Since I am trying to be topical and let’s face it with gas pricing going up and up and the economy going down and down, and even the president asking for conservation it is hard to be more topical than how to save gas. So I have a new and improved post.
(Just a quick reminder) In most other countries (except our neighbors to the north and south)gas is betweeen $5 and $9 a gallon. However, saving money is never a bad thing.
Ok the most under rated way to save money on gas is to check the inflation of your tires, under inflation can cost you >7% of your fuel efficiency, plus tires aren’t free and wear faster when under inflated. You can find the proper inflation pressure on the VIN sticker on the driver side door frame. On long, high speed trips slight over inflation can improve your mileage, but since it can affect ride characteristics and traction on snow or mud I mention it only for completeness.
Remove excess weight, since every 100 lbs of extra weight is a ~5% reduction in fuel efficiency, so the 400 lbs of crap in your truck is causing you to have 20% worse gas mileage.
If you are going over 45 mph and your car is less than 20 years old then running the AC is more efficient than open windows. Sure the compressor loads the engine, but over 45 the aerodynamics of the car are comprised more by the drag of open windows, than the load. Below 45 it is a wash, but I like to be cool. Speaking of engine load if you don’t need it on, when you drive, then turn it off. What am I talking about? Well anything, the lights, the radio, cruise control everything. The car is not magic, everything in it takes power to run, and power comes at the price of fuel economy. Running the headlights is >1% against fuel economy. Your custom stereo that when the base hits can stun birds in flight is ~5% against you mileage per 1000Ws, (plus the weight).
If you drive a truck cover the bed or remove the tailgate. Remember a solid tail gate has the same aerodynamic properties of a wall and kills your mileage.
If you will be idling for more than a minute turn off the engine, a warmed up fuel injected engine uses no more gas to start than it does any other time. A minute is just a guideline, but long waits at a drive through window or creeping traffic kill your mileage, so go in and get the food, or wait at work till traffic decreases you will save lots (like a third or more). It pains me to say this but driving slower helps too, newish cars are most fuel efficient between 45-60 MPH. Above 70 you take a substantial hit in fuel economy, and going 80 requires almost twice the fuel of 55, so how fast do you really need to get there?
Do your preventative maintenance, a clogged air filter, EGR valve or crack case vent, kill the gas mileage, as does a worn out oxygen sensor, dirty fuel system, or just bad tuning. Get you car a checkup and replace some cheap parts, you might save >50%. Remember $8 for a new air filter can mean 15% better mileage alone, plus a better torque curve. If your car is newish then get it washed and waxed, the dirt and bugs can cost you up to 2% fuel efficiency. (Why do you think you never see dirty UPS or FedEx trucks, or an airplane with “wash me” written on the tail?)
The number one way to save money on gas is buy the right fuel for your car. Premium or super is not better gas, is simply higher octane so it can be compressed more before it detonates. In fact 91 octane gas contains lots less energy than 87 regular gas. Is super a good deal? Well 91 costs like a quarter more a gallon and you have to burn up to 10% more to make the same power, so I am going with no! Now if you drive a modern luxury car or have super/turbo charging than you have a high compression engine and need 91 to prevent knock, for the rest of us 87 is fine. 89 or midgrade is a total waste of money since it is too high octane for regular compression engines to make good power but too little for high compression engine to prevent knocking.
While I am on the subject most fuel additives are a waste too, and cost serious money. If you buy good quality gas (like Exxon or Chevron) instead of Racetrac’s old coffee/fuel mix and are least once a week going more than 15 miles in one trip at high speed, you fuel systems and valves are plenty clean. (The detergent in good gas isn’t really detergent it is solvents and ions but for marketing purposes detergent = cleaning and is easy for most people to understand.) However, it really does clean the fuel system, but only if the engine gets hot and stays hot. Now if you are buying cheap gas or only make short trips, some injector cleaner can help but you still have to make that long high speed trip for it to work. Don’t be fooled jet fuel is just cheap kerosene not some magic super fuel, Teflon/PTFE just burns and kills the catalytic converter, remember there is no magical mystical fuel additive on the market that can improve MPG. More importantly there is no gadget that can improve your MPG, that doesn’t involve at least removing the valve cover or altering the computer, so beware of snake oil vendors. (For the love of gd never add water, ATF or oil to your fuel, unless you drive a WWII era fighter plane, ask me and I can explain.)
If you really want to save money buy a diesel car since diesel engines are by their very nature >25% more fuel efficient than gasoline engines, and because they are massively overbuilt can last three as long as a gas engine. If that isn’t an option cut back on your mileage, plan you errands and actives so you drive the minimum number of miles, or at least never backtrack, and always drive your most fuel efficient car. A trip to the store to buy bread doesn’t require you to drive a Hummer (unless you live in a war torn suburb and without the 50 cal mounted in the back, your kids will be orphans.) For most things a Honda will do, ok you can’t put enough 2x4s in a Honda to frame a house, but do you need to buy/drive a Dodge RAM UltraMega Cab truck, when the only forest products you intent to transport are a box of invitations from Crane & Co. for your retro Fondue party? (No, it doesn’t count if the paper is heavy bond!) Yes, your kids will complaint it is tight in the back seat of a Honda, but 35 mpg vs 3 mpg can provide a lot of comfort. If you kids are teenagers, an uncomfortable back seat is a good thing…
Instead of driving, try biking or walking, most American can afford to waste caloric fuel more than petroleum based fuel. In my case once it cools off I will walk the 4 miles to the store and back, it is good exercise and at current prices saves me like 50 cents.
Going too far for biking or walking? Well then try to share a ride or carpool, yes I know the reason you bought a car was so that you didn’t have to share, but if you share then you save gas, since you aren’t driving all the time. Plus, you get to bond with your neighbors and coworkers, ok bad example, um you get judge your neighbors and coworkers, and pick on people in the safety of your car. Scary as it may sound you might also consider mass transit. Yes, bus and trains are scary, but maybe you really ought to think about it, $2 in bus fare versus $9 in gas. You don’t have to be lucid to get to work, so you can skip that first thing in the morning trip to Starbucks and that is a savings right there. (Actually being the environmentally friendly company Starbucks is, they should find away to make suburban locations ride share meting places.) Then you can use the money you save to buy an IPod and some really great headphones from Shure, that way you can pretend you aren’t on a bus, or you can use the time to read. Remember the time you swore to someone at a party you had read all of Dicken’s works, or put on your resume you spoke conversational Aramaic? Now you can make good, book CDs are a wonderful thing.
Hope this helps, and remember a Republican has asked you to conserve, so that really means something.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Business advice
Free advice on advertising in the world of Tivo
Ok if you are from a huge ad agency this will seem obvious but remember to watch your ads on a Tivo before you put them on TV. On fast forward with no sound really good ads can look like crap, and make people think the product is something it’s not or that the product is uninteresting. If you design the commercial so the soundless, fast forwarded version conveys your message too or better has a different meaning that, perhaps might not be allowed by the station, you can reel in the Tivo people. Plus, quick flashes of something tend to stick your mind and pop again later. So, what might be a 4 second long product shot of Oreo’s is reduced to a single frame that is planted in the mind that is processed later as a craving for Oreo’s when the person catches a glimpse of Oreo's in the store. As far as I know subliminal advertising is illegal, but this can get you pretty close. Failing the ability to convey a 30 second message in 3 seconds, you can always put in something that in the full story makes prefect sense, but soundless and fast forwarded will give the viewer reason to rewind and watch the whole commercial. Despite claims to the alternative Tivo is the advertiser’s best friend. Plus, late night TV is now available at any hour, advertisers can put spots during popular “cult” shows that get recorded at 3 am for a fraction of the cost.
Free advice to inventors
Do not invent what people know they need, invent something that only once you tell them about they will want it. If you try and met a current demand you run a strong risk of getting scooped, I call this being two steps ahead. A new inventor needs to be five steps ahead of the competition, since it will take the time equivalent to 3 steps to get up to speed, and then you will be in a good position to compete or will have enough proof of principle to sell your idea. Example of two steps ahead: a knife rack that clamps the knife blade and acts like a sharpening steel as the blade is with-drawn. Five steps: a home clothes drier/dry cleaner that uses liquid CO2 or an internally recycled low vapor pressure solvent to extract the water and then once the water is removed “dries” the cloths under a mild vacuum. Actually this is in my opinion the difference between sales (2 steps) and marketing (5 steps).
For my frequent viewers this is a rerun, but what can I say, the second season of Hogan’s Heroes came out on DVD yesterday so I am busy.
Ok if you are from a huge ad agency this will seem obvious but remember to watch your ads on a Tivo before you put them on TV. On fast forward with no sound really good ads can look like crap, and make people think the product is something it’s not or that the product is uninteresting. If you design the commercial so the soundless, fast forwarded version conveys your message too or better has a different meaning that, perhaps might not be allowed by the station, you can reel in the Tivo people. Plus, quick flashes of something tend to stick your mind and pop again later. So, what might be a 4 second long product shot of Oreo’s is reduced to a single frame that is planted in the mind that is processed later as a craving for Oreo’s when the person catches a glimpse of Oreo's in the store. As far as I know subliminal advertising is illegal, but this can get you pretty close. Failing the ability to convey a 30 second message in 3 seconds, you can always put in something that in the full story makes prefect sense, but soundless and fast forwarded will give the viewer reason to rewind and watch the whole commercial. Despite claims to the alternative Tivo is the advertiser’s best friend. Plus, late night TV is now available at any hour, advertisers can put spots during popular “cult” shows that get recorded at 3 am for a fraction of the cost.
Free advice to inventors
Do not invent what people know they need, invent something that only once you tell them about they will want it. If you try and met a current demand you run a strong risk of getting scooped, I call this being two steps ahead. A new inventor needs to be five steps ahead of the competition, since it will take the time equivalent to 3 steps to get up to speed, and then you will be in a good position to compete or will have enough proof of principle to sell your idea. Example of two steps ahead: a knife rack that clamps the knife blade and acts like a sharpening steel as the blade is with-drawn. Five steps: a home clothes drier/dry cleaner that uses liquid CO2 or an internally recycled low vapor pressure solvent to extract the water and then once the water is removed “dries” the cloths under a mild vacuum. Actually this is in my opinion the difference between sales (2 steps) and marketing (5 steps).
For my frequent viewers this is a rerun, but what can I say, the second season of Hogan’s Heroes came out on DVD yesterday so I am busy.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Desperate Housewives, moral leadership and personal responsibility
I will admit I have only seen like 15 minutes of that show but from what I saw I was shocked! What kind of example does this show set? I am not talking about role models for children; I am talking about for adults. These shows are base entertainment, so lurid they are a topless shot for being shown only on Cinemax late at night. We as a culture need to suck it up and realize we can’t be puritanical and hedonistic at the same time. The duel message screw with peoples minds, and the show rationalizes that type of behavior in people’s minds. Ok it isn’t TVs job to educate, and I am in general not in favor of censorship, but if TV is already censored, um are the current generation of censors asleep or just on the take? Actual I don’t blame the tv stations, because they don’t make people watch, and yet they come in droves.
Who is the moral leadership?
It isn’t the politicians from Clinton to DeLay neither side can claim to be moral superior. It isn’t the religious establishment, from pedophile priests to corrupt ministers fleecing their flock, who can you look to? Is it the schools? No, because they can’t say boo to the kids without getting sued. The family unit? I believe I have covered that, on the whole between Desperate Housewives, CNN and Grand Theft Auto, morality has the same chance as a Jehovah’s Witness at a Hell’s Angels rally right before the kegs float. So, all that is left is personal choice, and accepting personal responsibility. (Notice the frequent use of the word personal, as in you alone.) You can choose to be a decent human being, or you can choose the join the zoo. Now being a decent person, doesn’t require you to be an angel. You can and will stumble, but as long as you do your best to live up to the standards you set for yourself you will come out ok. You don’t have cricket on your shoulder, just a set of principles to guide your action, and your will power to help with the hard decisions. I will quit before I get too preachy, but best of luck to you, it is a hard road you face!
Newish topic:
I have already expressed my dislike of reality shows like Survivor and the uber crap Big Brother type shows, in a previous post (the reality TV of the time, games in the Coliseum was used to distract people so they won’t notice Rome falling). I can see some amusement in the Amazing Race, since that is less scripted, but overall the escapism and voyeurism provided by reality TV is a bad bad sign. Ok, I don’t think the Vandal’s Visigoths are at our gates quite yet, since the previous generations had escapism too. The escapism of choice for our grandparents was religion, and hunting communists, and our parent’s generation actually escaped into a drug induced haze, and dodged responsibility. Gen X and Y have to be responsible, so our escapism promotes what we long for, to be wild and free. What will it take for the next generation to escape since we got televised war? I don’t know but I rue the day that I hear Marylin Manson as elevator “muzak”.
Perhaps, if my posts were more lurid I could get more hits. I will have to sprinkle in references to lesbianism, infidelity, breasts and drug use. Hey I can be suggestive, I wrote that nice intro to a trashy romance novel, yet I was still tasteful. A name change might help too. “Desperate blogging”, actually that sucks. Hmm I need a new name something to trick people to coming to my blog, but to keep them reading and coming back I will need a hypnotic animation too. Something subtle like a rotating spiral, or I could skip the animation and just have screen after screen of solid text. Then once they are in my power I will have them say over and over in their mind, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here. Good… Now on the count of three you will awaken, you will remember nothing, but you will feel refreshed, without a care in the world.
1, you are beginning to awaken
2, more and more awake
3
How do you feel? That was a very good session, we made real progress.
See you again soon.;)
Who is the moral leadership?
It isn’t the politicians from Clinton to DeLay neither side can claim to be moral superior. It isn’t the religious establishment, from pedophile priests to corrupt ministers fleecing their flock, who can you look to? Is it the schools? No, because they can’t say boo to the kids without getting sued. The family unit? I believe I have covered that, on the whole between Desperate Housewives, CNN and Grand Theft Auto, morality has the same chance as a Jehovah’s Witness at a Hell’s Angels rally right before the kegs float. So, all that is left is personal choice, and accepting personal responsibility. (Notice the frequent use of the word personal, as in you alone.) You can choose to be a decent human being, or you can choose the join the zoo. Now being a decent person, doesn’t require you to be an angel. You can and will stumble, but as long as you do your best to live up to the standards you set for yourself you will come out ok. You don’t have cricket on your shoulder, just a set of principles to guide your action, and your will power to help with the hard decisions. I will quit before I get too preachy, but best of luck to you, it is a hard road you face!
Newish topic:
I have already expressed my dislike of reality shows like Survivor and the uber crap Big Brother type shows, in a previous post (the reality TV of the time, games in the Coliseum was used to distract people so they won’t notice Rome falling). I can see some amusement in the Amazing Race, since that is less scripted, but overall the escapism and voyeurism provided by reality TV is a bad bad sign. Ok, I don’t think the Vandal’s Visigoths are at our gates quite yet, since the previous generations had escapism too. The escapism of choice for our grandparents was religion, and hunting communists, and our parent’s generation actually escaped into a drug induced haze, and dodged responsibility. Gen X and Y have to be responsible, so our escapism promotes what we long for, to be wild and free. What will it take for the next generation to escape since we got televised war? I don’t know but I rue the day that I hear Marylin Manson as elevator “muzak”.
Perhaps, if my posts were more lurid I could get more hits. I will have to sprinkle in references to lesbianism, infidelity, breasts and drug use. Hey I can be suggestive, I wrote that nice intro to a trashy romance novel, yet I was still tasteful. A name change might help too. “Desperate blogging”, actually that sucks. Hmm I need a new name something to trick people to coming to my blog, but to keep them reading and coming back I will need a hypnotic animation too. Something subtle like a rotating spiral, or I could skip the animation and just have screen after screen of solid text. Then once they are in my power I will have them say over and over in their mind, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here, this is the best web site I have ever seen, I will tell everyone I know to come here. Good… Now on the count of three you will awaken, you will remember nothing, but you will feel refreshed, without a care in the world.
1, you are beginning to awaken
2, more and more awake
3
How do you feel? That was a very good session, we made real progress.
See you again soon.;)
The future of power generation: Nuclear energy
Yes, nuclear power isn’t PC but given the choice of a new generation nuclear power plant cranking out 1 GW or a 1 GW coal fired plant, which would you pick? The nuke plant that might be an environmental disaster, but the coal plant will be. (“Clean coal” or not it would burn two train loads of coal a day (by train load I mean a train that has >150 hopper cars and 3 locomotives), and after a few years the heavy metal, and acidic oxides plume it sends up wind will build up and start to degrade the environment, oh then there is all the CO2, mining and ash to think about.) In real terms 24 tons of uranium replaces 3.1 million tons of high grade coal, with reprocessing that is only ~1,500lbs of high level waste, versus 7 million tons of CO2 (best case scenario it would take a managed forest the size of Yosemite National Park to remove that much CO2), 200K tons of SO2 (an acidic oxide), a couple tons of heavy metals and several hundred pounds of naturally radioactive materials all coming out of the smoke stack plus 200K tons of corrosive fly ash waste. (Sidenote: There is less radioactivity in released reactor coolant water than in the same amount of beer.)
The choice is yours, and don’t BS yourself thinking we don’t need more generating capacity or that renewal energy will fill the need. I have discussed base load in a previous post so I won’t go into it again, but every kilowatt that is coal or nuclear is a kilowatt that isn’t natural gas (so less to import) or hydro. (Yes, we could open dams and let rivers and fish run free, but the river will be cooling a power plant that replaces the lost hydro generation.)
Ok the clean coal people say they can capture all the emissions and so they will be carbon neutral. Um quick question what do you do with 7 million tons a year of CO2, you could carbonate a small lake with that? Assuming you can get rid of that much CO2, what does that cost? Answer me that and I will post an apology to the clean coal people. Either way it makes nuclear more competitive…
Well I would love to say Integral Fast Reactors are the future, with their short lived waste (yes the waste would make a great dirty bomb, but during the few short years it was useful stealing it would be fatal with in minutes, and processing into a weapon would be difficult because it would either melt anything it was contained and spew so must high energy radiation a Brownie troop with a radiation detector made from old fluorescent tubes could track it down) their efficient fuel use, and ability to use nearly any tranuranic element as fuel but I can’t. While liquid metal cooled reactors are essentially failsafe since the liquid metal will make convection currents and be self cooling if the external cooling fails, being a huge pool of radioactive molten sodium makes them hard to maintain. The next generation of reactors will be pebble bed which is barely critical or hopefully my favorite, supercritical steam (if you have studied your steam tables you know that above 1200 C? steam behaves like water, so rapid depressurization does not cause a steam explosion) or helium cooled. Both the supercritical steam and helium are nearly self cooling since the pressure in the reactor drives a convention current causing the hottest coolant to be forced out and sucking in “cooler” coolant. So as long as the pressure vessel is intact and the laws of physics are in effect the reactors will be cooled, whether or not the pumps work. Also they will be smaller reactors. Why smaller? They say smaller is safer but actually bigger is more efficient however they are having trouble making turbines larger (the blade tips exceed the speed of sound and that causes problems), plus small turbines can be built in a factory and trucked in, while big turbines are built onsite.
One of the biggest things against nuclear power besides the safety is the waste issue. Both what to do with the waste that no one wants and what if someone steals the waste. (The irony there is thick.) The biggest concern is that in the reactor U238 is turned into Pu239, which is nuclear fuel and nuclear bomb material, (which it is bad stuff to have lying around, since a piece the size of a grapefruit in the wrong hands could flatten a city.) However, Pu239 can be converted into Pu240 by fast neutron bombardment, which is a bad thing for bomb makers, so the fuel rods are changed frequently to prevent that from happening. Why is it bad for bomb makers? Pu240 is fissile, (there is no Pu isotope that isn't), but it is too easily fissile so a nuclear bomb made out of it fizzles instead of explodes. (I will come back to this, so keep Pu240 in mind.)
Yes, the isotopes can be separated but that defeats the whole point of using Pu for secret nuke project. The beauty of Pu is that it is easy to chemically separate from the spent fuel, so you don't have to buy lots of expensive gas centrifuges from Germany, Russia, or France, and build a huge facility to enrich uranium that the UN will freak over, and the US or Israel will bomb (like Iran, and Iraq did), etc. With normal Pu your >$10 million buys you a ready to strike a blow for Allah against infidel West nuclear pit. (Yes that is a stereotypical statement, but if it's true it's true. If the Pu you buy/steal is mixed with Pu240/242 all you end up with is a very expensive and really crappy dirty bomb.)
So what is the future?
The future to me is MOX. Mixed OXide fuel is a way to convert weapons grade Pu into slow neutron (thermal) reactor fuel, by mixing it with weakly enriched uranium. The argument against MOX is reprocessing spent fuel into MOX costs too much (uranium is so dirt cheap and plentiful in the US it is barely worth mining). Well what are the costs of one pass fuel use when the cost of Yucca Mountain is added? If we reprocess we only have to keep the waste isolated for a couple thousand years, instead of millions (making the engineering simpler) and the reprocessed waste takes up only 3% of the space of raw waste (lets make it 5% to account for reprocessing waste) so the WIP doesn’t fill up as fast.. The next argument against MOX is that stolen fuel rods can be turned into a nuke, but stolen Pu239/240 fuel rods are worth more for the zirconium housing than the Pu.
Now what about spent fuel rods? Well spent fuel is harder to get hold of because it is kept on site for a few years to cool off, so much of the dirty bomb potential is lost. That leaves the Pu in the rods, and that is a tough problem, since they have to be transported for disposal or reprocessing. How would I fix it? Well either the fuel has to be blended with Pu240 before transport, or at least tracer gases added so stolen fuel can be tracked via rare noble emissions given off during reprocessing.
Two areas I would encourage research into: First is using an “inert” filler instead of U238 to make up the bulk of the fuel rod (and therefore the bulk of high level waste), since only a small percentage of the rod is fissionable material. The inert filler could be degraded during the use of the fuel but as long as the half life was short, the filler would contribute very little waste, and facilitate waste processing. Or, if the filler was well designed it could would vitrify at high temp, so the waste could be rendered useless for weapons manufacture, or if the temperature of the reactor rose too high it would prevent the fuel from burning. Second bring back the Integral Fast Reactor. It is an almost closed cycle reactor taking in only small amounts of new fuel and its waste stream is small and can mostly be sold for medical isotopes. So, no transporting high level waste to Nevada, and no risk of proliferation since the Pu is contaminated with Pu240/242. You can thank the forward thinking John Kerry for canceling the IFR program, even though it answered all his criticisms of nuclear power.
Sorry I got tired and side tracked here at the end. Also while researching this post I found out I was not the first person to think of the Pu240 thing. (Which is a good thing because if someone as ignorant as I am is the first person to think of all this then the DOE has really been slacking.)
On last rant:
American’s have an irrational fear of radiation, if you are truly afraid of radiation, stay out of the sun, don’t eat or breath because the world around us is actually very radioactive but before you freak out, blame the earth and the sun cause it was this way when we got it, and without radiation we wouldn’t be here cause radiation keeps the mantle and core molten. Now I am not saying radiation is safe, I am just saying while you are outside protesting the building of a reactor you are exposed to more radiation from the sun, and if you were in the plant control room. Also, irradiated food is not still radioactive; the gamma rays from the Co60 pass through the food like a hot knife through butter, and destroy the DNA of bacteria, killing them. The amount of damage done by radiation to the nutritional content of the food is nothing compared with the damage you will inflict when you cook it. Now for all the reactionaries pick one: Giving someone you love irradiated food, or a fatal case of food borne illness? E coli O157:H7 is out there and kills dozens of people a year mostly young children, and is spread by eating raw vegetables (especially ones grown organically with umm natural fertilizers) more than undercooked meat.
I will leave you with this thought: if you have ever eaten out or bought prepared food you can eaten irradiated food.
The choice is yours, and don’t BS yourself thinking we don’t need more generating capacity or that renewal energy will fill the need. I have discussed base load in a previous post so I won’t go into it again, but every kilowatt that is coal or nuclear is a kilowatt that isn’t natural gas (so less to import) or hydro. (Yes, we could open dams and let rivers and fish run free, but the river will be cooling a power plant that replaces the lost hydro generation.)
Ok the clean coal people say they can capture all the emissions and so they will be carbon neutral. Um quick question what do you do with 7 million tons a year of CO2, you could carbonate a small lake with that? Assuming you can get rid of that much CO2, what does that cost? Answer me that and I will post an apology to the clean coal people. Either way it makes nuclear more competitive…
Well I would love to say Integral Fast Reactors are the future, with their short lived waste (yes the waste would make a great dirty bomb, but during the few short years it was useful stealing it would be fatal with in minutes, and processing into a weapon would be difficult because it would either melt anything it was contained and spew so must high energy radiation a Brownie troop with a radiation detector made from old fluorescent tubes could track it down) their efficient fuel use, and ability to use nearly any tranuranic element as fuel but I can’t. While liquid metal cooled reactors are essentially failsafe since the liquid metal will make convection currents and be self cooling if the external cooling fails, being a huge pool of radioactive molten sodium makes them hard to maintain. The next generation of reactors will be pebble bed which is barely critical or hopefully my favorite, supercritical steam (if you have studied your steam tables you know that above 1200 C? steam behaves like water, so rapid depressurization does not cause a steam explosion) or helium cooled. Both the supercritical steam and helium are nearly self cooling since the pressure in the reactor drives a convention current causing the hottest coolant to be forced out and sucking in “cooler” coolant. So as long as the pressure vessel is intact and the laws of physics are in effect the reactors will be cooled, whether or not the pumps work. Also they will be smaller reactors. Why smaller? They say smaller is safer but actually bigger is more efficient however they are having trouble making turbines larger (the blade tips exceed the speed of sound and that causes problems), plus small turbines can be built in a factory and trucked in, while big turbines are built onsite.
One of the biggest things against nuclear power besides the safety is the waste issue. Both what to do with the waste that no one wants and what if someone steals the waste. (The irony there is thick.) The biggest concern is that in the reactor U238 is turned into Pu239, which is nuclear fuel and nuclear bomb material, (which it is bad stuff to have lying around, since a piece the size of a grapefruit in the wrong hands could flatten a city.) However, Pu239 can be converted into Pu240 by fast neutron bombardment, which is a bad thing for bomb makers, so the fuel rods are changed frequently to prevent that from happening. Why is it bad for bomb makers? Pu240 is fissile, (there is no Pu isotope that isn't), but it is too easily fissile so a nuclear bomb made out of it fizzles instead of explodes. (I will come back to this, so keep Pu240 in mind.)
Yes, the isotopes can be separated but that defeats the whole point of using Pu for secret nuke project. The beauty of Pu is that it is easy to chemically separate from the spent fuel, so you don't have to buy lots of expensive gas centrifuges from Germany, Russia, or France, and build a huge facility to enrich uranium that the UN will freak over, and the US or Israel will bomb (like Iran, and Iraq did), etc. With normal Pu your >$10 million buys you a ready to strike a blow for Allah against infidel West nuclear pit. (Yes that is a stereotypical statement, but if it's true it's true. If the Pu you buy/steal is mixed with Pu240/242 all you end up with is a very expensive and really crappy dirty bomb.)
So what is the future?
The future to me is MOX. Mixed OXide fuel is a way to convert weapons grade Pu into slow neutron (thermal) reactor fuel, by mixing it with weakly enriched uranium. The argument against MOX is reprocessing spent fuel into MOX costs too much (uranium is so dirt cheap and plentiful in the US it is barely worth mining). Well what are the costs of one pass fuel use when the cost of Yucca Mountain is added? If we reprocess we only have to keep the waste isolated for a couple thousand years, instead of millions (making the engineering simpler) and the reprocessed waste takes up only 3% of the space of raw waste (lets make it 5% to account for reprocessing waste) so the WIP doesn’t fill up as fast.. The next argument against MOX is that stolen fuel rods can be turned into a nuke, but stolen Pu239/240 fuel rods are worth more for the zirconium housing than the Pu.
Now what about spent fuel rods? Well spent fuel is harder to get hold of because it is kept on site for a few years to cool off, so much of the dirty bomb potential is lost. That leaves the Pu in the rods, and that is a tough problem, since they have to be transported for disposal or reprocessing. How would I fix it? Well either the fuel has to be blended with Pu240 before transport, or at least tracer gases added so stolen fuel can be tracked via rare noble emissions given off during reprocessing.
Two areas I would encourage research into: First is using an “inert” filler instead of U238 to make up the bulk of the fuel rod (and therefore the bulk of high level waste), since only a small percentage of the rod is fissionable material. The inert filler could be degraded during the use of the fuel but as long as the half life was short, the filler would contribute very little waste, and facilitate waste processing. Or, if the filler was well designed it could would vitrify at high temp, so the waste could be rendered useless for weapons manufacture, or if the temperature of the reactor rose too high it would prevent the fuel from burning. Second bring back the Integral Fast Reactor. It is an almost closed cycle reactor taking in only small amounts of new fuel and its waste stream is small and can mostly be sold for medical isotopes. So, no transporting high level waste to Nevada, and no risk of proliferation since the Pu is contaminated with Pu240/242. You can thank the forward thinking John Kerry for canceling the IFR program, even though it answered all his criticisms of nuclear power.
Sorry I got tired and side tracked here at the end. Also while researching this post I found out I was not the first person to think of the Pu240 thing. (Which is a good thing because if someone as ignorant as I am is the first person to think of all this then the DOE has really been slacking.)
On last rant:
American’s have an irrational fear of radiation, if you are truly afraid of radiation, stay out of the sun, don’t eat or breath because the world around us is actually very radioactive but before you freak out, blame the earth and the sun cause it was this way when we got it, and without radiation we wouldn’t be here cause radiation keeps the mantle and core molten. Now I am not saying radiation is safe, I am just saying while you are outside protesting the building of a reactor you are exposed to more radiation from the sun, and if you were in the plant control room. Also, irradiated food is not still radioactive; the gamma rays from the Co60 pass through the food like a hot knife through butter, and destroy the DNA of bacteria, killing them. The amount of damage done by radiation to the nutritional content of the food is nothing compared with the damage you will inflict when you cook it. Now for all the reactionaries pick one: Giving someone you love irradiated food, or a fatal case of food borne illness? E coli O157:H7 is out there and kills dozens of people a year mostly young children, and is spread by eating raw vegetables (especially ones grown organically with umm natural fertilizers) more than undercooked meat.
I will leave you with this thought: if you have ever eaten out or bought prepared food you can eaten irradiated food.
Those bright blue headlights, and bargaining
The people who have those blazing blue (HID) headlights on their cars really irk me. They are so bright that they blind on coming cars or at least force them to look away, it just seems unsafe. However…
With my car in the shop for some extensive suspension work I managed to talk my way into a high end loaner (a TSX) instead of the normal loaner (a RSX). You guessed it, the TSX has HID headlights, and now I know why people love them. From the other side of the windshield they are great! Unlike my car’s xenon headlights that cast two dots ahead of the car, these headlights bath everything in a 160 degree arc in a clear blue light. It is as I expected the regular lights are like having your “brights” on all the time, (which is why it blinds the oncoming cars.) I haven’t turned on the brights yet but if the regular lights are any indication the brights might start a grass fire. I have become what I hate, ah the dark side is very seductive.
I tell you what; the gas mileage differences between the TSX’s V6 and my car’s inline 4 are really obvious, and painful. My drive home from the dealership, and a trip to the store was almost a quarter tank. That is like $8 in gas, sure the car has great (but evil) headlights but clear night driving and a smoother acceleration curve aren’t worth the extra 3 dollars a day!
Last I would like to say that in today’s America most people consider bargaining to be dead, unless you are buying a car or a house. I can tell you it isn’t, car repairs have very high margins, and if you politely “discuss” with them that you are aware of this show them where they can make the adjustments and then give them a carrot like I will only get one thing fixed for $800 but two things for $1300 (which cost $1700 separately) they might go for it. Oh and with cars like most expensive precision machines, replacing something before it breaks is always cheaper than after, since the dying part will generally take some other stuff with it.
With my car in the shop for some extensive suspension work I managed to talk my way into a high end loaner (a TSX) instead of the normal loaner (a RSX). You guessed it, the TSX has HID headlights, and now I know why people love them. From the other side of the windshield they are great! Unlike my car’s xenon headlights that cast two dots ahead of the car, these headlights bath everything in a 160 degree arc in a clear blue light. It is as I expected the regular lights are like having your “brights” on all the time, (which is why it blinds the oncoming cars.) I haven’t turned on the brights yet but if the regular lights are any indication the brights might start a grass fire. I have become what I hate, ah the dark side is very seductive.
I tell you what; the gas mileage differences between the TSX’s V6 and my car’s inline 4 are really obvious, and painful. My drive home from the dealership, and a trip to the store was almost a quarter tank. That is like $8 in gas, sure the car has great (but evil) headlights but clear night driving and a smoother acceleration curve aren’t worth the extra 3 dollars a day!
Last I would like to say that in today’s America most people consider bargaining to be dead, unless you are buying a car or a house. I can tell you it isn’t, car repairs have very high margins, and if you politely “discuss” with them that you are aware of this show them where they can make the adjustments and then give them a carrot like I will only get one thing fixed for $800 but two things for $1300 (which cost $1700 separately) they might go for it. Oh and with cars like most expensive precision machines, replacing something before it breaks is always cheaper than after, since the dying part will generally take some other stuff with it.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Coming soon, a wise saying and study tips
Home theater design hints; how to achieve audiophile quality, on a shoestring budget. How istopes, MOX fuels and breeder nuclear reactors can prevent nuclear proliferation, and much more!
Plus, I still take questions!
Wise saying of the day, since it is midterm season:
“For better or worse it will be over in an hour.” Dr. Hamilton (one of my advanced microbiology professors) said as he prepared to pass out the first test. He is right, once you have done your best to prepare there is no need to worry, since it only clouds your mind. As you wait to take the test, what can you do anyways? Seek peace grasshopper!
If you can't reach peace, think of Dune "fear is the mind killer...."
A study tip, so you can avoid the whole panic thing altogether:
Always study in groups, and study with a person who doesn’t get it (but could if it is explained right). As you teach them, you will learn the material better than you possibly could by memorization alone, since you actually have to fully understand the unlying concepts to teach it. Also, since you thought about the material in ways other than just scanning it for bold words, you accessed multiple parts of your mind, so you have a better shot of making long term memories. Sure you say but I don't understand the material that well. Well if your mind is primed to teach, you will read what you need to know, and your mind will put it together, so you mouth can explain it. The others are there for questioning and correcting correcting, it is the Socratic method in action. They also gain knowledge too, since even if you aren't teaching, if you can question the teacher you must consider the material well enough to do so effectively.
This also means less studying later since as new concepts are added you already understand the foundation, and don't have to relearn the old stuff to "get" the new stuff, and by finals time a quick review session with your friends will be about all the studying you need.
Caveat if you study with someone who will never understand no matter what you do, it will only serve to confuse and annoy you. I don't care if you have known each other since pre-K, or if you consider them to be the most attractive person you have seen, you gotta cut'em loose.)
Plus, I still take questions!
Wise saying of the day, since it is midterm season:
“For better or worse it will be over in an hour.” Dr. Hamilton (one of my advanced microbiology professors) said as he prepared to pass out the first test. He is right, once you have done your best to prepare there is no need to worry, since it only clouds your mind. As you wait to take the test, what can you do anyways? Seek peace grasshopper!
If you can't reach peace, think of Dune "fear is the mind killer...."
A study tip, so you can avoid the whole panic thing altogether:
Always study in groups, and study with a person who doesn’t get it (but could if it is explained right). As you teach them, you will learn the material better than you possibly could by memorization alone, since you actually have to fully understand the unlying concepts to teach it. Also, since you thought about the material in ways other than just scanning it for bold words, you accessed multiple parts of your mind, so you have a better shot of making long term memories. Sure you say but I don't understand the material that well. Well if your mind is primed to teach, you will read what you need to know, and your mind will put it together, so you mouth can explain it. The others are there for questioning and correcting correcting, it is the Socratic method in action. They also gain knowledge too, since even if you aren't teaching, if you can question the teacher you must consider the material well enough to do so effectively.
This also means less studying later since as new concepts are added you already understand the foundation, and don't have to relearn the old stuff to "get" the new stuff, and by finals time a quick review session with your friends will be about all the studying you need.
Caveat if you study with someone who will never understand no matter what you do, it will only serve to confuse and annoy you. I don't care if you have known each other since pre-K, or if you consider them to be the most attractive person you have seen, you gotta cut'em loose.)
Gas prices, hurricanes, refineries and the commodities market
President Bush has asked all Americans to try and conserve fuel. While that may sound innocuous or even like a good idea, take a moment and think about it. How bad does it have to really be before a Texas oil man starts pushing for conservation? Just a thought…
Now then:
People complain that gas is too expensive, and while I agree it is, (discounting the effects of the hurricanes on stocks, I think the national average should be around $2.209 for a gallon of regular) oil and gasoline are commodities after all and therefore are subject to volatility and speculation. Yes, the oil companies are making a killing with $3 gas, but they also know that for every day prices are high enough to make the news is one day closer to congressional or state investigation (think about what Spitzer from NY would do), and the ensuing media scandal. They wish to drive down prices too, because they can still make money with gas at $2.30 or so and right now they would get a medal for doing it. However, as I said oil and gasoline are commodities, and the lead time between purchase and delivery is months. So, if they think prices is going to rise sharply, they buy all they can to ensure they get stocks as cheap as possible, so that drives up prices, so others get skittish and buy too, so prices go up more, etc. Then, prices get too high and everyone worries, "if I buy at this price will I get left holding the bag when prices go down"? So they stop buying till the prices go down, but that leaves them open to a demand they can’t meet, which causes them to buy stocks at current market value which means they get taken to the cleaners, or if they have bought too much at the peak and market value drops by the time they take delivery and they can’t make they margins, they are just as screwed.
Why are the prices so volatile?
Their is plenty of oil in the ground, despite what the environmentalists say (yes, we will run out sooner if we don’t conserve, but there is enough to meet today’s needs no problem, and that is my point.) The two bottlenecks are tankers, and refineries, (and to some extent pumping). Why? Because those things cost a fortune and have multi-year lead times. Say Exxon commits to building a new refinery today, it will cost >$5 billion dollars, and not be finished for a decade (a super tanker costs like $100 million and won’t be finished for 5 years, oh and material (metal) prices are really high so that just piles on). The oil companies know these high prices won’t last, so in 10 years what if gas is selling for $1.759 (I wish!), and they can’t pay for the capital cost? You say “that won’t happen, gas will never be so cheap again”, well that is what they said in the late 1970’s and then oil prices collapsed, and the whole industry nearly died! I am sure you are about to weep at the plight of the oil companies, but they are necessary and take incredible risks, so that American’s can even now pay half of what the rest of the world pays for a gallon of gas, when and where ever we want it.
Ok enough history, prices are so volatile since we have exactly enough or a little less than the necessary refining capacity if every plant runs at top output, and like most companies with "just in time delivery" (thanks FedEx, for the ever so safe business model) the oil companies keep just enough oil and gas in inventory to meet expectations. (Excess inventory in times like these is liability.) However, if demand exceeds expectations even regionally a shortage occurs, and heaven forbid say 30% of the nation's refining capacity was idle, (like it is now) then major shortage will occur. Look the US hasn’t built a new refinery since 1976, (a lot of nuclear reactors are newer than that, and that is saying something) advances in processing have allowed plants at >100% of designed capacity to meet demand, but they can’t even shut down for preventative maintenance without a hiccup in prices.
Ok I agree that it is a sad state of affairs when I am happy to see gas for $2.509, but if things are going to improve there are only two options: use less (and that is not really an option since the amount of conservation required to make a difference would have to be 10% or more, starting ASAP, and getting higher every year) or build new refineries. Right now the only refinery in the serious planning stage, is going to be owned by a foreign power, think middle eastern, and China wants to buy the 6th largest oil company in the world, and make it state run. Real oil independence (and national security) is American owned and operated oil companies and refineries. We can buy the oil from Russia if the Middle East gets too unpleasant, but if we can’t refine it we are just as screwed as not having it at all. This is not the politically correct thing to say but if you want to see cheap gas again, write your congressman and demand that they investigate the lack of refining capacity, and hope the mandate (read political pressure) will get ground broken on a couple new refineries, since only through excess capacity (or at least the perception of excess capacity) will the market be stabilized. (Or at least that is how commodity prices have been stabilized in the past.)
I recommend refineries be built in or near St. Louis, MO, Winston-Salem, NC, and Bakersfield, CA. Why? Because those areas are located near major areas of consumption, close to water deep enough for at least Panamax tankers to charge the delivery pipelines, (but far enough inland that “ocean spawned storms” are tempered), and have excellent transportation infrastructure in general. These areas also need the jobs, and are distributed enough that they will be served by different ships and pipelines, so they are not inter-dependent. Now I did pick these locations without at lot of thinking especially Bakersfield, CA (which thinking about it might be the earthquake capital of the world), so additional/alternate locations for refineries are NV/UT, The Rustbelts in PA & WV, and CO, which I picked for all the same reasons (the water access isn't great for those states but a nice pipeline can make anywhere "close" to the water.) (These areas might be better because the unemployed mine and steel workers of these regions should take well to the refinery jobs.)
Now then:
People complain that gas is too expensive, and while I agree it is, (discounting the effects of the hurricanes on stocks, I think the national average should be around $2.209 for a gallon of regular) oil and gasoline are commodities after all and therefore are subject to volatility and speculation. Yes, the oil companies are making a killing with $3 gas, but they also know that for every day prices are high enough to make the news is one day closer to congressional or state investigation (think about what Spitzer from NY would do), and the ensuing media scandal. They wish to drive down prices too, because they can still make money with gas at $2.30 or so and right now they would get a medal for doing it. However, as I said oil and gasoline are commodities, and the lead time between purchase and delivery is months. So, if they think prices is going to rise sharply, they buy all they can to ensure they get stocks as cheap as possible, so that drives up prices, so others get skittish and buy too, so prices go up more, etc. Then, prices get too high and everyone worries, "if I buy at this price will I get left holding the bag when prices go down"? So they stop buying till the prices go down, but that leaves them open to a demand they can’t meet, which causes them to buy stocks at current market value which means they get taken to the cleaners, or if they have bought too much at the peak and market value drops by the time they take delivery and they can’t make they margins, they are just as screwed.
Why are the prices so volatile?
Their is plenty of oil in the ground, despite what the environmentalists say (yes, we will run out sooner if we don’t conserve, but there is enough to meet today’s needs no problem, and that is my point.) The two bottlenecks are tankers, and refineries, (and to some extent pumping). Why? Because those things cost a fortune and have multi-year lead times. Say Exxon commits to building a new refinery today, it will cost >$5 billion dollars, and not be finished for a decade (a super tanker costs like $100 million and won’t be finished for 5 years, oh and material (metal) prices are really high so that just piles on). The oil companies know these high prices won’t last, so in 10 years what if gas is selling for $1.759 (I wish!), and they can’t pay for the capital cost? You say “that won’t happen, gas will never be so cheap again”, well that is what they said in the late 1970’s and then oil prices collapsed, and the whole industry nearly died! I am sure you are about to weep at the plight of the oil companies, but they are necessary and take incredible risks, so that American’s can even now pay half of what the rest of the world pays for a gallon of gas, when and where ever we want it.
Ok enough history, prices are so volatile since we have exactly enough or a little less than the necessary refining capacity if every plant runs at top output, and like most companies with "just in time delivery" (thanks FedEx, for the ever so safe business model) the oil companies keep just enough oil and gas in inventory to meet expectations. (Excess inventory in times like these is liability.) However, if demand exceeds expectations even regionally a shortage occurs, and heaven forbid say 30% of the nation's refining capacity was idle, (like it is now) then major shortage will occur. Look the US hasn’t built a new refinery since 1976, (a lot of nuclear reactors are newer than that, and that is saying something) advances in processing have allowed plants at >100% of designed capacity to meet demand, but they can’t even shut down for preventative maintenance without a hiccup in prices.
Ok I agree that it is a sad state of affairs when I am happy to see gas for $2.509, but if things are going to improve there are only two options: use less (and that is not really an option since the amount of conservation required to make a difference would have to be 10% or more, starting ASAP, and getting higher every year) or build new refineries. Right now the only refinery in the serious planning stage, is going to be owned by a foreign power, think middle eastern, and China wants to buy the 6th largest oil company in the world, and make it state run. Real oil independence (and national security) is American owned and operated oil companies and refineries. We can buy the oil from Russia if the Middle East gets too unpleasant, but if we can’t refine it we are just as screwed as not having it at all. This is not the politically correct thing to say but if you want to see cheap gas again, write your congressman and demand that they investigate the lack of refining capacity, and hope the mandate (read political pressure) will get ground broken on a couple new refineries, since only through excess capacity (or at least the perception of excess capacity) will the market be stabilized. (Or at least that is how commodity prices have been stabilized in the past.)
I recommend refineries be built in or near St. Louis, MO, Winston-Salem, NC, and Bakersfield, CA. Why? Because those areas are located near major areas of consumption, close to water deep enough for at least Panamax tankers to charge the delivery pipelines, (but far enough inland that “ocean spawned storms” are tempered), and have excellent transportation infrastructure in general. These areas also need the jobs, and are distributed enough that they will be served by different ships and pipelines, so they are not inter-dependent. Now I did pick these locations without at lot of thinking especially Bakersfield, CA (which thinking about it might be the earthquake capital of the world), so additional/alternate locations for refineries are NV/UT, The Rustbelts in PA & WV, and CO, which I picked for all the same reasons (the water access isn't great for those states but a nice pipeline can make anywhere "close" to the water.) (These areas might be better because the unemployed mine and steel workers of these regions should take well to the refinery jobs.)
A weird fact:
I had never even thought about this but baking soda (as in Arm and Hammer) is mined out of the ground in Wyoming. From there baking soda is made in a process that is highly reminiscent of making cement, and if it was fired hotter I think you could actually make cement out of it. How does this affect your life? It really doesn’t, I have just never considered where baking soda comes from; I guess I just took it for granted. So, now I can think of three baking ingredients that are mined, soda, salt and alum (discounting certain food dyes), and all the rest are grown.
A miner once told me that "all we have that isn’t grown, is mined”. He was a wise man. Now I am off to seek my fortune by prospecting for big soda strike!
A miner once told me that "all we have that isn’t grown, is mined”. He was a wise man. Now I am off to seek my fortune by prospecting for big soda strike!
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
An internet business model and shameless self promotion
I was surfing around today and saw a webpage of weird Ebay auctions, with people selling themselves as human billboards, etc. I had suggested something similar to a friend who was having trouble scraping up cash to buy gas. The difference is she is sculpture and a landscape architect, and I told her to sell her services (and not her person) on Ebay. She would take the winner’s design parameters and come up with sketches for a landscape design that they could implement. I think it is an underserved market, since lots of people watch HGTV and DIY and will do the work themselves, but need a professional to do the design and layout, for a price most people can afford. However, that is just me and I haven’t done the market research to see if it is a viable business plan, but given the huge fix up crazy I would think it could be very profitable. (This could also work for interior design people, and of course I have the complete idea implementation in my head.) Oh, by the way she didn’t do it, she got paid and started setting aside money to by gas, since she needs gas to drive to work more than she needs food.
Now to the shameless self promotion:
As much fun as it is getting to spout off in semi-private, I actually want people to come and read this site. So, the Ebay thing got me to thinking, once I have free time again, (it's looking like late November-ish) I should put up a thing on Ebay offering to solve someone’s problem (within reason) with the money going to the SPCA and Heart Association in my grandmother’s name (she died recently and those were her favorite charities, plus it is called freeguidance, so I can’t very well keep the money.) Besides helping a good cause, (if a bag of air that Brad Pity might have sneezed in can fetch $5, I think I can squeeze out at least $7), I can help someone and get publicity for the site. Ah guerilla marketing at it’s finest. Anybody think it is unwise, immoral, illegal, etc ? I need a reality check on this one; the world is full of people crazier than I am, so your thoughts are appreciated!
Now to the shameless self promotion:
As much fun as it is getting to spout off in semi-private, I actually want people to come and read this site. So, the Ebay thing got me to thinking, once I have free time again, (it's looking like late November-ish) I should put up a thing on Ebay offering to solve someone’s problem (within reason) with the money going to the SPCA and Heart Association in my grandmother’s name (she died recently and those were her favorite charities, plus it is called freeguidance, so I can’t very well keep the money.) Besides helping a good cause, (if a bag of air that Brad Pity might have sneezed in can fetch $5, I think I can squeeze out at least $7), I can help someone and get publicity for the site. Ah guerilla marketing at it’s finest. Anybody think it is unwise, immoral, illegal, etc ? I need a reality check on this one; the world is full of people crazier than I am, so your thoughts are appreciated!
A return to flippant
After reviewing numerous other blogs and finding many lacking, I got to thinking. Those people probably think what they are writing is inspired prose, but it is actually mostly tripe. Since one cannot judge ones own accomplishments objectively I have to wonder, do I write banal tripe, inspired my false belief in an intelligence that is lacking too? Oh sure I write random, poorly proofread crap all the time and I know it. I figure as long as the errors don’t make it unintelligible, quantity is better than quality. (I am a published author with manuscripts in the scientific literature and several short stories, so I can write well if I try. (Before you ask I used a nom de plume, and no I won’t tell you where to look for my short stories. Hint: think about it and read old posts and it shouldn’t be hard to figure out what kind of fiction I wrote. My excuse? I was young and bored, okay mostly bored, but I did have quite a following.)) (Now that was one hell of the tangent, I am impressed I could go so far and still come back so easy. Move over James Joyce, I am the king of stream of consciousness!)
Ok back to the point, for real
If my attempts at humor and deep thought are nothing more than inane ramblings, and you find yourself laughing for all the wrong reasons, I hope someone will tell me, so I can stop acting the fool...
On the other hand if someday I am deified, or at least elevated to prophet status, this will be my earliest scared texts. Hmm, I will have to go back and correct all my postings and engage in seriuos revisionist history. I would hate for the sacred writings to be a hard read, plus it might call into question my omnipotence if people found out that I don’t use enough commas or misused affect and effect.
Remember all my friends and the frequent readers can easily transition that relationship to apostles of the burgeoning faith, (I leave it to my followers to decide between Ryanism, and Ryantology.) Ok sure you will be able to "effectively wield" your power, what kind of religion would it be if those with authority couldn’t, but I am not in freaky things or polygamy, so there will be firm limits. Most of my friends are women, so I will establish the hierarchy not on gender or race but on intelligence. I strive to be egalitarian, but I don't suffer fools well. Plus if you treat women well, they will come, and where women go men follow.
What will it be like?
Well I am not going to be short sighted, no apocalypse, (at least for several generations), and nothing that will upset the ATF, FBI or media. I will be wholesome and start small, just simple rules on how to lead a good life and be happy. I will integrate into main stream society/religion, and then start siphoning off followers. I would strive to be an affordable religion that requires minimal time commitment (at first), oh and the use of the word religion is right out since that leads to the label “cult”, so I’ll need to come up with something good like “life management system”, that way we will be secular. However, there must be a carrot to get people more involved, so we will have to have secrets or great truths that only the “worthy” can understand. Remember this has to be stuff that will be easy to say with a straight face. The biggest draw I think will be the ease that people can join, and how quickly they will feel better about themselves once they do. We will encourage the questioning of other faith based belief systems and when they are found lacking, offer the substitute of a common sense based belief system, (transparency is good if you plan to encourage the masses to question authority.)
Oh I don’t expect "it" to achieve religion status during my lifetime, a couple generations will need to do by before all the bad stuff is forgotten (like my poor punctuation.) Time obscures the truth or at least rounds the rough edges, so in a few hundred years all the questionable stuff my apostles and I did will be forgotten and only the good stuff will be remembered. Oh and I want to be one of the "great people" who die quietly in their sleep, a violent death as a martyr, while it will help my public profile and serve as a rallying point for the faithful, really holds no appeal for me.
The final question is doesn’t writing this hurt my chances to see it come true?
No, first off L. Ron Hubbard is quoted as saying “if you really want to make money, start a religion”, and that really hasn’t hurt his religion at all. Second off I really do wish to help people, and if I did this it would help people. Lastly this is a joke, (you know, a satire, a humorous commentary on our belief system, etc), so I really doubt it will ever come up.
However, keep the offer in the back of your mind just in case your other life plans (or mine) don’t work out… ;)
Ok back to the point, for real
If my attempts at humor and deep thought are nothing more than inane ramblings, and you find yourself laughing for all the wrong reasons, I hope someone will tell me, so I can stop acting the fool...
On the other hand if someday I am deified, or at least elevated to prophet status, this will be my earliest scared texts. Hmm, I will have to go back and correct all my postings and engage in seriuos revisionist history. I would hate for the sacred writings to be a hard read, plus it might call into question my omnipotence if people found out that I don’t use enough commas or misused affect and effect.
Remember all my friends and the frequent readers can easily transition that relationship to apostles of the burgeoning faith, (I leave it to my followers to decide between Ryanism, and Ryantology.) Ok sure you will be able to "effectively wield" your power, what kind of religion would it be if those with authority couldn’t, but I am not in freaky things or polygamy, so there will be firm limits. Most of my friends are women, so I will establish the hierarchy not on gender or race but on intelligence. I strive to be egalitarian, but I don't suffer fools well. Plus if you treat women well, they will come, and where women go men follow.
What will it be like?
Well I am not going to be short sighted, no apocalypse, (at least for several generations), and nothing that will upset the ATF, FBI or media. I will be wholesome and start small, just simple rules on how to lead a good life and be happy. I will integrate into main stream society/religion, and then start siphoning off followers. I would strive to be an affordable religion that requires minimal time commitment (at first), oh and the use of the word religion is right out since that leads to the label “cult”, so I’ll need to come up with something good like “life management system”, that way we will be secular. However, there must be a carrot to get people more involved, so we will have to have secrets or great truths that only the “worthy” can understand. Remember this has to be stuff that will be easy to say with a straight face. The biggest draw I think will be the ease that people can join, and how quickly they will feel better about themselves once they do. We will encourage the questioning of other faith based belief systems and when they are found lacking, offer the substitute of a common sense based belief system, (transparency is good if you plan to encourage the masses to question authority.)
Oh I don’t expect "it" to achieve religion status during my lifetime, a couple generations will need to do by before all the bad stuff is forgotten (like my poor punctuation.) Time obscures the truth or at least rounds the rough edges, so in a few hundred years all the questionable stuff my apostles and I did will be forgotten and only the good stuff will be remembered. Oh and I want to be one of the "great people" who die quietly in their sleep, a violent death as a martyr, while it will help my public profile and serve as a rallying point for the faithful, really holds no appeal for me.
The final question is doesn’t writing this hurt my chances to see it come true?
No, first off L. Ron Hubbard is quoted as saying “if you really want to make money, start a religion”, and that really hasn’t hurt his religion at all. Second off I really do wish to help people, and if I did this it would help people. Lastly this is a joke, (you know, a satire, a humorous commentary on our belief system, etc), so I really doubt it will ever come up.
However, keep the offer in the back of your mind just in case your other life plans (or mine) don’t work out… ;)
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Hybrid vehicles: Plugin vs regular and storing renewable energy, a novel combined cycle approach
Hybrid vehicles: Plugin vs regular
This is the follow up post to the original hydrogen economy post. I have read up a bit topic and there are definite advantages to using plugin hybrids since the production of energy by a power plant is more efficient than using a gasoline engine. However, the problem is that using the predictions of the plugin hybrid proponents once they are mass produced they will still cost $5K more than a regular hybrid which are ~$5K more than a regular car. So driving 25 miles a day, the pay back period of a plugin is 10 years with $3 a gallon gas (assuming it never uses any gas, at all and you're buying electricity at $0.08/kWh), versus the 8 year pay back of a regular hybrid that gets double the mpg of a regular car. You can say well the environment is worth it regardless of the cost, but the problem is that to get to the $5K from the current $30K it has to be worth it because of the cost alone!
Do I think it could work at all?
I think a plugin hybrid bus could work, however it would work better if at the bus stops there were overhead chargers so the bus could recharge, and not drain the batteries to run the electrical loads while it idled at a passenger stop. An added advantage is that the biggest load for a vehicle is getting off the line, so if the bus was fully electric coming out of the stop you save a lot of drain on the batteries and/or not have that huge cloud to diesel exhaust as it starts up. In addition you don’t have to string wires over every road on the route, just selected and permanent locations, so you retain most of the flexibility of having buses versus electric trolleys. Fleet vehicles might work as well (but not police or fire vehicles since they need total flexibility and go too many miles per day), perhaps even taxi cabs, since they could charge while idling at the airport, and at distributed stations waiting to be dispatched.
Now I did read a very interesting article that the batteries in plugin hybrids could be used for peak shaving, since the electric company can sell them cheap off peak power then get it back to met peak demand. I think that is a brilliant idea except, the conversion (AC/DC then DC/AC) and transmission loses would eat up the savings. However if it was individual companies that did it, and then they could have special DC chargers for the cars and DC air conditioning equipment so they could cut the loses and maybe save money, plus the employee benefit of giving them free fuel for the commute in. Well that is does make a very nice model till you consider that peak demand is: 3 to 6 in the afternoon. Well this is also when most cars are on the road, and when they get home the batteries will be in no condition to provide power. Plus, if you want to store wind energy (sun up to ~10 am) you will be trying to charge batteries that have already recharged all night, or are on the road already.
Storing renewable energy, a novel combined cycle approach
Ok since wind power is now cheaper than even combined cycle natural gas utilities are investing heavily in it, but since renewal isn’t on demand, most wind power is wasted. The problem with electric is that it has to be used as it made, so in my previous post I suggested we use excess energy to make hydrogen gas. I still think this is an excellent idea, since hydrogen has many uses that command a premium price (ie more than the company could get for selling the electrons) but I wish to consider alternatives too. The most obvious is store power in either flywheels or batteries but the cost and maintenance issues make that impractical. So I suggest a combined cycle system, it is complex but I believe workable. Making ethanol is limited since yeast require simple sugar for food, but most plants convert sugar to cellulose which yeast can’t process, and is even difficult for most bacteria. However, acid can readily break down cellulose to sugar but the process is plagued by high acid costs, and difficultly of getting rid of spent acid. One of the main acids for the process is HCl, which can be produced by electrolyzing salt to sodium metal, and chlorine gas, then reacting the chlorine with hydrogen (which can be made from reacting sodium metal and water and yields NaOH aka lye). This provides a feed stock gas to turn useless biomass into yeast food, (which is neutralized with you guessed it lye) then finally biofuels. Unlike the traditional process the spent acid is not recovered from the waste solution it is instead reacted in situ with iron or nickel to produce FeCl or NiCl. Since one you can make a whole day’s worth of chlorine with a few hours of power, the process is well suited to being discontinuous.
Now here is the cool part there is a battery technology the uses a sodium metal (anode) and either finely divided FeCl or NiCl as the cathode in a molten salt electrolyte. While currently this is sealed cell technology, since it uses liquid electrodes in permeable ceramic containers it is well suited to conversion to a continuous process by having the reactants flow in and out or semi-continuous flowing only sodium and having the reduced metal coat the anode so you recover rods to neutralize the acid solution again and regenerate the finely divided metal chloride. Since the parts are cheap and while liquid sodium isn’t as safe it is considered safer than high pressure stream, these cells could complete against high temp fuel cell technologies. Plus since they use industrial waste instead pure hydrogen, they save money (especially the part about not having to recover spent acid).
Some will criticize me and say the production sodium and chlorine is not efficient if the cell isn’t continuous, (due to heat lose while idling), and so it must be done wet which produces NaOH not sodium. I agree there may be issues, but if sodium metal production is not possible that is still not a problem since sodium is the cheapest metal at >10 cents a pound. At that price it cheaper than hydrogen gas on a W/kg basis (Na 23 g/mol versus H 1g/mol.)
Is it cheap enough for peak shaving in a competitive market? It might be if the plant was built near a big city in the interior of the country, in a windy area, next to a paper mill. Even without the combined cycle to get work out of the intermediate products simply making and storing sodium metal and using chlorine to directly make FeCl/NiCl is easier and cheaper than making and storing hydrogen and oxygen (compressors and chillers require huge amounts of power you can’t get back, plus hydrogen has a low energy density.)
This is the follow up post to the original hydrogen economy post. I have read up a bit topic and there are definite advantages to using plugin hybrids since the production of energy by a power plant is more efficient than using a gasoline engine. However, the problem is that using the predictions of the plugin hybrid proponents once they are mass produced they will still cost $5K more than a regular hybrid which are ~$5K more than a regular car. So driving 25 miles a day, the pay back period of a plugin is 10 years with $3 a gallon gas (assuming it never uses any gas, at all and you're buying electricity at $0.08/kWh), versus the 8 year pay back of a regular hybrid that gets double the mpg of a regular car. You can say well the environment is worth it regardless of the cost, but the problem is that to get to the $5K from the current $30K it has to be worth it because of the cost alone!
Do I think it could work at all?
I think a plugin hybrid bus could work, however it would work better if at the bus stops there were overhead chargers so the bus could recharge, and not drain the batteries to run the electrical loads while it idled at a passenger stop. An added advantage is that the biggest load for a vehicle is getting off the line, so if the bus was fully electric coming out of the stop you save a lot of drain on the batteries and/or not have that huge cloud to diesel exhaust as it starts up. In addition you don’t have to string wires over every road on the route, just selected and permanent locations, so you retain most of the flexibility of having buses versus electric trolleys. Fleet vehicles might work as well (but not police or fire vehicles since they need total flexibility and go too many miles per day), perhaps even taxi cabs, since they could charge while idling at the airport, and at distributed stations waiting to be dispatched.
Now I did read a very interesting article that the batteries in plugin hybrids could be used for peak shaving, since the electric company can sell them cheap off peak power then get it back to met peak demand. I think that is a brilliant idea except, the conversion (AC/DC then DC/AC) and transmission loses would eat up the savings. However if it was individual companies that did it, and then they could have special DC chargers for the cars and DC air conditioning equipment so they could cut the loses and maybe save money, plus the employee benefit of giving them free fuel for the commute in. Well that is does make a very nice model till you consider that peak demand is: 3 to 6 in the afternoon. Well this is also when most cars are on the road, and when they get home the batteries will be in no condition to provide power. Plus, if you want to store wind energy (sun up to ~10 am) you will be trying to charge batteries that have already recharged all night, or are on the road already.
Storing renewable energy, a novel combined cycle approach
Ok since wind power is now cheaper than even combined cycle natural gas utilities are investing heavily in it, but since renewal isn’t on demand, most wind power is wasted. The problem with electric is that it has to be used as it made, so in my previous post I suggested we use excess energy to make hydrogen gas. I still think this is an excellent idea, since hydrogen has many uses that command a premium price (ie more than the company could get for selling the electrons) but I wish to consider alternatives too. The most obvious is store power in either flywheels or batteries but the cost and maintenance issues make that impractical. So I suggest a combined cycle system, it is complex but I believe workable. Making ethanol is limited since yeast require simple sugar for food, but most plants convert sugar to cellulose which yeast can’t process, and is even difficult for most bacteria. However, acid can readily break down cellulose to sugar but the process is plagued by high acid costs, and difficultly of getting rid of spent acid. One of the main acids for the process is HCl, which can be produced by electrolyzing salt to sodium metal, and chlorine gas, then reacting the chlorine with hydrogen (which can be made from reacting sodium metal and water and yields NaOH aka lye). This provides a feed stock gas to turn useless biomass into yeast food, (which is neutralized with you guessed it lye) then finally biofuels. Unlike the traditional process the spent acid is not recovered from the waste solution it is instead reacted in situ with iron or nickel to produce FeCl or NiCl. Since one you can make a whole day’s worth of chlorine with a few hours of power, the process is well suited to being discontinuous.
Now here is the cool part there is a battery technology the uses a sodium metal (anode) and either finely divided FeCl or NiCl as the cathode in a molten salt electrolyte. While currently this is sealed cell technology, since it uses liquid electrodes in permeable ceramic containers it is well suited to conversion to a continuous process by having the reactants flow in and out or semi-continuous flowing only sodium and having the reduced metal coat the anode so you recover rods to neutralize the acid solution again and regenerate the finely divided metal chloride. Since the parts are cheap and while liquid sodium isn’t as safe it is considered safer than high pressure stream, these cells could complete against high temp fuel cell technologies. Plus since they use industrial waste instead pure hydrogen, they save money (especially the part about not having to recover spent acid).
Some will criticize me and say the production sodium and chlorine is not efficient if the cell isn’t continuous, (due to heat lose while idling), and so it must be done wet which produces NaOH not sodium. I agree there may be issues, but if sodium metal production is not possible that is still not a problem since sodium is the cheapest metal at >10 cents a pound. At that price it cheaper than hydrogen gas on a W/kg basis (Na 23 g/mol versus H 1g/mol.)
Is it cheap enough for peak shaving in a competitive market? It might be if the plant was built near a big city in the interior of the country, in a windy area, next to a paper mill. Even without the combined cycle to get work out of the intermediate products simply making and storing sodium metal and using chlorine to directly make FeCl/NiCl is easier and cheaper than making and storing hydrogen and oxygen (compressors and chillers require huge amounts of power you can’t get back, plus hydrogen has a low energy density.)
A Rita’s Digest version of events
Yes, that is a bad pun, but I couldn’t resist, I hope you can forgive me. Well the whole Rita thing is pretty much over since the she has moved to the northeast of here. While the wind has been impressive, Dallas hasn’t seen a single drop of rain. Why did I decide to release a commemorative Rita post in a digest format? Mostly because it was bumping real posts off the main page, and since I maybe thought of as arrogant, I wouldn’t hide my mistakes. So now you can easily read from my early dire predictions to my admission that Rita was a non-event in Dallas. No sense starting revisionist history now, plus in this case I can place the blame for my poor predictions squarely on the people at weather.com. ;) Plus, all the odd little facts are still worth a read, and I stand behind my ideas for a quick efficient evacuation.
If you aren’t interested in the Rita stuff I encourage you to look to the right and pick a different topic to read.
Rita is here: The effects and the unknowns
Ok Rita came ashore last night last night and while Beaumont, & Lake Charles both took serious damage, the eye came on shore in a swamp so there was minimal lose in lives and property. Houston had high winds and some rain, but really not something you evacuate 2 million people for. (I would like to say that if they hadn’t ordered the evacuation, and Rita had hit Houston with 160+ mph winds and a 20’ storm surge the lose of life would have been staggering, so it was the right thing to do at the time.) Now they are afraid of all the people heading back to Houston at once and compounding the evacuation fiasco. Hopefully they can stage the returns so that traffic will be like holiday weekend return traffic, instead of a 100 mile long parking lot.
I doubt the Texas Gulf Coast will decent in lawlessness, those are tight knit communities, (for those unfamiliar with New Orleans it is a pretty lawless place normally, with only an iron handed sheriff keeping things together and protecting the tourists.) Speaking of New Orleans, it is screwed again, because the already damaged levees were over toped in places and the water has risen 6’ in several areas.
What’s next?
Sure the wind is inconvenient, with sustained winds of 20 to 30 mph and gusts to 40 in Dallas but the real unknown is the rain and the flooding. With the storm moving very slowly to the N/NE the rain fall is tremendous in a lot of places (like 12” a day). Dallas is expecting light rain for the next 3 or 4 days, but east and northeast of here they will see 3 or 4 solid days of heavy rains. So stay tuned.
My ideas for a good evacuation, w/ a Rita update version 2
I would like to start out with a Rita update. Dallas is now being affected by the winds coming from Rita. It is weird too, instead of the wind gusting then backing off it is a constant 15+ mph hour wind and it is from the NE, which in Dallas is not a direction the wind normally comes from. I just went outside and stood there pondering why the wind didn’t feel right. Then it hit me, the wind is very hot and wet, which is not normal especially in the middle of the night, you can feel the energy of the storm, and while it sounds strange the wind doesn’t smell right either. The clouds look weird too, since they are from one of the swirling arms of the hurricane. Overall the weather is very unsettling, not a drop of rain has fallen, but you can feel it is coming.
I have learned that they only say the hurricane comes ashore when the eye comes ashore. I feel this is a bit deceptive; the hurricane “hit” Louisiana yesterday but since it ran parallel to shore that didn’t count. Tell that to the people trying to stop the levees from breaking. Ok it is true that the area around the eye has the highest winds and most, but I don’t think I am being overly generous when I say that getting hit with 5 inches of rain and 75+ mph winds should count even if you don’t get to see the eye.
As I promised my ideas for a good evacuation:
This post has moved, since I thought it deserved its own heading!
Ready or not here comes Rita! Version 2
Well since Dallas will be only minimally inconvenienced by the remnants of Rita when they arrive late Sunday night-ish I have little to report, weather-wise. While it is true that there are gas shortages in Houston and Galveston, since tens of thousands of people deciding to take a long road trip at the same time quickly consumed supplies at the stations flanking I-45 and the other major roads out of the area. (The underground tanks at a large gas station only hold between 8-10 thousand gallons each, so they can only serve a few thousand cars a day max, then it takes 4 tanker trucks loads of fuel to completely refill the tanks.) Despite rumors to that effect there are no gas shortages in Dallas. Sure I saw long lines at places with regular going for $2.509 a gallon, as people try to save some money, but at the station down the street that has regular selling for $2.739 a gallon, you can just pull right in and fill up. For those keeping track the evacuation has gone poorly, (I don’t blame the government for this) I also don’t like to criticize unless I can present a plan to do it better. Accordingly I have given a lot of thought to evacuation and emergency management protocols, that I think could work in the case of an emergency. So, stay tuned and I will follow up with that post soon!
Hurricane Rita update: The anticlimax
Well it seems Dallas will be completely spared. The weather.com people seem to believe that Dallas will see less than an inch of rain, and only 10 to 20 mph winds. The storm is expected to kind of stall out over far east Texas and bring some serious flooding, but the DFW metroplex will be spared. This is a good thing because Dallas has absorbed tens of thousands of evacuees, so it would be bad if we had serious problems too. I have no real numbers but since 2 million people evacuated from Houston and Galveston, and there was a hundred mile traffic jam between Houston and Dallas I can imagine that more than few people have come here. Here is how bad it is: All 20,000 hotel rooms in DFW are filled and they are housing evacuees in the county jail, not moving people from the Houston jail to the Dallas jail, they are having to house regular people in the jail (as in the place with bars and guards.) I guess it is better than nothing….
Hurricane Rita, President Bush, Crawford, and floods
Just an aside for anyone who is interested, Crawford TX (where President Bush has his ranch) will be mostly spared the wrath of Rita. Sure it will get lots of rain and wind but I think it will see less rain and wind than Dallas since it is further west, and the remnants of the storm are expected to go N/NE after landfall. I don’t think Bush will ride out the storm there but doubt the Secret Service is boarding up the windows either. However, for all the protestors (if they are still there) I suggest you get wet weather work clothes from the local feed and seed, and park your cars on an elevated paved surface, since there will be at least light flooding.
This is Texas, all those sticks you see on the roadside that are marked off in feet and go to 5, are there for a reason. I thought they were stupid too, until I saw that one was gone as in completely underwater. (During a flood in Brown County I have seen a bridge that is normally 40 feet above the water line submerged more than 10 feet underwater.) When the soil is this dry (and sun baked it is 100+ today) , it doesn’t soak up water very well, so it all runs off, and once the streams and ditches fill it quickly floods low lying areas. I remind people to be careful, if the road is ever submerged don’t try it, even if it is just a little water, cause the road might be gone from the culvert collapsing. (It only takes 10-12 inches of water to float a car.)
Hurricane Rita Update:
Hurricane Rita is now the 3rd largest hurricane on record. While Texan’s are stereotypically thought to do things big, I feel that this is not a time Texan’s wish to live up to that reputation. However, with the high pressure ridge that was keeping Rita in the Gulf weakening the threat to Dallas is also weakening, since she might make land fall more to the East and come up the Texas/Louisiana border. So, now Dallas is expecting 30+ mph winds and only 3” of rain, and frankly we could use the rain too. However, what we don’t need are tornados.
Side note: For my readers outside tornado country the sound of tornado sirens is truly eerie. The wind and rain will be pounding so hard you can’t hear anything else then it starts arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr……arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr….. At first you are wondering what is that?, then it hits you. Sure they test them occasionally, so you have heard it before, but it sounds different on a clear sunny day than it does against the background of a ferocious storm.
Back to the point:
For reference I can normally drive from Houston to Dallas in a little over 3.5 hours. My friend’s family came up yesterday and it took them 12 hours. My bother is headed to Austin, since they are further west so in theory should get even less rain than Dallas.
I just read a news story that the only major city in Texas with hotel rooms is El Paso. Being from El Paso I would suggest the Westin (it has a new name now), it is a nice hotel, and has the best remaining example of Tiffany glass in the world. One other thing to consider is that El Paso is several thousand feet above sea level so the likelihood of flooding is remote.
Correction
I miscalculated the conversion from watts to joules in yesterday’s post so I decided to do it again from scratch. I convert the AOML numbers to assume Rita is bigger than their estimates for the average hurricane by wildly underestimating the rain fall in 24 hours as only 1.8 inches to get 2.6x10^20 joules per day or ~3x10^15 joules per second. Since 3” of rain is expected over 24 hours in Dallas with 8-12 in Houston you can see how low I have shot, but you get the point. Now I am only taking rain fall into account with these numbers because the fictional losses due to wind are only ~6.9x10^17 joules a day which is less than the rounding error. (How cool is that 1.5 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity is rounded down as insignificant.) While 2.6x10^20 joules per day seems like a lot of energy it is only 1.7% of the total amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun every day.
Rita’s coming!
Well hurricane Rita is coming for Texas, oh sure I am in Dallas so it’s not like I have to evacuate, but still. Dallas is going to get the real short end of stick on this one. Why? Because the people who left New Orleans after Katrina mostly went to Houston and Dallas. Now that Houston is being evacuated, we are getting the evacuated evacuates too. I do feel bad for them cause just as they were trying to get back on their feet, it is time to flee again.
Interesting hurricane stuff:
Assuming that the compression of the storm as it comes on shore isn’t too bad the main body of the storm will make College Station easily before the eye wall comes ashore and the hurricane is cut off from it’s energy source. If you haven’t already go to weather.com and look at the satellite photos since that is the best way to appreciate the size of the storm. The main body of the storm is larger than Georgia, yes the most intense part of Rita is bigger than a state, and not on the tiny New England states either. If you put the map in motion you can see that the swirling cloud mass which isn’t the most powerful part of the storm, but still brings wind and rain, stretches from the panhandle of Florida on the northeast to the Yucatan in the Southwest-ish. Take a moment to ponder that, Rita is sweeping the entire Gulf of Mexico, plus a little of the Caribbean sea. I looked it up and the Gulf of Mexico is 615,000 square miles or 1.6 million square kilometers, (for reference Alaska is only 570,000 square miles), so this hurricane is truly massive.
Something else I looked up a hurricane of Rita’s size produces 2.9x10^18 joules a day or 3.4x10^14 joules per second, the Hiroshima bomb was only 1.8x 10^13 by the most optimistic calculations. Another interesting fact is that after W they start naming storms with just a Greek letter. BTW the remaining named storms for the year will be Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. I bet it will be hard for the news people to say Tammy, Vince and Wilma with a straight face. (Try it, say in your best serious voice “As Hurricane Wilma, turns towards land… and not think of Fred Flintstone screaming Wilmaaaaaaa!) Back to the seriousness. Since we have nearly 2 months of hurricane season left, I figure hurricane delta isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Oh well what can you do? Dallas is expected to see 50+ mph winds and 5” of rain Saturday night and Sunday morning. Because the power will be going out, I guess I will have to watch TV by candle light like my pioneer ancestors. Yes, that was a joke, but with all my UPS’ I can surf the web and watch TV for several hours, or if I know power will be out for awhile I have enough battery backup power to have lights and radio for a week. Sadly, all my appliances are electric so no power means no: oven, stove, hot water, fridge or A/C. (Just on more reason gas appliances rule!!)
Like I said what can you do?
Nothing, I will just wait for my family from the coast to arrive and wait it out. Fortunately I like peanut butter crackers.
If you aren’t interested in the Rita stuff I encourage you to look to the right and pick a different topic to read.
Rita is here: The effects and the unknowns
Ok Rita came ashore last night last night and while Beaumont, & Lake Charles both took serious damage, the eye came on shore in a swamp so there was minimal lose in lives and property. Houston had high winds and some rain, but really not something you evacuate 2 million people for. (I would like to say that if they hadn’t ordered the evacuation, and Rita had hit Houston with 160+ mph winds and a 20’ storm surge the lose of life would have been staggering, so it was the right thing to do at the time.) Now they are afraid of all the people heading back to Houston at once and compounding the evacuation fiasco. Hopefully they can stage the returns so that traffic will be like holiday weekend return traffic, instead of a 100 mile long parking lot.
I doubt the Texas Gulf Coast will decent in lawlessness, those are tight knit communities, (for those unfamiliar with New Orleans it is a pretty lawless place normally, with only an iron handed sheriff keeping things together and protecting the tourists.) Speaking of New Orleans, it is screwed again, because the already damaged levees were over toped in places and the water has risen 6’ in several areas.
What’s next?
Sure the wind is inconvenient, with sustained winds of 20 to 30 mph and gusts to 40 in Dallas but the real unknown is the rain and the flooding. With the storm moving very slowly to the N/NE the rain fall is tremendous in a lot of places (like 12” a day). Dallas is expecting light rain for the next 3 or 4 days, but east and northeast of here they will see 3 or 4 solid days of heavy rains. So stay tuned.
My ideas for a good evacuation, w/ a Rita update version 2
I would like to start out with a Rita update. Dallas is now being affected by the winds coming from Rita. It is weird too, instead of the wind gusting then backing off it is a constant 15+ mph hour wind and it is from the NE, which in Dallas is not a direction the wind normally comes from. I just went outside and stood there pondering why the wind didn’t feel right. Then it hit me, the wind is very hot and wet, which is not normal especially in the middle of the night, you can feel the energy of the storm, and while it sounds strange the wind doesn’t smell right either. The clouds look weird too, since they are from one of the swirling arms of the hurricane. Overall the weather is very unsettling, not a drop of rain has fallen, but you can feel it is coming.
I have learned that they only say the hurricane comes ashore when the eye comes ashore. I feel this is a bit deceptive; the hurricane “hit” Louisiana yesterday but since it ran parallel to shore that didn’t count. Tell that to the people trying to stop the levees from breaking. Ok it is true that the area around the eye has the highest winds and most, but I don’t think I am being overly generous when I say that getting hit with 5 inches of rain and 75+ mph winds should count even if you don’t get to see the eye.
As I promised my ideas for a good evacuation:
This post has moved, since I thought it deserved its own heading!
Ready or not here comes Rita! Version 2
Well since Dallas will be only minimally inconvenienced by the remnants of Rita when they arrive late Sunday night-ish I have little to report, weather-wise. While it is true that there are gas shortages in Houston and Galveston, since tens of thousands of people deciding to take a long road trip at the same time quickly consumed supplies at the stations flanking I-45 and the other major roads out of the area. (The underground tanks at a large gas station only hold between 8-10 thousand gallons each, so they can only serve a few thousand cars a day max, then it takes 4 tanker trucks loads of fuel to completely refill the tanks.) Despite rumors to that effect there are no gas shortages in Dallas. Sure I saw long lines at places with regular going for $2.509 a gallon, as people try to save some money, but at the station down the street that has regular selling for $2.739 a gallon, you can just pull right in and fill up. For those keeping track the evacuation has gone poorly, (I don’t blame the government for this) I also don’t like to criticize unless I can present a plan to do it better. Accordingly I have given a lot of thought to evacuation and emergency management protocols, that I think could work in the case of an emergency. So, stay tuned and I will follow up with that post soon!
Hurricane Rita update: The anticlimax
Well it seems Dallas will be completely spared. The weather.com people seem to believe that Dallas will see less than an inch of rain, and only 10 to 20 mph winds. The storm is expected to kind of stall out over far east Texas and bring some serious flooding, but the DFW metroplex will be spared. This is a good thing because Dallas has absorbed tens of thousands of evacuees, so it would be bad if we had serious problems too. I have no real numbers but since 2 million people evacuated from Houston and Galveston, and there was a hundred mile traffic jam between Houston and Dallas I can imagine that more than few people have come here. Here is how bad it is: All 20,000 hotel rooms in DFW are filled and they are housing evacuees in the county jail, not moving people from the Houston jail to the Dallas jail, they are having to house regular people in the jail (as in the place with bars and guards.) I guess it is better than nothing….
Hurricane Rita, President Bush, Crawford, and floods
Just an aside for anyone who is interested, Crawford TX (where President Bush has his ranch) will be mostly spared the wrath of Rita. Sure it will get lots of rain and wind but I think it will see less rain and wind than Dallas since it is further west, and the remnants of the storm are expected to go N/NE after landfall. I don’t think Bush will ride out the storm there but doubt the Secret Service is boarding up the windows either. However, for all the protestors (if they are still there) I suggest you get wet weather work clothes from the local feed and seed, and park your cars on an elevated paved surface, since there will be at least light flooding.
This is Texas, all those sticks you see on the roadside that are marked off in feet and go to 5, are there for a reason. I thought they were stupid too, until I saw that one was gone as in completely underwater. (During a flood in Brown County I have seen a bridge that is normally 40 feet above the water line submerged more than 10 feet underwater.) When the soil is this dry (and sun baked it is 100+ today) , it doesn’t soak up water very well, so it all runs off, and once the streams and ditches fill it quickly floods low lying areas. I remind people to be careful, if the road is ever submerged don’t try it, even if it is just a little water, cause the road might be gone from the culvert collapsing. (It only takes 10-12 inches of water to float a car.)
Hurricane Rita Update:
Hurricane Rita is now the 3rd largest hurricane on record. While Texan’s are stereotypically thought to do things big, I feel that this is not a time Texan’s wish to live up to that reputation. However, with the high pressure ridge that was keeping Rita in the Gulf weakening the threat to Dallas is also weakening, since she might make land fall more to the East and come up the Texas/Louisiana border. So, now Dallas is expecting 30+ mph winds and only 3” of rain, and frankly we could use the rain too. However, what we don’t need are tornados.
Side note: For my readers outside tornado country the sound of tornado sirens is truly eerie. The wind and rain will be pounding so hard you can’t hear anything else then it starts arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrr……arrrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr….. At first you are wondering what is that?, then it hits you. Sure they test them occasionally, so you have heard it before, but it sounds different on a clear sunny day than it does against the background of a ferocious storm.
Back to the point:
For reference I can normally drive from Houston to Dallas in a little over 3.5 hours. My friend’s family came up yesterday and it took them 12 hours. My bother is headed to Austin, since they are further west so in theory should get even less rain than Dallas.
I just read a news story that the only major city in Texas with hotel rooms is El Paso. Being from El Paso I would suggest the Westin (it has a new name now), it is a nice hotel, and has the best remaining example of Tiffany glass in the world. One other thing to consider is that El Paso is several thousand feet above sea level so the likelihood of flooding is remote.
Correction
I miscalculated the conversion from watts to joules in yesterday’s post so I decided to do it again from scratch. I convert the AOML numbers to assume Rita is bigger than their estimates for the average hurricane by wildly underestimating the rain fall in 24 hours as only 1.8 inches to get 2.6x10^20 joules per day or ~3x10^15 joules per second. Since 3” of rain is expected over 24 hours in Dallas with 8-12 in Houston you can see how low I have shot, but you get the point. Now I am only taking rain fall into account with these numbers because the fictional losses due to wind are only ~6.9x10^17 joules a day which is less than the rounding error. (How cool is that 1.5 times the world-wide electrical generating capacity is rounded down as insignificant.) While 2.6x10^20 joules per day seems like a lot of energy it is only 1.7% of the total amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun every day.
Rita’s coming!
Well hurricane Rita is coming for Texas, oh sure I am in Dallas so it’s not like I have to evacuate, but still. Dallas is going to get the real short end of stick on this one. Why? Because the people who left New Orleans after Katrina mostly went to Houston and Dallas. Now that Houston is being evacuated, we are getting the evacuated evacuates too. I do feel bad for them cause just as they were trying to get back on their feet, it is time to flee again.
Interesting hurricane stuff:
Assuming that the compression of the storm as it comes on shore isn’t too bad the main body of the storm will make College Station easily before the eye wall comes ashore and the hurricane is cut off from it’s energy source. If you haven’t already go to weather.com and look at the satellite photos since that is the best way to appreciate the size of the storm. The main body of the storm is larger than Georgia, yes the most intense part of Rita is bigger than a state, and not on the tiny New England states either. If you put the map in motion you can see that the swirling cloud mass which isn’t the most powerful part of the storm, but still brings wind and rain, stretches from the panhandle of Florida on the northeast to the Yucatan in the Southwest-ish. Take a moment to ponder that, Rita is sweeping the entire Gulf of Mexico, plus a little of the Caribbean sea. I looked it up and the Gulf of Mexico is 615,000 square miles or 1.6 million square kilometers, (for reference Alaska is only 570,000 square miles), so this hurricane is truly massive.
Something else I looked up a hurricane of Rita’s size produces 2.9x10^18 joules a day or 3.4x10^14 joules per second, the Hiroshima bomb was only 1.8x 10^13 by the most optimistic calculations. Another interesting fact is that after W they start naming storms with just a Greek letter. BTW the remaining named storms for the year will be Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. I bet it will be hard for the news people to say Tammy, Vince and Wilma with a straight face. (Try it, say in your best serious voice “As Hurricane Wilma, turns towards land… and not think of Fred Flintstone screaming Wilmaaaaaaa!) Back to the seriousness. Since we have nearly 2 months of hurricane season left, I figure hurricane delta isn’t beyond the realm of possibility.
Oh well what can you do? Dallas is expected to see 50+ mph winds and 5” of rain Saturday night and Sunday morning. Because the power will be going out, I guess I will have to watch TV by candle light like my pioneer ancestors. Yes, that was a joke, but with all my UPS’ I can surf the web and watch TV for several hours, or if I know power will be out for awhile I have enough battery backup power to have lights and radio for a week. Sadly, all my appliances are electric so no power means no: oven, stove, hot water, fridge or A/C. (Just on more reason gas appliances rule!!)
Like I said what can you do?
Nothing, I will just wait for my family from the coast to arrive and wait it out. Fortunately I like peanut butter crackers.
My ideas for a good evacuation (repost)
It has been discovered that you can’t evacuate 2 million people in 2 days (despite all the post 9-11 preparations), if you let them take there own cars. Since I don’t like to criticize others without suggesting a solution, here are my thoughts. Don’t get me wrong Rita is bad, but had this been an emergency, where like FEMA steps in declares marital law I would have handled it differently. You can’t let people take cars and then hodgepodge drive away this has been proven since now thousands will have to wait out a Cat 3 Hurricane in there cars exposed on the highway. The best way to move lots of people is to bus them to a train yard, then use trains to evacuate them. First in passenger cars, then in box cars if needed, remember the government gives lot of money to Amtrak, let them do some work and pay it back. Then once most of the people are gone, bus the last of the people out on Greyhound, school, city buses.
Ok how much stuff can people take? Well, perhaps the nice FEMA people can provide either military-style duffels and/or reinforced boxes, (the boxes should fit a suitcase that is suitable for carry on inside, so people who show up with luggage can have their stuff just put inside) with a list of items that should be brought printed on the lid. If the evacuation is only for a couple days one box, more if it is longer. As the people board the train before they are separated from there stuff they should be given bracelets with barcodes that match barcodes on the boxes (the boxes should be numbered so power isn’t required to find their stuff, and the boxes should as have RFID tags so they can be found quickly since for transport stuff might have to be sent after the people are out either by truck or train. The boxes then should be sealed in tamper evident waterproof plastic right after being taken at the station, this will discourage thief and prevent the stuff from getting damaged if it rains or snows. Then the boxes are palletized for quick loading and unloading. While people are registering their belongings, any medical conditions and required medications should be noted so that info can linked to their tag. Children and special needs people coded to their parents or guardians and then thumb printed so if they lose or remove the bracelet they can be quickly IDed, I see no reason to incur the difficult or constitutional issues of fingerprinting everyone. This allows families to be linked to each other, so that families can be kept together, boarding priority determined, and if consent is needed for medical treatment the responsible person instantly IDed. They people might also be asked their preferred evacuation destination, so if it is possible requests can be honored. A smaller bag would be given out with the boxes for carry on items like pills, or small comfort items.
When I say train station I don’t mean the nice train stations, I mean train yards or places were train tracks cross large streets, perhaps embarkation point is the better term. Since after 1950 train travel in most of the country went away, once everyone got cars, so the train infrastructure is mostly dedicated to cargo transport and therefore passenger train stations won’t be able to handle the load. Then as people board the train they should be given a small pack with personal hygiene items, non-perishable food and bottled water. Once at the destination the people loaded straight on to buses and their things trucked in once the people are offloaded since milling people and forklifts are a bad combo! I feel that FEMA needs to talk to the Walmart and Amazon people about how handle the logistics since they could do a much better job, they even have the boxes. This method of evacuation is more efficient for natural disasters, since it is easier to fix one rail bed and track than a multilane road, and the track can carry more stuff than the road anyway.
Ok here is the how to handle a car based evacuation, which is just a bad idea. First off all loops in the city are closed, that forces people to exit on the nearest outbound road spreading the loads instead of everyone going one direction (if possible.) If there are 3 lanes each way the 5 lanes go away and one back reserved for returning buses and relief supply staging. Even 5 miles or so fueling/restroom/food/first aid stations set up, I suggest manning the stations with RedCross people and Army 92Fs since now is not a time to charge for fuel or food. Then, as traffic increases people on motorcycles/atv go up and down the rows of cars checking fuel levels, and the condition of the people and vehicle so that people can be directed to turn off at the appropriate station. I think a colored sticker would work nice since a red sticker would tell the station traffic people that they need in, and a yellow would indicate that if there is room they should come in. This prevents people from running out of fuel plus it reduces load on the permanent infrastructure, the stations should only have high octane gas and diesel, since it will make people feel good that they are getting premium gas, but more importantly cars that don’t require it can run on 91 octane, but cars that require 91 can’t run on 87, so it serves the most cars. The patrols would also quickly move broken down cars off the road, and if the car has to be left for later towing take the people to the nearest station for later busing. Don’t try to keep the traffic going 60, shoot for 25 or 30, this means cars will have to enter and leave the road at a controlled rate. Also, since people will likely have to stop at least once make a pamphlet of the various facilities available at the destination and maps of the city available , so they can quickly find their way once they arrive, and clear off the road. Depending on the type of emergency, people and materials should be moved as close to area as possible during the evacuation, that way after the emergency, the help for the people who don’t evacuate can be swiftly staged, and the area quickly secured to prevent lawlessness. Also as the city empties people should go around asking the remaining people to leave, if they refuse then the location marked and the person braceleted if possible, and any info about the person and their home noted, so they can be checked on afterwards, and if they need medical attention it can be quickly rendered, and any family notified of their condition.
To save money on damage claims for cars and irreplaceable belongings, a hybrid evacuation should be considered. This works by letting people drive their cars and whatever can be put in them out of the area that will be hardest hit, but not to a region that is considered safe for people. The people evacuate on trains and buses, and the cars are protected by earthen berms (the Army has the technology). I am not sure how good an idea this is but it protects both lives and property, so it is worth consideration. Beyond these simplistic thoughts I would require more detail about the specifics of the evacuation, but since each city can be planned in advance it is not impossible. I realize there are some constitutional issues with some of what I have suggested, but that is the only way to do it. If you are allowed to decide for yourself what to do, then don’t hold the government responsible when it fails. Also, if you read the act the created FEMA, you will see that everything I suggest is in their power.
Ok how much stuff can people take? Well, perhaps the nice FEMA people can provide either military-style duffels and/or reinforced boxes, (the boxes should fit a suitcase that is suitable for carry on inside, so people who show up with luggage can have their stuff just put inside) with a list of items that should be brought printed on the lid. If the evacuation is only for a couple days one box, more if it is longer. As the people board the train before they are separated from there stuff they should be given bracelets with barcodes that match barcodes on the boxes (the boxes should be numbered so power isn’t required to find their stuff, and the boxes should as have RFID tags so they can be found quickly since for transport stuff might have to be sent after the people are out either by truck or train. The boxes then should be sealed in tamper evident waterproof plastic right after being taken at the station, this will discourage thief and prevent the stuff from getting damaged if it rains or snows. Then the boxes are palletized for quick loading and unloading. While people are registering their belongings, any medical conditions and required medications should be noted so that info can linked to their tag. Children and special needs people coded to their parents or guardians and then thumb printed so if they lose or remove the bracelet they can be quickly IDed, I see no reason to incur the difficult or constitutional issues of fingerprinting everyone. This allows families to be linked to each other, so that families can be kept together, boarding priority determined, and if consent is needed for medical treatment the responsible person instantly IDed. They people might also be asked their preferred evacuation destination, so if it is possible requests can be honored. A smaller bag would be given out with the boxes for carry on items like pills, or small comfort items.
When I say train station I don’t mean the nice train stations, I mean train yards or places were train tracks cross large streets, perhaps embarkation point is the better term. Since after 1950 train travel in most of the country went away, once everyone got cars, so the train infrastructure is mostly dedicated to cargo transport and therefore passenger train stations won’t be able to handle the load. Then as people board the train they should be given a small pack with personal hygiene items, non-perishable food and bottled water. Once at the destination the people loaded straight on to buses and their things trucked in once the people are offloaded since milling people and forklifts are a bad combo! I feel that FEMA needs to talk to the Walmart and Amazon people about how handle the logistics since they could do a much better job, they even have the boxes. This method of evacuation is more efficient for natural disasters, since it is easier to fix one rail bed and track than a multilane road, and the track can carry more stuff than the road anyway.
Ok here is the how to handle a car based evacuation, which is just a bad idea. First off all loops in the city are closed, that forces people to exit on the nearest outbound road spreading the loads instead of everyone going one direction (if possible.) If there are 3 lanes each way the 5 lanes go away and one back reserved for returning buses and relief supply staging. Even 5 miles or so fueling/restroom/food/first aid stations set up, I suggest manning the stations with RedCross people and Army 92Fs since now is not a time to charge for fuel or food. Then, as traffic increases people on motorcycles/atv go up and down the rows of cars checking fuel levels, and the condition of the people and vehicle so that people can be directed to turn off at the appropriate station. I think a colored sticker would work nice since a red sticker would tell the station traffic people that they need in, and a yellow would indicate that if there is room they should come in. This prevents people from running out of fuel plus it reduces load on the permanent infrastructure, the stations should only have high octane gas and diesel, since it will make people feel good that they are getting premium gas, but more importantly cars that don’t require it can run on 91 octane, but cars that require 91 can’t run on 87, so it serves the most cars. The patrols would also quickly move broken down cars off the road, and if the car has to be left for later towing take the people to the nearest station for later busing. Don’t try to keep the traffic going 60, shoot for 25 or 30, this means cars will have to enter and leave the road at a controlled rate. Also, since people will likely have to stop at least once make a pamphlet of the various facilities available at the destination and maps of the city available , so they can quickly find their way once they arrive, and clear off the road. Depending on the type of emergency, people and materials should be moved as close to area as possible during the evacuation, that way after the emergency, the help for the people who don’t evacuate can be swiftly staged, and the area quickly secured to prevent lawlessness. Also as the city empties people should go around asking the remaining people to leave, if they refuse then the location marked and the person braceleted if possible, and any info about the person and their home noted, so they can be checked on afterwards, and if they need medical attention it can be quickly rendered, and any family notified of their condition.
To save money on damage claims for cars and irreplaceable belongings, a hybrid evacuation should be considered. This works by letting people drive their cars and whatever can be put in them out of the area that will be hardest hit, but not to a region that is considered safe for people. The people evacuate on trains and buses, and the cars are protected by earthen berms (the Army has the technology). I am not sure how good an idea this is but it protects both lives and property, so it is worth consideration. Beyond these simplistic thoughts I would require more detail about the specifics of the evacuation, but since each city can be planned in advance it is not impossible. I realize there are some constitutional issues with some of what I have suggested, but that is the only way to do it. If you are allowed to decide for yourself what to do, then don’t hold the government responsible when it fails. Also, if you read the act the created FEMA, you will see that everything I suggest is in their power.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Medical research, phony cures and reality
I saw a man on a "morning news show" who was promoting a miracle snake oil, actually say that the day before he has talked to an official at a pharmaceutical company who told him there was a cure for most diseases that ail mankind, but the greedy companies were keeping it from people. And I am here to confirm that that is actually true, but there is a caveat. I have personally worked on very effective cures for both solid tumors (cancer) and Alzheimer’s, so I know this to be true. Here is the caveat they have minor side-effects, the anti-cancer agent I worked on would cause massive and strokes and/or heart attacks in basically every person who received the treatment, and the Alzheimer’s therapy would cause massive bleeding in the brain, since without the amyloid plaques to stabilize them all the blood vessels would burst. But if the person managed to survive they would be disease free…
Don’t laugh these were excellent ideas, some very clever science went into making these treatments. Remember my team and I did this work in weeks or months for a couple grand (that is a shoestring budget in my line of work), and created very effective therapies, there was just a few unforeseen problems… (Yes, I think I can get around the side effects but that isn’t my job anymore, so oh well.) Big drug companies could be so lucky; they take years and spent millions to stumble so close to the finish line. At least I didn’t invent an HIV vaccine that only after I infected myself and my team with live HIV, did I discover it only worked in animal models. (True story!) Medical research is full of great discoveries that don’t come out like we hope.
Ok here is the point, there aren’t safe cures for every disease. Yes I am quite aware that it is not in the best interest of these companies to actually cure the disease but it is equally bad business to let you die. Also, there will be no single cure for cancer or heart disease because the is no single disease to cure, those terms are generic terms for dozens of different diseases that will each require a unique treatment. Big pharma doesn’t care about where the drug comes from, if it works they will sell it. The fact that they don’t sell something that could make them money is more telling.
Last but certainly not least the author of “Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About” Kevin Trudeau is convicted felon who did time for posing as a doctor and writing >$80K in bad checks, he has been convicted of defrauding 15,000 people, who became reps for his supplement companies. Then in 2003 the FTC banned him from being on infomercials, this man is so bad that he can’t be on infomercials since even they have standards. But I must admire him, since he uses his totally unrelated legal troubles to further himself, claiming that he is the victim of a conspiracy to silence him, so his claims must be real. He stole $122K from American Express over 5 years using false IDs, and plead mental incompetence at his sentencing. That is not a conspiracy against him, it is not persecution, it is prosecution in a district court in Massachusetts.
Oh and for anyone who keeps track I did manage to get some work done tonight, I even made a cool discovery. It is a gene that recycles its core exons with different termini to have 3 or more completely separate functions in different parts of the body. Is this a novel discovery I think so but I will have to wait till tomorrow when I go to work to find out.
Don’t laugh these were excellent ideas, some very clever science went into making these treatments. Remember my team and I did this work in weeks or months for a couple grand (that is a shoestring budget in my line of work), and created very effective therapies, there was just a few unforeseen problems… (Yes, I think I can get around the side effects but that isn’t my job anymore, so oh well.) Big drug companies could be so lucky; they take years and spent millions to stumble so close to the finish line. At least I didn’t invent an HIV vaccine that only after I infected myself and my team with live HIV, did I discover it only worked in animal models. (True story!) Medical research is full of great discoveries that don’t come out like we hope.
Ok here is the point, there aren’t safe cures for every disease. Yes I am quite aware that it is not in the best interest of these companies to actually cure the disease but it is equally bad business to let you die. Also, there will be no single cure for cancer or heart disease because the is no single disease to cure, those terms are generic terms for dozens of different diseases that will each require a unique treatment. Big pharma doesn’t care about where the drug comes from, if it works they will sell it. The fact that they don’t sell something that could make them money is more telling.
Last but certainly not least the author of “Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About” Kevin Trudeau is convicted felon who did time for posing as a doctor and writing >$80K in bad checks, he has been convicted of defrauding 15,000 people, who became reps for his supplement companies. Then in 2003 the FTC banned him from being on infomercials, this man is so bad that he can’t be on infomercials since even they have standards. But I must admire him, since he uses his totally unrelated legal troubles to further himself, claiming that he is the victim of a conspiracy to silence him, so his claims must be real. He stole $122K from American Express over 5 years using false IDs, and plead mental incompetence at his sentencing. That is not a conspiracy against him, it is not persecution, it is prosecution in a district court in Massachusetts.
Oh and for anyone who keeps track I did manage to get some work done tonight, I even made a cool discovery. It is a gene that recycles its core exons with different termini to have 3 or more completely separate functions in different parts of the body. Is this a novel discovery I think so but I will have to wait till tomorrow when I go to work to find out.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
A wasted day or blog analysis
I have successfully killed an entire day, yes I will probably work tonight, but still. I did however; look at the recent posts of several hundred blogs. (Enough to reset the history file in IE to zero, which I didn’t know could happen.)
Subtracting the many many blogs that aren’t in English, (like nearly half) I found some interesting things.
There are a lot of truly great artists out there (and a fair number of crappy ones too.) I saw some work that is truly outstanding, especially in the digital medias. I even found some good blogs that I might read again on things like how to self publish, to the rise of big pharma in India, so blogging is not a total waste of time. On the other hand there is some stuff that is.
Most of the poetry and music sites really suxed, seriously girls don’t write poetry about your cat or and ode to the cute guy on the train, and guys if you are upper middle class living in a suburb I do not I repeat do not attempt to rap or do metal rap (al la Limp, Linkin, Korn, etc). It doesn’t work, you sound stupid, and you are going to end up with a girl who writes poems about her cat Snickers in pink glitter ink anyways…
I need to pick on the girls abit now I know lots of women who write poetry to express the things that are otherwise inexpressible, and I have read some disturbing (but good) stuff. Here is the thing, for a poem that isn’t a limerick to be good it needs to have deep and have powerful emotion, and therefore is not something you put on a blog. So if you wrote a poem in 3rd period Spanish class about what a loser the teacher is compared to cute boy of the day #29363-1alpha, then it is not something the world needs to see. Plus it will not impress 29363-1alpha should he ever see it, (just something to think about girls.)
Since I am picking on girls (don’t worry I will get to the boys soon) be careful what you post on your blog, especially if you use names, and never use last names. Why do you think your bother was always trying to read your diary when you were young? He wanted dirty on you. Ladies (girls) play it cool with the boys, if he doesn’t call you right away don’t go off about him on your blog. First off he might be unable to call you since he is unable to find the time to make a call that will last long enough not to piss you off. (Remember girls men know is easier to be forgiven for not calling that is for calling getting into conversation and having to go before it is resolved.) However, once you call him names that I will not use, and compare him to various animals’ fecal matter, he will not be calling back. However, if he did dump you, and your anger was justified, etc your log of psychotic behavior is there for the entire world to see. Trust me men will pass you over in a heart beat if they think you are a psycho, and a day by day journal of anger and misery is not something you want the guy, you want too marry finding, esp early on. Ladies, trust me unless you can do a Barr body test (the best way to be sure someone is female) prior to reading your site don’t post stuff that men won’t empathize with (like emotions especially how sad you get without him, kinda stuff, it shifts the balance of power away from you, to him since he has proof you are insecure and needy.) Look most men can’t use empathy in a sentence, much less understand it.
Now the boys turn. Ok men are just stupid and ignorant in their blogs. One guy was documenting his cocaine addiction, I mean seriously if you have the presence of mind to blog it, perhaps you could maybe get help? The opinions and ideas expressed by men and boys again are not something that should be posted openly. Sure all the guys on your softball team think killing all the “ragheads” is a good idea, but is writing a multipage essay on it such a good idea? Oh and technically hundreds of pictures of babes is in not a blog, but it would be an excellent tear off calendar. The one thing that struck me is there were no naked pictures, I mean Zero! That is impressive because the internet is the largest depository of pornography in history, which also happens to sell books. ;) Ok, that wasn’t much picking on men, but since I can summarize so readily, I don’t need a lot of words.
The best blogs were the ones by the real whackjobs. You know who I am talking about, the positive energy, alien abduction, astral focusing ones. I am cool with tree huggers since someone needs to do it, most alterative lifestyles don’t make me blink an eye, and I have chatted with the “end of world” people on the street but there are some people who just aren’t right. Now there are those who say I am not quite right, and I would tend to agree, but I am not that far gone. I mean if Alchemy and magic were real I would have an advanced degree in them, I would go to high schools on career day and give talks on jobs available chimera research, and soul transfiguration. However, until my Ouija board can spell words I can’t spell, I will remain skeptical, but amused. On the other hand, if changing the color of Bush’s aura to off mauve will bring peace in the middle east or building a huge magic circle on the gulf coast using oil platforms will stop the hurricanes I am totally in favor of these efforts. So that it is clear where I stand on this issue I am firmly against praying to Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar and asking The Traveler to come.
Subtracting the many many blogs that aren’t in English, (like nearly half) I found some interesting things.
There are a lot of truly great artists out there (and a fair number of crappy ones too.) I saw some work that is truly outstanding, especially in the digital medias. I even found some good blogs that I might read again on things like how to self publish, to the rise of big pharma in India, so blogging is not a total waste of time. On the other hand there is some stuff that is.
Most of the poetry and music sites really suxed, seriously girls don’t write poetry about your cat or and ode to the cute guy on the train, and guys if you are upper middle class living in a suburb I do not I repeat do not attempt to rap or do metal rap (al la Limp, Linkin, Korn, etc). It doesn’t work, you sound stupid, and you are going to end up with a girl who writes poems about her cat Snickers in pink glitter ink anyways…
I need to pick on the girls abit now I know lots of women who write poetry to express the things that are otherwise inexpressible, and I have read some disturbing (but good) stuff. Here is the thing, for a poem that isn’t a limerick to be good it needs to have deep and have powerful emotion, and therefore is not something you put on a blog. So if you wrote a poem in 3rd period Spanish class about what a loser the teacher is compared to cute boy of the day #29363-1alpha, then it is not something the world needs to see. Plus it will not impress 29363-1alpha should he ever see it, (just something to think about girls.)
Since I am picking on girls (don’t worry I will get to the boys soon) be careful what you post on your blog, especially if you use names, and never use last names. Why do you think your bother was always trying to read your diary when you were young? He wanted dirty on you. Ladies (girls) play it cool with the boys, if he doesn’t call you right away don’t go off about him on your blog. First off he might be unable to call you since he is unable to find the time to make a call that will last long enough not to piss you off. (Remember girls men know is easier to be forgiven for not calling that is for calling getting into conversation and having to go before it is resolved.) However, once you call him names that I will not use, and compare him to various animals’ fecal matter, he will not be calling back. However, if he did dump you, and your anger was justified, etc your log of psychotic behavior is there for the entire world to see. Trust me men will pass you over in a heart beat if they think you are a psycho, and a day by day journal of anger and misery is not something you want the guy, you want too marry finding, esp early on. Ladies, trust me unless you can do a Barr body test (the best way to be sure someone is female) prior to reading your site don’t post stuff that men won’t empathize with (like emotions especially how sad you get without him, kinda stuff, it shifts the balance of power away from you, to him since he has proof you are insecure and needy.) Look most men can’t use empathy in a sentence, much less understand it.
Now the boys turn. Ok men are just stupid and ignorant in their blogs. One guy was documenting his cocaine addiction, I mean seriously if you have the presence of mind to blog it, perhaps you could maybe get help? The opinions and ideas expressed by men and boys again are not something that should be posted openly. Sure all the guys on your softball team think killing all the “ragheads” is a good idea, but is writing a multipage essay on it such a good idea? Oh and technically hundreds of pictures of babes is in not a blog, but it would be an excellent tear off calendar. The one thing that struck me is there were no naked pictures, I mean Zero! That is impressive because the internet is the largest depository of pornography in history, which also happens to sell books. ;) Ok, that wasn’t much picking on men, but since I can summarize so readily, I don’t need a lot of words.
The best blogs were the ones by the real whackjobs. You know who I am talking about, the positive energy, alien abduction, astral focusing ones. I am cool with tree huggers since someone needs to do it, most alterative lifestyles don’t make me blink an eye, and I have chatted with the “end of world” people on the street but there are some people who just aren’t right. Now there are those who say I am not quite right, and I would tend to agree, but I am not that far gone. I mean if Alchemy and magic were real I would have an advanced degree in them, I would go to high schools on career day and give talks on jobs available chimera research, and soul transfiguration. However, until my Ouija board can spell words I can’t spell, I will remain skeptical, but amused. On the other hand, if changing the color of Bush’s aura to off mauve will bring peace in the middle east or building a huge magic circle on the gulf coast using oil platforms will stop the hurricanes I am totally in favor of these efforts. So that it is clear where I stand on this issue I am firmly against praying to Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar and asking The Traveler to come.
Data display and visual data mining:
Before you ask I will occasional put up updates about Hurricane Rita, but since hundreds of people are doing that I will keep to my regular format.
When many people hear the words data mining they think it is something really complex, but if it is done right it can be the so simple that it is amazing. (For those who know me, the vagueness that follows should tell you that this is only the surface of a much bigger idea. I think I might have to start a protected site for the really cool stuff, since I could make entering the site equivalent to a digital NDA, which would protect me from getting ripped off and protect my international patent rights. Actually I have considered starting an idea clearing house, sort of a low cost distributed think tank, but more on that some other time.)
There is no greater pattern recognition engine than the human mind. I can see everything from how the tile is laid on the floor in mall, to ancient stream beds under vegetation in satellite photos (thank you Keyhole) and so can you if you know what to look for. However, to do this the information must be displayed properly and that is really hard part. My job is biomarker discovery from massive noisy data sets, so I know how hard it is to display data so that it has high informational content and is intuitive. First off tables aren’t the answer, lets say I was running data mining for Amazon.com, oh sure I could handle it as tables but that would be intractable. So, now let’s say I do it as a tree so I can have 3 to 5 dimensions of data, still not all that useful since you need to see the clusters in context. If you have ever even been on the Amazon site you have been mined, those people who bought x also bought y and z is simple data mining. However, to do it right you need more variables you need time of year, location of buyer, and several other parameters. To best predict for the year in general you have to exclude all purchases made for school supplies, and holiday gift giving, since those are excepts that will bias your results. Ok I have strayed little from the point, and that is what I get for making up examples as I go.
Let’s say you wanted to provide the best page design for a website Amazon when it just started. So you start out with a standard site and simple linear structure. Now you watch the site logs for a while and want to mine the results. Ok the raw logs provide no information that you can extract, and trying to mine the data blindly for trends won’t work because your customer base is too diverse. Now say you put the location of all the website hits on the map, you can quickly see the areas that have clusters, and sub divide since winter in Chicago is different from winter in Key West, so now you know that winter clothes should have two sections light and heavy. Next you look at gender, sure it is obvious that men and women buy different clothes, but you women will consider men’s jackets but men are less likely to buy a woman’s jacket, so you divide your suggestion. You also notice that women buy more from your mulled spice selection and men from the snow blowers, so you make it easy to link from common items like winter clothes to these items you might be able to “talk” them into. If you aren’t selling but providing information you should mine for webpages that are commonly viewed by the most groups. Now a machine can do this by looking at usage stats but a person still has to see that the branch point for headaches is migraine and stress and that by altering the structure the information can be conveyed more efficiently so that to people can quickly move to the right information.
Hmm this one is proving very hard to write, because the examples are either too complex or too easy. Ok last try, let’s say I wanted to break up my site so you can find info faster. I would first look at the logs, and see that foreign visitors came in to look at the Rita stuff, people from cities with major universities looked at the science ideas and the most distributed group looked mostly at personal advice. Before anyone freaks, I don’t have log files that can give me this much info. I would then break my site up so all the hurricane news was front and center. I would have ways to read all the science ideas or advice about men separately, with an anchored keyword search. To generate maximum revenue with minimum cheapening of my site , I would place the Google ad engine on each search generated page, since the user would select a key word set they were interested in. That way even the none too bright Google ad engine could lock on to such a huge target and find ads that you might click on. Why not put the Google ads one every page? Since I write on such a varied subject list no keyword(s) would dominate so you would see ads for the most general things it could find or nothing at all so no clicks.
Exercise 1:
Try it with your gmail account, email this to yourself and see what you get: cold fusion, Baltimore, apple, penis, jobless, hydrogen, free, yellow, Allah, oil, Texas, joule, JFK, thin. Ok, I tried it and the ad engine failed to find anything, so when you try it just pick ~4 words.
I could further assist the reader (and ad engine) by having a section entitled “Ladies things you need to make you man read” or other stuff like that, to cater to each interest group. If I was truly bold and had lots of free time I would get an RSS reader, and pull down news and other people’s blogs, then mine that to determine what was on people’s minds and how I could find a different angle so as to be different and more interesting. I will stop here since I am sure you can follow the applications of this method.
What is the point of this? With simple data visualization tools and your mind you can mine complex datasets very easily.
When many people hear the words data mining they think it is something really complex, but if it is done right it can be the so simple that it is amazing. (For those who know me, the vagueness that follows should tell you that this is only the surface of a much bigger idea. I think I might have to start a protected site for the really cool stuff, since I could make entering the site equivalent to a digital NDA, which would protect me from getting ripped off and protect my international patent rights. Actually I have considered starting an idea clearing house, sort of a low cost distributed think tank, but more on that some other time.)
There is no greater pattern recognition engine than the human mind. I can see everything from how the tile is laid on the floor in mall, to ancient stream beds under vegetation in satellite photos (thank you Keyhole) and so can you if you know what to look for. However, to do this the information must be displayed properly and that is really hard part. My job is biomarker discovery from massive noisy data sets, so I know how hard it is to display data so that it has high informational content and is intuitive. First off tables aren’t the answer, lets say I was running data mining for Amazon.com, oh sure I could handle it as tables but that would be intractable. So, now let’s say I do it as a tree so I can have 3 to 5 dimensions of data, still not all that useful since you need to see the clusters in context. If you have ever even been on the Amazon site you have been mined, those people who bought x also bought y and z is simple data mining. However, to do it right you need more variables you need time of year, location of buyer, and several other parameters. To best predict for the year in general you have to exclude all purchases made for school supplies, and holiday gift giving, since those are excepts that will bias your results. Ok I have strayed little from the point, and that is what I get for making up examples as I go.
Let’s say you wanted to provide the best page design for a website Amazon when it just started. So you start out with a standard site and simple linear structure. Now you watch the site logs for a while and want to mine the results. Ok the raw logs provide no information that you can extract, and trying to mine the data blindly for trends won’t work because your customer base is too diverse. Now say you put the location of all the website hits on the map, you can quickly see the areas that have clusters, and sub divide since winter in Chicago is different from winter in Key West, so now you know that winter clothes should have two sections light and heavy. Next you look at gender, sure it is obvious that men and women buy different clothes, but you women will consider men’s jackets but men are less likely to buy a woman’s jacket, so you divide your suggestion. You also notice that women buy more from your mulled spice selection and men from the snow blowers, so you make it easy to link from common items like winter clothes to these items you might be able to “talk” them into. If you aren’t selling but providing information you should mine for webpages that are commonly viewed by the most groups. Now a machine can do this by looking at usage stats but a person still has to see that the branch point for headaches is migraine and stress and that by altering the structure the information can be conveyed more efficiently so that to people can quickly move to the right information.
Hmm this one is proving very hard to write, because the examples are either too complex or too easy. Ok last try, let’s say I wanted to break up my site so you can find info faster. I would first look at the logs, and see that foreign visitors came in to look at the Rita stuff, people from cities with major universities looked at the science ideas and the most distributed group looked mostly at personal advice. Before anyone freaks, I don’t have log files that can give me this much info. I would then break my site up so all the hurricane news was front and center. I would have ways to read all the science ideas or advice about men separately, with an anchored keyword search. To generate maximum revenue with minimum cheapening of my site , I would place the Google ad engine on each search generated page, since the user would select a key word set they were interested in. That way even the none too bright Google ad engine could lock on to such a huge target and find ads that you might click on. Why not put the Google ads one every page? Since I write on such a varied subject list no keyword(s) would dominate so you would see ads for the most general things it could find or nothing at all so no clicks.
Exercise 1:
Try it with your gmail account, email this to yourself and see what you get: cold fusion, Baltimore, apple, penis, jobless, hydrogen, free, yellow, Allah, oil, Texas, joule, JFK, thin. Ok, I tried it and the ad engine failed to find anything, so when you try it just pick ~4 words.
I could further assist the reader (and ad engine) by having a section entitled “Ladies things you need to make you man read” or other stuff like that, to cater to each interest group. If I was truly bold and had lots of free time I would get an RSS reader, and pull down news and other people’s blogs, then mine that to determine what was on people’s minds and how I could find a different angle so as to be different and more interesting. I will stop here since I am sure you can follow the applications of this method.
What is the point of this? With simple data visualization tools and your mind you can mine complex datasets very easily.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Dr. James Watson and the rules of science
I got to see James D. Watson speak today as in Watson and Crick. Before anyone has a fit his talk was called "Rules of science". It was a very good talk and if I can find a way I will post it on here. Wow, he is a misogynist, ah the simpler times when women were kept at home chained to the stove, or in his case with Rosalind Franklin chained to the beam line of X-ray defractometer cook up his data. I am not sure he married, hmm that will always be a mystery.
However he was very inspiring to me, since he said many of the same things I say only he said them better and he gets believed cause he is 80 and has a Nobel Prize and I am 28 and don’t. His top statements were be that the best would always be thought of as arrogant when they are young since they are trying to change things, but you can’t be arrogant past 50 cause then you really are just arrogant. Never be the brightest, cause then who do you learn from? A scientist needs a great mentor to guide them and a partner who is their equal to support them, he said 1 person is just 1 person but 2 people is equal to something between 4 and 9. Does any of this sound familiar? He said many other wise things since he started with how to pick the best college, then grad school, post doc, and job, then brief spoke on how what it is like to get a Nobel Prize (he said it was really dull, but since he bought a house with the money his $17K is now million plus, but Crick bought a boat…) He then touched on life post Nobel, and ended with how to be a good young professor, since he said grad students should only work for young profs.
I do feel sorry for him since fame is a blessing and a curse, sure he can write his own ticket, but he can never just go out and eat, etc. I debated with a lab mate before the talk whether it is better to be rich or famous, and I would pick rich every time. I have one word for why and that is: rich, ok two words: rich & paparazzi, if those two words can’t convince you, then I can’t help you. I am not exactly preparing my acceptance speech for the first double Nobel in science and peace for my pioneering work in negotiating peace between the immune system and pollen, but still. I am just not sure the fame is worth it, and heavens knows once you win the Nobel you can’t just rest on your Laureates you have to do bigger and better things.
However he was very inspiring to me, since he said many of the same things I say only he said them better and he gets believed cause he is 80 and has a Nobel Prize and I am 28 and don’t. His top statements were be that the best would always be thought of as arrogant when they are young since they are trying to change things, but you can’t be arrogant past 50 cause then you really are just arrogant. Never be the brightest, cause then who do you learn from? A scientist needs a great mentor to guide them and a partner who is their equal to support them, he said 1 person is just 1 person but 2 people is equal to something between 4 and 9. Does any of this sound familiar? He said many other wise things since he started with how to pick the best college, then grad school, post doc, and job, then brief spoke on how what it is like to get a Nobel Prize (he said it was really dull, but since he bought a house with the money his $17K is now million plus, but Crick bought a boat…) He then touched on life post Nobel, and ended with how to be a good young professor, since he said grad students should only work for young profs.
I do feel sorry for him since fame is a blessing and a curse, sure he can write his own ticket, but he can never just go out and eat, etc. I debated with a lab mate before the talk whether it is better to be rich or famous, and I would pick rich every time. I have one word for why and that is: rich, ok two words: rich & paparazzi, if those two words can’t convince you, then I can’t help you. I am not exactly preparing my acceptance speech for the first double Nobel in science and peace for my pioneering work in negotiating peace between the immune system and pollen, but still. I am just not sure the fame is worth it, and heavens knows once you win the Nobel you can’t just rest on your Laureates you have to do bigger and better things.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
A personal note: version 2
In case anyone thinks otherwise I make all the examples up. I hate pork chops, stuffed or otherwise. Lest you get any ideas; I think bacon should be a spice. There are few things on this Earth bacon can't improve in one capacity or another.
I would also like to say Hi! to my readers especially the one in Ann Arbor, thank you all for taking the time to wade through my inane rambling. I hope you all enjoy my wit and wisdom and I would love to hear from you! My email address is in the profile section.
If anyone is interested in my ideas, I am looking for a job, and I am willing to relocate. Plus I can also write properly and spell correctly when I take the time too to proofread. :) Remember I don’t give all the details, so there is lots more info behind each idea. A benefit of hiring me is you can get the patent rights the invention! While publishing it here prevents me from getting foreign patent rights on the invention as is, it does give a clear and traceable invention date and since I frequently update on the progress of each invention I can show continuous effort to reducing it to practice, so my US patent rights are completely intact. Now if you like an idea you read on here, but aren’t ready hire me out right, please contact me and I will send you a NDA so we can discuss matters further.
While I am sure all my readers are decent honest folk, but as one of them pointed out, I might get ripped off. So in case you are thinking of borrow one of my ideas and taking credit for it, think about the intellectual property issues, and the availability of lawyers in this country who will work for a cut. Also I might be willing to share some cool stuff but I didn’t fall off the turnip truck, for the more complex ideas I leave in fatal flaws, so to rip me off will require you to find them and think your way around them. I apologize for that rude side note but it was suggested since some off my stuff has real commercial applications.
I would also like to say Hi! to my readers especially the one in Ann Arbor, thank you all for taking the time to wade through my inane rambling. I hope you all enjoy my wit and wisdom and I would love to hear from you! My email address is in the profile section.
If anyone is interested in my ideas, I am looking for a job, and I am willing to relocate. Plus I can also write properly and spell correctly when I take the time too to proofread. :) Remember I don’t give all the details, so there is lots more info behind each idea. A benefit of hiring me is you can get the patent rights the invention! While publishing it here prevents me from getting foreign patent rights on the invention as is, it does give a clear and traceable invention date and since I frequently update on the progress of each invention I can show continuous effort to reducing it to practice, so my US patent rights are completely intact. Now if you like an idea you read on here, but aren’t ready hire me out right, please contact me and I will send you a NDA so we can discuss matters further.
While I am sure all my readers are decent honest folk, but as one of them pointed out, I might get ripped off. So in case you are thinking of borrow one of my ideas and taking credit for it, think about the intellectual property issues, and the availability of lawyers in this country who will work for a cut. Also I might be willing to share some cool stuff but I didn’t fall off the turnip truck, for the more complex ideas I leave in fatal flaws, so to rip me off will require you to find them and think your way around them. I apologize for that rude side note but it was suggested since some off my stuff has real commercial applications.
Random things
If you are looking for a cheap pet, get a praying mantis egg sac. They make great pets and while they aren’t dog, cat or kid safe, they are cheap ($10 for 200 babies), exotic and fun. You can keep them in a terrarium or for the more adventurous leash them with a thin cotton or silk thread and let them go free range. Ants are bad for them so feed them little pieces of ground meat or crickets. They can live 6 months, and if you have a bug problem you won’t anymore. Feed them well enough so they get nice and big and they can off small mice.
Speaking of pets,sure people breed dogs to be big, but no one is breeding big house cats. I think that would be cool but for safety reasons the lynx is about the safest size (say 30 lbs). (Cats are carnivores and only marginally social, so while a 150 lbs dog is safe, a cat of similar size might not be.) Imagine how cute they would be. If you think it is adorable when they bring you a bird or a mouse, imagine how adorable they would be if they could hunt deer or nutria. Speaking of hunting think of it, you could train them to stalk wild turkey or other hard to hunt game birds. Also consider the security applications, dogs aren’t subtle since they are pack hunters, a guard cat would sneak up on the intruder and pounce. The breeding would take 10 to 15 years unless a larger cat could be used as breeding stock, then a first generation could be ready in a few years, but it would probably take 5 or 6 years to ensure they are docile like normal house cats.
If you want to know who did it on one of those TV detective shows with in the first few minutes here is the key. For Law and Order type shows, it is always the semi-famous person; you know the one, the actor who has been on lots other shows, but isn’t famous enough to have a name ( be warned this doesn’t work if they are the victim.) For CSI and Crossing Jordan type shows, just pay close attention, the person who gets those weird little details that seem to have no reason, did it. If someone mentions in passing they have a weird hobby that will leave the key piece of evidence that spoils the otherwise prefect crime, they did it.
Ok sometimes I am wrong but I am right often enough there is no suspense. That is why I watch foreign TV shows and educational programming. Why? Asian programs don’t have a base in Victoria theater so they aren't predicable at all, and with UK and Canadian programs I don’t know their bit part actor well enough to guess.
Last but certainly not least if you want to save money, buy gas tomorrow. Gas has gone down quite abit since Katrina but is unlikely to go down anymore for awhile. With hurricane Rita on its way to Louisiana or Texas in the next few days, it is much more likely it will go up once all the Gulf Coast production is shuttered for the storm. If the refineries and/or platforms are damaged in the storm, then it will stay up for weeks. Why tomorrow? Because once people start to worry gas prices will rise from fear alone, even if the storm falls apart before it hits, so $2.639 will be $3 or more again soon. I am not suggesting hording or that there won’t be enough gas after the storm hits, but that saving 40 cents a gallon is never a bad thing.
Speaking of pets,sure people breed dogs to be big, but no one is breeding big house cats. I think that would be cool but for safety reasons the lynx is about the safest size (say 30 lbs). (Cats are carnivores and only marginally social, so while a 150 lbs dog is safe, a cat of similar size might not be.) Imagine how cute they would be. If you think it is adorable when they bring you a bird or a mouse, imagine how adorable they would be if they could hunt deer or nutria. Speaking of hunting think of it, you could train them to stalk wild turkey or other hard to hunt game birds. Also consider the security applications, dogs aren’t subtle since they are pack hunters, a guard cat would sneak up on the intruder and pounce. The breeding would take 10 to 15 years unless a larger cat could be used as breeding stock, then a first generation could be ready in a few years, but it would probably take 5 or 6 years to ensure they are docile like normal house cats.
If you want to know who did it on one of those TV detective shows with in the first few minutes here is the key. For Law and Order type shows, it is always the semi-famous person; you know the one, the actor who has been on lots other shows, but isn’t famous enough to have a name ( be warned this doesn’t work if they are the victim.) For CSI and Crossing Jordan type shows, just pay close attention, the person who gets those weird little details that seem to have no reason, did it. If someone mentions in passing they have a weird hobby that will leave the key piece of evidence that spoils the otherwise prefect crime, they did it.
Ok sometimes I am wrong but I am right often enough there is no suspense. That is why I watch foreign TV shows and educational programming. Why? Asian programs don’t have a base in Victoria theater so they aren't predicable at all, and with UK and Canadian programs I don’t know their bit part actor well enough to guess.
Last but certainly not least if you want to save money, buy gas tomorrow. Gas has gone down quite abit since Katrina but is unlikely to go down anymore for awhile. With hurricane Rita on its way to Louisiana or Texas in the next few days, it is much more likely it will go up once all the Gulf Coast production is shuttered for the storm. If the refineries and/or platforms are damaged in the storm, then it will stay up for weeks. Why tomorrow? Because once people start to worry gas prices will rise from fear alone, even if the storm falls apart before it hits, so $2.639 will be $3 or more again soon. I am not suggesting hording or that there won’t be enough gas after the storm hits, but that saving 40 cents a gallon is never a bad thing.
Monday, September 19, 2005
The hydrogen economy
I saw a talk on fuel cell technology and despite the fact the speaker and content was dismal I did learn a lot. For those unfamiliar with fuel cell technology a fuel cell like a battery is a chemical source of electricity, but unlike a battery it is not self contained so as long as H2 and O2 are added it keeps producing power. It is the king of the hydrogen economy!
However, they are as of last Wednesday wholly impractical for large scale electrical generation. First off a 200KW fuel cell costs a million dollars. Worse yet the fuel cell stack isn’t even good for a year (<5,000 hours) at half power, and being generous the replacement stack is a third of the cost of the unit, and the availability is ~70%. Discounting the cost of fuel which is compressed hydrogen which I generously estimate as $200 an hour (which at the availability I state is $1.2 million a year), you are still spending $1.3 million for a 100KW generator. Compare this to a marine diesel 200KW generator (for a mere $26,000 and offers 99.9% availability), run at half power on $3 a gallon vegetable oil ($210,000 a year in fuel), with a $4,000 a year maintenance cost, you savings is $2,260,000 the first year and $1,319,333 every year after. Plus, the exhaust can be used to boil 1,000s of gallons of water a day to recover even more energy (ok so can a fuel cell). Vegetable oil is carbon neutral, contains more energy that is put into its production and helps farmers because the USA is the world leader in oilseed production, and the meal is animal feed. The killer for hydrogen as fuel source is that it requires more energy to make than be extracted.
Why? Hydrogen is an energy storage form, not a fuel. Unless we start mining the sun hydrogen is not available on earth unless it is bound with something else generally carbon and/or oxygen. Hydrogen is therefore generally produced from catalytic cracking of hydrocarbons into CO (or CO2) and hydrogen (this process requires platinum catalysts which aren’t cheap. The catalyst is slowly degraded by the sulfur and salts in the fuel, or in an instant with the wrong grade of fuel, so required frequent replacement. Even better as the catalyst fails the byproducts can ruin the fuel cell stack) or by the hydrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen (guess where the electricity for this process comes from? Coal and nuclear power!) Other strikes against hydrogen are it is hard to transport and store, the 900 C flame of burning hydrogen is invisible,“spilled” hydrogen destroy the ozone layer faster than CFCs and it requires huge amounts of clean water to produce huge amounts of hydrogen. Where exactly will we be getting that water when water shortages are common?
Ok so fuel cells aren’t going to met the base load or even power cars, why develop them? Well, because small ones can replace batteries when the cost per watt is premium and the convenience of pouring a mix of methanol and water into it is better than charging. So laptops, cell phones, remote relay stations and satellites can use them, sure the battery they replace cost $100 and they cost $400, but you never have dead battery since you can use Everclear as fuel.
Why not cars? The conversion between watts and horse power is 750W to 1HP, so a small engine producing 100HP is replaced by a 75KW fuel cell. To be fair you can use batteries and capacitors to boast the amount of power to get off the line but you still need a 7.5KW fuel cell to get sustained performance at highway speeds. As a reference point high end lawn mowers use a 7.5KW engine and cost $400 dollars. From a practical standpoint mount a lawn mower engine in the fuel cell car and have it run a high current DC generator and pocket the huge savings. Since you will get 60MPG you won’t be getting gas much, you can use the money to buy lots of snacks and drinks to keep you going between trips to the gas station. The government can save money too, since they will be the ones paying to put hydrogen at the pumps. If they really want to spend the money on something they can pay to develop renewable energy.
How can the hydrogen economy be saved? Pending a major advance that can rapidly convert water and sunlight into hydrogen and oxygen, and a major advance in the storage of hydrogen, it can’t. Now the technology can be put to good use. For example wind power is mostly available in the morning when demand is low so it is wasted since electricity can’t be stored. There is the magic word: stored. If the electricity is going to be wasted anyways use it to hydrolyze water, and store the energy as hydrogen. Now you could use the hydrogen and fuel cells or better gas turbines for peaking generation at high demand, but looking at a map of where wind generation is common puts it close to cities with lots of oil refineries. Guess what! Oil refining requires huge amounts of hydrogen to crack heavy tars and waxes into lighter produces like jet fuel, diesel and gasoline. They will pay a premium for renewal hydrogen, and even better they can produce more fuel grade oils from the same amount of crude oil.
Now I can be accused of not thinking long-term since I still say internal combustion engines are better, but I counter with hydrogen isn’t long term either. We need base load generation and clean cars, not fancy batteries. Long term (as in 30 years) is efficient biomass, solar, wind and tide energy, to produce base load and make low cost synthetic fuels. Better battery, transmission and capacitor technologies will be required to move and store the “not on demand” renewal power sources. Nuclear power is going to be required too, since if coal is out and fusion isn’t practical, fission is the only solution. However, the point of this essay is not to propose radical change but to better work with what we have. Sure if a fusion reactor comes online in the next few years, or someone develops a integrated fuel cell system that can use “$3 a gallon vegetable oil” for fuel, cost about the same as a diesel engine of similar output and run for years at 99% availability I will admit I was wrong. In the mean time perhaps someone (like the DOE) will give me a grant start a lab, plant several thousands of acres of mesquite trees and demonstrate the power of biomass. (Of course I have a better plan that I let on, since this site is freely available I would get ripped off if I gave out the whole plan.)
I didn't put references since the information I used is free available on the internet, but if you want some let me know.
However, they are as of last Wednesday wholly impractical for large scale electrical generation. First off a 200KW fuel cell costs a million dollars. Worse yet the fuel cell stack isn’t even good for a year (<5,000 hours) at half power, and being generous the replacement stack is a third of the cost of the unit, and the availability is ~70%. Discounting the cost of fuel which is compressed hydrogen which I generously estimate as $200 an hour (which at the availability I state is $1.2 million a year), you are still spending $1.3 million for a 100KW generator. Compare this to a marine diesel 200KW generator (for a mere $26,000 and offers 99.9% availability), run at half power on $3 a gallon vegetable oil ($210,000 a year in fuel), with a $4,000 a year maintenance cost, you savings is $2,260,000 the first year and $1,319,333 every year after. Plus, the exhaust can be used to boil 1,000s of gallons of water a day to recover even more energy (ok so can a fuel cell). Vegetable oil is carbon neutral, contains more energy that is put into its production and helps farmers because the USA is the world leader in oilseed production, and the meal is animal feed. The killer for hydrogen as fuel source is that it requires more energy to make than be extracted.
Why? Hydrogen is an energy storage form, not a fuel. Unless we start mining the sun hydrogen is not available on earth unless it is bound with something else generally carbon and/or oxygen. Hydrogen is therefore generally produced from catalytic cracking of hydrocarbons into CO (or CO2) and hydrogen (this process requires platinum catalysts which aren’t cheap. The catalyst is slowly degraded by the sulfur and salts in the fuel, or in an instant with the wrong grade of fuel, so required frequent replacement. Even better as the catalyst fails the byproducts can ruin the fuel cell stack) or by the hydrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen (guess where the electricity for this process comes from? Coal and nuclear power!) Other strikes against hydrogen are it is hard to transport and store, the 900 C flame of burning hydrogen is invisible,“spilled” hydrogen destroy the ozone layer faster than CFCs and it requires huge amounts of clean water to produce huge amounts of hydrogen. Where exactly will we be getting that water when water shortages are common?
Ok so fuel cells aren’t going to met the base load or even power cars, why develop them? Well, because small ones can replace batteries when the cost per watt is premium and the convenience of pouring a mix of methanol and water into it is better than charging. So laptops, cell phones, remote relay stations and satellites can use them, sure the battery they replace cost $100 and they cost $400, but you never have dead battery since you can use Everclear as fuel.
Why not cars? The conversion between watts and horse power is 750W to 1HP, so a small engine producing 100HP is replaced by a 75KW fuel cell. To be fair you can use batteries and capacitors to boast the amount of power to get off the line but you still need a 7.5KW fuel cell to get sustained performance at highway speeds. As a reference point high end lawn mowers use a 7.5KW engine and cost $400 dollars. From a practical standpoint mount a lawn mower engine in the fuel cell car and have it run a high current DC generator and pocket the huge savings. Since you will get 60MPG you won’t be getting gas much, you can use the money to buy lots of snacks and drinks to keep you going between trips to the gas station. The government can save money too, since they will be the ones paying to put hydrogen at the pumps. If they really want to spend the money on something they can pay to develop renewable energy.
How can the hydrogen economy be saved? Pending a major advance that can rapidly convert water and sunlight into hydrogen and oxygen, and a major advance in the storage of hydrogen, it can’t. Now the technology can be put to good use. For example wind power is mostly available in the morning when demand is low so it is wasted since electricity can’t be stored. There is the magic word: stored. If the electricity is going to be wasted anyways use it to hydrolyze water, and store the energy as hydrogen. Now you could use the hydrogen and fuel cells or better gas turbines for peaking generation at high demand, but looking at a map of where wind generation is common puts it close to cities with lots of oil refineries. Guess what! Oil refining requires huge amounts of hydrogen to crack heavy tars and waxes into lighter produces like jet fuel, diesel and gasoline. They will pay a premium for renewal hydrogen, and even better they can produce more fuel grade oils from the same amount of crude oil.
Now I can be accused of not thinking long-term since I still say internal combustion engines are better, but I counter with hydrogen isn’t long term either. We need base load generation and clean cars, not fancy batteries. Long term (as in 30 years) is efficient biomass, solar, wind and tide energy, to produce base load and make low cost synthetic fuels. Better battery, transmission and capacitor technologies will be required to move and store the “not on demand” renewal power sources. Nuclear power is going to be required too, since if coal is out and fusion isn’t practical, fission is the only solution. However, the point of this essay is not to propose radical change but to better work with what we have. Sure if a fusion reactor comes online in the next few years, or someone develops a integrated fuel cell system that can use “$3 a gallon vegetable oil” for fuel, cost about the same as a diesel engine of similar output and run for years at 99% availability I will admit I was wrong. In the mean time perhaps someone (like the DOE) will give me a grant start a lab, plant several thousands of acres of mesquite trees and demonstrate the power of biomass. (Of course I have a better plan that I let on, since this site is freely available I would get ripped off if I gave out the whole plan.)
I didn't put references since the information I used is free available on the internet, but if you want some let me know.
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