Ambivalent Engineer

The Department of Homeland Security has said that it wants imagery delivered in the cloud. Several counties and states have expressed the s...

When you drill a hole in the ground and flush water or CO2 through it, you cool the rock you've drilled through.  The amount of heat e...

You can group geothermal plants into two types: The kind that pump water underground and take steam or hot high pressure water out. The kind...

Coal and nuclear powerplants make heat, convert some of that to electriciy, and reject the rest. They use water, and lots of it, to reject ...

I've been looking into the costs of pumping water through the filters and valves and pipe work around the pool, and it's quite inter...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gates/why-we-need-innovation-no_b_430699.html His essential argument is: We have some agreement on tw...

I need to buy a new computer for Martha. Must drive a flat panel display Must accept data from a FireWire miniDV camera Must have a DVD burn...

Relative Risk: Global Warming and Imported Fossil Fuels vs Nuclear Power It's from last year, but Representative DeVore perfectly summar...

At the July 8-10, 2009 G8 summit in L'Aquila , Italy, Allianz (a global insurance company) partnered with the World Wildlife Foundation ...

Senator Alexander Lamar has a white paper which well summarizes how I feel about our desperate energy situation, and lays out a plan for how...

Here's a link to the New York Times article " Combative Start to Senate Climate Hearings ". And, here's my response: I’m a...

Energy plans are like ..., well, everybody's got one.  Today I'll be looking at Zubrin's plan, as presented by Anne Korin.  Chec...

This graph , from the New York Times, shows the extent of U.S. financial commitments made over the last year to deal with the credit crisis....

We have a consensus among politicians in this country that we must spend our way out of this recession.  Of course, there are many things to...

Now I've read Andy Grove's plan (at The American , or via Wired ) to fix our energy dependence national security mess. Mr. Grove th...

Jesse Ausubel has a pretty good essay which describes what he thinks the future of power production will look like. It's a somewhat ro...

I found some numbers for the oil cost of burning coal. Freight trains in the United States burn 1 gallon of diesel to move a ton of frieght ...

Read " The Wonderful Curse of Natural Gas Price Volatility ". It's short, just 12 pages long. Check out the graph at the top ...

Afghanistan grows most of the world's opium. Opium is technically an illegal crop there, and it is one of the few crops that makes enou...

Last time I looked , oil was priced at $22/barrel and we were importing 9.14 million barrels a day, which made up 20% of our trade deficit o...