Where are YOU? Click the Earth to add your pin or see others
Our Sponsors:
Babel Fish
Who's Online
Graffiti
Porn Robots Have taken over the site
Porn Robots will probably take over the world
some day. Porn is always pushing technology. Porn Spam robots have
succesfuly deposited so much porn commenting that i can''t be bothered
to remove it. So read at your own risk!
The North American Solar Challenge races solar cars from Austin to
Calgary. This year's cars are Hot! The North American Solar Challenge
is sponsored by the US DOE, Resources Canada, & NREL. The race is
from July 17-27 2005.
Click "READ MORE" to see a pictorial of the Stanford Solar Car from it's unveiling May 7th, and more links.
Posted by john on Friday, July 22 @ 01:20:07 EDT (290 reads)
(Read More... | 1345 bytes more | comments? | Energy | Score: 5)
We are BACK ONLINE!!
Anonymous writes "The Lab is back online! Our old server was hacked and the site was
disabled. We have a new server, updated software, and a new look.
Look for new content coming soon. In the meantime, feel free to check
out any articles you may have missed. If you have a story you think
would be good for the site, please send it in! We could use some new
material.
If you have any problems, please let me know john(at)macroscopic.org "
Posted by john on Monday, July 18 @ 12:40:48 EDT (194 reads)
(comments? | Score: 0)
How to Run your car on bio-fuels; Veggie oil or Biodiesel
By
John Humphrey
Here's some quick tips for running your car on bio-fuels. First, unless
you live in Brazil where bio-ethanol is available, the bio-fuel options are Biodiesel or Straight Vegetable
Oil (SVO). All you need is a vehicle with a diesel engine.
I won't go into too many technical details, there is a lot of info out
there. If you really want to run your car on bio-fuels, a great start
is to buy or borrow the book "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank"
by Joshua Tickell.
Common veggie cars
are Volkwagens and Mercedes Benz, but any diesel car or truck is fine.
Here are some pictures of cars powered by biodiesel, canola oil, and olive
oil (biofuels)...
Posted by john on Monday, April 25 @ 01:44:21 EDT (1104 reads)
(Read More... | 4553 bytes more | comments? | Score: 5)
Anonymous writes " The End of Oil Is Closer Than You Think
By John Vidal
The Guardian UK
Thursday 21 April 2005
Oil production could peak next year, reports John Vidal. Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye.
The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.
They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.
"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," he says.
Campbell reckons..."
Posted by john on Friday, April 22 @ 18:49:13 EDT (229 reads)
(Read More... | 14888 bytes more | comments? | Energy | Score: 0)
Two New Reports Highlight Enormous Potential for Solar PV in the U.S.
Two reports released today, one by Clean Edge, Inc. and Co-op America's Solar Catalyst Group, and the other by the Energy Foundation and Navigant Consulting Inc., highlight the enormous potential for solar PV in the U.S. if government, industry, and investors cooperate to bring down installed solar photovoltaic (PV) pricing.
Posted by john on Tuesday, March 01 @ 19:50:09 EST (251 reads)
(Read More... | 2589 bytes more | comments? | Energy | Score: 0)
On February 16, 2005, the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change goes into effect
to begin a global rescue mission. It's a historic first step, but the U.S.,
the top greenhouse gas producer hasn't signed on. And developing countries,
including China and India, are exempt.
Still, every country in the world meeting Kyoto's goals wouldn't save our
children from the catastrophes a consensus of scientists predict. Meeting
the Climate Challenge, a report from the International Climate Change Task
Force, warns we're approaching a point of no return. If we don't act
decisively, average global temperatures could over decades rise almost four
degrees Fahrenheit above 1750's levels. They're already up over one degree.
We'd face agricultural failures, diseases, droughts and floods. Some
experts forecast a 10 degree jump, much higher sea levels and possible
abrupt, runaway changes to ocean currents...
Here is an update to an earlier
story published on macroscopic. The first set of results are back from climateprediction.net,
an experimental project that joins over 90,000 computers all over the world
to create more processing power than the world's largets supercomputers, and
they don't look good!
"Greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise by more than
double the maximum warming so far considered likely by the Inter-Governmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to results from the world's largest
climate prediction experiment, published in the journal Nature this week."
Follow the "Read this story
link to see a summary and links.
nolagreen writes "Today was the day that GW was re-sworn in as president of the United States. As thousands of his supporters were preparing for the evening's lavish festivities, there was a much more somber feeling to the city of New Orleans.
Over 1500 people followed a traditional jazz funeral procession from Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park to the Mississippi River, mouring the death of democracy in the US. People from all walks of life, of all ages gathered together to vent their frustrations and to follow a horse-drawn carriage with coffin and two jazz bands.
People along N. Rampart and Canal Street, waiting for the bus and streetcar, shouted words of support, while the procession (most of which was dressed in black) passed.
The procession ended at the river, where the ashes of the Patriot Act were tossed into the Mississippi. Speakers in Jackson Square went on for over an hour, rallying people (a lot of which were unsuspecting tourists in the French Quarter). Noted historian, Howard Zinn, who was scheduled to speak, did not attend due to a family illness- but the crowd was inspired nontheless and continued down Decatur Street into the Marigny, where the day ended with several bands continuing to play in the street.....
"
Note:(Originally submitted January 20th but due to moving across the globe I have gotten behind on updates -john)
Posted by john on Saturday, February 19 @ 15:15:00 EST (336 reads)
(Read More... | 2182 bytes more | 11 comments | Score: 0)
I love solar vehicles. Of course my usual exposure is to high end vehicles like the Stanford Solar Car or the Nuna.
But what I realy like is people making their own solar cars, which is why this project is so neat. Here is an "open source" project devoted to sharing information and helping people build their own small solar vehicles...
Posted by john on Friday, December 10 @ 04:20:00 EST (344 reads)
(Read More... | 1810 bytes more | 3 comments | Energy | Score: 0)
From Energy Pulse
November 30, 2004. Article Written by Murray Duffin
Much has been written about the hydrogen economy (HE), and much misunderstood. In fact the label itself is probably a misnomer. Many in the USA believe that the Administration's hydrogen initiative is just a way to postpone doing anything useful about energy for as long as possible. If so it has backfired. Widespread research on all aspects of hydrogen production, storage, transportation and use is evident, not just in the USA, but worldwide, and technological advances are appearing at a bewildering rate. The subject is so large that only a few highlights will be touched on here.
Posted by john on Thursday, December 09 @ 03:42:43 EST (340 reads)
(Read More... | 18363 bytes more | 9 comments | Energy | Score: 5)
Since the Election, two new sites have popped up and quickly became huge successes. One is a site of pictures of people apologizing to the rest of the world for the election of president Bush. The other site is pictures of people accepting the apologies.
It's an example of not only how the internet is re-shaping the way the world communicates, but how people are creating new ways to use the internet. It's also nice to see this kind of international dialogue.
Read the story to see the URLs.
We can't just stop doing what we have all been doing leading up to the election. We have a lot of work to do if we want the country to move in the direction we think it needs to go. Slavery wasn't abolished by an election, and racial inequality is still a major problem. Women's rights took a lot of work to get where they are, and have a long way to go. The environmental movement that started in the 70's is re-gaining momentum and is as important as ever. There will always be struggles to make the world a better place, and there will always be disappointments.
I am copying a list of positive things that we can do as we move forward which was sent to me. We have to think positive. Feel free to add to the list and forward these around:
While most people associate P2P file sharing networks with music and movie files, Thad Anderson, a second-year student at St. John's School of Law in Queens, New York is using the file sharing networks to make the American government more transparent and accountable by making public documents (such as those obtained through Freedom Of Information Act requests) more accessible to people.
Now you can use Soulseek, Kazaa, Limewire, and even BitTorrent to download such items as recent torture memos related to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, a Senate Intelligence Committee report on what the government knew before it invaded Iraq and a document showing how the Bush administration suppressed information about the full cost of its Medicare plan until after Congress passed the plan.
There is also a copy of a no-bid contract obtained by a Halliburton subsidiary for work in Iraq and congressional testimony from former employees of the subsidiary showing how their company engaged in wasteful and costly conduct in Iraq (such as abandoning an $85,000 Mercedes truck after its tires went flat)...
Energy: BMW Hydrogen Powered Car Breaks Speed Records
BMW's Clean Energy program
produced a formidable winner this weekend. The BMW H2R set nine international
speed records for internal combustion powered vehicles using hydrogen as a
fuel at the Miramas high-speed Proving Grounds in France. BMW has thus proven
its conviction that hydrogen is able to replace conventional fuel without any
compromises in terms of performance and emissions.
Posted by john on Tuesday, October 19 @ 00:00:00 EDT (546 reads)
(Read More... | 5676 bytes more | 8 comments | Energy | Score: 0)
Hydrogen has been called the energy technology of the future, but what exactly does that mean? Hydrogen is not an energy source. You can?t find huge deposits of hydrogen under the sand in the Middle East. Hydrogen is only a way to store energy. It is almost like a liquid version of a battery (although it isn?t always a liquid).
Water is the most abundant thing on Earth. Most of the planet, including our bodies, is made up of mainly water molecules...
Posted by john on Friday, October 15 @ 08:47:14 EDT (382 reads)
(Read More... | 14057 bytes more | 8 comments | Energy | Score: 0)
According to a recent article
in Wired Magazine, new modelling software in the United States is allowing potential
wind farm developers to analyze the energy potential for a site quickly and
effectively, without having to wait and collect a year or more worth of wind
data at the site.
Wind power development has been slow in the U.S. compared to the rest of the
world for the last couple of decades. In the 80's, government incentives in
California provided the industry with a huge boost, and for a while California
was the world's largest market for wind turbines. But when Raegan became governer
in the early 90's, the incentives disappeared, and wind power in the U.S. ground
to a virtual standstill compared to other parts of the world such as Denmark,
Germany, and Spain.
Things are picking up again...
Posted by john on Wednesday, September 22 @ 04:15:51 EDT (415 reads)
(Read More... | 2585 bytes more | 9 comments | Energy | Score: 5)
Energy: Is Nuclear Power the best weapon against global warming?
James Lovelock is an independant scientist and the creator of the Gaia hypothesis of the Earth as a self-regulating organism.
In a recent opinion article for the UK Independent, he argues that nuclear power is our only option for tackling urgent climate change issues.
"We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger"
Note:Although this is a controversial viewpoint, I tend to agree. Burning fossil fuels has arguably caused more damadge to society and the world than all the nuclear accidents and explosions put together. -john
Posted by john on Tuesday, September 14 @ 05:16:33 EDT (445 reads)
(Read More... | 8044 bytes more | 7 comments | Energy | Score: 5)
" Climateprediction.net is the
largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st
century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their
computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using
them to their full capacity."
Note:
Editors note: I installed this a couple days ago. I had to restart after installing to get things running smoothly. Some of you may remember the SETI at home project that used a similar distributed computing system to analyze radio telescope data looking for Extra-Terrestrial life. Now SETI at home is running on BOINC. With climateprediction.net, you are actually running BOINC, which lets you connect your computer to a distributed computing project. climateprediction.net is one of these projects. You could also let your computer, for example, search for signals of intelligent life or predict the folding of proteins in the background after installing BOINC. -John
The world is a big place and there are a lot of people in it. If you look at numbers enough you realise that whatever you are doing, there are other people doing it too. As the old proverb says "Nothing is original anymore," you can easily assume that somewhere in the world
50,000 people are doing whatever you are doing.
It is also hard for anyone these days to say that...
Macroscopic.org
has been selected to receive the Environmentally Friendly Website Award. The
award is given by Naturally
Home to "websites that show a high level commitment to helping
the environment through providing knowledge, eco-friendly business practices
or providing alternatives to businesses and consumers that will help save our
planet."
Waste heat from the power generation industry or any other heat generating process is being regarded today as a valuable resource of energy in cold-climate countries. Utilizing the heat for district (or space) heating optimizes the efficiency of the overall system and saves resources.
However, similar optimization is not an option in hot-climate countries ?it is not heat that they need; they need fresh water. Furthermore, the countries in most need of fresh water resources happen to fall in the warmest regions of the world, which also happen to contain the majority of the world population. Thus the global problem is defined; there is an immediate water threat in regions that are most abundant in (wasted) heat energy, whether solar, or from industrial processes. Clearly, the sustainable energy solution is cogeneration for fresh water ?water from waste heat.
Technically, Xzero?s solution of membrane distillation (MD) for cogeneration is the most flexible solution compared to the similar technologies today, and in some cases the only solution. The experimental studies made on the pilot MD plant in the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)in Stockholm, Sweden, have demonstrated ..."
Posted by john on Monday, August 09 @ 13:01:36 EDT (401 reads)
(Read More... | 4504 bytes more | 4 comments | Energy | Score: 5)
By Bill McKibben, Originally published by Alternet.
Bill McKibben Writes: "What can you do about our deadly dependence on foreign energy, our ever-rising utility bills, and the flood of carbon into the atmosphere? Buy 50 feet of clothesline.
Once, visiting a friend, I helped wash the dinner dishes. I soaped the plates and cups, and she rinsed them and stacked them in a dish rack. When we were finished, I asked where the dish towel was so I could dry. "Oh, don't bother with that," she said. "That's air's job."
Food is a basic human need. Yet for most of us in the U.S., it is merely an inexpensive commodity that we take for granted. Issues surrounding how, where, or by whom it is grown are not generally the topic of conversation around the dinner table. Considering the current situation in agriculture, perhaps they should be. Food in the U.S. travels an average of 1,300 miles from the farm to the market shelf. Almost every state in the U.S. buys 85-90% of its food from some place else. In Massachusetts, for example, this food import imbalance translates to a $4 billion leak in the state economy on an annual basis. UMass studies have determined that Massachusetts could produce closer to 35% of its food supply. This 20% increase would contribute $1 billion annually to the Commonwealth.
Increased local food production would add..."
Posted by john on Monday, July 12 @ 04:56:23 EDT (649 reads)
(Read More... | 10255 bytes more | 4 comments | Score: 5)
Energy: Solar Energy Guide - Intro To Photovoltaics
Friday, May 28, 2004.
Macroscopic labs founder John Humphrey presented a lecture at the Department of Heat and Power Technology at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology.
The lecture was titled:Photovoltaics, an Introduction to Solar Electric Power Systems.
The slides from the presentation are available for download and a short summary is available by following the link below.
GW Bush and John Ashcroft have lost. The Miami court ruled that they have been vindictive, using an 1872 law to prosecute Greenpeace. They were trying to stifle civil disobedience by shutting Greenpeace down. But justice has prevailed and the case has been DISMISSED!
I just added bunch of pictures to the image gallery. Sweden, Poland, Russia, Puerto Rico, New York, Switzerland.... here:http://macroscopic.org/gallery/
A Consumption Manifesto: The Top Ten Principles of Good Consumption
Consumption is one of life's great pleasures. Buying things we crave,
traveling to beautiful places, eating delectable food, owning every Stevie
Wonder album: icing on the cake of life. But too often the effects of our
blissful consumption make for a sad story. Giant cars exhaling dangerous
exhaust, hog farms pumping out noxious pollutants, toxic trash heaps nudging
into poor neighborhoods?none of this if there weren't something to sell.
But there's no need to swap pleasure for guilt. With thoughtfulness and
commitment, consumption can be a force for good. Too long have we consumers
been a blushing bride overwhelmed by business suitors. It's time for the bride
to assert herself. We've got the dowry; we have the purchasing power. We can
require our suitors to comply with our vision of environmental
stewardship?or we can close the door behind them on their way out.
Through buying what we need, produced the way we want, we can create the
world we'd like to live in....(Read More)
Posted by john on Friday, February 20 @ 10:52:28 EST (648 reads)
(Read More... | 3758 bytes more | 3 comments | Score: 0)
Web Ring:
e=mc^2
Award Winner
Macroscopic.org
has been selected to receive the Environmentally Friendly Website Award. The
award is given by Naturally
Home to "websites that show a high level commitment to helping
the environment through providing knowledge, eco-friendly business practices
or providing alternatives to businesses and consumers that will help save our
planet."
To find out more about the awards, go to the Naturally
Home site.
We really appreciate the award and hope to continue to provide useful information
for responsible citizens around the globe. Keep reading, and join the dialogue.
Send in Your story today!
-John Humphrey
Founder, Macroscopic Labs
email: macroscopic_labs(at)yahoo(dot)com
or john(at)macroscopic(dot)org
Wired News
Slashdot News
Moonphase
Renewable Energy News
macroscopic labs - mixing science, design, technology, and nature, since year one
Please be nice to your planet. Freedom does not come without responsibility. Imagine a world of peace and justice without war and oppression.
Sustainable lifestyles can be achieved for our global community.
Technology can create responsible energy systems such as wind, solar, biomass, hydro, and other renewable energy technologies. Design a better world for yourself.
All content is copyright Macroscopic Labs or it's original author.
Orginal content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
For more information about this license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/.
For republished content, In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C.
Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who
have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information
for research and educational purposes.
For questions regarding copyrighted material, or if you would like to
republish something you see here, please contact
macroscopic_labs(at)yahoo.com