I got an e-mail the other day about a new car supposedly being made in China. The e-mail was partly true, and partly not true. But the truth is so cool that I can't resist blogging about it.

The e-mail claimed that a new car had been developed in China, with a bit of input from Volkswagen, and that the car got phenomenal gas mileage at an unbelievably low price. Well, the price point is unbelievable, and the car was developed by Volkswagen in Germany, not be a Chinese company with input from Volkswagen, but the gas mileage claim is real.

Here are some pictures from the e-mail. These are for the concept prototype, not a production version. The concept was known as the VW 1-Litre Concept Car. The 1-litre designation is because the goal of the car design was to be able to go 100 km on 1 liter of fuel. The car managed to meet that goal, needing just 0.99 liters for 100 km, or to put that in terms familiar to us U.S. readers, it achieved 238 mpg.

Volkswagen had a second prototype similar to the original one but with several improvements, and then moved on to a production version. The production version is named the XL1. Here are a couple pictures of it.

According to Volkswagen, this production version only needs 0.9 liters to travel 100 km, or in other words, it gets 261 mpg. That's pretty amazing. And it sounds like VW is planning on putting the car into production. The catch? It's not cheap. According to a Car and Driver article, the anticipated price is around $50,000.

For those interested in reading more about the car, here are a few good articles on it. And for those interested in the original e-mail that prompted this entry, I'm including that below the fold.

More Info:

• VW Press Release - Volkswagen unveils the XL1 Super Efficient Vehicle in Qatar
• Car and Driver - Volkswagen XL1 Concept First Drive
• Wikipedia - Volkswagen 1-litre car

Continue reading "VW XL1 + E-mail Debunking - China's New "Little Car"" »

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Mar 14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a short entry today, but it's something I've been thinking about for a little while now. It seems to me that if you only judged bloggers by what they blogged about, you would have a very biased image of that person. Take me, for example. I write an awful lot about religion and politics. And granted, I may think about religion more than most average people, and I'm always a little bit excited to talk about it if the topic comes up in conversation, but that's only if it actually comes up in conversation. If you came over to hang out with me at my house or grab a beer at the local bar, chances are pretty good that I'd never even mention religion or politics. I write about them here because partly because it's an outlet where I can express my opinions, but also because it's something I think people might actually be interested in reading. Nobody except my friends and family really cares what TV shows I've been watching, what I've been eating for supper every night, the chores I did around the house last weekend, the grades my daughter makes in school, how she did at her piano recital, or many of the other things I do or talk about on a daily basis. Like I wrote above, if you only judged a person based on what they wrote about in their blog, you would only be judging them based on a tiny fraction of their real life.

Posted by Jeff on Tuesday, Feb 26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Fastnacht Day is once again upon us. My daughter and I will be busy making fastnachts tomorrow morning in celebration. Since I don't have anything new to say from previous years, I'll just rework last year's entry a bit.

Depending on where you are in the world, you may call tomorrow something else, like Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake Day. But from where I'm from in Pennsylvania, it's called Fastnacht Day (here's a link to the not-so-thorough Wikipedia article). Traditionally, you make potato based donuts, called fastnachts, supposedly as a way to empty your larder of all the fatty, sugary foods in preparation for the Lenten fast. My elementary school even used to give out donuts with the lunches on this day. So, in celebration of Fastnacht Day, here's my family's recipe for making them:

• Fastnacht Recipe

You're supposed to wake up early to make the fastnachts on Tuesday morning (they're freshest that way), but a few times I've made them the night before, and they're still okay. They keep pretty well in a brown paper lunch bag. I also like to put a little bit of powdered sugar into a ziploc bag, and a mix of granulated sugar and cinnamon into another one, to coat the fastnachts just before eating them.

To see just how popular fastnachts are back up in Pennsylvania, go have a look at this article, Fastnacht reminder -- order yours before Tuesday, with a photo showing some of the 2800 fastnachts that a local church made, or this article, Frying fastnachts for pre-Lenten splurge, about a fire company that's making 42,000 of them for a rundraiser. Here's an article from a couple years ago, Pre-Lenten fastnachts a traditional treat, describing how bakeries in Hagerstown started baking on Sunday night to meet Tuesday's demand.

A guy I worked with from Chicago mentioned a similar tradition up there - paczkis, from the Polish immigrants. But instead of a hole in the middle like my family's fastnachts (not all fastnachts have the hole), they have a filling, usually jelly or creme. I guess lots of groups have invented traditions to allow indulgence before a 40 day fast.

Doughnut Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Update 2013-03-12: I took a few pictures while we were making the fastnachts this morning. The first is my daughter rolling out the dough to cut more fastnachts, the second is the first batch frying up in the pan, and the third is the completed fastnachts. Note that we doubled the recipe, so that's twice as much as what you'd normally get. But we all three (my wife, daughter, and I) take them in with us to work/school to share them, so the double batch still goes quick.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Feb 11 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Given the time of year and knowing that many people will be donating to charities around this time, I figured this was a good time to address this. A friend of mine got an e-mail supposedly listing charities that don't do a good job of spending donations, and other charities that make your dollars go farther. He knew I'd want to see it, so he forwarded it to me. He was right - the e-mail was one that I couldn't pass up.

This e-mail was actually already covered pretty well by Snopes:
Charitable Compensation

And of course, the Mickelson's covered the e-mail pretty well, but I still wanted to add a bit more.

Needless to say, most of the information in the e-mail was wrong or misleading. But what if it wasn't? Several of the supposed facts in this e-mail are about CEO salaries, not overall spending of these organizations. And while a part of us wants everybody involved in a charity to be charitable themselves, the real question is, what's best for the charity? Look at it this way. The Red Cross is a big organization with a big budget. They need someone at the top who knows what they're doing. Now maybe, they could get someone charitable enough to be CEO for a low salary, but what would be the qualifications of that person? Or, they could decide to spend some money and hire the best CEO they can get - maybe not a particularly charitable person, but well qualified. Which would be better for the organization, and which would help them be more efficient overall?

In my mind, the measure of efficiency of a charity should not be how much the top person gets paid, but how much of their money is going into actual charity, not overhead. Luckily, a few organizations have already done the hard work of researching the finances of several charities to come up with this information. The chart below summarizes a few charities - the top 10 by revenue, the other charities listed in the e-mail, and a few that I included just out of personal interest. All of the data for the table below came from Forbes magazine's The 200 Largest U.S. Charities. Clicking on any of the charity names will take you to the Forbes entry for that organization.

Here's another way of looking at the data. I took the last column from the table above, % Spending on Charitable Expenses, and plotted it for the included charities, sorted from highest percentage to lowest.

I'll add that there are other considerations. For example, in a previous entry of mine, The Salvation Army - To Give, or Not to Give?, I discussed how the Salvation Army spends its money. As it turns out, they spend money on causes that I don't agree with, so I've decided to donate to other organizations that perform similar functions.

What to do with all this information is up to you. It depends on how much overhead you think is an acceptable amount, and whether or not there are any other organizations dedicated to performing the same mission as those charities.

More Info (including links already given):

• Charity Navigator - Your Guide to Intelligent Giving
• Forbes - The 200 Largest U.S. Charities
• American Institute of Philanthropy - Charity Watch
• LoveToKnow - What Percentage of Donations Go to Charity
• The Salvation Army - To Give, or Not to Give?
• Council for Secular Humanism - Research Report: How Secular Humanists (and Everyone Else) Subsidize Religion in the United States
• Snopes - Charitable Compensation

For anyone interested, the e-mail that prompted this entry is available below the fold.

Image Source: ATR International

Continue reading "Debunking an E-mail on Charities" »

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Dec 19 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Christmas season is upon us, which means it's time for us Scrooges to ramp up the war. To tell the truth, after skimming through some of my older entries, I don't have anything new to add. The 'War on Christmas' is a bit silly, considering how Christmas has been treated in this country in the past. The Puritans even outlawed it's celebration (see the first link below). Personally, I'm going to decorate the house, put up a tree, give presents, and just about every other tradition associated with this time of year other than go to church.

Some of the Christmas entries I've written in the past are pretty good. I especially recommend the first three below for information content, and the fourth if you want to support a good cause.

My previous War on Christmas posts:

• War on Christmas
• Yes, Virginia, There Are Liars
• The Salvation Army - To Give, or Not to Give?
• Buy White Wine in the Sun, Support Autism Society
• Another Attack in the War on Christmas
• War on Christmas, 2010
• War on Christmas, 2011

And of course, other people have created very interesting content in regards to Christmas and the 'war' upon it. Most of the links below are humorous, but the first is a serious look at the Salvation Army, and one more reason why I have trouble supporting that organization despite the good they do in other areas. Though as I wrote previously, if the only way you'd donate at all is by dropping pocket change into the Salvation Army's kettles, then do it. I don't donate to them personally, but I compensate by donating more to other charities.

Related Links to Other Sites:

• zinnia jones - The company they keep (more info on the Salvation Army)
• Calamities of Nature - What Christmas Is All About (spoof of Peanuts Christmas)
• Digital Cuttlefish - (The War On) The War On The War On The War On Christmas
• Digital Cuttlefish - The Night Before (The War On) Christmas
• XKCD - Tradition
• SMBC - Miracle of Christmas
• The Daily Show - The War on Christmas: Friendly Fire Edition

And to continue with what is now a tradition on this blog, here is a YouTube video of Tim Minchin singing his Christmas song, White Wine in the Sun. And if you missed my previous entry, Buy White Wine in the Sun, Support Autism Society, then let me repeat that if you go and buy the song this month, the proceeds will go to supporting the National Autistic Society.

Posted by Jeff on Thursday, Dec 6 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)