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Back of the envelope: is solar power feasible?

solar_panelsDr Buzzo has some interesting back of the envelope calculations concerning localised solar power generation. This kind of localised, renewable energy generation, is something that Greenpeace are pretty hot on:

Day by day the sun supplies 15,000 times the amount of the daily energy-demand of the total global population. In less than 30 minutes the sun sends more energy to our planet than is consumed in a whole year.

This certainly looks promising. Dr Buzzo looks at it from the other direction, by taking available data on the amount of solar energy available, the efficiency of solar panels etc, and looking at how much energy could be generated in his native Connecticut:

Reasonably speaking I

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Pay attention, J K Rowling – fan-created content can work in your favour

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J K Rowling might be interested to see that suing people who make derivative works based on your own creations isn’t necessarily the best option. YA author Stephanie Myers Meyer took the opposite approach by encouraging her fans to produce a Lexicon of her Twilight Vampire books, and as a result has engendered a hard core of people who evangelise the books on her behalf. [via TechDirt]

Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing there is, so they say – and getting someone else to do the hard work for you seems like a smart move in a networked world. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the importance of fan-fic in building an author’s career is set to increase over time, and it is in author attitudes to fan-created works that we’ll start seeing the split between writers who have embraced the internet and those who cling to the old paradigms of print.

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Reinventing the Top 40 music chart

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Red vinyl record on a turntableOne of the biggest cultural gaps between me as a teenager in the nineties and my parents was our understanding of how music worked as a diverse cultural landscape. To them, the Top 40 charts told you what was best, what was universally popular. To me, the same chart was a pretty good guide to what a certain demographic thought was best – a deluded demographic that certainly didn’t include me. Ah, the arrogance of youth… [image by Jono Rotten]

And this was long before ripping and burning, iTunes, Napster and MySpace, of course. So little wonder, then, that you can count the number of people who find the old-fashioned chart run-downs relevant on the fingers of one hand. Stepping into the void are IBM and the BBC, with a plan to make music stats more detailed, accurate and interesting to individuals with different tastes. Take it away, TechDirt:

Rather than assuming there’s just one single chart to rule them all, the system lets you create custom lists for a better understanding of more niche-targeted music. So, say, if you wanted to know who’s hot on YouTube and Last.fm in the indie and punk worlds among US listeners between the ages of 20 and 30, you can create just that list. Or, as per Will’s suggestion, you could find out what female Emo fans between the age of 15 and 20 are talking about on Bebo — and get that list.

Technologically this is just another web2.0 data mash-up, but I think it’s interesting from a cultural point of view because it derails the still-common complaint that the world is developing into a homogeneous monoculture, and demonstrates that narrowcast media like the internet encourages diversity rather than suppressing it.

Of course, you could argue that the tribal nature of music fandom is symptomatic of a Balkanisation of culture, in much the same way as genre fiction fandom… in which case we should probably go to a gig together and have a very drunken argument about it. 😉

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Conducting bacteria that feed off garbage to produce power

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Is rubbish going to become too valuable to be piled up like this?Whilst some of first generation biofuels like corn and soy based ethanol are proving to be more trouble than their worth, scientists are working hard on second and third generation alternatives that should add to our energy mix without damaging our food supply. One new development is microbial fuel cells (MFCs) – bacteria that breaks down garbage and conducts electricity. Scientists think by digesting our waste these cells could replace up to 25% of the fuels we currently use.

In a microbial fuel cell, the bacteria acts on the anode of the circuit, breaking down waste with oxidation. As a byproduct they produce electrons. Normally a bacteria would transfer these electrons to a nearby oxygen molecule but if the fuel cell has no oxygen in it, the microbe must move these electrons elsewhere and an MFC uses this to drive an electrical current.

Researchers are beginning to make headway in creating self-contained microbial fuel cells. Biofilms are bacteria that create matrices of material to attach themselves to the anode. This mix of sugars, proteins and cells is thought to contain tiny conducting nanowires that help move the electrons into the electrical circuit, making the whole clump of bacteria act like a big living anode. If this works, people aren’t going to be leaving their litter on the streets any longer. It’ll be too valuable!

[via Daily Galaxy, picture by Alan Stanton]

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