Dyson's Digital Motor

 Dyson, the vacuum company, came out with a digital motor. As an electrician, and worse, a nerd, that grips my attention. Digital, they said!

Well, everything nowadays is bragging about being 'digital'. It's most often used as a marketing thing, along with organic, green, and environmentally friendly. Digital rarely means digital. Sound is analog, there is no digital speaker or headphones, even though they are all labeled digital nowadays.

Sound and speakers work by vibrating at a variable pitch and speed, which is, by definition, analog. Digital is either all on or off.

But there is such a thing as digital motors. Computer fans use them all the time, so I was intrigued. I wanted to know more.

Their 'breakthrough' was to simply replace the rotor coils (part that spins) with permanent magnets and use transistors to manipulate the stator coils (stationary). Hardly a breakthrough in my book.

The advantages were that it didn't waste energy with friction from the brushes, which is true. The brushes are what wears out first and the main point of energy loss with inexpensive electric motors. The fan motor in my car, that I blogged about fixing with whittled down D batteries, had worn out its brushes after only 20 years of service! It uses permanent magnets too, but the typical design is to put the permanent magnets in the stator and use electric magnets in the rotor, and do all the fancy switching with cheap brushes.

But using permanent magnets has a disadvantage too. Permanent magnets are expensive and very weak in comparison to their electric counterparts. But it got me thinking and I pulled an old design out of my highschool past. Back then, I couldn't figure out the switching aspects of it (which Dyson does with transistors). But then, I was just in highschool and had forgotten all about it by now.

HD Crashed...

Sucks to be me, sometimes. My HD crashed, but my paranoid mind had backed up everything in triplicate. I lost nothing, but time.

Windows XP has been running on my laptop now for three years. That's the longest I've ever kept an operating system on a computer. My usual pattern is to keep Windows on the system for 6 months to a year at most before reformatting it, then reinstalling everything. This, of course, is because Windows has what I call system bloat. It slowly develops more and more problems until they bloat into something unbearable and I finally delete everything and reinstall. Well, since this NEC has a spontaneous combustion problem (It burned four times since I got it in 2003) and takes a full 8 hours to reinstall (most aggravating too!), I never bothered.

Well, one day it refused to boot. Argh!!

But, because I use partitions and a flash port for everything important, nothing substantial was lost. Just the operating system partition crashed. Set back... so far.

Freaky Vindication...

Ok, last night on 20/20 they had a special on SuperFreakOnomics. Now that John Stossel has been fired/quit, it's rare that I will even watch a 20/20. Even when he was on 20/20, I would just watch the opening five minute to see if he was going to have a segment, and, if he didn't have a segment that night, I'd watch something else.

Now, I loved the Freakonomics when it was on, that was pure John stuff. So I tuned in.

About midway through the episode, they produced a cure for hurricanes. That's right, a cure for hurricanes. Ok, even if implemented, it wouldn't prevent a hurricane, but it would drop it from a category 5 to a cat 4 or 3. That's significant. And the cost was reasonable.

The secret? Well, they position hundreds of buoys around the gulf and the coast. These buoys each have a wave-powered pump that pushes the warm surface water down a few hundred feet where it cools and slowly returns. This drops the surface temperature a few degrees and takes most of the energy out of the storm when it passes over the array of buoys.

It was such a good idea that Bill Gates bought the patent!

Vindication. Well over a year ago, perhaps even as early as 2003, I sent an email to NASA suggesting that they do something very similar. Almost identical in consept. They laughed at what Bill Gates and this little company went for. But, I did use it in at least two books.

I loved SuperFreakOnomics and their guiding principle that most solutions to the really tough problems come from simple, inexpensive answers. They're never these huge, big government-knows-best, top down ideas. They're always simple things like buoys and pumps.

I needed that little slice of validation. It came at just the right time.

Trains, taxes, and other forms of slavery...

I watched something on PBS last night that hasn't left me yet.

You're in the front of a runaway train, hand on the switch. You've already done everything you can think of to stop it, but it's all too late. Ahead of you are four workers, stuck in the tunnel. They can't escape. If you do nothing, they will all die.

But, under your hand is the switch. You can divert the train to another track, where there is only one worker.

What do you do?

What do you do?

What if you knew the lone worker, but the other four were strangers. Does that change the math?

What if the lone worker was a woman? A baby in a stroller?

What if the four were all very old, or had brain cancer and only a year to live?

If you believed the right thing to do was kill the one for the sake of the four, but changed your mind when the variables adjusted, are you second guessing your convictions or your morals now?

When I first pondered this, really pondered it. . . hmm. . .

When I was in high school, I think I would have mowed over a friend without giving it a second thought. That's the position of well over 90% of the population, by the way. But things change as you get older.

Today, I doubt I could target one person for the sake of others. I think it's the action of deliberately targeting one person that I can't morally live with. The switch is too much like pulling a trigger, where the four is more like the angst of waiting for a grenade to go off that someone else had tossed. IE, morally, to me, the four deaths are not because of something I did, but something I didn't do. But the one death is a direct consequence of my actions.

Sounds conflicted and confusing, I know. That's nothing compared to the contradicting voices in my head.

Remind you of a new movie about receiving a million dollars for pushing a button that kills someone?

Now, apply it to the ticking time-bomb / torture issue.

Is it moral to torture, or even kill one person to save the life of others?

Unlike the train, where everyone is assumed to be innocent, torturing for information assumes that a preponderance of evidence links the person who will be harmed to a horrendous future terrorist act. We can assume that this person is most likely a bad guy. Since getting information from a dead person is highly unlikely, we can also assume that his life is never intentionally in danger.

Is torturing acceptable? And if it is, how does that math match up with the train argument?

Back to torture again. Would it be ok to torture an innocent child, the mastermind's son or daughter, just to get the information that saved dozens?

After pondering, I would have to say that torturing is regrettable, but ok to some degree. But, at the same time, it is something that I couldn't personally do. So, morally, at my core, I know it's wrong. But, even in this sentence, I somehow still rationalized it. But this should in no way be confused with torturing for the amusement of others, the way Saddam Hussein did it.

Is stealing wrong?

Let's start with the cliché example. If you're starving, is it ok to steal food from WalMart?

Is it ok to steal a bag of food from someone after they paid for it and are trying to load their car in the WalMart parkinglot? What if they had a baby in the backseat? What if they were old or handicapped? Is it easier to steal from someone getting into a broken-down Ford, or a Hummer?

Is it ok to steal money from someone at an ATM, if you later buy food with it?

Now, what if you hired a third party to do the theft for you. Is it still theft? What if that third party split the stolen money with you; which of you, if any, is the thief? Does having someone else do the confiscation make the recipient less culpable? What if we call that third party the IRS?

They had an experiment with an honor jar. Everyone is familiar with the honor jar system. Someone in the company puts a jar next to the coffee machine that says $0.20 a cup, one by the fridge that says $0.25 for soda, etc. Nobody watches over the jar and everyone is expected to make their own change and help themselves. Generally, it works fine IF all the employees know (and like) the person who manages it. Generally, that person does all the shopping and restocking on their own time and, it's assumed, would have to make up the difference. The jar has a face, if you will. And when people can personalize the victim, they have difficulty stealing from the jar.

But when the jar is managed by 'the company' and has the company's money, it's usually robbed blind within a week. It's easy to have the IRS to steal from nameless, faceless others, even if you would never steal from your neighbors. It's ok to have someone tortured, as long as you don't have to do it. And it's ok to kill one person if it saves four others. . .

I think my head will be stuck on such things for some time to come.

Sometimes my thoughts get the best of me.

Chicken?!?

Today, my sister made chicken.

I'll say it again, my sister made chicken.

Oh, wait, I forgot something. . . she's a vegetarian.

And, ok, one more thing. It wasn't a real chicken either.

I pick in her, kiddingly mostly, about her new religion of vegetarianism. I kid, but she really has been able to come up with some truly spectacular meals with no meat, milk, or cheese.

I know! How do you make anything that tastes good without cheese? But, somehow, she does.

Anyway, back to the chicken that isn't chicken.

It started as a flour made out of soybeans. She kneaded it for a few minutes, cut it into biscuits, then BOILed them in a sauce, like they were dumplings or something. Then, she dipped them in a batter and finished them off with some baking. And, believe it or not, it tasted reasonably close to. . . and I hate to say this, chicken.

It even had the stringy, fiber-like muscles you see in chicken. But, seeing them as boiling biscuits, that must have been what would have been the flakes in a flaky biscuit.

I don't know if I buy all the arguments of her new 'religion', but the chicken-flour-biscuits are killer! Shape them as breadsticks and dip them in sauce. . . . Oh, yeah. . .  ( drooling: )