Archive for June, 2008

This is a DIY project waiting to happen.

The combusting stick of wood you see in the picture to the right is brought to you by the guys at MIT. They’ve come up with an ingenious, very inexpensive way to capture solar energy. They’ve built a parabolic dish out of cheap alumnium tubing and lined it with cheap flexible mirror. This creates a focal point that when pointed at the sun gets extremely hot, concentrating the sunlight by a factor of 1,000. Think of melting steal, and you’re about right.

At the focal point of the dish, they’ve run a coil of metal tubing with water running through it. The water gets flash boiled, creating steam. This steam can be used for whatever you need: heat, cooling, electricity, sauna…

Video, Pictures, and the original story.

I’d love to see this hooked up to the Green Steam Engine, which is a small, easy to build steam engine that can be easily hooked up to an electric generator.

My sincere apologies to my mother, who was holding out for a girl after already having 6 male grandchildren, but it looks like she’ll be having lucky number 7, because we’re having another boy!

Amy’s only 14 weeks along right now, so we weren’t scheduled to get an ultrasound for another month or so.  However, it seems events have transpired to allow us to find out sooner than expected.  Early Wednesday morning around 3:00 am Amy woke up with some slight bleeding, which to any expecting woman is definitely not a good thing.  We got hold of the on-call doctor who calmed our nerves a little bit, but still made sure we came in early that morning to check things out.  They did an ultrasound to make sure the baby was moving, and he definitely was!  He was stretching and kicking and smiling… not to mention showing off his wobbly bits.

So we found out early.  We haven’t quite decided on names yet, but we’re close.