My Steve Jobs

I have never owned an Apple product. In fact, I have always been annoyed by what seemed to me to be the cult-like attitude that many Apple owners expressed towards Steve Jobs, the Mac, and the variety of iPhones, iPads, and iWhatevers.

Then I read Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography. I still don't own an Apple product, but I have a better understanding of and empathy for the Apple mind-set. In particular, I realized the other day that I have my own Steve Jobs. His name is Elon Musk.

Musk has done something similar to Jobs. He has not only been a pioneer in shepherding a technological revolution, but he has done so in multiple industries. Musk was a founder of PayPal. He then started Tesla, the only spectacularly successful electric car company. Not satisfied with that, he started SpaceX, the first private rocket company to service the international space station. To top it off, he inspired SolarCity, which has become a quite successful solar power company in California.

I watched this video today with rapt excitement, listening to the adoring crowd soak in Musk's presentation, and realized how similar the event was to those many times in which Steve Jobs unveiled new Apple products to the similarly devoted.

I guess that this makes me kind of a nut, but it is a burden that I will have to bear.

Urban Electrification

Last week I did something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. I traded my Ford Fusion hybrid for an electric car, a 2013 Nissan Leaf. The Leaf is not suitable as one's sole source of transportation. Its range is limited to about 80 miles. However, as a commuter car it is almost ideal. It is comfortable, quiet, and surprisingly quick. Once you have experienced an electric drive train, it is hard to imagine ever going back to a internal combustion engine. The Leaf has no oil, no spark plugs, no transmission, and. . . uses zero gasoline.

Forgetting the Leaf in particular, I have discovered something in my short time with this car that leads me to believe that the electric car is destined to take over the personal transportation market. Electric cars are almost unbelievably inexpensive to drive.

Consider the following: The average car gets 22.4 MPG. The average cost of regular gas is currently $3.63. If you assume that the average life of a car is 150,000 miles, then you can expect to spend over $24,000 on gasoline over the life of your car. By way of comparison, the local cost of electricity where I live is 10.4 cents per kilowatt/hour (kwH) and the Leaf, for example,  gets about 3.9 miles per kwH. Assuming the same 150,000 mile lifetime of the car, one could expect to spend just under $4,000 on electricity. That offers a savings of over $20,000 in fuel costs over the life of the vehicle! If you assume that the price of gasoline will go up, which it almost certainly will, then the savings would be even greater. These numbers are simply too dramatic to ignore.

With the opportunity for such huge improvements in efficiency, why haven't electric cars taken over the market already? There are two reasons. First, there simply is not a nationwide network of fast charging stations, stations that provide a full charge in no more than 30 minutes. For now, electric cars are mostly limited to commuting from home from where you can charge your vehicle every evening. Second, and even more importantly, battery technology is not yet advanced enough. Batteries that hold a sufficient amount of energy for normal use are extremely expensive. The Tesla Model S, which offers a range of 265 miles costs $80,000, way beyond the means of most consumers.

In fact, I believe that for purely electric mass market cars to be practical the battery needs to provide at least 300 miles of range in a vehicle that costs no more than $30,000.

The exciting part of all of this is that these two problems--fast charging infrastructure and affordable, more energy dense batteries--are almost certainly going to be solved in the next 3-5 years. More than one company has announced breakthroughs in battery technology. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that within 3-5 years batteries with 4x improvement in power-to-cost ratio. Second, building a nationwide network of fast charging stations is a relatively simple task. Unlike liquid fuels, electricity does not have to be transported through pipelines or fuel trucks. Its presence is already ubiquitous. The cost to build fast charging stations is not trivial, but much less expensive than building a new gas station. Tesla has already begun to do this.

These are relatively modest technological hurdles to overcome. Perhaps a bigger problem lies not with the technology, but with many peoples' reluctance to embrace a completely new approach to such a familiar and essential part of our lives.

I, for one, am excited about the future.

A Television List

The Writers Guild of America has produced a list of the top 101 best written television shows. Lists like this are great conversation starters.

What first struck me about the list is how it reinforces my previous blog post that centered around The-Best-Night-In-Television-Ever, the prime time Saturday night slate of shows on CBS in the 1973-1974 season.

• M*A*S*H
• All in the Family
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show
• The Bob Newhart Show
• The Carol Burnett Show

Three of these shows--three!--are in the top ten of the WGA list:

#4 All in the Family
#5 M*A*S*H
#6 The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Don't feel too bad about the remaining two. The Carol Burnett Show and the Bob Newhart Show came in at #37 and #41, respectively.

This is an almost unbelievable accomplishment. Never in the history of the medium has so much quality been so tightly packed into a single evening by a single network. I am stunned that there has not been any discussion of this in the entertainment media, at least none that I have seen.

A few other aspects of the list struck me.

• I was pleased that Seinfeld came in as the highest-rated comedy ever and the #2 best written show overall. This choice seems to validate a controversial TV Guide article that was published in 2002 announcing that Seinfeld was the greatest television show of all time.
• I was pleased that The Wire made the top ten, though I thought that it should have been #1. The Sopranos won that prize. One television critic I like explained this by pointing out that purely in terms of writing quality, The Wire should have been #1, but that The Sopranos was accorded that slot because of its overall cultural impact. However, he went on to explain that if cultural impact was a valid criteria then it was insane that Seinfeld was rated higher than All in the Family. I go back and forth on this myself. The difficulty in comparing the two shows is that they are almost mirror opposites: the show about issues and the show about nothing. This is not apples and oranges. It is apples and plutonium.
• I was pleased that the two most memorable shows from my childhood--The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show--both made the list. However, I think it was wrongheaded to rate Van Dyke at #15 and Griffith at #70. Oddly, The Andy Griffith Show has stood the test of time better Van Dyke's groundbreaking show, which can seem rather dated by contemporary standards. Morey Amsterdam's jokes and put-downs seemed hilarious to me in 1965. Now they seem like a lot of stale vaudeville schtick. However, Don Knots' brilliantly realized character of Barney Fife still makes me laugh forty-five years later.
• I was doubly pleased--as all right-thinking people would be--that Star Trek was ranked #33 way ahead of The Next Generation at #79.
• Disappointments? I never warmed up to Mad Men, so I certainly would not have placed it at #7. So too, Six Feet Under was little more than a warmed-over soap opera that had one or two decent seasons. Placing it at #19 is just silly. Dexter is a much better show, if Michael C. Hall premium cable shows is what you are looking for. I also thought that it was just plain weird that The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Late Night with David Letterman all made the list (The Daily Show made the top 20), but The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson wasn't on the list at all. This underscores a criticism I have heard about this this, namely that it is biased in favor of more contemporary shows that are fresher in memory.
• I was pleased that Law & Order (the original) made the top fifty. I have always been a big fan, especially seasons 3-10, for the way it managed to shoehorn original material into an incredibly inflexible format: 

1. the story begins when a crime is discovered and Jerry Orbach's Lenny Briscoe makes some wry quip at the scene
2. the crime is investigated and an arrest is made
3. the defendants are tried for the crime
4. after the verdict comes in and Steven Hill's Adam Schiff ends the show with a wry quip.

• Finally, I was pleased that Breaking Bad made the list at #13. People have been telling me to watch that show for years, and I got around to it only in the past couple of weeks (the wonder of Netflix makes this possible). Boy, were the advocates of that show right. It is very, very good. The Shield is another show like this that I will get around to once I have finished with Breaking Bad. It is #71.

Here's the entire list.

1. "The Sopranos"

2. "Seinfeld"

3. "The Twilight Zone"

4. "All in the Family"

5. "MASH"

6. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"

7. "Mad Men"

8. "Cheers"

9. "The Wire"

10. "The West Wing"

11. "The Simpsons"

12. "I Love Lucy"

13. "Breaking Bad"

14. "The Dick Van Dyke Show"

15. "Hill Street Blues"

16. "Arrested Development"

17. "The Daily Show"

18. "Six Feet Under"

19. "Taxi"

20. "The Larry Sanders Show"

21. "30 Rock"

22. "Friday Night Lights"

23. "Frasier"

24. "Friends"

25. "Saturday Night Live"

26. "The X-Files"

27. "Lost"

28. "ER"

29. "The Cosby Show"

30. "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

31. "The Honeymooners"

32. "Deadwood"

33. "Star Trek"

34. "Modern Family"

35. "Twin Peaks"

36. "NYPD Blue"

37. "The Carol Burnett Show"

38. "Battlestar Galactica"

39. "Sex and the City"

40. "Game of Thrones"

41. "The Bob Newhart Show"

42. "Your Show of Shows"

43. "Downton Abbey"

44. "Law & Order"

45. "Thirtysomething"

46. "St. Elsewhere"

47. "Homicide: Life on the Street"

48. "Homeland"

49. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

50. "The Good Wife"

51. "The Colbert Report"

52. "The Office" (British version)

53. "Northern Exposure"

54. "The Wonder Years"

55. "L.A. Law"

56. "Sesame Street"

57. "Columbo"

58. "The Rockford Files"

59. "Fawlty Towers"

60. "Moonlighting"

61. "Freaks and Geeks"

62. "Roots"

63. "Everybody Loves Raymond"

64. "South Park"

65. "Playhouse 90"

66. "The Office" (U.S. version)

67. "Dexter"

68. "My So-Called Life"

69. "Golden Girls"

70. "The Andy Griffith Show"

71. "The Shield"

72. "Roseanne"

73. "24"

74. "Murphy Brown"

75. "House"

76. "Barney Miller"

77. "I, Claudius"

78. "The Odd Couple"

79. "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

80. "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"

81. "Upstairs Downstairs"

82. "Monty Python's Flying Circus"

83. "Get Smart"

84. "Gunsmoke"

85. "The Defenders"

86. "Sergeant Bilko"

87. "Justified"

88. "Band of Brothers"

89. "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In"

90. "The Prisoner"

91. "The Muppet Show"

92. "Absolutely Fabulous"

93. "Boardwalk Empire"

94. "Will and Grace"

95. "Family Ties"

96. "Lonesome Dove"

97. "Soap"

98. "The Fugitive"

99. "Louie"

100. "Late Night With David Letterman"

101. "Oz"