Author Archives: alistair

Wind power: not the solution

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wind-millsThe Economist has a long article on the history and details of wind power over the years. Using the wind to generate electricity is beloved of greens because it produces little or no pollution. However, I have never had a good feeling about wind power as a solution.

Here are some of the reasons that I feel wind isn’t the way to go.

1. Not the final solution
Wind energy on Earth is vast, but not unlimited. According to a study quoted in the article wind-energy potential is only 5 times global energy demand. So even if all wind energy was captured (wind turbines all over Earth) we wouldn’t have a solution to meet substantial energy demand growth.

2. I don’t like wind turbines
Wind turbines are massive, expensive, noisy, and damaging to birds (okay that is a little tenuous). In order to make significant inroads into our energy requirements enormous numbers of the beasts would be required. It doesn’t seem like an elegant solution. They are also too expensive to be economical.

3. Winds are irregular and in the wrong places
Not only do you need to find a location for the turbines, but they need to be where the winds are. That is often not where (and when) the winds are so you need to build huge transmission networks to the middle of nowhere.

Conclusion – wind power isn’t the way to go
I just don’t believe that wind power is going to solve our problems. I really like the idea of personal turbines (especially in windy Vredehoek) but wind power is not the solution to the energy crisis!

I believe that solar power is the ultimate solution, but until then nuclear energy is definitely the way to go. Proven technology, not too dangerous, green, economical. Nuclear is the way to go.

TV can’t represent all visible colors

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gamutDo you know what “the gamut” is? Until I read this article on laser digital-cinema projectors I didn’t either.

Apparently “the gamut” is the range of colors visible to the human eye.

Modern TV sets can only produce about 50% of the colors that we are able to see! Traditional cinema film comes in at 60% of visible colors – a big improvement but with plenty of room for further improvement.

The image alongside shows a representation of the gamut and the subsets of that space that we routinely see. There are plenty of colors that can’t be represented on our screens.

The article discusses an ingenious system using laser film projectors that is able to produce images with up to 90% of the gamut. Very cool – I can’t wait to watch a movie using that system.

Internet traffic statistics

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This is an Economist article about whether the internet can survive rocketing traffic or not. It argues (well) that in fact infrastructure easily keeps up with increasing traffic requirements.

However, there were quite a few cool facts and statistics peppered around the article:

  • YouTube alone generated more traffic in 2006 than the entire internet in 2000! Imagine what it’s like now…
  • It is estimated that 50-60% of all internet traffic today is video. That has already been the case for three years
  • Global internet traffic is between 5 and 8 exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion (1,000,000,000) gigabytes!

That’s a lot of 1’s and 0’s. It’s going to be fun

ANC gets nailed in the Western Cape

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The Economist has this article summarizing for the rest of the world what is going on with ANC and COPE. Specifically what kicked off the article was the ass-kicking handed to the ANC by COPE and DA in the Western Cape.

One of my point-form summaries:

  • 27 Western Cape seats were recently contested in the Western Cape
    • The ANC had held all of them, but lost all but 3
    • The ANC didn’t contest 12 of the seats (through incompetence) so they outright lost 12 of the 15 that they did contest
    • COPE won 10 of the seats and the DA won 9
  • The formation of COPE has much to do with “personal interests and ambitions”
    • It is observed that COPE was formed by those who were squeezed out of power when Zuma came in
    • These are the same people who thought the ANC was fine until they lost power
  • Either way, COPE should benefit South Africa by:
    1. Offering black voters more choice
    2. Weakening the hapless ANC

Hands-free: not so safe after all

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hands-freeThe Economist has an article outlining an experimental result that I found surprising: using a hands-free for chatting in the car significantly impairs driving ability.

What makes this surprising to me is that an earlier study had shown that chatting to a passenger in the car does not impact driving ability.

Why would chatting to someone in person be OK but chatting on a hands-free have a big impact on your reactions?

I think that this may have something to do with context. A passenger understands a break in conversation when the driver needs to concentrate on something. More experiments are needed…

Another experiment showed that listening to someone talking has no impact on driving ability – even when subjects knew they would later be tested. So the problem clearly arises when drivers must think of responses.

PS. The researchers found that having a passenger was safer because the passenger would comment on things happening on the road.

Cave of Crystals

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National Geographic has this article on the “Cave of Crystals” in Mexico. Very interesting and with the usual great photos.

Quick summary:

  • The cave which is about 280m underground was discovered in 2000 during mining operations.
  • It takes 20 minutes to get to the cave entrance driving a van along a winding mine shaft (see photo below)
  • The cave is above a magma intrusion (a spot where magma comes close to the surface) and temperatures are about 45 Celsius!
  • Because of the heat researchers must wear ice-cooled suits and use respirators blowing ice-cooled air. Even so they can only handle about 20 to 40 minutes.
  • The crystals have been growing for the last 600,000 years in the cave which was originally water filled. The miners lowered the water table by pumping out the water and halted that growth.

This photo gives an idea of the size of the cave and the enormous crystals in it. Awesome stuff.

Getting to the entrance of the cave involves a 20 minute drive along the mine shaft

It is so hot in the cave that researchers must wear special ‘ice-suits’ in order to operate in the cave. They breath ice-cooled air through breathing packs and even so can only spend short periods in the cave.

You can view the rest of the photos here.

PS. National Geographic Magazine is an awesome publication – their articles are often fascinating and the photography is stunning. Their subscriptions are cheap and easy – I recommend subscribing.

Feral hogs: not cute

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The Economist has an interesting article on feral hogs in the states. Apparently there are between 4 and 5 million formerly domestic pigs living wild in the States.

They are brutal, fertile, adaptable and intelligent so they spread quickly and leave a wake of destruction. Some get truly enormous – you may have heard of Hogzilla, a monumental individual weighing several hundred kilograms (pictured).

The problem started when the Spanish conquistadors released some of their herds while traveling across the Americas.

Since then problem has become so severe that many States have a shoot on site policy. Other States encourage trapping, poisoning specially trained “Hog dogs” and even hunting from helicopters!

Pheromones: unconscious messages

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New Scientist has this interesting article on human pheromones. It’s amazing to find that we are unconsciously able to detect information and messages about each other.

A mothWhat are pheromones?
Actually, there is quite a lot of debate about that. Basically, pheromones are chemical messages emitted by animals that trigger responses in receivers.

For example a female moth will release a sex pheromone to signal that she is fertile. Male moths can detect and will react to the pheromone message.

There are many types of pheromones (see the Wikipedia article) including alarm pheromones, sex pheromones and food trail pheromones. They are actually fairly common in the animal world.

Pheromones in humans
Humans are animals so it would make sense that we would also produce and react to pheromones. They are evolutionarily useful after all.

For a variety of reasons (discussed in the article) there has been controversy about the existence of human pheromones. To me it seems pretty obvious that something is going on in humans too, and that is what the article is about.

Human examples
There are several examples of the unconscious effects of human pheromones:

  • It has been shown that women living together will gradually synchronize their menstrual cycles. Later experiments showed that the sweat of women in different stages of their menstrual cycle could affect the cycles of other women. Sounds like pheromones.
  • Brain scans have shown the ‘sex centre’ of women’s brains lighting up when they were exposed to the smell of a male sex hormone (found in men’s sweat). Interestingly the effect was only reliable when there was a man in the room.
  • Alarm pheromones can also be subconsciously detected by humans. Test subjects were able to distinguish between the sweat of people who had watched scary movies and people who had watched funny movies. This was despite not being able to consciously tell the difference.
  • In a similar experiment brain scans showed the fear centre of the brain lighting up when subjects were exposed to the sweat of first time skydivers.

Very interesting stuff. Luckily the effects seem pretty weak because it could get crazy if we learned to reliably affect people’s behavior using chemicals!

Being dirty makes you more ethical

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The Economist has this article about a recent study showing that washing makes people view unethical activities as more acceptable. In other words being physically clean makes you more morally relaxed!

Judging moral strictness
The ‘moral strictness’ of the test subjects was tested by asking them to rate a series of acts on an ethical scale (from perfectly okay to very wrong). The activities being rated ranged from “taking money found in a lost wallet, via eating a family’s dead dog to avoid starvation, to using a kitten for sexual arousal.”

Experiment 1
In one experiment test subjects were given sentences to unscramble. Half were given neutral words only, and half were given words like “washed”, “clean” and “immaculate”.

Experiment 2
In the second experiment all test subjects were shown a 3 minute clip from Trainspotting to “incite feelings of disgust”. Half of the subjects were then told to wash their hands while half were not.

Results
In both experiments the test subjects who were clean (or thinking about being clean) rated activities as more morally acceptable.

My theory
If you read my post on the truth about morality (it’s long but I highly recommend it) then you will know that humans have a group of ‘moral instincts’. Five moral areas that come instinctively to almost all humans across all cultures.

One of those moral instincts is purity (avoiding being dirty). So when the test subjects were dirty or thinking about being dirty the purity moral instinct was triggered thereby heightening activity in the moral centers of the brain.

So when the other moral instincts (like fairness) were tested during the rating phase of the experiments the moral centers of the brain were already active and the subjects were morally stricter.

The old ‘better than’ trick

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The old ‘better than’ trick is a favorite of mine. Whenever I find myself using a product/restaurant/program/website/etc I pop over to Google and search for

‘better than [product]’

Going through the results pages will often reveal that there is a better product out there.

For example I just bought a Garmin heart rate monitor/GPS. After using the default software (Training Center) that comes with the device for a while I was thoroughly unimpressed and figured there must be a better alternative.

So I searched for ‘better than training center’ . After going through a few results I found the superb SportTracks software which is MILES better than Training Center and is also free.

Obviously this trick works better for some kinds of products (e.g. software) than others – but it is normally worth a try.

The same kind of trick can be modified using things like:

  • reminds me of ‘lord of the rings’
  • sounds like nirvana
  • similar to cape town