Faster Cars and Smellier Air

First off, Robert Reich has just written much of what I wrote here on Tuesday, but way smarter. Here’s hoping this guy gets a prominent cabinet position.

Next, this weekend’s Green Festival at the Washington DC Convention Center. If nothing more, it was great to see so many people show up in the name of living in harmony with the environment… even if some of it did involve holistic vegan Yoga massage.

I got to meet William McDonough at a book signing (not sure whether his bow-tie was biodegradable) and talk to several solar contractors. I was pleased to see The Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Anacostia Watershed Society were there to represent.

One group that was new to me was The Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington DC. These folks brought a Prius modified with a kit to permit recharging by plug, without gasoline. It was neat to see and hear about one of these things first-hand.

Another interesting attendee was Burr Technologies. This company is trying to assemble computers that use less power, primarily by the use of more efficient power supplies that can be passively cooled, without resorting to a fan. In the same vein, this month brings the news that researchers at Penn State have made progress with the use of electrocaloric plastics for high-efficiency electric cooling, which would be perfect for computer chips. Having grown disenchanted with “Sleep Mode”, I think these folks may be onto something.

Start Me Up?

Computers have to load instructions into memory when first starting up. This process can take a long time. As Peter Gibbon learned in Office Space, the same is true for shutdown, when your computer has to clean-up open resources.

Well-intentioned engineers came up with Sleep Mode as a solution: instead of turning a computer off, just dump the system state to the hard drive, power down most components, and reload the state later, if needed.

Unfortunately, sleep mode hasn’t worked out so well. Even today, many non-Mac laptops struggle to wake when opened, presumably a consequence of poor software/hardware integration.

But even systems that wake up successfully when roused by an operator have come smashing up against a broken abstraction of the Network Age.

A “server” is any computer that provides services to another computer. When most clients were little more than screens or teletypes, this was a useful distinction. Today, it’s often hard to distinguish the server from the client. If you stream downloaded television shows from your desktop computer to a set-top box, or sync your calendar from your desktop to a mobile device, which machine is the server? And what happens if that “server” happens to be asleep when you need its services?

Efforts to address this, like Wake-on-LAN mode, have not seen wide adoption. So maybe the better solution is to reduce the computer’s energy footprint all the time.

Heart-felt congratulations to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the United States of America, and the Earth.

Audio I recorded from the celebration in downtown Washington DC at 2:34 AM Wednesday morning.

Government is not perfect. But properly managed, it can harness our collective genius in times of challenge.

Government investment brought us the Internet, put us on the Moon, and built a system of trails and highways that reach from one end of this country to the other. New investments like these in energy technology can save us from global climate change and from our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. The money we spend will also put Americans to work and help jump start our stalled economy.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy

It’s Election Day in the United States, everybody. Let’s do this.

We got to see many of the Maryland homes on the DC Solar Tour this weekend. The center of Maryland solar activity is clearly Takoma Park. Sadly, Roscoe the Rooster and Chris Carter’s Lone Gunmen have moved on. But happily, the hippies endure. They are a little grayer and have traded in their VW Buses for Toyota Prii.

Several photovoltaic technologies were on display. “Green All Over” on Conway Avenue has SunPower panels. These are traditional, crystalline Silicon panels… very effective and very expensive, not just in terms of cost but also input manufacturing energy. I read in Scientific American that SunPower is able to squeeze out a few more watts by moving the conduction wires to the back of the cells, where they don’t block the sun.

Lots of innovative companies are now hard at work on “thin film” solar panels. Thin films can essentially be painted onto a surface using printing technology, and can be bent or rolled-up without damage. Alternately, they can be incorporated into ordinary building materials like roofing tiles.

The cheerful, marigold “Hutchinswasser Haus” on Holly Avenue employs UNI-SOLAR thin film panels. These are thin film, amorphous Silicon cells. UNI-SOLAR is manufactured by Energy Conversion Devices. Another, prominent competitor in this space is Innovalight.

No Takoma Park solar tour would be complete without Mike Tidwell’s Clean Energy Home, and in fact he and his Chesapeake Climate Action Network give them regularly, complete with endearing descriptions of his “pancake-powered” push lawnmower.

Mike was able to score BP (formerly British Petrolium) thin-film panels before they gave up and ceased production, re-focusing on traditional Silicon. BP’s effort, like that of the more successful First Solar company, employed Cadmium Terlluride.

The other thin film technology on the horizon involves CIGS cells (Copper Indium Gallium Selenium) and is being pursued by companies like nanosolar and Miasolé. (source, Earth: The Sequel.)

Hyattsville residents are generally up on Hyattsville, but none of us like the mosquitos. Mosquitos aren’t just annoying, they are also big-time disease vectors.

When I lived in Tampa, the problem was addressed by periodically spraying the heck out of everything. I remember hearing the helicopters and running to my car before I was lacquered with sticky Malathion.

Is there a more environmentalsome answer?

When I bike home from work at dusk, I often am delighted to see bats swoop down alongside me on the Northwest Branch Trail to gobble up bugs with admirable precision.

Could our bat friends provide the solution to the mosquito menace? I think it’s time to install a bat house and see.

I just ordered one on eBay… I’ll keep you posted.

In different bat-related matters, the editors of tmbw.net, the otherwise cool They Might Be Giants wiki, remain unpersuaded by my arguments that the lyrics of The Deranged Millionaire refer not to “The Genome of Bats”, but rather to a baseball team called The Genova Bats. Starting my own They Might Be Giants wiki seemed excessive, so I decided to post here, instead.

Bike commuting involves a lot of inventory control. At a minimum you need water, a light, batteries for the light, and a fix-it tool. If it’s hot out and your commute is any real length, you’ll need clothes and toiletries. And you may want a map, GPS, gym membership card, towel, chain lube, rags, emergency pump, sun block, tire patches, something to read… it can quickly get out of control. If you’re wearing bike pants, you may not even have pockets for your wallet!

It’s generally hard to protect bike luggage from would-be thieves, so you want to be able to remove and put it back easily.

It has taken me a while to arrive at a configuration that really works. A rack is essential, but I’ve found panniers and baskets to be unwieldy.

I attach a top pack to my rack. For heavier loads, I hang laptop bags from my rack with carabiners. I find I can carry a surprising amount of stuff this way, so much that I have to make sure to distribute everything evenly to keep from becoming unbalanced at low speeds.

Bungee is useful so long as you don’t get carried away with it. I often use it to provide some extra securing for my top pack. That also permits me to tuck my U-shaped bike lock away on top of it.

Backpacks are okay, too, if you keep them light and it isn’t very hot out. I avoid messenger bags… I find them hard to balance and they can strangle you if overloaded. Even fanny packs can hurt you over time if consistently overloaded.

I am pleased to report that all the human trash-talkers of human-powered lawn mowers are wrong.

We just picked one up and it’s awesome. The rotary blade is coupled to the wheels and spins around as you push. Since there isn’t a power plant on board, they are much lighter and consequently easier to operate than conventional mowers.

Gasoline-powered lawn mowers try to cut through stray branches, lawn gnomes, etc. Since a human-powered mower stops automatically when not in use, it’s safe to leave the blade exposed. If you hit something other than grass with a human-powered lawn mower, you simply reach down and remove it.

Consumer-grade gas-powered lawn mowers are probably the least energy-efficient devices commercially available today. So it’s all the stupider that they mess up our atmosphere pretty much for nothing.

Concurring opinion at Treehugger.com

Administrative note! I’m renaming the blog from Jeweled Battleshorts to Faster Cars and Smellier Air (another Douglas Adams quote) to better reflect the Environment-oriented nature of many of my recent blog postings. I’ll probably be deleting or retconing some of the more extraneous previous entries to bring them better in line with that theme.

I’ll also put up a more appropriate icon as soon as possible.

Troubling news here at the only blog with an Irish Pikachu category.

The heavily-anticipated Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out in the United States, but apparently without our beloved Hibernian Hero! [ Gamespot forums post | entry on disturbingly-named blog ]

This proud member of the diaspora cannot recall a comparable disappointment since the tragic failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and I have read two whole books on Irish history!

I for one am holding out hope that Pikachu’s leprechaun hat is tucked away hidden inside the game somewhere, waiting to be unlocked by the right combination of moves (perhaps right then left then 70 consecutive Peach/Wario match-ups.)

A sad development indeed with St. Patrick’s Day just a few days off.

This year’s IFComp winner, Lost Pig is some of the best interactive fiction I’ve played in a while. Here’s the opener:

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

The invention of a successful new machine takes hard work and brains. It usually also requires lots of capital. This typically comes from investors whose involvement is predicated on the expectation that they will be able to exploit the machine exclusively for a period of time. Easier said than done!

I’ve been reading a book about experimentation with steamboats in the early United States. It’s pretty dismal stuff, and kind of a nice counterweight to all the upbeat inventor success stories I have read before. Historical Biography selects for winners, but sadly, history itself is replete with losers.

Apparently, a federal patent office overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction isn’t unique to our era. Patent Office troubles plagued the inaugural generation of American steamboat experimenters. Without them, a successful steamboat might have been achieved earlier, and we might have stood on stronger commercial footing in our ensuing conflict with Great Britain.

It seems to me that those of us in consumer software development should be glad that compilation to byte or machine code provides our work with some degree of protection outside the expense of a formal patent. But we still have to worry about somebody else obtaining one on flimsy grounds and coming along to clobber us. I’m not sure that I’m against all software patents, but a lot of them sure seem to have been granted for ideas that I don’t consider novel.