2009/07/22

Sen. Lamar Alexander on Nuclear Energy

On July 13th Sen. Lamar Alexander held a press conference to propose a low-cost, clean energy plan centered on nuclear energy. I still haven't digested the whole proposal, but it's an interesting read.

C-SPAN has video. Senator Alexander's website has the proposal in PDF format.

One bullet item from the press conference really resonated:

"We want an America in which we are not creating “energy sprawl” by occupying vast tracts of farmlands, deserts, and mountaintops with energy installations that ruin scenic landscapes. The Great American Outdoors is a revered part of the American character. We have spent a century preserving it. We do not want to destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment."


Amen to that! "Energy installations" can be beautiful...

Navajo Power Plant Lake Powell

But I'd hate to see the Taos valley scarred over with wind turbines.

Anyway, just now the most cost effective way to address the electricity needs of the U.S. seems to be to reduce demand, by improving energy efficiency. Going forward, since our population is projected to grow by 44% by 2050, we'll probably still need to increase electricity production.

If we're willing to change U.S. policy on re-processing spent nuclear fuel, Sen. Alexander's proposal could work. France provides an existence proof.



Life Shore Gits Tedious

I was hoping to find numbers on total electricity consumption by country, to compare France's production capacity to our own projected needs. Instead I found this Wikipedia entry, which describes the currently-decreasing per capita electricity consumption of the U.S.; notes that the U.S. still consumes considerably more electricity per capita than countries such as Germany; discusses various ways of measuring national energy efficiency (e.g. energy intensity); describes the relationship between population growth and electricity consumption; and so forth.

Why does the reading list never get shorter? :)

2009/07/21

Unresponsive console.app on OS X 10.5

Recently, when I opened console.app and tried to view either Console Messages or All Messages, cpu usage spiked and console.app became unresponsive. Activity Monitor showed aslmanager using up all of the cpu.

The following discussion thread helped solve the problem. The final required step seems to have been to remove the entire /private/var/log/asl/ directory before restarting syslogd.

Apple - Support - Discussions - ASLMANAGER hogging CPU, resisting fix? ...

Update: It looks like aslmanager first appeared in OS X 10.5.6. It also looks like the asl facility is Apple's replacement for syslogd, created to make it easier to quickly search system logs. From the asl(3) man page: "This API permits clients to create queries and search the message data store for matching messages."

2009/07/18

I really like New Mexico...

... but every once in awhile I wish I was back in Dayton.

Apollo astronauts relive experiences at ceremony

2009/07/15

Bravo Bill Gates

In the same vein as yesterday's half-baked post, Bill Gates has helped make freely viewable (if not downloadable) a lecture series by Richard Feynman.

From CNET:

"Gates first saw the series of lectures 20 years ago on vacation and dreamed of being able to make them broadly available. [...] Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research Web site."


The name of the site?
Project Tuva. Nice touch.


The site doesn't seem to load in Safari 4 w. Silverlight 2, but Firefox 3.5 / Mac works fine.

2009/07/14

Lots of offsite backups

[behold, another half-baked post]

The Register says that NASA will on Thursday release 'greatly improved' footage from the Apollo 11 landing. They speculate that this footage is derived from original tapes of the landing, which in 2006 NASA admitted having lost.

I hope NASA makes the new video freely available for download. If they do, they'll get thousands (millions?) of offsite backups for free, hosted by history buffs around the world. And they won't need to worry so much about losing the originals again.

The Library of Congress has already done something similar with the nation's library, e.g. by posting images to Flickr.

Granted, backups are useless if you can't restore them. It should be easy to put out a call for well-known documents such as the lunar landing videos. But LoC has all kinds of documents ranging from famous to obscure, and retrieving them by broadcasting a call to volunteers would be dicey at best.

So it's interesting to see that LoC is launching a pilot program "to test the use of cloud technologies to enable perpetual access to digital content."

2009/07/02

Canada and Japan blocking climate-change deal, Sir David King warns - Times Online

Canada and Japan blocking climate-change deal, Sir David King warns - Times Online:

"Governments previously were able to hide behind the US's intransigence on climate change, he said, but the pro-climate policies being launched by the Obama administration means this is no longer possible. 'The time has come for people to reveal their cards,' he told delegates."


via @TomRaferty by way of @timoreilly.