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Category Archives: Science

Electric vehicle nirvana

A new video by @joesimpson and I: Electric Vehicle Nirvana explained over at Brits On Green. Really quite good, and we’re fans of the format. Next one will be shorter of course, in a Pascalian sense :-)

How it works.

There are three kinds of people: snacks, trolls and bastards. Snacks are people without strong personal competence or will. Trolls are people with strong personal competence, but without social status. Many computer programmers and engineers are trolls. They live in caves. Bastards are people with strong personal competence and high social status. Bastards who speak [...]

“Feed the world” at the Royal Institution

Feed the World We live in an age of scientific and technological advancement that was almost unimaginable only a few generations ago. From mobile telephones to the Large Hadron Collider, human know-how and ingenuity is deeper, more widespread and disseminates faster than at any time in history. However, despite our vast knowledge almost 900 million [...]

Which kind of chart should I use to show my data?

A Back-of-the-Envelope Master at work (on how to get renewable drinking water for 2m people.)

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson on Global Swadeshi fleshing out how to provide water security for the Canary Islands. I just love this post. This is exactly the kind of magic that I hoped that Global Swadeshi would produce. Now let’s build it! I’ll note that the same logic applies to the dry coastlines of Africa too. And [...]

Great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel

Really great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel. Via Evonne – great link, thank you so much!

Born to run: endurance running as a human evolutionary advantage

People are astonishingly successful endurance runners, “and I don’t think it’s just a fluke,” Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other [...]

Village scale integrated solar power technology

http://www.igf-online.org/fileadmin/Images/Menue/Pdf-Dateien/RE_SunventionSept06_engl.pdf Looks GREAT. Several devices, well-explored design synergies and so on. Cutting edge work from the Tamera Ecovillage in Portugal. Amazing stuff, well done folks.

Terabyte SATA drives likely contain single bit errors

http://alumnit.ca/~apenwarr/log/?m=200809#08 They’re so big, there are likely to be problems on any given drive (56%) which is (the author notes) a big issue for RAID. Seems like exactly the sort of thing ZFS was designed to combat.

Electric light plane

A direct drive 5 KWh electric motor carbon fiber lightweight 45 inch propeller gets the little airplane climbing at 500-600 feet per minute. The ElectraFlyer-C has a cruisng speed of 70 mph (112 kmph), a top speed of 144 kmph, and your flight time would be 1.5 to 2 hours. That is with the top [...]