| Tuesday, November
13, 2007
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Friday the 13th falls on Tuesday this
month. However, there is good news:
Subject: Cheap hydrogen?
Jerry
This sounds good, but with all the hype on the
hydrogen front I wonder if this is real or just more hype.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071112/sc_afp/ussciencefuel
-- James Early
Long Beach, CA
Or perhaps good news. It's worth watching. I
wrote about getting both hydrogen and methane from bio-waste back in the
1970's, with articles in Galaxy, American Legion (I did a series called
"America's Looming Energy Crisis" for American Legion back in those times).
Bio-waste is a possible energy source as well as a problem for disposal. In
those days Southern California Edison wanted to take all the bio-waste
including sewage from the city of Oceanside, CA, and see what kind of energy
they could extract from it; but the Public Utilities Commission decided that
this wouldn't be a good investment, and forbade the research project.
Decisions like that led to deregulation. Alas, the deregulation was governed
by politicians, crooks, and both, presided over by Jerry Brown, and the
result was a disaster capped by Enron, but that's another matter.
One needs to be careful in putting together an energy budget
when looking to unconventional energy sources. It needs to include the costs
of collection and transportation. It also needs to subtract out costs of
collection and disposal if it's truly waste, an economic "bad" as opposed to
a "good". With modern spread sheet software this is a lot easier than it was
in the 1970's. I was more enamoured of
hydrogen in those days than I am now; the difference is the DC/X experience.
Hydrogen is a wonderful rocket fuel once you get it into the rocket engine;
but collecting it and storing it is another matter. It's small, it's light,
it's energetic at any temperature above deep cryogenic, and even at normal
cryogenic temperatures it wants to get OUT. Once it is out it collects in
the oddest places, and likes to burn or explode. The little 'pop' we used to
get igniting a test tube of hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water
experiments we did in high school chemistry lab (back when there were high
school chemistry labs) was fun, but you didn't want to try it with a bell
jar full of the stuff. Well, some of us did want to try it; the result
wasn't too damaging and there were no fatalities; alas, I didn't learn then
that hydrogen is really mean stuff to work with when you have energy-useful
quantities.
The late Max Hunter became disenchanted with
hydrogen and died saying that we'd build single stage to orbit ships running
on propane/LOX, not hydrogen/LOX; the operations difficulties of hydrogen
were just too severe. Of course Max learned the same way I did, from the
DC/X experience. But: having said all
that, if there were hydrogen wells, or a good source of hydrogen from stuff
we have to dispose of anyway, it can be sent through pipelines (expensively:
it really likes to get OUT) and it sure burns clean (no carbon; but it burns
hot so you need to be careful about making NOX byproducts). So it is good
news. =========
A colleague points me to this:
http://www.memwg.com/
the-uneconomics-of-book-publishing/
which says a lot. Most does not apply to me: I long ago found
that computer book publishers use Hollywood accounting systems, and pay in
the same way. The publishers I deal with pay a percentage of cover price.
On TWIT this week a couple of my colleagues noted that they
get more from selling their books through Amazon and getting paid as Amazon
Associates than they get from the publishers. I didn't say much at the
time, but that isn't true for me. When you buy one of my books through
Amazon by clicking the Amazon Buy A Book Now button you will see all over
the place on this site, I get a percentage of what you paid. It is not
trivial, and I am very grateful for it, but I also get about 10% of the
cover price from the publishers, and that is considerably more than what
Amazon pays. Apparently for computer book writers this isn't true.
When I first got into book writing I spent a lot of time out
on the road. Thousands of miles, driving to any coffee pot radio station
that would have me, and lots of time in New York City on the Long John
Knebel and Candy Jones radio show from Midnight to 5 AM, and every TV show
that would have me. That helped launch Mote in God's Eye and Lucifer's
Hammer, and getting on best seller lists will change your life. Alas,
as Mr. Heinlein warned me, we're professional gamblers. It doesn't last. But
I still do better from the publishers than from Amazon, not that I disparage
the Amazon income. When you buy books,
by all means use the little red button... 
==========
They're filming Eddie Murphy's latest movie at Osula
University down the street (Osula is the US campus of a Japanese finishing
school, where bright young things come to study how to operate in the US;
they bought the campus of what was Corvallis High School, a well known
Catholic girls' high that failed to merge with Notre Dame and go Coed at the
right time, and sort of vanished as the notion of girls schools became
unfashionable). The WGA has
"informational pickets" at the site, meaning that they're not trying to stop
the filming. Even so there are three LAPD police (off duty cops in uniform
hired by the studios) and more than a dozen Executive Associate uniformed
rent-a-cops. We got to talking with a couple of the writers carrying picket
signs. I had just read
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/
cl-et-bigpicture13nov13,0,5241794.story?
coll=cl-movies in which I learned
that "When Tom Preston was fired from Viacom in 2006 he received $600
million in severance pay, more than all the DVD residuals paid to WGA
members that year." Which suggests to me that if one company can afford to
pay that to one failed CEO, perhaps they can afford to pay the writers a bit
more in residuals. Viacom can manage with Tom Preston -- indeed has done so
-- but it's pretty hard to be in the entertainment business without writers.
Of course "information wants to be free" and there are many
in the Net 2.0 community who have different views.
But everywhere I look I see CEO's of entertainment companies
telling their investors how much money they are going to make from digital
rights -- and then telling the writers that the future is so uncertain they
can't afford to give any part of digital rights -- and then collecting more
in severance pay as the traditional companies come apart.
We do live in interesting times.
And we all have to learn from them.
In my case, on the TWIT show, I was told I ought to get a
good camera and do a Facebook page, and probably other such pages, and
update them regularly: I'll sell a lot more books that way, I am told. I
suspect it is true. I'm getting the camera (recently sent back some older
ones to JVC; I'll get the latest consumer grade from them, and if all this
works out I suppose I'll invest in something better). Now I need some
help on how to do this. I suspect the
first advice I'll get is "Get a Mac." That's certainly what Leo Laporte
suggests. But I have a bunch of Windows machines, and I probably ought to
start there.
And first I need to get Inferno II out the
door, Inferno I out the door (they will reprint it at the same time as
Inferno II), and then get Mamalukes out the door. And then I can start on
something new. So I need to do the promotion videos in my copious free
time... It should make for some
interesting columns as I try to learn how to make a better living through
digital... ================
And my friend Fred Reed says
Just got back from ten days in Cuba. If the
island is about to revolt when Fidel goes, I'm Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst.
Poor, stable, don't hate Castro, do hate
the country that has blockaded them forever. How odd.
How odd indeed. You mean people don't like it
when you blockade them? I suspect it's true when you drop bombs on them, and
block all their river traffic along the lower Danube, too. How irrational of
them. If Sophia eludes you, try
Catherine the Great. ===========
For the man who has everything:
http://www.hammacher.com/publish/
74670.asp?source=NEW11707&cm_ven=
WC&cm_cat=20071113_New117&cm_pla
=BYR&cm_ite=74670_
Only_Complete_Swiss_Army_Knife
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