Algal fuels: is hydrocarbon extraction always necessary?

This is the second posting prompted by something I read today at FuturePundit.

Commenting on news that a new proprietary strain of algae has been bred to increase its uptake of CO₂ (and hence its production of fuel hydrocarbon) in high-light conditions, Randall says that "The rate of growth of algae is just one of several factors that affect biodiesel algae costs. Another big factor is extraction cost. What does it cost to get the oil separated from the rest of the algae mass?"

That might be so for use in the field of transport, which is after all a big consideration, but in the field of power generation I seem to remember power stations being built in the UK that took coal, crushed it (into either small crumbs or a fine powder, I can't remember which) and then burned it. The crushing meant that the coal burned more efficiently: increased oxygen flow meant that more of it burned and that it burned at higher temperatures. Would it be too fanciful to imagine hydrocarbon-rich algae being skimmed from the pools in which they grow, dried into an oily cake and the cake then transported to similar power stations where it could be crushed and burned, without any necessity for extracting the oil from the algal mass?

If that did work then it would be possible to extend the idea to heating factories, offices and even individual homes. After all, it's not so long ago that a man knocked at my parents' front door every week and sold us a few sacks of coal for the fire.

Ocean plastics break down faster than expected

First of a couple of posts stimulated by reading FuturePundit.

One Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University seems to have said, in a presentation to the American Chemical Society: “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

Apologies to Saido-san if he's been misrepresented somewhere along the way, but that's so typical of the mind-set of the present day clod-botherers^TM: damned if you do, and damned if you don't. First the plastic refuse collecting in the ocean is bad because it would never degrade; then it's bad because it does degrade. I seem to remember that once upon a time, oxygen was the nasty new chemical that was destroying 99% of all life in the ocean. Turned out well eventually though, didn't it?

There seems to be a strain in modern-day environmentalism that just wants to bring about a stasis that is the antithesis of the real world (I was going to say "wants to wrap the world in clingfilm", but there's a limit to the amount of irony that I can take).

Today's unfinished business

Not exactly unfinished, since I've already started using it! But I want to record the original url somewhere. I'm talking about Bill Katz' very nice full text indexing for App Engine.

Kaupthing made ISK billions in insider loans, now seeks to gag reporting

This and this and particularly this may go some way to explain why the UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the British assets of the Icelandic banks when they went bust, a move that was widely decried at the time.

Iceland was always a beautiful country with good, hard-working people, but now there's something rotten in the state of Iceland and it's not just a load of old cod. The Icelandic people seem extremely angry with their financial and political elites, and frankly I don't blame them.

Czech Property

www.czechpropertysearch.co.uk.

A nice little site, they sound enthusiastic and they don't look like ripoff merchants. I imagine Czech property prices may have become even more affordable in the past several months.

The Czech Republic looks like a delightful place to visit, perhaps to live. Here's an interesting blog written by a British woman who took the plunge into Czech property. If you go to her profile you'll see links to her other blogs, which are also interesting in this context, and from there there are also links to other Czech property blogs and ones on Cesky Krumlov in particular.

Turkey attacks China 'genocide'

So Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has described the ethnic violence in China's Xinjiang region as "a kind of genocide".

Now at last we know then, what the Turkish authorities consider to be "genocide": it's the death of 47 people and the injury of few hundred others.

Well, not just any old people exactly. Just some people, apparently.

Because the Turkish authorities do not consider the deaths of between one and one-and-a-half million Armenians due to forced marches, ethnic cleansing and good old-fashioned massacres, to have been "a kind of genocide" at all.

What a strange, what an obscene, double standard!

To the BBC's eternal shame, the article linked at the top of this post, reporting Mr Erdogan's words, does not contain any reference to Turkey's Armenian Genocide. Which might have put things into a bit of context.

Chrome OS

I must admit, a new netbook OS from Google, and one that's not based on Android, did rather surprise me. Though there had been mutterings that Android's single-window approach, which just right for phones and (perhaps) internet tablets, was not rich enough for netbooks and (certainly) laptops and desktops, where a multiple simultaneous windows are required.

So the base is Linux, but the windowing system will be new. There might be some overlap with Android at the base, Linux level then. It looks like X gets the thumbs down from yet another vendor as a modern windowing system though.

And on top of their so-far unnamed windowing system, the GUI itself will basically be the browser: Chrome. It's not as far fetched as it sounds. While the idea itself is older, Firefox brought home to me the possibility of writing an application in a browser window. With Firefox, it's not just the inner pane, the one that displays the web page, that's a browser window: the outer pane is a browser window too, and all the menus and toolbars and whatnot that make up the browser itself are built up in the same way as web pages are.

Looking back a few years to Internet Explorers 4 to 6, Microsoft themselves reinvented the desktop as a browser pane with Active Desktop. The desktop could now include HTML fragments that contained anything from a simple specification of the background wallpaper to a desktop widget.

And now Palm's Pré mobile phone shows just how good a GUI you can build using web technologies. WebOS is the Pré's GUI and is written — you guessed it — using this now-standard approach of a browser pane as the basic window type, good for the "desktop" (phonetop?) as well as for application windows.

If Chrome OS can run Flash Player (and therefore also Air) and, dare I say it, Java as well (and there's no reason why it shouldn't, as Chrome-the-browser can certainly do all that) then I'd say it's got most bases covered, even games (to a certain degree).