Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Conspiracy Theory Notes

11 Outrageous Taxes
Above Top Secret
Another Runaway General: Army Deploys Psy-Ops on U.S. Senators
The Best Conspiracy Theories (Lizard People are Running the World!)
Building the American Caliphate
Caliphate Revival
CIA Spy Gadgets Go Public
Conspiracy Planet
Curveball Confession: Another Dent in Iraq Conspiracy Theory
Glen Beck Adds Google to Caliphate Conspiracy Theory
Infidels are Cool
More on conspiracy theories
Obama Conspiracy Theories
Protect Smart Keys from Hackers, Car Thieves
Rolling Stone: General Deployed Psy-Ops Against U.S. Senators
Slow Broadband Still a Problem for the U.S.
Solar Flare Scrambling Communications
Why is Glenn Beck Freaking Out over Egypt and a Caliphate

Some proponents and opponents of conspiracy theories use inflammatory language. If you want to comment here, keep your cool, and watch your language.

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Dawson, George, and Richard Glaubman. Life is So Good. New York: Penguin, 2000.

George Dawson was in his nineties when he learned to read. He was a centenarian when he and coauthor Richard Glaubman wrote his biography, Life is So Good. I think Dawson’s life was good, and not just because it has been so long.

Even a good life is sometimes hard. Most of Dawson’s life was hard. Black and poor were not auspicious beginnings for a boy in Texas at the beginning of the 20th Century. In the opening chapter, Dawson tells of how, as a boy, he witnessed the lynching of a young black man falsely accused of raping a young white woman. Dawson was ready to become bitter and withdraw from all contact with white people, but his father would not allow him to even consider it.

Dawson presents his parents and wise and pragmatic, making things better for themselves bit by bit. He picks it up and does the same thing in his own life, especially once he settled down to start his own family.

He had some wandering to do first. His early life of travel and adventure makes for interesting reading. He road trains all over North America, sometimes as a ticketholder and sometimes joining the hobos. He was able to find work wherever he went, mainly because there was no job so hard or unpleasant he was unwilling to try it.

Traveling opened his eyes, especially to race relations in the U.S. Growing up in the South, he thought the discrimination and oppression he was accustomed to be the way things were. In Mexico and Canada, even in parts of the U.S., he was treated like anyone else, regardless of color. Mexican villagers welcomed him like family and delighted in the novelty of someone so tall. Canadian lumbermen were curious about his home and happily directed him to the snow he had never seen before—it almost killed him. In his early days, he found it strange to be in places where no one cared which train car he was in or the restaurant at which he ate.



Things changed a lot in Dawson’s more than 100 years of life, though racism hasn’t disappeared. (I grew up in a town that was 99 percent white and I’m barely 40 years old. In the same county were villages that were almost entirely black.) Even in the face of difficulties, Dawson persisted and bit by bit made life better for himself and his family. When retirement came it wasn’t time to rest from his labors, it was time to pick up the education he had been denied as a boy because he had to work.

Dawson’s life story is worth reading simply because he is a witness to history who tells his story in an interesting and accessible manner. It’s worth reading because, without trying, it has a message too: don’t worry. Dawson recommends that people not worry if they want a good life. I think it’s very good advice. Arguably, though, he was working too hard most of his life to have time for worries, even though he had cause for them.

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It's Not About Me by Max Lucado

Many of our problems arrive from our focus on us. The cure, which leads to fulfillment, is a life focused on Christ. Max Lucado makes the case for this idea in his book It’s Not About Me.

Everything and everyone was made to reveal the glory of God. God is holy. It is hard to imagine how higher and more is God than anything else is, and He made everything else. Contact with God changes us and we become holy, different and set apart, too. When Moses was given a glimpse of God, his face shown so that people were afraid to look at him.

We are to shine, too, as mirrors that reflect the glory of God. We have reason to praise Him. He is our stable foundation; He never changes though all else does. He saved us entirely for His own purposes and pleasure even though we could never deserve it. He redeems our suffering, and our fleeting suffering for His name’s sake will be rewarded with eternal blessing. If we have success in life, it is His gift. Even our bodies are His and make to glorify Him, so it important for us to take care of our bodies and avoid sin.

I found a personal connection to one of the stories recounted by Lucado. As a Texan, he was aware of the collapse of the Queen Isabella Causeway on September 15, 2001,when it was struck by a barge. I was vacationing nearby in Corpus Christi at the time. One of my in-laws reacted in fear, assuming my wife and I must have been trapped, or worse killed (even though the bridge collapsed in the middle of the night), and frantically called anyone in the family or at work who might have some contact with us. A close relative of mine shrugged it off, saying a call from the Texas Highway Patrol would come if something happened to us. One reacted with fear (surely, something was wrong), one reacted with faith (we were in God’s hands, whatever happened).

You might note that this happened only days after terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in New York. On the first day of that vacation, we were struck by another car under strange circumstances in Arkansas, leaving us stuck in Morrilton; we ended up skipping a planned stop at Hot Springs. The collapsing bridge was the last straw, we were too heartsick to enjoy our vacation and we came home early.

Even after all that, we were grateful. We were alive and well when so many others were not. We had our family with us when others did not. We knew God was with us, comforting us, and that even if the worst had happened to us, we would be with Him, which is the thing our hearts long for.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Into the Depths of God by Calvin Miller

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good by Robert H. Schuller

Stop Whining, Start Living by Dr. Laura

Walking with God by John Eldredge

I previously posted a review of this book here->.

Lucado, Max. It’s Not About Me. Nashville, TN: Integrity, 2004.

The Revenge of Analog by David Sax

The joke about visions of the future that never panned out is usually, “Where is my flying car?” The proliferation and promises of digital technology over the last two or three decade might prompt us to pose some other questions such as, “Where is my paperless office?”

In The Revenge of Analog, journalist David Sax discusses how analog technologies are sometimes thriving in the digital ages. Some are making comebacks. Some never went away. Some are growing more popular because of digital technology, not in spite of it.

Sax looks at a lot of analog technologies. This includes vinyl records, paper and pen, tabletop games, books and brick-and-mortar stores.

Some of these have very interesting histories in how they have fallen, risen and interacted with digital technology. What I found most interesting in the book is the reasons analog persists. It is usually because it brings something that digital technology leaves out.

For instance, analog technology appeals to the senses. I know a lot of bibliophiles who love the smell of books, though it would not seem to be a pertinent feature. The IRL space is simply much richer that even the most detailed virtual space.

 “There’s never going to be a virtual environment as completely engaging as the physical environment is,” computer game designer Bernie De Koven quoted in The Revenge of Analog

Analog is usually slow. Generally, a strength of digital is that it is almost always faster. We don’t always want fast. Sometime the slower pace, the pauses, helps us to take things in and savor them. For instance, when you listen to a vinyl record, you can’t skip songs at the touch of a button, you have to lift the needle and move it or even change records. You can’t listen to any songs you have in random order, but you have to listen to song on a single album in the order the artist or producer arranged them unless you introduce a lot of pauses as you interact with the discs and player.

Analog is limited. The digital world can be so rich with information and choices that it can be overwhelming. Paper and pen limits the size, colors and effects you can produce. These limitations help us hone in on the main issues quickly and get moving.

“People think limitations are bad things. But it moves the process forward, in a good way. You can easily get lost in the process. It’s easier to stick to a plan when you have limitations,” analog recording studio owner Chris Mara quoted in The Revenge of Analog

In the real realm of communication, analog is more intimate that digital. The ultimate analog communication is a face-to-face conversation, mediated by nothing but the air in between two people. We send off a lot of nonverbal signals when we speak, and we sense these signals from others, which gives us a more rich and nuanced understanding of what is said (and unsaid) than we can get from a text message or even over Skype or Facetime.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Learn Better by Ulrich Boser

The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin

Sax, David. The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016.

Writing: Steal Characters

A lot of writing revolves around characters. For some writers, characters are central, and they’re drives, decisions, history, and idiosyncrasies move the story. A popular series character can be the jackpot for a writer, especially a genre writer.

Great characters are all around. How do you find them? Do as your predecessors in inventing great characters. Steal them.

I’m not suggesting that you actually steal characters. Nor am I suggesting that the writers I’ll be discussing stole their characters. It’s a matter of looking around in literature and life for real and fictional people then reworking them, consciously and unconsciously, into your own character.

Let me draw an illustration. Let’s take a popular character and see how other popular characters are in some way a reworking of it. These connections are my invention. I have not idea what the creators of these characters were thinking. I doubt most of them were thinking along these lines.

Let’s start with the Lone Ranger. Created by George W. Trendle (written by Fran Striker) in 1933 for the radio, the Lone Ranger saw success in several media, especially television. Before looking at the masked strangers successors, look at his predecessors. There were white-hatted cowboy heroes before the ranger. His contribution was the secret identity and the avoidance of lethal force. These heroes were white knights transformed for the gunpowder age. You might see those chevaliers as vaguely Christianized versions of mythological questers like Odysseus and Hercules.



Now imagine that the Lone Ranger is an antihero, his bullets are deadly lead and he uses a lot of them. You might picture something like Jonah Hex. John Albano and Tony DeZuniga created Hex in 1971. He is a scarred frontiersman who roams the West, not necessarily protecting the innocent, but collecting bounties or dealing deadly justice.

Maybe you like that the Lone Ranger avoids deadly force. Let’s keep that, but make him a pulp-era vigilante. That is what Trendle and Striker did in when they created the Green Hornet for the radio in 1936. They even made the Hornet a distant relative, though not a descendant, and imitator of the Ranger. The Hornet is darker, though. Instead of riding a white horse, he drives the Black Beauty. He sometimes pretends to be a criminal, but it is mainly to allow him to infiltrate gangs and break them apart from the inside. In spite of this, he avoids killing just as his predecessor did (I guess Seth Rogan didn’t notice that).

What if the Lone Ranger was a costumed superhero? He might be Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939. Bruce Wayne’s identity isn’t hidden from the audience, but his costumed crusade against crime could have been modeled on the horseman. Batman writer Bill Finger gave Batman a code of ethics that would have made the Ranger proud. Not only did Batman eschew deadly force, he rarely used a gun at all. In appearance, at least, Batman resembles Zorro more than the Lone Ranger. (Batman comics tie him to Zorro, too. Several authors have depicted it as the move the Waynes had just seen when Bruce’s parents were killed by a criminal). Zorro himself might be taken as a Latin American spin on the Ranger, except he was created 14 years earlier by Johnston McCulley.

Not all of these ostensible progeny are as good as Batman. Put the Ranger in a talking car and you might end up with something like Knight Rider. Put Jonah Hex on a motorcycle in a futuristic megacity and you might get Judge Dredd. (The Judge Dredd comics weren’t bad, just not my cup of tea. The Sylvester Stallone movie was bad.)

The Lone Ranger is an archetypal hero, which is how we can so easily draw connections between him and characters that came before and after. It doesn’t denigrate Trendle and Striker to say they drew on archetypes, or even specific characters or people, in creating his own character. It’s a compliment that they created a character that was so popular, enduring, and inspiring to other writers.

Think of your own twist on the Lone Ranger archetype. You might have other characters you love that you could call on. Take your favorite romance heroine and put her in a completely different setting (Charlaine Harris put Sookie Stackhouse in a Louisiana full of vampires). You could put a detective in the far future (Isaac Asimov did in Caves of Steel). Bring a dragon into the atomic age (yeah, Godzilla). You could make a dragon a slave to the boilermakers in a steampunk fantasy—hey, maybe I’ll do that.

Interesting Stuff Oct. 26, 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Passes 2008 August 3
Capitalist Quotations
Dog Acts as Mom at Kansas Zoo
Interesting Stuff (Oct. 4, 2008)
Liquid Found On Saturn Moon
NASA's Sure: There's Water On Mars
Nissan Shows Off Powerful New Electric Car
Nobel Prize-Winning Russian Author Dies
North Texas lake evaporation high, but conservation measures helping
Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies
Toyota Announces Changes in North American Production
Toyota to Build the Prius Hybrid in Mississippi

Stealing Plots

I previously wrote about “stealing” characters.  In that essay, I described several characters from popular fiction and how they might be seen as variations on the same character template.  I suggested that a writer can modify and reimagine existing characters to create new ones.  Actually, I think that is probably how most characters are born, even if the authors aren’t consciously aware of it.

Similarly, plots can be “stolen.”  Some have suggested that there are a very limited number of plots, so in a sense all writers are stealing from a small pool.  On the other hand, there is a lot more to a story than just the plot, so it may not matter.  Let me illustrate the idea with some examples.

A Christmas Carol is one of the most popular, and I think one of the best, ghost stories ever written.  Charles Dickens’ novella was first published in 1843.  The story has been adapted to the stage (including opera), many films, radio, television (my wife and I are fond of the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge), comic books, and numerous pastiches.

The plot is well known.  Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a miser.  On a certain Christmas Eve, he is confronted by the ghost of his former business partner and three spirits who represent Christmases past, present and future.  The visions they show him convince Scrooge that his single-minded pursuit of money has deprived him of life.  He awakes Christmas morning as a new man committed to relating to his fellow man and putting his money to use.

Let’s reverse Scrooge.  Make him an extremely generous person instead of a miser.  In that case, he might be something like George Bailey.  Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, was the generous man at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life.  His dream is to travel the world.  Instead, he delays his dream again and again to help his neighbors, his brother, and eventually his own wife and children.  It comes to a head when a mistake by his uncle brings imminent ruin to the savings and loan George runs. Faced with ruin, George sees himself as an utter failure.  He contemplates suicide in hopes that his insurance policy will rescue his family from financial ruin.

At this point, he receives a spiritual visit like Ebenezer.  In this case it is a single spirit, an angel named Clarence.  Like the Christmas ghosts, Clarence shows George a vision.  This is also an inversion of Dickens’ tale.  Instead of showing him a history of missed opportunities and blindness to the needs of others, Clarence reveals an alternate world in which George and his generous acts did not exist.  His brother is dead.  His wife is a frightened spinster (it’s hard to believe Donna Reed would have been overlooked by the marriageable men of Bedford Falls even holed up in the library with her glasses on).  The people are mired in poverty because he hadn’t been there to fight for access to credit so they could build homes and businesses.  The town is under the thumb of the miserly landlord Mr. Potter, himself a type of unreformed Scrooge.

Like Scrooge, George is changed by his vision.  He sees that his life is worth something and that his sacrifices bought him a lot of love.  In the end, returned from his walk in the dark alternate universe, that love is displayed by a return of generosity from his many friends that saves him.

These beloved stories don’t have the same plot.  However, one is a variation or alteration of the plot of the other.  This plot archetype doesn’t have to be so serious.

Topper, either the book by Thorne Smith or the movie starring Cary Grant, is an example of this plot played for laughs.  Cosmo Topper is a banker.  He is bored with his job.  He is somewhat alienated from his wife who clings to respectability.  He has money and status, even what might have been considered a good marriage in a time when such relationships were as much about business as love, but he has no fun and it is wearing on him.

The ghosts are a piece of work, too.  George and Marion Kerby are a wealthy couple who die in a car accident.  Instead of shuffling off to the afterlife, they find themselves stuck on earth.  They have never done something substantive, either good or bad, in their entirely frivolous lives.  They decide to fix the situation by helping their old friend Topper.

In this case, all the major characters are a type of Scrooge.  Topper has let his job, money, and status keep him from a life of fun and serious connection.  The Kerbys had so little meaningful connection to other people that they neither helped nor harmed another soul.  Even Topper’s wife Clara has sacrificed intimacy in her marriage to focus on social climbing.

So Topper is visited by spirits like Scrooge and Bailey.  Instead of taking a serious look at life, it is presents a screwball comedy.  The Kerbys drag Topper into all kind of risqué situations he would normally not get into.  Misunderstandings abound and Topper is embarrassed repeatedly.  The ghosts are have good intentions, but they are not very competent.  Topper feigns irritation at the hijinks, but in his heart is having a ball and doesn’t want the haunting to end.  Clara feels humiliated by all the trouble Topper is getting into, but fear of losing him to a wild life reminds her of how much she loves him.

Through a series of screwy events, the characters undergo a Scrooge-like change.  The Toppers loosen up and rekindle their love.  They discover that their intimacy as a couple is more important than jobs, wealth or status, though they don’t have to completely give up those things.  The Kerbys take responsibility for themselves and their actions.  They finally put Topper’s needs ahead of their own and do something substantively good, opening the doors of heaven.

You can probably see that these stories are related by more than similarities in plot.  They have a common theme.  All of these stories are about connecting to others in relationships.  Bailey is a little different from the others in that he starts out blind to all the good that has resulted from his seemingly humble touching of the lives of others.  Scrooge, the Toppers and the Kerbys are isolated for various reasons, mostly of their own making, and need to discover that relating to others is the main thing.

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