Wii Sports Resort

Nintendo's Wii Sports sequel — Wii Sports Resort — goes tropical with three new games: Sword Play, Power Cruising, and Disc Dog.

I have been waiting for a Wii sword-fighting game for a long time — and it looks like there's a reason:

The newly announced Wii MotionPlus — a new accessory that plugs into the base of the Wiimote to provide better tracking of arm movement — will come packed with the game.

Ah, sweet, sweet, faux-light saber action...

Testing of electric truck for Los Angeles port sparks enthusiasm

Testing of electric truck for Los Angeles port sparks enthusiasm:

Although electric truck tests are still underway, the port has already ordered 20 more of the vehicles at a cost of $208,000 each.
[...]
The electric truck, which takes about three hours to charge, has a range of about 30 miles while pulling a 60,000-pound cargo container, and about 60 miles empty. Although that distance may not sound useful, much of freight hauling within the port complex is from terminals to nearby train yards.

It costs about 20 cents a mile to operate, or about four to nine times less than a diesel truck, depending on fluctuating fuel costs and operating conditions.

You can watch a short puff piece on the truck too.

Despite the fact that Los Angeles Harbor Commission President S. David Freeman says, "With diesel fuel selling for nearly $5 a gallon, this is the cheapest truck on the road," that's not clear at all.

How does the $208,000 price tag compare to the price of an equivalent diesel truck? How long does the battery last, and how much does it cost to replace? Why don't those numbers ever make their way into an article about cost savings?

Anyway, I do believe that an electric truck makes perfect sense for moving cargo containers short distances across port facilities, and I know I'd rather work around electric trucks than diesels.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008

Kindle 2.0 Coming Around October 2008:

An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October.

The first is an updated version with the same sized screen, a smaller form factor, and an improved interface. The source told us that Amazon has “skipped three or four generations,” comparing the old Kindle to the 1st gen iPod and the new version to something like the sexy iPod Mini.

The second new model, which is shaped like an 8 1/2 x 11-inch piece of paper, is considerably bigger than the current model and should be available next year.

Both models should come in multiple colors and may be aimed at younger readers.

Wii Music

I've been wondering how long it would be until someone came out with a free-form version of Guitar Hero or Rock Band, where you could play your own music. Now it looks like Nintendo's leading the way, with its upcoming Wii Music:

Nintendo this morning announced a new addition to the Wii family: Wii Music. Instead of your musical creativity being confined by the limitation of the number of plastic instruments that can fit in your living room, Wii Music uses the Wii Remote, Nunchuck and Balance Board to let the user play more than 60 different instruments.

But don't get confused: Wii Music isn't trying to compete with Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Instead, the game's more like an open jam session where players improvise as they go—there are no notes to follow, no one to boo you off stage, no Star Power to reward you for a 100-note streak. It's a non-judgmental way to rock out through your TV.

We heard a drum and sax solo, and then a few Nintendo executives demonstrated full-band play onstage by gracing us with a calypso rendition of the Mario theme song. But we're still unsure how much skill is actually required to "play" each instrument. In fact, Nintendo’s press release says "the music always sounds great," so we're pretty sure anyone can pick up the controllers and put on an impressive show.

The drums were the most interesting instrument demonstrated. The remote and numchuck are used like drum sticks, so you need to move your arms around like you're air drumming to get your sound. The Wii Balance Board is used like the drum pedals on any drum kit. It manages to seem very realistic without requiring a physical set the way Rock Band does. And the game gives you lessons, so theoretically you should learn how to play an actual drum set in a few weeks.

Wii Music also lets you record multi-track videos, so you can be your own one-man band. Or you can be like indy band The Postal Service and send tracks back and forth with friends through WiiConnect24. Bottom line: Even though it might not be as demanding as the other music-making games out there, Wii Music looks like a lot of fun. It will be in stories in time for the holidays—let's just hope that Nintendo ships enough copies to satisfy all the Wii Fanatics out there.

Boeing's Blimp-Copter

Behold Boeing's Blimp-Copter:

Boeing has teamed with a Canadian company to enter the blimp market with a combined airship-helicopter. Working with SkyHook International, Boeing says its JHL-40 could take some 80,000 pounds of cargo over 200 miles. "Boeing said the blimp would be environmentally friendly because it would eliminate the need to build roads or rail lines to remote locations, where transportation can be costly, inadequate and unreliable," Reuters reports. "The JHL-40, or Jess Heavy Lifter, is named after Pete Jess, president and chief operating officer of SkyHook International, the Calgary, Alberta-based company that secured the patent for the blimp, which combines elements of a helicopter and a traditional airship."

Writing at Aviation Week's ARES blog, Graham Warwick notes that Boeing is not the first company to push a heli-airship combo. "Piasecki flew the PA-97 Helistat in 1986," he notes. "This combined a 343 ft-long Navy aerostat with four Sikorsky H-34 helicopters. Boeing says the PA-97 was brought down by ground resonance, something it can avoid using the latest computational tools."

I almost expect to see Nick Fury aboard this helicopter airship — once it gets a carrier flight deck added on top.

Acting Squirrelly

Cringely believes that SAP is acting squirrelly — which gives him an excuse to examine squirrel behavior in a bit too much depth:

You are driving down a street in your car and up ahead there is a squirrel at the side of the road eating a nut. You aren't on an intercept course, there is no way you are going to hit that squirrel. So what does the squirrel do? At the very last possible moment, rather than watching you drive by, THE SQUIRREL DARTS STRAIGHT FOR YOUR CAR, passing inches in front of or behind the front tires.

Why does he do that?

Obviously I'm a guy with too much time on my hands because I've given this quite a bit of thought.

From a purely metabolic perspective, whatever its motivation the physical advantage clearly lies with the squirrel. Sure, my car is bigger and faster, but the squirrel is smaller and quicker, with a heart that beats up to 700 times per minute. To the squirrel I seem to be driving by in slow motion, and whether he goes in front of the tires or behind or in front of one and behind another is strictly a matter of style: once the squirrel has my vector, Victor, he's in command.

But judging by the number of squirrels squished on the road, there must be some risk to this game, so why does he do it?

The answer has nothing to do with cars because squirrel psychology predates both cars and men. For the squirrel, in fact, there may be no difference between my car and an ice age saber-toothed tiger.

The squirrel doesn't trust me. Sure, it looks like I'm not even chasing him, but he's a tasty squirrel and I'm a saber-toothed tiger. By waiting until the last possible moment then running TOWARD me, the squirrel is rushing the net, moving the confrontation effectively forward in time in such a way that the squirrel is pushing his tactical advantage.

As a predator, I'm simply not supposed to expect this squirrel to be running toward me, rather than away. He's using the element of surprise to confuse me. And it works, because I've never hit a squirrel with my car.

So, what does this have to do with ERP giant SAP?

SAP and companies like it do something similar by making powerful software that is quite deliberately difficult to use. They could make it easier. Heck, the capability to make it easier is shipped right with the software, though never pointed out to the customer.
[...]
Unlike standardized financial statements, the most powerful ERP screens and reports will vary dramatically from company to company, so the ability to customize SAP is vital to obtaining the maximum possible benefit from the software.

That's why there are so many SAP consultants. And that's why SAP, itself, makes 40 percent of its revenue from providing consulting services -- revenue that would be significantly less if the software was easier to customize and easier to use.

If SAP software was easier to customize and use, SAP the company might get a few more customers but would have significantly less revenue. Or that's the fear.

There is a product called GuiXT that is an interface builder shipped for free with every copy of SAP R/3. Pronounced "gooey-x-t," this client-server application sits on top of R/3 and can be used with almost no programming to customize and integrate R/3 screens as well as add certain overlay functions that aren't readily available in R/3, itself. The point with GuiXT is to not mess with the underlying R/3 code, which means an SAP installation can be less customized on the back end, installed cheaper, and be up and running quicker.

So when you, as an SAP customer, call up your SAP consultant to ask for customization, that consultant will often show you the next day a GuiXT implementation that does exactly what you asked for but is presented as a mock-up. Once you've signed-off on the look and feel then the SAP consultants can dig into R/3 itself and spend a few weeks implementing what you asked for. OR they could simply run the GuiXT app that took them an hour to build.

Are you starting to see the picture?
[...]
The squirrel dives for your front tires because by ice age rules that's the thing to do, though at an obvious cost today in squished squirrels. Similarly, SAP deliberately hides the power of GuiXT thinking it could hurt consulting revenue when, in fact, it could INCREASE sales revenue by broadening the market and making R/3 less scary for companies to install and run.

Both the squirrel and SAP do what they do because it appears to work, though a safer and easier course was there all along.

The Island in the Wind

Elizabeth Kolbert calls the Danish island of Samsø the island in the wind because of its switch to renewable energy in 1997, after the Danish Ministry of Environment and Energy decided it had potential:

They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

Some details:

All told, Samsø has eleven large land-based turbines. (It has about a dozen additional micro-turbines.) This is a lot of turbines for a relatively small number of people, and the ratio is critical to Samsø’s success, as is the fact that the wind off the Kattegat blows pretty much continuously; flags on Samsø, I noticed, do not wave — they stick straight out, as in children’s drawings. Hermansen told us that the land-based turbines are a hundred and fifty feet tall, with rotors that are eighty feet long. Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity. (This is true in an arithmetic sense; as a practical matter, Samsø’s production of electricity and its needs fluctuate, so that sometimes it is feeding power into the grid and sometimes it is drawing power from it.) The offshore turbines, meanwhile, are even taller — a hundred and ninety-five feet high, with rotors that extend a hundred and twenty feet. A single offshore turbine generates roughly eight million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year, which, at Danish rates of energy use, is enough to satisfy the needs of some two thousand homes. The offshore turbines — there are ten of them — were erected to compensate for Samsø’s continuing use of fossil fuels in its cars, trucks, and ferries. Their combined output, of around eighty million kilowatt-hours a year, provides the energy equivalent of all the gasoline and diesel oil consumed on the island, and then some; in aggregate, Samsø generates about ten per cent more power than it consumes.

Of course, this all treats the transition as free, which, of course, it isn't:

Each land-based turbine cost the equivalent of eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Each offshore turbine cost around three million dollars. Some of Samsø’s turbines were erected by a single investor, like Tranberg; others were purchased collectively. At least four hundred and fifty island residents own shares in the onshore turbines, and a roughly equal number own shares in those offshore. Shareholders, who also include many non-residents, receive annual dividend checks based on the prevailing price of electricity and how much their turbine has generated.

I need more policy details:

Thanks to a policy put in place by Denmark’s government in the late nineteen-nineties, utilities are required to offer ten-year fixed-rate contracts for wind power that they can sell to customers elsewhere. Under the terms of these contracts, a turbine should — barring mishap — repay a shareholder’s initial investment in about eight years.

If the investment pays for itself in eight years, that's a surprisingly good return on investment. To what extent are the Danish tax-payers subsidizing it?

How to sell your software for $20,000

Bill — he only reveals his first name — has "gone from a one-man micro ISV selling shareware for a few hundred bucks a month on the side, to building up into a 5-employee, $2 million software company."

When he started his company, he saw a choice:

It really comes down to, would you rather make a new widget with 99% chance of making nothing and 1% chance of making $10 million; or a 50% chance of making $1 million for the same amount of time and effort (for a remake of some boring business-to-business product but done better)? The former is what everybody seems to do, but the latter is what I did making my very niche vertical market software. It took me over a decade to build, but the money keeps coming in and last year my sales were just under $2 million of which $800K was profit. Not bad for under 200K lines of code!

Once he had a little success, he quickly became cynical:

For some reason I got inundated with all kinds of companies wanting to be "strategic partners" or form a "strategic alliance." No, they never want to buy anything, in fact they all would in effect be suppliers to me. But they still want to fly out and meet with me, and get my brochures and specs, and see demos, and have telecons, and talk about "joint marketing opportunities," and sign this NDA and that exclusive teaming agreement, and oh yea, could I help pay for some ad or some trade show booth with them, or help them put together a proposal for some bid. Huh? Yet for some reason at first I couldn't say "no" if it was just talking with them or trading information. I was a nice guy. I wasn't about to spend anything or sign anything, but when they'd say "we'll be out there the 22nd, how's 3pm sound?" what was I supposed to say? So there I was giving demos all the time and sitting on telecons about nothing and writing up this and that.

Soon all the overhead phone calls and emails and visits and demos with these wanna-be "strategic partners" I realized were a complete waste. None of them would bring me any new business — they all just wanted a piece of my action.

He also became cynical about his friends who said they wanted to work with him on his new project:

So when it came down to it, no, my coworker couldn't quit and work with me for free for a year for a big chunk of the company if we hit it off, because he didn't want to spend his savings and 401K until we had income. Too risky for him and that was totally understandable.

What wasn't so understandable and was disappointing to me, was over the next several years as I took all the risk, finished the product, hit the road selling it, fretted over meeting delivery schedules, took out loans to pay for the equipment and hoped the customer would pay on time, after all that he finally wanted to join. [...] He seemed disappointed and finally said he expected he'd get a share of the company "since I'm one of the first employees." I asked how much were you thinking? He replied "I don't know, 30, 40 percent maybe."

Wow.

Anyway, Bill goes on to explain how to sell your software for $20,000:

1. Find software out there that sells for $20,000 a copy
2. Pick the products that are supporting a handful of million-dollar companies.
3. Build the product but only with the core features
4. Get your name out in the industry
5. Present yourself as consultingware — it won't matter that it's you against big companies

Project Management with Niel Robertson

The folks at the Devver Blog have posted a piece, called Project Management with Niel Robertson, summarizing Robertson's recent presentation on product management for start-ups:

In fact, he went as far as saying the number one thing that goes wrong at startups might be PM. Niel described PM as a process for delivering Kstrong>the right features at the right time. He went on to discuss why PM can become stale, be ignored, and is often hated because it is associated with excessive documentation, which it shouldn’t be. Mentioning more than once that the best feature requests, requirements, and specs are often just one sentence.
[...]
His basic points about why every project can benefit from PM are:

• It takes 30 secs to write a requirement
• 2 minutes to clarify in discussion
• 5 min to for an engineer to spec
• Hours or days to prototype, write code, integrate, or deploy it

[...]
As my notes are often just a list of key points that caught my attention, I will do as I often do and share some favorites.

• How to write a good requirement… “The user should be able to…”
• How to respond with a good spec… “The user can do that by… doing X… List the exceptions”
• A spec is well written when QA can figure out how to test a feature based on the spec.
• Doesn’t encourage people to shotgun tons of things to market. “When I make spaghetti, I try not to throw all of it against the wall.”
• On gathering data, go out and talk to people getting more data points about the problem you are solving until you start hearing the same things and can’t learn more from talking. Then go work on it, knowing all this data.
• Niel doesn’t recommend a developer also taking on the role of PM, as there needs to be a tension between who represents the user and who implements the product.
• “The PM should be the most empowered employee in your company… Yes, even more than the CEO”

I've uploaded the actual presentation to Google Docs:

Our Electric Future

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, argues for Our Electric Future — with illustrations by John Hersey:









I find his history more compelling than his proposed future:

In the early 1970s, President Nixon kicked off Project Independence, defining a national goal in his State of the Union address: “At the end of this decade, in the year 1980, the United States will not be dependent on any other country for the energy we need to provide our jobs, to heat our homes, and to keep our transportation moving.”

The failure to meet that goal was dramatic.

After Nixon, president after president set similar goals. Every target was missed. We became more and more dependent on imported petroleum. Net energy imports doubled between 1970 and 1980, and then again by 1990.

Amazon Kindle Sales on the Rise?

Are Amazon Kindle sales on the rise?

According to a source at Amazon, "on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles." Amazon is notoriously tight lipped about sales data, and the new line of business that the Kindle represents for the online retail powerhouse has been especially frustrating for analysts and media to parse. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.
[...]
A couple of things could explain the uptick. The Kindle quickly sold out shortly after it was unveiled on Amazon at the end of 2007. However, the company recently cranked up supply to meet demand, and cut the price at the end of May from $399 to $359. Some analysts estimate Kindle sales at around 55,000 a month.

Hot Airships

I was recently reminded of the SF trope of establishing a parallel universe by sticking a few airships the sky, and that got me to thinking about everyone's favorite hydrogen- and helium-filled leviathans — and why hot air works so well for balloons, yet we never hear about hot-air dirigibles.

It turns out, they exist. The Airship Alberto, for instance, uses hot air for lift, which means it can deflate and fold for storage, like an ordinary balloon, without a large hangar and ground crew:



The Alberto — named after Alberto Santos-Dumont, of course — has a semi-rigid, umbrella-like skeleton, unlike a balloon, which gives it the structural rigidity to handle higher air speeds and tighter maneuvering — and with vectored thrust from the rear-mounted propeller, it is quite maneuverable.

Of course, the real advantage of the Alberto's hot-air design is that it's one-tenth as expensive as a helium dirigible. (They expect the sale price of the aircraft to be between $100,000 and $200,000, the price of a small airplane or mid-sized sailboat.)

So why use helium at all? Because a given volume of hot air can lift only about one-third as much as the same volume of helium — so a hot-air airship needs to be roughly 1.5 times as tall, wide, and long as a comparable helium-filled airship.

If helium is that much better than hot air, how much better is hydrogen than helium? Not that much better, it turns out. Amateur chemists might note that hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, versus helium's atomic weight of 4, and assume that it would have four times the lift. After a little thought, they might realize that hydrogen (H₂) has a molecular weight of 2, versus helium's 4, implying half the density. The key is that half the density does not mean twice the buoyancy:

The density at sea-level and 0°C for air and each of the gases is:

• Air (ρ_air) = 1.292 (g/L).
• Hydrogen (ρ_H2) = 0.08988 g/L
• Helium (ρ_He) = 0.1786 g/L

Thus helium is almost twice as dense as hydrogen. However, buoyancy depends upon the difference of the densities (ρ_gas) - (ρ_air) rather than upon their ratios. Thus the difference in buoyancies is about 8%, as seen from the buoyancy equation:

• Buoyant mass (or effective mass) = mass × (1 - ρ_air/ρ_gas)
• Therefore the buoyant mass for one liter of hydrogen in air as:
  • 0.08988 g * (1 - (1.292 / 0.08988) ) = -1.202 g
• And the buoyant mass for one liter of helium in air as:
  • 0.1786 g * (1 - (1.292 / 0.1786) ) = -1.113 g

The negative signs indicate that these gases tend to rise in air.

Thus hydrogen's additional buoyancy compared to helium is:

• 1.202 / 1.113 = 1.080, or approximately 8.0%

Hans Reiser: A jailhouse interview

Stephen Elliott discusses his jailhouse interview with murderer — and Linux guru — Hans Reiser:

When told two days later his estranged wife was missing, he refused to talk to the police. They started following him but he engaged in counter-surveillance, driving in circles, pulling over to the side of the road, exiting and entering the freeway. Within two days of being notified Nina was missing, he hired a well-respected criminal defense attorney, William Du Bois. Hans withdrew large sums of money from the bank. When the police found his car -- it was missing the passenger seat and rear assembly -- they uncovered two books on murder, including "Homicide" by David Simon. Simon wrote about the importance of not talking to the police and how a crime is rarely solved without a body. Without a body, you first have to prove the person is dead.
[...]
Everything Hans said reinforced the image I already had of him. He wasn't interested in what was true, only in whether or not he had been treated fairly. There wasn't a shred of remorse in his body. He was a sociopath, incapable of caring about another human being. A narcissist. A manipulator who thinks everybody else is stupid. The strangest thing about this murderer is how he never gets away with anything. Nobody ever believes him but he keeps lying anyway. He's a genius who invented a new way to store information, supervised millions of lines of complex code, and he has no idea how he is being perceived.
[...]
Five days later, Hans took the police to Nina's body. He had buried her less than a mile from his house, not far from the trailhead. He lived close to the Redwood Regional Park, a place where you could hike for days. Search and rescue had scoured the area with ground troops and cadaver dogs, but the body was hidden in a shallow grave more than 100 feet down a steep ravine. She had been strangled. His lawyers stated that Hans was remorseful; that he was trying to make things right. I knew that wasn't true. He had maintained his innocence since being arrested in October 2006. I was the last journalist to interview him before his confession. He wasn't remorseful, he was angry. He still felt the world owed him something.

Reiser had an interesting history:

He grew up in California and dropped out of his junior high school before he was 14, citing disagreements with the conventional schooling system. He was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley at the age of 15, which he attended off and on until he received a BA in Systematizing (an individualized major dealing with physics, math and related topics) in 1992, at the age of 28. Reiser was also one of the founding members of the Open Computing Facility at UC Berkeley. Though preferring higher education, Reiser chose not to pursue a Ph.D., citing the same reasons he had dropped out of junior high school.

In 1999, while working in Russia, Hans Reiser selected from a mail-order bride catalogue, and subsequently married, Nina Sharanova (Нина Шаранова), a Russian-born and trained obstetrician and gynecologist[9] who was studying to become an American licensed OB/GYN. They had two children.

The death of the yearbook

The Economist notes the death of the yearbook on American college campuses, as social networks like Facebook take over. Of course, what students really need is a printed archive of the "best of" their Facebook network for those four years:

Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Anyway, a one-size-fits-all yearbook might work for a high school class of a few hundred, but it makes little sense for a state university class in the tens of thousands.

Can a freight train really move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel?

American freight trains move a ton of freight 436 miles on a gallon of fuel:

According to our calculations, which match the [Association of American Railroads]'s tally exactly, the nation's seven major railroad companies reported the following for 2007:

• Moving 1,770,545,245,000 ton-miles of freight


• Consuming 4,062,025,082 gallons of diesel fuel (including freight trains and trains in switching yards, but excluding passenger trains)

The average works out to be 435.88 ton-miles per gallon of fuel.
[...]
The rail industry says its fuel efficiency has increased by 85 percent since 1980. It attributes that to factors that include using new and more efficient locomotives, training engineers to conserve fuel, using computers to assemble trains more efficiently in the yard and to plan trips more efficiently to avoid congestion, and reducing the amount of time engines are idling.

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways

Japan Sees a Chance to Promote Its Energy-Frugal Ways — which it pursued even when energy prices were low:

With its towering furnaces and clanging conveyer belts carrying crushed rock, Taiheiyo Cement’s factory looks like an Industrial Revolution relic. But it is actually a model of modern energy efficiency, harnessing its waste heat to generate much of its own electricity.
[...]
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which makes the waste heat generator at the cement factory in Kumagaya, started developing the technology in 1979. But the generators were too expensive to sell outside Japan while energy prices were low. But overseas orders took off three years ago, after energy prices began rising.

Since then, the company has sold 64 units, mainly through a joint venture in China.

“Japan rushed to embrace these technologies back in the 1980s,” said Katsushi Sorida, head of the waste heat plant department at Kawasaki Plant Systems, a subsidiary that markets and installs the units. “Now the rest of the world is finally catching up.”

I suppose the rest of the world is "catching up" because it finally makes sense to spend massive resources to reduce energy waste.

Japan's forced-conservation regulations led it to use less energy when energy was cheap:

According to the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, Japan consumed half as much energy per dollar worth of economic activity as the European Union or the United States, and one-eighth as much as China and India in 2005. While the country is known for green products like hybrid cars, most of its efficiency gains have been in less eye-catching areas, for example, in manufacturing.

Corporate Japan has managed to keep its overall annual energy consumption unchanged at the equivalent of a little more than a billion barrels of oil since the early 1970s, according to Economy Ministry data. It was able to maintain that level even as the economy doubled in size during the country’s boom years of the 1970s and ’80s.

Japan’s strides in efficiency are clearest in heavy industries like steel, which are the nation’s biggest consumers of power. From 1972 to 2006, the Japanese steel industry invested about $45 billion in developing energy-saving technologies, according to the Japan Iron and Steel Federation.

The results are visible at the Keihin mill on Tokyo Bay, run by Japan’s No. 2 steelmaker, JFE Steel. Massive steel ducts snake from the blast furnaces and surrounding buildings. These capture heat and gases that had previously been released into the air or burned off as waste. Now, they are used to power generators that produce 90 percent of the plant’s electricity. (The plant’s main fuel remains the coal used to heat its huge blast furnaces.)

Such innovations allow the mill to produce a ton of steel using 35 percent less energy than it did three decades ago, said Yoshitsugu Iino, group leader of JFE Steel’s climate change policy group. Mr. Iino calculates that if the global steel industry adopted Japanese conservation measures, it could reduce carbon emissions by some 300 million tons a year.

Virtual fencing

Virtual fencing has existed for dogs for decades. Now the "Ear-a-round" is bringing a higher-tech version to ranching:

The Ear-a-round consists of a small, light box that sits on top of a cow’s head, and a pair of earpieces made of fabric and plastic. The box contains a computer chip, a GPS tracking device and a transceiver that enables it to be programmed remotely. The earpieces serve both to keep the box upright and to supply command signals — either sonic or electric — to the animal wearing the device. For maximum working lifetime, the whole thing is powered by lithium-ion batteries that are topped up by solar cells.

One question for Ear-a-round is whether it can be made cheaper than fencing. At $600 a cow, that is not obviously yet so. Dr Rus, however, is working on getting the price of the hardware down to the $100 that farmers will pay. Meanwhile Dr Anderson is about to start working out how many cows actually need to be fitted with Ear-a-rounds to control an entire herd. He hopes that, by identifying a herd’s leaders and fitting out them alone, this number can be reduced to a handful.

The range that an animal is allowed to occupy is recorded by the chip as a set of GPS co-ordinates. The animal’s activity is also recorded. The GPS system gives its location, while an accelerometer and a magnetic compass housed inside the box track its rate and direction of travel. If an animal roams beyond the range specified in the chip, the device responds in a way determined by its wearer’s recent behaviour. The algorithms devised by Dr Rus are able to work out, based on past experience, how strong the message to turn back needs to be. Minor transgressions lead to whispers or tingles. Major ones to shouts or shocks. In both cases the cue is delivered to the ear opposite the direction that the animal is being nudged towards. Four years of research at a ranch in New Mexico have shown that cattle quickly cotton on to what they need to do.

The secret of the greatest-ever student prank

The secret of the greatest-ever student prank — in British history — has been revealed after 50 years:

At an anniversary dinner this month, ringleader Peter Davey revealed he had hatched the plan while staying in rooms at Gonville and Caius College overlooking the Senate House roof.

He felt the expanse of roof 'cried out' to be made more interesting and decided a car would do the trick, recruiting 11 others to help realise his plan.

The group chose the May Bumps week, when any passers-by were likely to be drunken rowers celebrating after their races.

After finding a clapped-out Austin Seven, the group had to tow it through Cambridge to a parking space near Senate House but hit on the idea of sticking signs on it advertising a May ball to explain its presence.

Mr Davey, now 72, said a ground party manoeuvred the car into position while a lifting party on the Senate House roof hoisted it up using an A-shaped crane constructed from scaffolding poles and steel rope.

A third group, the bridge party, passed a plank across the notorious Senate House Leap - an 8ft gap between the roof and a turret window at Caius - and helped the lifters ferry across lifting gear comprising three types of rope, hooks and pulleys.

Policemen who heard a commotion as the equipment passed above them questioned some of the ground party but were distracted by careless drivers nearby and left them alone.

Three carousing rowers spotted the car swinging about 40ft up, despite the efforts of two girls on the ground team who had been recruited to hitch up their skirts a couple of inches to distract passers-by - a ploy more likely to work in 1958 than now. The rowers were fobbed off with the explanation that it was a tethered balloon.

The stunt almost went awry when the team tried to swing the car through the apex of the A-frame, over the Senate House balustrade and on to the roof.

They had failed to erect a rope check line running from the Caius side which would have steadied the vehicle. It crashed on to the roof from 5ft above it and, fearing they would be discovered, the lifting team hastily pushed it to the apex before grabbing their equipment and fleeing over the plank bridge.

The next day the bizarre sight enthralled crowds of onlookers as attempts by the authorities to construct a crane to hoist it back down failed.

Interestingly, in Philip Wylie's 1930 novel, Gladiator — arguably the inspiration for Superman — the protagonist pulls off a similar prank, placing a cannon from his school quad on the roof of a nearby building — without using any equipment, of course.

Go Home, Bill

Cringely says, Go Home, Bill:

The last two executive actions on the part of Bill Gates that had singular effects on the future of Microsoft were: 1) his 1995 Think Week that resulted in Microsoft shifting course to flow with the "Internet Tidal Wave," ultimately destroying Netscape, and; 2) his 1988 decision to back Jeff Raikes' proposal to bundle most of Microsoft's productivity applications into what they called Microsoft Office, which effectively destroyed all Microsoft's competitors for shrink-wrapped applications. The first action was that of a strong chief executive operating at the very top of his game while the second was that of a major shareholder who was willing to accept lower earnings in the short term for the long-term success of his investment.

These were radical and dynamic positions to take that resulted in creating thousands of millionaires in the greatest peacetime transfer of wealth since OPEC. But they were also 13 and 20 years ago, respectively. If Gates took another Think Week and determined Microsoft's future lay in baked goods or virtualization, could he turn the entire company toward one or both of those product directions today? I don't think so.

No one person can control Microsoft today, which has been obvious to Gates for at least eight years, since that's how long ago he put Steve Ballmer in the CEO job. For at least eight years, then, these guys have known that their jobs are not so much to steer the Microsoft ship as to try and keep it from drifting onto the rocks. That's the way it is with huge and successful companies. At best you can trim the sails, because to come about (to significantly shift direction) is just too dangerous for the money machine.

The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator

Charlie Sorrel of Wired describes Julius von Bismarck as The Brains Behind the Image Fulgurator:

But first, about that name: According to von Bismarck, 'Image Fulgurator' comes from the Latin for 'lightning' (fulgur) and means 'Flash Thrower'.

First, let us make clear that von Bismarck has applied for a patent for the Fulgurator. He stressed this point. Of course, anyone with the requisite skills can make one of their own, but Julius wants to keep some degree of control over commercial use.

To see why, consider how it works. The device is a modified camera -- in this case, an old manual Minolta SLR. A flashgun fires through the camera in reverse, from the back. The flash picks up the image of a slide inside and projects it out through the lens and onto any surface.

The trick is in the triggering. The Fulgurator lies in wait until an unsuspecting photographer takes a picture using a flash. When the device's sensor sees this flash, it fires its own unit, throwing up an image which is captured by the hapless photographer's camera while remaining unseen by the naked eye.

I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

I've Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch, says Bruce Schneier:

OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it's calling "Digital Manners Policies." According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast "orders" limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That's a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices — computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders — with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

His conclusion:

"Digital Manners Policies" is a marketing term. Let's call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It's not polite, it's dangerous. It won't make anyone more secure — or more polite.

Glory Days

Joel Spolsky looks back at his time at Microsoft, during its glory days in the early 90s, when Bill Gates himself would read a spec and grill the designer:

He was flipping through my spec! (Calm down; what are you, a teenager?) And there were notes in all the margins! On every page! He had read the Whole Darn Thing!

As the conversation went on, Bill's questions got harder and more detailed. And they seemed a little bit random. But I didn't care. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy — a nice guy who had read my spec. In my head, I was already thinking of how I would address his comments, pronto.

Finally, the killer question. "I don't know, you guys," Bill said. "Is anyone really looking into all the details of how to do this? Like, all those date and time functions. Excel has so many date and time functions. Is BASIC going to have the same functions? Will they all work the same way?"

This was exactly the question I had spent the previous day investigating. And as I had discovered, there was a discrepancy. In both Excel and BASIC, each date was assigned a numeric code. The code for any day in 1992 that I looked up was the same in both. But when I looked up a date around the turn of the last century, Excel and BASIC were one digit apart. Huh?

When I went to find someone who might be able to help, I was directed to Ed Fries, a longtime Excel programmer famous for inventing those screen savers with the swimming fish. I hadn't had much contact with Ed, but I used to see him every Friday afternoon as he played miniature golf in the hallways outside my office.

"Check out February 28, 1900," he told me.

Its number in the Excel code was 59.

"Now try March 1."

Its number was 61.

"What happened to 60?" Ed asked.

"It's February 29!" I said proudly. "1900 was a leap year!"

"Nope," Ed said, and left me pondering the problem for a little while longer. I eventually figured out, with some more guidance from Ed, that a group of programmers at Lotus had skipped a day in 1900 because it created a mathematical shortcut for them, and they probably figured that nobody would care about a mistake buried in the software's internal calendar more than 90 years in the past. The people who made Excel hadn't cared at all and built the bug into the code that the spreadsheets ran on. But the people who had written the code for BASIC had apparently been offended by the shortcut, so they set the start of their internal calendar a day earlier. That way, it would accurately reflect the actual calendar, but the solution was also practical. Because BASIC started its count a day earlier, the number that BASIC assigned to March 1, 1900, was also 61, and from that point on its date and time functions were aligned with Excel's.

So were the date and time functions compatible?

"Yes," I told Bill. "The dates are exactly the same, except for January and February 1900."

Silence. The F Counter and my boss exchanged astonished glances. How did I know that?

"OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked-up copy of the spec…wait! I wanted that…and left.

"Four," announced the F Counter, and someone said, "Wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, at the time, 36. Later, I had it all explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec," a colleague told me. "He just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard MO is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with, because it's never happened before."

What did I take from all this? Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company's software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables -- and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

Watching nonprogrammers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf. Even if he has great advisers standing on the shore telling him what to do, he still falls off the board again and again. The cult of the M.B.A. likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand. But often, you can't.

Technology: It's Where the Jobs Are

The technology sector is where the jobs are:

The highest concentration of technology workers — 286 for every 1,000 workers — was in, no surprise, Silicon Valley. Boulder, Colo., came in second, with 230, and Huntsville, Ala.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington rounded out the top five in density.

Now for the answer to the question on everyone's mind: Where are the highest salaries? That would be Silicon Valley, where the average tech worker is paid $144,000 a year. That's nearly double the $80,000 national average for tech jobs. Runners up included San Francisco and Oakland, Calif. Austin, Tex., home of Dell came in fourth, and Seattle was fifth. San Juan, Puerto Rico, had the lowest salaries, with an average of $38,000 a year, but living expenses there are also considerably lower.

What a Difference a Day Makes

I had a colleague who briefly worked with a mad scientist intent on bringing a "trash laser beam" — that's what we called the plasma furnace — to market. In What a Difference a Day Makes, Robert X. Cringely describes the technology and its potential:

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient.

The Days propose building not just a plasma furnace but a chemical plant around it:

The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

One of the commenters, an Ed Underwood, notes that there's nothing new here:

There have been companies selling plasma incinerators for years. They do a good job of greatly reducing a trash pile but they will not normally generate much energy. The water content of trash greatly reduces the efficiency of the system. Even if you break it into oxygen and hydrogen and burn it — you still dump a huge amount of energy into it to do that and you don't get energy back to make up for that loss. Also when dealing with toxic trash , no matter how many times you feed the exhaust gases back into the system — you will still have to have a scrubber for exhaust — those require a lot of energy and are expensive to maintain.

In his opinion, you can reduce the volume of trash, but you won't produce an energy surplus in the process.

The Electric Car Lives

The Electric Car Lives, Matt Vella of BusinessWeek claims, in the form of Think Global's new Ox:

An electrified people's car for the 21st century, the Ox is a preview of Think's next-generation production vehicle, due out in 2011. Roughly the size of a Toyota Prius, the Ox can travel between 125 and 155 miles before needing a recharge, and zips from zero to 60 miles per hour in about 8.5 seconds. Its lithium-ion batteries can be charged to 80% capacity in less than an hour, and slender solar panels integrated into the roof power the onboard electronics. Inside, the hatchback includes a bevy of high-tech gizmos such as GPS navigation, a mobile Internet connection, and a key fob that lets drivers customize the car's all-digital dashboard. Pricing has yet to be announced, but the company's current vehicles cost less than $25,000.

What about the name Ox says zippy little town car?

By the way, this stat puts some things in perspective:

Still, the American market for electric vehicles "is virtually nonexistent," says John O'Dell, a senior editor specializing in green vehicles for car-buying site Edmunds.com. Even well-established gas-electric hybrids such as the Prius and Honda's Civic account for barely 3% of U.S. auto sales.

The Web Time Forgot

Alex Wright calls Paul Otlet's réseau The Web Time Forgot:

In 1934, Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Otlet (pronounced ot-LAY) described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”

Although Otlet’s proto-Web relied on a patchwork of analog technologies like index cards and telegraph machines, it nonetheless anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. “This was a Steampunk version of hypertext,” said Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired, who is writing a book about the future of technology.

Otlet’s vision hinged on the idea of a networked machine that joined documents using symbolic links. While that notion may seem obvious today, in 1934 it marked a conceptual breakthrough. “The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century,” Mr. Kelly said. “It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions.”

Today, Otlet and his work have been largely forgotten, even in his native Belgium. Although Otlet enjoyed considerable fame during his lifetime, his legacy fell victim to a series of historical misfortunes — not least of which involved the Nazis marching into Belgium and destroying much of his life’s work. [...] The Germans cleared out the original Mundaneum site to make way for an exhibit of Third Reich art, destroying thousands of boxes filled with index cards. Otlet died in 1944, a broken and soon-to-be-forgotten man.

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol — or, rather, they create them:

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory — funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems — Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Solar Power's New Style

Solar power's new style is thin — and thin is in because it's cheap:

Solar producers measure their costs in terms of dollars per watt of energy produced, a formula that's a combination of the cost of producing a module and its power efficiency. Right now the best crystalline-silicon makers can sell modules at $3 to $4 a watt; First Solar can sell at around $2.40 a watt, a price the company expects to reduce steadily. "They've really pushed this industry over the threshold," says Travis Bradford, author of The Solar Revolution. "They possess great technology."

But First Solar doesn't generate the most buzz. That notoriety belongs to the start-up Nanosolar, which shocked its competitors in December when it announced it would begin profitably selling thin-film panels at $1 a watt. That figure is solar's holy grail, the point at which power from the sun becomes generally cheaper than coal, without the help of subsidies.

Nanosolar ceo Martin Roscheisen, who, like many new solar kings, has roots in Silicon Valley, says he can achieve radical cost savings by directly applying photoactive chemicals with an ink composed of nanoparticles. Nanosolar's PowerSheet cells roll off the machines like pages of newspaper in a printing press, at the rate of several hundred feet a minute. Roscheisen, an intense Austrian, says Nanosolar's first 18 months of production have already been purchased. "We're looking for a 35% market share in the next couple of years," he says. "The simple truth is, we can scale a lot more product out for a lot less."

Roscheisen's competitors are, to put it gently, dubious about his claims, pointing out that the cost of raw materials alone should make it impossible to produce $1-a-watt panels profitably. "Of course they doubt it," he says. "Otherwise it makes a joke of their business models." Nanosolar's claims should become more transparent as the company scales up and either meets demand or fails to; in the past, it has suffered production delays.

I guess we have to wait and see.

Caveman Chemistry

A few days ago, when I mentioned telegraphy without electricity and the time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall, I didn't realize that Tyler Cowen had just launched a discussion on how to survive in A.D. 1000 as a modern American. When I read the comments though, I wasn't particularly impressed; most people clearly hadn't given the idea much thought before.

He followed up with another post asking, How far back could you go and still be useful?, and a commenter named Scott made a recommendation right up my alley — he pointed to a book — and website — called Caveman Chemistry. I have been interested in bootstrapping society for a long, long time, and I've never been able to find a decent book on practical chemistry from scratch. This could be the one.

It's the Platform, Stupid

Robert X. Cringely compares cars to IT hardware and software when he says, It's the Platform, Stupid. Drivers won't switch to a new "platform" unless they can switch over bit by bit, since only 10 percent of the total fleet is replaced each year with new cars. The only way he sees to change energy consumption quickly is to change the fuel used by existing gasoline-powered cars:

This happened to a certain extent in Brazil during the '70s and '80s by embracing ethanol. But ethanol has less energy per gallon so fuel consumption goes up and mileage goes down. Ethanol can't be shipped in pipelines also used for oil. Cars have to be modified to run on it and even then there are issues about internal corrosion. Ethanol is far from perfect. What's needed is a replacement for gasoline that looks and feels and tastes just like gas to your car but isn't made from oil. Then the platform could remain completely unchanged yet my 1966 Thunderbird (and the world) could benefit starting with the very next tankful.

There is such a fuel, developed by a husband and wife team of scientists working in Indiana in cooperation with Purdue University. This new fuel, called SwiftFuel, is right now intended for airplanes, not cars, but the lessons are the same.

Piston-powered airplanes have a unique fuel problem. Their high-compression air-cooled engines require higher-octane fuel to avoid destructive engine knock. This higher octane is achieved through the use of tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive. Remember lead was outlawed from car gas in the U.S. more than 30 years ago to good effect: we all have significantly less of the toxic metal in our bodies than we used to. But lead is still used in aviation fuel, which accounts for an infinitesimal portion of total U.S. gasoline consumption. Lead is on its way out for aircraft use, too, with international treaties scheduling its demise in 2010.

If we aren't going to retire all the little airplanes in America — force a total platform change — we'll have to come up with a replacement for tetraethyl lead. The additive used most for this is ethanol added to gasoline to bump up the octane number. But ethanol does a number on seals and hoses typically used in aircraft to an extent that it is specifically prohibited by the Federal Aviation Administration from being used in certified aircraft. At the same time, U.S. energy policy is moving toward the mandated use of ethanol in ALL motor fuel, meaning there may be nothing available two years from now to fuel your Piper Cub.

Enter SwiftFuel, the Splenda of motor fuels because it is made from ethanol yet contains no ethanol. SwiftFuel is the invention of John and Mary Rusek from Swift Enterprises in Indiana. To your airplane SwiftFuel looks and tastes just like gasoline. It has an octane rating of 104 (higher than the 100 octane fuel it replaces) yet contains no lead or ethanol. SwiftFuel mixes with gasoline, can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and be shipped in the same pipelines as gasoline. It is made entirely from biomass, which means it has a net zero carbon footprint and does nothing to increase global warming. Its emission of other polluting byproducts of burning gasoline are significantly lower, too. SwiftFuel has more energy per gallon than gasoline so your airplane (or your car) will go 15-20 percent further on each gallon.

Oh, and based on an average $1.42 per gallon wholesale cost for the ethanol used as its feedstock, SwiftFuel costs $1.80 per gallon to produce, meaning that it ought to be able to sell for $3 per gallon or less no matter what happens in the Middle East.

Heck of a deal.

The ethanol used to make SwiftFuel can be any type, according to Mary Rusek, president of Swift Enterprises. The pilot plant they are building in Indiana will, interestingly, make ethanol from sorghum, not corn. The Ruseks claim that sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production.

The FAA is already testing SwiftFuel with the goal of approving it for use without modification in all aircraft, leaving the platform unchanged while improving its impact on almost any scale. Hopefully by the 2010 cutoff for tetraethyl lead SwiftFuel will replace the 1.8 million gallons of 100LL aviation fuel used every day.

It sounds a bit too good to be true.

Markov and Paul Graham Parodies

Jeff Atwood fed the text of the last twelve Paul Graham essays into an online Markov generator, using two word groupings — what Bentley refers to as "Order-2" — and got this back:

You can feel the need to take advantage of increased cheapness, however. You're not all playing a zero-sum game. There's not some fixed number of startups; we fund startups we fund to work on matters of passing importance. But I'm uncomfortably aware that this is part of any illusions about the problem of overeating by stopping eating. I couldn't simply avoid the Internet had become, because the company is the new trend of worrying obsessively about what it meant for someone, usually an outsider, who deliberately stirred up fights in a startup than just start it. You know how the A List is selected. And even that is more work.

Telegraphy without Electricity

I recently got around to reading Lest Darkness Fall, the influential alternative history science fiction novel that inspired Harry Turtledove to switch his studies to Byzantine history and to become an alternative history science fiction novelist. (Perhaps I should read some Turtledove...)

The story is in the style of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — which I finally read last year — only the protagonist is an American archaeologist transported back from Italy in 1939 to Italy after the fall of Rome, while it was under barbarian rule, and the east was under Justinian's rule. It shares the same progressive tone as Twain's story.

Anyway, one of the first important inventions our protagonist invents — after brandy, which bankrolls everything else he tries — is a semaphore telegraph that relies on telescopes in towers.

As Kris De Decker of Low-Tech Magazine points out, such a system existed in the 18th century:

Centuries of slow long-distance communications came to an end with the arrival of the telegraph. Most history books start this chapter with the appearance of the electrical telegraph, midway the nineteenth century. However, they skip an important intermediate step. Fifty years earlier (in 1791) the Frenchman Claude Chappe developed the optical telegraph. Thanks to this technology, messages could be transferred very quickly over long distances, without the need for postmen, horses, wires or electricity.

The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. On each of these towers a wooden semaphore and two telescopes were mounted (the telescope was invented in 1600). The semaphore had two signalling arms which each could be placed in seven positions. The wooden post itself could also be turned in 4 positions, so that 196 different positions were possible. Every one of these arrangements corresponded with a code for a letter, a number, a word or (a part of) a sentence.

Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through the telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. Next he used the telescope to look at the succeeding tower in the chain, to control if the next telegrapher had copied the symbol correctly. In this way, messages were signed through symbol by symbol from tower to tower. The semaphore was operated by two levers. A telegrapher could reach a speed of 1 to 3 symbols per minute.

The technology today may sound a bit absurd, but in those times the optical telegraph was a genuine revolution. In a few decades, continental networks were built both in Europe and the United States. The first line was built between Paris and Lille during the French revolution, close to the frontline. It was 230 kilometres long and consisted of 15 semaphores. The very first message — a military victory over the Austrians — was transmitted in less than half an hour. The transmission of 1 symbol from Paris to Lille could happen in ten minutes, which comes down to a speed of 1,380 kilometres an hour. Faster than a modern passenger plane – this was invented only one and a half centuries later.

The technology expanded very fast. In less than 50 years time the French built a national infrastructure with more than 530 towers and a total length of almost 5,000 kilometres. Paris was connected to Strasbourg, Amsterdam, Toulon, Perpignan, Lyon, Turin, Milan and Venice. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was possible to wirelessly transmit a short message from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour’s time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month’s time to do the same.