About Sci Fi Engineer

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Sundays always get me down…

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Trying to keep up with a busy real job schedule and my desire to get Exotic Contraband ready for the first book to be published on Smashwords so blogging has not been prolific, will at least be home this week, hope to get a few meaty posts done.

Used to be that Sunday was the day before Monday and I dreaded school…until I got over that and actually started to like it. Then it was the day before Monday and I had to face the fact that I was just a cog in the gears of my job. Then I was a manager and I would have to face the folks who worked for me and keep up expectations. Next I was working for myself and Monday meant having to figure out how I was going to keep it up after the near term mana gave out. Then I was working for a small company and it meant another week of 12 to 14 hour days, and commutes that really sucked, though I enjoyed what I was doing. Still the case but now its the realization that I didn’t get to most of the things I’d intended to do over the weekend and the week is going to be clogged…

But then isn’t that the human condition, never really satisfied, isn’t that what keeps us moving forward?

Sorry edited, used the quick blog button and it made the central paragraph a differen color and unreadable on my blog….had to get into the HTML, I find that WP is a way to learn some HTML…again.

So I need to up my game

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Work absorbed my time this week, one of those weeks where every hour was tagged and I almost forgot several calls even though my electronic adjuncts tried to keep me on path. I work with some really great people who I enjoy spending time discussing problems of society, America, industry and the world, we almost always solve most of the problems by the end of the meal.

But after solving the world’s problems verbally I just didn’t feel like blogging…and with the iPad and the WP app there is really no excuse for that. So I need to make another dedication to getting at least something, even its just “Mehe” or “Have some eye candy, now don’t bother me conscience’

Speaking of eye candy the series of solar eruptions have produced their usual stunning skyworks and since the cycle is 11 years, this is the first solar maximum in the age of digital photography so there are fabulous, fantastical pictures all over the web.

APOD Aurora Image

Such as this one, todays APOD eyecandy.

APOD Aurora Image

Or this one from the Jan 24th APOD.

Those were from two solar flares, the first a 3 the second a 2, there has been a near max one as well (above a 5 on the scale which is a log, scale so more than a thousand times stronger than the one that produced the image above.) Here is a bit more information. You’ll notice that it’s from Kent (England) which is because the English, and even more the Scots see a lot of this sort of thing, the British Isles are surprisingly far north (Hudson Bay Canada sort of North.) The Aurora is a polar effect due to the Earths powerful magnetic field (which prevents this sort of thing from sterilizing the planet) the magnetic field lines plunge into the body of the world north and south, allowing the energetic particles to interact with our atmosphere, creating plasmas, immense natural neon signs.

BRAVO: Red Tails, Everyone should see It!!!

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

: Red Tails Broadsheet

Saw this movie with my son today (Sunday 22nd Jan). This is like Saving Private Ryan a watershed war movie. It is fabulous to watch, the characters are realistic and well played so you care, the story telling is deft, there is no complexity her but that’s not the point. It is an uplifting story of brave men (all types of bravery) trying to do the best they can and winning on more than one level.

I will warn you that I do not go to movies to learn history, neither do I go to them to learn philosophy of life lessons, I go to be entertained. And most movie critics these days appear to be operating in a different plane and writing for each other not the folks in the real world.

The biggest problem I have had with many war movies up until recent time is technical. All the compromises that had to be made to make any large scale war movie and my inability to look past ‘minor’ issues like US M48’s used in The Battle of the Bulge to represent German Tigers/Panthers.

Red Tails shows that modern technology and good film making are beyond this, the setting is viscerally real throughout, providing a rich background canvas that the people and the action can play out in. Absolutely fabulous aircraft scenes throughout. When the only thing I could gripe about is that sometimes they made some of the ground sets look too old and worn I should just shut up…. and the mud and basic layout etc were again exquisitely done.

The men (and it really is all about men the only female character though sweetly played is only a set piece) are well played, it might have been biased for modern tastes but they came off as real, the relatively clean cut, slightly less demon ridden people of a simpler day men who were playing their part in two wars. One with bullets and one with hearts and minds.

This movie was rated very highly by the public and moderately low by the critics. The explanation I have for that is that the Critics cannot stand a movie that puts the bigotry of the time in the proper context. It was so obviously a constant drain on the men but it was the background to their lives, the constant slights many unconscious rather than direct attacks. I am very sure many critics wanted a movie that wallowed in the bigotry and hatred a bleak look at the dark hearts of men (we don’t need that, know all about it.) Instead what is here is a simply fabulous war movie about men I grew to care about that made its point about the utter stupidity of bigotry by positive rather than negative example.

Bravo Lucasfilm, George Lucas, Industrial Light & Magic, and of course the writers, director and actors.

A few chemicals and a microwave and see what you get

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

: Zapping raw materials in a microwave oven and drying the resulting solution produces a black powder (top) made of hexagonal bismuth telluride nanoplates (bottom).

Technology Review| New Process Makes Heat-Harvesting Materials Cheaply: Such materials could be used to cool computers and buildings, and harvest waste heat in cars.

High-efficiency thermoelectric materials could lead to new types of cooling systems, and new ways to scavenge waste heat for electricity. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have now developed an easy, inexpensive process to make such materials.

The materials made by the RPI team already perform as well as those on the market, and the new process, which involves zapping chemicals in a microwave oven, offers room for improvement. “We haven’t even optimized the process yet,” says Ganpati Ramanath, a materials science and engineering professor at RPI. “We’re confident that we can increase the efficiency further.”

What caught my eye here is that the material is a form of nano particulate, its produced in an evidently very simple process and it has a very high efficiency. This type of technology as the article notes could have a great number of applications. In a car one could conceive of replacing the mechanically driven alternator with something like this or supplementing it, this would essentially be using waste heat to provide electricity and would increase gas mileage. There are many other places where heat scavenging would make sense and have an impact if the materials and system were cheap enough. This goes back to a fundamental issue, energy efficiency costs money and if the cost of burning a tiny fraction more fuel over the life of the system (which can add up to biggish $) is less than the energy scavenging equipment then the equipment will not be installed unless the added cost is passed on to someone.

Algae to the rescue

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

Green tea: Joule Energy's SolarConverter turns carbon dioxide and sunlight into ethanol fuel at a pilot plant in Leander, Texas.

Technology Review| Photosynthesis Fuel Company Gets a Large Investment: Joule Unlimited will build a production plant for turning sunlight and CO2 into liquid fuels.

The company is combining many technologies to move to direct creation of biofuel precursor liquids. The algae is similar to that others are experimenting with but excrete the molecules into the water instead of retaining inside the cells. This way the harvesting ‘only’ entails fractionating the liquid from the flow. The bioreactors are essentially double panel windows with the algae filled liquid flowing inside. The water gets CO2 from a power plant which scrubs it out of the plant effluents and one guesses that in cooler climates the water could be warmed in the cooling cycle of the same power plant so the system could operate year round.

The company calculates that their system can produce a great deal more, more easily refined biofuel precursor liquids than the alternates. Which mostly involve growing various kinds of plants and then converting them to biofuels in either chemical or bio reactors.

Air power revolution in miniature

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

If you like thinking about change, in a war setting, this article on StrategeyPage has it all.

Aerovironment micro UAV

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

AeroVironment’s Hummingbird NAV shown in the palm of a hand to give it scale. The company has been able to fly the NAV (nano air vehicle) indoors and outside, including flying it through doors and down corridors into a workshop and office environment.

From the SAE aeronautics eNote. Not new news but best picture and ‘technical’ description yet.

AeroVironment has captured the imagination of a worldwide audience with news of a major extension of its activities into nano air vehicles (NAVs). Ever since human beings first discovered the basic principles of lift and the importance of wing shapes, the necessary muscle power and control movements of birds defeated all attempts to emulate the mechanical process of using wing flapping to beat gravity. The hummingbird’s amazing ability to conduct a perfectly stable hover has long fascinated students of aerodynamics, especially when slow-motion film footage displays the complexity and perfection of its ultrahigh-speed wing flapping movements.

Elgin First Draft is Done and Posted

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

The wait is over, at least for the unedited version. So when the 24th of Nov hit it was 58K words. It is now 122K and you may not believe this but it’s the shortest book and by far the shortest draft I’ve ever managed. I think it works, I hope you like Elgin and his world. It’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea, it rises through a series of peaks to a crescendo then slips into the end.

Download, enjoy, especially if you’ve downloaded, read and enjoyed the first parts.

And remember that the finished Moon Dreams and Under Siege are available.

Skynet it’s not yet, but one has to wonder…

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

: Skynet’s distant ancestor

The fact of the matter is that this, like so many other things, is coming. I used to laugh at some ‘SciFi-ish’ cartoons for their depiction of flying drone/droid/robo cops, but then I’ve never been any better at predicting the future than most other engineers, we always dive way too deep into the details far too quickly unless we have something keeping our head out of the water long enough to figure out if we are in the ocean, sea, lake, pond, swamp or whirlpool.

But there is the issue of privacy and the increasing ability of ‘the system’ to keep track of citizens 24/7/365. Save a few puppies and a kid or so and we’re all for giving up a little bit of something for increased safety. But at what cost, and have ‘we’ ever considered that we may be being manipulated?…..Anyway….

This post by Babbage at the Economist covers the ground pretty thoroughly, at least for the near term. I think the killer app here is the comment about replacing choppers which cost a couple of million up to operate along with expensive maintenance and aircrew tails. Smaller police forces will be able to have an air contingent and big forces will have a lot of these things (hopefully replacing most if not all the choppers, which are IMO a waste of taxpayer money.)

UAV’s , particularly like the one in the picture have a lot of advantages they :

can fly in a wider weather window than crewed craft.
are harder to see and hear
can land and sit/monitor for long periods
could operate 24 hours with rotating crews or units
can travel ‘as the crow flies’ instead of around buildings, fences, traffic etc

That’s in the near term, 2-3 years, what about the middle Future (4-7 years)?:

Wide area surveillance from solar powered (maybe a SolarSaurs?) high altitude platforms.
Add ‘Gorgon’s Stare’ technology, constant surveilance with roll back capability.
UAV’s the size of a bird it could follow a perp under cover.
UAV’s that can launch a smaller pursuit drone with a TAZER ?…a bit like this
What about a humingbird UAV?

And as you add those capabilities my libertarian hackles go up more and more. None of the above should be given by a free citizenry to a gov’t that is actively growing and actively misusing its powers or taking advantage of congressional stupidity.

…Maybe I’d be happier if…..I had the right to pot one of the little puckers if it was over my property without my permission? Hey it would create a new market, for home ultra short range anti aircraft systems! Maybe these guys would have a head start?

The old New VW bug, a VW through and through

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Sci Fi Engineer

I’ve owned more VW’s than any other make of vehicle and I have always enjoyed them. I bought a bright yellow new Beetle as a commuter car in 1999, a safe but fun vehicle with some class. And it remains all of those things. It has been abused one way and another and its stayed good looking, solid feeling and fun to drive.
It now looks like I am about to replace the third battery which is supposedly good though I find it odd since its the only vehicle I’ve ever had to replace a battery more than once. I’ve had the fuel gauge stick once and strand me on the road….out of gas and absolutely clueless as to why the car had stopped running. The passenger side window motor blew in the middle of a Commute around Boston in the middle of a Noreaster once, which was bloody interesting….

Which brings me to my only beef really, they are expensive to have work done on and they are almost impossible to work on yourself these days. The old New Beetle, is, was, a Rabbit (sorry a Golf) with a swoopy outline, making it hard to work on. I’ve had to replace the headlamps and that’s expensive since you have to take it in to the dealer, there is no what to get at them without removing something important. So the shape compounds the problem with upkeep cost.

But on the whole I have no regrets and I notice a lot of ‘bugs’ around these days. They maintain their ‘fun’ a lot longer than other cars and they really are good commuter cars and a fun but safe first cars for the kids (having a certain panzerlike ruggedness.)