Ideas and creative technology solutions to problems both green, envrionmental and otherwise. All my own, some more viable than others, best viewed with out great seriousness.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE

I found this link on half bakery. VIRGIN EARTH CHALLENGE it does sound quite cool. Makes you wonde what the rules are
Link: go . I was looking around thinking about harnessing the aerostat turbines in very remote locations to compress air and then condense it. If I read the diagrams right by compressing to 100 atm at about room temperature the C02 will condense out as a liquid. Assuming this can be pumped off and the expanding air used to assist the compression of the incoming air ( lets get 20% of the energy we put in back ). Then perhaps we could use the power of the wind to extract out liquid C02 that we could then pump down wells or down to the bottom of the ocean ( so looks like I want to run this on a ship or platform teathered out in the ocean).

Wickpedia has some other possibly better C02 mittigation possiblies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide )

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Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Another BBC Horizon Rant.

I was really looking forward to watching this and I was terribly disappointed. I mean it took 50 minuets to say we might find it profitable to go back to the moon by mining (some how in some way we won’t describe) for helium three. Oh and someone is selling property on the moon but we don’t know if this is legal or not or at least we don’t want to explore this any further. Oh and someone we found is spending his retirement driving around and eating and looking for gifted moon rock, but we are going to leave it at that. All the assertions where put up with out any journalistic attempt to balance them about opposing views. What about the people who say we should not go back to the moon, what about the scientists who say we should go back but using robots not people and save money and do real science?

Ok a program like this is a good excuse to do a couple of interviews and then use lots of free historic NASA shots for a cheap program but at least you could use Google and try to get some of the exciting and interesting ideas and issues. Here are a few examples to demonstrate how you manage to make an exciting idea and turn it in to a turgid boring school report. Did you read ‘Return the Moon’?

LunaCorp – want to do private exploration to look for water on mars by having a robot people form earth can learn to drive for a mile or two from earth.

Groups like space-frontier are groups of concerned citizens who are spearheading the new developments in economically viable permanent human settlements on the moon. Where are the developments coming from the private and volunteer sector not NASA or Government?

Private companies have already begun to make advances on the beginnings of private space travel would they go out to the moon ( good chance to recyle interviews and stock footage from old Horizon missed).

Some studies have shown that moon dust will be incredibly dangerous to long term occupation – what about astronauts surviving the trip only to die of silicosis of the lungs in later life?

Why exactly did you not share with use the outline of the method used to make water? Its like watching a magician who promises to revel the secret of how its done and then says ‘no showing you how the trick is done it will put you off’. If you where filming a murder mystery would you edit out the exposition in front of all the suspects with the detective saying ‘the murderer was very clever, and I don’t want to talk down to you or patronize you so I I’m not going to tell you did it or how or even why’?

One of the worst Horizons and most missed opportunities in a long time. You could have done a lot better job for a lot less money.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

email with life expectancy

back on the simple but useful front. I was wondering about a life time for email.

After spam my inbox gets full of invitations. I don't want to get rid of them until the event is over but then I generally forget to delete them leving me with a large inbox.

Perhaps email should have an 'expected lifetime' after which it would invite the web browser to automatically refile its self into a paste events folder. the past events folder could be a trash or timed trash( delete in 14 months).

So every time I quick or opened my mail a dilog would appear to say 'hay' you have 6 passed events in your email inbox do you want me to automatically refile them?(yes please/no thanks).

So to make his work you also need a box that says.
'I noticed you have a date in your email. Would you like to me to make this email a timed email so that everyone will get an automatic notice to refile after the date is advanced ? ( yes please/no thanks).

google blogger failures

I have been having a problem recently - I created a new blog with google but I cannot upgrade my old blogs ( like this one ) to log in via my google account. I have tried all kinds of solutions but I just don't get the pages that the help system tells me I must use to change things. I also tried inviting my self to join up to edit the account but that does not work eiher.

I'm currently stuck using another browser to log in to edit these ones and using my copy of safari to do the new ones.

the only current plan is to copy the contents and delete the old blog and create a new copy ( !) a lot of work to stay current with google.

Well I logged into day( 19th april 2007 ) and have been forced to upgrade to new blogger. The good news is that they sorted this problem out wonderfull.