On the Bottom Half

Monkies!

Bloody Monkies...

BBC Article: Monkey misery for Kenyan women villagers

Cheeky little buggers, though.

posted by Kyle @ 19:24 0 comments

Total Lunar Eclipse!

If you're crazy enough to be up at this hour and are reading my blog (for an even more inexplicable reason), go outside right now! There's a total lunar eclipse on at the moment and it's glowing red...

The Moon is passing in Earth's shadow - Earth is directly between it and the sun - this is the second one in 2007, which is a bit of an exceptional occurrence. Sorry for the lack of warning, I'm usually more forthcoming with spacey stuff, but I realise I've been derelict in my duties to you fine folk.

Marvel at this amazing cosmic event!

posted by Kyle @ 04:18 2 comments

Mysterious Universe.

I've upgraded my listening experience recently, officially joining the ranks of the digeratti with the purchase of an MP4 player. MP4 is, for the non-tech types among us, the shorthand for a new level of portable media. Rather than just music, for example, MP4 players can do videos and pictures, etc.

It's the Cowon D2, and it's a gem. One of the reasons I got it was for podcasts, which are basically MP3 files of radio shows, but with a wrinkle. There are thousands of produced shows that are only on podcast, and they are interest specific.

I mention this because my standout favourite is one called Mysterious Universe, and I'd like to share it with my readership. It's released on the website (linked) but if you are an iTunes type, you can also subscribe to it there. It's basically a weekly news show, hosted by Australian Benjamin Grundy, which covers the weird and the thought provoking, the 'news from beyond the mainstream.' You get to hear about shadow people, UFOs, conspiracy, ghost lions, male phantom pregnancies, aliens, abductions... Totally interesting and done with tact, a good measure of scepticism, and passion. To top it all off, its production values are huge.

Anyway, in the void of shareable experiences to regale this week, perhaps a few will give MU podcasting a go. It's a rush.

posted by Kyle @ 08:15 0 comments

Twitterpation and Astronauts.

With all these e-mails and comments flying my direction containing the word 'twitterpated', I'm starting to think I'm slowly garnering a reputation, in absentia, as some sort of weird academic casanova. If so, first of all wipe that awful mental picture from your mind, consider that 'casanova' to me means 'house' in Spanish and 'a periodically exploding star', and read on.

My screaming hordes have not managed to get past the security fence and I'm still single.

There are some interesting developments with this most recent Shuttle mission: there is confirmed damage from cascading foam during launch on the underside of Endeavour. It punctured completely through the 2.5 cm-thick Thermal Protection System tiles arrayed on the bottom surface of the Orbiter and has exposed the underlying layers between the TPS and the aluminium skin.

The mission has been extended 3 days with the successful initiation of a new Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System, allowing the Orbiter to conserve it's hydrogen fuel for later use, drawing instead from the solar array electricity of the Station.

Two spacewalks, starring Canadian Dave Williams, have been completed successfully, having installed the S5 truss segment and now replaced a faulty control gyroscope - one of four which help to stabilise and orientate the Station.

Spring hasn't formally sprung yet, though it is nearing. I was flying (!) Sunday morning and everything is delectably green. It's really wonderful to see everything so richly verdant, while still cool and wet. I'm a bit concerned that Northern Hemisphere summer is a harbinger of what we're in for. 'Yikes' sums up my feelings succinctly. I think the official first day of spring is 1 September, which is interesting because they don't tie their seasons to celestial markers, instead declaring them at the beginning of the month in which the celestial event occurs.
Spring = 1 Sept
Spring Equinox = 21/22 Sept

Summer = 1 Dec
Summer Solstice = 21/22 Dec

And so on...

In other news, I spotted this one on the CBC today:

25-pound chunk of airplane debris, mistaken for UFO, lands in Maryland park

From which I gleaned these little gems:

" 'The landing gear door is not necessary to land the plane,' United Airlines spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said." and

" 'Various things fall off airplanes from time to time, but it's fairly unusual to have one of these landing-gear doors fall off,' Brown said. 'Airplanes are designed not to shed parts.' "

posted by Kyle @ 19:55 4 comments

The next step in Solar Cells.

Just found this on BBC News:

The new wave of Silicon Valley start-ups

But, the important part, which I've excerpted from that article, is this:

Green machines

It is not just computer technology that folks in the valley are working on. Green technology is winning investors too, said Drew Clark from IBM Capital Ventures.

"I think [one of] the major drivers in today's buzz in Silicon valley is clean tech or energy tech or energy 2.0, whatever we are calling it these days," said Mr Clark.

"If you look at venture capital statistics it is now the third highest place that money is going into.

One of the green innovations dreamed up is a highly efficient solar panel.

The curved panels use 1/1000th of the area needed by traditional ones

The panels produced by SolFocus reflect sunlight to a central point to harness the energy.

Unlike flat panels it means the expensive materials used to convert the energy to electricity are concentrated in one place. SolFocus claims to use 1/1000th of the area needed by flat panels, which keeps the manufacturing costs low.

Gary Conley, SolFocus explained: "These cells have efficiency over double that of the best silicon today. We concentrate the sun 500 times on that small amount of cell, hence the 1000th of the amount of material used, or the expensive part.

"When there is no sun, or you can't see the solar disc, our panels produce zero power. They only produce power in bright sunny locations or when the sun is out."

Contracts have already been signed with the Spanish government for a large scale solar farm in Southern Spain.

From discussions with some of the engineers on the solar car trip, I found out that the way to get close to the maximum theoretical efficiency of monocrystalline silicon solar cells (which is >70%) is to increase the magnitude or brightness of the light hitting them.

This is it people! This is the next stepping stone to high-power, high-volume solar energy generation. Granted you need bright sunshine, but that's the case with all solar cells. Put a field of these in outback Australia or the Mohave Desert and you've got a hell of the lot of power generating capacity. Solar radiation is about 600-700 watts / square metre at Red Deer latitude and even higher in places like Australia and the U.S. The SolFocus people say their panels are more than double the efficiency of the best silicon available today, which means their getting about 300+ watts per square metre of panel, which is a lot. Invest in this idea...

posted by Kyle @ 21:04 1 comments

Elevating.

This one wanders a bit, but remember that 'not all those who wander are lost'.

Once a long time ago, I worked as a surveyor with a very interesting man named Tim. Tim was, among other things, a windmill artist with his own exhibition, an American Scientist-Discover-NewScientist-Nature-Science magazine reading part-time scientist, deaf in one ear from a dynamite explosion, and a surveyor.

He told me that to really succeed I needed to find my question, my one question, which would become a singular underpinning zeal fit to last an entire lifetime. I thought this was germane advice considering my status as a freshly minted first-year university student, but I unfortunately failed to learn that lesson at the time that it was given. I had my questions, but they were numerous and varied. Still, they are numerous and varied.

We spent a lot of time discussing science stuff and one topic that came up was propulsion, which I do find very interesting. I feel quite strongly that we've simply reached the limit of this idea of burning a propellant with an oxidiser out the back end of an impressive bell housing to push a craft through the air, through space, through time... There must be something more powerful, more compact, and more efficient... As a consequence, I thought about how simple a frame within which almost any action can be described, and came to the not ground-shaking conclusion that such a frame is energy. Everything is a question of energy: how to make it, how to use it, how to transport it and store it, how to conserve it. To transport oneself anywhere with a car one burns fossil fuel, which is solar energy transformed into metabolic energy stored as glucose and other carbon molecules by photosynthesis; that carbon then stored, metamorphosed through heat and pressure, later becomes wonderfully compact but high energy-yielding oil. To move one's own body, food is ingested, which is in itself solar energy in modified form - carbon compounds produced by photosynthesis; reprocessed carbon compounds originally produced by photosynthesis but secondarily modified through animal metabolism. The Space Shuttle, thrown into the sky by an 8.5 minute, spectacularly violent display of fire. From Earth, stationary at sea level to 220 miles at 17500 miles per hour in 8.5 minutes. 2045 tonnes at 28800 km/hr - that's eight km or five miles per second. The kinetic energy of which, I might add, must all be dissipated as heat on reentry - that's 6.2 x 10^13 J of energy or enough energy to continually power the average 25 year old human male for 4.9 million days or more than 13500 years (leap years not factored in).

Recently there has been much interest in the idea of a space elevator and the materials that would be required to make such a device. This idea has such an astounding potential to revolutionise orbital flight and beyond, maximising the time available for the necessary paradigm shift away from propellant/oxidiser propulsion to really powerful solutions like zero-point energy (alternatively, Arthur C Clarke's 'The Songs of Distant Earth') or something else (warp drive anyone?) - some sort of fundamental antigravitation, space warping surf propulsion - to finally make interplanetary manned exploration commonplace and at long last crystallise humanity's ultimate exploration of interstellar space and the very mysteries of the universe.

The first thing to consider, however, before shucking the mantle of traditional propulsion methods and Relativity, are tethers that could tie the average ground-based human to geostationary orbit. And this is one mondo tether, too - 35,786 km long, extending straight up from the Earth's equator to some sort of anchor in geostationary orbit. There has been much chatter about using carbon nanotubes (scroll down a bit in the article) for such a tether, which I think is a great idea, as manufacturing problems are steadily being overcome. There're even prizes about to encourage this idea, sponsored by no less than NASA, which the University of Saskatchewan has won two years running.

It occurred to me today that I was wondering exactly where the sorts and quantity of energy required for orbital flight were going to come from as the hardy climbing device attached to it's amazing tether climbs into orbit - sort of redefines the idea of climbing to orbit doesn't it?

Well, NASA, as part of its Centennial Challenge Space Elevator competition, is encouraging a laser energy transmission system, which I think is altogether too complex, and which brings me to the crux of this post - energy!

Theorising assuming a carbon nanotube-like tether: a 35,700km long line of highly conductive carbon tether transgresses the Earth's magnetic field for all of that distance. A conductor immersed in a magnetic field. Is this not the world's most spectacular electricity-generating pole?

Of course, one immediate problem occurs - there's no relative motion between the rotating Earth and the geostationary orbit-anchored tether. However, the Earth's magnetic field is not a purely stationary field and only small fluctuations along a line of this length would surely generate massive current. Does any one have any in-depth knowledge of terrestrial magnetic field motion independent of planetary motion (besides the rotation of the magnetic poles)? Surely this is an elegant idea - a climb to an orbit of the explorer's choosing with the energy provided by electricity generated through the line to orbit. Only relatively small rockets are further required to complete orbital stabilisation.

Anyway, an idea to ponder.

posted by Kyle @ 02:40 1 comments