Situation Hopeless

4 DEAD AS KORAN PROTESTS RAGE

(NEWSER) – At least four people were killed and dozens wounded today as protests over the burning of copies of the Koran at Bagram Air Force Base swept across Afghanistan. Police shot and killed two demonstrators outside of Bagram, and one each in Logar Province and Kabul, Reuters reports. In the capital, 21 people, including 11 police, were wounded, as protesters threw stones, smashed vehicles and windows, and set fire to a housing compound where American contractors live.

The US embassy tweeted that it was "on lockdown; all travel suspended. Please, everyone, be safe out there." Protesters were heard crying, "Long live Mullah Omar!" referring to the Taliban leader, and "Death to America! Death to Karzai!" The outrage wasn't limited to the streets, either; parliament passed a resolution demanding the Koran burners be punished, and several lawmakers shouted "death to America!" inside the chamber. A senior military official tells the Washington Post that the Korans had been removed from the base's prison library because they had radical messages scrawled in them.

Editorial comment: Once again, it is well past the time the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan.

1. We furnished our enemies, who we have captured and imprisoned, a library. This is located, probably, between the cafeteria and the soccer field. In that library we placed several Korans. This is because our enemies are very devout and need to read the Koran while they are locked up. They only want to kill us, after all, because their religion tells them they ought to kill us.

2. Some of these prisoners, devoutly, I'm sure, wrote fanatical things all over these Koran library copies. Death to America and what have you. The ignorant American jailers tossed the defiled Korans (Kori?) in the trash. When will we learn? - Should have probably gave them to a cleric for disposal. Or something.

3. The trash gets taken out and burned.

4. Muslim janitors on the American payroll note that in the fire are Korans burning. Americans rush to take them out of the fire, burning hands in process. But edges of pages are clearly burned. Muslim janitor employees, of course, feel it their duty to tell their friends and neighbors what the infidels have done. All hell breaks loose, so to speak. And it continues. Four dead as of this writing. See attached picture of Muslims with mouths open shaking fists and carrying signs. Flags will doubtless be burned. You've seen this picture, or one just like it, a thousand times since we've been in Afghanistan. Is this a rational response of a civilized people to what happened? Why am I the only one who thinks these people are irrational barbarians? I know, I know, it's only a few million who are doing these things. The rest of the Muslim world is very peaceful and rational. (And that's the truth, btw.)

5. Question: why would we want to spend billions to build schools and new roads and bridges and work to improve women's rights in Afghanistan, and pay the salaries of Afghan government employees? Is there anyone left out there who still thinks these people will start to love us? Thank us? Stop wanting to kill us? Really?

Go home, America.

Octane - don't knock it

In this post, I am only talking about internal combustion, 4-stroke, gasoline-fueled engines.

In the early days of gasoline engines, they discovered two things right away.

1. The first engines knocked like crazy.

2. If you compress the fuel mixture before igniting it, you got more power.

Engines "knock" or "ping" when the fuel ignites before it is supposed to.

One of the strokes of a 4-stroke engine compresses the fuel-air mixture (by design.)

The problem of knocking (pre-ignition) had to be solved. Experiments with various fuels showed that heptane couldn't be compressed very much before it exploded on its own, but octane could be compressed a lot (relatively speaking) without making it ignite on its own.

One doesn't want to use pure octane, for cost reasons, and further experiments showed it could be combined with other fuels and still be compressed sufficiently. Today's low compression (8:1, for example) engines can run on about 87% octane and 13% something else. Heptane. Ethanol. Cheeseburgers. Maybe not cheeseburgers.

Cars with higher performance engines (some Cadillacs, Corvettes, etc.) which put out more power (and are therefore usually higher compression) require a higher octane-rated fuel to not knock (pre-ignite the fuel.) Knocking not only makes your engine have less power, it can damage your engine.

Many "muscle cars" of the 1960s and early 1970s compressed the fuel mixture to over 12:1. Zowie. 95 octane, please.

Octane is tested in the laboratory to arrive at a theoretical performance level, a test known as RON (Research Octane Number.) It is also tested under real life conditions - which show how a fuel behaves under a real load - with a test called MON (Motor Octane Number.) Then an average of the two is taken. The octane rating of the fuel thus tested is arrived at, as the gas pump at your favorite filling station will attest, by the above method, abbreviated (R+M)/2. There are underground tanks which separately hold each level of octane, and the hoses on the gas pump are fed by the proper tank. If the gasoline delivery truck driver hasn't been drinking.

We are not going to go into fuel additives, except for talking a little bit about lead, below. Sorry.

Early on, scientists discovered a second way to get more "free" power out of a gasoline engine besides compressing the air-fuel mixture before igniting it with a spark plug. That second thing was adding a substance called tetraethyl lead to the fuel. And so this was added to all gasoline. Unfortunately, after decades of doing this, a thin layer of lead covered planet earth. Lead is not particularly healthful to flowers, humans, and other living things. By the 1970s, leaded fuel had been outlawed in the U.S. There are only a handful of asshole countries in the world that still put lead in their gasoline, though some deny it. Here is the current list of countries the CIA says still allow leaded gasoline to be used. I want to "out" them here, for all the good it will do.

Afghanistan

Algeria

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Egypt

Iraq

Kosovo

Montenegro

Myanmar

North Korea

Serbia

Yemen

(Source: Central Intelligence Agency, 2008)

Review:

Q. My car's user manual says it runs on unleaded regular gasoline. If I put premium unleaded instead, will it hurt my car's engine?

A. No. Why would it? You'll just waste money.

Q. Will I get more power if I use Premium fuel in my car that is supposed to use regular fuel?

A. No. Your little car isn't going to compress it any more than it did with regular gasoline. It can't.

Q. Is it ok to use regular gas in my car that is supposed to use premium gasoline?

A. No. You must use premium, if that's what your owner's manual says. Otherwise, your engine will knock. Do you remember why? Then why did you ask this question?

Q. Should I add lead to my gasoline?

A. Only if

1. You don't care about air pollution and killing things

2. Only if you have a desire to completely destroy your expensive catalytic converter in under five minutes.

There's that word catalytic again.