Kite Power

Parafoils — industrial-sized kites — from the German company Skysails can reduce ships' fuel consumption by up to 35 percent — and now a Korean team is suggesting dragging a hydroelectric turbine underneath a catamaran hitched to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air:

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.

“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

Bottled Wind

Modern windmills rise hundreds of feet above the ground, where the wind is stronger, but the future of wind power may be underground:

In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

The dispatch order is how grid operators decide which power plants to switch on. They have to balance the amount of generation and consumption or they risk the grid’s stability. The amount of power people use goes up and down, but it stays above a certain level all the time. To meet that need, utilities buy consistent always-on power from the large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid.

The electricity they need to meet the peaks in energy demand is generated by what are known as peaking plants, usually powered by natural gas. When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, so it keeps the natural gas plants shut off. If they want to replace coal plants in the pecking order, though, they’ll have to work all the time.

Using cheap wind energy to displace expensive natural gas energy seems like a good idea, but intermittent wind capacity can't displace reliable natural gas capacity — without storage:

The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.

While wind farmers say storage isn’t technically necessary until the amount of wind power on the grid exceeds 20 or 30 percent of the electrical load, private analysts, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy have identified grid-scale storage as a key need for the rapidly diversifying electricity system.

And going forward, compressed-air energy storage looks like the cheapest option available. Independent analysts have come to similar conclusions.

“CAES is the least cost, utility-scale, bulk-storage system available. If other factors such as its low environmental impact and high reliability are considered, CAES has an overwhelming advantage,” one Department of Homeland Security physicist concluded in a 2007 paper in the journal Energy (.pdf).

Transonic Combustion

Transonic Combustion has put its new fuel-injection technology into a test car, with weight and aerodynamics similar to a Toyota Prius, and the test car got 64 miles per gallon in highway driving — far more than a Prius, which gets 48 miler per gallon on the highway:

The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that "activates" it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.

We used to add a catalyst to gasoline, a few decades ago: lead.

The fuel-injection system also reduces throttling losses:

Ordinarily, the air intake to an engine is partially closed during cruising, and this makes the engine work harder. Transonic's system can operate with the air intake open, creating a lean mixture in the combustion chamber (with a lot of air, but just a little gasoline). Rocke says that at a steady cruising speed of 50 miles per hour, the test car gets 98 miles per gallon.

Pedersen Device

The Pedersen device is a fascinating footnote in the history of the modern assault rifle. In World War I, both sides used main battle rifles that resembled modern hunting rifles more than modern assault rifles — big, long rifles, shooting big, powerful rounds, very accurately, but very slowly. This would not do for storming enemy trenches:

John Pedersen, a long time employee of Remington Arms, was aware that the US would be entering the war at some point. Concerned about the inability for troops to effectively fire on the run while attempting to cross "No Man's Land", he decided to start studying the problem of semi-automatic fire that would allow them to fire from the hip without stopping. However, he also realized that there would be no way the Army would accept a totally new rifle design, as they were already struggling to produce enough Springfields, contracting to produce millions of M1917 "American Enfield" rifle with Remington and Winchester and were importing Ross rifles from Canada for training purposes.

This led him to the final design, which replaced the bolt of the standard Springfield with a device consisting of a complete firing mechanism and a small barrel for the small round. In effect, the device was essentially a complete blow-back pistol minus a receiver/grip using the short barrel of the device to fit into the longer chamber of the M1903 Springfield. The mechanism was fed by a long 40-round magazine sticking out of the rifle to the top right, and could be reloaded by inserting a new magazine. New sights were provided at the rear of the device. The system did require one modification to the rifle however, a hole had to be cut in the side of the bolt area to allow the ejection of spent rounds.

By 1917 his solution was perfected, and he traveled to Washington, DC to demonstrate it. After firing several rounds from what appeared to be an unmodified Springfield, he removed the standard bolt, inserted the device, and fired several magazines at a very high rate of fire. The evaluation team was astounded, and an immediate secret classification was applied. To deceive the enemy, the Ordnance Department decided to call it The US Automatic Pistol, Caliber .30, Model of 1918. Plans were put into place to start production of modified Springfields, which became the US Rifle, Cal. .30, Model of M1903, Mark I. Promises were made to have 500,000 ready for the 1919 Spring Offensive. The use of the Pedersen Device in the 1919 Spring offensive was to be in conjunction with the full combat introduction of the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).

After the war, Pederson designed a semi-auto rifle using a smaller .276 (7 mm) cartridge, but John C. Garand's design — re-chambered for Pederson's .276 cartridge — won the Army contract:

After the .276 Garand rifle was selected over the Pedersen rifle, General Douglas MacArthur came out against changing rifle cartridges since the .30-06 would have to be retained for machine gun use and one cartridge simplified wartime logistics. Garand reverted his design back to the standard .30-06 Springfield cartridge in 1932; the result became the M1 Garand.

The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle to be generally issued to the infantry of any nation and, in the words of Patton, "the greatest implement of battle ever devised."

Solar Thermal Paired with Natural Gas

Across 500 acres just north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group is building the world’s second-largest solar thermal plant, with 190,000 mirrors:

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This is (almost) exactly what I was discussing with respect to wind power recently. An intermittent alternative-energy plant can produce energy at near-zero marginal cost, but it can't guarantee energy when it's needed, while a natural gas plant can't produce free energy, but it can produce energy right when it's needed. (At least solar-thermal generation is naturally correlated with when people demand energy to run their air conditioners.)

Under the same ownership, I suspect we'll see that a kW of “backup” natural gas capacity combined with a kW of seasonal solar capacity has very high capital costs for its sometimes-low, sometimes-high variable costs — so only questionable subsidies and mandates will make solar appear economical, as in Spain, where they agreed to buy solar power for $0.58/kWh.

Trapping Sunlight with Silicon Nanowires

Some solar cells, or photovoltaics, can now convert sunlight into electricity at 20-percent efficiency, but silicon nanowires promise a more important kind of efficiency — cost efficiency:

“Since the fabrication technique behind this extraordinary light-trapping enhancement is a relatively simple and scalable aqueous chemistry process, we believe our approach represents an economically viable path toward high-efficiency, low-cost thin-film solar cells.”

Yang holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, and the University of California Berkeley’s Chemistry Department. He is a leading authority on semiconductor nanowires – one-dimensional strips of materials whose width measures only one-thousandth that of a human hair but whose length may stretch several microns.

“Typical solar cells are made from very expensive ultrapure single crystal silicon wafers that require about 100 micrometers of thickness to absorb most of the solar light, whereas our radial geometry enables us to effectively trap light with nanowire arrays fabricated from silicon films that are only about eight micrometers thick,” he says. “Furthermore, our approach should in principle allow us to use metallurgical grade or “dirty” silicon rather than the ultrapure silicon crystals now required, which should cut costs even further.”

The New Fast

Seymourpowell recently unveiled its Aircruise concept, which it is pitching as a clipper in the clouds and a hotel in the sky. You see, slow is the new fast:

Nick Talbot, design director at Seymourpowell explains, "The Aircruise concept questions whether the future of luxury travel should be based around space-constrained, resource hungry, and all too often stressful airline travel. A more serene transport experience will appeal to people looking for a more reflective journey, where the experience of travel itself is more important than getting from A to B quickly."

On Aircruise, it is the very abundance of time and space that defines the luxury experience. In a world where speed is an almost universal obsession, the idea of making a leisurely journey in comfort is a welcome contrast. Talbot explains, "The physics of the airship requires a gigantic volume of lifting gas, yet simultaneously demands a relatively limited amount of weight. This allows for a potentially large amount of space with relatively few people onboard — a luxury for any traveller."

None of this is new, of course — airships have always been good for slowly moving a large volume but low weight — but now it has an environmental spin. The technical details are interesting:

From the docking rig at the base to the tip, the ship is 265 metres tall. Hydrogen, the lightest gas, is used as the lifting gas, and is capable of lifting around 1.2 kg per cubic metre of volume. Large PEM hydrogen fuel cells will provide on board power and some drinking water.

The volume of the main envelope in the ship is calculated at 330,000 cubic metres, which equals 396,000 kg of available lift at sea level (1,000 kg = 1 Tonne (t)).

Estimated weights:

Primary structure, envelope and systems [270 t] around the same weight as an airbus A380 super jumbo, empty
Consumables, water, ballast etc. [20 t]
People (estimate max 100 people on board) [15 t]
Control deck and staff (20 staff) [6 t]
Bar/Lounge/communal zone fit out [15 t]
4 Duplex apartments at 5 t each [20 t]
Penthouse apartment [12 t]
5 smaller apartments at 4 t each [20 t]
Total load factor [378 t]
Available lift excess is therefore 18-20 t or 20,000 kg of lift.

Part of the renewed interest in airships derives from advances in materials, structures, stabilisation and clean propulsion technologies. Utilising composite frames and fabrications, lightweight semi flexible structures can be built at large scales. Although large, this is nevertheless a semi rigid ship, the primary tensioned structure consisting of 8 vertical composite lattices supporting four main flexible envelopes, which contain 330,000 cubic metres of hydrogen gas. Lower decks are 'hung' off these primary supports.

Each of the 4 external envelopes contains modular self-sealing lifting bags, minimising the incidence of bag rupture and ensuring safe flight even with a major external skin rupture.

Automatic stability thrusters and altitude control using automatic adjustment of the gas density ensures a smooth ride compared to previous airships. Although still susceptible to storms and very poor weather, advanced weather radar and weather prediction systems allow the ship to route around major problems.

Despite the perceived risks, hydrogen is used for its inherent lifting efficiency and as a power source. Flexible photovoltaic (solar panel) cells cover the upper part of the envelope, augmenting the primary power generation, in this case from fuel cells. Large surface area PEM fuel cells generate the primary power for on board systems and turn low speed compressors located in the mid section of the ship. This compressed gas is ducted to provide directional thrust and auto stabilisation. Compressed hydrogen stored in parts of the main structure provides fuel for longer ranges and by venting to the envelope or re-compressing these volumes, altitude stability is achieved.

By combining the lifting gas and the fuel for thrust the overall weight of the ship can be minimised, whilst ensuring a silent, pollution free passage. Water vapour is harnessed to augment on board potable water.

The service ceiling is limited to 12,000 feet, given the attenuation of the atmosphere (the hotel is not pressurised) and the limits of gas expansion within the envelope. If however, there are specific locations of interest en route, the ship can drop down to within a few hundred feet of the ground.

Cruising speed without tail or headwind is 100–150 km/hr. This equates to journey times that are appropriate to the cruise experience: London to New York in 37 hours; Los Angeles to Shanghai in 90 hours.

Six-flight crew will include two flight engineers, and will fly the ship in shifts, given the likely cruise durations. 14 support staff will run the hotel experience for the guest passengers.

Wind Power and the Grid

Carl from Chicago, who oddly knows quite a bit about the grid in Texas, notes that wind power doesn't have to live up to its commitments:

Power is generally dispatched in the following manner:

1. The grid control operator makes a request for how many megawatts of power that it needs for the next day.


2. The various owners of generating capacity (wind, gas, coal and nuclear) submit their available power for the next day.


3. The wind power is always taken because it has the lowest incremental cost, along with the nuclear power available as well as coal. Then natural gas is selected until demand is equal to supply, with older less-efficient “peak” gas plants turned off if there isn’t enough demand.

The issue is that wind power can’t guarantee its available capacity. In general, if a generation owner “commits” to a certain amount of supply capacity and can’t provide the electricity, then that generation company is charged a penalty for failing to deliver.

In the case of wind power, the generation owners are not penalized if their promised power is not available. All of the other power providers (nuclear, coal and gas) face penalties for failing to deliver.

This issue, the useful capacity of wind power (not its “rated” capacity), and who pays for backup capacity since the wind may or may not be blowing reliably on any given day, is a critical question. Wind in a way is “free riding” on the grid; wind is paid as if it is reliable, when in fact it isn’t, and then the other electricity providers de-facto subsidize wind (again, they already receive Federal and State subsidies) by not charging them for failing to deliver and taking on their pro-rata share of the power needed when the wind farms don’t deliver.

Not only does wind power get a “free ride” on backup capacity, which hurts the gas generators, but the gas generators that do run are also getting a lower per-unit reimbursement because the revenues are set based upon the highest “marginal” cost for electricity; on a given day when there is more wind only nuclear, coal and the most efficient gas plants will be online (along with the wind, which always is in the stack, depending on weather conditions) if there isn’t much demand, so not only do gas plants lose money from not being on but the gas plants that are on receive a lower price for their power.

My thoughts:

The fact that everyone sharing the grid has to play nice, or the whole grid goes down, makes me wonder about the wisdom of breaking up ownership and control amongst so many firms using such disparate technologies. Sorting out everyone’s responsibilities is non-trivial.

It obviously makes sense to use wind power when the wind’s blowing and you’ve already got windmills — the fuel cost is zero, after all — and it doesn’t make much sense to punish a wind generator when the wind’s not blowing — because it’s not negligence that’s causing the unreliability — but the natural gas generator, which is quick to fire up and available on demand, is what’s keeping the whole system from crashing. That would imply that the natural gas generator shouldn’t be paid so much based on how much natural gas gets burned but more on how much capacity it can provide, as insurance.

If the wind and natural gas generators were owned by the same firm, I think the problem would resolve itself — and we’d more clearly see that a kW of “backup” natural gas capacity combined with a kW of intermittent wind capacity has very high capital costs for its sometimes-low, sometimes-high variable costs. Right now, as Carl points out, the wind folks are free-riding on the security provided by the natural-gas folks.

(Another option would be to tie the wind power in with hydro power, which could serve as storage.)

Why Alternative Power Is and Will Remain Useless

There's no alternative energy source that can replace the old, faithful, coal-fired electric plant built with 1930s-era technology, Shannon Love reminds us, which is why alternative power is and will remain useless:

An obsolete coal plant using 80-year-old technology can provide power where and when you need it. It can be positioned almost anywhere from the equator to the tundra. (It will even work aboard ships.) It can be positioned immediately adjacent to the point of consumption. It works around the clock and in all types of weather. It can easily store weeks or months of coal reserves in a big pile outside. 99% of its offline time is scheduled and it is trivial to build in redundancy to compensate for both scheduled and unscheduled offline time. For the last 80 years, this type of technology has chugged out the electricity all over the world without pause.

“Alternative” energy sources have none of these attributes. They can only be built in specific locations, and those locations are wholly unrelated to the points of consumption. They can only operate under specific weather/environmental conditions, so they cannot fulfill the when of the point of consumption need.

They operate on nature’s schedule not ours. If we could easily operate on mother nature’s schedule, we wouldn’t need the energy in the first place, because we primarily use the energy to alter natural environmental conditions to keep ourselves alive.

“Alternative” energy is really Weather-Dependent Energy and it has all of the hazards posed by being exposed to the vagaries of weather. Wind turbines only generate power in certain locations, within certain wind speed ranges and only when the wind blows in the specified speed range. Solar panels only generates significant power in certain locations, in certain latitudes, in certain environmental conditions (deserts mostly). It only generates significant power in the daytime, only during certain hours in the day, and random weather conditions like thunderstorms, ice storms or sandstorms can knock it offline completely. (Even hydroelectric power is weather dependent and can be seriously crippled by drought or flood.)

To even begin to replace the 80-year-old coal plant with weather dependent technology, you have to invest resources on a massive scale.

If he had simply argued that alternative energy is useless — or even that it is and will remain useless until we have better transmission and storage — I'd have largely agreed, but I felt he went too far. New technologies can improve exponentially, and their early glacial pace of improvement "suddenly" turns into another Moore's Law.

And, more importantly, an alternative energy source does not have to replace a coal plant to be useful:

We currently rely on a portfolio of energy sources, not just coal plants, and something like cheap solar power could clearly play a role, even without cheap storage to make it reliable around the clock, because we really, really need electricity on hot sunny days, and spending over $1,000 per additional kilowatt of coal-plant capacity isn’t necessarily justified.

A solar-thermal plant in Arizona or Southern California could presumably provide power during peak demand. (California ISO reports peak loads from 1998 through 2009 in the 41–50 gigawatt range, from occurring from 2:30 to 4:52 PM, from late June to early September.) Even a photovoltaic system with enough distributed nodes and a wee bit of storage could conceivably provide reliable enough power during peak demand.

We're definitely not there yet, but such a system could make economic sense, even with a price-per-kWh way higher than coal, as long as its price-per-kWp came in just under a coal plant's.

Or, alternatively, if photovoltaic power gets cheap — really cheap — the cost of capital (per kWh) for a solar site might drop below the cost of coal (per kWh), in which case we would want to use solar whenever possible, with coal and natural gas filling in the gaps.

We're definitely not there, but such a future is hardly inconceivable.

Anyway, I made the mistake of poking the beehive, and I got denounced as just another left-wing nutjob — which reminds us of the nature of the Net.

Spencer Repeating Rifle

Christopher Spencer received a patent for his Spencer Repeating Rifle in 1860, just before the Civil War broke out:

Cheney arranged an interview in June, 1861, for Spencer with the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, who was a friend and neighbor of Cheney. Spencer claimed his rifle could shoot fifteen times a minute, which was unheard of in that day. He shot an average of 21 shots a minute in this casual meeting.

Commander John Dahlgren, the inventor of the Dahlgren naval cannon, was so impressed that Captain Andrew Harwood as Chief of Naval Ordnance ordered 700 Spencers. Not a large order.

A test was also arranged in August, 1861, with the Army under Captain Dyer (later the Army's Chief of Ordnance) at Fortress Monroe, Virginia. Although Fortress Monroe was safe from Confederates, such a test was rather close to the enemy. Capt. Dyer reported he "fired it some 80 times" and gave the sample gun nasty tests with sand and covered it with salt water for 24 hours. "The rifle was then loaded and fired without difficulty..." (an amazing feat) "...I regard it as one of the very best breech-loading arms that I have ever seen."

But the Army stalled in ordering any:

Spencer was interviewed by President Lincoln, who is reported at some time in 1861 to have fired a Spencer at short range using his own front sight whittled from a piece of wood. The President instructed the Army Chief of Ordnance, General Ripley, to order 10,000. Spencer (perhaps Cheney) accepted this first large order on the last day of 1861.

But the Army (and the Navy) balked at placing further substantial orders for another year and a half. Spencer roamed the western fighting front south from Indiana and Illinois trying to sell guns to individual commanders. Colonel John Wilder facing the Confederates in Tennessee ordered Spencers; the Army rejected the order; the brigade voted to buy them anyway, and did, at $35 each. That's when a private earned $15 a month — which was about the cost of the traditional muzzle loading musket.

Spencer had another meeting with President Lincoln on August 18th, 1863, when the President hit a 6" wide pine board at about 40 yards with at least six shots.

Looking back, we know that repeating rifles are the future of small arms, but the Union did not rapidly adopt them. Why not? Largely because they were expensive, and they used a lot of expensive ammo, which had to be carted around:

For a very long time, like about the year 1700 to today, soldiers going into battle carried only a few pounds of ammunition on their person. In the Civil War, the goal was for muzzle loading infantry to go into battle with about 40 rounds apiece (at 11 to 12 shots per pound for 4 pounds). The Confederates could shoot that off in about a dozen minutes or so. In World War Two, the soldiers carrying the M1 Garand carried 96 shots (12 eight round clips) at 20 shots per pound and could shoot that off in about four minutes. In Vietnam, the soldiers carrying the M16 could carry 200 to 300 rounds for about 6 pounds, and could shoot that off in about three minutes. When General Phil Sheridan headed south from Winchester, Virginia, on February 28th, 1865, on a sustained cavalry ride that carried his 10,000 troopers (Sharps and Spencer armed) all the way to the end of the War, each trooper started off with 40 rounds each carried on the horse. Muzzle loader firing for 12 minutes or Spencer firing for 3 minutes, 40 rounds was the Civil War standard allotment of ammunition per man.

Taking all this in, General Ripley of Army Ordnance may not have been as wrong as frequently portrayed. The money, the transport, the speed the soldiers would shoot off everything they had before the battle was over, and the lack of more horses to pull more wagons laden with heavy ammunition, all of this says the repeating Spencer, as wonderful as it was, may not have been the big issue.

This seems like a job for Operations Research — which did not exist until WWII, even though it could have and probably should have been applied to earlier "modern" wars.

Obviously the Union's resources are constrained. Arming every soldier with a repeating rifle, at twice the cost, and more ammo, that is also more expensive per round, is not an option. But what are the trade-offs?

If trained soldiers can shoot 20 rounds per minute from a repeating rifle versus three rounds per minute from a muzzle-loader, this seems like an overwhelming advantage for the repeaters — seven times the firepower. We now know, for instance, that bayonet-charging men with repeating rifles is suicide, because they get so many shots at short range against a target without cover. A soldier with seven times the firepower is not quite seven times as effective — see Lanchester's Square Law — but he's more than twice as effective.

On the other hand, if two forces take up positions across from one another and take potshots throughout the day, the limiting factor is not rounds per minute but total rounds available. If you only have 40 rounds, you only have 40 rounds. Blowing through all 40 in two minutes doesn't help. In this scenario, the advantage goes to whichever side has more ammo — because it is cheaper or lighter — or to the side that causes more casualties per round — whether from more accurate weapons or more accurate shooters. Those expensive brass cartridges start looking worse, and those $50 Whitworth sharpshooter rifles start looking better, under such conditions.

In either case, fewer men with better weapons could conceivably form a more effective force — with much fewer logistical demands for food, water, medicine, etc.

Space: The Final Frontier of Profit?

I would not rush to call space the final frontier of profit:

Companies and investors are realizing that everything we hold of value — metals, minerals, energy and real estate — are in near-infinite quantities in space. As space transportation and operations become more affordable, what was once seen as a wasteland will become the next gold rush. Alaska serves as an excellent analogy. Once thought of as "Seward's Folly" (Secretary of State William Seward was criticized for overpaying the sum of $7.2 million to the Russians for the territory in 1867), Alaska has since become a billion-dollar economy.

The same will hold true for space. For example, there are millions of asteroids of different sizes and composition flying throughout space. One category, known as S-type, is composed of iron, magnesium silicates and a variety of other metals, including cobalt and platinum. An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion.

An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid is worth more than $20 trillion? An average half-kilometer S-type asteroid, if it's a 500-meter-diameter sphere, is 65 million cubic meters in volume and, at 3000 kg/m³, 2×10¹¹ kg in mass — 200 million metric tons. So a "valuable" asteroid is worth $100,000 per metric ton. That's 200 times the value of slate here on earth — which doesn't seem like it would justify the freight costs.

The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447

Investigators have pieced together the last four minutes of Air France Flight 447:

Air France flight 447 had been in the air for three hours and 40 minutes since taking off from Rio de Janeiro on the evening of May 31, 2009. Strong turbulence had been shaking the plane for half an hour, and all but the hardiest frequent flyers were awake.
Suddenly the gauge indicating the external temperature rose by several degrees, even though the plane was flying at an altitude of 11 kilometers (36,000 feet) and it hadn't got any warmer outside. The false reading was caused by thick ice crystals forming on the sensor on the outside of the plane. These crystals had the effect of insulating the detector. It now appears that this is when things started going disastrously wrong.

Flying through thunderclouds over the Atlantic, more and more ice was hurled at the aircraft. In the process, it knocked out other, far more important, sensors: the pencil-shaped airspeed gauges known as pitot tubes.

One alarm after another lit up the cockpit monitors. One after another, the autopilot, the automatic engine control system, and the flight computers shut themselves off. "It was like the plane was having a stroke," says Gérard Arnoux, the head of the French pilots union SPAF.

The final minutes of flight AF 447 had begun. Four minutes after the airspeed indicator failed, the plane plunged into the ocean, killing all 228 people on board.

Between Sea Vessels and Cargo Planes

The US Navy is mulling the return of airships, because they fit a niche within the wide gap between sea vessels and cargo planes:

But the time premium you pay for airship travel buys you several advantages: airships are highly fuel-efficient for a ton-mile; as long as they avoid storms, they endure few stresses in flight, affording them extremely long service lives; they can be scaled up to a very, very large size at low cost compared to airplanes.

Hat tip to John Noonan — who dismisses the whole idea:

Led Zepplin will make a comeback before military zepplins ever do.

Aquaponics

Aquaponics combines hydroponics (or water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish cultivation):

What feeds his winter crop of lettuce is recirculating water from the 150-gallon fish tank and the waste generated by his 20 jumbo goldfish. Wastewater is what fertilizes the 27 strawberry plants from last summer, too. They occupy little cubbies in a seven-foot-tall PVC pipe. When the temperature begins to climb in the spring, he will plant the rest of the gravel containers with beans, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers — all the things many other gardeners grow outside.

In here, though, the yields are otherworldly. “We actually kept a tally of how many cherry tomatoes we grew,” Mr. Torcellini said of last summer’s crop. “And from one plant, it was 347.” A trio of cucumber plants threw off 175 cukes.

A low-tech, low-cost barrel-ponics system can be built out of three 55-gallon barrels, a pump, a wooden frame and some off-the-shelf hardware:

One barrel, which sits on the ground, holds the fish. A second — split in half and filled with gravel — holds the plants. The final barrel, a storage or flush tank, perches above the other two like a toilet tank. The effluent-rich water that flows from one receptacle to the next is the life of the system, flooding the plants with nutrients and then trickling back into the fish tank.

Utilities Are Slow to Make the Most of Smart Meters

Utilities are slow to make the most of smart meters — which measure not just cumulative electricity usage but when that electricity gets used — because consumers don't understand the economics of electricity:

By making variable pricing plans possible, smart meters are expected to play a big role in getting customers to reduce their peak-hour energy consumption, a key goal of utility executives and policy makers. Electricity grids are sized to meet the maximum electricity need, so a drop in peak demand would let utilities operate with fewer expensive power plants, meaning they could provide electricity at a lower cost and with less pollution.

Utilities have run dozens of pilot tests of digital meters and found that people cut power consumption the most when faced with higher peak-hour rates. But utility executives and regulators have been reluctant to implement rate plans that penalize people for too much energy use, fearing that if customers associate smart meters with higher bills, they will stall the technology's advance just as it is gaining traction. Only about 5% of U.S. electric meters are "smart" today, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, but that figure is expected to grow to about one-third in the next five years.

So, many utilities are trying an approach that is less controversial, but also less effective: offering rebates to customers who conserve energy in key periods of the day. By doing things like turning off clothes dryers and adjusting air conditioners on hot summer afternoons, customers earn credits that can reduce their electricity bills.
[...]
Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a unit of PG&E Corp., got a taste of the public-relations risk last summer when it installed smart meters in Bakersfield, Calif., as part of a broad upgrade in its Northern California service territory. When customers — who weren't participating in any sort of experimental rate plan — received dramatically higher bills shortly afterward, they blamed the meters for what they assumed was faulty billing. The San Francisco utility investigated and concluded that the meters were functioning properly. It found that the higher bills were simply a case of unfortunate timing: An increase in conventional rates had taken effect just ahead of unseasonably hot temperatures.
[...]
Pepco Holdings Inc. recently did a pilot test in Washington, D.C., of three rate plans designed to gauge how customers respond to different price signals. One plan pegged the price, which ranged from a penny to 37 cents a kilowatt-hour, to the wholesale cost of electricity. One charged a "critical peak price" of 75 cents a kilowatt-hour during certain hours on a handful of days, and 11 cents per kwh at other times. The final plan gave customers 75 cents for each kilowatt-hour of energy saved and charged 11 cents per kwh for power used.

Results showed that people responded most when threatened with the 75-cent-per-kwh peak pricing. Those customers cut their overall energy consumption between 22% and 34%, depending on whether they also had programmable thermostats that could automatically change temperature settings. Customers offered rebates reduced their usage 9% to 15% — again, with the deeper cuts among those who had smart thermostats.

Despite evidence that sticks are better motivators than carrots, the utility intends to offer rebates in the future in an effort to change behavior. "Our general sense is that consumers would prefer a rate structure with no downside," says Steven Sunderhauf, a program manager for Pepco. "From a purist's standpoint, I may prefer critical peak pricing because it gets the boldest response… but using rebates will help people get comfortable with smart meters."

Electricity demand varies tremendously throughout the day and throughout the year, but electricity capacity is largely fixed and very expensive — more than $1,000 per kilowatt.

So an off-peak kilowatt-hour — a constant kilowatt of energy usage from, say, 1:00 AM to 2:00 AM — costs the utility the price of one kilowatt-hour's fuel, but a peak kilowatt-hour — a constant kilowatt of energy usage from, say, 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM, on the hottest day of the summer — costs the utility the price of one kilowatt-hour's fuel plus an extra $1,000 to increase capacity.

Imagine getting that electricity bill in the mail in September! Instead, you get a blackout. And you pay high prices all year round, night and day.

General Atomics' Energy Multiplier Module

General Atomics is launching a 12-year program to develop a commercial reactor that runs on nuclear waste:

The General Atomics reactor, which is dubbed EM2 for Energy Multiplier Module, would be about one-quarter the size of a conventional reactor and have unusual features, including the ability to burn used fuel, which still contains more than 90% of its original energy. Such reuse would reduce the volume and toxicity of the waste that remained. General Atomics calculates there is so much U.S. nuclear waste that it could fuel 3,000 of the proposed reactors, far more than it anticipates building.
[...]
The EM2 would operate at temperatures as high as 850 degrees Centigrade, which is about twice as hot as a conventional water-cooled reactor. The very high temperatures would make the reactor especially well suited to industrial uses that go beyond electricity production, such as extracting oil from tar sands, desalinating water and refining petroleum to make fuel and chemicals.

The technical hurdles are dwarfed by the regulatory hurdles:

High-temperature reactors place special stress on the metals used in reactor components, and there isn't any commercial certification process at the NRC to assess the reactors' unique characteristics and to verify that they could operate safely for an expected 40- to 60-year life. That process would need to be developed or such reactors couldn't be certified.

The regulatory agency would also have to decide how to handle license requests from companies that might want to locate reactors near industrial facilities, such as oil refineries, something that current regulations don't contemplate and that could pose special safety risks in the event of an industrial fire or explosion.

General Atomics was founded in 1955, by the way, when a name like General Atomics seemed perfectly natural.

Bloom Box

Bloom Energy received $400 million from Kleiner Perkins and others to develop its $800,000 fuel-cell power plant in a box, the Bloom Box:

The box consists of a stack of ceramic disks coated with green and black "inks." The disks are separated by cheap metal alloy plates. Methane (or other hydrocarbons) and oxygen are fed in, the whole thing is heated up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, and electricity comes out. Bloom estimates that a box filled with 64 ceramic disks can produce enough juice to power a Starbucks.

As of right now, Bloom isn't angling for the residential market — the box is far too expensive. But major companies like eBay, Google, Staples, and FedEx have already secretly started using the boxes. So far, the Bloom Box has been a success — eBay has already saved $100,000 in electricity costs since its 5 boxes were installed nine months ago. EBay even claims that the boxes generate more power than the 3,000 solar panels at its headquarters.

So, a $4 million investment has saved $100,000 over nine months. Well then, it should pay for itself in "just" 30 years. (Does a Bloom Box last 30 years?)

Algae to solve the Pentagon's jet fuel problem

DARPA-funded projects have already extracted oil from algal ponds at a cost of $2 per gallon and are on track to begin large-scale refining of that oil into jet fuel, at a cost of less than $3 a gallon:

McQuiston said a larger-scale refining operation, producing 50 million gallons a year, would come on line in 2011 and she was hopeful the costs would drop still further — ensuring that the algae-based fuel would be competitive with fossil fuels. She said the projects, run by private firms SAIC and General Atomics, expected to yield 1,000 gallons of oil per acre from the algal farm.

The military's primary goal isn't to be green but to shorten their supply lines:

The switch is partly driven by cost, but military commanders in Afghanistan and Iraq are also anxious to create a lighter, more fuel-efficient force that is less dependent on supply convoys, which are vulnerable to attack from insurgents. Give the military the capability of creating jet fuel in the field, and you would eliminate that danger, McQuiston said. "In Afghanistan, if you could be able to create jet fuel from indigenous sources and rely on that, you'd not only be able to source energy for the military, but you'd also be able to leave an infrastructure that would be more sustainable."

Space Invaders Enterprise Edition

The whole notion of Space Invaders Enterprise Edition is jarring, but it's meant to demonstrate a particular technical approach to solving business IT problems:

I’ve separated out the game logic from the Java source into a file parsed by a rules engine. This means we can easily view the game design, without it getting muddled with too much implementation code.

Rule engines are commonly used in enterprise-level companies to decide things like how much your car insurance premium will be. Let’s start using this for something more fun!

The "business" rules are written for the questionably named Drools engine:

rule "Reverse aliens if one reachs the edge of the screen"
 when
     $alien : AlienEntity()
     exists (AlienEntity(x <> 750))
 then
     $alien.setHorizontalMovement(-$alien.getHorizontalMovement());
     $alien.setY($alien.getY() + 10);
end 

rule "Process bullets hitting aliens"
 when
     $shot : ShotEntity()
     $alien : AlienEntity(this != $shot, eval($shot.collidesWith($alien)))
     $otherAlien : AlienEntity()
 then
     game.getEntities().remove($shot);
     game.getEntities().remove($alien);
     $otherAlien.setHorizontalMovement($otherAlien.getHorizontalMovement() * 1.04);
end

rule "End the game when all aliens are killed"
 salience 1
 when
     not AlienEntity()
     exists ShipEntity()
 then
     game.notifyWin();
     game.getEntities().clear();
end

rule "End the game when an alien reaches the bottom"
 when
     exists AlienEntity(y > 570)
 then
     game.notifyDeath();
     game.getEntities().clear();
end

I'm sure if we just write code in an English-like language, non-technical business experts will be able to write their own business rules, right?

Death By Revenue Plan

Steve Blank describes Death By Revenue Plan:

We were at the board meeting of company building a radically new type of communication hardware. The company was going through some tough times. It had taken the company almost twice as long as planned to get their product out the door. But that wasn’t what the heat being generated at this board meeting was about. All discussion focused on “missing the revenue plan.”

Spread out in front of everyone around the conference table were the latest Income Statement, Balance Sheets and Cash Flow Statements. The VC’s were very concerned that the revenue the financial plan called for wasn’t being delivered by the sales team. They were also looking at the Cash Flow Statement and expressed their concern (i.e. raised their voices in a annoyed investor tone) that the headcount and its attendant burn rate combined with the lack of revenue meant the company would run out of money much sooner than anyone planned.

The VC’s concluded that the company needed to change direction and act aggressively to increase revenue so the company could “make the plan.” They told the CEO (who was the technical founder) that the sales team should focus on “other markets.” Another VC added that engineering should redesign the product to meet the price and performance of current users in an adjacent market.

The founder was doing his best to try to explain that his vision today was the same as when he pitched the company to the VC’s and when they funded the company. He said, “I told you it was going to take it least five years for the underlying industry infrastructure to mature, and that we had to convince OEMs to design in our product. All this takes time.” But the VC’s kept coming back to the lack of adoption of the product, the floundering sales force, the burn rate — and “the plan.”

Given the tongue-lashing the VC’s were giving the CEO and the VP of Sales, you would have thought that selling the product was something any high-school kid could have done.

What went wrong?

What went wrong was that the founder had built a product for a New Market and the VC’s allowed him to execute, hire and burn cash like he was in an Existing Market.

Risky Experiments on New Directions for Humanity

Sociologist William Sims Bainbridge has shifted his focus from religious cults to virtual societies:

Each well-designed virtual world is based on a coherent theory of human society, history, and our options for the future. Thus, this is like an entirely new field of literature or a laboratory that develops and tests social theories with actual human beings, somewhere between philosophy and social science but also with utopian qualities.

For example: Pirates of the Burning Sea is set in the Caribbean in 1720 and reflects a general view of society often called political economy.

A Tale in the Desert, set in a kind of utopian ancient Egypt, illustrates principles of industrial supply chains, and fits theories of technology as ritual originally proposed by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski.

Star Trek Online (which opened only two days ago) is based on the cultural relativist principle Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

Tabula Rasa expressed a well-developed ideology of space exploration, and our avatars were actually taken up to the International Space Station.

Of course The Matrix Online was built on European theories of false consciousness.

In the 1960s I started studying utopian communes and religious movements, because I saw them as valid if risky experiments on new directions for humanity. That's what virtual worlds are today.

Solar Cell from "Earth Abundant" Materials

IBM researchers have produced a solar cell from inexpensive "earth abundant" materials:

The layer that absorbs sunlight to convert it into electricity is made with Copper (Cu), Tin (Sn), Zinc (Zn), Sulfur (S) and/or Selenium (Se). This is pretty abundant compared to the Copper (Cu), Indium (In), Gallium (Ga), and Selenium (Se) that GIGS thin film cells use.

The beauty is that it has a "conversion efficiency of 9.6 percent, which is 40 percent higher than previous attempts to create a solar cell made of similar materials." But this is just a start. More improvements to power conversion should be possible.

IBM says that it "does not plan to manufacture solar technologies, but is open to partnering with solar cell manufacturers to demonstrate the technology."

The Roman Army Knife

When Rome fell, many important technologies were lost for centuries — including the Swiss Army Knife:

The world's first Swiss Army knife has been revealed — made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart. An intricately designed Roman implement, which dates back to 200AD, it is made from silver but has an iron blade. It features a spoon, fork as well as a retractable spike, spatula and small tooth-pick.

Experts believe the spike may have been used by the Romans to extract meat from snails. It is thought the spatula would have offered a means of poking cooking sauce out of narrow-necked bottles.

The 3in x 6in (8cm x 15cm) knife was excavated from the Mediterranean area more than 20 years ago and was obtained by the museum in 1991. The unique item is among dozens of artefacts exhibited in a newly refurbished Greek and Roman antiquities gallery at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge.

(Hat tip to Younghusband.)

Terminator-Dog

DARPA has awarded Boston Dynamics a $32 million contract to build its BigDog robot and given it 30 months to turn its prototype into a war-ready LS3 Legged Squad Support System:

LS3 is a direct descendant of BigDog, and it'll be battle-hardened and clever enough to use GPS and machine vision to either yomp along behind a pack of troops, or navigate its own way to a pre-programmed assembly point. Yup, that's right, LS3 is smart enough to trot off over the horizon all on its lonesome. That opens up all sorts of amazing military possibilities, like resupply of materiel to troops who are deployed in difficult remote locations, as well as the standard "If LS3 can offload 50 pounds from the back of each soldier in a squad, it will reduce warfighter injuries and fatigue and increase the combat effectiveness of our troops" as described by BD's president Marc Raibert.

The obvious name for such a pack-carrying robot is M.U.L.E.

And its clear that these, and other, potential benefits have been proven to DARPA enough that it's prepared to fund what seems to be an extremely future-focused piece of military hardware. But LS3, of course, stands for much more than its simple "squad support" label would suggest. It's placing artificially-intelligent robots right next to soldiers on the battle field, which is a natural extension of the way robots are currently used in combat--essentially as smart remote control units for situations too dangerous for a human to risk. And in that sense, LS3 is a significant piece of kit. Because it won't be too long before someone considers the benefits of replacing its 400-pound load with a heavy gun, and LS32 becomes an AI-equipped armed battlefield robot. More terminator-dog than K9, you see.

Rocket Mass Heaters

Lesley Verbugge came across references to rocket mass heaters while researching solar ovens, got sidetracked, bought a book on the subject, and ended up building one:

The Three T’s
In seeking a clean burn, think 3-Ts: Time, Temperature, Turbulence. The molecules of oxygen and of the combustion gases all need to be able to find each other as well as commingle. It’s like one of those huge country dances, where all the men line up on one wall, and all the women on the opposite one. When the music begins, everyone surges out onto the dance floor, looking for a partner of the opposite gender. For everyone to pair up, the tune needs to be prolonged (time), the music fast (temperature) and the dance rambunctious (that’s your turbulence).

So your combustion unit needs an insulated combustion chamber (in order to maintain the dancers at a high temperature), a tall enough heat riser that all the oxygen is used up (as the hot, lightweight dancers strut and spin their way up it), and a nonstreamlined profile to tumble the gases (shakin’ their boogilators, as they say). Hence the abrupt right-angle turns in a Rocket Stove’s interior.

Directing the Heat
There are variables which change where the heat is delivered. You can divide the heat that your stove generates according to your needs. There will be a trade-off between fast radiant heat and a long-lasting thermal battery. What heats up quickly — for example, a radiant barrel with little insulation around it — also cools down quickly. Conversely, what heats up slowly cools down slowly, so that the system with its pipe sunk several inches into a massive bed or couch provides warm comfort all night, hours after the fire has gone out. Decide well in advance what proportion you would like to have available for cooking, fast convective heat in your house, direct radiant heat that you can sit in front of, or contact heat that you sit, sprawl or lie on.

A Portable Cash Register

The iPad, like the Kindle, is a portable cash register, Arnold Kling says:

With a Kindle, wherever you are, you are in a bookstore, with your credit card handy. There's nothing wrong with that. I own a Kindle, and I'm happy with it. But it's really not necessary to have to pay for one. I've shelled out much more for books on my Kindle than I did for the Kindle itself. The only reason not to give the Kindle away for free is that you would wind up putting it in the hands of consumers who are not all that interested in books.

Regardless of the price at which the iPad is sold, it is going to generate plenty of revenue. For Steve Jobs, getting people to pay for it is a bit like Tom Sawyer getting his friends to pay for the privilege of doing his whitewashing work for him.

Except that Apple and Amazon don't make much profit off of media sales — yet.

On horses and history

The Offshore Balancer discusses horses and history:

Actually the horse was never ‘replaced’ so straightfowardly. In the mythologised ‘Blitzkrieg’ conquests in 1939–40, only a small part of the Wehrmacht was mechanised. In the invasion of Poland, many vehicles actually broke down on the plains, while most of the Wehrmacht moved on foot, and supplies were often transported in horsedrawn wagons. In fact, the Wehrmacht, probably the most lethal land force of the century, was heavily reliant upon horses.

Horses remain vital. Who could forget our own special forces in Afghanistan in 2001–2, on horseback with laptops? That photo above was taken at that time, and is a warning against glib historical assumptions. The horse is not a premodern relic, but in some contexts, a remarkably effective vehicle.

The historical view of the horse as an obsolete tool of direct battlefield offensive is simplistic. Competent medieval commanders knew that a direct cavalry charge on a well-prepared and dense enemy line could be disastrous. The value of cavalry never fully rested on their ability to make direct assaults on enemy lines. They did many other valuable things. In combat, they were a tool of exploitation, thrust into a disorganised or fleeing enemy to hammer home success. Outside it, they were used for reconnaisance and supply. The Wehrmacht relied upon them extensively on the Eastern Front of World War Two, where mechanised units ran into many enviromental problems of their own, like extreme weather, primitive roads and stretched supply lines.

Liddell Hart’s own intellectual record on the issue is murkier than Richards allows. He was a prophet of tanks, but his ambitious vision of armour as a single, self-sufficient instrument was very wrong. As more cautious interwar experts argued, tanks were only effective when used as part of a combined arms system.

Ironically, one of the reasons that the interwar British did not fully embrace armour to Liddell Hart and Richards’ satisfaction was not because of intellectual backwardness or a fetish for cavalry, but because there were simply too many competing demands on scarce resources, including the job of policing its empire. This meant that heavy tanks lost out to other things, such as light armoured vehicles and colonial constabularies. The task of fighting ‘wars amongst the people’ that Richards believes the UK must prioritise now came at the expense of preparing for armoured and mechanised warfare. Britain was under-prepared to fight a continental war partly because of its investment in small wars. I hope we never have to re-live that shortfall…

For every battleship admiral or cavalry general, there is a wild-eyed visionary who sees a revolution in military affairs:

Alfred Nobel thought dynamite was such a radical change from the past that it would render armed conflict impossibly costly and lead to the end of war. Ivan Bloch thought the same for the machine gun…navalists in France thought the development of torpedo-wielding light surface vehicles would sweep the capital ship from the waves in the 1880’s and lead to a whole new era of naval warfare. Prior to World War I, airpower visionaries looked at the new technology of the airplane and reasoned that this changed everything: land warfare would become impossible in the face of bomber fleets attacking attacking cities directly from the air…After the war, US Army and Air Force concluded that the atom bomb would revolutionize warfare and make traditional continental operations impossible; both organisations abandoned their conventional methods and restructured to fight the atomic wars of the future. For the Air Force, this cost lives in subsequent nonnuclear land wars in Korea and Vietnam; for the Army, it resulted in the ignominous abandonment of the atomic-optimised Pentomic Division structure by 1961.

The calibration of destruction

The Economist reports on how smart bombs are changing warfare:

During the first Gulf war, in 1991, American warplanes had to drop an average of six 450kg satellite-guided bombs to destroy a tank or a small building. During the second war, 12 years later, a similar attack required bombs half that size, and fewer of them. Today 100kg bombs would suffice, because guidance systems are so good that individual rooms, as opposed to entire buildings, can be aimed at.
[...]
One defence contractor, Israel Military Industries, makes a 225kg bomb, the MPR-500, that can hammer through several storeys of a building and explode on a chosen floor. This feat means triggering the detonation about two milliseconds after the bomb hits the ceiling above the doomed storey. The bomb can be programmed to do this just seconds before it is dropped. Such precision means it is sold as a replacement for ordnance two or more times its size.

The CBU-105 is the kind of hardware war nerds love:

On April 2nd 2003, during the second Gulf war, a hundred or so Iraqi armoured vehicles approached a far smaller American reconnaissance unit south of Baghdad. Responding to a call for help, a B-52 bomber attacked the first 30 or so vehicles in the column with a single, historic pass. It dropped two new CBU-105 bombs, and the result shocked the soldiers of both sides — and, soon enough, military observers everywhere.

While falling, the CBU-105 bombs popped open, each releasing ten submunitions which were slowed by parachutes. Each of these used mini rockets to spin and eject outward four discs the size of ice-hockey pucks.

The 80 free-falling discs from the pair of bombs then scanned the ground with lasers and heat-detecting infra-red sensors to locate armoured vehicles. Those discs that identified a target exploded dozens of metres up. The blast propelled a tangerine-sized slug of copper down into the target, destroying it with the impact and the accompanying shrapnel. The soldiers in the 70 vehicles farther back in the column surrendered immediately.

The CBU-105, however frightening, may actually point the way toward less violent warfare. Cluster munitions — which release bomblets to cover a wide area — are banned or tightly restricted by an international convention. But the CBU-105 and its cousins, known as sensor-fused weapons, are considered legal because very few discs remain unexploded on the battlefield. Those that fail to detect a target are supposed to self-destruct in the air. The trigger batteries of those that do not will quickly die, so duds are unlikely to kill civilians later.

Crucially, the manufacturer of the CBU-105, Textron Defense Systems, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is improving sensors to allow the weapon to distinguish the heat signatures of cars, buses and homes from those of military hardware. If there is such a thing as a humanitarian bomb, this might be it.

I'm not sure what role that plays in counter-insurgencency, but it sure is a whiz-bang gizmo. Emphasis on the bang, I suppose.

SHOT Show Technology

The Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show featured a number of new technologies.

Armatix, for instance, is offering a pistol that only shoots if it's near its matching wristwatch. I can't imagine too many people will pay €7,000 for a .22 pistol that lights up green (or red) though.

More practically, Glock has updated its pistols:

Each one has a fiercely textured grip, a larger magazine release and interchangeable backstraps. There’s something new under the hood too. Each gun has a set of three springs to dampen recoil. When we shot the .40-caliber Glock 22, its kick was surprisingly soft.

This Burns scope sounds like technology I expected to see much earlier:

It has a laser rangefinder that can automatically adjust your sights to compensate for the fall of each bullet over long distances. Just point the crosshairs at the target, push a button on the side of the scope, and a bright red dot will show you exactly where the bullet will fall. We were able to easily hit targets at 400 and 700 meters without any experience at long-range rifle shooting.

The semi-auto civilian version of H&K's 416, the MR556, should be out soon — but by then everyone will already have an assault rifle, right?

Threatening home invaders with apparently deadly force and then shooting them with tiny koosh balls does not strike me as "the most intelligent way to defend your family" — but that's what Lightfield is selling:

Later this year, you will be able to buy rubber bullets for home defense. Lightfield has been selling these projectiles to law enforcement agencies and wildlife officials for years. Each round is filled with a soft projectile that resembles a koosh ball. They look like toys, because they’re made by a Chinese toy factory. The best thing about them is that they aren’t likely to kill someone even if they are fired at point blank range. They’re so soft that they’re almost incapable of penetrating the body.

‘Forced Features’ Drive Up Hybrid Prices

The Union of Concerned Scientists — with all the credibility of the Super Friends — has released a Hybrid Scorecard that faults automakers for selling their fuel-efficient cars with forced features that drive up prices:

These features [DVD players, keyless entry systems, heated power mirrors and other pricey gadgets] are standard equipment, not options, and add an average of $3,000 to the bottom line. That’s on top of the “hybrid premium” that typically adds three to four grand to cover the cost of the electric motor and battery pack.

“Consumers shouldn’t be forced to take features on the hybrids and pay thousands of dollars more because manufacturers don’t want to offer them a choice,” said Don Anair, a senior analyst in the vehicles program at the union. “People are looking for fuel-efficient vehicles, and they shouldn’t be forced to pay thousands more for them.”

The automakers can only make so many hybrids, which use new technologies and exotic raw materials, so they can't make up low margins with volume. If they took out all those "unnecessary" high-margin add-ons, they couldn't, and wouldn't, sell the cars for thousands less.

Leonardo da Vinci's Resume

Leonardo da Vinci's resume, written to Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan, in 1482, describes what the 30-year-old weapons-engineer could do:

Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1. I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. Also methods of burning and destroying those of the enemy.
   


2. I know how, when a place is besieged, to take the water out of the trenches, and make endless variety of bridges, and covered ways and ladders, and other machines pertaining to such expeditions.
   


3. If, by reason of the height of the banks, or the strength of the place and its position, it is impossible, when besieging a place, to avail oneself of the plan of bombardment, I have methods for destroying every rock or other fortress, even if it were founded on a rock, etc.
   


4. Again, I have kinds of mortars; most convenient and easy to carry; and with these I can fling small stones almost resembling a storm; and with the smoke of these cause great terror to the enemy, to his great detriment and confusion.
   


5. And if the fight should be at sea I have kinds of many machines most efficient for offense and defense; and vessels which will resist the attack of the largest guns and powder and fumes.
   


6. I have means by secret and tortuous mines and ways, made without noise, to reach a designated spot, even if it were needed to pass under a trench or a river.
   


7. I will make covered chariots, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the enemy with their artillery, there is no body of men so great but they would break them. And behind these, infantry could follow quite unhurt and without any hindrance.
   


8. In case of need I will make big guns, mortars, and light ordnance of fine and useful forms, out of the common type.
   


9. Where the operation of bombardment might fail, I would contrive catapults, mangonels, trabocchi, and other machines of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of offense and defense.
   


10. In times of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.
    


11. I can carry out sculpture in marble, bronze, or clay, and also I can do in painting whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the bronze horse may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of the prince your father of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your park, or in whatever place may please your Excellency — to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc.

Creating Cities From Scratch

American real-estate developer Stan Gale is building a South Korean city from scratch:

The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea's banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.

New Songdo City won't be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre "Central Park" modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan's. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea's tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park's canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he's stocked the canal with fish yet. "It's four days old!" he splutters, forgetting he isn't supposed to rest until the seventh.

As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there's a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

Experimental prototype community of tomorrow? I feel like I've heard that somewhere before.

A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It's an "international business district" and an "aerotropolis" — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it's supposed to be a "smart city," studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its "Smarter Planet" religion.

It's not quite clear what a "smart city" offers, but Cisco seems to think it should mean "telepresence":

No longer content to sell just plumbing, the company is teaming up with Gale, 3M, United Technologies (UTC), and the architects of Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) to enter the instant-city business. At a Cisco event near New Songdo last summer, Gale stunned the room by announcing plans to eventually roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. In the spirit of Moore's Law, he says, each will be done faster, better, cheaper, year after year.

Cisco calls this Smart+Connected Communities initiative a potential $30 billion opportunity, a number based not only on the revenues from installation of the basic infrastructure but also on selling the consumer-facing hardware as well as the services layered on top of that hardware. Picture a Cisco-built digital infrastructure wired to Cisco's TelePresence videoconferencing screens mounted in every home and office, with engineers listening, learning, and releasing new Cisco-branded bandwidth-hungry services in exchange for modest monthly fees. You've heard of software as a service? Well, Cisco intends to offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities — water, power, traffic, telephony — into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident's bill.

In case you missed it, Gale announced plans to roll out 20 new cities across China and India, using New Songdo as a template. We'll see how that works out.

DIY Streamliner Motorcycle

Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” Allert Jacobs has modified a Honda Innova to get 199 miles per gallon:

The Honda Innova is no slouch out of the box, returning 133 mpg from a 125cc engine producing a whopping 9 horsepower. But the Dutch “efficiency enthusiast,” as EcoModder calls him in its write-up, couldn’t leave well enough alone.

He’s put in a lot of miles on recumbent bicycles and knows a thing or two about aerodynamics, so the first thing he did was convert the Inova to a recumbent by moving the seat waaaay down on the bike’s step-through frame and moving the footpegs. That and a simple fairing boosted the bike’s top speed from 56 mph to 69 mph. Together with taller gearing, Jacobs raised his fuel economy to 156 mpg.

But why stop there? Jacobs spent several months designing and building the full fairing, which splits in two vertically just behind the windshield so he can get in. While it looks like you’d blow right over with a sneeze, Jacobs claims the bike is stable even in a 40-mph crosswind.

The bike’s record is 214 mpg, and Jacobs says it averages 199. But he’s not done yet. He’s shooting for 235 mpg — which for those using the metric system is 1 liter per 100 kilometers.

If you travel 10,000 miles per year, going from 133 mpg to 235 mpg saves you 33 gallons of gas, or about $83, per year.

Balloon Wars

In the 1950s, early in the Cold War, the US enlisted balloons — because they had attributes that airplanes couldn’t match:

They could stay aloft for a long time (days or even weeks), they could reach altitudes where airplanes couldn’t fly (100,000 feet), and they could go places that were too dangerous for manned aircraft (flying over the Soviet Union).

America used to think big:

Project MOGUL was an Air Force balloon program to detect Soviet nuclear tests by listening to sound waves traveling through the upper atmosphere. During World War II, scientists had discovered the existence of an ocean layer that conducted underwater sound for thousands of miles. They thought that a similar sound channel might exist in the upper atmosphere. If they could put microphones in the upper atmosphere, the U.S. thought they might be able to hear Soviet nuclear tests and even detect ballistic missiles launches heading toward their targets. Designed to test this theory, Project Mogul balloons carried microphones up to the sound channel to “listen” and radio transmitters to send the sound to the ground. At first, project MOGUL flights involved trains of small weather balloons up to 600 feet in length. Later MOGUL flights used the large polyethylene balloons developed for the Navy’s SKYHOOK.

SKYHOOK balloons, funded by the Office of Naval Research, were designed to stay at a fixed altitude (~100,000 feet) and carry a payload of thousands of pounds. They were huge, 400 feet high, made possible because the then new material called polyethylene. These “flying sandwich bags” were built by a company that had experience using this material in packaging – General Mills (the same company that makes Cheerios.)

In 1957 the Air Force started Project ASHCAN (using SKYHOOK class balloons at 100,0000 feet) to take high altitude air samples and search for nuclear particles and trace gases in fallout from tests in the Soviet Union. For the first time, U.S. intelligence could estimate the amount of plutonium being produced by Soviet weapons production reactors. These balloons were secretly launched from Brazil and the Panama Canal Zone, and from air force bases in the U.S. Over time, U.S. intelligence also used reconnaissance planes like the U-2, RB-57’s, and C-130 aircraft to collect air samples.

In 1950 the Air Force thought that high-altitude balloons might be used to perform photo and ELINT spyflights over the Soviet Union. They placed aerial reconnaissance cameras on the balloons and ran a series of test programs (code names of GOPHER, MOBY DICK, GRANDSON and GRAYBACK) launching 640 balloons from New Mexico, Montana, the West Coast, Missouri and Georgia. With the tests completed, the program name changed to GENETRIX and was given the designation of Weapons System 119L.

In late 1955 President Eisenhower gave the ok to launch the GENETRIX balloons over the Soviet Union. Hundreds of these balloons took off from secret sites in Norway, Scotland, West Germany, and Turkey carrying a gondola with two reconnaissance cameras.

The United States launched 516 of the GENETRIX balloons but only 44 or so made it out of the Soviet Union. The rest landed on Soviet farms dumping 600-pound cameras in hayfields. We did get coverage of about 8 percent of the Soviet Union, but politically it created a lot of tension as cameras were popping up on Khrushchev’s desk. “Oh, another balloon Mr. Premier.” The Soviets put on a public exhibition of the equipment.

These high-tech balloons didn't just spook the Soviets:

Before sunrise and after sunset, while the Earth below was dark, high altitude balloons were still lit by sunlight, and their plastic skin glowed and appeared to change color with the change in sun angle. Some of the Project Mogul balloon flights were launched from Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico in 1947, and a few crashed nearby – one near a town called Roswell. The start of the Mogul balloon flights coincided with the first reports of UFO’s. To someone on the ground, these balloons may have looked like UFOs.

Spirit

The latest xkcd strip, on the Mars rover Spirit, is bittersweet. I find it far too easy to identify with a little, well-intentioned robot.

Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible

Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible, Scott Adams (Dilbert) explains:

I keep getting unexplained bankcard services fees on my business checking account, somehow related to selling some of my original art a few years ago. I contacted my bank to clear it up. My bank could find no record that I ever had a merchant account with them. Nor could they find any record that I have a current checking account with them. They did acknowledge billing me for the services they say I don't have.

Allow me to say that again: My bank can't find any record that I have a checking account with them, searching either by my name or my account number. As I write this, it still isn't cleared up.

In the end, it will turn out to be something simple. I probably called the Bankcard Merchant Services department instead of the Merchant Services Bankcard department, and they can only see certain types of accounts, or some such thing. I don't think my money actually disappeared. The real problem is that the world has become so complex that simple tasks are nearly impossible.

I recently got a video switching device, professionally installed, that lets multiple televisions in the house display what is playing on, for example, a DVD player in another room. We just built our home, so we had the luxury of wiring it for that sort of function. It's a great idea, except that when I turn on the TV in one room it sometimes randomly turns on a TV in another. A team of very smart and experienced technicians have been trying to solve that bug for a week. In the end, I'll just live with it, or stop watching television, whichever is easier. Complexity transforms the simple into the impossible.

I went to upgrade a family member's cell phone the other day. I knew exactly what I wanted. The store even had it in stock. Still, the transaction took 90 minutes. It had something to do with using the upgrade of one family member for the phone of another, which ended up killing the wrong phone, hosing e-mail on my BlackBerry, and a host of other issue before we got it all working. Complexity made the simple nearly impossible.

Lately I've been trying to get all of my insurance issues sorted out. I need about seven different types of policies for various car risks, house risks, business risks, and personal risks. So I ask my insurance guy a question, and he passes the question to the carrier, and by the time I get the answer, I forgot what I asked. Worse yet, I have three more questions. Insurance documents keep piling up on my desk. Some want payment, some want inventories, some want data, some need review, and maybe signatures. I don't even know where to start. The complexity has overwhelmed me. So I just stare at the pile and hope a meteor doesn't strike the house.

Giant, Sophisticated, Disposable

Growing up, I had always assumed that spy satellites were chock-full of sophisticated electronics — including, of course, television cameras. This probably was true by the time I was aware of spy satellites, but the first spy satellites carried Kodak film, which they had to return to earth from orbit. They were giant, sophisticated, disposable cameras, produced by something called the Corona project:

When the Corona satellites were launched the CIA used a “cover” story. They called the Corona satellites the “Discoverer” program and claimed it was an experimental program to develop and test satellite subsystems and explore environmental conditions in space. The film recovery capsule was described as a “biomedical capsule” for the recovery of biological specimens sent into space as an early test of how humans would react to manned spaceflight.

The Corona project was run like a startup — a small team, minimum bureaucracy, focussed on a goal and tightly integrated with customer needs. Starting in February 1959, only 12 months after the program began the Air Force launched the first Corona reconnaissance satellite from the military’s secret spaceport on the California coast at Vandenberg Air Force Base. But the first 13 missions were failures. Yet the program was deemed so important to national security the CIA and the Air Force persevered. And when the first images were received they transformed technical intelligence forever. Objects as small as 6 feet (some claim 3 feet) could be seen from space over millions of miles of a formally closed country.
[...]
While Corona had a number of technological breakthroughs, including the first photoreconnaissance satellite, the first recovery of an object from space, etc. it was Corona imagery in 1961 that told the intelligence community and the new Kennedy administration that the “missile gap” (the supposed Soviet lead in ICBMs) was illusory. By fall of 1961 Soviet Union had a total of six deployed ICBMs — we had ten times as many. In truth, it was the U.S. that had the lead in missiles.

Corona was just the beginning. Overhead reconnaissance would become an integral part of the U.S. intelligence community. Hidden in plain sight, Lockheed and the U.S. intelligence community were just getting started in Silicon Valley.

Science project prompts school evacuation

A tech magnet school, holding a science fair, was evacuated, because an 11-year-old student showed up with his project, an empty bottle with wires and other electrical components attached:

Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said the student had been making the device in his home garage. A vice principal saw the student showing it to other students at school about 11:40 a.m. Friday and was concerned that it might be harmful, and San Diego police were notified.

The school, which has about 440 students in grades 6 to 8 and emphasizes technology skills, was initially put on lockdown while authorities responded.

Luque said the project was made of an empty half-liter Gatorade bottle with some wires and other electrical components attached. There was no substance inside.

When police and the Metro Arson Strike Team responded, they also found electrical components in the student's backpack, Luque said. After talking to the student, it was decided about 1 p.m. to evacuate the school as a precaution while the item was examined. Students were escorted to a nearby playing field, and parents were called and told they could come pick up their children.

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

Luque said the project was intended to be a type of motion-detector device.

Both the student and his parents were "very cooperative" with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student's home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

"There was nothing hazardous at the house," Luque said.

The student will not be prosecuted, but authorities were recommending that he and his parents get counseling, the spokesman said. The student violated school policies, but there was no criminal intent, Luque said.

The student violated school policies by bringing a home-made motion-detector to school as part of the science fair?

Nikola Tesla Is Back in Tech Fashion

Nikola Tesla is back in tech fashion, the Wall Street Journal reports:

When California engineers wanted to brand their new $100,000 electric sports car, one name stood out: Tesla. When circuit designers at microchip producer Nvidia Corp. in 2007 launched a new line of advanced processors, they called them Tesla. And when videogame writers at Capcom Entertainment in Silicon Valley needed a character who could understand alien spaceships for their new Dark Void saga, they found him in Nikola Tesla.

Kudos to Daniel Michaels for not mentioning the hair band as an early example of Teslamania:

An early hint was "Tesla Girls," a 1984 single from the British technopop band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Performance artist Laurie Anderson has said she was fascinated by Tesla. David Bowie played a fictionalized version of him in the 2006 film "The Prestige," alongside Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Director Terry Gilliam described Tesla in a recent documentary film as "more of an artist than a scientist in some strange way."

By the way, that image of Tesla is of David Bowie playing Tesla.

The beauty of Tesla is that he wrote little down, and most of what he did write down was destroyed, so you can start from some of his boasts and assume he understood just about everything well before its time:

His papers suggest he stumbled upon — but didn't pursue — lasers and X-rays, years before their recognized discoveries. He proposed transmitting electricity through the upper atmosphere. He sketched out robots and a death ray he hoped would end all wars.
[...]
Tesla's more outlandish pronouncements stoked that mythology. He said he could use electricity to cause earthquakes and control weather. He claimed to have detected signals from Mars while he was in Colorado.

Unlike Edison, who died in 1931 with 1,093 patents to his name, Tesla left few completed blueprints. The shortcoming undercut his legacy but added to the air of mystery surrounding him.