Stuart McMillen, an Australian comic artist, recently released a new comic about Buckminster Fuller’s idea that we all have thousands of “energy slaves” working for us in the form of finite fossil fuels. I particularly enjoyed these two slides which…
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Will Martin's site for energy, investing, sustainability, electric cars, and other passions and projects
Category: Interests
The Sustainability Checklist
Moving towards sustainability means moving towards a world that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Unfortunately this is a lot easier said than done and the individual actions…
Do Aerator Shower Heads Use More Energy?
Our house had an old “high flow” shower head. As California is in the midst of an epic drought (despite all the recent rain), I was planning on installing a low flow “aerator” shower head. These shower heads mix in…
Peak Oil + Autonomous Cars = Traffic Nightmare
Autonomous Cars For a number of years now, high-end luxury cars have had autonomous cruise control systems that use lasers or radar to maintain a set distance to the car ahead. Earlier this month Tesla rolled out an autonomous driving mode in its…
Peak Fish and Sustainable Food’s Last Mile Problem
Peak Fish My wife and I are subscribers to a local sustainable “fish share.” It’s like a vegetable CSA except instead of getting locally-grown vegetables we get fish that have been caught off of the San Francisco Bay. The fish are super…
Posted in Energy Posts, Interests, Sustainability Tagged with: EROEI, last mile, local food, Net Energy, peak fish, Peak Oil, sustainability
Buying Starbucks Stock Instead of Starbucks Coffee: A Lesson in Compounding
If instead of purchasing a $4 coffee from Starbucks every trading day (~250 per year) you had purchased $4 worth of starbucks stock each day starting in 1992, how much money would you have today? Steve Calk, a finance lecturer…
The Anonymity-Privacy Matrix
Anonymity and privacy are not finite states. They exist across a spectrum and are mutually exclusive from each other. On the anonymity spectrum, transactions can be completely anonymous (where no transacting party knows the true identity of the other party), pseudo-anonymous (where transacting parties…
Posted in Interests Tagged with: Anonymous Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin, Bitcoins, BitXBay, Darkcoin, DarkMarket, OpenBazaar
Pneumatic Ram Drag Racing Car Accelerator
I’ve often wondered why drag race cars don’t use pneumatic rams to give them a boost of initial acceleration. The system would work on the same principles as an aircraft catapult. You could set up the ram to push against a…
Wine
Wine is a passion of mine. To me wine is an art and a game at the same time. It is a game to find wine you love and enjoy the art that went into making it. At Cornell I…
Posted in Interests
Travel
I love to travel. I think the world would be a better place if everyone traveled more. Mark Twain once wrote “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome,…
