I am glad that I had a manual transmission and learned to drive stick shift years ago. Probably in 25 years with electric cars children won’t understand why cars had gears you had to shift or transmissions at all. Electric cars don’t have torque bands or gears because electric motors don’t need them as they have 100% torque at any speed, only limit on torque is current supplied to the motor. Even big electric buses, trucks and trains have only one gear.
Gas engines have to be turning at least 2,000 rpm to have much power and 3,500 rpm for full power. Electric motors have full torque at 1 rpm or 3,500 rpm, the only limit in torque is current supplied. Technically you don’t need to gears with a gas engine with a high stall speed torque converter as the slip in the torque converter can allow the engine to spin at a speed faster than the wheels, a feature aggressively exploited in an early automatic transmissions with one or two gears but allowing a lot of slip wastes a lot of energy. Buick made a one speed automatic transmission in the early 1960s – the car was painfully slow and got 6 MPG on a good day. Modem automatic transmissions limit the time they are slipping by having multiple gears and having gears that fully lock at highway speeds.
More than 3,100 Pennsylvanians died prematurely in 2018 due to air pollution, the most in the nation, according to a new study published in the science journal Nature.
There was 791 murders during the same year in the state.
The architectural world is reeling over President Trump's call for traditional designs for new Federal buildings. His proposed executive order is called "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again," it takes an out-with-the-new, in-with-the-old approach to architecture, calling modern federal buildings constructed over the last five decades "undistinguished," "uninspiring" and "just plain ugly."
It's true that modernism abounds in D.C. Standing on a street corner near the National Mall, there's actually a mishmash of architectural styles. Let's talk about three of them: In the distance, the gleaming white pillars of the U.S. Capitol dome, the kind of classical architecture the president's order favors. Closer in, there's a towering, steel-mesh scrim that's part of the Eisenhower Memorial, a contemporary design by Frank Gehry which is under construction. Right behind the scrim, there's the beige, boxy, concrete-heavy Department of Education, a Brutalist building — the style a lot of people love to hate.
FISHERS LANDING, NEW YORK — Road salt normally helps keep the public safe. But in this small hamlet near the Canadian border, residents say it’s contaminating their wells and eating their appliances from the inside out. Worse, they believe the state misled them about the cause to avoid culpability.
Researchers from Virginia Tech, who helped uncover drinking water contamination in Flint, Michigan, think Fishers Landing’s problems were caused by runoff from a nearby salt storage shed run by the New York State Department of Transportation.
They also say the problem could be far more widespread than a single shed in a single town, with their analysis showing nearly half a million people across the state could face similar risks.
And while New York uses more road salt than any other state, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont use similar amounts of salt per mile of roadway, meaning residents there could be at risk, too.
Unlike public water systems, private wells aren’t regulated, said Kelsey Pieper, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Boston’s Northeastern University who studied the Fishers Landing area while at Virginia Tech beginning in late 2015.
"Worse, they believe the state misled them about the cause to avoid culpability." Our government would do such a thing?
