First, before we start the rather macabre discussion of burial, I want to wish you all a happy new year. Also, my blog this year will alternate between Thursdays and Fridays. Thursdays will remain the traditional Thermo Thursday and Fridays will be Finance Fridays in which I will dissect energy or thermo related stocks to help you discern if their business is based on hope or hype.

CNN carried an article on a trend toward using biodegradable coffins for burial. In it is a picture of a grieving relative of someone about to be buried in a coffin made from recycled newspaper. I hope they only used the obituary section and not the sports section!

We are not talking about the Rio Grande, but the mid-size coffee serving at Starbucks. Yes, Starbucks has short, tall, grande and venti sizes for their coffee and lattes. The grande is 16 oz. (More on Starbucks lingo is available at Quicksilver.com.)

I was recently in the local Starbucks when I overheard the patron in front of me ask for a "140 degree latte." Being a thermo expert, I had to ask the barista what this meant. The barista replied the milk in the 140 degree is warmed less than the normal 160 degrees. I started doing mental arithmetic to determine how much energy Starbucks could save if all patrons became green and asked for the 140 degree grande non-fat latte (with one Splenda and no foam, single-cupped).

Today with tongue in cheek we thank our Government for their new found interest in thermo. Today the Senate will not take up a vote on the energy bill as it stands with added taxes on oil companies. The end to the filibuster was one vote short.

The thermodynamic genii will take up the vote minus the added taxes provision. Hopefully the part on increased efficiency in energy use will remain intact.

This is not about Billy the Billionaire but about gates that allow electrons to flow. It is the sixtieth anniversary of the invention of the first transistor. A transistor is a gate that allows electrons to flow or can stop electrons from flowing depending whether the gate is open or closed.

The boys at Bell Labs came up with the transistor in 1947. This solid state device replaced the vacuum tube old Tommy Edison had invented back in the 19th century.

There is much debate regarding the need for energy self sufficiency in the US. The discussions are also shaded by opinion on the possible problems of global warming. All this public debate is for good reason even if the debate is not always well reasoned. Of course the US should wean itself from imported oil if we want to improve the environment and reduce our balance of payments deficit. The problem is difficult to solve not because of lack of discussion but rather because of fundamental thermodynamics. Hence, I chose the title Hydrocarbons – The Weapons of Mass Combustion for this article.

Today is the first anniversary of Genentech’s gRide program where employees are rewarded for not bringing a car to the campus. I have opined on the brilliance of this program and Andrew Tobias a TT subscriber as well as a very well known finance and political person carried the Carpooligan’s blog that I wrote a few months back.

I had promised an analysis of the Toyota Prius versus a Corolla but an Omninerd beat me to the punch with a very good analysis of the Prius. I was going to blog about a person who carpools and whether a Corolla is then better than a Prius. My belief is that it is obviously better to own a Corolla and carpool than own a Prius and not carpool. The effective fuel economy on a Corolla with two people alternating their driving is higher than the one person in a Prius. The cost of ownership of a Corolla is lower, and the added benefit of lessening the amount of cars on the road for all other motorists is also considerable. I once opined that more than 2 billion gallons of gasoline are wasted in traffic jams in the USA in addition to the more than 4 billion hours of wasted time of the motorists stuck in traffic. If we had 2/3 of the cars filled with 2 people instead of 1 person we would eliminate 1/3 of the vehicles from the road and this would free up traffic flow considerably. My crystal ball says we would better than halve the wasted time and gasoline eaten up by traffic jams. On this basis over 1 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved by not sitting in traffic. On top of this if we had one third fewer cars on the road (about 70 million vehicles) each not using 2 gallons a day for the five work days a week this carpooling effort would directly save 35 billion gallons of gasoline a year. On this basis oil prices would drop back to $2 a gallon and America would be saved. I carpool and us Carpooligans are the Paul Reveres of the 21st century.

Today we will discuss mass and grams are a unit of measure of mass. First a thank you to Ajay for his blog on how Brother Gibb had an oldie disco hit song titled "How deep is your love of thermo."

The EPA has reported the mileage cars sold in 2007 can expect.

Interestingly the average mass of vehicles sold in the USA has increased significantly since 1987 from 3,221 pounds to 4,144 pounds or 1,873,088 grams. The average horsepower of a vehicle has almost doubled since 1987 from 118 to 223 horsepower. The heaviest horse in history had a mass of 3,360 pounds or about the mass of the average vehicle sold in the USA in 1987. The acceleration of the average vehicle measured in the time taken to get from zero to sixty MPH has decreased from 13.1 seconds to 9.6 seconds in the past twenty years. The fuel economy of the average vehicle has decreased from 22.0 mpg to 20.2 mpg because of the change in mass, horsepower and the proliferation of trucks (SUVs included) from only 28% of vehicles sold in 1987 to 49% of the vehicles to be sold in 2007.

Yes we have to thank the Reds (not Cincinnati) for today’s episode of TT. It is exactly 50 years ago today that space exploration began. The USSR launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. This 180 pound payload sat atop a R7 Rocket. Sputnik did nothing except send some radio noise back to earth.