Properly inflating your tires saves more oil than offshore drilling can produce

Over the past few days, Republicans have been gleefully mocking Barack Obama's call for Americans to ensure their tires are properly inflated and to get regular maintenance on their cars to preserve gas. John McCain's campaign has even been passing around tire pressure gauges to reporters and donors to mock Obama. Clearly, Obama's call for tire inflation is no match for McCain's plan to increase off-shore drilling, right?

Incidentally, it was Barack Obama's birthday today and the RNC put this up on their website:

Classy, beating a black man over his head with a long, blunt object. You know, sort of like the nightsticks that Southern white cops used to beat black men during the Civil Rights Era.

Well, it turns out that Obama was right. Time is reporting that

[E]fficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points.

By the Bush Administration's estimates (probably on the extremely optimistic side), expanding off-shore drilling would provide us with only 1% of our oil demand in 20 years.

This is yet another demonstration that if elections were merely about facts, this thing would have been over a long time ago.

No More F------ Around

What drew me to this article about control schemes in military hardware is:

1. That's an X-Box 360 controller in the picture.

2. That's obviously ROB, everyone's favorite Smash robot, Winter SS Variant, ready to rock and roll.

Obama too skinny to be president

Who else but Fox News would release a completely serious "article" arguing that Obama will be unpopular due to being slim? McCain's camp has also criticize him for going to the gym and eating healthy food and nutritional supplements citing these acts as things that only celebrities like Obama do. I think the most cogent response to this comes care of The Onion.

Intel Marches on Discrete Graphics Market

Yes, Larrabee is not entirely a GPU, but it's not a CPU, either. It is, however, discrete, geared towards graphics, and possesses an inherently multicore architecture that will allow it to potentially utilize hundreds of cores (they are starting out with a modest count of about a dozen or so, cough). The article didn't some of the more practical aspects of this type of architecture, however, like how such a hundred-headed beast would not crush a mobo (these are targetted toward consumer PCs) and/or not burn a hole through it.

World's Oldest Joke Traced Back to 1900 BC

Proof that toilet humor predates toilets by a long shot. I don't really get them, but the general themes are timeless.

Fast Food Banned in Poor Neighborhood

Last Thursday, the LA City Council passed an ordinance stopping the construction of new fast food joints in a low income neighborhood. Currently the moratorium is set at one year but might well be extended to two years or indefinitely. Read the article from Slate plus a follow-up posted today.