Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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SmartPlanet: Liquid Air (Chilled and Released) as Energy

05 Energy, SmartPlanet

The latest renewable energy: Liquid air

By Mark Halper | October 2, 2012, 3:52 AM PDT

EXTRACTS:

Air, that invisible ampleness all around us, could hold on to energy from wind turbines that spin at night when we don’t need the electricity, and then release it later, the BBC reports.

All you have to do is first turn the air into a liquid state, using technology adapted by a British company called Highview Power Storage.

. . . . . . . . .

Highview uses night time electricity generated by wind turbines to chill air down to -190 degrees C (-310 degrees F), at which point it becomes liquid nitrogen. (I assume the process could also store excess daytime solar energy, although the BBC article only discusses wind).

Store that liquid in a giant vacuum, heat it back into a gas some other time, and the rush of air will drive a turbine. Feel good that renewable energy, not dirty old coal, will power your coffee maker in the morning. Except possibly for one thing – some external energy source has to help warm things up, and that source might not be renewable.

Read full article see video of car running on air.

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Richard Stallman: Free Software Issue 54 September 2012

Software
Richard Stallman

Free Software Supporter

Issue 54, September 2012

Welcome to the Free Software Supporter, the Free Software Foundation's monthly news digest and action update — being read by you and 61,769 other activists. That's 1,189 more than last month!

Encourage your friends to subscribe and help us build an audience by adding our subscriber widget to your web site.

Miss an issue? You can catch up on back issues at http://www.fsf.org/free-software-supporter.

Multilingual? Send translations of the Supporter to campaigns@fsf.org.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Stop software patents from muscling in on Europe
  • Save the Web from software patents
  • Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory
  • Hi, I'm Zak (one of the new campaigns managers)
  • Web host Dreamhost pledges to quadruple donations to the FSF
  • Apple v. Samsung: a patent battle with freedom as the collateral damage
  • GPL violations are still pretty common, you know?
  • Hampshire College distributes free software bundle to all incoming students
  • Trademarks and free software
  • LibrePlanet featured resource: Free Software Courses
  • GNU Spotlight with Karl Berry: 12 new GNU releases!
  • Richard Stallman's speaking schedule
  • Other FSF and free software events
  • Thank GNUs!
  • Take action with the FSF

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Gordon Cook: Highly Recommended Video “Modern Money and Public Purpose – The Historical Evolution of Money and Debt” – Partial Transcription

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Ethics, Government
Gordon Cook

An hour and three quarters, hugely relevant to our problems today, strongly recommended.

Modern Money and Public Purpose: The Historical Evolution of Money and Debt

L. Randall Wray and Michael Hudson present at the Modern Money and Public Purpose seminars. L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Michael Hudson Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri (Kansas City), and President of the Institute for the Study of Long-term Economic Trends (ISLET).

This video is an hour and three-quarters long — Wray begins, then Hudson takes over at 43:00 — so I suggest you listen to it over your Sunday morning coffee instead of NPR. (And if you’ve been taking note of all the “tally stick” jokes in the threads lately, I’m guessing this video is where that comes from…)

Click for Source Page, Video Embedded There

Transcribed portion below the line.

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Michel Bauwens: When Growth Outpaces Happiness (Corrupt Mis-Appropriation of the Benefits of Growth)

03 Economy, 11 Society, Culture, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Michel Bauwens

When Growth Outpaces Happiness

CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.

As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.

Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.

Read full article.

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