Brute Finesse

As promised, another piece of Specutech to throw on the pile. This one relates to wireless power, specifically resonant coupling. Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the current state of wireless energy transfer.

No technology develops in a vacuum and there are always considerations such as the current infrastructure and how best to modify new tech to fit them or how to alter infrastructure to accommodate new tech such as HDTV.

I cannot conceive of a future without some degree of wireless energy transfer. It already exists in limited scope on planet earth, right now. However the demand for wireless electronic devices has reached a fever pitch and demand is unlikely to slow barring some catastrophic events. Most of the current research has dealt with information transmission through various media. Copper cables are ubiquitous, fiber optic lines are being laid with ever greater frequency and wireless signals are crisscrossing through the cells in your body as you read this.

Even short range implementations are common for electric tooth brushes, shavers and battery chargers. This is fine and with a few modifications this technology should reach the exalted status of ubiquity!

I hate batteries. They suck, the are expensive and they are a royal arse pain to replace/purchase/charge.

Any technology that could replace batteries gets a vote on this blog, my other blog and my opinion until proven otherwise.  With that in mind the ubiquity of resonant coupling technology would pose some new challenges and problems.

That is unless electricity is ever rendered free to anyone who can access it.  Now if we have devices with smaller batteries or fuel cells due to the reduced need for long periods of drain time between charges then we’ll obviously require ubiquitous access to power sources outside the house.

For that I propose the E/IP switch, a double-duty bit of specutech that can provide personal area data and power transmission to mobile devices.  It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement something like this.  Each device would have a unique ID that would tie it to a unique or shared account.  IPv6 would allow nearly everything from your toaster to your SIDR’s to your embedded credit card to have its own address.

Whilst in public, such as at a coffee shop, a mall or even a taxi (or anywhere really) a relatively small bit of tech could allow you to access local power points nodes (damn you, Microsoft) and authenticate your device to draw power and bill appropriately.

The PEP-C for this technology is obviously, Bluetooth, or something similar.  I suspect its only a matter of time before another short range (call it personal area if you wish) transmission technology supplants the tooth.  With higher bandwidth and a slightly higher range you could do wonders with the stuff.

Privacy of course becomes an issue, if you went around broadcasting your personal info, credit card and social security numbers and whatnot, it would only be a matter of time before you got sniffed and some person mooches off your identity.  So, this would require encryption of course.

Cryptography not being my strong suit I will not speculate as to what strength or algorithm would be best suited.  Another benefit of IPv6 would make spoofing harder because unique addresses should never be duplicated and any such duplication would be fairly easy to spot based on prior use, geolocation and the sound principle that objects cannot exist in multiple locations (quantum aside.)

Anyone who’s brushed into Information Theory would be quick to point out that this would give an unparalled glimpse into the personal lives of anyone and everyone who subscribed to the tech as your location would be updated and recorded whereever you set foot.

The potential benefits probably outweigh the gross violation of privacy but no doubt whatever company implements this tech would have to have strong security measures in place to prevent tampering whenever possible.

A side benefit, going back to identity theft, would allow you in the event of a misplaced or stolen device allow you to block access to remote power or at least notify authorities who could then track it with the greatest of ease.

As always the caveat remains that something better and slicker may be available but this is how I see it happening.

In the previous post I was thrilled about solar farms and landscapes dotted with windmills or geothermal harvesters but maybe I was wrong.  It seems two seperate firms are working on implementing oil-producing bacteria or algae.

Not surprisingly one startup is in California and the other is in Japan.

If this technology pans out then in fewer than 5 years we could be seeing renewable petroleum that is carbon neutral or carbon negative.  In the first integrated energy post I said we shouldn’t abandon ethanol-based biofuels because its one thing to churn out electric road vehicles but things like space shuttles and jumbo jets require chemical fuel (at this time.)  The tech just doesn’t scale.

Well I conditionally take it back.  If either the algae farms or the crude oil bugs can become viable sources of fuel then we should return corn to its intended use as food and ethanol its intended use as a tasty beverage.

The key is cellulose versus sugar.  Simply put you can’t make ethanol out of dead trees and various other bits of raw biomass.  You can make wood alcohol or methanol.  But you can’t even drink it without going blind.

Cellulose is the most common organic component on planet earth, its like the hydrogen (in terms of abundance not simplicity) of the ecological universe.  Ethanol requires sugars which are much less common.  If sugar was as common as cellulose most of the plant world would be edible to humans, and therefore microbes and the consequences would be disasterous.

However specific areas that contained microbes capable of converting cellulose into the crude oil analog could fulfill a vital role for the future of transport.  As for how the facilities themselves will manifest I am excited.  It is worth noting that the two articles approach the production of oil very differently.

The silicon valley seems to be taking a factory-based approach, building a big facility where carefully monitored tanks will churn out the appropriate product and then kill the cultures between production cycles.  The japanese oil algae are apparently going to be farmed out doors and with some presumable monitoring but nowhere near the precision detailed by the American venture.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.  I have a little theory that I doubt will ever come to fruition but consider it for entertainment purposes if nothing else.

Leafcutter ants harvest biomass in the form of leaves (shocker!) and culture a certain type of fungus which feeds them.  I wonder if ant colonies could be reprogrammed via genetic manipulation to collect only dead biomass and retrieve it and then transport it to some central location.  It seems likely that this feat could be accomplished and some other means of collecting the piles of biomass could assist in the collection of large amounts of biomass from a relatively distributed system of ant colonies.

As I type this I realize I should have polished it up a bit more.  Maybe next time I’ll have a better strategy mapped out.

I added a category, as is my wont, to cover this section. We’ll call it Electriculture. See Part I for the intro into integrated energy.

Before we begin to explore the possibilities of integrated energy as they related to transport lets think about how we get food. A short but necessary history lesson follows:

Early cultures did not farm, they hunted animals and gathered fruits, nuts, berries and all of their food. This was fine and dandy for small groups of humans living in a huge expanse of uninhabited jungle. However with no ability to produce surplus and store it for long term use the human population stagnated. It could not grow beyond a certain limit without starving itself into a population correction.

This is true for any terrestrial mammal, or any living creature in any environment. It’s the nature of life on Earth and presumably any other planet as well. Agriculture changed all that. It is the single most important foundational technology ever to grace the blue planet.

With agriculture people stopped roaming, started building permanent structures and populations soared because food was available and could be reliably produced by a fraction of the population. This in turn allowed division of labor and literally every other aspect of human culture that could follow. Tribes became nations, territory became contested and possession would ultimately become the dark specter that has haunted every generation since.

Despite that, stationary humans in large groups can produce tools, culture, writing, and most importantly knowledge that can be easily stored and passed on to subsequent generations. It was agriculture and the secondary effects that allowed humans to transcend our animal origins and gave us the ability to leave a lasting impression on this good green Earth.

Surely negative consequences came about as well. Malnutrition, famine (during bad times) war and social troubles have always plagued humanity. In larger groups these troubles multiplied. However as time passed, technology grew in fits and starts and eventually we arrived where we are today.

This was possible because our ancestors learned to produce large amounts of food energy in sufficient quantities to support ever greater numbers and an increasingly complex infrastructure.

This begs a simple, humble question: Why are we still hunting and gathering non-food energy?

Whether its coal, natural gas, petroleum products, fissile material or even just good old fashioned firewood humanity has always relied on preexisting supplies of energetic material to power our economies. This must change for humanity to take its next big step into the future.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea I am not referring to the literal farming of corn or other biological material to generate fuel. I have come to believe that given our abundance of natural sources of renewable energy that we could be putting our topsoil to much better uses than bio-diesel and ethanol production. I do not think we should abandon the research because these fuels are still very useful. Instead I think we should negate a great source of demand via personal and municipal transportation.

Simply put, we should be farming non-biological sources of energy to support and grow our infrastructure. At least until humans can run on fuel cells that aren’t biological products. Cars, trains, maybe even planes do not require liquid hydrocarbons, they are just being built that way because we have a windfall of petroleum.

Stop it. I mean that, stop wasting this stuff when we don’t need to. It’s like burning rare books to roast marshmallows.

Electriculture, as I am sure no one else will call it, gives us the means to produce locally the stuff that wars and pollution spring from like mold from neglected bread.  This will break our reliance on distant deposits of energetic hydrocarbons and the petty dictatorships that are ruthlessly profiting from them.

I know we would be doing the same given the chance, but we instead have the opportunity to snap off the stranglehold of an oil economy once and for all.  It is not a question of economy or national policy I believe it as a duty of the human race to deflate our reliance on oil, foreign or domestic, or at least greatly reduce the need for it.

In Part II you’ll see how we can take the concepts from Part I and flesh out the details on how to make a viable integrated energy solution and extend the benefits of this infrastructure to our need for personal transport. Part III will go a step further and address small devices inside and outside the home and how they can benefit and integrate further still.

The next post will postulate another bit of specutech that will become prominent in the next few years.

After some correspondance with Matt I decided to make this post regarding energy systems and the future of electricity generation. There are few basic points that this post is built on.

• Batteries suck compared to fuel cells in terms of lasting environmental damage
• Liquid hydrocarbons are useful in some areas but not for power plants or ground transport
• Clean renewable energy is only out of our reach because we lack the tech to harness it effectively. Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies whatever hypothetical stumblers may have come across this page.  I’ve been more concerned with the energy using/making sections of my body than the informational ones lately.
Rest assured good stuff is sure to follow soon.

So I watched this interesting video.

To sum up Mr. Shirky is saying that approximately 2 billion person hours are spent watching TV and just passively soaking up the entertainment as it rolls in. The thrust of the lecture is that interactive and involved entertainment is going to fundamentally change society once we get over the shock of free downloadable porn all over the place. Read the rest of this entry »

So I read this news article.

(I know its a boring intro but the content speaks for itself)

Basically some smart types have concocted a nifty hand held scanner out of basic parts. Instead of processing all the imaging data locally the raw data is transmitted offsite, crunched, and images are sent back to the phone.

And just a year ago this would have been pure Specutech. Read the rest of this entry »

So I came across an interesting post about stuff windows should have but doesn’t. It’s worth a read if for nothing else to see what you might be missing out on. Third party apps, many of them free or trial free can accomplish much of the list with minimal hassle.

This post relates to numbers 3 and 4 on the list. And you won’t need two macs running leopard to accomplish it!

There are a slew of remote access solutions available on the internet. Everything from tried and true VNC to Logmein (my favorite) PC Anywhere, Gotoassist, Bomgar and others I am sure.

You never know when you’ll need to access a program or a file from home and if you don’t have a laptop you can’t very well lug all that pc power around. Luckily the internet plus a few easy tricks will give you easy access to all your files and printers from anywhere with internet.

Oh and this is totally for free, you’ll just have to do a little click work.

Remote Access Only - For this, and I am assuming you’re a windows user, all you will need is an email address and an internet connection. First download and install Logmein Free.

Detailed instructions can be found here.

That’s it. Now you can access the home PC from anywhere. Congratulations. Repeat for the remote computer/laptop and you should be all set.

The limitation here is that Logmein free does not integrate file/printer sharing from host to remote computers. Do we care? Of course not, there are always workarounds to any problem.

Remote Access + File Transfer - Now if you want to transfer files but have no need to print then the answer is as simple as typing MSN. Virtually any chat program worth its salt should have some file-transfer capability. If you can access the remote computer you can initiate and accept the file transfer. You’ll need two screen names but that should not be hard to setup.

That is the quickest and easiest file transfer solution. If you require this AND print function than I suspect it is high time that you became acquainted with a very good friend of mine. Meet Hamachi. It will change the way you look at the internet.

To understand the awesomeness of Hamachi you have to appreciate the concept of a VPN. Think of your home network. It’s a bunch of PC’s physically connected by Cat5 cable or tied in via wireless signals. It’s a Local Area Network and there are millions of them all over the place. That’s fine for local data storage and sharing but when you extend the distance between pc’s to miles instead of feet physical connectivity becomes impossible. Hence we have switches and routers and frame relay and all sorts of goodness that the internet is built upon.

Data isn’t safe as it gets transmitted however (hence security features of all flavors) and so if you want to securely transmit data from one specific point to another specific point without snooping or interference the solution is a VPN or virtual private network.

Think of it as a tunnel through which a secure point-to-point transaction can take place. Very easy in theory, kind of a pain in real life without dedicated hardware. That is until Hamachi came along!

Now you can connect a number of computers, for free, anywhere on earth that can use windows file and printer sharing securely via the internet. What good is that you might ask? Well consider the benefits.

• Print to your home PC from anywhere
• Access documents securely from anywhere
• Listen to that song you love or store huge amounts of data from, you guessed it anywhere.

This setup, using free remote access plus free hamachi is a way to settle an aspect of the dreaded Intelligence Problem.  Basically as long as you have a mobile broadband access solution you can carry around a relatively lightweight mobile internet device or laptop and through the hamachi connection still have access to all your files and data.

After all having internet access anywhere on the planet is fine and dandy but actually storing data via web based technology is still relatively young.  Sure there are offsite backups, online document storage (thanks google) and photo/video sharing sites aplenty but some things are just too personal or too secret to share online.

…or are you just happy to see commericially available exoskeletons hitting the market before you turn 30?

I know I am.

When asked about the likelihood that any particular flavor of specutech will actually be developed I can only shrug. If you had asked someone about the future of ram circa 2003 they might say ‘ddr1 is dead and the future will belong to Rambus’

They would have been wrong. Around the same time you might have asked ‘how long until we see a 10ghz processor?’ The traditional answer would have been ‘just a few years down the road.’ Wrong and wrong!

Read the rest of this entry »