Friday, April 10, 2009

Where to focus our energy policy?


Printed supercapacitor could feed power-hungry gadgets       

   ( April 10th 2009 by Colin Barras)     For similar stories, visit the Nanotechnology Topic Guide

A supercapacitor – a device that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly – has been created using printing technology for the first time. The advance will pave the way for "printed" power supplies that could be useful as gadgets become thinner, lighter and even flexible.
Advances in electronics mean portable gadgets are shrinking in size but growing in their energy demands, and conventional batteries are struggling to cope.
Batteries are slow to recharge because they store energy chemically. By contrast, capacitors, which are common in electronics, are short-term stores of electrical energy that charge almost instantaneously but hold little energy.
In recent years capacitors able to store thousands of times as much energy as standard ones, called supercapacitors, have been developed. They are charged by applying a voltage to two electrodes suspended in a solution so that positive ions head to one electrode and negative ions to the other.
Now, a team led by George Grüner at the University of California, Los Angeles, has printed a supercapacitor for the first time, building on earlier theoretical work to provide quick bursts of power that today's electronics devices demand.
Team members sprayed carbon nanotubes onto a plastic film – two such films act as both the device's electrodes and charge collectors. Between the two films, the team sandwiched a gel electrolyte made by mixing a water-soluble synthetic polymer with phosphoric acid and water.
Experimental batteries

He thinks the real advance in the new work is in engineering – many researchers study the electrochemistry of potential flexible supercapacitor components, but no one has built a working flexible device before. "There's more than the electrochemistry to think about here – there are manufacturing and material selection issues to consider too," says Chen.
Both Grüner and Chen think portable devices will ultimately carry a battery and a supercapacitor to provide the high energy storage and fast energy discharges demanded by modern devices.
But Chen points out that experimental batteries show some promise towards filling both roles. They have the energy storage of normal batteries, but also possess a power density rivalling supercapacitors, meaning they can charge and release energy 100 times as fast as normal lithium ion batteries.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Live or MemoMatrix?



Living in a simulation?            
                                                                                                    
Nick Bostrom discussing his theory
that we're already living in a computer
simulation, but don't know it, on
'Countdown With Keith Olbermann"
15 August 2007:



Living in a simulation? Video will open in another window.

NYT Times piece here:
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: August 14, 2007

Findings
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?
If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.
It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Adam Sandler Rides A Scooter in "Reign Over Me"


It was inevitable that a post 9/!! widow/er, 3 hanky flick, was gonna come out, whodathunkit was gonna be an Adam Sandler vehicle?

I'm going to leave off any discussion of the film's relative merits on this site, since the focus is on technology, maybe I'll post about it elswhere, but I do want to mention that in the trailer that's making the rounds we see both Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle tooling around Manhattan's streets on the kind of scooter we champion here on Digital Components.

Yes, I know it's a gas model, but at least it's a step in the right direction.

I don't have a lot of hope that it will spark the revolution in the general public mind that this is the future of urban transport, but maybe it will break through and convince a few folk that are tired of paying $2 a ride on the NYC subway system that this is not only a viable alternative, but an economic one since it costs all of 2 cents a day to use an electric scooter in Manhattan.

At around $300 for a scooter like Adam Sandler rides in "Reign Over Me" the thing pays for itself in all of 3 months, or less.

Go see this movie, if you like, there was talk about releasing it last December for Oscar season, so the performances may be worthwhile.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The Authoritarians

The Authoritarians

Herein lie the Psychological roots of Bush supporters, fascists and psychopathic psychosis. Enjoy!

My daily Musings: What I learn from my web browsing

My daily Musings: What I learn from my web browsing
My Fave Pic here is the Buddhist Monk burning himself to death to protest the torture of Priests.
I really believe these pics affected the deep consciousness of the American People,
thus leading to the end of the Viet Nam war.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Monday, February 05, 2007

Saturday, January 27, 2007

A Cross Between Youtube and Karaoke

I think this is gonna be huge...

Friday, January 26, 2007

Domain Value

Can you recover your old silicon valley domain?

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Marshall Brain On Buying A $300 Electric Moped

The $300 electric moped is already a reality at Pep Boys in the United States, according to this Marshall Brain piece:

Friday, September 02, 2005

Buying an electric scooter



I have a friend who filled up his gas tank yesterday. Because of the supply disruptions caused by Hurricane Katrina, he paid $3.20 a gallon and it ended up costing about $60. His reaction to that was, "I'm not going to take it anymore!"

What he decided to do is interesting. He decided to go to Pep Boys and buy an Electric Scooter. Since I have a truck, I helped him out by driving him down to pick it up.

This scooter is fascinating. It is made in China, and with a rebate it is currently priced at $299. I had a moped in college, and this scooter is exactly like the moped. It has a 750 watt (about 1 HP) motor that gives it a top speed on level ground of 30 MPH. It has a four 12-volt batteries that give it a range of about 25 miles. It has everything you would expect it to have from a moped standpoint -- head light and tail light, turn signals, horn, rear view mirrors, storage under the seat, etc.

It has two things that you do not get with a moped. First, it is completely silent. It's almost spooky how quiet it is. Going 30 MPH with zero noise is a new experience. It's a lot of fun to ride it. Second, it costs basically zero to operate. Perhaps a penny per mile. With gas at $3.20 a gallon, his car is costing 16 cents a mile just for the gas.

His wife sent him to the grocery store last night for a gallon of milk. The store is two miles away. He found that taking the scooter was quicker than driving because you can park the scooter right next to the store's door, walk in, walk out and you are done.

Here's the funny thing about this scooter. By the time you add in tires, oil changes, gasoline and per-mile depreciation on the car, the average car costs about 30 cents a mile to operate. That means that if he uses this scooter for 1,000 miles, the scooter is free.

Obviously he won't be riding a scooter like this in the winter when it is 20 degrees F outside. He won't be riding it in the rain. He won't use it for any journey longer than about 15 miles round trip. But his office is only 6 miles away so he can ride the scooter to work on nice days. He can use it to go to the store and so on. Let's say it takes him a year to put 2,000 miles on the scooter. And let's say that at the end of the year he throws the scooter away, so he has zero maintenance costs. He has saved 100 gallons of gasoline and he has put $280 in his pocket compared to the cost of driving his car (2,000 miles would cost $600 in the car, while the scooter cost $299 and he spent $20 on electricity for it).

There are 235 million cars in America -- about 1 for every adult. If 235 million people bought a scooter and used it 2,000 miles per year, it would save the nation about 1.25 million barrels of oil per day. That is nearly equivalent to all the oil pumped out of the Gulf of Mexico every day. And the nation would save $280 * 235,000,000 = $65 billion.



Not quite the scooter I have in mind, but I'll take it.

Monday, January 22, 2007

RU Sirius interviews Joe Quirk

This is REALLY fun! Except they have not a clue regarding Evolutionary Enlightenment, just don't get that there is a science of consciousness.

God knows they seem to have done enough drugs. Maybe I'm missing something here.

Let's see, they FEAR a unitive consciousness, where the individual ego goes to die. Oh, ok, I get it.

Thank you.