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Techlog—August 2K8

8.10.2K8: Sometimes you feel like a nut...

...and sometimes, you feel like getting that nuttiness out of your system. And onto the pages of someone else's web site. Just for kicks.

That was my impetus for writing 6 of One... in the MobileRead website's Lounge section, known for its so-called "unutterable silliness." I just felt like being unutterably silly, and seeing how many people I could drag along for the ride.

And silly me: I thought that, as others joined in, they would also join me at the reins, and help write the story with their own additions. As it turned out, though, they were content to sit back, make suggestions and unutterably silly comments, and let me do all the writing!

So, I did. I put together a story on-the-fly, not knowing from one installment to the next where I'd be taking it... nor where other peoples' comments might steer it. Thankfully, I was going for laughs, not Great Expectations, which made it easier to churn out a piece of entertaining short story fare. And all things considered, it came out well enough for me to include it, with all of its unutterable silly comments, on this site. (Look on the Novels page, down amongst the freebies.)

Will I do it again? Who knows... I can be a glutton for punishment. Will I do anything longer? Well, as much fun as this was, writing an entire comedic novel is much tougher, and I don't know if I have it in me.

But anything's possible...

8.14.2K8: Geothermal transfer illustrated

geothermal transfer system, vertical installation

The August issue of Scientific American has some great illustrations of the geothermal transfer method I used in my novel Chasing the Light. For those of you who may have been interested, the pictures are presented here.

In the novel, a franchise company comes to the client's property and sinks pipes carrying heat-exchanging fluid into the ground. The fluid circulates below the ground, in the areas below 6-8 feet where the ground temperature does not waver... it will stay the same temperature year-round, generally in the seventies in most of North America. This fluid can then be used in a heat pump to warm air in the winter, and cool air in the summer.

The SciAm illustrations demonstrate both methods mentioned in the novel, the horizontal installation, and the vertical (which is better for smaller lawns). So far, heat pumps represent a small proportion of the home heating and AC market, and buried ground line systems an even smaller proportion. But as the ground-based method requires no power to directly heat or cool the fluid, and is very reliable and efficient, it is getting much more attention from builders and homeowners.

Burying fluid-filled pipes over a 100-square-foot area, or a smaller area 150 feet deep, is not cheap, which explains why more homeowners (like myself) are not installing these systems in great numbers yet. But a few experimental neighborhoods are even having the systems pre-installed when the new homes are built (a much easier and less expensive process than doing so after the home is built). Possibly, if installation methods are standardized and costs brought down, we will see an installation system that is cheap and convenient enough for the average homeowner to spring for it.

And someday, maybe we'll see a franchise operation like the GeTi organization in Chasing the Light, making geothermal transfer possible for every existing home.

geothermal transfer system, horizontal installation

8.20.2K8: Bill Clinton's energy laundry list

At the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Bill Clinton delivered a top 10 laundry list of actions that the U.S. government should take to help solve the energy crisis.

Hmm... why does this sound familiar?

Oh, yeah: Because Jimmy Carter did the same thing! Carter's 10-point plan was covered on this site, with the question posed of how far off Carter was to a workable plan. Comparing and contrasting, we can see the changes in thinking that different viewpoints and 30 years have wrought:

Jimmy Carter's 10-point energy plan (mid-1970s)	Bill Clinton's 10-point energy plan (2008)*
We can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices.	Congress must pass legislation that puts a price on carbon and establish a cap-and-trade system.
Healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.	We need to renew and lengthen the tax credits for clean energy. The time frame needs to be longer than three years — more like 6 to 10 years. That is the only way to stimulate enough production of clean energy technologies.
We must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems —wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both at once.	It’s important to figure out the federal government’s role in modernizing the electrical grid, including both efficiency and carrying capacity. The grid wastes a lot of energy moving power, given that the wind blows and the sun shines in places where a lot of people don’t live. Tax payers should also be able to split the cost of modernizing the grid with utilities.
We must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and developing a strategic petroleum reserve.	Utility decoupling should be federally mandated. That’s what California has done on a state level, separating its utility profits from electricity sales, and has thus become one of the most efficient energy states in the nation.
We must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve, just as the consumers will. The energy producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer.	We should have legislation to accelerate replacing traditional incandescent lighting with LED lighting. This could save us the equivalent power of a dozen power plants over the next 20 years.
Reduce the demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way we can buy a barrel of oil for a few dollars. It costs about $13 to waste it.	On the production side we need to continue to fund carbon capture and storage projects. China is bringing on a new coal plant every 10 days or so, so we need to figure this technology out.
Prices should generally reflect the true replacement costs of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford.	We need to accelerate the move from corn-based ethanol to more sustainable biofuels. The conversion ratio is twice as good, but the enzyme process is twice as expensive. Many of the corn ethanol plants can be easily modified to produce cellulosic ethanol from the waste of farm crops. We can’t continue to raise the price of food and skew production patterns. It seems worth it to have differential tax incentives to do this right. We should consider doing a joint investment with Brazil, potentially in the Caribbean, which would import sugar cane-based ethanol into the U.S, but it would not be subject to the tax that is placed on the rest of Brazilian ethanol. (It might not be politically feasible, Clinton added.)
Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason I am working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy, to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy.	We should have a program to shut down urban landfills and use them for either waste heat or fertilizer. The green house gas coming out of landfills is methane, which is pretty bad. Organic landfills should just not be there — it’s bad for global warming, and it’s a public health nightmare.
We must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are more plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption when they make up seven percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy.	We need to accelerate the move to hybrid and electric vehicles and modernize our railway system. After our party lost, Clinton said, we were succeeded by a group that thought high-speed rail was virtually closet communism. Biofuels are also just a transition to electric and hybrid cars. We have this electric vehicle technology today, and it’s made in America.
We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century.	We need to demonstrate to the rest of the world that this is not an affectation for rich countries — that this is as big an opportunity for developing counties as it is for wealthy countries. The most popular thing the U.S. has done is its work with AIDS and Malaria, including work done by the Gates and Clinton Foundations. We need to also use this model for what we could do for clean energy development in the developing world.

*text taken from Earth2Tech article

It is clear that both viewpoints encourage the government to step up to the plate and pass meaningful legislation. But from there, the two former Presidents diverge widely. Carter's plan focuses on the American people also owning up to their national and global responsibility to conserve and live sensibly... while Clinton ignores the public entirely, and encourages businesses to do their part to develop the new energy-based economy.

Carter's plan also encouraged the effort to find alternative fuels, and specifically to reduce our dependence on foreign fuels. Clinton's plan encourages the search for biofuel products to replace corn for ethanol, and suggests partnerships with agricultural countries that we don't happen to be at war with, but other than calling this a "transitional step" to hybrid and electric vehicles, says nothing about new fuels or energy sources (not even hydrogen). Clinton's plan also concentrates on limiting carbon output specifically, although cap-and-trade systems have already been criticized as a "buck-passing" device that will do nothing to reduce net carbon output, and carbon storage and sequestering has likewise not been proven workable or effective.

Most importantly, Carter's plan emphasized the need to figure in the real costs of energy use, including the costs of environmental cleanup, which would bring more efficient energy sources into cost-efficiency against dirty fuels that dodge their cleanup costs in red tape. Clinton clearly depends on big business to find the profit in energy... which one might argue is exactly how we got into this situation in the first place.

At any rate, Carter's laundry list never progressed much past the plan... and Clinton's may not, either. We'll have to see what the future brings. But if I had to pick one, I'd go with Carter's plan as the more sensible and comprehensive one.

8.25.2K8: Kindle stars at the MobileRead DC meet-up

Various members of the MobileRead e-books forum decided to arrange local get-togethers this year, in Europe and in the U.S. On August 23rd, members of the Washington, D.C. members met for the first time.

Spearheaded by RWood, one of the veteran members of the forum, the group arranged to meet at a Herndon restaurant, where we shared dinner, traded stories, played Star Trek ringtones across the table, and showed off our various e-book reading devices. And what a collection it was: Everything from ancient handheld computers to modern PDAs, cellphones, and dedicated e-book readers.


	Kindle: Makes a good first impression.

Taking an honorary place of honor was an Amazon Kindle reader. As one of those devices that are still hard to find (given that they are not available in stores, and have very few online images that look even half as good as the shot on the right), whenever they turn up around e-book readers, they usually draw a crowd of the curious, hoping to finally get a chance to see one up-close, to touch and hold it, to try it out, and examine that e-ink screen. My wife had a chance to see one for the first time, as well as other members of the MR forum. I had a second chance to see one since my first encounter in Vermont (described in last month's log). And so far, the reaction I've seen from everyone who's finally gotten a chance to see one has been the same: "Hey, this thing ain't half bad!"

I'd had a revelation about the Kindle a few weeks ago, one that may explain much of its popularity:

I'd always wondered how a $400 device that was not available in stores could sell so well, sight-unseen, in the not-yet-popular e-book market. Then it was pointed out to me that there were a lot of romance e-books available for the device (romance novels are the largest genre of e-books available, bar none). Two things I know about romance readers are, one, they often buy multiple books a month... often multiple books a week. And two, they like to share.

So, imagine a romance reader being introduced to the Kindle through a friend or significant. They buy one, and love it so much, they will keep it with them (as they would with any romance novel) and, when they see their romance-reading friends, will immediately bring it out and demo it for them. The Kindle makes a pretty good first impression, much better than its online impression, and many a person who has been physically introduced to one has gone online and bought one. And as those romance readers have bought them, they have shown them to other readers (romance or no), and further promoted them.

So the Kindle is likely being sold by grass-roots promotion, and the most significant number of those promoters are likely romance readers. And suddenly, its success makes sense.

Amazon is holding its sales numbers close to the vest, which is their fashion, leaving many people to guess how well the Kindle is doing. But thanks to get-togethers like the MobileRead meet, and individuals showing off their devices to each other, at least now we have a good idea of how it's being sold.

8.28.2K8: Soleri's resurgence


	Soleri's Arcosanti is a model of efficient, organic city design.

Back in the late sixties, architect Paolo Soleri, a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, espoused a new kind of architecture that brought people together into tight communities instead of spreading them out over the landscape, and that created intelligent cities that were easy on the environment, instead of sprawling cities and suburbs. He knew back then that covering the ground with cities and driving back and forth were not efficient nor sustainable ways to live, and he sought a better, efficient, logical community design based on organic principles.

But he was largely ignored by the world, and when he retreated out into the Arizona desert to create a prototype of one of his "Arcocities," he was considered irrelevant and out-of-touch at best, and a crackpot at worst. (The Arcocity concept, from Soleri's book Arcology: City in the Image of Man, was used in The Onuissance Cells, Encephalopath and Evoguía.)

Today, Soleri is doing talk circuits. His views on intelligent city design and communities have found a new audience, one that realizes our present culture is not sustainable, and needs a new perspective. A perspective that is over 30 years old, in fact. His Cosanti, located near Scotsdale, Az, is again becoming a model for intelligent city design, and a hint at the communities of the future.

Like Wright, Soleri concentrated on concepts, not details... consequently, there are no "finished plans" for any of his arcocities. However, his work on Cosanti proves many of his engineering concepts, and demonstrates an innate understanding of environmental concepts and low-impact, high-efficiency designs. Though his city designs often look like flighty and impossible sfi-fi constructs, there is nothing about them that is impossible to build with today's materials and engineering know-how.

Soleri, now 89, has also come to terms with the likelihood that he will not live to see the fruits of his work come to pass. Still, he is willing to keep spreading the gospel to Cosanti visitors and to lecture listeners. Thanks to a renewed worldwide interest in green and sustainable living, Soleri's vision for organic architecture and sustainable communities is being rediscovered, and his wisdom has become prophetic.

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