Total Pageviews

Showing posts sorted by date for query ames research center, set. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query ames research center, set. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Sunday, July 27, 2025

WHAT HAVE I ACCOMPLISHED AT THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII?

This blog site is into my 18th year.  Thought I'd glance at how many partly written articles were in storage and  spent yesterday discarding many of them.  There were around 450.  After a hundred or so I gave up, and still have around 350 drafts.  However, one was the basis for my posting today.

I was born and grew up in Honolulu, but did not spend any school time at the University of Hawaii until August of 1972, when I was hired by the College of Engineering as an assistant professor.  So it's been 53 years since I first came to the main Manoa Campus.

  • I originally taught Fortran IV Programming and a couple of other computer courses.  This is the textbook I used.  I knew the co-authors, Paul Murrill and Cecil Smith.  Murrill went on to become president of LSU.
  • After a couple of years, I joined the Civil Engineering Department.  Environmental Engineering and Technology & Society were two courses where I had more than a hundred students for some semesters. 
  • But teaching takes a lot time and effort, where there is pressure to  get research funds and publish papers for promotion and gaining tenure.
  • My research topics focused on geothermal reservoir engineering and laser biochemical engineering (my PhD dissertation topic), where the student I hired to do the  lab work, Bill Bow, went on to found his own engineering consulting firm.  He was selected for the Lifetime Achievement Award last year by the Hawaii Council of Engineering Societies.  
  • The fact that he is now retired says a lot about how long I've been here.  I still maintain a functioning office with two computers, a sound system and assorted other stuff.  Here below are some displays and  photos on my wall.
    • The first one is a best sellers list from the local newspaper showing two of my books in the top ten.

  • That map on the wall is of the St. Andrews Old Course, where I've golfed several times.  A microwave oven and refrigerator with drinkables.
  • In 1987, during a trip to Europe I bought a print of Van Gogh's Blue Irises, which set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold, $54 million.  This is a replica from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Some of my awards.


The item below is a fake press release Harvey Meyerson and I created way back in 1981 when we were working for Senator Spark Matsunaga.  Why this specific topic?  His political advisory committee had picked crime and punishment as the focus of his re-election campaign, when he did nothing in this area.  Nary a bill, speech or anything of that relevance.   If this press release had ever gone out, we would have been fired.
Following, the scorecard of the ultimate golf game I played in 2007, scoring a 74.  I had separated my right shoulder when I tripped across a rope at the Ala Wai Golf course a few months earlier, and this was the first time I had played since then.  Swinging was still a problem, so I did not try to hit the ball too hard.  You'd think this would have taught me a lesson.
I worked closely on these two below bills which became law, and Chairman of the Senate Energy and Resources Committee, Scoop Jackson, arranged for me to get copies.  I had a special relationship with him because Senator Matsunaga did not get to many committee sessions, and Jackson voted up or down for Sparky depending on which way my thumb faced.
My final passion is the Blue Revolution.  I have a Blue Dragon as our mascot.
Someone gave me this sign.  Can't imagine why.
So what have I accomplished at the University of Hawaii?
  • In 1976 I was on the team that discovered, drilled for (to a depth of 6450 feet), and found what at that time was the hottest geothermal well in the world.  We produced electricity for 2000 people on the Big Island.
  • I might add that this region of Puna was then isolated, and close by there were illegal patches of marijuana.  They were among the most vocal opponents of geothermal energy development, and had funds to fight our efforts.
  • I was on leave from the UH from 1979 to 1982, and staffed the passage of original legislation in hydrogen, OTEC, wind energy and seabed mining, while working for U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga in DC.
    • These two organizations were awarded more than $100 million to build the first open-cycle ocean thermal energy conversion at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii on the Big Island, a biomass-to-methanol facility on Maui, and a range of renewable energy operations on all the major islands.
    • HNEI became the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen Center, U.S. Department of Interior's Marine Mineral Technology Center, and National Science Foundation's Marine Bioproducts Engineering Research Center.
    • 40 years after being founded, PICHTR today has a sterling board of directors.
  • Also spent assignments with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in laser fusion and the NASA Ames Research Center in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
  • I also published more than 100 articles in the Huffington Post.  Typical one-page summaries of topics such as the Blue Revolution, Star Power for Humanity, the Stanford Marshmallow Test, 10% Simple Solution to Peace, Human Cloning, Biofuels from Algae, the Future of Sustainable Aviation, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, the Ultimate Ocean Ranch, Geoengineering of Climate Change and The Venus Syndrome.
To close, three sporting events.
  • Lottie Woad, 21-year old from the UK, won the Scottish Open today.  This was her initial LPGA event.  She just was victorious in the Irish Open as an amateur earlier this month.  She no doubt is the favorite at the AIG Women's Open, which starts on Thursday at Royal Porthcawl in Wales.  This is a different course from where the men had their Open, which was the Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland.
  • Hard to believe that the NFL will begin pre-season play this week.  The Hall of Fame Game between the Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Charger will also be on Thursday.
  • Week Zero in college football is not until August 23 when Iowa State plays Kansas State in Dublin, Ireland.  Aviva Stadium opened in 2010, and has already showcased 4 previous U.S. football games.  There will be 8 other weekend games, ending with Stanford at Hawaii.
Typhoon Krosa is up to 90 MPH, and heading for Japan.  However, models show the eye making almost a right turn, and take a path parallel to the Honshu coastline, sufficiently far enough away not to cause any serious damage.
-
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, July 7, 2025

TRUMP vs MUSK AND MORE

 I reached a milestone today, hitting 4 million viewers:

Since my first blog on 29April2008, there have been 6792 postings.  Thus, an average of close to 600 readers/day.  221 countries have visited this site.


Actually, in October of 2020 I reached the limit of how many labels I could use, so in parallel I initiated a different location, which began accumulating another set of viewers, and this blog is up to 172,000 viewers.  So you have an option to read this second site, which has the same content, but looks different.  One of the photos I used in that initial 10October2020 posting was of Phil Spector.  Why?  My #80 favorite song was featured, To Know Him is to Love Him, and he started performing by writing that song and is one of the three Teddy Bears.  Then he later developed his wall of sound background music for which he is famous, married Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes and became mad, as in crazy.  Incidentally, if you are already only accessing this new blog, the original can be found at this site.


After re-reading my posting of yesterday, I observed that I missed a few other somewhat adventurous periods in my life that added to my mostly prosaic professional career.

In the 1970's one telling question was why bother with SETI when science had not yet confirmed even one planet outside our solar system.  So in 1976 NASA created Project Orion and brought together 19 faculty members from throughout the Nation to devise methods for detecting extrasolar planets.  Most the group worked together to design an interferometric system to indirectly find extrasolar planets.  I was given an opportunity to develop a direct method, called the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (or PAT).  Click here for the full details.  I have thus followed this effort now for nearly 40 years.

  • That above blog was posted a dozen years ago, so I have now been involved with SETI for nearly half a century.
  • As indicated above, I was able to investigate my personal project, for which I enlisted the assistance of Charles Townes, who had just won the Nobel Prize and moved to the University of California at Berkeley.  I thus drove a lot to that campus.  The concept we developed was his idea that planets with an atmosphere lased, meaning that all we had to do was design an instrument to track monochromatic lights to first determine this was an extrasolar planet, but as a by-product, obtain the atmospheric content of that planet.
  • This was only a summer escape, so I had loads of opportunities to enjoy the area.
    • Lived in Escondido Village, a premium studio for married students on the Stanford Campus, close to my freshman dormitory, Wilbur Hall.
    • Took a wine tasting course in the evening.
    • Rented a large 36 inch TV set to watch the Montreal Summer Olympics.
    • Golfed 9-holes almost daily at the Palo Alto Municipal Golf Course.  This summer job only met for a couple of hours in the morning, after which we did research, or anything you wanted to do.
The second adventure opportunity occurred twice.  I spent two 6-month sabbatical periods on the campus of the Tokyo University of A&T (a national university called Nokodai).
  • My wife and I were housed in married students housing on campus for a very low price.
  • My office was at the top of a new building with a picturesque view of Mount Fuji.
  • I joined the lab of Professor Tadashi Matsunaga, who went on to become Dean of Engineering, President of this university, then on to work for the Prime Minister of Japan.
  • I had previously hosted Dr Matsunaga at the University of Hawaii as the First International Professor for the Blue Revolution.
  • I had thoughts of truly learning Japanese, which did not happen.
  • When on sabbatical, I was free to do anything, and at the end of the period was asked to give a lecture on whatever I wanted for the engineering faculty, which both times featured the Blue Revolution.  If you know nothing about the Blue Revolution, watch my TEDx talk given three years ago.
The latest on the Trump vs Musk feud.
  • Attorney General Pam Bondi continues to waffle on the Epstein documents.
  • Don't expect any full release, for there is reason to believe that Donald Trump himself was involved in the Epstein follies.  One wonders if DOGE actually succeeded in slipping the truth to Musk.
“Time to drop the really big bomb,” Mr. Musk wrote on social media. Mr. Trump, he said, “is in the Epstein files. That is why they have not been made public.” Mr. Musk did not offer any evidence, but soon added, “The truth will come out.”
  • Musk did delete that above post, but on Friday indicated he will be forming the American Party.
    • While Musk's new party candidates will not win any election, they could influence the results of the general election by pulling enough Republican votes to give more Democratic victories.
    • Although Tesla stock value has dropped, apparently Musk is still the richest man in the world.  His money could well make a difference in swinging control of Congress to Democrats.
My sense is that Elon Musk tells the truth, but Donald Trump must hold the world record for most recorded lies.  Appropriately enough, today is TELL THE TRUTH Day.
I should mention that Typhoon Danas struck Taiwan yesterday:
  • Jan 5     50 MPH
  • Jan 6   105 MPH
  • Jan 7     45 MPH


In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Chantal reached 60 MPH yesterday, made landfall, and is bringing floods to North Carolina and points north.  The really big storm, though, is the 4th of July flash flooding over central Texas, with more rain still coming.  So far 95 bodies have been found.  This was at least partially a leftover from Tropical Storm Barry.  Upwards of 20 inches of rain fell, and the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes.  The lesson here is that you need to be watchful for any storm, not only hurricanes.  Fox News reported that the Trump administration's staffing cuts for NOAA and FEMA might have been responsible for exacerbating this tragedy.

-

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

TODAY, YESTERDAY and TOMORROW

Before reaching back to my past on nostalgia Tuesday, first a lot of news items for today.  I'll mostly hint at the topics, so you can click on the links to follow up in detail.

  • The biggest of all of them is the matter of democracy vs dictatorship.
    •  The headline of the day:

Roberts rejects Trump’s call for impeaching judge who ruled against his deportation plans

    • Finally, Chief Justice John Roberts showed some backbone on the matter of President Trump's call for impeachment of all judges who ruled against him.
    • This deportation case now appears to be the issue.
    • How important is this comeuppance?  Very, for if Trump continues to do as he pleases, he becomes a dictator.
    • Trump is already in control of two parts of our government, his White House and the U.S. Congress.  The third leg is the Supreme Court.
    • However, the Supreme Court has no enforcement capabilities.  The Supreme Court, while having the power to interpret laws and the Constitution, lacks direct enforcement power; its decisions rely on the executive branch for implementation.   Trump controls the Department of Defense and National Guard.  Basically, he can do whatever he wants, and if he does, he becomes a dictator.
    • If Trump bends on this deportation/impeachment/judiciary matter, we will still have a democracy.  
    • If Trump does not, we suddenly will have a dictatorship.  It's scarily as easy as that.
    • Democrats can do nothing of relevance.  If they get the public to protest, and this becomes serious, Trump just arrests the leaders, some Democrats and the critical elements of the news media, invoking a wartime justification.  Just like Russia, we suddenly become a dictatorship.
  • Ukraine-Russia War ceasefire?
    • Donald Trump and Vladimir  today had a phone discussion of an hour and a half.
    • That in itself says a lot...and Putin also brought up the matter of hockey games, a good sign.
    • No ceasefire, but some concessions.
    • Clearly, Putin is trying to delay things to gain more territory for the eventual outcome.
    • Seems like both Trump and Putin are acting like they would like Zelenskyy to be replaced by someone more cordial to Russia.

On Sunday, my posting was on WORLD PEACE FOR HUMANITY.  Surely a preposterous concept today.  But I have a history of these ideas.  Crackpot scheme?  Beautiful dreamer?  To quote:


From my Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence with NASA, to Laser Fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to the Hydrogen Economy, to the Blue Revolution, to World Peace, nothing I do seems to attain any kind of reality. 


No success yet, but I still think they are all great pathways for humanity, and I am confident that they will attain reality someday.  In fact I have a few more of them I did not even mention.  


So I will today provide a few more details on these opportunities for our future.  Mind you, as fanciful as I think, I'm only into the Type I civilization of Nikolai Kardashev.   Watch this video of a true visionary.  I'll proceed chronologically.    

  • My first job when I graduated from college with a B.S. in chemical engineering was in biomass engineering for C. Brewer and Company, then the oldest company in Hawaii, at the Hutchinson Sugar Company on the Big Island.  The industry is now gone, but I was into renewable energy before it became popular.  Sure, sucrose is one of the most dangerous substances we consume, but in those days, it was not a health concern.
    • Half a can of soda has the daily requirement of sugar.
    • Table sugar, sucrose, manufactured from sugar cane and sugar beets, is broken down by enzymes to glucose and fructose.
    • Fructose, which also naturally occurs in fruits and honey, is slightly sweeter than sucrose, which is sweeter than glucose.  It has more health dangers than the other two.  Is mostly used in corn syrup.  
    • All sugars are bad, but fructose is the worst. 
    • Artificial sweeteners, though, are even worse.
    • So my first job was to refine a product not good for your health.  Not a good start.  I did, though, do my part in getting this industry to disappear from Hawaii.
  • After getting a PhD in biochemical engineering, my first few projects at the University of Hawaii were all related to the environment and renewable energy.  I even taught these courses.
    • My first project was as the reservoir engineer for the Hawaii Geothermal Project.  
      • We succeeded in drilling a little more than a mile down in Puna, Hawaii, to find the hottest geothermal well in the world.  
      • Produced 3 MW of electricity.
      • Founded the Community Geothermal Technology Program to develop by-products from the facility.
    • As a faculty member, though, I early went into administration.  However, I was able to also spend time elsewhere:
      • In the mid to late 1970's, worked at the NASA Ames Research Center on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and had two assignments at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Laser Fusion.
      • I went to D.C., in 1979 to work in the U.S. Senate, where I was responsible for the passage of legislation in wind energy, ocean energy and hydrogen, where I drafted the original bills for the latter two.
      • Returned to Honolulu in 1982, became director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, then, in tandem, became vice president for development of the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, where we successfully built a $25 million ocean thermal energy conversion facility  on the Big Island and tested another $25 million project to convert sugar cane into methanol on Maui.

    • In the 1980's, spent some time forming a national team on global climate warming remediation.
      • Of course the science had to come first to prove this danger was real.  However, we felt that perhaps 10% of research funds should go to a few groups to determine solutions if they were necessary.
      • I much later summarized our efforts in a HuffPo on Geoengineering of Climate Change.
    • During this period, I was involved in the future of sustainable aviation. Click on that to read my 2009 Huffington Post publication on the subject.  A quote:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will spend $100 million over the next few years to evaluate this field, but the reality is that we should be spending a billion dollars annually. Three-quarters of the energy used by our military goes to jet fuel.

While there are several fanciful air systems bandied about in various publications, one in particular, the Hawaiian Hydrogen Clipper, a hydrogen-powered dirigible potentially capable of flying at 350 MPH (none of the other blimps go anywhere close to this speed), proposed by Rinaldo Brutoco, President of the World Business Academy, I think shows the most promise. In particular, he sees Hawaii as the ideal lead for this effort. (This concept is mentioned in my Huffington Post article of December 18.)



If you think that this hydrogen transport effort is too blue-skyish, Rinaldo Brutoco has talked to me about the notion of utilizing "fast" dirigibles (several hundred miles per hour speed, as opposed to the current 50 MPH) as the next generation aviation option for Hawaii.  His concept is to refuel his Hawaiian Hydrogen Clipper with hydrogen from geothermal powerplants.  The aircraft would come to the site, eliminating an expensive part of the process.  A portion of the fuel would then be sold on the West Coast.  In his dreams, the H2 Clipper would eventually replace jet planes and jet fuel.  As far as I know, no one has a better idea, for when petroleum skyrockets to $200/barrel, it will take a solution on the order of the Brutoco Hydrogen Clipper Plan to sidestep a local economic depression.

    • Also during the 1980s, most of the funds for the renewables went to produce electricity.  
      • What was missing, I thought, was more effort on fuels for transportation. 
      • Sure hydrogen for aviation made sense, but that was perhaps 50 years away.  What about ground transport options?
      • It appeared that ethanol from renewable energy did not make much sense, and was a gimmick of the farm industry.  It took until 2019 for Forbes to release this article:  With Ethanol and Biomass No Longer Viewed As 'Green,' will Other Renewables Soon Follow?
The Nation and World unfortunately went in the wrong direction when ethanol from corn (plus sugars and other starches) and biodiesel from terrestrial plants were selected for focus. The Farm Lobby no doubt should be congratulated for smartly lobbying Congress and the White House, for farmers are in great shape. Job done! Regrettably, grain prices jumped, causing a food crisis for developing countries. The knee-jerk reaction was, of course, all that fibrous cellulose, why not ferment those wastes into more ethanol? So, a second herd of white elephants is now being groomed. Why? Because there is a simpler alcohol called methanol that makes more economic sense. My HuffPo article of June 10 compares ethanol and methanol.

Also.

Regarding biodiesel, the notion is almost laughable, as only a very small percent of the plant itself is used. Biodiesel from algae, for example, is ten to twenty times more efficient in converting sunlight into usable fuel. Plus, these land plants grow relatively slowly and need irrigation water.

And.

Per unit volume, a fuel cell should be able to provide five times more energy than the lithium battery.  In short, this device works like a battery to produce electricity, but uses hydrogen as the energy source instead of lithium, lead or cadmium. However, and this defies common sense, one gallon of methanol has more accessible hydrogen than one gallon of liquid hydrogen. Thus, the logic argues for producing methanol from biomass to power a fuel cell, as hydrogen is very expensive to manufacture, store and deliver. This simplest of alcohols is the only biofuel capable of directly and efficiently being utilized by a fuel cell without passing through an expensive reformer.

        • The answer was the direct methanol fuel cell.  Unfortunately, again lobbying against the DMFC made funding impossible, and such a device was never really created.

More recently, meaning the past third of a century, I chose to combine many of facets of my earlier experience--ocean energy, hydrogen, global warming, and so on--into a mega-project that would:

  • The first floating city will host the 2050 World Expo.
    • The first was The Great Exhibition in London of 1851.
    • In 1975, there was an Ocean Expo in Okinawa.
    • Thus, 75 years later, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, maybe it will be near Okinawa, and 200 years after the first, this marine world fair will set the tone for the expansion of humanity into our seas.

I can envision a world someday of hundreds, if not thousands, of marine mega-cities mostly surrounding the equator.  

  • The United Nations has problems enough with fewer than 200 countries to manage.  Each of these floating cities can theoretically become a nation.
  • But they will all be producing renewable energy and resources to share with the rest of the world.
  • The marine biomass plantations of macro and micro plants, will be cultivated to remediate global warming, while placement of a few of these floating cities where hurricanes form, will eliminate them.

-

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)