Smart Energy

There's a secret moonbase near you.

Via Slashdot:

“Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. ‘The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,’ Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea.”

The U.S. has long had a secret base on the moon manned by astronaut-spies with telepathic powers. Telepathy is used to communicate with Earth-based controllers in order to avoid detection by foreign powers monitoring radio frequencies.

Jay Shafer doesn’t like to vacuum… so he lives in a Tiny House. Here’s a short tour (it’s a small house, so the tour is quick).

I especially like the very end when the videographer giggles a girlish giigle and says, “Show me your ass.” But that’s just me. What do you like about the Tiny House?

Got a hankering to watch more videos about tiny houses? Check out the Tumbleweed channel on YouTube.

A new bike wheel from the folks at MIT turns a regular bike into a hydrib e-bike. Called the Copenhagen Wheel, it was unveiled at COP15 on Dec. 15.

Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.

Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.

How freekin cool is that? Want me one!

For the first time, a study on humans proves what we’ve known for years: corn-derived fructose is bad for you.

“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study. “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose [natural sugar].”

A spokesperson for the processed food industry of course denies that HFCS is dangerous: “It makes no sense to highlight one single ingredient as a cause of obesity.”

More details in the Times of London online…

When the Clash sang “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” I did a little jig. I’ve never had much use for the mop-tops. As time passed, and the only two good Beatles became dead Beatles, I figured the rest of the planet would give up on them, too.

I mean, we still have the Rolling Stones, and how many self-cloning sixties copy-cats do we need?

And then there was Paul McCartney’s pro-war, post-9/11 song, “Freedom.” (“I don’t know what came over me,” he later said. I do: he’s always been a jerk.)

Now, the biggest-selling album of the decade is by…. gods dammit! The Beatles. Could we have some integrated pest management, please? I mean, before things get ugly?

Skills for educating wind-turbine technicians have been agreed upon by a consortium of Washington state technical schools and community colleges. The job category is important because the wind-power industry has been identified as one of the fastest growing sectors of the renewable energy industry in the U.S. The Skill Standards for Wind Turbine Technicians report is available online.

In a WSU Energy Extension news release, Terry Meade, plant manager at Energy Northwest’s Nine Mile Canyon Wind Farm, said, “The skill sets defined in the report are an important first step to help the education sector provide the specific training needs of this industry, where good fundamental skills, technical knowledge and a safe work environment are extremely important.”

Alan Hardcastle, a senior researcher at the WSU Extension Energy Program, directed the development of the standards over the past year and, with research colleagues, wrote the final report. “Industry and labor were actively engaged in this project from the beginning, and that says a great deal about the importance they attach to having a skilled workforce, including the key roles that our postsecondary education and workforce development partners need to play to support continued growth in renewable energy,” he said.

The original press release, mostly puffery, is here.

Self-cleaning solar panels: they're nanolicious.

Sure, the sun is the ultimate source of energy on our little marble, but corralling it is another matter. Solar panels are a great idea but they have a little-discussed flaw: when they get dirty, they don’t produce as efficiently.

And when panel materials are already only fractionally efficient (compared to plants, the most efficient of which only convert about two percent of the energy they receive), a coating of dust is a big deal.

All of the this applies to windows, too, of course: if you’re going for solar gain (like we are right now, with single-digital temps), a dirty window cuts down on precious free heat.

So, OK, wash dirty windows and dusty panels, right?

But then you’re into water use, spending a resource when the whole idea is to reduce overall footprint and consumption.

Scientists at Tel Aviv University may have a solution in the form of a material that, if used as a coating on windows and solar panels, could repel dust. Here’s what Gizmag has to say on the matter:

Using a variety of peptides – short polymers formed from the linking of amino acids – the researchers from Tel Aviv University found a novel way to control the atoms and molecules of peptides so that they “grow” to resemble small forests of grass. The short peptides, which are simple and inexpensive to produce, were used to create self-assembling nano-tubules in a vacuum under high temperatures.

In the range of one-billionth of a meter in size, these nano-tubules can withstand extreme heat and are resistant to water, making them an ideal candidate for the creation of a coating that could be used to cover the sealed outer windows of skyscrapers so that they never need be washed by daredevil window-washers again.

Such a coating could also improve the operation of solar panels, which can become up to 30% less efficient due to dust accumulating on their surface. This would also save money on maintenance and cleaning, which is especially a problem in dusty deserts, where many solar farms are installed.

The material is also a super-capacitor, so it may have a use in the batteries of electric cars, too.

Lowave, an independent film label that promotes experimental film and video art, collaborates with Collectif Jeune Cinéma to produce Cinema Different. Cinema Different is a more or less annual film festival held in Paris, and Different Cinema Volume 3 includes selections from the 10th festival.

The purpose of Different Cinema Volume 3 is to showcase young (in age, yes, but more in the sense of exposure) filmmakers who are rethinking the nature of cinematic images. There’s some artsy stuff going on here, and some of it may show up next month or year on MTV or, more likely, in a cell phone or car commercial. The fate (or good fortune) of the avant garde is to be able to sell out to Hollywood and the ad agencies.

continue reading my review of Cinema Different: Different Cinema Vol. 3

review by Brian Charles Clark

Peter Weibel is a fascinating artist whose career extends from the late 1960s to the present. He is not, however, the cultural saboteur (much less terrorist) art critics make him out to be.

Osvaldo Romberg, who curated the show of Weibel’s early works upon which this DVD is based, claims that Weibel’s work reflects “the strategies of the Tupamaros, a Latin American group active in Uruguay in the 1960s. This group operated not through fear [as terrorists, by literal definition of the word, would] but by exposing secret bank accounts, money laundering schemes, and other economic transgressions. In this way, the Uruguayan public was made aware of the corruption that pervaded their country.”

Artists have, on rare occasion, made the public aware of the need for change (Upton Sinclair comes to mind in this regard), but Weibel is certainly not among them. But far be it from art critics to let reality restrain their hubris or deter them from making grander-than-thou claims for Art. Christa Steinle, in her essay “A Heretic of the Art System,” claims that Weibel forced art lovers to trample on the law when he wrote the words “trampling on the law” on a gallery floor in Krems in 1968. If there’s danger of trampling here, it’s as we roll on the floor laughing at the hubris of this ludicrous assertion.

Alas, the problem with the presentation of art, at least for the past hundred or so years, is that curators and critics get to do the presenting. The art-curious should take it as a given that, after opening their copy of Peter Weibel, Rewriter, the booklet should be thrown straight into the recycling bin.

continue reading my review of Peter Weibel, Rewriter: Early (conceptual) photographs, (expanded) films, (body) videos and (contextual) works, 1964-1975 – DVD review – documentary / film directors.

I’m amazed by people who have the ability to build a musical instrument of any sort. I’m gob smacked by instruments hybridized from existing ones or invented from whole cloth. I just stumbled upon a site that shares this amazement; it’s called Odd Music. But it’s not really the music that’s odd (though some if, frankly, is to me unlistenable) — it’s the instruments. There’s lots of MP3 samples of these different invented instruments.

Here’s my favorite (so far; I haven’t finished clicking everything clickable on this site) — the Penciliana, invented and played by Bradford Reed. (The guy needs someone to help him name his instrument, though, then again, maybe not; I don’t think he’s trying to sell this thing; he appears to have enough trouble and fun trying to wrangle it.

But I also want a Hapi Drum, a tuned percussion instrument that looks really easy to play and also like it would travel well (read: tough as hell). I also want a bamboo Maui Xaphoon (a Pocket Sax would also be nice) — these tenor-sax-reed using whistles sound amazing and are so affordable! Even though I’ve played B-flat clarinet and sax for decades, I’d get a C Xaphoon, as it’d drop right into a jam with guitar and keys players without having to transpose.

Maybe the most amazing thing on Odd Music, though, is the intrepid violin player, Jon Rose. Besides having some serious chops (check out his site), this Aussie’s been traveling around Australia for years playing the Great Fences. If you don’t know what Australia’s Great Fences are, you really need to see Rabbit-Proof Fence — the title says what the fences are (or were, they don’t work as intended and only corralled people, not rabbits) and the film has great music by Peter Gabriel. Here’s a very short example of fence playing by the amazing bow-master, Jon Rose.