Kyle Brady: A Blog

CNN reported awhile ago that Exxon had a record-breaking quarter ($11.7b), which set the record for the highest amount of profit a single company’s posted per quarter and per year.

Nobody sees anything wrong with this?  Anybody?

In the article, after praising the company for it’s astounding efforts,  they go on to say that Exxon, along with a yet-more-profitable competitor at Chevron, raised the attention of the government and consumer advocates, who are clamoring for an investigation and the removal of the massive tax breaks these companies receive.

They’re just noticing that something’s wrong? Gas prices have been raising absurdly for the past few years, always being blamed on the cost of oil per barrel… but Exxon has been having massive profits for at least a year.  Doesn’t that seem a little like, I don’t know, lying?

Remember how Microsoft got in alot of trouble for being a monopoly, and got that anti-trust suit against them?  Well, there’s another thing in America called “price fixing“, and it’s illegal.  Let’s do some math.

• How many gas stations are in any given area?
  • Alot
• How many of those are owned by the same company?
  • Some, not all
• Who owns these gas stations?
  • Mostly the large oil companies, under different names, with a smattering of independents
• How many of those have the same price, within 2 cents per gallon?
  • Most likely, all of them

See, that was a simple equation.  The result?  Price fixing.

This is not a new problem in America when it comes to gas prices, or energy in general (Ever broken down you gas/electricity bill?  Ever noticed how many taxes, fees, and “government standard rates” there are?).  But it needs to be fixed.  An oil company should not be posting massive profits when some families can barely afford to heat their homes or fill their tanks.  Exxon, and companies like it, are providing a public service, and should do business accordingly.

posted on February 9th, 2008 at 4:22 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Energy, Exxon, Price Gouging, Rant

Recently, I came across a release from Harvard University that’s titled “Engineered weathering process could mitigate global warming”. I was pretty interested, so I read on.

The Basics

I won’t get into all the details, since you can read for yourself, but it’s “simple” to understand, at least in a broad concept (I have no idea how it’s actually done). Long story short, the title is a little misleading, because this is not a way to control weather, but rather to manipulate our environment to slow/reverse global warming. How?

Burn, baby, burn.

It involves a topic that has been discusses many times: the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this case, they claim to be able to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, and permanently transfer it to the ocean (a pool of water in a lab?), by some complicated process. Apparently, this happens naturally, and they are only replicating this process on a faster time-table.

The Benefits

The benefits of such a process, were it to be implemented, should be pretty obvious. A slowdown of global warming (”if it exists!”), or even a reversal, would be highly lauded around the world… especially by greedy corporations, and China, who have a large footprint, yet don’t care to do anything about it unless forced.

Hello, Exxon.

The Negatives

In other research projects / thought-experiments on such processes, there have been a few “problems” with such a process [Note: I won't link to any specific one, but if you Google it, you'll find many valid results]. The biggest one? It should be the most obvious… the effect on oceanic life.

It’s common knowledge that fish take oxygen out of the water to breathe, right? What happens when you add an over-abundance of CO2 to the same water? Many scientists claim you’ll end up hurting, if not killing, many fish and other ocean-based creatures, as well as making shrimp questionable to eat (because of poisoning).

The Answer?

I’m not sure there really is an answer to this, as to whether or not humanity should inflict it’s problems on other life-forms of the same planet, but I do know this: out of global warming “control” / “reversal”, it’s quite possible that we will see complete weather control, ala “Weather” in Frank Herbert’s Dune books.

Not really what I had in mind…

Why? If you can control the amount of CO2 in the air, it then follows that you can directly control the temperature. (If you didn’t follow that: global warming is occurring because we are trapping excess heat within our atmosphere due to gases. If you remove those gases, less heat is trapped.) This, at least to me, would seem to be the first step in weather control.

Now if only we could figure out how to make hurricanes disappear…

posted on November 12th, 2007 at 6:44 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Energy, Environment, Future, Global Warming, Physics

I’m sorry, I was under the impression that programmers had come to a general conclusion in the ’70s that “bad” code was unacceptable, and the sign of either someone of inferior skills, or of low intelligence. Apparently, I was wrong, and “bad” code has now been deemed “bad”…

If you read the article, you’ll find a very thorough discussion of bad code, modern application architecture, and people’s experience levels. Believe it or not, I agree with (and actually liked) the larger part of the work. Here’s a breakdown, from my perspective:

Web 2.0

While “Web 2.0″ is interesting, and useful to a certain extent (and I run a company involved in a “Web 2.0″ project…), the ratio of intelligence and programming skills to lack thereof is astounding. And not in a good way.

Maybe you should hire him, he’s probably awesome.

Personally, I have the programming knowledge and “awareness” of someone many years my senior; however, this is most often not the case. Digg’s faceman, Kevin Rose, is a likable guy (supposedly), and he’s generally given credit for “running” and “creating” Digg. Does no-one else in the world understand that Kevin has little to no programming experience, and he outsources all his ideas? This is a repetition of a theme throughout Silicon Valley.

The flipside of Digg’s situation is when you have a large handful of developers who collectively have the programming IQ of a small child.

“Yeah man, I code!”

Why?

Why am I harping on “Web 2.0″? As was mentioned in the article I linked to, depending on the web application you come across, it can be several layers of abstraction away from actual programming… each of which requires processing power, and by association is slow and waste energy.

Look at another of Rose’s creations, Pownce. Seriously? “Made with Django” screams “we didn’t write most of the code, and instead used a library that sits above another language”. And, if you actually use it, you find that they use AJAX in places that make no sense. For example, if you link to a video or a picture, it embeds it. But only at runtime, and is Javascript based. WHY? I just wrote something about a weekago that is similar, and it was done in PHP… it takes about 98% of the loadtime of using the Javascript version.

And I bet Leah Culver doesn’t even run…

Waste

Ever heard of “Flex“? It’s, in principle, a way for people who are lazy to design fully fledged applications without really designing the whole thing. I don’t know about the rest of the programming community, but this seems to me like using FrontPage to build a website… not only is it stupid but it’s a huge waste of time and ends up with a result that either is supremely terrible or without originality.

Think of the sites you visit. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Gmail, etc… most of the most used and most famous applications / sites are created from scratch, without using any sort of quadruple-bypass layer of abstraction. Google isn’t “Powered by Django” and Yahoo isn’t “Designed in Flex”… and they never will be.

Maybe those people writing “web OSes” should consider this…

If you’re thinking of creating something, stop. Think about it. Do you have the ability? If you do, that’s great. But don’t be a stupid waste of human life and build the web application equivalent of a C#.NET program.

Not only does it waste electricity, slow everything down, and just suck in general… but it makes the rest of us look bad too.

posted on October 16th, 2007 at 12:57 pm by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Code, Energy, Google, Rant, Technology

It popped up awhile ago, but it’s back again: the idea to beam collected solar power to Earth.

There’s only a few, shall we say, minor problems with getting this to work, aside from those mentioned in the article:

• Satellite Position
• Transfer Mechanism
• Ownership
• Defensibility

Satellite Position

Modern times have made the Earth’s rotation as common knowledge, and yet something like this appears. Will the satellite be in a stationary orbit, so as to have contact with the Sun at all times? If so, how do you collect something that is always moving in relation to you? Or will the satellite be orbiting at the same speed as Earth (having a relative velocity of zero)? If so, where is this energy beamed to?

Not too close, eh?

One could imagine that, for practical and efficiency reasons, the satellite would remain in a stationary orbit so it would have contact with the Sun at all times (unless it was far enough away that Earth’s shadow was negligible… but we’ll pretend that’s impossible). How would the energy be collected?

Transfer Mechanism

Since we’re assuming the satellite will remain in a stationary orbit, the transfer mechanism to Earth would be very complicated. The most sensible method (since we can’t yet transfer power via radio waves) is a high intensity beam of energy/light, or a laser. That’s all well and good, but the Earth is rotating below the satellite…

Some solutions:

• a subset of satellites that bounces the laser around the Earth and always targets one specific location
• a network of something akin to a wireframe, on which the collection mechanism can “slide” around the Earth to receive the transfer
• a huge line of receivers that encircles the Earth, always having contact from the satellite’s laser at one point on this line

As you can see, there is no easy answer.

Energy says “Beam me down, Scotty!”

Ownership

Who would own this satellite? The U.S. Government is the one with funding interest at the moment, but what about it’s reality? Do the American energy companies, who already charge exorbitant amounts of money, add this to their energy arsenal? Is it owned by the United Nations, in an effort to be a “global society” and transfer the power around the world? Does it become temporarily “owned” by the country to which it is beaming energy at the moment?

Short of having one of these energy grabbers for each country that wants one (and maybe for each energy company), there will be huge debate, and possible fighting, over an item such as this.

Defensibility

How do you defend a giant satellite that you, as a country or corporation, may come to depend on for energy? Attack rockets and lasers-that-don’t-yet-exist to the satellite, with an auto-targeting computer? What about meteors destroying something that costs so much? What happens when, say, a Chinese satellite is unknowingly armed with missiles comes close… and attacks? Solar flares? The slight “wobble” of Earth? Ground-based attacks? Spaceships? Debris?

Me R SpaseCatz. Me eet SpaseMise!

My Point

My whole point is this: it sounds like a good idea, and is really cool to think about… but there is no way this can be designed and built without spending alot of money, and causing worldwide problems on many levels.

Maybe you should work on global warming first…

posted on October 13th, 2007 at 11:08 am by Kyle - Comments

Tags: Energy, Physics, Space, Technology