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http://humboldt1.com/~zerdo/

This fellow in one of the foggiest/rainiest corners of California has been improving -- and lowering the cost of -- sunrise simulators for several years, and I've been giving them to friends who didn't know they needed them for quite a while.

I'm using his current -- $25 -- model; simple, not adjustabled like the $160 research-grade model made by PiSquare, but it works fine.

"Trouble in mind, I"m blue, but I won't be blue always, sun's going to shine in my back door some day." -- meaning, sun starts to rise north of east after the equinox (it's just started shining in my back door on the north side of the house) so I won't need the dawn sim til late August.

If you get winter blues READ UP and try one of these. It saved my life, it might help yours.

It's a popular Senior or Graduate physics exercise to design experiments demonstrating GTR -- and a somewhat more ambitious exercise to perform them. This one is notably primarily for being bloody expensive and having blown it's schedule by such a honking big margin.

According to http://www.humboldt1.com/~michael.welch/pvpayback. pdf photovoltaic payback in all energy costs associated with manufacture is anywhere from 3-7 years, depending on photovoltaic type (CIS or SC-SI) and assuming 5 hours/day of direct sunlight. Interesting read. --M

www.expervision.com/webtr6.htm

http://docmorph.nlm.nih.gov/docmorph/ here are some OCR programs

http://www.scansoft.com/omnipage/

http://www.abbyy.com/

more ocr links than you really want http://web3.humboldt1.com/~jiva/ocr/_ocr_resource. htm

Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy.

A cool concept, but the nations of the earth would be too fearful of weaponization to allow any one group the chance to control something like that.

We don't have to do it alone. We could just as well lead a partnership of world space agencies to accomplish the same goal. I'd prefer this, actually.

Aside from the ongoing dispute as to the feasibility of assembling a solar-panel whose total potential energy output will exceed that used to construct it.

In the 1970s that might have been the case, but it's demonstrably false today. From an energy payback perspective, most panels reach their break-even point in a little over three years, some in as short as 6 months. Photovoltaic modules have been shown in the real world to produce up to 17 times more energy during their lifetime then used in their construction, and that number is increasing rapidly. More info here and here. (The first is a PDF.)

You should also keep in mind that lunar solar power would be significantly more efficient than terrestrial solar power because the Moon simply receives much more intense sunlight than we do on Earth. You can read more about it in an article Criswell wrote for The Industrial Physicist.

If anybody is interested in this kind of tech for doit yourself applications, I found this nifty guide
build you own fuels cell at homepower mag.

ecosoul sells a fuel cell kit, and there are instructions (pdf) from homepower mag about how to construct one.

The US Supreme Court ruled in 1886 that corporations are "natural persons" entitled to the same constitutional protection as any citizen.

Here's a link on the history of corporations in the US.

And the amazing thing is someone's done it. Electro-Biking

How do you make liquid Hydrogen? The same way you make electricity, off at a plant somewhere.

Take a look at this article from Home Power magizine. It's a 5KW fuel cell system that runs off natural gas, kerosine, gasoline, etc. It uses a catalyst to extract the Hydrogen from the fuel source. It is still a little large for powering a car but it would fit nicely in a small minivan. It costs $6000-8000 US.

Sun Pyrosystems | Posted by Grogg on 12:15 PM February 25th, 12000 B.C.
from the ooga-booga dept.

Kragga write, "I saw good article about UltraSpark 3 at Ace's Rock Field. It goes into depth about technical specs of this fire-burning technology. Best part is second page where they talk about mammoth cooking, roasting, and flamability (up to 1000 BTUs!) There are some excellent examples of mammoth cooking, and fire-starting latency."

Here is a link to the "Art of Assmbler" :-) It's really a good read.

If you want to know *why* ASM is good, go to the homepage of the DGen/SDL project, a genesis emulator for Linux. It uses an ASM memcpy function (using either MMX or "native" mode) as well as an ASM 68k and Z80 CPU core. By doing this, it makes the emulator /much/ faster, and a lot more useable. I'm sure other famous emulators (like GeneCyst, etc) use ASM CPU cores at some point, as it's pretty hard to emulate well without. I'm not even going to go into the ASM wizardry John Carmack did for Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, etc :-)
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...not too detailed but this guy got it to run.