stuff and ponderings

Another party last night, another evening with Noah.

Spent today trying to reconstruct an image from a binary file, which contains a series of them. Resolution and pixel depth were known. However, the data is contained in a rather arbitrary and confusing arrangement. Much progress was made. It also seems likely that the job will go 3/4 time. Great news for my financial wherewithal, and frankly, I’ve been being really unproductive anyway, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to get a bit more serious about this. I could actually make significant debt progress, and maybe travel a few times a year. Wouldn’t that be cool.

Did much research this evening on fuel cells. I was pretty sure that fuel cells did exist, in commercial applications, using non-hydrogen fuel. Ro and I have many times had the “fuel cells fundamentally don’t work” conversation wherein he claims that hydrogen is made by separating water into its constituent elements, and that fuel cells will never work as a primary energy source, because you’re only reversing the process, and thermodynamically, that’s not going to work out evenly. I then claim that I’ve read about fuel cells running off hydrocarbons, albeit not as well as off hydrogen, and he remains skeptical.

Web digging stuff at bottom, my condensation of the material in between.

Business analysis (circa june 02) about the current state of the fuel cell industry.

Basically, my impression is that fuel cells can work with hydrocarbons by either a) converting the hydrocarbon (methane, methanol, methane carbonate, whatever) to h2 + co2 then using the h2, or directly. The former is inefficient, the latter suffers from materials & efficiency problems, as well as concerns about carbon deposition. But they do work. And there is good reason for optimism, if funding continues.

DOE figures showed combustion power plant efficiencies in a roughly 40% & under range. “Ideal” fuel cell efficiency is about 80%. Real efficiency listed on another DOE website said fuel cells + turbines came out to about 65% efficiency.

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v400/n6745/full/400649a0_fs.html

http://www.idatech.com/solutions/multi_fuel_solutions/index.html

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2002/tc20020618_9295.htm

http://www.fuelcellstore.com/information/benefits_of_fuel_cells.html

http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/96/96fc/fc96/96FCP-13.PDF

Thinking about the fuel cells, and how they are an emerging technology, and the likely consequences of such a new technology makes me wonder how I could make the greatest good in the world. I’ll probably be a computer geek for another year or maybe two. But I have to wonder how I could make the world a better place. I think there may be some validity to ‘s claim that ‘social technology’ is nonsense, and that the course of history is determined more by the tools we invent than by the way we organize ourselves (because of course the three are disjoint entities, with unidirectional causation). How different would the world’s geopolitical landscape be, if in the early 1900’s, we had gone with electric cars instead of the internal combustion engine? Then again, how different would it be had the automotive industry not been allowed to dismantle the urban and interurban rail networks in a blatant act of anti-free market, anti-competition, lassiez-faire stupidity (a question of how we organize ourselves).

Setting aside the soapbox regarding the damaging consequences of unrestrained greed, I am bothered by a number of elements of the way we organize and make decisions. I do not trust the concentration of power in individuals. I do not trust people to make decisions based on their outcomes, or even necessarily to give thought to them. I agree with Howard Zinn, who spoke out during the vietnam war (as quoted on a flyer recieved in the last peace march I went to). Posted below.

And our topic is topsy-turvy: civil disobedience. As soon as you say the topic is civil disobedience, you are saying our problem is civil disobedience. That is not our problem…. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is the numbers of people all over the world who have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. And our problem is that scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where the schoolboys march off dutifully in a line to war. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world, in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. We recognize this for Nazi Germany. We know that the problem there was obedience, that the people obeyed Hitler. People obeyed; that was wrong. They should have challenged, and they should have resisted; and if we were only there, we would have showed them. Even in Stalin’s Russia we can understand that; people are obedient, all these herdlike people.

But America is different. That is what we’ve all been brought up on. From the time we are this high and I still hear it resounding in Mr. Frankel’s statement-you tick off, one, two, three, four, five lovely things .~ about America that we don’t want disturbed very much. But if we have learned anything in the past ten years, it is that these lovely things about America were never lovely. We have been expansionist and aggressive and mean to other people from the beginning. And we’ve been aggressive and mean to people in this country, and we’ve allocated the wealth of this country in a very unjust way. We’ve never had justice in the courts for the poor people, for black people, for radicals. Now how can we boast that America is a very special place? It is not that special. It really isn’t. (full speech at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/CivilObedience_ZR.html)

Oh well, so much for setting aside the soapbox. =)

I embarked on the question because I wanted to consider what it was I could do to keep body and soul together, yes, but only secondarily. Primarily, a full time job is something you spend all day doing. It no small way it is what you do every day, and it is therefore what defines who you are. “What should I do with my life?” is therefore in many ways equivalent to asking “Who and what do I want to become?”

I have a few ideas for how I can make something of value (after all, that’s what we get paid for in a ‘free market economy’ right? =) Teaching children/adolescents/adults, collective/cooperative business/legal/management consulting, geekwork, non-profit management. All have pros and cons, but it’s already way past my bed time, so I’ll contemplate that question sometime tomorrow. =)