Talk Talk Talk

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

TRY HARDER -- People are feeling the stresses of Reaganomics

People are feeling the stresses of the Reaganomics economy. Pay doesn't go up very fast, but rent and other things do. It doesn't seem to touch the rich though. CEO pay is through the roof.

Sometimes you also see the counter-view, that people need to stop complaining and just do more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/ur188i/boomers_in_florida_who_voted_against_rent_control/

Thursday, May 12, 2022

Learning to Speak Blue, and Beyond

I bought a cheap book ($4.00) at a local bookstore. It's about languages and what we learn from learning different languages. One early part of the book talks about the discovery in the 1800s of Homer's writings and the lack of any mention of BLUE. They apparently didn't have blue in the ancient world (circa 1200BC). Another person, Lazarus Geiger, who had studied and learned many languages discovered that this had also occurred in other people and other places around the world. As humans developed/evolved, this characteristic was revealed in writings because nobody mentioned blue or green and the order of their reveal was always the same. This gives rise to many questions and I presume today's scientists have those answers. DNA changed, rather than the sun's light and things like that. But, can you imagine never seeing blue, indigo, or violet? What was it like for humans going back even earlier. Supposedly mankind learned something about color around 23 million years ago. Before that, did we see shapes in shades of gray (black in various brightness levels from none to full white)? This makes me think the French idea of black and white, noir et blanc, as the same thing is probably a concept from ancient times. They do have different brightness levels and that means White is a shade of the black hue.

Being a person who thinks of chronology, though I am quite terrible at it sometimes, I also wondered what we will evolve next. Apparently we have red, green, and blue (remember tv sets were RGB), but there is something (butterflies?) with two more color perceivers and another thing, shrimp(?), with 16 more color perceivers which would give us not just 16 more colors, but all the mixtures of those 16 (as red & yellow give us brown). There are among us some super color vision people who are like this. I saw one short video by a painter who lives in California and she has a fourth color perceiver. She is extremely sensitive to various colors.

Being a person who lets the mind wander, intentionally this time, I began to wonder about our other perception capabilities and which of those might evolve further. Is this just limited to perception of colors? Perhaps our sense of hearing or taste or other things will give us new capabilities. The book says that just in Homer's time they had begun to see green. The colors revealed themselves over time from red, yellow, green, and finally blue (remember the color spectrum acronym ROY G BIV from school?). What do we perhaps perceive in part today which might become much greater in the future. Do we need 16 more color perceivers or would that become a burden? Do we need to hear as well as a hound dog or would that just be a distracting thing?

It may be possible that we only develop capabilities when our experiences demand it and a random few have less or more capabilities. This is true with everything about us. Is a chess player more successful because of greater memory/recall capabilities and is there a point at which that becomes too cumbersome and a problem? Is there a point where intelligence becomes more of a waste of time than of real use to succeed?

Here is a short video on the topic that is easy to follow and quite informative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1-WuBbVe2E

I certainly don't mean to write a book report, but so far I'm fascinated and looking forward to other things I may learn from learning French.

Thursday, April 28, 2022

A Heat Engine -- thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell

This list of Green Energy or Environmentally Friendly stories is only because I think the TPV is a huge revelation and I wanted to post these links quickly. The other stories just continue to show the technological progress being made. Nuclear batteries is not a new idea, but this is the first story I've seen which shows they can and are being made. They aren't for all applications, but there are more and more situations requiring low energy, so they should be very valuable. Technologies to help us clean up waste from the older generation of high-quality lifestyles is just a plus.

The reason the TPV is such a big story is that in the past, even up to today, we have relied on energy from burnable sources (peat, coal, oil, natural gas) and nuclear fuels which all create heat and use that to spin a turbine that generates electricity. We haven't fully utilized the potential of the photoelectric effect to turn sunlight directly into energy. So, having centuries of experience with heat and having some new technologies to collect heat from sunlight, it has always been frustrating to not have a good way to turn heat into electricity. Like light to electricity, it is a major source which does not involve burning carbon-based fuels. NOW, we have a technology, the TPV, which can convert heat to electricity as efficiently as heat from burnt fuels heats gases, expands them, and spins a turbine. That's news!!!

Heat-driven photovoltaic device hits 40 percent efficiency | Ars Technica

This new device gets us closer to a decarbonized grid

Scientists Turn Nuclear Waste Into Diamond Batteries That Could Last For Thousands Of Years

A simple chemical twist turns plastic waste into a carbon-soaking sponge

March 29 marked the first time wind surpassed coal, nuclear power in lower 48

In a First, Wind Generation Tops Coal and Nuclear Power for a Day - Scientific American

--   Mark Hathaway

Monday, March 14, 2022

Oil and Gasoline Prices -- updated

Information from: https://tradingeconomics.com

Oil price for the last 5 years

======================================================

Gasoline Price over the last 5 years:

The price of oil has come down 23 dollars / barrel.

The price of gasoline has come down 36 cents / gallon.

Perhaps much more impressive is that from the depths of the pandemic semi-depression, the prices skyrocketed far beyond recovering their pre-pandemic values -- beginning long before the November 2020 presidential election or the January 2021 swearing-in of the new president, Joe Biden.

3/15/22 Here is the new oil price graph:

It is sharply dropping from $102.12 down to $95.39 in only a few days. That's a $24.61 drop from its peak. Will it drop to other previous levels like $80 of 11/2021 ?