Dark Flow and a Soft Radio Network

To the dark matter and dark energy mysteries, we can now add dark flow...

NASA’s Sasha Kashlinsky discovered a twenty degree patch of sky between Centaurus and Vela to which 700 X-ray clusters are being pulled at 611 miles per second. The significance of this is that it contradicts predictions that large-scale motion should show no preferred direction and that the motions should decrease at ever increasing distances. Kashlinsky posits that the source of the pull is "outside the currently observable universe".

I mention this because this gives us a patch of sky to which we can point our software-defined radios and perhaps observe something interesting.

The limitation is that our radios have to either be space-borne or in the Southern Hemisphere to get in on the action. Also this "dark flow' patch occurs out of the range of the Ukrainian radio telescope data visualized in a previous post:

It is my hope to create a network of Orbs - Soft Radios that can cooperate to locate celestial signals. Orbs are wide-band radios that downlink to the web using TCP/IP 802.11 protocols. Orbs talk to each other to using ham, astronomy, and ISM bands in real time. Their locations in space time is computed using GPS-disciplined internal oscillators.

References

Game Theory: Socialism vs. Capitalism: The Hybrid Strategy

It always pays to articulate the obvious. Sometimes it pays to articulate the subtle. I am going to talk about Cooperation vs. Competition. About Socialism vs. Capitalism. About game theory.

You decide if my points have merit. If there is fallacy in my metaphor, please identify it. Please save me from even one more minute of erroneous thinking, because life is short. Let's begin.

I like teaching people to do new things. I like physical education because it keeps people healthy. My belief is, that if people are healthy, they will be happier. I like to make people happy. That is who I am. Who are you?

I was teaching someone to play badminton. I like badminton because it combines agility, alertness, quickness and stamina.

The birdie can absorb as much power as a strong person can generate, producing a pop when the birdie goes supersonic. But a person of small stature can also excel. The physics of the game, “levels the playing field”.

Thus this innocent and interesting game can be enjoyed by a diverse group of people. That is another thing about who I am. I advocate things that include diverse groups of people. What do you advocate?

I can discuss the physics of the game and the aerodynamics of the birdie, but that is irrelevant to my point so I won’t. What is critical about badminton is the way in which people interact and contribute to the achievement of the game.

One day I noticed that if a seasoned player faces a novice player, the novice quickly becomes discouraged. Unless they are able to participate in keeping the birdie going back and forth, the game isn’t fun. A self-important seasoned player might obtain some joy in dominating the newer player. But as newer player becomes discouraged the game stops, resulting in no benefit to either player.

Thus emerges our first principle:

“When players are unevenly matched, competition destroys the game.”

Now in terms of coaching, teaching or participating, there is another strategy one can take.

When players are unevenly matched, the responsibility of the stronger player  is to return the birdie such that the weaker player is guaranteed the possibility of returning it.

The consequence of this anti-competitive strategy is that the stronger player is now challenged to produce an exacting sort of shot, within the envelope of the weaker player’s skill. The weaker player now has the obligation to at least try to return this buffet platter of a shot. They are obligated to return the favor to the stronger player.

When this strategy is employed a very interesting thing happens. The stronger player begins to fatigue, because it takes more energy and more skill to deliver to the weaker player, this idealized shot, so that the game can continue.

If the game continues in the anti-competitive strategy, after awhile, it becomes the stronger player who withdraws because the demands of the game become so high. But the weaker player improves rapidly as a result of multiple successful returns.

Thus emerges our second principle:

“Anti-competition stresses the stronger player
while improving the weaker player”.

The game continues, but only for the duration of the stronger player's ability to endure.

I would say that these principles of competition and anti-competition should be obvious to everyone, but they were only obvious to me after fifty years of life, so perhaps not.

For the game to continue a new strategy MUST emerge. A strategy that takes the needs of both players into account. I call that strategy, the Hybrid Strategy. If you don’t already have it on the tip of your tongue, I will explain how it works.

Two players, a weaker and a stronger player start anti-competitively, enabling the game to be established, allowing the players to assess their position and skillset in the game. The weaker player becomes stronger and the stronger player (a measurable quantity by score…) eventually tires and calls for a strategy switch.

The players now engage the game in a competitive strategy. BUT, the players are now more evenly matched. The weaker player is now stronger, the stronger player is now tired. The game continues until the weaker player no longer wishes to participate, or the roles reverse from the weaker player becoming strong.

Now we have the third and most important principle:

"When both players consent to a strategy switch, the game continues."

The result? Improvement and value-added for both players. When either player does not consent to a strategy switch, the game ends.

Now in politics or government the metaphor can be applied as follows. Players can be Rich vs. Poor. Republican vs. Democrat. Brahman vs. Untouchable. High IQ vs. Low IQ. Strong vs. Weak. Coordinated vs. Clumsy. Citizen vs. Alien. Capitalist vs. Socialist Etc.

The hybrid strategy enriches everyone’s life to the fullest extent, and leads to the most important principle, “Reduction of Harm”. Reduction of Harm is a topic for another essay, but is quite useful in calculating those laws, ordinances and enforcements that are, in some global sense, best for society.

The selflessness of the hybrid strategy ends up benefiting both parties to the maximum degree.

We know this intuitively. How can we put it into practice?

Duals and Duels

Point 1: Maslow's Hierarchy

Point 2: Economica:

There was a movie, directed by Dr. Charles Venus, about economics. It featured flow charts showing goods moving from supplier to factory to customer - with money flowing the opposite direction. Credit and Debit, Electrons and Vacancies if you believe in the Solid State.

At the time, the critical necessities were Food, Clothing and Shelter. Which is great for a Cave Man living in the Stone Age. For those not living in solitary confinement an updated list is:

(Economic-Necessities

     Food Clothing Shelter Information

)

The last entry, information, implies communication, education, entertainment, PC's, TV's and cellphones.

Point 3 Duals and Duels:

ADC - DAC

The input to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is some measurable feature of the real world. The loudness of a moment in time perhaps. The output, quantized to a digital representation is a superposition of, "Yes, I heard it", or, "No I didn't".

A digital-to-analog converter does the opposite. It converts a digital number to an analog signal.

A good way to test an ADC is to undo it with its inverse, the DAC. One compares the real world to the real world run through the ADC-DAC combination. If the measurements are the same, you have a perfect ADC and DAC.

One can make a similar remark about DAC-ADC combination.

The idea is this: One can test a thing using its dual. The dual of the ADC is the DAC and visa-versa.

I find this simple idea to be one of the most useful ones I know.

VTF-FTV

A similar argument applies to a voltage to frequency converter (VTF) and a frequency to voltage converter (FTV). These devices exist on integrated circuit chips. The same chip can be run one direction to be a VTF and the other to be an FTV. It is a profound thing to convert a signal in the time domain, to a signal in the frequency domain. Each representation has its strengths and weaknesses. Moving a signal into the frequency domain makes some things, like filtering, very easy to understand.

HW-SW

Hardware (HW) and Software (SW) aren't really duals in the sense of the other examples. I have a friend who likes to move functions into software. I would like to see more things move into hardware. So we duel, in a friendly way of course. But you may be getting an idea here and I will leave you to that way of thinking.

Reading Past the End: The Knotted Universe

While completing a lecture I stumbled upon Robert Scharein's thesis:

http://knotplot.com/thesis/thesis_letter.pdf

which along with its companion software:

http://knotplot.com/

enables one to generate knots:

This is knot the end. Think of milk drops. Think of cymbals. Think of resonating loops or 'strings' as in Brian Greene and String Theory. Can a string ring in different modes? Can a knotted string be ringing in different modes? Two such modes, orthogonal?

I can build a circuit or structure that will ring in several modes. But can a circuit be knotted? A loop antenna exists at the electron level and at the macro level. Such loops communicate by radiating and receiving photons. Knotted fields of energy. Perhaps deeper issues in physics, space-time and dimensionality are connected via knots.

Knots appear in organic chemistry. Left-handed glucose gives cells energy. Right-handed glucose is useless, unless you live in a world that is the mirror image of our own.

Knots appear in DNA storage on histone coils where multiple levels of recursion enable a six foot strand in each cell.

Proteins that fold correctly function properly. There are protein folding diseases. BSE (Mad Cow), Alzheimer's, Huntington's Chorea and even cataracts.

The issues of three dimensional correctness are covered with amazing clarity and brevity in this knot thesis. Knots are symbols with structure and meaning, flying all around us.

There exist symbolic algebra, symbolic geometry and symbolic topology.

Understanding how the three relate will make life easier for the implementers and students of same. Thus a rudimentary understanding of them is essential in the set of thinking primitives we require. 

Delay Discounting Measures Operational Amplifier Gain

As a systems engineer and professional mathematician, I sometimes notice two completely different fields are governed by the same model, equations, or phenomenology. One might never guess that the decomposition of ammonia gas over a platinum screen, has the same underlying equations as freefall from an airplane. This observation is unlikely unless one is exposed to both contexts and happens to also know the fundamental mathematics. By coincidence or luck, sometimes one stumbles into seeing the similarity.

Recently I observed this as a test subject in a medical psychology experiment called "delay discounting". 

These studies characterize addictive behavior by attempting to measure a person's tendency towards impulsiveness and control of same. Impulsiveness is quantified by asking the test subject questions like, "Would you rather have $50 now, or $100 in a week?", on a sliding scale where the impulsive person will take anything in the here and now, rather than pie in the sky after some interval of time. Delay discounting behavior is a useful window into addictive and other human behaviors. Consider the show Survivor, where the contestants will pay $500 for a hamburger if they can have it right now, even if it means risking a million dollars in a few days.

In delay discounting there are four categories of questions. Gain and loss versus time, like the question above, and gain and loss versus certainty of reward.

The stunning (to me at least) observation is that after a subject answers these questions, they have effectively calibrated the gain curves on four specific operational amplifiers.

Amplifiers take small signals as inputs, and subject to variables like feedback, gain setting, and stability, produce large signals as outputs. There is a saying in electrical engineering that, "Amplifiers Oscillate and Oscillators Amplify". One may extend that saying to the world of digital filters to say, "Filters Amplify and Amplifiers Filter".

Without going into an incredibly boring tirade, let me just provide a few assertions that apply to the amplifier model.

1) Clusters of neurons sum their inputs to produce an overall action, and this is similar to amplifying a small input to produce a large output.
2) Different clusters of neurons, responsible for different activities, have different gain settings. The gain settings of these clusters can be imaged using techniques like fMRI and PET.
3) After measuring an individual's gain curves, one could actually predict (the thesis of the delay-discounting world) their propensity to engage in various addictive behaviors.
4) One an individual is characterized, one could simulate the behavior of that person with an analog or digital amplifier.
5) One could create an electronic implant to control addictive behaviors in willing individuals that are afflicted. (Implants in the unwilling are beyond the modest scope of this note!)

Addictive behaviors have a wide range of expression and involve substance and non-substance stimuli (gambling for instance). Basal ganglia disorders like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders or OCD,  may also involve the brain centers connected to addition.

Whether addictive disorders are architectural from brain morphology, neurochemical from nerve cell receptor distribution, or both, I do not know. What I do know is that the amplifier model can be very useful for characterizing both the likelihood and the expression of the behavior in individuals for which the measurements have been properly made.

In that sense, delay discounting measurements provide what engineers call, "A Characterization of the Amplifier".
 
This would certainly seem a useful model for characterizing behavior, in my mind at least.




Ref: Eisenberg et al. Behavioral and Brain Functions 2007 3:2   doi:10.1186/1744-9081-3-2

Boosting the Shuttle to Geosynchronous Orbit

Figure Created Using Geometry Expressions™

The Space Shuttle could (theoretically) be boosted to Geosynchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) using a Hohmann Transfer Orbit. It would require two burns. The first burn would increase the speed of the shuttle from 7.62 km/sec to 10.0 km/sec. After entering the transfer ellipse 5.3 hours would elapse until the second burn was necessary to circularize the orbit. Otherwise the shuttle would stay in an elliptical orbit. This second burn would produce a change in velocity of 1.45 km/sec, leaving the shuttle in GEO orbiting at 3 km/sec at a fixed point over the Earth's surface. The beauty of these two burns is that they are both tangent to the orbits, in opposite directions, and use the minimum amount of fuel.

For verification purposes I have included links to the two programs used for this analysis. It is important when driving spaceships to have consensus before turning on the motor.

Appendix: Calculations in wxMaxima™

Tracking the 100 Brighest Satellites

Robert Simpson created this Google Earth database for the 100 brightest satellites using the NORAD Two Line Element database. This database updates with changes in spacecraft position, which is useful. For FallingStar meteor-tracking work the following extensions would be useful:

1) Add trajectory paths.

2) Merge with NAVSPACESPUR so we can listen to crossings.

3) Add more satellites and sort these by type for amateur radio operations.

4) Add more information to placard display when spacecraft are selected.

Hamtrak - Excerpt from Work In Progress

Added the ability to annotate RF sources streamed from data capture.

Lane Lickers Criterium - Sep 19, 2009

(click images to enlarge)

Meet at Cook's Landing, Ride to ADEQ Loop, Have Fun!

Radio Light -

I’ve got hamtrak, my communications monitoring program, running more reliably. It listens on my soft radio and plots pins in Google Earth as amateur radio contacts occur. I wanted to know if there was bias in the reception I was getting due to geographic, antenna or electronic factors. I let it run for 11 hours. Then I compared the picture it produced with US population as seen from space:




For this small sample, the visual correlation appears representative.

A Solution to the North Rising Sun

Lately as I ride across the pedestrian bridge at sunrise, I have noticed the sun has been rising in the north. Having been informed that the always rises in the east, I found this perplexing. The trouble turns out to be the accumulation of two interesting factors.

1) The pedestrian bridge does not head due north, it is rotated 15 degrees towards the east. Picture:

So believing the bridge to be north-south was problem one.

2) The sun does not rise in the east. Tomorrow (9/4/2009) it rises exactly 9 degrees north of east. But back in July when I was first having the problem, it was rising 28 degrees north of east. As late as August 4, it was 21.4 degrees north of east. Moreover just before sunup, the sun is another couple of degrees north of east, when its light is beginning to fan out across the sky.

3) Accounting for the early light makes 30 degrees north + 15 degrees of bridge rotation, so the sun APPEARS to be rising at 45 degrees north of due east and that surely looked wrong. I noted this out fearing some sort of cosmological malfunction of my brain or dire state of misinformedness.

4) The sun does not rise in the east, it rises in the north east, in the summer and the south east in the winter. This is paradoxical since the winter sun rides lower in the southern sky as the northern hemisphere tilts further away from it. It rises in the east only one day of the year. This year that will be September 23 at 7 am CDT, a day after the equinox. After this the sun heads south of east for its rising reaching a of maximum southness of east of 28.6 degrees around the solstice, December 21.

5) Riding on the bridge, the sun will appear to rise in the east on Halloween morning at 7:15 am in a suitable tribute to my distress. The next day we reset our clocks introducing a new kind of biological confusion.

A Short Trek to DNA Cutter M87

Tonight I was watching the city of my old workplace, JPL, burn.

While doing so I ran across UCLA data on Messier object M87, a galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole.


I opened a certain Google Earth database built from the Ukrainian observations and found out that, indeed, this RF source is one of the brightest in the universe.

But for the first time I had a possible name for bright source GR1228... could it be M87?!


M87 is very interesting because it contains a spinning black hole that is the mass of six billion of our suns, diversely radiant in frequency and direction. It has been observed at frequencies from as low 16.7 MHz, through microwave and optical frequencies, up to gamma ray frequencies. Extremely wide band radiation. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that it is a strong cosmic ray emitter as well. As such it represents a "DNA cutter". M87 gamma rays cause the emission of ultraviolet light when the upper atmosphere of Earth is impacted.

I needed to make sure that G1228 was M87, so I did some calculations and found a discrepancy between the M87's position in Google Sky and its position in the Ukrainian radio telescope database:


Now M87 has neighbors and GR1228 has neighbors, but none are so bright in the radio spectrum.



For the time being I will assume that some kind of atmospheric refraction is at work and for pointing purposes M87 is a good starting point for listening to GR1228.

I was most curious to know the current position of M87 relative to our daily experience, so I fired up Hallo Northern Sky, a free astronomy program that does time lapse on all known planets, stars, constellations and Messier objects. Running planet and star paths, past, present and future is just amazing.


Now M87 is on a line between Arcturus and Denebola. The “Star of Joy” Arcturus is the fourth brightest star in the sky and Denebola is only 36 light-years from earth.

Today for thirteen hours M87 is exposing us to its DNA splitting radiation, starting at 9:23 AM CDT this morning and ended at 10:37 PM on a route slightly more overhead than the sun.

M87 makes a good calibration standard for celestial radio location activities. I would like to know how fast M87 it is spinning, its strength as a cosmic ray source, what kind of antennae one might use to track it, and if it is truly the same object as GR1228.

A Fence In Space...

For the past couple of days I have been listening to satellite crossings from the Kickapoo Space Radar. NAVSPASUR is part of the North American “Fence” that operates along the a great circle fan crossing the US. The "post" in Kickapoo is at latitude 33.558, the second tack to the left of my home in Little Rock (the red tack). One can listen to objects crossing the radio fence using Stan Nelson’s station in Roswell, New Mexico. The broadcast is in real time.

For a real treat, the NASA Java Applet JTRACK-3D allows one to view which of 900+ satellites are in crossing the fence at any given time.






When a space borne object crosses the fence it chirps. With practice one can distinguish satellites from meteors. An audio chirp and no satellite, means a meteor or a satellite crossed that isn’t in the public database. I heard two while writing this sentence. Notice that the four platforms above all have orbital periods of around 100 minutes.

Platforms which cut obliquely like ORBCOMM FM 36 have a different audio signature than those with highly inclined polar orbits due to their longer dwell time in the RF swath. To some degree the chirps are unique and I wonder if a blind person could actually get to where they knew the satellite by its chirp. Locals will be happy to know that there is a “post” in the space fence at Red River Space Surveillance Station, AR, near Texarkana.

To Catch A Falling Star...

Using the light on one can see...

When any object reenters the earth’s atmosphere it gets hot. Orbital velocities are on the order of 17,000 feet per second, and much higher, and the angle of reentry determines the fate of the object. If it enters steeply, it gets hot more quickly, and the forces are much higher, on the order of hundreds of gees. These forces can break an object into smaller pieces which then proceed along their own paths. Peak heating (and deceleration) occur between 200,000 feet and 400,000 feet, the boundary of space. Objects in this region are supersonic, and become subsonic around 100,000 feet (give or take).

If an object enters at a shallow angle, it can skip off the atmosphere, much as a rock skips along a lake. It will often go back into orbit and reentry again, but at a slightly steeper angle until it encounters the fate of the first group. If it is going escape velocity, it can skip and then just go back out into another orbit, but this is not the most likely scenario.

When an object enters at an angle of between 2 and 8 degrees (give or take) it undergoes a smooth and controlled reentry, pulling only a few gees. All objects that encounter the atmosphere create a boundary layer of ionized gas. This does several things. First, it attempts to melt the skin of the object. Second it reflects RF internally. Third, and most importantly for us, the layer of ionized gas creates a streak in the sky that is an effective RF reflector. Because of the conical shape of this streak of ionized gas, the reflector does not reflect the same in all directions, the fancy word for this is anisotropic. It polarizes the RF, favoring some orientations and frequencies over others, just as your Polaroid sunglasses do.

Because this reflector is not the same size in all directions, it will favor some frequencies along its long axis and other frequencies along is short axis. One could (and may hams have) broadcast against this reflector and used it as a relay until the cloud of ionized gas cools and dissipates. But broadcasting against this reflector is not necessary, as the sky is full of signals that are already bouncing off of it, like VOR stations for example. When those signals are located using SDR, GPSDO and multilateration, they can be combined to create an image of the shape of the reflector.

This image of the shape of the reflector provides the trajectory of the reentering object. The size and frequency response of the reflector provides information about the size, position and velocity of the object. Combining this information can be used to determine where the object landed, by solving a differential equation called the initial value problem or IVP. IVP says find where the object is now, based on where you saw it last, and how it was moving.

This is how you catch a falling star.

EVCalc2: A Calculator for Electric Vehicles

Who has time to read? You can just download the calculator here.

If you want to know how it came about, the story goes like this: About four years into my engineering career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I got the chance to attend a series of lectures put on by Aerovironment at Caltech. Aerovironment was an early green company, maybe the first with a lineup of such heavy hitters. The lectures were entitled the "Sunraycer Lectures". They detailed how Aerovironment had won the Australian Solar Race in a car called "Sunraycer". Official sources say GM put almost two million dollars into the Sunraycer. The figure I heard was higher than that. The Sunraycer was a forerunner of the Impact. The ill-titled Impact was later renamed EV-1 and featured prominently in a movie called, "Who Killed The Electric Car". A system-by-system account of the Sunraycer was given by each of the principals: Peter Lissaman's shape, Al Cocconi's on drive train, Ray Morgan's body layout, Bart Hibbs material choices, etc. Several figures of note gave presentations on their subsystems. There was a systems engineer and a structures guy who did the "landing gear".

For a final, attendees got to do a design, I did a solar-to-steam car design intended to work around the low efficiency of solar cells and built a scale-model, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Peter, as in Dr. Lissaman - had a famous gliding airfoil named after him. He opened with a lecture about GMR method, which stood for Goal-Method-Result. I never met Sir Edmund Hillary, the first conquerer of Everest, but Peter looked and sounded like Sir Edmund to my imagination with his bold declarations and British accent. Lissaman had decided to fair the flow at the rear of the Sunraycer with "chines", discrete panels that would allow the solar cells to be attached without bending them excessively. Later designs would smooth the tail completely, but the shape was interesting and met the fabrication needs of the time. It also made for a car with an extremely low drag coefficient, 0.125, the lowest ever achieved at that time.
Al Cocconi was an electronic genius, cut from the cloth of Apple's Steve Wozniack, but by rumor, a bit more temperamental. He had figured out that high voltage AC made for a more efficient use of a battery's limited energy compared to the low voltage DC that characterized golf-cart techology of the time. He used power MOSFET's, control circuitry and a host of cool tricks to produce a drive train that was extremely energy efficient. He later invented the first hybrid, part of which was in a trailer towed behind his car, and worked on aircraft that can stay aloft for days, but those are tales for another day.
Ray Morgan was a down-to-earth engineer who talked about how Kevlar was better than Boron composites if you're in the ER after an experimental aircraft crash, because they "don't have to pick the boron splinters out of you one at a time". Ray could build stuff, in that enigmatic Mythbuster's sort of way. He talked about "Hot Shot" glue, a methacrylate glue that allowed you to put things together fast in a prototype and how you could pound the ends of fine tubing with a hammer so you could drill and fasten them together with a bolt. He is shown here shaking hands with Burt Rutan. Morgan is on the right.
Bart Hibbs, son of Al Hibbs (the voice of the Voyager spacecraft), talked about Spectra vs. Kevlar. Spectra is stronger and lighter but had the disadvantage of "creep". This meant that a Spectra panel or component placed under sustained load would actually change shape over time and usually in a way you wouldn't want. The load dynamics of Spectra, from the slow responding viscoelastic ones, to the high speed stiff response encountered in parachute openings made it a questionable material in some sense. A generation of skydivers would discover this the hard way. Bart was smart like his dad and didn't miss details.

Paul had a habit of only hiring CalTech Ph.D's for quality-control reasons, just as Honda liked Art Center College of Design people. Great if you went there, sad if you didn't. During the lectures Paul MacReady himself would chime in with the wonderful observations and questions. He reminded me of Richard Feynmann, and had most certainly attended lectures by Feynmann during his time at CalTech where he received a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, or somethign akin to that. Paul had already distinguished himself on numerous occasions, the most notable of which was his winning the Kremer prize for the FIRST human-powered flight. Paul had worked on the wing of the DC-9 and asked himself, "What happens if you cover it with clear plastic sheeting instead of aluminum?" Paul had a knack with doing calculations that simplified things and figured out that a person on a bicycle produced sufficient power to keep such a wing aloft. The early prototype was secreted in a hanger with a landing gear of toy firetruck wheels. The final version hung in the Smithsonian.


One thing I remember was Paul, or by title, Dr. MacReady was defining specific energy in an easy-to-apprehend way. A battery had enough energy to lift itself so many feet. Different battery types could then be ranked by how far they could lift themselves and indeed any energy storage or conversion scheme. The Sunraycer used batteries you could make in your kitchen with silver foil and potassium hydroxide. A similar battery was used on the moon vehicles. Light and powerful, the name of the game in electric cars.

Now all this took place in the context of yours truly bicycling back and forth to work, and I got really tired of breathing LA exhaust fumes, which drifted north to Pasadena and clung in an opaque and stupefying fog that hid the mountains that would light on fire from time to time.

After finishing the course, it all seemed kind of straightforward, except for the two-million dollar part. It came about that a certain fellow and I cooked up a scheme by which we might retrofit existing cars by removing their internal combusion engines and replacing them with a drop-in "electric-car conversion." We picked the Geo Storm as a starting point because it was trendy and quasi-aerodynamic. The sales guy was more than happy to hear this.
I immediately began mechanical design of the "module" and collecting the components for a prototype, sinking about $30,000 into credit card debt in the process. The fellow that I had originated the concept with parted ways with me, and I was left holding the bag and running out of funds, never finished the prototype. Coincidentally, there was almost no demand for electric cars. Later simulations would show that our "modular motors" concept was somewhat ill-fated from the start. If I had done these simulations at the beginning of the project, this would have been understood with considerably less pain. The mantra that emerged from the simulations was, "Electric? Half the Car at Twice the Price", due primarily to the range limitations of the lead-acid and nickel-cadmium battery technologies of the time.

So I decided to take the basic parameters of an electric electric car, including hybrid APU's and solar panels if desired and codify them as a set of calculations. The sophistication comes from the number of related issues, "pushing on this pulls on that".Those calculations can save you a great deal of pain, dollars on the cutting-room floor, and get you closer to realizing the ideal of a practical electric or hybrid electric car. I ask a few dollars for the software, but according to my experience, its a pittance compared to $30,000...

Van / wdv.com