We haven’t been using the Roomba
I put it back on the charger, and it charged quickly. Too quickly, I fear. I think that the batteries have seen their last.
I was looking on line to see how much replacements are, and found a site that describes how to replace the Roomba batteries with standard sub-C NiMH batteries, with much more capacity than the factory original (four hours on a charge). I may give it a try.
We can capture a powerful greenhouse gas and store energy at the same time. Just imagine pastures full of this.
It has squirrel undies beat hands down. Errr…so to speak.
Clark Lindsey has some space-related thoughts in response to T. Boone Pickens’ solar energy proposal:
…one major hurdle, among several, with the plan would be the need to build more long distance electric power transmission lines to reach the more populated and more industrialized areas. This will be difficult since people all along the routes will fight having the lines and towers in their backyards.
Occasionally in discussions of Space Based Solar Power, the topic of microwave relay satellites comes up as a way to move power around. For example, in this paper, Reinventing the Solar Power Satellite (2004) Geoffrey Landis talks about using relay sats for distributing power to different parts of the globe from a single Solarsat. So it should be similarly possible for relay satellites to move power from the Midwest to where it’s needed.
Yes, this is one of the “tiers” that Peter Glaser proposed in the development of powersats when he first came up with the idea forty (geez, has it really been that long?) years ago. He envisioned that before energy was produced in space, it might be relayed from energy-rich areas that didn’t have local demand (such as a large dam in Venezuela or Brazil). He envisioned such relays as passive microwave reflectors, which are currently a major structural challenge in terms of keeping the surface the right shape within a fraction of a wavelength. But at least at GEO, they wouldn’t have to move much.
Rather than giant relay sats in GEO, it might be preferable to place a constellation of relatively small ones in LEO since this would allow the beams to be much more narrow. Perhaps the switching techniques developed for Iridium/Globalstar could be built upon. Smaller beams might also lessen NIMBY resistance to transmitter/receiving sites.
Perhaps, but now you have high slew rates on the reflectors, which makes for even more of a challenge. An active phased array system can be steered electronically as it switches from rectenna to rectenna as it orbits. A reflector has to rapidly move the entire structure while maintaining its shape. The higher the orbit the better in this regard, because it won’t have to slew as fast. Also, it would make LEO pretty crowded. A medium orbit (a couple kilocklicks) would probably be better, both because it would require slower motion, and would allow more ground rectennas to be seen at a time, while not cluttering up LEO. The slewing problem could be ameliorated by going to an active system, but that means that the satellite must now not only receive and convert the power, but reconvert and rebeam it to the ground, with all the attendant efficiency issues.
Anyway, I suspect that, regardless of size, NIMBY resistance to rectennas will dwarf that of resistance to transmission lines and towers, given that it’s a devil they don’t know.
There will be a test tonight. A guide to fireworks effects.
…with wind mills:
…the only feasible backup for the planned 25-gig wind base will be good old gas turbines. These would have to be built even if pumped storage existed, to deal with long-duration calms; and the expense of a triplefold wind, gas and pumped storage solution would be ridiculous. At present, gas turbine installations provide much of the grid’s ability to deal with demand changes through the day.
The trouble is, according to Oswald, that human demand variance is predictable and smooth compared to wind output variance. Coping with the sudden ups and downs of wind is going to mean a lot more gas turbines – ones which will be thrashed especially hard as wind output surges up and down, and which will be fired up for less of the time.
The fiends.
Some thoughts, over at Fight Aging.
…through hookworms:
“Many of the people who were given a placebo have requested worms, and many of the people with worms have elected to keep them,” Dr. Pritchard said.
I hope they can figure out how it works, and (literally) eliminate the middle man…errrrr…worm.
It’s been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we’re still not taking the threat seriously.
It’s been a hundred years since Tonguska, but we’re still not taking the threat seriously.
…through metabolites:
Douglas Kell, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain, has already created a computer model based on metabolite profiles in blood plasma that can single out pregnant women who are developing pre-eclampsia, or dangerously high blood pressure. Research published last year by Rima Kaddurah-Daouk, a psychiatrist at the Duke University Medical Centre in America, may not only provide a test for schizophrenia, but also help with its treatment. She found a pattern of metabolites present only in the blood of people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The patterns change according to the antipsychotic drugs patients take and this may throw light on why some respond well to certain drugs, but others suffer severe side-effects.
This seems very promising, and near term. This part is a little misleading, though:
Studying genes alone does not provide such detail. Genes are similar to the plans for a house; they show what it looks like, but not what people are getting up to inside.
This implies that the genome is a blueprint–that the body is built by following a plan. But that’s a bad analogy. A much better one is a recipe. First do this, then do that. If it were a blueprint, identical twins would be truly identical, and indistinguishable. But because it’s a recipe, there are subtle differences (e.g., fingerprints) because the genome doesn’t specify the body design to that high a level of detail, and much can depend on womb environment (one reason to think that this could be a strong factor in the creation of homosexuals, in addition to genetic predisposition).