Foolishly, I actually went and looked up some facts before I wrote up the post. I’ll not be making that mistake again! Holy crap facts are the last thing I needed, and not really in keeping with the get-poor-quick ethos.

I did learn that the surface of your teeth is host to an amazingly complex and adaptable ecosystem with 1000 different kinds of bacteria, forming a complex structure that changes as time passes. My little genetically modified tooth scrubbers wouldn’t stand a chance; there’s nothing I could invent that’s not already in there and part of the system.

Unless…

Hang on, I’ll get back to you on this after I don’t check some more facts.

*Sigh* Back to flossing.

Add background noise and that changes in a hurry. My ability to filter noise from signal was never that good, I think (recalling people having conversations with bursts of static on their CB radios), but thirty-five years of rock and roll and twenty-five years of highway driving with the top down have taken their toll. Now when my sweetie is by the sink with the tap running I’m lucky if I can tell she’s speaking at all. Forget about understanding her words.

Recently I was on an airplane and every time I tried to speak with the attendant I had to repeat myself. I could understand her, but she couldn’t understand me. The difference? I was wearing noise-canceling headphones. Even with the big cans over my ears I could hear her much more easily, and so naturally I responded in a lower voice than necessary. A nice reversal of the person-with-headpohones-on-talking-loudly joke.

If I wore those big-ass headphones around the house, I’d probably miss fewer things that my sweetie said. I’d hear more while driving as well, though wearing those things would undoubtedly get me pulled over.

What I need, then, are nice little inserts like a hearing aid, but while hearing aids amplify the signal, these would simply reduce the noise. My hearing without noise is plenty good enough, thank you.

I mentioned in an episode a while back that if I ran an airline, I’d have all my on-aircraft personnel fitted for items like this, both for their health and for more efficient service on-plane. So this isn’t a brand-spanking-new idea. I just can’t find a product that actually does this. I don’t even think this is a get-poor-quick scheme. I suspect the pattern of my hearing degradation is pretty dang typical, and all the technology already exists to make these things. The market could potentially be huge.

So, someone make me my earplugs already!

It’s time to do something about it.

Back in the prairie days, before the plow reached the plains, there was grass to hold down the soil. Then came farmers and soon after came the dust bowl. When there wasn’t enough rain, crops withered and the desiccated soil was exposed to the wind. These days, the main reason we don’t have more dust bowls is irrigation. Mighty pumps draw water from below the surface and spray it on the crops. This is still not as effective at erosion control as the prairie grasses were, and the activities of farming just plain raise a lot of dust. Not much one can do about it.

Or is there? What if we could do something about the other element in a dust storm — the wind? Slow the wind down and the air won’t be able to carry as much particulate matter. If we can slow down the wind enough, we might even begin to accumulate soil from less-enlightened neighbors.

Oh, I hear you now: “Hold the phone, there, Sunshine! Slow down the wind?” Yeah, it sounds crazy, I know, but in fact we already have machines that slow down the wind, and as a special bonus they give us electricity. Yep, windmills are machines that take energy out of the air and turn it into juicy, useful, power. There are already wind farms popping up in Kansas, giant pylons standing in neat rows across the very fields that are losing topsoil to the wind.

The difficulty with the current setup is that the windmills are put way up in the air, where there is less interaction with ground winds. This is done on purpose, as the giant rotors’ primary purpose is electricity, not erosion control, and the wind is steadier up there. (Also, it makes sense to get those giant rotors up where they won’t be whacking into things.) For this job we’re going to need windmills closer to the ground, which probably means many smaller windmills. Since efficiency at generating electricity is no longer the top priority, we can put them closer together. Each will generate less electricity, but the rows of them will make a more effective windblock.

How much do windmills slow down the air? I’m not really sure, but I’ve heard about habitats being affected downwind from them. It’s all a matter of taking enough energy out of the system.

That might be enough to make a difference, but we can add a low-tech modification to our fields to deflect the wind up off the ground and into the whirling blades. Simple scoop-shaped fences, perhaps configured in V shapes, can funnel the air whooshing along the ground up and into the windmills. More electricity, even less soil erosion. I’m not sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the water needed for the crops was reduced as well. Less water per acre means more land can be irrigated, which means more food.

The fence system assumes that wind usually comes from the same general direction; I imagine that when the wind is blowing parallel to the fences they might do more harm than good. Judging by the way the wind farms are set up, I think the direction is pretty steady, however. The V-shaped fences may prove to be a hassle for the farmer; modern machinery likes straight lines and big circles. Perhaps the fences could be replaced by long rows of grape vines. They would be less efficient at deflecting the wind but they would provide a significant additional crop. Another type of food makes the farmer less vulnerable to crop-specific pests and to random market swings.

I picture the ideal field as having some of the giant turbines to slow down the air up above, with rows of closely-spaced windmills below to slow the surface wind. Air moving over the field would be slowed enough that it’s carrying capacity was reduced, and rather than picking up sediment would deposit some of what it was already carrying instead. Free dirt!

The cool thing about this get-poor-quick scheme is that while it may not have the same immediate return on investment of a traditional wind farm, the watts per acre will be pretty high. Assuming energy prices keep climbing, it could even pay for itself. Then, when the aquifer runs out and the dust bowl returns, maybe America will still be able to feed itself.

Granted there are many plants that are much better candidates for creating biofuel than corn, the main crop used now, and even corn production could be made more efficient and less destructive to the soil. Still, perhaps it’s time to step back and look at the actual problem we are trying to solve. A better solution just might present itself.

What we are trying to do is make solar energy portable. Plants do that using photosynthesis — they put some carbon dioxide and some water next to each other and wait for a photon to whack the system just right, and out comes an energetic molecule, and some nice free oxygen to boot. It’s a pretty slick system. What we are doing now is using plants as solar collectors. We set them out in the sun, give them access to (lots of) water and carbon dioxide, and later we chop them down and collect the energy. Of course, the form of the energy isn’t quite right (sugars aren’t good fuel), so we have to process the result, using up some of the energy we collected.

The goal, then, is to turn sunshine into gasoline, alcohol, or some other handy hydrocarbon.

Flash back to when you were in grade school science class, watching a movie about how plants work. We zoom down into the animated land beneath the surface of the leaf where the magic is happening. A little wizard is hard at work, gathering the ingredients, then… at the critical moment he gawps at the camera, eyes round, and pulls a screen in front of his workbench. “We don’t know what happens back there,” the narrator says in his happy-narrator voice, “but what comes out is…” (I don’t remember exactly what comes out. ATP? You can look it up.)

Bumblebees. Photosynthesis. Great mysteries when we were kids, but not anymore. (Did no one mention to you that bumblebees can fly now? They have tiny horizontal tornadoes raging just above their wings. Sometimes the explanation is even cooler than the mystery.) Anyway, photosynthesis. Somehow, films made before DNA had been discovered still have us convinced that some things are unknown. I’m no photosyntholigist, but I only have to glance at wikipedia to know that the process is pretty well-understood today.

So I ask you: Do we really need the plant? We know how that stuff works, and we can reproduce it. Can we not create a solid-state device that captures solar energy and puts out an energetic molecule – the exact molecule we want as an end product? We could use such a device to create fuels with absolutely no impurities (no sulfur, for instance), and no net carbon footprint. The system does not have to be very efficient to easily outdistance existing plant-based methods, and it would use land that has much less value in terms of ongoing human prosperity. Farms could go back to growing food.

Picture a gas station on the highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Behind it there is an array of dark panes stretched over the desert floor. From the array a pipe leads to a holding tank which holds the highest-quality gasoline money can buy. And the cost to the dealer is fixed – he just has to pay to maintain the system.

There would be environmental impact, of course. Vast tracts of desert would be shaded, and somewhat cooler as a result of energy being removed from the system. Although our machine would use a lot less water than a living plant, (or perhaps another source of hydrogen?), there would still be some demand. Overall, though, I think environmentalists would see it as a lesser evil.

I’ve been kicking this idea around for years, now, but apparently I haven’t ever written about it here. The plan is filed under get-poor-quick, but man, if anybody got something like this working, they could become some kind of ridiculously wealthy. As well they should.

Second, running multiple products from Adobe, along with their infamous memory leaks, means that my little Mac Mini is severely challenged. Adobe makes big products, and seems much more worried about features than performance. I have an income (made in part from using Adobe products), and can justify upgrading hardware at some point, but then what happens to the old machine? There’s still plenty of computing left in the little guy. It’s actually pretty fast.

Then it occurred to me that the perfect answer would be a second mini just like the first, that I could connect in such a way that they could share the workload. Suddenly my upgrade gets a lot cheaper and I’m not getting rid of a perfectly good computer.

I know that there is a supercomputer built from a bazillion macs all hooked together and sharing the load, so why can’t I get some of that action? What would it take to get two macs hooked together to become a single computer? It seems just too damn obviously a good thing to not exist.

I’m filing this under Get-Poor-Quick Schemes, since it’s probably one of those ideas that looks good on paper but is in fact a major PITA. Still, what a great OS feature that would be.

Enter cigarettes with extra printing on them, negative things that you conquer by burning them. You can buy the regular pack with random messages or you can custom-order with your own personal nemeses. Sure the custom ones would cost a lot more, but that alone might provide incentive to cut back, while making the occasional smoke a poetic act. There must be a brand of cigarette that markets to the black-beret crowd that would make a killing off this.

Plus, it would be a kick to write the ill-fortunes.

fuego thought about that for a bit and came up with “rent-a-drunk”. Need a little push to get you closer to that pretty girl? Call rent-a-drunk! It’s a special sort of wing-man who is never connected with you. I took the idea further; there are definite chivalry points to be scored. Want to meet that lovely woman? Rent-a-Drunk will send an asshole her way, and you can stand him down, perhaps at apparent personal risk. Can you say knight in shinig armor?

So now you have a chance to charm the woman of your desires. The thing is, if you use a plan like this, you’re probably a jerk, and if she finds that out you’re sunk. No problem. Any time the conversation gets uncomfortable, with a hand signal the drunk is back, and you can dominate him again.

If everything else fails, at least he can drive you home.

It occurs to me as I sit here that there is one side of me That Girl has not really met. That particular me is the one who likes to watch sports on TV. There are times it’s nice to sit and watch a game. This afternoon was one such time.

I don’t get much on my little TV at home, and although there were a couple of sports options, it was all motorsport. There are some activities that are by far more fun to do than watch, and driving is one of them. Oddly, golf is in that category as well. Happliy, the Budvar Bar Near Home has: 1) cheap beer, and 2) sports on TV.

The Budvar Bar Near Home had one major strike against it: It was closed. Hmm… As I mentioned my my previous episode, it is Sunday, and this is Strasnice.

I am now at U Slamu, until recently the home of breaded and fried pork stuffed with bacon and cheese. (That lament can wait for another day.) They still have beer, however, and they have sports on TV.

When one gets one’s tv sports fix this way, one can’t be too picky about what one gets. When I came in it was English Premier League Football. (Don’t be fooled by the name: it’s soccer.) When I first arrived there was some controversy going on, and then they showed a replay, and a new drinking game came to me.

Depending on the match, there are five to twenty cases of someone falling down at the slightest contact (or no contact at all) and feigning terrible injury. It is, I’m told, part of the game. That may be true, but it’s a part of the game that sucks. For a well-covered match, the “contact” is shown many times from many angles, and the game I propose is this: create a dvd of these terrible, life-threatening injuries, and freeze them at the moment the player is just starting to throw himself to the turf, his eyes bugging out and his mouth wide open. Stop the action right there and have everyone guess: What body part is he going to hold as he rolls on the ground in agony? One point for a correctly predicted ankle, maybe two for a thigh, but the gambling types might want to try to score the big money with a shoulder.

For the sake of propriety, no players would be shown who actually left the game. But there would be slow-motion appreciation of the acting skills of the rest.

What’s great about this game is that it can be a subscription service. People will want to download the latest week’s floppers and crybabies to play the game over and over. Certain players would, no doubt, earn a cult following among players. “All right! It’s Jones again! He’s down! Oh, the agony! This time it must be serious. Just look at his face!” As a special bonus, maybe some of the players who showed up regularly would discover a little pride and play the game on their feet rather than on their backs.

A chance to make some money and shame some of the world’s best-paid babies at the same time? Sign me up!

The only catch is that the radiator is really important. Owners of old air-cooled Volkswagens can testify to that; those engines had no radiators and were not terribly reliable — plus, they paid the same aerodynamic price to have the air pass through the engine compartment.

Internal combustion engines produce a lot of heat; in fact, thermodynamics says that the hotter they burn, the more efficient they are. My clever nephew Gerald, when presented with the Radiator Conundrum, realized immediately that one solution is simply to embrace the heat rather than get rid of it. If one builds the engine out of materials that can withstand much higher heat than modern engines, then you can let that sucker get really, really hot and actually burn more efficiently at the same time. It’s win-win! I know that there are experimental ceramic engines built around this principle, and it’s about time to get them into production vehicles.

Superhot engines may be good, but superhot engine compartments are not. There’s still going to be some waste heat to manage, if only for safety. My thoughts turned to ways to take at least some of the waste heat and make use of it. By converting the heat energy into some other form of energy, say, electricity, we can simultaneously cool the engine and reclaim some of the waste. Perhaps we could even do away with the alternator, which costs a typical car a couple of horsepower. By reducing the load on the engine once again we can increase efficiency.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done (or it would be done already). However, with a really hot ceramic engine, I think it would be possible to use the thermoelectric effect. All you need to do is embed series of different metals along the heat gradient within the engine to create thermopiles. (More modern thermopiles are used to power deep-space probes.) Thermopiles can supply large amounts of current, but only at low voltages. With enough of them, however, you would have a cooling system that simultaneously recharged the car’s battery. If the system worked really well, you could even use surplus current to power a small electric helper motor.

So, anyone up for investing in Jer’s Radiatorless Engine? If it works, we’d make a fortune!

One bit of modern gee-whizzery of which I am fond are noise-canceling headphones. These babies actually pick up the ambient noise around you and generate their own sound waves that cancel the noise out in the location of your ear canal. Pretty dang slick. The most popular place for the technology is on airplanes; it’s amazing how much of the engine drone is cut out by a good pair of noise cancelers. With the background reduced, it’s also easier to hear the people around you.

Pilots use noise cancellers all the time these days, but if I owned an airline I’d outfit all the flight personnel with inside-the-ear noise cancellers. Not only would they be able to hear what is being said to them better, but their ears wold be protected. That constant assault on their ears can’t be good for them in the long term.

So, the technology is without a doubt useful. Yesterday it occurred to me that if you wired up the headphones with a specific signal to cancel, that you could have headphones that virtually eliminated a very specific sound while allowing others to pass. There is one industry in particular that would benefit from such a boon, a group of men and women subjected to the same sound over and over, day in and day out, until it must haunt their dreams. I expect insanity is common among these people.

You know who I’m talking about already, don’t you? That right, ice cream truck drivers. I bet they’d pay a bundle to MAKE THAT SONG STOP! As a bonus, they’d be able to hear traffic and the calls of little children more clearly.