SolarReserve: Another Obama Backed Green Energy Boondoggle

Posted on January 9, 2012 by steve

What will a $747 million tax payer backed loan guarantee buy these days? How about 2.5 square miles worth of mirrors. That, and a puny amount of electrical generation capacity:

SolarReserve of Santa Monica, Calif., can store heat from the sun in the form of molten salt. A field of mirrors that are aimed by a computer reflect the sun’s light on a black box on top of a central tower. In the box is the molten salt, which the sun heats to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The salt can be run through a heat exchanger to make steam to power a conventional turbine and generator.

The advantage is that extra salt can be stored for a rainy day or plain old nighttime so that the plant can continue to make electricity at any hour. That ability is increasingly important as more and more conventional solar farms are set up; ordinary solar cells produce electricity only while the sun is shining, and a system that relies heavily on an intermittent source of power needs storage.

In May, the Energy Department gave the company a promise of a $747 million loan guaranteee for a 110-megawatt plant using that technology in Tonopah, Nev.

Of course, nowhere does the three NYT articles cheer-leading the project discuss, you know, the sheer size of the project discussed. However, if you click over to the project web site they give us the projected size of this project.

Quick Facts:

Location:	Northwest of Tonopah, NV
Technology:	Concentrating Solar Thermal with Storage
Size:	110 MW
Water Use:	less than 600 Acre-feet/year
Site:	~1,600 Acres, BLM-managed land
Transmission:	9.5 miles
Fuel:	Sunlight

In case you were wondering, 1,600 acres is 2.5 SQUARE MILES.

The green zealots are willing to cover 2.5 square miles of land to generate a paltry (and more than likely overstated) 110MW of electricity.

To put this in perspective the Zeeland ‘Peaker’ power station covers 30 acres of land (including the parking lot) and generates 930MW of power using natural gas.

November 6, 2012 can’t get here fast enough.

So much for conventional wisdom: Do Stradivarius Violins really sound better?

Posted on January 9, 2012 by steve

Hmmm….

it appears that concert violinists cannot tell from the sound alone whether they are playing a 300-year-old Stradivarius or an instrument made last week. And, for playing quality alone, the virtuoso will opt for the modern one when asked which fiddle they would like to take home.

These discordant findings emerge from experiments by Claudia Fritz, a researcher at the University of Paris, at an international violin competition in Indianapolis in 2010. She asked 21 musicians to play six different violins, three modern instruments and three by Italian maestros – one made by Guarneri del Gesu around 1740, and two made in Antonio Stradivari’s workshop around 1700.

The plot thickens further.

The researchers could find no link between the age and value of the violins and how they were rated by the violinists. The three old instruments had a combined value of $10m, a hundred times that of the modern violins. “They are beautiful instruments, but the prices are insane,” Fritz said. “The old versus new issue doesn’t make any sense.

“It doesn’t matter if the violin’s old or new, all that matters is whether it’s a good violin or a bad violin. Many modern violin makers are doing a great job.” One shortcoming of the study was that the violinists were asked to rate a particular instrument’s projection, how well its sound travels, themselves. Another was that only a few violins were tested.

But, as the researchers note, this latter was perhaps unavoidable. “Numbers of subjects and instruments were small because it is difficult to persuade the owners of fragile, enormously valuable old violins to release them for extended periods into the hands of blindfolded strangers.”

Kai-Thomas Roth, secretary of the British Violin Making Association, said that double blind tests, where neither experimenter nor musician knows which violin is played, had already shown people cannot distinguish a modern violin from a priceless work of art.

“There’s some myth-making that helps old instruments,” Thomas said. “If you give someone a Stradivari and it doesn’t work for them, they’ll blame themselves and work hard at it until it works.

So much for conventional wisdom.

Since this is a post about violins, a short violin solo by Anastasia Khitruck.

Sunday Morning Links: The Sneaking Into A Russian Rocket Factory Edition

Posted on January 8, 2012 by steve

Sometimes I’m still amazed how the internet works. One web site I follow, but rarely (if ever) post / link to is Above Top Secret. Occasionally I’ll peruse the site. It is interesting, but I’m not really into conspiracies. That being said, I found these pictures and they really caught my eye.

The amazing thing about the internet is the ability to follow the links and find out more about the pictures. Gizmodo linked to the pictures with an accompanying write up.

And yet, she found nobody. No guards, no security. Nothing. Just a few CCTV cameras here and there in rooms packed with huge machinery.

While some of these zones look decrepit and abandoned, the factory is active. In fact, the government is really pissed off about Lana’s adventure. The authorities have sent her letters saying that her situation will get “much worse” if she keeps posting photos from the factory.

But Lana doesn’t seem to give a damn about it. She posted the letters on her site, which makes me want to go to Moscow, become her friend and party hard for a whole week. This girl is cooler and more badass than I will ever be.

The Gizmodo post also includes a link to the photographers own web page. Her page is in Russian, but most web browsers will now translate languages, but it includes a link to the company that owns the site.

And, to follow the trail, it all took about 10 mins. Now, on to the links:

Great minds think alike: Spellchek has more pics from the Russian rocket factory. He also has a post discussing the U.S. shifting undeclared wars to the Asia-Pacific region.
WWTFT: Addendum to Confronting Terror
Bunker: E.E.O.C warns business ‘be careful in requiring a H.S. Diploma’
GTBTBA: I Think I’m Excited…
SJ: No difference between Mitt Romney and President Obama

CH 2.0: An Interesting SOPA Video
The Eye: Palmetto State Primary Edition
LAS: 2011 Review & 2012 Preview (Part 3 of 4)
MTTM: Before you all get too excited
‘Bot: “just had to stop to take a picture of this wonderful juxtaposition.”

As if we needed any further proof: Proof Positive That Chris Matthews Is Insane.
Pundette: Culture of death update
TMGGB: Overview of the NH debate 1/7/12
theCL: Gloom, Doom, and Optimism
Gator: A Musical Tribute To Saturday’s NFL Wildcard Losers… And yes, Gator picks Detroit Rock City. I would’ve gone with Motor City Madhouse.

Wade: Treason in Desperation
WyBlog: Forget voting rights, Illinois makes you show photo ID to buy drain cleaner
FCBZ: Where is the #OWS outrage? Tiger Woods’ Ex-Wife Elin Nordegren Demolishes $12.3 Million Mansion in Florida (video)
Republican Mom: Wall Street and FDR (Chapter 5)
So, what has a guy got to do to get a Zilla award? You know, maybe a mention in the Best Weekly Round-up of Fellow Bloggers’ Blog Post category? Oh well, maybe next year…

Video: Visualizing Photons in Motion at a Trillion Frames Per Second

Posted on December 13, 2011 by steve

This is amazing:

Via MIT:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionth of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nano-second long event.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at a rate equivalent to roughly half a trillion frames per second. However, due to very short exposure times (roughly two trillionth of a second) and a narrow field of view of the camera, the video is captured over several minutes by repeated and periodic sampling.

The new technique, which we call Femto Photography, consists of femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques. Our light source is a Titanium Sapphire laser that emits pulses at regular intervals every ~13 nanoseconds. These pulses illuminate the scene, and also trigger our picosecond accurate streak tube which captures the light returned from the scene

Watching the light photons move slowly across the scene in the video is surreal.

Video: Mentos and Diet Coke-powered car sets distance record

Posted on December 10, 2011 by steve

Looks like too much fun.

Via AutoBlog:

Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the two men who helped kick off the fun in the first place, are back, claiming a new record for the longest distance traveled in a car powered by Diet Coke and Mentos: 239 feet.

No, that doesn’t seem very far to us, either, though Mark II of their machine is a marked improvement over Mark I. The Mark II vehicle is more aerodynamic and seems to have less mass than its predecessor, which positioned the rider way out in front over a bicycle-like contraption. That said, we think Grobe and Voltz do even better… especially since they used just half the fuel this time ’round.

Video: SubMicro Blimp

Posted on December 9, 2011 by steve

A SubMicro blimp…

Via make.com:

With an 11″ latex balloon filled with helium, it will carry its own weight of about 10g; with a 14″ balloon, he reports, “it has a payload capacity for a miniature camera.” The thrusters are driven by subminiature R/C servos that have been stripped down to bare motors with dangling circuit boards and potentiometers. A tiny 80 mAh lithium-polymer battery is the heaviest single component at 2.5g.

Looks like fun.

What? There are no cows on Mars…

Posted on November 23, 2011 by steve

You don’t say…

There are no cows on Mars.

Of that, planetary scientists are certain, which leaves them puzzling over what could be producing methane gas detected in the thin Martian air. Methane molecules are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane around must have been released recently.

Could the gas be burbling from something alive? Cows, after all, burp methane on Earth. Other creatures, including a class of micro-organisms that live without oxygen, also produce methane.

Many scientist (and the goofball who wrote the NYT article) are so desperate to make the jump that if there is methane on Mars, then, obviously life must have been there at ‘one time’ as well.

One big problem with this so called hypothesis are planets in our solar system known as the gas giants. Both Neptune and Uranus contain significant amounts of methane in their respective atmospheres. Jupiter and Saturn also have some amounts of methane gas in their atmospheres as well.

And, if you are looking for methane (and other hydrocarbons) look no further than Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.

Instead of water, as on Earth, Titan’s cycles of precipitation, evaporation and cloud formation involve hydrocarbons such as methane and ethane, which at the extremes of cold on Titan pool as liquids in thousands of lakes around its north and south poles.

Indeed, scientists estimate that Titan holds hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.

I’m reasonably sure, there are no burping cows, decaying plant life (or rotting dinosaurs) on Titan, Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune or Mars.

An extra big tip O’ the hat to Instapundit for pointing out the original article.

Interesting Graph: Does music taste reflect intelligence?

Posted on November 9, 2011 by steve

: click for larger image

This is a really interesting chart that correlates taste in music to SAT scores:

Virgil Griffith, popularly known for the Wikipedia Scanner that detects where the Wikipedia edits are coming from, maintains another very interesting project that maps musical tastes of college students with their intelligences levels (determined by their SAT score).

The x-axis represent the SAT score while the colored boxes indicate the music genre and the artist / composer.

Of course, SAT scores are not a direct measure of intelligence, but it is a directional indicator.

Check out the full size charts here.

Google wants to be “the operating system of your life”

Posted on October 2, 2011 by steve

No, really… They do:

As John Battelle of Federated Media notes, the urgency of this goal was communicated by CEO Larry Page when he changed the compensation scheme at the search behemoth — in one of his first moves as the new chief executive — to create incentives for staffers to try harder at making Google’s social efforts a success. Battelle says in talks with Googlers over the past while, it has become obvious that Larry Page “is obsessed with Google+,” and that for the Google co-founder, the new social network has become the core of what he wants the company to become: namely, Google as “the operating system of your life.”

This push to integrate all the different Google services (GMail, YouTube, Picassa, Doubleclick, ITA Travel, Zagats and on and on) using Google+ as the common thread connecting these disperse products can lead to some serious privacy issues.

And that brings up another tricky aspect for Google: if my activity through Google+ starts to influence everything that Google does, including search and search-related advertising, how will it keep from stepping over the kinds of privacy boundaries that have caused Facebook so much difficulty? The number of Google Circles that I appear in has already started showing up in search results, and the things that I give a +1 to are affecting my search as well. Tying all that to my real name and my Google+ posts is another step down the road towards a potential personal privacy debacle.

I’m so glad one of Google’s core philosophy’s is “you can make money without doing evil” so this new push to become the operating system of your life shouldn’t be a cause for anyone’s concern. Right?

Cool Video: Synchronization

Posted on September 26, 2011 by steve

syn·chro·nize:

[sing-kruh-nahyz] verb, -nized, -niz·ing.

To adjust the periodicities of (two or more electrical or mechanical devices) so that the periods are equal or integral multiples or fractions of each other.

This is cool, in a nerdy sort of way:

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A conservative view of south east Michigan and beyond

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