Solid Tires

When I think about tires, the more I realize how completely weird they are.   Our roads are full of vehicles that ride on inflated air.  Why?  A completely solid tire would cause too much wear on the road, but they're also vulnerable to puncture, deflation, and so on.

There's a number of reasons that we do this.  Tires need to be soft enough to not damage the road that you're driving the car on, provide enough friction to prevent the car from sliding, and hard enough that the engine doesn't get overtaxed by pushing them.  (Deflated tires have a greater resistance to actually turning). 

So the usual solution is to have inflated tires, filled to a set pressure.  (Mine is 35 PSI, about twice atmospheric pressure.)   If driving conditions change, you can inflate it more, for greater gas milage, or less, for more traction.  For instance, in a very sandy road, I might want to deflate my tires to 20PSI to make sure that I don't skid.

However, since basically 100% of my driving is on cement or asphalt roads, which change very little, and puncturing a tire is a severe problem, I was thinking, as a longer lasting solution of a tire that instead of being inflated, was filled with a memory-foam like substance.  This tire could not be punctured, would perpetually remain balanced, and could be used until the treads physically wore off.

On the downside, if you did ever need the characteristics of the tire to change, you'd have to pretty much have to remove all four tires and put on four new ones.

Sea Bucket

During a lunch break, I saw a "ha-ha, only serious" article suggesting that we deal with sea level rise by flooding arctic Canada. Why? Several reasons:

1. No one lives there.  90% of Canada lives within 100 miles of the US border.
2. North of the tree line, the plant life stops being all that interesting
3. No real commercial interest in the area either

Of course, Canada will raise objections to this plan, if no other reason than because it makes them lose territory for no good reason.  However, thinking about it gave me an idea.

I can model the ocean as a bucket, 5 miles deep, with a trickle of water being added to it.  (The rise is more related to its change in temperature, but that'd be harder to model in the small scale.)   We as humans can dig far deeper than that.   I'm thinking of the borehole studies like the Kola borehole, where we dug down as deep as we could just to see what was there.  Previous knowledge of the depths of the earth was based on seismic studies, in which we bounced sound off of it.  Things got weird.

The kola borehole went down 40,000 feet.   The further the geologists drilled, the stranger it became, and the more often the drill would break and have to be replaced.  The environment at depth was over 360 degrees (180C), and they reported clouds of hydrogen gas. 

Accordingly, in a location of low commercial value, but still near the ocean, we dig as deep a hole as we can manage, build a geothermal plant over it, then dig a shaft from our hole to the ocean.   Water from the ocean drains into our hole, gets superheated into steam, and turns the turbines in the geothermal plant.  The water then condenses into fresh drinkable water.  The first place that would be good to do this would be the Kola borehole itself, if the Russian government is amenable to this.

Ideally we would pipe this water into the various fossil water reservoirs that we've been using all these years, but in practice I have a nagging feeling that the water will be sold to the highest bidder.   Probably a bottled water company.

Garbage eating Pigeons

The pigeon is ubiquitous in the world's cities due to a similarity to the native habitat of these birds -- seaside cliffs in the middle east. We humans went and built these cliffs everywhere, and even leave around half-eaten sandwiches for sustenance. If there weren't cars and cats and predatory hawks, pigeons would think cities were perfect.

One thing that annoys me about the city is litter.   I often see little bits of garbage thrown into some corner where it will just kind of sit around for all eternity.  Occasionally I've gathered it up and thrown it away myself, but within a week's time, it's back.   This gave me an idea.

Using the de-extinction technology I mentioned earlier, I make an artificial variant of the pigeon.  This species will have digestive enzymes that can consume paper, plastic, and styrofoam.    I'd like to include glass, but glass is made of pretty much pure silicon dioxide, and there are limits to what protein can accomplish.   I engineer 20 of these, and release them in a major city, ideally one with an extreme litter problem.

The garbage eating pigeons will clear the streets quite handily.   While existing pigeons will go to extreme lengths to grab old bits of bread and discarded lunch things, such as jumping into dumpsters, charging across five lanes of traffic, and I even saw a pigeon try to divebomb a sandwich out of someone's hands once.  (This failed.)

So when pigeons can eat stuff that's just lying around, I imagine it'll be snapped up in a matter of weeks.  At which time they will move on to dumpsters and landfills, lowering disposal costs.

Of course, there's a catch.  No organism is 100% efficient, and birds poop.  Birds in fact have an annoying instinct to poop into puddles to disguise their trail from predators, and when airborne often confuse shiny cars with puddles.   This is going to mean a greatly increased bird population in the city, and with it, greatly increased car washing will be required.   I may be able to breed a new instinct into them to poop into grass instead, which would fertilize the grass.

And if they get too numerous, there's another creature from their native habitat that also does well in cities, the Peregine falcon.   This is the fastest moving bird on earth, and exclusively eats other birds.   It enjoys pigeons for dinner the way that I enjoy a medium-well steak.  Each released falcon will eat a minimum of five pigeons a day.

De-Extinction

One of the great tragedies of animal conservation is that a lot of animals are threatened with extinction -- the death of the last of them, causing their species to forever become absent from the face of the earth. Remarkable animals like the Carolina parakeet, the Aurochs, the Dodo, and the Moa, are extinct, and will never be seen again. Anything relying on them is also gone. And anything that relies on that goes away quite quickly too. Some of them have surviving relatives, like the modern Cow's relationship to the Aurochs, the Ostritch to the moa, and the nicobar pigeon to the Dodo. One scientist is aiming to change that:

Essentially, the extinct species will, from what few remaining scraps we have of their DNA, be cloned into a genetically modified parent. A modified chicken will birth small extinct birds, a modified cow will produce extinct bovines, and what was once gone forever, will cease to be gone. The first generation of these will be sickly, as the modification process has certain complications, but their children will turn out normally. And then the cold hand of death will have to release it's hand on certain animals.

Or to put it more mad-scientistly, IT'S ALIVE, IT'S ALIVE, MAKE MY CREATION LIVE!!!!

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Blerg

Where did the past four months, almost five, go? Oh right, I was working a crapton of overtime due to a major expansion event. We're now taking clients as far away as San Antonio and Dallas. All this work has been great for my budget, but for ideas, I haven't had any for months. Then I had one, but it will take some time to properly write up. This can only mean one thing. I'm back. Let's see if I can keep it that way.

Swing Pressure House

I have an impractical idea that may have beneficial effects for our space program: A house in which there is no carbon dioxide whatsoever, and it's all shunted aside to a greenhouse. This both benefits the plants, and is a security system for pests and vegetable thieves. We start with an oxygen generator, a machine who's name is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn't chemically generate oxygen so much as concentrate oxygen in the air. We want the industrial type, because it's cheaper, has higher airflow, and makes fewer assumptions about the air flow stream. This is used to pressurize an airtight house to 1.1 atmospheres. The higher pressure is to ensure that if any leaks do develop, the air flows out, not in.
Next, for dealing with the exhaled breath of the house's occupants, we have an airflow system that takes air from the house, and bubbles it through a hydroxide. All metal hydroxides react with carbon dioxide to form carbonates, which filters the carbon out of the air. Calcium hydroxide would be my primary choice, as this produces heat when synthesized, and is easily cleaned due to calcium carbonate being insoluble in water. You could even check visually to see when a hydroxide sample is worn down and needs replacement. Unfortunately, the synthesis of calcium hydroxide is more complex than sodium hydroxide, which can be produced by electrolyzing salt water. Enormous vats of hydroxides keep the air carbon free.
Over at the greenhouse, the metal carbonates produced by the air filtration system are bought to a lime kiln or vat of strong acid. The carbon becomes liberated from the metal, and spews forth throughout the greenhouse. This suits the plants fine, as the original earth's atmosphere was something like 30% carbon dioxide. As far as plants are concerned, modern earth is polluted all to hell with oxygen, which they produce as waste.
I wanted to make this a closed cyclical system, in which the greenhouse reset the conditions of the house, and vice versa. This would be necessary in space, where the gathering of additional materials is not possible. In space, if you did not bring with you, then you do not have it. I would recommend a calcium based system for this:
CaCO₃ + HCl → CaCl₂ + CO₂ + H₂O
H₂O + electricity → H₂ + O₂
CaCl₂ → Ca + Cl₂ H₂ + Cl₂ → HCl
Ca + O₂ → CaO
CaO + H₂ → Ca(OH)₂
Ca(OH)₂ + CO₂ → CaCO₃
On earth, a sodium based system is probably more practical: NaCl + H₂O → NaOH + Cl
NaOH + CO₂ → NaCO₃ + H₂O
CH3COOH + NaCO₃ → CH₃CO₂Na

You now have an endless supply of hand warmer and poison gas.

Windshield Wire

There's a small icon on my car's dashboard.

When I push this button, current runs through tiny wires in my car's back window, and the resistance to this heats the window up. The head makes water deposited on this window by condensation evaporate, making the window clear for me to see out of. This is legally mandated for my car, as lawmakers think it a reasonable expectation that I be able to see what the hell is going on behind me when I drive.

The windshield, though, or front window, is defogged by blowing hot air from the engine. This is partially because the engine is right below it, and this is a ready source of heat, but mostly because the little wires would be way too prominent at that close a distance. The back window is six feet away from me, the driver. The little black lines are just too tiny to notice at that distance. The windshield, though, is merely inches away. To put little wires here would mean looking a little black lines constantly while I drive.

Let us suppose, though, that I didn't mind the wires, but needed some sort of automated system, so I don't have to bother with the button. I think I would resolve this by materials science.

I would need to produce a material that conducted electricity, but developed greater resistance under low temperatures. In temperate environments, where the window does not fog up, the wires conduct efficiently, and very little heat is produced. However, in colder environments where my own body heat makes a temperature gradient that encourages condensation, the resistance rises considerably, producing heat, and evaporating this fog before it can really get started.

Nah, there's defoggers set up the way they are for a reason.

However, if I were redesigning cars, I would make each of its vents independent. The front vents for blowing air at my face, the lower vents that blow air at my feet, and the vents that blow air at the outer windshield would each have their own dial for temperature and amount of air. As I turn the amount of air dials up, a fan in the vent is given more voltage, making it rotate faster and push more air. As I turn the temperature dial up, more of the air is routed past the radiator.