Some Knowledge

I have a 1985 Mazda RX-7.  It’s seen better days.  For the last couple years the car has sat out by the barn.  It made a handy home for little mice and wasps.  Leaves fell on the car and decayed into dirt.  Rust slowly ate through the bottom of the doors, and the battery went dead.  A film of black dirt covered the paint.

The other day some guys came buy to ask if I wanted to sell this vehicle.  “Sure, why not?”  I thought, and led them back to the barn.  “The battery’s dead.  The car has a lot of problems.”  I explained, showing them the derelict.  I gave them my price and they still seemed interested.  I told them I would charge up the battery and try to get the thing started.  I gave them my phone number and they said they’d call me Saturday.

So, the next day I put the battery charger on the car, and pumped air into the tires.  I checked out the radio, and made sure the battery was taking a charge.  After a day on the charger, the engine turned over.  It would not run without a shot of starting fluid, of which I was fresh out.  I stopped by Murray’s Auto and got a can of starting fluid.  After sitting around this morning wasting time on the net and writing in this blog, I decided to see if the car would start.

A good shot of starting fluid down the throat of the carb and a key twist later the engine roared to life.  I let it warm up for a while, but not long enough.  It stalled out and I had to hit it with the fluid again.  This time I let it get good and warm, and it finally idled pretty well.  I closed up the hood and retrieved the can of fluid, and threw the thing into reverse.  The right rear wheel just spun.  In two years the car had sunk into the ground,  Some wheel spinning and back and forth rocking later, and the car was free.  I pulled up to the front driveway and parked the RX on asphalt.

With the car safely parked, I got the shop vac and cleaned out all the leaves that had collected in the various crevices of the vehicle.  I vacuumed out the engine compartment, including a mouse nest by the battery.  Then I mixed up a bucket of soapy water and got a rag and the hose and washed the grime off the car.  A little cosmetic help will not detract from any price offers.

So the car is running and can be transported and is relatively clean.  Now I’m waiting around for this guy to call.  If he doesn’t get back to me this week, I think I’ll make up some nice number signs and park the car by the road and put a price on it.  It never hurts to advertise.  I did a lot of work on that car to keep it running over the couple years I drove it, and I spent a lot of cash on stuff like cool speakers and a stereo and all the other stuff I did to make the car run.  Now I just have to become a used car dealer and sell the thing off.  Shouldn’t be too hard.  I can always sell it to the junkyard for scrap.  In fact, I might make more money taking and selling parts of it online to people looking to rebuild this car.  It’s not a complete pile of junk.

I have spent many days working on cars in my life.  I used to do all kinds of different service to vehicles.  It is a hobby I used to enjoy.  If you can take a piece of junk and make it work to get you around, you have saved some money.  I probably spent more on gas and insurance for that vehicle than I ever did on the price.  Still, it would be nice to get rid of the thing so I don’t have to think about working on it all the time.  I have considered converting it into an electric car, but it’s kind of heavy for that.  It was interesting to study the construction of this contraption and learn how it operates.  Perhaps I will go into the car business and design my own vehicles.  Perhaps I will only need a couple hundred million to start a car company.  That’s what venture capital is for, right?

Cyber Wyre has a pretty interesting website value calculator.  All you do is enter a URL and this widget looks up Alexa rank, Google page rank, counts backlinks on Yahoo, Alta Vista, and the web in general.  From these numbers the thing figures out how much you might make per month in advertising and affiliate sales, and calculates a sale value for your site.

I’ve been using this gadget to track page rank here for a while.  It’s very easy to use and doesn’t give huge inflated values for a site like some other website value calculators do.  Cyber Wyre makes an interesting tool for getting some idea of how a site is doing as far as ranking against other sites.

As an aside, another site I use to track ranking is Technorati.  Once again all you do is enter a blog URL and Technorati gives you a rundown on the authority and rank of your site.  I’ve noticed this blog slowly climbing up on both of these evaluations, which is maybe a good thing.  It might be helpful or just interesting to look up how your own site is doing with these simple tools.

I’ve been at this blog almost every day for two months now.  It seems I’m finding less and less to write about every day.  Google Trends used to give me a few ideas, but the topics there have been mostly uninteresting lately.  I guess I’m burning out on trying to blog about factual information.  I should have studied more closely when I was reading that book on writing comedy.  Then again, the jokes in the comedy writing book were not very funny.  Perhaps I need to move in a new direction.

There was a lot of interest in one little three paragraph post I wrote about a racing game.  Over three thousand page views there.  Two whole comments from all that.  Candy Tracks contest ends next week, so my visitors from that search will no doubt evaporate soon.  Still, it got far more traffic than anything else I wrote.  Stuff like news stories only draws a few people for a while.  Maybe I haven’t been marketing my site effectively.

Then there are the comments.  There are a few comments on some of my posts.  Mostly these are pretty nice.  If I were making any money on this deal I might consider putting better references in my articles, but now, I don’t feel the need to justify what I write by citing sources.  It’s a blog, not Wikipedia.  I might write some long endless diatribe about something and not list a single reference.  Apparently, I just write to hear the keys on my computer click.

But now, back to the topic.  What to do about burning out on this blog?  I might need a better source of information than the Internet.  Does such a thing exist?  Certainly it’s not TV.  I have been considering going totally fictional.  The problem with that is that a blog is backwards for what fiction should be.  You need first in, first out architecture for fiction, not last in first out like a blog.  Maybe it doesn’t matter.  Most of the access to this blog is random.  Readers just come from everywhere and look at one thing then split.  That’s generally what I do when I find blogs on the net.  I might read related articles if they are interesting and listed in some way that is logical.  In general I just read something and go back to the search.

I spent a lot of time this morning looking at sites about solar power and alternative energy.  For some reason this interests me.  Maybe I should start a power company and sell power to consumers.  I could branch out into electric cars when I make some cash.  Electric cars to use the electric power from my solar power plants.  Maybe Warren Buffet could slide me a few billion to get going.

I looked around for a while at different money making schemes on the net.  They are all basically the same.  Write an ebook and sell it for $29.95.  Sell moneymaking websites and hosting.  None of this produces anything but information that anyone can get just about anywhere.  Do you know how many ebooks there are about making money with Google Adsense?  There are probably thousands of those things being sold on the net.  Ridiculous.

Compared to my other blogs, which I’ve pretty much abandoned, this is the bigtime.  I’ve gotten over a hundred page views a day for a while.  There is still the problem of what to write.  Maybe I should ask people to email me funny pictures of rabbits and post those.  What a dumb idea.  A blog that’s nothing but funny pictures.  I guess people would like that.  Don’t bother trying to write stuff that makes people think, just show them idiotic scenes to make them laugh.  Sort of how TV works, isn’t it?

I guess if I wanted to post a novel or something I could figure out how the web page editor works and just post it as some chapters on another wordpress page.  That would mean I would have to post a novel I worked on and then would be publishing for nothing.  Maybe some book publisher would see how brilliant my story is and offer me a book deal.  Most likely, people wouldn’t even read anything I post as a novel.  Even if it were about a magical wizard who turns ogres into frogs.  What nonsense.

I’m not sure what the point of this post here is.  Maybe it’s just typing practice.  There’s not much point in trying to educate people in a blog.  People pay big money to schools for their education.  One blog can only contain a small amount of information in the big scheme of things.  If all I write about is passing fads, then the usefulness of this blog will be nothing but a passing fad.  I need stuff that people can read in ten years that will still be relevant.  Even writing about games has a limited lifetime.  Games get old and people stop playing them.  I wrote something about chess a while ago.  I think one person read that little piece of knowledge.  Not a big payoff for some considered work.  Still, I enjoy what I do, so it’s not a total loss.

There are other things I should be doing today.  I should try to get my old car started so I can sell it.  There’s a fifty-fifty chance some person will call me today and offer to buy the old RX-7.  I don’t have the kind of money or patience it would require to turn that car into a good vehicle.  Things get old, and turn into total losses.  I might have to call the scrap yard and sell it for junk.  That would be a pity.  Still, aluminum, steel and glass have some value.  I could go into the junk business and make money off the derelicts of our automotive culture.

I think this is about the end of this post.  I still have no idea what I want to write about.  The weather is getting nice and warm, and I will soon have a ton of outside things to do like take care of the garden.  Perhaps what I should have done is start a blog about nothing but cars.  People like cars.  I have a few articles on Helium.com that are about cars, and people still read those.  Oh well, it’s just an idea.

Scientists are working on ways to grow algae for fuel.  Certain species of algae produce large quantities of oil.  Using water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight, algae can produce all the fuel the world needs.  Algae is more productive per acre of pond area than most crops and can continue to grow and be harvested year round in suitable climates.  There is little waste in an algae operation, as the plant produces oils, starches, and protein that can be used as feedstocks for fuel production or for food.

An algae farm, or any other farm for that matter, is just a way of converting solar energy to chemical energy.  Photosynthesis is a means of capturing the energy of sunlight.  The advantages of farming over other forms of solar energy is that large areas of land can be covered with some crop and large amounts of sunlight can be captured in a form that is easily utilized by machinery.

The overall efficiency of photosynthesis for converting sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into carbohydrates is approximately 6.6%.  This is not as efficient as good solar cells.  This is also the plant efficiency, and will be lower when energy inputs for processing are factored in.  There is some waste involved in any biofuel operation.  This waste will occur from costs for drying the product, extraction of oils, fermentation of starches into ethanol, and other costs such as transportation and further refinement.

The overall efficiency of any biofuel operation could be improved by just drying and burning the crop directly in a high-efficiency steam turbine electrical powerplant.  The whole point of growing  algae would be to derive fuel that could be used in motor vehicles, airplanes, and for other uses like home heating.  As the price of petroleum goes up, the economic payoff for an algae farm increases.  The cost inputs of an algae farm are for land, pond construction, maintenance, harvesting, drying, and further processing.  Once set up, however, the system could continue to run with only input from sunlight.

Many of the species of algae being studied for farming are marine species.  This means that algae farms might be located in warm coastal regions where they could draw seawater for their ponds directly from the ocean.  There are algae farms under construction in Texas now, and some in operation in Arizona recycling carbon dioxide from a power plant.  It has been estimated that it would take algae farms equivalent in area to the state of Maryland to supply the United States with fuel.  An area the size of Texas could supply the entire world with oil.

As with any other large scale venture, farming algae for fuel will require a lot of capital.  It costs a lot of money to construct such huge operations.  Algae farms could power the entire world, but it would require a large investment in land and refineries to make this energy available to people.  When the petroleum begins to run out, algae farms may be a good way to supply the world with the power it needs.  As the petroleum was originally made by algae in the ancient seas of earth, this is not such a strange idea.  Man has always used nature to survive, and will continue to do so in the future.

A California company is planning on marketing a home system for generating pure ethanol from sugar.  The e fuel corporation is planning on marketing a device that looks like a gas station fuel pump, runs on electricity from your home, and uses a feedstock of inedible Mexican sugar supposedly available for 2.5 cents a pound.

My question is:  If you have a distillery in your home, why bother going anywhere?  Sure, you will need to buy sugar for the still, or filter, or whatever it is they use to separate the water from the alcohol.  It’s pretty strange to me, this idea of filtering water out of the fermentation liquid.  In general, you need a still for that process.  What’s more, the maximum percentage you can get of alcohol by distillation is 196 proof, which explains why this is the proof of Everclear.  To get the last four percent of water out of the juice, you need a complicated chemical process involving bromine.  In any case, this company claims they have a process to make 100% ethanol suitable for motor fuel from something the size of a washer-dryer.

If this ten thousand dollar system actually makes fuel-grade ethanol, why wouldn’t they just scale up the operation and sell the ethanol at a profit like any respectable energy corporation?  E fuel claims their system will make alcohol for a dollar a gallon.  Surely if it works like this the availability of a fuel they can mark up and sell for a three hundred percent profit must have them thinking.  What does the IRS have to say about their home still?  I’m sure the revenuers would be interested in any gas pump that spits out high-octane white lightning.

There seems to be a trend these days to want to make motor fuel at home.  Yes, the stuff is expensive.  it’s expensive for a reason.  It costs a lot.  Sugar is more expensive than gasoline.  From what I recall about fermentation, it takes two pounds of sugar to make one pound of ethanol.  The yeast consumes some of the energy in the process.  This is pretty wasteful.  Maybe instead of selling these things to motorists they should think of selling them to bars.  There is a higher markup on beverage alcohol than on motor fuel.

I don’t know what the world is coming to with the high price of oil.  Things keep getting more expensive every day.  There is just no way I am going to pay anyone ten grand for a lousy still I could make myself, if I were that desperate.  It would be cheaper and less hassle just to pay for gas and not drive so much.  If a home still is such a good idea, why does the government keep busting moonshiners?  If this system makes pure ethanol you would have to pay the liquour tax on any fuel you make, because it would be drinkable.

A home still is just a bad idea.  If people really wanted to save money they could ride a bike.  I don’t see anyone marketing enclosed pedalcars for transporting people.  There’s no practical way to drive a pedalcar on the roads the way they are now.  If there weren’t so many cars on the road I could get a rickshaw and start a taxi business.  If I spent ten grand on a still I wouldn’t burn the booze it made in a car.

I’ve just seem more nonsense for supposedly increasing fuel economy in vehicles.  Various companies are selling products that are supposed to increase fuel economy or convert your car into running on water.  These things all work the same way.  They take water, pass electricity through it from the car’s electrical system, break the water down into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn the resulting gasses in the cylinders of the car.

These systems sell for from hundreds to thousands of dollars.  Some even claim they will run your car on nothing but water.  This is all a load of nonsense.  It takes energy to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen.  It takes more energy than you get from burning the resulting hydrogen and oxygen.  Water is not a source of chemical energy.  Water is a product of combustion.  You can not run your car on water as an energy source.

There is a lot of talk these days about a hydrogen economy and use of hydrogen as a fuel source.  Hydrogen is not available in its elemental state on earth.  It is bound with oxygen in water, or bound to carbon in methane and petroleum.  Hydrogen in fossil fuels combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to release chemical energy and combine into water.  If you want to use hydrogen as a fuel, you will have to supply energy to generate the free hydrogen in the first place.  In a car engine system, using electrical energy from the alternator to generate hydrogen from water will not supply net energy to your engine.  You will lose more energy to heat and inefficiencies of electrolysis than you will gain from burning the resulting hydrogen in an inefficient engine.

Do not waste your time or money trying to get something for nothing.  You will only lose whatever money you spend on this system.  You can not improve your gas mileage by recycling mechanical energy from the engine to generate fuel gasses.  I can’t believe people get away with selling such ridiculous systems.  This is a ripoff.  Your car can not run on water as fuel.  You will only decrease your mileage and compromise your engine by installing any such hydrogen generator in your car.

There are a lot of people in the world.  Many of these people can not afford food.  Some 50,000 people die each day from malnutrition.  30,000 of these people are children.  The situation is deplorable.  What can be done to feed all these humans?

There is at this time no shortage of food in the world.  Farmers produce a surplus every year.  What is in short supply is money for the poor.  It is a financial problem that causes people to starve to death.  It’s not that food is not available, it’s that people can not afford to buy this food.  The price of food has been going up recently.  This means that more people will not be able to afford this food.

There is only a limited amount of money available to people.  This is because there are only so many jobs.  A job does not create money.  A job apportions money from one person to another.  The fact is that there are a lot of rich people and corporations.  These people make money by selling stuff to workers.  The workers make their money by working for some factory or other operation.  It is a closed loop.  If you want money, you have to get in the loop.  This is where the system fails.  There are not enough jobs for all the people.  Some people are unemployed and can not afford to buy necessary things.

So, what can be done to end this mess?  If governments were responsible they would create work programs for people to earn money.  Governments print the money, so there should be no shortage.  In a worst case scenario, governments could even give away money to the poor.  This already happens in the welfare system.  The government isn’t losing anything but a bit of inflation on the value of their currency.  The alternative is that more people will die.

The world is basically run on a free market economy.  This means that the corporations rule the earth.  If you have money you control things, like commodities and companies and other resources.  The problem with this system is greed.  People are naturally inclined to amass large fortunes.  One person having a thousand times as much money as the average person means that a thousand average persons have nothing.  It is a simple equation.

Perhaps the solution is to supply free food.  Free food cuts into the profitability of local farmers, who then can not produce food to feed local people.  Still, if all food were free, it would solve the problem of starvation.  We do not live in a world where you can just go off into the forest and spear a deer.  We live in a world that has concentrated populations.  If you lose your job, you might die of hunger.  Maybe what is needed is a program that guarantees jobs to everyone.  It’s just an idea.

It’s disgraceful for children to be starving to death while corporations turn perfectly good corn into motor fuel.  There has to be a solution to this problem.  Perhaps the governments of the world could forget their paranoid militaries and spend that money on coming up with a plan to feed the hungry.  Even in the united states there are many homeless people who have no food.  Instead of relying on the darwinian forces of the free market economy to solve problems they have no incentive to solve, we should tell our governments to find a solution to the problems of poverty and hunger.  It makes no sense that so many people should have to die while there is so much food in the world to feed them, if they only had money.

Fishing is an enjoyable sport that does not take a lot of gear to participate in.  A person can go to almost any department store and buy a simple fishing rod and reel for a little cash.  Some Mr. Twister plastic lures is all the bait you will need to catch as many fish as you want.  Be sure to buy a fishing license, which only costs a few dollars.

It is important to look for clean water if you are going to eat the fish you catch.  Muddy water or polluted water will affect the taste and healthiness of the fish you catch.  If you are going to go to the trouble of getting all the gear and going fishing, you may as well eat what you catch.  Look for clean lakes and ponds and rivers that are not downstream from any factories or sewage treatment plants.  Dams are a good place to look for a fishing site.  If you are lost for a place to catch fish, there are books that are published that list different fishing sites in your area.

A spincasting reel is one of the easiest to use.  There is a button on the reel that holds the line when you press it.  You swing the rod, then release the button and the line pays out as your lure is cast.  You will need either lead-head jigs or a sinker on your line to allow the lure to travel a good distance when you cast.  A spinning reel is a bit more complicated, but is still easy to use.  You flip the bail and hold the line with your finger.  When you cast, you release the line and let your lure fly out over the water.  You will want to reel in your lure with a good steady motion, so it’s action is good and it attracts the attention of any fish.

When you are fishing, look for underwater structures that the fish may be hiding in.  This means rocks and fallen logs.  Also look for weeds that may harbor insects.  Fish over and along these areas and you will be more likely to catch something.  When a fish takes your lure, set the hook by pulling back on the rod and then reel it in.  You will want either a bucket or some kind of creel or a stringer to keep your fish alive in the water as you continue to fish.

Fishing is an enjoyable sport even if you do not catch anything.  You will be out on the shore of a lake or river, looking at the scenery.  You will be part of nature, and play out a scenario of man that goes far back in history, even before writing was invented.  If you go out in a boat you will have the waves to rock you and the boat to float you anywhere you want to go.  However you go fishing, it is a time to relax and enjoy yourself.  You will learn about nature and what it means to catch your own food.

Man lived the life of the hunter-gatherer for millions of years.  Human beings survived and spread over the earth even during such harsh climatic times as ice ages.  It has been argued that human society as a hunter-gatherer was far more beneficial to the individual than our modern life.  These hunting societies were so successful that they managed to drive many prey species to extinction using only stone spears as weapons.

When agriculture came on the scene, it allowed people to give up the nomadic life and settle in one location.  People often congregated around a reliable source of food, such as a river with spawning salmon.  These areas were some of the first that were cultivated.  It takes a lot of work to prepare the soil for planting and tend crops.  Along with the extra work comes a surplus of food that can provide for larger populations.  Cities developed which relied on the growing of various foods to supply them with energy.  Labor was done by hand, and there developed a class system with people stratifying into leaders and followers.

Hunter-gatherer societies still survive in isolated regions of the earth inhabited by tribal peoples.  These people often live in forest regions that are rich in game and forageable foods.  Hunter-gatherers do not live in high concentrations in these areas.  It takes a large area of land to support a human being.  Often, these people engage in tribal wars for territory or other necessities of life.  People lived this way for millions of years.  Language was developed in such societies.  Primitive peoples also engaged in artistic activities like cave painting and singing and dancing.

Agriculture allowed a ruling class to develop.  Agricultural societies were some of the first to employ slaves to do the backbreaking work of planting and harvesting.  These societies developed permanent structures, water distribution systems, governments, and armies.  Modern society is the result of ten thousand years of agriculture.  Farming is the bedrock on which our modern world is built.

Farmers did not just grow plants for sustenance.  Agricultural societies developed domesticated animals as a ready source of meat.  Land that was in grass could be used to grow sheep for wool and meat.  People were no longer reliant on an unsteady supply of game from disappearing wild stocks for high-quality food.  Animals also provided milk and eggs, good sources of protein.  The animal wastes from the farms were applied to the fields as fertilizer to increase yields long before people understood the scientific reasons behind the use of fertilizer.

Some people think it is the organization of people into states and the construction of cities that led to civilization.  None of this would have been possible without the farmers to feed all these people.  It is agriculture that allowed some people to lead lives of leisure and develop writing and science.  Society was built on the work of the poor people, often held in slavery.  Human beings developed a heirarchical society in which a privileged upper class controlled the lower classes that were doing the actual work.  Even animals were pressed into service as a source of mechanical energy for the plowing of fields and the threshing of grain.

Today, modern society does not rely on slave labor.  People have become intelligent enough to devise machines to do the hard labor of plowing and planting.  Our machines run on energy derived from petroleum, coal, nuclear, or hydro power.  The earth is home to over six billion people now.  We need the power of machines to plant and harvest our crops.  We live in buildings with water supplied by pumps and convenient toilet facilities.  Our words can be published for the world to read at the click of a virtual button.  There are many advantages to living in the modern world.  We have health care that goes far beyond what our ancestors could have imagined.  We can travel great distances in comfort.  All of this is made possible by agriculture, which supplies food for the billions of people on earth.

The price for food is increasing worldwide.  People have been killed in food riots in many countries triggered by the higher cost of food.  There are many factors involved in the higher prices.  The cost of energy necessary to grow and transport food has gone up.  There are diminished supplies of some grains due to bad weather.  Stockpiles of wheat are diminishing.  Even in developed countries like Italy, people have protested the higher prices.

Protests and riots will do nothing to lower the cost of food.  What is needed is more supply of grains and other staples.  To increase production, the world will have to focus more on growing food.  The diversion of food products to the production of biofuels is one of the causes of higher prices.  Any way you look at it, higher energy prices mean higher prices for food.

The market is what determines prices.  People speculate on food commodities.  This is like large scale hoarding, hoping that the price will increase, all to make money.  Speculation is just one of the things that drives market prices.  With supplies diminishing, prices will naturally increase.  This is why diamonds are so expensive.  If there were a lot of diamonds everywhere, they would be worthless.  The same principle applies to food.  The thing is, there is less food available.  The answer to this problem is to grow more food.  The problem with growing more food is that it costs more to grow the food.  The weather is also a factor.  Droughts drive up the price of food because there is less that survives.

Another factor driving up the price of food is the devaluation of currency.  Money tends to lose value over time.  Inflation is a factor in every economy.  It’s not just the dollar that’s losing purchasing power, it’s money in general.  Prices tend to increase over time.  An economic theory for why prices increase might be that they keep making more money, so the supply of money increases, so it has less value.

People need to eat to survive.  In any shortage or price increase, it is the poor people who will suffer first.  Possession of money has a survival value associated with it.  If you are wealthy you can afford the higher prices for things.  If you are broke, you could starve to death.  Whether this is fair or not is a question for philosophers.  The fact is that some people are more privileged than others because they have more money.  You don’t see people rioting over the high price of lobster.  Lobster has been very expensive for years.  You don’t see people protesting the high price of caviar.  Caviar is a luxury food.  If you can afford expensive foods, you are in no danger of starvation when the price of grain doubles, as it has.

What is the answer to the increasing cost of food?  I don’t necessarily think there is an answer.  People will probably have to work harder to survive.  Persons with access to land might want to plant gardens to grow some of their own food.  Even food you grow yourself costs some money.  It might be better to rely on grains and vegetables for your food, as these tend to cost less than meat, both in terms of price and cost of production.  People too poor to afford food will either have to find better lines of work, or will have to rely on government aid or humanitarian programs.  The age of abundance is coming to a close.  Unless some new, cheap energy source is found to drive our society, prices will continue to go up and more people will suffer.