Tag Archives: oil

The Future of Power?

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The California PG&E outage is a clear note about what happens when you ignore your infrastructure and you don’t have a regular preventative maintenance schedule. PM can cost a lot, but as we see in California, does it really?

I started wondering about alternatives to high tension power lines in California. You couldn’t really bury any of it, with so many quakes, maybe. So what else? Microwave transmission? Maybe make it auto-aiming so if there is a quake and the tower moves a little, it can reacquire the source faster? Or perhaps spread out the generation stations, like solar reflector installations, to distribute the load and increase the production rate…

But then these ideas lead me to truly knackers ideas. If you are going to go this far, why not just also install immense Tesla coils and then outfit cars with wireless AC receivers and then the entire automobile fleet can be electric and not need charging, since you can skip batteries, it’s much easier and cheaper.

But if we did — then we might be able to use addressable frequencies per vehicle or overlay a data stream on top of the power itself, so a car that did a hit and run or is involved in an OJ chase could be remotely turned off. But man, with enough coils dotting the landscape, powered by solar reflector stations you could drive from coast to coast with ease. We could possibly make covered tunneled roadways and then increase the speed, then automate the entire thing so after you get past human reaction limits, your car can accelerate to a comfy cruising speed of 350mph or higher.

I want to trade an immense battery bank for honeycombed graphene and kevlar car bodies so I’m traveling safely even if I impact at ridiculously high speeds. Or I want a car that automatically fills with a gassy rubber filler and ejects the passenger compartment upon a catastrophic impact event, like we have with fighter jet ejection systems. And an adorable theme-able packed parachute, maybe Hello Kitty? 😉

But an entire truck fleet that is automated and powered by solar reflector stations and tesla coils. Zero emissions. Poof, just like that. I suppose I like solar reflectors more because they mean business. Plus you could put the parabolic mirrors on gantries say twenty feet up, and then have open pasture underneath for cows, chickens, and sheep. Or grow shade-happy crops?

These power stations might, if there are enough of them, raise the albedo of the local area and then you nip greenhouse effect at the beginning of the cycle. You’re channeling the incoming solar radiation elsewhere. It isn’t heating up water or pavement or farmland. It’s being soaked up by hungry devices like trucks and cars and trains.

I sort of wonder what an airplane with a wireless AC box would look like? Different jet technology, based on electrics not on jet fuel. And the tons of carbon saved. You could replace the jet fuel with new safety equipment, like foam bursters and ejection systems in case of some sort of failure in the air. The plane just falls apart, the cabin fills with sticky goop, and it parachutes to earth safely.

We would be free of oil completely. It would rewrite the entire narrative.

Rocky Mountain Barber Company’s Unscented Beard Oil, 1 oz.

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The Rocky Mountain Barber Company also has variously scented and unscented beard oils. I selected the unscented beard oil because of my positive experiences with their balms and that they had the packaging, the rubber dropper, that made sense. This is genuinely unscented, there is almost no scent to this product whatsoever. The bottle is a Brown Glass Boston Bottle and should be what the Beardoholic folks switch to for product packaging.

This is an excellent beard oil, and I use it when I want the benefits of the oil without a strong scent that would otherwise clash with either my fragrance choice or my balm choice. The Honest Amish Beard Oil goes well with some of the warmer more woodsy scented balms whereas this one, the Rocky Mountain Unscented works well with the citrus or soapy scented balms. While I love exploring the scents in these products, having a good option that is totally unscented will always be in my beard-care kit.

Honest Amish Premium Beard Oil, 2 oz.

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The Honest Amish Premium Beard Oil is next. This is one of the beard oils I use routinely. The scent screams woodshop. The notes in the scent are sawdust, the warm smell of metal saw blades and a very weak burned resin. I humorously regard this one as “An exploding lumber yard.” The oil is quite darker than anything else I’ve used and might slightly alter the white in my beard and bring out a very slight yellow tint, but I’ve never thought that a negative.

Honest Amish again delivers more product for similar cost than any of their competitors. They ship double the product for almost the same price. I seem to vacillate between applying the beard oil by hand, versus dropping the oil on my brush and using the brush to apply it. I don’t know if there is a difference in application styles, but I do think that applying it by hand seems to be a more thorough method. There doesn’t appear to be any consensus online either, as I have searched in vain numerous times.

Once the bottle at work is exhausted, I intend to rotate the Honest Amish in and carry it around with me as my go-to beard oil choice.

Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil 1 oz.

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The Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil, in the 1-ounce bottle, came damaged from Amazon. Beardoholic appears to use aluminum caps on both their bottles and tins and for some reason, the materials always seem to come from the factory bent, warped or buckled. There is little if any scent to discuss about this product, beyond the smell of some of the component oils, which are ever so slightly vegetal or woodsy, if at all.

I started using this beard oil a few times during the day but quickly grew tired of the bottle assembly. It came with an aluminum cap that was buckled from distribution if not from the factory, and so it would never retain a seal. It did not leak, but it also did not fully seat properly. There was an inner plastic dropper-hole cap, with a small plastic plug and after five or six times putting it on and taking it off, it started to warp and ultimately I had to throw the little plug away because it could no longer seal to the dropper-hole it was mated to. After about half of the oil was used, I noticed small spots of leakage, so I resolved to transfer the contents to some other bottle. This created a new comedy of errors and a life lesson on cheap scale problems for consumers. What I wanted was a Boston Bottle, brown glass, with a certain thread count and density. I learned more about bottle choices trying to fix this problem than I ever meant to. As it turns out, you cannot merely order anything like this in one piece increments. You can find lots of people to sell you exactly what you want, a brown-glass Boston Bottle with 20/400 thread with a rubber top and glass pipette. What you can’t find is anyone willing to sell it to you in counts less than 500. So, if you want to fix this one problem, you have to buy 500 glass bottles to fix just one. It’s thoroughly absurd. I have moved away from Beardoholic as a brand, not because of their product, but because of their packaging. It was the first beard oil I tried, and it was a challenge to use. In the end, I did more shopping online and discovered that many other manufacturers use rubber-top/glass-pipette bottles, which I find to be incredibly more pleasant to use. In the end, I ended up at of all places, Hobby Lobby. They were the only ones I could find that had bottles like what I was looking for, and even still, I had to buy a set of three. The cost was almost nothing, but even today, I have two unused bottles in my cupboard that I will likely never ever use since I only needed the one.

I have resolved to use up the Beardoholic Unscented Beard Oil and keep it at work. In a few more days there will be nothing of it left, and I will wash the bottle and store it away as supplies. I don’t think I will be buying any more Beardoholic products, not when their packaging is so weak, or shipping is so strangely rough on them. The quality of the product that I don’t doubt and I do think it a good choice, but only when they address their bent, warped, buckled, and odd options for their products to be shipped in. When your customer has to rebottle your product, that’s not really all that great.