn lead climbing and work on more roped climbing, so we can go climb this Old Man. It looks super exciting!