tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62521322009-07-16T02:51:24.903-04:00Talk largely about energy and work, but also politics and other random thoughtsEngineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.comBlogger225125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-70352699218637458412009-07-09T11:01:00.001-04:002009-07-09T11:03:50.685-04:00

Coming late to this, but in case you missed it, Lou Grinzo notes that another piece of the government has reconciled itself to the inevitable—even if it is written in almost Greenspannish understatement. Go read it.

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-86292815935846323202009-07-06T11:22:00.002-04:002009-07-06T11:29:17.526-04:00

In an announcement which should have surprised no one (least of all me), a jury of international experts has declared that Steorn's "free energy" device has shown no evidence of working.  FTA:“The situation was we had engaged them in February 2007 and went through a process with them,” Mr McCarthy said. Two years have passed however and the jury clearly decided that enough was enough.It posted an

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-55926408955208300352009-06-15T14:38:00.000-04:002009-06-15T14:39:01.718-04:00

Via the UAE comes a warning from Saudi Arabia:  crude oil prices are likely to spike above last year's record high.  "If others do not begin to invest similarly in new capacity expansion projects, we could see within two to three years another price spike similar to, or worse than, what we witnessed in 2008." This is no surprise to anyone who's been following the peak oil news, and it seems very

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-40259741783362589912009-05-30T19:48:00.001-04:002009-05-30T19:50:23.715-04:00

How do I hate Yahoo's "improvements"?  Let me count the ways: Yahoo upends the way Mail operates with no rhyme or reason.  For instance, my mail folders used to open to the most recent messages, in time-stamp ascending order.  For a while, folders opened to the oldest messages instead, with no option to change this without also changing the order of presentation.  Now it's changed back. Yahoo

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-74693756142189705532009-05-14T22:58:00.001-04:002009-05-14T23:01:17.821-04:00

Roughly 100 days into the Obama administration, Steven Chu has announced that the hydrogen fuel cell will not be a practical power source for cars in the next 10-20 years and does not merit the emphasis placed on it.  Funds for vehicle development have accordingly been cut off. That didn't take long.  (Pity Europe was 3 years ahead of us, but better late than never.) Hydrogen fuel-cell

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-83799521245831951172009-04-01T01:11:00.002-04:002009-04-01T01:18:03.284-04:00

From Green Car Congress: The researchers found that Archaea, using about the same electrical input, could use the current to convert carbon dioxide and water to methane without any organic material, bacteria or hydrogen usually found in microbial electrolysis cells. “We have a microbe that is self perpetuating that can accept electrons directly, and use them to create methane.” —Bruce LoganThis

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-567911682942320252009-03-26T09:40:00.006-04:002009-03-26T10:12:38.245-04:00

The furor over the AIG executive bonuses is, as others have already noted, largely misplaced.  Why should anyone care about the disposition of less than 1/10 of 1% of the total bailout money?  The whole thing is less than a day's expenditures in Iraq; it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It does, however, suggest that there are real culprits, and the government and media are carefully directing

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-5282569358227228462009-02-19T19:36:00.004-05:002009-02-19T19:38:26.142-05:00

Posted to be linked elsewhere. Nothing to see here, move along.

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-16522083326975789022009-02-05T11:05:00.006-05:002009-03-09T14:05:22.537-04:00

In news today, President Obama implies that faith used as a tool to divide people is being mis-used and says there is no faith in the world that is based on hatred. Will he then note that Islam states in no uncertain terms (Sura 98:6) that "those who disbelieve, among the People of the Scripture and the idolaters, will abide in fire of hell. They are the worst of created beings"? This is a

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-5098720178051387032008-12-30T16:27:00.002-05:002008-12-30T16:31:43.789-05:00

Saint Gasoline has produced an entertaining little exposition on the evolution of art.  An excerpt:Then something happened in the past century that changed art. Artists sort of went apeshit. James Joyce made novels full of jibberish and vague allusions to Greek myths. Picasso painted portraits of people made out of squares and seemingly smashed into two-dimensions. And in the culmination of this

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-69911409892768046592008-12-29T22:38:00.001-05:002008-12-29T22:40:02.828-05:00

Mostly because it's Dave Barry's year in review, and it's laugh-out-loud funny (okay, that's redundant).

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-16924806237908281252008-12-23T09:28:00.002-05:002008-12-23T09:36:02.429-05:00

AC Propulsion used to have a very useful collection of white papers and other things on their site.  I cited this stuff all the time. The other day I went to cite some of their V2G work related to reactive power... and it was all gone!  The entire resources directory had disappeared; there wasn't even a pointer to a new location for the information.  This probably happened during the revamp of

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-58618210542437436642008-11-07T11:51:00.000-05:002008-11-07T11:52:08.673-05:00

This is the season of bailouts.  A great many people did foolish things with other people's money, and now Congress is putting the US taxpayer on the hook for it. The $700 billion bailout of Wall Street is the biggest of these, but far from the only one.  With Congress handing out fiat money, the auto companies have also begged for and been granted a $25 billion slice of the pie.  The only thing

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-80512425749451609772008-10-23T09:53:00.000-04:002008-10-23T10:04:32.536-04:00

Sometime in the distant past, I recall seeing ads for plans to convert an automotive A/C compressor to a steam or air motor.  These were supposedly simple enough that they could be done with a drill press. Now that I'm interested in playing with something like this, I can't find a bit of info on it.  Anyone know where it's hiding, or did I hallucinate the whole thing?

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-42193691953220468722008-10-01T00:07:00.001-04:002008-10-01T00:12:16.391-04:00

Wherein the author continues a discussion as an essay Over at The Oil Drum, a discussion subthread about gas turbines as energy converters ended with this late-arriving statement by Cyril R.: Non-combustion gas turbines are not proven. They're mostly in pilot/research stages. You say that the conditions in non-combustion lower temp operation are more reasonable than in higher temp combustion gas

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-30222442318026941782008-08-28T22:32:00.000-04:002008-08-28T22:34:14.206-04:00

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-51879602491229750362008-06-05T23:21:00.000-04:002008-06-05T23:25:28.079-04:00

We interrupt our regular schedule of energy blogging and rants for this special bulletin. Does anyone know if Möbius Stripper is on-line even the tiniest bit?  It's been two years since the last post on Tall, Dark and Mysterious, and I miss the acerbic humor and take-no-hostages approach to the follies of edu-land. We now return you to Whatever The Hell I Feel Like Posting Next.

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-28305258388572270932008-05-31T01:20:00.002-04:002008-05-31T01:31:00.422-04:00

CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage) is being promoted as a way to smooth the delivery of intermittent supplies of power from e.g. wind.  This would increase its ability to displace other supplies of electricity and reduce carbon emissions from the same. Of course, pumping lots of air around is going to have secondary effects (you cannot do just one thing).  A question I have not seen addressed

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-26349183240445138522008-05-28T23:30:00.000-04:002008-05-29T00:04:34.632-04:00

Pablo Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers."  He was right.  Correct answers to the wrong questions get you nowhere. The crisis in commodities is feeding back into the cost of energy.  The amount of raw materials (both steel and fuel) required to bring new oil fields into production is growing rapidly. Sooner or later, you'll get more energy return in less

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-88546750510387837482008-05-06T00:24:00.000-04:002008-05-06T00:27:44.611-04:00

I've been suffering with the products of a company called Sauer-Danfoss.  This company makes industrial controllers and displays, programmed with a proprietary graphical system resembling ladder logic.  Here is my litany of complaints (addressed as an open letter, because I would like the world to know what a pain this stuff is; maybe S-D will take bad press as a good incentive to improve their

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-56962862763513327082008-01-26T08:55:00.000-05:002008-01-26T08:57:11.605-05:00

Biology is under attack in the US right now — there are a great many people who are utterly ignorant of the subject who have decided that no, sir, they don't like it, they don't want to be a descendant of no monkey, and Jesus tells 'em everything they need to know. It's gotten so bad that one of our major political parties, while not making it a central issue of their campaigns, has made

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-44762933178305799712008-01-05T02:35:00.000-05:002008-01-05T02:41:30.570-05:00

I've been so consumed with a very few blogs and activities of late, and realized that there were at least a dozen that I'd been neglecting (easy to do, because they're bookmarked on a computer not currently connected to the Internet and with a screwed-up USB automounter).  I thought about making quick visits to a few, and.... realized that I couldn't remember their URLs, or even more than a

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-36083208733518170402007-12-13T22:50:00.000-05:002007-12-13T23:09:20.153-05:00

Once upon a time, the English played a game of creating collective nouns.  It is from this that we get "a gaggle of geese", "a murder of crows", and so forth. The Internet creates a need for terms to describe new things and phenomena.  I nominate "an irritation of trolls" for a 21st-century collective noun.  There are a number of them plaguing blogs such as Green Car Congress and The Energy Blog

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-1176563664827938832007-04-14T11:11:00.000-04:002007-04-14T11:14:25.090-04:00

Robert Rapier received 3 PDF files on Changing World Tech's thermal conversion process (TCP, formerly thermal depolymerization) from a correspondent.  Since they have become hard to find on the web, I have put them up at The Ergosphere's formerly-undisclosed location, ergosphere.wordpress.com.

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6252132.post-1175312526509143412007-03-31T00:34:00.000-04:002007-03-31T00:42:06.760-04:00

(Title references this, BTW.) I logged in to post comments elsewhere, and got a surprise:  the dashboard page, which I never thought I'd see again.  At least per superficial appearances, no action on my part was required to keep going past... what, exactly?  Was the blog converted?  Is this now a Google account?  I have not the foggiest idea. If I can still post, and if Google recovers some

Engineer-Poethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06420685176098522332noreply@blogger.com3