Some Knowledge

I went outside and looked at the wind blowing clouds across the sky.  I thought about all the solar power driving the winds, and how good it felt to have a warm day with a nice breeze.  It would have been a good day for sailing, if I were near the lake, but I wasn’t so I did some gardening instead.

After sitting on the porch swing for a while, i put on a baseball hat to keep the wind from blowing my hair into my face.  I got a pair of work gloves and went out in the front yard and pulled all the long grass I could get at out of the flower garden.  This was hot work, and I was bent over, so it was not great for my back.  I spent twenty minutes or so clearing away as many of these weeds as I could get then I looked at the sky.

It did not look like it was going to rain again, like it did last night, so I decided to plow up the garden.  I went out to the barn and poured a couple gallons of gasoline into the tractor tank.  I got the tractor going and let it warm up good.  Then I drove out by the garden, unhitched the bucket, and hitched up the plow.  The tractor strained to pull the plow through the garden soil, but I gave it some gas and went in low gear and after half an hour or so the garden was all turned over.  I unhitched the plow and parked the tractor back in the barn.

I had a pretty good time doing the gardening, but it also tired me out a bit.  I went back to the house and made a pot of coffee.  I sat out on the porch on the swing for a while as the coffee percolated and watched the wind blow through the trees.  I thought about windmills and how expensive it is to build a good high-powered wind turbine.  I wondered for a while where people get all the money to build things like this.  I should look up ways to make millions of dollars.

I got a video link yesterday in my email for a video somebody made showing how much money they made in 2007 with all their affiliate marketing businesses.  It was pretty funny, because the face was blurred and the voice was altered to hide the identity of the speaker.  Supposedly this person made over a million dollars selling affiliate products and advertising them on Google Adwords.  He showed his income on one screen and his advertising costs on another and then subtracted to get his net profits.  I thought this was interesting.  Apparently, all you need to do to make a million dollars is set up a website to sell somebody else’s products and advertise your website on Google.  Very interesting.

I’ll probably go back to surfing the web for a while after I finish writing this.  A lot of people have been reading my little article about the new tribe they discovered in the Amazon yesterday.  I have Yahoo to thank for that little story idea.  Maybe I should just spend my time looking up news stories and writing about them.  Apparently, people are more interested in parroted ideas than they are in original thought.  When I have an original thought, I’ll be sure to record it for posterity.

I’ve been reading about energy this morning.  I read about solar steam turbines for a while.  There was a person in the late 1970’s who built a solar boiler out of 100 1-foot square mirrors and a lot of metal.  The square solar concentrator had to track the sun to focus all the light it collected onto a boiler that generated the equivalent of 6 kw of steam.  Very interesting, but not very practical.

Then I read about windmills.  The Siemens corporation makes some giant windmills.  I read all about how they cast the blades out of a wood-epoxy-fiberglass composite, all in one piece.  I read the technical specs on their 3.6 Mw wind turbine.  What it said nothing about was the cost of all this machinery.  I’m sure these things run in the millions.  It costs a lot of cash for tons of materials.  Still, it would be a good solution and the wind is basically free.  If I had billions of dollars like T Boone Pickens I too would probably buy a lot of windmills.

I just got done reading about using grass as a fuel for a powerplant.  Apparently, some places in England and Iowa are already doing this.  The plant in Iowa plans to replace 5% of the coal they burn with switchgrass.  This will take 50,000 acres of land to grow all this switchgrass.  Still, it is supposed to be marginal land that is not in production of food crops.  I’m not sure, but there must be a lot of solar energy that falls on 50,000 acres.  A quick calculation shows me that that much land could produce 40,000 Mw of peak power if it were covered in photovoltaic panels.  That’s not small potatoes.

Of course, the ultimate energy alternative is to just not use so much power in the first place.  It is a well-known fact that most of the energy that is used in the world is just wasted.  Look at incandescent lightbulbs.  These things waste 80% of the energy that they use because they generate so much heat.  Just replacing them with fluorescents would cut the energy cost of lighting by 2/3.  Still, people use the filament bulbs because they are cheap.  Maybe the problem is really not energy.  Maybe the problem is money.

I was reading the first part of Nicola Tesla’s autobiography yesterday and came across an interesting passage.  Tesla describes his system for wireless power transmission and along with power, he envisions a system of interconnected communications devices.  He describes pictures, telegraph, stock ticker, telephone, and even print media being transmitted on his towers from one device to another.  As I read the short description I knew what he was talking about.  It was the internet.

The only parts of the net that Tesla didn’t have were the actual devices that make such a network possible.  He does not mention computers or network equipment and says nothing about packet communications.  In an earlier passage he describes an idea he had as a child to build an autonomous thinking robot, so he did have ideas about thinking machines.

Tesla became obsessed in his later years with his scheme for wireless transmission of power.  It’s not surprising that he got nowhere with this idea.  There is no profit in power if the power company can’t meter and charge for the power a person uses.  Still, the general idea was that all devices that used electricity would be connected together on a common medium where they could all communicate with each other.  That is pretty much what we have today with the net.  When reading about Tesla I am struck by the fact that one man had so many useful ideas.  It would be hard to find another person who has had such an effect on society as this one person.

Using the UPenn Digital Library I found an interesting biography of Nicola Tesla.  The biography is located here.  Apparently, a small book was discovered in a used book store and was without copyright information.  The authors of this website decided to copy the book to the Internet so that anyone who is interested in reading about this great inventor can have the chance.

Tesla has always interested me.  His electrical inventions ushered in the modern age.  Without the system of AC power he developed, electricity would have remained a curiosity for the rich.  I became interested in him today when I was reading some websites about the Tesla Turbine, which is a steam turbine that uses thin, closely spaced plates instead of vaned wheels to extract power from steam.  Apparently, materials science was not advanced enough at the time of this invention to produce a workable device.  Still, it is an interesting design.

Anyone who is interested in the history of electricity or of power in general might be interested in reading about this man.  I don’t know if Tesla ever imagined the Internet, but he was a pioneer in radio communications and did invent the technology that made this net possible.  It is important to learn about the past, and the turn of the twentieth century is one of the most important times in all of human history.  Perhaps there is even something to learn from the thoughts of this man who lived a hundred years ago.  Knowledge feeds and builds on other knowledge, and information and ideas grow on one another.

Johnson Electro Mechanical Systems has invented a new type of heat engine in which they claim the efficiency of energy recovery from a heat source approaches 60%.  This device is similar in some ways to a fuel cell.  At one end of the device, heat and a membrane ionize hydrogen, which separates into protons and electrons.  The electrons are collected on an electrode and are sent through an external circuit to do useful work.  The protons migrate through the membrane to the cold side of the device, where they combine with the electrons and release heat to the cold resevoir attached to the cold side of the device.

It is claimed that this device operates on the Ericsson cycle, which closely approximates the Carnot cycle.  This device is being developed as a means of extracting electrical energy from solar power and from other sources of heat such as burning fuel.  Johnson, who invented the Super Soaker, is developing this device and is supposed to be working on a commercial application as soon as he gets funding to complete his research.

The IEEE has another website that explains how this miniature heat engine with no moving parts is said to work.  It is supposed that hydrogen will flow in a loop through this device and generate a surplus of electrical current.  It is supposed that the pressure generated by heating the hydrogen will force the hydrogen through the proton exchange membrane and thus generate a surplus of current that will be available to power external devices.  It is also supposed that current can be run through this device from an external source to generate a temperature differential that can be used for heating and cooling.

From the diagrams and explanations I’ve seen on the various sites I’ve looked at about this device, I can still not see exactly how it is supposed to work.  It seems to me that any current you might generate at the hot membrane would have to be applied at the cold membrane to pump the hydrogen back across that junction.  Perhaps the hot side generates a higher voltage that can have useful work extracted from it.  The claimed efficiencies seem pretty high.  Even the best solar cells only extract 28% of the available energy from sunlight.  This is one of the inventions that may take a while to implement.  If the concept actually works, we may be in for a more efficient future as far as energy use goes.

Yahoo News reported this morning that a new tribe has been found near the border of Peru and Brazil in the Amazon jungle.  This tribe has not been previously contacted and appears to be a new find.  It is estimated that there may be as many as 100 such tribes scattered around the world, most of them in the Amazon region.

The Yahoo site has pictures taken from the air of the tribe.  As yet, no expeditions to the region have been reported.  I imagine anthropologists will want to make contact with this tribe to study their culture.  It is feared that the first modern people to make contact with these tribes will be loggers, and there is the possibility that the new tribe will be wiped out before they can be contacted.

In this day and age with so many modern conveniences it is pretty amazing that there are still people living a stone age lifestyle.  I find it interesting that these people haven’t been found before this, even with all the satellites in orbit taking detailed pictures of the earth.  Perhaps people will learn from the mistakes of the past and treat these survivors from a different age with respect and learn from them.  It would be cool if somebody made a TV show about contacting these peoples.  It would also be cool if this tribe got a website and posted stories of their day to day lives.

Share The World’s Resources is a group that wants to change the world.  Their website has a lot of articles about war and food and oil and the other resources and politics of the world.  There is some interesting stuff here to read if you’re bored.  I found the site when I looked at an article on it about oil company price fixing.  That article was pretty interesting to read.

Apparently, STWR has been around since 2003.  It is situated in the UK and seems to want to change the world so that all people get a fair share of the pie.  I’ve looked around at some of their literature, but I don’t see many real plans for going about this great sharing.  I know it is probably a good idea with good intentions, but I still don’t see how they are going to accomplish their goals.

We live in a world where stuff is shared based on how much money a person has.  You have more money, you get more and better stuff.  This is of course basically not fair.  Economics is how people are convinced to go to work and do stuff.  If you want money, in general, unless you are very rich and can invest, you need to work.  The world is run by a system that has aspects of a meritocracy, and aspects of a lottery.  If you get lucky and get a good job, you get more money and more stuff.  If you can’t find a job you are out of luck.  You might try to start your own business, but the deck is stacked against you.  The world is run on a system of competition, and if you can not compete, you might starve.

I think it’s nice that a group wants to change how the world operates.  If everybody thought this way there would not be so many problems.  Wars are not started by people who are looking to share their stuff with other people.  People die from starvation and disease while food and medicine rot in warehouses in sight of the problem, all because there is not enough money to buy these items.  Then, there are governments who cause problems by arming people and sending them into areas to shoot and kill.

We live in a dangerous world that needs to be improved.  Perhaps in the future groups like this will become more influential and come up with a plan that will work to change the world.  Maybe if there’s anything that has the potential to make this planet a better place, it’s the Internet and open communications between people.

Farming and agriculture are the original ways man harvested solar energy.  Even before humans learned how to plant seeds, they reaped the foods of the earth for their nutritional value.  Today we are seeing a somewhat new phenomenon: energy farming.  With the ever-increasing cost of fuel, people are growing plants for the fuel value of the energy they harvest from the sun.

In ancient times right up to present times, farming has required a lot of hard work.  Modern man has developed a lot of machines to help him with the tasks of cultivating food.  In the old days it required animals to pull plows.  Now, we have tractors and petroleum products.  There is still a lot of work involved in driving a tractor and hitching up implements.  There is the cost and labor necessary to irrigate crops, as well as the cost of applying fertilizers and pesticides.  Any way you look at it, it takes a lot of work to grow plants.

In agriculture, the soil must be made ready to accept seeds.  This usually means breaking it up in some way so that the seeds will have plenty of water and air available in the ground to grow.  Plows, discs, harrows, rototillers, all these devices work the soil to get it ready for planting.  Then, after the soil is prepared, there is the task of planting the seeds.  This task was made more effective and easier with the invention of mechanical planting devices.  In the old days, a person might broadcast seed over a wide area by hand.  They might also dig furrows by hand and cover the seed with a hoe and set the seeds in place by treading on the row.  All this takes a long time and can be back breaking work because much of it is done stooped over.  Machines went a long way to improving the life of the farmer.

Farming is not just about planting stuff and waiting for it to grow.  Weeds and insects often pester crops and have to be dealt with.   One of the hardest jobs on the farm is removing weeds.  Weeds root themselves in the soil and are hard to pull out.  They are fibrous and difficult to cut out even with a sharp hoe.  Modern farmers often rely on chemical herbicides to kill weeds.  Weed control can be as simple as mixing and spraying the right compound.  Still, this costs a lot of money and takes a good deal of knowledge.  Insects can do even more damage to crops.  Aside from removing them by hand or just living with the losses, chemical sprays are about the only way to remove insects from a crop.  There is much research being done on biological controls for insects, but it is not always possible to find a predator species for a pest and introduce it in the required numbers to solve the problem.

After everything has grown and has been tended, there is the work of harvesting.  Modern crops are often harvested by machines, if this is possible.  Harvesting is hard work and requires some care when dealing with delicate crops like tomatoes or fruits.  In America, much of the harvest work is done by migrant workers who often come from Mexico for this seasonal employment.  There is a very narrow window on harvesting, which means when things are ripe and ready you have to get them in from the fields.  If you miss a harvest and lose a crop, sometimes because of weather conditions, all the work and expense of planting and tending your farm will be for nothing.

Almost all of the food we eat is grown on farms.  Fishing is the one industry where animals are still harvested from the wilds for food, and even fish farming is becoming more prevalent.  In recent years there has been a surplus of production of staple foods, which are often fed to animals to produce premium proteins.  Animal farming is a big industry and employs a lot of people.  Dairy, meat, cheese, wool, leather, gelatin, and many more products are produced by animal agriculture.

In recent years there has developed a trend, supported by governments, of fermenting foods into ethanol to burn in motor vehicles.  This uses up most of the surplus production of foods and drives the price of food up.  Corn is fermented into ethanol to mix with gasoline for motor vehicle fuel.  In Brazil they get most of their fuel from ethanol manufactured from sugar cane.  This is a growing technique of making fuel that is controversial.  It may in fact take more energy to grow and process ethanol than you get from burning it in your car.  It is a fact that this added use of food for fuel drives up prices.  It remains to be seen what effect this has on the world’s supply of food.

Human beings have been farming for thousands of years.  There is no other way to supply the foods necessary to support large populations of people who live in cities.  As long as there are many people on planet earth, they will have to farm food to supply themselves with the necessities of life.

It is not hard to build a solar food dehydrator.  This device is basically a box with glazing that holds screen racks for the placement of sliced vegetables or fruits.  If you can’t think of your own design, there are several books on the market that have plans.  A quick search on the Internet shows that there are even plans available online for these dehydrators.

The principle of the solar food dryer is fairly simple.  Heat and light are radiated by the sun.  On a sunny day an enclosed glazed box will build up a considerable amount of heat.  One way to design a cheap solar food dryer is to find an old windowpane.  If possible, for safety, this windowpane should have some kind of frame.  A large window is not necessary if you are only planning on drying a small amount of food.  For larger quantities, such as if you are planning on starting a sundried tomato business, look for larger windows.  While it is expensive, plexiglass may make a better glazing material than glass, as it will not break if something falls on your drier and the glazing will not be damaged by hail.

Once you have your glazing it is time to take some measurements and get some dimensions.  You will want to set your glass at an angle to the ground which will depend on the latitude of your location.  Polar regions will require a higher angle than tropical regions.  A good plan is to go outside on a typical day at noon and measure the angle of a shadow.  Measure the length of the shadow and the height of the object casting the shadow.  You could divide these measurements to get the tangent of the angle of the sun, or you could just use this ratio directly in the design of your box.  To use the terms from highschool geometry, the run of your angle should be the rise of the angle on your box.  This will get you a surface at 90 degrees to the sun, which is what you want.

You will need some plywood or particle board to build your box.  You will need some slots cut into the board, or some runners nailed to the board for the screen trays.  Screen is pretty cheap, and tray frames can be made out of wood.  The important thing to remember when designing your solar dryer is to allow holes for air circulation.  You will want to direct hot air to move over your food so it dries effectively.  You will want to paint the inside of the box black to absorb all the heat from the sun.  You might want to put in baffles to direct the flow of air in your dryer.  You will need to screen over the ventilation holes to keep bugs out of your food.  You will want to paint or varnish the outside of your dryer to protect it from the weather.  Your box should also have legs to hold it off the ground for good air circulation.  Air intake holes should be on the bottom of the drier to keep out rain.

A solar food dryer is a good way to use solar energy to preserve your food.  A dryer can often be made out of recycled materials and can be used for years if it is built well.  Home-dried fruits, vegetables, and herbs can keep for a long time and will provide nutritious food without the added chemicals of commercially-processed items.

I have to admit that I’ve read some pretty bad fiction in my time.  There are few things more annoying than buying a book that you think is good, only to find out as you read the first chapter that it is written by a hack who does not know what he’s doing.  Here are a few tips on what not to do when writing a book of fiction.

Do not just throw out names you make up for fantasy characters and places and assume they have some significance for your readers.  Some books read like lists of nonsense words strung together by conjunctions.  The names you make up for people and places are nothing but random sounds to a reader with no meaning.  If you treat nonsense words like they have meaning you sound like an idiot spouting random burblings.  It is difficult to read long passages with nothing but made-up words in them.  You should be using the English language to communicate with your reader, not your own personal language of delusion.

Another thing you should try to avoid when writing fiction is long passages of back story.  A person reads a book to find out what’s happening now.  If your characters are constantly digressing on their childhoods and previous adventures your story will have no flow or continuity.  If something in a character’s past is important for your story, start it in the past and move on with the plot.  Flashbacks are a very annoying ploy in fiction that are way overused and completely unnecessary for a good plot.

Stories that do not maintain a sense of logical integrity are hard to read.  What I mean by this is that characters should not come out of nowhere to save the day.  If your main character is falling off a tower, some strange knight on a flying horse should not swoop out of nowhere at just that instant to snatch the falling person from certain doom on the metal spikes in the moat below.  This is not likely to happen in real life.  In fact, the odds of a knight on a flying horse appearing out of nowhere to save the day are pretty much zero at any given time.  Stuff like this just does not happen and should not be part of any story.

Any situation that is impossibly unlikely and that has been done before in a popular story has no place in any work of fiction.  The evil wizard should not in any circumstances turn out to be the father of the hero.  The farm boy should not turn out to be the long lost heir to the king.  There is no reason to invoke the power of some supernatural being to save the day in your story.  Stories are interesting because people who could be normal people, complete with flaws, do things that could possibly happen.  There is no way the secret agent would be able to defuse a Lithuanian atom bomb.  It takes time for people to learn any new skill.  Verisimilitude means things that are possible in real life.  If a story would not be possible in some version of reality, it is nonsense.

I like to read interesting stories of things that happen to realistic characters.  I do not like to read stories of impossible things happening to perfect characters with meaningless names.  What gives a story life is when there is some meaning to what is happening, and when there is a good possibility of failure for the main character.  If you want to write a good story, it will have to be about human characters, complete with flaws, and with interesting personalities.