Older blog entries for ncm (starting at number 283)

27 Aug 2008 (updated 27 Aug 2008 at 20:47 UTC) »
mako: Three remarks. First, I presume your real reason for posting the pictures was to display the original sticker. Second, a forward slash (top-right to bottom left), technically a "bend", indicates approval, so the joke's on your friends; to ban something, it needs to slant the other way. Finally, making a guy add a sticker to his laptop is an odd way to flirt; I approve.

Wow, you mean Avery Pennarun and Havoc Pennington aren't really the same guy? Who knew? (Has anybody actually seen them in the same room at the same time?)

7 Aug 2008 (updated 7 Aug 2008 at 22:30 UTC) »
More Transient Power Storage

There are plenty of idle shipyards. Turn them to building 100-meter diameter spherical, floating pressure vessels. Power generated anywhere at sea, whether by wind, solar, tides, deep currents, or ocean-thermal can go to pumping air into them. Pumped to capacity, they can be towed cheaply by tugboat to any coastal city to operate turbines there.

Oil (supplied by an offshore platform on-site), methane (extracted from solid deep sea-bed deposits), or even coal may be burned far out to sea without climatic consequence, if the resulting carbon dioxide is pumped deep under the sea, there to condense to solid form, or to dissolve far from vulnerable coral.

For cheaper transport, put a loose membrane through the middle of the sphere, dividing it in half, and fill with hydrogen on one side. When the sphere is fully pressurized, the hydrogen is pressed between the membrane and the wall; when the pressure is released, the hydrogen-filled tank is nearly weightless.

Given efficient electrolysis (e.g. using the new MIT process), put your power generation sites in oceanic dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff. Pressurize the tanks throughout with hydrogen which may be delivered the same way to turbines on shore, and dissolve the waste oxygen into the water to restore fish habitat.

7 Aug 2008 (updated 7 Aug 2008 at 21:02 UTC) »
Transient Power Storage

Perhaps the most efficient of all possible energy storage media is ammonia. It's needed everywhere, as fertilizer, so conversion loss is effectively zero. Transport costs are minimal because it doesn't need to go very far. It can be produced any time power is available, and then not when there isn't.

Whoever develops a self-contained fertilizer production module that may be plugged into any variable-output generator will do more for the planet than anybody developing clean power generation.

Such a module would be immediately usable attached to wind generators in places with wind but no transmission grid, and next to oil wells that presently flare off natural gas as too expensive to condense and transport. It could be attached to solar power towers in deserts far from population centers, and operate directly off the high temperature in the tower without first converting to electricity.

chalst: My experience is that the account deletion threshold is set so (artificially) high that the only way to get a spammer account deleted is to mark them down as spammers unless it's dead clear they're not. Even then lots of fake accounts get through. Mostly the real spammers don't start spamming immediately; they appear to be accumulating fake accounts and holding them in reserve.

Anybody who gets their account deleted can just sign in again and behave less spammerishly next time, so there's no reason to use kid gloves.

14 Jul 2008 (updated 14 Jul 2008 at 21:17 UTC) »

I have altered the "s_t" and "c_t" ligatures in my copy of the Linux Libertine font so the loops are higher. They look really good in Firefox, when it uses them. (I haven't discovered yet how Firefox -- really, libpango -- decides whether to substitute ligatures; sometimes it does, sometimes not, sometimes both in one paragraph, e.g. this one.) Now I need to fix the italic, bold, and bold-italic versions, and get them all accepted upstream. I'd still like to find a better way to get them used by default.

labaru: What? I'm one of Mauro's biggest admirers. Sincerely: Go, Mauro!
10 Jul 2008 (updated 10 Jul 2008 at 21:43 UTC) »
redi: No kidding! "We do not use C++ exceptions." What a way to dispel the myth of a Google populated by geniuses. Oh, and StudlyCapsTypeNames, too. If it's true that "taste is the feminine of genius", they've shot both. Oh, look, enumerator names that get clobbered by common vendor header macros? Fail. No rule against public virtual functions? Fail. No requirement to qualify member accesses with "this->"? Fail. "Don't use an unsigned type", without a peep about how signed overflow is undefined behavior? Fail.

I just changed my linux-libertine typeface to make Firefox use the looped ligatures for "st" and "ct". I don't know what would be the "right" way to do it; I just added those ligatures to the default set. Unfortunately, they're kind of ugly (not loopy enough), and there's no ligature for "sc". To fix.

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