A Proud Moment (or two)

I am in good company, because, ”I Believe in ZERO” that is an anti-hunger campaign sponsored in part by Alyssa Milano, or at least supported by her, and lots of other fairly famous Hollywood stars (Lary Fishburn, Lisa Liu, Mia Farrow) who appear in a 30 Public service Announcement that appears on her web site, though the program it is promoting is actually the UNICEF program. You know the one you probably either took our yourself on Halloween, or sent your kids out with the little boxes to collect coin donations for the cause of Children everywhere. I signed on with a comment on Alyssa’s video, to indicate my support of emergency aid in the form of charity provided by organizations like UNICEF (that’ United Nations International Children’s Fund, just in case it has been a long time since you saw it spelled out and had forgotten what the acronym actually stands for), but as I stated there, if it is not a response to a crisis, a genuine emergency situation, charity is not the answer. It is the wrong side of the old adage about teaching a person to how to catch fish rather than merely giving them a fish to eat.

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Stafford “Doc” Williamson says:
January 16, 2010 at 2:31 am
Most of the “preventable” diseases are water borne, which makes me especially passionate about improved sanitation and clean water for everyone. The work that UNICEF does is wonderful, and I can remember carrying the UNICEF donations box with me at Halloween 50 years ago. But as important as UNICEF work is, the only real solution is to create sufficient economic development in underdeveloped areas that people can make a sustainable living in “modern” contemporary terms equivalent to Europeans and Americans.
This is one of the reasons that the “green” revolution in biofuels has become so important. Every country can now grow their own fuels, and fuels mean independent, secure, environmentally friendly sources of local energy, for heat, transportation, electricity. I am working with other entrepreneurs to create such “islands of green energy”, thousands of them, across Africa and other underdeveloped portions of the world.
Unlike colonialist exploitation we hope to have local communities become equity partners while we also provide them with the tools for better education and safe water. Offering local people employment is not enough, they MUST take a stake in the enterprise and the community development for future generations.
Please wish me good luck.
Sincerely,
Stafford “Doc” Williamson
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Of course the fact that my response was prominently featured (first place under the video) was flattering, and pleasing to me (I’m easily flattered, in case you haven’t noticed), but further compliments were added with the following message from another “fan”.
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Roxy says:
May 24, 2010 at 3:01 pm
Stafford is fabulous. I’ve shared this on my facebook, and have kept reminding people that there are people dying from drinking diseased water out there they’re so impoverished, so give spare money to charity. These problems need to be constantly put in people’s faces until they’re fixed, because so many people forget that 1 person donating £1 actually helps, ‘cos 1 million people all donating £1 each obviously helps… Yeah.
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ASU Biodesign Institute

I have probably mentioned before that my design for an improved cultivation method for algae (and also, not entirely coincidentally, the “blue-green algae” now more correctly known as “cyanobacteria”, both of) which hold great promise for the future of non-fossil source liquid fuels has been to university and “graduated” with flying colors. Fuels from algae will be used as replacements, and “blendstocks” for gasoline, kerosene, and jet fuel which sparks substantial interest. My device design was subjected to the scrutiny of a whole team of PhD students at the Arizona State University, under the supervision of Dr. Bruce Rittmann—Regents’ Professor and director of Biodesign’s Center for Environmental Biotechnology as part of Rittmann’s fall graduate seminar, “Advanced Environmental Biotechnology. These college kids took certain “liberties” with my design, but “what’s a mother to do” when “they” go off to college. They added curved mirrors to their version of my design, which I considered quite un-necessary bejewelment, but I suppose it is better than a pierce eyebrow. The team leader was, highly appropriately, given our own focus on economic development for Africa by developing independent islands of green energy, a Fullbright Scholar from South Africa.

Her name is Precious. No, I don’t mean her name is “cute” I mean, her name is Precious. Her whole name is Precious Biyela. As team leader she had a number of very bright folks helping her (not least of which, of course, was Dr. Rittmann). They were, Chou-An Chiu, Fariya Sherif and Youneng Tang. And the whole story is related in an article from last December in the ASU Biodesign Institute’s website’s “news” section in a article written by Richard Harth.

Jason DiBari, President of Source Integration Inc., the firm that is now developing the device, said when the reporter interviewed him, “We’re trying to create a hybrid system, offering all the protection of a lab, which keeps out the invasive species, while retaining the low cost of an exterior system, like an open pond.” Mr. DiBari also noted later that existing systems are energy and labor intensive, requiring sophisticated apparatuses and artificial light.

Is Everyone in Congress a)Stupid, b) Crazy, or c)BOTH!!

According to the latest “insider” reports out of Washington today, Majority Leader Senator Harry Reid has dropped all hope of passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill through the Senate before the fall, and probably not even before the elections. With all the doom and gloom forecasting of Republicans taking back seats in the House in November, enough to minimally slim the Democratic majority, if not take over the majority there, as well as expecting gains for the Republicans in the Senate, it makes Senator Reid’s move look a great deal like he’s trading in his flag for a white bed sheet to make it a total surrender. His claim is that he (still) hasn’t got the necessary 60 votes to pass anything in the senate so he isn’t going to waste time on it. Can he not see that this self-defeating attitude is only going to leave the Democrats more vulnerable?

Even Jim Rogers, President, CEO and Chairman of Duke Energy is in favor of a “utilities first” carbon cap bill to restrict carbon emissions from electric utilities companies. “Put simply,” Rogers says in an open letter to Senator Reid, “without a resolution to the carbon issue for our sector, our “business as usual” future will include no nuclear plants and no new coal plants – this makes the “dash to gas” the industrials so fear all the more likely.” His meaning is that turning to natural gas for power plants will, as other industrial sectors fear inflate the cost of gas and therefore make their power costs soar.

Meanwhile Senator Kerry, who, along with the “independent” Senator Lieberman have been developing a utilities oriented cap and trade bill, has offered a very magnanimous olive branch to the man who funded the “Swift boat” ads that sunk his presidential campaign, T. Boon Pickens. Senator Kerry reportedly offered to include concessions favorable to Pickens’ scheme to use natural gas for heavy transport trucks while supplementing electric generation from his own wind farms in West Texas. But what does Senator Reid do?

Reportedly, Majority Leader Reid has co-opted Boone’s support by including provisions supportive of his “Pickens’ Plan” natural gas vehicles in a cobbled together, ineffectual aggregate of minor provisions for which little opposition exists in order to pass “something” (no matter how desperately anemic it may look to anyone with a brain), and even that may not slide through until September. At this point the Democrats need a good albatross to hang on the necks of all the Republicans to turn the news in their favor through the Summer August recess. Sure the cozy history of Republicans and the oil industry may last through to November as the mill stone that drags them down on the causes of the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill, but the Democrats have to cross their fingers and hope that hurricane season doesn’t turn into a new Gulf grease slick on which they trip on the way to the polls.

At minimum Senator Reid should put up a piece of legislation that contains a straw dog provision, in order to use the Republican reaction to some strongly liberal but popular energy provision (that would evoke Republican threats of filibuster to kill debate a death knell) that Democrats can then use as a talking point when they head home for the recess to bolster and build support for the Fall elections. At minimum they need some “issue” with which to skewer Republicans’ positions to avoid the kind of lambs to the slaughter effect that happened last August and stretched out Health Care Insurance Reform into this year before we could get it passed into law, instead of sliding through easily with the clear 60 vote majority that Senator Reid and the Democrats had prior to last year’s recess.

Nano Paint Disappears

You may find this difficult to believe, or you may wonder why it took so long to discover, but an Israeli company called Nanoflight has a product that seems to be getting good results at making things disappear. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately), it makes things disappear to specific wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. That is, thus far, they have managed to make rockets disappear from radar. Testing is underway (or will be soon, the company has indicated) for using the paint to make things (soldiers in particular) “invisible” to infrared night vision devices. That could be a lot better trick since the “problem” of infrared is that the temperature of the object itself is radiating the heat signature. In the case of radar, the radar is being beamed out and the “bounce” of that signal is being interpreted.

In the case of this nano-particle enabled paint, the effect is that it absorbs some of the radar spectrum and also scatters some of it in random directions rather than a conventional “bounce” of the radio waves back to the detectors. Stealth aircraft accomplish roughly the same thing, using similarly “absorbing” material on their surfaces and by the shapes that bounce radar waves away from their source rather than back to the source with is waiting to detect these “echoes”. If that sounds a little strange, “absorbing” electromagnetic waves is what happens to everything we see. Indeed the colors that we “see” are the light waves that have NOT been absorbed by the object. So something that appears “green” to our eyes is actually absorbing all the light EXCEPT the GREEN, which is what our eyes see after the green light bounces from the green object. That is also why a white car heats up in bright sunlight a little less rapidly than a black car. White is reflecting all the light frequencies in roughly equal amounts, so the light energy isn’t being absorbed by the material and turned into heat. A black car, on the other hand, it absorbing ALL of the wavelengths of light that are hitting it, so all of that light serves (to some extent) to heat up the object. Of course, that is also how the Nano-paint works too. Instead of bouncing back all of the radar energy (the equivalent of “radar white”) it absorbs the energy and turns most or at least much of it into heat, scattering the remainder and turning the object into a “fuzzy black” which is radar is more or less equivalent to “nothing” or “invisible”.

Although the article I originally read on this was in the Engineering news from the IEEE.org, they point out that the Israeli news Ynetnews.com contains this statement: ”Even though they may not entirely disappear from radar screens, this technology is a considerably more cost-effective method to evade radar detection than purchasing an American stealth plane for $5 billion.” That is interesting from two perspectives. It suggests that perhaps Israel has been “shopping”, and secondly, that making “stealth aircraft” might be highly profitable, because my understanding was that even the latest version of the Stealth Bomber was only cost us, the USA, a “mere” HALF BILLION DOLLARS (each). So US$5 billion (each) would be a 1000% markup. Nice margins there.

Happy Thoughts

I accepted an invitation this week to speak at a conference in China next April. The conference to be held in the Chinese city of Dalien focuses on advances in biofuels.
1st Annual World Congress of Bioenergy-2011, Theme: Developing Bio-renewable Energy from Nature, Time: April 25-29, 2011, Place: Dalian, China
Website: http://www.bitlifesciences.com/wcbe2011 Dalien is the home of an Intel computer chip fabrication facility. Prior to their arrival, Dalien was known by many names, including “Soccer City” and “Fashioin City”, but was considered by many to be a “rustbelt” town in Northern China. Unfortunately Dalien, too, is currently battling a massive oil spill. Let us hope that they are not facing hundreds of millions of gallons of crude like our own BP Gulf of Mexico situation.

Following my acceptance of their offer of a speaking position, a conference representative wrote: “Organizing Committee is very interested in your title.”  My speech is schedule to be …

TITLE: <B><I>It Only Takes 90 Days to Conquer the World</b></I>

SUBTITLE: <B><I>(The 1000 Biomass Species with Infinite Potential)</B></I>

Sincerely,
Love and warm wishes,

Stafford “Doc” Williamson

http://daochienergy.com