I’ve been ill the past few days which is one reason my level of posting has been low. Another is that I am moving to a new job starting Monday (which might mean my blogging might take a more permanent hit; one of the reasons I started blogging was that my current job had so little to occupy my day) and been getting things ready for my absence. My new job, in case anyone is interested, is C++ programming on a Tilera CPU (sort of like a supercomputer on a chip, with up to 100 cores all linked by an internal mesh network) on an intrusion detection-like system. I might even get the opportunity to do some FPGA and embedded ARM programming. I picked this over some systems engineering opportunities largely because SE work tends to be mostly about sitting in meetings all day attempting to extract actionable meaning from clients. While I heard a couple of very persuasive arguments that someone with my background would be better spending time doing the sorts of things that junior developers lack the experience to do (in most cases), ultimately it boiled down to that I would rather do heads-down programming on my own time (I generally work 5:30-2 which gives me a minimum of several hours of daylight when I get home to do things) than sit in meetings on someone else’s time. The money really wasn’t that different and while from a career perspective SE work is probably a better direction, I am really _really_ hoping that we can retire early in ‘just’ 12 years, so I don’t need to squeeze that much more out of my current career path to accomplish that goal. Besides, I also think that few junior programmers have the chops to maximize throughput on hardware like that and I have been itching to have the chance to do so for years and years now.
Regarding my patent I had a bit of a scare when I realized that several years ago I had, when attempting to get help from a hardware forum (never offer to pay for advice! almost all the responses I got were sarcastic complaints about how little I was offering when had I not even offered to pay they no doubt would have given the same advice for free), basically described the core of my technical approach and one of the commenters cleverly guessed exactly what my intent was/is. Fortunately, it seems that because I never discussed the _application_ of what I was asking about, according to my patent lawyer, that doesn’t amount to disclosure of prior art. Looking back at my notes, I have been hammering away at this idea since mid 2007, so over 5 years now. It sure would be nice to get something for all that effort (a couple of thousand hours, I estimate), but a little kernel of me still thinks it will all be a waste of time. I guess once a dog gets beaten enough it begins to consider being beaten as the normal course of events.
My wife and I are considering attempting to expedite our greenhouse/pool project by hiring some carpenters. On the one hand I would love to see that work gets done during the week, but on the other hand, we are already running over budget (shocking, I know) and are already having to juggle funds to ensure we can finish paying for the project (or rather, finish the project by putting the expenses on credit cards and then spend the next 3-5 years paying them off). It is really frustrating the glacial pace of the construction (last weekend I probably shouldn’t have done anything because of my illness but felt since the bulk of the work at this time is just dumping gravel into the bottom of the pool and grading it out it would be OK, something that was working until I realized I had forgot an element and had to dig some of the damn gravel back out, probably why I missed work on Monday), it took us over 2.5 years to get the occupancy permit for the house (3 years before it really was ‘done’), in April we will have been at this thing for 2 years and it is hard to feel confident we can be done with it by the end of the year. If we could just win the lottery!
I have been obsessing about ‘osmotic energy‘ the last few days (Tuesday night I actually had a lot of trouble getting to sleep because of it). On Monday I read this interesting article on the use of osmosis to generate energy and was rather frustrated to learn about something that has been around since at least the early ’70s that I hadn’t heard about. I have invested over a decade into studying alternative energy (as well as mainstream energy, no doubt I could bore you for days with what I know about nuclear energy) and thought my knowledge base encompassed all forms of alternatives (viable or otherwise). I have done some preliminary research and calculations and it isn’t something that is quite so simple as it is made out to be (is anything?), but I have been doing a lot of thinking that the basic concept is quite sound. There is a very strong focus on use of naturally occurring intersections of fresh and sea water when I think there are other opportunities that might be much better (because I haven’t finished my calculations and might want to pursue this as research I intend to be rather cagey about my thoughts). As yet I think there is a very strong possibility that by combining a few different techniques I have learned about over the years it might be practical to make this concept into a viable alternative that might actually be able to scale to the point it could supply a meaningful portion of the world’s electricity. Lots of ifs yet, but such is the nature of research. Shortly I might find it worth my while to invest some actual bucks and bench hours into this, or I might conclude that there isn’t enough ‘there’ there as I did with the ethanol from fallen apples. In principle there are around 64 kilowatts in the difference between a gallon of pure water and a gallon of saturated brine (that is, kilowatt/second, so you need 3,600 of them for a kilowatt/hour). Based on some reading so far the max realistic amount of energy that can be extracted is a bit less than 50%, so each pair of gallons, when mixed appropriately, has the potential to produce 32,000 watts (or 8.8 watt/hours). You can see how this wouldn’t be practical in a car, for instance. A 20 gallon tank would only produce 88 watt/hours, probably not enough to get you out of your driveway (for comparison, a gallon of gasoline has the potential of 36,000 watt/hours, though generally you only get 10-15% of that to the wheels (still, 40x on a per-gallon basis)). However, when weight and volume are less of an issue (such would be the case for many industrial processes), the amount of energy potential starts to be meaningful. It is likely to remain a niche product, though, just like concentrated solar, geothermal and tidal energy, but I can envision some scenarios where it could have wider appeal, which is why I continue to explore it.
