Spudtater's Journal

Just spotted this beastie oot 'n aboot in Rosyth town centre. It was trying, and failing, to navigate a roundabout. Poor fail bus, I still love you.

Edit: BBC video of the bus in action.

Back in May 2003, an article was published in Discover magazine that seemed to many to be as naïvely optimistic as cold fusion. A company called Changing World Technologies claimed to be able to solve the problem of excess garbage, oil shortages and global warming in one fell swoop. How? By creating a chemical process that mimics the natural process of oil production, and takes a fraction of the time.

It would mean turning practically any garbage into oil, including farm waste, plastics, paper, sewage... even medical waste! The by-products apparently make an excellent fertiliser. And the fact that no oil comes out of the ground means that it would be carbon-neutral, hence the global warming claim.

Their process, which they call "Thermal Polymerisation", has been tried before in various guises, but CWT is the first company that claims to have passed the break-even point — when the amount of energy in the oil produced outweighs the energy taken to run the conversion process.

I must have missed this the first time round (I'm sure I would have remembered an article like that!), but apparently it's becoming news again. In the intervening time, the company has built a plant (which had more than a few teething troubles), struggled to get oil subsidies, and has been fighting with the government over odour emissions (eww!). But Bush's new renewable energy policies, and the rise in prices of oil from traditional sources, means that the oil produced is now becoming competitive.

Is this really the panacea it claims to be? Can it solve the energy crisis? Or is it, as some claim, bogus; a company running not so much on giblets as on hype and mumbo-jumbo? I have no idea. What are your opinions?

A shortened version of the original article, written June 8, 2003
The original article, text-only version, written May 2003
A skeptic's opinion, written 9 April 2005
Thermal depolymerization on Wikipedia
An update from Discover magazine, written April 2006

The KEO programme is a volunteer-funded project that aims to send a satelite, bearing messages encoded on DVD, out into space. In 50,000 years' time the satelite will (if all goes well) return to earth, where an Aurora Borealis-like effect will attract the attention of the future population of Earth to its re-entry.

It's an ambitious project, but it seems just about feasible.

It will have on it an encyclopaedian collection of knowledge dubbed a "contemporary Library of Alexandria", as well as a drop of human blood, a sample of air, sea water and earth, photographs of people from all cultures, and several other items.

Most interesting, however, is its collection of messages; it aims to include a message from every person on earth, giving each a space of up to 6000 characters to express whatever they like, without any censorship. Including you. (N.B. they do read the messages and publish the ones that they like on their website, although you don't have to give your name.)

Do you want to send a message to people 50,000 years in the future?
If so, what will you write about?

You've got a while to think about what to write; they don't intend to finish collecting messages until December 31st, 2006, with the satelite due to be launched in 2007 or 2008.