Podcasts about Noisebridge

Mitch Altman, a pioneer in the fields of field-programmable gate arrays and virtual reality, has long been a leading figure in the maker community. Not only did he help establish the Noisebridge hackerspace, but he's also taught thousands how to solder while globe-trotting as an ambassador for makers. Additionally, Mitch created the TV-B-Gone universal remote, a device designed to turn off televisions. Far from a whimsical endeavor, his motivation for this invention is deeply personal. In this episode of the 3DPOD, our conversations with Mitch, touching on open hardware, maker spaces, and technology development, were incredibly enriching.

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Mike * Kev * http://www.radcade.com/ Topics * Embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common? * Thanatosensitivity * GDC happened this year! They really did it * Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy * Being left handed in a right handed world Microtopics: * Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine. * Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES. * Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage. * How to learn to program while having kids. * Radical content for radical gamers. * Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does. * The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art. * What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy. * Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring. * Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea. * Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error. * The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems. * Improvising bridges. * Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields. * The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof. * The user experience of death. * Digital ghosts on LinkedIn. * Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago. * Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid. * Thanatechnologies. * The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time. * Slug World. * A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge. * alt.ctrl.GDC * Spending all of GDC on the lawn. * A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people. * The Unconference Phenomenon. * Substance-to-fluff ratios. * Your three GDC lives. * Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better. * The ascended platonic GDC. * Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know. * Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you. * Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats. * GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove. * A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days. * A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map. * Disrespecting the expo. * Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first. * Katie hauling off and gassing you up. * The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer. * A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous. * The tangled underworld of your socks. * Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders. * Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia. * Hog snakes. * The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip. * Formative bug experiences. * Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party. * Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat. * The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules. * Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest. * Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag. * Left-handed zippers. * Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem. * The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir. * The prince who was promised. * Fretting with your dominant hand. * Picking a specific guitar string at speed. * Whether handedness exists. * Drawing with gross motor movements. * Left-handed mugs. * Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.

In previous episodes we've talked about how to choose a technical stack and figure out what works best for you and your team. In this episode, we are joined by Jason Lengstorf to talk about how the choice of stack and infrastructure reflects the company culture. Guests: Jason Lengstorf - @jlengstorf Panelists: Ryan Burgess - @burgessdryan Jem Young - @JemYoung Stacy London - @stacylondoner Shirley Wu - @sxywu Brian Holt - @holtbt Picks: Jason Lengstorf - Ooni Koda Pizza Oven Jason Lengstorf - Coava Coffee Ryan Burgess - Standing Out LOUDER in the Technical Interview Ryan Burgess - Mare of Easttown Jem Young - Invincible Jem Young - FLoC Jem Young - Workout axe Stacy London - Lilys by Warpaint Stacy London - Animal by LUMP, Laura Marling, Mike Lindsay Shirley Wu - So I'm a Spider, So What? Shirley Wu - Amy's Noisebridge mural! Brian Holt - Tropical weather coffee - Onyx coffee Brian Holt - Mythic Quest

This week we bring together Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister (the author of The Scene That Became Cities, from Penguin Random House) together with anarchist community organizer Naomi Most of Noisebridge and Playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano for a conversation about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality — and how holdouts worldwide persisted in “IRL” celebrations that preserved the face-to-face community and presence Burning Man cannot yet replicate online.This discussion was a total treat, and covered everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city to the new and strange ontologies emerging in the blue light of our screen-bound era.• Was Burning Man always just a physicalized version of the World Wide Web? Or is its power and uniqueness in precisely how it ISN’T?• Is Burning Man a kind of virtual reality already, or — like VR — just a not-entirely-successful effort to screen out the world that creates it?• What is the value of culture for culture’s sake, and why should we protect the efforts for it?• Is Black Rock City pointless, or is it an engine for teaching Applied Existentialism…or both, and more?• What happened at the in-person Burning Man(s) this year, when people still decided they would gather during a pandemic?This episode is dedicated to the memory of James Oroc.Writing and videos we mention in this episode:*** The Case of the Missing Man by Caveat Magister (Read the whole series!) ***Sand Talk by Tyson YunkaportaThe Garden of Forking Memes by Aaron Z. LewisWilliam Irwin Thompson in 1975 x Burning Man 2013 Through Google Glass [video]Transformational Festivals are a Symptom of Dissociation by MGGiving Into Astonishment: Scenes from Burning Man’s American Dream by MGIf you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, please send your friends to this page and encourage them to support Future Fossils on Patreon. Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our book club, and whatever else spills out of my overactive imagination. We’d love to have you in our thriving little Discord server, if you’re interested in meeting other members of our awesome scene. And if you’re up for helping edit Future Fossils Podcast transcripts, you’re my hero! Please drop me a line at futurefossilspodcast@gmail.com.Intro music in this episode is “Valles Marineris” from my Martian Arts EP. Outro music is an early mix of “You Don’t Have To Move,” from my forthcoming/in-progress album The Age of Reunion.Dig deeper into these related Future Fossils episodes:25 – DADARA on Art, Virtual Realities, and Flow States31 – Mitch Altman of Noisebridge on Hacking Life for Fun & Profit41 – Hannah Faith Yata on Art, Wilderness, and Rebellion55 – “Creativity and Catastrophe” at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 201761 – Jamaica Stevens on Crisis, Rebirth, and Transformation71 – JF Martel on Sequels & Simulacra76 – “Technology as Psychedelic Parenting” at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 201796 – Malena Grosz on Community-Led Party Culture vs. Corporate “Nightlife”100 – The Teafaerie on DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do With All of God’s Attention Enjoy and thanks for listening!Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/FUTURE-FOSSILS. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * James is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos * https://twitter.com/Triplefox * http://ludamix.com/ * Jay is on Twitter. https://twitter.com/jaytholen Topics: * 1:38 References dating things and/or making them inaccessible. Examples: older Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and that Winter Wonderland song where they say a snowman looks like Parson Brown. Who the heck is that?? * What color is Parson Brown? https://www.datalounge.com/thread/18081042-what-color-is-parson-brown- * "What are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases?" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/whatareyourfavoriteculturallyuntranslateable/ * 9:33 How four-year-olds perceive Lego(tm) * The Game Engine Black Book: Doom. http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ * Romero's Sigil Doom episode, featuring Buckethead. https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il * 19:25 Watching behind-the-music documentaries and realizing all the meatheads I was judging from their appearance in music videos in the 90s are as huge music theory nerds as any of my friends. * T-Pain without autotune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyzlUUqxXYs * 25:06 Groke asks: "Cheap musical instruments are cool, aren't they? Penny whistles, harmonicas, ocarinas... any personal experiences with these?" * The Thomas the Tank Engine theme played on Otamatone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugWeU5jgIM * The Tastee Bros. play the Olympic Fanfare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAcoY8 * The Tastee Bros. 300 tips for playing a trumpet really high: http://www.gibble.org/high.htm * "A dodecaphonic scream trumpet homage to Christmas the Tastee Bros and Mr Santa. X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udvy8XYzH4U * 32:35 Timberwolf/husky breeds and their incredible jaws. * 38:49 Losing the ability to know when things are conventionally aesthetically pleasing. * One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/ * 53:04 This CPAP machine is really putting a damper on my dreams of growing a Santa beard one day. * "Your Source for CPAP Mask Sealant Specially for Bearded Men" https://cpapbeardandmustacheseal.com/ * "The 'Machine Bow' is a reality!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAcoY8 Microtopics: * Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it. * Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together. * Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up. * Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago. * Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes. * Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke. * Liking a joke better before you get it. * Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns. * A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road. * Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com. * Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown." * Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something. * A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers. * A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe. * Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists. * Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago. * Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work. * Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy. * Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time. * A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time. * Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do. * A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords. * Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled. * Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life. * A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw. * Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense. * Method acting but for video games. * Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself. * Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you. * The note getting louder when you squeeze the face. * Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing. * When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off. * Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet. * Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating. * Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful. * Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves." * Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement. * Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways. * Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen. * Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging. * Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat. * Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat. * Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place." * Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders. * The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication. * Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background. * Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it. * Art getting way better when the image links start breaking. * Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something. * Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work. * Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead. * Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before. * The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly. * Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not. * Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple. * Having an aesthetic plan for growing old. * Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams. * Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap. * Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea. * The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment. * Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest. * Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.

Makerspace Managers is all about interviewing people who've run makerspaces, but the Libre Lounge podcast beat us to the punch! Pop over there to hear their interview with Mitch, who founded Noisebridge.

Someone is stealing James's Kale! This week's vexes include how to massage your kale, disrespecting community areas, and anarchist maker spaces. Links: James's Garden: https://twitter.com/GoodVexations/status/1095474107267858433 Massage Your Kale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzCwZVRoknE Joshua Tree: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/11/us/california-joshua-trees-cut-down-during-shutdown-trnd/index.html Noisebridge Maker Space: https://www.noisebridge.net/ Noisebridge buys a vacuum Feb 8, 2011: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Meeting_Notes_2011_02_08 Cover Illustration: Alisha Wilkerson Intro/Outro Music "Everything is Awful" by The Taxpayers (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

Alex Glow is the Lead Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Host: Megan Morrone Guest: Alex Glow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Alex Glow is the Lead Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Host: Megan Morrone Guest: Alex Glow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Alex Glow is the Lead Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Host: Megan Morrone Guest: Alex Glow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Alex Glow is the Lead Hardware Nerd at Hackster.io. Host: Megan Morrone Guest: Alex Glow Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation.

Our guest this week is Alex Glow. Alex creates electronics videos and tutorials at Hackster.io in San Francisco; she loves building wearable tech, EEG, music, bikes, holograms, and more. Alex grew into hardware as a FIRST Robotics team member, then as a director of the AHA and Noisebridge hackerspaces and Artist in Residence at Autodesk's Pier 9. For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/alex-glow-hackster-io

Honey-Skin Woman - The Roscoes Wild Child; Theory - The Well-Worn Circuit Path; Farm Like We'll Live Forever - Nagdeo, Apocalypse Now - Amphibian Man, WALK LIKE A DUCK II - The Roscoes Wild Child; Geeknotes: 10/5 - Free Citizenship Workshop, SF Chinatown, 10/6-7 First annual ATLANTA AfroFuturism Fest, 10/7 - Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, MLK Jr Park, Downtown Berkeley, 10/8 - Bay Area Mural Festival-Richmond 2017; Practice - Sun Stone 4.5 Beta; The Wolf - Mercury And The Architects

“I would love to see a world where 100% of the people on this planet, and all the other beings, believe their life is WAY worth living. Not just kinda okay, even, but WAY worth living.” This week’s guest is Mitch Altman, a hacker and electronics scientist whose life is the stuff of legend (here's his Wikipedia entry).Founder of Cornfield Electronics (“We Make Useful Electronics for a Better World”), co-founder of Noisebridge (epic hackerspace in San Francisco), inventor of TV-B-Gone.This episode’s title is pulled from Mitch’s talk by a similar name. In this Episode: Living in alignment with your dreams, working for yourself. Entrepreneurship as serving your own sense of the awesome and letting the resonant audience come to your own articulated personal meaning.The potential of full-cost accounting: how weaving every invisible cost (“ecosystem services,” mothering, etc.) into the economy could transform selfish behavior into good for all.Self-discovery and finding the place where your enjoyment and passion meets the needs of your society.“Helping me includes helping other people, which feels good. How can I NOT do this?”Getting through depression and loneliness to find creative fulfillment.Breaking out of habit to discover the life we CHOOSE with our sudden wealth of free time…The importance of boredom and leisure to the full development of the soul.The evolutionary fitness landscape and looking at our choices as moves across a geography of our adaptation to various environments.Making the hard decision to back out of something you’ve invested in and begin again as something new…Technological Unemployment, Universal Basic Income, and the rise of Hacker Spaces.The role of local currencies and minimum guaranteed income in the architecting a society of creativity and leisure.“All of this has to happen slow enough that things don’t collapse or become traumatic, but fast enough that we can survive as a species.”Open Source Digital Democracy and fractal structures in economy and politics – what comes after representative republics and printing-press-era legislature in the age of the Internet?Natural hierarchies (holarchies and do-ocracies) versus artificial hierarchies…and how to create a pocket of effective, fruitful anarchy within the right container.Chaos Computer Club and the future of meta human swarm intelligence (read also: social creatures living in community)“I try to not be pessimistic OR optimistic. I try to the best of my ability to see things AS THEY ARE.”The recent explosive proliferation of Chinese hackerspaces. Photo Credit: Dennis van Zuijlekom See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Podcast Notes Parker has been hard at work on the PinHeck Test Fixture. It uses over 160 pogo pins to test every single function of the PinHeck Pinball System. There will be an article about designing pogo pin style test fixtures for production in the next couple weeks. Stephen tested the Diode Compression opamp he built a couple weeks ago on the FX Dev Platform. Sounds great! Noisebridge, A hackerspace out of San Francisco, wrote an article about the large variety of fuse quality. Cheap and gray market fuses tend to not break the circuit and melt. Potentially catching fire. Something even as simple as a fuse should be tested in your product to ensure everything works correctly and safely. Arduino.cc released a new ARM build of their popular IDE. Users can now compile code and develop on their raspberry pi style devices. Parker thinks an Android version would be great to tweak and push code up over Bluetooth or WiFi. Semiconductor materials market fell 1.5% in 2015. Mainly from changing the die bond wires from gold to copper. Materials to make semiconductors are inexpensive. Labor and process driving the cost of semiconductors. Sleev is a Kickstarter that sells adhesive lined heat shrink tubing for $3 for 2 inches. You can buy the same stuff at McMaster for $5 for 4 feet. Goes to show that consumers will buy anything with a fancy graphic and video. Stephen thinks we should Kickstart the "SKRü". If listens have any silly ideas for Kickstarters let us know via twitter: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig, MacroFab, INC.. Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!

Napa community comes together to rebuild after earthquake; finding a home on Hotel 22; homeless hackers head to Noisebridge for shelter; In legal grey area, West Oakland resident discovers free house; and local band Rupa and the April Fishes.

Homeless hackers head to Noisebridge for shelter; San Francisco: Surviving the Future; The Video Room Survives a Mass Extinction; and local songwriter Jim Bruno.

Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco's Mission at the Noisebridge hacker space with Stan James, founder of Lijit, creator of the first browser-based massively multiplayer games, co-host of the 7th Kingdom podcast, and author of a book in progress on technology and our minds. They discuss Noisebridge itself and its almost Utopian qualities; how the supernormal stimuli of cat videos create addiction; how his early multiplayer games could created addiction; San Francisco's position as the American city to be in for those with technological interests, not exclusively technological interests; the optimal Mission-style burrito ordering strategy; how we've left the concept of immersion in virtual reality behind in favor of always being at least a little bit on the internet, and how we can see it in the ways we navigate and even date; stepping outside our reactions to new technological developments by going back to Plato; parental disregard for the protocol of Skype calling; his life in Berlin, another city where people go to do projects and make things; how and why he became "Wandering Stan," and the importance he's found of digging into others' lives when he's in actual places; whether younger so-called "digital natives" can better handle technological addictiveness; how wide a swath of the human experience San Francisco offers; how he discovered the difference between his engaged-in-a-project face and his dead-eyed Reddit-browsing face; and how word of Avril Lavigne reached Nepal before it reached him.

Inventor and self-described hacker Mitch Altman talks about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace he co-founded. Altman is responsible for co-founding 3-ware is now the President and CTO of Cornfield Electronics. His many inventions include TV-B-Gone and NeuroDreamer sleep mask.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly Speaker 1: 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift on today's show. Rick Carnesi and I interview Mitch Altman. [00:00:30] Mitch is an inventor and self-described hacker. He cofounded the company three where and is now the president and CTO of cornfield electronics. We're talking to him about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace that he co founded, as well as some of his many inventions. These include the TVB gone a remote that turns off most TVs and his recently successful Kickstarter project, the neuro dreamer sleep mask. Mitch Altman. Welcome to spectrum. [00:01:00] Thanks. Would you mind telling us sort of that career path? Speaker 4: How I got to sitting here today? Uh, I've been a geek all my life. You know, I dreamed about this stuff when I was a little kid. I actually did a, I remember having this recurring dream where I saw the inside of my mom's radio, which, uh, they were tubes. I didn't know what tooks were though. They were just glowing. They look cool. And I dreamed about pushing it off the counter to see what was in it. And in my dreams I actually did it. But in real life [00:01:30] I was always too timid. But I really wanted to see what was inside. And eventually I started taking apart my parents things and somehow they let me and eventually I learned to put them back together, making my own things from scratch. It's been fun in electronics, I always want to know how things work. I mean that's, that's what makes us geeks tick, you know. Speaker 4: But the thing that fascinated me the most was electronics. So I started playing with wires and alligator clips and putting forks into electrical outlets and having my parents scrape me off the ceiling [00:02:00] and learning from my mistakes, learning and growing. And eventually I was making my own intercoms between my brother's bunk bed and mine below him in high school, making an electronic bong. And, uh, that was one of the things that actually got me talking to other kids rather than just being alone geek. So, uh, inventing, making things. It's been part of my life since I can remember thinking. But you've also had this entrepreneurial spirit as well, I suppose. Yeah. And I'm not really sure [00:02:30] where that came from. Maybe from my parents. My father was an architect, you know, and I see a lot of what I do as art, you know, expressing ourselves truthfully and doing things in a way that give other people an opportunity to think about themselves in the world around them. Speaker 4: And my father did his art architecture and it made him a living without really being conscious of it. That's probably the path that I followed. I actually quit the job that I had created for myself, which was consulting in electronics [00:03:00] for usually small companies. But I quit that so I could explore ways of doing more of what I loved and that's how I came across TV be gone. And I was lucky enough that it actually makes me a living. It's really cool to be able to make a living by doing what you love, making enough money, doing what you love to keep doing what you love. I mean, that's my idea of success. Where does the inspiration come from your projects? Well, that's a good question. Where does inspiration come from? You know, obviously, uh, other people can be inspiring random [00:03:30] events in our lives and people are a great random elements in our lives. Speaker 4: And if we relate to people when they throw something at us that really sticks in our [inaudible] and uh, nibbles away at us, uh, it's like sticking in there. Maybe it's subconscious. Eventually it becomes an idea for a project that screaming to come out, TV gone. I got the idea of sitting in a Chinese restaurant in 1993 talking with some friends and we were there [00:04:00] to talk to each other, not to watch TV. And yet there was a TV on and we were watching the TV and that was crazy. So we started talking about that and then I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just turn off these horrible distractions everywhere I went? And instantly I knew I could because I'm a geek. Of course. It took me 10 years to get to a point in my life where I had time and energy to do it. Speaker 4: And I'm glad I did. And I had to make that time though. You know, inspiration is really important. Ideas are really important, but they don't go anywhere unless [00:04:30] you make the time to do something with them. And you just prioritize it because you're passionate about it. Or how, how do you make sure that you actually finish something? You start o finishing what you start. Well, you know, I think that's overrated. I've done zillions of projects as have we all that we have that I haven't finished. That's great. You know, and if I'm not motivated to finish it, that leaves time for doing something else. TV began I think is the first project in my entire life where I actually finished it. Totally. And I had to, if I was going to make [00:05:00] it a product, you know, and uh, I don't think we've mentioned TV beyond for people that don't know, it is a key chain that turns TVs off in public places and it really does work. Speaker 4: And I did it cause I got rid of TV in my life at home. I am a TV addict. Uh, I watched it every waking moment of my life as an unhappy child, but I didn't have to keep doing it later in life. And I chose not to, but in public, no one chooses those things to be on. People don't leave their home to watch television except me for sports [00:05:30] bars or something. But I don't like bars and I don't like sports so I don't go to those but everywhere else. So I made it so I could turn them off and other people wanted them. And then when their friends wanted them in friends of friends, that's when I decided I would make a bunch. So, um, I started it like many projects and it got on a roll unlike many projects. But I actually was so passionate about it continually and I had so many people that are kept asking me when's that going to be done? That that probably helped me follow through and actually finish it [00:06:00] and get it to a point where it's a manufacturable product. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum Inka LX Berkeley. Our guest is inventor Mitch Altman. Speaker 4: And once you get something at that point, what's next? Do you tinker and invent more stuff or do you spend time supporting TVB gone or, yeah. Well when you do what you love, all sorts of [00:06:30] interesting things open up that you might notice where you wouldn't if you're consumed doing something that just exhausts you like a job, you know, you don't like that too. Many of us, unfortunately on our planet are in that position. I have been working on many other projects along the way. I started getting into hacker conferences and maker fairs as a result of TVB gone. People invited me to these things and I, um, would give talks, [00:07:00] which is kind of bizarre for me. A totally introverted geek, terrified of public speaking. Like so many other of us introverted geeks. But, uh, it turned out I liked it. It makes it easier to talk about something you love. Speaker 4: Yeah. I don't like being pedantic. Uh, I like making things fun and if other people relate then maybe they'll learn something, maybe make a new choice in their life that serves them better and I don't want to tell anyone else what to do. Well sometimes I do, but I like making it more fun for people to choose for themselves what's good for themselves. [00:07:30] I found a place where at hacker conferences, at maker fairs where I could teach doing what I really love, which is soldering and making cool things with electronics and that led to me finding things to teach with. So I started making my own little kits for total beginners and I started doing that by hacking other people's kids and then making my own and that's been supplementing my income a little bit, but mostly it's been paying for me to be able to travel around the world and teach doing this, which I also [00:08:00] love. Speaker 4: That led to going to more hacker conferences and maker fairs and things related and going to hacker spaces that existed but not too many back then. Back then was 2007 okay. The first maker fair was 2006 which led me to meet people who invited me to the first hacker conference also in 2006 that I went to a hope in New York every other year. And I've been actually helping organize those now, which is another thing I make time for at one [00:08:30] of these hacker conferences in Germany, put on by the chaos computer club who have been responsible for creating hackerspaces in Germany and then the world for over a quarter century now of in 2007 it was about a quarter century of that and they gave a presentation on how to start your own and I was way inspired to come home and do that in my home town and with my friend Jake, we Noisebridge and instantly we just put out the word and we got lots [00:09:00] of way cool people to help and with our ideas and their ideas collected more people. Speaker 4: And Noisebridge was a just a natural growth out of all of our enthusiasm and inspiration for having the energy and the high really of being at one of these hacker conferences where people do what they love, explore it, they love Sharon, teach and learn from each other. Uh, but not just once a year, uh, but every day, all night, all day, all year round. [00:09:30] And Wow. Hundreds of us go through there every week. And it constantly amazes me how many cool people are doing cool things there now. And what kinds of things happen at Noisebridge? It's very diverse. A, it's not just tech. You know, I teach soldering and electronics, but [inaudible] Mondays. Yeah. So every Monday, uh, since 2007, I've been teaching how to solder and I love doing that. I'm really good at it by now too. And when I'm not in town, I'm on the road. Other people do [00:10:00] it on Wednesdays. Speaker 4: There's a similar kind of thing for craft and art folks to get together and that's called scow sewing, crafting or whatever. Also on Mondays is people. There's someone who's teaching a class on how to do your own website. There's a python language class, there's German language, human language class, there's a space exploration program, there's food classes. We have a full kitchen, we have a dark room, there's lithography classes. He printing three d printers. We got lots of those. And we understood [00:10:30] sewing machines and lots of cool, uh, electronics equipment as well as the machine shop and laser cutter and a library. We've got classrooms, we've got events, spaces, all this and more. And everything happens just because people think it would be cool to do. And they, they do it and people help. And this is just one of about a thousand hackerspaces in the world. Now it's another thing I love doing is going around helping people start these supportive communities, which are hackerspaces for people to explore and do what they love and hopefully even make a living out of it [00:11:00] so they can do what they enjoy and find fulfillment in their lives. Speaker 4: You know, now there's only a thousand in the world. What will the world be like when there's a million? Uh, more opportunities for people to do. Way more cool things. Earlier guests on our show did talk about the makerspace project of which you're fairly vocal critics. So can you say why you're a critic? I wouldn't say I'm a critic. I love maker fair and I love make magazine. They've created opportunities for so many people and my life has been [00:11:30] changed for the positive by it and so it was so many other people and it will continue to be that kind of positive role model for others as well. They recently sought and received a grant for $10 million from DARPA, which is an arm of a research arm of the u s military. Their goal is to help create new technology for the u s military. That's their stated goal. So they have a bunch of grants now available. Speaker 4: Most of them are because they [00:12:00] see the u s education system as horribly flawed as do I. People in the u s military see that just as clearly as many of us too. And making grants for hands on learning is a way to give more people opportunity to at least have a start and becoming high quality engineers, which they need to further the goals of their organizations, which is in my view, simply put to hurt and kill people. Of course, that's [00:12:30] my personal view. You know, other people will see it differently. What I would love to see happen is for people to explore and continually reevaluate what it means to them to receive funding from organizations or people whose goals don't align with your own cause. There's consequences, so anything we do, there's consequences. There's pluses and minuses for everything. When you accept funds from sources that have goals that don't [00:13:00] align with your own, of course you're helping your goals because you have funding to do so, but you're also helping the goals of the funding source, which don't align with your own. Speaker 4: How do you actually weigh the pluses and minuses in that way? It's not easy, but for me, after struggling with it for months, I can't feel good about associating myself with helping the goals of DARPA. Even though good things come from what DARPA has [00:13:30] done, I would rather put my energy directly into doing things that I believe are helping people rather than helping the goals of an organization that does things that I find well, use the word reprehensible, so I'm not trying to talk anyone into not associating with makerfair or make magazine. I still respect many of the people at make and a maker fair, great deal. I think they'll do great things. I just can't feel [00:14:00] good about helping myself and I really would hope that people do consider the funding sources because it does change what you'll do maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously. So what are you willing to do that you might not have done to make it more likely to get funding renewed funding? Speaker 4: What are they going to stop doing that they might have done because it doesn't look so good to the funding source? I see these as very, very much related. It's really important [00:14:30] to explore these things before making a conscious choice about whether to accept these funding sources. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe it isn't. It's up to each and every individual. I need a couple points of clarification just to make sure we got everything right. Yeah. So the DARPA funding at all go to maker fair to your knowledge? Uh, sort of the, with some of the other projects that those same people were doing well before making my choice. I talk to the person who started maker fair and make magazine, [00:15:00] uh, Dale Dougherty and he's a great guy. We've done lots of cool things through the years together. And my main goal was to explore the possibility of helping with maker fair without being associated with DARPA funding. And the funding that they got is for a program they call mentor program a but that's intertwined with making makerfair. So there's no way to dissociate the funding Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:15:30] this is spectrum k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Mitch Altman, Co founder of the hackerspace Noisebridge. Speaker 4: I also see this theme of wanting to help people. So for instance, you host these depression and Geek meetups. Life isn't all totally wonderful. Life is full of things that are amazingly wonderful and rapturous and blissful and it's full of things [00:16:00] that totally suck and anything in between up, down and all around. And any given life, no matter how wonderful your life is, uh, there's ups and downs. And I, um, started off my life as a totally depressed geek and, um, I was brutally bullied. I was, you know, I'm introverted geeks when I was a little kid, did not farewell. And not only that, but, uh, I was an am queer and little kids take any difference big and small, and they brutalize [00:16:30] people for it. Uh, life was horrible for me and my parents were terrible parents. Lucky for me. They turned out to be cool people as adults for me when I was at adult. Speaker 4: And uh, no matter what childhood can be rough for people and there's unhealed stuff and we carry all of that with us if we survive into adulthood. And here we all are as adults living our lives, hopefully exploring and doing what we love with the help of, uh, our supportive communities, including hackerspaces, but still there was a huge [00:17:00] amount of depression in geek communities. Uh, last November a friend of mine killed himself. It was the first time in my life where I felt close to someone who killed themselves. And, uh, it's rough. It really, really sucks. There's nothing like it. And still, uh, by this time in my life I tried to see opportunity in anything to help not only myself but other people. It's part of my healing process. So I wrote up [00:17:30] a very personal blog post on the Noisebridge blog site about my feelings and hundreds or more people responded. Speaker 4: It was overwhelming. And, uh, it really showed me that way more people are dealing with depression than I could imagine. And, and my friend, I had no clue he was, and I'm very sensitive to it. He hit it so well and I hit it well when I was a first half of my life living with depression. But yeah, a lot of us in the geek world. And in our planet are suffering [00:18:00] with depression. So after all these responses, I thought, you know, maybe we could have a meetup where we can talk about this and openly and if we talk about this openly as a community, maybe maybe someone will reach out for help rather than harm themselves and maybe someone will live another night. And any case, these geek and depression meetups that I started are now happening in various cities around the world and hopefully more as, as we become [00:18:30] more open about this cause, you know, I think we really can benefit all of us, each of us and as a community, if everyone is able to be totally open about all of who we are and not have to be shameful or secretive about something, you know, we can be open about everything but this then, then soon we're closing off huge parts of our lives and we have this part we can't even explore ourselves cause we can't talk about it to anyone. Speaker 4: We're not open about it with ourselves and not just about being queer or [00:19:00] whatever, but also being depressed, feeling suicidal, has a lot of shame associated with it. And a lot of people feel, unfortunately, sadly, tragically, that the easiest way out is killing themselves rather than just asking for help. And that's just so awful and unnecessary. So, uh, there are geeking depression meetups now that happened in San Francisco. I would like to see more happen elsewhere, bigger, small, whatever, and I'm [00:19:30] always available if anyone wants to contact me for any reason, project help how to start a company. Uh, if you're depressed, if you want someone to talk you into quitting a job, you don't like anything. I'm totally willing to communicate any time. Just please email me mitch@cornfieldelectronics.com. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Our Guest Today on spectrum is Mitch Altman, enter hackerspace activist. This is KALX Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:20:00] You had, uh, mentioned this sort of lackluster state of science, technology, engineering and math education or education in general. Do you see other possible solutions to bringing that up? Yes. This is one of the huge reasons why I started Noisebridge and why help other hackerspaces start. These are places where education happens in a very real wonderful way. Noisebridge is a 500 C3 public [00:20:30] benefit corporation in the state of California, but it's not your traditional kind of education organization. We teach and learn and share through hands on whether it's with computers, whether it's in a kitchen, a sewing machine, a soldering iron, a machine shop, whether it's exploring biology and growing mushrooms or using a laser cutter or exploring space. It's all about learning and teaching and sharing. People can try stuff if they know they love something, they can blurt more, they can [00:21:00] teach it. Speaker 4: It's really fantastic and this is an opportunity for some people to actually learn what they want to learn to live lives that they want to live. I wish the u s education system were more of that way, but it's very unfortunate that the only schools, well most of the schools that actually provide that opportunity are very expensive. Private schools in our country and there are fortunately some exceptions. I was just teaching some kids over at them, met West School in [00:21:30] Oakland who are providing hands on learning for their kids and it's public. It's really cool that, that, that exists. But it's only, I think 165 kids are allowed there. I would love to see more of that. So hackerspaces around the world are providing these opportunities right now. It's very few opportunities compared to what we need. There's only a thousand hackerspaces in the world and we need a million and we'll get there. Speaker 4: Uh, because hackerspaces are incredibly cool. People are [00:22:00] spontaneously creating them. There's all sorts of ways we can create these niches within which we can provide ourselves the services that our governments are not providing us. Hackerspaces just happened to be a really wonderful way near and dear to my heart and Mitch, our hackerspaces able to reach out to younger students populations that are stuck in those schools that you were talking about that aren't doing any of this hands on stuff. Yeah, well they, it's already, uh, it's already there. I mean, Noisebridge has [00:22:30] always been welcoming to people of all ages and most hackerspaces are, although some are afraid of liability issues a and they only have 18 and over, which I think is absurd. Yeah, there's, there's no age limit for learning. Not If we don't have it beaten out of us. That is, I'm not doing hackerspaces to get rid of schools. Speaker 4: I would love schools to become places where people can actually learn, but kids can have these often totally free and it Noisebridge [00:23:00] it's always free opportunities as an alternative during lunch or before or after school, they can come to Noisebridge over weekends, uh, with or without their parents. People are always welcome to come. Hopefully as there were more and more hackerspaces, there'll be more opportunities for these kids. There are hackerspaces in the East Bay, there's ace monster toys. There's one that's just forming now called pseudo room, s u d o room, [00:23:30] and there's mothership hacker moms, which is primarily for moms who are hackers and there's also a lowel space. I can't remember what the acronym stands for, unfortunately, but therefore liberating ourselves locally. There you go. Liberating ourselves locally. There are a bunch of cool people primarily for, uh, hackers of color, of various sorts and we need more. There's actually people just now starting to talk about another hackerspace in [00:24:00] San Francisco. What I would love to see is a hackerspace in every neighborhood of San Francisco, every neighborhood of every city around the country. We need a million of these things. Okay. Well, Mitch, thanks for joining us. Yeah, it's been great being here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Speaker 5: Mm. Speaker 6: A regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski at Lisa kind of joined me for the calendar. The next science [00:24:30] at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on August the 18th in genetics and plants biology room 100 the lecture will be given by Dr Anton Trypsin and will be titled, can one see a flower through a granite wall? Amazing capabilities of neutron imaging. The detection technology developed for NASA astrophysical missions at UC Berkeley space science lab has been successfully extended to such diverse areas as synchrotron instrumentation, biomedical imaging, ground-based astronomy [00:25:00] and neutron micro tomography. Dr Trypsin will talk about his experience with neutron imaging and how it's useful find new applications. He got his phd in Applied Physics in 1992 at the Russian Academy of Sciences and was then a British royal society fellow with University of Lye Chester and joined the space scientist lab at UC Berkeley in 1996 where he is currently a research associate Speaker 7: on Saturday, August 18th the exploratorium at three six zero one line street at the Palace of fine arts in San Francisco [00:25:30] and celebrating founder of Frank Oppenheimer's hundredth birthday. Standard admission is $25 but college students, seniors, teachers, persons with disabilities and youths age six to 17 pay only $19 members and children five and under are free during regular museum hours of 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM visitors can take part in a variety of events and activities. Honoring Frank at the explorer bowls table from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM you can make a spinning top when [00:26:00] a Frank's favorite DIY projects throughout the day in the mine theater. You can see a series of exploratorium home movies featuring the early days of the museum as well as footage of frank engaging with visitors and staff. Today's events will also feature a frank themed presentation in the McBean theater and screenings of some of his favorite films from the museums, cinema arts archives, including the Em's classic powers of 10 there will also be birthday cake exploratory members can go [00:26:30] to a special celebration from six [inaudible] 9:00 PM for more information, visit exploratorium.edu no news with [inaudible] Speaker 6: Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature reports that the average temperature of the earth land has risen by 2.5 Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records suggest [00:27:00] that the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions. Five Times more station records were used than in previous analyses and a new statistical approach allowed Berkeley Earth to go about a hundred years farther back in time than previous studies allowing the team to conclude that the contribution of solar activity to global warming is negligible. Five scientific papers including the raw data are available online@berkeleyearth.org Elizabeth Mueller Co founder and executive director [00:27:30] of Berkeley Earth says that one of our goals at Berkeley Earth is complete transparency. We believe that everyone should be able to access raw climate data and do their own analysis. Mueller was a guest on spectrum and her interview is available on iTunes university Speaker 7: science daily reports that UCLA researchers found that older adults who regularly used a brain fitness program played on the computer demonstrated significantly improved memory and language skills. The team studied 59 participants with an [00:28:00] average age of 84 recruited from local retirement communities in southern California. The volunteers were split into two groups. The first group you used the brain fitness program for an average of 73 and a half, 20 minute sessions across a six month period. Well a second group. You use it less than 45 times. During that same period, researchers found that the first group demonstrated significantly higher improvement in memory and language skills compared to the second group. The study's findings add to the field exploring whether such brain fitness tools may help improve language [00:28:30] in memory and may ultimately help protect individuals from the cognitive decline associated with aging and Alzheimer's disease. Age-Related memory decline affects approximately 40% of older adults and is characterized by self perception of memory loss and decline in memory performance. Previous studies have shown that engaging in mental activities can help improve memory. That little research has been done to determine whether the numerous brain fitness games or memory training programs on the market are effective. This is one of the first studies to assess the cognitive effects [00:29:00] of the computerized memory training program. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: The music heard during the show is by Anna David from his album folk acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum.at Speaker 1: yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Inventor and self-described hacker Mitch Altman talks about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace he co-founded. Altman is responsible for co-founding 3-ware is now the President and CTO of Cornfield Electronics. His many inventions include TV-B-Gone and NeuroDreamer sleep mask.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k l x Berkeley, a biweekly Speaker 1: 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift on today's show. Rick Carnesi and I interview Mitch Altman. [00:00:30] Mitch is an inventor and self-described hacker. He cofounded the company three where and is now the president and CTO of cornfield electronics. We're talking to him about Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace that he co founded, as well as some of his many inventions. These include the TVB gone a remote that turns off most TVs and his recently successful Kickstarter project, the neuro dreamer sleep mask. Mitch Altman. Welcome to spectrum. [00:01:00] Thanks. Would you mind telling us sort of that career path? Speaker 4: How I got to sitting here today? Uh, I've been a geek all my life. You know, I dreamed about this stuff when I was a little kid. I actually did a, I remember having this recurring dream where I saw the inside of my mom's radio, which, uh, they were tubes. I didn't know what tooks were though. They were just glowing. They look cool. And I dreamed about pushing it off the counter to see what was in it. And in my dreams I actually did it. But in real life [00:01:30] I was always too timid. But I really wanted to see what was inside. And eventually I started taking apart my parents things and somehow they let me and eventually I learned to put them back together, making my own things from scratch. It's been fun in electronics, I always want to know how things work. I mean that's, that's what makes us geeks tick, you know. Speaker 4: But the thing that fascinated me the most was electronics. So I started playing with wires and alligator clips and putting forks into electrical outlets and having my parents scrape me off the ceiling [00:02:00] and learning from my mistakes, learning and growing. And eventually I was making my own intercoms between my brother's bunk bed and mine below him in high school, making an electronic bong. And, uh, that was one of the things that actually got me talking to other kids rather than just being alone geek. So, uh, inventing, making things. It's been part of my life since I can remember thinking. But you've also had this entrepreneurial spirit as well, I suppose. Yeah. And I'm not really sure [00:02:30] where that came from. Maybe from my parents. My father was an architect, you know, and I see a lot of what I do as art, you know, expressing ourselves truthfully and doing things in a way that give other people an opportunity to think about themselves in the world around them. Speaker 4: And my father did his art architecture and it made him a living without really being conscious of it. That's probably the path that I followed. I actually quit the job that I had created for myself, which was consulting in electronics [00:03:00] for usually small companies. But I quit that so I could explore ways of doing more of what I loved and that's how I came across TV be gone. And I was lucky enough that it actually makes me a living. It's really cool to be able to make a living by doing what you love, making enough money, doing what you love to keep doing what you love. I mean, that's my idea of success. Where does the inspiration come from your projects? Well, that's a good question. Where does inspiration come from? You know, obviously, uh, other people can be inspiring random [00:03:30] events in our lives and people are a great random elements in our lives. Speaker 4: And if we relate to people when they throw something at us that really sticks in our [inaudible] and uh, nibbles away at us, uh, it's like sticking in there. Maybe it's subconscious. Eventually it becomes an idea for a project that screaming to come out, TV gone. I got the idea of sitting in a Chinese restaurant in 1993 talking with some friends and we were there [00:04:00] to talk to each other, not to watch TV. And yet there was a TV on and we were watching the TV and that was crazy. So we started talking about that and then I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just turn off these horrible distractions everywhere I went? And instantly I knew I could because I'm a geek. Of course. It took me 10 years to get to a point in my life where I had time and energy to do it. Speaker 4: And I'm glad I did. And I had to make that time though. You know, inspiration is really important. Ideas are really important, but they don't go anywhere unless [00:04:30] you make the time to do something with them. And you just prioritize it because you're passionate about it. Or how, how do you make sure that you actually finish something? You start o finishing what you start. Well, you know, I think that's overrated. I've done zillions of projects as have we all that we have that I haven't finished. That's great. You know, and if I'm not motivated to finish it, that leaves time for doing something else. TV began I think is the first project in my entire life where I actually finished it. Totally. And I had to, if I was going to make [00:05:00] it a product, you know, and uh, I don't think we've mentioned TV beyond for people that don't know, it is a key chain that turns TVs off in public places and it really does work. Speaker 4: And I did it cause I got rid of TV in my life at home. I am a TV addict. Uh, I watched it every waking moment of my life as an unhappy child, but I didn't have to keep doing it later in life. And I chose not to, but in public, no one chooses those things to be on. People don't leave their home to watch television except me for sports [00:05:30] bars or something. But I don't like bars and I don't like sports so I don't go to those but everywhere else. So I made it so I could turn them off and other people wanted them. And then when their friends wanted them in friends of friends, that's when I decided I would make a bunch. So, um, I started it like many projects and it got on a roll unlike many projects. But I actually was so passionate about it continually and I had so many people that are kept asking me when's that going to be done? That that probably helped me follow through and actually finish it [00:06:00] and get it to a point where it's a manufacturable product. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you are listening to spectrum Inka LX Berkeley. Our guest is inventor Mitch Altman. Speaker 4: And once you get something at that point, what's next? Do you tinker and invent more stuff or do you spend time supporting TVB gone or, yeah. Well when you do what you love, all sorts of [00:06:30] interesting things open up that you might notice where you wouldn't if you're consumed doing something that just exhausts you like a job, you know, you don't like that too. Many of us, unfortunately on our planet are in that position. I have been working on many other projects along the way. I started getting into hacker conferences and maker fairs as a result of TVB gone. People invited me to these things and I, um, would give talks, [00:07:00] which is kind of bizarre for me. A totally introverted geek, terrified of public speaking. Like so many other of us introverted geeks. But, uh, it turned out I liked it. It makes it easier to talk about something you love. Speaker 4: Yeah. I don't like being pedantic. Uh, I like making things fun and if other people relate then maybe they'll learn something, maybe make a new choice in their life that serves them better and I don't want to tell anyone else what to do. Well sometimes I do, but I like making it more fun for people to choose for themselves what's good for themselves. [00:07:30] I found a place where at hacker conferences, at maker fairs where I could teach doing what I really love, which is soldering and making cool things with electronics and that led to me finding things to teach with. So I started making my own little kits for total beginners and I started doing that by hacking other people's kids and then making my own and that's been supplementing my income a little bit, but mostly it's been paying for me to be able to travel around the world and teach doing this, which I also [00:08:00] love. Speaker 4: That led to going to more hacker conferences and maker fairs and things related and going to hacker spaces that existed but not too many back then. Back then was 2007 okay. The first maker fair was 2006 which led me to meet people who invited me to the first hacker conference also in 2006 that I went to a hope in New York every other year. And I've been actually helping organize those now, which is another thing I make time for at one [00:08:30] of these hacker conferences in Germany, put on by the chaos computer club who have been responsible for creating hackerspaces in Germany and then the world for over a quarter century now of in 2007 it was about a quarter century of that and they gave a presentation on how to start your own and I was way inspired to come home and do that in my home town and with my friend Jake, we Noisebridge and instantly we just put out the word and we got lots [00:09:00] of way cool people to help and with our ideas and their ideas collected more people. Speaker 4: And Noisebridge was a just a natural growth out of all of our enthusiasm and inspiration for having the energy and the high really of being at one of these hacker conferences where people do what they love, explore it, they love Sharon, teach and learn from each other. Uh, but not just once a year, uh, but every day, all night, all day, all year round. [00:09:30] And Wow. Hundreds of us go through there every week. And it constantly amazes me how many cool people are doing cool things there now. And what kinds of things happen at Noisebridge? It's very diverse. A, it's not just tech. You know, I teach soldering and electronics, but [inaudible] Mondays. Yeah. So every Monday, uh, since 2007, I've been teaching how to solder and I love doing that. I'm really good at it by now too. And when I'm not in town, I'm on the road. Other people do [00:10:00] it on Wednesdays. Speaker 4: There's a similar kind of thing for craft and art folks to get together and that's called scow sewing, crafting or whatever. Also on Mondays is people. There's someone who's teaching a class on how to do your own website. There's a python language class, there's German language, human language class, there's a space exploration program, there's food classes. We have a full kitchen, we have a dark room, there's lithography classes. He printing three d printers. We got lots of those. And we understood [00:10:30] sewing machines and lots of cool, uh, electronics equipment as well as the machine shop and laser cutter and a library. We've got classrooms, we've got events, spaces, all this and more. And everything happens just because people think it would be cool to do. And they, they do it and people help. And this is just one of about a thousand hackerspaces in the world. Now it's another thing I love doing is going around helping people start these supportive communities, which are hackerspaces for people to explore and do what they love and hopefully even make a living out of it [00:11:00] so they can do what they enjoy and find fulfillment in their lives. Speaker 4: You know, now there's only a thousand in the world. What will the world be like when there's a million? Uh, more opportunities for people to do. Way more cool things. Earlier guests on our show did talk about the makerspace project of which you're fairly vocal critics. So can you say why you're a critic? I wouldn't say I'm a critic. I love maker fair and I love make magazine. They've created opportunities for so many people and my life has been [00:11:30] changed for the positive by it and so it was so many other people and it will continue to be that kind of positive role model for others as well. They recently sought and received a grant for $10 million from DARPA, which is an arm of a research arm of the u s military. Their goal is to help create new technology for the u s military. That's their stated goal. So they have a bunch of grants now available. Speaker 4: Most of them are because they [00:12:00] see the u s education system as horribly flawed as do I. People in the u s military see that just as clearly as many of us too. And making grants for hands on learning is a way to give more people opportunity to at least have a start and becoming high quality engineers, which they need to further the goals of their organizations, which is in my view, simply put to hurt and kill people. Of course, that's [00:12:30] my personal view. You know, other people will see it differently. What I would love to see happen is for people to explore and continually reevaluate what it means to them to receive funding from organizations or people whose goals don't align with your own cause. There's consequences, so anything we do, there's consequences. There's pluses and minuses for everything. When you accept funds from sources that have goals that don't [00:13:00] align with your own, of course you're helping your goals because you have funding to do so, but you're also helping the goals of the funding source, which don't align with your own. Speaker 4: How do you actually weigh the pluses and minuses in that way? It's not easy, but for me, after struggling with it for months, I can't feel good about associating myself with helping the goals of DARPA. Even though good things come from what DARPA has [00:13:30] done, I would rather put my energy directly into doing things that I believe are helping people rather than helping the goals of an organization that does things that I find well, use the word reprehensible, so I'm not trying to talk anyone into not associating with makerfair or make magazine. I still respect many of the people at make and a maker fair, great deal. I think they'll do great things. I just can't feel [00:14:00] good about helping myself and I really would hope that people do consider the funding sources because it does change what you'll do maybe consciously, maybe subconsciously. So what are you willing to do that you might not have done to make it more likely to get funding renewed funding? Speaker 4: What are they going to stop doing that they might have done because it doesn't look so good to the funding source? I see these as very, very much related. It's really important [00:14:30] to explore these things before making a conscious choice about whether to accept these funding sources. Maybe it's worth it. Maybe it isn't. It's up to each and every individual. I need a couple points of clarification just to make sure we got everything right. Yeah. So the DARPA funding at all go to maker fair to your knowledge? Uh, sort of the, with some of the other projects that those same people were doing well before making my choice. I talk to the person who started maker fair and make magazine, [00:15:00] uh, Dale Dougherty and he's a great guy. We've done lots of cool things through the years together. And my main goal was to explore the possibility of helping with maker fair without being associated with DARPA funding. And the funding that they got is for a program they call mentor program a but that's intertwined with making makerfair. So there's no way to dissociate the funding Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:15:30] this is spectrum k a l x Berkeley. Our guest is Mitch Altman, Co founder of the hackerspace Noisebridge. Speaker 4: I also see this theme of wanting to help people. So for instance, you host these depression and Geek meetups. Life isn't all totally wonderful. Life is full of things that are amazingly wonderful and rapturous and blissful and it's full of things [00:16:00] that totally suck and anything in between up, down and all around. And any given life, no matter how wonderful your life is, uh, there's ups and downs. And I, um, started off my life as a totally depressed geek and, um, I was brutally bullied. I was, you know, I'm introverted geeks when I was a little kid, did not farewell. And not only that, but, uh, I was an am queer and little kids take any difference big and small, and they brutalize [00:16:30] people for it. Uh, life was horrible for me and my parents were terrible parents. Lucky for me. They turned out to be cool people as adults for me when I was at adult. Speaker 4: And uh, no matter what childhood can be rough for people and there's unhealed stuff and we carry all of that with us if we survive into adulthood. And here we all are as adults living our lives, hopefully exploring and doing what we love with the help of, uh, our supportive communities, including hackerspaces, but still there was a huge [00:17:00] amount of depression in geek communities. Uh, last November a friend of mine killed himself. It was the first time in my life where I felt close to someone who killed themselves. And, uh, it's rough. It really, really sucks. There's nothing like it. And still, uh, by this time in my life I tried to see opportunity in anything to help not only myself but other people. It's part of my healing process. So I wrote up [00:17:30] a very personal blog post on the Noisebridge blog site about my feelings and hundreds or more people responded. Speaker 4: It was overwhelming. And, uh, it really showed me that way more people are dealing with depression than I could imagine. And, and my friend, I had no clue he was, and I'm very sensitive to it. He hit it so well and I hit it well when I was a first half of my life living with depression. But yeah, a lot of us in the geek world. And in our planet are suffering [00:18:00] with depression. So after all these responses, I thought, you know, maybe we could have a meetup where we can talk about this and openly and if we talk about this openly as a community, maybe maybe someone will reach out for help rather than harm themselves and maybe someone will live another night. And any case, these geek and depression meetups that I started are now happening in various cities around the world and hopefully more as, as we become [00:18:30] more open about this cause, you know, I think we really can benefit all of us, each of us and as a community, if everyone is able to be totally open about all of who we are and not have to be shameful or secretive about something, you know, we can be open about everything but this then, then soon we're closing off huge parts of our lives and we have this part we can't even explore ourselves cause we can't talk about it to anyone. Speaker 4: We're not open about it with ourselves and not just about being queer or [00:19:00] whatever, but also being depressed, feeling suicidal, has a lot of shame associated with it. And a lot of people feel, unfortunately, sadly, tragically, that the easiest way out is killing themselves rather than just asking for help. And that's just so awful and unnecessary. So, uh, there are geeking depression meetups now that happened in San Francisco. I would like to see more happen elsewhere, bigger, small, whatever, and I'm [00:19:30] always available if anyone wants to contact me for any reason, project help how to start a company. Uh, if you're depressed, if you want someone to talk you into quitting a job, you don't like anything. I'm totally willing to communicate any time. Just please email me mitch@cornfieldelectronics.com. Speaker 2: [inaudible]. Our Guest Today on spectrum is Mitch Altman, enter hackerspace activist. This is KALX Berkeley. Speaker 4: [00:20:00] You had, uh, mentioned this sort of lackluster state of science, technology, engineering and math education or education in general. Do you see other possible solutions to bringing that up? Yes. This is one of the huge reasons why I started Noisebridge and why help other hackerspaces start. These are places where education happens in a very real wonderful way. Noisebridge is a 500 C3 public [00:20:30] benefit corporation in the state of California, but it's not your traditional kind of education organization. We teach and learn and share through hands on whether it's with computers, whether it's in a kitchen, a sewing machine, a soldering iron, a machine shop, whether it's exploring biology and growing mushrooms or using a laser cutter or exploring space. It's all about learning and teaching and sharing. People can try stuff if they know they love something, they can blurt more, they can [00:21:00] teach it. Speaker 4: It's really fantastic and this is an opportunity for some people to actually learn what they want to learn to live lives that they want to live. I wish the u s education system were more of that way, but it's very unfortunate that the only schools, well most of the schools that actually provide that opportunity are very expensive. Private schools in our country and there are fortunately some exceptions. I was just teaching some kids over at them, met West School in [00:21:30] Oakland who are providing hands on learning for their kids and it's public. It's really cool that, that, that exists. But it's only, I think 165 kids are allowed there. I would love to see more of that. So hackerspaces around the world are providing these opportunities right now. It's very few opportunities compared to what we need. There's only a thousand hackerspaces in the world and we need a million and we'll get there. Speaker 4: Uh, because hackerspaces are incredibly cool. People are [00:22:00] spontaneously creating them. There's all sorts of ways we can create these niches within which we can provide ourselves the services that our governments are not providing us. Hackerspaces just happened to be a really wonderful way near and dear to my heart and Mitch, our hackerspaces able to reach out to younger students populations that are stuck in those schools that you were talking about that aren't doing any of this hands on stuff. Yeah, well they, it's already, uh, it's already there. I mean, Noisebridge has [00:22:30] always been welcoming to people of all ages and most hackerspaces are, although some are afraid of liability issues a and they only have 18 and over, which I think is absurd. Yeah, there's, there's no age limit for learning. Not If we don't have it beaten out of us. That is, I'm not doing hackerspaces to get rid of schools. Speaker 4: I would love schools to become places where people can actually learn, but kids can have these often totally free and it Noisebridge [00:23:00] it's always free opportunities as an alternative during lunch or before or after school, they can come to Noisebridge over weekends, uh, with or without their parents. People are always welcome to come. Hopefully as there were more and more hackerspaces, there'll be more opportunities for these kids. There are hackerspaces in the East Bay, there's ace monster toys. There's one that's just forming now called pseudo room, s u d o room, [00:23:30] and there's mothership hacker moms, which is primarily for moms who are hackers and there's also a lowel space. I can't remember what the acronym stands for, unfortunately, but therefore liberating ourselves locally. There you go. Liberating ourselves locally. There are a bunch of cool people primarily for, uh, hackers of color, of various sorts and we need more. There's actually people just now starting to talk about another hackerspace in [00:24:00] San Francisco. What I would love to see is a hackerspace in every neighborhood of San Francisco, every neighborhood of every city around the country. We need a million of these things. Okay. Well, Mitch, thanks for joining us. Yeah, it's been great being here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Speaker 5: Mm. Speaker 6: A regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Rick Kaneski at Lisa kind of joined me for the calendar. The next science [00:24:30] at cal lecture will be given at 11:00 AM on August the 18th in genetics and plants biology room 100 the lecture will be given by Dr Anton Trypsin and will be titled, can one see a flower through a granite wall? Amazing capabilities of neutron imaging. The detection technology developed for NASA astrophysical missions at UC Berkeley space science lab has been successfully extended to such diverse areas as synchrotron instrumentation, biomedical imaging, ground-based astronomy [00:25:00] and neutron micro tomography. Dr Trypsin will talk about his experience with neutron imaging and how it's useful find new applications. He got his phd in Applied Physics in 1992 at the Russian Academy of Sciences and was then a British royal society fellow with University of Lye Chester and joined the space scientist lab at UC Berkeley in 1996 where he is currently a research associate Speaker 7: on Saturday, August 18th the exploratorium at three six zero one line street at the Palace of fine arts in San Francisco [00:25:30] and celebrating founder of Frank Oppenheimer's hundredth birthday. Standard admission is $25 but college students, seniors, teachers, persons with disabilities and youths age six to 17 pay only $19 members and children five and under are free during regular museum hours of 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM visitors can take part in a variety of events and activities. Honoring Frank at the explorer bowls table from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM you can make a spinning top when [00:26:00] a Frank's favorite DIY projects throughout the day in the mine theater. You can see a series of exploratorium home movies featuring the early days of the museum as well as footage of frank engaging with visitors and staff. Today's events will also feature a frank themed presentation in the McBean theater and screenings of some of his favorite films from the museums, cinema arts archives, including the Em's classic powers of 10 there will also be birthday cake exploratory members can go [00:26:30] to a special celebration from six [inaudible] 9:00 PM for more information, visit exploratorium.edu no news with [inaudible] Speaker 6: Karnofsky and Lisa Katovich. The Berkeley Earth surface temperature reports that the average temperature of the earth land has risen by 2.5 Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of 1.5 degrees over the most recent 50 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records suggest [00:27:00] that the most straightforward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions. Five Times more station records were used than in previous analyses and a new statistical approach allowed Berkeley Earth to go about a hundred years farther back in time than previous studies allowing the team to conclude that the contribution of solar activity to global warming is negligible. Five scientific papers including the raw data are available online@berkeleyearth.org Elizabeth Mueller Co founder and executive director [00:27:30] of Berkeley Earth says that one of our goals at Berkeley Earth is complete transparency. We believe that everyone should be able to access raw climate data and do their own analysis. Mueller was a guest on spectrum and her interview is available on iTunes university Speaker 7: science daily reports that UCLA researchers found that older adults who regularly used a brain fitness program played on the computer demonstrated significantly improved memory and language skills. The team studied 59 participants with an [00:28:00] average age of 84 recruited from local retirement communities in southern California. The volunteers were split into two groups. The first group you used the brain fitness program for an average of 73 and a half, 20 minute sessions across a six month period. Well a second group. You use it less than 45 times. During that same period, researchers found that the first group demonstrated significantly higher improvement in memory and language skills compared to the second group. The study's findings add to the field exploring whether such brain fitness tools may help improve language [00:28:30] in memory and may ultimately help protect individuals from the cognitive decline associated with aging and Alzheimer's disease. Age-Related memory decline affects approximately 40% of older adults and is characterized by self perception of memory loss and decline in memory performance. Previous studies have shown that engaging in mental activities can help improve memory. That little research has been done to determine whether the numerous brain fitness games or memory training programs on the market are effective. This is one of the first studies to assess the cognitive effects [00:29:00] of the computerized memory training program. Speaker 1: [inaudible]Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 1: [inaudible].Speaker 2: The music heard during the show is by Anna David from his album folk acoustic made available by a creative Commons license 3.0 attribution. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum.at Speaker 1: yahoo.com join us in two weeks at the same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Joe Cordaro is a principle member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist who received his PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l [00:00:30] x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa [inaudible]. Rick and I interviewed Joe Carderock, a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia national laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist. [00:01:00] Joe received his phd in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems. Joe, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Rick. Can you explain to us a little bit about concerted solar power? Sure. I'd be happy to. People have looked at using mirrors to focus light to do exactly what we are now doing in the 21st century since the mid 17 and 18 hundreds. There's a few reports that people using mirrors to focus [00:01:30] sunlight to heat up water in a boiler to generate steam for creating a pump for irrigation. And there's also been a report of a printing press that was powered off of steam that was generated using mirrors to focus light to once again heat up a boiler. Speaker 3: Um, that all happened in the 19th early 20th century. But from about the early 1920s until the 1970s not a lot of work went into looking at concentrated solar power to make electricity. Primarily that was because at the same [00:02:00] time that research to make solar electricity from sunlight was taking off, oil was discovered and that became much cheaper and economical than it was to invest in technology to look at concentrated solar power. So concentrated solar power is a method by using in mirrors to focus the sun's rays onto a type of central receiver in order to boil water, to turn a turbine to generate electricity. So it's really a complicated way to boil water just to make electricity, but it works [00:02:30] and it only uses the sun. Is this sort of input for energy? Yeah, it's actually pretty amazing that we, that we don't use this more often because there is no emission from it. Speaker 3: There's no greenhouse gases, there's no radioactive material and it's mostly made using commodity parts that can almost 70% be made in the United States. So there's three main architectures for concentrated solar power. There's the sterling engine, there's parabolic trough systems and then a central receiver tower [00:03:00] vista. Then engines are maybe the most efficient type of concentrated solar power, but they also have the most moving parts and a reliability is somewhat low right now. Their module, so you can add one and then another and another and another and increase your field side to base on demand. You can also just stick one in your backyard if you had the money to buy it and uh, didn't mind the thumping noise at the sterling pump makes so they're a little loud. The most employed type of concentrated solar [00:03:30] power facility right now is a parabolic trough system. And in a parabolic trough system you have a field of mirrors that are focused on a central tube that runs through the parabolic trough. Speaker 3: And this tube is about three inches in diameter. And inside the tube is a working fluid and it's usually a silicon based oil. And the silicon based oil is used because the uh, operating temperature for that is around zero degrees Celsius up to 450. If you're in the desert, you typically have cold winter nights, [00:04:00] so you need to have a flu that doesn't solidify at nighttime in the wintertime. And so zeros are pretty good, that lower limit, but the a heat transfer fluid and based on silicon is slightly expensive. And how does that upper limit established? How hot can these things really go? So the upper limit would be the thermal stability of working fluid and the upper stability is just dependent on the chemical nature of the fluid. So the bond strengths of the actual carbon oxygen and silicon bonds within the heat transfer fluid. Speaker 3: But as far as the amount [00:04:30] of heat energy that can be sort of harvested, that's going to be dependent on the thermal heat capacity of the fluid times the actual density times the uh, flow rate. So the more heat you can store per volume per time will give you a more energy out at the end of the day. But all of that is gonna be dependent on factors like your thermal conductivity between the two betters holding the heat transfer fluid, and then also the heat exchangers that are down the line when you convert from a silicon [00:05:00] oil heat to steam heat. So there's a lot of limiting factors that control your efficiency of these things and a lot of losses. Also third type of concentrated solar power facility called the central receiver tower. And in those systems you have one tower that could maybe be 50 to a a hundred meters above the ground and that tower surrounded by field of mirrors and those mirrors are flat. Speaker 3: I also call them heliostats and those mirrors track the sun and then reflect the sun's rays onto the central receiver tower. And [00:05:30] the essential receiver tower has a molten salt inside of it and the temperature that usually goes up to about 550 degrees Celsius. And the reason why we're using molten salt is because you can get a higher operating temperature. Then you count the silicon fluid and this molten salt heats up to its operating temperature, which has been pumped only a short distance to a heat exchanger, which then boils water to turn a turbine to make electricity. Speaker 2: This is spectrum on k a l x [00:06:00] Berkeley. We are talking with Joe Cordaro of Sandia national laboratories about concentrated solar power. Speaker 3: And Are we limited at all about where we would deploy a concentrated solar power plants or are these all going to end up in the deserts of Arizona or so one of the main limitations for concentrated solar powers that you need to have good sunlight, you need to do need to have many, many days of sunlight [00:06:30] per year with a high intensity. So putting a concentrated solar power field up in northern Europe or the northeast of the United States doesn't always make sense economically. It's a much better to put it in the desert in California or Arizona or New Mexico or Utah or in Africa. So the key being cloud free, cloud free with a lower latitudes. And how prevalent are concentrated solar power plants right now? Well, [00:07:00] they're building them pretty rapidly, but I think the total percentage of the electricity we get in the United States, it's probably less than 1%, but they're building these plants in California and Arizona, especially essential receiver towers. Speaker 3: There's a big plant being built in Ivanpah, which is outside of Barstow. There's a couple of being built outside Las Vegas and Phoenix. They're building them in Morocco. They're building them in Italy. There's quite a few in Spain and there's some in France. Israel is building them. The amount of electricity [00:07:30] coming from these plants is uh, increasing, but it's still nothing compared to coal or natural gas. So essentially receiver towers are being explored a lot more because they have the potential for higher efficiency because you can go to higher temperature. So the carnow efficiency basically says that the higher difference in temperature between your hot and cold for doing work gives you the higher efficiency. So if you can increase your high operating temperature to five, six, seven, 800 degrees Celsius, but keep [00:08:00] your low operating temperature is still above the boiling point of water, you'll have a much more efficient cycle. Speaker 3: So if you're limited by our heat transfer fluid, thermal stability of 450 degrees, then you're uh, overall fishing in the plant will be limited. So a lot of the work that the Department of energy is doing to try to improve the efficiencies of these systems is to look at higher operating temperatures. But with higher operating temperatures comes also a materials compatibility issues. And then also higher losses. So as you go to higher temperature, you not only get better [00:08:30] efficiency for your carnow efficiency, but you also get higher radiative losses. So you actually start to lose more heat throughout your whole system. And your materials become more difficult to match. And Costco, Costco really high. And why is that? Well, materials are becoming a big issue. There's not a lot of industries that currently use high temperature materials that except the nuclear industry. So if you want to do large scale industrial power plants, you really [00:09:00] want to stick with commodity items that can be purchased cheaply. Speaker 3: Otherwise the costs are too expensive. So there's a lot of analysis that goes into try to decide if I increase my temperature by just 200 degrees or even a hundred degrees, is the efficiency gain worth the cost? So one of the big issues with these costs and material selection are the corrosion issues with your heat transfer fluid. So if you have a fluid that's operating at 700 or 800 degrees Celsius, you start to have incompatible [00:09:30] materials between your heat transfer fluid and the actual material of the pipe is made out of, I don't know, most of these salt baths, very simple sort of two ion component systems like this. Well the only actual molten salt used in the fields now are based off of sodium, potassium nitrate and nitrite mixture. So there are four components, two to four components, and they're pretty simple. But they do have reactive properties with a lot of alloys. Speaker 3: So there are still some [00:10:00] corrosion issues, especially when you get above 550 degrees. So there's the longterm stability of the molten salt bath or the molten salt storage tank, or the molten salt pipes that have to be considered because it's a 30 year plant that leave expected design. So most power plants are built with the idea that it's going to have a 30 year lifetime. So you have to figure out what's gonna happen over 30 years. And the rate of a simple chemical reaction usually doubles with every 10 degrees increase in temperature. So if you have a simple first order [00:10:30] reaction, like the decomposition of a Moan Salt, and you increase the temperature by 10 degrees, you can expect your rate to double. And so that starts to really matter. If you're looking at something that's going to be a 30 year lifetime, Speaker 2: you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift and Rick Karnofsky are talking with Joe Cordura about concentrated solar power and [inaudible]. Speaker 3: [00:11:00] So how intense is the beam once all these mirrors reflected into the molten salts? The central receiver tower like I described, has a large receiving window that maybe 10 by 10 meters and it's a target area that's painted black in order to absorb as much sunlight as possible from maybe a hundred, maybe 200 or maybe a thousand mirrors in the field, and they're focusing the sun's energy onto the central target in order to [00:11:30] get a really, really high temperature so that you can heat up some working heat transfer fluid. There's a way that a lot of the engineer's describe the intensity is it by the number of sons that are being focused onto that area and you're focusing all of those mirrors on a central spot, but you can get up to 3000 suns mean focused onto a single spot. 3000 suns is quite a high amount of energy and also very high temperature and there have been reports of birds that have flown [00:12:00] in the path of the sun. It's hot enough that they've burst into a little ball of fire and then fallen down into a fiery death below. Fortunately, it's only a few birds every once in a while, but that's how hot it does get in front of those receivers. You get nowhere that high of intensity and a parabolic trough system because you only have one large curved, mere focusing the sunlight onto a tube rather than hundreds of mirrors all focusing onto a central receiver. Speaker 3: [00:12:30] Can you explain more about how you store the, is it the heat you're storing? Are you, what are you storing actually, so one of the biggest advantage of concentrated solar power is the ability to store thermal heat. When you use the sun to generate electricity, you're depending on the sun's sunlight to be consistent on the race to be consistent. And if a cloud goes in front of the sun and you're generate electricity using photovoltaics, your power drops to zero until the cloud moves [00:13:00] out of the sky. At nighttime, you can't generate any electricity either cause you don't have any sun. If you look at the peak demand time for electricity in the United States, it tracks with the date, time sun, which is good. But then it also continues into the evening until six seven eight o'clock at night when everyone comes home at night and turns on their washer and dryer turns on their television and it turns on their dishwasher. Speaker 3: If you don't have any electricity on the grid available, then you're going to have a big problem. Coal and nuclear power plants can just generate electricity 24 hours a day without any problem. So [00:13:30] concentrated solar power offers the ability to do that as well through what we call thermal storage. So if you have a huge field of parabolic troughs that are heating up a heat transfer fluid to a high temperature, you can then take this fluid and store it into a large tank. And this hot fluid is going to stay hot for eight 1220 hours to pay on how big you build that tank. So now if you have a hot tank that's storing all of this heat, you can draw heat from that tank rather than drawing it from the field. [00:14:00] So you can decouple the power generation cycle from the actual solar sunlight. Speaker 3: So the tank is kept at a high temperature and constantly being recharged by the sun. But if the sun disappears, you have a reserve of fluid that's still hot that you can use to generate electricity by boiling water. And the size of that tank is dependent on how many hours of storage you want. So people will make these tanks based off of an eight hour storage cycle or a 10 hour or 12 hour [00:14:30] storage time. So typically they're made up of an eight hour storage time because no one needs a lot of electricity at four, five in the morning, and then the sun comes back up again and you can start your whole plant back up. And that makes it much easier to tie into the grid and much easier to distribute electricity to the population. So what we call a dispatchable electricity generation. That's a big advantage for concentrated solar power compared to wind or photovoltaics and what [00:15:00] happens to the system if the outage is longer so you don't just have to worry about nights they have to worry about clouds or dust storms or, so there's a lot of potential backups that can be engineered into a system. Speaker 3: One of them being gas powered burners just put in line to boil water to power the system in reverse basically. So if there was a really big problem where you had no sunlight for a week, could potentially use natural [00:15:30] gas burners to boil water but cycle it in reverse and so then the water goes and operates as a heat transfer fluid actually warm up the salt again. Fortunately historical data I think shows that that just is not a big risk. I mean you wouldn't build a plant in the northeast where you actually could have a week of cloud cover and cold rainy weather. You'd build a plant in the desert and a week of no sun doesn't happen. There's been plants that have been in operation for 30 years [00:16:00] in the desert in California, and there's historical data that is available to kind of map out where in the world you would build these plants. Speaker 3: That goes back many, many, many years and the Department of Energy has collected this data, specifically the national renewable energy lab. Our enrol in Colorado has a lot of this data and industry and the national labs work strongly together to try to figure out where the best places to build these plants that have not only the highest solar [00:16:30] radiation, but also the lowest environmental impact when you build a plant because despite it being a zero emitter of greenhouse gases, there are environmental issues related to water usage and also endangered species and the Atlantan usage. Pretty big. Yeah, they can be quite large. So there are some land issues that are associated with building a system in the middle of the desert. There's also issues about how do you get the electricity to where consumers actually [00:17:00] live. If you build a power plant in the middle of the desert but everyone lives a couple hundred miles away or thousands of miles away, how do you actually get the electricity to more populated areas? And this is an issue Europe is dealing with because they want to build power plant in North Africa and then have electricity ship to continental Europe somehow. So it's another topic, but they're looking at ways to make high voltage DC transmission lines from northern Europe down into Africa. So you can actually distribute the electricity from where it's generated. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:17:30] Joe Cornaro is our guest. The show is spectrum. The station is k a l x Berkeley. The topic is concentrated solar power. Speaker 3: And what are some of the other open research questions that are out there besides the materials compatibility issues that you, some of the other areas are looking at. How do you actually set up a field of mirrors that maybe [00:18:00] 50 acres big and then get everyone in those mirrors to actually align properly without making it an incredibly expensive task. So all of these mirrors have to track the sun at the same angle and you have to figure out how can you put all these mirrors on some type of mechanical platform that moves to track the sun and then direct the sunlight efficiently. Cause just a small error in one of the mirrors can really change your beam and decrease your efficiency quite significantly. [00:18:30] You also have to think about what happens when a big wind storm comes around in the desert and you have 70 mile an hour winds. Speaker 3: Now all the mirrors have to be stowed, turned pretty much horizontal so that they don't get blown away. Then you have to worry about the sand that comes by and and polishes. The mirrors are unpolished as them heres so there's a lot of technology goes into the coatings figuring out new pumps, valves and fittings when you're running at 800 degrees. So you can pump a fluid at 500 degrees. We have commercial equipment to do [00:19:00] that, but using that equipment at 700 or 800 degrees hasn't been tested. So manufacturers will make things that they say possibly will work at 800 but it's not actually been tested at 800 and then we don't even have sensors to measure things that 800 on a large scale like this to measure what kinds of things? A viscosity is a big one. So we want to know how fast a fluid is flowing through a pipe so we can calculate how much heat is coming out. Speaker 3: So we know how much steam we're going to generate and try [00:19:30] to measure viscosity at 800 degrees hasn't been done either. So we have active programs to look at making new sensors for viscosity. Some of the other issues, I'm trying to get more efficient steam cycles. Actually there are commercially available turbines to make steam for the uh, colon, natural gas industry that have been around for 50 75 years and they work really well up to a certain temperature. But if you can go higher with your heat transfer fluid, then you want to go higher with your turbine as well. And then [00:20:00] using steam no longer as efficient. And so people are looking at other types of cycles that don't use water anymore to make steam, but they're using super critical CO2 or helium or some other type of gas for what we call air brain cycles. Speaker 3: And those could operate up to 1200 degrees and Japan has actually looked at those for quite awhile, but America has been pretty scared of looking at a 1200 degree high pressure systems. As far as the risk. Yeah, as far as the risk goes, it is a little bit more dangerous [00:20:30] when you have 1200 degrees and high high pressure systems, but the efficiency could be a lot higher. So all of this is still open for optimization. All of it requires inputs from systems engineers to finance people to determine the cost, whether it's worth it down to scientists, to the Terman stability and compatibility of parts to the last thing you want to do is build a big field and then have to replace a huge [00:21:00] portion of it in three years because you have something break that'll make the entire project economically a nonstarter. So the risks have to be reduced to save as much as possible. Speaker 4: Joe, how was it? Did you became involved in concentrated solar power? Speaker 3: After I got to Sandia national labs, I began working in the concentrated solar power research project because I was a chemist in looking at materials, compatibility issues and also stability issues of heat transfer fluids and while it doesn't sound like the most sexy [00:21:30] area of chemistry to be in formulating new salts and looking at high temperature materials, I really, really enjoy it because it is actually being built is actually real science being turned into engineering projects that is actually being deployed throughout the world to solve our problems and to make us energy independent. So unlike a lot of academic research that I did in school, concentrated solar power is real. It's been done and it's been put to use and that makes me incredibly [00:22:00] excited about being part of that project. Joe Codero, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick and Lisa, join me for the calendar. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies [00:22:30] will hold a symposium titled Towards Longterm Sustainability in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It takes place today and tomorrow and it starts soon, one 30 to five 30 today, so you better hurry up and get over there, but if you can't make it today, tomorrow will feature three Speakers, all of whom have been actively involved in analyzing the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, its historical context, and the sociopolitical actions taken by the various stakeholders. The symposium [00:23:00] will situate the causes and the consequences of the disaster in the context of a longterm sustainable future. For more information, go to the website, I. E. A s@berkeley.edu Speaker 4: cal day is tomorrow, Saturday, April 21st the Berkeley campus, the museums, the botanical garden are open to the public. There are a wide variety of presentations and facilities you can tour for details, go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu Speaker 5: [00:23:30] on June 5th, 2012 Venus will transit or pass directly in front of the sun. A transit like this is so rare. No human alive today. We'll witness it again. The next one will not be until 2117 get ready. This event by going to the transit of Venus Planetarium program at the Lawrence Hall of science this Saturday on cow day at 3:00 PM learn why transits are so rare, how studying transits taught us exactly how big our solar system is [00:24:00] and how they may be the key to discovering other earths and other star systems. Then come back on June 5th and observed the actual transit of Venus at the Lawrence Hall of Science. The hall will have several solar telescopes for viewing the eclipse safely on the main plaza. Most of us are aware of the obesity epidemic facing the United States, but is it simply a matter of calories in, calories out on Thursday, May 3rd from 1210 to 1:00 PM in the auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum, [00:24:30] you CSF neuroendocrinologist Robert Lustig will present the lecture health, Darwin Diet disease and dollars. He will examine some of the more controversial dietary factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, the role that these obesogens potentially play in our evolution toward an unhealthy nation. And possible solutions for turning this trend around. You must register for this event. Go to u h S. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 6: [00:25:00] on Saturday April 28th at 1:30 PM the Commonwealth Club and the Youth Science Initiative. Host the research group lead for Pixar and our guest on spectrum two weeks from today, Tony rose. Senator, the admission is $20 Commonwealth Club members get in for 12 Speaker 6: and is $7 for students 18 and under. The talk will be at the Los Altos High School Eagle Theater, two zero one almond avenue in Los Altos. Tony will discuss how math [00:25:30] is central to Pixar film production process and also the young makers program. That's the topic of our interview. In the next episode of spectrum, students are teamed up with adult mentors to design and build ambitious projects for the maker fair for tickets and more information, visit www.commonwealthclub.org another feature is spectrum guest Maggie Court. Baker will also be giving a lecture soon. Maggie is the science editor of Boeing, boeing.net and we'll be discussing her recent book before the lights go [00:26:00] out, conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us. She'll put the fun back in the infrastructure and described the surprising ways our electric system evolved, what we can and can't do about the energy crisis now and what the future might hold. This is the spring seminar for the Berkeley Science Review and will take place in the lead caching building room. Three four five on Wednesday May 2nd at 6:00 PM yeah, RSVP At B e r c. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:26:30] pseudo room, a newly forming East Bay hackerspace is having a free kickoff and fundraiser on Friday May 4th at 7:00 PM at Tech Liminal two six eight 14th street in downtown Oakland. Okay. Pseudo room is a collaborative community of tech developers, citizen scientists, activists and artists. Mitch Altman, cofounder of Noisebridge. We'll discuss hackerspaces for more information, visit s u d o room.org [00:27:00] now the news Speaker 5: significant declines are expected in the number of emperor penguins over the next century due to earlier spring warming around Antarctica. A new study in the April 13th edition of Science Daily reports that an international team of scientists using satellite mapping technology reveals there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought. Using a technique known as pan sharpening to increase the resolution of the satellite imagery. They were able to differentiate between birds, [00:27:30] eye shadow and Penguin Guano. In the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space 595,000 birds were counted almost double the previous estimates. Speaker 6: The origin of cosmic grays has long been and remains a mystery. The ice cube collaboration in which Berkeley lab is a crucial contributor published in an article in the April 18th issue of nature on their exhaustive search for a high energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extra galactic [00:28:00] explosions known as Gamma Ray bursts are a source of ultra high energy cosmic rays. They I know events they have correspondents to these bursts when they would predict to see at least 8.4 events that correspond to some of the 215 gamma ray bursts detected from two periods in 2008 and 2009 there are other popular models for the origin of cosmic rays including active galactic nuclei. The Ice Cube Neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of ice under [00:28:30] the South Pole and has over 5,000 digital optical modules that track the direction and energy of speeding yuan's which are created when you Trina is collide with Adam's in the ice. On a later episode of spectrum, you'll hear from Spencer Klein and Thorsten Settle Berger about this experiment. Visit ice cube dot [inaudible] w I s c.edu for more information, Speaker 2: thanks to Rick Kaneski [00:29:00] and Lisa cabbage for help producing show music heard during the show is by Lasagna David from his album, folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons attribution license 3.0 spectrum shows are now available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [inaudible] [00:29:30] email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. Same time. [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Joe Cordaro is a principle member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist who received his PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l [00:00:30] x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news [inaudible]. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm joined today by spectrum contributors. Rick Karnofsky and Lisa [inaudible]. Rick and I interviewed Joe Carderock, a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia national laboratories in Livermore. He is a research chemist. [00:01:00] Joe received his phd in chemistry from UC Berkeley. He talks with us about his work in concentrated solar power systems. Joe, welcome to spectrum. Thank you. Rick. Can you explain to us a little bit about concerted solar power? Sure. I'd be happy to. People have looked at using mirrors to focus light to do exactly what we are now doing in the 21st century since the mid 17 and 18 hundreds. There's a few reports that people using mirrors to focus [00:01:30] sunlight to heat up water in a boiler to generate steam for creating a pump for irrigation. And there's also been a report of a printing press that was powered off of steam that was generated using mirrors to focus light to once again heat up a boiler. Speaker 3: Um, that all happened in the 19th early 20th century. But from about the early 1920s until the 1970s not a lot of work went into looking at concentrated solar power to make electricity. Primarily that was because at the same [00:02:00] time that research to make solar electricity from sunlight was taking off, oil was discovered and that became much cheaper and economical than it was to invest in technology to look at concentrated solar power. So concentrated solar power is a method by using in mirrors to focus the sun's rays onto a type of central receiver in order to boil water, to turn a turbine to generate electricity. So it's really a complicated way to boil water just to make electricity, but it works [00:02:30] and it only uses the sun. Is this sort of input for energy? Yeah, it's actually pretty amazing that we, that we don't use this more often because there is no emission from it. Speaker 3: There's no greenhouse gases, there's no radioactive material and it's mostly made using commodity parts that can almost 70% be made in the United States. So there's three main architectures for concentrated solar power. There's the sterling engine, there's parabolic trough systems and then a central receiver tower [00:03:00] vista. Then engines are maybe the most efficient type of concentrated solar power, but they also have the most moving parts and a reliability is somewhat low right now. Their module, so you can add one and then another and another and another and increase your field side to base on demand. You can also just stick one in your backyard if you had the money to buy it and uh, didn't mind the thumping noise at the sterling pump makes so they're a little loud. The most employed type of concentrated solar [00:03:30] power facility right now is a parabolic trough system. And in a parabolic trough system you have a field of mirrors that are focused on a central tube that runs through the parabolic trough. Speaker 3: And this tube is about three inches in diameter. And inside the tube is a working fluid and it's usually a silicon based oil. And the silicon based oil is used because the uh, operating temperature for that is around zero degrees Celsius up to 450. If you're in the desert, you typically have cold winter nights, [00:04:00] so you need to have a flu that doesn't solidify at nighttime in the wintertime. And so zeros are pretty good, that lower limit, but the a heat transfer fluid and based on silicon is slightly expensive. And how does that upper limit established? How hot can these things really go? So the upper limit would be the thermal stability of working fluid and the upper stability is just dependent on the chemical nature of the fluid. So the bond strengths of the actual carbon oxygen and silicon bonds within the heat transfer fluid. Speaker 3: But as far as the amount [00:04:30] of heat energy that can be sort of harvested, that's going to be dependent on the thermal heat capacity of the fluid times the actual density times the uh, flow rate. So the more heat you can store per volume per time will give you a more energy out at the end of the day. But all of that is gonna be dependent on factors like your thermal conductivity between the two betters holding the heat transfer fluid, and then also the heat exchangers that are down the line when you convert from a silicon [00:05:00] oil heat to steam heat. So there's a lot of limiting factors that control your efficiency of these things and a lot of losses. Also third type of concentrated solar power facility called the central receiver tower. And in those systems you have one tower that could maybe be 50 to a a hundred meters above the ground and that tower surrounded by field of mirrors and those mirrors are flat. Speaker 3: I also call them heliostats and those mirrors track the sun and then reflect the sun's rays onto the central receiver tower. And [00:05:30] the essential receiver tower has a molten salt inside of it and the temperature that usually goes up to about 550 degrees Celsius. And the reason why we're using molten salt is because you can get a higher operating temperature. Then you count the silicon fluid and this molten salt heats up to its operating temperature, which has been pumped only a short distance to a heat exchanger, which then boils water to turn a turbine to make electricity. Speaker 2: This is spectrum on k a l x [00:06:00] Berkeley. We are talking with Joe Cordaro of Sandia national laboratories about concentrated solar power. Speaker 3: And Are we limited at all about where we would deploy a concentrated solar power plants or are these all going to end up in the deserts of Arizona or so one of the main limitations for concentrated solar powers that you need to have good sunlight, you need to do need to have many, many days of sunlight [00:06:30] per year with a high intensity. So putting a concentrated solar power field up in northern Europe or the northeast of the United States doesn't always make sense economically. It's a much better to put it in the desert in California or Arizona or New Mexico or Utah or in Africa. So the key being cloud free, cloud free with a lower latitudes. And how prevalent are concentrated solar power plants right now? Well, [00:07:00] they're building them pretty rapidly, but I think the total percentage of the electricity we get in the United States, it's probably less than 1%, but they're building these plants in California and Arizona, especially essential receiver towers. Speaker 3: There's a big plant being built in Ivanpah, which is outside of Barstow. There's a couple of being built outside Las Vegas and Phoenix. They're building them in Morocco. They're building them in Italy. There's quite a few in Spain and there's some in France. Israel is building them. The amount of electricity [00:07:30] coming from these plants is uh, increasing, but it's still nothing compared to coal or natural gas. So essentially receiver towers are being explored a lot more because they have the potential for higher efficiency because you can go to higher temperature. So the carnow efficiency basically says that the higher difference in temperature between your hot and cold for doing work gives you the higher efficiency. So if you can increase your high operating temperature to five, six, seven, 800 degrees Celsius, but keep [00:08:00] your low operating temperature is still above the boiling point of water, you'll have a much more efficient cycle. Speaker 3: So if you're limited by our heat transfer fluid, thermal stability of 450 degrees, then you're uh, overall fishing in the plant will be limited. So a lot of the work that the Department of energy is doing to try to improve the efficiencies of these systems is to look at higher operating temperatures. But with higher operating temperatures comes also a materials compatibility issues. And then also higher losses. So as you go to higher temperature, you not only get better [00:08:30] efficiency for your carnow efficiency, but you also get higher radiative losses. So you actually start to lose more heat throughout your whole system. And your materials become more difficult to match. And Costco, Costco really high. And why is that? Well, materials are becoming a big issue. There's not a lot of industries that currently use high temperature materials that except the nuclear industry. So if you want to do large scale industrial power plants, you really [00:09:00] want to stick with commodity items that can be purchased cheaply. Speaker 3: Otherwise the costs are too expensive. So there's a lot of analysis that goes into try to decide if I increase my temperature by just 200 degrees or even a hundred degrees, is the efficiency gain worth the cost? So one of the big issues with these costs and material selection are the corrosion issues with your heat transfer fluid. So if you have a fluid that's operating at 700 or 800 degrees Celsius, you start to have incompatible [00:09:30] materials between your heat transfer fluid and the actual material of the pipe is made out of, I don't know, most of these salt baths, very simple sort of two ion component systems like this. Well the only actual molten salt used in the fields now are based off of sodium, potassium nitrate and nitrite mixture. So there are four components, two to four components, and they're pretty simple. But they do have reactive properties with a lot of alloys. Speaker 3: So there are still some [00:10:00] corrosion issues, especially when you get above 550 degrees. So there's the longterm stability of the molten salt bath or the molten salt storage tank, or the molten salt pipes that have to be considered because it's a 30 year plant that leave expected design. So most power plants are built with the idea that it's going to have a 30 year lifetime. So you have to figure out what's gonna happen over 30 years. And the rate of a simple chemical reaction usually doubles with every 10 degrees increase in temperature. So if you have a simple first order [00:10:30] reaction, like the decomposition of a Moan Salt, and you increase the temperature by 10 degrees, you can expect your rate to double. And so that starts to really matter. If you're looking at something that's going to be a 30 year lifetime, Speaker 2: you were listening to spectrum on k a l x Berkeley. Brad swift and Rick Karnofsky are talking with Joe Cordura about concentrated solar power and [inaudible]. Speaker 3: [00:11:00] So how intense is the beam once all these mirrors reflected into the molten salts? The central receiver tower like I described, has a large receiving window that maybe 10 by 10 meters and it's a target area that's painted black in order to absorb as much sunlight as possible from maybe a hundred, maybe 200 or maybe a thousand mirrors in the field, and they're focusing the sun's energy onto the central target in order to [00:11:30] get a really, really high temperature so that you can heat up some working heat transfer fluid. There's a way that a lot of the engineer's describe the intensity is it by the number of sons that are being focused onto that area and you're focusing all of those mirrors on a central spot, but you can get up to 3000 suns mean focused onto a single spot. 3000 suns is quite a high amount of energy and also very high temperature and there have been reports of birds that have flown [00:12:00] in the path of the sun. It's hot enough that they've burst into a little ball of fire and then fallen down into a fiery death below. Fortunately, it's only a few birds every once in a while, but that's how hot it does get in front of those receivers. You get nowhere that high of intensity and a parabolic trough system because you only have one large curved, mere focusing the sunlight onto a tube rather than hundreds of mirrors all focusing onto a central receiver. Speaker 3: [00:12:30] Can you explain more about how you store the, is it the heat you're storing? Are you, what are you storing actually, so one of the biggest advantage of concentrated solar power is the ability to store thermal heat. When you use the sun to generate electricity, you're depending on the sun's sunlight to be consistent on the race to be consistent. And if a cloud goes in front of the sun and you're generate electricity using photovoltaics, your power drops to zero until the cloud moves [00:13:00] out of the sky. At nighttime, you can't generate any electricity either cause you don't have any sun. If you look at the peak demand time for electricity in the United States, it tracks with the date, time sun, which is good. But then it also continues into the evening until six seven eight o'clock at night when everyone comes home at night and turns on their washer and dryer turns on their television and it turns on their dishwasher. Speaker 3: If you don't have any electricity on the grid available, then you're going to have a big problem. Coal and nuclear power plants can just generate electricity 24 hours a day without any problem. So [00:13:30] concentrated solar power offers the ability to do that as well through what we call thermal storage. So if you have a huge field of parabolic troughs that are heating up a heat transfer fluid to a high temperature, you can then take this fluid and store it into a large tank. And this hot fluid is going to stay hot for eight 1220 hours to pay on how big you build that tank. So now if you have a hot tank that's storing all of this heat, you can draw heat from that tank rather than drawing it from the field. [00:14:00] So you can decouple the power generation cycle from the actual solar sunlight. Speaker 3: So the tank is kept at a high temperature and constantly being recharged by the sun. But if the sun disappears, you have a reserve of fluid that's still hot that you can use to generate electricity by boiling water. And the size of that tank is dependent on how many hours of storage you want. So people will make these tanks based off of an eight hour storage cycle or a 10 hour or 12 hour [00:14:30] storage time. So typically they're made up of an eight hour storage time because no one needs a lot of electricity at four, five in the morning, and then the sun comes back up again and you can start your whole plant back up. And that makes it much easier to tie into the grid and much easier to distribute electricity to the population. So what we call a dispatchable electricity generation. That's a big advantage for concentrated solar power compared to wind or photovoltaics and what [00:15:00] happens to the system if the outage is longer so you don't just have to worry about nights they have to worry about clouds or dust storms or, so there's a lot of potential backups that can be engineered into a system. Speaker 3: One of them being gas powered burners just put in line to boil water to power the system in reverse basically. So if there was a really big problem where you had no sunlight for a week, could potentially use natural [00:15:30] gas burners to boil water but cycle it in reverse and so then the water goes and operates as a heat transfer fluid actually warm up the salt again. Fortunately historical data I think shows that that just is not a big risk. I mean you wouldn't build a plant in the northeast where you actually could have a week of cloud cover and cold rainy weather. You'd build a plant in the desert and a week of no sun doesn't happen. There's been plants that have been in operation for 30 years [00:16:00] in the desert in California, and there's historical data that is available to kind of map out where in the world you would build these plants. Speaker 3: That goes back many, many, many years and the Department of Energy has collected this data, specifically the national renewable energy lab. Our enrol in Colorado has a lot of this data and industry and the national labs work strongly together to try to figure out where the best places to build these plants that have not only the highest solar [00:16:30] radiation, but also the lowest environmental impact when you build a plant because despite it being a zero emitter of greenhouse gases, there are environmental issues related to water usage and also endangered species and the Atlantan usage. Pretty big. Yeah, they can be quite large. So there are some land issues that are associated with building a system in the middle of the desert. There's also issues about how do you get the electricity to where consumers actually [00:17:00] live. If you build a power plant in the middle of the desert but everyone lives a couple hundred miles away or thousands of miles away, how do you actually get the electricity to more populated areas? And this is an issue Europe is dealing with because they want to build power plant in North Africa and then have electricity ship to continental Europe somehow. So it's another topic, but they're looking at ways to make high voltage DC transmission lines from northern Europe down into Africa. So you can actually distribute the electricity from where it's generated. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 3: [00:17:30] Joe Cornaro is our guest. The show is spectrum. The station is k a l x Berkeley. The topic is concentrated solar power. Speaker 3: And what are some of the other open research questions that are out there besides the materials compatibility issues that you, some of the other areas are looking at. How do you actually set up a field of mirrors that maybe [00:18:00] 50 acres big and then get everyone in those mirrors to actually align properly without making it an incredibly expensive task. So all of these mirrors have to track the sun at the same angle and you have to figure out how can you put all these mirrors on some type of mechanical platform that moves to track the sun and then direct the sunlight efficiently. Cause just a small error in one of the mirrors can really change your beam and decrease your efficiency quite significantly. [00:18:30] You also have to think about what happens when a big wind storm comes around in the desert and you have 70 mile an hour winds. Speaker 3: Now all the mirrors have to be stowed, turned pretty much horizontal so that they don't get blown away. Then you have to worry about the sand that comes by and and polishes. The mirrors are unpolished as them heres so there's a lot of technology goes into the coatings figuring out new pumps, valves and fittings when you're running at 800 degrees. So you can pump a fluid at 500 degrees. We have commercial equipment to do [00:19:00] that, but using that equipment at 700 or 800 degrees hasn't been tested. So manufacturers will make things that they say possibly will work at 800 but it's not actually been tested at 800 and then we don't even have sensors to measure things that 800 on a large scale like this to measure what kinds of things? A viscosity is a big one. So we want to know how fast a fluid is flowing through a pipe so we can calculate how much heat is coming out. Speaker 3: So we know how much steam we're going to generate and try [00:19:30] to measure viscosity at 800 degrees hasn't been done either. So we have active programs to look at making new sensors for viscosity. Some of the other issues, I'm trying to get more efficient steam cycles. Actually there are commercially available turbines to make steam for the uh, colon, natural gas industry that have been around for 50 75 years and they work really well up to a certain temperature. But if you can go higher with your heat transfer fluid, then you want to go higher with your turbine as well. And then [00:20:00] using steam no longer as efficient. And so people are looking at other types of cycles that don't use water anymore to make steam, but they're using super critical CO2 or helium or some other type of gas for what we call air brain cycles. Speaker 3: And those could operate up to 1200 degrees and Japan has actually looked at those for quite awhile, but America has been pretty scared of looking at a 1200 degree high pressure systems. As far as the risk. Yeah, as far as the risk goes, it is a little bit more dangerous [00:20:30] when you have 1200 degrees and high high pressure systems, but the efficiency could be a lot higher. So all of this is still open for optimization. All of it requires inputs from systems engineers to finance people to determine the cost, whether it's worth it down to scientists, to the Terman stability and compatibility of parts to the last thing you want to do is build a big field and then have to replace a huge [00:21:00] portion of it in three years because you have something break that'll make the entire project economically a nonstarter. So the risks have to be reduced to save as much as possible. Speaker 4: Joe, how was it? Did you became involved in concentrated solar power? Speaker 3: After I got to Sandia national labs, I began working in the concentrated solar power research project because I was a chemist in looking at materials, compatibility issues and also stability issues of heat transfer fluids and while it doesn't sound like the most sexy [00:21:30] area of chemistry to be in formulating new salts and looking at high temperature materials, I really, really enjoy it because it is actually being built is actually real science being turned into engineering projects that is actually being deployed throughout the world to solve our problems and to make us energy independent. So unlike a lot of academic research that I did in school, concentrated solar power is real. It's been done and it's been put to use and that makes me incredibly [00:22:00] excited about being part of that project. Joe Codero, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: Regular feature of spectrum is to mention a few of the science and technology events happening in the bay area over the next few weeks. Rick and Lisa, join me for the calendar. Speaker 5: UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies [00:22:30] will hold a symposium titled Towards Longterm Sustainability in response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It takes place today and tomorrow and it starts soon, one 30 to five 30 today, so you better hurry up and get over there, but if you can't make it today, tomorrow will feature three Speakers, all of whom have been actively involved in analyzing the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, its historical context, and the sociopolitical actions taken by the various stakeholders. The symposium [00:23:00] will situate the causes and the consequences of the disaster in the context of a longterm sustainable future. For more information, go to the website, I. E. A s@berkeley.edu Speaker 4: cal day is tomorrow, Saturday, April 21st the Berkeley campus, the museums, the botanical garden are open to the public. There are a wide variety of presentations and facilities you can tour for details, go to the website, cal day.berkeley.edu Speaker 5: [00:23:30] on June 5th, 2012 Venus will transit or pass directly in front of the sun. A transit like this is so rare. No human alive today. We'll witness it again. The next one will not be until 2117 get ready. This event by going to the transit of Venus Planetarium program at the Lawrence Hall of science this Saturday on cow day at 3:00 PM learn why transits are so rare, how studying transits taught us exactly how big our solar system is [00:24:00] and how they may be the key to discovering other earths and other star systems. Then come back on June 5th and observed the actual transit of Venus at the Lawrence Hall of Science. The hall will have several solar telescopes for viewing the eclipse safely on the main plaza. Most of us are aware of the obesity epidemic facing the United States, but is it simply a matter of calories in, calories out on Thursday, May 3rd from 1210 to 1:00 PM in the auditorium of the Berkeley Art Museum, [00:24:30] you CSF neuroendocrinologist Robert Lustig will present the lecture health, Darwin Diet disease and dollars. He will examine some of the more controversial dietary factors contributing to the obesity epidemic, the role that these obesogens potentially play in our evolution toward an unhealthy nation. And possible solutions for turning this trend around. You must register for this event. Go to u h S. Dot. berkeley.edu Speaker 6: [00:25:00] on Saturday April 28th at 1:30 PM the Commonwealth Club and the Youth Science Initiative. Host the research group lead for Pixar and our guest on spectrum two weeks from today, Tony rose. Senator, the admission is $20 Commonwealth Club members get in for 12 Speaker 6: and is $7 for students 18 and under. The talk will be at the Los Altos High School Eagle Theater, two zero one almond avenue in Los Altos. Tony will discuss how math [00:25:30] is central to Pixar film production process and also the young makers program. That's the topic of our interview. In the next episode of spectrum, students are teamed up with adult mentors to design and build ambitious projects for the maker fair for tickets and more information, visit www.commonwealthclub.org another feature is spectrum guest Maggie Court. Baker will also be giving a lecture soon. Maggie is the science editor of Boeing, boeing.net and we'll be discussing her recent book before the lights go [00:26:00] out, conquering the energy crisis before it conquers us. She'll put the fun back in the infrastructure and described the surprising ways our electric system evolved, what we can and can't do about the energy crisis now and what the future might hold. This is the spring seminar for the Berkeley Science Review and will take place in the lead caching building room. Three four five on Wednesday May 2nd at 6:00 PM yeah, RSVP At B e r c. Dot. berkeley.edu [00:26:30] pseudo room, a newly forming East Bay hackerspace is having a free kickoff and fundraiser on Friday May 4th at 7:00 PM at Tech Liminal two six eight 14th street in downtown Oakland. Okay. Pseudo room is a collaborative community of tech developers, citizen scientists, activists and artists. Mitch Altman, cofounder of Noisebridge. We'll discuss hackerspaces for more information, visit s u d o room.org [00:27:00] now the news Speaker 5: significant declines are expected in the number of emperor penguins over the next century due to earlier spring warming around Antarctica. A new study in the April 13th edition of Science Daily reports that an international team of scientists using satellite mapping technology reveals there are twice as many emperor penguins in Antarctica than previously thought. Using a technique known as pan sharpening to increase the resolution of the satellite imagery. They were able to differentiate between birds, [00:27:30] eye shadow and Penguin Guano. In the first comprehensive census of a species taken from space 595,000 birds were counted almost double the previous estimates. Speaker 6: The origin of cosmic grays has long been and remains a mystery. The ice cube collaboration in which Berkeley lab is a crucial contributor published in an article in the April 18th issue of nature on their exhaustive search for a high energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extra galactic [00:28:00] explosions known as Gamma Ray bursts are a source of ultra high energy cosmic rays. They I know events they have correspondents to these bursts when they would predict to see at least 8.4 events that correspond to some of the 215 gamma ray bursts detected from two periods in 2008 and 2009 there are other popular models for the origin of cosmic rays including active galactic nuclei. The Ice Cube Neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of ice under [00:28:30] the South Pole and has over 5,000 digital optical modules that track the direction and energy of speeding yuan's which are created when you Trina is collide with Adam's in the ice. On a later episode of spectrum, you'll hear from Spencer Klein and Thorsten Settle Berger about this experiment. Visit ice cube dot [inaudible] w I s c.edu for more information, Speaker 2: thanks to Rick Kaneski [00:29:00] and Lisa cabbage for help producing show music heard during the show is by Lasagna David from his album, folk and acoustic made available through creative Commons attribution license 3.0 spectrum shows are now available online at iTunes university. Go to itunes.berkeley.edu thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send [inaudible] [00:29:30] email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. Same time. [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Inspired in part by the open source movement, public spaces are emerging where people congregate to share ideas, make cool projects, teach, and brainstorm with collaborators on everything from coding to cooking. With no leaders, they have one rule: "Be excellent to each other." Take a tour of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, with co-founder Mitch Altman.

Inspired in part by the open source movement, public spaces are emerging where people congregate to share ideas, make cool projects, teach, and brainstorm with collaborators on everything from coding to cooking. With no leaders, they have one rule: "Be excellent to each other." Take a tour of the hackerspace Noisebridge, located in the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, with co-founder Mitch Altman.