The 4th what? District? Where the hell is that? I've lived here most of my life and never heard of a 4th District. The city is divided into named districts. Even for our garbage/recycling.
Depends. My 100 (ok, I exaggerate. It's 99) year old house has, um a 175A panel and all modern wiring. Cost me $6k, took an electrician about a week, done just before we moved in (we'd expected it, and it means our insurance rate is low, too). It's got blown in insulation, done before I bought it, but essentially the same as my neighbor's 10yo house. And single-pane windows aren't that much worse than double on an old house. Unlike a modern house, they are generally inset about 4 inches. This isn't just aesthetic - there's a boundary layer that gets trapped, even in high winds, which is not the case with modern flush windows. Yeah, that's what those "cute" sills and frames are for - they're actually functional. More heat is lost to convection than to radiation, so don't put too much stock in your infrared pix. People weren't stupid 100 years ago, or even 1000 years ago. Oh, and cooling? Hah. Don't need aircon. Double-hung windows have a purpose, again it's not just aesthetics. Open both top and bottom, and the hot air goes out the top, sucking cool air in the bottom. You won't get better than outside ambient air temp, but that's usually adequate in the Pacific NW. And you get a constant air recirc and breeze,*even in a room with only the window open. Bliss. And I could go on about the gallery design of such houses.
Unlike my neighbor (10yo house again), I don't have mold growing on the drywall in my basement, the foundation's quite done settling, and my 1953 GE gas furnace, while not as efficient as his THIRD furnace, is definitely more reliable. With a programmable thermostat, my costs are low. I did have to replace a thermocouple once ($25). But I'm pretty sure, if you include the various replacements/tinkering he's had to do, it's WAY cheaper to run, even if it uses more gas.
Downsides: plaster walls. Hate em. Hard to put holes in. Hard to fix. Though they kill sound better than drywall. Erm, that's about it. I definitely spend less time and effort on repairs than my neighbors. But the, say, $10k and 2 weeks I paid/took to bring it up to code was much less than the price differential between it and a new house.
As an aside, most (not all) houses build during and after WWII, say to 1955 or so, suck really bad. The build quality and materials are significantly inferior to early 1900's houses, or to modern houses. They do tend to be leaky, drafty, and have all sorts of terrible engineering (flush, metal pane windows, leaky cripple walls, etc).
Because it's infeasible; in the US, generally all elections occur on the same day: federal, state, county, city, etc.. There may be fifteen presidential candidates (though you only hear of two or three), three senatorial candidates, two representative candidates, and so forth, for perhaps 30 or 40 offices. Judges, for example, are often elected, sometimes the head of law enforcement for the area (sheriff) is elected, various minor officials e.g. head of waterworks may be elected. This varies by region.
It's important to emphasize that the federal government does NOT run the election in any way; it's managed by individual states, even for federal offices. The reasons are historical.
There is a often also a referendum or three, to pass/repeal a law, there are measures to raise taxes to fund schools, emergency services. Why these often aren't directly government-funded, but are instead funded by locally levied taxes, is a long and tedious story. Suffice it to say, that's how it's done, it's not changing soon. Except, of course, there are some states that do it differently.
In other words, one of the biggest problems is that there are so many regional exceptions, any system has to be very flexible to accommodate the needs of 50 states, each of which is divided into multiple districts, each with their own particular needs or systems.
Each state, (sometimes subdivisions in each state) has different methods for doing all of these things.
When all is said and done, there can often be fifteen pages or more of choices to make.
Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious. Some states use optically scanned ballots with circles which are filled in by hand, but these confuse the same people who were confused by them in school.
In some states, using mechanical (and now electronic) machines, you can simply select the party of your choice, and vote for all of their candidates at once; but you still need to decide on positions (e.g. judges and commissioners) which are technically non-partisan, and so forth.
I'm not saying it makes sense, or that the system doesn't badly need reform, but at the moment that's pretty much the way things are. Electronic voting is the latest way to try and mitigate these issues. It's just being implemented very poorly.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to make it seem like you were wrong, I was just obliquely observing that much of the country doesn't seem to get it. DOJ certainly doesn't, and SCOTUS barely does.
The "except" is only supposed to refer to people where:
they are actively serving in the military and
there is currently an actual war or public danger
This isn't supposed to apply to anyone else, not even during wartime. Though I admit it often seems like nobody cares for that little distinction these days. At least the Supreme Court remembered it for their last session.
Exactly. I should have a been a bit more clear: the parent post was referring to the Tiger I & II tanks, which was also what the German general referred to. They were superior to the Soviet T-34's, etc., but were never deployed in enough numbers to make any difference. They also faced American forces, and were again technically superior, but numerically inferior; hence, the general's wry comment.
No kidding. This is ridiculous. Colour-coordinated removable seat cushions? Split headrests so that women with ponytails can be seated more comfortably? Please, how absurd do they think...
If I've gotta die I'd rather do so for liberty, not a police state.
Yes, I believe there was some wacky gentleman who agreed with you about 230 years ago. Something about "Give me liberty, or give me death."
Name was Patrick Henry, helped write some idiot thing called the Bill of Rights. Very dangerous nutcase, one of those commie pinko liberals, no doubt. Or whatever they called people like that back then.
(Note for the sarcasm and history impaired: Patrick Henry was a very conservative fellow, and he essentially wrote the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Consitution.)
The referenced studies also show that the range of variation within each sex is greater than the difference between them.
I.e. while men, on average, may tend to have a better visuospatial ability, the male average is only a few percent greater than the female; within each sex, individuals vary over a large range. In other words, the sex differences are too small, and the overlap in ranges is too large. The studies really only tell us what kind of distribution we can expect to see in a very large group, along with some interesting data on brain development.
It's also worth noting that, on average, women have better hand-eye coordination/reaction times than men, but similar arguments to the above apply. There's only a few instances, upper-body strength, linguistic ability, maybe a couple others, where the difference is meaningful enough to be a decent predictor for individuals.
Some provisions make it relatively easy to sue companies for violating the strictures. It does look as though companies are taking it fairly seriously.
For example, you know those "preferred customer" cards that most stores have? Well, the pharmacies at stores in Canada are refusing to take them, because of the possibility that the marketing info from the cards could be correlated with your prescription information. They have big signs up to this effect in the stores in my area, and they say this is to comply with the law.
And Safeway (perhaps others as well) is hoping to develop a generic coupon system so you can get credit for the pharmacy purchases later. I suppose they'll hand you the coupon with your prescription, and you can present it at the cash register at a later date, so there's no way to correlate the pharmacy purchase with the money. They already do this with a couple of other things, so it wouldn't show as pharmacy purchases. Not really sure though.
Of course you'll get to vote! After all, we've never much liked those ridiculous ballots you use. You know, the ones where you mark your preferred candidate with an "X"? That leaves things too much to chance. We have a much better system in mind, something we call a "butterfly ballot". Trust us. You'll like it.
I don't find it too bad. Perhaps not idea, but workable, because individual users can be configured such that they only are presented with, say screens that deal with order entry. So user "sales-charley" might only be able to enter orders for Company-X, while "sales-anna" might be able to deal with more companies, but only be able to run quotes, not enter sales. Or whatever. It's up to the admin (and there can be subordinate admins who only deal with certain aspects of things) to set up individual users.
As for an auditor? Good question, that I'm not sure about.
I think what he's referring to was a project a few years ago. The premise was, since all of our mitochondria are inherited from our mother, it should be possible to track human mitochondrial DNA back to a single female ancestor (or "Eve", fo r obvious reasons).
The first such major project to act on this took several years and thousands of DNA samples. They determined that Eve was from the Phillippines, and this was announced with quite a bit of publicity, articles in Time magazine, etc. Unfortunately, it was soon found that the analysis had been done with a faulty understanding of how the analysis software worked. Or something like that. Can't remember anymore. Anyway, for whatever reason, the results were not meaningful, and the data they had gathered couldn't be re-used. It was quite a disappointment for all involved. But you still hear references to Eve having lived in the Phillippines because of this.
They probably wouldn't vote for it. But if you jack the price up to, oh, about $100 billion you can get a space station!
Surely $17 billion isn't much compared to the space station? Although there would no doubt be cost overruns. Say it costs $50 billion. Still a bargain compared to the space station, and quite a bit more useful, I think.
It's very annoying when you have to visit the colo and the security shmuck at the reception desk wrote it down wrong and won't let me in because the name doesn't match my identification. *sigh*
It doesn't only happen with unusual names. My friend and I went into a pizza joint to pick up the order we'd called in. It was early afternoon, the place is dead; seating for 150 people, but nobody there at all. Just us.
So he asks the counterperson for his order, name of "Bill". She goes back and looks at the ONLY pizza order in the case, and returns and says its not ready yet. We ask when it will be ready. She goes back, rummages around a bit, returns and tells us that there is no order for "Bill". We can see that the pizzas in the case are the right size/quantity to fill our order, so we ask if, in fact, the order in the case is one large pepperoni and one large Hawaiian pizza for "Bill".
She goes and checks, and tells us that no, it's one large pepperoni and one large Hawaiian pizza for "Jill".
Groan. We politely ask her to see if the phone number matches Bill's, which we give to her. Shockingly enough, it does match. We point out that whoever took the order obviously got the name slightly off, but it must be ours, logically. "But those are for Jill, not Bill," she says.
Yes, that's true, we agree. We carefully and politely point out that there probably is no Jill, as such, because the name was recorded incorrectly, and was, in fact supposed to be Bill. A simple matter of a small misunderstanding, or perhaps a handwriting error. We tried to explain that the fact that we want the same thing as "Jill", have the same phone number as "Jill", showed up when "Jill"'s order was ready, and one of us has almost the same name as "Jill", made it likely that those pizzas were, in fact, for us.
"But those are for Jill, not Bill," she says.
So we asked for the manager. We carefully explained the situation, and even asked him to call the phone number on the order to confirm who had ordered it (which would ring Bill's cellphone, which he had with him).
"But those are for Jill, not Bill," he says.
I'll spare the rest of the painful conversation, We'd have gone somewhere else, but we were really hungry, and it was miles to a store or restaurant (semi-rural college town in the summer, the only pizza was this joint up the highway). Eventually we got the order amid many suspicious looks and glowers.
A friend of mine, a musician, almost fooled his still-drugged up wife into naming their new daughter "Claire Annette" (i.e. clarinet), but she figured it out at the last second anyway.
This is not necessarily true. It depends on what kind of wood it's made of, for one. Rosewood, ebony and mahogany pianos can sound perfectly fine even if they're a hundred years old (which is likely, considering how expensive and banned those woods are now, rightly so) because the wood is so dense and well suited to such a construction. Mahogany, in particular, doesn't tend to dry out. The moving parts can easily be replaced when worn; most piano makers still produce parts for their older models. Even a cracked soundboard is relatively easy to repair. It's not unusual to rebuild the mechanism every ten to fifteen years in a heavily used piano. There's a lot that can be done to maintain the mechanism though. Your tuner should be doing this every six months or so, depending upon usage.
Newer good pianos are generally made of maple, oak, fir, that sort of thing, but it's just not the same, and they do show their age quickly. Some less expensive ones are pine, or even particle board.
The most important part is the frame, which is usually cast steel. That's what holds the strings (twenty-two tons of tension in a grand!) and determines a lot of the sound quality.
I've used a 75-year old Bösendorfer that sounds better than most new Böses, and far better than any Steinway, even the German ones. And then there're the old Bechsteins... mmmmmm. Don't get me started.
Octane is used as the standard by which the relative tendency of a fuel to explode (i.e. burn in an uncontrolled fashion) is measured.
There are several different ways to calculate it -- the U.S. used to use one, while Europe used a different one. I may be wrong, but I believe they use the same standard now. But, some people may remember back in the 70's and 80's when fuel (in the U.S.) had octane ratings of 102, 104 and so forth, whereas now, it's more like 87,89,92. Well, the fuel didn't change much, just the measuring technique.
Anyway, back to the question: alcohol burns cooler and slower than octane (or gasoline in general), and it is harder to make it explode, so it is given a higher relative octane number.
When fuel explodes in the engine, as opposed to burning, the energy is expended in too short of an interval for power to be extracted efficiently. We call that "knocking", observed when an engine is run on a low-octane fuel.
Knocking robs power, as there is essentially little pressure on the piston downstroke; it was all expended when the piston was at the top of its travel.
However, it is a common misconception that higher octane increases engine power. It does not. The most efficient fuel for a given engine is one that is just barely not causing knocking. After that point, the fuel burns more and more slowly, and not all of the expanding, burning gases are applied during the optimum part of the piston downstroke.
The reason more powerful engines require higher octane fuel (giving people the idea that high octane fuel is more powerful) is that things such as compression and burn temperature can be increased, turbo/supercharging can be added, etc. increasing overall efficiency. Note that the high octane fuel simply allows for a more efficient engine design, in itself it does NOT increase power!
Not only that, but even more than paying yourself rent, you are paying the bank rent on the money you borrowed. Only they call it "interest".
If, in Seattle, I buy a $400,000 house (middling kind of house), with a $300,000 mortgage, that's approximately another $300,000 interest ("rent") I pay to borrow that money over 30 years. In other words, my $400k house meant I had to pay an average of about $10k/year to the bank to rent their money to buy the house. More realistically, you're paying about $20k/year to the bank for the first few years, then it tails off.
If you live in a apartment, you can simply take the difference between your rent and the mortgage on a house, pay that sum into a savings account/money market fund/CD/whatever, and save as much or more than if you were putting that into equity instead.
That takes more self-discipline than most people have, of course.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the first 6 or 7 years of a mortgage are just interest payments - you're hardly building equity at all.
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The 4th what? District? Where the hell is that? I've lived here most of my life and never heard of a 4th District. The city is divided into named districts. Even for our garbage/recycling.
Depends. My 100 (ok, I exaggerate. It's 99) year old house has, um a 175A panel and all modern wiring. Cost me $6k, took an electrician about a week, done just before we moved in (we'd expected it, and it means our insurance rate is low, too). It's got blown in insulation, done before I bought it, but essentially the same as my neighbor's 10yo house. And single-pane windows aren't that much worse than double on an old house. Unlike a modern house, they are generally inset about 4 inches. This isn't just aesthetic - there's a boundary layer that gets trapped, even in high winds, which is not the case with modern flush windows. Yeah, that's what those "cute" sills and frames are for - they're actually functional. More heat is lost to convection than to radiation, so don't put too much stock in your infrared pix. People weren't stupid 100 years ago, or even 1000 years ago. Oh, and cooling? Hah. Don't need aircon. Double-hung windows have a purpose, again it's not just aesthetics. Open both top and bottom, and the hot air goes out the top, sucking cool air in the bottom. You won't get better than outside ambient air temp, but that's usually adequate in the Pacific NW. And you get a constant air recirc and breeze,*even in a room with only the window open. Bliss. And I could go on about the gallery design of such houses.
Unlike my neighbor (10yo house again), I don't have mold growing on the drywall in my basement, the foundation's quite done settling, and my 1953 GE gas furnace, while not as efficient as his THIRD furnace, is definitely more reliable. With a programmable thermostat, my costs are low. I did have to replace a thermocouple once ($25). But I'm pretty sure, if you include the various replacements/tinkering he's had to do, it's WAY cheaper to run, even if it uses more gas.
Downsides: plaster walls. Hate em. Hard to put holes in. Hard to fix. Though they kill sound better than drywall. Erm, that's about it. I definitely spend less time and effort on repairs than my neighbors. But the, say, $10k and 2 weeks I paid/took to bring it up to code was much less than the price differential between it and a new house.
As an aside, most (not all) houses build during and after WWII, say to 1955 or so, suck really bad. The build quality and materials are significantly inferior to early 1900's houses, or to modern houses. They do tend to be leaky, drafty, and have all sorts of terrible engineering (flush, metal pane windows, leaky cripple walls, etc).
Plain English? Have you ever heard any of our leaders speak in plain English? Well, they can't understand it, either.
Because it's infeasible; in the US, generally all elections occur on the same day: federal, state, county, city, etc.. There may be fifteen presidential candidates (though you only hear of two or three), three senatorial candidates, two representative candidates, and so forth, for perhaps 30 or 40 offices. Judges, for example, are often elected, sometimes the head of law enforcement for the area (sheriff) is elected, various minor officials e.g. head of waterworks may be elected. This varies by region.
It's important to emphasize that the federal government does NOT run the election in any way; it's managed by individual states, even for federal offices. The reasons are historical.
There is a often also a referendum or three, to pass/repeal a law, there are measures to raise taxes to fund schools, emergency services. Why these often aren't directly government-funded, but are instead funded by locally levied taxes, is a long and tedious story. Suffice it to say, that's how it's done, it's not changing soon. Except, of course, there are some states that do it differently.
In other words, one of the biggest problems is that there are so many regional exceptions, any system has to be very flexible to accommodate the needs of 50 states, each of which is divided into multiple districts, each with their own particular needs or systems.
Each state, (sometimes subdivisions in each state) has different methods for doing all of these things.
When all is said and done, there can often be fifteen pages or more of choices to make.
Using the the 'X in the box' system would mean a ballot that was probably 50 pages long, and hand counting would be slow and tedious. Some states use optically scanned ballots with circles which are filled in by hand, but these confuse the same people who were confused by them in school.
In some states, using mechanical (and now electronic) machines, you can simply select the party of your choice, and vote for all of their candidates at once; but you still need to decide on positions (e.g. judges and commissioners) which are technically non-partisan, and so forth.
I'm not saying it makes sense, or that the system doesn't badly need reform, but at the moment that's pretty much the way things are. Electronic voting is the latest way to try and mitigate these issues. It's just being implemented very poorly.
Yeah, I wasn't trying to make it seem like you were wrong, I was just obliquely observing that much of the country doesn't seem to get it. DOJ certainly doesn't, and SCOTUS barely does.
Where one has to smile and finger the device (pun intended) like an ordinary criminal to enter a free country.
I would like to point out to you, citizen, that you are exaggerating: people are not allowed to smile! C'mon get your facts straight!
This isn't supposed to apply to anyone else, not even during wartime. Though I admit it often seems like nobody cares for that little distinction these days. At least the Supreme Court remembered it for their last session.
Exactly. I should have a been a bit more clear: the parent post was referring to the Tiger I & II tanks, which was also what the German general referred to. They were superior to the Soviet T-34's, etc., but were never deployed in enough numbers to make any difference. They also faced American forces, and were again technically superior, but numerically inferior; hence, the general's wry comment.
I'm sure there are some smart one out there, but I've never heard of them.
Sure you have. They're called "congressional representatives".
he is blind and his dog is a service animal.
:-)
BTW: he has done more in the company to weed out the "complainers" than any other HR person ever has...
yes he is the HR rep
Er, who is the HR rep? The blind guy, or his dog?
No kidding. This is ridiculous. Colour-coordinated removable seat cushions? Split headrests so that women with ponytails can be seated more comfortably? Please, how absurd do they think...
Oh crap.
My wife's gonna want one of these yesterday...
If I've gotta die I'd rather do so for liberty, not a police state.
Yes, I believe there was some wacky gentleman who agreed with you about 230 years ago. Something about "Give me liberty, or give me death."
Name was Patrick Henry, helped write some idiot thing called the Bill of Rights. Very dangerous nutcase, one of those commie pinko liberals, no doubt. Or whatever they called people like that back then.
(Note for the sarcasm and history impaired: Patrick Henry was a very conservative fellow, and he essentially wrote the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Consitution.)
The referenced studies also show that the range of variation within each sex is greater than the difference between them.
I.e. while men, on average, may tend to have a better visuospatial ability, the male average is only a few percent greater than the female; within each sex, individuals vary over a large range. In other words, the sex differences are too small, and the overlap in ranges is too large. The studies really only tell us what kind of distribution we can expect to see in a very large group, along with some interesting data on brain development.
It's also worth noting that, on average, women have better hand-eye coordination/reaction times than men, but similar arguments to the above apply. There's only a few instances, upper-body strength, linguistic ability, maybe a couple others, where the difference is meaningful enough to be a decent predictor for individuals.
Some provisions make it relatively easy to sue companies for violating the strictures. It does look as though companies are taking it fairly seriously.
For example, you know those "preferred customer" cards that most stores have? Well, the pharmacies at stores in Canada are refusing to take them, because of the possibility that the marketing info from the cards could be correlated with your prescription information. They have big signs up to this effect in the stores in my area, and they say this is to comply with the law.
And Safeway (perhaps others as well) is hoping to develop a generic coupon system so you can get credit for the pharmacy purchases later. I suppose they'll hand you the coupon with your prescription, and you can present it at the cash register at a later date, so there's no way to correlate the pharmacy purchase with the money. They already do this with a couple of other things, so it wouldn't show as pharmacy purchases. Not really sure though.
I think Ambrose Bierce's term was more accurate: the "unfair sex".
Of course you'll get to vote! After all, we've never much liked those ridiculous ballots you use. You know, the ones where you mark your preferred candidate with an "X"? That leaves things too much to chance. We have a much better system in mind, something we call a "butterfly ballot". Trust us. You'll like it.
I don't find it too bad. Perhaps not idea, but workable, because individual users can be configured such that they only are presented with, say screens that deal with order entry. So user "sales-charley" might only be able to enter orders for Company-X, while "sales-anna" might be able to deal with more companies, but only be able to run quotes, not enter sales. Or whatever. It's up to the admin (and there can be subordinate admins who only deal with certain aspects of things) to set up individual users.
As for an auditor? Good question, that I'm not sure about.
The first such major project to act on this took several years and thousands of DNA samples. They determined that Eve was from the Phillippines, and this was announced with quite a bit of publicity, articles in Time magazine, etc. Unfortunately, it was soon found that the analysis had been done with a faulty understanding of how the analysis software worked. Or something like that. Can't remember anymore. Anyway, for whatever reason, the results were not meaningful, and the data they had gathered couldn't be re-used. It was quite a disappointment for all involved. But you still hear references to Eve having lived in the Phillippines because of this.
Surely $17 billion isn't much compared to the space station? Although there would no doubt be cost overruns. Say it costs $50 billion. Still a bargain compared to the space station, and quite a bit more useful, I think.
It doesn't only happen with unusual names. My friend and I went into a pizza joint to pick up the order we'd called in. It was early afternoon, the place is dead; seating for 150 people, but nobody there at all. Just us.
So he asks the counterperson for his order, name of "Bill". She goes back and looks at the ONLY pizza order in the case, and returns and says its not ready yet. We ask when it will be ready. She goes back, rummages around a bit, returns and tells us that there is no order for "Bill". We can see that the pizzas in the case are the right size/quantity to fill our order, so we ask if, in fact, the order in the case is one large pepperoni and one large Hawaiian pizza for "Bill".
She goes and checks, and tells us that no, it's one large pepperoni and one large Hawaiian pizza for "Jill".
Groan. We politely ask her to see if the phone number matches Bill's, which we give to her. Shockingly enough, it does match. We point out that whoever took the order obviously got the name slightly off, but it must be ours, logically. "But those are for Jill, not Bill," she says.
Yes, that's true, we agree. We carefully and politely point out that there probably is no Jill, as such, because the name was recorded incorrectly, and was, in fact supposed to be Bill. A simple matter of a small misunderstanding, or perhaps a handwriting error. We tried to explain that the fact that we want the same thing as "Jill", have the same phone number as "Jill", showed up when "Jill"'s order was ready, and one of us has almost the same name as "Jill", made it likely that those pizzas were, in fact, for us.
"But those are for Jill, not Bill," she says.
So we asked for the manager. We carefully explained the situation, and even asked him to call the phone number on the order to confirm who had ordered it (which would ring Bill's cellphone, which he had with him).
"But those are for Jill, not Bill," he says.
I'll spare the rest of the painful conversation, We'd have gone somewhere else, but we were really hungry, and it was miles to a store or restaurant (semi-rural college town in the summer, the only pizza was this joint up the highway). Eventually we got the order amid many suspicious looks and glowers.
A friend of mine, a musician, almost fooled his still-drugged up wife into naming their new daughter "Claire Annette" (i.e. clarinet), but she figured it out at the last second anyway.
Newer good pianos are generally made of maple, oak, fir, that sort of thing, but it's just not the same, and they do show their age quickly. Some less expensive ones are pine, or even particle board.
The most important part is the frame, which is usually cast steel. That's what holds the strings (twenty-two tons of tension in a grand!) and determines a lot of the sound quality.
I've used a 75-year old Bösendorfer that sounds better than most new Böses, and far better than any Steinway, even the German ones. And then there're the old Bechsteins... mmmmmm. Don't get me started.
Octane is used as the standard by which the relative tendency of a fuel to explode (i.e. burn in an uncontrolled fashion) is measured.
There are several different ways to calculate it -- the U.S. used to use one, while Europe used a different one. I may be wrong, but I believe they use the same standard now. But, some people may remember back in the 70's and 80's when fuel (in the U.S.) had octane ratings of 102, 104 and so forth, whereas now, it's more like 87,89,92. Well, the fuel didn't change much, just the measuring technique.
Anyway, back to the question: alcohol burns cooler and slower than octane (or gasoline in general), and it is harder to make it explode, so it is given a higher relative octane number.
When fuel explodes in the engine, as opposed to burning, the energy is expended in too short of an interval for power to be extracted efficiently. We call that "knocking", observed when an engine is run on a low-octane fuel.
Knocking robs power, as there is essentially little pressure on the piston downstroke; it was all expended when the piston was at the top of its travel.
However, it is a common misconception that higher octane increases engine power. It does not. The most efficient fuel for a given engine is one that is just barely not causing knocking. After that point, the fuel burns more and more slowly, and not all of the expanding, burning gases are applied during the optimum part of the piston downstroke.
The reason more powerful engines require higher octane fuel (giving people the idea that high octane fuel is more powerful) is that things such as compression and burn temperature can be increased, turbo/supercharging can be added, etc. increasing overall efficiency. Note that the high octane fuel simply allows for a more efficient engine design, in itself it does NOT increase power!
Not only that, but even more than paying yourself rent, you are paying the bank rent on the money you borrowed. Only they call it "interest".
If, in Seattle, I buy a $400,000 house (middling kind of house), with a $300,000 mortgage, that's approximately another $300,000 interest ("rent") I pay to borrow that money over 30 years. In other words, my $400k house meant I had to pay an average of about $10k/year to the bank to rent their money to buy the house. More realistically, you're paying about $20k/year to the bank for the first few years, then it tails off.
If you live in a apartment, you can simply take the difference between your rent and the mortgage on a house, pay that sum into a savings account/money market fund/CD/whatever, and save as much or more than if you were putting that into equity instead.
That takes more self-discipline than most people have, of course.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the first 6 or 7 years of a mortgage are just interest payments - you're hardly building equity at all.