This technology seems to be moving along pretty well, and it’s one of the revolutions that will constitute a major solution to our energy problems.

This approach allowed the engineers at Standard Oil to build a multifarad device. At the time, even large capacitors had nowhere near a farad of capacitance. Today, ultracapacitors can store 5 percent as much energy as a modern lithium-ion battery. Ultracapacitors with a capacitance of up to 5000 farads measure about 5 centimeters by 5 cm by 15 cm, which is an amazingly high capacitance relative to its volume. The D-cell battery is also significantly heavier than the equivalently sized capacitor, which weighs about 60 grams.

I’ve probably told this story before about innumeracy, even of physics students, and the inability of some to think through a problem. When I was teaching an E&M lab in college, we were doing experiments with capacitors, and someone came up and said, “The lab instructions say to use a microfarad capacitor, but this one says MFARAD instead of (greek letter mu–the symbol for micro)FARAD. I assume it means megafarad. Don’t we have smaller ones?

I explained to him that the largest capacitor I’d ever seen (this was in the late seventies) was a quarter farad, and it took a truck to deliver it. Did he really think that he was holding something in his hand with four million times that capacity?

The article is also a good tutorial on capacitors in general, for those unfamiliar with how they work. The way that I like to think about this is that the positive charge accumulates on one plate, and the negative on the opposite one. They are held in place by their mutual attraction (being opposite charges), but cannot combine because of the insulation gap represented by the dielectric. The more accumulated charge, the higher the attraction (and field force) and accompanying voltage and potential energy. When the plates are allowed to connect to each other through an external circuit, the charges flow toward each other and create current (and power). The breakdown voltage is the voltage at which the gap can no longer restrain the attraction between the two groups of charge, and they jump across it to meet their destiny. This is to be avoided.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sorry, link was slightly mangled (though usable) before. Fixed now.

Buy a cell phone jammer if you want to project 30-foot cones of silenced phones. Or if you don’t want to be arrested for using a jammer, build yourself a Faraday cage: no signal and no interference.

blocked call out

And here’s a discussion of another kind of blocked call out.

I’ll also be doing light posting. I’m having dinner and a ZEROG flight with Buzz Aldrin. There still appears to be some availability. If you can get to Vegas by 6:30 tonight, you can make the dinner and the ride prep starts tomorrow at one. The price is $8,900; it’s more than the regular price of $3,500, but less than $144k for a flight with Stephen Hawking. At $3500 for 25 seconds * 12 parabolas at 0g is $700/minute. That’s about a quarter the price per minute of a week in 0g on the International Space Station.

Here they are. I’d read most of them before, but it’s nice to have them all in one place. They’re missing Vannevar Bush’s quote about ICBMs.

Intercontinental guided missiles, Bush contends, need not be feared at all

Joel Garreau has an interesting WaPo piece on Aubrey de Grey.

Well, according to this article, we’re past it. I don’t buy it, though. It says nothing about shale or tar sands, which are going to come on line in quantities that will make current prices unsustainable. Another encouraging thing is that solar may become competitive within a decade. As the Guardian article points out, we are in an energy transition period, but it’s nowhere near as apocalyptic as it makes it out to be.

Glenn is kvetching about having to buy both types of HD players:

The prices have dropped enough that I might be able to buy this high-rated HD-DVD player and this Sony Blu-Ray player and not spend much, if any, more. On the other hand, the notion of having to buy two just bugs me somehow.

My preference, actually, is to buy two things if I have the room, and I can afford them. Bundling functions in a single unit might seem convenient and cost saving, but the problem with it is that if one component fails, you still have to either replace the entire thing, or at least replace the functionality of the part that failed. The old example would be a combination microwave/range. The microwave dies, and you not only have to go replace it, but you can’t find a stock replacement for it that will fit the range, so you have a permanently dead microwave in your kitchen, and have to take up space with the new one on or under the counter. Unless you go out and replace the entire stove, even though the range and conventional oven are just fine.

A more recent, and mundane example is these television/DVD combos. If the TV dies, it’s become a boat anchor, unless there’s a way to get the DVD output from it to bypass the TV. Plus, some of them (amazingly) are HDTVs, with standard DVDs (hopefully, they at least do up conversion). So you get instant obsolescence, built in! My (two-channel, thank you) stereo system still uses a separate pre-amp and power amp.

A risk analyst (like yours truly in his day job) would say that by increasing the complexity you’re increasing the probability of failure (can anyone say Space Shuttle? Apparently it really bugged NASA to have to buy both a launch vehicle and an orbital laboratory…)

But I suspect that bundling is the wave of the future, particularly as electronics continues to become less and less expensive (as living space becomes more so).

Three-dimensional home printers:

More importantly, prices for 3-D printing machines have been falling rapidly, reaching $20,000, and the day is foreseeable when they will fall below $1,000 and become home appliances, says Phil Anderson of the School of Theoretical and Applied Science at Ramapo College in New Jersey.

The results, he warned, could be economically “disruptive.”

“If you can make what you need in your own home quickly, then manufacturers become designers, with no need for factories, warehouses or shipping,” Anderson told LiveScience.

Given the drawbacks discussed in the article, I think that this is likely to be a gradual transition, that will allow time us to adapt.

Randall Parker writes about the biggest barrier to medical advances:

If you read the full article above you’ll learn that the first experimental subjects for a Novato California company were in Argentina – not exactly close by. I suspect this says something about medical regulation in America today. The Argentines were on hemodialysis for kidney failure and had what the report below characterized as “typical risk factors for end-stage renal disease”. You might expect regulatory agencies to grant greater freedom of action to try out new treatments on people who are looking death in face. But this company used subjects from another country. I fear excessive regulatory obstacles in the way of new treatment development are costing lots of lives.

I suspect that the FDA probably kills more people by delaying the introduction of new drugs and procedures than it saves. But it’s like protectionist policies and other interferences with the market–the jobs and businesses that aren’t created are an invisible consequence compared to existing jobs that are lost, and a bureaucrat is much more concerned about being blamed for a death that results from a new drug than one that results from its delay, because the latter is just a maintenance of the status quo.

Randall also has bad news about avian flu. It may be easier for it to mutate to affect humans than we thought.

I can’t find any web confirmation of this on a quick search, but I am reliably informed that Bob Bussard died yesterday. I didn’t know that he was ill. I may have more thoughts later.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This isn’t my (direct) source, but this is the news from Jerry Pournelle.

[Tuesday morning update]

Well, there are certainly a lot of encomia in comments. I didn’t really know the man, myself. I met him once, a quarter of a century ago, at a monthly OASIS meeting in LA, where he gave a talk on his “fusion lightbulb” concept, and several of us had dinner with him afterward. Prior to that, I had only known him as the man after whom the interstellar ramjet was (appropriately, since he invented the concept) named. My brief experience matches that of commenters, though. He was an interesting, friendly man, who seemed to be attempting to accomplish great things for humanity.

And it’s sad that people don’t realize what humanitarians technologists can be. Most people think that humanitarians are only social-worker types. But whatever you think of him personally, Henry Ford revolutionized America, and gave mobility to the masses. Edison brought them light. Sam Walton (who was not a technologist, but a businessman), for all of the unfair demonization of his store chain, has helped the poor more than any social program, by making relatively high-quality (by the standards of a century ago) goods much more affordable to them.

More humanitarian technologists should be recognized as Norman Borlaug was. Perhaps, if polywell fusion pans out (and I have no opinion on the probability of that), Dr. Bussard will be as well, but it will be a shame that if so, it will be posthumously.