Electrons and Photons and Such

So the other day I decided to withdraw my vast bitcoin hoard because the thing is almost flat stable at $14, and if anything, is gently declining… but rather than convert it to cash, I decided to actually buy something.

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.