Hyrpoxia, Eutrophication, Carbon and Power

So we live in a world with all sorts of problems.  To me these problems are temporary until we can figure out how to solve them (and probably create different problems for ourselves in the process.)

So here is a problem chain:

1. We want cheap, easy, reliable food source.
2. Therefore, we use fertilizers to make food production more efficient.
3. These fertilizers eventually end up in rivers.
4. The fertilizer causes Eutrophication, lots of algae, phytoplankton or cyanobacteria growth which hamper other plant/animal growth
5. The algae, phytoplankton or cyanobacteria die and are then eaten by bacteria which use up all the oxygen.
6. This creates hypoxia, or a dead spot in which most marine life cannot live.

So, here is what I think could be a solution.

• Gather nitrogen rich/algal rich waters and confine them.
• Allow  more algae to grow.
• Harvest the algae
• Bacteria eat the algae, producing natural gas.
• Clean water returns back to the river.

Ideally the elevation head on the water would power most of the plant, and the natural gas production could pay for it.

Captcha's

Who thinks capchas are annoying?

I think instead of these we should employ less annoying means of stopping spam.  Such as pripple could make an account worth an anti spam service that would verify too other sites that you are a human.  The site could collect data such as time of day, platform, browser, ip address, location and a rough picture of your behavior to determine if you are likely to be a spammer.  Only if this data indicates a high risk of spammer would it require a test.  Tests could be fun, such as identifying objects in not copyrighted art and photos or playing a little game or reading handwriting from old documents to digitize census records and so on.

Stitching Pictures

Have you ever taken a picture with another person, or better yet a group of people?  Have you ever been somewhere and noticed that everyone is taking pictures?  Unfortunately even when you take the same portrait with a dozen cameras, all you end up with is a dozen incomplete pictures.  Some were too close, others too far, some too bright others too dark or grainy, some were a little blurry, some were framed too wide, others cut off someones arm, or head, some had one thing in focus, others something else.  Even with a single camera, there are these variations as a handful of pictures are taken.  In one someone was squinting in another someone else sneezed.

What if you could put together all of those pictures?  All of them are out there digitally somewhere.  The first step would be to collect all of the pictures of the same scene in one place.  The next step is obviously the hard part, -stitch them all together to make a 3d or quasi 3d image with higher resolution, better color, better lighting, everyone eyes open.  It's completely possible with today's technology.  ...It's just a matter of time until someone does it.  Sorry it won't be me, I'm busy.

For the Dreamers out there...

I am an avid dreamer.  I'm continually thinking of new ideas for the future.  Here's a great dreaming quote I ran across today.

Those who dream by night ... wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."

--T.E. Lawrence,
British army officer

Thorium: An alternative nuclear energy?

Today I learned about Thorium and its potential as a nuclear fuel source.  Thorium, like Uranium can be used as a nuclear fuel.  The U.S. built a working Thorium reactor in the 1960's but eventually gave up on it because it wasn't useful for producing nuclear weapons.  In today's world, thorium looks like it could be a sustainable energy source for a number of reasons:

• Thorium is very abundant
• Thorium is safer for meltdown risks, and should naturally shutdown during a disruption.
• Thorium may have a lower risk of nuclear proliferation
• Waste will be radioactive for only hundreds of years instead of tens of thousands

So, if it is so great, why we aren't using it?

• Research has been stopped for decades
• Utilities don't have the capital to put into developing complex unproven technologies, especially given the political, economic and technical uncertainties associated with nuclear energy
• Although safer, it is still dangerous and will take considerable effort to figure out how to regulate it
• Actually there is still a nuclear proliferation

In our quest for energy independence it seems like Thorium could be a very good option.  The technology could prove to be an excellent alternative to traditional nuclear and could generate significant cost savings by reducing the meltdown risks and the many costs of mitigating them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v492/n7427/full/492031a.html

Thoughts on Storm Saturn Flooding....

Since my research is about roads flooding, I am of course always interested in the possibility of roads flooding.  Today's threat comes from winter storm Saturn.  Even if it is too cold for there to be very quick runoff (as much of it may in fact be snow), there is a possibility for flooding due to storm surge as the storm hits the high seas and creates gale force winds.  This should happen some time in the early morning hours on Thursday.

A number of sources have mentioned that there may be coastal flooding in the Mid Atlantic, namely the great state of Delaware.  Since, I have a bunch of data about roads flooding in Delaware, I will try to estimate about how many road flooding incidents we will have.

To start out let us compare the four highest tide events at Lewes Delaware in the last 3 years:

Event	Road Flooding reports	Max Tide     (ft above MSL) at Lewes	Precipitation (inches) at Dover
Sandy	63	6.46	3.17
Irene	41	5.74	5.55
10/29/2011	13	5.45	1.54
6/4/2012	0	5.07	0.59
SATURN	???	fcst - abt 5.9	Snow / 4?

So, some of the best comparisons are Sandy and Irene. While these have very similar tides, this storm is very different because it probably won't bring a lot of rain, but instead brings snow.  I haven't gone through the data enough to figure out which roads are flooding based on rainfall, which flood from tide/storm surge and which are driven by the combination of the two.  Anyway, for now I won't make a forecast.  But, I think the data above should give you an idea.  Make your own forecast and put it in the comments if you want!

For more information:
See the tide forecast 
Read the Wunderblog
Read the coastal flooding warning
Try out wundermap (confession, I'm becoming a weather underground fan, despite the whole domestic terrorism thing)
Get the Tide Data
Get Precipitation Data

As things progress, we can see who has the best forecast by watching for flooding alerts in DelDOT's real time alerts and watching the flooding via DelDOT's many webcams (be sure to check the Prime hook road webcams, it is practically guaranteed to flood).

A look back at an old idea

So this is the first big idea that I've been really proud of.  I developed it in 2000 when I was only 13.

My idea was to find a way to take all of the functionality of a full-sized computer and cram it into a handheld device. It would be a fully functional computer with a touch screen and a docking station so that you could also use it like a desktop.

The pictures speak for themselves:

Anticipation

Also check out my anticipation idea for technology.

Basically, in the future our technology will collect and use massive amounts of data about us, so that it can give us the information we need right when we need it and do what we want it to without even asking.

This is already being done a little bit by Google Now.

See my full idea at https://futurecontest.intel.com/idea.php?id=628

Google Earth Tricks for Presentations

Demo

You can use PowerPoint slides, panoramio images, tours, animation, ground overlays based on 2D PDF maps to awesome-ify your presentation in Google Earth!
YouTube video of what you can do
Google Earth KMZ file of Flood Risk presentation
KMZ of Animated Hurricane Irene Image

Put PowerPoint Slides into Google Earth

It isn't that hard to add powerpoint slides to Google Earth.  There are many ways to do this.  To make them easily fill up the whole screen without fighting they should be a screen overlay.  Screen overlays can't be created by hand in Google Earth but you can pretty easily make one by hand by copying the following code:

<ScreenOverlay id="khScreenOverlay756">
 <name>Slide2 - Flooding</name>
 <visibility>0</visibility>
 <Icon>
  <href>C:/YOURPATH/YOURFILE.png</href>
 </Icon>
 <overlayXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <screenXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <rotationXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <size x="0.8" y="0" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
</ScreenOverlay>

Ground Overlays from PDF, JPG Etc...

To do this you must first capture just the image of the map you are looking to add.  You will probably need to crop out the background and stuff so that it doesn't look crappy.  To do this I used... uh, um well, I used powerpoint.  To be honest, I love powerpoint it simple, powerful and easy.  In Powerpoint 2010 you can use Insert and then picture or screenshot to select the map you need.  Once it is in PowerPoint you can use the remove background tool to make sure it only shows the part of the map you want.  Once this is done right click on the image go to save as picture and then save it as a PNG.  In Google Earth go to add image overlay, find your image and then adjust the size/position/rotation so that it matches up with Google Earth.  You can get some very nice results.

Animated Placemarks (points):

Animating a set of points is fairly straight forward.  Google earth makes it possible for each point to have a beginning time and an ending time (see timespan in KML reference).  To make it for Google Earth, first make a spreadsheet with the points names, locations, beginning and end times.  Then you must save it as a CSV.  Then you can use a website (such as earthpoint) to make a Google Earth KML file based on your spreadsheet).  This can lead to some pretty awesome results.

Animated Image Overlay:

Example:  Animated Hurricane Irene Image 

So this one was a little harder.  I wanted to get the video of Hurricane Irene into Google Earth.  I first used a program to take a video of Hurricane Irene and turn it into individual  about 40 TIF images, one for each time period.  After that I used Google Earth to add one of the image overlays and stretch and place it in the right position.  The KML code for the rest of the overlays will be exactly the same as the first, except we need to change the filename pointing to the TIF file and we need to have it be visible during a different timespan.  I wrote a program in python that takes the template KML code and then makes a copy of it for each time period, substituting in the appropriate time span and filename.  Once this was done I put them all in the same folder and put them in Google Earth.

The Greek Yogurt Temperature Apparatus (Remote Temperature Monitor)

So, my wife decided to try more and more ambitious recipes and now she's making Greek yogurt.  The trick with yogurt is that you have to keep it at about 120 F for about 16 hours such that the live bacteria cultures can grow.  This turned out to be a fun little arduino project (although next time I'll try Raspberry Pi).

We kept the yogurt at this temperature at first in a crock pot and then in the oven all night.  The trick for the oven is that if you heat up the oven to 200 F and then put your crockpot pot in it (wrapped in a towel?) and then leave it in their all night with the oven light on, it will remain about the right temperature.  So I decided to make a little system to communicate the oven temperature to us, so we could monitor it all night long from the warmth of our bed.

Basically it consisted of:

• Dallas Temperature Sensor
• Arduino Mega
• My PC
• A mobile device

The temperature sensor sent the temperature to the Arduino Mega (over 1 wire serial).  The Mega would send this serially to the computer.  A python script on my computer read it and updated a webpage with the temperature.  Then we used our Nexus 7 to read the temperature.

Unfortunately I didn't start this project until my wife was already well into making the yogurt.  She was asleep once I finally got everything debugged, so I didn't have the pleasure of impressing her.  But she was surprised in the morning when she got up to check on it, and I shouted the temperature from bed.  I'll be more prepared next time.

Useful Quantitative Models

These are all the tools I've learned in grad school that may be useful to my thesis.  My thesis is on  trying optimize the design and maintenance of individual infrastructure elements (such as road segments or substations) so that they are more resilient to hazards and the like.

Maybe I'll add references later.

•Concept of Resilience

•Decision Tools

–Life Cycle Cost Analysis

–Cost Benefit Analysis

–Multi-criteria analysis

–Decision Tree

•Design Philosophies

–Existing Building Codes/Standards: Design Storm

–Performance Based Design

–Genetic Algorithms

–Threat depended versus threat independent design

–Reliability based design

•Risk Assessment Tools

–Failure Mode Effects Analysis

–Event Tree

–Fault Trees

–Markov Chain

•Operations Research Tools

–Stochastic Programming (LP/NLP)

Simulation (monte carlo, discrete event, queueing, stochastic processes

Rough ideas for my thesis come together on prezi

1 Wire Serial Temperature Sensor (No need to calibrate!)

So this is a great little temperature sensor I got for the Arduino.  No need to calibrate or map or anything, it gives you the temperature straight up via a 1 wire serial interface.

Here is the sensor:
Temperature Sensor: $2.53
The datasheet

I followed instructions here to get it to work with the Arduino Mega:
Keyes modules blog

It works just fine on the Arduino Mega.  I will have to see if I can get to work on my Raspberry Pi!

RTC for Arduino

The real time clock makes it so that the Arduino knows what time it is.  This is useful for timestamps in datalogging.


Component:
http://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10000007/1012004-tiny-i2c-rtc-ds1307-at24c32-real-time-clock-module

Help:
The arduino wire library documentation

Arduino with SD Card

I am not the first or the smartest to record my Arduino projects.  But I'm writing this so that even if it helps none of you, I can save myself four hours next time I decide to get out a certain part.

Components Used:

SD Reader from FastTech: $2.88

Resources:

I downloaded the latest version of SD library from adafruit's github

I followed instructions from adafruit

I had a look at the Arduino SPI reference and looked at the SD card notes

I found Profmason's site useful too.

Once the wiring is right try the cardinfo example from the SD library and it should work!

Problem:  I got all the wiring wrong because I have a mega.  

Solution: follow the wiring in the CardInfo example Source

Problem:  My card didn't work

Solution:  It was an MMC card, it needs to be FAT and SD