When vaporware becomes real.

There is a thrill and a buzz I get when the CGI video of some really cool idea is supplanted by a real video of the idea realized. And that feeling is especially strong when the idea had the combination of extremity and coolth. (Yeah, "coolth." I typed that.)

A recent example is kite-assisted ship propulsion. I remember the first time I saw it... I don't know if it was on the cover of Popular Mechanics, but that's how I picture it. An "artist's rendition" in the style familiar all the way back to proposals for flying cars. The vision was appealing: One of the oldest transportation ideas (using the wind to move heavy loads on water) updated to meet economic challenges (increasing fuel costs) and environmental challenges (Global Warming -- although, to be sure, a shipping magnate wouldn't have to care about, or even believe in, anthropogenic climate change to be motivated toward this idea). The update includes technological leverage: computer control and flying the "sail" up to 300m above the water, where the winds are steadier and stronger than the captains of the Age of Sail ever knew. But it seemed fatuous, and I thought that, like flying cars, it would remain in sci-fi-styled book-cover art only.

But here's my buzz: Reuters has a report on the launch of a proof-of-concept freighter flying a robotically-deployed, computer-controlled, high-flying, propulsion-assisting kite. I'm savoring the thrill.

Cooperating with the Trade Winds (consider the etymology) rather than fighting hull drag with combustion... an idea with a lot of coolth. Bucky Fuller would be all over this.

Human ingenuity - THE resource

Pearl Harbor Day, 2007.

Here's the quickest of entries just to retain a path to a piece of video from Discovery Channel Canada's 2003 piece about an American in the Midwest who, in his retirement, has been moving massive pieces around with only muscle, wood, and rope... and, as he put it, his "favorite tool," gravity. As he builds a version of Stonehenge in his own back yard, he makes it look more like quotidian labor and less like a miracle.

And, he makes me want to shove some stuff around, too.

People with purpose produce surprising and wonderful results, again and again.

What if you captured some of that exercising energy?

My brother, a cool guy and a road cyclist by avocation, sent me an email yesterday:

Ok, here's an idea. I want to get a trainer bike for the basement. Can you devise a way of taking my effort and storing the energy in a battery so I can reduce some of my household elec consumption off the grid. I see a future - kind of like Tina Turner running Bordertown in Return To Thunderdome on sheep s**t or whaterver.

Always thinkin,
yer brudda.

I had thought about things like this a little myself. I wrote back:

Yes, I can, Tina!

I'm working on one for myself. Despite that human effort isn't much next to the grid. But wait...

The good news is that in winter time, it's a done thing. EVERY CALORIE EXPENDED cycling indoors goes to heating your house. No kidding, no exaggeration. Even if you're not using your mechanical output as stored or delivered electrical energy, it, and your metabolic energy expenditure, are reducing heating demand in your house; you need to burn less gas in the furnace to maintain the indoor temperature! Indeed, if road cycling really takes 700 Calories/hr, or 700,000 calories, which is almost 3 MJ, that's a big help to your furnace; the rough equivalent of burning a 1000W lamp for the whole hour.

Back to the bad news: Imagine that you could capture what you can of the mechanical output from your exertions. (You still get to keep metabolic output as home heating, by the way; indeed, "waste heat" is really hard to capture for re-use for anything but heating.) A fit cycling demon like yourself can sustain about 1/3 hp, or 250W, of mechanical output for your, say, hour-long workout. Thus, assuming perfect conversion to storage, and then perfect energy conversion from storage back to electrical, you will have captured about .25 kW-hr of energy. At 7.3 cents/kW-hr, you will have saved yourself... TWO CENTS! (Almost two cents. Not quite.) You could run your toaster for about 10 minutes with that kind of effort! Neat.

Of course, that's assuming no losses. It's really about half that, because of losses converting from mechanical to electrical to chemical and back to electrical. So you could save about a penny's worth of electricity from the grid with an hour of exercise; maybe get something worth spreading butter and jam on.

But then, back to good news: the waste heat from the inefficient conversions STILL goes to heating your house. Thank goodness. Otherwise this would be really depressing, instead of just mildly depressing.

As I said, I am still going to build an energy storage device for an exercise bike because that's cool, and I am still going to heat my house partly with exercise; "being" a 1000W bulb for an hour every now and then is good support for the home-heating plant.

Hey! You just caused me to write an awesome blog entry! What a brother. Thanks!

...and I wasn't kidding.

You! Go blog!

Slim told me, "blog!" And when Slim says "blog," I ask "how high?!"

And so I blog.

The picture in my profile is of me sitting in the driver's seat of R. Buckminster Fuller's second, and only surviving, Dymaxion Car. A front-wheel drive, one-rear-wheel-steering vehicle with a Ford V8 engine. Fuller got better than 35 mpg and speeds over 120 mph... in the early 1930s. Fuller is a hero of mine, so a trip from Boston to Reno to spend time with the last Dymaxion was a pilgrimage.

In this web log, I look forward to sharing, with comment, some of the things important to me. The beautiful thing is that if you, dear reader, don't find it interesting, you don't have to read it. You can go elsewhere, and buon viaggio to you!

Here's to the information age.