Some Knowledge

I look around for free stuff on the Internet.  If you do a Google search for dotcomology you are sure to find a free ebook with Albert Einstein’s picture on the cover.  Why waste money on paying for ebooks when you can get them for free?  In fact, here’s the link directly to dotcomology.com.

I started reading this ebook a half hour ago or so.  It seems pretty interesting and well-written.  From the first chapter, it looks like this person sells ebooks and website services.  I suppose you could pay $49.95 for any number of other books, but why pay anyone for information that’s free?

There was nothing on TV last night at 9:00 PM, so I turned on the Glenn Beck show.  He had most of an hour with an interview of Ted Nugent.  Ted came out in his jeans and cowboy hat and started in on everything that’s wrong with America.  This program reminds me of the comedy parodies on Comedy Central, only it’s funnier because these people are being serious.

So, Ted Nugent is a conservative.  He did his best to try to convince me to vote for John McCain.  He bragged about how he likes to kill and eat various animals.  He talked about the idiotic environmentalists who know nothing about nature.  It was an entertaining show.  Then there was a clip of his tour, singing the same old songs he wrote in the 70’s.  It seems there are still a lot of fans for Ted’s guitar skills.  If you ask me, it’s more entertaining to listen to him talk.

What I thought was a bit ridiculous was the way these two enjoy putting down the average American.  According to Nugent, the average Joe spends more than he earns, sits around all day drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and getting fat.  Maybe this is true for the average, caricatured American, but I think it’s pretty sad for two elitist, rich entertainers to sit around putting people they don’t even know down.  Of course, you have to say something to rile people up if you want them to listen to your opinion and vote the way you want them to.

I was entertained for a while by this interview, and I can see where people might get these kind of opinions, but I don’t necessarily agree with any opinions I see on TV.  It’s all well and good to sit around complaining about taxes and wasteful government and fat lazy bastards who max out their credit cards and drink too much beer, but what’s the point?  You’d think if a person interviewed a famous rock star they would ask questions about music, but aside from a short tour promotion bit, the subject never came up.  Of course, if there are two opinionated complainers in the same room, they are bound to complain about something until somebody tells them to shut up.

There are a lot of websites on the Internet.  All websites reside on some kind of server, the host.  You don’t have to own or maintain hardware to make money selling web hosting.  There are many companies who offer web hosting reseller packages.  One of these places is Hostgator.  For as little as $24.95 a month you can buy a chunk of hard drive space and some bandwidth, then split it up and sell it with a website, hosted on the same server on which you are selling space.  It’s all a matter of marketing how much money you can make with this kind of business.

Reseller packages are an easy and cheap way to get started in the web hosting business.  The hosting company takes care of the maintenance and you take care of managing your customers hosting.  This Hostgator company includes automatic billing software.  All you will need is some kind of record keeping software like a spreadsheet to keep track of your own records for your business.  Web hosting resale is fairly common, and there are lots of places online you can learn about this kind of business.

With the college football season getting underway this weekend, Big Ten Network is getting hit with a good deal of web traffic.  You can use the website to find TV schedules for games in your area, and to read live blogs about the games, players, and teams.

Apparently, the Big Ten Network is also a broadcaster that shows football games continuously.  It seems they have every game scheduled for today, except the Utah-Michigan game, which is on ABC at 3:30.  This is just fine with me, because I don’t get Big Ten Network on the cable, but I have a couple instances of ABC.  I’ll probably skip watching the game actually, even though I graduated from Michigan, because I’m just not interested that much in sports and have probably seen enough beer commercials in my life.

If you are a sports fan and are interested in how things are going in the world of Big Ten college football, check out this site.  It seems to have all kinds of game information and looks like it’s easy enough to navigate.  Big Ten Network also follows other college sports like rowing and gymnastics if you get tired of watching football.

In yet more breaking news, the annual Dragon Con Parade is being held in Atlanta this morning.  Starting at 10 AM, the parade should be winding down by now.  If you missed it check out YouTube in a few hours, surely some fans will have posted video of this event by them.  If not, you can watch videos of the parade from the last two years.

DragonCon is apparently the country’s largest scifi/fantasy convention.  Personally, I’ve never heard of these people before.  This is not surprising, as I never got into the whole fan/convention scene.  I like scifi and fantasy and read some novels in this genre occasionally, but I never felt the need to congregate with other people and discuss the finer points of Star Trek for instance.  If this is your thing, however, you might want to check out a convention in your area.  Of course these events charge admission, but they have to cover the cost of renting the hall in some way.  A simple google search for sci fi convention returns around 377,000 results, so I’m sure nobody would have any problems finding one of these things.

Once again it is that time of year when anachronists get together to celebrate the dark ages.  The Michigan Renaissance Festival is going in full swing at this time.  This weekend is the buccaneer beer fest, where you can dress up as a pirate and drink beer.  This would seem to be just the kind of thing to interest followers of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  All joking aside, if you feel like travelling back in time and experiencing a carnival atmosphere, I guess a ren fest is quite the thing to check out.  There are always vendors of sundry things, and usually some kind of sword fighting demonstration.  In fact, a few years back somebody was horribly wounded in one of these sword demonstrations.  Swords are dangerous, even dull exhibition type swords.

If you want tickets to the Michigan Ren Fest they go for a bit less than $20, $10 for kids.  The fair is located near Holly Michigan, south of Flint on Dixie Highway.  It runs until September 28 and is open on the weekends and Labor Day.  Be sure to dress up in period clothing if you want to experience the fair in full.  Have fun!

First, find a hosting company who is looking for new customers.  Cut a deal with them to get them some customers for a piece of the action.  Better yet, purchase some servers and set up your own host.  Then you get creative.  You pay some coder to cook up a generic Clickbank storefront website.  This shouldn’t cost you a lot.  Get all the information people would need to set up and advertise a site like this into an ebook.  Pay the designer to build you your own storefront sales site where you sell Internet business packages.  Record a video or a podcast of some kind to load along with your page so you can talk to people directly.  Then pay Google to advertise your site on thier Adwords program.

Now you wait for people to come to your site and listen to your sales pitch.  You should be getting thousands of hits off your Google ads.  One in a hundred will end up buying your $49.95 package.  Of course, they will also buy hosting from your web hosting provider.  This hosting is how you get monthly funds from your customers.  Be sure they understand that they have to get hosting from your provider.

Of course you will need plenty of promises of wealth and believable testimonials from happy people who seem to have bought your system.  If they actually end up making money using your business model that’s fine.  If they lose money, and complain, tell them they are not spending enough on advertising.  You have a very simple business, you are selling dreams.  It’s not your fault if the dream never materializes.  You will be making money from everyone who buys into your system, and you will have residual income every month from taking care of your customer’s hosting needs.  What a life.

Midnight Race is a flash game.  It loads directly to the browser and starts once you click the play button.  There is a chat app that runs on the game screen so you can shout out to other players.  I tried this game, and to be honest, it’s not really worth playing.

First of all the only control is left and right arrows.  The speed is set on floored and you have to scurry back and forth across the screen trying to avoid the cars that are going your way, which might be hard to see, and the headlights coming at you in the other lanes.  There is some spastic music that plays along with the game action, and the game takes about a minute to load with a high speed connection.

I guess if you’re really bored you might try this game.  I didn’t have any real problems with it, except that I kept crashing into other cars.  Once you crash it’s game over.  It doesn’t look like there is any interaction with other players aside from the annoying chat text.  I found one site where I could get code to embed this game on a blog or a web page, but in my opinion it’s a waste of bandwidth, so I wouldn’t go to the trouble to put a copy of it here.

The Study Island website is down right now.  It seems they are getting a lot of hits off the web.  As near as I can figure out, Study Island is a web-based state assessment test for students.  I found one blog that is partially about the site here, but it really does not explain what is going on with the main site or why it is so popular today.

According to one source I found on the net here, study island prepares students for taking the various state assessment tests that are used to grade students these days.  It seems that over a million students have used this website to prepare for these tests.

World reserves of fossil fuels are finite.  Looked at chemically, there is only a finite, yet large, amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to even burn fossil fuels.  What does this mean for the future of energy use?  It’s fairly obvious that if humanity is going to keep using energy at an accelerated rate, new sources for this power must be found.

The prime source of power in the universe is the fusion reaction that occurs in stars.  This energy streams down continuously on earth from the sun and costs nothing.  Solar energy keeps the earth from being a dark, frozen rock in the depths of space.  While this source of energy is not as concentrated as the energy derived by chemically combusting a fuel, it is available everywhere.  The only thing we need to do to harvest this energy is to collect it somehow.

Photovoltaic solar cells convert sunlight directly into electricity.  They are however, not very efficient.  Even the best solar cells only convert 27% of the light that falls on them into electrical power.  Still, even though there is loss of energy in this technology, the energy produced is easily stored and used.  Solar cells have a distinct drawback.  They are very costly to produce, both in terms of money and energy.  Still, it would be possible to power the entire earth if enough solar cells were made and distributed.  They last for a long time and have no moving parts.  The panels would have to be cleaned occasionally, and any defective cells replaced.  The only thing keeping people from powering this whole planet on solar electricity is the cost.

Wind and weather are other manifestations of solar energy on the earth.  Wind turbines can produce power, when the wind blows, but it takes some machinery to accomplish this.  Moving parts wear out.  Some days the wind does not blow.  Hydroelectric power plants are more reliable.  Rainwater stored in reservoirs falls through a turbine and spins a generator.  This technology has been used for many years.  Even ancient people used water wheels to grind grain.  The limits to hydroelectric power are that there are limited places on earth where these dams and power stations can be built.  They require rainfall and the control of vast quantities of water.  Dams use significant amounts of concrete and steel and take considerable effort to build.  Still, once built and properly maintained, there is no reason a hydroelectric station should not last for many years, perhaps even centuries.

Heat from the interior of the earth can be used to produce steam and spin turbines and generators.  In volcanically active regions, like Iceland, considerable potential for such geothermal power generation is available.  There are a limited number of regions on earth where the interior heat of the earth is close enough to the surface to supply energy for these stations.  Still, deep drilling and good design can make this source of energy more widely distributed.  Geothermal heat comes from the decay of radioactive elements in the interior of the earth.

Nuclear power is one source of energy that is being used to power society.  Nuclear reactors run on the fission of Uranium 235 or Plutonium in carefully-designed and fail-safed power stations.  There is a lot of Uranium available for use in reactors.  In some reactors, such as the Canadian Candu design, it is not even necessary to enrich the fuel.  Of course, like anything else, there are problems with nuclear energy.  Reactors, because of the neutron flux from fission, create radioactive waste.  This material can be hazardous for thousands of years.  Stable underground storage and responsible handling of radioactive waste is one of the necessary factors that must be considered in any plans to derive power from nuclear fission.

Scientists have been working on designing a fusion reactor for over 50 years now.  There is much potential for nuclear fusion power, but the task itself is extremely difficult.  It takes high temperatures and pressures to produce fusion.  In a fusion bomb, these conditions are produced by detonating a fission bomb in the vicinity of fusion fuel.  This approach is not useful in a power reactor.  Large vacuum chambers with powerful magnets are used to contain the compressed and heated hydrogen isotope plasma in such devices as the Tokamak.  Fusion reactors also produce neutrons, so radioactive waste is also a factor in their operation.

There are several other schemes for extracting energy from the environment.  Ocean currents, waves, and tides have all been harnessed to provide electrical power.  Many crops such as sugar cane, corn, soybeans, and palm oil are grown to produce biofuels.  Plants are not as efficient as solar cells at harvesting energy from sunlight, but they have been doing this for billions of years.  One of the latest areas of research is into the use of algae as a source for oil for biodiesel.  There is still a lot of coal in the ground, and it has been estimated that the world could operate at present energy consumption rates for the next 300 years on just this source of energy.

As long as people live in modern society, they will continue to use energy at ever-increasing rates.  Instead of waiting for supplies of fossil fuels to run out, people are actively working on alternative technologies for powering the earth.  As fuel prices increase and the cost of fossil fuels goes up, the alternative, renewable sources of power will become more economically feasible.  If industry and government do not realize the finite nature of fossil fuel reserves and begin to switch over to sustainable sources of energy, there will be a crisis at some time in the future that will be disastrous for humanity.  It is a simple thing to get power from the sun, which drives all life on earth.  It is stupid to waste the resources we have now and not work on ways to replace them with technology that will last for all time in the future.