Applied Impossibilities

What would a world of balanced books, balanced budgets and small governments look like in 2050 if the tea party won world wide?

2011-08-04T04:16:00.000-07:00

The prerequisite for this is a stable gold based competing currency system with private mints and media based testing and verification of the coins, notes and digital accounts.

Most 'government' activities would be converted to charities with out a change of address or staff. Projects would be listed on web pages with a donate now button. The money donated comes from a bank account for the purpose. This account is a small or micro account that earns no interest because its not a term deposit. These donations are logged at the account and are tax deductible. The account would be topped up after a cell phone alert. Mixed with the free services an express service to paying customers might be added in the case of some non essential services. Immediate care for later voluntarism; paying with your own hands has been used in the third world often as an out growth of refugee and missionary work. It may come to the first world. The similarity to a co-op or mutual aid society should be noted.

Agencies that waste money wont get may donations. Agencies that are deemed unconstitutional will only get donations from their supporters and employees; that may be enough to keep them going but not enough for expansion. The productive wont subsidise the unproductive. The beseechers wont be rewarded at the expense of the producers.Those in true need will get help.

Long term private bond systems selling either to the public or to vested interest groups would cover long term infrastructure including transport, ports, public parks, recreational and the fixed assets of police, courts, defence, civil defence, etc. Donations, tolls, rents and other usage fees would be accumulated to cover the bonds final payout. The option remains to allow fee access in many cases where donations are sufficient. If they are not then there is an error in how the public asset is operating. Some entities already bill people via their cell phone. Similar systems for large public recreational facilities, parking, camping, etc would be normal.

In the case of some RFID based toll systems the first few rides are free on a section of road you have never been on. Provision would be made for drivers to donate tips to working road crews, where they see them, electronically without stopping. By 2050 many vehicles will be fully robotic with toll functions automated and invisible.

There would be no huge unfunded pension liabilities such as social security and Medicare. Almost all people would have their own pension funds and medical insurance which are fully portable: not just interstate or inter job but internationally as well as nationally, perhaps trans-planetary given that some may no longer be living on planet earth.

Those that lack incomes would still have pensions and health care via charities that pay the premiums. Unemployment insurance would be cheaper because with a gold based competitive currency system there would be no booms or busts just steady growth at a sensible rate. There may be fewer jobs building houses that a housing boom affords but there will be no risk of a bust either. There may be some miscalculations leading to short term large scale losses where technology change, sudden disaster or the end of a fad ruins plans.

3D printed goods, digital matter and other equivalent technology would be cheap and nanofabricators might be available. These lower the cost of living for all making lower wages and smaller pension payments go further than they did in the inflation prone 20th century.

At the time of writing, 2011, new medical technology is coming on stream including adult stem cell cures for arthritic disorders, bone density loss, skin elastin loss, and diabetes. These treatments are cheaper than the many years of pharmaceuticals and doctors visits that they require. Cancer experts think that most cancers will be easily treatable by 2050. Robot cars will reduce road trauma to a fraction of the current rates. This means that most major drivers of rising medical costs. Gene-therapy for many rarer but very expensive disorders are being funded by aging billionaires; a dollar spent there saves five in later hospitalisation.

Defence might be significantly smaller, particularly the US military. I think some of the bases will still be out there in the world and several countries will still have a global reach. New techniques and new technologies coupled with a greater defensive focus, much more civil defence and robotic warfare will contribute to the shrinking of armies. The adult stem cell advances are already being used to repair the ware and tare that force many older soldiers to retire. Most don't leave because of combat injuries but because of strained joints and tendons due to the fitness regimen they must maintain. The cure of this problem coupled with robots carrying the heavy stuff will mean the average soldier wont be a teen or twenty something but will be much older men and women with the experience of decades. This will change war like nothing before it.

Politicians would still exist but their function would mostly be confined to media like functions of oversight, and law making not handling trillions of dollars of someone else's money. Campaign donations may still exist but will be much lower because most will be also donating directly to the genuine needy and other causes. The politician is just another middleman. The pork barrel would be almost empty and those that want a free lunch at the governments expense would find life harder.

Minecraft fun

2011-06-05T04:07:00.000-07:00

I've mapped hoboland [probationary player area] on the wrxds server. Mine craft has a in game mapping systyem that allows you to make a map object and use it to map the world. You must wander around with the thing in your hand to get the map made. Given that the game has zombies, cliffs, deep holes, traps and lava ponds that can get interesting at times.

Human rights for mother earth?

2011-04-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

Some want to grant mother earth human rights.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/18/prepares-debate-rights-mother-earth/
Defining what is needed to sustain the earth and humanity at the same time is easy?

Avoid extinction of properly defined species by allowing ownership and breeding. Farming endangered species if needed, keeping them as pets if possible, and creating seed banks and private parks.

Develop tools to increase the efficiency, productivity and intensity of some natural resource systems so that others can be rested allowing recovery. Intensive crops and hydroponics replacing unproductive peasant farming.

Develop industries that buy degraded systems, speed its recovery and sell at a profit the improved land or resource. Private parks and Permaculture. [Only in a government monopoly can land become so degraded that it can't be restored. Love Canal was an official government and army waste dump before Hooker Chemical were given federal orders to dump there. "The corporation refused to sell, citing safety concerns, and took members of the school board to the canal and drilled several bore holes to demonstrate that there were toxic chemicals below the surface." Wiki Sale of the site]

Where viable recycle; where that's not viable, store waste in safe land fill for later mining and recycling. The first profitable landfill mine was in Israel in the 1950's. There are hundreds today.

Develop a diversity of energy technologies, using fossil fuel to increase the wealth of society and buy time while other energy technologies are matured to cover base load energy and transport.

Rule no technology out unless it proves truly and indisputably unsafe and uninsurable.

Farm the seas don't just hunt them blindly. Fertilise, sow and reap for maximised yields. Farmers must own their area of the sea.

Finally, remember that there are 3 other terrestrial planets, 80 moons and 1 billion asteroids in this solar system. All have resources.

We already have a name for the key tool that allows all of this, its called 'capitalism and private property rights'.
If property rights are allocated properly then it has the same effect as granting rights to the earth itself because in the free market no land or resources has a zero value. When you declare something priceless and strip away property rights you make it worthless and put maintenance in the hands of disinterested bureaucrats who can easily drop the ball and become more concerned about the size of their desk than the species they protect.

If climate change was real and effected agriculture

2011-04-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

Assuming it was not based on flawed data, fraudulent scientific papers and exaggerated media claims used in UN documents. Assuming the world was warming and that changed growing patterns world wide, what would we do?

We would need to retrain millions of farmers. Formal training for farmers, not agronomists, ordinary farmers, is needed anyway. Over 60% of Australian farmers are past retirement age. We need to train people to replace them anyway. Farming is not for amateurs. 80% of the third worlds farmers need training too regardless of climate change. Private, web or magazine based teaching is the cheapest option for agricultural extension with some investment in vehicle mobile teaching tools in remote areas.
As seasonal patterns shift farmers will need to change their choice of seed stock and crop variety. Seed company's have ample diversity in different seed stocks for wetter, drier, colder and hotter growing conditions.
Some farmers will need multiple on farm seed storage for several varieties so they can buy cheap, store long, sow what they need in rush without running fowl of a scramble for seed stocks and rising prices when it apparent that they will need a given seed type.
We need to plant wind brakes, hedges and grass hedges [Lev 19:9]. These block hot and cold wind, flows of frost carrying cold air and by stilling the air over the field it reduces evaporative water loss. It can with good design modify the temperature back to the pre-greenhouse temperature where desired. If fodder, fruit or nut yielding trees are used they are an investment with a quicker return than wood. Such plantings should be tax deductible and should be depreciated as machinery is.
When greenhouse models predicted increases in rain fall the IPCC painted it as bad by calling it Increased rainfall variability and talking about flash floods. That sounds bad but by simply adding artificial bends and meander in streams, overflow channels and ponds we can catch these rains.
At the smaller scale swales* or ploughing with a Yeomans** aerating plough make the water move into the ground rather than running off. The key is to hold the water on the land long enough to allow the water to move into the water table where it moves very slowly and feeds springs that run deep into the dry years. The most extreme but effective means of doing this is terracing. Even with all our modern technology we do much less terracing of farm land than our bronze-age ancestors did. why?
Where increased drought is predicted we need cisterns. Covered water storage and underground canals. Ancient man could build these in the stone age. Can't we do better? Developing ways to make them cheap and easy to build should make you rich.
Also in deserts we need to move to more drought tolerant crops with drip and underground porous pipe based irrigation. This makes the desert bloom. This means a shift from water hungry crops to things like dates, olives and fruiting cacti but moving from one mono-culture to another leaves you vulnerable. Mixing up different species and value adding removes the vulnerability to fickle market fluctuations. The boab tree seedling is the latest new desert cultivar. http://www.boabsinthekimberley.com.au/
We are the first generation that don't move livestock away from drought enough. We also need to be ready and equipped to move livestock away from flood zones early. Using farmer to farmer agreements as a form of insurance and looking at transport and agistment for livestock as part of a drought insurance process. While individual regions are drought stricken often there is another accessible region that is not. If done well it could be cheaper than current government drought assistance.
We need to give our gazing land time to grow high and put down roots deep restoring soil carbon. This drought proofs and flood proofs farms. If we allow the animals to graze land too sparely they bite back the recovery growth and the grasses can't grow strong and deep, they have no energy. There is a solution Holistic Management created by Allan Savory and Jody Butterfield. http://holisticmanagement.org/
Where floods are an increased risk we need to make hills creating high ground where there was none, so people and livestock can get above the torrent. About half the farms have the necessary equipment. The channels we dig to get the earth will catch flood sediment and retain water long after the flood is gone remaining green as the rest of the land browns.
We need to domesticate many new species. Why fear flood if you livestock is Hippopotamus or Capybara. Why fear drought if your farming a drought tolerant native desert grass or the boab. We are domesticating two new species a month world wide. If we farm endangered species, e.g. the American buffalo, we find that their population recovers. Why not farm seals for the skin and meat? Why not keep a hairy nosed wombat on your farm as a wild pet? Numbats and monkeys are good eating I'm told. Properly farmed they could feed millions.
In the most extreme cases of weather based disruption we will need to build greenhouses and hydroponics. These are getting cheaper by the year and are far cheaper than replacing our energy infrastructure. They can be fully climate controlled. Climate change is irrelevant; They would work on Mars and even Venus. The air can be cooled with solar powered air-conditioning, heated with solar thermal and all water can be in theory retrieved and recycled by solar powered dehumidifiers. In practise it might be cheaper to deal with transpiration losses by hauling in water by rail or even truck.
We may need to develop radical new technologies: Machines that convert cellulose to starch, algae farms to supplement livestock feed supplies. These too can be air and water tight, recycling everything if needed to be. Even Food nano-fabricators are not in theory impossible there are people working on them today.

All these things are doable, some may not be cheap but a little more inovation could make them as cheap as modern computer chips. Remember when a cheap computer cost a million dollars?
Most of these things will need to be done anyway. If the government tries to do them it will never have enough money. Only by tapping the tools of the free market and developing new tools to capitalise individual farms and farmers (education and agricultural extension) will we succeed.
World population is growing; Food production has always grown to match. The climate is always changing we need to be ready for anything. We have the tools and techniques its not impossible to adapt to anything.

*If you don't understand any term feed it into wikipedia.
** Water For Every Farm. Using the Keyline plan. By P.A.Yeomans. http://www.keyline.com.au/ also uses swales.
Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren developed some of these ideas into Permaculture. I recommend a Permaculture course. I've done one. Find a teacher that's greenhouse neutral, there are a few.

If sea level rise was real and became a problem

2011-03-24T01:22:00.000-07:00

If the worst case scenarios for sea level rise come true and we get between 30 cm and 9 metres of sea level rise in 100 years, what's the worst that could happen?

We would need to rebuild our coastal resorts. We do that anyway about every 60 years. They are not built to last and go out of style soon after their paid off. If its profitable no government funds are needed. If its not profitable blow it up and make a park.
We would have to jack up or move a few hundred historic buildings. At five million each that's a few billion and half that will be millionaires 'moving house'.
Some low lying towns will need to dig a hole and build a hill in or next to town. If they are smart all new structures will be multi-story and will be built on that hill or will be connected to it with a bridge at 3 to 9 meters above sea level. Turn the hole into a nice lake and put floating houses on it. Most towns already own the needed earth moving equipment. In 100 years you can heap up a lot of dirt. (I do not trust dykes and levee banks, too many have failed, why make them when for the same cost you can raise the town.) If you loose crops in a flood then you were growing the wrong crops in the first place. Grow something you can harvest before the flood season.
We need to farm coral in the pacific to make more sand fill to adjust the hight and shape of about 300 atolls. The coral will grow up to match sea level rise but there will be lags and cases where the natural process messes up the real-estate values- atolls move about real-estate boundaries don't (they could and should on atolls but don't now).
We would need to "build up" on those islands and out over the lagoon or the open sea with floating factories, malls and apartments. Most of the low islands of the Pacific, Caribbean and Indian ocean are under developed and needs reconstruction anyway. Those Island nations own millions of hectares of sea bed with minerals; They only think their poor. If its profitable government need not interfere.
Some coastal farms will need to switch to growing salt tolerant crops or fish. We already have a salt water irrigated grain: Palmer's grass ( Distichlis palmeri ) A biofuel crop: Salicornia bigelovii and a sugar crop: Nypa fruticans.(mangrove palm) There are many other halophytes, salt tolerant plants, being developed as crops.
Some third world estuarine systems will need to be redesigned and rebuilt with all of the above measures. However since they are third world countries they need the development anyway. If they can't discover (or refuse to accept) the tools of modern democracy, development and capitalism then they will stave long before the sea rises to get them.

That's it! A few trillion dollars of free enterprise and profitable development or redevelopment that would have happened anyway. The occasional million dollar community investment in the form of donations to educational institutions and heritage foundations so they can re-educate builders and farmers and move the odd historic building. It need not be done at all with taxpayer funds.

Sea level rise is much slower than a tsunami. While the latter is horrendous; even the elderly in some cases outran the Japanese 2011 tsunami. Whole cities can outrun sea level rise!

Earth Hour advocates miss grid storage

2011-03-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

Those that push Earth Hour fail to acknowledge that without backup systems or candles, both mostly fossil fuel technologies, solar fails in winter, particularly if there's snow.
I'm trained in that field: Energy storage is the critical tool we need to make grid solar and wind work. According to calculations grid storage needs to be 16 to 18% depending on whether it snows and how much biofueled grid power is available as a backup tool.
We have the technology.

Pumped storage between dams (or cisterns) of different hight is 90% efficient but the greens wont allow more dams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

Its particularly effective if wind and solar drive water pumps directly since both are more efficient at pumping at low wind and on dim days.

Hydrogen is a viable technology too if your not trying to make it for transport. Hydrogen electrolysis is 80% efficient. The inefficiency often cited occurs where your then liquefying the gas, that's very inefficient.
If you store the gas in a simple 18th century gasometer it would be cheap and sustainable grid storage particularly if the hydrogen is plumbed into a conventional coal fired power station.
Yet no government has backed such a simple technology and the greens might oppose the gasometer's.

Compressed air storage is also viable, 2 working plants at the large scale and several at the micro/ house hold scale, but because its 130 year old technology you can't get a patent and capital markets are not interested if the solution is not exclusive. To do 10000 compressed air systems you need at least 100 companies.

Exclusivity is the problem. World War one destroyed exclusivity in the fossil fuel game; we ended up with hundreds of companies in the game beaching each others patents willy nilly.

When governments say their trying everything please remember its always a lie.

In order to make this viable you also need a price differential between the makers of energy and the price of energy at the house hold or factory meter. There needs to be a peak and off peak differential at the energy producer not the energy consumer. This margin allows the grid storage companies to buy low and sell higher into the peak demand. If renewables are paid the same price per watt regardless of their reliability there is no margin for the grid storage companies. They can't capitalise the needed technology. If Solar is subsidised without consideration for demand patterns and the need for grid storage the result is a negative margin blocking grid storage altogether.

Some in the renewable industries reject base load energy and the need to match generation to demand patterns. Yes it is possible to change demand patterns a little but these things are often locked into how all societies work. No society has been able to change them significantly. If grid storage is properly priced into a grid then there is less profit for intermittent energy producers like solar. However without grid storage these energy technologies are not viable beyond 6% of grid capacity.
Generally grid storage should make renewables viable and reliable and therefore profitable. It should be profitable. If allowed, not encouraged just allowed, it should make a solar wind system viable as a response to real or perceived energy scarcity.

Torture is never simple.

2011-02-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

Why do we believe the claims of torture and oppression on the part of Mubarak's regime? The same people claim Israel, America and even Australia tortures Moslem. We know that's not true in our case, Australia, so why believe it in the other cases. Mosab Hassan Yousef in his book Son of Hamas showed that half of the torture in Israeli prisons is from scared Jewish conscripts and half is Palestinian on Palestinian abuse in search of Israeli informants or because some prisoner is not in the right faction. Is it the same in Egypt? In the Palestinian case the prisoners tortured by other prisoners invariable protect themselves and their families by blaming the Israeli government for the scars and missing fingernails.

In vietnam the vietcong infiltrated the south vietnamese police, military and interlegence services. Some of the most fanatical and ruthless members of the south vietnamese forces turned out to be north vietnamese deep cover agents. To be ruthless in the name of the state you've infiltrated is a powerful propaganda tool. It allows you to expand attacks onto neutral targets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Th%E1%BB%8B_Kim_Ph%C3%BAc
The wikipedia give the official cover story of the time. Blaming the pilots.
You know that this image did more to win the war for the North Vietnamese than any other. What you did not know in the 1970's that it was a strike with napalm by South Vietnamese air crews on a civilian villagers and south Vietnamese troops well inside South Vietnamese lines and that it was caused by a North Vietnamese double agent who is believed to have switched the target coordinates and confined the target when the pilots were doubtful. The officer is now retired on a North Vietnamese army pension.

How much of this sort of thing is going on in Egypt. How many of the Egyptian police and military are Moslem Brotherhood deep cover agents.

Mubarak may be a despot but if he was as ruthless as they claim I would have expected Tahrir square to be knee deep in bodies by now; thousands dead in minutes. We don't see this! We see Mubarak moderating his actions at least in front of the camera. He is doing what many governments in the west would do, have done, in such emergencies. Muddled and botched attempts at law and order in the face of chaos. Not much different from Katrina or the French response to Moslem riots in the outer suburbs of Paris. We have only 6 officially dead and 900 wounded. We don't know what proportion of those are Mubarak supporters. We see the left wing anti-mubarak media under attack from Mubarak supporters. However would these western reporters be able to tell if they are being attacked by Mubarak supporters or moslem brotherhood fanatics playing both sides. Its only the translators words they understand.

Remember the tea party marches in Washington, the few left wing reporters that bothered to show up made similar claims of pushing and shoving. Some of that was true.

I think Mubarak should, and will, go soon. I don't think democracy will result. The world, particularly the western media are overdosing on naivety. The so called secular moderates that started this battle are no longer in control. Their hit and run protests of the first few days replaced with a very old fashion massive last stand in a public square. A very Islamic last stand at that starting with prayers.
An islamist dictator will arise, perhaps with a sham democracy as cover for a while. Remember Hitler was elected in a democracy.

A post Federal Reserve Bank World

2010-11-04T07:50:00.000-07:00

The worlds banking system is in crisis. The Keynesian paradigm of fiat money and fractional reserve banking is dying. It has always failed but this time its smoke and mirrors tricks have failed to. They have printed too much money and broken the system.
If they end the FED then what do we do?

What does a post FED world look like.

The key to an alternative is two conditions. 1. Open entry,anyone can make money but no one is obligated to accept it. and 2. Enforcement of contracts, no one can make false claims about or fraudulent valuations of their money. I might ad a third: Public and media based testing and checking of these money's and contracts.
Assuming other central banks are also eliminated in the process.

1. Gold and silver currencies in many competing forms:

a. Gold backed electronic money for large and web transactions,

b. Gram weight metal in plastic cases that work like coins or credit cards,
c. Ounce weight metal barter coins,
d. Nickel and copper coins with a contractual valuation in gold or silver not both.
e. large Dollar silver coins with a contractual value in silver and a computer and screen that lists the current gold /silver value ratio.
In most places one currency with predominate with machines accepting other currencies and giving the local favoured currency.

2. Full reserve banks with fewer offices* but more digital and video phone to real staff interfaces. Several types of savings:
a. Target savings accounts. Money is not available on demand until the target is achieved. (I remember these from my youth.)
b. Term deposits with two days notice to withdraw. Mostly invested in mortgages and commercial loans.
c. Direct bond sales via the banks interface (computer, phone or auto-teller) with a receipt. These bonds do not pay annually, they are true bonds. This avoids borrowing short to cover long liabilities. You know for sure you have the bond. Bank holds the bond until you request it.
d. Credit and debit cards with small fees, higher but sustainable interest on the credit, none on the debit and higher default fees.
* It is possible to have contract based fractional reserve banks but these would need to recall and extinguish their note and contracts each time they lower their reserve provisions. These would be much higher risk but fee free.

3. Many more mutual funds. Operating as above.

4. Automatic digital transfer of remaining accounts from failed banks to other banks that the first bank must pre-nominate and contract with. Any remaining assets are transferred with the accounts. This eliminates bank runs and is largely the norm today. The banks share holders take a full remaining loss. That'll teach them to avoid real-estate and other bubbles.

5. More peer to peer lending with legislation ensuring that the contracts are clear with no fine print. Defaulters get banned and get a poor rating that goes global across networks. This is unsecured lending but as the mortgage derivative debacle taught us, Banks don't always adequately secure the loans.

6. Companies can sell shares and micro shares via a web application or digital broker on their web site with another site handling resale's. No minimum limit on the size of a share sale thanks to digital tracking. The limits, minimum share issues and brokerage practices are tied to out of date methods and paperwork systems.

7. Microshares are for very small web businesses with valuations in the fractions of a cent or via a virtual currency like SL Linden. Essentially the micro-transactions that were promised in the dot Com boom but got blocked by government meddling. Hence the bust.

8. Many charities will use targeted fund-raising with things like The Point.

9. Some charities will sell bonds. The interest on the bond goes to the charity with the Donor retaining the ownership of the principle or donating it fully to the charity. This creates a permanent predictable income for the charity to match on going needs and avoid fluctuations in donations. (Note: Not all charities today can invest donations long term. They must spend as they go creating a long term stability problem.)

Some of these solutions were not available before 1914 and therefore we can't talk of going back. New technologies eliminate some of the excuses for fractional reserve banking and fiat currency. They don't eliminate the bankers desire for a cartel that blocks out new players or get government to cover their losses but it makes it harder if we take away their excuses. It wont eliminate the governments desire to spend beyond their means but again it eliminates the currency excuses. The new charity solutions further reduce the need for government services which is why I list them.

Interest rates would be higher, Rarely going below 6%, Mortgages would match this limit. Some long term interest would be 3%. Most shops would have tools to check coins and web linked digital signs up date everyone on the current ratio of the available currencies. Currency values would be stable overtime and productivity would be high 5- 8 % but not spectacular. Spectacular GDP would be mostly fake where encountered. The exception would be rapidly developing new third world communities and space colonies.

It will be a very different world where we learn to judge money as a product and check its price and exchange rate as we go. Most shops will have tools for checking coins, digital signs advertising current gold and silver ratios, etc. Your money will be safer than it is today allowing peoples plan to be fulfilled and not confused by government meddling.

Building the first generation of buildings on Mars.

2010-10-28T03:51:00.000-07:00

The initial exploration of Mars will be in Mars habitats sent from the earth.

Image: http://www.marssociety.org/images/full/surface1.jpg from http://chapters.marssociety.org/pugetsound/

However there would in all likelyhood only be four or five such missions. Once a good site is found with the prerequisites for colonisation a real base would be built from mostly Martian materials. Those prerequisites are a deposit of water ice or underground water, Iron or Aluminium ore, good rock for building or aggregate production and some nitrates.

Then an industrial module or two with the capacity to make structural materials would be sent to the colony site. Carbon fibre and carbon composites may prove cheaper and easier that metals. Carbon dioxide provides abundant carbon. Plastics can be made from CO2.

So the question is what structure to build? Most think domes but domes have their disadvantages.

Image from http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/babylon5-hi-def-petition.html

Domes have lots of round corners that boxy furniture and things don't fit into, Its hard to stack radiation shielding in a dome and you need some shielding to shut out the natural cosmic ray flux.

There is another little known problem: While Mars is cold the structure will have a lot of heat sources inside it so there will be a heat dissipation problem. Domes are good at keeping heat in due to their low surface area to volume ratio. A box is good for getting rid of that heat without expensive equipment.

I believe the best early first generation buildings will be multi-story box like structures. Like this:

This structure has several advantages. Most surfaces are rectilinear so replacing panels and windows is easy. There are ample windows for natural Martian light to enter. There are views of the farm domes and the landscape beyond. Reducing any claustrophobia risks.
The Martian radiation flux is cosmic rays so its a vertical flux. As a consequence only the roof needs to be shielded. If you make the building multi-story then one square meter of shielding shelters many square meters of living space. The shielding would be just rock or gravel, ~2-3 tons per square meter of roof. Far more than most domes could handle. The main structure would be reinforced concrete or reinforces polymer bonded aggregate with carbon fibre or iron reinforcing.
This structure has several other features.

Viewed from above you can see that the buildings stand on a central base,or shared ground floor, that allows shirt sleeves access from section to section. The buildings are segregated so if there is any pressure breach or fire in any building people can escape to the other sections. Behind the building are several tanks for spare oxygen and other chemicals that are kept clear of the main structure for safety and temperature control. The greenhouses are less shielded because plants are less vulnerable to this radiation.

If you really like domes you can add them;

You could even add playing fields etc in them:

In the above structure we have a playing field. Short exposures to the cosmic ray flux is safe; it happens to you every time you fly on the earth. This sports dome doubles as a place to stitch together large plastic pressure structures. The brown boxes in the fore ground are chemical and heavy industrial plant units segregated from the main structure for safety reasons. To the side you have a mine and on the left in the distance you have the spaceport with its big white fuel tanks.

This Mars base has several kinds of farming. The university dome in the fore ground has planters and grasses on any available area to feed people and animals. This includes planting on the roof tops. Most activities are indoors within the buildings. The elliptical domes hold fields for grains, pulses and vegetables. There is a multi-story vertical farm behind the university with hydroponic and airponic fruit and vegetables. Most people and some livestock live in the three remaining tall buildings. Some things will be boringly the same as on earth; there is a cell phone tower on the ridge behind the buildings.

These structures would be built unpressurised. With pressure tight balloon like structures added to each floor and pressurised double glazed widows added to the out side. This gives the structures emergency redundancy. Essentially a plastic balloon in a box with internal panelling protecting the pressure balloon from knocks and wear and an outer shell to keep the sharp Martian dust away.

Eventually another technology will be used where suitable. These are low world houses. Roofed valleys with normal looking farms and suburbs. That however is many decades away.

I've written on low world houses here:

http://vacoyecology.com/valleyhouse.html

It may be possible to terraform Mars but these technologies will make it habitable without much fuss.
Most of my illustrations are done partly in Second Life and worked up in gimp. Some are on display at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EDAKent/232/144/32
Within Second Life.

Banked track Magnetic levitation based artificial gravity

2010-10-27T22:53:00.000-07:00

We can make space station that simulate the earth's gravity using centrifugal force. Generally for maximum comfort the centrifuge needs to be limited to 1 RPM and that leads to a diameter of about a mile (1.6 km). These are thus very big structures with a lot of material mass. OK in the zero gravity of space but you can't stand one on end on the moon.

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacecolony1.jpg

There is a way to put a centrifuge on the moon or an asteroid. This is to use basic railway technology to create centrifugal gravity. The centrifuge is a train with multiple carriages running around a track 1.6 km in diameter and as close to perfectly circular as possible. Either the track is banked or the carriages are built at an angle so that the centrifugal forces combine with the low gravity of the moon or planetoid to produce approximately one g.

The blue is the track with a large dome adjacent to it for low gravity recreation and some food and oxygen production. The Dome is stadium sized.

Each carriage would be as spacious as a large train carriage. Some would be gyms for maintaining muscle tone and bone density by exercising in normal earth gravity. Some would be medical and maternity facilities to ensure normal recovery and normal pregnancies. Some would have apartments and hotel suites. In a well established base there may even be livestock stabled in some carriages.

Unlike a larger space station the train stops regularly to allow people to come and go. Warnings are given so none are caught out. Many internal structures are designed with a radical change of orientation. The direction of down changes through 60-90 degrees.
To generate one earth gravity the train must run at 239 kph an easy speed for magnetic levitation technology in vacuum or a thin atmosphere. Stopping and starting takes several minutes so there is time to find all the loose things lying around that may fall.

This small pioneer carriage is designed for the starting crew. Its orientation goes from this normal running orientation above to:

This orientation when stopped. There is a possibility that the table and counter top might tilt. This model is in Second Life. The crew sit in a lounge near the table not on the blue seats. there is provision for standing at odd angles in the shower behind the floral screen, in the toilet opposite and beside the camera (Note: in the top hab image the the grey/ white deck with the writing on it and the green box. ).

The counter top has a kitchen bowl that is clam shell shaped. Thus it retains the water regardless of orientation. A spar bath in the gym would be the same only much larger.

The first unit on the moon however would be small as the second life representation of a small habitat shows. It has three bunks, a tread mill for muscle and bone fitness and would be on an above ground track. A separate solar flare shelter would be near the track or one section of the track would be covered.
A full sized flat car would look more like a luxury railway car.

Image made with gimp from google images of search "railway luxury carriage"

This technology is not just useful on the moon. There it allows large long term human population to live normally. The technology could be used on asteroids. There the gravity is so low that you don't need spare floors at strange angles. As the train slows down to a stop the gravity drops to zero. Your wash basin needs a lid not just a funny shape.

On this Asteroid we have two magnetic levitation train lines, yellow rings, as well as some domes for zero g gardening and several cylindrical building for zero g recreation and manufacturing, etc. the Black structure on the back of the asteroid is a solar furnace for power and metals smelting. The green domes are lit by free floating mirrors behind the camera. This asteroid could support 10000 people.

I've also designed a free flying space station. This has the lowest mass to crew ratio of any design with centrifugal gravity.

The twin trains run in opposite directions within the yellow ring. This is shielded with water tanks, storage spaces and space slag. The Sphere has a double geodesic shell with water in the gap for shielding and thermal control. The internal spheres are farms with shielded stowage for zero g planters. The geodesic spheres entire volume is pressurised as a large zero g recreational habitat.

The large dark thing on the right is a solar shield. This reflects the suns radiation away, provides some radiation shielding and a safe place for ships to dock. The station and the shield are linked by a pressurised cable car and perhaps a few long torsion spars. Sun light is provided by a steerable free flying mirror that give controllable day length and temperature control (black ellipse above. Your seeing the back of the mirror ). This structure would support 5000 people with some farming or gardening in the carriages and smaller centrifuges.

Here's another design. This unit might support 3000 people. It would have the same shield and mirror technology as the sphere.

Most people don't know that plants have been grown successfully in zero g on the various space stations. Plants like gravity but a few days as a seedling in a small fast centrifuge will suffice. Plants don't get dizzy.

Plants on the International space station.

In case your worried about radiation hazards all the banked track systems on the moon, asteroids and space-stations are either burred in the ground or armoured with a high mass shell around the track itself. There would be provision to move planter pots and whole garden beds into shelters under the domes and inside larger solid structures.

This technology will allow people living in space to have gravity when they need it and zero g for fun and research. Short exposures to normal gravity daily prevent bone calcium loss. By designing the cars to be used for about half the day time hours would suffice. Short periods of zero gravity should not harm anyone including embryos. Though that needs to be checked.
While these space stations will never look like a chunk of earth transplanted into space, like the illustration below, they will be adequate and interesting.

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacecolony3edit.jpeg

All other illustration created in Second Life with some reworking in Gimp. Sorry the hab photo's are so dark. I stuffed up with the virtual camera. Lol.
See Wesley Farspire for directions or look for this image below at the EDAKent sim.
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EDAKent/232/144/32
Find the sign that invites you to venture into a banked track maglev car.

13 things that will boom if oil goes to A$7 liter or $25 a gal

2010-10-02T23:22:00.000-07:00

These things will boom and will be quickly organised via the web and social networks if something pushes oil to disastrously higher levels. A war in the middle East would raise prices as might the collapse of our currencies by high or hyper-inflation.

1. Car pooling with 'fares' paid to cover the fuel. Governments may try to block these in defence of taxi regulation but will be laughed out of court.

2. Conversion kits and businesses that covert cars to LNG.

3. Conversion kits that turn an older car into an electric. Licensing barriers will be blown away quickly. Already legal in Australia and some US states.

4. Conversion to ethanol. Only 400 dollars. Big ethanol may be non-viable but there are those working on smaller stills and more sustainable ethanol. All the red tape imposed today will be bypassed by some cities best placed for ethanol.

5. Mopeds, scooters, motor units that convert your push bike into a moped. If your cities got warm winters or a tropical climate then these will boom; particularity in flat cities with intermediate distances and only one hill climb.

6. Bus companies that buck the system raise fares to cover the rise in diesel and offer free or cheap pensioner fares only in off peak periods. This will be particularly powerful if these are LNG buses. LNG wont rise as fast.

7. House swapping web sites. These minimise the cost of moving, finding a house without paying a real-estate middle man, swapping the papers without paying anything but the perceived value difference and taxes. Most governments facilitate swapping of government rentals but this will be mortgage for mortgage with desperation shortening the haggling.

8. Suburban micro-office. A house or shop converted into office space for 10-20 people. This creates a workplace away from the kids and the distractions of home and with the amenities of an office: broadband, fax, a big copier/printer complex. A centralised business hires a desk or cluster of desks for a month or so for its staff that live in that suburb. All staff work there 5 days a week commuting to the central office in the 'company carpool or minibus' as required but no more than twice a week. This gets people out of the house and into an office but their still in the suburbs. Team building will require some grasp of geography.

9. Company buses. Industrial companies, early in the crisis, will hire or charter private buses to go to a hub in the suburbs; Everyone working for the company will be instructed to walk or ride to the suburban hub.

10. Every church, old peoples home, NGO with a small to medium bus or large vans will go to work ferrying a few people from their congregation or neighbourhood to the nearest rail hub. The buses will fill. There will instantly be a thousand 'donations at the door bus services' using these generally underutilised mini-buses. Donations will exceed the fuel cost quickly.

11. Bus trams will be deployed in many cities. These are normal buses with capacitors in their hybrid or electric power train. At most stops there are overhead wires that a pantograph links to for quick a charge while people are boarding. There are no overhead wires on the roads its only at main stops and some traffic lights. This is the cheapest new alternative to light rail and it can be quickly deployed. http://gas2.org/2009/10/21/electric-ultracapacitor-buses-becoming-more-feasible/ and at the shanghai expo this design is in use. http://212.181.8.238/webbplatser/vbeb/archive/2009/12/15/sunwin-super-cap-bus.aspx The ultra-capacitor technology is in free fall prices wise; one system uses flywheels that are even cheaper.

12. Some families will adopt the strategy of taking the whole family to work in the city. With schools chosen for their proximity to work not home. Tea time will be at a restaurant or in the office cafe. The trip home will be later in the evening taking advantage of cheaper off peak buses and trains. In some third world countries where the price of oil is already beyond them this is often done.

13. One from dear old Fidel Castro's Cuba. A semiprivate company has designed a 'bus' that attaches to an 18 wheeler tractor. http://business.fullerton.edu/management/slpurkiss/images/truck-bus.JPG These are called camel buses. Cheap and nasty but with a little smarts, intercom for safety and cameras so the driver can see all round the vehicle these will deploy by the thousands. Off peak the tractor does other work. Actually quite smart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trailer_bus

All of these solutions can be quickly deployed. All have potential problems with rip off Merchants,fraud and government red tape. Struggling city councils will shred the red tape after the first city that resists the changes dies. In some cases the Greenhouse scare has paved the way with red tape disposal and facilitation developing in response to CO2. To some extent people forget that there was suburbia before the car became cheap and ubiquitous.

Cellulosic Starch. - biotechnology challenge.

2010-09-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

Cellulosic Starch would be the one technology that would go further to feeding the next three billion people than any other biotechnology. There is as far as I know no work being done on it.
The key is to take the same cellulose breaking enzymes that turn straw into sugar for ethanol production and use them to make food grade glucose most of which would then be made into starch with another enzyme.
We can grow grass, straw and jungle leaves from the high Arctic to the deserts and on to the equator. We can grow much more cellulose than grain in the same field. Planting and harvest is closer together and the crop of grass can be perennial.
The cellular processes that turn glucose into starch is not yet fully understood. We need to identify the key cellular processes in edible plants, publicise the need so private, commercial or charitable funding can be found.
A team needs to be created.
The final desirable product would be a machine sized for a first world farm or third world village that can do the following steps.

Pre test the plant matter for toxic contamination. This may include a slow conveyor that allows the plant matter to be visually checked for obvious contamination dirt, plants and animal material.
Mill and break down the cellulose into glucose or sucrose in sterile water through the action of the enzyme.
Sterilise or filter out the enzyme.
Filter-out any non digested cellulose, lignite, plant oils and other extraneous non sugars.
Possibly, concentrate the sugars recycling the water.
Synthesise edible starch from the sugars. Perhaps using a naked enzyme or an engineered glucose feeding starch cell culture.
Remove the enzyme or plant hormones that make that work.
Dry and package in a storable form.
Test for contaminants, spoiling or other problems. This should be concurrent with each step.
Regenerate waters filters, testing gear, etc.
Produce more bulk enzyme and plant hormone or plant starch cell cultures.

We should ensure that the taste is not influenced much by the taste of the feed stock. A bland flavourless starch is best. Some of the glucose can be retained for sweetening. Some can be used with other value added cell cultures to produce proteins such as gluten, lysine, Guanine, etc. These would need to be carefully labelled since some people can't eat gluten.

If we can make such a technology then we can harvest grasses and other fast growing plants and turn that into starch. Then using a mix of the raw plant material and the starch we can feed livestock for protein: eggs, milk and meat.
Because hay and straw can be stored for months and years areas with short growing season and long droughts can feed many more people.

Ideally the technology should be cheap enough to sell in the third world. Financing arrangements would be needed for both the research phase, the third world deployment phase and the follow up maintenance phases.

While the starch will compete with normal starch crops it will augment their availability not replace them. As world population grows those industrial applications for bulk starch will switch from food grade starch to cellulosic starch freeing up more edible starch. Food grade cellulosic starch would fend off famine in the developing world. There are ethics questions to be asked and they should be asked early but I can't see how a categorical no would make sense.
It wont solve all humanities problems but it will feed many people.

Game changers in war. The technology of free market defence.

2010-09-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

Minute man 2020. Game changers.

Robert Murphy has looked at free market defence.

http://mises.org/store/Chaos-Theory-P190.aspx

It can be argued that a free market system guided by the profit and loss system would make use of a slightly different set of weapons.

Some weapons that a libertarian society might prefer can be predicted. Nuclear weapons are out; cheap weapons that save lives even enemy lives are in. Weapons that minimise property damage make better sense than bombs.

Here's 25 links and some notes. Note this technology is not in the Bob's book its the logical choice of a private defence entity.

Infantry - Armour, ballistic shields for the light infantry. Some solutions are simple.

http://www.patriot3.com/portable-folding-ballistic-shield/

One company is designing a ballistic apron but will soldiers wear it if they look like a butcher? This ones for factory workers but its the same technology.

http://www.amazon.com/FastCap-BKILT-Ballistic-Black-Nylon/dp/B0001GUDVO

For the elite specialists.

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3062/

The biggest factor will be at the building design level. If a society takes on the challenge of defending its self rather than leaving it to the government they will build different kinds of buildings. A common feature of Israeli housing developments since the katyusha rocket attacks of the second Lebanon war (2006) has been to build bunkers in housing complexes.

Gear and supply's too heavy? Try a pair of robot legs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdK2y3lphmE

or 4 robot legs. Big dog.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2bExqhhWRI&feature=fvw

or errr just watch this after the one above. I couldn't resist neither could the researchers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptyV1cpE14o&feature=related

Intel is essential, particularly in urban warfare. Thrown cameras help. The Israelis are way a head on this stuff. Micro drones may supersede these. A soldier could carry several of either.

http://www.israel21c.org/technology/israeli-baseball-camera-spies-out-terrorists

Or send in this little fellow. One version has a gun.

http://defense-update.com/newscast/0307/news/080307_viper.htm

Want to fight at lower risk.

Corner shot. Now being used yet still new. This will save many civilians who get caught up in a fight and get hit because an exposed fighter can't risk a second glance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RaubAtWZQM

In an ambush context this will take them down without killing them.

http://www.taser.com/products/law/Pages/ShockwaveLE.aspx

For the heavy hit.

Sniper bus rounds. A grenade launcher with the range of a sniper rifle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_XM109 Now deploying.

If all else fails send this guy in. Its only CGI but all the hardware exists except power supply.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1845016404760165806#

Armoured corps – Tanks are useful for retaking territory the enemy has taken and for defending open farmland, desert and plains. Fixed defences are sitting ducks in the GPS age.

The future light tank will be armed with sensor drones to check for mines and ambush ahead. It will fire smaller calibre but more versatile rounds. It may deploy ground robots as it main weapon system rather than a turret or APC infantry. It will be expensive but we will only need a few not thousands. Air-mobility will still matter. The enemy will try to cut units off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AZe8jOuGpo

However a free market society may not want to telegraph its punches or attract the ire of foes by deploying a tank. It may use something like the Rhino Runner. With digital ink advertising and a little cheap camouflage this could drive past you and you would not know it was an armoured vehicle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhino_Runner

Yet this could carry dozens of troops, robots, or an entire swarm drone command centre and drones. A truck version would look like a civilian truck. http://www.armored-trucks.com/

Robotic cars are also off the drawing board and may be 3 to 6 years away. In an emergency these robot taxi's could be sent in to rescue people where a driver may fear to go. They can deliver supplies or could be sent in to create an automated traffic jam around the enemies convoy.

Check the video's here. http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

or this Wikipedia page, Its a little out of date.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car

Militia air-force and intelligence. -

Coffee cup sized flying Swarm robots. These gather intelligence and can hunt down foes. Their down playing the attack function in the video. It can be lethal or non lethal. A swarm of 30 could take down a squad of infantry in seconds. This scares even governments because at $200 a robot, half the population of a free city or enclave could own one. By 2020 the sophisticated communications technology to control these at long range will be in civilian hands. New power systems means they will be silent unlike the whining toys of today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5YkQ9w3PJ4

One prototype.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAVtuTOKGsA&NR=1

If you need more hiting power.

http://www.gizmag.com/autonomous-rotorcraft-sniper-system-packs-338-caliber-rifle-controlled-by-xbox-360-pad/11559/

Getting gear where its needed.

http://www.baldwintechnology.com/

and

http://www.gizmag.com/boeing-a160t-hummingbird-uav/14548/

Navy.

Have a coast line or sea stead to protect? 10 of these can cover 50 miles of coast for the cost of a patrol boat. Add some micro drones and they can inspect vessels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_USV

Robotic submersibles loitering on the coast provides underwater coverage. Set them up with a sea bed charging station or battery swap system for long endurance. Neptune Canada is a seabed sensor network with a robot sub based on the sea bed. Its for oceanographic studies but the technology could be adapted to "own the sea".

http://www.neptunecanada.ca/

Most of the strife of naval war is about getting cargo and fuel in and out through blockades. Cargo-submarines has always been a good answer but for some reason never used by the good guys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_submarine

What they can't see they can't stop. Ports need camouflaged sub pens.

All of these systems are an order of magnitude cheaper than the alternatives. They are all force multipliers and reduce casualties and soldier training requirements. You don't have to be fit to control a drone from your lounge, office or bomb shelter. Because of communications and intelligence limitations they favour defensive operations. Yet in combination some can deliver a strategic strike capability (non nuclear) where needed.

The challenge of a green controlled Senate.

2010-08-26T06:46:00.000-07:00

If Tony Abbott forms a government in Australia the greens and labor in the senate can block supply but that will cost them at the subsequent vote particularly if the liberal party is putting up all the No Regrets options from the Garnaut report and other clearly sensible options. MP Bob Katter will oppose the ETS and he seems to influence the other two country independents on that a little.

To counter the green balance of power we need someone to go "full metal climate sceptic" in the senate and get into Hansard all the sceptics arguments.
http://surfacestations.org/ 80% station wrong with a 30% effect on warming signal. That means that the detected warming is not +0.6 its +0.4. and it disapeared altogether in the mid 1990's due to changes in solar activity.

The missing M's http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/17/giss-metar-dial-m-for-missing-minus-signs-its-worse-than-we-thought/

The fact that some old records have been adusted down to make the 21st chentury look wormer than the early 20th century.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/contribution-of-ushcn-and-giss-bias-in-long-term-temperature-records-for-a-well-sited-rural-weather-station/

Cloud based negative feed backs are being discovered and confirmed.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/new-paper-from-lindzen/
This second paper is believed to have triggered off the whistle blower at the CRU.

The fact that the system of carbon reduction scheme were so sloppy that people have been ripping the system off by making CFC's and the destroying them. http://joannenova.com.au/2010/08/corruption-for-dinner-anyone-the-carbon-market-scandal/

And the fact that the two climate exchanges have crashed to the floor and are laying off staff. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6791WI20100811
The floor in Chicago is 10 cents. The European markets floor is 15 EU. http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/
No demand means even Al Gore isn't playing the market any more.

Could Iran kill off Palestine? The danger no-one sees.

2010-08-09T01:38:00.000-07:00

Most people that talk about Iran's nuclear threat to Israel argue that Israel is a small country, a tiny target, one nuke would do it! This is said with fear on one side and evil intentions on the other.
However a tiny target is a tiny target. It may prove hard to hit. The Iranian missiles are not renowned to their accuracy. If the bombs to big or delicate for the missile then the attack must come by air, land or sea. Israel intercepts boats a hundred of miles off shore, It has agents and drones watching the roads to its boarder. It probably has ground routes 'bugged' with Geiger counters. I know I would. It may even have these defences forward deployed at the Jordanian border with Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis may now have such nuclear bomb detectors deployed on their own borders and ports given that Riyadh is the other most named target of Iran.

Being a small target will mean that if a missile or bomber from Iran misses long it hits Gaza or the Mediterranean. If it drops short it might hit the west bank or Amman Jordan. Miss to the north and you kill a lot of Lebanese. Miss south and you kill off the Egyptian Bedouin. Any strike near a border will kill UN personnel.

If Iran hits Israel it will kill off Palestine totally. Atomic bombs produce fall out plumes that can have a radius of 20 to 50 kilometre and persist for days.
The Zionist radicals have NBC and know how tho used them. They reportedly have Geiger counters in their cars. The moderate Zionists have radical Zionist relatives. Both will be in the bunkers within minutes. Only a few will die.

The Labor vote, the Israeli Arabs and 'peace now' Israelis have junk in their bunkers, limited NBC and at best only think they face Katyusha. They will die in their bunkers thinking they should have read the instructions earlier.

The Palestinians don't have bunkers or NBC and will die in the streets by the million or die fighting for any building they think might work as a bunker. Tens of thousands will flee into neighbouring countries.

Some in Palestine will survive. These are the hidden pro-Israel Palestinians; Arab Zionists. I suspect they have acquired good NBC from friends in the settlements. There's less than a thousand of them. A few Palestinians will survive because their deep in Israeli prison cells.

All this assumes no Israeli violence in revenge. I think that unlikely but they may be too busy to lash out.
When the fallout settles and becomes safe the Zionists will be the majority among the angry survivors and one in a hundred Palestinians will be alive to curse Iran. 'Ahmadinejad' in Iran is the most dangerous threat that Palestine faces.

Old Green lament

2010-08-05T03:25:00.000-07:00

I was once a proud green before the watermelons took over. Many greens are genuinely concerned about real environmental issues but the education system has taught them that the only solution is government, taxes and removing humanity from the ecosystem. 'Reducing the human impact.'

The old idea that there might be free market solutions to these problems is totally alien to them. If David Holmgren and Bill Mollison were trying to kick off Permaculture today the greens would be their major opponents. They would be classed as greenwash. Some of the older greens in the 1970 were Christian conservatives and anti-homosexual. One was still helping with organic farming field studies in the 1990's and got in fights with lesbian students.

Some greens are disillusioned humanists, past technophiles who thought green technology would solve all things. They have seen the failure of the technology they love. They have become semi-Luddite rejecting technology as technofixes. It really wasn't the technologies that failed but the big government and subsidies approach to deploying it.

There is good news to be had. Some greens are becoming active out side the green movement like Bjorn Lomborg. Others are linking up with the liberal party, etc.
And best of all when more that 4 greens get into a Parliament they tend to split on things a lot. Giving them some power is the most effective way to destroy them.
Or at least force them to realise that you can't save the world by ending civilisation and modernity in all its forms.

Saving the World by burying the Greens.

2010-07-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

In medieval Europe many cathedrals and churches were built with money from people that paid for crypt spaces and burial spaces in the building or its grounds.

What's the equivalent today? For many nature is sacred so lets give them their eco-cathedrals.

Why have grave plot in the big city costing many thousands of dollars if you could have a hectare plot in the wilderness? Grave plots are getting very expensive. Even getting a hole in a memorial wall for grannies ashes is very costly. However land in the country side is very cheap particularly if its non arable land. Even arable land in the country is only a few hundred dollars a hectare at most. A green funeral plan could be created where an hectare, half hectare or quarter acre plot is purchased in an ecologically useful location. A grave plot or two are set out and the rest restored to wilderness.

Wilderness can be created by skilled landscapers, botanists, entomologists and zoologists. It need not be fenced but it may be wise to fence out feral animals: introduced predators like the cats, foxes in Australia, possums, goats and pigs in Oceania. Trees are planted if necessary and bird boxes, artificial nesting sites created. Hollow logs are created and deployed. Ponds may be added to encourage frogs and water the fauna. Ideally the memorial nature parks should be located to create fauna corridors and buffer zones around fragile areas.
Some consideration is needed on the provision of fire brakes, fire shelters, road crossings for both ground fauna, aquatic fauna and arboreal animals.

Only part of the money is spent on immediate costs land purchase, landscaping and the burial. The rest becomes a memorial trust invested carefully with some investment in gold and some compounded. This grows the fund, the gold protects against a crash, it provides the economy with a long term investor to match some long term borrowers.
The interest is used in two ways:

Firstly, If the funeral is not immediate they pay for the funeral its self. Funeral costs should be kept under half the interest funds if possible.

Secondly, It is used to fund on going long term management of the this and the other memorial nature parks. Care must be given to remove invasive weeds, non indigenous plants and feral predators and browsers. The principal should not be spent if possible.

When the buyer of the plot dies they are buried in the burial plot. Early purchase means the ecosystem becomes a wonderful back drop for an out door ceremony. To be viable the total cost, including the seed money for the trust, should be less than the urban burial plot.

Some consideration is need in the design phase of the burial location to the effects of the burial itself on the ecosystem. The impact and space required for crowds, vehicles and access for a backhoe. Because there is an inflation protected memorial fund covering long term maintenance of the ecosystem the nature park is guaranteed. It is not dependent on the whims of government or the threat of budget cuts. It must also be protected from land, capital gains and inheritance taxes.It will eventually end up very overgrown but that's the idea.

There is another benefit. Today hundreds of people are trained in environmental science but the major employer in that sector is government. Industry positions are rare. With budgets being tightened and governments going broke and winding up with their bonds reduced to junk status. This pitches those that genuinely want to save species and the environment against those advocating small government, capitalism and property rights. In a time of fiscal collapse this raises the spectre of ecological collapse and drives some to very dangerous political positions.
These memorial projects provide a new employment opportunity for these same people trained in environmental science, botany, zoology, etc turning them into the 21st century equivalent of cathedral architects. In some cases it will be their first introduction to capitalism and private sector employment.

I'm not the only person thinking about this strategy. In the US there's already an organisation. http://www.greenburialcouncil.org/
I don't want to become an undertaker so others are free to take it up. There are some legislative changes needed to burial laws, zoning and the tax protections but these are almost cost free to governments and create a new industry.

Is Obama a socialist or an islamist?

2010-07-06T06:37:00.000-07:00

His parents appear to have been hard line Marxists and atheists at the time of his birth. I don't think there was ever a birth certificate, they avoided it because the draft is based on birth date. They did not think the USA would be still around in the 1980's. Even when his father moved them to Indonesia it was never to an area that had a hard line Islamic culture. They appear to be nominal in all things but Marxism. After the 1980's they may have even become disillusioned with that but Barack Obama's beliefs would have been locked in. The Christian life we also see is more his wife's doing. And the church he went to was much less of a church as it was a communist cell.
Obama is a very mixed up kid with the same Marxist/ Islamic hybrid that rose to power in the middle east after world war two. Hard line Islam killed it off in Afghanistan, Egypt, Southern Lebanon and Gaza after the Soviet Union went broke.

Barack Obama's world view is the same on that informs all on the left.
1. All conflict is caused by capitalist exploitation. (end exploitation and everyone will love us; even murderous would be dictators.)
2. The entrepreneur has no true function and can thus be robbed, taxed, exiled or shot freely with no consequences.
3. Government can anticipate and deal with the economic factors of risk, innovation and peoples time preference. (Generally the don't grasp time preference at all.)
4. There will always be someone else to tax or borrow from to pay the governments bills. (However today our Pension funds are the only rich capitalist pig remaining unbutchered.)
5. Individual actions such as sex and drugs have no consequence beyond the direct parties to the act.
6. All human activity destroys nature and no human activity (particularly private activity) can restore it.
7. Government activity can restore nature, etc, by just locking humans out of ecosystems.
8. The defence of liberty at home means isolationism, pulling the troops back to the USA. (This fails to realise that liberty is an idea that can live in the hearts of non Americans and forgets that without the French Navy in 1777-1783 Washington and the other revolutionaries would be in an unmarked grave today.
Who are Afghanistan's Sons of Liberty?)
9. All gods and religions are false and therefore irrelevant.
10. You can teach people to be sharing, caring, socialistic, atheistic, and obedient citizens without creating amoral, greedy, lazy, and down right dangerous Social Darwinists or Post Modern Pagans.

Unfortunately some or all of these ideas are held by many on all sides of politics, even conservatives.

Yes he panders to several islamist fronts at home and abroad but he panders to everything and everyone that he thinks will respond positive to his being 'polite'. He does not see the true danger of Islam because what he saw as a child was relatively moderate Sufi Islam in Indonesia and Kenya.
He grew up playing with a kitten; now he's in the Lions den!

Capping the gulf oil leak with plastic.

2010-06-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

The gulf oil leak seems to have beaten a multinational and a superpower so what chance do I have? The same chance as anyone else. A chance that depends on creativity and the fact that no one knows every thing but I may know something that they don't happen to know. I have nothing to loose. Could even make a buck or two.
To cap the oil leak is technically possible but there's a catch. The initial explosive blast has shattered part of the well bore lining leading to a down the hole leak into the sea bed. The sea bed has porous strata that's allowing this oil to seep to the sea some distance from the well bore. Thus we have a flow from the BOP blow out Preventer (which didn't work) and a seep or seeps a few miles away. Its apparent that BP does not want to cap the BOP leak transfering the pressure elsewhere underground. That could trigger a geological event that may produce a tsunami or damage the relief well work.

When BP tried to put a steel box like cap on it it failed cloging with methane hydrates (a solid foam of methane and water ice)
http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2010/05/08/alg_oil_tanker.jpg
The first gulf oil cap.
These methane hydrates dissolve back to gas at surface temperatures and pressures. They clog pipes like rubbish in a storm water line. The logical solution to this problem is to make a much larger diameter pipe up to depths where the hydrates can't form. Smaller pipes can be used from there.
A pipe 30 ft in diameter may sound like over kill but it should work. A big pipe has another advantage you can put robots in the pipe to trouble shoot the flow and smash the hydrates up into bite sized chunks. The robots would be recharged via induction coil charging stations on the inside of the pipe. Thus we get something like this:

To make such a huge structure, hundreds of feet wide at the base and over a 5000 ft high we need to avoid steel or concrete. Both are too slow to fabricate. We need to make this structure out of plastic and cloth. Any rigid elements can be tubes of the same material pumped full of water. Its a giant tent. An under sea big top.

The oil and gas rises within the water under the conical dome and flows up into the pipe. No attempt is made to resist the pressure. None is needed. Its not the pressure that matters its controling the chemistry of the ocean that matters.

The structure has a water lock to facilitate robots entry and exit.
The canopy would facilitate umbilical power and communication with though the plastic powerlines and umbilical swapping. Wireless communications and induction charging or battery swap could be and should be used. The robots anchor the structure down with dozens of screw anchors drilled into the sea bed under the dome and around it. Where currents are a problem additional anchors are places up current with a line linking them to the base and upper pipe.

At the top we have a cap that's designed to handle methane hydrates while feeding the oil to multiple lines to tankers, centrifuge barges and gas flame off buoys.

Click to enlarge visual summary.
While there are ample available vessels there are two additional problems.
If a hurricane barrels though the area all these ships will be forced to head for safety. We would not want to have to dump the oil because of the storm. There is a solution. Floating oil bladders like this one.

We need a dozen very big ones to hold the oil at the surface but at the same time contained and separate from the ocean. These should be quite storm and wave tolerant moving with the water not fighting it. They will need to be anchored with sea anchors and hard sea bed anchors. we could also use this technology to create a floating pipe several miles long to get the oil clear of the shipping and rigs. That bit of ocean is becoming difficult to navigate. It already needs a traffic control centre.

These bladders can also help separate the oil from the water. By adding pipes to the bottom that hang down several meters and clarity sensors and pumps, water can be drained out the bottom of this contained oil slick. A clarity sensor is a LED and a photo-detector. Oil obstructs this light and the valve shuts, when the water is reasonably clear the valve opens and the small pump runs. Air bubble may assist clarify the water in these pipes.

The second challenge is pressure on the structure.
This is why the oil men use steel. The ocean at these depths apply great forces on pressurised structures. The oil and gas apply forces of their own due to buoyancy, de-pressurising hydrates, chemical reactions with the sea water and drag effects. There is also entrained debris from the sea bed to deal with at the seeps. Allowing water in and out to equalise pressure will allow the structure to deploy. Water can be pumped in to fender the plastic and sacrificial canvas linings may help. Removing some of the water higher up the pipe will also help with the hydrate problem. The key is to control the oil flow not worry about de-watering until we're clear of the hydrates problem. One way valves and water pumps in the lower structure would equalise there. Higher up we would need an oil water separator integral to the wall of the big pipe.

The oil and gas flow passes this structure; water is displaced downward. The two little dots are more clarity sensors activating the pump/valve.

Lastly, This structure, particularly the canopy, can be constructed from modular patches of material and put together with a heavy volunteer input. Final assembly and folding is easy with thousands of volunteers hard with hundreds of cranes and complex jugs.
Deployment should be done with fishing boats and barges and the big tent should be sized for the available vessels. There are several natural oil seeps that this technology may also work on.

Someone needs to rally the necessary materials and resources to get these equi-pressure caps and bladder based contained slicks made and deployed.
Lets get going on the underwater circus tents; the circus in Washington and London isn't getting us anywhere.

Why Rudd can't get the mining tax right.

2010-05-30T23:44:00.000-07:00

Why can't Kevin Rudd get the number correct in taxation and investment. They're not lying, they simply can't bring themselves to believe that their theory of money, profit and interest is fundamentally wrong.

Interest and profit are the product of three things. Time preference, risk cost, and inflation expectations.
K Rudd thinks he can control the first by printing money at the RBA, so do some in the RBA. He can't, we're in a mess globally because governments and central banks have the same false idea. Time preference is a personal thing. Artificially low interest doesn't change it. It just confuses investors and borrowers about what kind of investments will succeed long term. Their investments don't match their own long term demands or anyone elses.
Rudd thinks he can control risk by promising to bail out failed mining projects: he can't even spell Moral hazard but the mining industry and stock markets can. Many less viable mining projects would start, most would fail and the deficit would go exponential. That's the sovereign risk.
Rudd inflation expectations are in fairy land. If it weren't for paranoid banks reading the Austrian School warnings an dumping those bail outs into excess reserves we would have global hyperinflation by now.

Most Australians share one of these miss interpretations. Academics and public servants share them all.

The Gulf oil leak.

2010-05-27T04:22:00.000-07:00

If the top kill works its almost all over but if it fails there will be hell to pay.

My solution would be to stick a tent on it. Make a plastic/canvas tube 20 metres across and 200 metres long with a balloon at the top. Add oil removal lines on the sides of the balloon at its widest point. At 200 metres above the sea floor the methane hydrates should not be a problem, the 20 m pipe is wide enough for turbulence to clear them and they will accumulate above the pump-out lines.
Just in case add a small electric UAV tethered to a power supply on the side of the tent/giant pipe. The UAV is inside the balloon. Why there wasn’t a UAV inside the hat structure they put on it beats me. Idiots I guess.
Because its in the oil it will need the same sonar sensors as a PIG, a cleaning robot used in oil pipe lines. This cleaning robot would have a high pressure hot water hose to blast any goop clear of the pump-out lines. The pump-out lines pump down and out. Hydrates and tars float. Provision is added for a solvent input line.
The tent would be anchored to the sea bed with big concrete blocks. This giant pipe wont plug the hole but buys time. It also raises the option of adding a water exclusion collar to the bottom so this tent/ Giant pipe is eventually full of ‘clean’ oil eliminating the dewatering process with the oil. Also if your smart such a collar has an ‘airlock’ waterlock to allow UAV’s to go in and out.
Once this is all over make one tent/ giant pipe with a zipper down the side and store it and the USV’s for any new accident.
Eventually someone will discover that its cheaper to drill in the sea bed on a hydrogen filled dome with telepresence robots replacing the crew. Fully automated sea bed drilling rigs.

The Mining supertax.

2010-05-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

The Australian labour government is pushing a crippling 40% supertax on mining in Austarlia. This is on top of the 30% existing tax base in Australia. It makes mining non-viable in Australia! Its already crashed our stock market, trashed half the pension funds and split the union movement.
Michael Darby posted this on Facebook about the advocates of this tax.
http://www.facebook.com/?tid=1296892189218&sk=messages
I snipped the group part of the message.
Our opponents are dangerous ideologues who believe that the "people" of the whole of Australia somehow own the iron ore beneath the ground in WA and the coal beneath the ground in Queensland. This false and pernicious belief leads the Prime Minister repeatedly to assert that the purpose of his punitive tax is to gain a "fair share" for all Australians.
The false and tendentious "fair share" theory flaunts two important historical principles.
1. Security of Tenure
The first principle is that fundamental to the growth and development of modern industrial civilisation, a prospector owns title to what a prospector has found, subject to staking out the ground in accordance with a secure system of tenure, subject to bringing the claim into production within a reasonable (and known) period of time and subject also to paying a certain royalty to the sovereign government or to the owner of the land as the case may be. Where the sovereign government is the owner of the minerals, as in Queensland and WA, the State protects the interests of the landowner by imposing obligations upon the miner such as payment of compensation, notice of entry onto land, and rehabilitation of damage. Of vital importance to this process, from the moment a prospector first registers an interest in a prospect, the rules must not be changed. Any alteration adverse to miners in the system of royalties, for example, has a retrospective effect which destroys the confidence of all future miners.
2. The sovereign governments are the States, not Canberra
Only a fool would suggest that West Australians or Queenslanders deserve a "fair share" of the Melbourne Cricket Ground or of Mt Kosciuszko or of the Barossa Valley wineries. The Prime Minister may be such a fool. In 1892 residents of the eastern colonies who wanted a fair share of Coolgardie gold booked a passage to Fremantle and tramped east with a pick and shovel. Or they set up business in Coolgardie as blacksmiths or farriers or hoteliers or butchers. In modern times most Australians own a "fair share" of coal and iron ore through their superannuation funds (already wounded by the anti-mining tax). Anyone seeking a larger "fair share" need only email the stockbroker, or apply for a job in Central Queensland or the Pilbara. Of course, any discussion of a "fair share" must take into account the huge contributions of mining companies in company tax, PAYG tax, and royalties to State Governments. The Canberra claque resents the idea of a relationship between miners and State Governments and wants a monopoly on exploitation of the mining industry.
The Canberra exploiters would do well to learn the lesson of the great Scot, Leslie Urquhart (1874-1933), whose Russian mining companies a century ago employed 40,000 workers and provided housing and amenities for them and their families. When the Bolsheviks stole his mines, Urquhart thankfully came to Australia and became the driving force behind Mount Isa Mines. The dwellers in fantasy land imagine that capital and expertise will hang around to get kicked in the guts.
These are among the points I have been making in talk radio programs, and I am pleased to report a consistently good response from presenters and other callers. Queensland Senate team leader for the DLP Tony Zegenhagen qldsec@dlp.org.au was the first political leader to come on board with his 27 April 2010 statement of unqualified opposition to the anti-mining tax, and I am pleased that Tony Abbott has followed.
This is a battle for the rights of miners worldwide, and for all who support civilisation.
Please nominate yourself as a Convenor, for your mine, your union, your town, your electorate, your university, your district or even for your State. My personal email address is michael@michaeldarby.net Phone me anytime on 0402 558 947 and I'll phone you straight back
Kind regards
Michael
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are in a huge fight. Previous labour governments have taken two or three terms to stuff things up this badly. Our best hope is that labour will self destruct over this folly.
Mining is costly and risky the profits are not windfalls or exploitation they are the real cost of high risk capital. That the PM Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan don't grasp this is catastrophic.
For those in the USA this tax is an order of magnitude larger than the tariff disputes that triggered the American civil war in 1861!

Fixing the flaw in education. Creating job creators.

2010-04-21T20:35:00.000-07:00

We have an economic crisis with many people out of a job and many looking for a comfortable job that does not even exist. The real problem is that we have an education system that churns out people that have expectations of an easy life, short working hours and no need to take risks in business or do any heavy or hard drudge work.

Our schools produce people that are well trained in filling out forms but de-skilled in basic entrepreneurship.
Our universities wash out thousands in first year. These kids go on to work using partial skill sets and no training in business creation. They gravitate to public service and become trapped there. Their only hope of advancement comes from an ever expanding bureaucracy and an ever expanding government deficit. That hope is doomed to fail.

A large percentage of businesses are kicked off by university undergraduates and graduates who were never taught the basics of business formation and operation. They are good engineers, technicians and programmers but that can't file a patent, copy write or self publish a book. They can't write a contract to save their life and they are taught not to trust those 'capitalist pigs' that can. Some good people landed in jail after the dot com bust that way.

We need business studies subjects to be created for scientists, environmentalists, social scientists, etc. These courses need to be in first year so we don't miss the kids that drop out in the first year but still wind up working in the field as assistants or whiz kid CEO's. This also allows students to see what subjects lead to a job and what are a waste of time and the governments money. Marxist theories of bicycle maintenance wont get you a job.

Grounding aircraft kills people.

2010-04-21T19:19:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of planes grounded. People stranded, trade interrupted all by one little volcanic eruption in the middle of the Atlantic. But at least no body died right. Wrong! grounding aircraft kills people.

People haven’t realised yet. The media is silent but people will have died because of the no fly rules. Most organs for organ donations go by air. Ground transport is too slow. A percentage of people on waiting lists for organ transplants die while they wait. There will have been several dozen death in Europe as a result. There are now disputes about the MET Office computer modeling that led to the grounding of all those air craft.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/21/airlines-blame-flawed-computer-modelling-for-up-to-1-7-billion-loss/
If the met office gets sued for damages you will see subsequent legal actions on these deaths. It will take a few weeks, end of the month, for anyone to notice but someone will notice a bump in statistics in mortality of people on organ waiting lists.
The no fly will have also fowled up hundreds of chemotherapy treatments and radiation therapy treatments. These drugs and isotopes are time sensitive and generally go by air. No one is talking about this aspect.

Skipping Moores Law with unlimited detail

2010-04-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

Moore's law predicts that the number of transistors per CPU chip will increase with resulting processing power doubling every two years or so. This process is driven by game software. There's no good reason for a computer doing accounting, administration or email to go so fast. Web browsing and other fast software has been riding the wave but its gaming that pushes everything along. 3d Graphics is the great challenge of computer game, graphics lag the biggest effect of any failure to meet that challenge.

Now a couple of very smart software writers in Brisbane Australia have come up with a piece of software that side steps most of the problems giving unlimited detail.

Its a compression process and search based decompression process that puts pixels on the screen without creating in memory somewhere the whole virtual world including all the unseen bits. It works with pure point cloud data and not polygons. This means that polygon counts are irrelevant. The graphics are pure points of colour in memory.
http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/home.html

Some have said that unlimited detail is impossible because it would require unlimited random access memory. I'm always amazed at the ability of the media to find some academic that is eager to say If I can't figure out how to do it nobody can. It rebinds me of the statement."Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

I think they have something very powerful. By its self it will allow even the most basic game to surpass the high resolution images seen in movies and ads.
However it may not end there if their software works with any point cloud data input then not only can the laser scan objects into games but they could use ladar and bifocal cameras to map in landscapes, trees, whole forests. Live animals, people and buildings.
That's because a ladar produces point cloud data and the bifocal camera can use an Boolean AND algorithm that creates point cloud data from a scene. Any point that has the same colour at a given focal length from both cameras defines a point. If it remains as the camera orbits the target a point is archived. Its a little more complex but not much. Point cloud data and voxels are the same thing. Voxel means a volumetric pixel. 3D pixel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

We may see within a year or two photo-realistic game worlds. That wont eliminate Nvidia and ATI though some may fear that. Once the polygon problem is solved the next great challenge is game AI and more realistic animations. We will want our virtual worlds to move right not just look right. While Unlimited Detail Technology can do awesome animation I expect such motions must be integrated to other parts of the game physics, lighting etc.

The other challenge is creating fast low memory point cloud editing systems that creates convincing objects quickly and easily. Such editors exist and are powerful but its easy to get things wrong. If Unlimited Detail Technology is adopted by a object editor then even the editing of the objects could be done on smaller computers. Also don't forget that it will very quickly go 3d on the screen.

Another break through may follow. Very fast Voxel physics. If they can use a search algorithm to find the colour for each screen pixel then a second 'camera' may be used to look at the data in another way. What's the closest voxel doing? Is it solid, stationary, moving, fluid, flexible, gas? Which are my bounding box, avatar, clothing. Is it the ground. A voxel that can move could be water, fog, rain, bullets, magic fire balls, or just grass crushing under foot. By adding a byte to the points in the cloud you could add 255 options.

The world of computer gaming is about to spike. Hang on to your hats it will be a wild ride.

Church in second life - A messianic passover.

2010-03-29T04:37:00.000-07:00

I've just attended a church service in Second Life.

The presentation was a messianic Passover. Messianic Jews are Jewish Christians that preach that Jesus is the messiah of the Jews with a full exposition of the gospel in Hebrew (and English in this case). They show you how the passover and other religious services in Israel pointed to and prophesied Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. The service was in a dedicated sky-box at “You are loved ministries” at EC Beach Community. (in Second Life a sky-box is a building or platform that seems way up in the sky above the clouds or in them.) This was a big sky box at an amazing height. Eternal creations owns 6 sims in second life forming the EC island.

Rivkah and Judah Sorbet gave the sermon with assistance from others. Included was a special interactive tray where selecting items did things like filling or drinking wine. Consuming the symbolic foods and breaking the bread. All these parts of the ritual have teaching function that is often lost on people practicing them because they don't see the connection to the messiah-ship of Christ.

Here are some pictures.

86 people attended.

Thats a lot for any event in a computer MMO game.

Lag was bad but everyone was so interested it did not matter.

Its as very nice building. Everything was StoneAngle Ingelwood's handy work. Even the briliant tray.

The tray on the wall showed us what to do on our tray.

We all had a tray. I'm the one in the blue black solar cell spacesuit.

We then all wandered out to the red sea (white foam in the distance). Lag was bad but not enough to deter us.

We crossed the red sea and then went to watch a movie. Rivkah gave an appeal worthy of Billy Graham. An evangelical call to unbeleivers to come and ask Jesus to take their sins away and help run their life properly. Here was then music performances and a farwell.

Some stayed afterwards to talk and thank the organisers for the great church presentation.
As someone pointed out church is people not buildings. This is even truer in second life where buildings come and go with the touch of a button. But still great art and great teaching go together.

Thank you everyone who made it work.

[Click on the pictires for full screen views.]

Image holder post

2010-03-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

I'll be sticking various images here from time to time.

Gale crater roofed in.

Another variation. The purple is really red and blue warning stripes.

Minecraft stuff . Treasure chest

Green dragon boats

2010-03-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

Sea steading is the idea of colonising the open ocean with homesteads and floating cities. The greatest challenge is waves that can swamp a sea stead and cause a constant rocking motion that some people find impossible to endure for long. The seasteads can be made smaller if we 'throw' the food production system overboard. I.e. Move any farming out to smaller structures that are built to float independent of our seasteads.
Plants don't get sea sick.
Though to much agitation can puree the garden there are systems that could work if we create sheltered waters with some kind of floating break wall. More on that at http://appliedimpossibilies.blogspot.com/2010/03/float-ponds-in-second-life.html and http://appliedimpossibilies.blogspot.com/2010/03/sea-steading-as-fleet-of-vessel-classes.html

However in more open waters a sea stead floating farm has to be more robust and complex. In looking at this I developed the fluke boat.

I have refinned these vessels a little to create a new craft the dragon boat.
I haven't done the engineering but believe they will be technologically possible in the near future. Here's a work up in second life. Space Destiny sim.

What we have here is dragon boat, a mock up of a sea fort sea stead [not mine but good] a sandy coloured wharf, and a floating algae oil farm (green & blue).

The dragon boat green house is a robot. The head is radar and ladar units in a decorative pod. Ladar is laser radar a system for detecting other vessels and mapping the waves at short range. It also has a sonar under the water line and GPS. The main bay is a greenhouse with soil, hydroponics or airponics. Water comes from reverse osmosis or forward osmosis with fertiliser drawing water through a membrane. Most of the water is fully recycled through a fish farming system (fresh water fish). The craft unmanned with automated systems. In good weather and low waves the farmer boards to plant, tend and harvest.

The boat has flukes: wave power systems that propel the vessel.

The fluke is the blue wing. It hinges with the waves but is retarded. As the waves lift the boat the fluke resists and forces water backwards. As the water is heavier than the boat the boat moves forward. Fluke boats are not fast but they can sail for months limited only in the durability of the hinges and retarding springs. Such things can be built to last years but I'd still want to check them every few months.

The dragon boat has a high streamlined bow and stern for a reason, its not just decoration. These structures are hollow and buoyant.

When a big wave hits them the volume in the water increases and the centre of balance shifts. The bow or stern rides up the wave rather than digging into it. Since there is no deck for the water to catch on and fill it is harder to sink. In high seas the plants get a rough ride. They may be damaged but they aren't destroyed.

Two or more dragon boats could be integrated into a multi hulled vessel.
However I favour the idea of retractable linkages(not shown). That allow you to switch and swap units in the double or triple hull form. This also allows them to break the linkages and stand clear of each other in a heavy storm. Since in the tropical oceans the sea is calm in the morning and stormy in the afternoon and early night this means most would be linked in the morning and delink and scatter by 3 pm.

In reality the vessels hull may be wider and sit lower in the water. With extra volume below the water line but second life has its limits.

Float ponds in Second life

2010-03-07T05:36:00.000-08:00

I have created a little display of sea farming, sea steading and fish farming in Second Life. Its at the EDAKent at Scilands. Look up Wesley Farspire in game I'll show you around.

SLURL http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/EDAKent/38/199/25

What's a float pond? I hear you ask.
A liferaft with plants in it. The design is my own but some work was done on this in the 1970's. Today we have the plastics and the plants so we can begin.

These SL float ponds are about 10 m across in reality they would be 20 to 50 m in diameter. The key is flexibility to roll with the waves, design for recycling and mass production. (life rafts are still often hand made)

Most are swamp or aquatic plants. Some are salt tolerant shore plants. A covered pond with a sturdy deck could grow vegetables.

See more at:
http://vacoyecology.com/Bubble_ponds_fluke_boats.html
More pictures below.

This is an open ocean sea stead fish farm.
The floating algae farm, green, feeds small fish in one of the spherical cages. The little fish feed the big fish in the other cage. At the back is a solar powered upwelling pump bringing rich deep water up from 300 meters or more down. The surface of the ocean is relatively starved of fertility but rich in light. The upwelling pump fixes that. The result is an increase in the abundance of fish and more food for humanity.

Look, a tree?
In theory a float pond could even grow wood. Mangroves anchoured into a floating mesh with extra buoyancy and a membrane to prevent mud from falling out the bottom or washing over the edge. It could be fertilized with plant matter and algae.
It would however be of little economic value. We need to restore the mangroves to our shore lines. I'll post on that later.

Why have a sea steading display in a space related sim in SL?
Because to feed the next 30 billion we need to colonize the seas and the stars and every where else. If you can master the sea then space is easy. There's more of it and there are no storms. Key resources can be found on the sea bed, the ocean surface, as well as other planets and asteroids.
One of the criticisms of space colonisation is that 'we should fix the earth before going off world.' This is just plain wrong! Some of us believe that we can do both at once and we will never 'fix' the world to everyone's satisfaction. The real challenge is to reduce the impacts on species. Preventing extinctions. We have solutions for this to.

Sea steading as a fleet of vessel classes.

2010-03-03T03:36:00.000-08:00

Most think of sea steading in terms of cities on the sea with a single design and structure. I.e.
Oceania.

Or one of the more modern TSI sea stead designs.

or a spar or flip ship design.

However, it is highy likely that a sea stead complex would be a mix of such systems intergrated into a city.

Something like this.

Here we have a large variety of vessels and structures.

Dark Green are ship based seasteads and unmanned floating farm units. These are powered to tow the other structures as required.
Gray are wave damping floating break-walls or "wave-steads". Most of these would be light industrial, chemical plants or farm decks. These rest on wave-damping structures that create calm water in the areas behind them. They need not be continuous as long as the wave damped areas they create overlap. They are not to scale width wise; they would be much thinner.
Light Green is a large floating mat based sea stead/ farm system. A Continuous mat of float ponds and inflatable decks with switchable rigidity. (Floating digital matter.)
Orange are large clusters of interlocked seasteads forming the business center. Note one is also a ship bases sea stead for trade further afield.
Yellow is algae oil farms: very big but modular arrays of floating bladders of fuel producing organisms.
Blue are small spars, flip ship like spars and other smaller units.

The area enclosed by the gray wave damping units is calmer with wave heights ~1% of the normal height. Since most seasteaders are hoping to pick an area where average wave heights are 3 -5 meters (9-17 feet) this would reduce them to 3 - 5 cm (1-3 inches) 10% of the energy of those waves could be tapped for energy by the wave-steads.

Everything would be held in place by a array of large deep sea anchors.

A wave stead rests on truck like axles connected to non circular buoyant tubes. These Salters duck tubes, cream in the picture, rotate in response to the action of the waves. Because the wave forces are converted to rotating oscillation we can tap off that force as usable energy and the bulk of the wave energy does not convert into heave or rocking on the sea stead on top. Energy only units would have a skeletal deck and no super structure. The first duck, visible, Damp the waves 90% The second, hidden, damps the residual 10% down by 90%.

The ship based sea stead would look like this. There's a man standing on the bow for scale.

http://vacoyecology.com/Bubble_ponds_fluke_boats.html

The top three structures could all be used to some extent in the sheltered area of the center.

Modern cities are not built with one architecture dominating the landscape. Why should we try that at sea?

Sea steading design based on flip ship and a life boat.

2010-01-27T00:04:00.000-08:00

Flip ship is here. http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/voyager/flip/

It should work as a sea stead.
Ive done my own design. I'm not an engineer but I'm linking up with people. At http://seasteading.org/

The vessel sits flat in good weather and while traveling.

When the owners want to avoid the waves they flood the bow and pump dry the stern. This lift the the stern mounted pods that contain the house.

Each pod has three rooms; about 25 cubic meters in each pod.

In cross section it looks like this.

Each pod is a fully functional life boat.

Where to now on war.

2010-01-24T19:55:00.000-08:00

We are mired in a state of war with militant Islam, with a cold war with South American Marxism brewing on the side. Our armies are not holy warriors fighting for Christendom but generally humanists who can't tell friend from foe. Our weapons kill civilians or sanctions starve them. We have no good intelligence tools and the ones we do have are open to manipulation by both sides.

We are under attacks from entities that go beyond the nation state and perhaps supersede it. I don't believe the US government blew up the twin towers on 9/11. I don't believe they were that capable of organising or concealing such an action. I do believe that that something like Al Qaeda could and did organise 9/11 and 7/7. Clearly all the armies and rockets of the west are no match for the simple tools of improvisation, fanaticism and self sacrifice. That is not new as the IRA, the weathermen and the Oklahoma bombing all testify.

To wage war we must deal with the fact that our enemies leaders don't march out and face our leaders in personal combat. They hid behind an army of conscripts, brain washed 19 year olds and fanatical believers. Al Qaeda holds its planing meeting at weddings so that the cost of attacking them is great. Despots and deluded politicians whip their populations up to stand with them. We are forced to mow down millions to kill one man or false idea.

Isolationism and non-aggression are not defences. Free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of travel and immigration, freedom to change religion are all provocations in the eyes of Islam, communism and socialism.

We can't keep liberty bottled in our territory. Everything is global: faith, belief, truth. The air we breath and the resources we own are all claimed by despots or would be despots some where.

The simple decision to not allow imams to blare their calls to prayer over Swiss cities with minimal Moslem populations has made neutral Switzerland into a target. The decision to ban the veil in France may sound harsh but in areas that allow the full veil girls who don't ware the garment are attacked. Acid is thrown in their face. This happens in the west as well as the middle east. The burqa also hides criminals and terrorists. Western women's refuges are overwhelmed with women and Girls that are fleeing such attacks. Accepting apostates as refugees or honouring their property rights is a provocation to most Islamic cultures. Honouring any property rights of a refugee fleeing communism is an offence to communism. Even their education and the refugees clothes are the property of the state according to some left wing groups.

Even if a austrolibertarian republic were created it would by definition need to have open borders, free speech, freedom of weapon ownership, the right to perfect private encryption. Courts would be private with the risk of both a Moslem and Marxist private judiciary arising. To crush such sharia judges or any of the above liberties would amount the creation of a non libertarian state.

In such a society statist rebels and foreign agents would invade without weapons. Buying them on arrival, their communications and planning would be encrypted and could not be monitored or used in the courts as a result. Any immigrant refugee could buy up weapons and wage unofficial war to free his family. Instead of a few entangling treaties we would have a hundred unofficial, uncontrolled and amateur operations killing thousand each and provoking every external entity.

The absence of a foreign policy is still a foreign policy.

We need new tools, idea's, solutions. I believe there are good ideas like non lethal weapons, robotic sentries and vehicle inspectors. New frontiers on the sea and space. Somehow we, who don't believe in the planned economy, must plan out way out of this mess.

Main steam media in the hot seat.

2010-01-13T03:20:00.000-08:00

Global warming has put the mainstream media in the hot seat. Obvious bias, poor knowledge of the arguments and a tendency to favour the sensational over the factual has all caught up with them.

The mainstream media still think the global warming is a right wing plot. Someone forgot to tell the communists in China. When the data came in and the emails popped up on the of 19th November they acted shutting down most chances of cap and trade, a global tax on fossil fuels.

Actually the whistle blower first posted the climategate emails on the 17th of Nov. It was ignored for two days and is still being ignored, in content and meaning, by most in the mainstream media.

How much trouble are the CRU scientists in?

Enough to be in court for years.

But will the mainstream media be behind those cameras or the new media and the blog sphere?

Venusian Dreams.

2010-01-08T07:16:00.000-08:00

In Venus's dense CO2 atmosphere oxygen is a lifting gas like helium is here. You could live in the balloon.

Top an airship homestead in Venus's atmosphere. CO2 is processed into O2 and hydrocarbons; from them we make carbon fibre and plastics.

A larger village ship with gliding wings.
Below a top like structure with a homestead ship docked to it. This structure makes smaller ships. The green is vegetation under glass/ polymer. Blue is solar cells for power.

Getting bigger and bigger. Cities in the sky. You can never land the surface is unsafe but robots will be sent down to mine the furnace below. The acid clouds can be processes by flying robots to produce water and fluorine. The sulfur fuels the mining robots.

Perhaps with a little genetic engineering we could create plants that fly. There are aquatic plants and sea weeds with gas filled bladders. We need to tweek the genes for size and shape. We could do that on earth in a pure CO2 dome. All the oxygen from photo-synthesis would need to go into the lift bladders. The plants roots would need to be fertilised and watered by robots; creating a flying ecosystem of aliens. Juvenile plants would bud off the parents or grow as symbiont on the robot bees back. Our options are as big as our imagination.

How do we get there. We need a ship that's solid enough to get off the earth but light as air at Venus. A rocket with a gaseous fuel or oxidiser, and a lot of airtight empty space.

Dr Geoffrey Landis was the first to write on this. http://www.geoffreylandis.com/

http://rt.grc.nasa.gov/power-in-space-propulsion/photovoltaics-power-technologies/news/venus-mission-design/

The art here was done in second life, gimp and Microsoft draw.
We dare not set foot on Venus but we can possibly colonize it. Yes it will be risky but so was seafaring and flying once.

Climategate cop-15 was I right or what?

2009-12-18T22:46:00.000-08:00

My predictions on Gary Norths site have in part been borne out.
Also found here.
Cop-15 turned into a giant bargaining table where extreme things were proposed to drive everyone to a minimal compromise. Two rival proposals came out: one billing the first world and one billing the third world for the cost. Neither we meant to be signed. Both were decoys for the screaming mob. Meanwhile the heads of state, working in private, settled on a pact which promised everything, enforces nothing and pays a pittance to the loudest of the third world and the low islands.See.

No one was scapegoated in public but when Phelim McAleer when through the conference in a polar bear suit calling for Phil Jones, people all knew who that meant. They swore at him, threw things at him and tried to interfere with the camera and sound man. Phil Jones is the climatologist at the heart f the UEA CRU scandal. Polar bear suits were banned soon after.

Behind closed doors I suspect he (Phil not the polar bear) got mentioned a lot. Could any government have mentioned climategate in public. Probably not. The Cop-15 conference was teaming with true believers that were so fanatical that even the Presidential body guards of a dozen countries combined could not have held them at bay.

So what's the midnight deal.
The key features of note are that the targets a set in terms of temperature not CO2. This means that the 2 degrees target will be met by all because there is no real warming. Governments can later report on the current cooling trend as if its a new discovery and back away from CO2 reduction and commitments.
Expect a lot on negative feed backs soon. Its the suppressed science that the CRU etc were trying to keep out of peer review.

The other thing is that its non binding CO2 commitments and non binding financial commitments. None of there will be enforceable or enforced. With inflation expected in two years the amounts are trivial. Pledges to pay for solar energy technology depend on the cost of that technology, those costs are falling but with the dollar falling faster this means few renewables than the free-market, free from both Keynesian policies and government subsidies, would have delivered.
A few tens of billions have been promised to the third world and low islands. May third world counties can't survive without handouts from the west, they would get that money somehow.

The key game at cop-15 was to get out of commitments while all professing to be committed. In the light of the climategate it was not about saving their seats at the next election, its about saving their party for the election after that. This was a process of backing a way from the man eating polar bear with as few sudden moves as possible.

Are there any secret promises to scape goat the CRU, you-bet-cha. If governments aren't gunning for them then half the NGO's will be when their funding, both government and donations, collapse next year.

Lastly there's a huge blizzard descending on Copenhagen. Everyone may be stuck for a few days. Some noted that huge numbers of people flew in private Jets. These have been parked at smaller airports across the region. Their stuck. Al Gore may have to hitch a ride home on the Rainbow Warrior. What happens when a few thousand Bureaucrats, a quarter of a million bored but angry NGO's, communists and anarchists all get stranded in a snow storm together? The cops have had it with cold riot gear and frozen batons. Its not going to be fun. Technically their contract with the UN ends tomorrow.

The blizzard also means that many heads of state will be getting home earlier than most of their minders. Once clear of the big green monster how many will speak their minds? You could see something of this in the interviews after midnight. Questions of who's to blame or why decisions went the way they went are met with a pensive pause. You could see the words in their heads. “Don't mention climategate, don't mention the Hadley emails.” And then off they went with the usual waffle of meaningless answers.

I haven't had so much fun in years. I'm not a Prophet I'm not even Profitable. I should probably fix that.

Climategate – Declare Victory and go home.

2009-12-18T02:02:00.000-08:00

[First posted on Gary North's web site on Dec 05,2009. Dr North has used it on the site's front page and on the Lew Rockwell site. With my permission. I'm posting here so its searchable. One for the history books.]

Could it be? Heads of state are changing their schedules: heading to Copenhagen later in the conference.

I've seen the climategate data, it is huge. It will kill the Climatic Research Institute. The emails are not fatal, bad but not fatal. They indicate bias, manipulation, junk science, criminal behaviours and fraud but that would not convince heads of state to change their plans. However there's raw data and blocks of code attached to these emails. Forget smoking guns; this is the whole armoury. With bloody finger prints and all.

People have now had time to analyze the data and code as well as the emails.

Questions are being asked by too many entities.

What breakthrough could they possibly have in mind? What sudden glimmer of progress could they possibly see? Are they just rushing to action while the mainstream media is silent? Acting before the majority of old media watchers [victims] catch on?

I've done climatology and international environmental law. The process does not adapt well to new information but it does work well when it switches to the blame game mode.

I don't think a cover-up will work for several reasons. It may not even be tried.

1. Government hackers in CIA, MI5 and a dozen other intelligence agencies will probably have hacked their way into Hadley and other institutes to check the data for their political masters. Obama, Hu Jintao, Medvedev and even Brown may not like climategate but you can bet your bottom dollar that they are checking to see if the hacked/leaked emails are real and match the data in the institutes hard drives.
2. Anyone acquainted with Fabian socialism will know that when a Fabians' plot is exposed the networks generally turn on those members sloppy enough to get caught in the act: i.e., Jones and Mann. Obama is very much a master of this fabian socialist tactic, dropping hot potatoes faster than anyone I know.
3. The British parliament entitlements leak has resulted in a majority of the politicians there not renominating. The parliament after the next election will be clean skins. Untainted with the errors of the past. The election may also go to the conservatives with the Liberal democrats forming the main opposition. Labour could be decimated. All the investigators will probably know this. There's no point protecting the status quo, if its already busted or in flux.
4. Many of the investigators will be personally more concerned with the economy and keeping their own jobs. Few will be climatologists. All will face carbon taxes. If anthropogenic climate change fades away it costs them nothing. If they cover up and succeed; it still costs them much via carbon taxes. If their cover-up is blown it costs them everything.
5. To the few 'disinterested' climatologists in the investigation, the fall of Jones and Mann from the top will be of benefit. It raises their chances of promotion. Everyone moves up a rung in the bureaucratic hierarchy.
6. Lastly there is an internal division within the UN over the Food verses Fuel debate. It's just as bogus as climate change but it's a strongly-held position and climategate undermines one side, those pushing biofuels. The other is waiting in the wings to cry "we need global governance to avoid famine."

There thus good reasons to throw the Hadley institute and its sister institutes to the wolves and cry victim, 'We were conned!' Many more reasons to cover your tail and scapegoat these scientists than to stand by your local 'warmist' and fall with him or her. I think we will see a radical change of direction. With heads of state ordering the IPCC to do a massive review, perhaps acting on the biggest demand of the skeptics and publishing all the data. Declaring that the problem is smaller than expected so after a review we will implement a minimal-cost no-regrets climate plan.

Such a plan would cost much less because they could throw out the expensive cap and trade and most of the first-world to third-world subsidies by setting much lower targets. Scrap the taxes and industry-destroying clauses but leave in a small wedge of bureaucracy [Government always grows]. That would turn COP-15 into a giant union deal. One where they come to the table with a huge list of demands, most of which are unreasonable bargaining chips to be thrown on the table, while you manoeuvre your opponent to the position of perceiving your small but still significant demand as quite reasonable.

I hope I'm wrong. A cover-up is more fun and, when it comes unstuck, does more damage to the status quo. A massive stuff-up at Copenhagen just as the truth hits the mainstream will be devastation for the players in this global game. Particularly those facing elections soon.

While we all agree that governments are somewhere between hopeless and dangerous we all know that the one thing they do best is protecting their own vested interests and positions at the top.

As for the perpetrators of the fraud: Jones, Mann, etc., "Bernie" Madoff got 100 years for stealing or loosing a few billion dollars from a few thousand people. The climate mob have ripped off or wasted ten times as much with billions of victims.

Or to put it another way: "If someone did a graph like this in a stock prospectus, he would be jailed." ~ Jo Nova, on Michael Mann's hockey stick graph.

An own goal for the CRU Hockey team.

2009-12-17T03:52:00.000-08:00

What if there was no whistle blower at the UEA or CRU.
What if FOIA.zip was not produced and released by a noble whistle blower but was created and released to the wild accidentally by Phil Jones et al. Could it be that Phil Jones may be the whistle blower but doesn't know it.

OK It sounds nuts but bear with me. The theory is a bit complex but its an exquisitely ironic and too good to ignore.

We know Phil Jones and the others wanted to delete the data and emails to cover-up their actions and errors from those true climatologists that want to ask key questions like, which stations did you 'not' use in the climate graphs.

We all should know that simply shifting a folder or email into the windows bin does not actually destroy the data. It relabels it and/ or changes the file tables. Any digital detective looking at the computer would know where to look for these 'deleted' files and folders. It also does not clear temp folders or logs of file usage. A cybernetic officer plod looking for digital records that are requested under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) would just load a little disk that looked behind the façade of the trash bin first.

Phil needs help. Phil needs a program that sweeps his hard drive clean, sanitises it, wipes the data permanently, invisibly and irreversibly. He needs something like this or this or maybe even this. He needs untraceable eraser software.

I haven't used these. Nor do I think he did. These are just examples of what's out there. There are indications that this is how the deletions were done but there's a catch.

I've always thought these programs a little suspect. If I were a frustrated computer forensics' officer working on fraud and vice all day for years this technology would be public enemy number one. Every other case I would be left suspecting that these programs are being used to cover up the crime. However I would also realise that its the ideal tool for the prefect sting.

I think officer plod somewhere in the world made his own data eraser and distributed it. I'm not saying the above three programs in the links are it. There's been a lot of turnover in the field since 1996.

I think our nefarious climatologists got a bugged version. It seemed to do the job but it created a hidden zip folder that archived all the data. By using this software all the Hadley people systematically selected the data and stored it. Only the most damming evidence got deleted with such care, so the archive seems to have been crafted by someone close to the data, with climatology skills and full knowledge of the manipulations. It was, they all were.
Then one of two things happen.

1) Its not an active bug just an archiving system. Its waiting for the cops to find it. However changes in the computer security at the UEA or Hadley, or an internal trigger based on time, 5 years are up, data size or a key word in the text trips it to send the zipped archive out. It emails the whole thing to an appropriate whistle blower site.
Or 2) It is a bugged eraser. The bugged eraser is no good if it doesn't have a place to phone home to. It could call its vice squad creator and report in. Yet since the program is not quite legal calling home directly is a problem. It needs to go via a set of re-mailers. Even in 1996 this part could be almost fully automated.

Either way our jaded cop turned spy may not at first know what he's got. Its not obviously illegal: not child or snuff porn; financial records or anything else he's familiar with. If its a bug he ignores it for years, it keeps getting updated, it keeps reporting in, he glances at it but takes no action. If its a robot it reports in in early 2009.

Then mid 2009 climate change is in the media. Its dominating the air waves, there's even a few mentions of the climate skeptics. Our cop connects the dots re-reads the emails and decides to do something with it. But what?

Ok the UEA is in the UK so one copy goes to the Attorney General's Office (AGO), or MI5 or Scotland yard. Nothing happens it probably gets ignored as a prank email. (Brits take note your homework is to ask around and find it.) Then a version goes to the BBC but again nothing happens.
The third attempt is to send it to Realclimate but unbeknown to our accidental climate skeptic its a mouth piece for the US end of Mike Mann's hockey team. (In it up to their necks with the CRU). Mmmm running out of ideas. Oh the first email is from Russia lets try that. Bingo! A server with a good reputation among cops and whistle blowers gets the file and the rest is history.
Cute. We have the conspirators crafting the evidence that will hang climate change. An unconnected party, probably a cop halfway around the world, posting the data. Strictly speaking he is a hacker and a vigilantly but he's untraceable. If he's ever asked he can claim that he was after legitimate criminals with semi-legal software (fully legal in some countries) and caught the CRU by accident. If the first copy went to the British government but was ignored he's off the hook. That's why we need to look.

Yes its a wild idea but it fits quite well.
It is probably just fiction. It would make a good TV episode. Oh boy its fun to think about.
Its also a warning, crime doesn't pay and software isn't always what it seems. I can't prove that there's any bugged eraser software out there. There probably should be.

Insert 'ti' above.

2009-12-16T07:08:00.000-08:00

Spot the spelling mistake in the URL above. No one remembers to spell check URL's when they acquire them. I didn't and missed a T. I should blame Dyslexia but that's just an excuse. I just plain got lazy.

I'll probably leave it. Fixing it will be a hassle and pretending to be infallible is someone else's job. have a good laugh. If you want someone to find my site just tell them it search Applied Impossibilities that'll get it. Who spells out url's anyway. I can't even spell impossibilities.

Climategate is blowing up in the IPCC's face.

2009-12-16T06:17:00.000-08:00

Governments are stuck. The people in the climate gate emails, 'the hockey team', are facing prosecution. There are hundreds of independent legal entities, state governors, provincial assemblies, quasi-autonomous government audit agencies like the Office of the Auditor General in the USA. The heads of state don't control them. They can and will sue. Private law suits have now also been filed. Forget the greenwash hogwash, the coal and oil industry will be lawyering up and ready to sue the IPCC into extinction.

The heads of state at Copenhagen can't go forward to sign the Copenhagen agreement and risk ridicule when the court find against the hockey team. The hockey team is the 42 odd people behind all the IPCC science. Backing this losing team is not just fatal to a politicians re-election chances; this can and will destroy many political parties.

However if they don't sign the brainwashed mob inside and outside the building at Copenhagen will openly rebel and riot. A million public servants world wide will join that rebellion in vain hopes of protecting their jobs.

We are seeing the collapse of a paradigm in real time. What took years in the past is happening in weeks. When academia put Galileo under house arrest for his views his supporters waged a quiet campaign to win the world with new navigation charts. Because he was right and the academics of his day were wrong; his charts were more accurate and more useful. They won shipping merchants and crews and won the day. Yet the process took years.

Like wise the Holy Roman Empire, a synthesis of royal and catholic church power, came to a catastrophic end with the rise of French republicanism and Napoleon. French atheism was far more ruthless than Protestantism and therefore could do what the reformation would not do. However that process took several years.

[When the Berlin wall fell many in eastern Europe were surprised but they had already lost faith in communism. This will be different.]

The events of this month will be like the shattering of a religion. The very idea of government managed and funded science will be called into doubt.

Millions will be shocked awake. Some will react with violence, some with silence, withdrawing from public view forever. Some unfortunately will suicide. Not since Nagasaki have we seen an ideology, the god Emperor Hirohito, broken so fast by the power atomic bomb.

Good climategate videos

2009-12-16T05:53:00.000-08:00

These put things in perspective while helping clarify the details.

Lord Monckton on climategate.

Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference from CFACT on Vimeo.

Tim Ball. interviewed by James Corbett

Enjoy these resources.

Global warming is urban heat island warming

2009-12-10T03:44:00.000-08:00

This is the simplest case for urban heat island (UHI) warming being most of the 'global' warming seen in the data.

And its fun to see a kid and his biologist dad showing how easy it is to show that the climate lobby has got it wrong.
In a few months time school kids world wide will be doing this and the expensive climate panic attack will be over.

Urban heat island is dismissed by the 'warmists' as a signal much less than global warming. UHI = 0.1 degree a decade verses 0.5 degrees a decade for global mean surface temperatures.

Here: Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
P. D. Jones,
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
D. H. Lister
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Q. Li
National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008JD009916.shtml
and
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/90lettnat.htm

This looks at weather stations in China but others have noted that the raw-data from those weathers stations is not consistent with the claims.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/02/26/phil-jones-and-the-great-leap-forward/
and www.informath.org/apprise/a5620/b23.pdf
These areas were possibly disrupted by communist take over and the cultural revolution. Also China has industrialised and urbanised a few decades after the west as a consequence of some lessons learned in the west May have been applied to the Chinese cities. It turns out however that most of these rural weather stations weren't really rural enough and some of the data sets from china now can't be found, If they ever existed.

The real problem is sloppy weather station installation and management.
http://omniclimate.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/barbecue-climate-stations-reality-catches-up-with-fiction/
Various uncontrolled heat sources: parking areas, air-conditioners, uninsulated buildings, have crept up on the weathers stations Stevenson screens. The box the instruments are in. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

This happens in many so called rural weather stations.
Jones et al may exclude a few big cities from their analysis in response to UHI but they don't check the environment on the ground.
That's been left up to a bunch of volunteers at http://www.surfacestations.org/
What are we paying the bureau of meteorology to do?

I feel the need to buy a camera and photograph a few local weather stations.

I'm in danger of becoming a sceptic

2009-11-28T23:58:00.000-08:00

I'm not supposed to be a greenhouse sceptic, I'm trained in the field. Yet the data is poring in contradicting the idea of Anthropogenic greenhouse effect. Its looking bad for the greenhouse lobby. The Hadley institute leak was the last straw. It has clear indications of bias, data manipulation, active harassment of independent scientists and criminal evasion of FOI laws.

Here's Glen Becks take on it.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/11/23/glenn-beck-skewers-scientists-involved-climategate

The best documentary covering the problem is:
Global Warming - Doomsday Called Off
Part 1

Pt 2

Pt 3

Pt 4

Pt 5

Science is all about testing theories not panicing about models. The tests have been done and the theory is busted.

There are still good reasons to move away from oil and to develop more efficient energy technologies. Solar will play a huge part of the future of energy. We have more time to get a viable technology. Its impossible to rush to the future, its very hard to get anything done in a panic attack. The panic on greenhouse should end and a new focus on getting energy technologies that cost so little even the third world can use it. That means getting sustainable energy costs down to 1 cent a Kilowatt. And yes of the opportunity presents that will include zero carbon technologies if there no more expensive than 1 cent a kilowatt.

Why Detriot wont Recover

2009-11-20T01:33:00.000-08:00

Raphial Morgado, angel labs, has made a design break through with the toroidal engine. His design perfects the timing for this combustion chamber design. The Main stream car industry has ignored him. They either disbelieve him or can't implement the technology because of government red tape.
There are clauses in the various bail-outs and earlier laws designed to protect oil, steel and the many parts manufacturers in the existing industry. The massive yet tiny engine disrupts that by using less fuel, steel and far fewer parts to do the same job.

The MYT toroidal engine has a massive displacement, very long dwell time at (the equivalent of) Top Dead Center in a very small volume and mass with a power to weight ratio greater than Jet engines. Its biofuel compatible, burns diesel cleaner than most engines and would in a car be as small as the cars alternator.
See these youtube movies:
SJSU Part 11: Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) Demo (1) by Raphial Morgado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iVlJGGhSfg

SJSU Part 12: Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) Demo (2) by Raphial Morgado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm8aEp47ZE

SJSU Part 13: Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) Demo (3) by Raphial Morgado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBHCqDL3QEs

SJSU Part 14: Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) Demo (4) by Raphial Morgado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbOmUWlfw9c

SJSU Part 15: Massive Yet Tiny (MYT) Demo (5) by Raphial Morgado
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y80wA-CYQeo

His plan is to make and sell to the retrofit market on second hand cars. This power-plant in the engine bay of most cars would leave a huge empty space under the bonnet. He give good business advice in these video's. I believe the MYT engine is so compact and light that it makes super hybrids, 300 km/L equivalent possible. A MYT engine with 80 km of compressed air or batteries sould be possible as a retrofit. Where greenhouse matters, cars with carbon capture possible as well. Biofuel finishing plants in a vehicle also become an option. It opens many doors.

The power to weigh ratio is so high it will revolutionize aerospace as well. As Mr Morgado says 'Elephants and brick houses will fly'. It makes jet packs, air-cars and super light airliners possible. The power to weight is that high. The defense implications are huge, Flying tanks are not out of the question; we already have the armour. The thing holding up cheap battle field robotics is compact power systems too.
However while Raphial Morgado is not a pacifist he wants to do cars first. If the west gets off oil the conflicts in the middle-east change radically. They wont end but the enemy will be broke.

The only catch is that very strong mechanical components are needed because there's so much power in such a small volume. This in part drives the markets disbelief. However the metallurgy is available at the required strength.

The US car makers have missed the boat. The future is out of their hands. If the MYT deploys as a drop in retrofit you will see big problems for the old industry. They will be left making body work and fancy suspension. Many others can do that too. The motor is the key to the car industry.
Expect the MYT to show up on the web as a mail order kit before the end of the recession.

Flywheel grid storage.

2009-06-16T23:06:00.000-07:00

Flywheels are a short term energy storage technology. Mostly used for voltage control and emergency Uninterrupted power at hospitals, computer centres, etc.
No one is looking at big cheap flywheels for day night grid storage but that should work if you can make it big and very cheap. Those working with flywheels to date have focused on high speeds. Energy density increases exponentially with speed but so does structural stresses and thus cost. Energy density increases lineally with mass but with concrete and steel the cost decreases with size and mass. Someone needs to look at whether really big wheels, what I call "millstone flywheels" would be viable.

Eestor

2009-04-01T23:07:00.000-07:00

The company Eestor claims to have developed a high voltage storage ultracapaciter. This is an ultracap that replaces a battery system in a vehicle. It is planned/claimed to have a greater power density than lithium, faster charge than all other systems and its cheaper than lithium. The US Department Of Energy has launched a competition that Eestor is almost guaranteed to win assuming Eestor is not lieing about its capabilities.

http://theeestory.com/topics/1474

The main discussion of Eestor is at:
http://bariumtitanate.blogspot.com/

Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eestor

If the company delivers its a huge story and a massive break through.
If they fail it will still be a big story.
Note: George Bush et al knew of this technology, Colin Powell, is an adviser to one of the investors.

Detroit knew of this technology which is why the US car industry was/is behaving strangely. Your not going to sink money into green cars using other technology while this kind of game changing break through is emerging. If ford sinks to much money into lithium or even ethanol and Eestor comes to the party then Ford looses all the R & D money spent. Billions. GM and Chrysler are in the same boat and so was Bush for that matter.
The seeming paralysis in the US is really quite sensible.

If Eestor can deliver on its claim it will be significant. Electric cars with 300 km range, hybrids with incredible fuel efficiencies, solar cars with good short haul ranges. It can also change trucks and trains improving the power to weight ratio making hybrid freight transport cheap. Electrical energy storage units EESU under the tray of a truck or stacked behind the cab with electric drive in each wheel or axle. Hybrid boats are already being built an EESU could make both hybrid and solar boats viable and common. The impact on submarines will be immense. Even hybrid air craft and drones become possible.
Stationary applications such as grid buffering, white goods with EESU buffering and car to grid would all be possible and cheap. Even if the EESU turns out to be not as bullet proof as they expect and can't be used in a moving vehicle the stationary applications will matter.
Lockheed-Martin is designing several kinds of energy storage unit for the army including a unit that fits in the back of a bullet proof vest and forms the back armour unit. Real bullet proof batteries. Most people don't know that we have powered exoskeletons, first generation battle field energy weapons -- lasers and stunners -- and combat robots. These are all waiting for an adequate power-source, an EESU or the smaller Lockheed-Martin units will revolutionize warfare.

I suspect that the arguments from the sceptics are just examples of an "I can't do it therefor it can't be done". An inadequate unimaginative response to design problems. Goddard and Von Braun's opponents used that one all the time in 1920-30 response to their rocketry claims.
The main criticism is that the EESU should heat up catastrophically on charging. Even I can see how to fix that problem; Chill while charging: build a fridge in the car to hold the EESU.

The big three car companies

2009-04-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

GM and Chrysler and perhaps also Ford are facing bankruptcy. The bailouts aren't and wont work. Dysfunctional companies go bankrupt.

Bankruptcy is not as bad as it seems. The skilled labor will be rehired by the new green car companies waiting in the wings, mostly California and Florida. The dozens of small EV and hybrid companies are at the point where they need to expand out of their converted warehouses and into proper factories so the big three's factories will be quickly acquired ant foreclosure. One reason why the three are being kept on life support is that they do defense contracts. However the vehicles they make are now obsolete. They can't do Hybrid biofuelled tanks, trucks or indestructible hummers. Others have demonstrated the capacity to do so. Defense will shift towards these new players. One company in Florida makes an armored bus. It floats, it can take an IED and when hit with a car bomb in Baghdad traffic it survived. Everyone walked out. http://www.gizmag.com/go/4178/ As we move to robotic warfare these Rhino runners will become the command vehicle of choice. Detroit can't compete with that -- its been losing defense contracts for years now.

It also wont cooperate with some of the new players like the new EV car people, the universities and companies with new power plants. http://www.cyclonepower.com/index.html and http://www.angellabsllc.com/index.html
Detroit is doomed, these men will end up owning the factories.

However the names may survive. The names Ford, GM, And Chrysler may be sold off with a little surviving 'goodwill' to either the new players or their own design and testing facilities which are already doing a little external work to make the pay.

Check my Eestor post for another reason why the big three wont go green. Eestor may have them beaten already and they know it.

Carbon trading and carbon capture.

2008-06-18T02:26:00.000-07:00

Carbon trading is a key to reducing greenhouse emissions by the cheapest means. I've found a good documentary on it.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1321273620/bclid1373284323/bctid1612511154

I believe that all kinds of solutions are needed and none should be overlooked.

Socialist Luddite plans for Greenhouse wont cut-it but capitalist R & D can!

2008-06-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

The Stockholm network has come up with a set of scenarios that model global energy and greenhouse trends.
http://www.stockholm-network.org/downloads/publications/CS_WEB.pdf
It’s discussed at green cars congress:
Devil in the Details: Three “Profoundly Disturbing” Carbon Scenarios

I'll Assume you've read it.
Ok the three Luddite socialist models so nicely described in the Stockholm report clearly don't work! So where's the real solution? The model that's missing is the one George Bush has been pushing.
"It’s the technology stupid!"
The 80 or so break through renewables per year we're seeing now all get capital, factory floors and buy up old energy technology distribution network (or get bought by them). A down turn in the rest of the world economy only serves to free up such capital, labour and factories.

We see a global deployment with biofuels at $30 a gallon and renewables and clean coal at 4.5c a kilowatt hour.
Metal air batteries, Nickel Zinc, cheap lithium and better ultra-capacitors combined with lightweight but stronger car bodies result is clean cars that go 130 km on a charge. The lighter weight can be achieved with carbon, aluminium, plastic panels with air bags in them and in the crumple zone. Some of these cars are biofuel plug-in hybrids for those that need more flexibility. The average car travel distance per day is 65 km.

These are recharged by an integrated mix of solar PV, Solar thermal, wind, wave, and run of the river hydro/currents plus waste to energy in most cities. All new car-parks are designed with charging points and many old ones are also equipped.
A massive investment in fast trains in the Midwest of the USA, Australia, China, India and Eastern Europe is done with semi-private bond financing.

Throw in a massive 5 year deployment of ‘clean energy systems Inc’ clean coal technology in ALL the coal power plants. And then turn the CO2 into man made carbonates. Mine slurry & tailings plus CO2 = building materials. Carbonsciences.com cleanenergysystems.com
What? Who told you clean coal would take 15 years? Oh those that can't do it, that's who!

All these technologies are coming out of the labs world wide in a massive and truly amazing deployment. When you add up the capacity of each of these technologies, they can power the world three times over.

Oil, gas and dirty coal may be obsolete within 15 years and green house reversing may begin within 20. Yes I said reversing! If the carbon in biomass is fed to clean coal power plants, then turned into carbonate building materials [chalk, plaster] then we can pull the carbon out of the atmosphere as fast as we put it there.
Carbon pricing will work in some rich countries but the third world can't afford them. However all these technologies will be profitable even in the third world.

Could Clean Coal be easy, quick and cheap?!

2008-06-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

In Australia Clean Coal has been hotly debated. It's rejected by many as a tool to divert greenhouse attention away from the coal industry. Most skeptics of clean coal have not thought through the motivation of the clean coal people. Those that have given it thought, believe its either a way to buy time for the industry until the climate skeptics win (a very unlikely event even if temperatures plummeted and the Arctic refroze tomorrow). Or that the industry is trying to hang on until a crisis forces governments to buy them out of the sector with large compensation packages. That may happen.

In reality no scientist or businessman advocates a technology that he or she believes will not work. The advocates of clean coal are genuinely seeking an answer that is a win win solution for both coal and climate. All genuinely believe that coal power will and must continue into the future as a viable energy technology. That our civilization is built on the cheap energy of coal and oil. Many in the green movement also believe this idea: arguing that the era of cheap energy is gone and with it global trade, travel and western wealth will all cease [or even be banned].

The coal advocates costing of wind and solar may be out of date. However as long as coal is cheaper than unsubsidized renewables they will be unconvinced by the arguments for renewables. They are also acutely aware that the third world can't afford carbon taxes or to pay subsidies of any kind. However China and India still can afford dirty coal.

The challenge then is not simply to forcibly replace coal but to make all energies as cheap and easy as coal or make coal as clean as solar. Given the global growth in energy demand we need to do both.

Australia has several very useful projects in coal gasification including Solar enhanced pyrolysis of coal to gas, hydrogen production with CO2 capture. Deep geological sequestration experiments are under way in Victoria.

I believe geological sequestration will never be permanent because the CO2 is already a resource thanks to Carbon sciences. http://www.carbonsciences.com/01/index.php This Company wants to convert CO2 into man made chalk and plaster. Artificial carbonates made from mine tailings and CO2. The process is cheap and pays for itself and the carbon is immobilized for millennia with no risk. This and the technologies outlined below produce a powerful tool that can be used on the large scale within a few, 1 to 8 years. We need not wait for 2025!

Many have noted that money is being pulled from some clean coal projects world wide. This is not because governments have given up on clean coal but is because some projects are already obsolete. In the USA two of the discontinued projects were related to sulphur and mercury respectively; not CO2 related at all.

Clean Energy Systems has a prototype technology at a very low cost. http://www.cleanenergysystems.com/. It’s unlikely that they are either overstating their technology or understating the cost of their burner; particularly if it can be mass produced. This device burns Coal slurry in pure oxygen in a burner derived from rocket technology. It can be mass produced and if it can be retrofitted to existing power plants then, again, deployment could take a half dozen years instead of a quarter century.

I know enough about oxygen production to know that we can reclaim most of the energy used to produce it. Oxygen is produced by refrigerating air down to a low enough temperature that it liquefies or dissolves in various solutions. The cryogenic (but not liquid) nitrogen produced, if it is heated with waste heat will expand powerfully and can drive an auxiliary turbine. As I said reclaiming most of the energy.

Also if adequate oxygen storage is added we can use off peak energy from any source to make the oxygen thus any energy that would have been wasted is reclaimed, amplified and used to facilitate clean coal. There are also plans to create a huge fleet of hydrogen fuelled cars, buses and other vehicles. If you use electrolysis to make hydrogen you also make oxygen. For each mole of hydrogen you make half a mole of oxygen. Only a true fool would throw that resource away! It is essentially free in both monetary and energy terms. A clean coal plant can't make oxygen by electrolysis. Renewable energy would be needed; but its a perfect job for renewables that don't match the minute by minute demand of the grid.

If a powerplant can be built with these technologies integrated in, the debate would be over. The age of cheap clean coal would begin. It would be easy to convince the Chinese and India to accept and deploy the same technology in place of dirty coal and nuclear technologies.

Some solar, wind and biomass technologies will compete with such clean coal technology. Ausra, nanosolar, suncube and solar chimneys. Most established wind power will compete. General Compression and Flodesign should also be competitive with cheap clean coal. There are other technologies that will compete.

Only this clean combustion technology can, over time, reverse greenhouse gas emissions by burning biomass with the coal to produce energy and carbonate building materials. Eventually the coal oil shale, tar sands, etc will run out leaving only biomass and plastics to fuel these plants. By then solar will have matured to the point where it's ubiquitous, has integral storage and is as cheap as house-paint.

Those advocating renewables need to welcome clean coal into the fold, now that it has arrived, and call it what it now is, another renewable energy: Clean Combustion. It's good for ~1200 years on coal and much longer on oil shale or tar sands,and then almost forever on biomass and plastics garbage.

Strategic Speculation

2008-06-04T23:56:00.000-07:00

Much of the rise in food prices, particularly corn, has been pushed up by heavy speculative buying on commodities markets. It strikes me that if someone wanted to kill biofuels then buying up the feed stocks and holding them would be an easy tactic. Those that are pro-biofuels need to ask such question. Yes we have drought in key agricultural areas and yes there is growing demand but neither explains why these new grain market speculators are not taking a profit by selling now that the prices are very high. However if the objective was to kill biofuels by pushing the feed stocks up and taking huge amounts of food from the market, then it is easy to see why a buy and hold position would be taken.

It also occurs to me that if you really wanted to kill biofuels you might buy up the edible by-products, dry distiller’s grains with Solubles and soy meal/ soy flour, at a price of $80 a ton and ship it to land fill. Some how somewhere we have LOST 40 million tons of DDGS and an unknown quantity of soy meal. If the Chicago board of trade listed all these by-products we would clearly see how we have not actually sacrificed any protein production capacity. If wet distiller’s grains can be made into food instead of producing DDGS, then even more edible food would be produced. In Biofuels we really can "have our cake (the fuels) and eat it" at the same time.

Who would have an interest in killing biofuels? Most of the Oil industries are just shareholder companies; Exxon Mobil has major investments in key components of lithium batteries. Shell invests in solar. They could all buy into the renewables at any time and some are.

The most likely actor in this game is Arab sympathisers with hard line Islamic (Wahhabism) extremism. If biofuels replaced oil then the spread of Wahhabist teaching, that prepares people for more extreme ideas like Al'Qaeda, would cease and Islam would be much less powerful.

A buy and hold position would also be cost free. The Middle East has ample money in its sovereign funds and private family accounts. Grain prices move slowly. They can buy, hold and as long as they eventually sell at just above the buy price, they can’t make a loss. It all looks like a normal transaction but the second attempt at replacing oil with biofuels lies in ruins.

Remember we have been here before after the first oil shock. A dozen Biofuels were researched and moved to production and at the critical point OPEC dropped the price of oil to record lows to kill everything. Hundreds of projects died, millions were lost. We are on the look out for the same tactic this time and with Russia back in the oil export game OPEC can’t kill biofuels with a simple price drop.

If the speculators are politically motivated and are trying to kill the biofuel industries what do we do? Only governments have the power to ask who these speculators are and check to see if they are likely to be engaging in an attack on the west. If this is true then laws must follow; Disclosure legislation that forces them into the light of day. Action to mandate that if food is horded via the global commodities and futures markets is remobilised. Hopefully this may not be necessary, I believe in free markets; simply naming the speculators may drive them to sell.

The biofuels did not cause the food crisis!

2008-06-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

It’s all stupid propaganda and media hype. When you make a ton of ethanol you make a ton of Dry Distillers Grains with Solubles [DDGS]. When you make a ton of biodiesel from soy you get 5 tons of soy flour or 1 ton of soy meal. It’s all STILL food; High protein food stuff at that. It’s been used up by the livestock food industry, pet food [I suspect] and in some cases it’s been made into food for humans. Some has been wasted because the food industry was not ready for the huge boost in production occurring in the USA and Europe.

The main drivers of the food crisis is panic buying by governments and others. The speculators that messed up the US real estate market are jumping in to food speculation. The price of oil and thus fertilisers has pushed up costs. There have been huge GM crop failures in Asia that have gone under reported. The organic farmers in the third world are laughing loudly but the media doesn’t want to know about good news.
The fair trade people have contributed by making the world prices known to third world farmers. They can't be conned into selling very cheap to middlemen any more. I think that’s good news because the poor prices in the third world prevent farm capitalization. Even Organic farmers need some capital for seed stocks, irrigation, harvesting technology and workers.
The famous Tortilla riots were due to price rises caused by a bakers union wage claim but they blamed the price on corn from ethanol to throw the screaming mob off the union boss’s scent. See:http://www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/FOODvFUEL.pdf

Ethanol and biodiesel can both be sustainable if you do six sensible things.
(1) Power the tractor and trucks on biofuels. [Or solar electric]
(2) Use solar thermal to heat the feed stocks and do 80% of the distillation.
(3) Install food plants at the ethanol plants to make noodles etc from the 1 to 3 kg of wet distillers grains produced per gallon of ethanol.
(4) Feed some of the DDGS or soy flour to livestock on or near the farms where the grain/beans came from. That way the nutrients go back to the soil and you get ample nitrogen.
(5) Convert sewerage from those livestock to sterile fertiliser where possible and send it to cellulosic ethanol crops, orchids and fibre crops. It can be used on non food crops but this is easier to sell to the public in some places if its used on non food crops.
(6) Read http://www.sustainableethanol.blogspot.com/

All these steps, or versions of them, will work with most cellulosic ethanol and algae oil as well as grain ethanol, or rapeseed and soy biodiesel. And yes that means food from switch grass and wood chips in the long term.
The cereals ethanol industry was always meant to be transitional to cellulosic ethanol and algae oil. Both are coming faster than expected so there are fewer cereals based ethanol projects being developed as people move to these more advanced options.
All biofuels projects face a challenge with conflicting economies and dis-economies of scale. The industry and government often fail to grasp these details. Measures 4 and 5 above tend to favor small plants on the farm but governments and the multinationals don't grasp this point.

Robotics

2006-03-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Robots are in the air but now a new class of fighting robots are ready to hit the battle field. Teleoperated bomb disposal robots are already used in Iraq and elsewhere but they don't shoot back. The new units arriving feb 2006 are fighters not expendable bomb disposal units or robots that are sent into a suspect building to find the bad guys with a fetish for high explosive underwear.
Talon sword will be begin active duty fighting the enemy. The 'bot' is 'weaponized' with guns and rockets added. See http://www.foster-miller.com/lemming.htm and http://www.foster-miller.com/literature/documents/Weaponized_Talon.pdf

Until now only a soldier can hold ground. A grunt is needed to protect tanks from other grunts with RPG's. A human is needed to check vehicles at the checkpoint. Some unlucky individual needs to go into a building to see if the occupant is friend or foe or a bunch of cowering confused children.
A B52 can't take people prisoner. A cruise missile can't interrogate people. A tank round can't notice a key document or retrieve a lap top.

Until now that's been the reason why we send the poor bloody infantry in.

Talon Sword will change that. It's still operated by a human but the operator is in a safe place; preferably a base or an Armoured vehicle. It can go in harms way and find out what's around the corner or what's in the next room. It can go over the top or charge up the hill.
If the enemy is encountered the robot can fight using either a rifle, grenade launcher or a light machine gun. Is backed up with other robots equipped a sniper weapon or rocket launchers. The sword is no bigger that a dog but it packs a bark that goes bang and a bite that goes boom.

We hope and pray the first operation are successful and that lives; both our troops and the enemy are saved by the advent of this new weapon. We must also hope and pray that the technology does not fall into the wrong hands and that as we learn to use it we are able to avoid friendly fire incidents and civilian casualties.

getting started

2005-09-27T21:25:00.000-07:00

There are many solutions to the worlds problems scattered like leaves around the world. If only we could bring them togeather with the organization and money then povety and other problems could be solved. Lets see what we can do.