After a ridiculously long absence and neglect of this particular blog, I felt this was something worth spreading around. I have been highly disappointed that the government, in attempting to "fix" the situation "on Wall Stree" and in the credit markets allowed this to be characterized as a "bailout". The government "loan" to AIG cost them essentially all the shareholders equity, if I understood that one correctly, and most of the rest of the bank and brokerage takeovers were a fairly natural 'survival of the fittest' contraction of an overheated market. Yes it was somewhat like the 2000 bursting of the internet "bubble", but despite the crisis mentality that froze up the credit markets from a lack of confidence, the actual soundness of the "Main Street" industries are, as John McCain was (though now has stopped) proclaiming, "fundamentally sound", suffering mainly from this confidence crisis in the financial industry which was over-extended on mortgages that were less solid than was assumed/claimed.
The following is an article (rather long but worth knowing about) which I received via email from a source that spends most of their emails trying to sell me investments and investment advice. I don't know how much weight to put on the particular mechanism that this author is blaming for the financial meltdown on Wall Street and the credit markets generally across the globe, because I think there were other "derivative" investment instruments which contributed, including, especially the "tranches" of mortgages sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but also by similar poolings of essentially less than sound mortgages that held a higher degee of risk than the sellers "admitted" (claimed) in their sales pitch. But here is a lengthy discussion/disclosure of why AIG was in such BIG trouble and why it had such global implications despite the regulations that existed on banks foreign and domestic (though lesser or absent such capital requirements for "investment banks" due to "deregulation" since the Reagan era).
How AIG's Collapse Began a Global Run on the Banks
By Porter StansberryOctober 4, 2008
Something very strange is happening in the financial markets. And I can show you what it is and what it means...
If September didn't give you enough to worry about, consider what will happen to real estate prices as unemployment grows steadily over the next several months. As bad as things are now, they'll get much worse.
They'll get worse for the obvious reason: because more people will default on their mortgages. But they'll also remain depressed for far longer than anyone expects, for a reason most people will never understand.
What follows is one of the real secrets to September's stock market collapse. Once you understand what really happened last month, the events to come will be much clearer to you...
Every great bull market has similar characteristics. The speculation must – at the beginning – start with a reasonably good idea. Using long-term mortgages to pay for homes is a good idea, with a few important caveats.
Some of these limitations are obvious to any intelligent observer... like the need for a substantial down payment, the verification of income, an independent appraisal, etc. But human nature dictates that, given enough time and the right incentives, any endeavor will be corrupted. This is one of the two critical elements of a bubble. What was once a good idea becomes a farce. You already know all the stories of how this happened in the housing market, where loans were eventually given without fixed rates, without income verification, without down payments, and without legitimate appraisals.
As bad as these practices were, they would not have created a global financial panic without the second, more critical element. For things to get really out of control, the farce must evolve further... into fraud.
And this is where AIG comes into the story.
Around the world, banks must comply with what are known as Basel II regulations. These regulations determine how much capital a bank must maintain in reserve. The rules are based on the quality of the bank's loan book. The riskier the loans a bank owns, the more capital it must keep in reserve. Bank managers naturally seek to employ as much leverage as they can, especially when interest rates are low, to maximize profits. AIG appeared to offer banks a way to get around the Basel rules, via unregulated insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps.
Here's how it worked: Say you're a major European bank... You have a surplus of deposits, because in Europe people actually still bother to save money. You're looking for something to maximize the spread between what you must pay for deposits and what you're able to earn lending. You want it to be safe and reliable, but also pay the highest possible annual interest. You know you could buy a portfolio of high-yielding subprime mortgages. But doing so will limit the amount of leverage you can employ, which will limit returns.
So rather than rule out having any high-yielding securities in your portfolio, you simply call up the friendly AIG broker you met at a conference in London last year.
"What would it cost me to insure this subprime security?" you inquire. The broker, who is selling a five-year policy (but who will be paid a bonus annually), says, "Not too much." After all, the historical loss rates on American mortgages is close to zilch.
Using incredibly sophisticated computer models, he agrees to guarantee the subprime security you're buying against default for five years for say, 2% of face value.
Although AIG's credit default swaps were really insurance contracts, they weren't regulated. That meant AIG didn't have to put up any capital as collateral on its swaps, as long as it maintained a triple-A credit rating. There was no real capital cost to selling these swaps; there was no limit. And thanks to what's called "mark-to-market" accounting, AIG could book the profit from a five-year credit default swap as soon as the contract was sold, based on the expected default rate.
Whatever the computer said AIG was likely to make on the deal, the accountants would write down as actual profit. The broker who sold the swap would be paid a bonus at the end of the first year – long before the actual profit on the contract was made.
With this structure in place, the European bank was able to assure its regulators it was holding only triple-A credits, instead of a bunch of subprime "toxic waste." The bank could leverage itself to the full extent allowable under Basel II. AIG could book hundreds of millions in "profit" each year, without having to pony up billions in collateral.
It was a fraud. AIG never any capital to back up the insurance it sold. And the profits it booked never materialized. The default rate on mortgage securities underwritten in 2005, 2006, and 2007 turned out to be multiples higher than expected. And they continue to increase. In some cases, the securities the banks claimed were triple A have ended up being worth less than $0.15 on the dollar.
Even so, it all worked for years. Banks leveraged deposits to the hilt. Wall Street packaged and sold dumb mortgages as securities. And AIG sold credit default swaps without bothering to collateralize the risk. An enormous amount of capital was created out of thin air and tossed into global real estate markets.
On September 15, all of the major credit-rating agencies downgraded AIG – the world's largest insurance company. At issue were the soaring losses in its credit default swaps. The first big writeoff came in the fourth quarter of 2007, when AIG reported an $11 billion charge. It was able to raise capital once, to repair the damage. But the losses kept growing. The moment the downgrade came, AIG was forced to come up with tens of billions of additional collateral, immediately. This was on top of the billions it owed to its trading partners. It didn't have the money. The world's largest insurance company was bankrupt.
The dominoes fell over immediately. Lehman Brothers failed on the same day. Merrill was sold to Bank of America. The Fed stepped in and agreed to lend AIG $85 billion to facilitate an orderly sell off of its assets in exchange for essentially all the company's equity.
Most people never understood how AIG was the linchpin to the entire system. And there's one more secret yet to come out...
AIG's largest trading partner wasn't a nameless European bank. It was Goldman Sachs.
I'd wondered for years how Goldman avoided the kind of huge mortgage-related writedowns that plagued all the other investment banks. And now we know: Goldman hedged its exposure via credit default swaps with AIG. Sources inside Goldman say the company's exposure to AIG exceeded $20 billion, meaning the moment AIG was downgraded, Goldman had to begin marking down the value of its assets. And the moment AIG went bankrupt, Goldman lost $20 billion. Goldman immediately sought out Warren Buffett to raise $5 billion of additional capital, which also helped it raise another $5 billion via a public offering.
The collapse of the credit default swap market also meant the investment banks – all of them – had no way to borrow money, because no one would insure their obligations.
To fund their daily operations, they've become totally reliant on the Federal Reserve, which has allowed them to formally become commercial banks. To date, banks, insurance firms, and investment banks have borrowed $348 billion from the Federal Reserve – nearly all of this lending took place following AIG's failure. Things are so bad at the investment banks, the Fed had to change the rules to allow Merrill, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman the ability to use equities as collateral for these loans, an unprecedented step.
The mainstream press hasn't reported this either: A provision in the $700 billion bailout bill permits the Fed to pay interest on the collateral it's holding, which is simply a way to funnel taxpayer dollars directly into the investment banks.
Why do you need to know all of these details? First, you must understand that without the government's actions, the collapse of AIG could have caused every major bank in the world to fail.
Second, without the credit default swap market, there's no way banks can report the true state of their assets – they'd all be in default of Basel II. That's why the government will push through a measure that requires the suspension of mark-to-market accounting. Essentially, banks will be allowed to pretend they have far higher-quality loans than they actually do. AIG can't cover for them anymore.
And third, and most importantly, without the huge fraud perpetrated by AIG, the mortgage bubble could have never grown as large as it did. Yes, other factors contributed, like the role of Fannie and Freddie in particular. But the key to enabling the huge global growth in credit during the last decade can be tied directly to AIG's sale of credit default swaps without collateral. That was the barn door. And it was left open for nearly a decade.
There's no way to replace this massive credit-building machine, which makes me very skeptical of the government's bailout plan. Quite simply, we can't replace the credit that existed in the world before September 15 because it didn't deserve to be there in the first place. While the government can, and certainly will, paper over the gaping holes left by this enormous credit collapse, it can't actually replace the trust and credit that existed... because it was a fraud.
And that leads me to believe the coming economic contraction will be longer and deeper than most people understand.
You might find this strange... but this is great news for those who understand what's going on. Knowing why the economy is shrinking and knowing it's not going to rebound quickly gives you a huge advantage over most investors, who don't understand what's happening and can't plan to take advantage of it.
How can you take advantage? First, make sure you have at least 10% of your net worth in precious metals. I prefer gold bullion. World governments' gigantic liabilities will vastly decrease the value of paper currencies.
Second, I can tell you we're either at or approaching a moment of maximum pessimism in the markets. These kinds of panics give you the chance to buy world-class businesses incredibly cheaply. A few worth mentioning are ExxonMobil, Intel, and Microsoft. I have several stocks like these in the portfolio of my Investment Advisory.
[DISCLAIMER: I, Doc Williamson do not recommend nor endorse this short sell strategy, but I
include it here because it was part of the author's original message.] Third, if you're comfortable short selling stocks (betting they'll fall in price), now is the time to be doing it... simply as a hedge against further declines
Keep the fraud of AIG in mind when you form your investment plan for the coming years. By following these three strategies, you'll survive and prosper while most investors sit back and wonder what the hell is going on.
Good investing,
Porter Stansberry
[Porter Stansberry's note] P.S. As I mentioned, my model portfolio is now loaded with the highest-quality businesses you can possibly own... and you can buy most of them for peanuts. In fact, if you buy the handful of stocks that carry my highest rating for safety and capital gains right now, they will far outperform anything else you could possibly do with long-term money. Click here to learn more about a subscription to my advisory.
(I thought it only "fair" to leave in Porter's link to his own subscription information since I didn't get his permission to send out this relatively private reproduction of his column.)
I would also add that the Fed's choice to increase the money supply (so far, in a non-inflationary way) was wise, and wiser still would be drastically increase the money supply which, although it would result in strong inflationary pressure and tend to devalue the US dollar, it would also be a tremendous stimulus on international balance of trade and reduce demand for imports (by making imports more expensive and less of a bargain to consumers).
Love and warmest wishes, always
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
My Death, BioDiesel in Lethbridge, Brazil, Houston, Uruguay, Methane Hydrate everywhere
My death was just 5 minutes away at most. NO, this was not a nightmare or a fictional story, this really happened. I know because it happened to me. The pill didn't slide down my throat the way it should, it detoured around the epiglottis and stuck firmly in my windpipe. No air in. No air out. I tried to cough. No air in, no air out.
I pounded my chest. I tried to thump myself on the back (if you've ever tried to congratulate yourself with a pat on the back you already know this is possible but it's tough to put any force behind it). I ran up the short flight of stairs to my wife's office, I was EXTREMELY glad I was not home alone at the time. I was waving my arms in what, apparently, was a poor attempt to communicate that I wanted her to pound on my back to dislodge the pill from my throat. Eventually I did get this idea across to her, but it didn't help. She could see the panicked look on my face, but since I had not said anything (of course, that was impossible) she asked, “What's the matter?” I tried, by gestures, to indicate that I was choking, and as I did that, I remembered the Heimlich maneuver.
If you've ever played charades you know how difficult it can be just to get the word “dog” out of someone with just gestures and without being able to make a sound. I was already about 90 seconds into this choking session and panic was really growing now. I don't remember what I did to try to get across the idea of Maggie doing a Heimlich to force air out of my lungs in hope of dislodging the obstruction, but clearly she was not getting the idea.
Now they say that at a time like this your life flashes before your eyes. Maybe that is true for some people but not for me. I say I was panicked, and I was, I was afraid to die. But it was not exactly what I expected. I said to myself, “I am not READY to die, there's too much I still want to do in this life.” On the other hand, I could see no alternative. I slumped to my knees, not to pray, but in acceptance that whatever was going to happen now, was going to happen without my intervention. I sincerely hoped that my wife, Maggie, might be able to do something to revive me, either herself or by calling 911 for an ambulance. We only lived about 1 mile from two different, very good hospitals. There was a slim chance I might survive.
When my knees hit the carpet I continued to drop until my thighs hit my heels, and my abdomen folded forward as my spine curved to absorb the shock of the sudden stop. Compressing the abdomen forced my intestines and organs up against my diaphragm. I had, in effect, accidentally done the Heimlich on myself, for the air from my lungs came whooshing out, depositing the pill on the carpet in front of me.
It felt good to feel the air fill my lungs again.
The reason I am telling this story this week is that a similar incident happen this week. The pill that was stuck in my throat is a vivid (if slightly hazy) memory from 20 years or more ago. This week it was just a glass of water and my own clumsiness that almost did me in. Having choked on a little water going down the “wrong” way, I still had a mouth full of water, so when I gasped to try to recover from this, I aspirated more water, filling my windpipe, and again (as it had many years ago) completely blocking air from entering or leaving my lungs. I recognized my peril immediately, and this time, I thought, “Dieing now would be REALLY INCONVENIENT. There are too many things left undone, too much I still want to accomplish.” I have tried to introduce the world to some ideas and processes that I sincerely hope will greatly benefit humanity. Yet I have not managed to make my voice heard or my efforts felt to a degree that I could feel certain that these things will have a chance to take hold.
I did manage to spit out the rest of the water in my mouth, and it seemed like a very long time while I crossed the room to the kitchen and tried to think what other actions I could take.
Fortunately, once again gravity came to my rescue, because gravity caused the water in the trachea to drain into my bronchial tubes, allowing air to pass freely once more. Well, that is not strictly accurate, “freely” is an exaggeration, but after several minutes of wheezing (some of it close to the volume of a jet engine's output), the remainder of the liquid in the trachea was cleared, and presume eventually, gradually the cilia of the bronchial tubes worked their magic (thanks in large part, I suspect, due to my having stopped smoking in 2000) to expel any remaining foreign liquid.
Now I am not going to recount every potentially fatal mishap in my life, like the bicycle accident that painted a large portion of a suburban intersection with my blood, because if I am really close to my feline quota of 9 lives, I might never dare leave the house again. Of course staying home is no protection in my case since both my choking episodes were at home. But needless to say, I am extremely glad to be alive, and working with a renewed vigor to try to get some things done before my number finally does come up.
While I'm being “nostalgic” for 20 years ago, let me regress a little further to 30 years back when I lived in Canada. Lethbridge is a town I never spent much time in. It was in a direct line between my home in Calgary and the US border, so I passed through (and over) a number of times, but with a sweet tooth like mine, I can't help but have a certain fondness for the sugarbeet growing territory surrounding that little city.
News this week arrived that Lethbridge is likely to become home to a biodiesel facility making 50 million liters of the stuff annually. Reportedly that will have a by-product of 4000 tonnes of glycerine, which currently sells (according to the company spokesman) at about CDN$1000/tonne, so that's a side revenue of CDN$4,000,000 a year. The problem at the moment is that canola oil, the main ingredient for their brew, is priced at CDN$655/tonne so it is not considered economic to make the stuff (they should read about Brazil, later in this column). However, despite the gloomy, distinctly unprofitable picture of their future, it will create 30 jobs, and ensure a future market for farmers products so the government of the province of Alberta has given BFuel Canada Corp. a grant of CDN$3.8 million, while they await word on a similar federal grant from Ottawa of an additional CDN$8 million, towards their proposed CDN$45 million facility. The Lethbridge Herald reports on their web site that the Alberta grant money is to be used for deposits on “refinery and processing equipment.”
It's not a new energy source, just one that has not received a lot of publicity. Methane hydrate is a kind of ice that is found below the permafrost layer in Arctic regions and at great depths along the ocean floor (benthic) at depths of greater than 300 meters. As the name suggests, this ice is rich in methane, encapsulated in tiny envelopes of water. It is very cold, and it is estimated that the world supply of methane hydrate is about equal to the natural gas reserves in conventional gas and oil fields. One of the reasons it may not be getting a lot of attention is that the discovery by popular writers have suggested that melting methane hydrate which bubbles to the surface of the ocean could actually explain the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. The theory (demonstrated as factual using models) is that when large pockets of gas are suddenly released under any sea going vessel, that although the density of water allows them to float, the combination of a lot of gas mixed in with the water is far less dense, and massive ships of steel (or even of wood) sink like a stone, very fast. Such speculative tales and associating the substance with the “mythology” of the Bermuda Triangle has keep methane hydrate out of the news in most cases.
That does not mean, however, that it is being ignored. Japan is desperate to reduce its dependency on foreign energy sources. They spent more than US$25 billion last year on energy imports. Therefore the island country is eagerly exploring exploitation of the methane trapped in large deposits not far from its own coast. They are working in cooperation with Canada and the US studying arctic deposits on land. Caution is strongly advised. Some scientists believe that methane hydrate is one of the main culprits in at least one of the great MASS EXTINCTIONS of the dinosaur era.
According to a Bloomberg News article from last December, filed by reporter, Shigeru Sato, some scientists claim it was melting of methane hydrate that caused the greatest overheating in prehistory. “Some researchers blame the greenhouse gas for triggering a global firestorm that helped wipe out the dinosaurs,” Sato says in his article. He also quotes Ryo Matsumoto of the University of Tokyo as saying, “Methane hydrate was a key cause of the global warming that led to one of the largest extinctions in the earth's history.” Indeed, reportedly Japan discovered these deposits of methane hydrate because some students noticed methane bubbling to the surface of the ocean spontaneously. Considerable caution seems only prudent as scientists explore the practicality of extracting the methane as a potential energy source.
Gulf Ethanol plans to purchase a biodiesel factory from Systems Management Group. That, in itself, wouldn't cause me to notice the transaction. What got my attention is, they are not buying it to operate as a business, they are buying it to disassemble it and move it to Central America. Gulf's CEO TJ Cloud is quoted on website “Red Orbit” as saying, “[that is] where feed stocks are plentiful and fuels are needed.” But on Gulf Ethanol's own website they also mention negotiations for new alliances with Uruguay's government and industrial community as well as strong ties with Brazil.
The fact that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is backing Senator Barack Obama's bid for the Democratic Party nomination for President may turn out to be good news for the biodiesel industry. Governor Richardson's Secretary of Agriculture, Miley Gonzalez, and his Rural Economic Advisor, Lenny Martinez were key movers in an “Biodiesel Policy Summit” held in that state recently. Naturally enough, the state's Department of Economic Development was another sponsor, as were Green Earth Fuels, Blue Sun Biodiesel, Sandia Labs, and the New Mexico Biodiesel Policy Association. Biodiesel Magazine online has all the details.
A Reuters news story from Friday also has some good news for biofuels industry. The government of Brazil just bought (at auction) 87 million gallons of biodiesel to help meet the mandated 2% biodiesel mix for all diesel fuel sold in the country. That is scheduled to increase to a mandatory B3 blend in July of this year. That is not, itself, the good news, but rather that they increased the offering price by 30% from previous auctions. Government officials claim that deliveries at the old prices presented no significant hardship to suppliers despite rises in prices for soy. It is their contention that most manufacturers probably had old stock on hand, purchased at lower prices, and that the new prices are sufficient to make a profit even with the new market price for soy in Brazil. They are now paying US$1.59 per liter. That converts to 1 gal. US = 3.7854 liters, so they are paying US$6.02/gal. I expect that US biodiesel makers would be only too happy to export to Brazil, if the opportunity came about at those prices.
Did you see the banana peel? Apparently neither did Senator Obama. I have heard two different recordings (both of the same speech) in which he spoke about people “clinging” to their beliefs, whether those might be religious, or social prejudice, or second amendment rights. The Clinton campaign and McCain have both siezed on that and focus on the word “bitter” in his characterizations of small town America. It bodes ill for Senator Obama in Pennsylvania, but it goes further than that. Many of the remaining contests could tilt in favor of Senator Clinton, IF she doesn't overdo.
We picked up the DVD of No Country for Old Men the multi-Oscar winning movie from the Cohen brothers, Joel and Ethan. No shortage of talented hands on this project. Splattered with violence and very high quality performances from legendary stars, the outstanding acting from the villain, played by Javier Bardem (who deservedly won Best Actor Oscar 2008). It was a chilling portrayal of a maniac without the caricature exaggeration typical in lesser films.
Love
Stafford “Doc” Williamson
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Biodiesel Auction Site Opens, Branson Hosts "Hot" Party, New Solid Catalyst is FAST!!
Visit DaoChi Energy of Arizona
Partial Index to articles by Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Okay, I admit I am confused, not that a state of confusion is all that unusual for me, but my head is swimming a bit trying to figure out if "history is about to repeat itself" or "yesterday was a lost weekend that lasted a week." If that didn´t clarify the situation much for you, welcome to my world, today, at least.
The events to which I am referring involve a gentleman who seems to have no difficulty setting heads to spinning. Indeed depending on your age and gender, his good looks alone I am sure have set many a heart aflutter. Combine that with his long standing success and even relatively longstanding billionaire status, and the man is doubtless the dream date of billions of people around the world. I am talking about Virgin Group chairman and CEO, Richard Branson.
Pardon me, more properly that would be "Sir Richard Branson", which also is not a recent development in his astounding career and accomplishments. It doesn´t hurt that his first major successes were in the music industry where a string of hits is practically a license to print money, but he has spread his success across the globe and all kinds of industries such that now one of his most visible assets is Virgin Atlantic Airlines. I mentioned recently that he had successfully flown a 747, or rather his company, in cooperation with Boeing flew a B5 biofuel blend in one engine of this test flight. Meanwhile he also announced that he made a deal with Rolls Royce (the British company that makes beautiful cars, but also makes powerful jet engines) that he would use those engines in the 787´s he had ordered from Boeing, provided that they continue to research biofuels for those "Trent 1000" engines. (The size of his order, US$2.6 billion, no doubt set some hearts aflutter at the Rolls Royce company, while his loyalty to British industry probably gave Queen Elizabeth another reason to be proud that she had recognized him with a knighthood for prior acts of national economic significance.)
Now, if you are one of those "glass half-empty" people, you could see him and all of his commercial, manufacturing and transportation ventures as one of the great [evil] pollution contributors of our times. The half-full glass people should be able to also recognize that the man is practically a one-man army against the forces of global warming. He keeps making appearances in my column because he is not merely "hedging his bets", (though no doubt he is doing that too) but he is diligently seeking solutions to the problems of green fuels and clean, or at least cleaner, transportation. In addition to his deals with Boeing and Rolls Royce, he has invested in biobutanol research and development (a far more attractive candidate because of its compatibility with existing vehicle fueling infrastructure, than ethanol) and has committed all the profits from his transportation businesses for the next several years to R&D on clean fuels.
While I am not, myself, swooning over Sir Richard´s good looks, or even his bank account, he was at the center of my dizziness recently because it was just a couple of days ago that I read somewhere that a distant acquaintance had been invited to attend some sort of "retreat" with Sir Richard on his (private) island in the Caribbean, along with some other people with whom I have at least a passing familiarity as prominent figures in Internet marketing circles. Since that person and I have a mutual friend (okay, my "friend" is more of an acquaintance, too, really) I wrote my "friend" a note yesterday about bringing up some issues of green energy and biofuels in particular if he too was going to be attending this little party. I was prompted to write because yesterday I came across an article which mentioned that Sir Richard is also interested in yet another aspect of "green" fuels that is a particular interest of mine.
Today, however, my head is doing a Linda Blair impression (in The Exorcist for those of your not old enough to recognize the reference, her head appeared to turn a complete 360 degrees or more because her character was "possessed").
The reason is simple, either I did not recognize that the "retreat" on Sir Richard´s island (actually he owns two, one called "Mosquito" for its tiny size, and another called "Necker Island", although I don´t know the origin of the second name ;o) ) would happen so soon, or I failed to notice that the mention of the gathering was not as fresh an entry as I had assumed at the time that it was mentioned. In any case, it does almost seem incumbent upon me to tell you that the meeting did, apparently already take place, and that those in attendance were, indeed, the glitterati of the Internet. The International Herald Tribune covered the event in a brief story. Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, "What he [Branson] wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet." Also in attendance was Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, and current backer of Tesla Motors, maker of the sexy US$100,000 all electric sports car (a bargain by Ferrari pricing standards, with similar performance some reports say).
Also attending was D. Hunt Ramsbottom, CEO of Rentech, a company specializing in Fischer-Tropsch conversion of conventional fossil derived hydrocarbon sources into jet fuel. They are, apparently, trying to adapt to the way the economic "wind" is blowing by adding biomass to the various feedstocks they currently use, but the commonality is that they aim to output fuels suitable for jet engines by upgrading the output of the F-T with a further differentiation (presumably differential distillation, though their website was not explicit on this point). Also in attendance was venture capitalist extraordinaire, Vinod Khosla, still singing the praises of ethanol (cellulosic, of course) but the reporter also noted that Mr. Khosla´s investments now encompass some 33 different ventures in the green technology field. Talk about bold and adventurous venture capital lending! Mr. Khosla definitely deserves highest marks for being open to the possibilities and is very likely to be a major influence in shaping the future, whatever that may bring. Good luck to him, as always.
BTW, Rentech says it prefers iron as the F-T catalyst because it isn´t prone to "poisoning" as is cobalt if impurities are contained in the feedstock.
But that is not what I wanted to talk about with respect to Sir Richard. What I found fascinating this week was a note in an article highlighting the initiation of fuel-cell shuttles in an experiment with ferrying Virgin Atlantic´s first class passengers to their planes in Los Angeles and later New York and Washington, D.C. Putting a few hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road these days is barely newsworthy, were it not for Sir Richard´s high public profile. Nope, what caught my eye was that Sir Richard, like me, and a few others, is a poop fan.
Yes, Sir Richard spoke of negotiations near and dear to my own perspective on future green fuels. "We're talking to a lot of sewage plants about setting up algae plants above and using a lot of the CO2 coming off those sewage plants" to feed the algae. The creation of less CO2 output from sewage as well as creating biodiesel feedstock (and biomass, if it were to be a well integrated operation) is as Andrew Ross Sorkin reports Mr. Branson called it, a "double-whammy".
What I wanted my friend to point out to Sir Richard was that his "double whammy" is good, but that the paradigm for this century is not just, "Don´t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but recycle the bathwater too!" In this case, of course, the figurative bathwater is the sewage itself. While I prefer the thermal depolymerization route, I recognize that there clearly are several methods that could be employed to turn the actual sewage sludge into energy in general and to liquid fuels in particular. It also seemed like, with Sir Richard´s strong advocacy of "greening" the transportation business that he would be a potentially strong ally in a plan to spread this technology worldwide. I remain hopeful that the conference that has already taken place was just the first in a series and that more discussions with other "netrepreneurs" will still happen in the next few weeks. I certainly hope that someone will pass along my story to him. Babies, bathwater and sewage are all precious resources, and two of them even smell alike a good deal of the time.
Credit where credit is due, the "Project Driveway" (the shuttles for Virgin Airlines) is actually planning on putting a total of 100 Chevy Equinox fuel cells cars into the pilot project, not just "a few".
Also, new to the "scene" of green energy and biofuels is a new website that is still relatively unknown and not much trafficked, but that may have some potential. Fillmorefuels.com is aiming, it seems, to become the eBay of biofuels. Perhaps more of "Craig´s List", (on a smaller scale at the present time, but who knows what the future may hold for them), they offer buyers and sellers of biofuels (biodiesel and ethanol, at least), feedstocks, acids, catalysts, processors, and algae (and equipment) and even glycerol and educational products to list their items in an auction style listing section. They also have a small community forum area, and have seeded from early participants, some interesting topics including a discussion of a homegrown algae bioreactor. Take a look and see for yourself.
The news of the week comes Augsberg College, possibly the one thing with the most immediate potential impact is the announcement from Augsberg College that a student there inspired the creation of an improved conversion process from vegetable oil into biodiesel. What began as a summer project and curiosity on the part of Brian Krohn (now 21 and a senior at the college) turned up some fundamental research that led to the discovery of a process that uses heat and pressure and an innovative solid catalyst to quickly (extremely quickly, just 6 seconds in this pressure cooker) turn raw vegetable oil into biodiesel.
The project was taken over by senior researchers and commercialized as the McGyan process (a combination of the letters of the entrepreneur and scientists names). Unlike the platinum catalyst used in some petroleum distillation columns, this solid catalyst is fairly cheap and almost as plentiful as glass (which, coincidentally it resembles in appearance). The developers, Augsburg College Science Professor Arlin Gyberg, Ben Yan and Clayton McNeff, say it lowers the cost of production by about US$2 per gallon compared to conventional processing, and will accept feedstock with high levels of free fatty acids (they say, up to 20%, too high for conventional processing) yet processes it 100% into biodiesel. Because it is a "dry" process it needs no "wash" to remove water and the glycerol and fuel are relatively easily separated. They estimate that their 4 inch by 24 inch reaction chamber can produce up to about 3 million gallons per year because of the extremely short resident time, and as if all of that good news wasn´t enough, they say the process will also convert glycerin into dimethyl ester (DME). With just 6 seconds residence time, the process could easily be virtually (or with paralleling, even actually) continuous flow, rather than mere batch. The half gallon chamber capacity is even large enough that by designing for multiple processors could keep both capital cost and maintenance to a minimum with little or no down time should repairs be required. Even Rumblestiltskin would probably be impressed.
Candidate Senator Barack Obama´s speech this week was a triumph, but perhaps not enough to triumph over the shortcoming it attempted to address. Far too many Americans are reluctant to forgive people for making "un-American" remarks. Back in the day, as they say, Senator Joseph McCarthy didn´t "sell" the witch-hunt he was conducting as, "The Congressional Committee on Communist Activities", he used the phrase, "Un-American Activities". It is a side effect of being steeped in such a strong tradition of national pride that borders on hubris that it could even be the leak that bursts the dam on the rising tide of pro-Obama sentiment in the country.
The media, meanwhile, though reluctant to give up on what they have perceived as a very saleable set of controversies and battles between the Democratic Candidates, are all but burying Senator Clinton´s chances of ever achieving the front runner position in the race again. They talk about how a 60-40% win for the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania would barely make any difference in the delegate count. I have to concede that the chances are fast becoming mathematically slim, but slim is not none, and even if Senator Clinton´s campaign is forced to accept a 50-50 split in delegates from Michigan and Florida, it is not impossible (despite the pundits´ predictions) that an overwhelming majority may reject Senator Obama, just because he has had this, and potentially other vulnerabilities to attack from a far less charitable Republican Presidential campaign. The possibility is not as remote as a lightning strike, or an earth destroying meteor, because it is possible that Senator Clinton could emerge with spectacular victories, unimaginable to the media, like a series of 80-20% wins in all the remaining primary contests.
I am not predicting it, but counting the Clinton campaign out before the counting is done, is clearly premature.
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Get the latest biofuels videos and news at http://winfotech.com/energy/
Partial Index to articles by Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Okay, I admit I am confused, not that a state of confusion is all that unusual for me, but my head is swimming a bit trying to figure out if "history is about to repeat itself" or "yesterday was a lost weekend that lasted a week." If that didn´t clarify the situation much for you, welcome to my world, today, at least.
The events to which I am referring involve a gentleman who seems to have no difficulty setting heads to spinning. Indeed depending on your age and gender, his good looks alone I am sure have set many a heart aflutter. Combine that with his long standing success and even relatively longstanding billionaire status, and the man is doubtless the dream date of billions of people around the world. I am talking about Virgin Group chairman and CEO, Richard Branson.
Pardon me, more properly that would be "Sir Richard Branson", which also is not a recent development in his astounding career and accomplishments. It doesn´t hurt that his first major successes were in the music industry where a string of hits is practically a license to print money, but he has spread his success across the globe and all kinds of industries such that now one of his most visible assets is Virgin Atlantic Airlines. I mentioned recently that he had successfully flown a 747, or rather his company, in cooperation with Boeing flew a B5 biofuel blend in one engine of this test flight. Meanwhile he also announced that he made a deal with Rolls Royce (the British company that makes beautiful cars, but also makes powerful jet engines) that he would use those engines in the 787´s he had ordered from Boeing, provided that they continue to research biofuels for those "Trent 1000" engines. (The size of his order, US$2.6 billion, no doubt set some hearts aflutter at the Rolls Royce company, while his loyalty to British industry probably gave Queen Elizabeth another reason to be proud that she had recognized him with a knighthood for prior acts of national economic significance.)
Now, if you are one of those "glass half-empty" people, you could see him and all of his commercial, manufacturing and transportation ventures as one of the great [evil] pollution contributors of our times. The half-full glass people should be able to also recognize that the man is practically a one-man army against the forces of global warming. He keeps making appearances in my column because he is not merely "hedging his bets", (though no doubt he is doing that too) but he is diligently seeking solutions to the problems of green fuels and clean, or at least cleaner, transportation. In addition to his deals with Boeing and Rolls Royce, he has invested in biobutanol research and development (a far more attractive candidate because of its compatibility with existing vehicle fueling infrastructure, than ethanol) and has committed all the profits from his transportation businesses for the next several years to R&D on clean fuels.
While I am not, myself, swooning over Sir Richard´s good looks, or even his bank account, he was at the center of my dizziness recently because it was just a couple of days ago that I read somewhere that a distant acquaintance had been invited to attend some sort of "retreat" with Sir Richard on his (private) island in the Caribbean, along with some other people with whom I have at least a passing familiarity as prominent figures in Internet marketing circles. Since that person and I have a mutual friend (okay, my "friend" is more of an acquaintance, too, really) I wrote my "friend" a note yesterday about bringing up some issues of green energy and biofuels in particular if he too was going to be attending this little party. I was prompted to write because yesterday I came across an article which mentioned that Sir Richard is also interested in yet another aspect of "green" fuels that is a particular interest of mine.
Today, however, my head is doing a Linda Blair impression (in The Exorcist for those of your not old enough to recognize the reference, her head appeared to turn a complete 360 degrees or more because her character was "possessed").
The reason is simple, either I did not recognize that the "retreat" on Sir Richard´s island (actually he owns two, one called "Mosquito" for its tiny size, and another called "Necker Island", although I don´t know the origin of the second name ;o) ) would happen so soon, or I failed to notice that the mention of the gathering was not as fresh an entry as I had assumed at the time that it was mentioned. In any case, it does almost seem incumbent upon me to tell you that the meeting did, apparently already take place, and that those in attendance were, indeed, the glitterati of the Internet. The International Herald Tribune covered the event in a brief story. Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote, "What he [Branson] wanted to know was whether his high-powered visitors, among them Larry Page of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, thought global warming threatened the planet." Also in attendance was Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, and current backer of Tesla Motors, maker of the sexy US$100,000 all electric sports car (a bargain by Ferrari pricing standards, with similar performance some reports say).
Also attending was D. Hunt Ramsbottom, CEO of Rentech, a company specializing in Fischer-Tropsch conversion of conventional fossil derived hydrocarbon sources into jet fuel. They are, apparently, trying to adapt to the way the economic "wind" is blowing by adding biomass to the various feedstocks they currently use, but the commonality is that they aim to output fuels suitable for jet engines by upgrading the output of the F-T with a further differentiation (presumably differential distillation, though their website was not explicit on this point). Also in attendance was venture capitalist extraordinaire, Vinod Khosla, still singing the praises of ethanol (cellulosic, of course) but the reporter also noted that Mr. Khosla´s investments now encompass some 33 different ventures in the green technology field. Talk about bold and adventurous venture capital lending! Mr. Khosla definitely deserves highest marks for being open to the possibilities and is very likely to be a major influence in shaping the future, whatever that may bring. Good luck to him, as always.
BTW, Rentech says it prefers iron as the F-T catalyst because it isn´t prone to "poisoning" as is cobalt if impurities are contained in the feedstock.
But that is not what I wanted to talk about with respect to Sir Richard. What I found fascinating this week was a note in an article highlighting the initiation of fuel-cell shuttles in an experiment with ferrying Virgin Atlantic´s first class passengers to their planes in Los Angeles and later New York and Washington, D.C. Putting a few hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road these days is barely newsworthy, were it not for Sir Richard´s high public profile. Nope, what caught my eye was that Sir Richard, like me, and a few others, is a poop fan.
Yes, Sir Richard spoke of negotiations near and dear to my own perspective on future green fuels. "We're talking to a lot of sewage plants about setting up algae plants above and using a lot of the CO2 coming off those sewage plants" to feed the algae. The creation of less CO2 output from sewage as well as creating biodiesel feedstock (and biomass, if it were to be a well integrated operation) is as Andrew Ross Sorkin reports Mr. Branson called it, a "double-whammy".
What I wanted my friend to point out to Sir Richard was that his "double whammy" is good, but that the paradigm for this century is not just, "Don´t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but recycle the bathwater too!" In this case, of course, the figurative bathwater is the sewage itself. While I prefer the thermal depolymerization route, I recognize that there clearly are several methods that could be employed to turn the actual sewage sludge into energy in general and to liquid fuels in particular. It also seemed like, with Sir Richard´s strong advocacy of "greening" the transportation business that he would be a potentially strong ally in a plan to spread this technology worldwide. I remain hopeful that the conference that has already taken place was just the first in a series and that more discussions with other "netrepreneurs" will still happen in the next few weeks. I certainly hope that someone will pass along my story to him. Babies, bathwater and sewage are all precious resources, and two of them even smell alike a good deal of the time.
Credit where credit is due, the "Project Driveway" (the shuttles for Virgin Airlines) is actually planning on putting a total of 100 Chevy Equinox fuel cells cars into the pilot project, not just "a few".
Also, new to the "scene" of green energy and biofuels is a new website that is still relatively unknown and not much trafficked, but that may have some potential. Fillmorefuels.com is aiming, it seems, to become the eBay of biofuels. Perhaps more of "Craig´s List", (on a smaller scale at the present time, but who knows what the future may hold for them), they offer buyers and sellers of biofuels (biodiesel and ethanol, at least), feedstocks, acids, catalysts, processors, and algae (and equipment) and even glycerol and educational products to list their items in an auction style listing section. They also have a small community forum area, and have seeded from early participants, some interesting topics including a discussion of a homegrown algae bioreactor. Take a look and see for yourself.
The news of the week comes Augsberg College, possibly the one thing with the most immediate potential impact is the announcement from Augsberg College that a student there inspired the creation of an improved conversion process from vegetable oil into biodiesel. What began as a summer project and curiosity on the part of Brian Krohn (now 21 and a senior at the college) turned up some fundamental research that led to the discovery of a process that uses heat and pressure and an innovative solid catalyst to quickly (extremely quickly, just 6 seconds in this pressure cooker) turn raw vegetable oil into biodiesel.
The project was taken over by senior researchers and commercialized as the McGyan process (a combination of the letters of the entrepreneur and scientists names). Unlike the platinum catalyst used in some petroleum distillation columns, this solid catalyst is fairly cheap and almost as plentiful as glass (which, coincidentally it resembles in appearance). The developers, Augsburg College Science Professor Arlin Gyberg, Ben Yan and Clayton McNeff, say it lowers the cost of production by about US$2 per gallon compared to conventional processing, and will accept feedstock with high levels of free fatty acids (they say, up to 20%, too high for conventional processing) yet processes it 100% into biodiesel. Because it is a "dry" process it needs no "wash" to remove water and the glycerol and fuel are relatively easily separated. They estimate that their 4 inch by 24 inch reaction chamber can produce up to about 3 million gallons per year because of the extremely short resident time, and as if all of that good news wasn´t enough, they say the process will also convert glycerin into dimethyl ester (DME). With just 6 seconds residence time, the process could easily be virtually (or with paralleling, even actually) continuous flow, rather than mere batch. The half gallon chamber capacity is even large enough that by designing for multiple processors could keep both capital cost and maintenance to a minimum with little or no down time should repairs be required. Even Rumblestiltskin would probably be impressed.
Candidate Senator Barack Obama´s speech this week was a triumph, but perhaps not enough to triumph over the shortcoming it attempted to address. Far too many Americans are reluctant to forgive people for making "un-American" remarks. Back in the day, as they say, Senator Joseph McCarthy didn´t "sell" the witch-hunt he was conducting as, "The Congressional Committee on Communist Activities", he used the phrase, "Un-American Activities". It is a side effect of being steeped in such a strong tradition of national pride that borders on hubris that it could even be the leak that bursts the dam on the rising tide of pro-Obama sentiment in the country.
The media, meanwhile, though reluctant to give up on what they have perceived as a very saleable set of controversies and battles between the Democratic Candidates, are all but burying Senator Clinton´s chances of ever achieving the front runner position in the race again. They talk about how a 60-40% win for the Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania would barely make any difference in the delegate count. I have to concede that the chances are fast becoming mathematically slim, but slim is not none, and even if Senator Clinton´s campaign is forced to accept a 50-50 split in delegates from Michigan and Florida, it is not impossible (despite the pundits´ predictions) that an overwhelming majority may reject Senator Obama, just because he has had this, and potentially other vulnerabilities to attack from a far less charitable Republican Presidential campaign. The possibility is not as remote as a lightning strike, or an earth destroying meteor, because it is possible that Senator Clinton could emerge with spectacular victories, unimaginable to the media, like a series of 80-20% wins in all the remaining primary contests.
I am not predicting it, but counting the Clinton campaign out before the counting is done, is clearly premature.
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Get the latest biofuels videos and news at http://winfotech.com/energy/
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Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Farmers High on Soy, Biodiesel Makers Not so Much, Brazil and S.A. Boom, Alabama Gets Texas Oil
The economics of soybean oil for biodiesel has committed market suicide. Even with rising gas (and diesel) prices, it is nearly impossible to make a profit from biodiesel production with soy oil as the feedstock. At least that is the conclusion of someone a lot closer to the ground than I am. The Farmers' Guardian published a story dated March 14, 2008 saying, "Two years ago soy oil was in the low 20s (cents per pound),"” says Ed Ulch, a soybean farmer from Solon, Iowa. "Now it’s 52 cents per pound. The break-even price for these biodiesel plants is 43 cents."
Now, in truth, I don't necessarily subscribe to the above stated conclusions, but considering other feedstocks (as the story goes on to discuss, including using rapeseed (canola), animal fats and waste fryer grease) is an essential strategy for survival of the many biodiesel production facilities that are still springing up like toadstools all around the world. Indeed, biodiesel producers have to realize that even if they find a much cheaper feedstock today, the demand for their product is rising so fast that the primary feedstock of tomorrow will rapidly rise in price, too, in all likelihood. By all means we need to turn more attention (and quickly, I might add) to jatropha, neam, and perhaps even cellulosic biodiesel (umm, I think that one would be one we'd have to call "synthetic diesel" according to the technical definitions that exist today). But beyond that, we need to turn our eyes (again, rapidly) toward the one biological source that appears to hold the most promise, which is algae.
On the other hand, the evidence is in that at least some biodiesel facilities are grinding to a halt as a result of the rising price of soy oil. The Albert Lea Tribune (in Minnesota) reports that the Board of Governors of SoyMor Biodiesel LLC are suspending the production of biodiesel at this time in hopes of preserving the longer term health of the company that employs 30 people. This source quotes soy oil pricing this way: "The Chicago Board of Trade closing price Friday for March soybean oil was 62 cents per pound; January soybean oil closed at 64 cents." Which a SoyMor spokesman called 10 cents too high to be viable. (Seems that the SoyMor spokesman and Mr Ulch, at least, can agree.) Yet they remain optimistic in the true tradition of mid-Western farm communities. Board Chairman Gary Pestorius, is also quoted as saying, "High prices cure high prices."
Clearly there are signs that businesses still have faith that soy can be a viable route for biodiesel. In South Africa, EngineeringNews (of South Africa) reports a R1.5 billion (US$213 million) biodiesel plant has been announced, claiming expected operational date some time in late 2009. Investors in this company are mainly from Australia, and have not yet sold an interest [as required by law] to South Africans, but, "Rainbow Nation Renewable Fuels (RNRF) was in the "final stages" of applying for a licence from government to produce 288-million litres a year of biodiesel from a R1.5-billion plant it was building at Coega in the Eastern Cape." Although the company has targeted domestic crops of soy from the South African nation as their eventual feedstock, they anticipate that they will initially be importing much of the required 250,000 tonnes a year since the entire domestic soybean crop is approximately just 300,000 tonnes per year according to the Engineering News report. Another company, LG Biodiesel has announced what, "they believe is a first in South Africa, a fully self contained and mobile Biodiesel manufacturing unit." It may well be the first in South Africa, but there are numerous versions available around the world. However, "the news" IS what you can get reported, so I guess it is newsworthy, or at least the price of R80,000 (which is just US$10,000) does seem like it might be viable for the purpose for which it was intended, which is to provide locally generated fuel for local electric generation in "off grid" remote locations. Provided local farmers are willing to grow the oil crops necessary, this really is likely to be the long term hope for eco-friendly modernization in much of Africa. While these mobile, trailer mounted units can provide fuel to power electric generators in isolated regions, they could also be used to accelerate development of villages as suburbs of the larger metropolitan regions too, temporarily extending the reach of electric services in advance of the arrival of a more interconnected power grid. There are those, too, who see the future of electric power as residing in distributed generation capabilities in general, and the addition of "smart grid" architecture is a hot topic in Europe at the moment.
Reportedly Brazil is considering advancing the target date of B5 manadatory blending to 2010. The report from Rio de Janeiro says (via the Estado newswire service, according to the CNN.com website, which came from the Dow Jones newswire service)(sorry, I like to have more direct resources, but although I am sometimes re-published in Brazil, I don't read Portuguese myself) Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao wants to push up the starting lines for 3% biodiesel blends as a mandatory regulation for Brazil as early as July this year, with another increment to 4% next year before the 5% in 2010. According to this story, the country now consumes 840 million liters with the current regulations that require all diesel to be blended at least as B2 (2% biodiesel), so that would boost domestic consumption to 1260 million liters per year. The Minister indicated that this level was not a problem for the country since current capacity it to produce 2.5 billion liters per year, which, according to my math says that they could theoretically bump that up to 5% immediately without creating a shortage.
Ah, but THEN the newswire story goes on to say that: "Much of Brazil's biodiesel output capacity lies idle, however, due to high prices of raw materials, such as soy oil." You see? I told you.
Ah, BUT, that's not the whole picture, and as I suggested above, let's now turn our eyes to algae.
Last month PetroSun BioFuels, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of PetroSun, Inc. (Other OTC:PSUD.PK - News), acquired an 87.5% ownership interest in Fleet Biodiesel, Inc. located in Bridgeport, Alabama. This facility is located with access to the Kentucky river, and is currently producing at about an annual rate of 720,000 gallons according to the news release from Petrosun. Now, if everybody else is moaning and groaning about biodiesel being squeezed out of the market by rising soy prices, what does Petrosun know that everybody else does not? Petrosun has also (and more recently) announced that they are opening a facility near South Padre Island (South East of Houston, TX), that will be producing algae, and from that, algal oil. Indeed, production plans for the Bridgeport facility are to boost production to 2.4 million gallons per year, using algal oil. The open pond method being employed by Petrosun allows them to get started with a huge facility (well, huge compared to anything anyone else in the continental United States is operating currently) (to the best of my knowledge, though if you know about one that is larger, please tell me about it). The photo at the top of this article shows some of the ten acre open pond cultivation areas, in full bloom on the left and not active on the right.
Petrosun says they expect to be operational by April 1st, 2008. The "farm" as they call it has 94 ponds of five acre size and 63 ponds of ten acre size on the 1,831 acre site. By Petrosun's calculation that is 1,100 acres under "cultivation" in the ponds. With their commitment to the Bridgeport facility I don't know how much oil they will have left over, but their press release tantalizingly promised, "PetroSun will conduct algae-to-jet fuel and algae-to-bioplastics research and development projects." If that's true, I applaud their aim, and will look forward to meeting and talking with them.I don't know where I found the self-restraint to avoid mentioning politics this week, except that it is already Tuesday, and I still haven't submitted this to my editors, so, I will postpone politics and entertainment "bon mots" until next time.
Love,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Oh, yes, part of the reason I have been so slow getting this week's musings together is that I have been working on a government bid, and revamping my "printer supply" shop at http://www.sav-mor-on-ink.com/ , where prices are better than ever to the public and the corporate and government trade has been isolated out of sight (more or less).
Saturday, March 1, 2008
A young man was killed - a hate crime
This link should be on THE mostimportantpageontheinternet.com if such a place exists.
I barely managed not to cry when I saw this. I hope you can understand the importance that everyone needs to act upon this plea from Ellen deGeneris
SEE THIS VIDEO NOW, and PLEASE, make sure everyone you know sees it too.
love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
I barely managed not to cry when I saw this. I hope you can understand the importance that everyone needs to act upon this plea from Ellen deGeneris
SEE THIS VIDEO NOW, and PLEASE, make sure everyone you know sees it too.
love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Green Politics requires Immediate Action to be Effective
I am in a hurry today, because this is NOT my regular weekly brain dump, just a quick note to test a theory.
I hope that people are listening, but I fear they are not. I have been seeing a lot of "biofuels are a hoax" nonsense lately. Some people even try to cloak this negative publicity in the garb of scientific jargon, like "it violates Newton's First Law" (of thermodynamics) without understanding that the systems are constantly acquiring input, which their calculations never take into account.
I have recently put up a couple of videos, including one called "Algae the Wonderfuel" that I rather like, but frankly I am concerned that all the "research" in the world is not going to get us to a practical level of actual attenuation of the problem fast enough to really be a solution. Endless political debates may actually be needed, but I, for one, think that we need to get something HAPPENING and the debates should take place on the issues to be refined, not the basic premise that we have to change our ways.
Conservation? Well, let's see, 30 years or more ago, as personal computers were starting to make an appearance, there were all these predictions of "paperless" offices. The opposite result came about. And paper waste in one form or another constitutes almost 70% of the content of all urban (industrialized nations') landfills.
Let's make a SERIOUS effort to convert all the administrative work we can to being work-from-home TELECOMMUTER work. The fuel savings there will be enormous. And that means not just the fuel itself, but all the infrastructure wear and tear as well as the depreciation and actual replacement needs in terms of automobiles as well.
Take a look at the "green" videos below and see what IDEAS you come up with, and by all means, discuss it here in your comments.
THANKS
I hope that people are listening, but I fear they are not. I have been seeing a lot of "biofuels are a hoax" nonsense lately. Some people even try to cloak this negative publicity in the garb of scientific jargon, like "it violates Newton's First Law" (of thermodynamics) without understanding that the systems are constantly acquiring input, which their calculations never take into account.
I have recently put up a couple of videos, including one called "Algae the Wonderfuel" that I rather like, but frankly I am concerned that all the "research" in the world is not going to get us to a practical level of actual attenuation of the problem fast enough to really be a solution. Endless political debates may actually be needed, but I, for one, think that we need to get something HAPPENING and the debates should take place on the issues to be refined, not the basic premise that we have to change our ways.
Conservation? Well, let's see, 30 years or more ago, as personal computers were starting to make an appearance, there were all these predictions of "paperless" offices. The opposite result came about. And paper waste in one form or another constitutes almost 70% of the content of all urban (industrialized nations') landfills.
Let's make a SERIOUS effort to convert all the administrative work we can to being work-from-home TELECOMMUTER work. The fuel savings there will be enormous. And that means not just the fuel itself, but all the infrastructure wear and tear as well as the depreciation and actual replacement needs in terms of automobiles as well.
Take a look at the "green" videos below and see what IDEAS you come up with, and by all means, discuss it here in your comments.
THANKS
Monday, February 25, 2008
Better than Coal: Gasification of Waste to Energy, Oscars, Afghanistan and Missing Mass Murderers
Sometimes a news release is more confusing than illuminating. I am becoming more of a fan of simple gasification of wastes to produce electric energy (as compared to using fossil fuels for this purpose). One such announcement came out a few days back that a company called Global Energy, Inc. has signed two separate deals. For some strange reason they seemed to feel it was only worth one publicity release, and thereby helped confuse more than enlighten me. The press release said that Global had a deal to allow them to purchase projects from the company to which they are licensing their technology (that is, IF I understood correctly, and I am not sure I did). Specifically the release says they will have, "the right to invest a majority of the equity for all of the projects that are developed by," the other company, which is called Renewable Diesel LLC.
Meanwhile, Global Energy Inc., has also done a deal to license their technology to Covanta, who have recently become involved in power production in Guangzhou province of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese deal is specifically for converting some of the 27 million tons of annual household wastes in that province. The deal with Global has to do with "certain feedstocks" in the US and some other countries. Meanwhile, Global Energy Inc., seems most intent upon using its Integrated Gasification and Combined Cycle IGCC processing for the (clean?) combustion of coal and "petcoke". So, I trust you can see where the initial reading of the half page press release left considerable confusion as to what was being announced and who was doing what, and to whom.
Nevertheless, I wish all three companies the very best in their efforts, and hope that we see more of the gasification of MSW and less of coal. Whatever else may be done with coal fired electric generating plants, it is still digging fossil carbon out of the ground, and spewing it into the atmosphere, or at best adding that carbon load to the life cycle carbon in plants and oceans. Until and unless we are forming smokestack carbon directly into sheets of carbon fiber materials for the construction of airplanes and cars and such, I have a great deal of difficulty looking upon combustion of fossil fuels (coal) as a positive step for the environment.
On the other hand, I read an interesting, though unsubstantiated statement this week that I will be giving some thought and perhaps some investigation to follow. In a "pro" forum on biofuels, one gentleman forwarded the proposition (which he claimed was a conclusion) that the temperature of the planet causes the rise in atmospheric carbon and not the other way around. As you may know, if you have been reading my columns for a long time, I am not a subscriber to the idea that ANY scientific theory or "law" is beyond re-examination, and I am certainly not convinced that the verdict of thousands of scientists make "global warming" (or, if you prefer, "climate change") a fact as regard to the main cause being human originated greenhouse gases concentrations rising in our planet's atmosphere. There are at least to major alternative theories that still seem viable and neither has been conclusively disproven. If either of those are, indeed, the primary cause of our climate change observations (including greenhouse gas concentrations), this gentleman's proposition that planet temperature may be effect rather than cause in our situation.
Whole books have been written, I am sure, on both of these postulates, so I won't try to argue for or against them, except to say that the actual amount of energy transaction initiated by humans for the last few thousand years is probably less than 1% of the energy output of the center and star of our solar system, the sun, in a week. (Probably closer to 1% of the sun's output in an hour.) So it seems perfectly plausible to me that the much overlooked idea that the upward trend in sun spot activity may well be the real source of additional energy striking the earth and possibly the principal cause for a warming trend in our weather. Nor is that the only alternative explanation.
Similarly, rather than an external force (or human's bumbling) causing slightly different weather, it could, in fact, be INTERNAL forces, below the surface of the earth's crust. Down deep in the mantel or even at the level of the earth's core, the convection currents of molten rock or the expansion or contraction of the core (by even microscopic amounts) could have unimaginably significant effects on the earth's magnetic fields, the gravitational fields, and thereby subtle but not insignificantly affect ion levels , wind patterns, ocean currents, and much more as well. I am certainly not saying that these are more valid explanations, I am simply saying that not enough is known about either core dynamics or solar radiation to completely eliminate them as contributory, to some large or small degree.
Remember that even Sir Isaac Newton's "laws" are invalid at the sub-atomic level, if quantum physics has any validity, and for that matter, quantum physics is starting to be displaced in the scientific pantheon by string theory. Who knows what the next generation might discover. I am also not saying that my own personal version of "string theory" is any more correct than anyone else's, but I do hope that eventually some brilliant young mind(s) may stumble across it (maybe even with my help) :o) and gain an insight from an alternative perspective that may flip on a light bulb in their mind that takes us through the next giant leap for mankind.
Back in today's energy world, Wired's Blog reported some substantial improvement in hybrid battery performance was claimed by some folks who replaced the factory installed Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries with their version of a lead-acid battery. Their variation was superior in performance because of more efficient charging. Lead-acid batteries can be recharged on a smaller increase in power than the factory ones (105% vs. 140%, I believe the article said), but also because of more efficient power management which was possible because of the addition of electronic monitoring and modern electronic capacitors, indeed it was called the "Supercapacitor UltraBattery". Further improvements were also expected by the use of a "foamed" lead plate. The foam structure is actually carbon fiber in the "Firefly" battery. Again the recharge characteristics offer an advantage because the NiMH batteries charge best with a constant flow of current (not really available when being charged by intermittent regenerative braking, for instance), while the lead acid batteries only require constant voltage for the most efficient use of the charging energy, so again, this is better suited to the mobile application, and Firefly touts this as making plug-in hybrids a step closer to your garage.
I watched part of a Bill Moyers program on PBS Saturday night (due to the inconvenience of Arizona having its OWN time zone, PBS may have broadcast this on another date in your area, if you even get PBS, which tends to only be available in the USA and border town to the North and South). His guest, being interviewed, was a former National Public Radio reporter. "After the war," as she termed it, Sarah Chayes, went back to Afghanistan to develop a business, to try to help, in many ways, including rebuilding the country in a way that we as Americans, or rather the Bush administration, have neglected to do in that country since "winning" the battle with the Taliban, and installing our guy, President Hamid Karzai as president of the "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" (hey, I kid you not, that's the link to his web site, just like "whitehouse.gov"). It is Ms. Chayes contention that the US$1 billion we are sending to Pakistan every year is what is financing the insurgents in the area, and the Pakistani government is turning a blind eye to a certain Mr. Baitullah Mehsud in order not to have him running amok all the time. Ms. Chayes says that the Pakistani army tosses us a token al-Qaeda leader from time to time, but the Pakistani people consider Mehsud to be the main terrorist in their country, according to what Senator Joe Biden said when he appeared on This Week with George Stephanopolous on Sunday) and no one is actually looking for Osama Bin Laden. The National Post (www.nationalpost.com online) reports that the Pakistani, "the military seem prepared to cut the same sort of deal they made two years ago with Islamist extremists in North Waziristan."
Meanwhile they also know very well where Mehsud is, too, but they are not attempting to go after him to avoid reactionary actions by his supporters elsewhere. Sarah Chayes still operates a cosmetics business in Afghanistan in Kandahar province. She says that although the roads in town and the road to Kabul have been paved, they are no longer safe for her to travel. Certainly not alone, and not as a woman alone. The locals tell her that during the day they are extorted by corrupt officials, and then the Taliban come with their own extortion threats at night when the government officials have gone home.
Senator Biden also pointed out that our total financial contribution to the rehabilitation of Afghanistan in the past 5 or 6 years has been about equal to what we are spending in Iraq in just 3 weeks. Senator Biden, Senator John Kerry, and Senator Chuck Hagel have just returned from observing Pakistani elections in which President Musharaf's party was overwhelmed by support for two opposition parties. Yet the "wise men" of Washington advise that it is too soon for the Pakistani Parliament to consider impeaching President Musharaf, even though he now says he has no plans to resign, and that we need to give him "room" to come to that decision on his own.
Although I am tempted to turn to the Oscars here, I will spare you, since I have just put the TiVO on hold to finish this column and haven't finished watching them myself, yet. However, in the world of entertainment, it is not entirely coincidental that I just watched a film set in Serbia where, this week, protesters set fire to the US Embassy to signal their disapproval of US officially recognizing the new independent government of Kosovo. Oh, don't mistake my meaning. I had no prescient feelings about Kosovo or US reaction to it.
What I meant was not entirely coincidentally to Ms. Chayes' account of the Taliban and the "ceasefire" with insurgents in Pakistan, this film was about a what happened after a "massive manhunt" that failed to turn up the leading Serbian war criminal known as "the Fox", reviled for his slaughter of whole villages Muslims and other unspeakable horrors in the name of “ethnic cleansing.” The film is called The Hunting Party which stars Richard Gere, Terrance Howard (probably best known for his fine performance in Crash) and although his "star" status did seem to rate him star billing, Jesse Eisenberg. (Mr. Eisenberg’s performance was outstanding, and I offer that unbiased assessment on Oscar night, of all nights.) The story goes that "only the most ludicrous details and incidents are true", that after a supposed massive manhunt by the UN forces, these few journalists are able to locate and meet with this heinous war criminal in just two days of casual journalistic investigation, at which point the film story goes, they are rescued by a secret (non-existent, they are so secret) CIA team from the clutches of this monster mass-murderer just as he is about to kill them. Yet somehow the Serbian leader who was just running out the back door when the CIA arrived, guns blazing, escapes and everyone who had any contact with the journalists is transferred to another country. I am not in the habit of spoiling people's enjoyment of a movie by giving away the plot entirely, so I won't reveal the ending, but although the film was at least passable, with many enjoyable moments, the real point of the film, and of my mentioning it, is the parallel to the situations in the Middle East today.
Well, that wasn't exactly my traditional "good news" ending, so I will take a quick side trip to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (“the Oscars,” to you), to mention that the wonderful young actress who gave such an outstanding performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (I commended her performance in this column a few weeks back, I believe) won the statuette for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. It was well deserved, even among such luminaries as Kate Blanchett, (who also DID win for Best Supporting for her portayal of Bob Dylan [yes, THE Bob Dylan, the man] in I'm Not There) and Julie Christie (in Away from Her) and the captivating newcomer Ellen Page (from Nova Scotia, by the way), in JUNO.
I was happy for Kate Blanchett in the supporting category, although it might have been nice to see the second "tie" in Academy history so she could split it with the marvelous performance by Ruby Dee who played Denzel's character's mother in American Gangster.
Now, I must get back to the rest of the Oscars on TiVo, and I will look forward to chatting again with you next week.
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Oh, yes, almost forgot to mention, I opened a new online "Game Mall" at
http://gamemall.winfotech.com and don't puzzle too long over the actual name of the Game Mall, it is pronounced "Circus" but spelled "Psyrk.us" (well, I thought it was cute). See you at the mall, I hope. ;o)
Meanwhile, Global Energy Inc., has also done a deal to license their technology to Covanta, who have recently become involved in power production in Guangzhou province of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese deal is specifically for converting some of the 27 million tons of annual household wastes in that province. The deal with Global has to do with "certain feedstocks" in the US and some other countries. Meanwhile, Global Energy Inc., seems most intent upon using its Integrated Gasification and Combined Cycle IGCC processing for the (clean?) combustion of coal and "petcoke". So, I trust you can see where the initial reading of the half page press release left considerable confusion as to what was being announced and who was doing what, and to whom.
Nevertheless, I wish all three companies the very best in their efforts, and hope that we see more of the gasification of MSW and less of coal. Whatever else may be done with coal fired electric generating plants, it is still digging fossil carbon out of the ground, and spewing it into the atmosphere, or at best adding that carbon load to the life cycle carbon in plants and oceans. Until and unless we are forming smokestack carbon directly into sheets of carbon fiber materials for the construction of airplanes and cars and such, I have a great deal of difficulty looking upon combustion of fossil fuels (coal) as a positive step for the environment.
On the other hand, I read an interesting, though unsubstantiated statement this week that I will be giving some thought and perhaps some investigation to follow. In a "pro" forum on biofuels, one gentleman forwarded the proposition (which he claimed was a conclusion) that the temperature of the planet causes the rise in atmospheric carbon and not the other way around. As you may know, if you have been reading my columns for a long time, I am not a subscriber to the idea that ANY scientific theory or "law" is beyond re-examination, and I am certainly not convinced that the verdict of thousands of scientists make "global warming" (or, if you prefer, "climate change") a fact as regard to the main cause being human originated greenhouse gases concentrations rising in our planet's atmosphere. There are at least to major alternative theories that still seem viable and neither has been conclusively disproven. If either of those are, indeed, the primary cause of our climate change observations (including greenhouse gas concentrations), this gentleman's proposition that planet temperature may be effect rather than cause in our situation.
Whole books have been written, I am sure, on both of these postulates, so I won't try to argue for or against them, except to say that the actual amount of energy transaction initiated by humans for the last few thousand years is probably less than 1% of the energy output of the center and star of our solar system, the sun, in a week. (Probably closer to 1% of the sun's output in an hour.) So it seems perfectly plausible to me that the much overlooked idea that the upward trend in sun spot activity may well be the real source of additional energy striking the earth and possibly the principal cause for a warming trend in our weather. Nor is that the only alternative explanation.
Similarly, rather than an external force (or human's bumbling) causing slightly different weather, it could, in fact, be INTERNAL forces, below the surface of the earth's crust. Down deep in the mantel or even at the level of the earth's core, the convection currents of molten rock or the expansion or contraction of the core (by even microscopic amounts) could have unimaginably significant effects on the earth's magnetic fields, the gravitational fields, and thereby subtle but not insignificantly affect ion levels , wind patterns, ocean currents, and much more as well. I am certainly not saying that these are more valid explanations, I am simply saying that not enough is known about either core dynamics or solar radiation to completely eliminate them as contributory, to some large or small degree.
Remember that even Sir Isaac Newton's "laws" are invalid at the sub-atomic level, if quantum physics has any validity, and for that matter, quantum physics is starting to be displaced in the scientific pantheon by string theory. Who knows what the next generation might discover. I am also not saying that my own personal version of "string theory" is any more correct than anyone else's, but I do hope that eventually some brilliant young mind(s) may stumble across it (maybe even with my help) :o) and gain an insight from an alternative perspective that may flip on a light bulb in their mind that takes us through the next giant leap for mankind.
Back in today's energy world, Wired's Blog reported some substantial improvement in hybrid battery performance was claimed by some folks who replaced the factory installed Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries with their version of a lead-acid battery. Their variation was superior in performance because of more efficient charging. Lead-acid batteries can be recharged on a smaller increase in power than the factory ones (105% vs. 140%, I believe the article said), but also because of more efficient power management which was possible because of the addition of electronic monitoring and modern electronic capacitors, indeed it was called the "Supercapacitor UltraBattery". Further improvements were also expected by the use of a "foamed" lead plate. The foam structure is actually carbon fiber in the "Firefly" battery. Again the recharge characteristics offer an advantage because the NiMH batteries charge best with a constant flow of current (not really available when being charged by intermittent regenerative braking, for instance), while the lead acid batteries only require constant voltage for the most efficient use of the charging energy, so again, this is better suited to the mobile application, and Firefly touts this as making plug-in hybrids a step closer to your garage.
I watched part of a Bill Moyers program on PBS Saturday night (due to the inconvenience of Arizona having its OWN time zone, PBS may have broadcast this on another date in your area, if you even get PBS, which tends to only be available in the USA and border town to the North and South). His guest, being interviewed, was a former National Public Radio reporter. "After the war," as she termed it, Sarah Chayes, went back to Afghanistan to develop a business, to try to help, in many ways, including rebuilding the country in a way that we as Americans, or rather the Bush administration, have neglected to do in that country since "winning" the battle with the Taliban, and installing our guy, President Hamid Karzai as president of the "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan" (hey, I kid you not, that's the link to his web site, just like "whitehouse.gov"). It is Ms. Chayes contention that the US$1 billion we are sending to Pakistan every year is what is financing the insurgents in the area, and the Pakistani government is turning a blind eye to a certain Mr. Baitullah Mehsud in order not to have him running amok all the time. Ms. Chayes says that the Pakistani army tosses us a token al-Qaeda leader from time to time, but the Pakistani people consider Mehsud to be the main terrorist in their country, according to what Senator Joe Biden said when he appeared on This Week with George Stephanopolous on Sunday) and no one is actually looking for Osama Bin Laden. The National Post (www.nationalpost.com online) reports that the Pakistani, "the military seem prepared to cut the same sort of deal they made two years ago with Islamist extremists in North Waziristan."
Meanwhile they also know very well where Mehsud is, too, but they are not attempting to go after him to avoid reactionary actions by his supporters elsewhere. Sarah Chayes still operates a cosmetics business in Afghanistan in Kandahar province. She says that although the roads in town and the road to Kabul have been paved, they are no longer safe for her to travel. Certainly not alone, and not as a woman alone. The locals tell her that during the day they are extorted by corrupt officials, and then the Taliban come with their own extortion threats at night when the government officials have gone home.
Senator Biden also pointed out that our total financial contribution to the rehabilitation of Afghanistan in the past 5 or 6 years has been about equal to what we are spending in Iraq in just 3 weeks. Senator Biden, Senator John Kerry, and Senator Chuck Hagel have just returned from observing Pakistani elections in which President Musharaf's party was overwhelmed by support for two opposition parties. Yet the "wise men" of Washington advise that it is too soon for the Pakistani Parliament to consider impeaching President Musharaf, even though he now says he has no plans to resign, and that we need to give him "room" to come to that decision on his own.
Although I am tempted to turn to the Oscars here, I will spare you, since I have just put the TiVO on hold to finish this column and haven't finished watching them myself, yet. However, in the world of entertainment, it is not entirely coincidental that I just watched a film set in Serbia where, this week, protesters set fire to the US Embassy to signal their disapproval of US officially recognizing the new independent government of Kosovo. Oh, don't mistake my meaning. I had no prescient feelings about Kosovo or US reaction to it.
What I meant was not entirely coincidentally to Ms. Chayes' account of the Taliban and the "ceasefire" with insurgents in Pakistan, this film was about a what happened after a "massive manhunt" that failed to turn up the leading Serbian war criminal known as "the Fox", reviled for his slaughter of whole villages Muslims and other unspeakable horrors in the name of “ethnic cleansing.” The film is called The Hunting Party which stars Richard Gere, Terrance Howard (probably best known for his fine performance in Crash) and although his "star" status did seem to rate him star billing, Jesse Eisenberg. (Mr. Eisenberg’s performance was outstanding, and I offer that unbiased assessment on Oscar night, of all nights.) The story goes that "only the most ludicrous details and incidents are true", that after a supposed massive manhunt by the UN forces, these few journalists are able to locate and meet with this heinous war criminal in just two days of casual journalistic investigation, at which point the film story goes, they are rescued by a secret (non-existent, they are so secret) CIA team from the clutches of this monster mass-murderer just as he is about to kill them. Yet somehow the Serbian leader who was just running out the back door when the CIA arrived, guns blazing, escapes and everyone who had any contact with the journalists is transferred to another country. I am not in the habit of spoiling people's enjoyment of a movie by giving away the plot entirely, so I won't reveal the ending, but although the film was at least passable, with many enjoyable moments, the real point of the film, and of my mentioning it, is the parallel to the situations in the Middle East today.
Well, that wasn't exactly my traditional "good news" ending, so I will take a quick side trip to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (“the Oscars,” to you), to mention that the wonderful young actress who gave such an outstanding performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose (I commended her performance in this column a few weeks back, I believe) won the statuette for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role. It was well deserved, even among such luminaries as Kate Blanchett, (who also DID win for Best Supporting for her portayal of Bob Dylan [yes, THE Bob Dylan, the man] in I'm Not There) and Julie Christie (in Away from Her) and the captivating newcomer Ellen Page (from Nova Scotia, by the way), in JUNO.
I was happy for Kate Blanchett in the supporting category, although it might have been nice to see the second "tie" in Academy history so she could split it with the marvelous performance by Ruby Dee who played Denzel's character's mother in American Gangster.
Now, I must get back to the rest of the Oscars on TiVo, and I will look forward to chatting again with you next week.
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Oh, yes, almost forgot to mention, I opened a new online "Game Mall" at
http://gamemall.winfotech.com and don't puzzle too long over the actual name of the Game Mall, it is pronounced "Circus" but spelled "Psyrk.us" (well, I thought it was cute). See you at the mall, I hope. ;o)
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Hybrid Plug-ins 100MPG & Hydrogen Fuel, Cashmere Mafia & Lipstick Jungle, AMA Medical Insurance Proposal
I am nothing short of amazed at all the news there is each week in the field of renewable energy. I would virtually have to start making this a daily column just to keep up with it all. On the other hand that would be thoroughly un-necessary because most of what is reported as "news" comes down to rather trivial matters of "announced" contracts which may or may not ever amount to anything of substance.
On the other hand, sometimes it takes a half a day of research just to find out if the "announcement" of a "BREAKTHROUGH" is justified, or just hype. One such instance was an item I came across this week claiming that a British firm, ITM Power, of Yorkshire, has achieved a "breakthrough" in converting renewable energy sources into hydrogen for use not only as a portable fuel, but to fuel households (in England at least) for both heating and cooking purposes. They did admit that your "gas cooker" (what we would call a "stove")(or an oven and stove) would have to be "slightly modified" as would the Ford Focus dual fuel internal combustion engine. In addition, the operating principles of this system are based the assumption that you have a wind turbine on your roof, or that the roof is covered in solar panels to provide you with a source of renewable energy, otherwise the only great advantage of the system is that you could use off-peak electricity at lower costs to accomplish the conversion of ordinary water into hydrogen (and release extra oxygen into the atmosphere, or at least they didn't mention trying to make use of the oxygen generated when splitting the water molecules).
Now if all of that negativity and intentional deflating description of the so-called "breakthrough" has led you to believe that I am no fan of this accomplishment, I should apologize for leading you down the garden path in this case. The real breakthrough of ITM Power is that they have come upon a method of constructing these electrolysers that reduces the cost from an industry average of some US$2000/kW, to something like US$163/kW.
Now if you want to consider that any 7th grade science student can electrolyze water with a $0.20 battery, $0.02 of wire and some electrodes, a US$163/kW might seem like no great bargain. On the other hand, a commercial grade product that can accomplish this benchtop demonstration in a safe and reliable manner, storing the hydrogen for transmission to "cooker" or the family Volvo, this could, indeed, be good news, worthy of the title.
If you have been reading my column for any time at all, you know how frustrated I get with the too little too late snail's pace of progress in most places, which is why it puzzles me that I found it very encouraging news that Pacific Gas and Electric has contracted with a company called "Raser" to provide them with a pair of plug-in hybrid SUV's for evaluation. Reportedly these vehicles would be able to achieve a net of 100 MPG by having a 40 mile range on a fully charged battery alone, and the story makes it sound like the onboard engine generates electricity (rather than powering the car directly) for another 400 miles from a (tiny?) tank of gas.
PG&E has already gone to great lengths to "Green" up their fleet of vehicles. They just purchased 250 new Compressed Natural Gas vehicles to bring their total of CNG and dual-fuel CNG to 1180 cars and trucks. They are also experimenting with a Ford Escape that they have converted to be a PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle) and a Ford F550 heavy duty truck. I saw my first F550 at the car wash the other day (I know, I lead a sheltered life, but hey, I don't get out much since I've been married) (27 years next month). This little monster was reported by the owner to be a highly reliable vehicle that had been used to pull 5th wheel style trailers across the continent frequently, though unfortunately he was not using biodiesel in the big V8 diesel engine. He asked about my mini-van, saying his wife was pushing him in that direction. I told me we liked the Pontiac, but our other car was a Ford product, the Mercury Mariner hybrid, and we have been pleased with that so far. He indicated he might consider a hybrid, so I suggested he look at the Saturn VUE hybrid which starting in 2008 was supposed to have electronic vehicle stabilization as a standard feature. The Mariner offered electronic stability control in all models EXCEPT the hybrid.
Speaking of choice in hybrid varieties, I don't think it elicited a laugh, or even a chuckle from me, but I did appreciate the fact that Lexus now has a whole series of Hybrid model vehicles available, or rather, most precisely, a hybrid for each of their GS, LS and RX series or models. Their lame attempt at humor in their advertising campaign about the "h" disappearing from alphabets everywhere else because they now have to be used for the "h" in the model numbers of the Lexus hybrids is catchy, but falls short of actual humor. On the other hand, the fact that Lexus now offers a line of hybrid is no joke either, so credit where credit is due, this is a good thing.
Speaking of "credit", yours had better be pretty good if you want one of the Lexus machines, the manufacturer's base price for a GS 450h is US$54,900, and although the Active Power Stabilizer Suspension System (with run-flat tires) is an available option, it will add another $3300 to the price, add another US$2850 for their "Pre-Collision System (PCS) and Dynamic Radar Cruise Control" package and another US$1500 for the voice activated navigation system.
They also are working on their corporate citizenship by recommending ways for hybrid drivers to help economize with their new cars. From the Lexus website's "Fuel Economy" page:
- 1. Plan ahead. Combine short trips in order to minimize cold starts.
- 2. Accelerate slowly.
- 3. Avoid heavy braking. Monitor traffic to minimize braking and coast whenever possible.
- 4. Avoid speeds in excess of 60 mph. Fuel economy suffers at speeds higher than 60 mph and drops significantly above 70 mph.
- 5. In slow-and-go traffic, accelerate to the desired speed, then lift off the accelerator pedal, allowing the vehicle to run more on electric power.
- 6. Ensure tires are at the recommended pressure.
- 7. Avoid carrying unnecessary loads. Extra weight reduces fuel economy.
- 8. Use the air conditioner and the defroster only when needed.
- 9. Use premium fuel to improve fuel economy and performance.
Frankly I have to wonder if this last one is not just something to pander to the "snob appeal" of the luxury car buyer market. Generally, premium fuel does not deliver any better gas mileage and most experts recommend against it unless the engine specifically requires it, because any performance increase is likely to be less than the proportional cost increase.
Lexus does list a number of the benefits to owning hybrid vehicles, including, "increased horsepower, lower emissions, smoother ride, reduced noise," (one of my favorites, it's just fun to drive down our street with the Mercury SUV making less noise than our neighbors' electric golf carts), "longer battery life, and better fuel economy."
I don't approve the following message, but it isn't my campaign. However you will note that the story has been very carefully crafted not to "hurt the party" (the Democratic Party, that is, of course), because it is accusing Senator Obama of being complicit in policies of the Bush administration, thus it is not exactly fodder for the Republican side, which has already launch anti-Obama media.
What I do like in recent developments in the campaign is the fact that Senator Obama and Senator McCain have been confrontative of each other. I think this is a far more constructive (so far) route for all concerned. I know that they claim "negative ads work", but that doesn't me I have to like to see them, and I don't. Actually I found the above YouTube.com video clip in an excellent column in Newsweek online by Andrew Romano which is probably worth reading (certainly if you happen to read this column before next Tuesday and the results of the Wisconsin primary are not yet in).
Mr. Romano seems to think that there is a very strong possibility that Senator Clinton will pull out a "surprise" victory (on this point he agrees with CBS political analyst and Slate.com's political columnist Jeff Greenfield) in Wisconsin, in part because Wisconsin closely matches Ohio where she is strongly favored because of the composition of the electorate there. Analysis from This Week with George Stephanopolous was of the opinion that Senator Hillary Clinton needs to win all three of Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania to put the outcome of the leadership race to rest before the convention and even then she will need the majority of the so-called "super-delegates" to achieve the necessary majority. Greenfield says, as I have recently, that the "managed expectations game" that the Clinton campaign machine is working is a finely honed strategy that they execute very effectively, and that he expects: "Indeed, its potential for Hillary is so promising that it's worth pondering whether the "on to Texas and Ohio!" battle cry of her campaign might be one huge head fake, designed to turn a strong Clinton showing—much less a victory—into one of those 'Oh my God, what a shocker!' reactions that changes the whole tenor of the political conversation."
I would really like to see Senator Clinton's campaign focus turn toward the matchup with the Republican candidate, and not risk damaging Democrats themselves any further with negative attacks.
This falls into the realm of politics too. I meant to get on with the entertainment news but this got me steamed, so the entertainment side will have to wait 'til the steam pressure goes down. Reason for steam: The AMA has a Health Insurance proposal for you to consider.
In the proposal linked above, the AMA shows us that what we need (according to the good doctors) is a tax credit for individuals to buy their own health insurance. Having worked at H&R Block for several tax seasons in the past, I can assure you that most Americans don't have a tax burden sufficient to be able to use a tax credit of the size the AMA is proposing (their example shows a tax credit to a family [presumably 4 persons]) of US$7500. If the government were to make it a "refundable credit" (the "earned income credit" which is currently available to low income tax "payers" [and I use the term "payers" loosely, because these are people who file income taxes in order to receive this federal income subsidy] to try to extend this benefit to low income families, I assure you that it would not go, in the majority of cases, to purchase health insurance. They might use it to pay off last year's hospital maternity bill that wasn't covered by insurance they didn't have last year, but more likely it would go to purchase a better used car than the rusty old hulk they are driving now, or to buy some "personal watercraft", or ATV or two. Purchasing health insurance is just not seen as a "necessary" investment of substantial portion of income by most low income wage earners.
The AMA's magic formula is shown in an example of a US$50,000 household versus a US$150,000 household, where the latter gets NO tax credit, while both families are expected to have employer provided health care insurance that amounts to about US$10,000 per year as a precursor to this example, in which the employer pays 75% of that US$10,000 premium. Now, at no time to my hands leave my sleeves during this "magic" transformation, but the employer provided premiums continue to be paid by the employer, but are now counted as employee salary. (From what well of the milk of human kindness the AMA believes these blessings flow, I don't know, but it seems like a highly unlikely scenario.) However unlikely, they continue now to show that the US$7500 that was formerly subsidized by the employer for both employees is now substituted for by the corresponding US$7500 tax credit against the US$50,000 family's now US$57,500 taxable income, thus having transformed healthcare costs for the lesser income family from 18% to just 4% while the upper income family's healthcare costs rise from only 5% to just 6% overall.
Let's get reasonable, please. "For profit" organizations providing healthcare insurance are in the business for the benefit of the shareholders, not for the benefit of the policy holders. That's why we see instances like the recently highly publicized one in which a girl with significant medical difficulties was being denied a liver transplant by the insurance company until the day she died, at which time, due to public pressure they reversed their decision. It doesn't have to be "single payer" healthcare (as in one monolithic federal health insurance system), but it certainly needs to be a national plan of NOT-FOR-PROFIT. Single payer does have tremendous economies of administrative overhead and costs, plus the advantage that individual health care providers don't have to maintain elaborate accounting and billing systems that address the demands of every separate insurance provider. I know of a local clinic here in Phoenix that offers a 40% to 60% discount for "self-pay" because of how much cheaper it is to deal with a cash client than insurance claims.
I am rapidly running out of time for today, so I will just mention that two shows cut from the same cloth have caught our attention, Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle. Lipstick Jungle was rather a disappointment in the debut episode last week, but this week they redeemed themselves. That is fortunate for Lipstick's cast, because they benefit from being born from the brain of HBO's now defunct Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell. The stars of Litpstick Jungle are the still beautiful Brooke Shields, Kim Raver, veteran of several seasons of Third Watch and 24, and a truly sparkling Lindsay Price. Cashmere Mafia is quirkier, and easier to like at first glance, especially the always charming Lucy Liu (formerly of Ally McBeal series, and the Quentin Tarantino film series Kill Bill), Frances O'Connor, and Miranda Otto, and Bonnie Sommerville. In the pilot episode Sommerville's character is suddenly smitten with another woman, a turn of events she finds both intriguing and unexpected. Neither show is aimed to steal fans from the wrestling or bass fishing channel, but with such a range of choices of beautiful women, they just might end up attracting a few glassy stares from mesmerized males.
Love,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Wood for Coal?, Propaganda x 3, Video ALMOST Everywhere, Obama the Beautiful
I saw a documentary film a night or two ago. The title was "Six Degrees" but although it intended to capitalize on the popularity of that name (the film starring Will Smith and Donald Sutherland)this was about speculations on the effects of global warming. You'll find this a "theme" in the stuff I am talking about this week, but this so-called "documentary" television program was bordering on grossly exaggerated propaganda, so of which was highly speculative, and some of it, intentionally misleading. Rather ringingly absent from the program was anything relating the supposed effects of "global warming" to any kind of time line. I may have missed it, but nowhere that I saw was there any attempt to correlate degrees of warming (in Fahrenheit, of course, for American audiences) with a time period over which that warming would have the proposed effect. One year or even two with the whole 6 degrees of warming for JUST that year or two would actually have relatively little effect in the longer term. More in the realm of reality if we have 2 degrees of warming (Fahrenheit) for 4 decades, yes, we'd probably see changes in ocean currents and the other "global effects" this program purported to be facts, but that was never part of their equation. They just kept bumping up the temperature and piling disastrous effect on top of devastations from the previous state.
This kind of yellow journalism was bad enough, but we hit intentional deception and misleading editing when repeatedly thoughout the program we were shown images of steam escaping from cooling towers, of conventional electric generating plants and from the nuclear cooling towers of Three Mile Island. The fact that there once was radiation contaminated steam rising from those towers at Three Mile Island is not something to be glossed over lightly, but in this instance, the editors and producers were (barring gross ignorance on their part) trying to imply that all this was heavy releases of particulates and carbon dioxide contributions to global warming. Water vapor condensing into steam is not a major contributor to climate change, and the use of the images of these billowing white clouds to suggest that we were witnessing "smokestack" pollution is downright dishonest. Propaganda is too polite a word for it.
“Wood is the new coal,” was the proclamation in a brief article that came to my attention this week. That’s not all that pleasant a thought to me, but then I gave it a little deeper consideration, and frankly, to some extent that is correct. The difference is that unlike the unfortunate ignorance of my own forefathers who denuded their native Fair Isle (off the North coast of Scotland) of all but ONE TREE in their desperate attempts to stave off death by freezing (as well as to boil their porridge, of course), we have the chance to apply modern silvaculture and seek alternative sources for the vegetative matter. Note that I didn’t call them “trees”, because although they are substantially “wetter” to start with, the most efficient green plans we know about these days are still algae.
That is not to say, either, that the development of wood pellet making plants in Northern Florida (by Green Circle Bio Energy, a subsidiary of SCE Group of Sweden) to export 120 truckloads (20 train car loads) of wood in the pellet form to Europe each and every DAY when they enter full production later this Spring is insignificant, because we need to recognize that even with the trees coming, in this instance, (reportedly) from managed tree farming areas, that such practices may not always be strictly observed in every place that attempts to duplicate this process. The trees are ground to a find powder, dried and compressed as pellets. They are intended specifically for the European electric generating industry. This report cites coal fired electric generating plants as having successfully tested combined coal and wood pellets combustion for steam generation as high as 10% wood pellets. The basic premise, of course, is that trees being renewable resource and absorbing carbon dioxide to produce their growth are part of the non-fossil carbon cycle, and therefore not adding to the carbon load in the atmosphere.
The secondary problem, however, may lie in the success of this type of use. If it becomes widespread enough, we could end up treeless like the Fair Isle. Okay, perhaps not entirely treeless, but demand is likely to outstrip supply if the trend is allowed to grow for a few decades.
The primary problem is, of course, that although 90% coal combustion is better than 100% it is too small a change to meet the demands we are facing in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources.
Okay, keeping in mind that I found this on a “social networking site” under a label saying, “Modern Propaganda?” this video was just so beautifully done that it was effectively (and affectively) inspirational. Now that is not to say that it changed by views politically (I am already a “fan”, just with limited to how fast want to see him rise), but this video, put together in an extremely professional and polished way was truly impressive.
It also didn’t hurt that Kate Walsh (formerly of Grey’s Anatomy and Scarlet Johansson (of Lost in Translation fame) were in there, supporting Senator Obama.
In Iowa, a state of which I became considerably fonder when Senator Obama was so thoroughly endorsed by members of the Democratic Party caucuses, a certain Mr. Curtis Hartog, a senior technical consultant for Foth Infrastructure & Environment, of Lake Elmo, Minn., reported to the Waste Commission of Scott County, that all 5 technologies that produce energy from waste were too expensive to be considered, when, as Executive Director of the Commission, Kathy Morris says that the current landfill being used still has 50 years capacity at this time. The was all reported in an article in the “Quad City Times” (online edition), in which we are informed that, “The cost of turning waste into energy can run as high as $150 per ton, while the price of the fuel produced fluctuates with market demand.”
Let me see if I can dig up the Changing World Technologies estimates of mixed MSW to fuel. Old data I have squirreled away suggests that Changing World Technologies (now a partner with ConAgra in the plant in Carthage, Missouri) expected to get about 20% usable fuel oil from mixed municipal solid wastes via what was then called “thermal depolymerization” (which Mr. Appel and friends now calls TCP for “thermal conversion process”). Now, even allowing that figure to be pretty optimistic, especially considering that they had trouble scaling up to their current plant, so let’s cut that down to 15% or about 300 pounds of fuel output per ton of waste input. Assuming diesel fuel at about 6.8 pounds per gallon, that should be about 44 gallons. Now, admittedly, municipalities may not have to pay retail prices for the quantities of products they buy, but since the gas station I passed today had diesel fuel on sale for $3.29, and I’ve seen it higher lately, that certainly suggests to me that even with Mr. Hartog’s “as high as” scenario of $150 per ton it is pretty close to break-even. And that is not taking into consideration the environmental impact of the fact that landfill garbage rots over time, producing methane, which although it is possible to collect it from a properly constructed landfill site, is actually a worse contributor to climate changing greenhouse gases than mere carbon dioxide.
Taking that these facts in combination with the fact that most people who want to construct waste-to-energy plants will cheerfully do so with private capital, accept municipal solid wastes (MSW) into their facility for less than the typical “tipping fee” charged even to municipalities themselves as privately owned landfill sites to dump something there, and can still make a profit (because with “negative cost” feedstock [due to the tipping fee], and the fact that virtually all of the possible energy-from-waste processes are at least partially self-fueling), in most cases the worst case cost scenario does not apply.
For my last point I a return to the point of “modern propaganda”. One of the films nominated for an Oscar this year is a strange little animated feature. Persepolis (of which I have only seen brief promotional cuts) is the story of a young girl and her family in Iran at the time of the revolution that deposed the Shah. I reserve final judgment until I have at least seen more of it, but the rather blatant anti-Iranian viewpoint, not just anti-Islamist intolerance viewpoint, it certainly looks like more propaganda (in black and white, a hallmark of propaganda traditionally) than “art”.
Okay, I lied, this last item is one that crosses categories, so while it is “kinda” entertainment news, it is also marketing and publishing news. There is a new service from Google that allows website owners to put a video feed on every page of their web sites (not that we’d recommend that kind of oversaturation, but in theory it is at least possible). Not only is that video feed updates on an ongoing basis, but it is also “tunable” content, which is to say, you can request just certain video “producers” like the national (American, as far as I know) television networks, or as specific as YouTube’s “geriatric1927” or “lonelygirl15” (a fictional character from some innovative “soap opera” producers), or just a theme, like “auto racing”. But it is also publishing and marketing news that Google is offering this because this type of video feed will also have “commercials” associated with it. Revenue from those commercials will be split between the web site publisher and Google (if you know how to set up this kind of arrangement), so the day of “everybody becomes a broadcaster” on “commercially supported” channels has arrived. Talk about the democratization of the media!! You can get more information about this at http://googleadsfree.winfotech.com/ (That page doesn’t actually contain all the info about the Google ad supported video feeds, but if you sign up in the form provided, the follow up emails will explain it all, and I can also personally attest that the information being sold through the offer on that page was well worth the price, at least from my perspective as a website publisher and author.)
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Oh, and just in case you are inclined to think of "diet" as a "dirty" word, you might want to check out our new UNdiet site at UNDIETLIFESTYLE.winfotech.com.
This kind of yellow journalism was bad enough, but we hit intentional deception and misleading editing when repeatedly thoughout the program we were shown images of steam escaping from cooling towers, of conventional electric generating plants and from the nuclear cooling towers of Three Mile Island. The fact that there once was radiation contaminated steam rising from those towers at Three Mile Island is not something to be glossed over lightly, but in this instance, the editors and producers were (barring gross ignorance on their part) trying to imply that all this was heavy releases of particulates and carbon dioxide contributions to global warming. Water vapor condensing into steam is not a major contributor to climate change, and the use of the images of these billowing white clouds to suggest that we were witnessing "smokestack" pollution is downright dishonest. Propaganda is too polite a word for it.
“Wood is the new coal,” was the proclamation in a brief article that came to my attention this week. That’s not all that pleasant a thought to me, but then I gave it a little deeper consideration, and frankly, to some extent that is correct. The difference is that unlike the unfortunate ignorance of my own forefathers who denuded their native Fair Isle (off the North coast of Scotland) of all but ONE TREE in their desperate attempts to stave off death by freezing (as well as to boil their porridge, of course), we have the chance to apply modern silvaculture and seek alternative sources for the vegetative matter. Note that I didn’t call them “trees”, because although they are substantially “wetter” to start with, the most efficient green plans we know about these days are still algae.
That is not to say, either, that the development of wood pellet making plants in Northern Florida (by Green Circle Bio Energy, a subsidiary of SCE Group of Sweden) to export 120 truckloads (20 train car loads) of wood in the pellet form to Europe each and every DAY when they enter full production later this Spring is insignificant, because we need to recognize that even with the trees coming, in this instance, (reportedly) from managed tree farming areas, that such practices may not always be strictly observed in every place that attempts to duplicate this process. The trees are ground to a find powder, dried and compressed as pellets. They are intended specifically for the European electric generating industry. This report cites coal fired electric generating plants as having successfully tested combined coal and wood pellets combustion for steam generation as high as 10% wood pellets. The basic premise, of course, is that trees being renewable resource and absorbing carbon dioxide to produce their growth are part of the non-fossil carbon cycle, and therefore not adding to the carbon load in the atmosphere.
The secondary problem, however, may lie in the success of this type of use. If it becomes widespread enough, we could end up treeless like the Fair Isle. Okay, perhaps not entirely treeless, but demand is likely to outstrip supply if the trend is allowed to grow for a few decades.
The primary problem is, of course, that although 90% coal combustion is better than 100% it is too small a change to meet the demands we are facing in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources.
Okay, keeping in mind that I found this on a “social networking site” under a label saying, “Modern Propaganda?” this video was just so beautifully done that it was effectively (and affectively) inspirational. Now that is not to say that it changed by views politically (I am already a “fan”, just with limited to how fast want to see him rise), but this video, put together in an extremely professional and polished way was truly impressive.
It also didn’t hurt that Kate Walsh (formerly of Grey’s Anatomy and Scarlet Johansson (of Lost in Translation fame) were in there, supporting Senator Obama.
In Iowa, a state of which I became considerably fonder when Senator Obama was so thoroughly endorsed by members of the Democratic Party caucuses, a certain Mr. Curtis Hartog, a senior technical consultant for Foth Infrastructure & Environment, of Lake Elmo, Minn., reported to the Waste Commission of Scott County, that all 5 technologies that produce energy from waste were too expensive to be considered, when, as Executive Director of the Commission, Kathy Morris says that the current landfill being used still has 50 years capacity at this time. The was all reported in an article in the “Quad City Times” (online edition), in which we are informed that, “The cost of turning waste into energy can run as high as $150 per ton, while the price of the fuel produced fluctuates with market demand.”
Let me see if I can dig up the Changing World Technologies estimates of mixed MSW to fuel. Old data I have squirreled away suggests that Changing World Technologies (now a partner with ConAgra in the plant in Carthage, Missouri) expected to get about 20% usable fuel oil from mixed municipal solid wastes via what was then called “thermal depolymerization” (which Mr. Appel and friends now calls TCP for “thermal conversion process”). Now, even allowing that figure to be pretty optimistic, especially considering that they had trouble scaling up to their current plant, so let’s cut that down to 15% or about 300 pounds of fuel output per ton of waste input. Assuming diesel fuel at about 6.8 pounds per gallon, that should be about 44 gallons. Now, admittedly, municipalities may not have to pay retail prices for the quantities of products they buy, but since the gas station I passed today had diesel fuel on sale for $3.29, and I’ve seen it higher lately, that certainly suggests to me that even with Mr. Hartog’s “as high as” scenario of $150 per ton it is pretty close to break-even. And that is not taking into consideration the environmental impact of the fact that landfill garbage rots over time, producing methane, which although it is possible to collect it from a properly constructed landfill site, is actually a worse contributor to climate changing greenhouse gases than mere carbon dioxide.
Taking that these facts in combination with the fact that most people who want to construct waste-to-energy plants will cheerfully do so with private capital, accept municipal solid wastes (MSW) into their facility for less than the typical “tipping fee” charged even to municipalities themselves as privately owned landfill sites to dump something there, and can still make a profit (because with “negative cost” feedstock [due to the tipping fee], and the fact that virtually all of the possible energy-from-waste processes are at least partially self-fueling), in most cases the worst case cost scenario does not apply.
For my last point I a return to the point of “modern propaganda”. One of the films nominated for an Oscar this year is a strange little animated feature. Persepolis (of which I have only seen brief promotional cuts) is the story of a young girl and her family in Iran at the time of the revolution that deposed the Shah. I reserve final judgment until I have at least seen more of it, but the rather blatant anti-Iranian viewpoint, not just anti-Islamist intolerance viewpoint, it certainly looks like more propaganda (in black and white, a hallmark of propaganda traditionally) than “art”.
Okay, I lied, this last item is one that crosses categories, so while it is “kinda” entertainment news, it is also marketing and publishing news. There is a new service from Google that allows website owners to put a video feed on every page of their web sites (not that we’d recommend that kind of oversaturation, but in theory it is at least possible). Not only is that video feed updates on an ongoing basis, but it is also “tunable” content, which is to say, you can request just certain video “producers” like the national (American, as far as I know) television networks, or as specific as YouTube’s “geriatric1927” or “lonelygirl15” (a fictional character from some innovative “soap opera” producers), or just a theme, like “auto racing”. But it is also publishing and marketing news that Google is offering this because this type of video feed will also have “commercials” associated with it. Revenue from those commercials will be split between the web site publisher and Google (if you know how to set up this kind of arrangement), so the day of “everybody becomes a broadcaster” on “commercially supported” channels has arrived. Talk about the democratization of the media!! You can get more information about this at http://googleadsfree.winfotech.com/ (That page doesn’t actually contain all the info about the Google ad supported video feeds, but if you sign up in the form provided, the follow up emails will explain it all, and I can also personally attest that the information being sold through the offer on that page was well worth the price, at least from my perspective as a website publisher and author.)
Love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
p.s. Oh, and just in case you are inclined to think of "diet" as a "dirty" word, you might want to check out our new UNdiet site at UNDIETLIFESTYLE.winfotech.com.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Imperium Delays IPO; Fed Rate Cut Still Coming; Bartiromo, Gates, Soros, Dell, Bono at WEF Summit; Obama Doubles Clinton; Kennedy X2 Endorse Obama
Imperium Renewables, the Seattle based firm with the largest US based biodiesel plant (at Grays Harbor) has delayed plans for an IPO citing "market conditions". This move was widely anticipated after the departure of their CEO. However, another interpretation has also been put forth which is that because of the tripling of biodiesel production capacity in the US, and the rise in Soy Oil prices there just is not enough available feedstock to supply additional plants at this time. Indeed the Greentech Media article that summarizes these facts proclaims "Feedstock Shortage" in its headline.
Of course, the "not enough" feedstock is not really the problem at all. The problem is that feedstocks for the popular, cheap and easy method of making biodiesel, using a catalyst, and ethanol (or methanol) to esterify vegetable oil needs cheap vegetable oil to keep it cheap (which is to say, competitively priced). Biodiesel as an industry has become its own major competitor. According to the same Greentech Media article, Soy Oil cost just US$ 0.27/lb. (or US$ 540/Ton) back in August of 2006, while the December 2007 price has soared to US$ 0.44/lb. which comes out to US$ 960/Ton. That's a 56% increase in less than 18 months.
Few will question that when cooler heads prevail that we will be seeing a lot more of jatropha and other non-edible oils becoming more important rapidly over the next few years. Off to a slower start may be the algadiesel based on the oil content of the fast growing green plant. But let us not neglect, either the use of genetic engineering and "synthetic biology" in which microbes are being grown specifically to produce "long chain alcohols" (butanol, for example) from cellulosic sources. Since, as far as I know, the oil content of algae is of no particular interest to these microbes that are producing butanol from the cellulose and lignin of plants (5 carbon sugars, as opposed to the 6 carbon sugars of glucose and sucrose) it would well behoove those working in these to areas to start talking and experimenting cooperatively and collaboratively. Wouldn't you agree?
I always find it incredible that occasions like a G8 meeting or this week's World Economic Forum annual Summit in Davos, Switzerland, produce a horde of, often unruly, protestors who are AGAINST globalization. There is entirely too much of the "us" (whoever "we" are) against "them" (and it matters little which "they" anyone refers to, since being "not us" is perceived as being inherently a bad thing). Globalization is about spreading the wealth. That is not to say that I don't recognize that some exporters of jobs aren't doing it to "exploit" the cheap labor in other parts of the world, but driving down costs while increasing profits is the aim. The idea that all CEO's and boards of directors of major multinational conglomerates somehow match the moustache twisting, black hat image of 19th century melodrama villains is a little far out there.
The industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries were building on ancient knowledge that had been ignored (if not outrigh suppressed) for anything up to a couple of thousand years. Unrestrained by public opinion, or the threat of exposure to public criticism, the so-called "Robber Barons" were indeed almost incomprehensibly callous in their tactics and even occasionally completely immoral in their practices. But major publicly held corporations do tend to have to answer for their actions and even their motives to the media and the public. The collapse of Enron is the prime example in recent times, though there have been others too.
My wife (I blame her NYC upbringing) tends to see corruption and conspiracies lurking around every corner, even brazenly in plain site. She is not entirely wrong, but I hope she is not right as often as she believes she is. (That's dangerous talk to put in print, so I'm hereby claiming temporary insanity in case we ever find ourselves in court.)
The fact is that I hope that the majority of businesses and business people have in mind to make their living by an ethically sound set of business practices to make the world a better place for themselves, their family and ultimately the world entire. Now all of that is preamble to the fact that I was teaching a class on industrialization last week, combined with the fact that I have been paying attention to a gentleman who I know only through internet correspondence as S. Kumar. S. Kumar is a resident of India, and seems to know a good deal more than I do about how to make money on the internet. The combination of these two factors, along with my long support of micro-credit as a means of bringing about some greater degree of equality globally, have led me to a new paradigm that I hope some readers will find interesting.
NEW PARADIGM
Global Village Cottage Industry is not as catchy a name as I would like it to be, but it does describe this concept that borrows a little, too, from Isaac Asimov's writings. Examples have been cited in literature about microcredit that speak of an "instant phone company" when a small, and previously isolated village suddenly gains access to market information because a microloan allows one villager (or that that villager's family) to acquire a cell phone. Suddenly the local basket weavers can access information from an uncle or a cousin in a larger town or city to discover what the market price of baskets (or whatever commodity) may be that week, and therefore better able to either price their own labors locally, or to attempt to calculate the costs/benefits of providing their own transportation and/or wholesale to the big city markets.
It is, in fact, possible now to earn several hundred dollars per week from a modest web presence, some of which can operate on "autopilot" for years drawing a few dollars a week, while others, which might require more human intervention and attention to keep it "tuned" to the market. For those villages where average wages are about US$1 per day or less, facilitating a micro-economy of internet information brokerage could well represent a doubling of the village's total net income. In remote villages where impoverished populations are isolated additional challenges and difficulties might also need to be addressed. Items like how to connect to the internet via phone lines, much less high-speed data lines could be a really difficult feat, especially at moderate costs. Just supplying power to a computer or two might require a generator or a solar panel (charging all day just to run the computer for a few hours at night) perhaps.
It is of no particular consequence to the owner of the web site, nor to its' users whether the owner may be in New York City, or Elberta, Alabama, or Mumbai, India, though server space on a direct high speed optical connection to the backbone of the net may be more expensive than a server in a basement in Siberia somewhere. Nor am I advocating that this should be the only industry in town, for we saw what can happen to a New England milltown when competition closes the mill. But it is possible to establish this kind of "cottage industry" virtually anywhere, and by capturing even a miniscule percentage of the worldwide traffic for certain items of ecommerce, it becomes possible to generate a modest income by American or North American standards, but that same very modest income to us, might represent full-on luxurious to an otherwise impoverished family in an isolated and economically disadvantaged community.
Just to be clear, here, let me state that I am not talking about publicizing the basket weaving skills of the locals, although that too could be one way to monetize a web presence. I mean that merely becoming a source of information that attracts people, one has the opportunity to earn a living by having once gained their trust, to refer them to other information of value, which might include pure information ("how to's" or houseplans) or access to money saving opportunities, like sales at Amazon.com (collecting affiliate commissions on sales made because of their referrals). At the same time large organization in the retail field like Wal-mart, K-Mart/Sears, Circuit City, and so on, are also placing retail advertising wherever they can "capture eyes", so merely having traffic to your sight could make you eligible to earn from the "publishing" of some of that advertizing content as well.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, who had a rather rapid rise to national television stardom just a few years ago had an interesting program this Sunday with an array of movers-and-shakers for guest. Not the least of her interviews was a satellite link to Texas (Ms. Bartiromo was in Davos covering the World Economic Summit) with former President of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, Mr. Robert McTeer. Mr. McTeer claims that he had been advocating "strong action" to avoid recession, meaning at least 50 basis points (0.5%) cut in the Fed Funds Rate. Mr. McTeer, with better comic delivery than most economic heavy-weights, joked in poker playing terms that they saw his bet and raised him a quarter, which resulted in the Fed Chairman Bernanke's cut of 3/4's of a percent in the first cut issued by the Fed outside its regularly scheduled meetings since 1971 according to Ms. Bartiromo's Wall Street Journal Report program on CNBC.
Mr. McTeer, however, was not impressed with the tax rebate giveaway the politicians were putting together. He didn't mention, but I think that I did (with respect to one of Congressman Ron Paul's policies about expansion of the money supply), that the M4 money supply was increased by fiat in December by more than US$ 40 billion. (Yes, "Billion," though the "funny money" auctions, as Congressman Paul might call them, were not until this month and next, I believe.) Mr. McTeer also said that he felt that the economic effects of the US$ 150 billion giveaway by Congress and the President in the form of direct rebates to taxpayers (plus business incentives and tax breaks) [and the probable "piling on" of some "tasty" pork by the Senate, as Donna Brazile on This Week with George Stephanopolous put it] was unlikely to be necessary considering the cooperative spirit of the Fed and it's quick action. Mr. McTeer did suggest, however, that he felt it was a good possibility that there may be an additional 0.25% interest rate cut coming, and that could happen as soon as the next regularly schedule Fed meeting.
And in the rest of the class of "heavy-weight" Maria found Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Bono promoting Bono's "RED" campaign to pay for HIV/AIDS drug treatments for Africans. Another interesting picture on the World Economic Forum website was one in which I believe I saw Bill Gates on stage with the Chairmen and CEO's of BOTH Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Nor would it be prudent to ignore that George Soros was also present at the summit. Mr. Soros is, I understand, also scheduled to appear on a CNBC European broadcast in a debate on economic policy in which the resolution he speaks to is something to the effect that their needs to be, "a new sheriff in town," on the world economic stage, because central bankers have, "lost their way."
Speaking of, "lost their way," the anticipated boom from computer telephony integration (or "CTI" as it was called in the comupter and communications industries) never really took place (except behind the scenes where it ended up crashing some of my early retirement dreams as Lucent Technologies stock took a dive at the turn of the century) although the anticipation of it may have inspired physicists to postulate "dark energy" because most of the fiber-optic cable that was laid in preparation for the explosion of demand remains "dark" (unlit by the necessary lasers to make it useful) because bringing it on line would cause existing tariffs to drop like stones to virtually nothing and it is hard for communications companies to continue to charge premium rates for guaranteed premium grade "quality of service" when there is no shortage of bandwidth for everyone everywhere. (It's another one of those "corporate inertia" things I spoke about last week that I find so annoying, everyone is so worried about preserving today's established markets that they stifle the evolution of new markets and new technologies to protect the old territories.) But the convergence we are now seeing is one of cell phones with video displays also accessing web based data and gradually creeping in is the GPS integration of local commercial information as well.
Things do not always work out the way we expect or plan them to. I predicted the future of the internet quite a number of years ago. Projecting the number of subscribers was not my field (and still isn't), but technology was, (and is), so I predicted several things. I expected to see a proliferation of "virtual reality" sights. That has been slow in coming about, but one example does stand out. I believe the most prominent example today is "Second Life", which is a really interesting phenomenon itself, because although it strongly resembles the Dungeons and Dragons romantic sword and sorcery roll playing games of the 1980's and 1990's, this seems to be a place to meet and greet real friends (new and old). I won't try to pigeonhole the D&D crowd but I will say that computer game players started out as the more geeky among us, and while one cannot know how many still are, the mere fact that these communities of online folks interact socially makes them seem to have more adventurous and more gregarious natures than those nerds and computer jockeys of old.
Now I have to admit I was more than a little bit spoiled by my early computer experiences. Mind you, I admit that I am discounting [naturally enough, I THINK] the Timex/Sinclair 1 kilobyte "toy" computer, which introduced me to programming but never did a single useful thing in its life with me. So I have had some optimistic views on the future of computers and the internet. At that same IBM and IEEE sponsored speech I gave in Toronto many, many years ago, I showed a picture of a video watch, or rather a mockup of a video watch that I predicted would be the future common access and interface device to the internet and most people's computer experiences. Along with that I predicted that it would be a voice interactive experience, which is to say that like the denizens of Star Trek we would just speak to the computer, and receive much of what we wanted back in the form of voice response as well, supplemented by screen graphics only when really needed. Video is a terrible waste of bandwidth, especially if all you are sending is the graphics to represent text that conveys the information.
Well, through a series of semi-disasters I just received on my desktop a Gateway GT5404 computer with Microsoft's VISTA Home Premium operating system. It has 1 GB of RAM, 250GB of SATA hard drive and a Pentium Dual-Core CPU, which is a 64 bit processor that handles two 32 bit streams at 2.8 gigahertz. Both a sticker on the machine itself and the software reporting the type of system it is emphasize that “dual stream” feature. The sticker says, “2 x 2 MB L2 cache.” The software says that it is “rated” 2.80, but then goes on to explain that it is 32 bits at 2.8 GHz and another 32bits at 2.8 GHz. This operating system also contains the speech recognition features that became standard with Windows XP editions. I am not, by any means, holding my breath, but I am hoping that this will become a feature of my computing in the very near future. This XP machine on which I am working (a Dell, by the way, but "only" 1.6 GHz, and 768 MB of RAM) can barely handle my 9 windows of Word, Internet Explorer and Outlook email if Outlook is attempting to download new messages (as it does several times an hour). Therefore speech recognition would be totally impossible since I would have long since forgotten what it was I intended to say LONG minutes before the operating system got around to attempting to copy my words to the screen (or execute the commands if that is what the words were). The dual execution scheme on this new Gateway might be the answer to this kind of problem, but I am fearful of getting too excited about it. I was doing voice/speech recognition work on an IBM XT computer back about 1986, and even though that was "discreet speech" (un-connected, distinct words with "pre-trained" vocabulary) the progress in this field has been of dire disappointment to me over the last 21 years, especially relative to the increase in computing power. For a comparison (you can do the math if you like) my old IBM XT type (actually from Matsushita) operated at 10 megahertz and had 1 megabyte of total RAM (even the hard disk was 10 megabytes total capacity).
Please wish me luck on that front.
Amazing political news: Caroline Kennedy wrote a endorsement for Senator Barack Obama, published by the New York Times newspaper, in which she said, "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them." The Times also reports that Senator Ted Kennedy is slated to provide his endorsement of Senator Obama on Monday (January 28th, 2007).
Not so amazing political news: Senator Obama won the Democratic Primary election in South Carolina. What was surprising, perhaps, was that Senator Edwards, who was born in South Carolina did so poorly. What was almost more surpising was that Senator Obama's vote count was 55% for Senator Obama, and just 27% for Senator Hillary Clinton. And talk about "globalization", it is certainly NOT a one way street. That article link above about the South Carolina election results is to a Korean newspaper website that just happened to be one of the top results on my Google search terms.
love
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
Of course, the "not enough" feedstock is not really the problem at all. The problem is that feedstocks for the popular, cheap and easy method of making biodiesel, using a catalyst, and ethanol (or methanol) to esterify vegetable oil needs cheap vegetable oil to keep it cheap (which is to say, competitively priced). Biodiesel as an industry has become its own major competitor. According to the same Greentech Media article, Soy Oil cost just US$ 0.27/lb. (or US$ 540/Ton) back in August of 2006, while the December 2007 price has soared to US$ 0.44/lb. which comes out to US$ 960/Ton. That's a 56% increase in less than 18 months.
Few will question that when cooler heads prevail that we will be seeing a lot more of jatropha and other non-edible oils becoming more important rapidly over the next few years. Off to a slower start may be the algadiesel based on the oil content of the fast growing green plant. But let us not neglect, either the use of genetic engineering and "synthetic biology" in which microbes are being grown specifically to produce "long chain alcohols" (butanol, for example) from cellulosic sources. Since, as far as I know, the oil content of algae is of no particular interest to these microbes that are producing butanol from the cellulose and lignin of plants (5 carbon sugars, as opposed to the 6 carbon sugars of glucose and sucrose) it would well behoove those working in these to areas to start talking and experimenting cooperatively and collaboratively. Wouldn't you agree?
I always find it incredible that occasions like a G8 meeting or this week's World Economic Forum annual Summit in Davos, Switzerland, produce a horde of, often unruly, protestors who are AGAINST globalization. There is entirely too much of the "us" (whoever "we" are) against "them" (and it matters little which "they" anyone refers to, since being "not us" is perceived as being inherently a bad thing). Globalization is about spreading the wealth. That is not to say that I don't recognize that some exporters of jobs aren't doing it to "exploit" the cheap labor in other parts of the world, but driving down costs while increasing profits is the aim. The idea that all CEO's and boards of directors of major multinational conglomerates somehow match the moustache twisting, black hat image of 19th century melodrama villains is a little far out there.
The industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries were building on ancient knowledge that had been ignored (if not outrigh suppressed) for anything up to a couple of thousand years. Unrestrained by public opinion, or the threat of exposure to public criticism, the so-called "Robber Barons" were indeed almost incomprehensibly callous in their tactics and even occasionally completely immoral in their practices. But major publicly held corporations do tend to have to answer for their actions and even their motives to the media and the public. The collapse of Enron is the prime example in recent times, though there have been others too.
My wife (I blame her NYC upbringing) tends to see corruption and conspiracies lurking around every corner, even brazenly in plain site. She is not entirely wrong, but I hope she is not right as often as she believes she is. (That's dangerous talk to put in print, so I'm hereby claiming temporary insanity in case we ever find ourselves in court.)
The fact is that I hope that the majority of businesses and business people have in mind to make their living by an ethically sound set of business practices to make the world a better place for themselves, their family and ultimately the world entire. Now all of that is preamble to the fact that I was teaching a class on industrialization last week, combined with the fact that I have been paying attention to a gentleman who I know only through internet correspondence as S. Kumar. S. Kumar is a resident of India, and seems to know a good deal more than I do about how to make money on the internet. The combination of these two factors, along with my long support of micro-credit as a means of bringing about some greater degree of equality globally, have led me to a new paradigm that I hope some readers will find interesting.
NEW PARADIGM
Global Village Cottage Industry is not as catchy a name as I would like it to be, but it does describe this concept that borrows a little, too, from Isaac Asimov's writings. Examples have been cited in literature about microcredit that speak of an "instant phone company" when a small, and previously isolated village suddenly gains access to market information because a microloan allows one villager (or that that villager's family) to acquire a cell phone. Suddenly the local basket weavers can access information from an uncle or a cousin in a larger town or city to discover what the market price of baskets (or whatever commodity) may be that week, and therefore better able to either price their own labors locally, or to attempt to calculate the costs/benefits of providing their own transportation and/or wholesale to the big city markets.
It is, in fact, possible now to earn several hundred dollars per week from a modest web presence, some of which can operate on "autopilot" for years drawing a few dollars a week, while others, which might require more human intervention and attention to keep it "tuned" to the market. For those villages where average wages are about US$1 per day or less, facilitating a micro-economy of internet information brokerage could well represent a doubling of the village's total net income. In remote villages where impoverished populations are isolated additional challenges and difficulties might also need to be addressed. Items like how to connect to the internet via phone lines, much less high-speed data lines could be a really difficult feat, especially at moderate costs. Just supplying power to a computer or two might require a generator or a solar panel (charging all day just to run the computer for a few hours at night) perhaps.
It is of no particular consequence to the owner of the web site, nor to its' users whether the owner may be in New York City, or Elberta, Alabama, or Mumbai, India, though server space on a direct high speed optical connection to the backbone of the net may be more expensive than a server in a basement in Siberia somewhere. Nor am I advocating that this should be the only industry in town, for we saw what can happen to a New England milltown when competition closes the mill. But it is possible to establish this kind of "cottage industry" virtually anywhere, and by capturing even a miniscule percentage of the worldwide traffic for certain items of ecommerce, it becomes possible to generate a modest income by American or North American standards, but that same very modest income to us, might represent full-on luxurious to an otherwise impoverished family in an isolated and economically disadvantaged community.
Just to be clear, here, let me state that I am not talking about publicizing the basket weaving skills of the locals, although that too could be one way to monetize a web presence. I mean that merely becoming a source of information that attracts people, one has the opportunity to earn a living by having once gained their trust, to refer them to other information of value, which might include pure information ("how to's" or houseplans) or access to money saving opportunities, like sales at Amazon.com (collecting affiliate commissions on sales made because of their referrals). At the same time large organization in the retail field like Wal-mart, K-Mart/Sears, Circuit City, and so on, are also placing retail advertising wherever they can "capture eyes", so merely having traffic to your sight could make you eligible to earn from the "publishing" of some of that advertizing content as well.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, who had a rather rapid rise to national television stardom just a few years ago had an interesting program this Sunday with an array of movers-and-shakers for guest. Not the least of her interviews was a satellite link to Texas (Ms. Bartiromo was in Davos covering the World Economic Summit) with former President of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, Mr. Robert McTeer. Mr. McTeer claims that he had been advocating "strong action" to avoid recession, meaning at least 50 basis points (0.5%) cut in the Fed Funds Rate. Mr. McTeer, with better comic delivery than most economic heavy-weights, joked in poker playing terms that they saw his bet and raised him a quarter, which resulted in the Fed Chairman Bernanke's cut of 3/4's of a percent in the first cut issued by the Fed outside its regularly scheduled meetings since 1971 according to Ms. Bartiromo's Wall Street Journal Report program on CNBC.
Mr. McTeer, however, was not impressed with the tax rebate giveaway the politicians were putting together. He didn't mention, but I think that I did (with respect to one of Congressman Ron Paul's policies about expansion of the money supply), that the M4 money supply was increased by fiat in December by more than US$ 40 billion. (Yes, "Billion," though the "funny money" auctions, as Congressman Paul might call them, were not until this month and next, I believe.) Mr. McTeer also said that he felt that the economic effects of the US$ 150 billion giveaway by Congress and the President in the form of direct rebates to taxpayers (plus business incentives and tax breaks) [and the probable "piling on" of some "tasty" pork by the Senate, as Donna Brazile on This Week with George Stephanopolous put it] was unlikely to be necessary considering the cooperative spirit of the Fed and it's quick action. Mr. McTeer did suggest, however, that he felt it was a good possibility that there may be an additional 0.25% interest rate cut coming, and that could happen as soon as the next regularly schedule Fed meeting.
And in the rest of the class of "heavy-weight" Maria found Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Bono promoting Bono's "RED" campaign to pay for HIV/AIDS drug treatments for Africans. Another interesting picture on the World Economic Forum website was one in which I believe I saw Bill Gates on stage with the Chairmen and CEO's of BOTH Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Nor would it be prudent to ignore that George Soros was also present at the summit. Mr. Soros is, I understand, also scheduled to appear on a CNBC European broadcast in a debate on economic policy in which the resolution he speaks to is something to the effect that their needs to be, "a new sheriff in town," on the world economic stage, because central bankers have, "lost their way."
Speaking of, "lost their way," the anticipated boom from computer telephony integration (or "CTI" as it was called in the comupter and communications industries) never really took place (except behind the scenes where it ended up crashing some of my early retirement dreams as Lucent Technologies stock took a dive at the turn of the century) although the anticipation of it may have inspired physicists to postulate "dark energy" because most of the fiber-optic cable that was laid in preparation for the explosion of demand remains "dark" (unlit by the necessary lasers to make it useful) because bringing it on line would cause existing tariffs to drop like stones to virtually nothing and it is hard for communications companies to continue to charge premium rates for guaranteed premium grade "quality of service" when there is no shortage of bandwidth for everyone everywhere. (It's another one of those "corporate inertia" things I spoke about last week that I find so annoying, everyone is so worried about preserving today's established markets that they stifle the evolution of new markets and new technologies to protect the old territories.) But the convergence we are now seeing is one of cell phones with video displays also accessing web based data and gradually creeping in is the GPS integration of local commercial information as well.
Things do not always work out the way we expect or plan them to. I predicted the future of the internet quite a number of years ago. Projecting the number of subscribers was not my field (and still isn't), but technology was, (and is), so I predicted several things. I expected to see a proliferation of "virtual reality" sights. That has been slow in coming about, but one example does stand out. I believe the most prominent example today is "Second Life", which is a really interesting phenomenon itself, because although it strongly resembles the Dungeons and Dragons romantic sword and sorcery roll playing games of the 1980's and 1990's, this seems to be a place to meet and greet real friends (new and old). I won't try to pigeonhole the D&D crowd but I will say that computer game players started out as the more geeky among us, and while one cannot know how many still are, the mere fact that these communities of online folks interact socially makes them seem to have more adventurous and more gregarious natures than those nerds and computer jockeys of old.
Now I have to admit I was more than a little bit spoiled by my early computer experiences. Mind you, I admit that I am discounting [naturally enough, I THINK] the Timex/Sinclair 1 kilobyte "toy" computer, which introduced me to programming but never did a single useful thing in its life with me. So I have had some optimistic views on the future of computers and the internet. At that same IBM and IEEE sponsored speech I gave in Toronto many, many years ago, I showed a picture of a video watch, or rather a mockup of a video watch that I predicted would be the future common access and interface device to the internet and most people's computer experiences. Along with that I predicted that it would be a voice interactive experience, which is to say that like the denizens of Star Trek we would just speak to the computer, and receive much of what we wanted back in the form of voice response as well, supplemented by screen graphics only when really needed. Video is a terrible waste of bandwidth, especially if all you are sending is the graphics to represent text that conveys the information.
Well, through a series of semi-disasters I just received on my desktop a Gateway GT5404 computer with Microsoft's VISTA Home Premium operating system. It has 1 GB of RAM, 250GB of SATA hard drive and a Pentium Dual-Core CPU, which is a 64 bit processor that handles two 32 bit streams at 2.8 gigahertz. Both a sticker on the machine itself and the software reporting the type of system it is emphasize that “dual stream” feature. The sticker says, “2 x 2 MB L2 cache.” The software says that it is “rated” 2.80, but then goes on to explain that it is 32 bits at 2.8 GHz and another 32bits at 2.8 GHz. This operating system also contains the speech recognition features that became standard with Windows XP editions. I am not, by any means, holding my breath, but I am hoping that this will become a feature of my computing in the very near future. This XP machine on which I am working (a Dell, by the way, but "only" 1.6 GHz, and 768 MB of RAM) can barely handle my 9 windows of Word, Internet Explorer and Outlook email if Outlook is attempting to download new messages (as it does several times an hour). Therefore speech recognition would be totally impossible since I would have long since forgotten what it was I intended to say LONG minutes before the operating system got around to attempting to copy my words to the screen (or execute the commands if that is what the words were). The dual execution scheme on this new Gateway might be the answer to this kind of problem, but I am fearful of getting too excited about it. I was doing voice/speech recognition work on an IBM XT computer back about 1986, and even though that was "discreet speech" (un-connected, distinct words with "pre-trained" vocabulary) the progress in this field has been of dire disappointment to me over the last 21 years, especially relative to the increase in computing power. For a comparison (you can do the math if you like) my old IBM XT type (actually from Matsushita) operated at 10 megahertz and had 1 megabyte of total RAM (even the hard disk was 10 megabytes total capacity).
Please wish me luck on that front.
Amazing political news: Caroline Kennedy wrote a endorsement for Senator Barack Obama, published by the New York Times newspaper, in which she said, "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them." The Times also reports that Senator Ted Kennedy is slated to provide his endorsement of Senator Obama on Monday (January 28th, 2007).
Not so amazing political news: Senator Obama won the Democratic Primary election in South Carolina. What was surprising, perhaps, was that Senator Edwards, who was born in South Carolina did so poorly. What was almost more surpising was that Senator Obama's vote count was 55% for Senator Obama, and just 27% for Senator Hillary Clinton. And talk about "globalization", it is certainly NOT a one way street. That article link above about the South Carolina election results is to a Korean newspaper website that just happened to be one of the top results on my Google search terms.
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Stafford "Doc" Williamson
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