Some arguments for nitrogen-filled tires just don’t make any sense. Like the argument that you don’t have to fill up your tires as often with nitrogen as you would with regular air. Air is free and nitrogen is $5 a tire!

Codiac RCMP to try nitrogen-filled car tires
RCMP in the Moncton area are filling their car tires with nitrogen in an experiment designed to reduce gas consumption.

How about taking the donuts away from the cops? That would lower the weight in the car thus reducing gas consumption.

Chantal Farrah, spokeswoman for the Codiac RCMP, said the firm that maintains the detachment’s vehicles is conducting a pilot project for the summer.

Twenty of the 38 vehicles in the Codiac RCMP detachment are sporting green valve caps on their tires to identify them as cars with the nitrogen-filled tires.

Do you hear that bad guys? Shot at the tires. BOOM! I don’t know if they would blow up, but that would be kinda cool.

“They’re going to decide if we’ve seen improvements with our gas consumption, and the wear and tear of our tires,” Farrah said Wednesday.

Nitrogen has been used in race car, airplane and commercial truck tires for years, but it’s only recently become available for passenger cars.

Unless the gas is raising the car off the ground, I don’t see how this would help at all. Didn’t they do this on Myth Busters?

Ed McNeil, who runs one of the few shops in the Moncton area providing the gas for consumers, said more and more customers are asking for a nitrogen fill up.

“The idea of nitrogen is to keep the temperatures down and keep air pressure constant,” McNeil said.

Nitrogen is less prone to leak from tires and cause the underinflation that increases fuel consumption. It also reacts less with metal wheels and the rubber in tires, extending their lifespan.

McNeil said the nitrogen-filled tires can improve fuel efficiency by as much as five per cent, but it costs $5 per tire to inflate them with nitrogen.

Question is, will it save you $20 in gas consumption and tire wear?

Here is an resource on why nitrogen in tires doesn’t make sense:
Enzine Articles

My son’s birthday falls on Leap Year. He is having his birthday tomorrow.

Wired News: Feb. 24, 1582: Mark the Date
1582: The Gregorian calendar is decreed in a papal bull by its namesake, Pope Gregory XIII.

The Gregorian calendar was devised by Italian doctor and chronologist Aloysius Lilius, primarily as a way of getting the various churches to agree on a formula for determining when Easter should fall. It also approximates a tropical year, the time it takes for the Earth to complete a full orbit around the sun.

The day is the basic unit of time, and 365 of them comprise a “common” year by the Gregorian computation. “Leap” years, consisting of 366 days, are blended in so that the calendar, based on a mathematical formula, will completely repeat itself every 400 years. The Gregorian calendar is divided into 12 months.

Adoption of the calendar, which replaced the older lunar and Julian calendars, was a drawn-out affair. While most Catholic countries switched over within the year, the non-Catholic world was reluctant to bow to Rome. The Protestant German lands didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1700. And it took 170 years, until 1752, before the British Empire finally caved, which led to some pretty messy bookkeeping.

The modern world, with the exception of some Orthodox churches that continue observing Easter according to the Julian calendar, has fallen into line behind Pope Gregory XIII.

We are all monkeys!

Neanderthal bone gives DNA clues – CNN.com
A bone fragment that scientists had initially ignored has begun to yield secrets of the Neanderthal genome, launching a new way to learn about the stocky and muscular relative of modern humans, scientists say.

Genetic material from the bone has let researchers identify more than a million building blocks of Neanderthal DNA so far, and it should be enough to derive most of the creature’s 3.3 billion blocks within the next two years, said researcher Svante Paabo.

Scientists don’t seem to want to offer any speculation.

Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, until Neanderthals died out some 28,000 years ago. Scientists have been debating whether the two groups interbred and whether modern humans carry some genetic remnants of Neanderthals.

Rubin said his analysis, like some previous work, found no evidence of such intermixing, though it’ll take more DNA to rule it out.

Paabo’s analysis didn’t directly address whether modern humans have DNA from Neanderthals, but it did raise speculation that DNA from anatomically modern humans might have found its way into Neanderthals. Scientists will have to examine more Neanderthal DNA to study that, he said.

Did I ever mention my relatives were from Europe?