Like, Thanksgiving And Stuff?

Well shucks. It appears to be November and I still have post stubs going back all the way to September. Lets see what we can do about that; DP style.

<-- Maybe this is why I'm psyched to see wind turbines on the horizon. I think they're pretty.

• EcoGeek: energy plant

This little future-Civic looks pretty kickass. Slap a type R badge on the back and stick a diesel under the hood and its really something to get excited about. Honda is bringing the diesel; its gonna rock; just bide your time.

• Jalponik: Type R to burn oil

Nice little tip here: cotton balls soaked in petroleum, once lit, will burn through pretty much anything. I'm gonna start carrying cotton balls and steel wool in one pocket with Vaseline and 6 volt batteries in the other.

• Lifehacker: Start a fire in the rain

We're gonna need a term for faster than fast as balls. Remember the concord? Childs' play. Forget twice the speed of sound, when you're in a hurry you need mach 5. Maybe a little faster. That's what the EU is hoping to get out of the A2; fueled by hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Looks like we keep finding reasons to love hydrogen. Now if we could just figure out how to make an ass-load of it.

• Register: Hypersonic hydrogen airliner

Yeah, you can find good stuff in the trash. Especially if you know a little something about art, apparently. Although I gotta believe if you're lookin for large cash settlements, your chances are a little better playing the lottery or jumping in front of limos.

• Treehugger: Dumpster diver finds $1m

Maybe its just cause my windows transfer more heat than a Central American arms merchant, but I'm totally in love with these windows. They have three, count em, three highly insulating panes. The center of which has a heat reflective surface like a one way valve. So in the summer you can keep heat out, but flip the frame during winter to keep heat in.

• EcoGeek: Better Windows

I know that anesthesiologists are generally very good and people normally don't wake up in the middle of surgery; but if I opened my eyes and saw a couple of surgeons standing over me with a bottle of hot sauce I would FREAK OUT. Straight-up crazy. Like they'd have to knock me unconscious with a shoe.

• AP News: Doctors test Hot Sauce

This one was gonna to be a joke about Cheney. I'm sure you can fill in the details.

• National Geographic: King tut died in hunting accident

I just couldn't resist the title of this one. Now that's good journalism. I'm not exactly sure how you make bio-fuel from lamb, but I'm sure quality is directly related to the fluffiness.

• EnvironmentalGraffiti: Cute Fluffy Lambs Sentenced to Death

This is pretty cool. It's a memory card with wifi built right in. So whenever it can find the Internet it'll upload your newest pictures whereever you want. Those chumps who bought that kodak wifi camera are kickin themselves now. Too bad my cameras take CF. Where's the Sea-FI love?

• Engadget: Eye-Fi Wifi enabled SD

Dangerous = Cool. Its just a fact of life. The more dangerous the activity, the cooler you look while doing it. For example: skydiving. Pretty cool looking. Now strap on a jetpack and some wings. Evel Knievel never dreamed of looking so good. Reminds me of the switchblade from Die Another Day, but with jet engines.

• Register: Stealth strap-on jet plane

David Copperfield Was A Naval Researcher?

How do you try to cloak a ship and accidentally end up tele-porting it to Virginia - and back?  Honestly, sometimes conspiracy theorists just sounds ridiculous.

•  Philadelphia Experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There's A Reason F1 Doesn't Use Plastic Tires.

Take Lombard street in San Francisco, close it, and add a few hundred people racing down in costumes on Big Wheels and you'll have a spectacle so grand it can only be captured by Internet video. Luckily we're smack in the middle of the Internet video age, so you didn't miss out completely by not stealing your kid-brother's big wheel and last year's Halloween costume. Seriously, watch at least one video about this avalanche of costumed miscreants.

• Laughing Squid: BYOBW2007

Ocean Motion

Wave power is something that I don't really think about all that much when I consider clean alternative power sources. Normally my thoughts drift straight to solar and wind and then on to the dreamy hunk that is fusion. But that may be off base. Here's a presentation by Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery at a Google Tech Talk.

The presentation is about an hour long but it gives great details about the actual device as well as energy potential, market and economics of wave power. Watch the video if you have the time he's much better at explaining it than I am, but I'll put some of my notes below. Skip to about 26:00 for video of the wave tank simulation.

• Google Video: Wave Energy
• Treehugger: Max Carcas of Ocean Power Delivery
• Ocean Power Delivery Limited
  

Solar currently generates 100 watts per square meter, wind 1000 watts per square meter while wave power houses the potential for 20,000- 70,000 watts per square meter depending on teh region. Wave energy can be thought of as compressed stored wind energy.

Waves are a highly forecastable energy source, which is a major concern with wind and solar generation. Output, even without forecasting, can be held constant within a 5 and 10% threshold.

The device is called "Pelamis" (a type of sea snake) for its vertical and horizontal motion as waves pass under it. It resides in an optimal depth of 80m which is 2-10km from shore depending on the region. At this depth the waves are not compressed by the shore and retain more energy while remaining in a non-volatile state (not breaking).

A single unit is 140m long and 3.5m wide with 4 rigid sections and 3 joints that contain pneumatic actuators. The joints move up and down as well as side to side at non uniform angles to induce a kind of harmonic tuning that is used to maximize the power output depending on the type of wave. That single unit will average around 750 KW output which is enough for about 500 homes.

The device is designed to be survivable with "load shedding" as an innate feature of the design. If a large wave is encountered it will simply pass through the wave rather than rising too high on a crest and breaking apart. This is much the same as the way that wind turbines can feather in excess wind or a hydro-electric plant can discharge excess water.

The technology was designed using existing technology as a guide. Natural gas, Oil and various other marine industries have developed standards couplings and materials that are well suited to this type of environment. The device itself employs very few revolutionary, and untested, modules which makes it very reliable.

The current cost of deployment per kwh is above wind but below solar. There is a distinct trend in applications of new technologies that cost drops fairly dramatically as process is streamlined and technologies refined. Wind turbine prices have dropped 80% since the first wind turbine project; so one might make an educated guess that a similar trend will follow for wave power. Government subsidies generally provide incentive to new projects during the first few years to help with this innovation cost hurdle, as we've done for solar and wind.

Asleep Is The New Brown Bag.

Apparently some people take sleep walking to the next level; which is, of course, sleep copulating. Yes, these folk are dead asleep but their spouses can attest they are by no means tranquil. Subjects are often quite different in style and virtually no idea what happens while asleep. Wow, wake me when its over takes on all new meaning.

• the Register: What is Sexomnia?

What Is Going On Here?

Check out this aerial imagery of a Nimitz class Aircraft Carrier located west of Shanghai, China.

• Aircraft Carrier

Notice anything? Zoom out a little. Yeah, its in a pond. Now, I know there are various floating casinos that basically have motes around them. But that's to avoid local gambling laws. What could be the point of having an aircraft carrier on a duck pond?

Well, it turns out that's a kickass "military education center" at an after school camp. Its a building in the shape of a 7/8 scale Nimitz Nuclear Carrier. "Think of it as a cross between summer camp, a school field trip, and a communist EPCOT Center." Wow, that place sounds great. And at 6 bucks to get in, I'm definitely going next time I'm in Shanghai.

• Nimitz Building

Captured Moments.

High speed photography is neat, and you get some especially intriguing shots during sporting events. Check out Sports Illustrated's 41 most interesting pictures of the year. Like this one of a defender giving someone the old reach around to try and prevent a goal. They're putting pretty high quality cameras every where these days.

• SI.com - Photo Gallery - The Year's Most Interesting Pictures

You may get to the point where you see the picture at my right and ask yourself "what the hell is going on there?" Well, that's "sepak takraw". Think volleyball and soccer all mixed up into one sport. Sounds pretty kick-ass, right? But they aren't just playing hacky sack over a net. They sometimes spike the ball with a bicycle kick and then land on their feet. Holy crap. Where can I watch me some takraw?

• Sepak Takraw - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It Wasn't A Warning Shot, It Was A Camera.

I love plans for the future, especially when they were devised in the past. Take for example this plan for an interstellar mission from 1973. The members collaborated on a method to send instruments to a near star system within the span of a human life while only using near-future technology. It was called the Daedalus Project; with a name like that how could it not work?

The plan (keeping in mind that this is a grievous summary) was to use a nuclear pulse rocket to accelerate the probe to 135,000,000 km/h. (the current fastest space-bound projectile is Pioneer 10 at 51,810 km/h) This rocket would trigger 250 tiny nuclear bombs per second for two straight years before moving on to stage two. In all the propulsion would consume 46,000 tons of deuterium and helium-3, and the craft would have to pit-stop at Jupiter to collect this fuel. Ac few years before the fifty year mission's conclusion several pods would split off the mother ship and record whatever they pass. The instruments will try to gather as much data as possible as they hurtle through the system at 3,750,000 m/s because they'll have no means of deceleration.

Goodness, lets hope there isn't someone we might piss off by shooting at them.

• Damn Interesting » The Daedalus Starship

Stones Squeal On Hog Line Burns.

Now granted I've only been curling for like half a season, but I hadn't really considered that one of the most controversial calls in the sport is a hog line violation. See, you slide off the hack with a 44 lb stone while balancing on a Teflon sole against a sheet of ice. 33 feet out is the "hog line" which is the plane by which you have to have released the stone. If anyone touches the rock after that line it is "burned" and removed from play.
I'm not really coming that close to a hog line violation, I usually release a couple feet before the line, so I never really thought about having to make these close calls. Obviously you wouldn't touch the stone if you knew you were over the line, and at competitive Speils there are hog line judges to make sure.

Like the digital timer and electric starting gun, technology is being used to absolutely differentiate as athletes push the boundaries of rules. These rocks have circuitry in them that detects when the thrower's hand lets go as well as detect when the stone passes the hog line. Hang on a fraction too long and red lights flash on the stone so you know to remove it. Pretty cool stuff, but at 650 bones a pop its a little prohibitive for smaller clubs. But next time I see a national competition on TV I'll be looking for these babies.

• Eye on the Hog

Ocean Motion.

Alright, here's the deal with that survey from yesterday. I was reading an article about sea-mounts being destroyed by over-fishing and got to thinking about oceans. I thought there were five (Because I know there are seven continents and there's two less oceans than continents. Shut-up, that's how I remember things.) but I couldn't really think of the fifth. Antarctic seemed the likely culprit, but that was just an educated guess. Somewhat embarrassed at my lack of very basic oceanographic knowledge I headed over to Wikipedia to slake my interest.

I would have been right if I'd been completing a test on the oceans in middle school. (Probably the last time such material was examined) However in 2000 oceanographers got together and changed Antarctic to Southern. What? They should not be allowed to change facts that were basic knowledge in my primary school education. I mean, sure if I'd been taught a geocentric view, I'd want them to change that; but something like this really makes me question the point to learning all that material. How many tidbits of information do I have stored away that aren't correct anymore, just cause a scientist renamed something?

The worst part about this is that I'm not sure if I knew that Southern was an ocean or not. I read it and it seems familiar, but the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that's just because one of the oceans on Pern was the Southern Ocean. (the others being Eastern, Western and Ring Sea) So I asked a few people and set up that survey to see if anyone else had the same problem. Spectacularly, no one else thought of the Southern Ocean (except for Dee two, who admitted to cheating) and my inferiority complex has been assuaged.

Bonus Story:
Yeah, I know I gave away the first answer in the survey with the second question. I'm fine with that cause the first one wasn't really the point of the exercise, it was just to get you thinking about oceans. It reminds me of a pop-quiz I had in elementary school once.

The teacher said to read the instructions (which was usual) but the first instruction was to read all the questions before beginning. I found that odd and so I did. The second to last question said to not complete the quiz and to put your pencil down and fold your hands. So I sat there shooting looks at the two other kids who had obviously read all the questions trying not to laugh while the rest of the class scribbled away.

In about 4 or 5 minutes the first person started erasing. It was like a rain storm coming across the water; drops building one at a time until all you could hear was erasing and blowing the shavings away. It all culminated when one of the slower kids reached the end and decried loudly "Oh what the HELL?" The entire class burst out laughing and the teacher got to give his little speech on the importance of following directions. I know, I was being subjugated and trained into a mindless drone, but shit, that was funny.

Military Monks.

Well its just about Veteran's day and an email I got from a friend set me to reading about the Tomb of the Unknowns. Its a monument in Arlington National Cemetery you may have heard of. Most notably its the grave of three nameless US servicemen that stands under constant guard. The lifestyle described for these sentries seems pretty monastic when you think about it. Sacrifice, training, study, regiment.

Its a pretty hearty investment and a symbolic gesture that extends past the usual commitment of an occupation; a lifelong commitment that shapes their lives.

Its also interesting to note that there pretty much won't be any new unknown soldiers. DNA testing and logistical management have ruled out most of the uncertainty. In fact the 'unknown' from Vietnam was identified and removed from this monument in 1998.

Go ahead and read a bit about it, so you're not just sitting around playing Mario 3 all day.

• Wikipedia: Tomb of the Unknowns