Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 53
August 1, 2013
Time isn’t spare…
In 2008, as I recovered from my heart defect, I had very little time to spare on anything that wasn’t income-producing. As a result, unless someone was paying me to appear somewhere, I pretty much cut out all such free appearances. Unintentionally, as a result, I came to sympathize with this author right here:
“Over the past five years, every writer I know has been told by their agent to ‘monetise the activity around their writing’. Give talks. Go to conventions. Judge prizes. Write reviews. W...
July 31, 2013
Solar will be a leapfrog technology
Peru planning on using solar to get the 34% of it’s population not connected to the grid access to electricity. Similar to the rural electrical project the US had, in it’s vision, I think.
This is one of the reasons I think developing world countries will leapfrog. Without massive investments in existing electrification infrastructure, solar makes more sense. Distributed, without a huge buildup. Cellphones had the same situation.
“When completed, ‘The National Photovoltaic Household Electrifica...
Europe bringing massive battery online to help regulate energy
Interesting. Energy storage is the big question mark for a green grid, seeing big attempts to solve for X here is a good thing:
“Europe’s largest battery is to undergo testing in the UK, where it will be used to store and regulate energy generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar power, The Guardian reports. The lithium manganese battery, developed by S&C Electric Europe, Samsung SDI and Younicos, will be capable of storing up to 10 MWh of energy.”
July 30, 2013
Henry Ford on wages
He’d not fit in to today’s captains of industry:
“Ford argued that high wages were essential for economic and moral reasons.As he wrote in his autobiography:
What good is industry if it be so unskillfully managed as not to return a living to everyone concerned? No question is more important than that of wages — most of the people of the country live on wages. The scale of their living — the rate of their wages — determines the prosperity of the country.
Ford set a powerful precedent in 1914 when...
July 29, 2013
New short story of mine will be in a George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois anthology, OLD VENUS
George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois have edited an anthology called Old Venus, full of stories about the Venus of old pulp SF (dinosaurs and swamps, oh my!). My story Pale Blue Memories was accepted a while back, Martin has just announced the full table of contents on his LiveJournal, and it looks like a great line up:
INTRODUCTION, by Gardner Dozois
FROGHEADS, by Allen M. Steele
THE DROWNED CELESTRIAL, by Lavie Tidhar
PLANET OF FEAR, by Paul McAuley
GREEVES AND THE EVENING STAR, by Matthew Hugh...
XKCD goes Kerbal
I just started playing with Kerbal Space Program this weekend, and am utterly delighted by it. It plays on the same sense of wonder that I get looking at space stuff, but with funny explosions, crazy rockets, physics, and funny Kerbals.
So I was totally psyched to get today’s XKCD totally without having to google up why it was funny:
Kerbal Space Program is an inexpensive sandbox simulator that lets you take a group of Kerbals and try to help them build a space program. It’s the sort of Minecra...
July 28, 2013
Burning weeds
While at my brother in laws I saw him use a portable, op-powered flame thrower that he used to kill weeds. I was quite taken with this idea.
Our back patio had gotten overgrown since last summer, when I used copious amounts of roundup and sweat equity to weed it, and it rapidly beat me back.
So this year I used a flamethrower.
Here is day one:
It took about 15-20 minutes to walk around and pass the flame over all the weeds.
Two days after day one, the weeds were mostly dying off. I let them sit fo...
July 26, 2013
World’s tallest skyscraper start is stalled
I’ve been fascinated by Broad Group manufacturing. But their epic new project is stalled for now.
No megastructure to be built in 10 months just yet.
“Ground was broken for the world’s tallest skyscraper in an empty field in China’s Hunan Province last weekend. It was a festive and audacious occasion: the Broad Group, developer of the Sky City project, promised to build 202 floors stretched over 838 meters (2,749 feet) in a mere 10 months, using pre-fabricated modular, stackable pods that requi...
July 25, 2013
Boeing’s new capsule inches closer
Neat. Though I didn’t realize NASA was only going to award a contract to the winner of the race (looks like it’s between SpaceX and Boeing). I thought they would award more business to the winner, but use both if both turned out to be awesome? Guess I was wrong.
Hopefully it’ll work out that both will continue competing.
“The CST-100 is scheduled to take off in 2016 for a test flight that could help Boeing win a coveted NASA contract to deliver crew to the ISS. Boeing is one of three companies,...
Arctic methane belch is expensive… more expensive than going green
Look, the cost of mucking about and waiting is going to be too expensive. Already billions are being spent to clean up after increasing natural disasters. Opponents of alternative energy claim it’s too expensive.
What’s too expensive is this:
“A sudden methane burp in the Arctic could set the world back a colossal $60 trillion.
Billions of tonnes of the greenhouse gas methane are trapped just below the surface of the East Siberian Arctic shelf. Melting means the area is poised to deliver a giant...
