American Solar Challenge status check

Just a quick status check on the lead-up to the American Solar Challenge next July. As my race information page indicates, we still have 39 solar car teams from 8 countries registered. But when we check the status of pre-race documents due last December, another story emerges:

The histogram is tri-modal. First, there is a group of 21 teams that are on schedule, or close to it. Most of them also show good signs of progress on social media. Then there are 12 teams that are well behind schedule. And finally, there are 6 teams that have submitted almost none of the required documents, raising serious doubts as to whether they will actually turn up.

My race information page will be updated from time to time with information on the progress of these teams. In July, I plan to blog about the race itself.

Model of the Italian Cruiser-class entry (picture credit)

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Calendar for February

Almost forgot this – the calendar for February (click for hi-res image). See more calendars here. And don’t forget the lunar eclipse tomorrow.

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Numeral Systems

Following up on my “origins of the alphabet” chart, here is one for numerals. The chart was produced using R, and the pictures are purely illustrative – unlike the pictures in the alphabet chart, they do not relate to the origins of the symbols.

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Religion in the Australian Census

Following up on my earlier post, here is a chart of religion in Australia, by age (as per the 2016 Census, with percentages on the vertical axis relating to the population of Australia as a whole, and excluding people with no religion specified). Coloured areas in this chart indicate the total number of people for each religious group:

The changing religious landscape is revealed by the variation with age. For people aged 65, the population is 25% Catholic, 24% secular, 22% Anglican, 16% other Christian, 7% Uniting Church, 2% Buddhist, 1% other religion, 1% Muslim, and 1% Hindu.

For people aged 25, it’s 47% secular, 21% Catholic, 11% other Christian, 8% Anglican, 4% Muslim, 3% Hindu, 3% Buddhist, 2% Uniting Church, and 2% other religion. The chart below shows these relative percentages, for each age cohort.

Immigration and children are keeping the Catholic Church stable in size, but the Uniting Church is in collapse, and the Anglican Church is not doing much better (other data suggests that it’s in collapse outside of Sydney). The “big three” non-Christian religions (Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism) are more than 10% of the age-25 demographic. The chart also shows the impact of student-driven Indian immigration to Australia over the past decade or so – there is a visible peak for Hinduism around age 33.

There seems to be something odd about the religion given for young children up to age 13 or so – some parents (especially Catholics) seem to be listing young children as “no religion.” This might reflect delayed baptism. However, it also seems that many children lose their childhood religion in late teens and early adulthood.

Mean ages for adults within the different groups are Hindu: 37.1, Muslim: 37.7, secular: 42, other religion: 42.6, Buddhist: 43.5, Catholic: 48.6, other Christian: 50.4, Anglican: 54.8, and Uniting Church: 55.8. The last two groups in particular are skewed towards older people.

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Upcoming solar car races for 2018

photo: Anthony Dekker

I am aware of four major solar car races this year (not including the Japanese races):

• American Solar Challenge (July 6–22) – 39 teams registered (see my race information page)
• European Solar Challenge (September 21–23) – five teams already confirmed (Cambria, Futuro Solare, Bochum×2, Punch)
• SASOL Solar Challenge (September 22–30) – limited information
• Carrera Solar Atacama (October) – limited information, no definite date yet

photo: SASOL Solar Challenge

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Solar car team composition

The chart above shows 2017 team composition for the Eindhoven and Bochum solar car teams (divided by study major, not team responsibility). Not surprisingly, electrical and mechanical engineering students are the core of both teams (about half in each case) Yet there is also considerable diversity, because the business side of a solar car team requires other skills too. The Bochum team also includes a media unit, which explains the large “other” category (one of the team photographers is a biology student, for example).

The chart was constructed by parsing web pages, which may have introduced errors (also, I guessed a bit with the German words). But the main point stands – solar car teams require a diverse set of skills.

The Bochum car (photo: Anthony Dekker)

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Climate Fiction

Someone told me the other day about climate fiction (cli-fi). I had no idea that it had become a genre. The difficulty with climate change, of course, is that it is slow. Anthropogenic climate change has been going on for more than a century, and is likely to continue for decades to come. The slowness of the process creates challenges for managing it, and also challenges for the novelist. It is a little like tying the hero to the railway tracks, and then having a train head to him at walking pace from miles away. The hero is doomed, but nothing dramatic will happen for a while. How does the reader sustain interest in the hero’s dilemma?

One solution for the novelist is to speed up the process, most commonly through a scenario involving a shutdown of the Gulf Stream. This would cause massive freezing in the US, a huge increase in Arctic ice, a consequent increase in albedo, and hence global cooling. This scenario has been explored in the film The Day After Tomorrow and in a trilogy of novels by Kim Stanley Robinson – Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007). There seems to be a flood of recent novels following in Robinson’s footsteps.

More usually, novelists assume that a particular climate change scenario has happened, and set their novel in the aftermath. This literary approach has existed for a while. The novel may be primarily dystopian, as in The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard (1962) or Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003).

Alternatively, the effects of climate change can simply be part of the setting, with the plot of the novel concentrating on other things. Much recent science fiction would fall in this category. A good example would be the “Event Horizon” trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton – Mindstar Rising (1993), A Quantum Murder (1994), and The Nano Flower (1995). However, I’m not sure it makes sense to describe such novels as “cli-fi” – they are simply novels in which climate change forms a significant part of the setting. What do my readers think?

Update: see also this 2016 article by Sarah Stankorb and this website with incredibly annoying background music by Dan Bloom (who claims to have coined the term “cli-fi”).

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Disasters in science #8

The sad story of the Mars Climate Orbiter reminds us all to use SI units.

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Disasters in science #7

Cold fusion is one of the most famous cases of science that wasn’t.

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American Solar Challenge: 6 months to go

Scrutineering for the 2018 American Solar Challenge starts on July 6. The chart below summarises the 39 solar car teams from 8 countries which have registered for the race. Many of them are frantically building or modifying cars – see my race information page. The race will run through the mountains from Omaha, Nebraska to Bend, Oregon. Follow the leadup to the race here and on the official ASC Facebook at  

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