Someone, somewhere else has pointed out that we’ve had successive waves of tech revolution, eg:

– the Computer Revolution brought about by cheap microprocessors
– the Communications Revolution brought about by cheap laser-switching.
– the Robotics Revolution brought about by cheap sensors

The last one is just beginning… the others have been going for a while, but are not anywhere near played out yet.

I think maybe there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about what robotics actually is – at this moment “robot” seems to include absolutely anything automated, and anything remotely controlled as well. Most washing machines are robots by the very loose definition that seems to pass in the blogosphere. In another corner is anything anthropomorphic, and in another, the more traditional “single-arm” robots that have been used in manufacturing for decades.

I think though that the dominant robotic form won’t resemble “droids” so much as “internet-leakage”… the much heralded “internet of things”. The internet is escaping… it’s getting out of the box… the boxes, and it’s ingesting and assimilating anything that uses electricity. We are right at the very very beginning of this… but it’s coming. I think that the robotics revolution is going to have a distinctly Web 2.0 flavour to it – and the dominant form is not going to be a droid or a manufacturing arm, but (like the internet itself) a human/machine hybrid.

Anyway, to that end:

1) Open Source Home Monitoring/Automation.

Home automation/monitoring is going to be huge. It’s going to be… defacto… default. I’ve gone on about this before, and (still) to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think it’s being done properly… and I think maybe it won’t every be… because it will always be evolving – so it needs to be a platform, much the same as the internet itself. The same way that there are huge numbers of web-developers, there should be huge numbers of home-app developers.

And this is where it starts. This is the physical compliment to Pachube.com

2) Siri has escaped – so that’s good news, I suppose – I don’t think Siri is a proper AI though. There are also alternatives to Siri… but I don’t think they are proper AIs either. By proper AI, I mean something that gets smarter… rather than something that is merely smart.

On the subject of Siri though – here it is being used to control a thermostat

Or to be more precise, a demo of the Siri proxy. This is not quite the same thing as the very pretty new “smart” thermostat, that learns from people’s behaviour…

This is what I mean about “getting it right”… the UI of this dial thing gets it right I think. The Semi-AI aspect of it is interesting – if it is linked to the brain-power of the web.

3) Little baby computerlet that can plug into anything

Looks like a thumb-drive, but has connectivity gear (wifi, bluetooth) built into it. Plug it into any screen, use a bluetooth keyboard and you’ve got a computer. It’s quad-core as well – so it’s got a bit of clout (for the moment). I think sometime soon the internet is going to eat broadcast television – ie: the box in the corner is going to get it’s info from the web, rather than broadcasters… this is going to make a huge different to the balance of power – which is probably no bad thing, because right now, the 4th Estate are not doing their jobs.

4) Body Monitoring… has a new poster-child,

Jawbone – a thing that measures… various things, coupled with software that measures various other things – which sounds like a bit of a chore to be honest, but if this can help people sleep better, then it’s going to sell by the truckload. I’d buy one.

This is another thing we’re going see a lot of – and god knows we (victims of first-world problems) need it.

–

I have a feeling that the essence of the Monitor/Control is the feedback loop… and that feedback loops might deliver results greater than the sums of their parts. Just a suspicion. I think this is the essence of consciousness – the feedback loop. Just a suspicion.

Which is threatening, to say the least. Follow that with this:

With major pointers toward the future – I find the carbon-fibre car thing particularly interesting on account of being particulary interested the notion of Bamboo Apteras… light-weight, locally-sourced, open-source motors. The VW for for the age of Favela Chic.

Distributed power is the thing… someone’s rolling out little solar stations in off-grid Haiti.

Which is pretty cool. Except that they say “We are not competing with the utility, we’re complementing them, so we’re trying to service people who are not currently reached by EDH—they love the fact that we’re going into dark areas and getting people used to paying for electricity”

No, no, no fucking no, no, no, no, no. Jesus, it sounds like they think they’re training cattle. No. People getting used to paying some fucking utility for electricity is the fucking OPPOSITE of what we should be doing. People should be getting used to never paying for electricity. People should be specifically aiming towards systems where nobody ever has to pay for anything.

I’m not talking about stealing it (which is more or less what happens now), I’m talking about P2P everything… nothing coming from centralised, optimised-for-scarcity sources.

ps: Here’s a video of a not-that-massive, solar-still that’s capaable of purifying 30,000 gallons of water a day

as well as electricity and satellite comms. All locked up with patents, and each unit costing $1.2M, which as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to murder. Doing with to the fledgling distributed-energy industry what big pharma has done to medicine.

“Intellectual Property” is a society-level, mental-illness that needs to be killed off as quickly as possible, and don’t tell me “people wouldn’t invent things if it wasn’t for IP”, because that’s just shit. Most R&D is public/state-funded anyway.

Which is pretty cool – AND they’ve actually made them, which is even cooler.

Looks like it might need to be hand-aimed though. Bit of a pest, but less of a pest than the water needing to be hand-pumped.

I’ve been looking at quite a lot of these recently… eg:

Which is the Solar-Fire variant that uses 360 (6m by 6m) slightly curved mirrors to focus on an area about the size of a plastic-bucket bottom, or like a small and very very overdone pizza. The solar fire one is also manually controlled

6m by 6m is pretty big… I quite like the idea of having lots of de-coupled mirrors, each with their own inbuilt guidance system… so the turn to face the sun like flowers etc… and you could put them on the side of houses or on top fences etc… up on rooves… and you can just add more, as they’re needed etc.

Like these, but smaller and crapper.

controlled by those little photovore robots

So that’s my theory etc.

Mind you, one of those dishes does 3kw… which is about what it takes to run an average house (if you tweak your boiler down a couple of degrees)… and the cheap-end of retailer solar-electric is around $1.5 a watt now – and for that ($4.5k) you’re getting a system with no moving parts, and without a 700° C thing that’s too bright to look at in your back yard.

If you don’t mind sewing your own, crystaline laminates are about 50c a watt. Theoretically these things last for 25 years… but I think it’s a fair bet that the solar-moore’s law will deal to that – and after about 10 or so, the cheapness of solar will change the way people use electricity – possibly by having dual-systems… eg: a 12v DC system and separate 120/240 volt systems – for big legacy appliances. Really it’s a waste of energy converting up and down. The only reason we do it is because we’re grid-tied.

This is a bloke playing with the bendy 120w ones you can get off ebay for about $280 a go

Which is about $2 a watt – not including the inverters and batteries and whatnot that you’ll need. You’ll need about 24 of these to match the parabolic thing at the top… but something tells me they’ll be a lot less grief to look after.

I think a large chunk of the energy crisis is probably going to just go away – if this stuff proliferates. I think innovation on this front is going to go from trying to make physical machines, to using the output of the bendy-solar-manufacturers as a platform… the way people build on twitter etc.

“Ford’s electric vehicles are now bundled with the option to have SunPower install rooftop solar panels for about $10,000 after a federal tax rebate. The panels, which are estimated to generate 3,000 kilowatt-hours a year, can fuel the electric car for about 12,000 miles. Customers can also monitor the solar panels’ output over the Web application or an iPhone app.” – PSFK

Which is pretty cool, because it’s a driver/gateway for several different that will take people off-grid, and offer enormous benefits in terms of resilience and freedom from corporate-fuckwittery.

The different techs, being solar (obviously) and remote-monitoring… or any kind of electrical monitoring in fact. I think it might also provide a driver for creating vehicles that aren’t based on the principle of using a ton of steel and glass to get a 12 stone human being from A 2 B.

Then I decided not to, because there was hardly anything I actually wanted, and that that I did had postage more expensive than whatever it was than I was buying and I could get the same thing off ebay for about 1/3 the price. So I’ve converted the whole lot to £ and put it back where it came from, which is my barclaycard. No point borrowing to play on the markets if the market movement is less than your interest.

Anyway – one bitcoin shop that was quite interesting is this Zumbador Solar, which sell solar-electric kits, and I found it particularly interesting because it had this:

Which is the times that things will run, with a charged deep-cycle battery. I pretty much only use a laptop – for 20 hours a day. I really must start playing with this solar stuff in Actual-Reality so I can teach other people how to do it when everything fucks up.

Whenever I mention solar, I also mention home-automation… because I think it will be a massive driver of efficiency, and therefore solar-uptake. An example of this is smart-street-lighting in… er… Somerset, UK. £36000 outlay, pays for itself in 8 years. I’m not sure how much a standard-non-efficient system would cost. About £500 per pole. Not sure if that’s a lot or not. Not for England I wouldn’t have thought.

But anyway, that’s what I’m talking about – it senses lighting conditions, if anyone’s actually there, etc etc… and adjusts accordingly. It could conceivably radically cut down light-pollution as well.

Speaking of smart-grids etc… California has just passed privacy ruling for smart-metering

“The CPUC’s decision applies to the state’s three largest electric utilities—Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), and Southern California Edison (SCE)—which serve eight out of 10 Californians and which combined have deployed approximately eight million smart meters, with the final three million to be installed by the end of 2012.

The decision means the utilities must provide daily updates on detailed energy usage, bill-to-date, month-end bill forecast, and projected month-end energy price, to be made available on the companies’ respective web sites”

Which means (I guess) that it’s illegal for utility companies not to have websites. They are now in the information business whether they like it or not. Pachube just sold for $13M btw – they were robbed. There’s gold in them-thar data-mountains… but it can’t be the “property” of institutions that optimise for scarcity like energy companies. It’s got to be out in the open web.

Speaking of um… that… apparently the cali-smart-meters are using a zigbee protocol device for networking… little gadgets, some of which look like this

- a new variant of which has come out… wifi enabled, which is pretty cool – makes it a hell of a lot easier to make wire-free arduino gadgets.

And speaking of that… the new 802.22 WIFI standard, apparently has a range of about 60 miles

on account of it using the same airwaves as analogue TV used to. Fuck TV. We should just mesh-network the entire planet and consign the broadcast model to the dustbin of history, which is where it belongs. We’ve seen what the broadcast model does, and it’s fucking dangerous. And boring. Inadequate. Have you seen TV recently? Christ on a bike, is that really worth preserving? With very very few exceptions, it’s bottom of the barrel shit. It’s for thick people.

Back to power.

Bruce Sterling recently went on about “developments he’d like to see”… and talked about energy… you know, “a box”, that you stick on the wall and energy comes out of it. And he’s kindof right. I think we can run a sustainable civilisation on solar and wind (which is a type of solar) and hydro (which is a type of solar) and so on and so on… but even though I’m totally against it, I think if we’re going to develop the types of technology that we read about in Iain Banks books… hovering AI drones and such

Then we’re going to need micro-nukes in some capacity.

Now, my objections to nuke are:

1) anti-monolyth
2) danger (yes it fucking is, you dumb fucks)
3) requiring taxpayer subsidy/underwriting (with private profits)
4) waste
5) run by a bunch of greedy, pathologically lying old cunts
6) cover for weapons proliferation

Now, if something could be shrunk to the size of a matchbox. Or a pea. Or even just a VW camper, then conceivably, 1/2 of those objections evaporate. Weaponisation… yup, I can see new, worse types of weapons arising as a result, but I think nuke is about to be sidelined by biotech on that front anyway. And the biggest danger is always monoculture. (and with 7 billion humans on this planet THIS YEAR, there’s only so much we can do about that).

So um… speaking of micro-nuke…

About a year ago, Bill Gates was going on about a reactor that eats the waste we have, but don’t know what to do with… and u38 (which is common) rather than u35, which ain’t. It’s claimed that it can be extracted from seawater, which I’ll believe when I see, but in the meantime, it’s the uranium still comes out of things that look like this.

And anything that needs something like that, is a bit fucked in my opinion… but being able to use the waste we have for fuel gets us out of a similar, metaphorical hole. They’re looking at 2016 for being in production. 5 Years out. That’s still a fairly big unit though.

What’s a bit more interesting (to me) is this:

(from)

And what that is, is a tiny device that converts heat to electricity… which it does by using nanotech to fire specific wavelengths of light at point blank range into photoelectrics sensitive to specific wavelengths.

“Based on that technology, MIT researchers have made a button-sized power generator fueled by butane that can run three times longer than a lithium-ion battery of the same weight; the device can then be recharged instantly, just by snapping in a tiny cartridge of fresh fuel. Another device, powered by a radioisotope that steadily produces heat from radioactive decay, could generate electricity for 30 years without refueling or servicing — an ideal source of electricity for spacecraft headed on long missions away from the sun”

Now that is interesting because it’s scalable down, sizewise… they reckon they can triple it’s capacity with a bit of effort as well. I don’t get how you can burn butane in a thing the size of a button*… or is it a chemical reaction? But a button-sized pocket-nuke?

If we’re going to have hovering AI drones, then that is exactly what we need. Hope they manage to pull it off.

Tungsten has come a long way from lightbulb filaments.

*well look at that, you can:

from

Various micro-combustors here.

Looks like people at Singapore Uni are doing stuff with thermal-photovoltaic as well.

We have a funny relationship with space… and space travel. We know what it’s supposed to be… what it’s supposed to be like – we just can’t do it. We’ve got a whole (massively popular) genre of entertainment based on something we can’t (for one reason or another) do. Part of it is that our political systems are too corrupted by wealthy interests – so more is spent on air-conditioning in war-zones, than on NASA. But part of it is that the laws of physics simply ain’t allowing it. We’re kindof stuck.

But this post isn’t about that, it’s about solar – which seems to be taking a fucking eternity to get here. At least once a month, some amazing new breakthrough happens… like this:

That’s a solar-cell array printed on paper using vapor-deposition (low-temp in a vacuum etc), in a way that is so robust that it’s foldable… up to about 1000 times (it ain’t indestructible, but still…). It’s from MIT (for all you people who think that only corporations innovate).

Currently running at about 1% efficiency – which they say they can improve… the crystalline cells are approaching 29% these days.

So what’s going to happen? Fuck all I bet. It’ll get tied up with patents so no one gets to use it except massive corporations, who don’t really want to use it and would rather sell incremental improvements to existing products, or whatever.

Konarka seem to be quite close to… changing the world, but they’ve seemed that way for years now – and the only thing that I’ve seen that I can actually buy, is a fucking solar-powered backpack, which is extremely underwhelming. Their web site has pictures of things that look like this

But danged if I can find something that I can actually buy and chuck up on the roof. If I want solar, I have to fall back on the clunky glass variety, or…

… actually, scratch that, these things ARE starting to turn up on Ebay.

$240 for a 68W flexible strip – that’s a fuck of a lot cheaper than it was last time I looked. $240 is less than I spend on a drunken night out. I spend over $3000 a year on fucking latte. Instead of buying more nuke power plants, the Japanese should just buy millions of these and drop them from helicopters over Tokyo. It’ll be cheaper than re-nuking – and more resilient. Trouble is… their govt already invested in nuke, so now they’ve got a $70-$250bn cleanup bill (The Belarus govt estimated Chernobyl to be over $250bn… and really, that disaster is still going on, which is why the Russian Govt is asking for financial help from the British to re-build the containment on the fucked reactor)

The Japanese are already committed to waste… and now millions of jellyfish are attacking their remaining power-plants, as they’re also doing (weirdly enough) in Israel and Scotland.

And for the same £ that the UK pisses up the wall on storage of nuke-waste created by people in the 1970s, it could buy about 6.3 MILLION of these panels a year, and just give them away. And that doesn’t account for bulk buying, or Moore’s law, which does alseo apply to solar, albeit at a slower rate.

But they can’t because they’re committed to waste.

–

Which naturally leads to this : Solar-uptake from the favela, or more accurately, the faveloid farm. People in India not bothering for major institutions to provide the infrastructure, and instead (like they did with cellphones) going straight for the (semi) off-grid option.

I think we’re going to see more and more of this – the innovations that really matter are slum-driven… or… favela-chic driven… or… places where lack of “governance” (which is expressly designed to create corporate monopolies) grants freedom to create solutions that are actually people-based, rather than serving some capitalist aim.

I see in Ebay, adverts for solar cells are accompanied by photos of scantily-clad women… and by scantily-clad, I mean really, budget-level, pirated stock-photography scantily-clad.

And I see this as a good sign, because it means that the market has hit drek-bottom and is competing on every desperate angle it can possibly find – which means the prices aren’t artificially high, because some toss-weed corporation is charging a monopoly rent on patents that it bought.

–

Ignoring that though… I think there’s another interesting angle that comes from uptake of off-grid solar – and that is that people will become aware of what electricity they’re actually using… which naturally feeds into and multiplies with a revolution in home-automation, which is coming, I promise you. Being able to play your power-consumption like a computer game, will massively reduce the amount we use.

from

Maglev in a vacuum delivering 97% efficiency… that’s incredibly impressive. They go on about them being safe… and I guess in some ways they are… until one escapes, and lets all the other ones out and then you’ve got about 20 steamrollers going at about a million miles an hour flying off in all directions.

Looks like portable ones are doable as well

Loads of little DIY variants about the place as well

And Porsche are playing with them

Jesus… listen to the voiceover of this

What. A. Crock. Of. Shit.

Fucking embarrassing to listen to, even with no one else around

For the absolutely mental price of 500 eu.

from : via

They have other cookers for about 1/2 this price… and about 1/2 of that price seems to come from the shiney bits.

I’m coming to find that there’s this price-level (particularly for camera gear) – where although the price seems like an outrage – that is about how much it takes to make your own. I bet the cost of water-jet cutting (If that’s how they do it) 20 shiney triangles with interlocking bits isn’t a hell of a lot less than the price being charged here.

It’s not just “the cost of not doing business in China”, it’s the cost of not mass-producing… and maybe the cost of no competition. Or maybe it’s what the market will stand.

Dunno – I went to the trouble of working on my process/materials/sources etc with my golden mean calipers – and was able to drop the price by 20% – and it made no difference to the level of sales whatsoever.

So this thing… that looks like it’s been rapid-fabbed will probably cost to make in your own rapid-fabbery what it costs to buy from someone who’s done all the trialling and erroring, and made thousands of them.

Or to put it another way – I think that the “threat” that some people think rapid-fabbing poses to “products” probably isn’t that much of a threat – or at least is only a threat where we’re being ripped off (eg: paying a premium for a “brand”). Or to put it another way, a side-effect of wide-spread proliferation of rapid-fabbing will be to “rationalise” product costs – but it will in no way put manufacturers out of business. Or to put it another way, the threat to manufacturers of physical products isn’t piracy, but mass-production.

And IP law of course.

–

Did you know that although pharma companies claim they need to lock everything up with IP law (which costs lives)…

… 80% of R&D into pharma is publicly funded and…

… of the 20% corporations do spend, 50% of that goes on trying to circumvent IP of other companies.

Ok, so obviously last night I drank a number of bottles of wine and went into drunken hilarity mode on the internet, and shot my mouth off all over the place.

While a general blanket-apology is offered to all, I do generally stand behind what I say. “Always keep a promise sober, that you made drunk” as Hemingway would often say to me.

So,

Nukes. In the news a bit recently, for all the wrong reasons – which has provoked the army of unpaid nuke-industry shills to try to trivialise the disaster that is unfolding. It might be dangerous, it might not be. It looks dangerous – and the fact that nuke companies refuse to underwrite the costs of accidents, as part of the deal they do with governments before they build the things would suggest that the people who should know best, also think they’re dangerous – although they deny it. Money talks; Bullshit walks.

Anyway – I wrote this in 2009 – the site I wrote it for is long gone (don’t believe it when people say “if it’s on the web, it’s there forever”.

–

1) It is bad systems design.

With small decentralised units, when technology advances (as it is doing, rapidly) you can swap in new units.

With nuke you’re stuck with a monolithic system for 50 years.

CHP[12] units are already used extensively by EU/Scandinavian countries, 8% of US power is generated using CHP. This is not rocket-science, though could be with the levels of investment that nuclear will cost… just to deal with its waste.

In addition to this, smaller decentralised units are more resilient to outages, are quicker to deploy and quicker to decommission. They create a competing ecosystem of technologies that is under pressure to advance. Nuke doesn’t.

To draw an analogy, Nuke is like a system of mainframe computers (from the 50s), while decentralised micro-generators is an internet of rapidly advancing, competing and evolving systems.

In systems-engineering terms, nuke stations also represent “single points of failure”. They’re less resilient.

From a military/terrorist perspective, they’re a giant “Kick Me” sign.

2) Nuke is dangerous.

Despite what the nuke industry says (you know, the people who last time around said it would be “too cheap to meter”), nuclear power is dangerous. When a fuse blows [1], you have to shut down a portion of the grid. Despite what the nuke industry says, cockups and accidents are happening all the time [2][3][4][5][6]

Nuke lobbyists now claim that it’s safe (funny, they said that last time round) but, (and this should be the first, last and only nail in the coffin of this idea) the UK govt has decided that nuke companies should not be responsible for the costs of cleaning up after an accident because no company should be reasonably expected to handle such a huge expense. This is an admission of risk – no company should have to pay for a Chernobyl… the public should.

This simple fact kills all arguments about safety.

And, once again, it’s privatised profits and socialised risks in a set up that resembles if not a monopoly then a cartel.

3) The economics stink

Nuclear power cannot work economically without massive government (that means you) subsidies. Anyone subscribing to ideas about free-markets should reject nuclear economics as a point of principle.

The potential for (distributed) profit from renewable technology on the other hand is vast – and this is technology that can be happily sold everywhere on the planet, without the paranoia we’re currently seeing over Iran etc. Instead of the benefit remaining in a few (gnarly old) hands, it can be distributed more democratically, planet-wide.

CHP (and other renewables) also offer much greater scope for local control.

Downstream energy savings (ie: efficiency) create huge upstream savings. The idea that our current escalating energy consumption needs to keep escalating at its current rate is nonsense. Amory Lovins’ (from the video above) company recently retrofitted the Empire State Building, reducing it’s energy consumption by 40% [9][10]

That’s a downstream energy saving – in the UK, 60% of energy generated goes straight up as heat. Our systems are inefficient… every watt saved at the wall-point, saves orders of magnitude greater of watts at source.

4) We don’t know what to do with the waste we already have.

Nuke is not clean, it’s incredibly dirty.

The Nuke industry have jumped on the idea that it produces low carbon emissions (and that’s ignoring that extraction/ running/ decommissioning etc are so carbon-intensive that nuke only represents a saving of 8% [13]) to promote the idea that it’s clean.

It’s not.

Nuke waste storage currently costs £1 billion a year, year in, year out, essentially forever. The half lives [7] of nuke waste runs to hundreds of thousands of years. How would you feel if… Oliver Cromwell’s generation say, had invented nuke power and left us with a billion pound a year storage bill? Feel a bit differently about them?

How about Willam the Conqueror?

The Romans?

The Sumerians?

Seems crazy doesn’t it? Look at it this way: one day, tens of thousands of years from now there will be cultures looking back at us as unimaginably distant memories… far far older than the Assyrians, Sumerians etc etc are to us…

…and they’ll still have to be dealing with this crap that ignorant morons from the 20th century left them with. That is our legacy. That’s the tyrrany we’ve already gifted to the future: taxation without representation.

This is assuming of course, that everyone producing this stuff is dealing with it responsibly. Know why the Somalian Pirates are seen as heroes by Somalis? Because EU ships have been dumping nuclear waste off the African coast[8]

Part of the sweetner that the UK govt is offering to the nuke industry to make new plants is to hide the costs of the waste in existing waste programs. They can’t do this without lying to us what the real costs are. Take a look at the history of the nuclear reactor that is being built in Finland [11]

Or to put it another way, they’re lying on behalf of big business, against your interests, again.

5) Centralised control.

You’ve seen what centralised control of dwindling resources (yes, there is such a thing as Peak Uranium, we have at most 50 years worth) did to the 20th century. You really want that for the 21st?

One of the things about renewables is that they’re oligarchy-breakers. They obviate the need for trillion-dollar wars.

They’re representative of participatory cultures (which is what we’re moving into) as opposed to nuke, which is representative of command-cultures (which is what we’re moving away from, but which all of our institutions are firmly entrenched in)

6) Proliferation

Nuke power provides the perfect shelter for proliferation of nuke weapons.

–

Why? Why do all this? We already have alternatives – we’re already building them. Why invest all these hundreds of billions into something that is so inadequate?

–

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12731668?nclick_check=1&forced=true

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/nuclearpower/5509277/Nuclear-disaster-averted-by-dirty-laundry.html

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/us/03nuke.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

[4] (UK) http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/29/britishenergygroupbusiness.nuclear

[5] (Fr) http://www.euronews.net/en/article/24/07/2008/france-fourth-nuclear-incident-in-a-fortnight/

[6] (De) http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,576550,00.html

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

[8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

[9] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKnxDcIUfdY

[10] http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid598.php

[11] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/business/energy-environment/29nuke.html

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration

[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/nuclear

Which is an electric plane that actually works

Although if I’d made it, I’d have made it with an android/iPad as a dashboard… with inbuilt gyro/location stuff… and I’d have made the entire compartment bit made out of bubblewrap…

It says “Peghiny says the key to flying is watching the voltage. The 72-pound, 70-amp-hour lithium-polymer battery started the flight with 74 volts. Peghiny says I should be ready to land when it hits 65. Once I climbed to around 600 feet, I could pull back the controller to 1,800 rpm to minimize the drain on the battery. Full power is 2,200 rpm.

You should climb out at about 40 miles per hour and cruise at about the same,” Peghiny tells me as I strap into the seat. “On final, fly it at 45 and remember it stalls at just 22.”

So that’s cool. More at Wired

… combine that with this here battery

Which is a battery that took an Audi 375 miles at 55mph on a 6-minute charge…

… and you’ve got two interesting things combined into one REALLY interesting thing.

The trouble with democratised flight (which is basically what the flying car thing is) is that most people are a clueless dipshits who can’t walk around their own house without falling over and breaking things – cars kill more people than Hitler – put that into 3 Dimensions… and you’ve got the solution to the population over-shoot right there.

But these thing go more slowly than your average car… so if we could make them out of zorb-stuff, we might have a winner.

–

speaking of winners, one day in an entirely unforeseeable future, I’m going to go over this entire blog from the beginning… and see what has happened to all this stuff, or if it is indeed all vapour-ware… which is what I accuse everyone else of.