The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
October 14th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Japan: Robo-Bulldozers Guided by Drones
October 14th, 2015Via: The Verge:
Komatsu is the world’s second largest construction company, a venerable Japanese brand with 94 years of history that sells forklifts and bulldozers to customers around the globe. But in its home country, Komatsu has been struggling with an aging population, a trend that has left few young workers available to operate its machines.
As Japan ramps up new construction in preparation for hosting the 2020 Olympics, experts believe it will face a serious obstacle. “The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years,” Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, told Bloomberg.
To get around this problem, Komatsu has begun creating a new service it calls Smart Construction. A team of robotic vehicles scoops rock and pushes dirt without a human behind the wheel. They are guided in their work by a fleet of drones, which map the area in three dimensions and update the data in real time to track how the massive volumes of soil and cement are moving around the site.
The drones are built by an American startup, Skycatch, and today it revealed that Komatsu is one of the principal investors in a new $25 million round of funding that the company plans on using for global expansion and R&D. The partnership will power an entirely new line of business for Komatsu: Instead of selling construction equipment to its customers, it can lease them out for a job, and use a staff of remote operators and autonomous vehicles to complete the work. One or two lightly trained humans are still required on site to take control if something goes wrong.
Naval Academy Reinstates Celestial Navigation: “After All, You Can’t Hack a Sextant”
October 14th, 2015Via: Capital Gazette:
Officials reinstated brief lessons in celestial navigation this year, nearly two decades after the full class was determined outdated and cut from the curriculum.
That decision, in the late 1990s, made national news and caused a stir among the old guard of navigators.
Maritime nostalgia, however, isn’t behind the return.
Rather, it’s the escalating threat of cyber attacks that has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars.
After all, you can’t hack a sextant.
If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy
October 13th, 2015Via: The Atlantic:
…we, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
Paxil: Researchers Said a Popular Antidepressant Was Safe for Teens — It Was Actually Deadly
October 13th, 2015Via: Vox:
For years, the drug company GlaxoSmithKline was illegally persuading doctors to prescribe paroxetine, sold under the brand name Paxil, as an antidepressant for children and teenagers. They did so by citing what’s known as Study 329 — research that was funded by the drug company and published in 2001, claiming to show that Paxil is “well tolerated and effective” for kids.
That marketing effort worked. In 2002 alone, doctors wrote two million Paxil prescriptions for children and adolescents.
But now here’s the horrifying news: A major new analysis of the raw data behind Study 329, published in BMJ, suggests that the original conclusions were wildly wrong. Not only is Paxil ineffective, working no better than placebo, but it can actually cause serious side effects, including self-injury and suicide.
In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly
October 11th, 2015Oh boy, I hope someone reading this makes sure the writers for Silicon Valley include this scenario in season 3. haha
Via: New York Times:
Of all the states, California has set the most ambitious targets for cutting emissions in coming decades, and an important pillar of its plan to reach those goals is encouraging the spread of electric vehicles.
But the push to make the state greener is creating an unintended side effect: It is making some people meaner.
The bad moods stem from the challenges drivers face finding recharging spots for their battery-powered cars. Unlike gas stations, charging stations are not yet in great supply, and that has led to sharp-elbowed competition. Electric-vehicle owners are unplugging one another’s cars, trading insults, and creating black markets and side deals to trade spots in corporate parking lots. The too-few-outlets problem is a familiar one in crowded cafes and airports, where people want to charge their phones or laptops. But the need can be more acute with cars — will their owners have enough juice to make it home? — and manners often go out the window.
…
Most people charge at home (using an electrical outlet) but also want to use public chargers, in part because the cars have a limited range — typically 80 miles. On top of this “range anxiety,” as it is called, drivers like the idea of getting a free or low-cost charge at a public station.
“Imagine going to a gas station that says, ‘Here’s free gas.’ Who wouldn’t want to muscle in and say, ‘I’ll take some free gas’?” said Ollie Danner, the founder of EVPerks, a California company that works with local and national businesses to offer coupons and other incentives to electric vehicle drivers.
…
Ms. Hull, an executive at Evernote, a software company where electric vehicles outnumber chargers 60 to 12, the scramble for chargers leads to curious behavior. The company does have a sign-up sheet for reserving charging time. But it is not uncommon for people to leave their cars too long, or for members of the public to take the spots or even, Ms. Hull said, for people to work outside deals.
“There’s an entire black market for trading spots,” she said. For example, employees will give their spots to friends or managers as favors, Ms. Hull said.
At some other Silicon Valley companies where workers own a lot of electric vehicles, employees will get a note from someone in their department when someone is about to unplug and open up a spot. The legal department might band together, for instance, or the communications department, creating little sharing fiefs.
Ask the Cryptogonners: Run Freezer Off Van and 12v Inverter? [Confirmed: Yes.]
October 11th, 2015Update: Success!
I bought a NOMAD MOBILE 1500w pure sine wave inverter from waveinverter.co.nz (I have no affiliate relationship with them, I’m just a customer).
For testing, I unplugged the freezer (Westinghouse WCM5000WC) for a couple of hours and let it warm up a bit. Then I connected the inverter to our van’s battery terminals using jumper cables, plugged in the freezer (with 10 metres extension cord), started up the van and switched on the inverter.
It all worked perfectly.
The freezer ran for about 25 minutes, getting the temp down to normal, then it switched off and just reverted to its normal duty cycle. I have it set so that it ranges between -15.8C and -17.8C.
Running this freezer is a walk in the park for this inverter, which stayed cool to the touch after an hour. The fans were turning at very low RPM.
I was thinking that I’d sell this inverter in a couple of years, once we get our batteries for our solar system, but seeing the quality of this thing, I’m having other ideas…
I might build some sort of off grid shack (known as a “sleepout” in NZ) for our sons on our land and this inverter, plus a couple of cheap deep cycle batteries, solar panels and a charge controller could give them plenty of AC for lights, computers and a small fridge, chest-freezer-as-fridge or even a small fridge/freezer. Wi-Fi the network over to them… Easy! (I used gear from Ubiquiti Networks on a recent job and it’s fantastic.)
My guess is that parents don’t usually know what their young children will wind up doing later in life. If our boys find themselves in mainstream circles, suits and ties, etc. they’ll be able to tell hilarious stories about how they had an off grid sleepout in the wopwops and their freak parents.
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Update: Inefficiency of Using the Van + Inverter Method
Lots of people are pointing out that the van + inverter method is inefficient. Yep. I get it.
Here’s an email I wrote to one person that covers this topic:
Hello,
I bought a 1500 watt (3000 watt peak) pure sine wave inverter.
I get that the van is an inefficient way of going for this, but considering:
* that six days is the longest outage anyone alive around here can remember
* that most of the outages we experience, (over 90%) of them, are less than 12 hours
* that I just don’t want a piece of crap Chinese generator breaking and or leaking petrol and oil
* that I can easily re-sell that inverter once I no longer need it because lots of people around here are living in off grid shacks and house buses, etc.
* and keeping the freezer cold would only require idling the van for a couple of hours per day, max.
The inverter seems like the way to go.
Cheers,
Kevin
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Update: Lots of Responses
Thanks to everyone who responded. I have a lot of emails to go through!
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Yesterday, we were given a chest freezer!
In the past, we used to keep the meat from our homekills in a chest freezer at my mother and father in laws’ house. That freezer is now in our garage, so we will be keeping the meat over here.
Regular readers will know that we routinely experience power outages here in the Far North of New Zealand. (There was another one yesterday. Update: “The Far North district has the worst number of outages in the country.”)
The substation that serves my inlaws’ place has diesel backup, so they have much shorter outages over there because Top Energy just spins up the generators. We never worried about keeping the meat over there. Out where we are, though, we’re usually the first to lose power and the last to get it restored. The record length of a blackout at our place is six days.
Ok, it’s not an option to lose thousands of dollars worth of meat due to a blackout. The obvious way to make sure that doesn’t happen is with the use of a generator. (Or, in the event of an EMP attack/zombie apocalypse, 200 litre barrels and lots of salt. *grin*) Honda makes the best small generators, but they cost the most.
There are lots of cheap Chinese made lucky dragon generators out there that cost about 1/4 of what a Honda costs. There is also a middle-ground option that uses a Honda engine and lucky dragon everything else, but costs half as much as a Honda. That one has a system warranty of two years and coil warranty of five years. All the rest have one year, the minimum required in NZ.
The generators I’ve been looking at are in the 2kw to 2.6kw range.
I used a Kill-A-Watt type device and learned that my freezer needs 1450 watts to start the compressor. It uses about 100 watts while running. (If you don’t understand why the startup load is so high, see locked rotor current.)
I really don’t want to buy one of those bottom of the barrel generators.
Within about three years, we’ll buy a battery system for our house that will have backup functionality. So really, what I want is a bit of insurance against an extended blackout until we get our solar system batteries.
As bad as power reliability is here, most blackouts don’t last longer than 12 hours and wouldn’t have much impact on a chest freezer. Past a day, especially in summer, we’ll need a backup plan.
So:
How about a 12 volt inverter connected directly to the battery terminals of our van? (Don’t try this with the cigarette lighter plug.) There are lots of 1000 watt (2000 watt peak) units out there for under $100. They even come with the car battery clamps attached. They’re all lucky dragon, but at those prices, maybe buy a few. I mean, if they’re all tested and working ok beforehand, it would be really bad luck to smoke three of them on the big day (when only one needs to work).
I’d love to hear from someone who has actually tried this: Car/Inverter/Freezer. What I’m interested in is stories of success or failure by people who knew their fridge or freezer startup power requirement, used an appropriately sized inverter and kept the length of extension cord to a minimum.
My guess is that the fly in the ointment for this cunning plan could come down to whether or not the inverter is actually capable of peaking to 1450 watts for the fraction of a second it takes to get that compressor motor spinning.
Turkey: Blasts At Peace Rally
October 10th, 2015Update: At Least 95 Killed in Explosions in Turkey’s Capital Ankara
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Via: NPR:
Eighty-six people were killed and another 186 were injured when two bombs exploded during a peace rally in central Ankara, Turkey, the country’s Interior Minister, Selami Altinok, said during a press conference on Saturday.
One video from the scene showed demonstrators dancing and chanting when a blast goes off behind them. Pictures from the aftermath show scores of bodies strewn on city streets — many of them covered with the banners used in the protest.
Who Is Responsible for a Driverless Car Accident?
October 9th, 2015Via: BBC:
Volvo says it will accept full liability for accidents involving its driverless cars, making it “one of the first” car companies to do so.
It joins Mercedes and also tech firm Google, who have made similar claims.
Volvo says it is trying to expedite regulation in the US, where “a patchwork” of rules is holding back the industry.
Uncertainty over liability for a driverless car crash is seen as one of the biggest barriers to adoption.
Wind Now Competes with Fossil Fuels, Solar Almost Does
October 9th, 2015Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in NZ. I’m long Enphase Energy (ENPH).
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Via: Fortune:
When it comes to electricity, it’s all about the cost. A new report shows how clean energy electricity is becoming mainstream.
Electricity generated by large wind farms is now cheap enough in many places around the world to compete effectively with electricity generated by coal and natural gas.
At the same time, solar panel farms aren’t quite low cost enough to be as competitive with fossil fuels as wind energy is. Still, the cost of electricity generated by solar panels has also come down significantly this year.
These are the findings of a new report from Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance research unit, which looks at the costs of electricity from various sources of energy around the world for the second half of 2015. The report focuses on the overall cost of electricity—from generation, to upfront investment, to the cost of financing—called the “levelised cost electricity,” or LCOE.
The new statistics are important because they show how, thanks to dropping technology costs and lower financing costs, clean energy is becoming mainstream. Wind farms and solar panel farms are no longer niche technologies.
As more countries and states enact market systems that put a price on carbon emissions, clean energy technologies will actually become cheaper than fossil fuel technologies. In fact, they already are in places like the U.K. and Germany, which have aggressive carbon policies.
These technology and market shifts will lead to one of the largest transformations ever for the world’s energy infrastructure.
