Back to CAD

I'm so very excited! Since starting work with renewable energy the idea of doing opensource design has been central to my task, and until two days ago the dream had become paralyzed. The problem was with code. There are many great ways to openly collaborate, but they all use code; essentially text. GitHub is one great example. But all of the designs that we have realized have been done in Google Sketchup; it was the only free, cross platform, and powerful CAD program found, and its files are all binary. But two days ago while showing a new student the git repository for the Amo-Esclavo Heliostat project I did a search for CAD and found openSCAD !

There are several good tutorials on using this package, but after watching Galvian's video I was hooked, and impressed. And aperently openSCAD plays well with the MakkerBot
project, with is also very handy to eliminate frequent trips to the metal shop. I am now planning on moving all my designs over to openSCAD!



Next we need an open, text based solution to electronic circuit creation (to replace Eagle). Any ideas?

Mini airplane models

this is a great video of some mini airplanes being flown in a gymnasium in Japan.. The flying angle was unstable.. but funny none the less...

Coffee grinds as a robotic gripper

A great idea, to use coffee grounds in a latex bag with a vacuum pump to grip objects!

Nature journals too expensive

I get the updates on journal by nature. But when you click the link to read the article you are asked to purchase the article (see this article on Lidar :Mapping the world in 3D ). The article costs $38 USD! So I wrote to Nature telling them this is an order of magnitude off in pricing! What do you think? Should science be easier to access.. is Nature shooting themselves in the foot?

my comment to nature photonics:

Why is the price for an article $30 USD?!! When I can buy magazines for $5, music albums for $10, books for $20, iPhone apps for $1-10, why would anyone pay $30 for a 1-2 page article! I know that the majority of your subscribers are universities, but not all of them. You are missing a huge group of scientists who would probably pay to read these articles, but not the price your asking!
May I suggest an iPhone/iPad / kindle app that lets me download papers and read them. You know that to any given scientist maybe 1/4 of the articles in any journal are of interest to them, so buying every journal is not as valuable as you may think.

What many do is get colleges to get the pdf for them, scan copies, or most of the time we go to an open access journal. I've never read Nature Photonics (aside from copies sent to me by friends) but use Optics Express all the time.
I think your journal is good, but inaccessible.. which mean not relevant. Please change this. Scientists are not payed that well, and personal copies are nice to have. Remember that we are blog readers.. so browsing and picking useful work is what we do, but with these costly journals there is no point.

Cheers

Rodger

Evolution has no forsight

A video of the dissection of a giraffe showing notable the laryngeal nerve:

Laser tracking

This is a really intersting combination of laser light and sound. I'm not sure how it is done, but I assume it is a combination of camera, laser with moveable mirror, and sound generation based on the deflection of the beam.

Something from nothing

This is a fabulous talk by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. Get some lunch, sit back and enjoy..

Back from vacation and the word is being taken over

What are you going to do when we are run by the soulless corporation? These ideas are for science fiction, but with the appearance of the leaked ACTA documents, we see how seriously changes are being pushed through far reaching international treaties; a good summary has been posted by Michael Geist in his ACTA Guide. Here is the agenda for round 7 which started yesterday here in Mexico.

Well the best thing is to keep communication open and flowing. That is where Tor comes in. It is a way to open proxy servers for use by anonymous people. A good overview was given and wildbee.org.

Get Tor

To become a volunteer, download this software.

To use Tor to protect your own privacy, download this software

The freedom of information and the public domain wars has taken on a new face with the proclamation of "The Public Domain Manifesto". To read about it you can go to their site and sign to show your support (done by Communia), or

Then with your information stream unhindered, you can fabricate your own tech. As I've mentioned before about the fab labs and home 3D printers, wired had a great article on the next revolution being 3D printers writing with atoms; Wired, Atoms are the new bits (very similar to the Diamond age by Neil Stevenson.)



And finally for today, a great journal, the Journal of Serendipitous andUnexpected Results. I love the idea of a journal of discoveries that happened when we weren't looking for them.

White roofs do help

It seems so obvious that I'm surprised that a law has not been passed forcing all flat roof buildings to be painted white. But aside from that, I con't understand why people don't paint their house's roof white just to take down the heat in the summer. Here is CICESE the roofs were all white, but this last year they repainted all of them red.. which makes no sense and was a very uninformed move.

Well, there is not good data from simulations stating the obvious.. white roofs are a good idea; Computer modeling indicates white roofs may be a good idea.

Patients Like Me

This is a fabulous talk by Jamie Heywood about a web site (patientsLikeMe.com) for medical analysis and social networking, where he is shows how people simply by sharing their experiences combined social networking and some data analysis can help predict solutions to medical treatments and problems.

I've been curious about this idea for many years. What if everyone shared how they feel, where they live, and what they do. Then crunch those numbers. How many toxic environments would be found, dangerous jobs singled out, and diseases could be seen. Maps showing the progress of the flu.. but better yet, what the people who didn't get that sick had in common. There is so much data out there, the problem is it is not shared, and no analysis is done!

Osmotic power

Using osmosis to provide a pressure difference, and then this pressure to drive a turbine; a great idea using a microscopic principal.

There is now a company, Statkraft, making a prototype system.

Good/Bad science jokes

Lots of water on the moon

NASA sent a probe to the moon that took its old booster and threw it into a crater wall on the lunar pole; LCROSS mission. The idea was to make a large explosion of material from the moons surface that is in permanent shade (at -230 deg C) and send the ejecta into the sun light. The probe, who collided several minuets later to make its own crater, quickly looked at the spectra of the ejected material to see what it was made of. They were hoping for teaspoons of water in a football field sized area, but have found buckets of water.



Why is this important? Because water is heavy, and crucial to life and rocket propellent. Ideally, we want to send up people and a few machines to the moon, but need there to be raw materials there to live off. A base on the moon is useful because it would be an ideal jumping point to go to other planets.

Videos are on CNN and youtube. I'm excited. A dream for me would be to design habitats on the moon and mars for people to live in. Sustainable living in these environments would is a necessity and the idea of designing this type of habitat here on earth is what I've been thinking of for a while.

An open letter to President Caldarón to not permit GM maize in Mexico

The letter in english and en espanole.

We are compelled to write this letter, given the latest element of a scientifically unjustifiable drive, embodied in the publication of amendments to the Law for the Biosafety of Genetically Modified Organisms (published by the Diario Oficial de la Federación on March 6, 2009), which disable the Special Protection Regime for Maize and other crops, for which Mexico is center of origin and diversification.

Science never sleeps

Gizmag; Data in from a NASA mission to map emissions of neutral particles from the outer heliosphere. This is cool because it is defining better the image that people have of our place in the universe and will help to get rid of the idea that we're sitting in space around a fixed sun. It is more like we're in the nucleus of a ball
rocketing around a galaxy full of gas and fields.

Stirling Engine

A GreeTrust article on Stirling engines; they cover the main pages of information. But they always make stirling engines seem simple, while they are apparently very complicated to make and require a very good machine shop to make.

But I'm sure that many car modern plants could make these engines in an efficient affordable way.

Heliostat Links

Here is a series of links to sites with useful info on sun tracking and heliostats;

http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Secliptc.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_path
http://www.dur.ac.uk/john.lucey/users/solar_year.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_tracker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_time
http://www.usc.edu/dept/architecture/mbs/tools/vrsolar/Help/solar_concepts.html
http://www.redrok.com/main.htm
http://www.practicalsolar.com/technology.html
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/eclip.html
http://www.rossen.ch/solar/miniheliostatfaq.html
http://www.barli.org/solar-storage.html
http://www.heliotrack.com/Products.html
http://www.rossen.ch/solar/
http://www.solbot.at/
http://www.inspira.es/newsroom/981130.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic
http://www.solardiy.info/?p=50
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Concentrating/concentrating.htm
http://www.aquaflector.com/technology.html
http://www.redrok.com/analemma.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_daylighting

Festival Eco Cultural la Raza

CEARTE, telar and various other groups in Ensenada are getting together to promote an ecofriendly festival. This is the same day as Day of climate action by the group 350.org (esp).

The festival is described as

La finalidad del festival es usar un espacio público para dar información, crear un ambiente de participación activa y multiplicar la visión de los grupos organizados en la ciudad en favor de una mejor calidad de vida.

Barrelponics- Aquaculture and Hydroponics

A Green Trust post on barrelponics, similar but much better designed to something I was planning at the bakery. The idea is to combine a fish tank and hydroponics system; called aquaponics. The fish clean and make nutrient rich the water that then is used by the plants. The plants clean and airiate the water for the fish. Barrelponics is a small version of this idea. I really like it, and hopefully when we get some land, I'll try making one of these.

Migraines and dizzy spells

Several years ago I was working in a laser lab in Toronto. The laser consisted of several flash lamps that fired once every second. Like most optics labs, we worked with the room lights off and once a second the room lit up as the laser fired and the beam made its way through all the optics. This was a normal night and I was painstakingly aligning the mirrors when one laser flash seemed to be accompanied by the room shaking. Then with each heart beat the room shook again. I thought an earth quake was running through the lab, then I realized it was me... I went to the adjoining offices and was hit with the worse head ache I'd ever experienced. I couldn't move, but couldn't stop moving from the agonizing pain. I took several aspirins, drank water, but was left lying alone under my desk for four hours. I'm not sure how, but I went up to the library to ask for help and found Sunny (one of the other students) and she gave me advil, and this helped. Enough that I called my girl friend and went to her house to rest. That was the first time I had what I think is a migraine. That year I suffered from about one a month. The doctors had nothing they could do aside from me taking a strong drug every day as a prevention; not something I was willing to do for what seemed to be a not too frequent experience.

Now, almost then ten years later I suffer once every several months. But in the past year I don't get the head aches, but just the nausea, and two days ago an extreme dizziness (vertigo).

I've been looking for information on this for years, and while there seems to be many people suffering from this, I've found very little.

There is a site called Dizziness-and-balance.com and they have a great post on Migraine Associoted Vertigo (MAV) which gives good numbers and comment that agrees with my experience.

As well, I've found an excellent forum of people discussing their problems. From what I can tell, I think, for me at least, that this problem comes from my neck. I've had stiff necks for years, and working in laser labs is about the worst thing for it, and when combined with excessive computer writing and bad eyes, it is no wonder I have a stiff neck more often then not.

But, I have no solution, nor cure yet. I'm considering going back to swimming as that relived a sore back in weeks last year; I'm just waiting for last months scholarship check to come in.

As a final note, these attacks seem to come 12 hrs before a major change in weather. I've been checking the local weather station, and they are not associated directly with pressure nor temperature, but there is a slight relation to changes in pressure. It could be that it is a type of arthritis pinching a nerve. The arthritis set off by weather changes, and made worse by bad habits in posture.

Comment if you have similar problems and have information on solutions.