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Out of the red, N2 the black
The Advocate
It’s hard not to feel all deflated by the MHCC budget dilemma.
Everyone knows the predicament. Do we make cuts or raise tuition?
That, however, is a bad and wrong-headed question.
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Tony Robbins, hyperkinetic super guru and master of motivational pumpitude, reminds us that “successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”
We’re creative. We’re college educated. So let’s uncurl from the fetal position and get our entrepreneurial freak on.
The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
A while back, I learned a gas station near my house was taking perfectly good air out of car tires, and replacing it with nitrogen – for $5 a tire.
On the face of it, this appears to be a colossal scam, considering that: air seems to inflate tires just fine; air is free; and air already consists of 78.082 percent nitrogen by volume.
Here, as presented on the station’s web site, is their main argument – and my incisive rebuttal:
Point: N2 is a larger molecule than O2and therefore will not leak as quickly out of a tire.
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Counterpoint: Various reliable Internet sources that all appear to have copied from the same place, confirm that O2 is only 3 percent smaller than N2.
One site translated this complex concept into lay terms this way: “The difference is like a chipotle burrito with lettuce vs. one without lettuce.” Now, to my mind, that’s not a big enough difference in size to warrant an infinite difference in price.
No matter how often I have to fill up my tires with tiny, leaky, no-lettuce air, it is always free!
If that was all there was to it, we’d have a good chuckle at those gas rascals, and get back to wondering how much money the college would save if it stopped providing wastefully extravagant items, such as toilet tissue and the student newspaper.
Well, guess what? Chuckle time is over.
It turns out there is an actual, organized inert-gas-inflation movement, headed by the impressively authoritative and mildly ominous sounding Get Nitrogen Institute (GNI).
The GNI promotes the nitrogen lifestyle with a plethora of compelling scientific facts, all of which essentially boil down to this: Most Americans don’t check their tire pressure regularly, so let’s come up with a way that let’s them check it even less, but not completely eliminate the need to check it, because there’s no continuous revenue stream in that.
The key point here is people love to be lazy and will pay dearly to do so. Somebody is going to take their money, so why not MHCC?
If we could re-flate the tires on just 100,000 cars in the greater Portland area, at $5 a tire, we could raise $2 million. Of course, given our fortuitous geographic location and unlimited supply of Gorge-Fresh Nitrogen™, we could easily charge a premium – up near the obscene end of the premium scale – and earn much, much more.
There’s no reason to limit ourselves to nitrogen, either. It would be nice to have a selection of gases from which to choose.
Why not fill your tires with helium? It would lower the weight of your vehicle and improve gas mileage tremendously. The bigger the tires, the bigger the savings.
For non-reactivity and large molecule size, I suggest radon, the heaviest of the noble gases. With a full complement of valence electrons and just the right amount of radioactivity to be fun, this atom has a muy grande covalent radius of 145 picometers, or almost exactly twice the size of a 73-picometer nitrogen burrito with lettuce.
Are you pumped up yet?