This guy also claims that he intends to go after professors on BOTH ends of the political spectrum (okay, yes, there are indeed more than two ends, bit it's a start.) If he does go after both ends, I don't know that I really have a problem with this. But knowing Universities, it is likely that there will be a larger portion of professors with a "liberal" bias than those with an extremely "conservative" one, and he will probably get called out because he will by default find more radical liberals than conservatives. If someone did the same thing to religious leaders they'd likely find the exact opposite statistics.
I know it is possible to do this, but have just seen a lot of systems where, basically, you can't. I probably didn't explain it the best considering it was about 4AM and I had to be up to get to work at 7:30.
Often times it makes more sense to stick with the old way of doing things than to upgrade to a newer, flashier system. I have seen too many times when lots of money was spent upgrading, only to end up with a system that ultimately runs slower and is less feature rich. One of the main cases of these are institutions switching the main software used from local run to web-based apps. One of the great things about locally run software is an increased ability for keyboard navigation and shortcuts... when a person is entering data for a good part of the day having to switch to the mouse to change fields in common tasks can really interrupt the flow of thought.
For instance I am a veterinary technician at an animal control facility and one of the common tasks I have is entering information about animals that come in into the computer. For a one year old black and white male stray cat, typing c (tab) m (tab) m (tab) 1 (tab) (tab) n(tab) a (tab) b (tab) b (tab) w (tab) sho (tab) dsh (tab) (m) (tab) (tab) n (tab) sf (tab) e (tab) ls (tab) n F9 (enter) to save it can be done in about 10-15 seconds, while selecting "cat" from a dropdown box, moving the cursor and selecting "medium" for size and "male" for sex, selecting the age box and typing 1 into the year field, selecting "normal" for condition, selecting "active" for status, selecting black for the main color group, selecting black for the main color, selecting white for the secondary color, selecting shorthair for the breedgroup, selecting domestic shorthair for the breed, selecting "mix" for the secondary breed, selecting "none" for collar type, selecting "short flat" for hair type, selecting "erect" for ear type, selecting "long smooth" for tail type and then selecting "normal" for temperment and finally clicking "save" and then "okay" on the dialog box takes a lot longer, and of course there are multiple mouse clicks for each attribute entered, first selecting the box being used, scrolling through a list of all the options, clicking on the desired value, and then finally clicking "use this" when you have the value you actully want. Usually ends up taking two to three minutes to enter with a mouse what should take 15 seconds or so (granted, there is a bit of a learning curve involved with memorizing some of the abreviations used, but that really doesn't seem to be a problem as I enter many animals every day. Only really seems to be a problem for people who are afraid of computers.) I could see how this would really reduce my productivity if this was switched to a poorly designed web app (as most small volume roll-outs seem to be.) Entering all this info on 15 animals could easilly take a half hour, and sometimes there isn't time for that (50 animals a day isn't all that uncommon, at least in summer months when we are busier.) This entry doesn't even include time spent on calming the animal down, initial health exam, vaccinations, filling out paperwork for the new animal etc. And there are many other duties besides just intaking animals...
I've heard of bank software costing millions of dollars to roll out that greatly reduces productivity of the tellers by taking away keyboard shortcuts. I've seen web based course registration systems at universities which were pretty painless in the old telnet host (once people learn to tab between fields instead of using the arrow keys) but trying to do it on the new (new when I was in school anyways) was a real pain, and that's when the system was even up. Although the new system DID incorporate a fair number of actual useful features and was easier for most people to look up old info (grades from previous semesters, financial aid information, etc)
I don't think GP was complaining about Windows Update requiring IE, but about other (non-microsoft) products that launch IE by some hard coding (I'm assuming he's talking about such things as links to help files which upen up Internet Explorer with a web page)
While this is a reasurring thought, nature really doesn't live up to it. Ecologists know all too well about the havoc invasive species can bring upon an existing, thriving ecosystem. One might say that it's very unlikely that any organism brought back to Earth would be suited to a terrestrial habitat, but we really have no way of knowing that. However, I also believe that the likelihood of us actually bringing anything back is pretty small. While it is probable that there is life somewhere else in the universe, I feel that it is unlikely that it originated close enough to us to actually get to it. Since the universe is estimated to be on the order of 10-15 billion years old (We'll just assume 15 billion for this discussion) we can not get information or materials from anything more than 15 billion light years away from us. Also, bringing the distance of contact is quite less than that considering that A)it is not likely that organisms were formed right away after the big bang, it would have taken a while for everything to settle out just right and B)There is no viable way to get an organism to move at anything approaching the speed of light. It would take infinite energy to get an object with any rest mass to acheive light speed, barring some shortcut that I am unaware of (such as spatial folding.)
But back to the point, I suppose it could possible that life did survive somewhere that was knocked off of Earth, or that life on Earth itself originated elsewhere and we are just a descendant of some other ecosystem and could possibly meet up with something else that evolved from that ecosystem. There would be the possibility of biological/ecological harm from mixing the two different ecosystems if a sample was brought to Earth.
And of course, if you were to come across another intelligent being then all bets would simply be off.
It's more like the police come to your door and demand that they be allowed to search your house, since they think someone somewhere might be commiting a crime (but they don't actually have any evidence of specific crimes)
I was thinking that maybe the "type two or three sentences in english" thing was also to keep annoying kids out of the group. That's more of an immediate annoyance than any goldfarmers.
I don't know if it's necesarilly true that adults have more disposable income than teenagers working at McDonald's. Those adults have all sorts of bill to pay: rent/mortgage/property taxes, food, utilities, cleaning supplies, etc etc etc. Most of the income a teenager makes is disposable. If they buy their own car, it tends to be that they are car fanatics and that car is their hobby. To play console video games, an adult has to not only buy the games and console, but also buy the TV, sound system, pay the electricity bills to keep it running and all sorts of other things. These costs go up much farther if you have kids of your own to support.
Yes, there are people who do have well paying jobs and don't have children to support (at least not yet.) This Yuppie market has slowly become the "geek chic" market, with more emphasis on electronic gizmos than name brand windbreakers.
population density. It costs less to maintain all that copper/fiber/whatever over shorter distances. Also the American business mentality which says profits must increase every year.
Is that 12,000 calories as in the measure of heat, or 12,000 calories as in the dietic measure. When talking about diet, 1 calorie is actual a kilocalorie if talking about units of heat/energy.
I knew you weren't being serious, but I just started playing a mental game with it and realized that it was more and more absurd the more I thought about it and so kinda became intrigued with the idea. Yeah, after posting I realized that pretty much the only feasible way to do this would be to get 150,000 people to allow their floppy to be used for storage in a distributed storage array. On the surface this sounds even more assinine, but may actually be able to accomplish it with nothing more than one huge pipe to the internet. Then the reason to do it is simply "because." And I'm sure it wouldn't actually be all that difficult to find 150,000 people with always on internet access who don't have a use for their floppy drive. Maybe even enough people to build in some redundancy. I can picture it now, the internet telling you to replace your floppy disk because it is corrupt.
Not to mention that the cheapest floppy drive I found on quick newegg and froogle searches was $5.00 (And that's not even USB, but let's go with it.) Let's just assume that with that sort of volume you can pick them up for $1.00 a unit. That's still $150,000 just for the drives, and you still have to worry about cables, floppy media, hubs and controllers (I believe one USB root hub can only control 127 root devices, uncluding hubs, so let's say about 100 floppy drives and 30 hubs per controller, means 1,500 USB controllers plus 45,000 hubs (powered of cours). This means you have to run power to every floppy drive, or at the very least to every hub, so you have quite possibly several miles of cable to deal with, and some way to generate all this electrical power (Hint: your standard home fusebox probably won't handle it. assume half an amp per device at 12 volts, that's 6 watts, that's almost a megawatt of power assuming good efficiency, so expect no less than about 1000 amps in your standard household 120v current just to power the drives.) and then dissipate the extra heat. And a place to put a square of 400X400 floppies, plus all the auxillary equipment won't be free.
So, we're easilly talking on the order of... a million dollars in equipment, labor and other expenses.
Oh, and this is just talking about RAID 0. If any of those 150,000 floppies fail the whole array fails. Even with massive redundancy you will still need at least a full time employee going around swapping in floppies when one fails. Not to mention you'd need to multiply all the original costs by the amount of redundancy, plus overhead (we're talking having to hire managers and middle managers to coordinate the whole process.)
A standard RFID reader can only read from a couple inches... it is possible to make higher powered reader that can read from several yards away. And it is possible to make this reader small and portable.
One thing to be careful of comparing reaction time tests to this study is that in the study, the reaction is purely mental, while in reaction time tests, you are generally dealing with a physical response to a sensory stimulus, so you have a potentially more complex path: Sensory stiumuls, decoding what the stimulus means, making a decision as to what to do with the stimulus, deciding what sequence of muscular actions to take (or possibly just releasing them from a holding area if the reaction is pre-determined) then sending the action to the muscles themselves, finally the muscles have to react and then actual appendages have to move, IE in the classic reaction time game where you drop a strip of paper between someone's open fingers and use basic kinetic equations to figure out reaction time, the strip of paper does not stop the exact moment the fingers start moving: it sure doesn't stop at the exact moment when you have decided that the proper action is to contract the muscles which result in closing your fingers. It is possible that you have made the decision as to whether you like or dislike a website at the point where you have decided that to start the procoss of closing your fingers, a point at which you may have not have even chosen which muscles to contract.
Of course, you have to be careful with how far you take this, as value judgements are likely to be far more complex than simple reactions, and usually don't have to be done as quickly.
And I thought they were referring to the submitter, haggiz. But then again, most people outside of Scotland might not consider that to be food (nevermind the alternative spelling.)
Re:Apparently you don't know much about induction
on
RFID Cookware
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To take the thought further, the only place I could see this being really useful is in pre-packaged heat and serve style food. Just embed another chip in the packaging which contains the instructions for heating. Waving the chip by the stove's RFID scanner will program the cooking cycle, with the pots measuring temperature to make sure everything's going right. Stirring would be sort of a problem, unless you incorporated some sort of inductive stirring similar to some chemlab hotplates. Just coat the magnet in some high quality porcelain or something so it washes off easilly.
There are a couple other uses with fresh ingredients, such as whisking eggs over a flame for a mother sauce and making sure it doesn't get warm enough to scramble, melting chocolate, making custards, controling temperature for a beurre blanc, making custards, etc. But for actually cooking most main courses I'd imagine the good old giant gas burner and a trained set of eyes and ears would go a lot farther (such as gauging temperature by the sizzle when cooking steak, and using the good old fashined poke test to gauge doneness: not using a fork, but simply pressing down with your tongs or even finger and feeling the resistance.)
But a fair amount of energy could in theory be recovered on re-entry. Picture a pulley system where a roughly equal mass travels down one side of the elevator while pulling the "launch" cargo up the other side. It realistically wouldn't be a rope, but probably magnetic braking similar to regenerative braking in an automobile or some similar technology, and energy gained from this would supplement the energy needed to lift the cargo going up. This wouldn't exactly be a free ride either due to friction and other inefficiencies, as well as the simple problems with trying to schedule equal loads up and down; but such a system could mitigate part of the energy costs of launch.
In fact, these would be quite complimentary technologies. Ion drive is pretty much worthless for exiting any kind of gravity well (such as launching from earth) and a space elevator only really gets you as far as orbit. Take the space elevator to orbit, use a little bit of conventional thrust to get out of orbit, then fire up the ion drives and eventually hop to the next planet, where your reverse the process.
But how quickly can YOU travel through a Bose-Einstein condensate?
Besides, that article has multiple instances of my most annoying literary pet peeve: Vacuums hundreds of trillions of times lower than> and temperatures almost a billion times colder that that appear in one sentence. Joy.
But the circuit you made does NOT draw power from the sun, this is just a battery driven by a chemical reaction between the copper and aluminum spikes.
Electric potential of copper:.34 volts. Electric potential of aluminum, -1.66 volts. That makes for a potential of 2 volts, just like this guy is claiming.
Oh yeah, and considering the electric potential of reducing copper is.34v, while the electric potential of oxidizing aluminum is -1.66v this working out to.34 - (-1.66) = 2volts, it seems kinda suspicious that the tree "generates" up to two volts of electricity.
Oh, the energy comes from somewhere indeed. There is an aluminum spike and a copper spike inserted into a tree. A tree has water with several dissolved compounds (including acids and salts) flowing through it. The tree's sap acts as an electrolyte, while the spikes are the anode and cathode in a simple aluminum/copper battery, similar to this gradeschool science experiemnt. The spikes will be consumed in the reaction, thus the tree is not generating any power at all. The fluctiations in voltage would be related to a changing internal resistance within the tree. Considering the amount of energy it takes to make aluminum, this fits under the "nothing to see here" category.
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This guy also claims that he intends to go after professors on BOTH ends of the political spectrum (okay, yes, there are indeed more than two ends, bit it's a start.) If he does go after both ends, I don't know that I really have a problem with this. But knowing Universities, it is likely that there will be a larger portion of professors with a "liberal" bias than those with an extremely "conservative" one, and he will probably get called out because he will by default find more radical liberals than conservatives. If someone did the same thing to religious leaders they'd likely find the exact opposite statistics.
I know it is possible to do this, but have just seen a lot of systems where, basically, you can't. I probably didn't explain it the best considering it was about 4AM and I had to be up to get to work at 7:30.
Often times it makes more sense to stick with the old way of doing things than to upgrade to a newer, flashier system. I have seen too many times when lots of money was spent upgrading, only to end up with a system that ultimately runs slower and is less feature rich. One of the main cases of these are institutions switching the main software used from local run to web-based apps. One of the great things about locally run software is an increased ability for keyboard navigation and shortcuts... when a person is entering data for a good part of the day having to switch to the mouse to change fields in common tasks can really interrupt the flow of thought.
For instance I am a veterinary technician at an animal control facility and one of the common tasks I have is entering information about animals that come in into the computer. For a one year old black and white male stray cat, typing c (tab) m (tab) m (tab) 1 (tab) (tab) n(tab) a (tab) b (tab) b (tab) w (tab) sho (tab) dsh (tab) (m) (tab) (tab) n (tab) sf (tab) e (tab) ls (tab) n F9 (enter) to save it can be done in about 10-15 seconds, while selecting "cat" from a dropdown box, moving the cursor and selecting "medium" for size and "male" for sex, selecting the age box and typing 1 into the year field, selecting "normal" for condition, selecting "active" for status, selecting black for the main color group, selecting black for the main color, selecting white for the secondary color, selecting shorthair for the breedgroup, selecting domestic shorthair for the breed, selecting "mix" for the secondary breed, selecting "none" for collar type, selecting "short flat" for hair type, selecting "erect" for ear type, selecting "long smooth" for tail type and then selecting "normal" for temperment and finally clicking "save" and then "okay" on the dialog box takes a lot longer, and of course there are multiple mouse clicks for each attribute entered, first selecting the box being used, scrolling through a list of all the options, clicking on the desired value, and then finally clicking "use this" when you have the value you actully want. Usually ends up taking two to three minutes to enter with a mouse what should take 15 seconds or so (granted, there is a bit of a learning curve involved with memorizing some of the abreviations used, but that really doesn't seem to be a problem as I enter many animals every day. Only really seems to be a problem for people who are afraid of computers.) I could see how this would really reduce my productivity if this was switched to a poorly designed web app (as most small volume roll-outs seem to be.) Entering all this info on 15 animals could easilly take a half hour, and sometimes there isn't time for that (50 animals a day isn't all that uncommon, at least in summer months when we are busier.) This entry doesn't even include time spent on calming the animal down, initial health exam, vaccinations, filling out paperwork for the new animal etc. And there are many other duties besides just intaking animals...
I've heard of bank software costing millions of dollars to roll out that greatly reduces productivity of the tellers by taking away keyboard shortcuts. I've seen web based course registration systems at universities which were pretty painless in the old telnet host (once people learn to tab between fields instead of using the arrow keys) but trying to do it on the new (new when I was in school anyways) was a real pain, and that's when the system was even up. Although the new system DID incorporate a fair number of actual useful features and was easier for most people to look up old info (grades from previous semesters, financial aid information, etc)
I don't think GP was complaining about Windows Update requiring IE, but about other (non-microsoft) products that launch IE by some hard coding (I'm assuming he's talking about such things as links to help files which upen up Internet Explorer with a web page)
While this is a reasurring thought, nature really doesn't live up to it. Ecologists know all too well about the havoc invasive species can bring upon an existing, thriving ecosystem. One might say that it's very unlikely that any organism brought back to Earth would be suited to a terrestrial habitat, but we really have no way of knowing that. However, I also believe that the likelihood of us actually bringing anything back is pretty small. While it is probable that there is life somewhere else in the universe, I feel that it is unlikely that it originated close enough to us to actually get to it. Since the universe is estimated to be on the order of 10-15 billion years old (We'll just assume 15 billion for this discussion) we can not get information or materials from anything more than 15 billion light years away from us. Also, bringing the distance of contact is quite less than that considering that A)it is not likely that organisms were formed right away after the big bang, it would have taken a while for everything to settle out just right and B)There is no viable way to get an organism to move at anything approaching the speed of light. It would take infinite energy to get an object with any rest mass to acheive light speed, barring some shortcut that I am unaware of (such as spatial folding.)
But back to the point, I suppose it could possible that life did survive somewhere that was knocked off of Earth, or that life on Earth itself originated elsewhere and we are just a descendant of some other ecosystem and could possibly meet up with something else that evolved from that ecosystem. There would be the possibility of biological/ecological harm from mixing the two different ecosystems if a sample was brought to Earth.
And of course, if you were to come across another intelligent being then all bets would simply be off.
It's more like the police come to your door and demand that they be allowed to search your house, since they think someone somewhere might be commiting a crime (but they don't actually have any evidence of specific crimes)
Do you mean before or after Twirling my moustache and tying young maidens to the train tracks with a sinister laugh the whole way?
(You told me to imagine I was Bell South, and sometimes I have an active imagination.)
I was thinking that maybe the "type two or three sentences in english" thing was also to keep annoying kids out of the group. That's more of an immediate annoyance than any goldfarmers.
I don't know if it's necesarilly true that adults have more disposable income than teenagers working at McDonald's. Those adults have all sorts of bill to pay: rent/mortgage/property taxes, food, utilities, cleaning supplies, etc etc etc. Most of the income a teenager makes is disposable. If they buy their own car, it tends to be that they are car fanatics and that car is their hobby. To play console video games, an adult has to not only buy the games and console, but also buy the TV, sound system, pay the electricity bills to keep it running and all sorts of other things. These costs go up much farther if you have kids of your own to support.
Yes, there are people who do have well paying jobs and don't have children to support (at least not yet.) This Yuppie market has slowly become the "geek chic" market, with more emphasis on electronic gizmos than name brand windbreakers.
population density. It costs less to maintain all that copper/fiber/whatever over shorter distances. Also the American business mentality which says profits must increase every year.
Is that 12,000 calories as in the measure of heat, or 12,000 calories as in the dietic measure. When talking about diet, 1 calorie is actual a kilocalorie if talking about units of heat/energy.
I knew you weren't being serious, but I just started playing a mental game with it and realized that it was more and more absurd the more I thought about it and so kinda became intrigued with the idea. Yeah, after posting I realized that pretty much the only feasible way to do this would be to get 150,000 people to allow their floppy to be used for storage in a distributed storage array. On the surface this sounds even more assinine, but may actually be able to accomplish it with nothing more than one huge pipe to the internet. Then the reason to do it is simply "because." And I'm sure it wouldn't actually be all that difficult to find 150,000 people with always on internet access who don't have a use for their floppy drive. Maybe even enough people to build in some redundancy. I can picture it now, the internet telling you to replace your floppy disk because it is corrupt.
Not to mention that the cheapest floppy drive I found on quick newegg and froogle searches was $5.00 (And that's not even USB, but let's go with it.) Let's just assume that with that sort of volume you can pick them up for $1.00 a unit. That's still $150,000 just for the drives, and you still have to worry about cables, floppy media, hubs and controllers (I believe one USB root hub can only control 127 root devices, uncluding hubs, so let's say about 100 floppy drives and 30 hubs per controller, means 1,500 USB controllers plus 45,000 hubs (powered of cours). This means you have to run power to every floppy drive, or at the very least to every hub, so you have quite possibly several miles of cable to deal with, and some way to generate all this electrical power (Hint: your standard home fusebox probably won't handle it. assume half an amp per device at 12 volts, that's 6 watts, that's almost a megawatt of power assuming good efficiency, so expect no less than about 1000 amps in your standard household 120v current just to power the drives.) and then dissipate the extra heat. And a place to put a square of 400X400 floppies, plus all the auxillary equipment won't be free.
So, we're easilly talking on the order of... a million dollars in equipment, labor and other expenses. Oh, and this is just talking about RAID 0. If any of those 150,000 floppies fail the whole array fails. Even with massive redundancy you will still need at least a full time employee going around swapping in floppies when one fails. Not to mention you'd need to multiply all the original costs by the amount of redundancy, plus overhead (we're talking having to hire managers and middle managers to coordinate the whole process.)
A standard RFID reader can only read from a couple inches... it is possible to make higher powered reader that can read from several yards away. And it is possible to make this reader small and portable.
One thing to be careful of comparing reaction time tests to this study is that in the study, the reaction is purely mental, while in reaction time tests, you are generally dealing with a physical response to a sensory stimulus, so you have a potentially more complex path: Sensory stiumuls, decoding what the stimulus means, making a decision as to what to do with the stimulus, deciding what sequence of muscular actions to take (or possibly just releasing them from a holding area if the reaction is pre-determined) then sending the action to the muscles themselves, finally the muscles have to react and then actual appendages have to move, IE in the classic reaction time game where you drop a strip of paper between someone's open fingers and use basic kinetic equations to figure out reaction time, the strip of paper does not stop the exact moment the fingers start moving: it sure doesn't stop at the exact moment when you have decided that the proper action is to contract the muscles which result in closing your fingers. It is possible that you have made the decision as to whether you like or dislike a website at the point where you have decided that to start the procoss of closing your fingers, a point at which you may have not have even chosen which muscles to contract.
Of course, you have to be careful with how far you take this, as value judgements are likely to be far more complex than simple reactions, and usually don't have to be done as quickly.
And I thought they were referring to the submitter, haggiz. But then again, most people outside of Scotland might not consider that to be food (nevermind the alternative spelling.)
To take the thought further, the only place I could see this being really useful is in pre-packaged heat and serve style food. Just embed another chip in the packaging which contains the instructions for heating. Waving the chip by the stove's RFID scanner will program the cooking cycle, with the pots measuring temperature to make sure everything's going right. Stirring would be sort of a problem, unless you incorporated some sort of inductive stirring similar to some chemlab hotplates. Just coat the magnet in some high quality porcelain or something so it washes off easilly.
There are a couple other uses with fresh ingredients, such as whisking eggs over a flame for a mother sauce and making sure it doesn't get warm enough to scramble, melting chocolate, making custards, controling temperature for a beurre blanc, making custards, etc. But for actually cooking most main courses I'd imagine the good old giant gas burner and a trained set of eyes and ears would go a lot farther (such as gauging temperature by the sizzle when cooking steak, and using the good old fashined poke test to gauge doneness: not using a fork, but simply pressing down with your tongs or even finger and feeling the resistance.)
But a fair amount of energy could in theory be recovered on re-entry. Picture a pulley system where a roughly equal mass travels down one side of the elevator while pulling the "launch" cargo up the other side. It realistically wouldn't be a rope, but probably magnetic braking similar to regenerative braking in an automobile or some similar technology, and energy gained from this would supplement the energy needed to lift the cargo going up. This wouldn't exactly be a free ride either due to friction and other inefficiencies, as well as the simple problems with trying to schedule equal loads up and down; but such a system could mitigate part of the energy costs of launch.
In fact, these would be quite complimentary technologies. Ion drive is pretty much worthless for exiting any kind of gravity well (such as launching from earth) and a space elevator only really gets you as far as orbit. Take the space elevator to orbit, use a little bit of conventional thrust to get out of orbit, then fire up the ion drives and eventually hop to the next planet, where your reverse the process.
But how quickly can YOU travel through a Bose-Einstein condensate?
Besides, that article has multiple instances of my most annoying literary pet peeve: Vacuums hundreds of trillions of times lower than> and temperatures almost a billion times colder that that appear in one sentence. Joy.
Forget sypware... I'd be afraid of people linking to the goatse.cx guy.
But the circuit you made does NOT draw power from the sun, this is just a battery driven by a chemical reaction between the copper and aluminum spikes.
Electric potential of copper: .34 volts. Electric potential of aluminum, -1.66 volts. That makes for a potential of 2 volts, just like this guy is claiming.
Oh yeah, and considering the electric potential of reducing copper is .34v, while the electric potential of oxidizing aluminum is -1.66v this working out to .34 - (-1.66) = 2volts, it seems kinda suspicious that the tree "generates" up to two volts of electricity.
Oh, the energy comes from somewhere indeed. There is an aluminum spike and a copper spike inserted into a tree. A tree has water with several dissolved compounds (including acids and salts) flowing through it. The tree's sap acts as an electrolyte, while the spikes are the anode and cathode in a simple aluminum/copper battery, similar to this gradeschool science experiemnt. The spikes will be consumed in the reaction, thus the tree is not generating any power at all. The fluctiations in voltage would be related to a changing internal resistance within the tree. Considering the amount of energy it takes to make aluminum, this fits under the "nothing to see here" category.