Here are some inviolable rules that people should know:

• Never start a land war in Asia Minor. If you’ve played Risk you know why. Obviously, Bush, Congress, and their lackeys never played Risk.
• Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. With apologies to Vizzini…
• Crusaders shouldn’t sin. They always get caught.

Somehow I take more pleasure in the scandals when it’s wide stance Senators in men’s rooms, sacrosanct family-first Senator’s visiting prostitutes, or Florida politicians offering money for blow jobs. But turnabout is fair play and few crusaders have been asking for it more than NY Governor Eliot Spitzer. What were you thinking about? It clearly wasn’t that virtually anyone would blow the whistle on him for virtually anything. Apparently he was distracted by high-end tail (one companion’s rate was $5,500 per hour.)

Now that we’re talking about this, where does a public servant get that kind of discretionary income? I think we’ve not heard the last of this particular scandal…The Republican’s love you Spitzer for taking the focus off their faux pas.

Eliot Spitzer signals his largess

This is an old story, but it’s important because it underlines all that is wrong with the last 7 years of executive branch “leadership” in this country. Here’s a timeline to remind us of the events:

• November 7, 2005 – George Bush states flatly “We do not torture.”
• January 25, 2008 – It is disclosed that the CIA waterboarded at least 3 detainees.
• March 7, 2008 – Bush vetoes anti-torture legislation.

It’s clear that either a) the administration has a collective IQ less than room temperature or b) they simply don’t care and will lie at every turn or perhaps c) all of the above. If torture ever produced good results, that would be one thing (it still would be wrong, but at least reasonably sane humans could understand some bit of the inclination to attempt it) but it’s crystal clear that the victims of torture will say anything to stop the torture.

To the Bush administration and anyone else who claims “yeah, but waterboarding isn’t torture.” I extend the following challenge: If you are willing to submit to the practice in question for an extended period of time as practiced in these so-called enhanced interrogations and come out the other end of the process still believing the practice is not torture, I’ll listen to your opinion and consider the possibility that it is not torture. Until that time, there’s no question, it’s torture, plain and simple.

I don’t see any of the defenders of the practice lined up to take the challenge. That must mean it’s unpleasant at a minimum. Terrorists torture. Dictators torture. That’s not what this country is about and we need to get back on the straight and narrow road here regarding basic human rights and rule of law.

We’ve been tracking solar thermal for some time as it is intended to be part of our Sou Hills project in due course. One of the more interesting players to enter the fray is Ausra, an Australian company transplanted to the US and the recipient of substantial funding from Khosla Ventures. Recently, David Mills and Robert Morgan, principals in Ausra, published a paper in which the claim is made that solar thermal could account for the entire US energy supply. Here’s a link to their paper.

It’s not lost on most people that the Sun does not shine 24×7 and, in fact, that it doesn’t shine every day even in a desert environment. Thus the stunningly low capacity factors delivered by solar solutions, both thermal and PV. However, with the advent of storage (water, pumped water, capacitors, and molten salts) this is beginning to change somewhat. The thesis advanced by Mills and Morgan is that an oversized solar array matched with a huge storage system sufficient for 16 hours of operation would be able to produce at baseload levels.

The “catch” to this whole approach is that to make the system work at baseload, a developer has the added cost of sizing the solar array 3x larger than normal and installing a huge storage system. Nevada Solar One is a 64MWe project that cost somewhere north of $250M in capital to complete. That’s around $3.9M/MWe at normal sizing. If we consider that the storage system is “free” and up the size 3x, that’s $750M+ capital cost to get 64MWe baseload generation, or $11.7M/MWe. To put this in perspective, a natural gas fired plant is on the order of $1M/MWe, clean coal is $3M/MWe, geothermal is $3M/MWe.

That’s not to say that the economics won’t change, as solar thermal becomes higher volume in production, the price should drop. If the price drops by 2/3, then there is an interesting discussion to be had, because sunshine is an underutilized resource. Also, we found the discussion about oil in the paper to be specious, less than 2% of the US energy load is generated with petroleum based products. If the authors wish to be taken seriously, they would address the technology vs. coal, nuclear, and natural gas generation as they are the top 3 producers of electricity in the US.

Nevertheless, it is an interesting assertion and it’s clear we can and should do more with solar thermal harvest than is happening today. Let’s hope Ausra and their cohorts can change the economic model to make this option viable.

Attribution: Unknown

This is your brain as a tattoo. As someone who has seriously considered, but never executed a tattoo for years, this strikes me as an original. I’ve been reading John Irving’s novel “Until I find you” and that has rekindled my interest, but I can never think of anything I could truly live with forever…Oh well.

No, this isn’t Scottish cuisine we’re talking about (though I do like haggis…) nor is it a law firm from Lord of the Rings. No doubt if I don’t get to the point quickly you’ll be entering them into your favorite search engine to find out what these odd words are – though with the readership of this blog, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a substantial number of you know the meaning of the words already. It struck me when I heard them that each industry does have jargon and if you’re not plugged in, you just wouldn’t know…

The kerf is the area of a cut made with a blade that is wider than the blade body itself. If you look at the image to the right, you’ll see that if one views a blade from the thin side, the teeth are wider than the blade. This creates the kerf while cutting so the blade doesn’t bind. In some saws, this is accomplished by offsetting the teeth from one side to another in an alternating pattern, these are called sets.

Now that you know we’re talking saws,

you probably guessed that the gullet is the gap between the teeth. Not only does this provide definition for the teeth, it serves the practical purpose of providing an area for the material that has been removed to occupy while the saw is in operation. This removed material is called swarf – you might also know it as sawdust or even noodles.

Now you can say you’ve learned something while surfing the net, not that you’ll likely ever use it. But I bet the next time you’re playing Scrabble, you might have some new entrants…It’s also a prime example of jargon in an industry, and honestly, I never thought of the innovation in the art of cutting, but there you have it. It’s clear that smart people have put deep thought into how to best cut materials. Scroll to the bottom of the entry to see swarf and a noodle.