Happy New Year to my readers!
Here’s a picture from plague-ridden Boston of our healthy 1-year-old and a stocked fridge. Hoping for more of the same in 2015…
And so that this blog doesn’t become indistinguishable from my Facebook feed…. let’s talk about what we’re (realistically) hoping to see in the aviation, technology, and economics world during 2015.
I’ll start off…
- the long-delayed Icon A5 amphibious seaplane delivered to customers (see my review from 2010).
- an announcement (but not a delivery) of the BendixKing AeroVue retrofit flight deck for the Pilatus PC-12 (currently King Air only)
- that the flight recorder from MH 370 will be found (I predicted to friends that it would be found in January 2015 so I hope that it will be found very soon indeed)
- a little progress toward the ground-based copilot idea that I wrote about in September 2008. (Could have been useful for preventing a lot of the aviation accidents that occurred in 2014, actually, which might motivate action (oddly enough probably to add a third pilot to the two-pilot airline crew rather than my idea of supplementing the single-pilot private flight).)
- sufficient progress on OLED that there will be a consumer-priced 4K OLED television announced by the end of 2015, which I think will pave the way for a 4K OLED desktop computer monitor (in the meantime maybe this LG 31″ IPS LCD monitor
that my friend Gary loves is the best option).
- despite the fall in oil prices, continued gradual progress in electric cars, solar power, and wind power (due to investments made years ago coming to fruition)
- a further reduction in the percentage of the U.S. labor market where wages are set by a market. Employers will increasingly either be hiring people they wouldn’t otherwise have hired (due to government-established quotas) or they will be paying some of their workers more than a market-clearing wage (due to government-established minimum wages or anti-discrimination orders, e.g., people who call in sick a lot will get paid the same as people who never call in sick due to new requirements around sick leave). This should result in a fall in the percentage of Americans who are working, as companies substitute capital for labor, but the effect will be masked for a few years by the fall in commodity prices. (Why this prediction? It is based on the 2014 election. Voters don’t seem to care what percentage of Americans are working, but are very concerned that every American who does work gets a package of wages and benefits that seem subjectively fair.)
I thought you would be the first to buy Dell 5K (14 Megapixel) monitor, it is manufactured by LG as well.
IBM is selling an ipad app which calculates most efficient way to save fuel.
OLED is on its last leg. Quantum Dots are coming just in time to steal any thunder left from OLED. aside from LG no one else is even close on OLED.
On phones OLED work because the handsets don’t last very long so no one knows the longevity of organic elements of OLED. No one says anything about OLED longevity on TV either.
Quantum Dots have the ability to not only get rid of Transistor part but also Liquid Display as well instead MEMS is proposed by an Apple Patent.
2015 Energy Education – I hope school boards across America see the wisdom incorporating “the science of energy and environmental impact” into K-thru-12 education such that all high school graduates will be able to:
1) Read and understand their electric bill.
2) Have a working knowledge of electrical energy and power units (kw-hrs, kilowatts, megawatts).
3) Know how to read the electric meter on the side of their house.
4) Determine the time of day with peak power usage in their home and explain why (list major loads).
5) Calculate the number of 2 megawatt wind turbines it would take to supply their city or town at peak usage. (Make representative round number assumptions for the number of households and their peak power usage.)
6) Define “capacity factor” as it applies to electrical generation (wind turbine, nuclear power plant, etc.).
7) Assume 4 acres per wind turbine, calculate the number of wind-turbine-acres it would take to supply their town or city at peak power usage.
8) Assume a representative capacity factor for wind turbines in their area and adjust the calculation result from #7 to account for capacity factor.
@Paul
I think you’ve got a better chance at hitting the lottery.
Energy literacy is one of the most important issues facing the world today. Over the next few years the United States and the world will make important energy decisions that will have long lasting effects on every aspect of life on planet Earth. It’s essential that “we educate” as many people as possible on the fundamentals of energy generation, usage, and the real environmental impact in order to make informed decisions. Else the public is left with propaganda, half-truths, tricky phrases, and outright lies on which to base decisions.
There’s really nothing complex here. It can all be done with 8th grade arithmetic. The biggest problem is developing a conversational understanding of some not often used “terms” (energy, power, kw-hrs). If you can understand concepts like horsepower and miles per gallon, then you can develop a conversational understanding of kilowatts and kilowatt-hours.
My personal preference is use of “renewables” only where they make reasonable economic sense. Currently the subsidies have created a false market where taxpayers are funding wind/solar projects that are not viable otherwise. Worse, when and if subsidies end, rates will double. (See Germany.) The economic shock will avalanche businesses and homeowners into a dark place.
Instead of a ground based co-pilot, why not switch to ground based pilots period? This way, private flying could be accessible to everyone (with enough money) and not just those with pilot training. In a four seater plane you could utilize the full capacity for passengers. Maybe one passenger would be minimally trained in emergency flying procedures in the unlikely event that the uplinks were lost but in most cases they would never have to use that training in a lifetime of flying. At the airport, there would be a dispatcher who would check the aircraft out on the ground but he would not fly. Each aircraft would have both a ground pilot and a ground co-pilot for extra safety but the teams could fly more than 1 aircraft at a time – once the plane was on autopilot in level flight they could turn their attention to flying other flights (and then return later for the landing sequence or if any adverse indicators popped up). You could have a room full of such people and model the maximum number of pilots needed simultaneously – maybe for 50 aircraft you would need a dozen pilots. The cost per hour, spread out in this way, could be very low.