I read an interesting conference paper proposing the concept of a Data Furnace. The idea is that instead of placing servers in large server farms that must use significant power for cooling, smaller clusters of servers can be be distributed to locations that can use the additional heat, such as homes and apartment buildings. While [...]
There is a new email circulating claiming that if we’d just drill for oil in the Bakken Formation, we could have inexpensive gas and could free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. I was asked for my take on the email, so here is my evaluation. As always with this type email, the conclusion turns [...]
Yesterday I mentioned that a car met the goal in the Vetter Fuel Challenge. This 100 mpg car is the MAX, a very small diesel car created by Jack McCornack. I was skimming his development blog and saw a good summary of the 1970s oil crises: Back in the ’70s, we experienced what I’ve been [...]
I’ve been following Craig Vetter’s motorcycle fuel economy projects for a couple years, and just noticed that he posted impressive new results. His goal is to create a vehicle that can safely and comfortably carry four bags of groceries on the highway on a windy day, and still get over 100 miles per gallon. In [...]
I saw this book on the featured shelf at the local library and it looked interesting. I only read this book quickly, so here is a nano-review: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Renewable Energy for Your Home is a very basic intro to the different categories of home energy production and conservation for people who [...]
I just found Fuelly, and I immediately thought “Why didn’t I create this website?” Fuelly looks like a nice simple (and easy to write) site that allows users to track their fuel economy. It uses this data to generate histograms of mileage for any model of car with a sufficient number of entries. Of course, [...]
Horizon Wind Energy is building a new wind farm just across the Ohio line along US 30. The windmills are Vestas V90 1.8 megawatt turbines. We drove out to look at them earlier this week, and I took some snapshots:
Since the price of gasoline in the US is increasing again, the talk making ridiculous claims about gas prices are too. For example, I recently received a chain email titled “Buy AMERICAN Gasoline”. This particular email (which I won’t help spread by posting a link) claims that we should buy “AMERICAN” gasoline or we will [...]
Here are four articles to read this weekend: ‘The Tyranny of Defense Inc.’ from The Atlantic about the insight of two of Eisenhower’s speeches. ‘Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You’ from the New York Times is about the latest edited edition of Huckleberry Finn. The original is public domain (as it should [...]
Also filed in climate, politics
Tags: Bosnia, climate, Eisenhower, energy, Huckleberry Finn, Koch, military-industrial complex, politics, public domain, Tea Party
While doing some background reading for another project, I ran across a couple interesting maps of the US natural gas pipelines: I haven’t read much about the distribution of natural gas—I’ve mostly looked at the electrical grid—so this will be worth studying after I finish several ongoing projects. The original maps: U.S. Natural Gas Pipeline [...]