Author Archives: Arjen Lentz

Statistics with a 4yo

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I believe school is very important, but I also think that kids learn lots of (if not most) important stuff from their parents, if they get to spend time with them. This just happens throughout a day going about regular business (don’t have to be special “quality” time), but I make a point of challenging things and just encouraging my little smurfette to think. Here’s a typical evolution of fun and education…

While waiting for the bus (to school), we were spotting cars coming over the hill and trying to predict the colour of the next car. Phoebe would guess and also “wish” for the next car to be a certain colour, or for the bus to hurry up. So I asked her whether you can actually “control” what comes over the hill next… she thought about that briefly, laughed, and reckoned no (good insight already).

I said well, I can guess in such a way that I “win” more often, and proved it. A next time we took a pen and paper, and tallied the # of cars coming past of each colour. So now the 4yo actually knows, and understands from practical example/application, that you can make a more educated guess about something by doing some fun research (e.g. it’s not quite random), but also that you can’t directly control, influence or otherwise magic most things.

By the way, the car colour popularity at the moment is, in descending order: white, silver, black, blue, red, and other – with other also containing grey which could possibly be on its own soon as it appears to be getting more popular.

Religious misdirection on bumpersticker

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I don’t expect bumperstickers to be of the highest journalistic caliber. That said, I found one spotted yesterday a bit irky. I was driving at the time so I couldn’t take a pic… from memory, it went something like this:

“Dear God, why is there so much violence in our schools? Signed, a concerned student.”
“Dear concerned student, I’m not allowed in schools. Signed, God.”

I reckon that’s misrepresenting the issues more than a little bit, as well as not having a foundation in fact. Australia has plenty of religious schools, in particular Catholic colleges and the like. Are there stats proving that there’s less violence in those schools compared to say State Schools? One diff is of course that private schools can have an admissions policy, which is only possible because public schools are obliged to accept at least anyone in their catchment area. Are religious environments less violent than others? I doubt it.

On a larger scale, most wars have religious “cause”, so there religion is actually triggering violence. There has been research on whether secular societies have a higher crime rate, and the answer is no (in fact the opposite, in some cases). Thus, any claim that non-religious people or societies would somehow lack morals to do what is right is utter nonsense. Morals have nothing to do with religion and everything with general practicalities in any society – the fact that religions also happen to have opinions on morals is of no consequence to that. This assertion can be proven by the fact that some societies -including religious ones- do engage (as a group) in various questionable behaviours which are regarded as ok within the group.

Social Psychology has a concept called “Social Proof”, if you see multiple others do something, it must be the right thing. We tend to look around us for “guidance” when we don’t know what to do in a specific situation. This system usually works well, but it can go wrong as well as be abused. Digressing a bit there… in any case I don’t think the sticker is making any point.

Transitioning to biodiesel – first steps: B20

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The long-term objective is to run my Hyundai i30 entirely on biodiesel, to completely remove the dependency on fossil fuel there. Not sure about B100 users, but I know there are several B50 (that’s 50% biodiesel) users for the same model that have been going for a few years now. So at least that’s possible.

The “nasty” is that the warranty on the fuel system of a car can become void when using more than B05 (5% biodiesel). That’s the Australian Standard baseline currently, but for instance Freedom Fuels has B20 which is also fully compliant. So I asked my prospective service dealer (Westpoint, Indooroopilly), and the verdict so far is that they’d be fine with me running on B20 from FreedomFuels. That’s great news!

I did make them that specific “promise”, to get my B20 from FreedomFuels. Since you can make biodiesel at home, safely and legally, there’s the issue of quality control and that’s probably why the car warranty is phrased the way it is.

The things to look out for with diesel is water, and dirty fuel. There’s a filter for both, and the most important thing is to make sure they get checked/changed in time. Now here’s the funny thing. Pure biodiesel is much cleaner than fossil diesel, however putting it in your tank will loosen deposits from the previous fossil diesel and thus clog up your fuel filter. So, you transition more slowly and check/replace the filter. Once you have a clean filter and run on pure biodiesel, you’re all clear.

At this stage I’m only going for B20 since that’s the most I have found readily available so far. I may find other local sources for higher biodiesel % or actually make my own later, but another point is of course that running B20 for a while will show the service centre in practical terms that it’s ok, as they’ll be able to see the fuel filter for themselves. So I’m quite happy with taking the “slow path”.

While talking to the service centre this morning I also learnt something else. I already knew that a regular checkup for a Hyundai is about $200 versus $400-500 for my old Subaru. So I’d already figured a 50+% savings on basic maintenance. However, it turns out that Hyundai only wants a service once a year rather than every 6 months, so that halves the cost again! I might go in more often for fuel filter checks, but it’d still be cheaper.

Papa, may I have some more tofu?

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This was the not-quite-5yo smurfette at dinner yesterday. Just to prod those fellow humans who reckon that tofu is boring… look, if a 4yo loves it, trust me, it’s not boring! ;-)

Nor flavourless… Phoebe is not one of those kids who gets brought up on “bland” food to protect her delicate developing palate! Haha. No, she eats lots of spiced stuff including Green Thai curry which she reckons is “a little bit spicy”.

PetrolMonkey – track your fuel consumption and compare!

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Some time ago friends of mine built the PetrolMonkey site. You can enter a basic profile/name for any car you own, and then input refills. The system then shows nice stats in both numbers and graph, and you can compare with other similar cars. There’s a minimal mobile version also.

By comparing Tiger (it’s the diesel growl ;-) with Otto (“the auto”), I already know that I’m spending about 40% less fuel now per km. Eat that, Kevin Rudd PM, with your pathetic 5% emission reduction over too many years proposal!