TECHPopuli

V-22 Osprey's early performance in Iraq a success

Always a favorite airplane of mine. This CNN story gives a positive report, though there is some negative stuff in the bottom third.

Once derided as a white elephant, the U.S. Marine Corps' tilt-rotor aircraft, the V-22 Osprey, is proving its mettle in Iraq, military officials said.

The Osprey, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, was designed to replace the Corps' aging and less-capable helicopter fleet.

...

Last September, Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 left for Iraq's western Anbar province on the first deployment of the V-22.

Since then, the planes have logged more than 2,000 flight hours, initially doing routine cargo and troop movements from base to base in an area about the size of South Carolina.

In December, commanders gave the planes a more risky mission called "aero-scout" in which a group of V-22s flies into a relatively unsecured location and drops off Marines for a search mission.

The planes sit on the ground until the Marines load up and then fly off to somewhere else for another mission.

Macintosh Intro Video

No particular reason to show this today. But it appeared one of the Mac email lists I belong too.

Notable:

* Remembering how truly revolutionary the bit-mapped graphics were.
* Monochrome screen
* "insanely great"
* Programming example was in Pascal. The "cool" language back then.
* It took awhile for text-to-speech to get much better than that.
* Steve said, "all the images will be generated" I'm assuming the audio is from another source.
* The audience response is a little ove-the-top. It was a crowd of mostly Apple employees, but still.
* Steve had hair and a bow-tie. I used to have hair too, but never a bow-tie.

Ah memories. ... When I was a boy we didn't have no internet. You had to walk to the computer store, uphill, both ways.

A new way to make ethanol.

One criticism of using bio fuels to replace gasoline, is that it takes as much, or more, fossil fuel to make ethanol as the stuff it replaces. Also it drives up food prices by adding demand for corn and the like.

My response has always been: five years from now it's still gonna take petroleum to make gas, but we'll find new ways to make bio fuels.

Here's a great example:

From an article in Wired.com:

A biofuel startup in Illinois can make ethanol from just about anything organic for less than $1 per gallon, and it wouldn't interfere with food supplies, company officials said.

Coskata, which is backed by General Motors and other investors, uses bacteria to convert almost any organic material, from corn husks (but not the corn itself) to municipal trash, into ethanol.

"It's not five years away, it's not 10 years away. It's affordable, and it's now,"...

The Macintosh Startup Sounds.

New technology to make cheaper, low-carbon hydrogen

technologyreview.com:

Nanoptek, a startup based in Maynard, MA, has developed a new way to make hydrogen from water using solar energy. The company says that its process is cheap enough to compete with the cheapest approaches used now, which strip hydrogen from natural gas, and it has the further advantage of releasing no carbon dioxide.

Many people claim that the fatal flaw in using hydrogen as the replacement for gasoline is that is also uses petroleum and natural gas to make hydrogen. But you have to remember that, while that may be true today, in five years you'll still be making gasoline from petroleum, but we'll have come up with all sorts of other ways to make alt fuels like hydrogen and biofuels.