I read something today that blew my mind:

If you raise a guzzler’s fuel efficiency from 15 miles per gallon to 35 miles per gallon, you save almost four gallons per 100 miles. But boost a fairly efficient car from 35 mpg to 100 mpg, and you save less than two gallons in the same distance.

Of course by “blew my mind” I mean, I totally didn’t believe it and stopped everything I was doing and started running the numbers. And that’s when my mind was blown. Do people know this? That the gas savings of a 40mpg engine over a 30mpg engine is not the same as 30 over 20? I doubt it.

How do you convert miles per gallon into gallons per mile? Ugh, math! Turns out it’s easy. Just take the reciprocal of mpg. For example 20mpg = 1/20gal/100mi = 0.05gal/100mi. The problem there is that really small fractions are not very illustrative. So it’s better to think in terms of gallons per X miles, such as 100. This, as it happens, is how fuel economy is listed in Europe, in liters per 100 kilometers (l/100km).

So a 20mpg vehicle would translate to 5gal/100mi. 30mpg = 3.3gal/100mi for a gas savings of 1.7 gallons (per 100 miles). Here’s where it gets crazy. 40mpg = 2.5gal/100mi for a gas savings of only 0.8 gallons over a 30mpg vehicle. What seemed like a constant improvement, 20mpg to 30 and then 30mpg to 40 actually represents half as much improvement, and it only gets “worse.” Every 10mpg improvement actually represents an increasingly diminishing improvement in actual fuel economy. Who knew?

As the article above mentions, what this means is that more effort, attention, and frankly laws should be directed at getting the gas guzzlers off the road (or up to 30 or 40mpg), rather than focusing on 100mpg supercars. In any case, I’ll be riding my Vespa to work, sipping 1.8 gallons per 100 miles (55mpg).

Over the holiday weekend Stephanie and I traveled to Seattle to visit two friends from grad school, Patrick and Christy. The last time I visited Seattle, which was also my first time, I went to catch Gillian Welch in concert with Christy and her daughter Chloe. At the time Patrick was still in Chapel Hill/Carrboro, but now with them both in the same place, it only made sense to visit them together. As it happens, Christy and Chloe would be taking part in the Tall Ships festival in Tacoma, providing us all with a built-in 4th of July event.

We arrived Thursday night. Patrick grabbed us at the airport, brought us to our hotel downtown, and then we wandered towards the market for a place to sit down, have a drink, and catch up. The next morning we had a filling breakfast at one of Patrick’s favorite spots, Atlas Foods, before heading down to Tacoma to meet up with Christy and Chloe.

Of course by “meet up” I mean find their tall ship, the Yankee Clipper. Only recently the boat was owned by the Boy Scouts of America and used for their Sea Scouts program. When the Boy Scouts decided it was time to divest themselves of the boat, Christy along with Daniel Joram, the boat’s captain, expanded the role of the Yankee Clipper Foundation to take ownership of the boat and continue to maintain it for the Sea Scouts. Or at least that’s how I understand it.

Update: Christy wrote in to tell me:

Also, while we host a Sea Scout crew on the YC, we have launched a non-scouting youth-maritime training program to provide equal access to interested youth, without discrimination. Our new website is:
www.tallshiptraining.org

What this all means is that Christy, Chloe, Daniel, and a number of teens have been living and working on this 40 foot sailboat for the past several weeks, as well as a few to come. And by “living” I mean navigating, sailing, sleeping, cooking, eating, and of course going to the bathroom. It sounds kind of like Outward Bound on steroids. For teens. When we found them, Christy was below deck kneading dough to make bread. Once the dough was set to rise, we got off the boat and explored the festival a little bit more. Periodically the boats went out for little cruises with passengers. We’d hoped to do the same on the Clipper, but their launch times ended up a too late for our schedule.

We let Christy get back to her dough (and her boat) and then the three of us went over to Patrick’s parents’ house, where they’d prepared for us a veritable feast of smoked ribs, marinated grilled chicken, and sausage. I was in barbecue heaven! After a lovely dinner in their backyard garden, we returned to Seattle with plans for a hike Saturday on Mt Rainier.

• Alfa Romeo
• Citroën
• Dacia
• Daihatsu
• Fiat
• Holden
• Lancia
• Microcar
• Opel
• Peugeot
• Renault
• Seat

There are others of course, but these are the ones I saw (again and again) in the course of two weeks in France. I don’t know why they stood out so much to me, I’m not exactly a car-guy, but it really amazed me how many different brands there are don’t exist in the US market.

You can sign me up for a Fiat 500 or a Daihatsu Trevis any day.

MC Soleil and I are taking White Noise Lounge on the road—to France! So posting might be a bit irregular, depending on the good sounds we find along the way.

To get in the spirit of travel, I took a recording on BART between Daly City and South San Francisco, on the way to the airport. It’s not as “pure” as I’d like, you can hear people talking and the occasional cough, but I suppose it adds something to its vérité. For anyone who’s never ridden on BART before, it can be surprisingly screechy, especially at high speed underground. Gives me a newfound appreciation for the Paris metro’s tires.

This post originally appeared on White Noise Lounge.

I tried on two occasions to record my scooter while I was zipping around the city, but the mic’s foam windscreen let too much wind noise through. That and the frequent stop-and-go city traffic made for a jarring listening experience. So in the interest of “white noise” over realism, I recorded a few minutes of my Vespa’s 4-stroke, 150cc engine just idling.

This post originally appeared on White Noise Lounge.