DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In January we put a timer-based cutoff switch on our well pump, to prevent the pump from running (and consuming expensive electricity) during peak hours, noon - 6:00PM.

In April, we set our clocks forward by 1 hour. Well, most of them. Not the one in the wellhouse. Doh!

I discovered this at 2:00 PM today. The pump timer was pretty sure it was 1:00 PM. This means it has been shutting off our well pump not from noon to 6:00, but 1:00 PM - 7:00 PM.

Fortunately we don’t use much water between noon and 1:00 PM, so the pump (which works on demand) would have had little reason to run at that time. But on those oddball days it was running… ouch. Our well pump consumes nearly 2 kW of electricity and is therefore almost capable of zeroing out the PV array’s output. Between noon and 6:00, that’s expensive power, not in the sense that we would be paying for it so much as in the sense that every watt we use cannot be sold back to the utility.

Seen in the NYT review of Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant:

Lobster is easy; potato salad is hard. And a restaurant that turns a summer picnic staple into a meal-stopping, sigh-inducing dish — and makes that dish a legitimate course in a $135 tasting menu — cannot be denied. Per Se is wondrous.

Proving that food writers, perhaps alone among journalists in an election year able to provide balanced coverage, restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni also raves about the calf brains.

On September 7th, the fuel-cell vehicle Hysun 3000 will start its record ride from Berlin to [Barcelona] on only one hydrogen filling.

The vehicle is an enclosed recumbant tricycle with half the air resistance of a small passenger car (or, probably, 1/6th of a typical American passenger truck). The manufacturer claims it will achieve a record 0.23 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers — or about 1022 miles per gallon.

Check the tour diary for updates. Note that the dates are written as DD.MM.YYYY — the tour takes 15 days, not 15 months.

Any mention of hydrogen-powered vehicles must be tempered by a measured dose of reality: most hydrogen is created from natural gas, which is no more renewable a resource than oil. Is it a coincidence that President Bush’s headline-making FreedomCAR program includes among its partners five of the biggest oil companies in the world? [scratch chin here]

(A hearty tip of my personal Proton Exchange Membrane to Bim for the link.)

According to charitablerecycling.com:

Old cell phones should not be disposed of in landfills since they contain many toxic materials that are harmful to our environment. By the year 2005, there will be 500 million stockpiled used cell phones weighing over 250,000 tons that could potentially enter our waste stream.

There are numerous centers that recycle cellphones, but I’d rather have someone still use my old phone. Sure, it’s a dinosaur, but it works. I hope it’s still worth something to somebody.

• oldcellphone.com pays cash for recent phones, and pays shipping too.
• wirelessfoundation.org’s Call To Protect program refurbishes and sells used phones; proceeds support agencies that fight domestic violence. Their site provides a list of local (nationwide) drop-off centers. CTP provides tax receipts for donations.
• collectivegood.com “attempts to recycle donated phones back into reuse in the developing world (usually Latin America or the Caribbean), where they serve useful, longer lives and offer affordable communications, in many cases offering families their first modern communications.” Their refurb center updates and replaces phone software, removing your call history and address book in the process, thereby reducing privacy concerns.
• phones4charity.org attempts to put functioning phones back into service. Tax receipts are available.

Recycling, legislation are among efforts to reduce phones dumped in landfills:

Californians Against Waste, an environmental group, estimates state residents throw away an average of nearly 45,000 cell phones every day.

The cell companies could do a much better job of closing this loop — if they promoted recycling with half as much vigor as they promote upgrades, that discard statistic would drop to zero.

Want to become a millionaire? Just solve one of the Millenium Problems, and the Clay Mathematics Institute will set you up: $1M US, plus a free propeller beanie. Here are the seven million-dollar-prize problems:

1. Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture, the official problem definition for which states, in part,
   L(C, s) = c(s-1)^r + higher order terms
   which incidentally that is the name of the next movie by Arntz, Chasse, and Vicente
2. Hodge Conjecture
3. Navier-Stokes Equations
4. P vs NP Problem
5. Poincaré Conjecture, which has to do with the “multidimensional topology of space in three dimensions,” for example donuts.
6. Riemann Hypothesis, which has to do with the distribution, and ultimately, perhaps, predictability of prime numbers.
7. Yang-Mills and Mass Gap

If you want to compete in #s Q or T, where Q=5 and T=6, you’d better hurry because it looks like Louis de Branges and Grigori Perelman might have beat you to them. Oh, and by the way, de Branges’ work might “bring the whole of e-commerce to its knees, overnight.”