We recently moved from Austin TX to Placitas NM. I was always interested in putting in solar / battery but the numbers I came up with for the house in Austin were daunting. Of course most of our bill was air conditioning in the summer plus a pool pump that ran every day for 8 hours. Here in New Mexico we dont have a pool and the weather is milder. Plus the house seems to be built in a way that uses less energy. We have only gotten our first power bill but my wife remarked that she hasn’t seen a bill this low since she lived in an apartment.

This brings up a conundrum for Going Green. The investment will be much smaller, perhaps as much as 5x smaller. But then the saving will also be smaller. It makes it less appealing in some ways. We will probably get a full years worth of electrical bills and then figure it out. We will probably go with solar / batteries either way, but now I am of the mind that building better houses that use more efficient appliances might be the bigger win in this energy transition.

In the US lots of crop land is used to grow corn for ethanol. This ethanol is mixed with gasoline for car and truck fuels. But suppose we just used that same land for solar? What would be the difference in energy produced? Turns out solar would produce 30x more energy. The story may be even more extreme. Car and truck engine are maybe 5x less efficient than electric. So given that all of this ethanol goes to transportation, solar could be 150x more efficient.

Ecologically informed solar enables a sustainable energy transition in US croplands

From Ember via CleanTecnhica.

Fossil Fuels No Longer Majority of US Electricity!

Just trying to get a handle on the scope of the losses from the two day stock market rout. At $5T for the S&P alone this comes out to almost $15,000 for every man, woman and child in America. And this wasn’t an act of nature or even a bubble popping. It was a result of a policy decision by leaders at the highest level. I don’t see this being recovered any time soon, nor do I see it resulting in any long term gains for the country. And if anyone thinks this is going to have any sort of positive benefits, I would like to see an example of another time a similar huge drop in markets has been in any way a good thing.

S&P 500 loses $5 trillion in two days in Trump tariff selloff

Bill Gates published the source code to his original commercial product, a BASIC interpreter for the Intel 8000 series microprocessor. As a high school student I got my hands on my first computer, a Heathkit H8 owned by my uncle. It ran a Heathkit version of BASIC called Benton Harbor BASIC, named after the town where Heathkit was based in Michigan. But there was a much better BASIC interpreter out there from a little company called Microsoft. I got a hold of a copy and it was a revelation. In my long career there are maybe a half dozen pieces of software that really impressed me. This was the first.

I managed to talk my dad into getting a Heathkit H-89 that I assembled on the family pool table. I immediately got a copy of Microsoft BASIC and I was off to the races. Even wrote a simple video game in Microsoft BASIC that I was able to sell and make a few bucks from. Sure beat mowing lawns.

The H-89 was replaced by newer and faster computers over the years but for some reason I lugged it around with me from city to city for almost 50 years. I also kept the photocopied manual for Microsoft BASIC, something perhaps even more rare than the software itself.

So yeah, I was one of those hobbyists who stole from Bill Gates. Just don’t ask him where he got his code from back in those wild and wooly days. I finally read his letter from 1976 and I’m surprised to see he invites people to send money to his office in Albuquerque. I have just retired to just outside of Albuquerque and will go see what is at that address today. It seems to be in a marginal, if not bad neighborhood. Perhaps it always was. If anyone is there I’ll ask what the tab is on a copy of Microsoft BASIC with 50 years interest. I owe you Bill. I suppose we all do. And hey, nice 8080 assembly. Very high quality stuff, especially for that era. From Gates Notes.

Celebrating 50 Years of Microsoft with the Company’s Original Source Code

A good article from El Pais on the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby. It also covers lots of the other writing and related arts of that era. It should be noted that this was the Jazz Age, a period of a prosperity of sorts just before the Great Depression.

The American cultural boom a century on: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Louis Armstrong