Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek Stuff, General

Distance as a matter of perspective

I was doodling around, as I sometimes do, thinking about the differences between East Coast Travel and Western Travel.  What brought this up is an upcoming trip to NYC and I realized I do not know the relationship of the area airports to the city.  When I lived back in the DC area, I would usually drive to NYC, or take a train.  I never really thought about flying unless there were extraordinary circumstances.

But I worked out some charts to compare a drive from DC to Boston with a drive from Albuquerque to Denver. Both routes by Interstate A-D on I-25 and D-B on I-95, I-84,and  I-90 (I could have taken I-95 all the way but the distance would be different.) Both routes are about 445 miles.

To give some context to the routes, I noted the population of the different MSAs (Metro Statistical Area) each route went through or by.

Interstate Distance Cities MSA Pop
DC 446 Washington 5,358,000
I-95 Baltimore 2,667,000
Philadelphia 5,838,000
Trenton 367,000
New York City 19,000,000
I-84 Bridgeport 900,000
I-90 New Haven 845,000
Hartford 1,190,000
BOS Boston 4,523,000
Total 40,688,000

There are more than 40 million people living along the DC-Boston route.That is a mind-numbingly lot of people.

Out here:

Interstate Distance Cities MSA Pop
Albuquerque 448 Albuquerque 846,000
Santa Fe 144,000
I-25 Pueblo 157,000
Colorado Springs 617,000
Denver Denver 2,506,000
Total 4,270,000

The total number of people living along the Albuquerque-Denver route is less that the population of the Boston MSA. More than half of Colorado lives in the Denver MSA.  About half of New Mexico lives in the ABQ and Santa Fe MSAs.

And the Western route is only in 2 states. The Eastern route passes through 7 states and districts.

Geek Stuff

Battery Backup

I was listening to the radio a few days ago and they were talking about the difficulties of building a power grid that is sized to handle the peak load in the middle of the day. For 18 out of the 24 hours the electric needs are relatively low and then in the middle of the business day the load can grow another 80%.  One idea might be to use solar or wind to cover the peak, but they aren’t always reliably available.

My first thought was to build a giant battery, charge it up at night and let it discharge during the day. I imagine that the batteries would have to be immense, multitudes of them, each the size the Pentagon. Might be none too feasible, potentially unsafe and esthetically challenging.

The next day, they were talking about the upcoming future of electric cars. Especially intra-city commuter vehicles. Then I had a vision of parking garages full of batteries. Just sitting there plugged into the grid topping off. They could be the peak power reservoir.  The Utilities would actually have an incentive to distribute recharging stations to every parking slot in every garage in the city.  Drivers could get free electricity in exchange for the use of their batteries for the day.  The report ended with a blurb that some city planners were already thinking of using the car batteries that way. Drat, another idea stolen.

Geek Stuff, General, Preparing for the worst

Yay!

Thank you!
World Community Grid is pleased to announce the completion of the first phase of the “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together” project. It took only two years to complete, even though the project was halted for 17 weeks due to the destruction of the University of Texas Medical Branch research facilities as a result of Hurricane Ike.

In total, members provided nearly 12,000 years of computer processing time to this project. Your computer run time contribution was 6 days of processing time to “Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together”.

Completing this phase of the project is a significant contribution to the research of not only Dengue Fever but also Hepatitis C, West Nile, Yellow Fever and other diseases caused by the Flaviviridea family of viruses.
More details about the conclusion of Phase 1 and the upcoming Phase 2 may be viewed by visiting: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=26618
Geek Stuff

Paying the Piper

I have often wondered about the networking costs of the big sites like YouTube and Facebook. For the amount of bandwidth they need to provide ubiquitous access to all those large files, and the servers that store all those files, it quickly turns into some serious money and this Slate article discusses the economics.

So rather than hosting all the content themselves, and the network connections to access the content, why don’t they let the content sources host the information. All they have to do is provide a directory to where the content is. (Didn’t Knapster and some of those previous file-sharing entities do that?)

If I go out and post a video on my server on my ISP, I could send the link to it to YouTube and if someone wants to watch it, they follow the link and stream the video directly off my server. If several million people want to see it, then my ISP service will probably shut down access to my server after I hit my bandwidth cap, or they will ask me to pay more for increased bandwidth. Then it is up to me to decide what I am willing to pay for.

YouTube’s main role would be to develop the applications that I would have on my server to allow the streaming and to provide some coordination between all the videos that people post. (Presumably they would get some advertising revenue from people browsing their site to see what videos are available.) If the video is not available because the server isn’t on line, that’s not YouTube’s fault.  (Actually, YouTube could do a quick query to see if the video is available before providing the link to the browser.)

I suppose YT could come up with a way to disguise the IP address where the video is coming from to stop people from bypassing YT for future videos.

Certainly sounds better than losing half-a-billion dollars a year.

Geek Stuff

Electric Cars

2 Comments

This Article on Tesla Motors reminded me of a potential solution to the range problem with electric vehicles.

Slot Cars!

Start with the Interstates and put an inductance coil down the middle of a lane and let the car pick up electrical power from the road. This way it can reserve its on-board batteries for when it is off the grid, or off-road.

The road power can be delivered by roadside solar panels, wind power, or by the national grid as needed. With feedback between the car and the road, cars can be zipping along at 50 mps or better, with some sort of auto-piloting. 

Then expand to convert other US Routes and the rest of the country can slowly follow suit.

Slot cars, that the ticket.