Gatherer's Garden

A walk in the woods

2010-08-30T06:56:00.000-07:00

Sam was walking in the woods one day and found a hornet's nest. Being a little thick in the head, he figured he might be able to get some honey from the nest. So starting poking the nest with a stick. At first, nothing happened. So Sam poked it harder. There was a loud buzzing sound and a stream of angry hornets began pouring out. Sam took off running, the hornets in hot pursuit. Luckily, Sam could run slightly faster than the angry insects. His nephew's house was closer than his own, so he ran up the doorstep, rang the doorbell, and sprinted around the back, headed for home. The next day his nephew called him up and said, "You know, the darndest thing happened yesterday. I went to answer the door, and a bunch of hornets were there and stung me! For the life of me I can't figure out how they rang the doorbell."

"That's pretty crazy, Sam exclaimed. "Those sound like a new breed of smart hornets. They sound dangerous. You know, we ought to go out in the woods and kill all the hornets we can find."

"I agree", The nephew replied.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the War on Terror began.

Earth Hour

2009-03-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

"Earth Hour takes place around the world at 8:30 pm, Saturday, March 28, 2009. The project invites cities, households, communities and businesses to turn off their lights for one hour to show that it's possible to take action on global warming."

That's the idea, at least. Another feel-good attempt save the planet, but its pretty much just a PR campaign, like much of "Big Green".

If one is to honestly believe in saving the planet (translate: save the humans), it helps to do it on a more regular basis.

Therefore I submit that a new event called "Earth Lifetime". It basically consists of turning off the lights when you leave a room, for the rest of your life. It amazes me how many people fail to do this, and it has the added benefit of saving you money with lowered power bills. It would beat the pants off of Earth Hour, in terms of saving the planet.

Of course this assumes you believe that A) global warming is a bad thing, and B) Humans are a significant part of it. Because otherwise we won't be accomplishing anything, would we? Earth Lifetime still would. Gets people on both sides of the fence, BAM!

Apple and negative ads

2009-02-11T07:33:00.000-08:00

I've got to hand it to them, Apple sure can make some nice products. The iPhone, iTouch, iShuffle, iPod, the list goes on. What doesn't belong in this list, however is the mac product line. Its not the only product line that Apple aggressively markets to the average american on TV, but its the only one that they do so with pretentious commercials which only feature savage attacks on their competition.

I don't know about other computer users, but this advertising campaign completely turns me off to the mac, and I will probably never buy one. Since this would be my entrance into Apple's product line, I will probably never use or buy an apple product, aside from the Macintosh Plus I had when i was a kid. I was already pretty off to the idea of a mac to begin with, due to the whole"gaming" issue, upgrades, and lack of real customization - I can easily get this from a PC build.

Keep in mind, I think that the rest of Apple's TV advertising is well done, and tasteful. The irony I find in in the mac/pc advertising battle is that at least from an advertising perspective, Microsoft has taken the high road and produces advertising that actually features their product, or at least what someone can do with it, and never mentions their competitor. Mac's entire "angle" here is basically to demonize the PC in pretty much every way possible, and in the process alienate a large sector of their possible market. I see a lot of parallels here with politicians, and particularly some recent ones, who capitalize on the idea that the alternative is the devil, while they peddle bullshit which smells good only by comparison.

Fans of mac would undoubtedly point out that mac is doing just fine in sales, and while that is true, they could be doing a lot better if it weren't for this relatively hostile ad campaign. Mac has accomplished brilliantly in all other advertising venues and products, by in large because of their portrayal of a serene product experience, which may or may not hug babies or cure cancer, and then actually delivering on at least the user experience!

Of course, I am essentially immune to mac advertising anyway, simply because I do not fit nor desire to fit the image portrayed for their users - hip, progressive urbanites with buddy holly eyeglass frames and latest-fashion abercrombie styles. I don't wear tight-fitting, solid color turtlenecks or hang out in coffee joints.

My spendthrift side also tends to avoid apple products, as their rapid cornering of the market on personal devices has forced their competitors to lower prices, and I'm taking advantage of that to save some green.

Space Solar Power

2009-02-09T12:33:00.000-08:00

Number 10 in Top Ten Blatant Misapplications of Science!

Solar power has many quirks, but by far the biggest, which literally overshadows (har har) the rest, is that the sun doesn't shine at night. The function of solar power plants limits them answering peak loads only during the day, as they cannot function as baseload plants. They also have the added issue of uncontrolled variable production due to weather conditions, much like wind power - although this issue is somewhat mitigated by proper siting of the plants.

A logical solution to this condition it to simple move the solar plants somewhere were the sun always shines, and without variation - space. An added benefit would seemingly be the the lack of attenuation of the energy by earth's atmosphere, thus providing more energy. The power could then be beamed down as microwaves to a receiving station on the earth's surface, and distributed from there in a normal matter.

So why not starting shunting space-power satellites into orbit?

Well, there are some MAJOR challenges, both economic and technical. To make them produce any significant power, the stations would need to be very large, on the order of football fields in size. This would make them heavy, and at $15,000 a pound, its starts to get a little out of hand. The second problem is construction and maintenance. They would need to be assembled and fixed in orbit - and remember, the simple repairs to the hubble space telescope, an object only the size of a school bus, cost over $1.5 billion and took almost a year to get fixed. The same peice of hardware, located on the ground, could be fixed for probably less than 1 million.

So lets assume we somehow solve the economics issue by providing dirt-cheap space travel. Then enters the technical issues. Remember the proposed efficiency gains? Well the station may be receiving more energy than it would on earth, but the microwave beam still has to travel through and be attenuated by earth's atmosphere, so there goes that advantage. To actually be able to send power to the same receiving station, the satellite would have to be in geostationary orbit, which is over 22,000 miles out. At this point you run into a beam divergance issue, it would be nearly impossible to focus the microwave energy into something narrow enough to not require a massively large collector on earth, probably as big as simple solar power plant. The technology does not exist yet to make microwave lasers, so we've hit a bit of a wall. The other problem is that solar cells (if they were to be used), actually have shorter service lives in space due to degradation from cosmic and solar radiation which is normally filtered by atmosphere. We could just use mirrors and steam generators instead, but that just makes everything heavier, and require more maintenance, because of the introduction of moving parts.

There are a lot of parallels between the notion held by advocates of space power and Nikola Tesla's dream of broadcasting wireless power. We don't have "magnifying transmitters" sending us power because of the inverse square law - power drops off at the square of the distance. This is a difficult law to overcome, not just a theory :)

As it might be evident this idea actually introduces more problems than it fixes. It requires cheap space travel, microwave lasers, and cheap solar cells, none of which exist today.

Since storing electricity at "grid level" is economically questionable, the simplest way to solve the "night" problem is to stagger the terrestrial stations at evenly spaced intervals on the planet, thus relying on the forward stations to power the darkened areas. There is no new technology to be developed, someone just needs to build it. A whackier but still cheaper than space satellites idea would be to float the solar stations on huge hydrogen blimps which could float above and avoid clouds, and beam the power only a few hundred feet in the form of concentrated light to ultra-efficient high temperature solar cell collectors the size of swimming pools. If this sounds silly to you, then there is no reason the the space idea shouldn't.

Top Ten Blatant Misapplications of Science

2009-02-04T08:35:00.001-08:00

Its nearly a decade after the year 2000, where are our flying cars, hoverboards, and obedient robotic servants? These ideas were touted as a vision of the "glorious future" in years past, but have not come to fruition. Whatever the culprit - technical details, economic considerations, policy decisions, etc we seem to be continuously generating more ideas which will most likely suffer the same fate.

Some of these ideas are merely "thought games" to improve understanding and spark interest for science in the minds of children. The issue appears to arise when some people take them a little too seriously, and don't realize its just a educational tool or joke. Problems are rarely one-dimensional enough to be solved by a single breakthrough.

Hindsight is 20/20, but sometimes foresight is too. A simple cost/benefit analysis works wonders at separating possibility from fantasy. And remember, just because something is possible is not proper justification for pursuing it :)