Gray Watson's Blog -- January 2009

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.

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January 14, 2009

Oh this is exactly right on. as of 1/1/2009, event 2009+ car in California must carry a label raking the vehicles environmental impact in terms of smog and greenhouse gas emissions. This is exactly what needs to be done to educate the consumer about the effect their buying habits have on the planet and, we can only hope, cause car makers to build more efficient and cleaner cars in the future. Other sources: autobloggreen.com.
The label will show a simple ranking system that provides consumers with practical information that can help them choose the most environmentally friendly vehicle that still meets their transportation needs.

The environmental performance label will have two scores on a scale of 1-10, a global warming score and a smog score. The higher the score the more environmentally friendly the car is. The average new car will score five on both scales.
Raser Technologies is developing geothermal power plants which use hot spots on the earth's surface to drive steam turbines. They estimate that their initial [small-ish] plant can generate 11 megawatts with room to expand.
Water deep underground is heated by the earth's natural heat. The hot water is brought to the surface and delivered to Raser's modular power generation array through pipes. The hot well-water is then distributed to each of the fifty power generation units in the network in parallel via the large pipes feeding each row of 25 units. Each power generation unit produces its own power simultaneously from the hot well water.
Article from the BBC reporting on the warnings from some experts that the increase in data flowing across the net will cause it to collapse at some point. I disagree an think that to a large degree the Net is self correcting. If the video phone doesn't work, you'll hang up and not use it again. There are many technologies that require the bandwidth but if they don't work, people will throttle back.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, every year someone says the internet is going to collapse under the weight of the traffic. Looking at the figures, that seems a reasonable prediction. "Back in the days of the dotcom boom in the late 90s, billions of dollars were invested around the world in laying cables," said net expert Bill Thompson. "Then there was the crash of 2000 and since then we've been spending that inheritance, using that capacity, growing services to fill the space that was left over by all those companies that went out of business."
Google continues to tweak its search engine algorithm to try and improve on their aps and stay ahead of spammers. They continue to be the best site on the net IMO so they are doing something right.
Google's approach to search reflects its unconventional management practices. It has hundreds of engineers, including leading experts in search lured from academia, loosely organized and working on projects that interest them. But when it comes to the search engine -- which has many thousands of interlocking equations -- it has to double-check the engineers' independent work with objective, quantitative rigor to ensure that new formulas don't do more harm than good.
Great piece on how hard it is going to be to colonize distant planets by Charlie Stross. He reviews the realities of current space technology and magic wand solutions. It is science fiction meeting brutal pragmatism.
The long and the short of what I'm trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic -- magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today's perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics -- interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won't rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.
So I am very close to buying an electric car from Hybrid Technologies. They are a company in North Carolina who takes Toyota Yaris, Mini coopers, and other cars and retrofits them with lithium ion battery packs. A converted Yaris will cost me ~$38k, get 120 miles range, and lose its back seat. A lot to pay but I believe in voting with my wallet and I've been promising myself that I would buy an electric car (no hydrogen here please) if I could find one. Needless to say, I'm very excited. I'll have a whole page about it if/when it happens.
Speed: over 75 mph, acceleration: 0-60 mph in 12 seconds, range: 120+ miles, charge Time: 6 hours, battery cycle life: 2500+ full charges. It comes with a LCD Touch Screen showing miles remaining, power consumption, each cell's level of charge, battery temperature, drive time, distance traveled, and average speed.

January 6, 2009

Here's a cool design for a shrouded wind turbine designed by the FloDesign folks. Not sure if it is as efficient but it encorporates some cool features. They claim the same output as the much larger and less stable 3 bladed designs which would be a big deal if true. Here's a cool video showing the airflow although you should read the article first to understand why.
The company's design, which draws on technology developed for jet engines, circumvents a fundamental limit to conventional wind turbines. Typically, as wind approaches a turbine, almost half of the air is forced around the blades rather than through them, and the energy in that deflected wind is lost. At best, traditional wind turbines capture only 59.3 percent of the energy in wind, a value called the Betz limit.

FloDesign surrounds its wind-turbine blades with a shroud that directs air through the blades and speeds it up, which increases power production. The new design generates as much power as a conventional wind turbine with blades twice as big in diameter. The smaller blade size and other factors allow the new turbines to be packed closer together than conventional turbines, increasing the amount of power that can be generated per acre of land.
I'm always interested in home wind turbine sites. Hope to have a small wind turbine grid-tied one on my house sooner. This is a cool little site which sells some nice looking kits and equipment. I found them from this you-do-it video on how to make a turbine. Pretty cool. If you want something a bit larger you could install a Redriver model turbine in the 10-20 kilowatt range. Yumm. Here's another site which sells complete wind turbine kits for ~US$1300. Looks like I might want better low wind speed output for my house but it's hard to tell.

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