Random thought: Greenhouse effect and solar energy

Comparing the effects of greenhouse effect and solar energy. I was thinking and I came to an odd thought: is it hypocritical/counter-intuitive to use solar energy to combat greenhouse effect.

Primer: The greenhouse effect that some believe is contributing climate change. Light penetrates the glass and heats the interior of the greenhouse (heating the surfaces it touches upon), the heat is then radiated into the air. Rather than letting it pass through the heat is absorbed into the greenhouse gases and then re-radiated outwards, sometimes back into the surface. End result is that the greenhouse is warmer than expected. More of the sun's energy remains upon the Earth rather than being reflected/radiated back into space.

The basis for solar energy is capturing sunlight and converting it into electricity. I know of two methods that they do this. The first is through photovoltaicism (probably spelled that wrong), whereby photons are absorbed by a metal and a current is generated. This is what you see on lawn lights and calculators. The second I know heats up a medium and then converts the heat energy into electricity, in much the same way as conventional electricity generation. This method uses mirrors instead of panels, to focus, rather than collect, the sunlight onto one spot. This spot is usually inhabited by something with a high specific heat capacity. something like molten salts. This way the energy is stored long after the sun has gone down. The heat is then used in some sort of engine to drive a turbine or otherwise generate electricity.

Overly simplistic thought: Greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, etc.) trap the sun's energy and convert it into heat. Solar power traps the sun's energy and converts it into heat, and then into electricity or directly into electricity. This electricity will likely be used and will, eventually produce heat. So Is using solar power contributing to the problem rather than helping it.

The other green power sources don't run into this problem. Wind, geothermal,and tidal utilize energy already absorbed by the planet. This energy comes from within the earth, from the movement of the earth, from the movement of the moon around the earth, and from the sun (only the energy that would have originally been absorbed by the earth)

So, is solar power adding to the problem rather than solving it?

Edit/Update:  Something I forgot to mention. A relatively recent solar power idea that I've read about is to beam energy collected from space down to earth. This would likely be done from a geostationary satellite that gathers the sun's rays and transmits them down to a receiver platform on earth via laser or microwave. This is, in many ways worse than conventional solar power with regards to this article as solar energy that would have normally passed the Earth by would then be transmitted to the planet.

On Jell-O (I'm dumb)

So the stores that I visit sell two versions of Jell-O. The sugar free-and the normal Jell-O. They are approximately the same in price. However, the unit price of one is FAR better than the other.

Sugar free:

Regular:

As far as I can tell they both taste EXACTLY the same. I just recently bought a bunch of regular Jell-O. The reason: cuz I was caught off guard by the unit price. I thought that it might make more Jell-O. They both make 500 mL of Jell-O. In reality, I was just paying for sugar filler.

Preliminary thoughts on the Enlightenment desktop (E17)

Background:
OS: Arch Linux
Architecture: x86_64

So I had to reinstall my computer the other day. For some reason, likely my haphazard tinkering, My home partition wouldn't mount. This is a big deal because everything is on my home partition and really I made my root partition too small. I knew it wasn't a problem with the partition itself, rather a problem with the operating system. I COULD mount the partition when I booted up into other OS's (ex. Ubuntu 9.10 and Arch setup disks). I was hesitant at first about reinstalling. I actually wanted to find out what was wrong and fix it for future reference. So I headed off into the world of linux forums. I posted my problem along with the output of of several commands (mount /dev/sda4 /home, dmesg | tail, fdisk -l, blkid, fsck.ext4 -fv /dev/sda4) as well as a few files (/etc/fstab). The help I received there was swift, within minutes of posting someone already responded. However, the help I got was of little use. While I probably could have gotten it fixed eventually with the help I was receiving, I'm impatient and decided just to reinstall. One thing though. I did as a bit of a stupid question and I got a bit of a sarcastic remark, but that's kind of to be expected. Looking back on a few things, I think it may have had something to do with an invalid journal inode.

So I was reinstalling when the thought occurred to me that this was a golden opportunity to try out the Enlightenment window manager v 0.17. I had heard good things about it and I was unsure as to whether the path that GNOME was taking was what I wanted. One of the first things I noticed was the lack of good user-level documentation on their website. This could have been due to the fact that their wiki was in migration, but I'm not totally sure. Installation was easy, a single command through the terminal.

Starting up the desktop for the first time a quick questionnaire pops up asking you for things like what you want in your quicklaunch. Once that was over you are shown a mundane desktop with a single dock/panel (they call it a shelf). I must say Enlightenment has a bit of learning curve. First of all, switching desktops is triggered by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen. This is a hassle if you aren't used to it. Don't know how many times I've switched desktops trying to close a window. But this kind of behaviour has benefits too. Making the switch easier, fewer buttons etc. The next thing you notice is that clicking on the desktop opens the application menu. This is kind of nice. This gives a previously unused space into something useful. Middle clicking the desktop opens a list of windows. This means that so long as you've a piece of desktop open, you can access any opened applications as well as open anything. The window menu (right clicking on the title bar) gives a wide variety of options, including: adding to the quickstart, always on top, lower, raise, pin to desktop. You can even customize the window borders for that particular window. This makes the look of Enlightenment very customizable. One thing I have to say about it though is that it takes a lot more to 'always on top' a window, it's nested in a few menus).

Now onto the 'shelves'. You can have as many as you wish but there are only 12 spots to place them (one on each side). I guess you could have individualized panels for each of your desktops but that's probably excessive. The shelf itself is a bit glitchy. Trying to remove 'applets' will cause the whole desktop to freeze. As a workaround one can disable the module associated with the applet.  These applets are pretty standard, sound, taskbars, quicklaunch, weather, time, etc. Most of these work really well.

Finally, there's the settings manager. Here you can configure almost EVERYTHING. It's nice to have a graphical way to access all your desktop settings.

Overall I think that with enough tinker time, I can get this desktop to look and behave jsut the way I want it to. I think I'll keep using it until I find something better. I wonder what it will be like once it's out of beta stage of testing.

Food

First I would like to extend my sympathies to those living in and around Japan.  I hope that all that are missing and injured are found and that they recover.

It's funny. I initially started this blog to get story ideas out of my head and now it's focus has diversified quite a bit. Today's topic food. Lots of ground to cover actually.

Let's start with the context. We had hotpot at home and in the end we had leftovers, a little bit of everything. As usual, I started to put a plan together to use up the leftovers. So I thought I'd share how I clear out hot pot left overs.

In my house we eat hot pot with rice (I know it's kind of odd), seafood, beef, lettuce, tofu and whatever else is in the fridge that would go well in hotpot. Usually we have a little bit of everything save the rice left over. The easiest way to clear out all of this is to make noodle soup. Basically, you boil the noodles, and then dump them in the hot pot broth. Instant noodle soup. Now this maybe undesirable because it's really like eating the same thing you ate the night before. Separately, it takes a bit more work.

Let's start with the sea food. I find the best option here is to make salt and pepper sea food dishes. The reason for this is that the seafood is already shelled and cut into little pieces. What you do here is you mix the seafood with a little bit of lemon juice/wine/vinegar, soy sauce, cornstarch and oil. Then you fry it in some hot oil. Take them out just before they're done and set them aside. Next fry up some sliced peppers and onions. Throw in your seafood, salt (I like five spice salt), pepper, chilli pepper to taste.

The beef and the tofu is just asking to be made into mahpoh tofu. Just stir fry with oyster sauce, soy sauce and spices and you're done. Lastly the lettuce and the hot pot broth can be a side dish used to temper the saltiness and the spiciness of the above dishes. The final thing you have left then is the dipping soy sauce. If you were smart you would have used them cooking the above dishes and you'll only have a bit left. It would be a waste to just throw it away so I usually just add it to my batch of soy sauce chicken broth/sauce.

And that's how I clear out hot pot leftovers (nothing left).

Evolution of Scientific Theory/Hypothesis: Lamarckian? (Ironic or just amusing?)

Random thought of the day (may or may not become a daily occurrence):

For those of you without a biological background, a primer. Evolution is the study of the development of new species from older species (ex. from ape-like beings to humans). During the development of evolutionary theory there were two competing theories. Both theories involve the transfer of traits from the parent generation to the next. Both theories also state that the accumulation of these changes/traits will eventually lead to the formation of new species. The two theories differed in where the traits came from. The first theory, largely discredited now, states that these new traits arose from an organisms own ability to change itself. A famous example of this would be the giraffe gaining its long neck via stretching. Giraffe-ancestors would not be able to reach foliage in high up places (they were vertically challenged), so they would stretch their necks. This self-inflicted change would be passed on to their offspring, eventually leading to the creation of giraffes. This theory was labelled as Lamarckian evolution. The second theory states that these traits originated among the population already and that environmental pressures would give individuals with certain traits an advantage and these traits would be passed on. While a famous example of this would be moths in Europe during the Industrial Revolution, I prefer to look at the evolution of antibiotic resistance in microbes. Many species of bacteria are susceptible to penicillin. If we take a large population of a species of bacteria and expose them to penicillin, you'll find that some of the bacteria will survive and form new colonies. In this case, the environmental pressure would be the antibiotics and the trait would be the resistance. This theory would be called Darwinian evolution.

Okay primer over, back to my story. I was reading an article about cancer and the article mentioned HeLa cells. I remembered what HeLa cells were, but I was curious as to any new research on them. Ironically, I came across a fairly old article (1991) that proposed that the HeLa cells had evolved into a new microbial species. This then made me think about evolution, and then about science itself when I came to the conclusion that scientific theories evolve in a Lamarkian manner.

Take a fictional scientific theory stating that liquid water makes aliens explode. With each new discovery the theory changes a little bit. At first it becomes liquid water makes aliens explode because they are made of lithium. In the end you have a theory about how alien physiology created a new flexible lithium. Now inspecting how this theory/hypothesis evolved, you see that with new challenges to the theory, the theory adjusts itself, becoming a new, slightly different explanation.

Looking into this further we are aware that sometimes there are competing theories that try to explain the same phenomenon. There are two outcomes to this. One, the theories merge and become a new theory (this would be akin to two species evolving into a single species [I can't think of a biological equivalent]). The second outcome would be that one of the theories is discredited. One could argue that this is textbook natural selection, but I disagree. In this case the theories adjusted themselves in different directions. The key here isn't the survival of the fittest concept but rather the origin of the differences in the theories. The theories may have started the same but they diverged by changing themselves. If the theories didn't start the same it is more akin to two different species competing for the same ecological niche.

Anyways, I'm not expecting, or even wanting the current scientific method to change. I was just amused by how scientific theories evolve in a way that is not parallel to biological evolution.

Standing desks

I converted my desk to a standing desk this morning (couldn't sleep and there was nothing better to do). Already I can feel the difference to my posture. I do understand what some people say when they complain about the pain in their feet but I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. You expend more energy, meaning it's one extra step in preventing obesity. Your posture doesn't slouch. Finally, since you aren't sitting, you can't really relax and do nothing. Standing desks force you to be doing something, otherwise you're just standing there.

Humans evolved a long way to stand on two feet, there's no reason why we shouldn't take advantage of that.

An empirical analysis on visual stimulus addiction.

Anime and TV shows have ruined me. I really have no one to blame but myself. Hours of constant visual stimulus via my computer has really warped me in many ways. There are three main observations I would like to point out about this 'addiction' of mine.

1. Whenever you're away from the visual stimulus, you feel like there's something missing.
2. The stimulus isolates you. There's so many reasons to go back to it and leaving it almost painful.
3. It warps your sense of time.

The first two are fairly standard in terms of addiction, but I think the third is the most interesting of all. You know what I caught myself doing one day? I started cooking an egg (hard-boiled) and I started an episode of anime. An anime episode is approximately 1/4 h long excluding intros and endings, so it serves as an ideal timer for hard boiling an egg. I was fast forwarding through the episode like I usually do and I found myself expecting actual time to speed up as well. From here I noticed that other things seemed to have changed about my sense of time. My patience has dropped almost exponentially and activities that take more than 1/4 h now seem to be lengthy and not worth it.

I've decided to wean myself off of anime and tv shows for a while (watching only an hour or so a day). I'll do this for a few weeks to see if I can reverse the time warp that has already occurred. Incidentally, this means that I'll have a lot more time to do stuff like my novel, so you might see me posting a lot more. If not, be sure that I'm still getting stuff done.

Brilliant ideas

So I was talking to a friend about pumps. In particular, we were talking about membrane-bound pumps (cellular biology). I thought about it for a moment and I could think of no examples of a non-membrane-bound pump. Of course, with my limited knowledge, that by no means indicates that there are none. At first I thought that the whole concept of a non-membrane-bound pump was kind of odd. If the pump didn't connect to the membrane, then what was the purpose? To keep the fluid that it was floating around in circulating? I tried thinking of non biological examples of pumps and then it hit me. Perhaps the most iconic pump of all is not membrane bound. A bike pump is a perfect example of this. It is a unattached pump that attaches to a membrane pore.

This is where my 'brilliant' idea came in. As a thought exercise, I thought of practical applications of a bike pump-like pump in terms of biology. I thought that it would be a great way to deliver drugs. You could use the pump as a way to target specific cells. In essence, a pill would contain two different compounds. One compound would be the pump. This pump would be a custom designed protein with two to three functional parts. The first would be a tissue-specific ligand that would bind to a pore or channel of sufficient size for the drug to pass through. The second part would forcefully open/activate the channel. Finally, the third would be a pump specifically designed for unidirectional transfer of the active drug. The second compound in the pill would, of course be the drug.

It seems like a no brainer when you think about it on the surface and it seemed, at least in my head, to work really well. Then when you delve deeper into it there are a variety of problems to overcome. First would be that making the custom pump would be ridiculously expensive and time consuming, probably better just to make a wide acting drug and let people deal with the side effects. The second problem would be finding a receptor or pore that is ONLY on the tissue you want. Another problem would be finding a way to make sure that you're pump doesn't attach permanently. This might actually solve itself, as some receptors are internalized after activation (which might be a problem in and of itself). Of course the biggest obstacle would be the fact that many drugs act on the receptors themselves, tricking the cell into doing a desired effect, which means that there is no need of a delivery system. Sigh so much for these brilliant ideas of mine.

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Another 'brilliant' idea I had recently was a slot machine dim sum restaurant. I figured that it would be a great way to introduce newbies into the world of dim sum. By leaving the choice to chance, they get an unbiased variety of dishes. Rather than being limited to the dishes that their friends or family want, they can try out more exotic dishes. Of course, this kind of defeats the purpose of dim sum whereby you choose the dishes as they come by but it doesn't have to be used by everybody. In addition to the slot machine dim sum, a rotation-sushi-like delivery system would be nice. It is unfortunate, though that such a delivery system kind of makes the dining experience kind of impersonal due to the fact that the participants are facing the conveyor belt rather than each other. Still, despite the problems, I think it would be a cool thing to do and not necessarily limited to dim sum. I could definitely see something like this used in conjunction with Microsoft Surface in restaurants.