Recently in Technology Category

Wouldn't it be nice if you could buy a normal looking car that was completely powered by solar cells covering its surface. If you follow the World Solar Challenge, in which self-sufficient solar cars speed across Australia, then you might think that it won't be long before this technology reaches the mainstream. However, there's still a huge gap between the energy that can be harnessed from the sun and the internal combustion engine.

In the chart, the solar value is for a car covered in 6 square metres of the most advanced solar cells on the planet (almost reaching the efficiency of those on the International Space Station). The Toyota Yaris is the lowest-powered small car that I'd still find fun to race off from traffic lights.

Bear in mind that most of the time these cars don't need full power. So, could I retrofit a Yaris with batteries and solar cells for my daily 15 minute commute?

To make things easy, I'll plug the car into the mains overnight to recharge, but only enough to get to work. I then leave it out in the sun for 8 hours, filling the batteries with 2 * 8 = 16 kWh. To get home with conservative driving techniques I need about 40 kW for 15 minutes, ie. 40 * 0.25 = 10 kWh. Woohoo! I make it home, with power left for the following day. Let's hope that it won't take too many years for the unrealistic assumptions in these calculations to be rectified with technology.

Who would've thought that ownership of billion dollar car companies could be so fluid? I've updated my diagram of which companies own which brands to take into account mergers and sales from the past year. Full details of the changes are in my original entry.

I like the Universal Serial Bus. I remember all too well the round 5-pin AT keyboard connector, the weird bus mouse interface that connected my Microsoft Mouse to an ISA card, the RS-232 serial port for my modem, and the huge parallel port for my printer. Nowdays, these all plug in to identical USB ports. Life should be merry.

However, when USB 2.0 came out, the marketers went crazy. First, the simple technical background. In USB 1.x, devices could run at either Low speed, 1.5 Mbit/s, or Full speed, 12 MBit/s. The big advance of USB 2.0 was to add a new Hi speed(sic) of 480 Mbit/s.

You might think it sensible that USB 2.0 should refer to devices that run at this new super fast speed. Indeed, often the only reference to speed given in product advertising for items such as printers or USB flash drives is "USB 2.0 compatible", or just "USB 2.0". Unfortunately, in a bewilderingly anti-consumer decision, a device of any speed that has been recently certified as USB compliant can be labelled USB 2.0. Indeed, peripheral manufacturers have taken full advantage of this. For example, an old USB 1.1 scanner might now be called USB 2.0, enticing customers to purchase this "faster" version.

Thus, the USB 2.0 label on a peripheral means absolutely nothing. Instead, we have to remember to counterintuitive fact that, in the land of USB, Hi speed is faster that Full speed.

PS. I wrote this entry because I've been looking to purchase a USB flash drive, and the online shops label many of them as USB 2.0, but don't give any indication as to their actual speed. Sometimes even the manufacturers withhold this information from their web sites. When this happens, it's safest to assume the worst.

While a healthy young person may think that medical science is well on the way to understanding and curing most diseases, the truth is that many common conditions have causes that remain a mystery. Oddly, these conditions may also have benefical treatments that operate in unknown ways. This compounding of unknowns may make it difficult to unravel the truth behind the workings of both disease and medicine.

I recall reading an article about a man who specialised in working in the margins of two or more scientific areas. He would become an expert in various areas, and because of his knowledge in multiple disciplines simultaneously he could make connections that specialists in one area could not. Are there medical researchers doing similar work, becoming experts in multiple disconnected fields, spotting links for the first time?

My interest in the subject was piqued by noticing that many of the recent innovative treatments for the inflammatory bowel disease Crohn's, such as those mentioned in the Crohnology blog, are drugs that have previously been used to treat other conditions.

Most straightforwardly, corticosteroids which reduce inflammation throughout the whole body are used to treat many conditions. For example, whereas Crohn's is inflammation of the intestine, asthma is inflammation of the airways. Both may be treated by corticosteroids such as predisone, though in neither case is this ideal because of its general nature.

Methotrexate, a drug that has been used against cancer since the 1950s has more recently been accepted as a valuable treatment for Crohn's, rheumatoid arthritis, and possibly asthma too.

Naltrexone is widely known as a medicine for reducing dependence on alcohol and opioids. Low dose naltrexone is now thought to be useful for treating Crohn's and multiple sclerosis.

As a final example, recent research has indicated that the famous impotence drug Viagra may also help treat Crohn's.

Initially, I'd love to see a medicinal version of the musicplasma / liveplasma site, incorporating diseases and their treatments, in the hope that innovative new connections would become immediately obvious. The data could initially be automatically parsed from the Wikipedia, and manually appended to as the result of research.

As a followup to my previous post about which companies manufactured the different brands of cars I now present a short table of the market capitalisation of some of the major players.

Car manufacturer market capitalisation (US $)

Daimler Chrysler	57B
Ford	16B
General Motors	13B
Honda	52B
Toyota	166B

I used Google stock information to get this information - just type the company symbol, eg. TM for Toyota, GM for General Motors, into Google to get a brief summary of that company's financial data.

There are various ways of comparing companies. Market capitalisation is the cost of buying a company in its entirety, and I chose it for this chart as it's easy to understand and the figures are readily available. The slightly rubbery aspect to it is that it takes into account future expectations for a company.

I've often wondered why bicycles weren't invented earlier.

Chariots have been around since 2000 BC, so the technology to create the bicycle has been in existence for almost 4000 years.

In the late 1700's the Industrial Revolution surely provided enough tools to turn 1764's Spinning Jenny into a cycling Jenny.

Then there was the rapid evolution of the car. All the way back in 1769 a French inventor named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot created a steam-powered car, and in the late 1800's petrol-powered internal combustion engined cars appeared.

The development of the bicycle was much shorter, but much later. The first one that wasn't propelled by running along the ground was a treadle-powered model of 1840. In the 1860's the familiar pedals were added, and by 1900 the essential elements of the modern bike had been born.