Self-induced brain death? ( Or: What is so great about cars anyway?)

This post has been hovering around for a while in an unfinished form. But a drive from Horseshoe Bay to East Vancouver in a jumble of mad drivers who just escaped some BC Ferry, which they probably had to wait 4 hours to get onto, gave me a migraine and flipped me between fits of rage at imbecilic drivers and a state of having no hope for the future of the human race.  (Did you know that one of the triggers of migraines is car exhaust ? ;-)  So this post will go live in its not quite perfect form.

Your friendly oxygen transport system

What happens if you put your car in the garage, close all the car windows, start the car, and connect a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car interior? Actually, if your garage is reasonably air-tight, you can dispense with the hose complication :-)  I guess everyone knows the answer, but what is of more interest here is the Modus Operandi of this silent killer. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning. CO enters your blood stream. Hemoglobin molecules (red blood cells) in your blood stream are responsible for transporting oxygen through your body to keep it ticking. For this purpose, hemoglobin creates a chemical bond with oxygen.  Where oxygen is needed, it is unloaded from the hemoglobin and the hemoglobin goes to pick up more in the lungs. Now for the nasty bit:  Carbon monoxide also fits into the oxygen cargo bay of hemoglobin. So, if CO is present, hemoglobin loads up, looking for a place to deliver. But no one wants the stuff, so hemoglobin keeps running around with a full cargo bay. If a significant percentage of the hemoglobin molecules in the blood stream are afflicted that way, there won't be enough of them left to provide an adequate oxygen supply.  So far so good; the vast majority of people isn't likely to do run their cars in the garage so they should be safe from carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhaust. Or are they?

You think you're not breathing this in?

Bear with me while I give you a basic explanation of the 'inverse square law": It basically says that if you double your distance to a source of light or similar, the amount of light will drop by a factor of 4. If you increase your distance by a factor of 3, the light will drop by a factor of 9. Everyone will have noticed this themselves: If you are sitting close to a fireplace and you are too hot, moving to twice the distance, will make it more than twice cooler ;-)  I'm sure that someone out there calculated the proper mathematics for exposure to exhaust gas as a function of distance to an exhaust pipe. However, the precise formula is probably not that important.  Driving normally with enough distance to the car in front of us, we should get enough semi-fresh ambient air mixed with the exhaust gases of the cars in front of us not to have to worry.
 

think again !

Of course, CO is cumulative, so even if we only get a little bit, it adds up to some degree, even if the exposure is low, but the exposure time is high.  Enough explanations; let's get to the point: What if your car's air intake is sitting in stop-and-go rush hour traffic no more than a meter behind the exhaust pipe of the car in front of you?  What if you traded cheap living for a 2 hour commute and maintain that distance to an exhaust pipe for 30 minutes? Or and hour?  See what I mean?  If just the thought making you take more shallow breaths right now to avoid taking in too much CO, you must be living in Vancouver ;-)

There must be some highly respected study by a highly respected and highly ethical company like Ford or GM out there ..... STOP!  HOLD the thought!


This just reminded me of something that should really have gone in a separate post with the title of "How is GM doing these days, anyway? (Or How DUMB or CORRUPT is our Prime Minister?). But that would have meant I'd have to do my research right ;-)  So: a Post within a Post it is.

Remember when GM was going belly-up and everyone was screaming for help from the Government?  Well, at that time our wise and well-advised PM gave GM a LOAN from Canadian Tax Payer's money in the amount of 9.6 Billion C$ (That is 9600 Million $s). Sine Canada has a population of somewhere in the vague vicinity of the number 30 Million lets call it 10 Billion for math's sake and find out that every Canadian, including me, you, my pseudo-nephew Mika, my Grandma, and even Jimmy Pattison, 'LENT' 333 Bucks to GM.  Wow!  You'd be happy to get that as a discount in your new car purchase, wouldn't you?  Do you also realize that our wise and well-advised PM gave $100 in YOUR name to Chrysler at around the same time?  Your car purchase discount just went to $433!
NOT. The reason you don't get a discount is because YOU now own a share of GM and Chrysler. YOO HOO!  You'd rather have bought a share in Toyota, you say?  Or Porsche, Mercedes, or VW?  NO, NO, NO: Losers can't be choosers!  But this seems to be kind of a tradition, like with those British Submarines.  Invest in the future: Buy Junk!  I'm sure some digging would produce more purchases along the same quality line.