Yup! The first of many Higgs Boson’s, just like the early Greeks predicted, particles within particles within particles ad infinitude.
Energy
A Green reason for Electric Cars
I have often wondered if the use of Electric Vehicles, cars and Scooter’,s would ever become viable. And I had a revelation about how they could be more integrated into a green lifestyle. Almost everyone knows that that an electric car needs to be recharged while at the home. But what if you stop thinking of the car as a separate object from the other household equipment.
One of the biggest drawbacks from utilizing Solar electric, and wind power generators is their inconsistent output. Wind power only works in a stiff breeze and solar, only during the day. And to make matters worse, neither may happen when there is a peak requirement for the power. Power fluctuations are a bane to green power. Thus all these technologies still require power from a main grid to fill in the gaps. And while you can pump power into the grid during peak green ellipsoids, you can’t store any locally to supply yourself, or if the grid should be down.
Unless you have an electric car that is. If you stop thinking of the eAuto as a separate entity, and think of it as a portable energy storage device, the problem is partly solved. If the power storage of the eAuto were large enough it would act like a power buffer, storing power during peak green output, and supplying supplemental power back into the house during peak requirements. A power filter regulator for the green fluctuations.
Frequently when the eAuto might be needed as transportation, power requirements are at a minimum as the occupants of the house are the ones traveling. It also could be moved to a location to recharge elsewhere and return to supply power to the house, much like a bucket of water, when your pipes freeze up.
The possibilities are endless.
Gore – As cardiac stimulator to the environment
A cardiac stimulator (shock box) is not a heart rhythm but you can’t restore one without the other when it gets out of kilter. But in this nitpicky article Do-gooder Gore has it all wrong Where the author uses cherry picking statistical plucks about CO2 levels that the Media have elevated to importance;
Carbon dioxide forms only 0.04% of our atmosphere, so its molecules are widely dispersed. The space between them is almost 200 times their diameter. As altitude increases, air density decreases, which scatters them still further.
Pah!
- Talk about the manmade pollution’s that cause increase cloud coverage that traps heat into the planet.
- Talk about the bulk consumption of finite oil and gas as a reason to create carbon taxes.
- Talk about the FACTS of weather, not the politics of the weather.
- etc, etc,etc
Try and focus on the big picture, as in
THE BIG PICTURE
OK!
The real Question, from the big Picture.
A fellow Blogger at A Networked World made the connection with another blogger. And Got me thinking about The Real, Next Big Question! He states;
What are we recovering TO?
It can’t really be the same as it was before. We have to seek new things, new jobs, and a different way of life than that which was before. That world is gone! IT will NEVER return, or better yet, SHOULD NEVER be allowed to return. It’s unsustainable and WILL collapse again (for the worst) should we ever ‘Recover’ it.
What’s needed is Vision and leadership, something sorely missing in the Irish mindset, let alone the mindless Government mindset.
A Picture of a DYI Server
This is a mythical DYI home server that just might be in my house.
The distributed Internet
A posting from Bernie Goldbach Powering the Information Age reminded me about the nature of the Internet. The underlying structure of the Internet is distributed, fault tolerant networking, initially intended to continue operating after a nuclear war. In the current climate, it routes around ‘damages’ like ‘censorship’ firewalls, and corporate throttling of bandwidth.
But one of the other things it’s good at is distributed computing, two nodes in the same domain can be geographically separated by an entire planet. This seems to escape the mindset of current datacenter deployment. While it might make sense to concentrate servers into small areas, in an energy constrained world perhaps powered by distributed power sources, it doesn’t. the loss or degradation of the power source to a datacenter places it on the back foot operationally, constrained to secondary generation, it server’s, all the server’s in the datacenter become vulnerable to the same ‘outage’ which the Internet will also treat as ‘damaged’ and route around.
Given a properly functional broadband infrastructure, servers located at the endpoints of the networks will as a whole, be less likely to be dropped from the Internet as damage. The likelihood of power being eliminated from a large distributed server domain is also contained. In a potential alternative energy future where solar and wind could be the primary source, distributed ‘green’ servers fit the requirement.
Size doesn’t matter, in IT
In the previous post I mentioned that the Intel Atom 330 D945GCLF2 motherboard looks lost in the Minuet 350 case;
and even the case is not very large as seen here compaired to a Dell 3100 case
and there is still room for a half high PCI card in the case where the motherboard extends across the end of the case where there are slot openings.
The good news is that as expected, the server could be considered Green with
- 9 Watts – Power Off!
- 49 Watts – During Boot (Peak)
- 27 Watts – At idle screen
- 35 – 38 Watts nominal usage
Personal IT server Simulator
I am undertaking the task of building a personal server which more or less emulates the type of environment I use at work. In this stage I built a small system from the Intel 330 BOXD945GCLF2 motherboard. This is a dual core hyper-threaded Atom chipset that looks like a quad core server, only at 1/4 the wattage, and about 1/3 the CPU crunch power. But it’s still looks and feels snappy enough.
I’ve currently loaded OpenSolaris as Solaris is a mature OS common in the IT world which also is very well tailored to mutli-core CPU’s.
Compaq Presario CQ2009F
Have you ever looked for the perfect thing, and find that no one in Europe carry it, and no one will ship it to you. I have! I have been considering a low power, very green, server platform to use as a MySQL / Sybase / HTTP server system. My perfect system would have been this, Compaq Presario CQ2009F however nether Amazon.com Nor the HP Home Store will ship to Ireland, and neither sell it in Europe.
In this Recession, would you think that anyone would give up a market opportunity, or give up revenue?
In the end, I’ll probably end up with this thing Asus Eee Box and pay more for less computer! Rip off Ireland indeed!
UPDATE: to add insult to injury, Misco won’t ship this Shuttle X27D Mini ITX into Ireland from the UK!!!
UPDATE 2: It looks like someone at HP heard me, and have now relaeased the Compaq CQ2000M to Europe. Now all I have to do wait until someone actually carries it. 🙁
Internet to shutdown to help environment.
In this article Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches the Times On-Line quotes from an energy researcher who has no access to Google energy data to state “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.” Much like posting his article online. Perhaps he should reflect on the old adage Without Reliable Data, I’m Just another A__Ho_e with an Opinion!
Google Rebuttals: Powering a Google Search
Weathermen and the GOP
What does a TV weatherman and the Republican Party have in common?
A weatherman can incorrectly predict the weather every day and still have a job.
The GOP politicians can be wrong about everything else and are still in the running to be elected!
Oil price fantasies
Listening to RTE this morning I was struck by a fantasy spoken about Aer Lingus. It’s a fantasy repeated often with all the economic crisis issues going on, the fantasy;
…when Oil prices go back down!
Oil prices going down is a fantasy! There is no motovation, nor reason for oil prices to drop a significant amount to make a difference. Oil is a supply and demand issue, and will stay high, with MAYBE a minor drop in price in the near term. At least until the next price rise some where in the area of 150$ a barrel by next summer.
The one thing that seems to be forgotten is that oil is a finite resource that has been subsidized to remain low, like heroin, we have become addicted and completely dependent. And when we seek to ween ourselves off it to renewables, the price is reduced to make the switch too expensive.
Oil is running out, and will continue to rise, and no fantasy will dilute that reality.
Ireland in Isolation
This article highlights a danger for Ireland Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization. Ireland is an Island! Almost everyone I’ve met in Ireland never think of Ireland as an Island (the center of the universe maybe, just not an Island). We have become so complacent about the availability of foreign goods and produce, we have forgotten that without cheap oil, we will have to live within our own agricultural means. Something the Lisbon “Yes” folks don’t seem to get yet. They believe that the mobile economy will balance the trade products and that putting fishermen and farmers out of business will not harm Ireland as a whole. Cheap oil has made this possible, and is no more. No more cheap fruit, and beef, no more massive highways and individual car ownership.
John Lennon sang Imagine, just Imagine no Oil.
Looks like the Thieves Co-Conspirators are leaving town.
It looks like George’s and Dick’s Co-Conspirators are leaving town before the fall of the Bush regime as Halliburton will move HQ to Dubai.
Anyone get the feeling of rat’s deserting a sinking ship?
Does the U.S. have an extradition treaty with Dubai?
Windpower and Solar face uphill battle in energy land
In this age when oil and gas, nuclear and coal and turf are being pushed as the ‘Only realistic’ source of energy for the future. The real issue is not that solar and wind power can’t supply the current and future energy requirements. It’s that it can’t supply the energy needs in the same way as is currently provided! A centralized, controlled, and profited by, a central authority or business.
Solar and wind are distributed power sources. Shoe horning solar and wind into the monopoly energy scheme is impractical. This is an example in miniature of what wind energy represents, independence; Handheld windmills. Now I’m not claiming that we need to carry iPods with little windmills attached. What this presents is that this device is independent of the power-grid, the tit we are all used to nurse from.
It is not impossible to supply a few hundred houses from wind, wave or solar power. You just can’t do this by pumping this energy into a national grid. If each community were wired into a local wind, solar or wave system, a community could become independent from the energy monopolist.
And that is also why these resources are never developed, monopolies do not see the profit for themselves, and resist competition from any other alternative.
Centralization is control.
Time for us to seek energy independance. Think Solar wind and wave.