IANAL, IJLS: “Once again probability proves itself willing to sneak into the back alley and service Drama as would a copper piece harlot.”
I have GOT to remember that for the next time something breaks the odds in real life. Something with a 10% chance of happening is really unlikely something with a one in a million chance is a sure thing. Just awesome.
Nasa’s lander sampled water on Mars results from last week show. I forgot to post this earlier. While not unexpected, it is still exciting to get the confirmation that, yes, water is in the dirt. People are making more of this than they should of course, but it is an exciting first step. Some of the making more of it comes in the form of articles being published and retracted. The latest news appears to be that peroxide may have been found in the ground. If true that would put the kibosh on any possible life. It also appears to get them the 90 day extension that they need to finish running the suite of tests that they sent up there. I mean really, how many millions to get this thing there and they have a couple delays and you are going to skimp out on the extra 90 days they need? At least they got it.
It looks like NASA has at least two more major press conferences coming up though, so who know what the verified results will actually be?
Branson has finally unveiled the mothership for his new space flight venture. That in and of itself isn’t so exciting, especially given the state of the economy and where I believe we are headed in the near future, however the technologies being improved for this venture are potentially extremely valuable. The lightweight banded composites, and more efficient lifting designs will certainly be useful as fuel becomes more and more expensive.
I will be much more excited when they have the Space Ship 2 ready to go.
The Atlantic has a great article on the background of the chevy Volt. It is a really great article and spends as much time talking about the politics and advertising behind it as it does the engineering. I really hope it does succeed and that GM is really able to back it and not wimp out like it did with the Saturn. GM and the US need this car to succeed.
Honeybees are disappearing. Watch this video to learn about how bees communicate with each other through their special dances, and how they are disappearing.
I’m glad to see that the CTA is trying out serial hybrid busses. While cars are really too small to use current technology in, busses are large enough that the different drive train makes sense. A similar system has been in use by trains for years. The addition of a moderating battery and regenerative braking turns the diesel electric drive train into a true serial hybrid. The advantage of this over a standard hybrid is that you only have one drive-train and the gas powered engine can always run at optimal efficiency since it is just running a generator. This also means no more busses idling downtown for a half hour at a time.
The detritus of the “Faster, Cheaper, Better” (pick any two) Nasa methodology was picked up and modified for the Phoenix mission. Because of that this was a fairly risky mission. However it appears that NASA managed to land a powered legged lander on Mars for the first time since the 70s. It appears that everything worked as expected, the legs are on the ground, the solar arrays are deployed, and pictures are coming back home. I’m only sad no rover. At least there are still two running about elsewhere on the planet.
From the ground to your car has a number of steps. Drilling, shipping (or flowing through pipelines), and refining. The drilling and shipping is normally done by the big oil companies who are making a pretty good profit right about now. Prices go up profit margins go up and all that. Of course as oil gets harder to get out of the ground, the price of drilling goes up, but over all the oil companies are doing ok. I am always trying to figure out why gas is so cheap though. If $20/barrel oil = $1/gal gas, you would think that $100/barrel would be $5 gas (modulo additives and sunk costs, like the refineries themselves).
Turns out the refineries are sort of taking some of that cost. I assume this is a what the market will bear situation, but it is interesting to note that independent refineries in the US are tanking in the stock market. Turns out their profit margin is way down. They rely on a heavy difference between the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline (the “crack” price) in order to maintain good cash flow to do maintenance and general operations on existing refineries. Not only that, but they also rely on that extra cash to make efficiency improvements. Unfortunately that crack price has dropped to record lows. One of the reasons that gas prices aren’t $5 yet is that the independent refineries are taking it on the chin. Unfortunately this also means that newer more modern and efficient refineries are not being built. As we learn to wean ourselves from oil we also need to be learning how to use what remains with the utmost efficiency. Right now it looks like the refining process may be one of the bottlenecks there.
On the plus side, they finally finished sequencing Trichoderma reesei and most Americans think that the world is running out of oil. Wow. I really didn’t expect that result at all.
If you think that we can retrofit our society to exist without oil, the refinery shut down in Scotland provides an educational example. The refinery shutdown has reduced fuel availability, thus stopping work on the large wind farm that is being constructed in Scotland. If we haven’t made good progress to a oil free system before oil becomes truly constricted we might not be able to build that alternative system.
Rather, the cost of converting will be larger than we are really willing to pay in human terms.
I’ve never been a big Edison fan. I’m more of a Tesla guy myself, but I think that is because I always root for the hard working underdog. I’ve lately been reading a couple of things from Edison though that make me appreciate his vision a lot more. Check this quote out from 1910:
Some day some fellow will invent a way of concentrating and storing up sunshine to use instead of this old, absurd Prometheus scheme of fire. I’ll do the trick myself if some one else doesn’t get at it. Why, that is all there is about my work in electricity–you know, I never claimed to have invented electricity–that is a campaign lie–nail it!
Sunshine is spread out thin and so is electricity. Perhaps they are the same, but we will take that up later. Now the trick was, you see, to concentrate the juice and liberate it as you needed it. The old-fashioned way inaugurated by Jove, of letting it off in a clap of thunder, is dangerous, disconcerting and wasteful. It doesn’t fetch up anywhere. My task was to subdivide the current and use it in a great number of little lights, and to do this I had to store it. And we haven’t really found out how to store it yet and let it off real easy-like and cheap. Why, we have just begun to commence to get ready to find out about electricity. This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of–it is so wasteful. It is just the old, foolish Prometheus idea, and the father of Prometheus was a baboon.
When we learn how to store electricity, we will cease being apes ourselves; until then we are tailless orangutans. You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all of our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.
Do we use them? Oh, no! We burn up wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property.
There must surely come a time when heat and power will be stored in unlimited quantities in every community, all gathered by natural forces. Electricity ought to be as cheap as oxygen, for it can not be destroyed.
Now, I am not sure but that my new storage-battery is the thing. I’d tell you about that, but I don’t want to bore you…
I love this quote on a number of levels. First, Edison was a Darwinian in 1910. (Or maybe that was just a metaphor.) Second, he is willing to slam on his own inventions. “The scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick.” I love that. Even just when generators are being invented he saw that burning resources was not the way to go. And such a simple metaphor, we burn up wood and coal as renters burn up the front fence. HA! That is great. (Of course he doesn’t mention another alternative to burning fuel which had been running since the previous decade.)
Still there is some vision there. Maybe the next book I read will be about Edison.
According to Crain’s (dead tree version, no link) Illinois landfill (unused) capacity is currently 1 billion cubic yards. My building generates 2 cubic yards a week, or about 100 a year. In 2006, Illinois landfills accepted 54.9 million cubic yards. That means my building generates .00002% of the waste in the state of Illinois. Interestingly Illinois recyclers report that they diverted 32.4 million cubic yards from the landfills. What does this all mean? Without recycling we have an excess of landfill of 11 years of garbage production, with recycling it is 19 years. It works!
Also, I recently discovered that “97.5% of structural steel beams and plates were recycled.[25] Other steel construction elements such as reinforcement bars are recycled at a rate of about 65%. (wiki)” Now if only we can make it so cost effective for other materials.
The more energy you pump into the system (energy = temperature, system = Earth) the more chaotic the system becomes. That is to say, in the short term, when you disturb an oscillating system (the Earth’s weather) you can get more erratic swings, until the system settles into its new equilibrium. This will cause greater unevenness in the heating of the surface of the earth, in turn causing greater wind speed. Conclusion: wind power becomes more viable, the more oil we burn.
Ed to add: The above is sarcasm. However it is useful for dealing with people who think that any individual data point has anything at all to say about global warming and climate change.
As the price of oil continues to rise, there are a number of solutions that are slowly being put in place. In my humble opinion, corn based ethanol is not the solution. If we are going to have an ethanol solution it will have to be a cellulosic one. I do not want my energy supply competing with my food supply. Especially not with the farmers can make much more selling corn as ethanol than as food. Plus corn is a terrible crop for other reasons.
War profiteering and war go hand in hand. When there is money to be made at the expense of others it will be made. I have to say though, this inflation of price makes $60 million for a satellite shoot down not look so bad. And speaking of that, my favorite explanation of why we did it: so that we could show China that you can test anti satellite weapons without reigning debris all over low earth orbit.
So, these guys came to my door about two months ago. They kinda freaked me out since, well, I don’t like people coming to my door. It was just before I went on vacation so I was nervous about them casing the joint, as it were. In any case, they announced themselves as representatives from ComEd. They had uniforms and badges and clipboards (Fletch anyone?). But I locked myself out just in case.
Suffice it to say, they gave the real hard sell. Interestingly they gave enough information to realize that as a company they couldn’t possibly make money in the long run. If you took the time to sit down and run the numbers that they were pitching that is. Those numbers were quite different from the numbers that their literature actually gives. The funny thing is, since I believe in the long term increase of the price of oil, even with their inflated rates, I think they would still have lost money in the long term. Still not worth it to buy in though because they will go out of business long before you actually get your money out of them.
So to cut this boring story short, RPB reports that they actually are scam artists. Lisa Madigan is taking them to court. And here when I was starting to lose my faith in her. The press release is pretty good, and clearly points out the flaws in their offer. The thing it doesn’t point out is that if the energy prices really did spike, US Energy Savings Corp would most likely have gone out of business paying off the more expensive gas prices having blown all the extra cash from when their prices were higher. That is if they just didn’t all run off to Aruba long before then.
I am not looking at this until I have finished my big push that I am doing for one of my clients right now.
You, however, may feel free to enjoy the mapstavaganza.
Did you know that your TV is about to become obsolete? That nice piece of solid state analog sub-carrierwave decoding device we call the color television will be obsolete on February 17th, 2009. One of the longest living common usage standards ever, RS-170a, or the NTSC standard, was an expansion of the 1941 NTSC standard (for black and white television) is being pitched out the window. The FCC even has a countdown timer on their truly horrific website. The interesting thing is that most people (more than half in the US) have cable anyway, so this won’t really effect them. This is only for broadcast TV. I don’t actually watch TV so it doesn’t really matter personally to me, but I find it a really intriguing cultural phenomenon. And my TV will no longer be able to pick up television signals. It is DVDs only for me moving forward. It is interesting also because so much money is at stake. The TV manufacturers stand to gain, the FCC has already gained (selling off freed up spectrum to the tune of billions), and companies that help people set up their new (more complicated) tvs stand to gain.
Apparently the GAO is kind of horked off at the FCC though. I guess they don’t think the FCC did a good job pulling this off. I do sort of wonder how many old people with old TVs are going to turn them on in February in 2009 and wonder why they aren’t getting any signal. Sure you can get you converter box coupon for $40, but I really have to wonder how many of the affected people are going to know about that beforehand.
The ATSC replacement is interesting, but I really have to wonder how long lived a spec that enforces a specific compression encoding scheme is (and the older MPEG-2 at that! Europe is generally using MPEG-4), given how fast the technology world changes. And of course, even if the digital aspect of it is all fine, there is still the issue of DRM on HD and blue ray DVDs. Although it looks like HDMI is winning out there, so that might be hashed out in time for the new TVs to come with the appropriate connectors.
For the record, the last time I bought a TV was 1994. And it was used.
Update: A good non-technical history of the TV through the digital and high def age. Though his timeline for the DTV transition is out of date, they pushed it back two years because of lack of uptake. (They technically need to have 85% digital TV household penetration before analog goes dark.)
Am I a bad person? I am getting waaay too much enjoyment out of all the apple news today.
The people in Cupertino have been busy monkeys lately. So what were the updates today? iPhone/iTouch firmware update, 5 EFI firmware updates (for all the intel macs), as well as keynote, pages, numbers and iWeb updates. Pretty impressive. Someone at apple hates customer support. But the thing that has really been making my day fun is reading all the drama about the people who unlocked their phones to use with other carriers who are now trying to figure out what to do. There are posts all over the web and they all keep getting updated as more info comes in. One minute it turns your iPhone into an expensive brick, the next it doesn’t. Tons of FUD and chaos and no one knows what is really happening.
Oh the humanity!
Recent studies have shown that both acupuncture and “fake acupuncture” help relieve back pain. This is awesome, you don’t even need to be an actual acupuncturist, just poke some needles in the back and watch the pain go away. So far the operating theory is that the stimuli distract the brain from the pain coming from the injury, though the effects last for a considerable amount of time. I think I’ll stick with my stretching and exercises for now though, thank you very much. If I really believe that they will work, do I get the placebo effect as well?
And on the creepy robot invasion front, the Air Force has started its first unmanned air attack wing. This wing will use a combination of old school predators, and the souped up version as well, which holds three times as many missiles and bombs. Interestingly the entire wing of 70 aircraft will cost less that three piloted attack aircraft. This wing will also have the best maintenance record in the Air Force, given the current uptime of the Predator in the field. This is the future of the Air Force, and it is going to piss a lot of people (in the Air Force) off. The era of the billion dollar attack airplane is over, and in my opinion, the era of the billion dollar fighter will be over soon as well. Planes are shockingly easier and cheaper to build when you don’t have to worry about holding a person in them. The biggest problem I foresee is the fact that this will make the generals from afar even more likely to intervene in situations where they really don’t know what is happening because they are not in situ. (Read “A Good Day to Die” by Sean Naylor if you don’t know what I am talking about, but be prepared to be depressed by the idiocy of the upper levels of the chain of comand.)
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