digital detritus

Ok, so the guys a nut, no argument there. But Kim Jong-Il may well have put together one of the hottest, sexiest, political (communist) screeds I’ve ever heard. So will the rallying cry for the next revolution be “Orgasms for All!”?

Check out this totally cool flash presentation of the text set to the sounds of Nina Simone by the folks at Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries.

Thanks to Amanda over at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog for a kick ass post.

In 1997 I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to finish my undergraduate degree in computer science. Now I’d never lived in the desert before so I had a lot to get used to. One of the things that I had to acclimatize to was the fact that Albuquerque has 300+ sunny days a year. That got me thinking about solar power generation and what it might be like on a large scale.

Here’s what I was thinking, what would it be like if a significant number of the houses in Albuquerque had photovoltaic panels up and generating power? What kind of change would that make in the power usage for the city? Could it significantly change how much power the city needed to draw from a major power plant?

Here’s my thinking on all of this:

A single house could generate as much as 7200 kWh per day. Not a lot but now think about that over say 2000 homes. That’s 14.4 million kWh per day. Now based on the 300+ days that there’s little or no cloud cover you get 4.32 billion kWh over the course of a year, that’s some serious power. This might not cover all of the power needs of a city, but it will damn sure make a dent in the need for things like nuclear or coal powered plants.

But I’m not just thinking about the power that can be generated, I’m also thinking about how the power gets generated. In this model, instead of one big power plant you have 2000 little ones. Now if something goes wrong at any of the power generation points the system doesn’t fail. If the system at my house fails then I get power from my neighbor, and if their power goes out, they can get power from me. The point here is that the system is fault tolerant, failures don’t have to be catastrophic.

When I was living in Albuquerque we had a power outage caused by a grass fire underneath some high tension power lines. That’s what got me thinking about all of this. With all the talk about terrorism these days having a heavily fault tolerant is a good thing as well. What do you blow up if every building is producing power?

Large numbers of small (micro) power generation points is just a good idea.

Technorati Tags: power, solar, wind, hydro-electric, power generation, parallel power generation, fault tolerant power

Now think about this: there’s a concept called Phantom Load in electrical engineering which is all of the power drawn by appliances when they are turned off. This includes things like computers, VCRs, stereos and microwaves. Just think of all of those VCRs that are blinking 12:00 over and over and over again. For any single home this doesn’t add up to a lot, maybe as little as 75 watts. Hey, that’s one light bulb, but how many of your lights to do you leave on 24 hours a day? Let’s do a little math:

75 watts * 24 hours = 1800 Wh (Watt hours) or 1.8 kWh (kilo Watt hours)

1,8 kWh * 95,000,000 households (U.S.) = 171,000,000 kWh per day.

171 million kWh * 365 days = 62,415,000,000 kWh per year, 62.415 billion kWh

By comparison the country of Brazil used 351.9 billion kWh in 2002 (courtesy of the CIA World Factbook). So, based on my rough estimate, the phantom load for the U.S. would power the country of Brazil for just over two months.

So, what do we do about phantom load. Well, I did some looking and I found the following suggestions

1. Buy low power, efficient appliances.
2. Use power strips on your appliances. This allows you to turn things off such that they can’t continue to draw power.

Terrorism (ter·ror·ism) n.

1. Any rationalization or propaganda used by the rich to convince the poor of the necessity of war.

War (wôr) n.

1. Any moment in history when the poor kill one another for the benefit of the rich.

Over at O’Reilly’s digital media site they have a great article about “The Ultimate Portable Studio.”

The Ultimate Portable Studio by Gina Fant-Saez — If you’re a musician, producer, engineer, or songwriter who wants to set up a professional, laptop-based recording studio, here’s all the information you need.

I’m in love with the idea of being able to record stories and oral histories that people and families have. I would love to have this kind of setup as it would allow such great recordings. Or imagine what kinds of music we might get from folks if they didn’t have to wade through all of the crap that the corporate recording industry has.

Of course, being a huge fan of Eugene V. Debs I am forever aware that what I consider to be inexpensive can mean medical supplies for a year for a village somewhere else in the world. Hell, the $4000+ price tag for this is more than I paid in tuition for two semesters as an undergrad. (big props to state universities). Nevertheless, with costs like this we are getting closer to a point where just about anyone can create so called studio quality recordings. That, I think, is pretty damn cool.

Here’s a nifty example of what I was talking about in a past post about bloggers and podcasters as stringers.

Doug Kaye has a great idea about using podcasters as stringers. The short version of the idea is this: since there are all kinds of talks, lectures, conferences and speeches, many more than anyone can hope to attend, why not get podcasters to record and re-distribute this content.

I can describe this in one simple word: Brilliant!

Doug, count me in.