What would you do with $700,000,000,000?  Well, you could stave off the recession for a few months, but it seems congress didn’t buy into that.  But let’s put this into perspective.  Do you have any idea what you could do with seven hundred billion dollars?  Here’s an idea: solve green energy.

I know, you say, you can’t solve a difficult problem just by throwing money at it.  But my point is, you can solve a difficult problem by throwing money and a million scientists at it.  Seriously.  Back of the envelope:

1 - Hire one million scientists and engineers full time for a few years, and ask them to solve green energy.  Tell them to form groups and share ideas however they like.  Plan on spending about $390 billion here.

2 - To keep them from slacking off, tell them you’ll pick the top 1000 most promising projects after a few years and give them an additional one hundred million dollars funding each for a second phase.

3 - To keep the people in phase 2 from slacking off, tell them you’ll pick the top 100 most promising projects after another few years for an additional one billion dollars funding each for a third phase.

4 - To keep the people in phase 3 from slacking off, tell them the top 10 out of those projects will be selected after ten years or so for a further ten billion dollars funding each for a final phase.  This should be enough for the actual build-out of the technology.  The LHC cost less than that.

You’d even have enough money left over to give the most successful project at the end a ten billion dollar bonus.

The money you’d make back with the technology would be many times the original investment, and the trade it would generate would likely rescue the economy big time.  Speaking of the economy, the companies you’d steal the scientists from are probably considering layoffs anyway, so it won’t have much short-term negative impact.  Also, you don’t need to borrow the full amount at the beginning, since the projects are funded in phases.  This is a doable idea if you’re actually planning to invest $700,000,000,000 into something useful, as opposed to just handing it over to your buddies.

Come on, people, this is just the first thing off the top of my head.  Can’t we get anyone to think more than a few months ahead around here?

I have only witnessed a few people in the act of littering, and those I have witnessed fall into two categories. The first was a man who was crazy. He was walking down the street talking to himself, and simply dropped the (empty?) grocery bag he was carrying. I can understand this, because this man clearly had no idea where he was, let alone where the nearest recycling bin was located. The other people I have seen litter were all punk kids, trying to impress their friends. I can understand the urge and so-called coolness of defying authority for the sake of defying authority, but littering is one of those things that is not about authority. It’s about the fricking environment. Under no circumstances is this kind of littering not completely stupid. There must also be innumerable litterers out there who do not fall into any category.

It could be helpful to adopt better recycling programs, like some other countries have, that make it easier for people to recycle. But littering is not caused by lack of recycling. Littering is, in my judgment, an unsolvable problem.

Am I wrong? How to solve it?

[update]

Some more details: The tubes shown in the pic each yield about 5 grams of ethanol per day. Fu expects improvements to this yield after more research into the process. He also talked about setting up kiloliter-sized tanks of this stuff for larger output.

[speculations]

5 grams of ethanol contains about 134 kilojoules of energy. If we had solar panels instead, assuming about 8 kWh/m^2/day, and 40% efficient solar panels, we would need about 116 square centimeters of solar panel to get the same yield (an 11 cm x 11 cm patch would do). I would estimate that Fu’s process is therefore less than one order of magnitude less efficient than the best solar cells at the moment. That’s not shabby, considering that the energy is stored in a fuel instead of a (costly) battery. Deeper vats of the stuff would mean more sunlight gets absorbed by the cyanobacteria, so the kiloliter tanks would probably have much better efficiency.

I got to see Chroino live at Wired NextFest. That’s the male type on the left, and the female type on the right. Chroino can strut, do yoga poses, and kick a ball with quite some grace. The female type does her little turn on the catwalk. They have no exposed wires, weigh less than a kilogram, and look just like a character out of an anime movie. They were developed entirely by Tomotaka Takahashi, who also ran the demo at the show. Check out the video:

Everyone loves the keepon! Seriously. I went to see the keepons at Wired NextFest. You may have seen the original youtube. While taking this photo, I overheard a grown man say “he’s adorable!” The developers hope to have keepons on store shelves someday, as soon as they can get the costs down. Take a look at the video: