OK, nothing has grabbed me today but in an effort to reward (punish?) those loyal reader(s) I figured I would spew some random thoughts in an attempt at being interesting and/or entertaining enough to justify your visits.
The US continuing down its path to an oligarchy controlled police state and I think I have babbled about that enough. The looming war with Iran continues to loom with more and more of our idiot talking head media shamelessly claiming their coverage is unbiased despite not getting a single point of view from Iran, so no need to carry on about that. The GOP race to the bottom continue apace, so much so that moderate stalwart Olympia Snow has decided to throw in the towel (it seems the forced rightward drift she has been engaged in has finally turned her stomach enough to convince her to leave), but except for the novelty of a politician actually standing up for principles (note, however, that she only did so after having sashayed rightward the last couple of years), there isn’t much of interest here.
I have been signed up on some groups in LinkedIn for a while, one of which has as its topic biofuel. I just can’t get excited about biofuel. I have convinced myself there are several ways to increase the profit potential per acre (the traditional way farmers measure their success) from the abysmal $50 (really! They make, on average, a profit of $50 an acre! What a bunch of morons! No wonder none of their children want to continue their legacy!) to way higher, but the funny thing is no matter how I slice and dice it, I can make at least 10x more profit by selling the raw materials as animal food than I can possibly make by selling it as fuel. My latest mental foray into biofuel is to grow duckweed and use thermal depolymerization to produce a light crude analog and based on my research it seems possible to get the equivalent of 50,000 gallons of fuel per acre (per year). Selling that for a couple of bucks a gallon and estimating capital costs on the order of $200K per acre gives a gross return on investment of 50% or higher, something that would normally be hard to resist. However, if the _exact_ same investment could be instead turned into $400K a year selling it as animal feed, why the heck would I want to give up that kind of money? I will probably validate my yield estimates when I finally get my greenhouse finished if for no other reason to have proof that it is indeed possible to do such, but I can’t imagine actually going forward with it unless I wanted to rip off dumbassed investors too clueless to do their own economic analysis. If only I lacked morals and ethics, I could be really wealthy!
I have been pursuing an idea for table-top fusion (not as silly as it sounds, check out the Farnsworth Fusor, but no one has been able to make it a net producer of energy) and alternatively get very excited and convinced it is a slam dunk and I should focus every waking moment on it and depression since I have done that a couple of times before (once to build molecular scale computer components and another time to build a DNA sequencing chip) and had my hopes dashed. If it works the upside is almost incalculable, but, of course, I have to build a working prototype first to know if I am full of crap or not. Since my wife and I have already committed a lot of our resources toward our greenhouse/pool project I am not encouraged by my better half in spending money willy nilly, but I am trying to remain motivated enough to pursue it. The upside is that unlike in the case of the DNA research where I would need several hundred thousand bucks to do it myself (presuming I could find the appropriate equipment used) and thus wound up dependent on doing the work at a university research lab (which made finding time very challenging), this work can be done for a few grand with vastly cheaper equipment (and thus at home whenever I feel like it). Still, I find myself so many times getting home from work, eating dinner, and sitting in front of the boob tube (sadly, seldom any views of actual boobs) until it is bed time.
Spring looks like it will be here early. Thanks Global Warming! My worry, though, is late frosts. If we can avoid the late frosts then everything get off to a wild head start and maybe, just maybe, this year the hundreds of plants I have tediously stuck in the ground will finally pay off with something to look at and enjoy. At our Maryland house I see lots of plants that have made the decision that spring has sprung, bugs are in the air (that is my favorite thing about winter, no damn bugs!) and the birds are singing. Actually, I tend to prefer how quite winter is, it always amazes me how much racket there is in late summer.
Have a great weekend!
