Blogging is a useful way for me to record my
thoughts and digital travels every so often. Hope you enjoy my digital stream of consciousness. 
2021:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2008:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2009:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
2006:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2007:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2004:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2005:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
October 31, 2005 
The populations of Striped Bass, Delta Smelt, and other fish species are at record lowest levels since scientists at the
California Department of Fish and
Game started keeping track in 1959. Here's another article about it. The delta collects water from the Sierra and Cascade mountain ranges in a ribbon of rivers stretching from Mount Shasta to the Central Sierra Nevada. The natural network of rivers, flood plains and wetlands drains 42 percent of California's land area and eventually winds its way to San Francisco Bay, forming the largest estuary and one of the most important ecosystems on the West Coast.
Neat
page that has plans and pictures on how to make your own steam
engine. These pages are designed to provide plans, ideas and inspiration to would-be steam engine enthusiasts. Our goal is to draw folks into the area of mechanical engineering by showcasing projects that wont scare off the neophyte (and nothing would please us more than attracting new enthusiasts that eventually outgrow these simple ideas, and move onto the fancier engines and other projects).
Disgusting article about how Wal-Mart is trying to get rid of employees who've been around
longer because they cost more but don't provide any value. The
more we shaft labor the more our whole society will tank. We are
going to obliterate the middle class and be left with a bunch of
short-term hourly workers making minimum-wage+ and executives making
millions. I'm not sure what the solution is because we don't want to
damage corporations ability to compete internationally, but at the
same time people need to understand the relationship between buying
that cheap plastic piece of crap at Wal-Mart with their cousin losing
his manufacturing job. As Chambers notes, an associate with seven years experience is almost 55 percent more expensive than someone with one year on the job, "yet there is no difference in his or her performance." The solution? Shift more work to part-time employees, who don't get benefits. Chambers proposes lowering life insurance benefits and cutting 401(k) contributions to 3 percent of wages from 4 percent.
In other words, do everything possible to discourage long-term employment. She also suggests raising health care premiums for employees' spouses because they are "by far the most expensive plan members."
October 26, 2005
Fun site
about how to build your own
wind turbine. It deals with the electronics, the blades, furling
systems, parts, suppliers, etc.. Here's another site with more home built
information including alternators, magnets, blade design, home
projects.
Lego.com
sports a cool program called Lego Factory where you
download a Windows or Mac application to design your own lego kits.
You then can buy the kits from Lego. Very cool. I'd be interested to
spec out a kit for SpaceShipOne. Choose the LEGO Factory palette of LEGO bricks & elements. Simply drag & drop to create your custom model! Digital building instructions are automatically created for you.
After you've completed your model, upload it to www.LEGOFactory.com. Your custom set will now be available for purchase or to share with others!
Cool site
which shows how to build SpaceShipOne in lego. The author shows the various pieces
needed and how to build it. Very cool. Tim and I need to do
this.
Analysis
of the Bush administration foreign policy team. It shows their polical
and social affiliations, their business relationships, and government
records. Most of the team is involved with the Project for the
New American Century whose goals are to put the US in a position
of "global leadership" and to promote a "Reaganite policy of military
strength and moral clarity". Moral clarity. Gives me shivers just
thinking about it. Sounds like Nazi/Orwellian propaganda.
The Whitehouse is suing the Onion because they use the Presidential
seal on a weekly joke piece. Fools. The Onion was amused. "I'm surprised the president deems it wise to spend taxpayer money for his lawyer to write letters to The Onion," Scott Dikkers, editor in chief, wrote to Mr. Dixton. He suggested the money be used instead for tax breaks for satirists.
More formally, The Onion's lawyers responded that the paper's readers - it prints about 500,000 copies weekly, and three million people read it online - are well aware that The Onion is a joke.
Article from Slate.com on how some former adminstration loyalists are
now criticizing Bush's foreign policy. This includes Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft (pictured at right). The article asks
why this wasn't done more last year when we could have gotten Bush out
of office or why more dissenters in the administration haven't
resigned in protest when there is obviously disagreement with the
Neocon dogma. Which leads to a larger question: Why do so few U.S. government officials do what Wilkerson might now wish he had doneresign in protest and announce their reasons publicly? Dozens of officials and probably hundreds of military officers will speak privately, to their families and friends, about their fundamental disagreements with this administration's foreign and military policy. But none has spoken publicly.
One who came close was Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, who, shortly before the war, testified before a congressional committee that a few hundred thousand troops might be needed to occupy Iraqonly to be upbraided, humiliated, and essentially dismissed from office a year before his term was up.
October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks, the woman considered by many to be the "mother of the
civil rights movement" died yesterday at 92. One thing I didn't
realize was that she wasn't sitting at the front of the bus nor in the
"white section" of the bus. Her action, started a more than a year
long bus boycott by black passengers that helped turn the tide against
southern apartheid. Here's the page from Wikipedia about
here. She and three other black people sat in "no man's land," a middle section of the bus where black people were allowed to sit if no white person came to sit there.
At a stop, a few white people boarded, and a white man was left standing. The driver, James Blake, turned around and addressed Parks and the other three. "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats," Blake is reported to have said.
According to the 1992 autobiography, "Rosa Parks, My Story," the man sitting next to her by the window stood up. The other two black women also complied. Parks wouldn't budge.
Colonel Larry
Wilkerson, former chief of staff of Colin Powell said that foreign
policy under the Bush administration is being run by a Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal. Sounds about right. Here's the speach in question. He also talks about Douglas Feith,
former Undersecretary of Defense, as "seldom in my life have I met a
dumber man". Here's his bio from the
State Department. Here's another article from the Washington post. Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."
Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."
October 21, 2005
These
guys reviewed a number of iPod FM transmitters. I had iTrip
which is a cool package but not strong enough to get through all of
the stations around Boston so overall a disappointment.
Here's a
new design for a wind turbine.
Looks like it is designed for residential areas where propeller
turbines either are unattractive or produce too much noise. The site
is minimal without pertinent information such as cost, output, sound,
etc. so I assume they are just starting out. Yeah, all they have is a
prototype and a patent.
Wait a minute.
It just occurred to me that I turned 40 while the movie the 40 Year Old
Virgin was in cinemas. The Pillsbury
Doughboy, Days
of our Lives, US
Medicare and Medicaid, all turned 40 this year, and now this. Huh. Not sure
what the take away is.
The Hubble
Space Telescope has focused on the moon to hunt for resources needed to sustain a
moon outpost such as oxygen. They took some high-res shots of the
Apollo 17 landing site. Looks like they need at least an order of
magnitude better optics to see the actual lander. I can't wait to see
the skeptics' faces when they show direct evidence of the lander. So
much work and time down the drain. The telescope first observed two Apollo landing sites, where astronauts had found the glassy, oxygen-bearing minerals. Hubble then viewed an area that astronauts have never visited: the young Aristarchus impact crater and the adjacent Schroter's Valley, or rille, where lava once flowed and which possibly contains additional oxygen-bearing material. A few billion years ago, lava flows and volcanic ash deposits covered the entire region with glassy material. The material is potentially similar to that found at some of the Apollo sites. Aristarchus crater, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon and 26 miles wide (42 km), was created when a asteroid collided with the moon a few hundred million years ago.
October 20, 2005
Cool tide calculator
site which implements David Flater's XTide
program. It shows you tables and graphs for times from the US,
Japan, and other sites around the world. Here's a good page about how tides work from
Wikipedia. Here's another from NOAA.
Researchers in Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL) have found a way to slow down and speed up
light in normal optical fiber. Here's the French page about it from EPFL (english translation). This is not the first time that scientists have tweaked the speed of a light signal. Even light passing through a window or water is slowed down a fraction as it travels through the medium. In fact, in the right conditions, scientists have been able to slow light down to the speed of a bicycle, or even stop it altogether. In 2003, a group from the University of Rochester made an important advance by slowing down a light signal in a room-temperature solid. But all these methods depend on special media such as cold gases or crystalline solids, and they only work at certain well-defined wavelengths. With the publication of their new method, the EPFL team, made up of Luc Thévenaz, Miguel Gonzaléz Herraez and Kwang-Yong Song, has raised the bar higher still. Their all-optical technique to slow light works in off-the-shelf optical fibers, without requiring costly experimental set-ups or special media. They can easily tune the speed of the light signal, thus achieving a wide range of delays.
A report in the New England Journal of medicine states that the drug Herceptin
cuts the risk of returning tumors in breast cancer by 50%. I
guess it is terribly expensive however (US$100k for a few months). Here's
the page about the drug from
the manufacturer Genentech.
Pressure is being put on regulators in the US and Europe to fast-track
the drug approval. Herceptin, which also has the generic name traztuzumab, targets a protein called HER2, which appears to be over-abundant in some women's breast cancers. An estimated fifth of breast cancer cases - around 10,000 women in the UK - are HER2 positive.
Roche, which makes Herceptin, has to submit an application to European regulators before the drug can be licensed for use in early-stage disease.
October 19, 2005
Meteorologists are saying that Wilma
hurricane may be the most powerful storm with the lowest recorded
barometric pressure in the history of the Atlantic. Here comes
another. May the powers that be help the folks in New Orleans if this
diverts from Florida. The 2005 season has (so-far) matched the 1933
record for the most active
season of tropical storms on record. Here's the warning from the National Hurricane Center. Forecasters are predicting the storm -- now a Category 5 with winds topping 175 mph -- to come very close to the Keys on Saturday. However, tropical storm force winds of at least 39 mph could impact the Keys beginning late Friday.
At 8 a.m. ET, the NHC reported an Air Force reconnaissance plane measured the storm's pressure at 882 millibars -- below the record of 888 millibars in 1988's Hurricane Gilbert. Forecasters warned that Wilma is a "catastrophic" Category 5 storm -- the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
October 18, 2005
10 years ago
today the OpenBSD
operating system was born when Theo de Raadt
forked the NetBSD sources after a longstanding dispute with the
maintainers. I use OpenBSD in a couple of places in my network where
security is critical: firewall, some DNS, some specialized. Thanks
Theo! Like the other open source BSDs and in contrast to most Linux distributions, the OpenBSD kernel and userland programs, such as the shell and common tools like cat and ps, are developed together in a single source repository. Third-party software is available as binary packages or may be built from source using the ports tree.
OpenBSD specialises in security and correctness and is considered by many to be very stable and reliable. It has a number of security features not found or optional in other operating systems and is often the first to implement new security ideas. In addition, its developers carefully and proactively audit the system's code. The project is led by Theo de Raadt from Calgary, Alberta, Canada and is released under a combination of licences, primarily the less restrictive BSD licence variants.
Disturbing
article about Sibel Edmonds, a translator for
the FBI who was terminated because she complained about department
problems. Seems on the surface like another example of using "war"
powers to hide problems in the administration. Sunlight is the best
disinfective. Some of the government's actions seem downright surreal. In the summer of 2002, for example, FBI officials met with Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and acknowledged the accuracy of some of Sibel's complaints. The senators then wrote to Justice Department officials, asking for an investigation.
After Sibel filed her suit the government declared that the briefing, the FBI comments, and even the senators' letters were to be retroactively classified and removed from public scrutiny.
Last April, the federal appeals court here excluded the press and public from Sibel's hearing. At one point, even she and her lawyers were told to leave the room so government attorneys could confer in secret with the judge.
October 17, 2005
Here's a terrible story about the mountains of trash on the streets in New Orleans. I've been
wondering what all of the cleanup will cost the federal taxpayer
versus proper planning and investment. The question is what it would
cost to properly protect all American cities versus just digging out
of a disaster every couple of decades. Roll the dice Johnny! It is more trash than any American city produces in a year. It is enough to fill the Empire State Building 40 times over. It will take at least 3.5 million truckloads to haul it away. "It is absolutely and completely revolting," Kathleen McGoey said on a recent day as she stood in front of a mound of Sheetrock, wicker chairs and moldy clothes outside an apartment building she owns.
This is not even counting the cars that have been abandoned on sidewalks, or the boats stranded on the streets. It is not counting the more than 1 million refrigerators, stoves and washing machines on curbs all over the area. This is not counting any of the hundreds of homes that will inevitably be demolished.
Interesting article about the Catholic Church's new teaching document entitled the Gift of
Scripture. The study book was recently published by the Catholic
bishops of England, Wales and Scotland. The document says that the
bible should not be expected to provide "scientific accuracy or
complete historical precision". That (for example) the story of
Garden of Eden is "symbolic language". I'm sure that this document
took courage to publish given the expected reaction by the devout.
I'm also very impressed that it states that the bible is "God's word
expressed in human language". Sounds very similar with language that
I have in my recent rant on Intelligent Design. Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in schools, believing intelligent design to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.
But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country's Catholic bishops insist cannot be historical. At most, they say, they may contain historical traces.
Here's another article about the document from Scotsman.com.
In fact the bishops go as far as to say that there are "significant dangers" involved in taking a fundamentalist approach to the Bible. "Such an approach is dangerous, for example, when people of one nation or group see in the Bible a mandate for their own superiority, and even consider themselves permitted by the Bible to use violence against others."
The document also warns against the use of certain passages for antisemitic purposes. In Matthew 27:35, the gospel reads: "His blood be on us and on our children", which, for centuries, was used to justify anti-Jewish behaviour. The passage is described as an example of dramatic exaggeration which has had "tragic consequences".
Pretty funny page
about this dude who had an account on Myspace which he hacked using cross-site scripting to
get a better popularity rating. Unfortunately for him it got a little
bit out of control. 
So
Rosemary noticed over the weekend that the Pillsbury
Doughboy also turned 40 this year. Not sure what that says about
me that he and I are the same age. Then again, he's still as smooth
and giggly as the day he was (ahhh) born. Thanks to Wikipedia
for telling me that the Doughboy's real name is "Poppin' Fresh". That
would be a cool name for a rapper.
October 14, 2005
Very
outdated but still very funny. Here are the 25 Dumbest Quotes of
2004 from Daniel Kurtzman of AlterNet. Here are a couple of my
favorites: 
Researches are close to developing a
vaccine that has shown itself to be 100% effective against two
virus strains that make up 70% of the cervical cancer cases. Wow!
Wonder if all cancers have a possible virus component. Wonder what
this means for more general disease research. Cervical cancer kills 274,000 women worldwide every year, including 1,120 in the UK. It is unusual in that most cases are known to be caused by a viral infection.
The two-year Future II trial found Gardasil was 100% effective at preventing early stage cancers and pre-cancerous abnormalities caused by the two key strains of HPV - the 16 and 18 strains - which cause 70% of cervical cancers.
Similar results were previously seen in a smaller trial of 277 women.
Another funny one from the Onion entitled Bush To
Appoint Someone To Be In Charge Of Country. "I've been talking to folks from all across this country, from Louisiana to Los Angeles, and people tell me the same thing: This nation needs a strong, compassionate leader," Bush said. "In response to these concerns, I'm making this a top priority. I will name a good, qualified person as soon as possible."
NASA and
X-Prize are teaming up to provide centennial prize competitions to
encourage "suborbital launch vehicle technology development". NASA and the Foundation are working toward signing a non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement to formalize collaboration on the two competitions. The competitions were tentatively named the Suborbital Payload Challenge and the Suborbital Lunar Lander Analog Challenge.
"We look forward to working with the X PRIZE Foundation over the coming months to define the rules for these competitions," said NASA Centennial Challenges Manager Brant Sponberg. "These prizes are intended to accelerate the development of the suborbital launch industry while also demonstrating technologies and capabilities relevant to other NASA activities."
Another scary story about the major drought in Amazon rainforest. It's unknown whether this is
a cyclical phenomena or some sort of byproduct of increased global
temperatures. I was just thinking that evening if the global warming
pundits have a 10% chance of being correct, given the penalties for
failure in that category (read global food/water catastrophe), you'd
think people would be more apt to err on the side of conservation. "The Amazon is a canary in a coal mine for the Earth. As we enter a warming trend we are in uncertain territory," he said.
Deforestation may also have contributed to the drought because cutting down trees cuts moisture in the air, increasing sunlight penetration onto land.
Other scientists say severe droughts were normal and occurred in cycles before global warming started.
Some initial
reports about the X-Prize event in New Mexico last week. Sounds like a lot of fun.
I might go out to the event next year. The organizers' goals were to show off what clever things entrepreneurs are doing to get into space, and to promote the X Prize Cup, a weeklong competition scheduled to begin in southern New Mexico next year. The contest will include a rocket race that backers pitch as a NASCAR event in three dimensions.
State officials, including Gov. Bill Richardson, are hoping that rocket races and space tourism will one day be a major part of the economy in New Mexico, a place that boasts the needed clear skies, wide open spaces and abundant controlled air space.
Interesting story about the New York Times' Judy
Miller and the neocons. This is the woman who spent 85 days in
jail protecting the identity of Irving Lewis Libby, Vice President
Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who is accused of outing an undercover
CIA operative in summer of 2003. Miller's reputation had already been deeply sullied by her inaccurate and one-sided reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction before the war. Questions have swirled about her relationship with the small coterie of neoconservatives, including Libby, who staffed key positions in the Bush administration, and who were allied with Ahmad Chalabi, a corrupt Iraqi expatriate and notorious liar who became Miller's principal source on WMD issues. Suspicions that Miller had crossed an ethical line and grown too close to her sources increased after the waiver letter she received from Libby was disclosed. That letter ended with this bizarre, highly personal passage: "You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby."
Extremely
cool hi-res picture of a sunspot taken by the Dunn Solar Telescope has
revealed striking features that hint at magnetic flow activity. The dark cores of penumbral fibrils and bright penumbral grains are seen as well in the sunspot penumbra (the fluted structures radiating outward from the spot). These features hold the key to understanding the magnetic structure of sunspots and can only be seen in ultra high-resolution images such as this one. Magnetism in solar activity is the "dark energy problem" being tackled in solar physics today.
Normally such features are beyond the grasp of ground-based solar telescopes because of blurring by Earth's turbulent atmosphere. The Dunn's AO76 system compensates for much of that blurring by reshaping a deformable mirror 130 times a second to match changes in the atmosphere and refocuses incoming light. This allows the Dunn to operate at its diffraction limit (theoretical best) of 0.14 arc-second resolution, rather than the 1.0 to 0.5 arc-second resolution normally allowed by Earth's atmosphere.
Great article from George Will complaining that Tom DeLay
is not a true conservative in the pure definition of the word. He
and I are supposed to be on opposite sides of the spectrum but I
always respect his views. He is rarely hypocritical. The indictments of DeLay although certainly political in terms of the prosecutor's motive and probably unjust as a matter of law are, considered solely in terms of their consequences, helpful to conservatives. DeLay, who neither knows nor cares any more about limited government than a camel knows or cares about calculus, probably will never return to the House leadership, and might even be voted out of the House in 13 months.
Great pages from the Register entitled Google Earth: the black helicopters have landed. Folks have been
running around the Google satellite images looking for interest
military and spy facilities. There's pictures of a B1B taking off, a
U2 in flight, submarines, North Korean propeller planes, NSA
facilities, bizarre runways, blurred facilities, and other oddities.
It makes me wonder if a bunch of people could get together and sponsor
a launch of a surveillance satellite that broadcasts public protocols
as a peace move. The ultimate Freedom of Information Act. Well, the results are in, but before announcing the winners, we thought it would be a lovely idea to have a look at some of the other entries which prove just why Google Earth will eventually provoke the complete collapse of Western civilization. If your stuff isn't included, don't take it too hard: we had so much material that it would have taken us another month simply to knock it into shape for publication.
So I'm turning 40
tomorrow but I thought I'd add this entry right now just to get it out
of the way. I just did a search on google images to find a 40 logo
and found the Old Guys Rule
t-shirt. That just sums it all up. Ugh. Turning 40 mostly makes me
really appreciate folks even older. I understand now that I will
always feel young at heart with the same (relatively) mental outlook
on life, with the only difference being that my body will be falling
apart. Self reflection helps you figure out what's important which is
always a good thing. Like I understand now that all I need to be
happy is a convertible and a secretarial arrangement!!
October 11, 2005
SpaceShipOne was installed at the Air & Space Museum in
Washington, DC on October 5th. Can't wait to go and see her.
I thought she was supposed to be installed in July. Here's the space.com article. Here's a bunch of pictures of the
installation. Rutan told several hundred visitors in the building's giant lobby that he was pleased the Smithsonian so quickly recognized the importance of SpaceShipOne.
"I knew that the significance would be known and understood by everyone in 10 years", said Rutan, 62. "I'm extremely pleased to see it here this early."
Like many space entrepreneurs, Rutan thinks the private sector can do what NASA cannot: inspire tomorrow's astronauts and scientists by offering them the real promise of a trip to space.
Found a bunch of
reference sites trying to psych out RSS and Atom feeds for my
blog.
Very
funny/cool site where the author makes a working sextant from
a CD case, some lego, and other various parts. The design takes advantage of the dimensional precision of CD parts and Lego bricks. The sextant arm is the CD itself and the sextant frame is the CD box. The angle is changed by turning the CD.
Of course the small CD radius gives limited precision to the instrument when compared to larger sextants, but it is enough for celestial navigation practice. Because the instrument is so small, care must be taken in all steps (cutting, sticking etc) to achieve the best possible precision.
The CD-Sextant is not only useful for celestial navigation, but also in coast navigation, using simple trigonometric relations. And it is surprisingly strong (I have dropped mine a couple times, with pieces flying in all directions, and it is still working).
Added initial
RSS features to my blog. Haven't used the validators, published the
link, or added any of the icons yet. Still thrashing out the formats.
Need at add atom support. There is a ton of information about this
and no clear information. I might muddy the waters with my own post
on the matter.
October 8, 2005
So I've finally
revamped my blog site. All of my entries are served from a perl
script that I hacked up. I know that I'm reinventing the wheel, but I
had some specific requirements and didn't want to be saddled with some
PHP or perl monstrosity that would never give me exactly what I
wanted. My script basically reads a number of ##_#.html files from a
year/month subdirectories to assemble the pages. There can be
##_#.jpg thumbnails associated with each entry. It does a number of
other stuff that makes my life easier and RSS compliance is on the
horizon.
October 7, 2005
Cool site that I stumbled
upon that is making specialized photovoltaic (solar) cells.
They use light concentrators on a revolving platform and get 6.6
kilowatt with a 23 foot diameter (415 square foot) circle. This is a
lot higher density than my solar panels for
example. PYRON SOLAR INC., an R&D company in La Jolla, California, developed in cooperation with Boeing-Spectrolab a novel system to convert sunlight into electricity. This revolutionary design is a low-profile floating system with short-focal-length lenses concentrating direct sunlight by 400X onto photovoltaic cells. These advanced multi-junction cells produce 800 times more electricity than conventional non-concentrating cells the same size.
News from the Guardian about flexible batteries developed by Donald Sadoway, professor of
materials science at MIT (research
paper PDF). These batteries are a thin sandwich of lithium and
Perspex, a special type of plastic. These batteries store a huge
amount of energy per kilogram. A traditional lead acid battery (where one electrode is made of lead, the other of lead dioxide and sulphuric acid floats between the two) has a capacity of 35 watt hours per kilogram (Wh/kg). The nickel metal hydride batteries that became available in the early 1990s, and enabled laptop computing, are about 90Wh/kg. Newer lithium ion batteries, used in mobile phones and today's laptops, are 125 Wh/kg.
"At 125Wh/kg, you can drive a car 125 miles on a single charge - that's not good enough," says Sadoway. "You need to go about 250 miles on a single charge before it's going to have widespread appeal. So you need a battery that's about 250Wh/kg. We've got batteries in my lab right now that are 300Wh/kg and I can see the possibility of breaking 400Wh/kg."
So this is a bizarre
site full of half baked ideas and things that look to me to be
outright scams. But there's probably some cool technology ideas or at
least impressive hacks. Here's one of my favorite product
descriptions. The Super Heat Pump can make hot refrigerant very efficiently from ambient, and cold water from the ground on its way to the crops can cool the gas down to repeat the work cycle that pumps the water and drives the compressor. The crops get lukewarm water for free.
Interesting page about hydraulic
regenerative braking where a hydraulic reservoir stores energy when
you brake and is used to assist the motor when starting up. It is
designed for large pick-ups to improve fuel mileage but it would work
for small vehicles too. There's also talk about the transmission that the Feds killed that doubles your fuel
mileage. Eighty percent of the initial kinetic energy is returned to the vehicle. "The system stores approximately 380 kJ of energy," says Brad Bohlmann, a mechanical engineer and business development coordinator in Advanced Technology at Eaton's Fluid Power Group. "With that much energy, we can accelerate a 10,000-lb vehicle from a dead stop to between 25 and 30 miles per hour with no assistance from the vehicle's combustion engine."
Found cool site the other called
Electric Vehicles UK. They have
very cool news links which
pointed me to a couple other cool links related to EV technology. Americans, unlike Europeans, have every reason not to question the growing fuel cell hype. This side of the pond, however, you can bet your bottom Euro that every vested interest in sight - taxman, oil-turned-hydrogen fuel-supplier(ie. BP, Texaco, Shell etc.) , 'ICE'-maker and 'ICE' retailer(see 'Glossary') - will frantically connive and collude to keep the price of hydrogen fuel pegged at least as high as that of petrol.
October 4, 2005
Looking around
at electric car pollution details took me to the electric car that I want to
buy -- the Tango. So it turns out that George
Clooney just recently bought one. "George Clooney saw and drove his Tango today for the first time. He was just interviewed by "Interview Magazine" today at the Smoke House across from Warner Brothers studios. As he bought the Tango sight-unseen, we are very pleased to see that he's so excited about it."
One of the common arguments
against electric cars from the ill-informed is that you are only
transferring the point of pollution -- from the electric car to the
power plant. This is untrue. I went looking for pollution output of power plants (referencing this
methodology) versus the "average car" and it looks like electric cars would produce 1/2
to 1/3 of CO2 and particulates even before we talk about cleaner
technologies such as nuclear, solar, and wind. It is also much easier
to clean up 1000s of power plants than millions of cars. Coal. According to these studies, a new coal fired power plant will release between 1.96 (PLC) and 2.09 (DOE) pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour of operation. For our report, we assume that any given coal-fired power plant will emit 2 pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour.
Natural Gas. Pace's table 3, "Emissions for Natural Gas-Fired Generation," puts the rate of emissions for these type of plants at 1.14 pounds (PLC) and 0.99 pounds (DOE) of CO2 per kilowatt hour. For this study, we assume that 1 pound of CO2 will be released per kilowatt hour; that is, a plant with 1 megawatt capacity will release 8.76 million pounds per year -- 4,380 short tons / 3,973 metric tons.
Oil. Pace's table 4, "Emissions for Oil-Fired Generation," puts the rate of emissions for oil-fired plants at 1.65 (DOE) to 1.75 (PLC) pounds of CO2 per kilowatt hour. For this study, we assume that 1.7 pounds of CO2 will be released per kilowatt hour, or the equivalent of 7,446 short tons / 6,754 metric tons of CO2 per year per megawatt.
Scientists have
discovered that the new Kuiper belt object named Xena
has a moon, nicknamed Gabrielle. This raises the prospect that it
will be declared a planet and also calls into question whether Pluto
is a planet given that it is smaller and without a moon. The newly discovered moon is about 155 miles wide and 60 times fainter than Xena, the farthest-known object in the solar system. It is currently 9 billion miles away from the sun, or about three times Pluto's current distance from the sun.
Scientists believe Xena's moon was formed when Kuiper Belt objects collided with one another. The Earth's moon formed in a similar way when Earth crashed into an object the size of Mars.
October 3, 2005
Terrible story
about what the Coca-Cola corporation is doing to a remote village in India. It
is yet another reminder that corporations have no soul, no conscience,
and no moral oversight. There are so many tragic stories about what
corporations are doing to native peoples around the world in the name
of profit. There has been talk about laws which try to hold
corporations liable for the behavior of their plants and subsidiaries
in other countries. This, as you might expect, has been rejected
vehemently by the the corporations. I think that this country would be
better served if there was such oversight. The behavior of US
corporations impacts human rights and world popular opinion which has
stability and security ramifications. That said we can't handicap our
corporations in the world markets so we would need to get WTF and EU
buy-in before it makes sense. Although the local people had begun protesting against their wells running dry months after the plant began operations, serious trouble for the company began a little more than two years ago when a local doctor declared the water still available in the wells unfit for consumption.
In July 2003, a BBC Radio-4 report, after carrying out tests at the University of Exeter in Britain, pronounced the sludge as dangerously laden with heavy metals, especially cadmium and lead and already contaminating the food chain. The sludge also had no value as fertilizer, the report said.
2021:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2008:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2009:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
2006:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2007:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2004:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
2005:
Jan
Feb
Mar
Apr
May
Jun
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
Nov
Dec
Free Spam Protection Android ORM Simple Java Zip JMX using HTTP Great Eggnog Recipe