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I've just had to do something I really hate to do. I just spent a couple of hours (closer to 3) summarily dumping blog comments. I had to do that because I ended up with nearly 4,000 comments waiting in my "pending comments" box.

To all the people whose comments I wiped, please accept my apologies. I didn't want to do it, but I had to. I teach three college classes; write two regular blogs; research and write numerous articles on high technology; spend six hours a week pumping iron in the gym; and pump out a couple of novels a year. Once in a while I like to say Hi to my wife. There are only so many hours in a day.

At this point, only about one in ten comments I receive get published, anyway. There are many reasons for that, so I thought I'd post a quick entry suggesting some dos and don'ts that, if you follow them, will up your chances of having your comment see the light of day, and might just reduce the amount of stuff I have to wade through every day.

DO

* Do be patient. Fielding comments is low on the priority list compared to everything else, such as writing new entries. It often takes me a while, but I try to read every comment.

* Do feel free to express your opinion in a comment to this blog.

* Do feel free to disagree with any position expressed in any posting. That just makes a healthy environment for ideas.

* Do fee free to suggest blog entry topics. I often take up subjects suggested by commenters.

* Do use standard English. It's amazing how many comments are unreadable because of simple errors in English. That includes spelling, sentence structure and using the right word to say what you mean. Nobody expects you to be letter perfect, but try hard. Even if English is not your native language, you want what you have to say to be heard. That won't happen if what you say is unintelligible.

* Do think about what you want to say before you start writing. There is always a "take home lesson" for everything you write. That's a phrase or two that you expect your readers to recall later on. If you don't know what you wanted to say in the first place, how will anyone else figure it out?

* Do write out what you want to say before you put it into the comment text box. Many commenters have commended me on how clear my writing is. That's the result of editing. I typically run everything through several (5-10) revision cycles before posting it. My latest novel, which is in the production stage right now, has already been through 11 separate revisions, and most of those revisions were proofread 3-5 times. You can start on a separate word-processor document, then copy and paste into the comment box when you're satisfied that what you've written actually says what you want to say. Nobody expects you to spend a lot of time revising a blog comment, but you need to take the time to make sure it says what you want it to say.

* Do sign with your name, or at least a "handle" that serves as a name. Your handle should NOT be a marketing message! "Buy my stuff" is not a valid handle. Neither is "my stuff's the greatest thing since sliced bread."

DON'T

* Don't expect a response. Generally, I don't respond to blog comments unless I have a specific reason for wanting to. If I do, count yourself lucky. Less than one out of a hundred comments get a response.

* Don't use profanity. This is a G-rated (well, at least PG) blog. Profanity in comments won't see the light of day. My own writing varies from G to XXX, but I know when and where to say what.

* Don't repeat comments. A lot of commenters write basically the same message in comments to multiple entries. That just fills up the space, and ticks me off because I've got to sort through it. I can tell, and will dump repeated comments in a heartbeat.

* Don't include your marketing message. It's my blog. If you want to sell your product or service, start your own blog. Yes, I often promote my books. That's the point: I promote my books in my blog. You don't promote your stuff in my blog. If you try to, I'll just toss your comment into the dustbin.

* Don't fill up my pending comments box with long strings of text that mean nothing. That's a variation on the old denial-of-service attack. But, it doesn't work here. It takes you a lot longer to paste a pile of rubbish in the comments textbox than it does for me to hit the delete key.

* Don't use blog comments to yammer on about something that you want to talk about, but which has nothing to do with the blog. Put that content in your own blog.

* Don't imagine that sucking up to me by piling a lot of praise into your comment will get your marketing message published. I get plenty of praise. If I see a marketing message, your comment's gone!

Those, I think, are the main things to think about when writing a blog comment.

Happy Motoring!

This is going to have to be a short post, sans image because I'm running out of work time, today. Before I dive into what I want to write about, however, I want to thank my loyal fans, who've put up with my website going "dark" for several months while I consolidated my move to Florida. Especially, all of you who've jumped in to add your comments so quickly after I started posting again, and opened the site up for comments. The hard part has been to keep up with all of your kind words.

What I want to talk about today is a little saying I picked up in MBA school, although I do not remember exactly where it originated: "Do what you do best, and let somebody else do the rest."

This saying came up in answer to multiple commenters complementing my blog site, and wondering how I managed it.

The short answer is that I didn't. I'm a writer. What I write about is mostly technology, but I also tell a few stories, crack a few jokes, and even cover some news items.That's what I do best, and have been doing it long enough so I can claim to be an expert.

Although I know how to create a website, and have done so many times, it's not what I do best. Other people can do a much better job in less time than me. So, what I do is hire them to do what they do best -- design websites.

Since I'm trying to drum up interest in my latest novel, Red, and the principle of doing what you do best is a major theme in it, I'm going to be flagrantly self-promoting and refer to it.

The main character, Red McKenna, is on a quest to find her long-lost father. Her initial idea is to just drive to the last place she knows for sure he was, and look. That gets her about 250 miles (out of a couple of thousand) before she ends up stranded by the side of the road.

She does finally succeed in her quest, but not without the aid of over a dozen experts who each contribute a little bit to her reaching her goal, from the mechanic who fixes her car, to the SEAL team that finally springs the trap to catch the bad guy. Part way through the project, she admits: "When I first started out, I thought I could do it on my own, but I couldn't....I didn't realize how big it was until I started working on the details."

What she ends up doing is managing the project, not doing it all herself. She's the one who wants to find her father, but she really doesn't have the skills to complete all of the tasks her quest involves. What saves her bacon is hooking up with her mentor, Doc, who does know how to handle the thousands of details that any project involves. He knows to identify those details, then find an expert to do each one right.

So, when you decide you want to build your website, or repair your car's transmission, or any of the thousands of things that people living in a technological society need to do, start by asking if it's in your area of expertise.

We all have our area of expertise, which is a small island surrounded by an ocean of stuff we're really not competent to do on our own. If what you want to do is in your area of expertise, have at it. If not, go find somebody who can do it better. Then get them to do it.

A final example: I'm in the process of publishing a sequel to Red entitled Vengeance Is Mine! One of the most expensive parts of publishing a novel is getting cover art.

I'm supposed to have some talent as an artist. In fact, my mother once told me she expected me to grow up to be a graphic artist, not a writer. I can -- in fact I did -- rough out a cover for the new book that cost me nothing.

I'm not planning to use it, however. I know that there are people out there whom I can pay to put together a much better, more attractive, and more compelling cover than I can. I'm going to end up paying them to do it because I'm not conceited enough to think I can do a better job than somebody who does it day-in and day-out for a living.

Just as I did for Red, I expect to rough out a concept, which I'll hand off to a professional graphic artist, who will do a much better job executing the finished product than I could.

Changing gambling laws have made riverboat casinos superfluous. We spent the night in riverboat ghost town.

This is the second in the ongoing series following our effort to move the Damifino to Naples, Florida.

We only made 74 miles yesterday, which is actually decent progress on the upper Illinois River, with its locks spaced only a few miles. Considering that we didn't start out until after noontime, and passed three locks before giving up the fight at about 6:00 pm, we did okay. It normally takes 1-2 hours to pass through a lock, so getting three hours travel time out of six hours isn't half bad. That's averaging an hour per lock and 25 mph in between.

Twenty five miles per hour doesn't sound like much to people used to burning up the road at 70-80 mph, but on a boat it's moderately fast for a cruiser. Damifino gets up on plane at 12-18 kt (that's nautical miles per hour -- about 15% faster than the same number in mph). Below that speed, the hull pushes laboriously through the water. Above that speed, it skips over the water like a thrown stone. Planing is much more efficient. In between, the hull is constantly trying to climb the hill of water it pushes up as it tries to plow through.

There are two roughly equivalent ways to think of the process of getting up on plane. Sailors think of it as the hull trying to climb up on its own bow wave. Another way to think of it is the hull trying to climb out of the hole in the water (A boat is a hole in the water, surrounded by fiberglass, into which you throw money.) that Archimedes said it must create to get bouyant force to hold the boat up  against gravity. To a hydrodynamicist, the displacement regime is when bouyant forces support the boat, and planing is when the hydrodynamic lift supports the hull. In between is a transitional regime where the hull rises out of the water, so bouyant force is lower, and hydrodynamic lift does the rest.

The best fuel economy -- miles covered per gallon burned -- comes when the hull moves fast enough to be fully up on plane, but not much faster. It's easy to tell when that happens: when running as a displacement hull, the boat runs flat through the water. As hydrodynamic forces come into play, the nose rises dramatically. When fully on plane, the nose drops back to run nearly horizontally again. At that point, you have to throttle back to avoid running really fast. That's when you get best fuel economy. On Damifino that's between 22 and 25 knots.

In any case, the 74 miles we made yesterday brought us to Hamm's Holiday Harbor Marina in Peoria, Ill. I actually passed the place because all I could see was a bunch of riverboat casinos. Clearly, some were, shall we say, "derelict," being drawn up on dry land. One, however, looked like it could be in operation. I figured that didn't look like the marina we were looking for. I was wrong.

When we sailed in, (boats still "sail," even powerboats without sails) we found a deep pool with floating docks presenting dozens of slips big enough to dock the Damifino. With no better directions, we pulled into the easiest slip to reach, and tied up.

The riverboats are a side business for the marina owner. In the past, shore-based casinos were illegal in Illinois, and a number of midwestern states. There was a loophole, however, that allowed casino gambling on floating platforms -- hence the launching of a slew of riverboat casinos.

That's all changed, now. The states realized how much revenue they were missing, and changed the laws to allow shore-based casino operations. That made the riverboats superfluous. Hamm's marina owner (Mr. Hamm?) has made a tidy business of taking these white elephants off the casino owners' hands, and cutting them up for scrap. Those in and around the marina pool are awaiting the gentle ministrations of low-wage workers bearing cutting torches.

This en

View of the Damifino docked in Seneca, Ill. prior to departure.

This entry breaks, once again, from the stated theme of this blog, which is to look at repurcussions of technological developments for society. We'll get back to that theme when we get back to that theme. In the meantime, take a trip with me down the Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Tombigbee rivers, thence around the Gulf of Mexico to the southern tip of Florida.

Some 40-plus years ago, my then bride-to-be asked: "Hey, could we live on a boat?"

She'd seen my parents spending weeks at a time aboard their 36-foot cabin cruiser during the summer, and it looked like a fun, romantic (and cheap) lifestyle. We were at the time firmly rooted in the Boston, Mass. area, however, so the full-time live-aboard lifestyle was impractical. Yet, the idea persisted, resurfacing from time to time.

Another persistent theme became the "I've never been to Florida. Could we go there?" question. Having visited my grandparents at their winter home near Orlando (long before Disney Corp. turned the place into Mickey's Corporate Office), my impression of Florida was of a gigantic sand spit with bugs, and rain every afternoon. It was never top of my list of places to go, so that idea didn't get very far, either.

More recently, when the school failed to pick up Bonnie's teaching contract for the forthcoming year, we finally decided to chuck it all, and abandon the Chicago-area winters for year-round live-aboard boating at the southern tip of Florida.

In the decades since getting married, we'd developed into gypsies, anyway; we'd picked up our own cabin cruiser; and learned the advantages of avoiding the annual butt-freezing season. It was time to live out Bonnie's particular fantasies.

The first step was, of course, a reconnaissance trip. Borrowing the temporarily empty house of a friend in Marco Island, Florida, we spent a week sampling the fleshpots (which, unlike Las Vegas, means beaches, not night clubs), and scrutinizing marinas.

Destination in hand, we returned to refit the Damifino (pronounced "Damn if I know!" We didn't name her. The previous owner did.) for indefinite occupancy, and move her through the western half of the Great Loop cruise track down through the river system and the Inland Waterway to the Gulf of Mexico, thence around to Florida's southern tip.

Lest this entry be completely without technological interest, let me note that I'm writing this on the upper deck (under that blue awning in the picture) using my laptop computer, which is wirelessly linked to a WiFi router attached to one of the bulkheads below, and running on ship's 12 VDC. Also on the wireless LAN are a printer, and Bonnie's laptop. The router ties into the Internet through a cellphone link.

The text editor I'm using does not run on my laptop. It's an example of thin-client technology in which I type into text boxes in a web page provided by the blogging section of my website, which runs in rented space on my ISP's server. Since the ISP's hardware is a server farm distributed over much of the U.S., it's also an example of cloud computing at its best.

Ain't tecknollogie wunnerfull!

We're now ready -- or as ready as we ever will be. Today, we drop the lines and blow a kiss and a wave to Illinois. In the words of the Paul Simon song: "We're on our way. We don't know where we're goin'!"

We'll know when we get there.

Business cycles are driven by a macroeconomic feedback mechanism that has a multi-year cycle time. Employment is one of the last economic metrics to show recovery because the process starts with unmet demand for goods and services, and only ends with jobs.

In every economic downturn, Chicken-Little pundits squawk about how we can't have a sustainable recovery until employment figures show improvement. Any investor, and here I use the word "investor" in its broadest sense to include those who put resources to work, not just those who invest in stocks and bonds, who listens to this drivel is destined to fail, and fail disasterously.

Macroeconomics - the study of large-scale economic trends affecting an economy as a whole - is based feedback loops that drive business activity. These loops describe causal relationships between economic factors affecting business. For example, an increase in production levels generally pushes employment up. Each of these causal relationships involve a time delay. So, when production levels increase, especially from a depressed level, employment does not rise until production levels exceed capacity at the current employment level. This takes time, as does the process of hiring new employees.

These delays are what cause business cycles in the first place. If we use, say, buggywhip manufacture as a hypothetical example, we might say that it takes 18 months for the buggywhip business to respond to a sudden change in the overall demand for buggywhips. So, if New York City should pass a law banning motorized vehicles, so all the Yellow Cabs in the city had to be replaced by horse-drawn surries overnight, that would ratchet up demand for buggywhips. Because it takes 18 months for buggywhip manufacturers to respond, actual sales of buggywhips would not stabilize at a level reflecting the new demand until a year and a half later.

Business cycles occur because it is not possible for businesses to precisely meet demand. In the buggywhip example, assume that there are two buggywhip manufacturers in business at the time the New York law passes. They will both attempt to grab more than their fair share of the enormous new market. Part of driving sales is assuring customers that you can actually deliver the goods ordered. So, both manufacturers will expand production faster than necessary to just meet demand. In addition, during that first 18 months, it will be clear that the established manufacturers won't be able to meet demand. Outside entrepreneurs will see this as an opportunity to jump in to the expanding market, by starting rival buggywhip manufacturing operations.

The result is that some 18 months after the new law passes, worldwide buggywhip manufacturing capacity will greatly exceed demand. Inventories of unsold buggywhips will expand. Buggywhip prices will fall. Marginal buggywhip manufacturers will fail. Buggywhip production capacity will drop. By three years into the process, we'd be back to having inadequate production capacity to meet demand, and the whole thing would start over again.

Boom and bust cycles like that are not some aberration, or the result of faulty business strategies, or some market inefficiency that politicians can erase by passing laws, it's how things inevitably work. In fact, most complex systems, such as economies, consist of multiple such cycles that operate on multiple time scales. Basically, they're all chaotic systems, which is why long term charts of practically every economic indicator - from long-term jobs trends to prices for individual stocks - look like profiles of the Andes Mountains. They're all fractals, which is the pattern most often associated with chaotic systems.

Economic expansions, recessions, depressions, and recoveries are actually just business-cycle components. As any Taoist sage could tell you, whenever the economy is expanding, you know that a contraction is on its way. Similarly, a depression always presages a recovery. It's inevitable. The Great Depression of the 1930s was, when looked at from a longer perspective, just a particularly deep bottom of the overall business cycle. The huge expansion we experienced during the 1990s was, conversely, a particularly robust phase of the overall business cycle.

This latest contraction, which started about 2005, and will probably not completely play out until 2015, was another particularly nasty dip in the more or less regular cycle. It's as inevitable as the tide.

So, getting back to jobs data, and the usual panicky predictions of a so-called "jobless recovery," the reason employment data have not significantly improved is that it's just too early in the process for it to show up. Those who ask: "How can sales recover when employment is down?" simply don't understand how the business cycle works. Sales aren't driven by jobs, it's the other way around, with a significant time lag between.

Jobs are driven by production requirements. As any industrial engineer could tell you, production is driven by inventories, not by demand. Demand is an intangible that is very difficult to predict or measure. Inventory levels, on the other hand, are easily measured and better reflect a company's ability to sell the products it makes.

In the real business world, the first thing to recover after a recession is demand. It begins to recover when end users have had their belts cinched so tight for so long, that they have no choice but to by new stuff. Demand for food starts to rise, for example, when pantries start to look bare. It makes no difference whether the family bread-winner has a job or not, when there's nothing for dinner, somebody makes a run to the store. Even if you have to beg a cup of sugar from the neighbors, that sends the neighbors off to the store for more sugar, increasing the demand for sugar. Therein lies the disconnect between jobs and demand.

Demand seems to have hit bottom about six months ago. Since then, we've been working off inventory that built up at the start of the downturn, when production still exceeded demand. Next, production has to rise (pulled by further increases in demand) until it exceeds capacity at the present depressed employment levels. Only then will employment figures begin to rise.

Don't look for employment metrics to turn up until at least the end of the first quarter 2010. The reason it hasn't happened yet is that it's just too darn early.

With the global economy generally in recovery mode, nearly half of respondents to a survey conducted by Control Engineering magazine in partnership with Morgan Stanley expect sales of industrial automation equipment to increase in 2010 Source: Control Engineering.

Over the next week or so, I hope to share with you results of studies pointing the directions we can expect technology trends likely will take next year, and in the decade ahead. The good news for Americans, and for many national economies around the world, is that the recovery is exactly on track. Yammering about "jobless recovery" and doubts over the U.S. economy's ability to expand until full employment returns simply demonstrate the commentators' ignorance of how economies work.

Garden variety depressions, which is what we've experienced over the past five years, take many years to play out. Calendar year 2008 saw the acute contraction phase, but things had been unraveling since late 2005. After a contraction, comes a bottoming, followed by an expansion phase.

Economic recoveries - that is the bottoming and expansion phases of a dip in economic activity - start with stock markets, which anticipate the turn around in general economic conditions by some months. The reason stock markets anticipate recoveries is that investment professionals, unlike media commentators, do understand economics, and recognize harbingers of business improvement long before the improvement happens. Just as meteorologists know that when days start getting longer, Spring is just a few months away, investors know that economic harbingers, such as inventory levels stabilizing at high levels, pre-announce changes in economic trends by several months, and stock prices rise as these investors put themselves in a position to capitalize on the new trend.

After stock prices hit bottom and begin to rise, we start seeing signs that the downward pressure on business activity begins to ease off. High inventory levels, for example, begin to drop. Productivity begins to rise as businesses streamline to cut costs. Later, these more efficient businesses begin reporting better than anticipated earnings on still-falling revenue. Still months later, revenues begin to rise as individuals and businesses can no longer put off purchases that have been delayed since the beginning of the downturn. More months later, employment figures, which conventional wisdom seems to think should lead the recovery despite the fact that it never happens, begin to recover as the productivity gains of a few months ago prove insufficient to meet the growing demand for goods and services. Finally, very late in the recovery, large capital investments, such as in real estate, reach their bottoms and start to recover.

At present, the U.S. economy, as well as that of most of the world, is recovering nicely. Trends in measures like corporate earnings are showing the correct patterns in the correct order and with the anticipated timing. Even the jobless numbers are tracking exactly as they're supposed to. Back at the end of 2008, when the depth of the dip became apparent, knowledgeable pundits were able to predict that the unemployment rate would reach just above 10%, which is just what it did, and begin to recover in late 2009, which it also has done.

By the way, don't listen to all that emotional drivel about some fictional "real" unemployment rate being something like 18% instead of the published 10% level. "The unemployment rate" is a real, clearly defined metric that we use to compare one time period with another. The "real unemployment rate" that Chicken-Little types yammer on about is poorly defined and very difficult to measure, so it's useless as an economic metric. It's only use is to give fear merchants something to shoot their mouths off about to their poorly educated audiences.

One extremely useful metric that can provide prescience about general industrial trends is expectations among industrial automation buyers and sellers about their purchases and sales (respectively) in the coming year.

To determine whether the market for industrial automation equipment was beginning to ascend from the depths of this latest downturn, or were destined to remain mired in the muck at the bottom of the pit for awhile longer, our friends at Control Engineering magazine in partnership with analysts at financial services leader Morgan Stanley surveyed participants in the industrial automation market. The reason to look especially at sentiment in this market is that factory automation is arguably the most important trend in industrial technology of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Early in the 20th Century, factory automation was generally non-existent. We (or more accurately, our ancestors) simply did not have the tools available to automate production facilities in any meaningful way.

By the middle of the 21st Century, on the other hand, we anticipate that factories will run essentially fully automatically. That is, there will be no production tasks that are not done by automated machinery. Humans will generally hold supervisory positions. There will be CEOs, managers, engineers, maintenance technicians, and such like, but the population of assembly line workers, for example, will drop to more or less nil.

So, unlike the situation a few decades ago, perhaps the best measure of industrial activity available at the start of the second decade of this century is the level of activity in the industrial automation sector. That is what the survey set out to study, and that is why it's the first thing we looking at as we peer into our crystal ball.

"I'm happy to report that the survey does, indeed, offer more than few rays of hope," wrote David Greenfield, Control Engineering's editorial director, when reporting the survey findings in his article entitled 2010 Global Automation Industry Outlook. "Overall, the findings appear to indicate that a bottom in the market has been reached, pricing is holding firm, and that customers remain loyal - all positive signs for global automation players."

Greenfield cited four key findings of the survey:

1. The automation market has already bottomed; modest growth will return in 2010;

2. There is no evidence of a price war in automation equipment;

3. There is limited differentiation between the spending outlooks for process versus discrete industries;

4. While highly cyclical, automation is a good business to invest in over the long term.

It is important to note that the second finding belies the fear that inflation might be a an immediate threat. Despite concerns over accommodative monetary policies around the world, this survey shows no sign of inflation's return in the immediate future. It's axiomatic that for inflation to appear, prices must rise. This survey of a significant sector of the economy shows no hint of rapidly rising prices.

Greenfield pointed out that the near-term trend in demand for automation equipment appears brighter than it did in early in 2009 because of the percentage of respondents expecting demand to increase, more budgets going up or staying level versus retreating, and increasing demand to replace aging equipment. In addition, pricing appears to be stabilizing in the near term. Few respondents expect to see prices fall, but neither are they expecting out-of-the-ordinary upward price moves by suppliers to help offset losses in the past year.

These results are exactly what we would expect at this stage of the present economic recovery. Pundits prophesying a double dip, an L-shaped recovery, or any similar pattern find no support for their views in this important economic indicator.

The 11 year solar magnetic cycle is associated with the natural waxing and waning of solar activity. On longer time scales, the sun has shown considerable variability, including the long Maunder Minimum when almost no sunspots were observed, the less severe Dalton Minimum, and increased sunspot activity during the last fifty years, known as the Modern Maximum. Source: Wikipedia. This figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde and is part of the Global Warming Art project.

During the 1970s, I conducted an (unpublished) meta-analysis of data Charles Greeley Abbot collected from various sources in the early 20th Century to look for cross correlations between his solar irradiance measurements, sunspot index measurements, and weather patterns in various cities. The meta-analysis showed a significant positive correlation between solar irradiance and sunspot data, and a partial correlation between them and the temperature data.

Abbot, like nearly all astronomers and astrophysicists of his time, firmly believed in a negative correlation between sunspot index and solar irradiance, rather than the positive one his data showed. He noted the partial correlation between sunspot index and temperatures, but his prejudice about the correlation between index and irradiance led him to reject the effect as spurious.

By the end of the 1980s, the positive correlation between solar irradiance variations and sunspot index variations had been confirmed by satellite measurements, overturning astrophysicists' previous view. This allowed partial explanation of historically observed climatic variations, specifically the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the latter half of the second millennium, by reduction of solar activity observed through anomalies in the sunspot index, specifically the Sporer, Maunder, and Dalton minima. This research strongly indicates that solar variability is also an important input to the climate system that is certainly not under human control.

Now, it is becoming clear that the climate system is highly complex, with multiple positive and negative feedback loops, as well as a large number of independent forcing inputs, only a few of which are under human control (see "Aerosols Cloud Climate Picture," Science News, v. 176, n. 11., pp. 5-6 for a brief synopsis). These are characteristics of a chaotic system

Paleontologists and geologists have pieced together a fairly complete, though not necessarily detailed, picture of Earth's climate over the 4.5 billion years of the planet's existence. This picture shows a chaotic climate capable of varying over a wide temperature range. On short time scales, weather patterns are now acknowledged to be chaotic, with a horizon of predictability on the order of a week.

Taken together, these bits of information lead one to the conclusion that Earth's climate exhibits chaotic behavior on all time scales. It is, basically, a chaotic system.

Now, let's look at efforts to control climate change. We are attempting to use a chaotic system (global politics) to harness a second chaotic system (social, economic, and technical institutions) to control a third chaotic system (Earth's climate), when not all the forcing variables (e.g., solar irradiance, geology) are in our hands, anyway.

This sounds like a fool's errand.

I suggest that we could much more effectively apply our energies to developing means to react to climate change that is inevitable, than to the fool's errand of trying to direct it. Climate change, in any direction, has both positive and negative affects. It would be far better to direct our efforts toward engineering social systems, laws, and technologies to take advantage of the positive effects, and ameliorate the negative effects.

Printed carbon-zinc batteries are small, inexpensive, flexible, and disposable in an environmentally friendly way. Source: Blue Spark Technologies.

Truly successful technologies - those that achieve widespread commercial application - generally exhibit a number of characteristics. Chiefest among them is probably the ability to help humans do a lot of things that they would be doing anyway, but do them faster, cheaper, and more easily.

Automobiles, for example, did not make people peripatetic. People have been wandering around Earth's surface for hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of years. They've been doing it since long before the modern species homo sapiens developed. All the automobile did was up the cruising speed from around 2 mph to several tens of mph. Human behavior didn't change, they still like to go from A to B whenever they can come up with an excuse, the automobile achieved enormous commercial success by making it possible to do it faster, cheaper, and more easily. What pushed the automobile's success to the enormous dimensions it achieved was the fact that its advantages applied to almost everything people do, from enjoying an afternoon tryst to seeking out new worlds to conquer.

Ultrathin, flexible, disposable battery technology should have similar success. It seems like such a simple thing: use thick-film technology to manufacture carbon-zinc batteries on a flexible substrate. How hard can it be to manufacture a battery consisting of a handful of non-moving parts compared to the typical automobile's 3.7 kazillion moving parts? You make the things with a glorified ink-jet printer. What could be easier?

Well, it isn't all that easy to make the things thin enough, reliable enough, and consistent enough for commercial success. It's simple to imagine doing it. The Devil's in the details of doing it right. Only a few companies have managed it.

Blue Spark Technologies is one of them. In an article published in yesterday's Designfax online newsletter, Matt Ream, Blue Spark's marketing manager and an electronics engineer with 20 years of experience in high-tech electronics and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, reviews ultrathin battery technology and presents a cross section of applications.

He says that products using the company's technology rely on convergence of printed electronics and thin, flexible printed battery technologies. Printed electronics is the printing of electronic devices on common media, such as paper, plastic, or textiles, using traditional printing processes. Examples include programmable chips (ICs), RFID antennas and tags, printed displays, and thin, flexible batteries that provide a low-voltage power source. Ream goes on to report that industry analyst IDTechEx predicts that the market potential for printed electronics will grow to over $35 billion by 2018, while NanoMarkets predicts sales of thin film and printed batteries will grow to over $5 billion by 2015.

For product designers of low-voltage electronic products and systems, Ream says his company's 1.5-V printed carbon-zinc batteries offer multiple advantages over traditional button and coin cells, such as:

• Eco-friendly, safe disposability, since they contain no lithium, mercury, or other toxic materials.

• Small form factor, thin profile, and customizable shapes with a thickness range from about 430 to 700 microns (0.017 to 0.027 in.), and peak drain currents of at least 1 mA.

• Lower production and integration costs because they are made using conventional printing processes, and can often be printed or mounted on the same substrate as other printed electronics.

Such batteries can be used in applications where integration of a conventional battery would be too complex and costly. Within limits, users can typically specify size and shape (linear and non-linear), overall voltage, storage capacity, and thickness -- all tailored to the application requirements.

In a CNBC interview, Gary Johnson, the company's CEO, and Michael Liard, RFID Practice Director for ABI Research, described the market potential for ultrathin disposable batteries. Basically, you can look forward to seeing the technology attached to, pasted on, or incorporated into all kinds of disposable items that you use every day. Actually, you won't know that you're seeing them. They'll sit there in the background making it possible to do faster, cheaper, and easier what you were going to do, anyway.

Racks of Cisco Unified Computing Systems gear supporting 23 different labs at VMworld. Source: Cisco Systems

In previous blog postings, I've attempted to pique your interest in the rapid technological changes that are transforming the data centers that we all rely on. Very soon these changes will revolutionize how folks around the world will use the Internet and what they will be able to do with it.

You don't have to just take my word for it, though. Tomorrow (Wednesday, 9/29) Cisco Systems will host a live Internet TV broadcast and Q&A session to discuss its vision for Data Center 3.0 and how the company's core technologies and new solutions are mapping to its overall corporate business strategy. Best of all, you don't have to be anyone special to attend. The session will be distributed free to all. No registration required. Just visit the event URL at 10:00 a.m. PDT and select "Play" to launch the live presentation.

Presenters will include:

Rajiv Ramaswami, vice president and general manager of the Data Center Switching Technology Group, will discuss how storage networking technology is evolving, including a glimpse at Cisco's future technology for storage networking innovation.

Ed Chapman, vice president of product management, Server Access and Virtualization Group, Cisco, will discuss how IT organizations are evolving their data centers with new protocols such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to reduce operating costs and simplify management. The presentation will include a glimpse at new technology being developed for unifying SAN and LAN networks in the data center.

Derek Masseth, Senior Director for Infrastructure Services at the University of Arizona, will describe how the university recently united its data center networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet to create a unified fabric. Masseth will explain the reasons for choosing this technology and the upgrade process, as well as benefits and cost reductions achieved.

The event will air Tuesday, September 29, 2009, from 10:00 to 11:00 a.m. PDT. Attendees who experience difficulties connecting can contact support at (866) 614-0208 or (617) 778-9652. Phone support is available 30 minutes prior to and after the event, as well as during the videocast. Attendees may also submit an Online Support Request to CiscoTV_help@external.cisco.com or ciscotv_help@btci.com if necessary.

Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical for motor vehicles and aircraft. Source: Glenn H. Curtiss Museum

With all the hoopla about electric vehicles and "carbon neutral" fuels lately, it brings up the question of why gasoline and diesel became the dominant fuel choices for mobile power plants in the first place. There, of course, have always been alternatives. Everything from coal to spermacetti oil have been tried in the past.

Two canards are worth disposing of right away: the inertia and conspiracy arguments.

The inertia argument goes something like this: "We use gasoline and diesel fuel for light trucks and passenger vehicles because that's what we've always used." This idea has appeal only to those who know nothing about early automobile development. From roughly 1890 through as late as 1920, enthusiastic inventors tried to use essentially every kind of engine and every available fuel to produce a commercially viable horseless carriage. The only ones that proved technically and commercially viable were powered by gasoline or diesel fuel. Everything else flopped for one reason or another, and most alternative fuel vehicles flopped for technical reasons related to their engines.

The conspiracy argument (Isn't there always a conspiracy theory?) holds that big oil companies, like Standard Oil, persued nefarious means to sabotage development of any vehicles that ran on anything but the gasoline and diesel fuel they supplied. While corporate leaders in the early 20th Century would gleefully have engaged in such behavior, they just weren't up to it. First, their companies didn't carry that much clout until the boom in automobile transportation - powered by gasoline and diesel engines - grew them into the giants we recall. Second, no amount of chicanery can make a winner out of a clearly technically inferior solution.

That's an important point to keep in mind.

The reasons gasoline and diesel became dominant fuels are simple and technical: power, weight, and storage/handling.

As students of aviation development know quite well, the Otto-cycle piston engine powered by gasoline has an enormous power-to-weight advantage over every other engine type in the sub-500 HP range, with diesel engines running a close second. The only engine type that beats them today is the Brayton-cycle turbine engine. (No, not the "turbocharged" or "turbo" engine, which is really a hotted up piston engine!) Technical issues involving manufacturing make turbine engines smaller than about 500 HP hard to justify, and 500 HP is rediculous overkill for a passenger car or light truck.

Airplanes proved impossible until Glenn Curtiss and his contemporaries made gasoline engines practical. The same power/weight advantages make these engines technically superior for passenger cars and light trucks as well. (Note that Curtiss started out making engines for racing motorcycles and only later adapted them to aircraft.)

Storage and handling make gasoline and diesel fuels technically superior as well. They are both non-volatile liquids, meaning that if you pour them out into an open container, they'll hang around for a useful length of time. Though gasoline will evaporate on the time scale of minutes to hours (depending on the container's geometry), that's long enough to run it through an engine and extract the energy locked inside. Diesel will hang around even longer.

Methane, propane, butane, and the mixture commonly known as natural gas must be kept pressurized or they'll have an instant escape. The same, by the way, goes for hydrogen, which has a host of additional issues. Gasoline and diesel fuel's low volatility makes designing, building, and maintaining in-vehicle fuel storage systems relatively cheap and easy. The skills involved are those of any Medieval Gypsy tinker, not those of a modern refrigeration specialist.

Another storage advantage gasoline and diesel fuel have is the amount of energy packed into every gram of mass and liter of volume. Ten gallons of gasoline, which weighs a mere 60 lb, is enough to push a four-passenger car weighing over a ton a couple of hundred miles without stopping.

This, of course, is the Achilles' heel of electric vehicles. While electricity, being pure energy, takes up no space and has no weight, the equipment needed to safely contain the stuff in quantities practical for motor transportation very definitely takes up large quantities of space and has enormous weight.

"But," you say, "those arguments hold quite well for that darling of the alternative fuels community, alcohol."

What messed up the works for alcohol at the dawn of the 20th Century, and haunts it still today, is the fact that the stuff doesn't occur naturally. Until humans figured out how to harness the sugar-munching-and-alcohol-pooping potential of microbes, alcohol simply did not exist in useful quantities. Fossil oil, on the other hand, occurs in oceanic quantities just below the surface of the Earth's crust. Not only is it laying around practically everywhere, but it's just dying to get out. One of the biggest technical problems for those whose life's work is to get the stuff out of the ground and into your tank is keeping it from spraying out all over the place before they have a chance to capture it in a pipe.

True, the stuff that comes out of the ground won't burn in your engine without some refining. That process, however, mainly involves heating it until the oversize molecules jiggle apart into smaller units, which are easy to separate and grade into various useful fractions - which include gasoline and fuel oil.

Alcohol, on the other hand, is a whole lot more expensive to produce. It is so expensive that nobody has found a way make it economically feasible for motor fuel. The same goes for other alternative fuels. The folks who advocate hydrogen for use as a fuel, for example, have to deal with this disadvantage as well.

Basically, we've disposed of pretty much all alternatives to gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles. What makes the alternatives unable to compete with them are the same things that made our ancestors choose them in the first place. They're simply the best choice by far among many alternatives.

No matter how committed the Obama Administration is, and how politically charged the debate about climate change becomes, alternative fuels just won't displace gasoline and diesel as motor fuels as long as the latter is readily available. It's like King Canute commanding the tide to stay out. All he accomplished was getting his feet wet.

Yes, alternatives will win out eventually, but not until we use up the available fossil fuels. And that will take many decades, yet.