Tag Archives: Future

A few chemicals and a microwave and see what you get

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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

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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.

Aerovironment micro UAV

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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.

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

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Police Drone...
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 Instant Mall of the Future….an interesting idea

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London’s new Containerized Mall

This  article A Walk Through London’s Boxpark, the Temporary Mall That’s Probably Coming Soon to a City Near You in the The Atlantic magazines Cities section talks about Boxpark, a containerized mall in london.  The structure are modified shipping containers with added insulation and fittings to make them into stores.  The whole thing was assembled on an empty lot in a few days and will be removed when construction starts on the building that’s going to go there permanently, in 5 years.  This is the next phase of the pop up store phenomenon, a pop up mall and there no longer needs to be an empty storefront available.  Also this would work to experiment with new store concepts, new locations, and even just to ‘freshen up’ or ‘change up’ a stale section of real estate. 

Also a dig for the Atlantic, which can be cranky liberal but is generally pretty even-handed and has some very good articles.  Their web page is pretty darn good and the Cities section has some fascinating off the beaten track articles.

Mark Twain and a thought or two about change

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Twain in ~ 1890
Twain in ~ 1890

A picture from the Wikimedia archive of photos, which cover his adult life pretty thorouhgly.  this is a fantastic source of images.

Before I had chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain

Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.
– Roughing It

Strangely enough I have only read a little of Mark Twain’s work, I like reading about him and I like his humor and his philosophy but his classic novels don’t interest me.  Not sure if it was Junior High, High School readings that did it to me or if I’m just not  up for the experience.

I find the times in which he lived fascinating, in some ways we should be ashamed of ourselves for complaining about the rate of change today.  The rate of change during the Victorian era, or the Twain era (which overlap a great deal,) was simply incredible.  The biggest difference is that the impact was probably less personal than the changes today, but they were more physical.  The Transition from horse carriage and canal to train, the telegraph, the steam ship, the spread of parliamentary gov’t and limited monarchy, the explosion of broadsheet papers and journalism, the beginnings of scientific medicine etc.

By the time Twain died the world he had been born into would be almost unrecognizable.  The world you and I were born into are recognizably precursors to our life today.  However the differences in mental attitude and knowledge etc, are many orders of magnitudes greater than the same types of changes that happened across Twain’s life.

The intellectual changes that lead to the Victorian/Twain era explosion, happened in  the decades and years leading up to the years of greatest change.  Is that what we are seeing now, the build up of an underpinning that will enable quantum leaps in the physical characteristics of our lives like those that occurred from ~1840-1900?

Just a thought …

Writing Update

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My first published novel Moon Dreams, published through Smashwords and available for Nook, iBooks, Sony Reader as well as Smashwords and other eTailers (for FREE!!!) is still available and is seems to be doing reasonably well.  It gets 5 stars by those who read it.  Its classic Sci Fi, how a new invention might be used and how it affects the world, it has it all, invention, a nutty scientist, hero, heroine, space battles, a reasonably happy ending etc.

Cover for Moon Dreams, created by Mark Harris
Cover Art

My second book, Under Siege is on sale for $1.99 on the same web sites, and is I think (I should) is well worth the price.  Its a far future Sci Fi in a rather different tradition than Moon Dreams, talking about the human condition and the tides of civilization using the tapestry of a decadent empire.  

My latest published book

Far Future Adventure, Intrigue and Battle

The third book (or the first half of it) currently available just on Smashwords and not published yet is Elgin.  The story of a modern day cowboy who finds himself in a completely different role as the avatar of an ancient guardian sent to earth to protect it from the predation of other interstellar species and to protect humanity from itself, in a world where Magic, absent since before the height of the Roman empire, is returning.

Cover

Cover

Future of Computing…Circa 2012…..

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Just eye-candy from APODnothing to do with computing

Several article/posts at PCMag.com that paint interesting picture of the near future. This one by M. Miller in Forward Thinking discusses next generation chips, tablet chips but also the direction of all chips. At the latest AMD chip conference

…strongly pushing the idea that the future of microprocessors will not be just traditional CPUs, or even the combination of CPUs and graphics processors (GPUs), but instead will consist of all sorts of “heterogeneous” processor cores working together.

In the article there were a couple of interesting tidbits….the doubling in speed with ~doubling of transistors per area faded over the last few years, one of the things driving multi core. Also today’s high end pocketable units have rough equivalency with 2001 supercomputers. Memory and peripheral speed obviously hit that raw performance as well as non optimized development environment.

Then this piece also under Future Thinking, discussing the direction of LCD and AMOELD and related technologies, there are several others not mentioned but this article is a good discussion of the near term mass production technologies.

Then there is an end of 2011 discussion by Tim Bajarin on the coming of Hybrid tablets, something like a Mac Air with a separable screen ~ tablet. I use my iPad (like right now) for a lot of light to medium duty tasks I once had to use my laptop, I sometimes use a Bluetooth keyboard (though not right now.) Can some one could come up with an ultrabook class laptop with enough additional functionality to make the added cost worth it? TB says he thinks WI 8 might be a leader, could be but iOS seems muscular enough….except maybe multi windowing…we’ll have to see.

Is Petabyte Storage and the supercomputer going to create the ultimate totalitarian state.

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FuturePundit: Government Total Recall On Past Communications.

Is Petabyte Storage and the supercomputer going to create the ultimate totalitarian state?  There is some discussion that Syria and Iran already do this….as does the US.  The NSA theoretically only trolls outside the ‘Homeland’ but how can you be sure…isn’t this a bit like th False in one, False in all assumption, Roman lawyers pulled out of their butts a couple of millennia ago.