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Storing energy – with big rocks

Storing energy – with big rocks

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Energy Vault (NYSE: NRGV) has licensed six additional EVx gravity energy storage systems in China after starting construction of the world’s first facility near Shanghai.

After trying, then giving up on, battery technology (which is not exactly eco friendly), Energy Vault is designing and building facilities that essentially recreate the physics of the most popular form of energy storage – pumped hydro – but with giant movable blocks.

The design goes like this: Energy Vault installations use excess renewable energy at low times to lift massive composite blocks. Then, when the energy is once again needed on the grid, the blocks are lowered and the potential energy is turned to kinetic energy from the dropping blocks. That lowering then spins generators that supply electricity to the grid. The company believes it will be able to achieve a respectable round-trip efficiency (RTE) of over 80% with its current design.

Like many other projects, the devil is in the details – and there is growing skepticism. There is almost no solid technical details being released by the company. Many have questioned how the designs will achieve the astounding 80% efficiency when the gold standard of pumped hydro can’t usually achieve that rate. There’s no information on how the motors work or just about all the details that would be required to figure out if the claims are even remotely feasible.

Many are claiming this all smells like another Forbes 30 under 30 scam wrapped in greenwashing. Adding to the skepticism, there’s a new securities fraud investigation about Energy Vault relating to stock price manipulation. The stock has dropped almost 75% since it was introduced. This could spell bad news for the company, and China isn’t known for being lenient to scammers.

Maximize your vacation time in 2024!

Maximize your vacation time in 2024!

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Want to maximize long weekends in 2024? Strategically request these vacation days to get three and four day holiday weekends galore!

  • Monday, Jan. 1 (New Year’s Day recognized)
    • Take off: Jan. 2 (Tuesday)
  • Monday, Jan. 15 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)
    • Take off: Jan. 12 (Friday)
  • Monday, Feb. 19 (President’s Day)
    • Take off: Feb. 16 (Friday)
  • Monday, May 27 (Memorial Day)
    • Take off: May 24 (Friday)
  • Thursday, July 4 (Independence Day)
    • Take off: July 5 (Friday)
  • Monday, Sept. 2 (Labor Day)
    • Take off: Aug. 30 (Friday)
  • Monday, Oct. 14 (Indigenous Peoples’ Day)
    • Take off: Oct. 11 (Friday)
  • Monday, Nov. 11 (Veterans Day)
    • Take off: Nov. 8 (Friday)
  • Thursday, Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day)
    • Take off: Nov. 29 (Friday) (If Friday is already a day off for you, take off the next Monday)
  • Wednesday, Dec. 25 (Christmas Day)
    • Take off: Dec. 23-Dec. 27 (Monday through Friday), using four days PTO to get nine consecutive days off

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Sail the Northwest Passage – for real

Sail the Northwest Passage – for real

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The Northwest Passage is a sea lane between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic Ocean, along the northern coast of North America. For centuries, such a trade route to Asia was sought.

A northern route was discovered in 1850 by the Irish explorer Robert McClure. Scotsman John Rae explored a more southerly area in 1854 through which Norwegian Roald Amundsen made the first complete passage in 1903–1906 (yes, it took 3 years since they would be frozen in the ice all winter). The passage was known for its many disastrous expeditions. Despite the incredible feat, nearly year-round ice pack made this traversal impractical.

In recent years, however, artic sea ice has been receding. In 2013, a Chinese shipping line successful made passage by the 73,500 ton Nordic Orion. The company expressed interest in continuing the route more frequently as winter sea ice recedes.

But it’s not just big companies, you can now take one of these trips yourself – if you have the money. In just the last few years, tour companies are starting to make regular trips through the Northwest passage. Costs range from around $10,000 – $50,000.

Read about what to expect on such a voyage here.

Tour companies now offering cruises through the Northwest Passage:

Holoboxes

Holoboxes

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Dutch company Holoconnects showed off its Holobox at CES. The selling point is it can bring realistic holograms into conference venues, hotels and more. The Holobox has an 86-inch, transparent 4K LCD screen for a life-size and realistic-looking holographic projection. Because of the lighting behind the screen, it creates the illusion of a 3D projection or hologram.

This works a bit better for multiple viewers compared to head tracking techniques that only work for one viewer.

Takashi Yoshinaga created a version that uses HoloLens2 and allows you to pull the person out of the holobox.

Challenges facing cities beyond covid

Challenges facing cities beyond covid

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Want to know how policy is generated and how governments evaluate challenges and future direction? Companies like Moss Adams present interesting research they do.

In this interesting discussion, Richard Florida (author of Rise of the Creative Class and award winning commentary on socio-economic urban studies) points out the misconceptions and changes facing cities in 2023 and beyond. He gives a really interesting summary of how things are (which is very different than what the media tells us), and will likely change, since Covid.

It’s an interesting take on how cities are changing and likely futures.

Unity loses almost $1 billion per year

Unity loses almost $1 billion per year

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Unity game engine is a beast in the marketplace, holding the majority market share in the (number) of games made with the engine. But what if I told you that Unity was running an almost $1 billion per year deficit?

This seems like quite a shock for a big company that is clearly dominating the marketplace – but the reason is likely strategic. Unity has been on a tear acquiring lots of tool and support companies in the last few years to make Unity the engine that has everything you need – from rendering, to marketing, to authoring, to storefronts.

Still, as the economic reigns tighten, this likely can’t continue. There was already a disastrous attempt to start charging fees for this once free engine, as well as announcing 3% layoffs on some of it’s more speculative VFX division.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/U/unity-software/net-income

RowHammer attacks have a new friend – RowPress

RowHammer attacks have a new friend – RowPress

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Rowhammer is a DRAM memory security vulnerability discovered in June 2014 (paper here). It demonstrates a security problem in which programs can modify memory they should not have access too. In the paper, they note how DRAM memory cells interact electrically between themselves by leaking their charges, possibly changing the contents of nearby memory rows that were not addressed in the original memory access. This circumvention of the isolation between DRAM memory cells results from the high cell density in modern DRAM, and can be triggered by specially crafted memory access patterns that rapidly activate the same memory rows numerous times.

The row hammer effect has been used in some privilege escalation computer security exploits (Paper here). Google’s Project Zero demonstrated two working privilege escalation exploits based on the row hammer effect in 2015. Since then, there has been a back and forth war of fixes and new exploits – some even involving ways to circumvent ECC (error-correcting) DRAM.

Now we fast forward to today, and there is another way to manipulate bits – RowPress (Paper here). Instead of ‘hammering’ neighbor rows with certain write patterns, this method involves manipulating the length of time the aggressor row is left open when reading it. When a computer accesses a chunk of memory, it opens the rows to the cells storing the desired data and transfers it to the CPU. The researchers show you can use clever methods to manipulate how long that row is left open. When an attacker row is left open the optimal amount, you can affect nearby victim rows:

We show that keeping a DRAM row (i.e., aggressor row) open for a long period of time (i.e., a large aggressor row on time, tAggON) disturbs physically nearby DRAM rows. Doing so induces bitflips in the victim row without requiring (tens of) thousands of activations to the aggressor row. We characterize RowPress in 164 off-the-shelf DDR4 DRAM chips from all three major manufacturers and find that RowPress significantly amplifies DRAM’s vulnerability to read-disturb attacks (i.e., greatly reduces the minimum number of total aggressor row activations to cause at least one bitflip, ACmin.

The methods they use are VERY clever. They started on a FPGA-based test beds to test the idea, then moved to PC’s. This required a deep knowledge of memory hardware and involves clever manipulation of the memory controller and cache systems (section 6.2 of the paper). The summary in the comments was great:

With respect to knowing how physical memory maps to their process memory, they allocated a 1GB hugepage and use a technique called DRAMA to determine the row-column mapping.

To keep their target row open, they take advantage of the fact (new to me) that multiple cache blocks will live on the same physical row, which means that repeated accesses to those blocks can influence the memory controller to keep that row open. They also empty the processor cache between each iteration so that they can be sure that they will hit the actual RAM.
To bypass the target row refresh (TRR) mechanisms that have been implemented to counter traditional RowHammer attacks, they also toggle a large number of dummy rows so that the TRR will pick up on those rather than the actual aggressor rows, since TRR implementations apparently have a small number of candidate aggressor rows.

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Dog plays Gyromite

Dog plays Gyromite

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There’s no rules against household pets speed-running games – so JSR trained his shiba inu Peanut Butter to speed run the 90’s era Nintendo game Gyromite. He didn’t set any world records, outside of being maybe the first dog to complete the game; but dang – what a good boy.

Бackup Ukraine

Бackup Ukraine

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Backup Ukraine, a collaborative project between UNESCO National Commission and Polycam (a 3D creation tool) which enables anyone equipped with a cell phone to scan and capture photorealistic 3D models of heritage sites in order to preserve them in case they are bombed.

Armed with the Polycam software (offered for free for the project) and an iPhone, the technology allows citizen archivists off the frontlines to preserve Ukrainian heritage sites.

Singularity Hub has an excellent article that describes the history of 3D capture as well as this effort at using it for cultural preservation. The article does a good job of covering previous solutions like Cyark, Google Map’s new Immersive view, AI tools like Luma, Scenario 3D, as well as upcoming technologies like Gaussian Splatting and NeRFs.

This kind of cultural and artistic preservation is unfortunately something the West and even my home town of Portland likely needs. In 2020, Portland Oregon saw over 100 nights of rioting and targeted, wide-spread artistic and cultural destruction by increasingly armed left wing protesters.

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