New toys...

We all like new toys - and telling the world we have them.

And I've got a new toy!

I'm fairly sure I've ranted about my netbook on here once or twice - I love the thing to bits, after all. But, well, it's not perfect.

And the one thing that bugs me is battery life. I can use it for between 1-2 hours. An hour playing warcraft or two hours with notepad, tea and some serious thinking.

(I know,doesn't happen often lately)

But if you use it for half an hour, while eating lunch at work...maybe use it later in the kitchen, listening to the radio while you cook. That leaves you at 50% or less.

Then you've got to start making choices - because deep discharging (aka, running till flat) is very bad for lithium rechargeable batteries.

So do you use it for another half an hour, push it to 25%? But what if you need it in a hurry for something else afterwards... shouldn't you be recharging it?

However, this problem is now solved.

For I've gone and spent money (painful though it was) for a new battery. It's not the same size, nor twice or thrice as big. It's 3.4 times as big. So a naive assessment says it should last 3.4 hours to 6.8. This sounds like an improvement!

But no, better yet - because it's new and not started to degrade it hasn't suffered the fate of the old one yet. The old one could store only 80% of a full charge due to age.

So that's really 4.25-8.5 hours. Getting better...

And still further - because it has more cells (9 vs 3) the drain on each cell is reduced by a third. So there is less energy lost at that stage as well. I can't quantify this (to do so would require a really sensitive thermometer and a sealed, controlled environment) - but it's one more reason the new battery is just...

...well...


...shiny....

Oh dear...

Morning all.

I was going to rip apart an article on pornography today. Mostly because I was reading the website and thought I'd fallen into the twilight zone.

However, I'm not.

Because I never want to talk about something on here that I wouldn't explain to a child.

So if you want a look, go here - but be warned, the author may not have a good relationship with reality. I certainly couldn't relate to any part...

Radiation!

Grrrr.

I often find myself telling the radio that it's wrong. And today was a case in point.

There was a "not-in-my-back-yard" environmentalist complaining about plans to store nuclear waste. You see, he's wrong. badly wrong. We shouldn't be trying to get rid of it. We should be getting more.

There are two ways to deal with very highly radioactive waste - we're talking fuel rods and the like. The easy one is store it. You find somewhere quiet and isolated (say, Scotland? In a Welsh mountain?) and store it for the next age or two. This does work, yes. You build a big enough facility and tell countries who want to get rid of the stuff "Pay us xxx, deliver it safely to [point] and we'll take it off your hands".

Charge enough and you cover costs - so a good approach to start with. It's stored in a high tech country away from nasty terrorists and freedom fighters and the like. (And no, I don't count the Scottish as freedom fighters. Other words spring to mind.)

But the other one is better - that is, after having acquired as much of the worlds really radioactive waste as we can, we change the plan.

We build a new reactor and use the damned stuff as fuel. It's so dangerous and radioactive BECAUSE IT CONTAINS ENERGY. You set up an environment where the neutrons it emits are recaptured by other material - this causes more fission and more and more. This generates more radiation for a short time - along with shed loads of heat.

End product - low carbon energy and your high level waste is suddenly not so dangerous.

Get rid of it? Buy it!