Interests Archives - Page 5 of 8 - the patient investor

August 4, 2014

Has Battery Technology Just Taken A Huge Leap Forward?

By Climate Progress:

A California firm called Imergy believes it’s hit on a new chemistry that can drastically reduce the costs of certain advanced battery systems.

In this case, it’s what’s called a “flow” battery. Most batteries create an electric current by shuttling ions between two positively and negatively charged solids. Flow batteries use two positively and negatively charged fluids, and create the ion reaction by pumping the fluids across either side of a membrane. This comes with several advantages: they’re long-lasting, they can be built to different scales and uses, and the tanks can be easily swapped to recharge the battery…..The downside of flow batteries is that their liquids currently rely on a solution of a mined material called vanadium — and the purer forms of vanadium that flow batteries require are also used by the steel industry. So the competition and constrained supply make vanadium expensive and hard to come by, which drives up the costs of the batteries. What Imergy did, according to reports by GreenTech Media, was come up with a chemistry that requires less pure forms of vanadium that it can purchase for much lower costs….instead of the 99.5 percent purity or higher most flow batteries need for their vanadium, Imergy can get by with 98.5 percent. That means Imergy doesn’t need to compete in the same markets as the steel industry, and instead can buy vanadium that’s been recycled from mining slag, oil field sludge, and other sources that come with a bit more contaminants.

July 16, 2014

The world’s lightest sports car

The Elemental RP-1 carbon fiber framed British sports car weighs in at only 450 kg, about one-third the weight of a VW Golf compact.

RP-1

World’s first 3D carbon fiber printer

The world’s first 3D carbon fiber printer will also soon reach the market. Nidhi Goyal writes:

Developer Gregory Mark, of MarkForged, unveiled his first working prototype of the world’s first carbon fiber 3D printer at SolidWorks World 2014 in San Diego recently. The printer can print in carbon fiber, fiberglass, nylon and PLA and can generate extremely stable, lightweight objects. Carbon fiber is 20 times stiffer and five times stronger than ABS plastic with a strength that exceeds steel….At $5,000, the Mark One printer is slightly more expensive than a normal 3D printer….

Could be useful if you have a fender-bender.

July 1, 2014

Design of the Year | BBC News

Artist Dame Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku, Azerbaijan, wins the Design Museum Design of the Year Award.

Heydar Aliyev Centre

Heydar Aliyev Centre The Heydar Aliyev Centre is a thriving conference venue, museum and gallery. The waves resemble dunes in a desert. Their biggest problem might be preventing skateboarders 🙂

June 25, 2014

Observers of World Cup Soccer are often puzzled by the referee disallowing a seemingly legitimate goal or halting the flow of play and awarding a free kick to the opposing side. I understand how the offside rule works, but often wondered why it had to be so disruptive. Its only evident purpose is to protect the goalkeeper from interference. With the World Cup currently occupying everyone’s thoughts, I decided to do some research — i.e. I googled Wikipedia.

offside

The offside rule dates back to when football developed at English public schools in the early nineteenth century. The sport was fragmented and two opposing codes developed: Sheffield rules, with no offside rule and players entitled to lurk in front of the opposing goal; and Cambridge rules, with a similar offside rule to rugby union — where any player in front of the ball was considered offside. As the game developed and the codes amalgamated, the offside rule proved a major point of contention. Sheffield eventually conceded and by 1863, when the Football Association was formed, the offside rule required “at least three” opponents between an attacking player and the goal.

In 1925 the requirement was reduced to the current “two players” leading to a sharp increase in the number of goals scored.

….4,700 goals were scored in 1,848 Football League games in 1924–25. This number rose to 6,373 goals (from the same number of games) in 1925–26.

Further attempts have been made over the years to reduce the impact of the offside rule on the game, especially as defenses nowadays deliberately attempt to trap an opponent offside (the “offside trap”). Changes attempted have so far proved unsuccessful. Most promising was the Scottish Leagues attempt, in 1973-1975, to only apply the offside rule in the last 18 yards of play (i.e. in line with the penalty area). The move fizzled out — probably because it originated North of the border — but I think they had the right idea. After all we watch soccer to see goals; not the referee blowing his whistle.

The Offside Rule

Law 11 in association football states that if a player is in an offside position (as defined below) when the ball is touched or played by a team-mate, the player may not become actively involved in the play. A player is in an offside position when:

He/she is in the opposing team’s half of the field;

Is in front of the ball; and

Fewer than two opposing players (the goalkeeper counts as an opposing player) are between him/her and the opposing goal line.

Any attacker that is level with or behind the ball is not in an offside position.

May 25, 2014

Unhealthy diets greater threat to health than tobacco, says UN expert | Fox News

United Nations investigator said on Monday.

In a statement issued on the opening of the annual summit of the World Health Organisation (WHO), United Nations investigator, Belgian professor Olivier de Schutter calls for a global effort to tackle obesity:

“Unhealthy diets are now a greater threat to global health than tobacco. Just as the world came together to regulate the risks of tobacco, a bold framework convention on adequate diets must now be agreed,” he said.

…..In 2005, a U.N. convention on tobacco control aimed at reducing deaths and health problems caused by the product went into force after long negotiations under the umbrella of the WHO.

In a report to the rights council in 2012, de Schutter said a similar accord on food should include taxing unhealthy products, regulating food high in saturated fats, salt and sugar, and “cracking down on junk food advertising.”

May 22, 2014

Does evil exist and, if so, are some people just plain evil?

Interesting discussion by Prof Luke Russell (University of Sydney) on the nature of evil:

If someone is an honest person, honesty is part of his or her character. He or she can be relied upon to be honest when it counts. Someone who tells the truth on some occasions might nonetheless be a characteristically dishonest person.

Similarly, not everyone who performs an evil action counts as an evil person. In judging that Hitler was not only an evildoer but an evil person, we assume that evil was part of his character. That’s is not to say we assume he was innately evil, nor that he had no choice but to do evil. Rather, it is to say he came to be strongly disposed to choose to perform evil actions.

Were Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot innately evil or did they merely commit evil acts? And how do we define an evil act, when violence is an integral part of human/animal nature? What forms of violence are acceptable or unacceptable? Is violence only acceptable in self-defense, in defense of others, or to negate a perceived future threat? Careful study of the factors that motivated Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot will help us to better understand and protect against future despots. Demonizing despots prevents us from understanding them, leaving us prone to repeat the mistakes of the past.

April 26, 2014

Mindset of WWII German Soldiers | Sonke Neitzel

Vivid, sometimes chilling descriptions of the life of German soldiers during World War II brought to life in secretly recorded transcripts of German POWs. Historian Sonke Neitzel, co-author of “Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying – The Secret WWII transcripts of German POWs.”

April 24, 2014

How Big Pharma Holds Back in the War on Cancer – The Daily Beast

From Jake Bernstein at ProPublica:

Take Michelle Holmes, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She’s been trying for years to raise money for trials on the effects of aspirin on breast cancer. Animal studies, in vitro experiments and analysis of patient outcomes suggest that aspirin might help inhibit breast cancer from spreading. Yet even her peers on scientific advisory boards appear uninterested, she says.

“For some reason a drug that could be patented would get a randomized trial, but aspirin, which has amazing properties, goes unexplored because it’s 99 cents at CVS,” says Holmes.

Increasingly, Big Pharma is betting on new blockbuster cancer drugs that cost billions to develop and can be sold for thousands of dollars a dose. In 2010, each of the top 10 cancer drugs topped more than $1 billion in sales, according to Campbell Alliance, a health-care consulting firm. A decade earlier, only two of them did. Left behind are low-cost alternatives—therapies like Retsky’s or medications not created to treat cancer, including generics—that have shown some merit but don’t have enough profit potential for drug companies to invest in researching them.

March 16, 2014

Silence of the Left | John Goodman

John Goodman points out that while the left are extremely vocal on the issue of income inequality, they are largely silent on the issue of reforming the public education system to create equal opportunity for all students.

Here is the uncomfortable reality:

1.Our system of public education is one of the most regressive features of American society.

2.There is almost nothing we could do that would be more impactful in reducing inequality of educational opportunity and inequality overall than to do what Sweden has done: give every child a voucher and let them select a school of choice.

3.Yet on the left there is almost uniform resistance to this idea or any other idea that challenges the power of the teachers unions.

He tells how newly-elected New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio is opposing expansion of some of the city’s best charter schools:

Among the 870 Success Academy seats blocked was a modest 194-student expansion for Success Academy students in Harlem to move into a new middle school. That triggered days of searing press coverage pointing out that those 194 students, all low-income minorities, were coming from a school, Success Academy 4, that killed it on the new state test scores, with 80 percent of the students passing the math test, and 59 percent the English test. The co-located middle school (P.S. 149) the mayor is protecting ….. 5 percent of students passed the math test, and 11 percent the English test.

Hat tip to John Mauldin.

March 8, 2014

Environmental quality is improving, not declining | Library of Economics and Liberty

Terry L. Anderson writes

….Thanks largely to the pioneering work of the late economist Julian Simon and, more recently, to the work of statistician Bjørn Lomborg, abundant data show that we are not running out of resources, that we are not destroying our environment, and that the plight of human beings is improving rather than diminishing. Simon’s confidence in challenging Ehrlich’s pessimistic thinking came from his belief that people respond to scarcity by conserving on scarcer resources and by reducing waste and hence pollution.

Doubting Simon’s logic and data, Bjørn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist, set out to prove him wrong by examining reams of data on various environmental claims…..

Category: Interests