Best of all, perhaps, is the word “scientometrics”.

What is it? There’s a detailed exploded diagram (PDF) of the display model on their site. It shows a rotor assembly with three main rings. The bottom two each have 8 magnets mounted in pairs at 90 degree intervals, and the skinnier top ring has only four magnets in the same alignment. The orientation of the magnets isn’t shown. The rotor assembly spins inside a frame with four pairs of toroidal coils which line up with the bottom two rings. A separate pair of “pick-up coils” align with the top ring. No wiring diagram is included. Based on the term “pick-up coil” the top assembly looks like a generator. Spinning magnets past a pick-up coil would produce AC, so the rectifiers shown below turn the AC into bumpy DC. Meanwhile, energy flows into the system through the remaining coils.

Oh, and the “Battery D-Size”. They claim it is only being used for temporary storage, to smooth out the flow of energy, and that the device is producing three times the energy it is taking in. It goes without saying that choosing to include a battery in a display model is a terrible choice for someone trying to convince a skeptical public that the device is more than a funny-looking motor.

From pictures I’ve seen, the battery doesn’t look off-the-shelf. It’s probably a high-density lithium-ion unit with capacity similar to a D cell, maybe 12 Amp hours @ 3 volts. That’s 36 watt hours. The rotor assembly itself uses low-resistance bearings and has an overall smooth shape for low wind resistance, so the amount of energy needed to keep it turning is probably quite small. Let’s say 50 mW. Given those figures, the device could run continuously for 30 days without needing to generate one scrap of energy, even discounting the possibility of clandestine midnight battery changes and the like.

The way the system is set up, it’s difficult to establish a reliable measurement. What if you hooked up a meter to the circuit with the battery in it–which way would current be flowing?

Turns out that’s a difficult question. The current flow varies over time, which introduces all kinds of measurement difficulties. A few paragraphs back, we did a simple DC power computation with volts times amps. In AC circuits, its more complicated–the addition of inductance or capacitance to a circuit adds an element of temporary energy storage which causes the two to become out of sync, so a simple scalar calculation isn’t possible. You get in the realm of imaginary numbers and a mathematical construct called a phasor, which you draw as a simple 2d diagram. For non-sinusoidal currents, including that bumpy DC from a rectifier, the math gets even more hairy.

Is it really this hard? Yep. I wrote earlier comparing the situation to the three-body problem, most often applied to gravitaional systems, but EM analysis is even harder. Take into account magnetic fields, the interchange of electric current and magnetic fields, back-emf, and Lorentz forces operating at right angles instead of attraction along a straight line. It all gets fearsomely complicated, well past the “vector calculus just for fun” level I’m at these days.

What they’ve now publicly shown seems to be enough for a competent person to duplicate, figuring out which of the few possible permutations of electrical connections make sense. If the claims turn out to be true, expect to see independent validations springing up. But it’s not easy, so expect this interesting situation to continue to unfold over (at least) several months. If I were Steorn and wanted to speed the process up, I would ditch the battery and take steps to make it easier, not harder, to validate the demonstration.

Disclaimer: I am a member of “the 300″, and have access to the SKDB. I haven’t paid anything to nor been paid from Steorn. Information in this posting comes from only public sources. -m

Update: The official video here clearly shows the battery with the markings NiMH and 10000, which is the capacity in mAH. So my capacity estimate above was a little high, though still a good guess if it was a lithium ion cell.

But the Nickel Metal Hydride battery raises other issues: NiMH batteries are very sensitive to overcharging, which should happen if the device is dumping continuous energy into it. At best this means that the battery’s capacity will get quickly diminished, reducing effectiveness as an energy buffer (and at worst, it means boom).

Note: I’m having trouble finding independent verification of this, other than what appears to be re-hashes of the superconductor.org article. If you have any additional proof or refutation, please post it in the comments.

But I do question parts of his thesis. He (with tongue in cheek) posits the existence of another species of human, called Homo Logicus. Stepping on to an airplane, Homo Logicus turns left into the cockpit with a million buttons but ultimate control over every aspect of the plane. Regular Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, turn right and tuck themselves into a chair–no control but at least they can relax.

But if there was only one “species” of Homo Logicus, members (like me) would never experience usability issues in software created by fellow Logicians. But ordinary fax machines give me fits. The touch-screen copier at work instills dread in my heart. And the software I need to use to file expense reports–written by enterprise software geeks probably very similar to me–is a usability nightmare. Words fail me in expressing my disdain for this steaming heap of fail.

The book is sub-titled “Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy”, but one doesn’t have to look very far to find similar usability bugs in the low-tech world. Seth Godin, for example, likes to talk about different things in life that Just Don’t Work, along with reasons why. Some examples:

• airport cab stand (75 cabs, 75 people, and it takes an hour)
• “don’t operate heavy machinery” warning on dog’s prescription medicine
• excessive fine print on liability agreements–intentionally hard to read and figure out
• official “Vote for Pedro” shirts that look nothing like the ones in the movie
• more examples on the web site

If anything, I think Cooper’s work doesn’t go far enough. It is relatively short on good examples, stretching out only four examples over four chapters. If properly-designed software is so hard to come up with examples of, then there are bigger problems in play (that would need to be dealt with by something more manifesto than book).

The book now 5 years old. Perhaps it’s time for an update. Particularly in the world of web software, lots has happend in 5 years. Flickr. Gmail. Yahoo Pipes. Google Docs. Even SearchMonkey. Instead of focusing on pointing at crappy software, I’d like to see more emphasis on properly-done interfaces. More delving into nuance, and common factors behind why both high-tech and low-tech products miss the mark.

But maybe that’s just me. -m

Recent news coverage mentions a badly-needed breakthrough at MIT in battery technology. Using a slight variation of existing lithium materials, much faster charge and discharge rates are possible. The money quote is that

[Professor Gerbrand Ceder and graduate student Byoungwoo Kang] went on to make a small battery that could be fully charged or discharged in 10 to 20 seconds.

News outlets seem to have latched on to this part of the announcement and hinted that all kinds of battery-powered devices will soon be chargeable in ten seconds. I don’t think it will be likely to see, say a cell phone (much less a vehicle, as some stories hint) that can fully charge in 10 seconds. Here’s why: A typical cell phone battery might be rated at 800 mAh. It’s not perfectly linear, but you can think of it as being able to deliver 800 milliamps for an hour, or 10 milliamps for 80 hours, and so on. You could approximate the energy storage of the battery by multiplying volts x amps x hours, giving a figure in watt-hours (in this case 3.6 x 0.8 x 1 = 2.88 watt-hr). To charge it in 10 seconds, all that energy would need to be delivered within the 10 seconds, which is a sixth of a minute, or a 360th of an hour. So the charging current would need to be 0.8 x 360 = 288 amps, not counting any efficiency losses in the form of heat.

What’s the big deal about pumping out 288 amps? Ohm’s law gives some idea. To push 288 amps through a complete circuit of one ohm (this includes the internal resistance of the battery), you would need to apply 288 volts, with a resulting power consumption of 288 squared, or just under 83,000 watts. That kind of current is more suitable for an industrial arc welder than a household battery charger. Even if the resistance can be made smaller, the benefit is only linear. To compare, my laptop, which dissipates 65 watts over several square inches, gets uncomfortably hot. Or see how long you can hold your hand on a lit 100 watt incandescent bulb. I can’t imagine packing that much energy into a “small” battery. It’s also hard to imagine a safe charging circuit that uses voltages that much above the nominal voltage of the battery.

So professor Ceder’s breakthrough looks great, and probably will be in iPods in a few years, but take the media coverage with a large grain of salt.

-m

Great picture too–love the closed laptop. -m

Take these calendars, and do invite

All your life

You are only waiting for this email to arrive

More collected Geek Thoughts at http://geekthoughts.info/.

P.S. Got a better one? Post it. -m

Overall, though, I’m enjoying the challenge, even if my postings are conspicuously short. :-) -m

I’m going through much the same now. Moments ago I changed my keyboard layout to dvorak. Why? I type alot. Variety helps keep carpal tunnel at bay. And a few mental flexibility exercises definitely won’t hurt. (I’ll keep using qwerty at work.) Some observations:

• “the” is really easy to type. It just flows out.
• OSX has a key mapping that preserves qwerty layout when the cmd key is down–useful for muscle memory on cut, paste, open, close, tab, etc.
• Expect more typos the next few weeks. :-)
• ABCD is highly recommended.
• Pointer fingers go on “u” and “h”. Without the little bumps on the keys, it’s hard to get your hands oriented. Two small pieces of tape help.
• I’m getting better at this already.

-m

So Jerry (or whoever is on deck as CEO), you should probably look into this mobile thing and see what’s up with leadership there and whether anything is salvageable… -m

Test successful.

If you don’t have your cable/DSL modem an router on a UPS, maybe now is time to consider it? -m

WIth this, I plan to turn off my landline, to the tune of about $35 a month, and by not using our mobile phones for so much long distance, reduce the calling plan for another $40 a month. The one-time cost for the box set me back about $231, so I will be even in just over 3 months. (Only recently, these things were retailing for $599.)

How do these guys stay in business? I’ll write more about this too, but the short story is that bandwidth is really, really cheap, monopolistic efforts of telecom companies notwithstanding.

So far I’m really happy with it. The online Ooma Lounge isn’t as good as Vonage’s system–for one thing, you can only see voicemails, not any kind of call logs. But the features that are there Just Work. The documentation is short and simple but thorough. Setup was a breeze.

Have you tried Ooma? Comment below. -m

Control over a million computers and can deliver over a hundred billion advertisements per day.

However, “don’t be evil” is not a part of this particular platform’s strategy… -m