Re:Use a 'fan center' to isolate when grid power d
on
Hobbyist Renewable Energy?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Okay, I've been interested in this for a long time and I read a good thread on the topic that I will put a copy of in this post.
But first I would like to make a quick point which is that this is a major political obstacle to alternative energy. It's not a technical obstacle, it's a political issue because we've "deregulated" utilities by letting them regulate themselves and this is insanity. At least it is one way to ensure that we remain bound to fossil fuel solutions.
So, on the topic of a DIY grid-tie inverter here are a few posts from a thread started by a guy looking to outsource the design.
Some dude makes the snarky remark about why don't you just pay the price and this is the response of a user named MarkM
(I've reformatted a couple of his posts into a single thread for readability.)
"Why don't you just buy one"
BECAUSE THEY ARE WAY OVER PRICED. That was yelled a the top of my lungs.
Solar panels cost about $4-5/Watt, inverters cost $1-2/watt. This is crazy. These grid tie inverters are no more complicated than a computer power supply which will cost you about $0.08/watt. The inherint nature of the grid tie inverters is to track the sinusoidal input and drive it to a higher voltage, thus selling the solar power on it. The IEEE 1547 require all kinds of hoops to jump thru and the inverter companies use this as an excuse to charge what they do. Again the hoops are simply jumped by a programed algorithum that monitors frequency and voltage levels. WOOOOO. I see this mans drive to find/build an inexpensive alternativ and do the gorella thing.
The way the grid tie inverters work per the regulatory hurdles is it syncs in on the line power voltage level and sine wave siganture. If power goes down it shuts off, no harm can come to the line man. This type of statement from you or utility companies is old school old day problems stemming from someone hooking a rotatry generator or non-monitoring piece of equipmnet to the line. And if a lineman is doing as he is suposed to he grounds live wires to ground before working on a "dead line". (that's a rule)
Utility companies have this power thing locked up and are going to be very reluctant to let small producers get in the game. Utility companies should not fear small producers they should embrace them and buy their excess power and resell it at a profit without any over head. The largest source of funds to build the power supply sytem is in the pockets of consumers: let consumers build it.
And as far as the regulatory cost as a part of the inverter cost that to is a pile. When the cost of regulation of a certain product is spread over the number of units sold it is small. Again we have a situation of free market and what the buyer will pay. In verter builders are maximizing there profits because competition is nill. I am all for free market but too I am for some of the Chinese or Indian products to slap the US, German and Australan made manufactures into a stop gouging mode.
On the general topic of grid-tie inverters you may find the following Wikipedia posts of interest. You will find the following components mentioned in the documentation for many grid-tie inverters.
Here's how I see it from the perspective of a person in Taiwan with some familiarity with the OEM industry which makes practically all notebooks in the world including the OLPC.
A lot of people outside of Taiwan don't really grasp what the whole OEM/ODM industrial ecosystem is about. OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer which is a vague title. What it really means is that there are these vast manufacturing plants owned by companies with names mostly unknown in the West that take design specifications from brands like Apple, HP, Compaq etc. and actually make the products in massive swaths of like a minimum of ten thousand units.
Now these OEMs profit by working on massive scales and have relatively thin margins. In order to profit, they have this basic minimum order number and they can't afford to negotiate below a certain unit number of say ten thousand units.
By the same token, this minimum order requirement means that there can only be so many players in market because there's only so much capacity and the granularity of the minimum order is set really high so there is something of a zero sum game in this. There is always room for future expansion of sales stay high for prolonged periods, but quarter to quarter things are pretty fixed.
Now, last year something big happened that had never happened before and that was the OLPC got enough orders that they were able to tie up a manufacturing unit of one of these OEMs. Again, this is a big deal because you can't just magically create more all of a sudden --there's a set amount. And what that meant was for the first time there was all this manufacturing in the notebook market that was being taken out of the windows market and being dedicated to the open source. Now there can be little doubt that MS had assumed for so many years that this market was their property.
To make matters worse, it was only a few months later when Asus hit the market with the EeePc and soon a whole flood of these little fuckers who weren't paying the tax were springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
No doubt this was a huge concern in Redmond. Then CNet attacked Vista and things were just seeming to go to shit and suddenly out of the blue --now come on, is it really out of the blue-- Negroponte announces that XP is probably just as good as Linux for the OLPC.
Damn, you'd think with this new layout they'd have put in an edit button.
I forgot to finish the thought. The Methanol Economy concept is relevant because one of the things you can do with existing proven technologies and that has been done on industrial scales in the past at relatively low costs is to convert methanol to high octane gasoline.
Again, the routes to methanol are abundant including just using the gases in the atmosphere and of course gasoline is practically as good as cash.
I think the idea of going to gasoline is really great and the most revolutionary approach of all because it can happen without waiting generations for a new transportation infrastructure to be accepted. That's puts radical transformation within realistic reach.
But cellulosics is not the only way to make that happen. There is general concept called the Methanol Economy that you can find an article on at Wikipedia. To summarize, methanol can be produced from all kinds of starting processes including my personal favorite which is solar energy, hydrogen and atmospheric CO2. But there are dozens of paths to the same goal and cellulosic feedstocks are a fine choice as is algae. Basically any process that can produce gasoline as an end product and remain carbon neutral is a kind of perfect solution.
I use one of these exact machines on the weekend and in the last few weeks I've been having serious eye strain. When I come home during the week and use generic 17" LCDs or my 19" CRT the need to rest my eyes constantly goes away by about Wednesday, but it comes back every weekend when I use that 20" iMac. Seems like a pretty direct correlation. It could be something else like the lighting in the room there, but I'm wondering if anybody else who has used one of these had noticed unusual eye troubles after prolonged usage.
I'm dead serious. Telecoms is a "natural monopoly". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) A monopoly is not something you build a business around, it's something you regulate. Thus, it is best funded by a regulatory regime AKA, a government.
And, for the practical example. I'm in Taiwan where the telecom is state owned. I am using the state owned telecom DSL service at 8M/640K for about thirty bucks a month although we just got a slight reduction in fees this month. Yeah, imagine that, a reduction. We have no throttling and the service, which I've had for about five years at that level is excellent.
Sure, there's a monthly fee for use, but the service is provided by a government monopoly which is obviously derivative of taxes.
Doesn't that kind of bloated figure screw up his own argument that wifi is irrelevant? Was that a typo? In the long run when the price is right --and that price will have to be a lot lower than ten bucks a day-- it's quite obvious that wifi will be overtaken by other wireless technologies with wider range. But it's also obvious that there are going to be dozens of standards for different regions of the world for probably another decade or so. On an international scale, telecoms, much like electrical utilities, don't like cooperation because they make money by charging to overcome incompatibilities. Quite to the contrary, there are many cases where telecoms make their money by staying as inefficient as they can possibly justify.
This is one that has been in the back of my mind since I heard about an supercapacitor based bus they have going in Beijing. It charges at every bus stop from an inductive charger. I found that so conceptually attractive. And it also fits so well with the Chinese attitude towards life. I live in China and people are really into keeping it light and just getting by with what you need. My in-laws can't stand my love for clutter and collecting stuff like old PCs.
Anyhow, after seeing that, I couldn't help but think of the recent work on resonant inductive wireless electricity transmission. That was also being researched at MIT if I recall correctly. It made the rounds here at Slashdot. In summary, it's a matter of pulsing a current at a certain frequency in both the transmitter and reciever to enable inductive charging over distances of something like ten meters. Probably it could go further than that if it was engineered for a specific application.
So here's my 0.02. Rather than trying to get cars to carry enough charge to go hundreds of miles, how about just giving them enough capacity to go say fifty miles and then building inductive chargers literally embedded into the freeways. In order to charge up, you simply get onto the freeway and every hundred feet or so your capacitor can get zapped with charge at a nice high voltage.
You'd have a set of buried transmission lines on the side of every freeway that would feed the inductive chargers. Then, in the roadbed itself, you'd only need minimally invasive roadwork since you could do a hundred feet or more at a time. A crew should be able to do several miles of road per night.
Safety shouldn't be a problem. The system only transmits to conductors that are resonating at a certain set frequency so you don't have to worry about the road getting wet and causing a hazard to someone who happens to stop and fix a flat in the rain or some such scenario.
The biggest hurdles are, as usual, probably more political than technical.
Bauxite isn't even a mineral. It's just a common industrial name for a kind of rock that includes a variety of minerals and is the most efficient way to produce aluminum using existing technologies. Any clay soil contains large quantities of aluminum. When the great clay shortage hits, I'm sure we'll have plenty of advance notice.
Indeed. That's true.
But it doesn't look like this conversion is a show stopper after all. It was a good question and I appreciate the motivation to look into it further, but it looks like on the balance economically it really would make more sense to go all the way to a high octane gasoline formula rather than sticking with methanol.
It's all about economics of course. Lots of things are technically possible like hybrids or this company's idea bout fuel cells, but the idea that will eventually really matter is the one that is cheaper than all the rest. The cheapest thing is to change as little as possible. By completely avoiding any change on the automotive side, you're cutting straight to massive volumes instead of trying to rebuild an infrastructure that eventually scales up to massive volumes. We already have a market that requires huge volumes of a product. The product has become problematic, but that doesn't mean the demand for that product can't be satisfied by a replacement product that doesn't have those problems. Rather than trying to start over with a new generation of autos, you get a far quicker reaction from the market by simply making the change up-stream.
These previous syngas efforts fail on the clean energy side. They're not exciting to environmentally minded consumers at all because it's just converting one hydrocarbon to another. You're still emitting vast quantities of formerly sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere. So, the only thing slightly interesting in these previous efforts has been their cost advantages.
Now this nanotechnological application comes along with a far cheaper method of hydrolysis and it opens the possibility of using atmospheric CO2 as starting materials --wow, the whole thing becomes far sexier from an environmental standpoint. Then it's no longer just strictly about costs compared to petroleum. At that point you have to start asking what it's worth to society as a green technology that creates local jobs and prevents the CO2 emissions and doesn't require fancy new automotive technology that a lot of people can't really afford. At that point, maybe you go beyond asking just how much it costs and start looking at whether it might even be worth some subsidies to make it happen fast.
Just a quick follow-up. I did go look further into the zeolite catalyst used in converting methanol to gasoline. It's one of the cheapest catalysts around. The process as it has been pursued so far does eventually require the catalyst to be replinished, but it is synthesized from alumina and silicate ores which are the most common minerals in the earth's crust. It's not a particularly expensive catalyst.
Here's a little blurb on the plant that they built in New Zealand. They were using natural gas as a starting material for their methanol.
The New Zealand plant was a technical success but produced gasoline at costs above $30 per barrel and required large subsidies from the New Zealand government.
The beauty of using this nanotech catalyst to obtain hydrogen and oxygen as starting materials would be that you could establish a sythesis plant anywhere there was a source of water which would cut transportation costs to almost nothing. That's a huge part of the liguid fuels energy equation.
Thirty bucks a barrel seemed like a fortune in 1985, but these days . . .
Anyway, they were using natural gas, so they didn't credit for being on the right side of the environmental equation, this technology could potentially alter that aspect of it as well.
There are other ways to obtain CO2 than compressing the air like adsorption but using compression based on solar has the steam punk aesthetic, but I love the combo. It's the nano/steam punk global energy green anti-CO2 solution and it says yes to gas guzzling cars! What's not to love.
Yeah, perhaps the zeolite catalyst puts full gasoline conversion out of the picture. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know the answer to tell you the truth. I'm just speculating, but think of all the up-sides on this approach.
Look how convenient it would be to power this hydrogen separation process with photovoltaic solar. One of the biggest catches with solar panels is their limited hours of operation. By converting that electricity straight to hydrogen with this super efficient catalyst, you overcome this limitation of photovoltaics and partly offset the high initial cost of PV through the efficiency of this catalyst.
On the CO2 side, how about using conventional solar thermal (ie parabolic mirrors) for low temperature steam to power pump compressors. Again, you overcome some of the conventional problems that come with the attempts to convert steam directly into electricity. Instead of electricity and all the hassles associated with turbines, you simply use large cylinder compressors in the fashion of nineteenth century low pressure steam compressors to do nothing but compress large volumes of air rendering a steady solar powered supply of easily separated liquid CO2. Nothing fancy on this side of things.
So, you've got your clean H2 supply and you've got clean CO2 and your input energy used in conjunction with this fancy catalyst is nothing but solar. Seems like it could be pretty cheap and quite clean. You've avoided a lot of the problems associated with traditional solar cycles because you don't need to keep it running around the clock.
But the second best part --and this should not be understated at all-- is the ability to make it locally. This ia very major issue. This is a clean technology that actually absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere while creating local jobs and reducing transportation costs. Oil, after all, requires an enormous amount of transportation which is one of the reasons why it does have costs at the pump despite coming from the earth basically for free.
The single best part would be if you could make the conversion all the way to gasoline for a price below what oil imported from around the world costs and thus leave the existing automotive industry intact. That is really the holy grail because it could be implemented nationally in as little as a few years time which would bascially be akin to a miracle.
Not only do you avoid all the issues of converting vehicles --a very big issue indeed-- you can also invert the normal equation and actually consume atmospheric CO2 in the process.
How bout them apples? Not only would such a technique halt the addition of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it would actually begin to actively reduce CO2 levels.
The chemistry is old school. CO2 + 3H2 --> CH3OH + H2O
This way you change as little as possible on the consumer automotive side and yet still move to a post-pertroleum world without any new massive automotive technology roll out. That's a freakin' huge plus right there. A lot of people genuinely love their old cars. This way they can keep their old rides forever. As much as I love clean tech, I kind of have a love affair with my old car I've rebuilt so many times and there's a lot of people like that in this world. The easier we make it for everyone to participate, the faster the impact will happen. If you just go with gasoline, the switch can happen almost overnight.
If the hydrogen production process is really as efficient as they claim, it should be quite cheap on top of the environmental and political benefits. Moreover, you could install the production facilities very near existing gas tank farms located at the edges of large metro areas thus further maximizing efficiencies that petroleum can't hope to match be eliminating the need for extensive liquid fuels transport systems.
The CO2 could be produced through simple air compression. Local gasoline would once more be a reality.
Alright, I think I'm getting it here. So ten is the magic number since 10ms-2 is acceleration on earth. So a 10,000kg object falling one meter represents 100,000J of PE. Of course a huge portion of that would be eaten up by friction in the gear train, the escapement mechanism and the pendulum, but the upper limit in a frictionless system can be calculated as 100,000J using the values of 10,000kg and one meter.
Okay, we're talking storage here so let's not worry about the work required to lift the weight. Granted, that's certainly a big issue when one is talking about large amounts of weight but I'd like to stick to the application of this formula and not the implications of how you'd lift the weight although that is certainly an interesting topic for another time.
So, back to the formula. You say that there is a confusion between "gravitational accelaration" and "speed" in the way I've applied it so this formula is not applicable to the problem. It makes sense now that you point it out because that's why the formula uses the symbol "g" to represent acceleration. I thought it seemed too easy and that explanation makes sense.
Given that, does anybody know of another way to state the problem that would allow you to calculate how much potential energy is in a given weight of a given height driving an escapement/pendulum clockwork mechanism?
Yeah the notion that people could still be trying to patent escapement mechanisms that are totally derivative of fifteenth century designs is revolting. But whater. I'm not saying that applies to this particular design because I didn't spend much time looking at it, but it seemed like an opportune moment to pose a question I've had about escapement regulated energy storage systems for a long time.
A few years ago I was somewhat randomly cruising around some java simulator sites and got intereted in some pendulum applets and I ended up getting side tracked on the fascinating history of escapement mechanisms which are the part of a mechanical clockwork system that, through the motion of the pendulum, regulates the release of energy. Really fun stuff and I'm sure many Slashdot readers know it well so I'd like to pose a question to those who are familiar with this kind of classic mechanical stuff.
Reading about ancient mechanical clocks made me wonder why this isn't a more popular energy storage system. Searching through patents I found that actually this is a very busy area with tons of active patents much to my surprise. There are patents with some cool ideas like using entire buildings as the weight in a pendulum and escapement storage system. Fascinating though perhaps impractical for various reasons.
But the question is about what formulas one could use to create estimates for such a system. I found this one:
PE=mgh
In which
PE = Potential Energy in Joules m = mass in Kg g = acceleration w/s squared h = height in meters
First of all, is this an approriate formula to use for a traditional clockwork mechanism? ("Traditional" in this case meaning a large weight attached to a gear train that connects to a pendulum that operates an escapement and thus regulates the release of energy.)
And if it is, then how does this result sound to you?
10,000 kilos (Sounds like a lot but it's only bout four cubic yards of concrete) at one meter falling at a rate of 0.0001 meter per second (an unrealistic rate but I'm keeping this numerically simple) equals 1J. Is that right or is this an inappropriate application of the formula?
Now I realize that this is not accounting for friction which is going drastically alter the real world result, but just as a ballpark estimator of maximum potential is this an accurate way to go?
If you think authors have it bad giving stuff away free, you can't imagine what it's like trying to sell it. What I mean is the print publishing industry is totally corrupt as it stands. The best thing in the world that could happen to authors would be for the consumers to stop supporting the utterly corrupt publishing cartels. This is especially true inthe case of textbook publishers. You're not supporting Joe Schmoe the budding author when you buy a book in a bookstore. Distributors are the only conduit into the bookstores, even the university bookstores, and the distributors only work with major publishers. As an unknown author, when you approach a large publisher they'll tell you to first get the book printed at your own cost before submitting it. Well you can't get away with a run of less than five hundred copies so you not only have to write a book that you believe in, you've got to pay to get it printed. Once you've done that, the next step is where the publishers realize you're serious and you've already committed cash so you're a sucker waiting to be had. At that point is when they invite you into the office and sit down face-to-face and actually start asking you for direct kick backs on the deal. Now of course they want 35% of the cover price and the bookstore needs fifty percent and you have to sign a contract guaranteeing that you will buy back unsold copies at the end of the year at the cover price. But the kick backs are on top of that. As an independent author, after you've paid for your own printing, you're looking at fifteen percent of the cover price and this is where your kick-back to the publisher is supposed to come from.
That's a real story from someone who has published many limited-run textbooks with a small publisher and once attempted to cut a deal with a major publisher only to by shocked by the audacity of those sleazy bastards. It was like welcome to the jungle sucker. They want you to basically pay them for the honor of writing textbooks. Screw that business.
And for the record, my small publisher went out of business about 2002 because it was obvious the market was basically dried up. My publisher and I agree that it really is for the best. The arguments that buying crap from these hustlers is somehow about patronage is totally naive.
Oh, and this article is absurd. None of his points make any sense. Authenticity? People will pay for authenticity on the Internet? What kind of moron would write such a thing. As has been pointed out earlier, the immediacy of media is already here, same for accessibility. Interpretation with Red Hat as an example? Huh, as a Debian user I find that Google answers just about any question I can come up with already. Findability? What?
Patronage is the only thing I see in that list that is "better than free" and as I've tried to point out, people's concepts of patronage as being the equivalence of buying the physical media is totally misguided because the very cartels that control the physical media are the greatest impediment to even beginning something that works like patronage. Moreover, it totally sidesteps the very complex social issues that lie at the heart of the concept of patronage.
The best thing is to simply get over it. The old economy of scarcity is dead. Let us get on with reassessing our economic and legal policies to adjust for this change rather than waging yet another war against the average joe. What's to win by fighting a trend that only benefits an increasingly concentrated group of elites against which the majority are framed as being in the wrong?
You're on baby.
Well, not from that list though. I'm giving way real open source hardware gifts in bulk and I'm flying from Taipei to LAX on Thursday via Malaysian airlines. I got a box filled with capacitors from 1uf to 4,000uf, resistors of all sorts of Ohmic variations, a stack of breadboards, dozens of transformers of various voltages, an entire box of assorted small motors, LEDs of all colors, 555 ICs, relays, 4040 counters, partially pre-assembled audio amp kits, speakers of various shapes and sizes all kinds of stuff. The box weighs like eighty pounds and it is filled to the brim with discreet devices and circuits. The airport is free to go through it and if they don't like any of it, I'll leave it but I see no reason why they will be concerned.
In fact, I've done this before. My nieces and nephews dread my "gifts". They're more like homework assignments. But the airport doesn't freak. They do want to go through it after the X-Ray machine shows them this bizarre collection of stuff they can't identify but what they do is take you to the side and ask you what it all is and see if you get agitated. They're mainly focusing on your attitude rather than what's really in the box. If you calmly explain what it is, even if they don't understand the details they'll still let you go ahead and pack it because the explosives machine doesn't detect explosives because there are none. It all gets checked in and none of it is, in fact, dangrous.
That kid from MIT with the breadboard on her shirt was a special case. It was wired up in a half-ass circuit with a blinking light looking like a movie version of a bomb which does freak out people who don't do tech. All freaky like that is how this stuff will end up after Christmas if all goes well, but I'm not going to take it to the airport wired up with blinky lights and hidden under my shirt.
Of course if I was flying domestically in the States, who knows. But I'm boarding here in Taiwan and people are less scared of electronics here than they are in the States. I don't think that was true just a few years ago, but I think perhaps it is now. That's partly why I'm bringing this stuff home so that some of the younger kids can get exposed to the basics and realize that technology is something they can control and even create instead of just being "the consumer". America needs to stop being the world's cow and start actually doing innovative stuff again. Thus, I go forth packed to the gills with components.
Yep, I've seen those pics before too and I was like, yeah --that's what I'm talkin' about.
Except instead of telescoping down what I was thinking was going straight down and just leaving a track along the edges protruding far enough out into the center of the pit for two lanes of traffic. One going up, one going down. You'd most likely need to reinforce the road overhang with ferrocement and peg it to the wall with lateral reinforcing beams as you went down but it could most likely be done. The reason I was thinking of Utah is that some of the deepest coal sediments are located there so you've got something to mine on the way down and you can play both sides politically because you can appease the conservative coal advocates in the near term and then have a promising alternative for the liberals on the horizon once you've reached several a depth of several kilometers.
Of course this is just a mental game to think of how you could do something potentially huge and near-term profitable with relatively small start-up money and conventional equipment. I'm well aware that big open pits are not considered cool geothermal technology and naturally I think coal sucks too. But the fungus growing thing is a nice angle. I'll try and work that in. I don't see where the telepathy comes in though and bowling? I think that's getting a little out in left-field.
But my point is that essentially all alternative energy including OTEC and massive offwhore wind, solar thermal space solar or tethers or cellulosic ethanol or algal biodiesel or fusion are all just mental games unless you have a way to obtain funding for them and this is the key problem with geothermal. Geothermal may be the worst case in a lot of ways because it's the kind of technology that inherently involves significant infrastructure investment and the shareholders in that business are going to way ---well, why don't we just do something safe with our money that will guarantee us profits in the next fiscal quarter like buy oil stocks instead?
Thin film PV actually has a workable business model which is to sell a low cost product directly to comsumers and so even though it's kinda lame from a sci-fi angle, it's probably going to be the only significant alternative player in the next decade.
There are dozens of great alternative energy resources requiring millions in start-up money that are perfectly viable as far as the experts are concerned. Solar thermal has worked perfectly well and very large wind generators can convert great quantities of power like the enormous design we saw last week with the magnetic bearing. There are several fusion experiments that look quite promising and orbital solar is no fantasy. Geothermal is merely another one of these many very promising alternatives that is no doubt quite technically feasible and potentially disruptive but therein lies the rub. These things all require large-scale investments and the organizations that are in position to make those large-scale financial commitments have no real motivation to do so.
This is why low-cost solar panels are so intriguing. It's not because they represent the best alternative energy conversion technology. In fact, they're quite lame in many respects. Nonethless it's the most likely technology that can be implemented in a way similar to the way the internet was built: inward from the edge rather than outward from the center. That's what makes solar the center of attention and the only genuinely likely candidate for a disruptive alternative energy technology.
No doubt geo is good to go. No doubt indeed. My personal favorite fantasy geothermal solution has been to go into Utah and just burn/dig an enormous hole through the coal into the depths. I mean like a hole you can drive huge trucks down into corkscrew like around the edges spiraling into the darkness. Once you've excavated all the coal down to a few miles, you can tap the geothermal energy at the bottom of the pit. You could build a whole community into the walls of the place. Yeah, geothermal is cool. Anybody want to front me some cash to make it happen?
The real debate goes far deeper than merely how to create patient specific stem cells. The real issue is longevity and let's hope we're getting closer to where there's something worth arguing about.
You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death. Personally, I was shocked at this and I brought it up with some people in my family and I was even more surprised to find that a lot of the older people were sympathetic to the idea that death was something that shouldn't be messed with.
Personally, I say fuck that. Ya'll can be my witnesses, I want to live as long as freakin' possible and if I end up lookin' like Frankenstein carrying my head in the jar in the crook of my sewn on arm then all the better. Sounds good to me.
Some of the arguments in favor of death are kinda lame. I've heard the economic argument over and over. This is a popular one. It's like the economy would get all screwed up if people stopped dying on seventy year clocks because all the old geezer's saving would just accumulate insane interests until the oldest people had all the money. Okay, I can see that but this is not a good reason for people to die. Money aint that big a deal if we all had indefinite life spans. I'm sure we could calmly negotiate something once everyone had matured a few hundred years.
Another pro-death argument is the idea of overpopulation. I think I have a sweet answer to this one and this is what I really wanted to post about. See, the key is that you've got to have an answer that appeals to a really silly level of religious symbolism and I think I got it.
What you do is, you say that anybody who wants to extend their life past a certain age and have children will have to voluntarily exile themselves into orbit or the moon or some other place off the surface of the earth. This is the perfect solution. Why? Because, the result is that the people who accept eternal life can only do so if they . . . wait for it. . . go to heaven.
Yeah, it was a pity they didn't elaborate on what would constitute a sufficient dose. It's easy to get a pound of bud that would take weeks to smoke into a pan of brownies that lasts a couple days. Of course the thing with the brownies is they make you a little sleepy.
These comments about the role of the state are totally off base. First of all, there is no government ratings system in the United States. All media ratings are voluntarily created by corporate industry groups, particularly the MPAA. If they were done by the government, they would be undone in the courts because there is no legal basis for government censorship of the media under the US Constitution. The reason we have de-facto censorship in the United States is because it was slipped in through the private sector much as we're seeing the attempts to do with the net in the efforts to politicize net-neutrality.
More importantly though, the real censorship comes from the role of advertising. If advertisers fund the media, then they inherently gain control over the content. Sesame Street is a great example because it was financed by the publicly funded Public Broadcast System rather than through advertising. Now that PBS has been neutered to the point that it plays no significant role in children's programming and a few decades have gone by we can see that in retrospect those works which were publicly funded appear over-the-top compared to what advertiser sponsored media will tolerate.
After cloning Dolly the sheep, Ian Wilmut was invited to Boston to give a lecture on his work. After his presentation, there was a call for questions and the room was silent. There was zero interest in this research and you'd have to quite naive to not know why. Everybody there was making their living on grants. The last thing in the world you want to put on a federal grant is that you're going to do human therapeutic cloning. So why would you even bother asking a question in the direction. The subject has nothing to do with you if you're an American biomedical researcher who plans to stay employed. And yet at the same time it's some of the most exciting science in decades.
That's fucked up. This is politics essentially censoring science.
Now, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread about how medicine is so regulated and semiconductors aren't, but I think that's slightly disengenuous. In fact, Intel has broken the law many times in their chip making efforts. This is not a secret. They've been sued probably hundreds of times since the seventies for contaminating groundwater supplies with heavy metals and doing all kinds of mean nasty things that release toxic chemicals into the air, water and dumped across the land. That's just a fact and it shouldn't be surprsing to anyone here at Slashdot. I'm all into recycling and doing my part to save the planet and what not, but being fully aware of Intel's past I'm still using their products right now. I'm culpable as well. What's done is done. They bent the rules and went for it and they certainly had the nuts to go ahead and say fuck it to the rules sometimes even if it meant lawsuits. Intel has been sued for taking chances with peoples health on hundreds of occasions. It's not such a different situation. Let's not pretend they never took any risks and everything was just hunky dory and above board all the way down the line and somehow it's a whole different game for people in medicine.
Admittedly, there is a big time difference in the business models which helps explain the differences. Semiconductors are essentially a glorified form of printing that uses lots of nasty chemicals. So printing and money go hand in hand. Money is printed too, after all. Medicine is a whole other ball of tits. It is supposedly privatized and profit oriented in the US, but it doesn't really work that way on the research level as we see with this story about Ian Wilmut and the questions that weren't asked. Personally, I belive medicine should not and essentially can not be profit oriented in an effective way, certainly not a moral way. It should be government subsidized just like education and the government should be forward thinking and willing to take chances and innovate. The heart of the problem with that plan is that the American electorate seems to be so incredibly dysfunctional and hooked on this psychotic free market rhetoric that real advanced medical techniques based on stem cells, gene therapy and tailored therapies will probably emerge and become popular in the massive state subsidized medical systems of Asia and Europe first.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I've been interested in this for a long time and I read a good thread on the topic that I will put a copy of in this post.
But first I would like to make a quick point which is that this is a major political obstacle to alternative energy. It's not a technical obstacle, it's a political issue because we've "deregulated" utilities by letting them regulate themselves and this is insanity. At least it is one way to ensure that we remain bound to fossil fuel solutions.
So, on the topic of a DIY grid-tie inverter here are a few posts from a thread started by a guy looking to outsource the design.
Some dude makes the snarky remark about why don't you just pay the price and this is the response of a user named MarkM
(I've reformatted a couple of his posts into a single thread for readability.)
"Why don't you just buy one"
BECAUSE THEY ARE WAY OVER PRICED. That was yelled a the top of my lungs.
Solar panels cost about $4-5/Watt, inverters cost $1-2/watt. This is crazy. These grid tie inverters are no more complicated than a computer power supply which will cost you about $0.08/watt. The inherint nature of the grid tie inverters is to track the sinusoidal input and drive it to a higher voltage, thus selling the solar power on it. The IEEE 1547 require all kinds of hoops to jump thru and the inverter companies use this as an excuse to charge what they do. Again the hoops are simply jumped by a programed algorithum that monitors frequency and voltage levels. WOOOOO. I see this mans drive to find/build an inexpensive alternativ and do the gorella thing.
The way the grid tie inverters work per the regulatory hurdles is it syncs in on the line power voltage level and sine wave siganture. If power goes down it shuts off, no harm can come to the line man. This type of statement from you or utility companies is old school old day problems stemming from someone hooking a rotatry generator or non-monitoring piece of equipmnet to the line. And if a lineman is doing as he is suposed to he grounds live wires to ground before working on a "dead line". (that's a rule)
Utility companies have this power thing locked up and are going to be very reluctant to let small producers get in the game. Utility companies should not fear small producers they should embrace them and buy their excess power and resell it at a profit without any over head. The largest source of funds to build the power supply sytem is in the pockets of consumers: let consumers build it.
And as far as the regulatory cost as a part of the inverter cost that to is a pile. When the cost of regulation of a certain product is spread over the number of units sold it is small. Again we have a situation of free market and what the buyer will pay. In verter builders are maximizing there profits because competition is nill. I am all for free market but too I am for some of the Chinese or Indian products to slap the US, German and Australan made manufactures into a stop gouging mode.
The original thread is here.
http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/4482
On the general topic of grid-tie inverters you may find the following Wikipedia posts of interest. You will find the following components mentioned in the documentation for many grid-tie inverters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEPIC_converter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mppt
Here's how I see it from the perspective of a person in Taiwan with some familiarity with the OEM industry which makes practically all notebooks in the world including the OLPC.
A lot of people outside of Taiwan don't really grasp what the whole OEM/ODM industrial ecosystem is about. OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer which is a vague title. What it really means is that there are these vast manufacturing plants owned by companies with names mostly unknown in the West that take design specifications from brands like Apple, HP, Compaq etc. and actually make the products in massive swaths of like a minimum of ten thousand units.
Now these OEMs profit by working on massive scales and have relatively thin margins. In order to profit, they have this basic minimum order number and they can't afford to negotiate below a certain unit number of say ten thousand units.
By the same token, this minimum order requirement means that there can only be so many players in market because there's only so much capacity and the granularity of the minimum order is set really high so there is something of a zero sum game in this. There is always room for future expansion of sales stay high for prolonged periods, but quarter to quarter things are pretty fixed.
Now, last year something big happened that had never happened before and that was the OLPC got enough orders that they were able to tie up a manufacturing unit of one of these OEMs. Again, this is a big deal because you can't just magically create more all of a sudden --there's a set amount. And what that meant was for the first time there was all this manufacturing in the notebook market that was being taken out of the windows market and being dedicated to the open source. Now there can be little doubt that MS had assumed for so many years that this market was their property.
To make matters worse, it was only a few months later when Asus hit the market with the EeePc and soon a whole flood of these little fuckers who weren't paying the tax were springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.
No doubt this was a huge concern in Redmond. Then CNet attacked Vista and things were just seeming to go to shit and suddenly out of the blue --now come on, is it really out of the blue-- Negroponte announces that XP is probably just as good as Linux for the OLPC.
I don't think there's a big coincidence here.
Damn, you'd think with this new layout they'd have put in an edit button.
I forgot to finish the thought. The Methanol Economy concept is relevant because one of the things you can do with existing proven technologies and that has been done on industrial scales in the past at relatively low costs is to convert methanol to high octane gasoline.
Again, the routes to methanol are abundant including just using the gases in the atmosphere and of course gasoline is practically as good as cash.
I think the idea of going to gasoline is really great and the most revolutionary approach of all because it can happen without waiting generations for a new transportation infrastructure to be accepted. That's puts radical transformation within realistic reach.
But cellulosics is not the only way to make that happen. There is general concept called the Methanol Economy that you can find an article on at Wikipedia. To summarize, methanol can be produced from all kinds of starting processes including my personal favorite which is solar energy, hydrogen and atmospheric CO2. But there are dozens of paths to the same goal and cellulosic feedstocks are a fine choice as is algae. Basically any process that can produce gasoline as an end product and remain carbon neutral is a kind of perfect solution.
Good luck to these guys.
I use one of these exact machines on the weekend and in the last few weeks I've been having serious eye strain. When I come home during the week and use generic 17" LCDs or my 19" CRT the need to rest my eyes constantly goes away by about Wednesday, but it comes back every weekend when I use that 20" iMac. Seems like a pretty direct correlation. It could be something else like the lighting in the room there, but I'm wondering if anybody else who has used one of these had noticed unusual eye troubles after prolonged usage.
There's your business model.
I'm dead serious. Telecoms is a "natural monopoly". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly) A monopoly is not something you build a business around, it's something you regulate. Thus, it is best funded by a regulatory regime AKA, a government.
And, for the practical example. I'm in Taiwan where the telecom is state owned. I am using the state owned telecom DSL service at 8M/640K for about thirty bucks a month although we just got a slight reduction in fees this month. Yeah, imagine that, a reduction. We have no throttling and the service, which I've had for about five years at that level is excellent.
Sure, there's a monthly fee for use, but the service is provided by a government monopoly which is obviously derivative of taxes.
I'm not sure it's full blown Linux though. I think it might just be Busybox.
Doesn't that kind of bloated figure screw up his own argument that wifi is irrelevant? Was that a typo? In the long run when the price is right --and that price will have to be a lot lower than ten bucks a day-- it's quite obvious that wifi will be overtaken by other wireless technologies with wider range. But it's also obvious that there are going to be dozens of standards for different regions of the world for probably another decade or so. On an international scale, telecoms, much like electrical utilities, don't like cooperation because they make money by charging to overcome incompatibilities. Quite to the contrary, there are many cases where telecoms make their money by staying as inefficient as they can possibly justify.
This is one that has been in the back of my mind since I heard about an supercapacitor based bus they have going in Beijing. It charges at every bus stop from an inductive charger. I found that so conceptually attractive. And it also fits so well with the Chinese attitude towards life. I live in China and people are really into keeping it light and just getting by with what you need. My in-laws can't stand my love for clutter and collecting stuff like old PCs.
Anyhow, after seeing that, I couldn't help but think of the recent work on resonant inductive wireless electricity transmission. That was also being researched at MIT if I recall correctly. It made the rounds here at Slashdot. In summary, it's a matter of pulsing a current at a certain frequency in both the transmitter and reciever to enable inductive charging over distances of something like ten meters. Probably it could go further than that if it was engineered for a specific application.
So here's my 0.02. Rather than trying to get cars to carry enough charge to go hundreds of miles, how about just giving them enough capacity to go say fifty miles and then building inductive chargers literally embedded into the freeways. In order to charge up, you simply get onto the freeway and every hundred feet or so your capacitor can get zapped with charge at a nice high voltage.
You'd have a set of buried transmission lines on the side of every freeway that would feed the inductive chargers. Then, in the roadbed itself, you'd only need minimally invasive roadwork since you could do a hundred feet or more at a time. A crew should be able to do several miles of road per night.
Safety shouldn't be a problem. The system only transmits to conductors that are resonating at a certain set frequency so you don't have to worry about the road getting wet and causing a hazard to someone who happens to stop and fix a flat in the rain or some such scenario.
The biggest hurdles are, as usual, probably more political than technical.
Bauxite isn't even a mineral. It's just a common industrial name for a kind of rock that includes a variety of minerals and is the most efficient way to produce aluminum using existing technologies. Any clay soil contains large quantities of aluminum. When the great clay shortage hits, I'm sure we'll have plenty of advance notice.
Indeed. That's true.
But it doesn't look like this conversion is a show stopper after all. It was a good question and I appreciate the motivation to look into it further, but it looks like on the balance economically it really would make more sense to go all the way to a high octane gasoline formula rather than sticking with methanol.
It's all about economics of course. Lots of things are technically possible like hybrids or this company's idea bout fuel cells, but the idea that will eventually really matter is the one that is cheaper than all the rest. The cheapest thing is to change as little as possible. By completely avoiding any change on the automotive side, you're cutting straight to massive volumes instead of trying to rebuild an infrastructure that eventually scales up to massive volumes. We already have a market that requires huge volumes of a product. The product has become problematic, but that doesn't mean the demand for that product can't be satisfied by a replacement product that doesn't have those problems. Rather than trying to start over with a new generation of autos, you get a far quicker reaction from the market by simply making the change up-stream.
These previous syngas efforts fail on the clean energy side. They're not exciting to environmentally minded consumers at all because it's just converting one hydrocarbon to another. You're still emitting vast quantities of formerly sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere. So, the only thing slightly interesting in these previous efforts has been their cost advantages.
Now this nanotechnological application comes along with a far cheaper method of hydrolysis and it opens the possibility of using atmospheric CO2 as starting materials --wow, the whole thing becomes far sexier from an environmental standpoint. Then it's no longer just strictly about costs compared to petroleum. At that point you have to start asking what it's worth to society as a green technology that creates local jobs and prevents the CO2 emissions and doesn't require fancy new automotive technology that a lot of people can't really afford. At that point, maybe you go beyond asking just how much it costs and start looking at whether it might even be worth some subsidies to make it happen fast.
Just a quick follow-up. I did go look further into the zeolite catalyst used in converting methanol to gasoline. It's one of the cheapest catalysts around. The process as it has been pursued so far does eventually require the catalyst to be replinished, but it is synthesized from alumina and silicate ores which are the most common minerals in the earth's crust. It's not a particularly expensive catalyst.
Here's a little blurb on the plant that they built in New Zealand. They were using natural gas as a starting material for their methanol.
The New Zealand plant was a technical success but produced gasoline at costs above $30 per barrel and required large subsidies from the New Zealand government.
http://www.chemlink.com.au/gtl.htm
The beauty of using this nanotech catalyst to obtain hydrogen and oxygen as starting materials would be that you could establish a sythesis plant anywhere there was a source of water which would cut transportation costs to almost nothing. That's a huge part of the liguid fuels energy equation.
Thirty bucks a barrel seemed like a fortune in 1985, but these days . . .
Anyway, they were using natural gas, so they didn't credit for being on the right side of the environmental equation, this technology could potentially alter that aspect of it as well.
There are other ways to obtain CO2 than compressing the air like adsorption but using compression based on solar has the steam punk aesthetic, but I love the combo. It's the nano/steam punk global energy green anti-CO2 solution and it says yes to gas guzzling cars! What's not to love.
Yeah, perhaps the zeolite catalyst puts full gasoline conversion out of the picture. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know the answer to tell you the truth. I'm just speculating, but think of all the up-sides on this approach.
Look how convenient it would be to power this hydrogen separation process with photovoltaic solar. One of the biggest catches with solar panels is their limited hours of operation. By converting that electricity straight to hydrogen with this super efficient catalyst, you overcome this limitation of photovoltaics and partly offset the high initial cost of PV through the efficiency of this catalyst.
On the CO2 side, how about using conventional solar thermal (ie parabolic mirrors) for low temperature steam to power pump compressors. Again, you overcome some of the conventional problems that come with the attempts to convert steam directly into electricity. Instead of electricity and all the hassles associated with turbines, you simply use large cylinder compressors in the fashion of nineteenth century low pressure steam compressors to do nothing but compress large volumes of air rendering a steady solar powered supply of easily separated liquid CO2. Nothing fancy on this side of things.
So, you've got your clean H2 supply and you've got clean CO2 and your input energy used in conjunction with this fancy catalyst is nothing but solar. Seems like it could be pretty cheap and quite clean. You've avoided a lot of the problems associated with traditional solar cycles because you don't need to keep it running around the clock.
But the second best part --and this should not be understated at all-- is the ability to make it locally. This ia very major issue. This is a clean technology that actually absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere while creating local jobs and reducing transportation costs. Oil, after all, requires an enormous amount of transportation which is one of the reasons why it does have costs at the pump despite coming from the earth basically for free.
The single best part would be if you could make the conversion all the way to gasoline for a price below what oil imported from around the world costs and thus leave the existing automotive industry intact. That is really the holy grail because it could be implemented nationally in as little as a few years time which would bascially be akin to a miracle.
Not only do you avoid all the issues of converting vehicles --a very big issue indeed-- you can also invert the normal equation and actually consume atmospheric CO2 in the process.
How bout them apples? Not only would such a technique halt the addition of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, it would actually begin to actively reduce CO2 levels.
The chemistry is old school.
CO2 + 3H2 --> CH3OH + H2O
CH3OH is methanol.
Using catalysts, which is this company's specialty, it is possible to convert methano into gasoline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_to_gasoline
This way you change as little as possible on the consumer automotive side and yet still move to a post-pertroleum world without any new massive automotive technology roll out. That's a freakin' huge plus right there. A lot of people genuinely love their old cars. This way they can keep their old rides forever. As much as I love clean tech, I kind of have a love affair with my old car I've rebuilt so many times and there's a lot of people like that in this world. The easier we make it for everyone to participate, the faster the impact will happen. If you just go with gasoline, the switch can happen almost overnight.
If the hydrogen production process is really as efficient as they claim, it should be quite cheap on top of the environmental and political benefits. Moreover, you could install the production facilities very near existing gas tank farms located at the edges of large metro areas thus further maximizing efficiencies that petroleum can't hope to match be eliminating the need for extensive liquid fuels transport systems.
The CO2 could be produced through simple air compression. Local gasoline would once more be a reality.
Alright, I think I'm getting it here. So ten is the magic number since 10ms-2 is acceleration on earth. So a 10,000kg object falling one meter represents 100,000J of PE. Of course a huge portion of that would be eaten up by friction in the gear train, the escapement mechanism and the pendulum, but the upper limit in a frictionless system can be calculated as 100,000J using the values of 10,000kg and one meter.
Thanks.
Okay, we're talking storage here so let's not worry about the work required to lift the weight. Granted, that's certainly a big issue when one is talking about large amounts of weight but I'd like to stick to the application of this formula and not the implications of how you'd lift the weight although that is certainly an interesting topic for another time.
So, back to the formula. You say that there is a confusion between "gravitational accelaration" and "speed" in the way I've applied it so this formula is not applicable to the problem. It makes sense now that you point it out because that's why the formula uses the symbol "g" to represent acceleration. I thought it seemed too easy and that explanation makes sense.
Given that, does anybody know of another way to state the problem that would allow you to calculate how much potential energy is in a given weight of a given height driving an escapement/pendulum clockwork mechanism?
Yeah the notion that people could still be trying to patent escapement mechanisms that are totally derivative of fifteenth century designs is revolting. But whater. I'm not saying that applies to this particular design because I didn't spend much time looking at it, but it seemed like an opportune moment to pose a question I've had about escapement regulated energy storage systems for a long time.
A few years ago I was somewhat randomly cruising around some java simulator sites and got intereted in some pendulum applets and I ended up getting side tracked on the fascinating history of escapement mechanisms which are the part of a mechanical clockwork system that, through the motion of the pendulum, regulates the release of energy. Really fun stuff and I'm sure many Slashdot readers know it well so I'd like to pose a question to those who are familiar with this kind of classic mechanical stuff.
Reading about ancient mechanical clocks made me wonder why this isn't a more popular energy storage system. Searching through patents I found that actually this is a very busy area with tons of active patents much to my surprise. There are patents with some cool ideas like using entire buildings as the weight in a pendulum and escapement storage system. Fascinating though perhaps impractical for various reasons.
But the question is about what formulas one could use to create estimates for such a system. I found this one:
PE=mgh
In which
PE = Potential Energy in Joules
m = mass in Kg
g = acceleration w/s squared
h = height in meters
First of all, is this an approriate formula to use for a traditional clockwork mechanism? ("Traditional" in this case meaning a large weight attached to a gear train that connects to a pendulum that operates an escapement and thus regulates the release of energy.)
And if it is, then how does this result sound to you?
10,000 kilos (Sounds like a lot but it's only bout four cubic yards of concrete) at one meter falling at a rate of 0.0001 meter per second (an unrealistic rate but I'm keeping this numerically simple) equals 1J. Is that right or is this an inappropriate application of the formula?
Now I realize that this is not accounting for friction which is going drastically alter the real world result, but just as a ballpark estimator of maximum potential is this an accurate way to go?
If you think authors have it bad giving stuff away free, you can't imagine what it's like trying to sell it. What I mean is the print publishing industry is totally corrupt as it stands. The best thing in the world that could happen to authors would be for the consumers to stop supporting the utterly corrupt publishing cartels. This is especially true inthe case of textbook publishers. You're not supporting Joe Schmoe the budding author when you buy a book in a bookstore. Distributors are the only conduit into the bookstores, even the university bookstores, and the distributors only work with major publishers. As an unknown author, when you approach a large publisher they'll tell you to first get the book printed at your own cost before submitting it. Well you can't get away with a run of less than five hundred copies so you not only have to write a book that you believe in, you've got to pay to get it printed. Once you've done that, the next step is where the publishers realize you're serious and you've already committed cash so you're a sucker waiting to be had. At that point is when they invite you into the office and sit down face-to-face and actually start asking you for direct kick backs on the deal. Now of course they want 35% of the cover price and the bookstore needs fifty percent and you have to sign a contract guaranteeing that you will buy back unsold copies at the end of the year at the cover price. But the kick backs are on top of that. As an independent author, after you've paid for your own printing, you're looking at fifteen percent of the cover price and this is where your kick-back to the publisher is supposed to come from.
That's a real story from someone who has published many limited-run textbooks with a small publisher and once attempted to cut a deal with a major publisher only to by shocked by the audacity of those sleazy bastards. It was like welcome to the jungle sucker. They want you to basically pay them for the honor of writing textbooks. Screw that business.
And for the record, my small publisher went out of business about 2002 because it was obvious the market was basically dried up. My publisher and I agree that it really is for the best. The arguments that buying crap from these hustlers is somehow about patronage is totally naive.
Oh, and this article is absurd. None of his points make any sense. Authenticity? People will pay for authenticity on the Internet? What kind of moron would write such a thing. As has been pointed out earlier, the immediacy of media is already here, same for accessibility. Interpretation with Red Hat as an example? Huh, as a Debian user I find that Google answers just about any question I can come up with already. Findability? What?
Patronage is the only thing I see in that list that is "better than free" and as I've tried to point out, people's concepts of patronage as being the equivalence of buying the physical media is totally misguided because the very cartels that control the physical media are the greatest impediment to even beginning something that works like patronage. Moreover, it totally sidesteps the very complex social issues that lie at the heart of the concept of patronage.
The best thing is to simply get over it. The old economy of scarcity is dead. Let us get on with reassessing our economic and legal policies to adjust for this change rather than waging yet another war against the average joe. What's to win by fighting a trend that only benefits an increasingly concentrated group of elites against which the majority are framed as being in the wrong?
You're on baby.
Well, not from that list though. I'm giving way real open source hardware gifts in bulk and I'm flying from Taipei to LAX on Thursday via Malaysian airlines. I got a box filled with capacitors from 1uf to 4,000uf, resistors of all sorts of Ohmic variations, a stack of breadboards, dozens of transformers of various voltages, an entire box of assorted small motors, LEDs of all colors, 555 ICs, relays, 4040 counters, partially pre-assembled audio amp kits, speakers of various shapes and sizes all kinds of stuff. The box weighs like eighty pounds and it is filled to the brim with discreet devices and circuits. The airport is free to go through it and if they don't like any of it, I'll leave it but I see no reason why they will be concerned.
In fact, I've done this before. My nieces and nephews dread my "gifts". They're more like homework assignments. But the airport doesn't freak. They do want to go through it after the X-Ray machine shows them this bizarre collection of stuff they can't identify but what they do is take you to the side and ask you what it all is and see if you get agitated. They're mainly focusing on your attitude rather than what's really in the box. If you calmly explain what it is, even if they don't understand the details they'll still let you go ahead and pack it because the explosives machine doesn't detect explosives because there are none. It all gets checked in and none of it is, in fact, dangrous.
That kid from MIT with the breadboard on her shirt was a special case. It was wired up in a half-ass circuit with a blinking light looking like a movie version of a bomb which does freak out people who don't do tech. All freaky like that is how this stuff will end up after Christmas if all goes well, but I'm not going to take it to the airport wired up with blinky lights and hidden under my shirt.
Of course if I was flying domestically in the States, who knows. But I'm boarding here in Taiwan and people are less scared of electronics here than they are in the States. I don't think that was true just a few years ago, but I think perhaps it is now. That's partly why I'm bringing this stuff home so that some of the younger kids can get exposed to the basics and realize that technology is something they can control and even create instead of just being "the consumer". America needs to stop being the world's cow and start actually doing innovative stuff again. Thus, I go forth packed to the gills with components.
Yep, I've seen those pics before too and I was like, yeah --that's what I'm talkin' about.
Except instead of telescoping down what I was thinking was going straight down and just leaving a track along the edges protruding far enough out into the center of the pit for two lanes of traffic. One going up, one going down. You'd most likely need to reinforce the road overhang with ferrocement and peg it to the wall with lateral reinforcing beams as you went down but it could most likely be done. The reason I was thinking of Utah is that some of the deepest coal sediments are located there so you've got something to mine on the way down and you can play both sides politically because you can appease the conservative coal advocates in the near term and then have a promising alternative for the liberals on the horizon once you've reached several a depth of several kilometers.
Of course this is just a mental game to think of how you could do something potentially huge and near-term profitable with relatively small start-up money and conventional equipment. I'm well aware that big open pits are not considered cool geothermal technology and naturally I think coal sucks too. But the fungus growing thing is a nice angle. I'll try and work that in. I don't see where the telepathy comes in though and bowling? I think that's getting a little out in left-field.
But my point is that essentially all alternative energy including OTEC and massive offwhore wind, solar thermal space solar or tethers or cellulosic ethanol or algal biodiesel or fusion are all just mental games unless you have a way to obtain funding for them and this is the key problem with geothermal. Geothermal may be the worst case in a lot of ways because it's the kind of technology that inherently involves significant infrastructure investment and the shareholders in that business are going to way ---well, why don't we just do something safe with our money that will guarantee us profits in the next fiscal quarter like buy oil stocks instead?
Thin film PV actually has a workable business model which is to sell a low cost product directly to comsumers and so even though it's kinda lame from a sci-fi angle, it's probably going to be the only significant alternative player in the next decade.
There are dozens of great alternative energy resources requiring millions in start-up money that are perfectly viable as far as the experts are concerned. Solar thermal has worked perfectly well and very large wind generators can convert great quantities of power like the enormous design we saw last week with the magnetic bearing. There are several fusion experiments that look quite promising and orbital solar is no fantasy. Geothermal is merely another one of these many very promising alternatives that is no doubt quite technically feasible and potentially disruptive but therein lies the rub. These things all require large-scale investments and the organizations that are in position to make those large-scale financial commitments have no real motivation to do so.
This is why low-cost solar panels are so intriguing. It's not because they represent the best alternative energy conversion technology. In fact, they're quite lame in many respects. Nonethless it's the most likely technology that can be implemented in a way similar to the way the internet was built: inward from the edge rather than outward from the center. That's what makes solar the center of attention and the only genuinely likely candidate for a disruptive alternative energy technology.
No doubt geo is good to go. No doubt indeed. My personal favorite fantasy geothermal solution has been to go into Utah and just burn/dig an enormous hole through the coal into the depths. I mean like a hole you can drive huge trucks down into corkscrew like around the edges spiraling into the darkness. Once you've excavated all the coal down to a few miles, you can tap the geothermal energy at the bottom of the pit. You could build a whole community into the walls of the place. Yeah, geothermal is cool. Anybody want to front me some cash to make it happen?
The real debate goes far deeper than merely how to create patient specific stem cells. The real issue is longevity and let's hope we're getting closer to where there's something worth arguing about.
You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death. Personally, I was shocked at this and I brought it up with some people in my family and I was even more surprised to find that a lot of the older people were sympathetic to the idea that death was something that shouldn't be messed with.
Personally, I say fuck that. Ya'll can be my witnesses, I want to live as long as freakin' possible and if I end up lookin' like Frankenstein carrying my head in the jar in the crook of my sewn on arm then all the better. Sounds good to me.
Some of the arguments in favor of death are kinda lame. I've heard the economic argument over and over. This is a popular one. It's like the economy would get all screwed up if people stopped dying on seventy year clocks because all the old geezer's saving would just accumulate insane interests until the oldest people had all the money. Okay, I can see that but this is not a good reason for people to die. Money aint that big a deal if we all had indefinite life spans. I'm sure we could calmly negotiate something once everyone had matured a few hundred years.
Another pro-death argument is the idea of overpopulation. I think I have a sweet answer to this one and this is what I really wanted to post about. See, the key is that you've got to have an answer that appeals to a really silly level of religious symbolism and I think I got it.
What you do is, you say that anybody who wants to extend their life past a certain age and have children will have to voluntarily exile themselves into orbit or the moon or some other place off the surface of the earth. This is the perfect solution. Why? Because, the result is that the people who accept eternal life can only do so if they . . . wait for it. . . go to heaven.
Is that sweet or what?
Yeah, it was a pity they didn't elaborate on what would constitute a sufficient dose. It's easy to get a pound of bud that would take weeks to smoke into a pan of brownies that lasts a couple days. Of course the thing with the brownies is they make you a little sleepy.
These comments about the role of the state are totally off base. First of all, there is no government ratings system in the United States. All media ratings are voluntarily created by corporate industry groups, particularly the MPAA. If they were done by the government, they would be undone in the courts because there is no legal basis for government censorship of the media under the US Constitution. The reason we have de-facto censorship in the United States is because it was slipped in through the private sector much as we're seeing the attempts to do with the net in the efforts to politicize net-neutrality.
More importantly though, the real censorship comes from the role of advertising. If advertisers fund the media, then they inherently gain control over the content. Sesame Street is a great example because it was financed by the publicly funded Public Broadcast System rather than through advertising. Now that PBS has been neutered to the point that it plays no significant role in children's programming and a few decades have gone by we can see that in retrospect those works which were publicly funded appear over-the-top compared to what advertiser sponsored media will tolerate.
After cloning Dolly the sheep, Ian Wilmut was invited to Boston to give a lecture on his work. After his presentation, there was a call for questions and the room was silent. There was zero interest in this research and you'd have to quite naive to not know why. Everybody there was making their living on grants. The last thing in the world you want to put on a federal grant is that you're going to do human therapeutic cloning. So why would you even bother asking a question in the direction. The subject has nothing to do with you if you're an American biomedical researcher who plans to stay employed. And yet at the same time it's some of the most exciting science in decades.
That's fucked up. This is politics essentially censoring science.
Now, I've seen a lot of arguments in this thread about how medicine is so regulated and semiconductors aren't, but I think that's slightly disengenuous. In fact, Intel has broken the law many times in their chip making efforts. This is not a secret. They've been sued probably hundreds of times since the seventies for contaminating groundwater supplies with heavy metals and doing all kinds of mean nasty things that release toxic chemicals into the air, water and dumped across the land. That's just a fact and it shouldn't be surprsing to anyone here at Slashdot. I'm all into recycling and doing my part to save the planet and what not, but being fully aware of Intel's past I'm still using their products right now. I'm culpable as well. What's done is done. They bent the rules and went for it and they certainly had the nuts to go ahead and say fuck it to the rules sometimes even if it meant lawsuits. Intel has been sued for taking chances with peoples health on hundreds of occasions. It's not such a different situation. Let's not pretend they never took any risks and everything was just hunky dory and above board all the way down the line and somehow it's a whole different game for people in medicine.
Admittedly, there is a big time difference in the business models which helps explain the differences. Semiconductors are essentially a glorified form of printing that uses lots of nasty chemicals. So printing and money go hand in hand. Money is printed too, after all. Medicine is a whole other ball of tits. It is supposedly privatized and profit oriented in the US, but it doesn't really work that way on the research level as we see with this story about Ian Wilmut and the questions that weren't asked. Personally, I belive medicine should not and essentially can not be profit oriented in an effective way, certainly not a moral way. It should be government subsidized just like education and the government should be forward thinking and willing to take chances and innovate. The heart of the problem with that plan is that the American electorate seems to be so incredibly dysfunctional and hooked on this psychotic free market rhetoric that real advanced medical techniques based on stem cells, gene therapy and tailored therapies will probably emerge and become popular in the massive state subsidized medical systems of Asia and Europe first.