On New Years Eve 2011 I was in Geelong at a restaurant, 800km from my home in Adelaide. This year I happened to be away from my children, who were staying elsewhere in Adelaide while I was interstate. My home was supposedly vacant. However I knew it was very hot in Adelaide . . . → Read More: Busting Teenage Partying with a Fluksometer
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My friend Bill Kerr gave me a copy of this book to read, which provides several ideas for solving energy and climate problems. The book has some interesting ideas, for example using boron as a fuel. Apparently any solid metal will burn under the right conditions, so you can use iron or boron as . . . → Read More: Prescription for The Planet – Tom Blees Backyard science is cool. For the last few months I have been working on a theory to reduce the energy consumption of my pool. I started with a theory, and tested it with an experiment. It failed a few times, so I re-worked my theory and have now reduced my pool energy consumption . . . → Read More: Low Energy Pool Once or twice a week, encouraged by my wife, I hop on my bike and pedal a few km down to a local gym. On the way I have to cross South Road, which is a major arterial road here in Adelaide. The only safe way to get across is using the pedestrian crossing . . . → Read More: Fuel Consumption of a Pedestrian Crossing I am interested in testing my my EV batteries – for example to measure the effects of various charging strategies. So I dreamed up a system using a WRT54G router and my little $2 PIC based voltage and current sensor WISPCAR board from last year. The WISPCAR board senses voltage and current and sends . . . → Read More: EV Battery Tester Yesterday I took a much needed break from Mesh Potato hacking and pedaled into Adelaide University to see a lecture by Kjell Aleklett, who is the president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas who is visiting Australia this week. Couple of important points that I took away: Kjell explained the physical process by . . . → Read More: Kjell Aleklett Lecture Today I was fortunate enough to go for a drive in a MIEV, the single demo unit that is on tour around Australia! This will probably be the first of the new generation of production electric cars (fingers crossed). Funny how these things come about. I was sitting down to lunch on Sunday talking to . . . → Read More: A Drive in the Mitsubishi MIEV I just built a Rocket Stove out of 3 tin cans and tested it by making my morning coffee:
My 10 year old son then followed up by frying an egg. Each time we used a tiny amount of fuel; a bit of cardboard to get it started and maybe two sticks 1cm wide . . . → Read More: The Amazing Rocket Stove The Australian Government has kicked off a $43B National Broadband Network (NBN) to give everyone in a Australia a 100Mbit/s fibre connection. It’s the biggest infrastructure project in our history, and represents about $2100 per person of unfunded government debt. The theory is that it will make us more productive, help education, health and . . . → Read More: What I would do with $43B Oil has no future. Really. Just look at this graph of oil discovery (borrowed from this excellent Peak Oil Overview). The graph shows oil discovery (in billions of barrels) per decade.
Now oil discoveries peaked at about 500 billion in the 1960′s, about the time I was born and started crawling towards anything . . . → Read More: Peak Oil and Why Growth is Evil |
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