Eco Factor: Sustainable city proposal to get powered by renewable energy.
It is predicted that by the year 2020 the city of Gothenburg will grow with 8000 new inhabitants each year. Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture has started a project to design a master plan for a self-sufficient city for Gothenburg that will be powered entirely by renewable energy.
Lookin At Lucky will be ridden by Garrett Gomez and is trained by Bob Baffert. This trainer jockey combination is blistering hot in 2009 with a 42% win percentage. Lookin At Lucky was a good second at the Breeders Cup Juvenile posting a 91 Beyer by finishing second in a 13-horse field and starting in post 13. Lookin At Lucky has 4 wins and a second in 5 lifetime starts. This two-year-old colt has already posted two Grade 1 victories in his short career. He is back on the track where he broke his maiden. This $843,000 money earner has three bullet workouts in his preparation for this one. Take the morning line chalk in The Cashcall.
Play #1 Lookin At Lucky to win Race 8 at Hollywood Park 4-5 on the Morning Line
Post Time at 7:34PM Eastern Time televised by TVG
Courtesy of Tonys Picks
Luv,
Bob
P.S. My resolution – Love everyone! My birthday (Dec 27th) is around the corner also!
Eco Factor: Artificial leaf, to water plants automatically.
We all love to have some plants in our living rooms, but watering them regularly is a different issue altogether. Industrial designer Jacky Wu has come up with a concept device that makes sure that your indoor green friends never go thirsty. Dubbed the Dew Drop, the device extracts water from thin air to water plants.
Today I went to see Avatar in Digital 3D and simply sat there in awe watching a movie so beautifully done. Frankly I have not been mesmerized by a movie like that before, and Avatar indeed pushed the limits of digital effects. 2010 is going to be 3D rage for your home and if this movie is an example of it, I am jumping on this wagon and buying the technology that brings a totally amazing and unforgettable experience.
Sony HD cameras were used to bring the magic of 3D appear so realistic in this new blockbuster movie. However those HD cameras had to be modified some and here is an interesting piece of info I dug out from the Wired magazine, this is how it all started.
Cameron believed there must be a way to do it better. What he really wanted to talk about was his vision for the next generation of cameras: maneuverable, digital, high-resolution, 3-D.
Inventing such a camera wouldn’t be easy, but Cameron said he was ready to break new ground. He mentioned a mysterious, long-gestating film project that would bring viewers to an alien planet. Cameron didn’t want to make the movie unless viewers could experience the planet viscerally, in 3-D. Since no satisfactory 3-D cameras existed, he’d have to build one. He’d brought Pace on the Pacific adventure to ask if the underwater cameraman wanted to help. His goal seemed kind of extreme, but Pace thought it sounded interesting and signed on. “Jim had a clear ambition on the dive trip,” Pace says. “It was fun, but I didn’t really know what I was getting into.”
Two months later, Cameron sent Pace a $17,000 first-class ticket from Los Angeles to Tokyo, and soon they were sitting in front of the engineers at Sony’s hi-def-camera division. Pace was there to help persuade Sony to separate the lens and image sensor from the processor on the company’s professional-grade HD camera. The bulky CPU could then be kept a cable-length away from the lens — rather than struggling with a conventional 450-pound 3-D system, a camera operator would just have to handle a 50-pound, dual-lens unit.
Sony agreed to establish a new line of cameras. After three months, he had fitted the lenses into a rig that allowed an operator to precisely control the 3-D imaging.
The camera performed well, delivering accurate 3-D images that wouldn’t cause headaches over the course of a long movie.
According to PRnewswire “Avatar” used eight Sony HDC-F950 cameras for primary acquisition. Additionally, Sony HDC-1500 cameras captured speed shots during live action, with the then recently available F23 camera also used for specific shots.
“It was important that the actual shooting of the movie wasn’t impacted by the fact we were doing it in 3D, and these cameras allowed us to do that,” said Pace. “They allowed us to create a unique and completely immersive 3-D experience. I don’t think it could have been done any other way.”
I highly recommend checking this movie out in 3D ($11 bucks was so worth it) and be prepared for an exciting experience of 3D that very soon will be a part of your living room.
Daily Random Recipe
INGREDIENTS:
Trim the bottom 1/2 inch / 13 mm off the enoki mushrooms. Break into 2 or 3 clumps and place in a small baking dish. Drizzle on the olive oil and sake, sprinkle with salt. Cover and bake for 10 to 15 minutes.
Serve as an appetizer.
> Would you like to see a genuine artifact of the COP negotiations? Have a peak at this scanned version of the final text of the Copenhagen Accord. On the same page you can see a copy of the draft text from Friday 5am, as apparently discussed by heads of state on Friday morning. A treat for the history buffs among you.
> One item that stood out: the final text mentions a $100 billion per annum fund by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries; more than expected. It says that the funding will “come from a variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance.” Sounds a lot like “we’ll find the money somehow, by golly”.
> On Friday morning the COP15 business delegations issued a strong statement asking for a global agreement. They ended up with “Business, governments and society are intricately linked – climate change solutions will need all three to work together.” Absolutely right.
> A window into negotiating tactics: in the early hours of the morning US negotiators inserted brackets at numerous places in the negotiating text for the main strand of the negotiations that includes all countries – the long term action plan. This effectively blocked discussions on this negotiating track. Some observers believe the US wanted to counter moves by developing countries to add their concerns to the text, effectively ensuring that discussions would have to be continued next year.
> COMMENT: Despite some good detail, the Copenhagen Accord is not a great agreement – nowhere near enough. Even US negotiators have admitted that the Accord won’t hold global temperature rises to 2°C; http://climateinteractive.org/ has already projected the deal will, despite the assertions of the deal makers, lead to temp rises of 3.9°C. Last week the Stockholm Environment Institute was telling us that 1.5° and 350ppm are the maximum we can afford. (At least Tuvalu got this on the media agenda.)
But the Accord was never going to be enough; even if we had got a serious deal, the time lag for impacts to be felt would mean we’d miss our short window to get emissions down. Our best short-term hope is to turn mitigation into a profitable activity and hope we can raise enough private debt because of the money to be made over the long term, with a carbon price a nice bonus if and when it happens.
Whatever the Agreement, the conference marks the beginning of a new global discourse of cooperation. The extent to which nations (numbers of Heads of State) are coming together to discuss something hard and real in the full glare of galvanising global civil society activism starts us on a road. COPs will begin to be the new global forum of import, eclipsing the WTO and the G20 (which will now be seen merely as the big nations caucusing ahead of COPs). COP15 may not give us an Agreement that matters that much, but I do think it will provide the mechanism for us to work through the ghastly challenges we’re going to face with environmental crisis, migration of peoples, and probably wars.
If we can construct mitigation as a profitable activity (and I believe we can) the Clean Energy race will become the next industrial boom – for those countries choosing to participate (and pity those that don’t). It will, eventually, see energy prices drop substantially from where they are now, kicking off further booms. If we can use it to also push through a new generation of energy related productivity improvements, then it will prove a lasting step-up in world economic wealth (technology productivity gains being the primary driver, after cheap energy, of wealth). As long as that wealth can be enjoyed in ways that don’t involve cannibalising resources and dirtying our nest, I reckon we have a good chance.
> Back to finance – I’ve had two exchanges this week with people setting up green fixed-interest investment funds, and two groups planning to issue green or climate bonds. Does two-by-two mean the dance is hotting up?
It’s like having a free option – interesting thoughts by Larry Doyle. Plus check out my video selections – BC.
More Mortgage Lying – Larry Doyle – … Let’s turn the page as many mortgages are attempting to be modified. What do we learn? People are once again lying about their incomes, this time understating income in an attempt to have their mortgages modified to a lower level. … What does this mean? In plain English, if a person intentionally understates his income level (that is, lies about his income), he no longer needs to restart the mortgage modification process but merely continues from that point based upon verified income level. In essence, this waiver will promote people to lie about their income levels. Why? There is no downside to lying…. more … – Sense on Cents
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And now, two bizarre Youtube videos about lying. The first comes from a children’s TV program, and the second includes the ladies of Gilligan’s Island TV show.
So what was there? A big thing of some kind of pudding, two HUGE cornucopia-things of cannoli cream with chocolate-covered cannoli shells, a huge basket of cookies, some Hanukah gelt, some horribly rich-looking chocolate thing with M&Ms on top (either brownies or fudge, I couldn’t tell!), those chocolate-cherry-cordial things, and cake.
I went down there with a teacher who’s still new and scared of the principal’s office (:D) and really had to take something. I took ONE cookie, ONE piece of Hanukah gelt, and ONE brownie-thing.
And I threw out the brownie thing 🙂
Must have timed/dosed the insulin properly, because my sugar was a steady 85 at the end of the day.
This two-minute video will warm your heart more than any paper Christmas card or holiday movie ever could. It starts with a sweet solo from Ellen, a 5-year-old patient at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Then things start to rock when several other patients join in.
If you agree this is the cutest holiday greeting of the year, (and I know you do) then please pass it along to a friend!
More about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
There’s no way you can not love this place. Not only do they freely share their research findings with doctors and scientists all over the world, but families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance. St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer research center to offer such special hope, even when families can’t afford treatment.
Patients at St. Jude are referred by a physician, and they generally have a disease currently under study and are eligible for clinical research trials. No child is ever denied treatment because of the family’s inability to pay. That’s impressive, especially considering that the daily operating cost for St. Jude is nearly $1.3 million. St. Jude relies on public contributions.
As a pioneer in cancer treatment, St. Jude continues to improve childhood cancer survival rates. My brother was a patient at St. Jude many years ago. Even though he had a very rare and serious cancer, he survived and is doing great. You likely know someone who has been touched by the work at St. Jude. They have treated children from all 50 states and from around the world. Even if you don’t know someone who has been personally helped by St. Jude, it’s still great to know that this hospital is helping children all around the world, either directly as a patient or indirectly through shared research.
St. Jude is the only pediatric cancer center designated as a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute. In addition to cancer, St. Jude researchers and doctors treat children with genetic immune defects and pediatric AIDS. Plus, St. Jude is a WHO Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza Viruses in Animals and Birds.
Find out more about ways to help St. Jude.
Post from: Blisstree
Technology Review has an article on research into improving solar PV cell efficiency at Boston College – Hot Electrons Could Double Solar Power.
For decades researchers have investigated a theoretical means to double the power output of solar cells–by making use of so-called “hot electrons.” Now researchers at Boston College have provided new experimental evidence that the theory will work. They built solar cells that get a power boost from high-energy photons. This boost, the researchers say, is the result of extracting hot electrons.
The results are a step toward solar cells that break conventional efficiency limits. Because of the way ordinary solar cells work, they can, in theory, convert at most about 35 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, wasting the rest as heat. Making use of hot electrons could result in efficiencies as high as 67 percent, says Matthew Beard, a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, who was not involved in the current work. Doubling the efficiency of solar cells could cut the cost of solar power in half.
Mark Rosedale (an employee of O’Reilly) was the first of a few to send in David Pogue’s recent column in which he discusses the question of ebook DRM. Remember, just recently a Sony exec claimed that you couldn’t make money on ebooks without DRM. Yet, Pogue relates his own experience in running a test with his publisher (which is O’Reilly) in putting out a non-DRM’d ebook, and he found that sales increased:
As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can’t stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free.When I wrote about my concerns a year ago, my readers took me to task. “For all you know,” went their counterargument, “the illegal copies are just advertising for you; people will download them, try them out, then go by the physical book. Either that, or they’re being downloaded by people who would not have bought your book anyway. Why don’t you try a controlled experiment and see?”
Well, it sounded like it could be a very costly experiment. But I agreed. My publisher, O’Reilly, decided to try an experiment, offering one of my Windows books for sale as an unprotected PDF file.
After a year, we could compare the results with the previous year’s sales.
The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying.
The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year.
Now, it’s worth noting that it really was just last year that Pogue insisted that publishing digital versions of his books was a terrible idea, because he had tried it twice and they were pirated all over the web. So it’s really nice to see that he’s actually come to his senses and realized that piracy does not automatically mean lost sales, and he was willing to run an experiment and actually look at the empirical data.
He’s still not totally convinced however — as he notes that the reason his experiment worked was because it drove sales of the physical (paper) book. But he’s worried that when more people have ebook readers, then things might change. Of course, at the time of that last column, we used it to point out that the mistake was in thinking that “give it away and pray” is a business model. It’s not. Instead, you have to give people a reason to buy, and “hey, because I want you to” isn’t a particularly good one. Instead, the focus should be on adding real value. Again, this is a situation where O’Reilly is pretty good. We were just discussing how one of the “reasons to buy” it offers is the ability to buy into “living books” that keep updating, so your copy isn’t out of date. In that case, what they’re really selling isn’t the content, so much as the convenience and the knowledge that the information will always be the latest, without requiring any additional work or checking. There are lots of ways to compete with piracy that don’t involve locking the content down in a customer-unfriendly way.
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Carbon Commentary has an excellent article on how renewables can provide large amounts of electricity into an electrical grid – in this case Spain’s – (Spain’s variable wind and stable electricity networks. Yet if you listened to some people spouting PR for the nuclear power industry, you’d believe this is impossible.
One of the frequent criticisms of wind energy is that national distribution systems (‘the grid’) cannot cope with large number of turbines because of the variability and unpredictability of their output. Grids need to match supply and demand precisely, the critics say, and because wind varies so much it causes huge problems. Recent data from two meteorologically unusual days in Spain – the world leader in the management of renewable energy supplies – shows this assertion is almost certainly false.
* During part of 8 November, Spain saw over 50% of its electricity come from turbines as an Atlantic depression swept over the country’s wind parks. (They are so big that no one seems to call them ‘farms’.) Unlike similar times in November 2008, when Spanish turbines were disconnected because the grid had an excess of electricity, the system accepted and used all the wind power that was offered to it.
* A very different event in January of this year saw unexpectedly high winds shut down most of the country’s turbines with little warning. The grid coped with this untoward incident as well. These two events show that a well run transmission system can cope with extreme and unexpected events even with a large fraction of power provided by wind.Over the course of this year Spain will generate about 14% of its total electricity from wind and this number is likely to rise to the high twenties by 2020. Spain is showing the rest of the world that these figures are not incompatible with grid stability. Although wind is ‘variable’, ‘intermittent’ and ‘unpredictable’, a well functioning grid system can still use wind to help stabilise electricity costs, reduce carbon emissions and improve energy security.
At some periods on the night of 8/9 November, wind provided 53% of Spain’s need for electricity. This was a new record for the Spanish system. As the country continues to install thousands of new wind turbines a year, this record will not stand for long.
Although Denmark has had similar percentages of its electricity provided by wind, the Spanish numbers are particularly significant. As its electricity transmission company, Red Eléctrica de España or REE, reminds us, the country is unusually isolated from international interconnections. It is ‘a peninsula electrically speaking, with weak electrical interconnections with the European Union’.[1] A country with limited capacity to import or export power has more issues accommodating large amounts of wind power. Denmark has international connections to cover 50% of its electricity while Spain has less than a tenth this amount. (The UK also scores extremely poorly on this dimension.)
Spain is able to manage the integration of wind power into its grid primarily because it has reasonable amounts of hydro-electricity and pumped storage.[2] Hydro-electricity can be used when winds are less than expected and pumped storage can assist both when wind is unexpectedly high or unexpectedly low.
One of the main criticisms levelled at wind is that its power is so unpredictable that huge amounts of fossil fuel generating capacity needs to be kept ready to replace it at a moment’s notice. Those antagonistic to wind believe that the carbon cost of keeping power stations in a state of what the industry calls ‘spinning reserve’ is enormous. Power stations, they say, are burning fuel so that they can instantaneously start producing electricity if and when the wind drops.
But is wind so variable that power stations need to provide immediate backup? The utterly superb REE website provides easy-to-use data to test this theory. I’ve used this data to try to demonstrate that wind production was remarkably consistent during the peak day of 8 November.[3] Not only is wind speed largely predictable with good meteorology, but REE data shows that even in the windy days of early November, the amount of electricity generated only varied gradually.
During this 24-hour period the total generated varied from about 9.3 gigawatts (9,300 megawatts) at the start, to a peak of around 11.5 gigawatts at about 14.30 in the afternoon. For most of the day, the wind output was very stable around 10 gigawatts. (The wind output estimate is provided every ten minutes on the REE website.) The mean percentage variation from one reading to the next was 0.72%. On only three occasions out of 143 observations did the output vary more than 2% between two readings.
When the wind is blowing strongly, any local variations in wind speeds tend to be balanced out by compensating changes elsewhere. A country like Spain, with over ten thousand turbines spread across a large landmass, will have low variability of electricity output from wind. As a country adds wind turbines, the degree of variability in electricity output will tend to fall. In Spain, the variations on 8/9 November represented no threat to the stability of the electricity system, even when wind was meeting half of total power demand.
Do you have a gym membership you never use? You’re definitely not the only one. And, according to a story in the Telegraph, you’re better off buying a dog than signing up for a gym membership if you want to get fit. So, with that in mind, here are … Read more
It’s been over five years since garage door opener company Chamberlain lost its bizarre DMCA case, which tried to argue that anyone making competing replacement garage door openers was violating the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA. If you believed Chamberlain, then it would mean that the DMCA could effectively be used to block out any competition in replacement parts just by using a bit of encryption. The court’s ruling was a bit convoluted, basically saying that this simply couldn’t be what Congress intended with the DMCA, even if it was sorta what the language of the law actually said. This was a victory, in that it did limit the DMCA against a ridiculous situation, but it was unfortunate in that the ruling didn’t address what the law actually said. To get around this, the court did a few different things, including noting that what Skylink did with its competing garage door openers didn’t really involve “unauthorized access,” which is key to the anti-circumvention clause. As the courts recognized, how could Chamberlain tell homeowners that they couldn’t authorize the opening of their own garage door?
Fast forward five years, and most tech/copryight folks haven’t thought too much about garage door openers and their relation to the DMCA… until Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson moved into a new house, and noticed his garage door opener manual (from Chamberlain, of course). The manual was from 2006… well after Chamberlian had lost its case. And yet… the manual contained clear DMCA-style anti-circumvention language, stating:
NOTICE: If this Security+ garage door opener is operated with a non-rolling code transmitter, the technical measure in the receiver of the garage door opener, which provides security against code-theft devices, will be circumvented. The owner of the copyright in the garage door opener does not authorize the purchaser or supplier of the non-rolling code transmitter to circumvent that technical measure.
What’s quite clear is that Chamberlain is trying to legaleze its way around the court rulings against it, by stating in the manual that you are not authorized to get around its little bit of technical trickery. Basically, it sounds like Chamberlain’s lawyers saw the loophole in the judges twisted reasoning to get around what the DMCA does state, and have jumped gleefully through that loophole. Of course, the lawyers Anderson questioned doubt that this would hold up in court, but the real question is whether or not this would ever go back to court. Chamberlain may just be hoping that enough people are scared off by the questionable legal language that it doesn’t need to file lawsuits, and competing product makers probably don’t find it worthwhile to file their own lawsuit either. But, in the meantime, we get to see yet another remnant of what the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause has created.
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Being that some of you will be getting holiday bouquets as gifts or placing some out for holiday decor, I thought we’d have a little refresher about how to keep flowers looking their best.
Winter Wonderland from Organic Bouquet
Post from: Blisstree
