Gray Watson's Blog -- March 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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March 30, 2009   

• Pretty cool research being done at the "NanoCenter" at University of Marylnad into nanocapacitors which store large amounts of power and recharge quickly. They are at the research stage only but still, here's another technology which holds promise to improve battery technology. Other sources: Nanocenter press release.

  Electrical energy storage devices fall into three categories. Batteries, particularly lithium ion, store large amounts of energy but cannot provide high power or fast recharge. Electrochemical capacitors (ECCs), also relying on electrochemical phenomena, offer higher power at the price of relatively lower energy density. In contrast, electrostatic capacitors (ESCs) operate by purely physical means, storing charge on the surfaces of two conductors. This makes them capable of high power and fast recharge, but at the price of lower energy density.

  The Maryland research team's new devices are electrostatic nanocapacitors which dramatically increase energy storage density of such devices - by a factor of 10 over that of commercially available devices - without sacrificing the high power they traditionally characteristically offer. This advance brings electrostatic devices to a performance level competitive with electrochemical capacitors and introduces a new player into the field of candidates for next-generation electrical energy storage.

March 29, 2009   

• Here's a cool little electronics project kit that I found on thinkgeek.com.

  Being a geek means being naturally curious about the world around you. Since you love electronic products you are also likely to be very interested in how they actually work. What are the basic electronic parts? How do they function? How are they related to one another? These questions and more can be answered by spending some time with our electronics kit.

  The DIY Electronics Design & Projects Kit contains everything you need to learn the basics of electronics circuit design. It contains all of the most common electronics components as well as a prototyping breadboard for you to get started right away. Make a light detector, work with IC chips, create an interactive noise maker and more. Hours of amusement and intrigue for students, professionals, hobbyists, artists, and geeks of all types. No soldering is required and the included illustrated manual guides you through each of the projects. After you build all of the projects you can use the parts for your own designs. Includes over 130 parts.

• I've been looking for a good solution for something like this for a while. This product claims to reflect heat without severely limiting visible light. The idea is to reflect the heat from a house back into the house in the winter and then turn the panels around to reflect the summer heat back out of the house.

  A see through Insulating Panel mounted to the inside of windows, doors or skylights. The panel is manufactured of a metalized, coated, polyethylene sheet laminated to a sheet of carbon graphite PVC that is then perforated and laminated to a sheet of clear polyester.

  The IN'FLECTOR insulating panel is reversible, so the reflective surface can face outward during the seasons when solar gain is a problem, and the carbon PVC surface can face outward during cold seasons to reflect heat back into the building and collect convective sunlight for conversion to radiant heat. The panel is held in place with magnets which form a virtually air tight seal and inhibits infiltration, conduction and convection while providing additional dead air space for insulation.

• Here's an interesting gadget -- a personal solar concentrator or heliostat. You get a computer controlled solar mirror about 3' square on a mounting pole.

  Introducing the Practical Solar Heliostat System – the world’s first computer-controlled heliostat system that’s easily installable using only hand tools. Rugged design comes together with superior tracking technology & user-friendly software that runs on the User’s PC. You now have the power to direct sunlight where you want it, for whatever purpose you imagine.

  Use one heliostat for natural lighting through a window or skylight – the mirrors on a single heliostat reflect as much visible light as forty 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. Or use two heliostats to reflect sunlight into a room for direct space heating*. Along with light, each heliostat reflects 600 watts of thermal energy, meaning that two heliostats provide about as much heat as an electric space heater. Several heliostats can be combined with a device like a thermal receiver for a wide variety of more sophisticated thermal applications.

• Here's a cute little gadget with which you can monitor the power usage of your appliances and other equipment remotely from the wireless display.

  Using a small unit that hooks up to your electricity meter and a portable handheld device, you can see how much electricity you are using. With greater awareness you’ll become more energy efficient, as well as unearth those stealth energy eaters that cost you more than you think.

  Fully educated, you're in a position to make lifestyle changes to reduce your carbon footprint and reduce your electricity bills. Try switching appliances off and on – you'll see instant results in your portable LCD display! Built-in memory stores previous data and before you know it, trying to maintain low energy consumption and beat yesterday's reading becomes a curiously addictive challenge.

• {} Here's some information about the state of the east coast offshore wind turbine projects: Cape Wind, Long Island Power Authority, and Garden State Offshore Energy from Treehugger.
  • New Jersey deep water offshore wind farm
  • 700 megawatt offshore wind farm plan takes step forward
  • Cape Wind offshore wind farm clears another permitting hurdle

• So there are ways of using solar power to cool of all things. It's an interesting principle to be sure. He's details about a project from Chile.

  Even if each time the words ‘solar refrigerator’ come in the news it sounds like a groundbreaking story, truth is the idea of using heat to create cold is pretty old. A French inventor came up with a concept to do this as far back as 1858, there are records that show a machine prototype from 1935, and the concept of evaporative cooling has been widely explored, as Lloyd notes in a previous article.

  However, it’s always interesting to see new prototypes. This one comes from South America and is based on adsorption, using methane as gas and active carbon as the absorbent solid material. Get the details and larger pics in the extended.

March 24, 2009   

• I love the Tintin comics and my 9 year old son now does too. Still fun to read and very well done. For those of you who are Tintin and Captain Haddock fans, here are some of the Captain's curses. Ten Thousand Thundering Typhoons!!

  Pirates! Doryphores! Gobbledygooks! Filibusters! Slubberdegullions! Patagonians! Vampires! Sycophant! Kleptomaniacs! Egoists! Tramps! Monopolizers! Pockmarks! Belemnite! Crooks! Miserable earthworms! Coconuts! Harlequin! Parasites! Macrocephalic baboon! Brutes! Guano gatherer! Pachyrhizus! Toads! Gyroscope! Bougainvillea! Bloodsuckers!

March 23, 2009   

• Some cool videos of New Zealanders test driving the Mitsubishi iMiEV, a futuristic looking Electric Vehicle (EV). This is [hopefully] what all driving is going to be in 15-20 years. More on the iMiEV from automotoportal.com.

  Things you'll find in the videos of everyday New Zealanders test driving the Mitsubishi iMiEV: astonishment at the silent motor, a joke about the horn "sounding like an electric car," another joke about putting a huge exhaust pipe under the back, just to mess with people and someone not getting anxious about the exhaust generated at a stoplight. "I'm just enjoying the guilt-free," says driver #1, Laurie Foon. Overall, the (assumed) natural responses to people testing this all-electric city car in the videos posted by MitsubishiMotorsNZ shows that the company should have a hit on their hands if they can just deliver what the car promises.

• Really cool tilt/shift movie courtesy of Boing Boing. Truly an amazing effect which shortens the focal range giving the effect of miniature life. Here's the wikipedia page on tilt shift miniature faking.

  Some photographers have popularized the use of tilt for selective focus in applications such as portrait photography. The selective focus that can be achieved by tilting the plane of focus is often compelling because the effect is different from that to which many viewers have become accustomed. Walter Iooss Jr. of Sports Illustrated, Vincent Laforet, Ben Thomas, and many other photographers have images using this technique on their web sites.

March 17, 2009   

• Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California are experimenting with 192 laser beams designed to fuse a pellet of hydrogen and generate more energy then they put in. The hydrogen will be compressed and heated to 800 times hotter than our sun in tests that will hopefully happen this year. Sources: Tom Friedman's Next Really Cool Thing

  The scientists hope to refine the process over the next year until they trigger a nuclear reaction capable of producing large amounts of energy. "We hope the ignition experiments will show that we can generate more power than we put in and that fusion can be the source of a supply of carbon-free energy," said Ed Moses, director of the NIF.

  "I think the old joke about fusion being just 50 years away, no matter when you ask, is about to become defunct. If we succeed, public perception of fusion will change because it is the ultimate energy source - no carbon, limitless, safe and secure."

• Keith Olbermann is often obtuse and like many pundits closer to the fringe of the left and the right as opposed to the center, he can get a bit shrill and often loses me. However, his piece about gay marriage done in the wave of the Prop 8 vote in California is right on the mark -- heart felt and sincere. I encourage you to watch the video or you can read it.

  If you voted for this Proposition or support those who did or the sentiment they expressed, I have some questions, because, truly, I do not understand. Why does this matter to you? What is it to you? In a time of impermanence and fly-by-night relationships, these people over here want the same chance at permanence and happiness that is your option. They don't want to deny you yours. They don't want to take anything away from you. They want what you want—a chance to be a little less alone in the world.

  Only now you are saying to them—no. You can't have it on these terms. Maybe something similar. If they behave. If they don't cause too much trouble. You'll even give them all the same legal rights—even as you're taking away the legal right, which they already had. A world around them, still anchored in love and marriage, and you are saying, no, you can't marry. What if somebody passed a law that said you couldn't marry?

• They are installing an underwater turbine downstream from a hydroelectric power plant in the Mississippi River near Hastings, Minnesota. The turbine was made by Hydro Green Energy from Houston, Texas -- Verdant Power is another manufacturer. They expect to increase the plant's output by 5%.

  "We don't require that massive dam construction, we're just using the natural flow of the stream," said Mark Stover, a vice president at Hydro Green Energy, the Houston-based company leading the project. "It's underwater windpower if you will, but we have 840 or 850 times the energy density of wind."

  Hydrokinetic turbines like those produced by Hydro Green and Verdant capture the mechanical energy of the water's flow and turn it into energy, without need for a dam. The problem for companies like Hydro Green is that their relatively low-impact turbines are forced into the same regulatory bucket as huge hydroelectric dams. The regulatory hurdles have made it difficult to actually get water flowing through projects.

March 16, 2009   

• Interesting piece about how solar water systems are more efficient from a $$$$ to kilowatt. It is going to be interesting to rate all energy systems in kilowatts -- in how much you are saving in equivalent electric systems. Evacuated tube water heating systems are plummeting in price while photovoltaic systems (solar electricity) are if anything getting more expensive.

  The evacuated tube solar hot water heaters like the one shown in the top picture are getting really cheap now that the Chinese manufacturers are cranking them out- the salesman told me that he could put one on my house for $3,000 and that it could serve a family of four.

  That would replace a conventional electric hot water heater that uses roughly 15kWh of energy per day. A natural gas heater probably uses pretty much the same, albeit cheaper, energy. But essentially, putting that solar heater on the roof offsets 15kWh worth of energy per day from other sources.

  Under average conditions, to get 15 kWh out of photovoltaics you would need a 3 kw system, batteries and inverters. At about ten bucks per watt that comes to $ 30,000. So cost of energy from the photovoltaic system is ten times as high as that from the solar hot water system.

March 14, 2009   

• Scary story about the effect on main street of the financial crisis. Cleveland neighborhoods are prime examples of the grim circumstances out there. Terrible.

  And in December, just when local officials thought things couldn’t get worse, Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, posted a record number of foreclosure filings. The number of empty houses is so staggeringly high that no one has an accurate count. The city estimates that 10,000 houses, or 1 in 13, are vacant. The county treasurer says it’s more likely 15,000. Most of the vacant houses are owned by lenders who foreclosed on the properties and by the wholesalers who are now sweeping in to pick up houses in bulk, as if they were trading in baseball cards.

• Fabulous speech by Aimee Mullins, athlete, model, and double amputee sponsored by the TED folks. Aimee talks about her dozen or so pairs of legs including ones she is wearing that make her 6' 1" tall in high heels. Fascinating. Here's her wikipedia page.

  Athlete, actor and activist Aimee Mullins talks about her prosthetic legs -- she's got a dozen amazing pairs -- and the superpowers they grant her: speed, beauty, an extra 6 inches of height ... Quite simply, she redefines what the body can be.

  A record-breaker at the Paralympic Games in 1996, Aimee Mullins has built a career as a model, actor and activist for women, sports and the next generation of prosthetics.

March 13, 2009   

• Oh my goodness is this painful to watch. This past week Jon Stewart from the Daily Show and Jim Cramer the loud idiot from CNBC's Mad Money have been yelling back and forth at each other. Cramer's an idiot to go toe to toe with Stewart. Watch here as Cramer comes on the show and is completely roasted. Uncomfortable. Other sources: PBS, CNN.

  Jon shows clips from some sort of training film as Cramer basically is telling some trader how to game the system. How to spread rumors that are false so that the stock goes the direction that you want it. Jon's basic point is that CNBC isn't reporting as much as it is colluding with the idiots on Wall Street. Anyone who thinks that most of their reporting operates within the boundaries of proper journalism needs to wake up.

  JON STEWART: When you talk about the regulators, why not the financial news network? That's the whole point of this. CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination. It feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard-earned -- and that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on, but that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening.

March 12, 2009   

• Man does this rock. This dude as combined a bunch of YouTube videos to make a musical piece. He takes various instruments and riffs and then edits the hell of them. Amazingly cool. Other sources: Thru-you, Josh Bearman's blog.

  The guy peruses god knows how many clips of songs, historical performances, homemade bedroom noodling, high school band recitals, and low budget YouTube instrumental instructional videos, and combines them to form his own songs. The result is seven diverse -- and good! -- songs of various genres. That first one arranges some fairly active and original funk out of dozens of different instruments and melodies, including a guy with a mullet playing a theremin.

March 10, 2009   

• So Ro and I watch Opera on occasion. Some trash but usually entertaining and often informative. On the show we are watching now, Dr. Oz, her physician consult who is always good. The show was on medical mistakes and Dr. Oz had some great ideas about how we as patients can help.
  • Avoid Infection:
  • Ask people to wash their hands before touching you.
  • Keep hand sanitizer by your bed, ask all health care givers use it
  • Try to avoid bacteria-promoting items, like flowers and jewelry.
  • Ask doctors to clean their stethoscopes. Clean television remotes.
  • Ask a male doctor to remove his tie, or else tuck it into his shirt. Bow ties are ideal.
  • Prevent Hospital Mistakes:
  • avoid wrong-site surgery by marking your body -- both "cut here" and "don't cut here" marks
  • avoid chit-chat, don't distract care workers from their job
  • find a high tech hospital
  • ask if hospital follows care checklist protocols
  • make sure sure hospital is accredited
  • make friends with your primary care giver in hospital (hospitalist)
  • be a smart patient
  • Be A Smart Patient:
  • make them check wristband when they come to do a procedure, ask questions
  • know why everything is being done to you
  • know what medicines you take
  • carry up-to-date list of medicines

March 2, 2009   

• Here's a bunch of interesting links to various stories on TreeHugger.com. Pretty good site for green technology news. Some crap of course. I subscribe to their blog which gets 10-20 stories daily.
  • Solar manufacturers are getting close to $1/watt costs
  • Very practical and interesting take on large scale cheap solar power using plastics
  • Interesting piece about how separating solid from liquid bathroom waste
  • Terrible story about how shipping accounts for the same polution as half of the world's cars
  • Very cool looking small plug-in low power PC

March 1, 2009   

• Here are a couple of stores from space.com that I found interesting.
  • NASA's Dawn spacecraft zooms past Mars heading for a rendezvous with the asteroid Vesta in 2011
  • The spirit rover on Mars has gotten another cleaning by the Martian winds given it a boost to its solar panel output
  • Advocates for space solar power generators which beam power to Earth are hoping for space in the stimulus package

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