Greg Clydesdale, Alan Hart, Stirling Engine, Solar Thermal

Here under Tinakori hill its hard to get a good drying day.



Thistle Inn July 1951 (Winter , I have just moved to this street, and have undoubtedly just started talking in sentences)

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I heard radio nz Kim Hill yesterday morning (7Jun08) [how fine Kath & Kim, the radio nz women!(Kathryn Ryan)] interviewing Greg Clydesdale, the infamous "underclass" chap (from Ardmore/Massey??) who blames Islanders [Pacific people, Polynesian immigrants, chose your own favourite term] for not getting ahead once they get here.

What an odious creep. I must admit to a bias, he pronounces 'with' as 'wiff' which I believe is a class thing, not a speech impediment. Also he says skill as 'skool'.
So as I criticise his racist view, he might criticise my classist views.
('muddle east' is apparently a place on earth somewhere)

His main contribution to human discourse seems to be the phrase "team fit" which it seems is the excuse given for not hiring Tongans et al. because they dont fit in. So 'creativity' is endangered. 'creativity' here taken to be ideas for novel business productions.

Now use of the term "Team fit" doesn't prove racism, it is, however, just what a racist who is endeavouring to hide, would say. So go figure.

Greg insisted that 'peer review' meant the 2 business chappies who had accepted his paper, and that the various Anthropologists, Sociologists etc who bucketed his work dont count.

Evidently he confounded immigrant and residents, ignored 2006 census, etc, I haven't bothered to read him or his critics, I treat this as a media event.

The odious Greg then blathered on about how 'diversity is overrated for creativity'
and has the audacity to instance the Beatles as some kind of example. There oughta be a law against types like him mentioning John Lennon's name. Greg apparently has produced a 'simplified' (fewer black notes) version of Bach's cantatas, which may well sell well. Is there no end to this fellows vileness?

Radio NZ then carried on with an interview with Alan Hart a geologist based in Nelson. AH does some work for oil companies, and gave one of the best short presentations on Peak Oil I have heard. One of the big constraints is the scarcity of skilled geologists, existing ones are chiefly boomers, it seems, GenY all went into computers, he reckons

How fine it is to have decent radio (Aus also does quite well in Radio)

[Radio NZ is poorly served , ie takes ages to load, but the MP3s are there]
clydesdale
alan_hart

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Efficient Food
I propose humans eat more cold-blooded creatures, because they use food vastly more efficiently than birds and mammals.
Insects and reptiles make better use of feedstocks. (Crickets, Crocodiles?)
They would require warm climates for optimum growth, but thats where the hungry are, and where we're heading.


sciencenews
Insects (the original white meat)

...edible insects can forage on a far wider range of plants than do traditional meat animals.., bugs can tap food sources normally worthless in conventional meat production, such as cacti, bamboo shoots, mesquite and woody scrub brush.

What’s more, insects turn more of what they eat into tissue that can be consumed by others. For crickets fed diets comparable in quality to the feed given to conventional Western livestock,. diet conversion efficiency is about twice as high as for broiler chicks and pigs, four times higher than sheep and nearly six times higher than steers, DeFoliart reports. Insects’ quick reproduction and high fecundity makes them look even more environmentally attractive. For the crickets, DeFoliart has calculated, this translates into “a true food conversion efficiency close to 20 times better than that of beef.”

Ramos-Elorduy, Julieta. 1998. Creepy Crawly Cuisine: The Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects.
Gordon, David George. May 1998. Eat-A-Bug Cookbook. 136 pages

RP:
Several related orthopteran species are eaten. The nymphs are called lukton and the adults balang. Locusts.. In a sample of 300 locusts of the genus Acrydium, the average weight per locust was 1.67 g with the edible portion (body and head) comprising 81%. 59.6% moisture, 24.1% protein 7.9% fat

I havnt seen a lot of insects on sale in RP. In Thailand they are popular. Thailand has commercial farmed insects, so would be the place to visit to see how its done. (feed types, pathogens etc)
Hint: remove the legs from deep fried crickets before chruncing them, the spurs & spines are not that pleasant.

I reckon a small, household scale Cricket production could serve a poor family well.

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Stirling Heat engines rock

the dish-Stirling system works at higher efficiencies than any other current solar technologies, with a net solar-to-electric conversion efficiency reaching 30 percent. Each unit can produce up to 25 kilowatts of daytime Stirling Energy Systems and utility Southern California Edison are building a 500-megawatt solar power plant to open in 2009. The plant will be the first commercial application of the Stirling Solar Dish (a smaller prototype is shown here at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.).

The cost for each prototype unit is about $150,000. Once in production SES estimates that the cost could be reduced to less than $50,000 each, which would make the cost of electricity competitive with conventional fuel technologies.

A solar dish farm covering 11 square miles hypothetically could produce as much electricity per year as Hoover Dam, and a farm 100 miles by 100 miles in the southwestern U.S. could provide as much electricity as is needed to power the entire country.

He notes the dish-Stirling system works at higher efficiencies than any other current solar technologies, with a net solar-to-electric conversion efficiency reaching 30 percent. Each unit can produce up to 25 kilowatts of daytime power.

1M = (1000000 / 25000 ) * 50000 = $2M ($50,000 is the [presumed price after mass production)
$6M - $2M per MWatt (cf Nuclear Power $5B++ for 1.7GWatt??)

bbc
geotimes

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Consersatives worth reading:
alternet
exile
Brecher
takimag
Taki

This might be interesting:
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Patrick J. Buchanan,

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Greg Clydesdale, Alan Hart, Sterling Engine, Solar Thermal



PS
Yesterday 7June 1848 Birthday of Paul Gauguin, Death day of Alan Turing 1954