Some Knowledge

Analog Devices manufactures a wide array of analog and digital integrated circuits.  If you are designing a new gadget that needs a radiation-hardened fast A/D converter, this is the place to look.  Analog Devices produces many different kinds of amplifiers and signal processors.  If you are looking for what’s new in the field of integrated circuitry, check out this place.

I found this site while looking for analog computer tracking circuits for guided missiles.  Apparently, the military still uses analog computers in some of its applications.  Tracking circuits are a natural for analog computers, as the sensors tend to have an analog output, and the parallel and almost instantaneous response of a fast analog circuit can be quite handy when you need real time control signals for steering a missile.

I haven’t had much time yet to explore this chip supplier website, but it seems more interesting to me than the consumer product websites I looked at this morning.  It always amazes me how there can be so much high tech stuff in the world that never gets used in everyday life.  Then again, even a simple CD player has some pretty high tech stuff inside it.  I really must try to get back into the cutting edge of technology.

But, I don’t want any of them.  Technology must be failing.  I’m not too hard to get interested in something.  I just don’t want a new laptop, an electronic computer phone, a Han Solo ice cube maker, A printer shaped like a bucket, a solar powered LED light for a bottle of water, or anything else.  I looked at both the major gadget blogs and found nothing of interest.  Still, there was a lot of stuff.

I must not be trying hard enough to find interesting things.  Apparently, I live in a cave.  I have a lot of things I never use.  I have about three guitars I hardly ever play.  I have what I consider to be the ultimate gizmo ever invented, a synthesizer.  Still, it doesn’t get me interested.

Perhaps I am not focussed enough on things.  Maybe I need to be re-educated in a consumerism indoctrination center.  Perhaps I do not watch enough commercials on TV.  Maybe I just don’t see any use for things like picture frames that show hundreds of pictures.  If I want to look at pictures I can show them on my computer.  That’s the point of having a general purpose analytical engine.

I wonder when they will start manufacturing steam punk gadgets.  Certainly there would be a market for a steam driven computer.  Just fill the firebox with coal and get it cooking, and all your music files will play so pretty.  Perhaps when the energy shortage comes, there will be a reason.  Perhaps they have these things in an alternative dimension where they took Charles Babbage seriously.

I think the next wave of the future will be in analog computers.  What do people need accurate digital computers for anyway?  Hooking up to your friends half way around the world should not be a complicated task.  A series of analog waves could be used to signify a port address on the analog net.  Of course, there would be problems implementing this.  Perhaps the analog circuitry could be better utilized in something like an engine control circuit for a car.  For years the military used analog computers in radar and guided missiles.  Of course, that was before accurate digital circuitry was available.  There’s only so much you can do with a ball and cone integrator.

I actually have one of these old mechanical gizmos.  I have an aerial sextant that was used in bombers for navigation.  It has a mechanical, spring wound integrator to average out the readings on the sun’s position in a moving plane.  It might even still work.  GPS makes something like this superfluous. Still, it is a big old ticking gizmo that somebody went to a lot of trouble to design and build.  It probably cost thousands in its day.  Now, it’s just a piece of junk sitting in a plastic box in a closet somewhere.  Yet another example of something that was once cutting edge and is now useless.  Maybe I should sell it on ebay.

I really must say, that I don’t know what’s the latest buzz in technology.  Maybe somebody should invent a personal data assistant that fills in its own information.  Who wouldn’t want a personal assistant that tells them what to do?  I don’t know.  Maybe somebody has invented something that translates brainwaves directly into text so you can message on your cell phone by just thinking about something.  Seems pretty far fetched.  Maybe they are working on a coffee maker that is plumbed into the household plumbing and that makes coffee continuously from a pipeline of coffee grounds that runs directly from the mercantile exchange.  I really doubt it though.

There is always some kind of new gadget coming out on the market.  There are several blogs that do nothing but write about new gadgets.  This is the power of marketing.  When something new is developed, it has to be sold.  When you have a new product, you issue press releases and film to TV and people try to buy your product.  I watched the cycle spin itself out yesterday with the new Blackberry Bold.  It was on the news at least three times yesterday morning.  It was the top search on Google Trends all day.  They must have pre-sold more of those things yesterday than they will make in a month.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of places where you can find the latest gadget.  Mostly these days, when you hear the word gadget, you think of electronics.  I remember when I first became an electronic geek.  I was 12 years old.  My parents bought me some electronic kits for my birthday.  I learned how to solder putting together those kits.  I made an audio amplifier that never worked as promised.  It fed back a lot and ended up on a shelf.  Still, it was interesting.  I bought some books on electronics and got some parts at Radio Shack.  I became a hobbyist.  All through high school I worked on radio circuits.  It was self-education at its best.  Hands on experience in a hobby that provided not only fun, but the training for every decent job I’ve ever had.  Nevermind I went through college and got a degree in physics.  What paid off for me was electronics.

So, where did I lose track of what’s happening on the cutting edge in electronics?  I used to read journals about audio and video and radio.  I used to keep up with the latest in integrated circuits.  I had a Vic 20 computer that I wrote programs in BASIC for when I was in high school.  I took a couple classes in microprocessors and electronics design.  But it never went anywhere.  I stayed on the lowest strata of tech, the lowly repairman.  The guy who gets all the problems and all the complaints.  I probably should have gone into engineering.

None of this speaks to the question at hand.  What is the latest gadget?  It’s probably some electronic device that makes it easier to do business.  It’s probably some kind of telephone.  People all like to talk on the phone.  There is a big market for phones.  I don’t use the phone a lot.  Sometimes a friend will call.  I talk to family.  I do most of my communicating on the computer.  I think the Internet is the greatest invention of all time.  I have a huge book all about network architecture and equipment.  I could spend a week doing nothing but reading that book.  It’s interesting stuff.  I have a computer that lets me type up entries for my blog and play games.  I don’t really need a magical phone.  I don’t need a radio to communicate.  My computer hooks up over a radio link.  It’s all very complicated and interesting.

I just don’t keep on top of the latest gadgets.  I should look into what kind of electronics components are available in the new market.  For years, the only components I purchased or looked up were replacements.  I was stuck in the junk industry.  The bottom is falling out of the junk industry.  We live in a throw away culture where things are replaced and not repaired.  There is still some stuff that can be fixed, but it’s not really common.  I suppose there could be a market for refurbished electronics goods.  There is going to be a lot of junk going to the landfill and recyclers next year when analog TV phases out in broadcast band.  A whole era of technology made obsolete by legislation and improvements in technology.

Maybe I should turn this blog into yet another new gadget advertisement forum.  I could solicit press releases from manufacturers and just republish the information they give me as advertising for new stuff.  I would even sell advertisement to make money when millions of people start reading this blog.  For now, I don’t know what’s the latest stuff in technology.  It’s certain there is a market for stuff though, because companies make millions selling stuff.  Just think of all the profits lost by the CD manufacturers when the mp3 player went into mass production.  New stuff is always just around the corner.  Finding out about new stuff is as simple as having a venue where people visit.  Now, if I can just get a billion readers, my project in communications will pay off.

The weather today has been cool.  It has looked like rain all day.  The sky was full of clouds and there is a slight wind.  It’s just a dismal chilly day.

I found some interesting cars online today.  First, I looked for Chevy Vegas, because I used to have a couple of those.  I read a lot about all the problems Chevrolet had with that model.  You’d think a company would design a car that would hold up to some miles.  Apparently, it’s easier to build a car that falls apart after a short time so people come back and buy a new one.

After reading about the Vega, I looked up my Olds 98.  I found a nice shiny maroon ‘73 98 that was listed online as sold.  The car had a pink steering wheel.  It looked like the boat that car was.  If I ever make millions of dollars I might buy another one of those vehicles and fix it up nice.  Nothing like living like an oil tycoon.

The oil tycoons really must have loved the big cars they made in the early 70’s.  A whole fleet of vehicles sucking down refined petroleum as fast as it can be made.  The oil companies are probably making more money today, with more vehicles on the road and the price of oil all going through the roof.  It’s like people can’t seem to use the stuff up fast enough.  Despite new oil fields being discovered off Brazil, we are just about at the peak of oil right now.  With higher consumption, the price will skyrocket and the supplies will run out sooner.

There’s something to be said for living simply.  Using only the resources you need to survive, a person could have a long happy life without all the comforts we take for granted.  I read a story about some people who live in a village in Costa Rica, I think.  It was an interview with a woman who is 100 years old.  She does not drive anywhere.  She lives in a shack and keeps chickens.  Of course, it is a tropical country and climate and a person does not have to fend off the cold of winter.  Still, people need food to live, clean water, and a place to shelter.  You do not need to drive out to the show in a big Cadillac.

Then, for a while, I read about the petrochemical industry.  They make a lot of stuff out of oil.  Plastics, various chemicals used in cars, just about anything you think of has some petroleum in it.  I read a discussion on a forum about how to produce synthetic petroleum from plant oils.  Forums are strange.  One person introduces a topic, and a hundred people all start talking about something else completely.  There was no real answer to this question.  It’s something I’m sure scientists are working on.  Who wouldn’t want an endless supply of renewable plastic?

As I recall, Henry Ford developed a plastic for his cars made from soybeans.  That was a long time ago.  With all that people have learned in the last 100 years, you’d think there would be all kinds of things we could make out of plants.  So, I read about some of this stuff, but soon got bored.  I read about Richard Branson going to fuel a 747 with biodiesel or something similar.  I guess if you have to fly, you may as well fuel your jet with something renewable.  The thing is, this was supposed to be a test flight, and there would be no passengers.  So, the whole flight is just a big waste of fuel.  How environmentally conscious is that?

The price of all forms of energy is increasing.  Well, all forms except the free.  Sunlight still falls on the earth and costs nothing.  Mostly, all it does is heat up the earth.  Some of it is captured by plants, or by solar cells, but for the most part, sunlight doesn’t do much but heat up the planet.  The sun is not even heating up the environment here today.  It’s all bouncing off the thick layer of clouds and speeding back off into space.

Water is the key to why the earth will even support life.  Most of the surface of the earth is covered by water.  Water is the coolant of this planet, along with the atmosphere.  It is a simple feedback system.  The hotter the earth gets, the more water evaporates from the seas.  The more water that evaporates, the more water that condenses into clouds.  The more clouds there are, the less sunlight reaches the earth.  The less sunlight reaching the earth, the less the earth heats up.  A cooler earth means less water evaporates from the seas.  Less evaporation means less clouds, and more sunlight.  It’s a thermal servo circuit that regulates the temperature of earth to within a hundred degrees or so.  How convenient.

I think a lot about what will happen in the future.  I know people are not stupid.  People can be ignorant of some things however.  People ignore most of the stuff they consume.  We live on a planet where we are programmed from birth by business to consume as much as possible.  We are told in endless commercial advertisements that we will only be happy when we can purchase certain things.  We are sold useless things like diamonds as if these things were necessary to our personal relationships.  Shiny carbon is nice, I guess, but it is in no way something that is necessary to form a pair bond with another person.  We need cars to transport ourselves to jobs that we need so we can afford to buy a car to transport us to our jobs.  We need new clothes so that we will be in fashion, which changes several times each year.

All this consumerism leads to senseless waste.  Should you send your old shoes to the landfill just because they are not the latest style?  Do you need to have plastic packaging surrounding your new widget that will just be thrown away?  When you buy that new car, does the old one just get sent to the junk yard as scrap?  In some areas of the world they still repair things that break.  More and more these days, things are not repairable.  It costs less just to get a new radio than it would cost to fix the old one.  There is a lot of room on this planet for recycling old products.

The more things people invent, the more different things people will want.  One new device makes all the old ones obsolete.  More and more, people use something until they replace it with something better.  Things can be made so reliable that they seldom break.  But the lifetime of a product is something that is engineered into it.  Your new computer is only good for as long as it takes for engineers to design something that will make it useless.  Software and hardware work hand in hand to produce this cycle of planned obsolescence.  You buy a new computer.  The software developers design a program that requires a more powerful machine.  If you want to run the new program, you will need to upgrade your hardware.  It’s the way a consumer society works.

Things don’t need to be that way.  With some lack of cutting edge functionality, you can use a computer until it breaks.  There will always be old programs to run.  The advantage to this is that often old software is free.  A person does not need to buy the latest gadget to use a cell phone.  You do not need the latest Blackberry Bold to store your phone numbers.  A pen and pad of paper can do almost the same job.  In the future, when things become more expensive, it may become the style to reuse old equipment.  Then again, we may have a revolution in our social system that allows all the people of the world to be rich.

The resources of the earth are finite.  There is only a certain amount of food that is grown each year.  There are over six billion human beings on the earth that all have to share these resources.  The various governments on the earth were not all founded to be fair systems.  Some people collect far more of the earth’s resources than they can use personally.  Other people have nothing.  Life is in many ways what you make of it, still, there are people who do not have a chance on this planet.  A person needs abilities, and opportunity to use those abilities.  Without knowledge and opportunity, a person is helpless and needs others to take care of him.  There’s really nothing wrong with this.  People like helping each other out, in general, as long as it’s not a huge imposition.

The world runs on money.  This is one of the things that all modern societies have in common, an economic system.  Money is how people apportion goods and services.  Money is how people control other people.  Most people would not want to clean out a sewer system.  The Romans used to force slaves to do this kind of work.  Today, all you have to do is create a job and offer money, and somebody will do this work for you.  The monetary system coexisted with slavery for many years, but has evolved to replace it.  A lot of people with jobs will even think of themselves as slaves to the dollar.  Money is useful for keeping track of transactions for goods and for trading for useful things.  The economic system is also open to the potential abuse of people controlling others for their own gain.  This is what a corporation is, a group of people who control other people for profit.

If I were going to start a company, I’m not sure what I would do.  Living in America is an advantage when it comes to going into business.  This country was founded with the entrepreneur in mind.  Yes, there are taxes.  Yes there are regulations.  Indeed, there are laws that have to be obeyed.  Still, America is the land of opportunity.  All a person needs is a product or service they can sell for a profit and the sky’s the limit.  The government loves business here, because business makes the government a lot of money.  Money is the one thing everybody is taught to want and need.  Without money, a person might not survive.  Business is how people make money.  People survive by selling things to other people for some of their money.  This is the modern world.

Now, look at things from a different perspective, outside of modern society.  The things a person needs to survive are air, water, food, shelter, and heat.  There is no survival value for possessing shiny rocks.  Gold and silver do not sustain life.  What is needed is food and air and water.  Money is an artificial construct that only serves the purpose of trade.  A person can trade without money.  I could trade elk meat for berries.  Modern society is far more complex than primitive culture.  Still, what is necessary for life is the same.  In the old days people did not think of the land as something they owned.  They moved from place to place following the game and the seasons.   People generally live in cities now where they cannot forage for food.  People have houses to maintain and land to tend and things to keep them busy.  It is an easy life in some ways, and a hard life.  You have to play the games of modern man to survive in the big city.

There are still primitive cultures in some places on earth.  Most modern humans would not want to live in these kinds of conditions.  They make TV shows about people who go to live with primitive tribes for a while.  There are many advantages to living in modern society.  Long life is one of these advantages.  Better communications and better diet are other advantages.  Soon, we will have robots to do the truly hard work that people just would rather not do.  The future holds much promise for man.  But the thing that powers all this advancement is energy.  Without energy, the whole thing grinds to a halt and people start dying.

Fusion energy is one of the sources that people have been researching for many years.  Fusion reactors are still off in the future.  There is no reason this technology will not be developed, but there are other ways.  We could derive energy from a fully functional fusion reactor that is 93 million miles away, the sun.  We could do a lot of things with the resources that are available to us.  We could feed all the starving people of the earth with the food that is already available, if only it could be distributed and was not wasted as a source of motor fuel and luxury foods like meat.  We could live in a peaceful world if only governments could find a way to get along.  Wars are very wasteful.  Modern society is very wasteful.  We do not need to throw away our resources just to keep the price of things high.  On the other hand, low prices promote waste.  People need to find a better way of apportioning the resources of earth than a wasteful economic system.  Maybe tomorrow I will think of the answer.

Back in the 80’s I was looking for a car.  I saw an ad in the Detroit News for an Olds 98.  I got my brother to drive me into the city and looked at the car.  The owner wanted $300.  He said it burned a lot of gas.  I didn’t care.  There was no rust on the car, and it ran.  I gave the man the money and got the title, then drove it home.

When I parked in the driveway I noticed the smell of gasoline.  Under the fuel tank was a small spot.  The tank had a leak.  I went to the hardware store and bought a couple packages of epoxy and some fiberglass cloth.  I siphoned the gas out of the tank, cleaned off the spot where there was an obvious pinhole.  I screwed a sheet metal screw into the hole and covered the repair with fiberglass and epoxy.  No more leak.

The car was heavy, and the tires were bad.  I bought a set of retread bias plys for $90 and had them installed.  There were a lot of hoses on the 455 CID engine.  Certainly a car this size did not need so many hoses.  I got a vacuum gauge and figured out what the different hoses coming from the manifold and carb were supposed to do.  I removed a lot of the unnecessary emissions controls.  I found the port that supplied vacuum to the secondaries on the carb.  I hooked up a T-connector and ran this hose to the vacuum advance on the distributer.  Now, when I stepped on the gas it would advance the spark timing.  Now, the car ran like crazy and left a black streak behind it as the tires spun when I stepped on the gas.

I did a number of other service things to this car.  It had no thermostat, so I got it one.  I changed out the spark plugs.  I did a tune up on the distributer and got it new filters and changed the oil.  The car was in good shape otherwise.  Even the power seats worked.  That car was so wide I could lay down on the front or back seat and neither my head nor feet would touch the doors.  Even as big as it was, the Olds 98 would handle well and would pass anything in like two seconds.

I drove that car for a couple years.  It got something like nine miles per gallon, but the gas tank was huge.  I ran out of gas once and had to walk four miles to get a gas can full of fuel to get me to the station.  I once got a speeding ticket for doing sixty in a fifty zone something like 50 yards after a complete stop.  That car had a lot of power.

The end of the 98 came one night on the freeway.  I was driving home and the engine lost power.  A horrible clanking sound was coming from the motor.  It was a bad knock.  I limped home and parked the car in the driveway.  Apparently, I had spun a bearing.  I had no major money to rebuild such a huge engine.  I parked the car out by the barn, where it sat for about a year.  The junk man finally came for the car and gave me $50 for the wreck.

Even though it was a nice car and didn’t cost that much in the first place, the Olds 98 was probably a bad idea.  It cost a lot of cash to keep it in fuel.  It was a good ride and drove well, but it was huge and a bit of a pain to park.  I’d say I got my money’s worth out of that vehicle.  It was my one experience with driving and owning a luxury car from the era of the gas guzzlers.

My first car was a red 1972 Chevy Vega.  The car had an aluminum four cylinder engine.  It had a two speed Powerglide automatic transmission.  The Vega came with rust.  The paint on those cars was never very good.  There was plenty of room under the hood, so it was not too hard to service the car.  In the time I drove that vehicle I changed the oil several times, installed different stereo systems, and replaced the thermostat and the alternator.

The Vega looked like a sporty little car, but it was heavy for its size.  The engine also lacked a lot of power.  The car struggled to get up to speed on the freeway.  Passing slower traffic on a two-lane was pretty hairy.  Still, it was a pretty fun car to drive.  In the winter I would run snow tires on the back for better traction.  This was in the days before radial tires became popular.  The Vega lasted a few years and got me through high school.

The main problems the Vega had were with its aluminum engine.  It seems the valve seals were poorly designed as well, and the overhead cam engine burned a bit of oil.  My car did not go through tons of oil, but I checked it regularly just to be sure.  This ‘72 was a GT model, and came with a tach.  Very few cars with an automatic transmission have tachometers.  Still, it was interesting to look at the tach as the engine shifted.

My second car was a 1976 Vega with a manual 4-speed transmission.  This car was a bit more reliable.  By ‘76 the engine had been re-designed for more durability.  This car was still underpowered, but it would squeal the tires if you popped the clutch in low gear.  The color of the ‘76 was a reddish burgundy.  I drove that Vega for a few years before it finally bit the dust.  The major problems with the Vega were with the unibody.  The body panels would rust out, then the frame would sag and the tires in front would splay out and the car was junk.  There was no point having the frame straightened, because there was just no metal for it to hold shape.  Both of the Vegas I drove died of this problem and went to the junk yard.

If Chevy had designed the car better, the Vega might have been a decent ride.  The car was heavy and weak and not durable.  Still, it was a decent car and got me back and forth to school for a lot of years.  In a way, I miss the old Vegas.  It had a decent body style and was not a boxy clone like you see everywhere today.  With the price of gas what it is these days and getting higher, I think there will be a lot more compact cars on the road in the future.  I doubt the Vega will ever come back, but there were enough of them made that I could probably find one to rebuild if I ever feel like it.

Any machine that produces more energy than it consumes is considered to be a perpetual motion machine.  Over the years there have been many proposals for creating such a machine.  The problem is that none of these devices actually work.

Energy in our universe is conserved.  You can not get something for nothing.  If you want to produce energy in some form, you will have to derive that energy from some other form.  Modern society runs off chemical energy for the most part, with some input from nuclear sources.  Most perpetual motion devices claim to extract power from static fields of force.  Gravity is perhaps the main force utilized by claims of perpetual motion, but magnetism is also employed.

The overbalanced wheel is perhaps the best known perpetual motion device.  In this device, weights are arranged on levers around the circumference of a wheel.  The weights are hinged and can swing out when the wheel is in one position and swing in on the other side of the motion.  The increased torque from the weights on one side of the wheel is supposed to drive the wheel to rotation.  What happens in practice is that the weights collect on the side of the wheel where they are closer to the pivot, and the wheel balances and does not operate as supposed.

Various people have invented perpetual motion devices from electrical components.  The most common of these inventions use an electric motor to drive a generator, that then supplies power to the motor.  Such a device can not possible work.  Motors and generators are not 100% efficient.  There are also mechanical losses in the bearings.  Other types of electrical or magnetic perpetual motion devices claim to use magnetic fields to force wheels to rotate or weights to move upwards against gravity and then release energy by falling.  Such devices can not in fact operate.

Energy is so prevalent in our society, but few people actually understand much about how it operates.  This leaves many people vulnerable to being duped by unscrupulous salesmen who offer investment opportunities in perpetual motion devices.  This is in fact an old form of fraud.  It takes some source of energy to get useful work out of a device.  In most instances, people who claim you can get something for nothing are trying to get some of your money for nothing.

The patent office will not issue patents for perpetual motion devices, because they will not actually work.  The laws of physics are proven with experiments and are not going to change.  It is through the study of physics that a person can understand the principles of energy.  There is nothing secret about scientific knowledge.  Any person who is interested can find out about how the world operates.  The universe works as a system of cause and effect.  Without some cause, an event will not happen.  Without some source of energy, a device will not give out energy.  It is a very simple principle that some people just refuse to acknowledge.

Even today, in the age of instant information, there are still people trying to sell perpetual motion devices.  Take for instance the HHO car fuel devices that are being sold everywhere.  These are a very inefficient example of a perpetual motion device.  In theory, these things take electrical energy from the car’s electrical system, use this energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn the hydrogen and oxygen in the engine to make mechanical power to drive the car forward and generate more electrical power to split more water into hydrogen and oxygen.  An idiot could see how this can not possibly work.  A typical internal combustion engine is something like 5% efficient at extracting mechanical energy from combustion.  A generator might be 90% efficient at generating electrical energy from mechanical energy.  Electrolysis of water is seldom more than 50% efficient at converting electrical energy to chemical energy.  In this system there is a maximum efficiency of .05 x .9 x .5 = 2.25%.  To power your car by electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen would require twice as much electrical energy as it would chemical energy from gasoline.

We all want to believe we can get something for nothing.  The fact is that everything has a cost.  Where energy is concerned, there is no way to avoid paying the price.  Perpetual motion machines are nothing but fantasies and are an example of faulty thought processes in their inventors.  There are many potential sources for energy in the universe.  Human trickiness is not a source of energy.  There is no way to derive energy from a machine that does not have a source of energy supplying it.  Perpetual motion is nothing but a hoax.

Here is a hilarious report on the effects of eating a diet rich in algae.  Scientists were interested in if they could supplement the diets of poor people with algae as a cheap source of nutrition and protein.  What they found is that algae is basically not edible for humans, or even for rats.  The report describes in detail what they did and what the results of this experiment were.

There are a lot of places selling algae supplements for outrageous prices.  AFA bluegreen algae flakes sell for $195 a pound.  The report above describes in detail the effects of eating 500 grams of algae a day.  It is not a pretty picture.  There are some things people just should not eat, and algae is one of them.

There are many creatures in the sea that live on a diet of algae.  These creatures are usually invertebrates.  Shrimp, as I recall, eat a lot of plankton and algae.  Some species of fish even filter algae out of the water.  In general, it is very tiny creatures that feed on this green soup.  Human beings might eat algae as a treat, sometimes, if they have nothing better.  In general, algae has a foul taste.  It upsets the gastrointestinal system because it is indigestible. I have tasted algae, as in kelp, and it is disgusting.  Nobody who wasn’t desperate would want to eat that stuff.

Of course, there are many kinds of algae in the world.  There is also genetic engineering, which works pretty good on one-celled organisms.  Perhaps, if scientists want to feed algae to people, they could create an edible strain.  They could put the gene that makes muscle tissue into the plant, so that it produces digestible meat proteins.  They could put the gene that makes gelatin in bones into the plant so that it produces a gelatin coat instead of a cellulose coat.  They could remove the gene that produces the bad taste.  Of course, they would have to leave the genes for photosynthesis.  With a lot of work they could get a plant that tastes like hamburger, and that would be digestible.  It may take a thousand years before people can do any of this.

Algae is not food.  It has been proven by experiment that people can not eat this stuff and survive.  The thing to do would be to grow algae and feed it to shrimps.  Poor people could then eat shrimp and be happy.  I think they might already do something like this with fish farming.  Then again, the whole ecosystem of the seas works on this principle.  All I can say is after reading the report of that experiment, I have no desire to try to eat algae.

Soylent Green, dystopian fantasy or grim vision of the future?  Made in 1973 and starring Charleton Heston and Edward G Robinson, Soylent Green is one of the classic movies of all time.  The film depicts an overpopulated world filled with pollution, where food is not generally available.  The vast majority of people exist on a diet of processed food products made by the multinational Soylent corporation.

Even though this movie is a darkly-themed piece of cinema, I still like it.  I think the concept is pretty funny actually.  The idea that you could feed people the processed bodies of the dead is pretty ridiculous.  How exactly do you turn meat into a cracker?  They must mix the dead bodies with a lot of filler like corn or soybeans, or as the company claims, plankton.  This kind of recycling just would not work in principle.  A person eats far more than their own weight in a year.  Sure, it might improve the flavor of soybeans, but still, the human flesh in the cracker is not going to be a big proportion of the caloric content.

Perhaps the funniest element in this movie is the way people riot for this great-tasting food product.  They actually used some kind of bucket loader to scoop up rioters looking to get more Soylent Green.  Sure, it’s pretty macabre to think of people fighting over human flesh for food, but at the same time it’s ridiculous and absurd.  If food were really so rare and expensive, people would dig up their lawns and plant potatoes.

The theme of this movie is anything but funny.  What would the world be like if there were ten times as many people as today?  What would everybody eat?  How would a government control crowds of rioting and starving persons?  Reality is different than movies.  There is no physical way for the world to become overpopulated.  The amount of available food limits population.  If there is not enough food to feed people, they die.  This limits population to a sustainable level.  Disease and crime also increase in crowded conditions, further reducing the number of people.  Then there are always the wars various governments foist off on people.

Soylent Green could have been a better movie.  Instead of turning it into a detective story, they could have done the movie from the point of view of the Soylent Corporation.  It might have been funnier to watch busy executives arguing over the laws of supply and demand as they go about grinding up bodies for food.  At the same time, it might have been worse that way.  Money should not grant one person privilege over another person’s life.  But that’s the way the world operates.

I don’t think the world will ever degenerate to the point where we have to recycle dead people into food.  Most people would be revolted by the very idea.  In a world where so many people are without food, what is needed is better management of the resources that we have.  If some company actually started making food products out of algae, we might have an alternative to land-based agriculture.  If I made crackers out of algae, I know what I would want to call them.  If I get anything out of this movie in the way of an idea, it’s that there is always some way to supply what people need.  If people ever want to eat tasty green crackers, or are forced to eat these things by necessity, some company will appear to manufacture the product.

It’s Sunday morning.  There is a wide area of rain sweeping across the nation, bringing storms and destruction to the unlucky few.  I’ve seen it on the news this morning, and know it is on the way here.  The big storms are all to the south, so we should only get some soaking rain.  There should be no tornadoes here this morning, and that is good.

If it were not so expensive, people might build homes that were impervious to storms.  If it were not for flooding, people could live in underground warrens, dug out tunnels below the ground where storms could not harm them.  Underground homes would be easier to heat and cool.  You could grow food crops on top of your house.  People could travel back and forth to their jobs on underground railways.  The surface of the earth could be covered with solar cells and windmills to supply power to the people living underground.  Robots could do the hard labor of farming and manufacturing.

Of course, there are other problems with living underground.  Lack of sunlight does nobody any real good.  There would be the constant threat of cave ins.  Floods could potentially drown people like rats.  It would be quiet, however.  The earth absorbs sound well.  There would be no traffic noise outside your windows.  Storms could just blow by overhead and uproot all the trees without wrecking your house.

Of course, underground cities would be massively expensive to construct.  You would need ventilation equipment to keep the air fresh.  It would take a lot of steel to shore up the roof and walls.  You would probably have to install several flat screen TVs on the walls to show live pictures of the outside so people don’t go stir crazy from being inside all the time.  There would have to be good artificial lightning all the time.  Plumbing might be a problem, as lines would be buried deeply.  Still, it could be done.

I’m not sure if underground cities are the new wave of the future.  Maybe if people built homes by welding together I-beams and setting them in concrete they would not blow down in tornadoes.  Maybe if people set up millions of windmills they would absorb the damaging energy of storms and keep destruction to a minimum.  Who knows.  Perhaps there is some survival value to being lucky.  One thing is for certain.  When the rains come, you will get wet, if you are not under some kind of roof.