Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Energy Storage is a means to smooth out intermittent power supplies or demands. It lets you shift the power from one time period to another. It lets you create a distribution system which sized for average load rather than peak load. The more isolated your power system the more you need all these. The electric power industry calls isolated systems island grids.

The book I’m reading describes an island with abundant power, via hydro, but lousy power due to local industry’s intermittent and high power requirements. So lousy that they were importing fuel to run generators just to raise that quality. In that case fly wheels were the solution. There are a few subway systems that take the power spikes from breaking trains and store them into flywheels to put back into the system when the next train starts up. There’s a huge flywheel at a mine in Alaska that buffers 5 megawatts of power every few minutes as a drag line they have jerks about.

Thinking about power spikes got be thinking about extreme cases. That’s natural for me since I presume that most sources of supply and demand have a very skewed distribution. For example the book includes an example of capturing power spikes from high wind gusts (which are quite skewed) by using fly wheels on an island off the coast of Japan. I wonder how large a spike that system can grab before it let’s it pass. Presumably it isn’t designed to absorb abundant energy from the few huge storms the island probably experiences every year. So there are power spikes the system is designed to survive rather than harvest. Which given the nature of highly skewed distributions means that a lot of the power goes untapped. Your typical wind power system harvests only the long tail of the wind, but not the elite wind.

So I got to wondering about lightning strikes. There is some great nutter material on the web about that. For example at the always amusing site “half bakery” there is a suggestion to running the lightning into an underground cavern and using it to melt tungsten. I love all these crazy ideas; particularly one that mix together other enthusiasms: kites, space elevators, or super conductors.

Poking around looking at these amusing ideas led me to this outrageous gimmick: a solution to an age old problem, the tendency for lightning to never strike twice in the same place.  Lightning rockets! You shoot a rocket into the storm trailing behind it either a wire or a conductive smoke trail. That’s fun to think about, but it’s much more fun to watch the short video!.

“… man … was killed and his wife injured when a tornado rolled their double-wide mobile home …. tornado swept up a cow and carried it close to a mile.  Its owner says the animal was uninjured. …”

Cows and double-wides.

This is horrible. Tropical Cyclone Sidr is forecast to hit the low lying and extremely densely populated regions of Bangladesh. The track shown at right will bring the worst, right side, of the storm over the area. The storm is currently a category 4, and is forecast to weaken a bit before striking.

This is an amazingly densely populated region. The next map shows the low lying areas in reds, and those over 10 meters above sea level in green. The deepest colored areas have over a thousand people per square kilometer. Dhaka, the urban center here, holds 12 million people.
This next chart shows the forecasted storm surge, i.e. the water pushed in front of the storm. It’s small but the only comfort to be had is the storm surge isn’t 10 meters, but only 4-5.

This is extremely similar to the cyclone in 1970 that killed a half a million people, lead to a civil war, and the founding of Bangladesh (formerly part of Pakistan).

Finally this next map shows the population of West Bengal, the area of India that borders Bangladesh. This area includes Kolkata, the planet’s eight largest urban area (14 Million people).  The next map is like the the one above, but for West Bengal, with the outlined area showing Kolkata.

I think I’ve found the most evil journal in the university library. The Journal of Consumer Research is marketing’s DARPA, the place where new weapons in are developed for sales and marketing. There are plenty of self help airplane books for salesmen, like Sales Closing for Dummies, or Sig Ziglar’s Secrets of Closing the Sale. What you get over in the Journal of Consumer Research is guys in white coats throwing around psychology jargon like mad scientists. For example: “Disruption should impede closure and motivate consumers high in NFCC to seek clarifying information that facilitates the ablity to reach closure quickly.”

The article that drew me in was on a little trick of the trade known as DTR, or Disrupt and Reframe. This gimmick works by first confusing the buyer and then re framing it to be less confusing. For example:

“The price of these note cards is 300 pennies.” This disruption was followed by the reframing: “That’s $3. It’s a bargain.” .. compliance rates ranged from 65% to 90% … compared to only 25% to 50% …”

While I love the use of the word “compliance” the take away is that 2-3 times more junk get’s sold if you bewilder your customers.

That mnemonic above NFCC refers to a trait known as need for cognitive closure. People with very high or very low NFCC are a bit rash. Folks with very high NFCC will rush to pin an explanation to a mystery; and then cling tightly to it going forward. Folks with very low NFCC leave everything open to further assessment.

It is but one of a slew of traits that psychologists have tests to measure, IQ probably being the most famous. The traits give rise to metrics, and the metrics can then be used to forecast patterns of behavior. It’s usually less accurate than predicting the weather with a barometer, but certainly more accurate than throwing dice. Puzzling out new metrics like this is one of the ways the field of psychology moves forward. It’s good if the metrics are independent much the way wind and temperature are better than wind and wind-chill. So it is standard practice to see if metric A is correlated with metric B. For example NFCC is not highly correlated with intelligence.

The psychologist, not a marketing guy, that invented NFCC has two other metrics that I found thought provoking. He points out that when solving a problem you can assess your options or you can get down to work. Presumably for a high stakes problem you’d be well advised do lots of both, but he suspects that people don’t. So he sought out a metric that would score people’s tendency to assess; and a second metric that would score their tendency to act.

One of the reasons that DTR works is that it exhausts the buyer’s willingness to assess the purchases, and that helps to move him into the acting phase.

To me the interesting thing about all this is that is suggests that many other persuasion techniques might be better framed into these terms. For example the usual explanation for why vendors like prices like $1.97 is that innumerate buyers think ‘Ah, a dollar” rather than “Ah, two dollars,” discussed here (pdf). I, now, think that’s wrong. The functional purpose of that pricing technique is to inflict a DTR attack on the buyer.

This chart show various possible solutions to a problem.  If you can create energy in one location how do you store it?  For example you might charge up a battery or spin up a fly wheel.

The upper right corner is suggestive of how dense and hot fuels are, i.e. oil and it’s friends.  But it’s hard to make an entire energy cycle out of them.

This post doesn’t really have point.  Just something I’ve been thinking about.  Triggered, to a degree, by discovering that natural gas is cheaper than pellets for your pellet stove and the associated  fact that people heat with corn in parts of the midwest.

I lifted that out of this presentation (pdf).