This blog is entitled "Save the planet movement" because it is - as it says. All the contents of this blogsite is intended to serve the needed knowledge required by anyone concerned in doing his part in saving the planet.
Congressman Paul gives his perspective on the swine flu issue...
WHO IS RON PAUL?... Why does his opinion matters?... See below:
Brief Overview of Congressman Paul's Record
* He has never voted to raise taxes. * He has never voted for an unbalanced budget. * He has never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership. * He has never voted to raise congressional pay. * He has never taken a government-paid junket. * He has never voted to increase the power of the executive branch. * He voted against the Patriot Act. * He voted against regulating the Internet. * He voted against the Iraq war.
* He does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
* He returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
Interviews with Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher, and Candidates@Google.
www.ronpaul2008.com
Congressman Ron Paul is the leading advocate for freedom in our nation’s capital. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dr. Paul tirelessly works for limited constitutional government, low taxes, free markets, and a return to sound monetary policies. He is known among his congressional colleagues and his constituents for his consistent voting record. Dr. Paul never votes for legislation unless the proposed measure is expressly authorized by the Constitution.In the words of former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Dr. Paul is the “one exception to the Gang of 535” on Capitol Hill.
Ron Paul was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Gettysburg College and the Duke University School of Medicine, before proudly serving as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force during the 1960s. He and his wife Carol moved to Texas in 1968, where he began his medical practice in Brazoria County. As a specialist in obstetrics/gynecology, Dr. Paul has delivered more than 4,000 babies. He and Carol, who reside in Lake Jackson, Texas, are the proud parents of five children and have 17 grandchildren.
While serving in Congress during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dr. Paul’s limited-government ideals were not popular in Washington. In 1976, he was one of only four Republican congressmen to endorse Ronald Reagan for president.
During that time, Congressman Paul served on the House Banking committee, where he was a strong advocate for sound monetary policy and an outspoken critic of the Federal Reserve's inflationary measures. He was an unwavering advocate of pro-life and pro-family values. Dr. Paul consistently voted to lower or abolish federal taxes, spending and regulation, and used his House seat to actively promote the return of government to its proper constitutional levels. In 1984, he voluntarily relinquished his House seat and returned to his medical practice.
Dr. Paul returned to Congress in 1997 to represent the 14th congressional district of Texas. He presently serves on the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He continues to advocate a dramatic reduction in the size of the federal government and a return to constitutional principles.
Congressman Paul’s consistent voting record prompted one of his congressional colleagues to say, “Ron Paul personifies the Founding Fathers’ ideal of the citizen-statesman. He makes it clear that his principles will never be compromised, and they never are.” Another colleague observed, “There are few people in public life who, through thick and thin, rain or shine, stick to their principles. Ron Paul is one of those few.”
Every politician should learn from this man... the world would have been a better place.
Fumes from indoor cooking fires kill more than 2 million children a year in the developing world. MIT engineer Amy Smith details an exciting but simple solution: a tool for turning farm waste into clean-burning charcoal.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes -- including speakers such as Jill Bolte Taylor, Sir Ken Robinson, Hans Rosling, Al Gore and Arthur Benjamin. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10 Category: Science & Technology
Here's something I caught from cyberspace... This is a cool way to harness the wind for less input cost! I am really impressed with this concept.
Shawn Frayne disclosing the intricacies behind his ingenious Windbelt! Pooja | Dec 3 2007
Shawn Frayne, 26, is the Windbelt’s inventor that became recipient of the 2007 Breakthrough Award from the publishers of the magazine, Popular Mechanics.
Shawn, a member of a team from MIT and Petite Anse working in the area, recognized that instead of kerosene lamps, white LEDs powered by a very inexpensive wind generator might be able to get better light homes and schools in the area. However, when Shawn tried to design this affordable, turbine-based wind generator, he hit a brick wall: turbine technology is too inefficient at these scales to be a viable option. Nevertheless, these difficult constraints of cost and local manufacture led to a new invention, the world’s first turbine-less wind generator.
Roll down as I take you to the roller coaster ride of Shawn’s exclusive interview, where he himself divulged the intricacies behind his cool invention,
1. First and the most rhetoric question is how and when did you come up with an idea like windbelt Micro-wind? Critics say that windbelt Micro-wind is a parody of Tacoma Narrows Bridge, is it?
Shawn: Well, I first saw the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse video in a middle-school physics class, and thought, “Boy, that’s a lot of energy. Maybe something like that could make electricity!’ However, I made the same mis-step that I think a lot of other sciency-dreamer kids might have made, which is to imagine a field of piezoelectric grass that will wave as the wind blows across it. It’s a nice idea, but it doesn’t make the leap from imagination into a practical system. So, that was a bummer. But that whole experience planted this seed of curiosity in me about different ways of perhaps capturing the wind, so when I visited Haiti for the first time several years ago and started thinking about wind power again, those old ideas started to grow into this new thing, the Windbelt. It’s sort of coincidental I think that the phenomenon underlying the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse that first inspired me ten or twelve years ago was actually so closely related to the aerodynamic effect that the Windbelt actually ended up using.
2. I assume the band (windbelt Micro-wind) is only going to oscillate at a very specific air velocity flowing over/under it and when the air speed is not the right one for vibration to occur it won’t set up mechanical resonance and so the band won’t oscillate and produce energy, what do you have to say in this regard?
Shawn: That’s not actually true. (phew). This is one of the biggest misunderstandings about the Windbelt technology. The smallish prototypes that got some coverage recently will produce increasing levels of electrical power from between 4mph to around 14mph, without any adjustment to the belt tension. Above 14mph, the generators still work, but the power output levels off. In larger versions I’ve been experimenting with, that wind speed range is even greater again, all without any dynamic tensioning systems. The reason people find this so hard to believe is that there is a common thought that the Tacoma Narrows was oscillating because it was resonating with the wind. That’s not really correct. This effect of aeroelastic flutter, which tore apart that bridge and is a dominant effect for the Windbelt generators, is not the same thing as resonance — in other words, it’s not like the opera singer that has to sing a perfect note to shatter the glass. Aeroelastic flutter is much more forgiving when it comes to wind speeds. That said, resonance is indeed involved in the Windbelt systems, but not in the way that I think most folks think it is.
3. Does it require a few seconds of strong wind to get it running, then a constant supply?
Shawn: The current prototypes will start operating in very low speed wind, around 4 or 5 mph. They start operating in under a second. There’s not a lot of mass to move, so stuff gets going pretty quickly.
4. Is there any probability of unifying these wind belts into standard power and phone lines down the line?
Shawn: Maybe. There’s a lot we don’t yet know about this nascent technology. For now, our focus with Humdinger Wind Energy, LLC is on getting a clear understanding of the landscape that can be influenced by the Windbelt approach, across a variety of applications. (Did I do a good job of dodging that question?)
5. Shawn, please make our readers aware of the two technologies, in the fields of “green” packaging and water disinfection, from concepts into developed products in pre-production.
Shawn: The invention in the field of ‘green packaging’ is now owned by a large Fortune 500 company, so I can’t really comment too much on it (but I think your readers will like it when it hits the market) — it has to do with a self-inflating packaging material, that can be reused many times. But anyone interested in the solar water disinfection project can check out this video in which I describe the concept and the product (thanks to Catherine Laine of AIDG.org for the video).
6. What is innovation to you - design, technology or the creative processes itself?
Shawn: I think there’s a difference between invention and innovation. In my book, inventions are the key fundamental advances that lead to new industries. The phonograph was an invention, certainly, the radio, the slinky. Innovations are different, in that they are the many incremental, but hugely important, advances that help to refine an invention so that it can become a marketable product, increasing the efficiency of solar cells, for instance. And I think there are inventions and innovations in both design and technology, and those two fields mush into each other quite a lot.
7. What work are you seeing right now that’s blowing you away?
Shawn: In the leading-edge tech, I see the UV water treatment technologies pioneered by Dr. Ashok Gadgil. The cool stuff that One Laptop Per Child is doing (despite any reservations people might have about their particular objective and approach, their technology is pretty unbelievable).
Amy Smith’s Phase Change Incubator which enables extremely low-cost, no-electricity testing of water quality; Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipTwo; Jaipur Foot’s work on driving down the cost and production time of prosthetics in India (they use some ingenious technologies to create very functional artificial limbs that can be provided free-of-cost, in a day or two to amputees).
In new business models, International Development Enterprises has over the last 26 years forged the idea (against great initial criticism) that profit can fight poverty, and millions of farmers across the world have benefited as a result; and Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group is developing a new model of development in Guatemala that involves incubating local self-sustaining businesses that design, build, install, and maintain wind generators, biodigesters, and micro-hydro power plants around the country. And there’s a lot of other great stuff going on out there that is totally amazing, which is just really unknown on the blogs, but I think that’s changing....
8. Where do you see yourself, after, let’s say, five years from now?
Shawn: Somewhere warm, with a cup of coffee or maybe somewhere cold, with a cup of coffee!
9. Any words of wisdom, you’d like to give to our readers?
Shawn: Cubicles kill creativity. So, if you are reading this from a cubicle, I suggest quitting immediately, inventing a time machine, and going back a few years to tell yourself to quit sooner.
Thank you Shawn for sparing out time in doing an interview with us, it is greatly appreciated.
I’d also like to wish you luck for all your future endeavors :)
The Netherlands is known for many breakthrough ideas... being a land below sea level, the nation is constantly under the threat of natural disasters... this became more of a challenge than a burden for the Netherlander.
With limited land, limited space and limited energies, a typical dutch design shows minimalism in every aspect of the package. By nature, a normal Dutch is a minimalistic person... in dress and in spending, but not in drinking, laughing and demands.
The dutch market is a very demanding market... but this can be explained. Since their nature is asking them to do so.... to get the most from the least.
When it comes to design philosophy, there is nothing fancy or flarish about Dutch design on the outside... They started platform technology and everything is basically centered on the inside.
The Drymer concept basically epitomizes the old Dutch spirit. After all, they are a fitz' loving people. "Fitz" means bicycle, they have annual events for cycling like the 4 days marches... where people walk for 4 straight days in Nijmegen and also bike for 4 days to a total of 100 kilometers; and every stop over is a beer stop-over. I can't imagine getting tired with all the free-alchohol fuel around.
At any rate, This is something each and every country should have... specially in the urban and highly urbanized countries. A sazzy way to save the planet.
An Industrial Design Engineering graduate from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has designed and built a working prototype of a scooter, which can be powered by hydrogen. Crijn Bouman, who graduated for his Master's degree with credits, designed the Fhybrid scooter for the purpose of fighting pollution in inner-cities. Industrial designer Bouman: "the look and feel of the scooter are aimed at selling the clean technology inside".
The scooter has an electric in-wheel motor that derives its power from a (Li-)ion battery. This battery (primarily when the scooter is stationary) is charged by a compact fuel-cell system, which derives its energy from hydrogen (from a tank) and oxygen (from the air). The battery moreover stores up energy when the scooter brakes. Depending on the amount of traffic, this so-called regenerating braking system reduces the hydrogen consumption by 10-20 percent. To use the energy generated during breaking optimally, the scooter is front-wheel driven.
Apart from being environmentally friendly, the Fhybrid performs better than regular petrol powered scooters during test drives. The Fhybrid has a top speed of 65 km/ph, accelerates faster than regular scooters and can travel approximately 200 km on a full tank of hydrogen. An additional feature is the parking assistant. The electric engine can be very precisely controlled when travelling at low speeds, enabling the driver to park backwards or forwards without having to push the entire scooter into place.
The Fhybrid is designed to be hydrogen-powered, but for now the prototype is powered by batteries, with the help of a fuel-cell simulator that was specially designed for this project. "A special course and various permits are required to build a hydrogen-powered engine. It wasn't possible to achieve this during the time period of my graduation project", Crijn Bouman explained. "The faculty is now trying to assemble all the necessary means to fully develop the hydrogen-powered scooter."
The Fhybrid's complete drive system and energy management system were built by Epyon, a TU Delft spin-off company, of which Bouman is one of the founders, and in partnership with the Delft Design Institute.
Posted by Frank at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Everything the Vancouver Gadgeteers have done is mainly focused into saving the planet. From Hydrogen ran scooters, to the 80-cent per day cost to run Electric Pick-up running on revived batteries... to the Tree saving technology they are now pushing.
Solar Road shows are being done regularly to benefit and enlighten kids and communities about off the grid technologies. The kids love it! Because science can also be fun!
For more information, please google search Van Gadgeteers or the Battery Reviver in youtube or any internet search engine.
The Vancouver Gadgeteers is a breath of fresh air for times like these.
I think people should make one in their own community.
Based
on EPA and Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) Values
PANACEA-BOCAF
This idea describes two technologies that can help every person on the planet, save energy, stop pollution and help reduce global warming.
We need your help to help you please vote for this idea.
URGENT MESSAGE #1
I personally do not agree with idolatry or cult personalities - I am merely posting these videos for the worthy educational contents - and I am not endorsing any of the perosnality intending to be idolised or praise or worshipped in these videos. Please stick with the contexts or contents only and discard the unimportant details like superlative titles to individuals.
