Like Sunday Morning

Watts != Joules

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:00:45 -0400

“The panels will generate 18,000 watts of energy a year, enough to power all six units in the 7,000-square-foot building. Voltaic Solaire is so confident in its ability to create a “net-zero” building that utilities will be bundled into the rent.”

—
Brooklyn Apartments to Generate Their Own Power - NYTimes.com

The state of NY pays me to yell at students that get this wrong because energy literacy is important. So I write this in the name of consistent behavior.

Watts are a unit of power, not energy (rate of energy produced/consumed). Assume the earth stops rotating at brooklyn faces the sun for an entire year without clouds, the panels will generate at an average of 17 kW, or kJ/s

Also: press a bit harder on claims of net-zero.

Thanks.

rstevens: SO, I woke up about three hours too early today due...

Mon, 28 May 2012 21:40:58 -0400

rstevens:

SO, I woke up about three hours too early today due to a power outage and decided to ride down to Home Depot on a holiday morning like a middle-aged male and treat myself to a nanotech-powered toilet plunger.

I have been obsessed with NeverWet superhydrophobic coating since first seeing demo videos last winter. This plunger is supposedly the first commercial product you can get with this surface treatment. There’s a spray coming this summer. I want to cover everything I own in NeverWet.

Can’t help myself.

osmium: erosum: Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson...

Mon, 28 May 2012 10:20:18 -0400

osmium:

erosum:

Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson (youtube)

It’s true. (Don’t normally like multi-gif things, but it’s true so …)

I never retum, but here we are. Panel 1,2,3: dead on. However, quarterly reports, while cumbersome, do have the effect of forcing reflection.

The Thing To Do On The Internet: 20120101

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:11:06 -0500

Do a twitter search for Michael Bloomberg’s American Flag Sweater. Here, I did it for you

Ever Again?

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:52:00 -0400

Brushing this off for a few thoughts on Steve Jobs. Between work, home, friends and relatives, I’ve actively lobbied people into dropping, collectively, $40K to $50K into apple in the last 8 years. Given Apple’s stock price, I’m guessing I’m not the only one.

I’m a “switcher”. As a kid, a teenager, and a college student I was not an Apple Person. Who knows why I switched. But here’s the story.

Winter, January 2003. Wifi was “a thing” now, I stopped playing quake X (thanks Halo), and I was doing more productive things than ever with my computer. I didn’t know how to program, but for some reason, at that point it time, I decided that if I was going to sit in front of a computer all day, it should be a beautiful computer. And the white ibook, 12”, was a beautiful computer.

But I didn’t want to drop $1500. On anything. So it was MacWorld 2003, some new powerbook was announced, and craigslist was flooded with used ibooks for $700.

$700 was still very expensive (I had bought my last three computers for $700 combined (not even including Diante’s computer which I got for $40 worth of gamecube stuff). But oh god the want. So I put a bid in, and some dude in the Richmond told me to come by.

When I was halfway there he said someone offered him $750, would I match that or beat it. And I was like, “No!” and hung up. I “flipped a bitch” in SF and was heading back for the bridge when he called me back, apologized for the bad karma. I met him and bought it.

I wasn’t planning on selling my PC(s), particularly given that the computer was slow and couldn’t easily run half the software I needed to run. But 2 weeks later I sold all my PC’s. I was done with that. Two weeks after that I flipped the iBook for a powerbook Ti I bought from some guy that did stunts on a 1000 cc road bike for a living.

I use computers more and more every year, somehow. I love to program now, and I still, everyday, when I sit down to one of my 3 macs (one that I’ve had since 2005), I think, wow, this is a fantastic machine. Nevermind my iThings.

So yes. Steve Jobs, whom I’ve never met, has created objects that I spend over 50% of my waking hours using to do just about everything I do. Crazy. Absolutely nuts, really.

Can someone that I’ll never meet have more tangible, beneficial impact on my day to day life? It’s hard to imagine.

Thanks.

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 11:08:03 -0400

Going Home

Sun, 01 May 2011 19:55:03 -0400

Going Home

Check out this podcast episode

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:15:32 -0400

Check out the ‘Groove Salad Taste of the Week’ podcast. I was listening to the episode ‘The Launch of Space Shuttle Discovery’ and thought you might enjoy it

Jaime @ Beard

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 05:15:10 -0400

Jaime @ Beard

Sigh.

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:55:19 -0400

Sigh.

Swinging

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:59:02 -0400

Swinging

An Open Letter to NYC Media

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 20:22:18 -0500

Dear NYC radio and print news outlets (and Bob Steel):

There are four research/engineering institutions in NYC.

1) CCNY/CUNY 2) Cooper Union 3) Columbia University 4) NYU/Poly

1,3, and 4 grant PhDs. 1 and 3 have received some of the most competitive energy grants in the country. See here and here. Columbia leads an EFRC on nanomaterials, and CCNY/CUNY just landed an NSF IURC on metamaterials. That’s right. Invisibility cloaks.

This is a drop in the bucket. This is just over the last two years. You are looking at $40,000,000+ in funding. There are at least 10 companies either spun off or spinning off from these efforts alone.

There are also all sorts of cool companies. To name a few.

Plainly put: there is engineering in NYC. Despite the fact that NYC is a very, very hard to place to make anything new.

Rent really is too damn high. Any engineering student ought to be good at math: and until 2008 they would look at what engineers made ($60K to $150K) vs. law, medicine or finance ($200K+ and no hands in acid). So now you do the math. What makes more sense when a pizza pie can cost $25 and real estate averages $900 sq/ft?

So please get your facts straight about the engineering schools. We’re not Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, or Cornell but we’re doing a lot more than you realize. Please come see our labs. Please talk to us about the the pros and cons of doing engineering here.

We really love the city, and the ability to be engineers in the city. Please work with us, not against us, to make it even more appealing to a wider audience.

Faye and tube

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 20:34:34 -0500

Faye and tube

Fwd: Sunday Buzz

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 16:34:00 -0500

I gave my buddy Christopher a bottle of the Steingart Brother’s Brew and here are his tasting notes:

It’s not even 4pm on a sunday…. couldn’t wait. I expected you to hand me something you felt good about, and that I was going to enjoy it, but this beer is really great!

For me it comes on with a strong full flavor and bite, pleasant bitterness, then gradually dissipates but doesn’t disappear; it become bright, opens up. The whole experience is dynamic yet balanced and leaves a real nice after taste. I’ve never described beer this way, but I’m curious how this compares to what your take is. Not sure how to describe the flavors, but I like it. I’m impressed.

BLUSH

photo.JPG

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:57:55 -0500

photo.JPG

smabon: Crazy parents decide to take baby out in blizzard for...

Sun, 26 Dec 2010 21:19:30 -0500

smabon:

Crazy parents decide to take baby out in blizzard for ramen

Emulsion!

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 00:28:07 -0500

Emulsion!

Space Suit

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 20:42:34 -0500

Space Suit

Late Thanks

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 09:22:00 -0500

Before leaving work wednesday (a brisk, crisp and clear wednesday) I managed to fix my rear derailleur and was able to bike home. I cheated a bit a listened to Pandora while biking home (one ear). The station: Magnetic Fields. Not really in the genre, “With or without you” was added to the station.

I have this flashback to ~1989. My father gives me an old walkman, and I’m biking to Saddle Rock (elementary) listening to some tape I found in the car, The Joshua Tree. It is also late november. And life was good then, and it’s great now.

So I’m thankful I can still bike to work, only now along the same route Little Mac used to train along, and that I can listen to the fucking internet while doing so, and that when I get home from work I’ve got the two most fantastic ladies in the world to greet me, and when I get to work I’ve got like a billion macs to play with and a laser cutter and 3 3D printers, and that I can now easily get to my parents on thanksgiving, prep food with my brother (who is now also just a bike ride away) and that my mother still makes apple-sour cream pie while having expanded the repertoire to smores pie, and the day after thanksgiving can still be dedicated to a trip to chinatown and playing video games with my cousin.

Trenton makes…: …the world takes

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 13:38:39 -0400

Trenton makes…:

…the world takes