Coyote Blog

I will tell you that no matter how confidence in one has in his own intellectual ability, it's hard not to experience an "am I crazy?" moment when one reaches a conclusion different from everybody else's.  Case in point is my critique of the EPA's mpg numbers for electric vehicles.   The EPA's methodology strikes me as complete BS, but everyone, even folks like Popular Mechanics, keep treating the number like it is a serious representation of the fossil fuel use of vehicles like the Volt and Leaf.

Sot it was therefore nice to see a mechanical engineering professor independently make the same points I did in this Pajamas Media article. Also, my Princeton classmate Henry Payne, who often writes on automotive issues, linked my article at the Michigan View.

Several sites have announced what purports to be a Darwin Award winner this year.  I saw the link first at Q&O,  but the same story has been on Pajamas Media and several other sources.  I thought the story was awesome, but was suspicious in that too-good-to-be-true way, particularly when the original source had "sources" but no links.  This is always a red flag for me. 

So I took a key phrase from a quote in the article, in this case "on that bridge when Thurston shot" and plugged it into google.  The second link is to the "official" Darwin Awards site, which tagged this story as an urban legend over 10 years ago.  Looking down the Google search, it appears this old chestnut comes back in 2-3 year cycles.

...Because there might come a slow news day in August when Tigerhawk, Hot Air, Pajamas Media, Reddit, the Free Republic, Ace of Spades, and many others all link to the same post at the same time.  In which case my servers here in the office and the poor hamster who powers them by running on his little wheel would be a smoking hole in the ground.