Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Tonight's online reading was Rad Decision, a novel about the events leading up to a nuclear accident in the US that didn't happen, but could have.
I found the the plot gripping, the situations utterly believable, the characters decent, the backstory quite plausible, and the denouement worth thinking about. Recomended.
I still think nuclear technology belongs in the mix of energy sources for the future.
I'm impressed with how far Nanosolar has come in the past few years, although I find it weird that they are concentrating on Germany rather than in places, like Central America and Mexico, that have boatloads of solar power.
I do appreciate the rush towards greener consumer technology, LED lighting in particular, seems to be getting better at a rapid rate. Earlier today I'd given up on getting any sheeva plugs this year, and went with an open-rd box, which promises about 1/3 the power consumption of a nearly equivalent PC. I also decided not to build out another quad core machine to replace my broken one.
Whether or not the open-rds could be used as a desktop and be as useful as an atom (the nearest competitor for the desktop) remains to be seen, but I intend to retire one of my computers in favor of it for use as the first iteration of Pocobelle 2, probably with added duties as a music server, and perhaps it - or the next Arm A9 based generation - will give intel a run for their money.
I read David Rowe's blog religeously. Here he talks about the power audit he did on his house and what he did to improve his negawatts. He also talks about what he did for his pool system to improve it, too.
I'm also big on geothermal power - I've been watching a Nicaraguan company, formerly known as Polaris Geothermal, now known as Ram Power complete a merger and obtain 150+ million in funding to bring up (at least) 70MW more geothermal power here. A terawatt is feasible, long term.
Nicaragua has enough geothermal energy in the ground to power 3 countries, if only they'd - or someone - would try, harder.
Through such slow, incremental change is the future made.
I'd had a really bad week last week. Nothing for me, personally, was really working, and I'd had some bad news about the Montavista merger that basically tore up some retirement plans entirely.
I took a cheap cab out halfway to Rivas, as I was too broke to get all the way to the frontier to renew my passport and return - and started walking south. I made it as far as the windmill project down that way, which has been under construction ever since I'd got here, with numerous hassles and delays.
The wind off the lake was blowing hard, and every last one of those enormous shiny white windmills was turning, and they'd finished running the power lines out - They were actually delivering power!
It was so beautiful that I sat down in front of the land, watched those windmills turn and turn, and cried. Maybe only another engineer can understand what it is like to struggle and fail and flail and fail again and then see something else that was actually working.
Shortly thereafter someone picked me up and took me to the border.
I made it home with 70 cordoba in my pocket, but my good friends at El Pozo let me run a tab, and all the friends I hadn't seen in a month showed up that night to visit.
So my life goes on, with a few moments like these to make it worthwhile to struggle on, and to keep trying. I keep saying to myself that the only way to win is to not play the game, but it's deeper than that, you need to invent new rules for the game. Better ones.
I found the the plot gripping, the situations utterly believable, the characters decent, the backstory quite plausible, and the denouement worth thinking about. Recomended.
I still think nuclear technology belongs in the mix of energy sources for the future.
I'm impressed with how far Nanosolar has come in the past few years, although I find it weird that they are concentrating on Germany rather than in places, like Central America and Mexico, that have boatloads of solar power.
I do appreciate the rush towards greener consumer technology, LED lighting in particular, seems to be getting better at a rapid rate. Earlier today I'd given up on getting any sheeva plugs this year, and went with an open-rd box, which promises about 1/3 the power consumption of a nearly equivalent PC. I also decided not to build out another quad core machine to replace my broken one.
Whether or not the open-rds could be used as a desktop and be as useful as an atom (the nearest competitor for the desktop) remains to be seen, but I intend to retire one of my computers in favor of it for use as the first iteration of Pocobelle 2, probably with added duties as a music server, and perhaps it - or the next Arm A9 based generation - will give intel a run for their money.
I read David Rowe's blog religeously. Here he talks about the power audit he did on his house and what he did to improve his negawatts. He also talks about what he did for his pool system to improve it, too.
I'm also big on geothermal power - I've been watching a Nicaraguan company, formerly known as Polaris Geothermal, now known as Ram Power complete a merger and obtain 150+ million in funding to bring up (at least) 70MW more geothermal power here. A terawatt is feasible, long term.
Nicaragua has enough geothermal energy in the ground to power 3 countries, if only they'd - or someone - would try, harder.
Through such slow, incremental change is the future made.
I'd had a really bad week last week. Nothing for me, personally, was really working, and I'd had some bad news about the Montavista merger that basically tore up some retirement plans entirely.
I took a cheap cab out halfway to Rivas, as I was too broke to get all the way to the frontier to renew my passport and return - and started walking south. I made it as far as the windmill project down that way, which has been under construction ever since I'd got here, with numerous hassles and delays.
The wind off the lake was blowing hard, and every last one of those enormous shiny white windmills was turning, and they'd finished running the power lines out - They were actually delivering power!
It was so beautiful that I sat down in front of the land, watched those windmills turn and turn, and cried. Maybe only another engineer can understand what it is like to struggle and fail and flail and fail again and then see something else that was actually working.
Shortly thereafter someone picked me up and took me to the border.
I made it home with 70 cordoba in my pocket, but my good friends at El Pozo let me run a tab, and all the friends I hadn't seen in a month showed up that night to visit.
So my life goes on, with a few moments like these to make it worthwhile to struggle on, and to keep trying. I keep saying to myself that the only way to win is to not play the game, but it's deeper than that, you need to invent new rules for the game. Better ones.
Labels: nuclear energy, pocobelle
¶ 5:15 PM
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Nice post. Would like to see more of the same.
Don't get too worked up about seeing something else was actually working. Up here in these untied states, I live in view of a lot of wind turbines. Tearing up our ridgelines, segmenting our once-contiguous forests, decimating our raptor populations, not the mention the bats. (don't kid yourself, it's quite real, stunningly so) and still after any given strong gusty day, at least 10% of them go offline for service. These things are seriously maintenance intensive. Do I like them? Yes, I do. But it's wrongheaded to think they aren't coming at a huge environmental cost. Worse than mountain top removal? of course not. But they aren't REPLACING coal power, they are supplementing it. And the construction will halt like it hit a brick wall the very second the subsidies run out. Pardon my cynicism, but these are the facts. Also, none of this power is being used locally. It's all being shipped out to fuel the continuing growth of the I-95 Sprawl. The same sprawl Gibson spoke of. SmartGrid my ass.
As to this love of nukes, I think Einstein said it best:
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
Yeah, nanosolar progress. How long have they promised us $1/watt? 5 years now? And where are they? So, in the mean time, forward thinking folks are putting up 'regular ole fashioned PV solar and just getting on with the work that needs to be done. I know a lot of folks who -even under Bush- just got tired of waiting for SOMEONE ELSE to deliver them from their evil ways, and took some responsibility for their impact and set up to make their own power. We used to call that a libertarian approach, now we call'em evil communists or something. Funny how it all turns around. We have the technology Now, Today, to make a difference. I know nanosolar will probably eventually hit a homer. Or the folks who inherit their techology when they burn out on their own hype. In the mean time, we have all we need. We are the ones we have been waiting for. The time is now, the work is clear.
Ironically, my PV panels are sitting in a friends basement, how sick is that? :)
Keep it up with the low power computing, it's fascinating and important work.
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Don't get too worked up about seeing something else was actually working. Up here in these untied states, I live in view of a lot of wind turbines. Tearing up our ridgelines, segmenting our once-contiguous forests, decimating our raptor populations, not the mention the bats. (don't kid yourself, it's quite real, stunningly so) and still after any given strong gusty day, at least 10% of them go offline for service. These things are seriously maintenance intensive. Do I like them? Yes, I do. But it's wrongheaded to think they aren't coming at a huge environmental cost. Worse than mountain top removal? of course not. But they aren't REPLACING coal power, they are supplementing it. And the construction will halt like it hit a brick wall the very second the subsidies run out. Pardon my cynicism, but these are the facts. Also, none of this power is being used locally. It's all being shipped out to fuel the continuing growth of the I-95 Sprawl. The same sprawl Gibson spoke of. SmartGrid my ass.
As to this love of nukes, I think Einstein said it best:
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
Yeah, nanosolar progress. How long have they promised us $1/watt? 5 years now? And where are they? So, in the mean time, forward thinking folks are putting up 'regular ole fashioned PV solar and just getting on with the work that needs to be done. I know a lot of folks who -even under Bush- just got tired of waiting for SOMEONE ELSE to deliver them from their evil ways, and took some responsibility for their impact and set up to make their own power. We used to call that a libertarian approach, now we call'em evil communists or something. Funny how it all turns around. We have the technology Now, Today, to make a difference. I know nanosolar will probably eventually hit a homer. Or the folks who inherit their techology when they burn out on their own hype. In the mean time, we have all we need. We are the ones we have been waiting for. The time is now, the work is clear.
Ironically, my PV panels are sitting in a friends basement, how sick is that? :)
Keep it up with the low power computing, it's fascinating and important work.
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