MarsBlog.net

 It’s juvenile, but still pretty informative.

[hat tip: Gina]

Posted on March 21st, 2011 under Science & Engineering, Useful Technology. Tags: earthquake, fukushima, japan, nuclear boy, nuclear power, poop, radiation, reactor, tsunami. Comments Off

The design of the Fukushima reactors (currently experiencing some…er…problems due to the combined effects of the earthquake and tsunami) is detailed in this helpful backgrounder from the NRC: Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) Systems [pdf]

I knew a good bit of the science of what went on inside the different types of nuclear reactors, but this document provides a good bit of hardware insight (to an engineer at least) of how the containment and emergency systems are designed.

For comparison, here is the backgrounder on Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), which the larger part of our 104 active nuclear power plants use.

Posted on March 13th, 2011 under Science & Engineering, Useful Technology. Comments Off

An interesting project at the South Pole, involving agriculture in a controlled (and in this case, sunless and soil-less) environment: To the moon…South Pole greenhouse model for growing freshies on other worlds

Crops of lettuce, kale, cucumber, peppers, herbs, tomatoes, cantaloupes and edible flowers comprise many of the plants grown in the climate-controlled chamber. Because the importation of soil is restricted by the Antarctic Treaty , dirt is not used to grow the plants. In fact, the closest local dirt is nearly two miles beneath the ice on which the station sits. The plants are grown in a hydroponic nutrient solution instead — no dirt needed.

For that matter, no sunlight is needed either. The growth chamber, which was built in the winter of 2004, makes its own light via 13 water-cooled, high-pressure sodium lamps. In this bright environment, it is not uncommon to find people, like the plants, dwelling happily under the intense light produced in the chamber during the dark polar winter.

Carl and I put a lot of thought into extraterrestrial agriculture while writing In the Shadow of Ares, not least because the primary setting for the book is a very large agricultural settlement. Interestingly (or perhaps not surprisingly), we came to some of the same conclusions as these researchers. Of particular note, the morale benefit to settlers in an inescapably indoor environment of having an open green space (or Greenspace, if you’ve read the book).

Posted on March 11th, 2011 under In the Shadow of Ares, Science & Engineering, Science Fiction, Settlement, Space Technology, Useful Technology, Writing. Tags: agriculture, antarctica, Economics, food, In the Shadow of Ares, mars, moon, Settlement. Comments Off

Three weeks in Iceland, as seen by my GPS unit:

Posted on January 29th, 2011 under Meta, Miscellaneous, Useful Technology. Tags: geotracking, GPS, Iceland, Laugavegur, road trip, travel, vacation. Comments Off

I bought a Kindle back in September as a means of test-driving the e-book version of In the Shadow of Ares, mainly because I hadn’t thought much beyond Amazon when we decided to go the electronic route. I was aware that Barnes & Noble and Borders each had their own e-readers, but Kindle seemed to be the one with the broadest reach and biggest potential market.

We ended up publishing on Barnes & Noble as well as Amazon, but even so, I hadn’t even looked at a Kindle up-close until yesterday. Turns out the Nook Color is a much more impressive platform overall than the 3G Kindle:

• The touchscreen is much easier to navigate with (especially when highlighting text or selecting a word to look up in the dictionary) than the Kindle’s “mouse box” buttons;
• Nook, like Kindle, has built-in audio capability for playing MP3s while you read, but the player on Nook is actually a proper function of the device, and not a grafted-on “experimental” feature like it is with the Kindle — a feature which, in four months, I have never gotten to work;
• Nook also has a built-in photo gallery function, which the Kindle (perhaps understandably in a grayscale device) lacks.

In short, the Nook is a little more like a tablet device than a no-frills e-reader.

On the other hand:

• Despite only being a tiny bit larger, the Nook was noticeably heavier (perhaps 25-30% heavier) than the Kindle, with the Kindle already at the upper limit of a comfortably-holdable combination of mass and shape;
• Being a backlit color display akin to those on laptops, the Nook was actually a little harder on the eyes than the Kindle with its “e-ink” display that reads more like the page of a printed book;
• Though I’m not a big fan of Kindle’s keypad, it’s still far and away preferable to tapping virtual keys on a touch screen.

You might expect that differences like this would drive Amazon to bring a color version of the Kindle, with color e-ink, to market in the near future. Mmm…maybe not:

[Bezos] noted that developing color electronic ink remains a challenge, and while he’s seen things “in the laboratory,” the prototypes are simply “not ready for prime-time production.” He also stated that these lust-worthy, mythical displays were “a long way out,” but that the Kindle would remain focused as a dedicated e-reader moving forward.

And yet, as the links at the Engadget post illustrate, there are in fact color e-ink options out there which may be further along that Bezos suggests.

With the introduction of the iPad last year, though, there may be market pressure to rapidly evolve e-readers beyond simple, dedicated e-book devices by including features like the photo galleries and MP3 player functions the Nook already offers and better, full-featured web browsers to take additional advantage of the built-in wireless internet capabilities (wi-fi and 3G). At some point, then, there may be no real distinction between e-readers and tablet computers besides the owner’s primary habit of use.

Posted on January 22nd, 2011 under Entertainment, Useful Technology. Tags: e-reader, In the Shadow of Ares, iPad, kindle, Nook, technology. Comments Off

Another reason to despise AGW adherents: their handwringing provides justifications for boneheaded ‘environmentally friendly’ ideas like this:

Hungry? Better turn on your linear induction motor and send a metal capsule through an underground polyethylene tube to retrieve some groceries.

That’s the vision of Foodtubes, a UK program that seeks to reduce carbon emissions by building a pipeline-capsule system to deliver food and freight. A series of tubes could ferry 6-foot-long metal bins among neighborhoods, entire cities or even to different countries, moving goods at 60 mph using linear induction motors and intelligent routing software. Foodtubes says it’s “really fast food,” brought to you by the Internet of Things.

“In the long term, we could see an ostrich slaughtered in Cape Town, and delivered to Edinburgh,” said Noel Hodson, Foodtubes’ CEO, in an interview in EWeek Europe.

But something tells me there’s more to this than saving the planet or expeditiously delivering still-steaming ostrich carcasses to your – umm- foodtube…

The group wants to start in the London suburb of Croydon with a $625 million pilot network connecting all the borough’s food shops, schools and buildings. Such a network would remove diesel trucks from the road, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 8 percent a year and reducing congestion, the project’s leaders say. [emphasis added]

For some reason, the Simpson’s monorail episode comes to mind.

Assuming it’s not a scam, though, here’s a few reasons off the top of my head why this is a boneheaded idea:

• Underground polyethylene tube. 3ft in diameter. Right. So the walls would be how many inches thick to keep their shape? And what would be the carbon footprint associated with producing that much polyethylene?
• What sort of bend radius would a tube carrying a metal capsule 3ft in diameter by 6ft long traveling at 60MPH require? And how would practical limits on bend radii affect the capsule itself, in order to prevent its leading or trailing ends from hitting the walls or wedging the capsule at a turn?
• Likewise, what sort of shape tolerance would there be on the tube cross-section? And how would it be maintained?
• Yes, “new 3-foot-diameter tubes are installed all the time”. True, but these are used for the handling of bulk materials (water, sewage, storm drainage, natural gas, etc.), not as a high-speed track for delivery capsules.
• Where is your average apartment dweller or homeowner going to fit a 3ft diameter tube and end “station”? At best, it will be larger than a typical American refrigerator.
• How does the system allow for concurrent utilization? It’s the same set of design problems encountered with railroads. Will you need two sets of tubes, one for each direction? How do you launch capsules into the trunk line, and then get them back out again at the end, without either causing congestion at entry and exit points or requiring long acceleration/deceleration spurs to end “stations”?
• How much room would the switches for each residence require, if the capsules are traveling at 6oMPH in the trunk tube and must be diverted at full speed into the acceleration/deceleration spur?
• How do these “linear induction” motors power the capsules? Are they built into the capsule and continually pushing it? If so, what is their power source, and what happens to the network when one of them runs out of power? How much otherwise usable cargo space do the motors and their associated power system consume?
• A 3ft diameter, 6ft long capsule made of metal and capable of moving at 6oMPH for an indefinite number of reuse cycles is going to be fairly heavy. What are the energy requirements associated with accelerating, maintaining at speed, and then decelerating that heavy capsule? How do these energy requirements measure up against the trucks the system is meant to replace?
• Do these capsules ride on wheels, or do they (like pneumatic canisters) simply slide through the tube on wipers or “skids” of some sort? If wheels, how much heavier do the capsules now become, and how much space is left over for the cargo they are intended to carry?
• If not on wheels, what happens to the polyethylene tubes when friction with the contact surfaces of a passing capsule heats them up? Or worse, when they are repeatedly heated by multiple passing capsules during periods of heavy utilization?
• How will the energy requirements be affected if acceleration/deceleration spurs are not used or are limited for practical reasons to very short lengths, but the capsules must still be moving at or near 6oMPH when they enter or exit the trunk tubes?
• Likewise, what would the resulting high accelerations/decelerations do to the structure of the capsule and the integrity of the contents? Would they make the capsule even heavier? And would they limit the type of cargo that can be sent via these capsules?
• What happens if a capsule approaching a residential “station” fails to decelerate? Or a capsule entering a trunk tube fails to accelerate sufficiently? Or a capsule abruptly stops somewhere along the line in a trunk tube?
• How do the economics of this system compare to alternatives? Have the full costs (design, construction, maintenance, emergency repair, etc.) been figured in? Is there an economic benefit significant enough to offset the costs of building and maintaining of a completely new and separate transportation network?
• And the big question: have they reviewed Denver International Airport’s experience with automated baggage handling systems?

As an aside, did anyone from the marketing department really think through the choice of name for this project? “Food tubes”? Really?

Just looking at this list, I get the impression that a $625M pilot project to link together an entire suburb might be a bit beyond their technology readiness level at the moment. Perhaps they should start with something smaller…like a hundred-yard straightaway.

Posted on December 5th, 2010 under Enginastery, Useful Technology. Tags: bad engineering, enginastery, food tubes, pneumatic tubes. Comments Off

A short, choppy featurette by our neighbors on the press riser on election night. I wish I had thought to do something like this when I had my hands on the big Sony we were using for interviews. (Yes, Michael self-identifies as National Review Online, but he’s still one of us.)

An amusing aside: Bob Zubrin (who is quite active in at least the rank-and-file level in Colorado Republican circles) was at one point examining our setup quite intently. Unfortunately, I had two interviews teed up and by the time I was through, he was gone.

Posted on November 6th, 2010 under politics, Useful Technology. Tags: election night, interview, new media, People's Press Collective, webcast. Comments: 1

One of the other things on my plate right now is putting the novel through one final edit, prior to publishing it on Kindle. We’ve tried (oh have we tried) to find an agent, but none seem interested in the genre right now…which is to say, every inquiry gets rejected out of hand, unread, with the explanation that the agent isn’t taking on new clients right now or is looking for other types of stories.

So, a few weeks back, I bought a Kindle 3G to test out the platform.

So far, I like it. It takes a little while to get used to it, but it grows on you fairly quickly. I had seen previous versions owned by friends, so I had an idea of what to expect, but I was still pretty impressed with it. The first thing that wowed me when I took it out of the box was the thinness of the thing — I was almost afraid to handle it, for fear of slicing my fingers off. The second thing was my mistaking the default display image for a printed shipping overlay — I had to look very closely at it, from several different angles, to convince myself that what I was seeing was really on the screen, such is the visual novelty of “electric paper” displays.

Turned it on, set it up in short order (added my home wifi info, which is actually optional with the 3G version), and it was ready to go. The only other setup I had to perform had to do with uploading of documents, and involved simply adding my personal email address to a list on my Amazon account so that the conversion server would accept documents sent to it from that address. With only one false try (using PDF format, which produced unsurprisingly dodgy results in formatting) I was able to upload the manuscript to my Kindle flawlessly. I had expected it to require a lot of online fussing and fixing to make it look right, but it digested the native .docx file with nary a burp.

One thing I have not yet done is paid to download any new books (for lack of time). I did download a few freebie classics I was familiar with (Machiavelli’s The Prince and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations…not kidding about the “classics” part), and have been poking around in them as time permits since their short, self-contained chapters make them more amenable than novels to reading in small increments. The feature whereby passages highlighted by other readers are highlighted on your own screen is a nice touch — it’s like a social-media version of buying a used book at the college bookstore, with the importance of a passage indicated not merely by the electronic equivalent of underlining or a highlight pen, but also by the number of other people who thought it significant>

One thing I didn’t like about it is the way the screen flickers when you “turn the page”, but this is where that “getting used to it” thing comes in — after a few minutes, you don’t notice it.

Time permitting tomorrow, I may be able to start posting sample chapters as an appetizer for the full novel, which we expect to have available via Kindle in the next two weeks or so.

Posted on October 23rd, 2010 under Entertainment, Useful Technology, Writing. Tags: amazon, Amber, Ares Project, kindle, Labyrinth, mars, novel. Comments: 2

I’ve always thought that NASA’s manned rover concepts were a little too consciously “futuristic”, designed more with a sci-fi aesthetic in mind than simple rugged practicality.

Now this…this is my idea of a manned rover…

Posted on August 30th, 2010 under Space Technology, Useful Technology. Tags: Iceland, rover. Comments Off