How Powerful are Phineas and Ferb

I watch kids shows, too many, I fully admit it.

On the show Phineas and Ferb, there is an episode, "Escape from Phineas Tower"  (Episode 315a) where the titular characters create a machine that within less than a day is able to enclose the entire galaxy.  This opens up an interesting question, how powerful of a civilization are Phineas and Ferb according to the Kardashev scale?  (I don't know who asks these questions really, but it is a good chance to do some math)  A quick explanation of the Kardashev scale, it serves as a means of scientists to roughly gauge how advanced a civilization is according to how much energy they can manipulate.  The scale is named after a soviet astronomer by the name of Nikolai Kardashev.  According to the current scale there are 3 types, a Type 1 can manipulate the total energy of a planet roughly the size of planet Earth (10^16 to 10^17 watts), a Type 2 civilization the power output of a local star (4*10^26 watts), and finally Type 3 where the civilization can capture the power output of their entire galaxy (4*10^37 watts), basically a boat load of power.

These values get us to a starting point of how to calculate how powerful Phineas and Ferb are, we know how much energy a given civilization type produces, and we know Phineas and Ferb's creation creates a barrier that encompasses the galaxy.  What we don't know exactly how quickly the barrier encompasses the galaxy and how thick the barrier is.  Both of these values are incredibly significant to our calculations, the thicker the more total energy required, the faster the more power production.

For me the first thing I want to calculate is the overall surface area of the barrier, for sake of convenience I am assuming a completely smooth surface and that the barrier is spherical, this makes the calculations a tad easier.  Much like the edge of the atmosphere the edge of our galaxy is not an instant transition from something to nothing, the density of stars tapers off, for convenience I will say this edge is at 50,000 lightyears from the center of the galaxy.

For the kind of math I would like to do, it is necessary to convert from light years to meters.

Using the above calculations we know that 1 ly or light-year is 9.461E+15 meters, or in terms that normal people use, 9.461 trillion kilometers, that's a big value.

Now that we know how many meters are in a single light year, we can multiply by 50,000 to get the number of meters for the radius of the galaxy.



From the above calculations we find our answer spells out to four hundred seventy three quintillion meters (4.73037E+20 m).  Honestly I am having a hard time properly coming up with a reference for how big that number is.

We now know our radius, with that knowledge calculating the surface area of our sphere is a pretty easy equation from high-school geometry, seen below.




The initial estimation will assume that the barrier is a massive sheet of graphene,  The choice of graphene is relatively arbitrary, but has the advantage of being a known material with an estimated surface area for a given mass (specific area), 2630 square meters per gram.  It is a relatively easy process of dividing the area of the sphere by the specific area to get the mass of the barrier.*



After this plug and chug we find that the graphene barrier has a mass of 1.069E+39 grams, to put that in perspective the Earth, has a mass of "only" 5.972E+27 grams.

Great, we know a lot of numbers, but how do we calculate the Kardashev civilization class of Phineas and Ferb.  We use one of the most famous equations in physics e=mc^2, using this equation we can calculate how much energy it would take to create the mass of the barrier**

The final answer is getting tantalizingly close, we now know the energy required to produce the mass of the barrier is 9.61E+55 Joules, a boat load of energy.  All that is left is to estimate the wattage of the system and from there we can guesstimate what Kardeshev civilizaiton class we have going on.  Calculating wattage is generally relatively straightforward, you divide the number of joules by the number of seconds it takes to release that energy.  First I will calculate how long it would take a Type 3 civilization to build this barrier.  This simply requires we divide the energy of the barrier by the power output of a Type 3 civilization
(9.61E+55 J)/(4E+37 W)=2.4E+18 seconds
That is the equivalent of 76 billion years, that means a civilization capable of capturing all of the energy of their galaxy would take over 6 5*** times longer than the universe has been in existence, to create that barrier.
On the show this takes less than a minute, but making life easier, it will be assumed that the barrier was built in 100 seconds.
(9.61E+55 J)/(100 s) =  9.61E+53 Watts  according to the wikipedia entry on the Kardashev scale, the entire visible universe only has around 10^45 Watts of power available, this would lead us to assume that Phineas and Ferb are the avatars of godlike beings whose rule encompasses a range of universes.

*For the general case we would arbitrarily designate a thickness for the barrier and the material the barrier is comprised of.  So long as the assumed thickness of the barrier is less than 500 light years there is no real need to do a complicated volume calculation, as the second radius is less than 1% greater than the original radius.  If you are so inclined to make your calculations overly accurate or make the barrier incredibly thick, calculate the volume of the larger sphere, and subtract the volume of a 50,000 light year sphere.  With the barrier's volume calculated, divide the volume of the barrier by a selected material's density.  Now you can rejoin the math above.
**  I am making the assumption that all of the barriers mass was created through some kind of matter synthesizer, this is because the episode doesn't show the barrier requiring any mass feed-stocks, that and it makes my life easier.  If some one wants to go crazier on details, please feel free.  Also I acknowledge this calculation ignores the chemical energy of the bonds in the graphene, if memory serves that additional potential energy should be negligible to the system's overall value, please correct me if I am wrong.

*** edited 12/14/2015 I forgot that the universe is currently estimated to be 13.82 billion years old, for some reason I was thinking 12 billion years, amateur hour malarkey I know

Schematics for Displaying your Lego Creation

Properly displaying one's Lego creations is an incredibly important aspect of any true Lego fan's efforts.  To that end I have sketched out a stand system that can be made using 1/8 inch acrylic, a laser cutter or CNC machine, and a decently high resolution 3-D printer, or if you are willing to destroy some bricks you can skip the laser cutter3-D printer.

 The image below is a full render of what the base should roughly look like. 

The grid pattern you see at the base of the display stand is to allow for the user to position the supports as needed.  The grid pattern repeats every 8 mm, which is the standard spacing for the studs on Lego bricks.  

The curved pieces have two lower contacts to help keep them in place.  The top element is intended to mesh with the custom printed Lego Brick, that being said, someone could cut off that top contact point from the design and directly glue on a pre-existing brick.  For the cost conscious this would be the wiser choice, seeing as the cost of 3-D printing at Lego brick resolutions runs you something like $5/ brick.  

I would like to thank the author of robertcailiau.eu for their page on Lego Brick dimensions, the explanations on tolerancing rationals used by Lego corps was very helpful, and much faster to read than going through patents.

I will try to put up some engineering files later today.  Please note that I will not have curf corrections in the drawings as I cannot account for machining variances.

Flat packing the critical parts of a home

Providing sustainable living arrangements for a burgeoning global population is a tough proposition. Engineers around the world are asking themselves how do you bring the most benefit to the world without draining its resources?  Housing has an amazing potential to impact the overall level of sustainability of a region, the more efficient a community is at using its local resources the lower their ecological footprint.  One way to make homes more efficient is to provide home makers with an efficient starting point for construction, to that end designers could work to create construction elements to serve as that starting point.  It is my opinion that these starting points should be the kitchen and/or the bathroom.  The rational for these rooms serving as the starting point stems from the additional mechanical complexity required for rooms that have plumbing.  If someone building a home had a wall that contained all of the necessary elements for moving water, electricity and if needed natural gas, the cost of building the home should be drastically reduced.  At this point I have an under constrained design space, which can be rather overwhelming as you start to consider so many different possibilities.

Possibility 1)  A really bare bones system with connection points for water (hot and cold), electricity, and drainage.  This provides a strong starting point that you could attach either a kitchen sink or elements from a bathroom.  Possibly the cheapest of the concepts.

Possibility 2) A total of 3 wall segments folded into a single flat packed element that allows for power and water distribution between the 3 walls, this would allow for builders to have a very easy starting point, that so long as it was unfolded along specified configurations, would also be rather stable, even before the rest of the house was completed.

Possibility 3)  Go more high tech and integrate electrical storage into the wall elements, helping to smooth the home's energy demands, varying tiers could be designed for different budgets,   The intro model ships with a 200 watt solar array and embedded into the walls enough energy storage capacity for 1 kilowatt hour of electricity.  Not a large amount of energy, but it would allow for the lights to stay on during power outages.  Higher tiers could store more electricity and provide for larger electrical draws.

Possibility 3 b)  Integrate additional lighting fixtures, considering modern LEDs are expected to have life expediencies of around almost 20 years, with some clever design work you could make a home where the lights wouldn't need to be changed for generations.  (there are some trade offs that may make this a terrible idea, but hey, we're talking theoreticals now)

The rational behind designing individual wall elements with all of this integrated equipment as opposed to creating a flat pack home stems from the belief that this technology should be used to empower local communities, not mitigate the benefits of local labor and resources.  With these panels, home designers could choose to make something akin to an Earthship, a more traditional American Cape-Cod, or a home design whose name I don't know.  Ideally such designs should be open source or at the very least, like shipping containers, there should be standardized dimensions and design constraints to ensure safety.  Examples could include making sure the wiring and socket elements can accommodate the various AC standards found around the world.

Shared thought processes part.. Uhhh. I should really number said posts

Recently the website FastCompany did an article about ground based robot delivery systems.  A very similar idea to my post "Let Us Segue the Conversation to the Segway", although Dispatch Robotics, the company who are making this delivery robot, opted to use 4 wheels instead of two.  So it is very cool to seeing real businesses coming up with a similar idea. and actually following through (kind of critical that bit)

Ambulance Escorts

It happens, traffic has slowed to a crawl, cars seem so close you can reach out and touch them, and out of nowhere an ambulance starts to blare its sirens.  Drivers have no way of knowing where to move to, the road is full, they know they should pull over, but where should they pull over to.  In previous years, the ambulance drivers and general public would simply have to hope they made the right decision.  Now things can change, technologies exist that would allow emergency personal to very clearly communicate what path they need cleared.  Small and smart aircraft equipped with projectors could race ahead of emergency vehicles, informing bystanders what path they should leave clear.  This increased awareness could shave critical moments off of a journey.


This idea was inspired by conversations with Natasha Scolnik while dealing with Cambridge traffic.

OK hyperbole aside, I do like this idea, it sounds so cool and futuristic, the real question, something I don't really have a clear enough sense of is this, would augmenting emergency vehicles with expensive drones really provide enough of a benefit to lives saved to warrant the additional costs, probably in the millions of dollars, and to that I have no solid answer.

Particle Accelerator Engines

This post will be on the shorter end of the spectrum as it is more a personal unanswered question than anything else.

One of the many ways to power spacecraft and satellites is the use of ion engines.

Over the past several years physicists and engineers have been working on making particle accelerators smaller and more energy efficient.  These shoebox sized particle accelerators might serve as a means to augment the capacity of a propulsion system, individual particles, super accelerated could have a very high specific impulse.  Who knows what the ramifications would be for space exploration?

Follow Up 12/2/15:  I wanted to note, part of the challenge of a particle accelerator being used as a means of space craft propulsion is the question of power required per unit of thrust.  There are articles about a seemingly magical drive that some researchers claim can provide something along the lines of a Newton of thrust for a few kilowatts, from a youtube video, which I will need to hunt down, the presenter notes that if a ratio of a few newtons of thrust can be gained by each kilowatt of power put into the engine system, it would revolutionize our ability to explore the solar system.  Under its current design the shoe box accelerator is far from optimized to shooting out a large volume of high speed particles, so first engineers would need to investigate the viability of such a modification from a cost benefits stand point.  If a micro-accelerator can improve the fuel efficiency of space craft the impact could be tremendous, here's hoping we keep solving problems.

Turning the World Right Side Up.... IN SPACE!!!!

One of the many challenges astronauts face while aboard the International Space Station is disorientation.  Basically humans don't really do well when they see things that don't make sense, this includes people working away at a position 90 degrees offset from what they consider the "correct" orientation.  This sense of disorientation has led to crew aboard the space station to temporarily become lost.  There have been several proposals to promote a more consistent sense of direction, this could, at least partially, be handled by painting a consistent up/down color scheme, up is blue, down is brown, something similar to the horizons here on Earth. (honestly I wrote brown without thinking the rhyming was fun, but unintended).  This is a starting point, but assumes that the space craft is built as a borderline plainer structure, something that the ISS is not.  Future space stations are also unlikely to be built in a roughly 2 dimensional configuration, so let us expand this design rational into the 3rd dimension (if you could read this with a dramatic voice that would be awesome).  Future space-craft could use a design reference system that would provide an absolute sense of direction, similar to how naval vessels use the terms, port, starboard, fore, and aft (honestly you really just need more authoritative sounding terms for up and down).  Each direction would have a corresponding color and physical texture.  Seeing as port and starboard already have red and green, respectively, it might as well be worth keeping them as is.  The other colors and textures, I will leave to others to decide, personally I would suggest "up" be a lighter color, "down" to a darker one.  To aid in astronaut's sense of orientation, the inside of buildings here on Earth could also be treated with this coloring and texturing.  Major players  NASA, ESA, JAXA, SpaceX, etc... would need to agree on this design scheme, but in the end, every perspective explorer of the stars could have a shared sense of direction.

Quick note, I can't find the article I read that first talked about using color schemes for orientation, I will try to provide the link at a later time.

Post Boredom Society

Many futurists discuss the concept of post scarcity societies, a place where the means of production are so capable, a person will not encounter a sense of need for almost any physical object or amount of energy.  Hopefully that day will come sooner than later, but before that day comes, I would like to postulate we are at the beginnings of a precursor to post scarcity, the concept of post boredom.  In our day to day lives, at least in the more affluent parts of the world, we have access to an unimaginable volume of distractions, entertainments, and knowledge.  Most of us no longer have the same sense of boredom that we had 20 years ago, if you are waiting for something to happen we have the ability to distract and amuse ourselves.  While the various boredom prevention tools are imperfect, they do represent a word where information is less and less scarce.


This post was inspired by some ramblings I had with my friend Andrew, I'm honestly not sure what it means on a deeper cultural level, just a personal observation on where it feels we are.  Within another 20 years as smart phones and internet access reaches true global saturation, it will be interesting to see what this will mean to our society.

I want it on the record

So this is a reminder to myself to make a fuller post sometime before the new year (2016), but I wanted this one to be on the record, so hopefully some day in the future I can get called out for being either too cynical on the creativity of humanity, or naively optimistic.

It is my opinion, that by 2069 humanity will have  a permanent presence in orbit around Mars, ideally using the surfaces of Phobos and/or Deimos as their base of operations.  These permanent bases will be akin to research stations in Antarctica and the ISS, crewed by humans, but still dependent on the resources of a logistics center to survive.  These bases will host mining operations, limited food growth infrastructure, and so many research sensors.

I know I am one voice saying this, but world, please prove me wrong in the best way possible.  Push the frontiers of human exploration and presence.  The universe feels too empty, let us reach out to the stars and feel the warmth of a thousand suns.

Making Universal Translators Lazy in Sci-Fi

A common trope in science fiction stories is that most species have some kind of universal translator that removes at least one barrier of communication between species.  Here's my quick question, why have tv producers not embraced characters mouths not syncing up with the audio, considering each party is hearing the audio differently, would it not make sense for their mouths to not move in a predictable fashion, this would make over dubbing so easy, and you could localize the show super duper easy.

This quick rant was inspired by stories of the teleporter in Star Trek The Original Series, which was created as the production company did not have the resources to actually make landing vehicles that would appear on set locations.  While my suggestion would be a cost saving, I really doubt it would inspire any cool creations.

Modular Home Lighting

I meant to write this post awhile ago, and the ideas are a little disjoint, but I would like to get something out there.

Home lighting in developing countries is a huge economic bottleneck, too many households need to focus on solutions that are low cost in the short term, even though the long term costs are much higher, things like candles, kerosene lamps, or battery powered flashlights.  Any number of NGOs and for profits have worked to develop a range of lighting technologies that will help make the home lives of their users better.  One potentially new concept to promote these lighting technologies is designing a product that can be equally at home serving as the very first electric light-source that person has ever used or as the lighting solution of a modern home.  This can be done by rethinking the LED lighting solution, the vast majority of home LED solutions take advantage of the 100+ year old Edison screw design, this makes sense if you are utilizing older infrastructure, but we are in an era where design rules are changing and there are new connection standards that can make more sense, for example the USB 3.1 C standard.  This standard will soon be ubiquitous across almost the entire planet, and unlike the Edison screw, the voltage and amperage characteristics will be equally consistent from nation to nation.  Engineers could work to create lighting elements that distribute power via USB cables and connections types, and to avoid overloading the power distribution capabilities of the cables, bulbs could be designed to include simple communication protocols that would warn users of low power, excessive draw, etc...

11/16/15 my brain is a little disjoint right now but I wanted to get this idea down. Broad strokes, create an open standard that uses a smart connection type, it doesn't have to be USB 3.1C, but honestly it makes the most sense with that hole 100 watts of power transfer range and what not.  Lighting modules don't need to be exactly the same, but they should have some minimums, shared micro-controller standards, simple and standardized power requirements, easy thermal management, basically if lighting unit A is next to B in normal operating temps, they should stay fine, without any external cooling system, a way for bulbs to efficiently distribute power across bulbs, think femto electrical grids.

The entire rational of this design is that if a community invests in this lighting system, as money becomes more available they can improve their solution, going from small lamps to more traditional overhead lights, all while up-cycling the original components of the small lamp.

11/20/15

LED bottom

I finally made a proper initial render of what this lighting system could look like.  Both as a single light source and grouped together.  The 8 points on the bottom of the Sub lighting element are one approach to the lighting systems power and communication contacts, with a similar chip element to what is found in the thunderbolt connector type (found in devices like the iPhone) it won't matter which way the lighting element is plugged into its power supply, the lights will work)  On the top you have 7 LEDs they will provide light as well as a means of diagnoses, depending on how many LEDs are illuminated and in what pattern, users will have a means of determining where power issues are occurring, when a module is nearing the end of its life, or other information.  Aside from the full on and full off values, the bulb could potentially have over points of data that could be communicated, assuming you don't worry about rotational symmetry.

LED top.

 
As I refine this idea I can add more details, as well as better models.  The critical question is maximizing functionality while keeping per unit costs as low as possible.  Additional questions on thermal performance of the bulb configuration are worth investigating.

Multiple lighting elements grouped together/

Is your civilization cockroach-ie enough?

There are several quantitative ways to measure a civilization, how much energy it can produce, how much unique data has it recorded and can manipulate, all well and good, but how does one indicate how hard a civilization, or species for that matter is too exterminate?  What I would like to suggest is a new qualitative scale indicating how hard it is to cause a complex system to shut down.  One means of describing this scale could be what major group didn't survive an extinction level event.  Species that are in a rather precarious position could be compared to the dinosaurs, civilizations that have spread out to multiple planets in their solar system would be cockroaches, and those groups that have colonized a large swath of the galaxy would be the microbes.  This scale is currently just an outline and more useful for sci-fi authors putting things into a scale, but who knows maybe we will start designating the aliens we meet throughout the galaxy by an index similar to this.

Tattoos for the Cyberpunk Era

Big Brother is watching, so is little brother, hell everyone seems to be watching what other people are doing.  In an era where video surveillance seems all pervasive, and getting worse, inventors all over the world are trying to create ways to confuse and block security cameras from identifying the wearer.  These solutions range from make-up patterns that will confuse facial identification techniques to hats with extremely bright infrared LEDs intended to blind cameras.  Beyond make-up there is the potential to integrate near infra-red ink into tattoo designs.  For the privacy minded, users could embed designs that would change how a camera could perceive their facial features.  These patterns would use varying regions of "light" and "dark" near infrared material, to those around you the patterns would be invisible, but when they looked at your face through a digital camera, the patterns would emerge.  As an alternative to hiding one's identity near infrared tattoos could serve as a means of enforcing personal copyrights, a readily searchable means of ensuring individuals a means of tracking uses of their personal image.  More extreme examples could be QR codes linking to personal pages, databases, the possibilities are almost endless.

A Re-Imagining of Cars in the 21st century

The march towards autonomous cars filling the world's highways over the coming decades currently appears to be more the question of when not if.  As we approach a future where humans are no longer responsible for controlling their vehicle we are provided with an opportunity to reinterpret what a motorized vehicles should look like.
In the mid 1990's General Motors proposed "AUTOnomy" a hydrogen fuel cell powered concept vehicle.  The unique premise of the AUTOnomy is that instead of having the primary engine placed in the front or the back of the vehicle, energy storage and power generation capacity (in the form of hydrogen fuel cells) are placed in a platform that looks akin to a thick skateboard.  This skateboard allowing for designers to create readily changed body designs for passengers to utilize.  The real question is could automotive design go even further?  In a future where the very nature of vehicle ownership is in question why would the markets create only a single platform for passengers and storage capacity to dock?  Instead of one really cool skate board concept that is exclusively built to run on hydrogen fuel cell based power, the automotive industry could push their boundaries of design by embracing containerization.
Shipping containers revolutionized the shipping industry by providing a known target for engineering teams to handle, whether by truck, train, or tug (I am using the word tug to keep the t scheme going), companies know that they will encounter, the shipper doesn't need to worry about the mode of transport so long as it is in the container.  Passenger and luggage capacity in transportation could embrace a similar rational, creating a standardized attachment types and available volumes.  Carriages designed to carry passengers would come in several major sizes, from individual privacy pods, to sports team road trip.  Luggage space would follow similar growth curves.  With each pod sized standardized, a range of autonomous vehicles could be optimized for various parts of a journey, from small urban transports intended for rapid pick up and drop off in a stop and go heavy environment to highway transport trains (akin to the Australian Road trains) moving large numbers of passenger pods along highway routes.  This containerization would also allow for trains and boats, maybe planes, to be integrated into the autonomous transport ecosystem, passengers would punch in their destination and depending on what mode(s) of transport made the most sense for that journey would be offered.
One example would be a cross country road trip, for that I would want to take a scenic route, so my queuing system would offer me rides via various transport platforms and depending on how many back roads I wanted to take I would spend more or less, the more back roads, the more money you spend.
Shipping could also benefit, when autonomous vehicles are less utilized, at night for example, companies could move their inventories more cheaply when more vehicles were available.

10/26/2015 some follow up.  Spectrum had another interesting take on autonomous vehicles earlier this summer where researchers suggest turning autonomous cars into service stations that you use while in transit.  Containerizing vehicle design could compliment this concept rather effectively.

The Gourdinator

Hey you! Yeah you!  Do you have an excess of pumpkins, squash, and other gourds?  Then you need the gourdinator.  The gourdinator turns your pumpkan't into a pumpkan. (there is a reason I should never write dialogue for actual consumer products) Using sophisticated 3-D sensing systems and a multi-axis CNC machine, your gourds will be transformed with designs ranging from a traditional Jack-o-Lanterm to the face of alien creations out of your child's nightmares.

This idea was inspired by various companies that CNC their pumpkins during the Halloween season.

Cleaning Up After Blizzards With the Power of the Sun

During Boston's series of blizzards and snowstorms of the 2014-15 winter season, it was mind blowing seeing how challenging it was for businesses and municipal governments to deal with the shear volume of snow coming down.  The shear volume of snow mitigating approaches inspired one additional potential solution for dealing with snow fall.  

Around the world businesses are starting to add solar canopies to parking lots, providing cooling shade for cars, reduced thermal gain for the local environment (when compared to asphalt), and most importantly renewable energy that can be used at the source.  During the summer months these features are rather impressive, but what if we could add additional functionality for the winter months.  This blog has already done several pieces on adding heat pumps to photo-voltaic arrays as means of producing extra benefit from installed solar capacity, we are going to do that one more time with snow melting technology.  

Even in the dead of winter solar panels will be warmed by the sunlight striking their surface, making the solar panel warmer than the ambient environment.  This extra thermal energy has the potential to be used to melt fallen snow.  Using a network of heat pumps and piping engineers could readily produce a solar canopy system that concentrate thermal energy from location to location, working for maximum efficacy of the available energy.  Immediately after the snow has stopped falling the system would first work to start exposing the solar panels, this part would likely need at least some degree of human interference to initiate the process.  As the panels are wiped off the electrical and thermal energy are used to aid in cleaning more and more panels until the majority are exposed.  After the panels have been exposed, a human operator or autonomous control system would start designating regions where the systems thermal energy would cause the greatest benefit.  As the snow is melted it can be dumped into the local drainage infrastructure. 

While the overall labor benefits are moderate, the added functionality could be the deciding factor for facility operators making the decision as to adding solar parking lots.

AIRSHIPS I Want Them NOW

The idea of people moving from city to city floating safely in lighter than air vehicles has been around for decades, look at old concept drawings of the Empire State Building and you will see mock ups of airships docking at the top of the tower.  An awesome concept, alas, that darn Hindenburg just had to explode and destroy people's sense of safety associated with traveling by lighter than air vessels.  Now almost 80 years after the Hindeburg disaster lighter than air vehicles are starting to have a renaissance, with companies like Aeroscraft and Skylifter, are working to develop their own unique technological solutions.  While these new solutions are cool, we need something crazier, a component that would allow us to really push the boundaries of what we can design, we need a lighter than air solid.  Imagine a material so light that when you let go of it at sea level, it starts to float away, and unlike helium balloons from a birthday party, this material will never lose its buoyancy.  While there are, probably, many potential ways to create a lighter than air material, one solution could potentially involve a sheet of graphene wrapped around a volume of molecular hydrogen held at atmospheric pressure.  The graphene exterior would keep the hydrogen for years without letting any gas escape, the hydrogen would provide a counter pressure to the outside environment, ensuring that the "balloon" did not require some kind of internal mechanical support.

If lighter than air solid could be made, the applications are legion.  Initially only the military and high cost research organizations would be likely to to afford this technology.  For the military, drone reconnaissance systems that would never need to land.  After disasters other models could provide communication relay services and remote sensing, aiding in finding the missing.  As the cost for a kilogram of lighter than this lighter than air solid went down the use cases would grow. hybrid lift air ships could be developed, the traditional cigar shapes with wings would slowly disappear.  When costs became lower still, new renewable energy solutions become possible, similar to the Altaeros flying wind-turbine design, we could build floating solar and wind arrays, generating power almost continuously.  These energy platforms would serve forward operating bases, research stations, and disaster recovery.   What would be more exciting is what technology like this would mean for space exploration on planets like Venus, there are already proposals to create research stations for humans that would float in the Venusion atmosphere, with lighter than air solids, we could potentially build massive structures of permanent habitation, harvesting useful chemicals from the thick Venusion atmosphere.  Eventually the wealthy would start building floating sky yachts, not nearly as fast their private jets, but far more luxurious.  Further into the future, floating gardens, gently scrubbing out surplus carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the atmosphere.

There are probably other applications, the real question would be, how much does it cost for a given amount of lift.  The Earth's atmosphere has a density of about 1.2 kg/m^3, that means if you wanted to lift 1 kg into the air and the lighter than air material had a density of 1 kg/m^3, you would need roughly 6 cubic meters of lifting material.  The lighter the solid the less volume you would need to displace.  I am betting that the most representative unit of measure would be $/kg of lift.  Comparing this number against alternatives is a more complex life time cost calculation, that I cannot realistically approximate at this time.

I hope you enjoyed the article.  Please feel free to comment, ask questions provide feedback.

Sustainable Water Towers

Water Towers are an impressive feet of engineering, allowing municipalities and buildings to maintain relatively constant water pressure throughout the day.  Awesome concept, what I wonder is why aren't these water towers doing more, there is plenty of available surface area that the water tower provides for green energy production.  Additionally the tower's height already provides much of the altitude gain that a wind turbine would need to ensure maximum energy production.  For municipal applications I could see concerns about liability or aesthetics, but for smaller use cases a water tower working in tandem with renewable energy sources would make a huge difference.

Imagine a traditional water tower 30-45 feet tall, providing water pressure for an off-grid house.  Rain water is collected in lower tanks, and when the home's energy production exceeds use, water is pumped up to be stored for later use. 

A more complicated use solution would integrate a range of technologies, solar panels, wind-turbines, and that really cool transparent blackbody material.  The solar panels would be on the side of the tower, the rational for the solar panels being on the side of the tower are two fold, the added height reduces the potential for the panels falling into shadows, and the mass of water behind the solar panels would minimize overall thermal fluctuation.  On the backside of the tower would be a passive radiator solution, intended to avoid direct exposure to sunlight, hopefully maximizing the passive cooling ability.  On top of the tower would be the wind turbine(s), while this does add another element that requires maintenance, the increased reliability of power production for an offgrid solution should make it appealing.

10/11/2015 (I'm taking a break from finishing this article as it is 1 AM and I should try getting some sleep

Sci-Fi Spaceship Idea

This has no bearing on reality, and the idea is relatively vague, oh and it is dependent on a really crappy understanding of Schrodinger's Cat.  Sci-Fi writers feel free to use.

The Starship Gumdrop was on the run, speed had kept the crew alive for the last five days.  The Gumdrop had stumbled into an Inguat military convoy.  Reactors had been pushed to the limit and could give no more.  The captain had no choice but to activate the Cat.  No one outside a research lab had ever been able to understand how the hell the Cat did what it did, but it was amazing.  Within seconds the interior of the ship would become completely indeterminate with respect to the outside world.  Every element of the ships interior was both everywhere and somewhere.  Now, when the Inguats finally got within firing distance it would be almost impossible for critical interior systems to be targeted in the first volley.  The Cat was far from perfect, once the interior of the ship had been impacted the defense was gone, the quantum uncertainty found inside the ship would collapse and the crew would be vulnerable again.  Even if it only meant surviving one volley after shield failure, the Cat was better than nothing.



This idea was partially inspired by this Scientific American article involving the impact of gravity on macro-scopic instances of Schrodingers Cat.


A crazier version could involve multiple vessels somehow sharing the same interior at the same time, as the ships are destroyed only the remaining vessels continue to hold the shared mass until only one vessel remains.  This provides the crew safety within a larger swarm.  I hope you guys enjoyed the idea.

The Internet of Things and the Sharing Economy: How this author is a buzzwords addict

So the title is a little excessive on buzzwords I totally acknowledge that, but I am trying to be better about semi-regular posts, so it was bound to happen

As planet Earth's population continues to grow we as a global civilization must work to find ways to improve the standards of living for all while reducing the environmental impact of providing said improvements.  In theory the concept of the sharing economy has the potential to empower communities find the greatest benefit from a given object, be it an umbrella, an electric screw driver, bicycles,  etc..., currently apps and services do a reasonable job of providing access to whatever rent-able device you need, but what these services don't do is provide object owners with a clear way of knowing how much potential benefit they could get from renting out their underused vacuum cleaner.  As the internet of things slowly matures, packages with sensors and computers are getting smaller and smaller, eventually these devices will become small enough and cheap enough that almost every expensive item in a home could have the ability to tell their owner, where they are and what they are up to.  With this information over time a user could determine that they in fact do not use their vacuum every day of the week, and in fact most weeks they only use it during one particular day.  Armed with this information people can now make the decision to put their vacuum on VacuuShr and make money from their device.

Realistically people are unlikely to want to share everything, but as rapid distribution services become more effective and people have hard data to help them avoid owning things that make more sense as a rental.  By being able to accurately gauge where inventory is everyone can more effectively manage our civilizations limited resources.

One potential business model could be something to this effect, home tools as a subscription, instead of owning complex hardware, you have a local subscription service that works in tandem with either a drone delivery platform or a car delivery system.  Users request whatever they need, delivery systems rapidly bring your order to your front door, and when you are done someone comes by to pick it all up.  The extra benefit of having everything having an inbuilt IoT controller is that the user's home system can help them find that object when they need to return it.

Another perk is knowing what you should just get rid of.  Some day in the future every mid-ticket purchase and above could have an embedded IoT sensor that measures a devices use and location, if you haven't used something in a pre-specified period of time your house asks you if it should post your old treadmill on Ebay for you.

This idea was inspired by a TED talk whose title I am unsure of at this time(10/7/2015), the book Makers by Cory Doctorow, and the article I linked above about shareable umbrellas.

Hey Someone Did a Thing I Said #3

In my post "Cooling with Hot Water Heaters"  I suggested that it might be a reasonable suggestion to integrate solar hot water heaters and solar panels into a single solution for home energy production (well that and the idea of producing colder mass during the night).  It turns out that a team of researchers in the UK have actually developed a hybrid solar thermal collector and PV array for rooftops.  This is very exciting and I hope that solutions like this do produce a cost effective solution.

On a similar vein I hope that they look into the more convoluted suggestion I had in which the water heating system is used as a refrigeration aid at night.  While this only makes sense for grid connected facilities in hot climates, the ability to cost effectively produce large quantities of both hot and cold materials does wonders for a structures ability to reliably maintain a comfortable climate without straining the grid too much.

Additional Note 10/29/2015  This is an example of pumped thermal systems that could really compliment traditional PV

Bringing Crude to the Stars?

A laundry list of proposals for the mining of the moon highlight the lack of available hydrogen in lunar regolith necessary to make viable quantities of water.  General suggestions include shipping up literal tanks of hydrogen to the surface of the moon, so that the contents can be mixed with oxygen to produce water, other proposals suggest simply using the leftovers from lunar landings as a seed material.  Focusing on only hydrogen stems from the fact that lunar dirt already has a rather high percentage of oxygen fully present, if chemically combined, with minerals found on the surface.  From previous research it seems likely that refining said oxygen is a relatively solvable problem, getting the hydrogen necessary to make drinkable water a slightly harder problem.  While I applaud the suggestion of recycling the leftover fuel found on a mission, I ask, what about the tank?  Now as I am not a material science guy (I really don't know what material properties are possible with the suggestion I am about to put forth) I wonder, can we develop a material, maybe a plastic, that can be used as structural elements for a spacecraft, that at the end of the life of the vessel, the materials can be reduced down, and the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen (you know the life elements) so that we can start the process of seeding a celestial body.  Imagine after every probe is sent to another body, future explorers can know that there will be a few more kilograms of chemicals essential to life available as a resource for the continuation of their mission.

This idea has been rattling in my head for a while, the biggest inspiration for posting this morning is I started reading Neal Stevenson's Seveneves, I haven't gotten too far, but so far I am loving it.

Follow Up 10/6/15  I remembered recently that NASA and private industry have looked into using rubber like materials for space exploration since the 60s.  Starting with Goodyear and more recently Bigelow Aerospace.  Additionally Kevlar has a decent amount of both hydrogen and carbon, although something that has less oxygen in the chemical make up would be nice as the oxygen is not what is lacking in lunar soil.

Follow Up 10/10/15 I just finished Seveneves, I highly recommend it.  While not as much of a mind-f*** as Anathem, it was in intriguing concept on how humanity could push itself when faced with a nigh unimaginable series of disasters.  Also I forgot to note with saying that Kevlar could be a good material for a design emphasizing multiple use cases over the material's life span, first as hardware then as feedstock, that the ISS is actually partially made out of Kevlar.  Here's hoping we can figure out a strong recyclable material that can aid in long term exploration and colonization.

The All Autonomous Universal Urinal System (Or Robotic Bathrroms where you need them)

One of the many challenges of visiting the fair city of Boston is a lack of public toilets.  This can also be true for major festivals or outdoor sporting events, getting the toilets to the people. Proper sanitation is critical to the operation of modern society, but it is one of those background issues that plays number 2 to many other infrastructure needs that seem more immediate.  This changes as soon as you get below critical toilet in a given area, if an event or space does not have enough places to go the bathroom for a set number of people, things will get gross.  Currently traditional port-a-potties provide a means to supply a space with sufficient bathroom facilities, this is great for events where you have relatively static needs on facilities, but what if the need for restrooms is dynamic?  For that I suggest developing the "All Autonomous Universal Urination Solution"  (I'm not married to the name) an autonomous vehicle designed to bring the bathroom to where its needed and bring itself in for maintenance at the end of its work day.  Imagine a series of autonomous platforms that drive around a city, following population flows, when a shopping district is filled with busy shoppers, the toilets are there, when the evening transitions from clothes buying to getting slizzerd (sp?) the toilets move to the locations of the bars.  These autonomous robots ensure that people have a safe and sanitary space to do their business.  This combined with their ability to follow the needs of users means that we have less infrastructure needlessly built up in an area.  Even better these mobile bathrooms could be designed to dock with autonomous vehicles, now your road trip car doesn't need a bathroom and you don't have to wait for a rest stop to take care of business.  The fuel savings of not having to stop should make this idea a valid contribution to the travel scene of autonomous vehicles (no it wouldn't but I am trying to play up the design firms vibe of an over promised solution)  These autonomous bathrooms could range in size from single person portable bathrooms to fully furnished restrooms moving from site to site.

Now how would we pay for this system?  Civil authorities would be unlikely to put up the cash, for this I keep it simple.  Pay-per-poo, each person will be required to pay to access the unit.  Additionally to ensure maximum use of the toilets, there would be the 2A2U app, which would allow users to find an available toilet, check wait times, and pre-pay for the usage.  If the system finds that more people in an area are looking for toilets, the units would move to accommodate.

The TL:DR version port-a-potties designed to be moved by some kind of autonomous mover system, designed to work with smart software to ensure that they are utilized as much as possible.

Flying Algae IN SPACE!!!!!

Simple fact of life that evolved on Earth, well technically most life that evolved on Earth, and by life I mean animal life, tangents are growing, back on track.  A simple fact of animal life on Earth is that organisms like humans, whales, and nerds all need oxygen to survive.  When we are not on planet Earth, we humans will often use advanced chemistry to filter out carbon dioxide and electrolysis to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen to replace the carbon dioxide that was scrubbed out.  (Honestly the electrolysis thing is surprising to me, before I started writing this piece 10 minutes ago, I sincerely thought we had a chemical approach to at least partially directly recycle the waste gases made by the crew)  This is a problem for long term exploration, if each breath of fresh O2 crew members need to breath in needs to be shipped up, via compressed air or chemically split water, your astronauts are going to be a tad too dependent on home base.  NASA researchers and science fiction authors have put forth a myriad of solutions suggesting ways that plant life could be used to offset at least some of the crews oxygen production means.  Some of my favorites include, specially bred plants with limited musculature that contracts and expands regularly causing air to move (I will try to add a link to the title of the sci-fi novel that has that idea later, found them, book 3 of the Night's Dawn Trilogy* ), in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky the author describes a space fairing civilization that ensures that every ship no matter the size has some kind of small garden inside even if it is only a small terrarium, NASA is more pragmatically developing small hydroponic systems to grow lettuce.  My suggestion takes inspiration from all of these ideas, creating a series of small semi-autonomous robotic growth media that are intended to float around the inside of space craft, providing air filtration, visual stimuli, and in emergencies a means to mitigate air from going stale.    

This last detail I will give a little background, actually I won't, after 20 minutes of research it turns out I can't find a link to the story I thought I had read.  The story that I do have is that of Astronaut Jerry Linenger and the Mir 23 crew. During the Mir 23 mission of series of disasters including fires inside of Mir and spacecraft collisions, astronauts and cosmonauts faced a litany of challenges including losing power.  The detail that I thought I remembered, but cannot find a reference to, so this may be just unreliable memory, is that when the Mir crew lost power, they had to manually fan the air around them to avoid CO2 build up.  (if I find the reference I shall add it in, if not well uhh, the false memory served as a source of inspiration)**

Anyways back to the idea, small robotic vehicles with semi-independent power supplies, designed to fly around the inside of a space craft.  One potential version could have the vehicles embedded with special LEDs intended to serve two distinct but equally beneficial uses.  The first is illumination for the plants/algae that grow on the robot, ensuring that the plants have sufficient energy to grow and provide enough clean air. The second feature is to aid in the sleep cycles of crew members, by increasing the relative ratios of red and blue light according to the time of day, astronauts might have an easier time falling asleep.  Roughly speaking, if you increase the amount of blue light people experience in their environment, they are more prone to being awake, if you increase the amount of red light in the environment, people are more likely to feel sleepy.  As plants only really use red and blue light to photosynthesis, it is not that unreasonable to carefully change the light output of the grow lights to accommodate the crew, and the plants, hopefully should not be any worse for the wear.

I hope you enjoy the concept, anyways I should go to bed, if so inspired I shall add conceptual renders down the line, or shitty drawings (the more likely scenario)

*Seriously, I highly recommend reading the Night's Dawn Trilogy, I read the books 10 years ago and many of the ideas have stuck with me.

(12/16/2015)**so i can't find the story about MIR, but someone posted an article on Reddit from the ESA on how astronauts need to sleep next to air ventilation systems to avoid suffocate in their own carbon dioxide.

Storage of mining waste materials

Edit 9/24/15 The better title for this article should have been "Asteroids, the Buffalo of the Final Frontier" (seriously I need to stop with this amateur hour malarkey)
This post is more long term oriented in the overall intent, but it is something we as a society should try to plan for now, better to have basic guidelines now than hope that deep space mining interests will plan for the truly long term.
One of the big risks to astronauts and satellites alike is loose orbital debris whipping around the Earth, causing potential disasters (although not on the same scale as what you may have seen in the movie Gravity.
Currently we have no idea what the waste material from asteroid mining will look like, namely because we don't even have a clear idea on how will extract those resources, as a consequence I will be incredibly vague (shocking I know) as to what said debris will look like, that being said, it is unlikely that the mining process will not create some type of rubble.  Under normal circumstances, the waste material is unlikely to start wandering around the solar system and causing chaos, that being said, in the unlikely event that a mined out asteroid does have a collision with another body or there is some kind of explosion on the mining platform, the cloud of detritus has the potential to cause a laundry list of issues for future space exploration.
Instead of allowing waste materials to be loosely floating around their parent celestial body, mining interests should be required to have a future plan for what to do with their waste mass before mining is allowed to begin.  Depending on the chemical make up of the mining site as well as the type of body being harvested different options will make sense.

One option is to melt waste metallic compounds or glass precursors and use them to bind waste materials into a much larger mass of slagged material.  After the larger mass is created it could be maneuvered via solar sail, laser ablative engine, ion engine, etc.. to a central waste mass reservoir where the waste mass could be refined at a later date when those substances are worth mining separately.  Another potential option is to collaborate with mining and space exploration interests in  the creation of a refining technology that is intended to provide maximum added value for readily available mineral deposits found through out the solar system.

More likely miners would be asked to fill any mining holes with waste material after the completion of resource extraction.  Early mining systems would go for the most obvious resource deposits, harvest as much as financially viable for the extraction system, lift off with a full load of cargo and let future explorers work for more difficult depoits

Hey robots, you've seen this blog 10k times

While getting ready to write a quick and dirty, real world applications of blog ideas I noticed that "My Cognitive Surplus" has recently reached 10k views, I'm assuming most of that is a result of various web-crawlers and bots, but hey, I'm assuming at least some of those views were people, and to the humans who have read, thank you for coming and I will try to keep the ideas flowing and if I really hunker down on the ol' discenprine (this is a reference to South Park) I will try to get more consistent about posting.  

Now to what I originally intended to post about.

Many moons ago I posted about a cool material being developed at Stanford that worked as a black-body radiator.  At the time I was under the impression that the material had to be optically opaque and as such outlined a design concept in my piece "Reflected Light Nano Materials and Better Solar Panels" (on a side note I need to get way better about titles), more recent research into this cool black body material has allowed for the substance to be optically transparent.  This is incredibly exciting, in a  nerdy engineering and science kind of way, as an optically transparent black body radiator means instead of convoluted side panels used to help cool solar panels, you are able to stack the cooling material directly onto the solar array.  While this stacking is unlikely to behave perfectly, read the additional cooling substance will slightly reduce the amount of light reaching the actual solar array, the net benefit of the cooling should outweigh energy losses from reduced light reaching the panel. 

Additionally this material could be a wonderful coating for windows in hotter regions of the planet, where light can be allowed to enter into a building while the heat can be kept at bay.  The trade off would be in balancing cooling during the day time and heat loss at night.  A side effect of constantly cooling  a system is that if the heat gain is variable, you need a way to reduce the cooling ability when heat is not being added to the system.  I can see a few options immediately come to mind.

Option 1)  have an air gap between the cooling system and the rest of the building, only when heat is being actively pumped between the air-gap and the building will sufficient cooling occur.

Option 2) shutters/curtains.  relatively straight forward, using mechanical shutters to physically block the thermal energy being radiated away from the building.  Said shutters do not need to be optically visible to work, they simply need to be able to either reflect or absorb the thermal radiation being released by the cooling system

Option 3) retractable cooling system, similar to shutters, the sections of the cooling material are put away when the desired thermal equilibrium has been achieved, in non-engineerese the cooling system stops cooling when the temperature is comfortable

Making Mountains into Couches

This is very much in the category of semi-useless but a lot of fun.  

Near my home town of Cordova, there is a mountain named Queen's Chair and loosely speaking it looks like a chair.  For years I have wondered, how comfortable would this mountain be if it was transformed into an actual chair and more importantly could an industry be made around making mountains into chair designs.  I would love for a company or service provider, allow me to choose a series of topological features, mountains, islands, canyons, and asteroids, and turn them into puffy memory foam furniture for homes, education spaces, and offices.  The big challenges for making these chairs is not the basic foam, CNC foam cutting machines should be reasonable, the real challenge is making the foam deform, when sat in, such that the foam becomes something the reasonable approximation of a comfortable seat.  The next challenge is the cover, simple two dimensional sheets are not going to look right, you need the cover for the couch that contours to the shape of the structure, so a manufacturing technique that allows dynamically producing covers that fit the mountain. 

Imagine in 20 years where various rapid prototyping technologies have lowered the barrier of entry to a "reasonable" cost how cool museums and visitor centers could be.  One could imagine the visitors center at the Grand Canyon, where children and adults can play in a miniature canyon with very little risk of injury as they bump into everything.  Or an office of some eccentric with their miniature Everest that they "ascend" every morning before sitting on the peak, allowing them to relive their glorious expedition where they were carried to the peak.

Changing the Light on a Thousand Worlds (or something)

This idea has been mocking me for completion, on my desktop, for let's say at least 6 months.

Space Exploration is, hopefully, the destiny of the human race and in some distant future we will try to colonize the wider galaxy.  One of the challenges of colonizing other planets is the available sunlight.  Some of the most common stars in the galaxy are red dwarfs, so if we can figure out how to make life around a red dwarf work, you can make colonization work in a large swath of the universe. The reason red dwarfs are potentially difficult to colonize is the amount of energy they radiate.  Unlike brighter stars, including the Earth's yellow sun, red dwarfs burn slowly, releasing the energy of fusing hydrogen and helium over a span of trillions of years.  This rate of energy output means that planets orbiting a red dwarf will be unlikely to receive enough energy to power the engine of an Earth like ecology. 

One potential solution, a modified Dyson swarm. For the uninitiated a Dyson swarm is a massive collection of artificial satellites orbiting a star, capturing as much energy as possible to power the needs of the satellite.  Instead of capturing the energy and locally consuming it, this modified design would redirect the energy of the star towards the planet(s), that is being terraformed.  The means of redirecting this energy are fairly legion, and that is with our current understanding of physics.  The image below gives a really crude example of what that could look like. 

Option 1) simple mirrors:  the name says it all and is pretty straight forward, sunlight hits a specially designed mirror, light is bounced roughly in the direction of the planet. Crude but reasonable.

Option 2) solar power converters, the individual elements of the swarm have solar collectors and some class of light emitter, the satellites capture the energy of the star, the broad spectrum energy is converted into electricity, which then powers some class of laser that aims light at the planet, (said lasers could be mono-chromatic or produce a range of useful light frequencies.

Option 3) Quantum dots.  This idea is similar to Option 2 but more sci-fi.  Quantum dots are cool pieces of material science where the piece captures energy in one part of the electromagnetic spectrum and re-emits that energy at a different frequency, examples include transforming infrared rays into visible light.  (there would probably need to be some mirrors to redirect the light emitted by the quantum dots.

These 3 options are broad categories and only indicate my inferences on possible solutions, others will most likely emerge if this idea is given credence.  

Challenges to this concept are legion, first and foremost, manufacturing and distributing these proposed swarm satellites, followed by how does a civilization guarantee that the satellites they use to ensure that the whole planet doesn't fall back into an ice-age.  

Positives of implementing light directing swarm. 

Multi-planet terraforming:  there are already proposals by engineers and science fiction authors to place arrays of mirrors at the langrangian points of Venus, Earth, and Mars to modify the quantity of solar radiation reaching these bodies with the hopes of regulating climates.  With a fully established swarm of satellites, a civilization bordering on Type 2 classification would have the ability to simultaneously regulate the climates of several worlds as opposed to a new array for each planet that needed to be modified.

Interplanetary trade would be far more feasible with a swarm of light directing satellites.  Depending on the level of sophistication of the swarm a civilization could provide highways of concentrated solar radiation, powering fleets of spaceships propelled by solar sails.

The planning required to produce this kind of swarm would be incredible, realistically building something as mind boggingly massive as a proper Dyson swarm would take centuries, but the benefits to the descendants of those who planned so far into the future would be tremendous.

Another thought before I go.  The nature of this kind of swarm, as opposed to more all encompassing proposals for modifying a star system, would ideally minimally impact the orbital plane that most planets find.  For researchers looking from Earth, I believe we would see the solar radiation of the star heavily modified, appearing compressed with semi-regular modifications to outputs that correspond to planetary orbits.  (honestly I'm talking out my ass here)

Edit 9/25/15:  I really should have re-read the Dyson Sphere entry on Wikipedia, in it they describe a range of designs, and consequently this entry is more of an example of a sub-category of development, that being said I still like the idea.

Ideas that Have Started to Happen

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, a post that highlights cool ideas that I wish I could claim I had been the inspiration for (my money is on convergent thought processes)

E-Ink in the keyboard. (similar to Keeping Your Input Dynamic) In the gizmag article Microsoft shows off a keyboard that has an e-ink multi-touch input device on the top row of the attachable keyboard, allowing for more inputs, similar to what I had imagined, (I should really get better about concept renders), although I wonder why they limited themselves to only the top of the keyboard.

Wired has an article about Dutch researcher's work into developing semi-transparent solar panels as a noise absorbing material, so the application is totally different than what I suggested in my semi-transparent solar panel article, but the core technology could be re-purposed for my suggestion, here's hoping the tech is cost effective enough for the greenhouse concept.

It is really exciting to see how seemingly sci-fi ideas are becoming reality.  Here's hoping I can make more updates like this, highlighting co-incidental innovations (or better, brag about bringing my ideas into RL)

Can I fix it

Relatively Simple Concept, really difficult execution
An app that lets you suggest a project you want to do, and through tracking your tool selection, knowledge of use, and available hardware, can suggest an estimated time to complete a project and calculate potential budget

Embedding Server Farms where the Power is

When Google or Microsoft want to build a server farm they do their best to build their facilities as close to major energy sources as possible.  The logic behind building their server farms close to energy sources is relatively simple the power is cheapest closest to the source.  Both companies have stated sustainability goals, Google to have all of its power produced by renewable energy sources and Microsoft to become carbon neutral, these sustainability goals, combined with our society's ravenous desire for cloud based services mean that unique solutions for powering server farms will become necessary as time goes on.  

Currently the majority of server farms are massive facilities covering thousands of square feet, what I would like to suggest is a complimentary server farm design that is intended to work with more distributed energy sources.  Instead of massive facilities organizations could invest in smaller systems designed to be installed right next to large scale wind turbines and solar arrays.  Under normal operations the distributed servers would operate at some baseline of data processing, when surplus power is being produced the servers would do scale up how much data they would crunch. 

These servers would most likely make the most sense serving as supplemental archival storage capacity and large scale data crunching where the time the processing completion time is more flexible.  The utilization of this capacity could be implimented in a range of ways, the servers could be owned out right by either cloud service providers, the power producer, or a 3rd party owner operator.  

Hopefully these smaller server arrays would also benefit from increased surface area, said increased surface area would mean more space for hot air to escape, assuming solar gain was not excessive.

Note to self add links for reference.

Window Heating Units

As an Alaskan transplanted to the New England area, my battle with the summer heat has been a constant uphill struggle to find some kind of happy medium to keep my core temperature from becoming entirely unpleasant.  My current solution has been to have a window AC unit at home set to as close to glacial as physically possible.  Come winter I have a different problem of not wanting to spend excessive money on keeping my apartment warm.  In an ideal world my residence would have thermostats in each individual room so that my bedroom was toasty, the living room pleasant, and if I magically had any other rooms in the space they wouldn't be huge energy draws.  In a more realistic version of reality getting a rented apartment to have a highly granular zoned temperature control is unlikely, so how is a renter to reduce their apartment's heating costs.  REVERSE AIR-CONDITIONING otherwise known as "Air Source Heat Pumps" can be used to capture the thermal energy of the outdoors (yes, if it is above zero degrees Fahrenheit, possibly colder, you can harvest thermal energy from the ambient air).

Currently there are a range of these heating systems available for general consumption, but none of them, according to my ten minute web search, are designed to be seasonally added to a window sill.  The benefit of this could be huge, instead of home owners buying incredibly inefficient heating element style home heating systems, consumers could buy a smart window unit that would capture ambient outdoor energy.

 Design challenges would be great, but not insurmountable. The total cost of the unit would need to achieve a reasonably short ROI, preferably less than three years, ideally less than one.   Cost consideration is where a clever business plan is most important.  Depending on the actual material cost of this system home-owners might balk at the up-front cost and not buy in, regardless of long term saving potential, so how do you get people to invest in a long term money saver, options include but are not limited to a model similar to roof top solar companies that rent your roof space and sell you the power.  The window heat pumps would not be owned by the home owner, but by a leasing organization, where the home-owner/renter simply buys the hot air from the company (some political joke here).  Power producers that identify customers who use electrical heating in their space could provide financial incentives to offset the cost to the consumer.  The window system would need to weigh no more than that of a currently available window AC unit that consumers would use in the summer.  After cost and weight are accounted for in the design, ease of use and ideally overall attractiveness of the design should then be accounted for.

Down the line dream features, the system can change which side it is pumping heat to and from, cooling in the summer, warming in the winter.  Connectivity to smart home systems, allowing the unit to know when to crank up the heat, ideally it could work with other systems in the home in concert, allowing for finer control of home energy use.

An alternative technology that I am unsure if it deserves its own post, so I will write it down here for the moment.

Smart blinds and curtains.  Windows can allow for a large amount of thermal energy to enter or escape the home, even well insulated windows can allow the energy of visible spectrum light to come and go as it pleases.  Well designed window coverings could offset some of a home's energy use (I'm going to need to look into that particular number 7/27).  On hot days in the summer, when no one is home, the smart blinds would lower a white and or silver curtain intended to reflect away excess sunlight.  In the winter the blinds would lower a darker covering designed to convert the visible energy of the light into thermal energy that would go into the house.  A very simple version of this system would use a small solar panel to power itself (or plug if need be) and use two types of curtains, one black one reflective to cool the house.  More sophisticated versions would use either smart materials or several layers of curtain material to give finer control of the amount of light allowed in and energy converted.

links for me to embed later http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/air-source-heat-pumps
http://energy.gov/energysaver/articles/heat-pump-systems