I had two brilliant thoughts today (if I do say so myself). Well, maybe I had more, but these two are shareable (if I do say so myself). I am working on a grant, so I apologize for the format in advanced.
Background One: In case you missed it, another huge piece of glacier in Greenland is gone. One of the things I think I understand is that salt water can be colder. When you have increased temperatures, even if they are seasonal, and you get these huge pieces of fresh water glacial ice breaking into the salty ocean. They will melt, decrease the salt concentration, and the water temperature does not get so cold because it is less salty. Warmer water will just make the problem worse - you'll get more melting glaciers and the water will be less salty and warm up and more melting glaciers and...
Desalination is a way of taking the salt out of water so that you can drink it. This is done on a lot of small islands I think, but now they even do it in the UK! One might argue that the UK is a fairly large island that gets a fair amount of rain.
What do they do with all that salt they take out of the water?
Brilliant Idea One: I think they should put it in the water in Greenland! Now, this is sorta tongue-in-cheek, but seriously. What do they do with the salt?
Background Two: I like to read novels the old fashioned way on paper. Part of this is that I have not accumulated a ton of books because I have cut down on my books as I have moved so many times over the past ten years. There are some that are still at my parents, like Island of the Blue Dolphins and Julie of the Wolves, and some here by some favorite authors like Diana Gabaldon, Isabelle Allende (if you've read her new one, let me know if it was good!), Jane Austen and Bill Bryson. I do not anticipate myself switching to the e-book format soon. However, since I started my post-doc I avoid printing papers out. I read them, take notes in a notebook, and put all of it in my reference manager. This has the benefit of not killing so many trees and having my references all on my computer when I want them. It has the drawback of not being able to grab a folder to write about a specific topic and not seeing my notes with the text. My rotating grad student just got a tablet PC and is really using it well to transition into an electronic notebook and handwriting things to be save electronically.
Brilliant Idea Two: What I would totally invest in is an e-journal reader. Not a kindle or something like that, but something that is geared towards pdf reading, annotating, and reference management. I think a lot of scientists would. How great if you had your whole file cabinet in a handy tablet to take on planes, to meetings, to read on the beach (just kidding about that last one at this stage in my career).
And there you have it. Two brilliant ideas that are now out in the public domain and no longer patentable, unlike what some yogis think is an appropriate thing to do for a practice that is thousands of years old.
3 comments:
Very impressive ideas! I didn't know about London's desalination plant. Last time I had an update on that technology, it was too expensive for practical application. That was ten years ago. Amazing how things move along!
I'm thinking the UK has some sort of contract with the Popcorn production industry and possibly with butter production as well.
I had actually heard once that kindle was going to try to break into the e-journal and e-textbook market. But like you said, you wouldn't have the ability to annotate/highlight etc. which is part of the reason why so many scientists still use paper.
I too have moved to keeping all of the pdfs in (somewhat) organized file folders on my computer. With doing work at home and at school, and with my lab space being a short walk from my office space, it is easier to have them on my computer and always have them "with me" and not in a filing cabinet.
Now I just need to find someone to scan all of my old papers....
;-)
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