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When I woke up this morning, it was nine degrees below zero, Celsius. It’s solidly overcast here, and what’s more, this time of year the sun doesn’t get much more than 20 degrees above the horizon — in the middle of an all-too-short day. (Atomic Age, that is.) From the University of Chicago Library site: Over at Nanoclast, Dexter Johnson writes: Technology Review: Self-Cleaning, Super-Absorbant Solar Cells. Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: Previous in series: VTOL It should be relatively high-powered compared to current light craft. What will your car run on in 2020 or 2030? What form of energy storage and transmission will allow intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar, to be a viable input to the economy? Here’s a University of Rochester press release from 2006: Scientists at the University of Rochester have created a way to change the properties of almost any metal to render it, literally, black. If you connect a 12-volt battery to a 4-ohm lamp, 3 amps of current will flow through the circuit by Ohm’s Law, V=IR. Power = VI = 36 watts will be dissipated by the lamp. If you add a 2-ohm resistor in series with the lamp, the resistances add to 6 ohms, the current [...] Two new items that are follow-ons to the Moore’s Law for Energy thread: A story at Technology Review about new electronics that improve the usable power from existing solar panels by 5-25%. The advance is new smarter electronics that allows for an inverter for each panel instead of one big one for the whole system. [...] There was a gratifyingly large response to last Friday’s post Acolytes of neo-Malthusian Apocalypticism. Several of the commenters seemed to think I was trying to refute the LtG model, but that would require a whole book instead of one blog post. I consider LtG to have been demolished in detail by people with a lot more [...] When I was in college 35 years ago, there was a major fad of neo-Malthusian doom-mongering, led by the “Limits to Growth” book and movement. A retreat was organized from the college, and some concerned, environmentally conscious professors and students, myself included, went off for a concentrated seminar in which we educated each other [...] Another step along the Moore’s Law-like trend line for solar power: Ink-Jet Printing for Cheaper Solar Cells at Technology Review. (see also Nanoscale Inkjet Printing) In this post I pointed out that in the foreseeable future, nanotech devices are likely to be energy-starved. Chris Peterson asks in a comment whether there would be a problem from the heat dissipation from this energy use. The analysis is worth a post of its own, so here goes: Earlier this week I was at the premiere of Transcendent Man, a biographical overview of Ray Kurzweil’s views on the coming Singularity. Kurzweil’s main argument is that the power of the exponential in technology is major, systemic, and underappreciated. MIT scientists have demonstrated the usefulness of biological frameworks for combining distinct functional elements to make a device. I recently heard a talk by Patri Friedman about seasteading. Seasteading means “homesteading the sea,” or at least building floating cities and establishing permanent residences there, and ultimately alternative polities in hopes of enabling beneficial economic competition in the field of governance. Before saying more, let me point out that I am generally in [...] The power density is large compared to that of macroscale motors: >1e15 W/m^3. For comparison, Earth intercepts ~1e17 watts of solar radiation. (Cooling constraints presumably preclude the steady-state operation of a cubic meter of these devices at this power density.) It is difficult, even for someone who has been working with these ideas [...] 20 years ago, in the wake of the cold fusion excitement-turned-debacle, I noticed an interesting fact. The people doing the experiments were divided into two classes: The electrochemists who believed that fusion was happening were doing their experiments in plastic tubs and glassware, whereas the physicists who believed that no fusion was really happening were [...] Jeriaska has made available videos of presentations from Convergence08, held on November 15-16, 2008 in Mountain View, California, to examine the convergence of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) technologies. Among those of special interest to Nanodot readers: Mapping a Cone of Uncertainty, Paul Saffo |
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