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From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 2:50 PM
Subject: Next Big Future - 5 new articles
From: FeedBlitz <feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com>
Date: Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 2:50 PM
Subject: Next Big Future - 5 new articles
Here are the latest updates
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Strategic Building and Infrastructure Reserve and Expanding the idea of Defence
Summarizing the concepts needed to transform to a more robust and faster recovering (from disaster) society.
1. Pre-sort and have system for quickly resolving the politics of rebuild
2. Bring infrastructure up to a fast maintainable or fast fixable state. (R&D needed) 3. Strategic reserve of building and infrastructure 4. Defense beyond defense against war. to include civilization hardening and fast reconstruction and recovery The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve holds about $65 billion worth of oil for an emergency supply that can replace all of the oil used in the USA for 36 days. The United States started the petroleum reserve in 1975 after oil supplies were cut off during the 1973-74 oil embargo, to mitigate future temporary supply disruptions. The EIA shows that the United States imports a net 10 million barrels (9 million barrels per day of crude) of oil a day (MMbd), so the SPR holds about a 70-day supply. However, the maximum total withdrawal capability from the SPR is only 4.4 million barrels (700,000 m3) per day, making it a 160 + day supply. I propose that all countries should have strategic building and infrastructure reserves and/or participate in regional or global strategic building and infrastructure reserves. I also propose that the concept of defense be expanded to consider more than defense against war and to expand national guards with engineering and rebuilding guard. I propose that the engineering, new super-heavy equipment for fast rebuilding and replacement and rebuilding guard should have 15-50% of the defense budget. The vast majority of the work and issues associated with the idea of fast and streamlined rebuilding is to have an effective system of pre-sorting all of the political issues and clearing away enough of the legacy incompatibilities with infrastructure that was put in piecemeal over one hundred years or more. There has to be work and money spent to bring everything up to an easily maintainable baseline. This is similar to the issues with keeping and retiring software and hardware in large data centers and companies. When something is no longer easily maintained then it has to be replaced and retired. Old infrastructure that is no longer maintainable or easily replaceable but still functional is left in place for decades. The data center concepts of "hot swapping" when something is broken needs to be designed into infrastructure and cities. The Japanese Tsunami destroyed some 120,000 buildings and damaged 220,000 others. There have been multiple situations the Katrina hurricane, Japan's Tsunami, Indonesia's tsunami, flooding and earthquakes in China where about million people up to five million get displaced and lose their homes. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) provides thousands of mobile home trailers which end up getting used for years after disasters. China's Broad Group has developed factory mass production of skyscrapers. They have assembled a 15 story skyscraper in 6 days and a 30 story building in 30 days. They will soon assemble a 220 story building in 90 days. The technology can also build shorter buildings quickly. 6 story buildings or less in one day. A strategic building and infrastructure reserve the size of the strategic oil reserve could provide housing, offices, hospitals, infrastructure, schools and stores for 1 million people and could be fully built in about 2 months. Read more » Japan restarted a second Nuclear reactor
Kansai Electric Power Co said its 1,180-megawatt No. 4 reactor at its Ohi nuclear plant resumed supplying electricity to the grid on Saturday, Japan's second nuclear unit to regain power since last year's Fukushima crisis led to the shutdown of all units.
The move came three days after the unit was restarted, and the reactor is set to begin full-capacity power generation around July 25-28.
All but two of the country's 50 nuclear reactors have been offline for checks amid concerns about safety, and the gap is being met by firing up costly fossil fuel units and through energy-saving steps. In 2011, Japan had to severely reduce its use of electricity with a big impact on domestic and industrial routines, while the utilities have switched to alternative fuels for power generation. The result was a jump of 25.2% in fossil fuel imports, which last year made up almost one third of Japan's total overseas spending. Oil, gas and coal were all in demand from foreign markets. In total during 2011 Japan spent ¥21.7 trillion ($277 billion) on fossil fuel imports, up from ¥17.4 trillion ($222 billion) the year before. This increase of ¥4.3 trillion ($55 billion) is clearly a major factor in the country's overall trade deficit of ¥2.5 trillion ($32 billion), the first posted by Japan since 1980. For 2011 and 2012, it will probably cost Japan more than $100 billion in extra fossil fuel imports to have the vast majority of its nuclear power shutoff. This does not include the business and econonomic cost caused by rationing of electricity. Read more » UK Reactor Update - China likely to build and not France
Guardian UK - China is poised to make a dramatic intervention in Britain's energy future by offering to invest billions of pounds in building a series of new nuclear power stations.
Greenpeace complains that Chinese nuclear players have state backing, which could help solve the issue of financing colossally expensive new nuclear power stations in the UK. But this just means that the money from UK taxpayers will flow to the Chinese government, rather than to France.
France EDF has a lot of state support and as was seen in the financial crisis most of the big banks, car companies will have state bailouts when needed. Japan also provided bailouts in the energy industry. The energy industry worldwide gets over $500 billion per year in various forms of government subsidies. This is for oil, solar, wind, coal, hydro, biofuel and nuclear etc... If you have an energy company and you are not getting state support, then you are incompetent. Read more » Memristor Random Number Generator
IEEE Spectrum - Engineers in Taiwan say they've invented a tiny low-power circuit based on memristors that could improve the security of data transmission over the Internet and of using Near Field Communication (NFC) from smartphone wallets. The security of many digital transactions depends on generating truly random numbers, something that's difficult to do using today's digital circuits, which typically produce numbers that aren't completely random. The new memristor circuit rapidly spits out true random numbers while consuming less energy compared with other techniques, according to research in an upcoming issue of IEEE Electron Device Letters.
For those who do not have a degree in computer science, it is a pain in the butt to make a pseudo random number generator program and the result is not true randomness. Memristors and resistive random-access memories (RRAMs) store information as resistance rather than charge, as other memories do. They are made by sandwiching a resistive material or a stack of materials between two electrodes. The device's resistance can be reversibly increased or decreased by applying a certain level of voltage across the device.  Contact RRAM: The resistive memory cell sits between a tungsten contact and the transistor's drain region. Read more » Getting the London Olympics without Cable or Satellite
A couple of years ago I dropped cable and satellite TV and just watch Netflix and Hulu over my internet connection via a Nintendo Wii (Playstation and Xbox or more advanced DVD/Blu Ray players or Roku type devices work as well.
However, I also want to watch the London Olympics which start in 8 days on July 27, 2012. Here are the details about getting NBC and other channels over the air in the USA. BTW- Canada switched to digital channels in 2011. 1. Receive Digital Channels To receive the digital signals that are broadcast now your TV needs to have an ATSC tuner. (Advanced Television Systems Committee) * By July 1, 2005 all televisions with screen sizes over 36 inches (91 cm) must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner * By March 1, 2006 all televisions with screen sizes over 25 inches (64 cm) must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner * By March 1, 2007 all televisions regardless of screen size, and all interface devices that include a tuner (VCR, DVD player/recorder, DVR) must include a built-in ATSC DTV tuner. If your desired TV does not have the ATSC DTV tuner then you either need to get DVD player that has one or get a digital to analog converter. Read more » More Recent Articles | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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