OT: How to profit from AGW?

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Dec 2009 10:35:13 -0800 (PST)) it happened Mark wrote in :

George Soros seems to have made billions available for 'alternative energy'. George Soros is known for his 'bubble bursting' tactics. This could mean he will expect those energy sources to gain a lot in value (the companies) then to finally crash (when the hoax becomes clear? Or fusion power is realised? Or Nuclear power is more common?) and then he will go short, to make some extra money. George could be wrong or not live long enough though, the scheme may be different too.

As always politics plays into this.... If the dems lose the next election, and some other oil representative becomes president, things may change again...

Obamama could also press the button now he lost face is Copenhagen... Invest in bomb shelters... Personally I think the $ should go down, you could leverage that, it seems too high now, but I am not betting. My program told me: Get out of there'. Gold?

Then do it somewhere else.

Tell us about the electronics you design.

No sheep, Sherlock. This is sci.electronics.design.

John

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Dec 2009 11:32:30 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

That is short sighted. Of course you can design electronics to profit from climate change. Millions are hanging in front of (first product) TV sets to watch politicians discus the global heat, (second product) listen to radios, (3rd product) read on PC monitors about it, (fourth product)talk about it on cellphones, (fifth product)use airplanes fly overseas to protest for or against, (sixth product) design satellites to measure it, (7th product) design more power efficient wallwarts, (8th product) super energy efficient home control systems, what not. And that is of course only the top of the list. That you only measure temperature under your stairs does not mean others do not do more elaborate measurements, and make money with that. Long time ago i was reading on Ray Andreka's website (he posted to comp.arch.fpga) about his satellite based rain radar, an other way to make money with weather... Over to you:

Kong the King

Not reliably. Almost any electronic design project is a crap shoot, and it's about equally likely, as of now, that the AGW thing may involve serious money, or the whole thing peaked as of yesterday and is fading to make room for the next fad.

I am working with a startup, all wealthy second-career software types, on a change-the-world energy thing. I'm doing their proof-of-principle hardware design for them, for $1, just for the fun of it and to make friends, and to learn some ZigBee stuff. They contracted with a guy who is on his 4th iteration and still can't make it work, and they need(ed) something literally last week.

It's surprising how brilliant software guys can know nothing about hardware, and how otherwise competant EEs are helpless/hapless when dealing with the AC power lines. I wish I could post the amazing stuff that guy designed.

I'm skeptical about AGW, but that doesn't stop me from designing stuff that saves energy.

cellphones,

what not.

do more elaborate measurements,

comp.arch.fpga) about his satellite based rain radar,

Given how much RF is floating around, radar doesn't actually need a transmitter any more.

John

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:08:11 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Well, eh...

Na, it will go on a while, you will see carbon taxes to finance it,

I have looked a

, what worries me about wireless for home automation is that it can be so easily hacked (remember my little program to control the 'Klik Aan en Uit' Dutch appliance control system (430 MHz)

Sounds a bit strange, perpetual machines come to mind...

I was happy when somebody actually asked a sane hardware question late last night in comp.os.linux.development.apps

Exactly. That was the point of my reply. But you can sell it to the AGW types as something that helps them :-) Bit like selling icons to religious people I guess. (Ducking for pies).

I dunno, from space? Perhaps at those very high frequencies, but radar needs a timing, so send - reflect- return, else it is *imaging* and imaging can just use any light (so also EM radiation) that is available. Then you need a stereo setup to measure distance,

You don't make the rules here - friendo.

The discussion about the validity of AGW is

So is posting off-topic whatgarbl in an electronics group.

How about a glitchless DAC?

Amazing. Publish that paper and your Nobel prize is all but assured.

and yet there is a political groundswell

Yes, the supply of such fuels is infinite.

Delta-sigma.

John

automation

night in comp.os.linux.development.apps

timing,

light

If you poke a few antennas up and digitize what they see, it's theoretically possible to form a PPI radar image of the vicinity. Use multiple transmitters at known locations and "just" do the math. The easiest transmitter would be something like an airport search radar. If you live close to one, you could just piggyback on its transmissions.

There was a rumor that China was tracking planes that way, passive radar using AM radio frequencies that defeated Stealth.

John

On a sunny day (Sat, 19 Dec 2009 14:26:08 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in : If you poke a few antennas up and digitize what they see, it's

Yes that works, if both the target and you can see the transmitter, and that transmitter is modulated in some way with enough non-repeating pattern to cover the travel time of the signal. I have read about a system like that long time ago. Old analog TV with sync pulses would be nice...

Right; you'd prefer a signal with a very clean autocorrelation function, so something with pulses is ideal. Loran wouldn't be bad.

John

A digital TV DVB-T COFDM signal would not be too bad either. With 6900 subcarriers each about 1 kHz from each other could also be an interesting source of illumination. At the end of each symbol, there is a guard interval for dealing with reflections. Detecting some new reflections would most likely be due to airplane reflections.

Without very directional antennas, the problem is how to separate multiple simultaneous planes.

Also the reflection from a plane contains up to 1 ppm of doppler shift, thus the UHF signal can be shifted by several hundred Hertz, which is a significant amount compared to the 1 kHz intercarrier spacing. The different doppler may help in separating planes moving in different directions from each other.

When listening to some narrow band fM signal and a plane flies close by, the signal is garbled in the distinct "airplane flutter" way. I guess this is just frequency selective fading. On the broad DVB-T signal, this would be visible as some nulls moving around the channel, killing individual carriers due to direct and reflected signal cancellation. How these multipath nulls are moving in the COFDM spectrum might be usable in following multiple planes.

Of course this speculation needs a lot of calculating power compared to the normal 8192 point FFT used in domestic set top boxes.

AGW or not -- one thing is clear: Usage of fossil fuels will decline because getting at what's left will become more and more expensive. And those that have developed the right technologies to deal with that situation will be at an advantage.

Riding the AGW hype may be a vehicle to get into just that position. Personally I do think that global warming s real and that it is a threat to human civilization. Other's views might be different, but I think that we can all agree on fossil fuels being a limited resource.

robert

Certainly. We'll run out of oil first, although people keep finding more. "Peak oil" had been a couple of years in the future for decades now. We have scads of coal and natural gas, hundreds of years worth.

And

The Chinese have coal, and they intend to use it. I don't think there is any way to stop them. And if we don't want the oil, they do. They

*might* sign things, but they won't permit inspection or enforcement.

John

They've also got a a much tighter food budget than the US, and clear memories of the last serious famine, 1958-61, which killed some 15 million people, according to the official statistics, probably considerably more in reality.

Their ruling class really don't want climate change. The country isn't all that politically stable, and China has a very long tradition of changing administrations after natural disasters.

, they do. They

Probably not. The Chinese do really think that they are a superior race, and they are training a lot of engineers and scientists. The best of them are very good indeed. They don't seem to be making the US mistake of training too many lawyers, or the British one of training too many accountants, but we'll just have to wait and see where they end up screwing up, and how badly. It seems unlikely that large scale businesses in China would waste their time and money trying to persuade the less educated part of the Chinses population that anthropogenic global warming was some kind of myth invented by scientists to keep themselves in work, but every country has it's particular inanities.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Place a bet with bookmakers that AGW will be proven false by say 2050 and bet all your worldly goods on that outcome. You should be able to find an insurer willing to offer at least 20:1 for a fair bet. That is they expect to have the shirt off your back 19 out of 20 times.

I think requiring the "deniers for hire" put their own money where their mouth is would be a very good test of their sincerity. They seem happy enough to gamble with the future of the planet.

Why not buy some low lying beach property in Florida then?

Far better that a denialist is flooded out by rising sea levels than a badly informed but basically innocent member of the public.

Of the electronics there is a clear mass market for smart standby that uses a only a few milliwatts or less when the appliance is "off". The variation at present is quite insane - worst case are fax machines and home computer sound boxes (typically about 20W even when idle). Smart boxes are already in production which truly switch on/off when it sees a learned IR remote code.

Inkjet printable solar cells may not be all that far away from mainstream now if they could solve the light stability problems...

Regards, Martin Brown

On a sunny day (Mon, 21 Dec 2009 14:22:27 +0000) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

As usual you fail to see the difference between AGW and GW. You just attribute any warming to the A.

HAHAHAHA Floppenhagen.

Kong the King

utomation

l

ast night in comp.os.linux.development.apps

eeds a timing,

any light

I used to live in an apartment under the approach path to the San Diego Airport. No cable TV, but the buiding had a rooftup antenna with cables fed to every apartment. Every approaching aircraft caused a different video ghosting and audio distortion, expecially when watching the weaker signals from LA stations.

Since the difference only exists in the ill-informed imaginations of those silly enough to fall for denialist propaganda, this is scarcely surprising.

Copenhagen was over-ambitious, but you shouldn't get your hopes up too far. There was no informed disagreement that we need to do something serious to prevent anthropogenic global warming exceeding 2 degrees Celcius, but loads of disagreement about who is going to carry the what proportion of the can.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

[...]

Even outside the usual gravy train recipients there is no informed disagreement on who gets to profit, big time:

--
Regards, Joerg

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