TurboHybrid

Hybrid cars are a sort of half-way house between old-fashioned twentieth-century petrol cars, and proper electric cars with batteries.

We can't quite have the latter, of course, because the batteries aren't up to it yet (see my post on electric aeroplanes of a few weeks ago).

All the hybrid cars I have seen, though, use a conventional reciprocating engine to drive their alternators.   This is very silly - reciprocating engines are inefficient and unreliable.  They have one single advantage: they respond rapidly when you blip the throttle.  You need that if they are directly connected to the power-train, as in the old-fashioned cars I just mentioned.  But that advantage is completely pointless in a hybrid, in which the battery accommodates sudden changes in load.  For a hybrid you need a simple reliable engine that runs at constant speed and more-or-less constant power.

The picture is of a Garrett GTP 30-67 gas turbine.  It's about half a meter long and generates about 25 Kw of power.  That sort of engine would be perfect for a hybrid car.

Go build one, World...

HolidayMoney

It's not work that creates wealth.  It's wealth that creates work.

In buoyant economic times near-full employment comes about as a consequence of people flush with cash going out and spending it: someone has to make the jet-ski that they buy or the resort hotel in which they book a room.  And recessions are created by people hunkering down, sensibly hanging on to their money now that that rainy day has come, and thereby throwing the other people who would have been servicing their needs out of work.

Now, apart from buying lunch and a couple of commuter tickets, people actually at work are not spending a lot of the money that their work is earning for them.  The company for whom they are working may be spending as a result of their activities, but the amount available for the company to spend is comparatively low.  The total assets of the people who work for a company usually far exceed the assets of the company itself.

Almost all the money those people spend is spent during their free time.

Yet we have the idea that hard work and long hours are what makes for a strong economy.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Hard work and short hours are what makes for a strong economy.  People with more leisure time spend more money on that leisure.  Further, as they are working fewer hours, there is more employment available to supply the goods and services that they are now buying.

As a consequence of all this I offer a five-word election manifesto to any political party that simultaneously wants to get elected and to improve its nation's economy.  It has such instant appeal to the electorate that it would guarantee an election win, regardless of how dismal the party's previous poll ratings were.

It is this: Add Friday to the Weekend.

AIQ

Artificial intelligence researchers are very fond of the idea of a Turing test: a computer program converses with a person who can't see their fellow interlocutor.  If the person cannot tell that they are talking to a computer, as opposed to another person, then the program must be intelligent.  (Or at least as intelligent as the person's friends...)

Turing's brilliant proposal cuts the Gordian knot of defining what is or is not intelligent behaviour with subtle elegance:  if people can't tell that they are not talking to other people through the wall when they actually talk with the computer, then the computer must be at least as intelligent as people expect people to be.

Of course, no one has written a program that will pass the test yet.  But programmers often simplify things by restricting conversation to a narrow area, such as fashion, or physics.

Others try to write programs that do non-conversational intelligent things that people do: the world chess champion is now a computer program, and poker-bots attempt to fleece real people on online poker sites.

But how about a program to pass human intelligence tests?  These tests are highly structured, and so it should be relatively easy to write a program to interpret the input.  And they usually require a rather restricted range of pattern-matching skills to solve.  Finally, the score can be directly compared with that of the large groups of people who also take the tests.

It might be rather salutary if computer programs were to turn out to be both good at IQ tests and quite simple to write...

CarbonSink

The two most immediate dangers the Earth faces are anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing current mass-extinction event, also anthropogenic.  There are bigger dangers, of course, but those two are the most close at hand.  They are also two that we can do something about.

For climate change, how should we set about reducing atmospheric CO₂?  It seems to me that if we are going to save the planet, we should harness the single most powerful force that we know and set it to tackling the problem.

The single most powerful force that we know is human greed and stupidity.

World yearly plastic production is currently about 300 Mt.  That plastic contains about 250 Mt of carbon.  World CO₂ production is about 30,000 Mt.  That CO₂ contains about 8,800 Mt of carbon (oxygen is a lot heavier than hydrogen).  So the world's consumption of plastics uses up about 3% of the carbon that we emit into the air - a useful dent.  Except it doesn't use it up, of course, because most of those plastics are made from oil that came from underground.

But there are plenty of plant-sourced plastics available.  They do use up atmospheric carbon - that's how plants grow.  The trouble is that the plastics industry tries as hard as it can to make those bio-sourced plastics also biodegradable, to enhance their green credentials.  But every plant-sourced plastic item that biodegrades returns the carbon that was locked up in it to the carbon cycle.

What we should be doing is to make non-bio-degradable plastics from plants, and then to encourage people to consume them and waste them, throwing them into landfill.  The economic churn would throw positive feedback into the mix, people would be getting more and more of the consumer goods that they crave, and the carbon would be being locked up in the ground far more securely than with any current carbon-capture scheme.

Greed is good, as Gordon Gekko said.  Consume, and don't recycle.  Throw stuff away to save the world.

PayWallNews

Last week I was named as the 103^rd most influential person in British science by the Times' Eureka science magazine.

So - only 102 people to bump off, then...

I am, of course, very grateful to the Times for considering me, and for the party that they organised in the Science Museum in South Kensington for us all.

In addition to lots of my fellow scientists and engineers, there were quite a few people from the Times at the party, and the conversation turned to News International's paywall.  Behind this their online newspaper content now resides.  There was much rather anxious discussion about whether or not it was going to work.  I said that it ought to be straightforward to predict if it will or not using evolutionary game theory, and on the train on the way back home, I worked it out.

Here's the result.  The Y axis is the income that a news site gets, which is made up from advertising and - for non-free sites - the paywall subscriptions.  The X axis is the proportion from 0 to 1 of news sites that are behind a paywall.  The blue curve is the income a paywall site gets, and the red curve is the income a free site gets.

The actual Y-axis numbers are arbitrary.  What's interesting is the shape of the curves.  As more and more sites go behind paywalls the income per site drops because the paying customers have more choice, and there is less advertising income per site.  The free sites' incomes rise, because all the remaining newsreaders go to them, and so - consequently - does most of the advertising.

With the numbers I used the evolutionarily-stable proportion of paywall sites is about 0.2 of all news sites, with 0.8 of them remaining free.  If you change the assumptions the curves change and so does the crossing point, of course.  But the principles remain the same.  If the number of paywall sites is to the right of the crossing point, you make more money if you run a free site; if it is to the left you make more money with a paywall.  That's why the crossing point is evolutionarily stable.

This graph must be the reason that News International broke ranks and went paywall first.  That means that they are operating at the left-hand end of the graph on the blue curve.  If you are a big news organization it makes sense to occupy as much of that left-hand end as possible.  Indeed, if the total of all your own paywall sites just makes your proportion of all the news sites in the world the crossing point, then you get all the paywall income that the world has to offer, and your rivals will do better to stay free...

WindPower

We all want sustainable energy these days, what with fossil-fuel-induced climate change and the need for nations not to have to rely on dodgy foreigners to sell them the gigajoules they need.

Why don't we use the power of the wind?  I don't mean the pathetic flow of air over our own planet that we already capture with giant versions of children's toy windmills.  I mean an altogether more serious wind:

And I also don't mean capturing its kinetic energy.  That would be far too difficult, and it's not the main source of energy in the solar wind anyway.  The main source of energy in the solar wind is helium-3.   This isotope of helium is particularly suited for use in fusion reactors.  Fusion reactors are attractive because they are potentially very powerful, and because anyone can make one for a few hundred dollars.  Admittedly we haven't yet made one that generates more energy out than you have to feed in, but an abundant source of helium-3 and the combined genius of lots of garden-shed tinkerers might well change all that.

There is almost no helium-3 on Earth.  It has been proposed to mine the Moon for it, as the solar wind embeds it in the lunar regolith.  But the problem with that is that the Moon is a gravity hole that you have to expend energy getting down to, and then expend more getting up from.

Why not put a solar-powered satellite that is, essentially, a big electromagnet at one of the Lagrange points?  The solar wind is ionised, and so it would stream to the satellite's poles, like a mini aurora.

Of course, helium-3 is only a minor component of the solar wind, so it needs to be separated.  But here things start playing to our advantage.  The satellite would use the same technique that mass spectrometers use to produce a clean stream: when you pass an ionised plasma through a magnetic field, the ions deflect through different angles depending on their mass.  All you have to do is to put a collector at the correct angle to the magnetic field for an atomic mass of 3, and the helium isotope you want just falls into it.

If we got everything right, we could provide thousands of amateur fusion researchers with a fuel with real potential, and leave them to collaborate and to compete in the usual crowd-source way to come up with the best design.

And, when they give us our first energy-positive fusion reactor, we would have a non-polluting power source for the entire world that, as it would have been developed on-line by a collective, would be free of patent encumbrance.

Finally consider this: people working on fusion power are, of course, working on building clean power stations.  But — in some cases without realising it — they are also building the human race's first starship engine...

NumberCounters

The number of people with autism-spectrum disorders is increasing faster than the number of those with any other single neuropsychiatric condition.  Without doubt, this is partly discovery through better diagnosis techniques.  But there is significant real growth too.

People with autism are more than twice as likely than people without to have fathers and grandfathers who are engineers.   Further, it is known that autism is strongly heritable.

The Industrial Revolution made engineering one of the most secure of human professions.  Engineers only occasionally get rich and famous, of course, but they almost always live comfortable lives.  They are often among the last to find themselves unemployed when times are hard, and economic pick-up sees them in the vanguard of those back to work.

And a comfortable life is an optimal basis for the raising of children.  Perhaps, since the Industrial Revolution, simple Darwinian selection has acted to increase the proportion of descendants of engineers in the population.

Perhaps further, a side-effect of this increase is the increase in autism-spectrum disorders that we are now seeing.

SkateSlope

Ice is flat. Or rather, to be pedantic, ice forms a surface parallel to the geoid, an approximate sphere roughly 13,000 kilometers in diameter.  This is true of both ice on rivers and lakes, and also ice in ice rinks.

Making an ice rink is fairly straightforward.  You construct a shallow dish and lay plastic pipes across the bottom.  You fill the dish a few centimeters deep with water, then pump refrigerant through the pipes.

Skateboard parks, in contrast, are anything but flat.  This allows skateboarders the freedom to play with the interchange between their kinetic and potential energy, with - in competent hands (or rather, feet) - spectacular results and  broken bones.

Skateboard parks are made by pouring concrete into formers and letting it set.

But you could do just the same thing with ice.  The formers could contain the refrigerant pipes.  You would fill them with water, not concrete, then turn on the refrigerator.

The result would be like a skateboard park, but for people wearing ice skates.