End the War on Freedom - Science/Technology

Sensawunda!

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:20:26 +0000

George Potter has had his childish sense of wonder reprimed by Karl Schroeder's idea for a Verne gun. Cool, indeed. Just get the socialist wastes of air out of power and free men & women will do this and a whole lot more.

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Put 1.5 terawatts of clean solar power into orbit with less than ten launches. Obsolete coal and petroleum power production with green baseline power, using less than a 10th the number of solar cells as you’d have to install on Earth to capture the same amount of sunlight.

Orbit an entire space elevator with one launch. Set it up, retire the gun, and get on with a clean space age.

Do the same thing with an orbiting greenhouse infrastructure. Drop solar-powered mass drivers on the moon to feed a continual stream of building material to the building sites.

Orbit fuel depots to drop the price of conventional rocketry to orbit through the floor. One shot and access to space for NASA becomes 10 times cheaper.

Send up a telescope so big that it can image the continents of planets circling other stars.

The Great Cholesterol Myth

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:02:07 +0000

Malcolm Kendrick at Spiked Online - the conventional wisdom about cholesterol, especially the relationship between diet and blood cholesterol, is wrong. Cholesterol in the diet does NOT cause cholesterol in the blood. Carobohydrates do. The truth is complicated. Statins DO reduce heart attacks, but they don't do it by reducing cholesterol. That's an unimportant side effect. [grabbe]

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:38:37 +0000

Richard Martin at Wired - apparently Thorium is a much better radioactive material for power generation than Uranium. Becomes harmless in 100 years, not 100,000. Plentiful. Cheap. Not subject to meltdown. The only difficulty is building containment materials that won't corrode over long exposure to the molten salt with which you control it.

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Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission occurs in the soup.

Bacteria Engineered to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Liquid Fuel

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:20:13 +0000

Science News - if too much CO2 is indeed a problem, which I doubt, here's a proper solution. No stealing of anybody's money. No government involved at all. Use the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus to turn CO2 and sunlight into "the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative."

A fresh way to take the salt out of seawater

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:39:46 +0000

The Economist - neat new desalination technology uses much less energy than former methods. [grabbe]

GeoBulb Arrives

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:02:47 +0000

I received today from C. Crane my first GeoBulb. It's a GeoBulb II in cool white. Standard Edison socket, 60 watt equivalent light, draws 7.5 watts, 30,000 hour life, $50 plus shipping. The bulb is quite heavy, relative to the incandescent bulb it replaced. It's cool to the touch when illuminated. Nice white light. It buzzes softly, but I only hear it if I put my ear within a few inches. Won't be able to fully judge it until the sun goes down, and when I discover if it really does last for three years, but so far I'm happy with it.

GeoBulb Box

Made in China

Well-packaged

With my old full spectrum incandescent bulb

In my 35-year-old desk lamp

The false god of coffee

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:02:22 +0000

Robin Barooah at The Quantified Self - Mr. Barooah has, as I have, gone through cold turkey on coffee a number of times, but each time he started again, because he thought coffee would help him concentrate better. He started his most recent withdrawal at the beginning of August, deciding to withdraw slowly, 20ml per week, to allow the psychological withdrawal to track the physical withdrawal. He also tracked his ability to concentrate, from June into October, so that when he started to think that starting coffee again might improve his concentration, he had objective proof that it wasn't so.

Interesting. I've now been off the brown stuff for 3 weeks. Laid in bed the first week, was slightly-less-than-usually productive the second week. Could hardly work at all this past week, though I was vertical for most of each day. Hope it gets better soon.

Best. Razor. Ever!!

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:18:29 +0000

Disposable safety razors were a pretty new idea, when I started shaving, in 1972 or thereabouts. I've been through their evolution, from one to two to three, and now, to four blades. I've tried Gillette and Bic, but have always preferred Schick razors. They pull less on my whiskers and stay sharp longer. I ran out of my latest disposable Schick blades, so I looked for some new ones yesterday. They didn't have any, but they did have the Schick Quattro Titanium, a couple of choices, one with batteries, which I didn't get, and the one pictured below, which I did. It has four blades on the main shaving side, plus a single edging blade, which I doubt I'll ever use, on the other side. It's metal, not plastic; there's a nice heft to it. The razor, with two blades, cost $9. It came with a coupon, worth $5 off a purchase of two packages of blades, so I got those, too. Total price: $25 for a razor and 10 blades, which will likely last me a year or more.

I tried it for the first time this morning. Smoothest shave ever. Not a hint of pull. And it trimmed my whiskers well. Big win!

[note to FTC and other worthless eaters: I received no compensation for this review, now go jump off a bridge]

What happened to global warming?

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:29:06 +0000

Paul Hudson at BBC - as it turns out, the Earth is no longer getting warmer. The warmest year on record was 1998. [lew]

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One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is hotting up.

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:10:13 +0000

Babak A. Parviz at IEEE Spectrum - a University of Washington researcher describes contact lenses he's working on, which superimpose an electronic image on the natural world image. The Cyborg is born! Well, not quite yet. They've done trials on live rabbits, but aren't yet ready for human subjects. And at present, the electronic image is only 8x8 pixels in size. The world's smallest banner ad.

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Babak A. Parviz wakes up every morning and sticks a small piece of polymer in each eye. So it was only a matter of time before this bionanotechnology expert at the University of Washington, in Seattle, imagined contact lenses with built-in circuits and LEDs. “It’s really fun to hook things up and see how they might work,” he says.

What's Inside a Cup of Coffee?

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:42:15 +0000

Patrick Di Justo at Wired - some of the contents of your cup of joe: Caffeine, Water, 2-Ethylphenol, Quinic acid, 3,5 Dicaffeoylquinic acid, Dimethyl disulfide, Acetylmethylcarbinol, Putrescine, Trigonelline, & Niacin. Who'd-a known?

Sirona CEREC 3D: CNC Milling Machines, for Dentists

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:13:01 +0000

Cerec Online makes the MC XL and MC L CNC milling machines for dentists. These allow a dentist to mill a crown himself, in his office, while the patient waits.

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Superior results: Precision in the range of +/- 25 microns
Production: Six minutes milling time for a full--contour crown; three to four minutes for partial coverage
Better fit and smoother restoration surface: 7.5u milling resolution
Intuitive: Automatic software downloads and user-friendly display guides
Compatibility: LAN, WLAN and network compatible
Longer life: Milling chamber design and easy block clamping (no tools required)
Platform for future in-office CAD/CAM development

It appears from the "Return on Investment Calculator" on this page at Patterson Dental, these machines cost $2,000 or $2,700 per month, depending on which configuration you pick.

Open Source Hydrogen Car Has a Porsche Pedigree

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:24:52 +0000

Keith Barry at Wired - The Riversimple Urban Car is a 700-pound, two-person, fuel-cell electric automobile. Its makers plan to lease it for 200 pounds ($330) a month, including hydrogen. It has a 50 mph top speed and a 200 mile range. It gets the equivalent of 300 miles per gallon. Cool. Hope they're successful.

Vibram Five Fingers Shoes

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:58:56 +0000

Tim Ferriss at Four Hour Work Week - a review of Vibram Five Fingers Shoes. Go barefoot with protection. Neat idea. I may spend the $75 it costs to try out (for the Classic model. The other three retail for $80-$90). That second link has a store finder and on-line buying, and Amazon has some sizes and models for slightly cheaper. [grabbe]

Homegrown Grains: The Key to Food Security

Fri, 29 May 2009 10:59:12 +0000

Gene Logsdon of Chelsea Green Publishing via AlterNet - why you should grow your own grains, and how much space you need to do it.

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My friend didn’t believe me until I showed him, step by step. We cut off a couple of armloads of wheat stalks, flailed the grain from the heads onto a piece of clean cloth (with a plastic toy ball bat), winnowed the chaff from the grain, ground the grain to flour in the blender, made batter, and fried pancakes. Topped them with real maple syrup. Sweet ecstasy. My friend forgot all about his tomatoes. The next year, he invited me over for grain sorghum cookies, proudly informing me that grain sorghum flour made pastries equal to, if not better than, whole wheat flour. Moreover, grain sorghum was easier to thresh. I had not only made another convert to growing grains in the garden, but one who had quickly taught me something.