Category: Technology

I will admit, when it comes to private sector action, I’m not a big privacy advocate.  I don’t really care if my supermarket chain knows what brand of toothpaste I prefer, or how often I buy paper towels.  I also don’t get how Google’s new street zoom features is violating anyone’s privacy.  When you’re in a public place, you’re in a public place.   And as for this:

Ms. Kalin-Casey, who manages an apartment building here with her husband, John Casey, was a bit shaken when she tried a new feature in Google’s map service called Street View. She typed in her address and the screen showed a street-level view of her building. As she zoomed in, she could see Monty, her cat, sitting on a perch in the living room window of her second-floor apartment.

“The issue that I have ultimately is about where you draw the line between taking public photos and zooming in on people’s lives,” Ms. Kalin-Casey said in an interview Thursday on the front steps of the building. “The next step might be seeing books on my shelf. If the government was doing this, people would be outraged.”

I have a novel and innovative new technology for dealing with this issue.  I call them blinds.

Instapundit seems to be a lot more skeptical than some reporters are. Follow the story to a guy who seems to have stumbled across a way to make hydrogen using a radio frequency generator. I’m not an expert in this area, but I do think this is possible. There’s already a patent on it, actually. The problem is that it’s not revolutionary. The radio frequency generator will consume more energy than is released by burning hydrogen. This article suggests that the efficiency is around 76% of ideal, which is less, I’m fairly certain, than conventional electrolysis methods, which are more like 80%.

Thermodynamics is a real bummer. It will always demand that you use more energy breaking the hydrogen/oxygen bond than you’ll get out of burning it.  I’m sure someday someone will make a fool of us all by figuring out to convert matter directly into energy, but when one sees inventions like this, the conventional laws of physics will apply.  There’s no such thing as free energy.

Instapundit is talking about compressed air cars.  The big problem with this technology is you’re essentially driving with a bomb under your car.  Gasoline contains a lot of energy, but it won’t explode under normal conditions.  You’ll get a hell of a blaze, but not an explosion.   Any compressed gas technology is going to have the fundamental problem of an explosion hazard, not because of the gas within being explosive, but because of the tremendous amount of energy being stored up in the tank.  See this summary of a dive shop explosion that occurred when the tank failed.

Also, the net greenhouse gas savings here would be negligible, since it will take copious amounts of electricity to operate the fill up stations and compressors.  This energy, if it comes from burning coal, will just shift the greenhouses gases to the power companies.   But still, this technology is more promising than the ones that involve reacting light metals with water to produce hydrogen.

Instapundit is skeptical of another hydrogen powered technology with the potential to not help much with our energy problems.

This one looks pretty identical to the magnesium based process that was talked about last month, and it suffers from the same problem. Aluminum is expensive, and it takes a LOT of energy to produce aluminum from bauxite ore, particularly electrical energy, which in this country, is produced mainly by burning coal.

The main problem with hydrogen is that it’s not an energy source. It’s a way of storing energy. To make hydrogen, you still need a source of energy that’s coming from some other source. In addition, it would be difficult to pack enough hydrogen into a small enough space to be a practical motor fuel, and it would be completely impractical to power larger vehicles like airplanes.

I can see this company is also big on the hype as well:

For Woodall, the biggest speed bump lies elsewhere. “The egos of program managers at DOE are holding up the revolution,” he told msnbc.com.

No, I’m pretty sure the laws of physics and principles of economics are what’s holding up the hydrogen revolution.

I guess I’m more affluent then, because I’d hate to think I fit into the “older” demographic now.  This Slashdot post talks about the increasing trend among young people to give up the land line:

More than a quarter of the under-30 crowd has decided you only need one telephone — and it sure as heck does not plug into a wall. The trend towards an all-mobile lifestyle is accelerating, according to a new survey. Besides younger people, lower-income people are also more likely to have cut the cord. And while businesses may be a bit slower on the cell-only uptake, there appears to be little doubt at this point that the traditional landline will be joining rotary dials and party lines as a relic of the telecommunications industry.

I still have a land line, but I have thought about giving it up.  I use my land line similarly to how I use GMail.   When I want to give someone a phone number, but I really don’t want them bothering me, I’ll give them the land line.  Anyone who I know well enough gets the cell phone number.  I don’t answer calls on my land line unless I recognize the caller, which is rare, since everyone who knows me knows to call the cell phone.

Thinking about it, it probably makes sense to give up the land phone.  But I doubt I’ll actually do it.  It must be the old fogy in me that has a hard time letting go of the wire.

Whoever decided that “FakeRAID”, which is a highly technical term used to describe the types of Serial ATA RAID apearing on some cheaper motherboards, was a good idea needs a severe beating.  It appears that FakeRAID is just basically a BIOS hint, requiring the CPU on the machine to do the majority of the work with regards to creating and maintaining the array.  I was trying to make Ubuntu do the FakeRAID thing on a server at work, but I think I’m just going to use the Linux software RAID, which seems to be the conventional wisdom these days anyway.

Now back to your regularly scheduled gun blogging.

The gun blogosphere is pretty quiet today, so I thought I’d take some time to take a look at a new technology. While I’m a gun blogger normally, by training and profession I’m an engineer, so this will be a rare occasion when I get to use that skill in the blogosphere.

Instapundit points to a technology that claims to be able to make hydrogen from magnesium and water. This is interesting, but I consider this another example of a company cashing in on the alternate fuel craze. The big reason not to get excited about this is the second law of thermodynamics will always demand that you lose. You will need to put more energy into cleaving the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen that you will ever get back from putting it back together either by burning it in a conventional internal combustion (IC) engine or fuel cell. In short, this system is essentially turning magnesium into an energy source, with hydrogen as an intermediary, to be turned into a usable form of energy in a fuel cell or IC engine. Interesting idea, but is magnesium cheap enough and sufficiently energy dense to be a practical motor fuel?

Magnesium seems to cost about $2.75 per kilogram. A kilogram of magnesium contains about 24.7 megajoules of energy. To compare to gasoline, we really need to measure energy by volume, which is 43 megajoules for a liter of of magnesium, compared to 34.6 megajoules for a liter of gasoline. Magnesium wins on energy density!

A liter of magnesium has a mass of 1.74 kilograms, and a cost of $4.79 based on recent pricing. It would take 1.24 liters of gasoline to have the same amount of energy that’s in a liter of magnesium. Gasoline in my area is about $2.60 a gallon, which comes out to about 69 cents per liter. Therefore the energy equivalent for gasoline comes out to cost 86 cents, compared to magnesium’s $4.79. So magnesium costs about five and a half times what gasoline does if you use equivalent energy.! If you do the unit conversions, to get the same amount of energy that’s in a gallon of gas, it would cost you $14.48. A little pricey for driving the kids to soccer practice, wouldn’t you say?

Also consider this is based on the current price of magnesium. No doubt common use of magnesium as a motor fuel would drive the price through the roof. Magnesium mining also requires energy, and is not exactly environmentally friendly.

So unless Ecotality has found a way to get around the second law of thermodynamics, this technology is a dead end. I’m sure the government would gleefully throw lots of grants (tax dollars) in their direction, but I certainly wouldn’t invest.

My source material was largely this Wikipedia article on energy density, plus a little Googling for prices. Someone go ahead and check my math if you want.

UPDATE: Glenn updated the article with a bit from a chemist who reveals where the energy is going in the process; making the elemental magnesium in the first place, and then recycling the oxides back into free metal.  If you submerge magnesium in water, it will react with the water as a matter of course, releasing hydrogen.   Didn’t know that.  My background isn’t in chemistry.   But the physics still says you lose.