Solar power

With the exception of nuclear fusion, solar power remains the greatest untapped energy resource available on the planet. The diagram on the left demonstrates the magnitude of the flow of energy from the Sun reaching the Earth's surface (89 petaWatts), compared to the average power consumption of humans (15 teraWatts). Solar power is generally expected to become a competitive rival to fossil-fuel power circa 2030, but an article in the Daily Telegraph (www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;?xml=/money/2007/02/19/ccview19.xml) claims that "Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-generated electricity." The article goes on to claim that "The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 (51p) per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power." This is a rather strange assertion, because the tipping point for solar energy is generally considered to be the point at which its financial cost, per kiloWatt-hour (kWh), drops to the fossil-fuel cost per kWh. The current cost of fossil fuel power is about 5 cents/kWh. Now, without patronising the reader, a Watt is 1 joule of energy per second, and there's 3600 seconds in an hour, and 1000 Watts in a kiloWatt. So $1 per Watt is $3,600,000/kWh, or 360,000,000 cents/kWh.

Liverpool FC

For the first time all season, the Liverpool football team has done something exciting. Sadly, it seems that the excitement includes red-on-red violence, and a drunken brawl with the Portuguese police.

Firstly, Craig Bellamy took a swipe at John Arne Riise with a golf club, after Riise had brazenly snubbed the Footballers' Code by refusing to take part in a karaoke session, (www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2007/02/19/sfnliv19.xml) Presumably Bellamy was madly yelling "Dribble with the ball, I say, dribble with it!" as he swung wildly at Riise's ankles. Riise is reportedly unhurt, so Bellamy must have under-clubbed, taking an 8-iron when perhaps a longer iron would have been advisable. This is what caddies are for.

Meanwhile, 15 Liverpool players have been fined for a general drunken brawl, (uk.sports.yahoo.com/20022007/4/benitez-fines-15-players-report.html), which prompted hotel guests to call for the police. Jerzy Dudek has subsequently been forced to claim on his web-site that he didn't take out an entire SWAT-team, in the style of Jean Reno in Leon.

Body-image

I've not had much luck with women recently. I thought things were going well with Anna-Nicole, but she hasn't returned my calls for a couple of weeks now, and I think I may have been dumped. And I was chatting to Britney the other day, and I may have let slip some remark about being able to spot a few split-ends. I'll admit, it wasn't the most diplomatic thing I've ever said, but I still think she over-reacted.

Anyway, I read today that young people are still 'hung-up on their bodies' (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6376367.stm). This is troubling because I'm not sure which pretentious French expression to use in response: 'quelle surprise', 'quelle horreur', and 'plus ca change', all work extremely well for me in this context. I also learn that Radio 1 have a doctor, and this doctor, talking through the results of the survey last night on Radio 5, said that 1 in 4 women actually like the skinny male body shape, as exemplified by Jarvis Cocker or Preston. There are two possibilities here: either a) I only ever meet the other 3/4 of the female population, or b) the female respondents in this survey mentally transformed the question into 'Do you like Jarvis Cocker or Preston?'

Britney Spears Jarvis Cocker

Transportologists discover expanding congestion zone

In a discovery set to revolutionise our understanding of personal mobility, transportologists have discovered today that the London congestion zone is expanding. Experts at the Centre for Rapidly Advancing government Prohibitions report that "London's congestion charge zone roughly doubled in size at 0700 GMT with a westward expansion," (news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6368957.stm).

A variety of theories have already been put forward to explain this phenomenon. The most popular is 'dark government energy', which suggests that those in government dislike the personal independence and mobility provided by the motor car, and would prefer people to be bused around by the state, from locations chosen by the state, and according to timetables determined by the state. An alternative theory, 'environmental quintessence', suggests that such measures are necessary to alleviate environmental pollution and congestion.

At present the distribution of the congestion zone appears to be inhomogeneous, confined to certain regions of high population density. Computer simulations, however, already suggest that the seeds of congestion zones and road charging have been laid throughout the country, and that within a few years, this exotic form of government may become homogeneous.

Spreng's triangle

A fundamental question facing our civilization is: which direction do we wish to go on Spreng's triangle?

Let me explain. Daniel Spreng conceived the eponymous triangle illustrated here to demonstrate the inter-relationship between the energy, time, and information expended or used to complete economic tasks. Each point in the lattice represents a different combination of energy, time and information.

For example, the more information (knowledge, understanding) we have, the more efficiently we can achieve a task; i.e., we can achieve the same task by expending less energy. We can think of a particular task as being achieved in a certain time (in rough terms, at a certain speed), by expending a certain amount of energy, at a certain level of efficiency.

A task can be achieved quicker if either (i) the amount of energy expended is increased, whilst the efficiency with which it is expended remains constant, or if (ii) the amount of energy expended remains constant, but the efficiency with which it is expended is increased, (or if (iii) both energy and efficiency are increased). As a sweeping generalisation, the technological history of the 20th century is one in which tasks have generally been achieved quicker by the expenditure of more energy.

If we are about to suffer an energy crisis, either due to global warming, or due to the end of cheap oil and gas, then we may need to travel in a different direction on Spreng's triangle. To consume less energy in the completion of a task, one must either (i) achieve the task more slowly, or (ii) expend the energy more efficiently, (or both).

As an example of the interplay between energy, time and information, (which I mentioned on Bryan Appleyard's blog last year: www.bryanappleyard.com/blog/, and which has been emphasised by Autosport's Mark Hughes) motorcar manufacturers are steadily increasing the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. In motorsport, this increasing efficiency is used to make the cars go faster whilst expending the same amount of energy; in road-cars, this increasing efficiency is used to make the cars expend a smaller amount of energy whilst going at the same speed.

John Barrow has also written about Spreng's triangle in his book, 'Impossibility'. See p146-147 here: www.angelfire.com/indie/green_economics/Limits.pdf

Astronomy and astrophysics

I've just finished my latest paper, 'Mathematics and explanation in astronomy and astrophysics':

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0702/0702137.pdf

It does exactly what it says on the tin.

Montoya and McDonald's

Formula One refugee Juan Pablo Montoya makes his NASCAR debut this Sunday, in the Daytona 500. (www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/56778). Montoya is my type of driver: audacious, unpredictable, spectacular, hot-headed, flamboyant, and spontaneous. Montoya enjoys racing and overtaking, and driving cars which oversteer. This is how Grand Prix drivers should be.

Sadly, success in Formula One now requires drivers to be dispassionate and analytical, and Montoya quit F1 in the middle of last season, unable to compete against team-mate Raikkonen in a McLaren car which suffered from understeer.

Montoya also got a bit of stick in F1 for his comparative lack of, how shall I say, gastronomic asceticism. Thing is, Montoya likes a burger or two. This is what he had to say to the NASCAR press last week:

Everyone gave me crap because I ate McDonald's. I like it. What do you want me to say?...Many years ago, I ate at McDonalds's in every country just to taste the difference. And, believe me, there is a difference in the way it tastes from country to country!

How to be free

Boredom was invented in 1760. That is the year, according to academic Lars Svendsen in his excellent study, 'A Philosophy of Boredom' (2005), that the word was first used in English. The other great invention of the time was the Spinning Jenny, which heralded the start of the Industrial Revolution. In other words, boredom arrives with the division of labour and the transformation of enjoyable autonomous work into tedious slave-work.

And we are very bored. Go into chat rooms and forums on the Internet between three and five in the afternoon and you will find hundreds of posts from office workers reading, 'Bored bored bored!' These pleas for help, these desperate entreaties from trapped spirits, are like messages in a bottle, sent out into the ether, into the oceans of cyberspace, in the hope that someone out there is listening and that someone out there may be able to do something to help. The odds, of course, are low.

This wonderful passage comes from Tom Hodgkinson's recent book, 'How to be free', which I have just started reading. Already, it looks like it may be as good as Hodgkinson's sublime 'How to be Idle'. Chapter titles include 'Reject Career and All Its Empty Promises', 'Stop Competing', 'Death to Shopping, or Fleeing the Prison of Consumer Desire', 'Live Mortgage-Free; Be a Happy Wanderer', and, my favourite, 'Self Important Puritans Must Die'.

The chilling stars?

This Friday sees the publication of 'The Chilling Stars' by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, and the journalist Nigel Calder. The authors argue in this book that solar activity has a stronger effect on climate change than greenhouse gases: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

Could they be right? Certainly, there is a sense in which the Earth exists in the extended atmosphere of the Sun, and there are three means by which the Sun can, and does, influence the climate of the Earth:

• Solar radiation


• The solar wind


• The solar magnetic field

Let's consider the effects of each one in turn.

On some estimates, solar irradiance of the Earth has increased by 0.4% over the past 200-300 years, causing a temperature increase of about 0.4 degrees C (Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, p276). Significant, then, but not enough to entirely explain global warming.

The solar wind is the flow of charged particles, mainly protons and electrons, from the corona of the Sun. The Earth's magnetic field protects us from most of these particles, but disturbances in the solar wind can cause disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field, and this can, amongst other things, accelerate charged particles down the magnetic field lines at the magnetic poles of the Earth, causing the aurorae.

However, the Earth's atmosphere is bombarded by particles much more energetic than solar wind particles, called cosmic rays, or, to distinguish them from solar wind particles, galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). These are high kinetic-energy protons, electrons, positrons, and the nuclei of helium or even heavier elements. Such particles are probably produced by the supernovae explosions of high-mass stars. When cosmic ray particles hit the upper atmosphere of the Earth, they produce secondary particles, which can reach the lower atmosphere or ground level. When the Sun's magnetic field is weaker, a greater number of GCRs impinge upon the atmosphere of the Earth.

Now, Henrik Svensmark claims that secondary cosmic ray particles such as muons can liberate electrons from the atoms in the lower atmosphere, and these electrons help to make the condensation nuclei on which water droplets form. Hence, argues Svensmark, the greater the flux of cosmic rays, the greater the amount of low-altitude cloud cover over the Earth. Low-altitude clouds have a net cooling effect upon global temperatures, so if there were less cosmic rays, there would be less low-altitude cloud, and global temperatures would rise. The solar magnetic field ultimately determines the flux of cosmic rays to which the Earth is subjected, hence variations in the solar magnetic field can cause variations in the global temperature of the Earth.

Svensmark argues that a shorter sunspot cycle corresponds to more intense solar activity, less cosmic rays, less low-altitude cloud, and rising temperatures. And, to some extent, the evidence supports this claim: the sunspot cycle shortened in the first half of the twentieth century, in synchrony with rising global temperatures. The increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the first half of the twentieth century was negligible, so this rise in global temperature can only be explained by solar activity. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, global temperatures rose again by a comparable degree, but the length of the sunspot cycle remained largely constant. Given the rise in greenhouse gas emissions during the second half of the twentieth century, this suggests that global warming is the combined effect of solar activity and greenhouse gases. Svensmark and Calder may therefore be overplaying their case, but I await their book with interest.

The flying car

A company called Terrafugia is developing a flying car, called the 'Transition', which, they promise, will be available for purchase by 2009. Sadly, the Transition doesn't appear to have vertical take-off and landing capabilities. The idea is that you drive it to your local airport, unfold the wings, and take-off. This rather detracts from one of the reasons for owning a flying car; namely, to avoid the road congestion around places such as airports. However, I guess that, once in the air, you would be travelling faster than the peasants still clinging to the surface of the planet below you.

The Terrafugia website invites interested parties to order now by putting down a $7,400 deposit www.terrafugia.com/deposit.html. The Terrafugia VP of Sales and Marketing appears to be one Alex B.Min. And he will, I'm sure, be found 'B min' like a cheshire cat if enough people fall for that one.

The man behind the Transition is an MIT prodigy called Carl Dietrich: www.boston.com/yourlife/articles/2006/02/15/baby_you_can_fly_my_car/

This article claims that Dietrich has a 'portfolio' of novel inventions, including a "desktop-sized fusion reactor". So not only has Carl solved the problem of controlled fusion, and thereby solved all the world's energy problems in one fell swoop, but he has done so without the use of huge lasers and superconducting magnets, in a handy desktop-sized package. And, not only that, but he's decided to concentrate on the flying car instead.

Blue roses

Today, the weather has been almost unremittingly grim. After a rainy night, the clouds briefly lifted at breakfast, the sun came out, and myriad raindrops hung like pellucid beads upon the mossy branches of the wintering trees. Shortly thereafter, however, the skies darkened once more, and the rest of the day was punctuated by cold, wintry showers.

Time, then, to think of more colourful things, and, appropriately, this week's Economist features an interesting story about genetic attempts to create a genuinely blue rose, (www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8663291). Horticulturalists attempted for many years, unsuccessfully, to breed blue roses, and existing roses which purport to be blue are, it seems, merely white roses which have been dyed blue. A couple of years ago, however, after many years of research, the Australian biotech company Florigene, working with researchers at its parent company, Suntory, produced a mauve-coloured rose, and attempts continue to develop a genuinely blue rose. www.physorg.com/news3581.html