Legend of the Corsair

Just found this interesting and thought I would share.

from the October 18, 2005 edition

The latest investor in green energy - the CIA
Within hours, solar and wind energy units can be up and running in war or disaster zones.

By John Dillin | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor



ARLINGTON, VA. – What if you had a power unit that generated substantial electrical energy with no fuel? What if it were so rugged that you could parachute it out of an airplane? What if it were so easy to set up that two people could have it running in just a few hours?

Now there is such a device - built by a small Virginia start-up - and the federal government has taken notice.

SkyBuilt Power Inc. has begun building electricity-generating units fueled mostly by solar and wind energy. The units, which use a battery backup system when the sun is down and the wind is calm, are designed to run for years with little maintenance.

Depending upon its configuration, SkyBuilt's Mobile Power Station (MPS) can generate up to 150 kilowatts of electricity, says David Muchow, the firm's president and CEO. That's enough to power an emergency operations center, an Army field kitchen, or a small medical facility.

Privately owned SkyBuilt now has a new investor - In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm set up by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Skybuilt and In-Q-Tel will announce Tuesday that they have signed a strategic development agreement, including an investment in SkyBuilt.

In-Q-Tel's support is a breakthrough for the small firm. (The "Q" in In-Q-Tel is a whimsical play on the movie character "Q" who supplies James Bond with nifty gadgets.) SkyBuilt provides innovative energy solutions with the potential to help meet a wide variety of critical government and commercial power needs, says Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel president and CEO.

The power stations could have important uses for disaster relief, homeland security, military operations, intelligence work, and a variety of commercial applications. The units are not yet designed for use by homeowners.

Though it is not mentioned, SkyBuilt units would have obvious applications in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where soldiers risk their lives over long supply lines to truck in fuel for generators.

After hurricane Katrina, SkyBuilt units could have been rushed to the scene and set up in hours, restoring power to hospitals, evacuee centers, police and fire departments, and cellphone towers.

One big drawback of solar energy until now has been that it was a "custom industry," says Scott Sklar, vice president of SkyBuilt. Components are usually put together on-site, and differ from location to location. "When you buy a car, do they ship in all the pieces to your front yard and have somebody assemble it? I'm afraid not. We [at SkyBuilt] learned something from Henry Ford," he adds.

SkyBuilt follows the Ford model. Its MPS units are what Sklar calls "plop and drop, plug and play."

It works this way: Parts for each Skybuilt unit are packed into standard-size shipping containers. The containers, specially modified and strengthened, can be moved by ship, truck, train, or even dropped by a laser-guided parachute to the most remote location.

Once on-site, the container is opened, and arms and poles are attached to the outside to hold solar cells and wind turbines. A prototype built here in Arlington has been running steadily for more than a year without repairs or maintenance.

While SkyBuilt has 140 patent claims on its energy system, most of its individual component parts are widely available. Mr. Muchow explains that its MPS can use photovoltaic cells, small wind turbines, computers, batteries, and other parts from essentially any manufacturer.

This open architecture allows its MPS units to be upgraded whenever a battery or other manufacturer comes out with a better product. It also reduces costs.

This was attractive to In-Q-Tel. The government could develop its own advanced technology (as "Q" might do). But it is far less costly to support technology like SkyBuilt's that also finds a larger market in the private sector, says Troy Pearsall, vice president of technology at In-Q-Tel.

In-Q-Tel, meanwhile, has signed agreements similar to this one with more than 80 companies since it was set up in 1999. Its mission is to identify and invest in firms with cutting-edge technologies that can aid US national security.

Stairway to heaven
By James Langton
(Filed: 25/09/2005)

Space may still be the final frontier, but getting there could soon be almost as simple as stepping into the office lift at the start of the day.

The race is on to build the first "space elevator' - long dismissed as science fiction - to carry people and materials into orbit along a cable thousands of miles long.

In a significant step, American aviation regulators have just given permission for the opening trials of a prototype, while a competition to be launched next month follows in the wake of the $10 million (£5.6 million) "X Prize'', which led to the first privately developed craft leaving the Earth's atmosphere, briefly, last year.

Supporters of the elevator concept promise a future in space that is both cheap and accessible, and contrast it to Nasa's announcement last week that it will be relying on 40-year-old technology from the Apollo programme for its $105 billion plan to return to the Moon by 2018. The companies behind the space elevator say they will be able to lift material into orbit for as little as $400 a pound, compared with $20,000 a pound using existing rockets.

That would open up the possibility of tourists visiting a sky hotel in stationary orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth, with a view previously enjoyed only by astronauts.

It would also allow for far cheaper travel to the Moon and other planets within the solar system, since most of the energy required by rockets is used simply to escape Earth's gravity.

Russian scientists first envisaged a fixed link to space, and the idea was popularised by the British sci-fi writer and vision-ary, Arthur C Clarke, in his 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise.

The theory behind the space elevator is deceptively simple. With a base station on Earth and an orbiting satellite, solar-powered "climbers'', each carrying up to 20 tons, would crawl up a single cable into space over several days. The cable would be held up by the rotation of a 600-ton satellite counter-weight, much like a heavy object at the end of a spinning rope.

Until recently, the concept seemed doomed by the technology available, not least finding a material strong enough to make such a long cable, able to withstand extreme temperatures.

Scientists now believe that a material known as carbon nanotubes could be bound together to make a ribbon, rather than a cable, three-feet across but just half the width of a pencil.

Nanotubes, which are microscopic cylinders of carbon, are currently being developed by a number of companies, including GE and IBM. In one experiment, a sheet of nanotubes one-thousandth the thickness of a human hair could support 50,000 times its own mass.

"Elevator 2010'', which is to be launched on October 21 in California, will offer an annual first prize of $50,000 for the best design for both a tether - or ribbon - and a lightweight climber. It is being run by the Spaceward Foundation, which promotes space exploration, and has the backing of Nasa, which has given $400,000 in prize money. At least 10 teams will take part in the first contest.

Brad Edwards, a board member of the foundation, says the initial development could be ready "in the next couple of years", with the elevator itself being built in another decade.

"We are talking about getting this up in about 15 years,'' Dr Edwards predicted.

A rival design is being produced in Seattle by the LiftPort Group, which is counting down to a first voyage into space on April 12, 2018. The Federal Aviation Authority last week cleared an experiment by LiftPort that would use a mile-long tether attached to a balloon, something the company calls: "A critical step.''

Fears that an aircraft would crash into the elevator ribbon is just one concern. Space debris and terrorism are others.

Developers propose a floating base station near the equator, more than 400 miles from the nearest flight path.

Should the 800-ton ribbon break, it would either fly into space or fall back to the ground in fragments that would, in theory, hit no harder than a sheet of paper.

Yep, watching CNN, reading interdictor's blog, reading articles elsewhere... I like many are glued to what's going on, hoping that the help that is needed will arrive finally (after DAYS of waiting)...

I'm amused though, about how CNN is almost giggling about how much fun they are having using Google's satellite pictures. "Before.... After.... Before.... After" "There's an oil spill... right here..."

And have you seen the picture? Posted on midnightmadness's blog and then snagged by crabbyolbastard that someone Farked? It shows the Shrub playing a guitar pasted into a picture of a woman in front of the Convention Center sobbing while holding a child on her hip.

I've been both amazed and disgusted, horrified and hopeful. As per usual, the emotions are swirling.

Good luck to all.

Well, I can see it now. The dumb pocknut Tom Gage, president of AC Propulsion is going to put regular lithium ion (cobalt) batteries in the Scion, trying to save money but actually increasing costs with attempting those "safety measures" mentioned... At least one of those things is going to blow up (like a Pinto) and there is going to be plenty of shame to go around in his little world. Don't they see, that by being the first (hybrid car) to use the new SAFE tech they will be hailed as consumer-loving safety-matters forward-thinking, rather than what's going to stick to them like glue when they otherwise fail? Sheesh. Hrm... do I want to blow up? No... I don't want to blow up! Dumb Pocknut! (yeah, I just invented that a few days/weeks ago, lets see how long it takes for someone to use it on TV, heh.)


Driving Green, Explosion-Free
By Matthew Shechmeister
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68631,00.html

02:00 AM Aug. 26, 2005 PT

A recent marketing video from battery maker Valence Technologies makes its point with all the subtlety of a Jerry Bruckheimer film: Unlike the competition's, its batteries don't blow up.

The Texas-based company is so confident of the safety of its product that it shot one with a bullet to see what would happen. Nothing much, it turns out. That's in stark contrast to the other lithium ion battery shown in the video, which explodes in a fiery ball.

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I'd been saying this for the last ten years! When I was little I even sent in a very rough design on what I thought the astronauts should be going up in. Also, in a recent science fictions novel, I believe it was Sunstorm by A.C. Clarke, it was predicted that we would go back to something more like the Apollo mission rocket structure. Sweet! And of course, having had all those companies/people competing for the X-Prize (did I get that right?) and putting space planes on the field has increased general interest in the space program again. Yippee! Okay, now all they need to do is to name the "new" planet Minerva. Then I'd feel like I was in orbit. Heh.



August 2, 2005
Redesign Is Seen for Next Craft, NASA Aides Say
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

For its next generation of space vehicles, NASA has decided to abandon the design principles that went into the aging space shuttle, agency officials and private experts say.

Instead, they say, the new vehicles will rearrange the shuttle's components into a safer, more powerful family of traditional rockets.

The plan would separate the jobs of hauling people and cargo into orbit and would put the payloads on top of the rockets - as far as possible from the dangers of firing engines and falling debris, which were responsible for the accidents that destroyed the shuttle Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003.
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This is fascinating. I wish I could be involved in a class that is using them. It sounds like a cool idea as far as the emphasis on increased interaction is concerned. The immediate response in grading is great too. It all reminds me a bit of the "smart desks" that you have in the book Ender's Game and was hinted at in Starship Troopers, the movie. At first I was a little perturbed, since it was compared to the clicker used for the television, the remote control. Associating the words Remote Control with teaching was definitely something they intended to avoid. There is nothing remote about the system. I was happily suprised (but not really too suprised) by the fact that children of teachers are involved in the marketing of this set of products. Grades go up, the rate of learning and understanding goes up (due to immediate feedback).

Classroom Clickers Make the Grade
Associated Press
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68086,00.html

12:40 PM Jul. 04, 2005 PT

An honors student at Ohio State, a kid in a fifth-grade science class in Kentucky and a deaf student in England all begin their learning experience the same way: with their hand wrapped around a remote control.

Not a TV remote, but rather one that connects a student with everyone else in the class, with the instructor and with the subject at hand.

Hundreds of colleges, high schools and even middle schools are using "clickers" -- as even manufacturers call them. A moderator can pose a question and within seconds the respondents' answers are anonymously logged on a laptop at the front of the room.

"This is the MTV era," said Neal H. Hooker, an Ohio State professor who uses the technology in his agricultural economics course. "It's the instant-gratification generation. They don't like doing a quiz and hearing the responses in three days. They want to see if they've got it right or wrong right then."

InterWrite, a clicker manufacturer in Columbia, Maryland, has over a half million remotes in use, most in classrooms.

The clicker itself isn't different in size or shape from the one that enables you to switch from Fear Factor to Nova at home. Software logs the students' answers, enabling the teacher to determine if students understand the topic as the topic is being discussed. Teachers can post a true-false or multiple-choice quiz at the front of the room and, within seconds, the students' responses are logged, their scores tabulated and a grade is assigned to each.

"My mom taught middle-school math for years," said Rob Meissner, the vice president of marketing for Interwrite. "And every day she started with a 10-question drill assignment. If you could do that and have those things graded in 10 seconds versus bringing them home at night, that's a phenomenally efficient tool."

Teachers can readily determine which students need immediate help -- and in what areas -- as the class progresses. The system actually encourages more class discussion, prodding even shy students to get involved as responses are debated.

Christina Grimsley, 16, a junior at Coeur d'Alene High School in Idaho, first used the clicker during a third-year Spanish class earlier this academic year. She said instantaneous feedback was a huge advantage.

"You don't have to wait for someone to sit down and grade them by hand," she said of class assignments. "Right away you're able to get your answers back."

Hooker said the new technology saves reams of paper that he used to use on quizzes. About the only paperwork now is individual grade sheets.

"I don't grade," he said. "It is simply done. And I can't make a grading mistake -- it all comes out on the spreadsheet. I just have to cut and paste and put it in my grade sheet, and it's done. So it's foolproof."

College bookstores sell the clickers for between $10 and $40 apiece to students, depending on a range of functions. Most schools provide a basic system, including a receiver and software, which runs around $1,500. Bigger systems with higher-end equipment can cost $25,000, according to Rick Baker, CEO of clicker maker Meridia Audience Response near Philadelphia.

At the end of an academic term, a college student can sell the clicker to the kid down the hall in his dorm or can keep it for future classes.

More book publishers are tailoring their textbooks to provide exams and quizzes for classes with handheld remotes to meet the growing demand, said Donald Yocum, a social studies teacher and technology specialist at King Middle School in rural Harrodsburg, Kentucky.

Yocum's school has five sets of mutually compatible clicker sets -- all won at state or national teachers conventions.

Many clicker makers hand out the systems as prizes. Their thinking is that once teachers and students see how cool the systems are, the word will spread.

"All of the kids like it," Yocum said. "It helps the ones who don't like the traditional way of doing things, who don't like to sit there and write out their answers on a piece of paper. This way, through an interactive system, they stay engaged."

Many feel that the ideal use of clickers is in larger classes at universities, where sometimes hundreds of students jam lecture halls to hear a distant figure at the front of the class talk in a monotone until the class ends. Clickers are also becoming popular in various business uses, such as seminars and conventions.

"It's not like an hour-long lecture where the professor is droning on and everybody goes to sleep because they don't know what's important," University of Southern California physics and astronomy professor Christopher Gould said. "It lets the lecture turn into a two-way conversation."

Teachers who have used clickers believe students learn more when using the remotes.

"The class that I just taught using it was possibly the best-performing class I've had in the five years I've been teaching it," Hooker said. "They understood the material well and the students really like it."

Mike Nelson, Grimsley's Spanish teacher in Coeur d'Alene, said he had proof that clickers enhance the lessons.

"I have noticed about a 15 to 20 percent increase in their oral grades and their quiz grades, because now I don't need to guess whether kids know it to the best of their ability," he said. "I can actually see it now."

This makes me worry about my two teenage sisters - who just got cell phones... They are on a pay as you go program which they are supposed to pay themselves. This shall be interesting. Reminds me of the credit card companies stalking students on campus.


January 9, 2005

Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, One Dime Message at a Time
By LISA W. FODERARO

Chaz Albert, a freshman at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is a passionate "texter," someone who loves to send and receive pithy text messages via cellphone. He does it at home, at school and at work. He often prefers texting over talking on his cellphone.

Last month, though, Mr. Albert's habit caught up with him. Only $80 of his $400 cellphone charges were his father's, and most of his own, he said, were for text-messaging.

"I was shocked, but I couldn't do anything about it," he said. "I didn't realize that I got charged for reading text messages. My dad was just like: 'Hey, it's your problem. Pay it.' "
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There's a 1-in-300 chance that a recently discovered asteroid, believed to be about 1,300 feet long, could hit Earth in 2029, a NASA (news - web sites) scientist said Thursday, but he added that the perceived risk probably will be eliminated once astronomers get more detail about its orbit.


    BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhuanet)-- A recently discovered 1,300 feet long asteroid --  2004 MN4 --has a slim chance of hitting Earth in the year 2029, according to the statements of NASA.


    2004 MN4, whose sightings are rarely available has been given an initial rating of 2 on the 10-point Torino Impact Hazard Scale used by astronomers to predict asteroid or comet impacts, said Donald Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

    No previously observed asteroid has been graded higher than 1. 


    "2004 MN4 is now being tracked very carefully by many astronomers around the world, and we continue to update our risk analysis for this object. Today's impact monitoring results indicate that the impact probability for April 13, 2029 has risen to about 1.6%, which for an object of this size corresponds to a rating of 4 on the ten-point Torino Scale. Nevertheless, the odds against impact are still high, about 60 to 1, meaning that there is a better than 98% chance that new data in the coming days, weeks, and months will rule out any possibility of impact in 2029." said the Dec. 24 update statement from NASA.


    On Friday, April 13, 2029, "we can't yet rule out an Earth impact," Yeomans said. "But the impact probability, as we call it, is 300-to-1 against an impact."


    2004 MN4 was discovered in June and spotted again this month. It is about a quarter mile wide.


    That's bigger than the space rock that carved the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, and bigger than one that exploded in the air above Siberia in 1908, flattening thousands of square miles of forest. If an asteroid the size of 2004 MN4 hit the Earth, it would do considerable localized or regional damage. It would not cause damage on a global scale.

    Scientists project an asteroid's future travels based on observations of its current orbit around the Sun. On computer models, the future orbits are not lines but rather windows of possibility. The orbit projections for 2004 MN4 on April 13, 2029 cover a wide swath of space that includes the location where Earth will be. Additional observations will allow refined orbit forecasts — more like a line instead of a window.


    "This is not a problem for anyone and it shouldn't be a concern to anyone, but whenever we post one of these things and ... somebody gets ahold of it, it just gets crazy," he said. 

    "In the unlikely event that it did hit, it would be quite serious. We're talking either a tsunami if it hit in the ocean, which would be likely, or significant ground damage," Yeomans said.  Enditem

the horse and rides off into the sunset with the election...

sorry folks, I'm on an overdose of "I can't believe any of this is happening" whirlwind and am posting like mad. Leave angry comments about taking up a majority of your friends page. Heh.

Berkeley Daily Planet
Edition Date: Friday, November 19, 2004

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From my November 3rd post:

Looks like the only people (in the news media) that are willing to talk about this issue is Democracy Now on National Public Radio... And even if it all comes out, that (some) senators, congressmen, and the president weren't really elected by the people - what really is going to happen? Would there be a fair resolution to this? Or are we being pushed into more "distractions" by the Bush administration? Is the media being pressured to not investigate??!!

(Time for a late lunch, I am super-hungry. Enjoy!)

Monday, November 8th, 2004
The E-Vote Factor: Kerry Conceded But Did He Really Lose?

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EDIT: MSNBC has now started covering this issue. (according to a report from my fiance's brother.)