2019/03/10

How not to screw up your kids

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician whose books have been published in twenty languages internationally. His interests include child development, the mind-body unity in health and illness, and the treatment of addictions. Gabor has worked in palliative care and as a family physician, and for fourteen years practiced addiction medicine in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

There are a number of his talks available online, below are two talks I've found that are related to our topic today, and which go into much greater depth, if you're interested in further exploring his ideas.
Biology of Loss: Recognizing Impaired Attachments & Fostering Resilience 1hr 31min
The Consequences of Stressed Parenting 1hr 21min

The video we'll discuss today is called "How not to screw up your kids":



Storing Energy in Air

Below are excerpts from several articles about CAES, or Compressed Air Energy Storage. The titles of each section are a link to the original article, if you want more information. Besides that, there's a fantastic selection of articles about 'outdated' energy technology used throughout the ages here.


Solving the intermittency issue of solar and wind generation
Electricity generated by fossil fuels is increasingly unsustainable and a shift towards renewable energy – principally from the sun and wind – is vital. Renewable generation is already less expensive per unit than its polluting counterparts, but the fact the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow presents an obstacle to a serious takeover of the energy sector.

Energy storage could overcome this pressing “intermittancy” issue. If storage was available at sufficiently low cost and high performance, renewable energy would rapidly displace all other generation forms.

Energy is already stored, of course, in batteries or various other technologies. Even reservoirs can act as huge stores of energy. However nothing that exists or is in development can store energy as well, and as cheaply, as compressed air.

CAES at its simplest involves storing air in tanks: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator.

Why not batteries?
Over their lifetimes, chemical batteries store only two to ten times the energy needed to manufacture them. Small-scale CAES systems do much better than that, mainly because of their much longer lifespan.

Furthermore, they do not require rare or toxic materials, and the hardware is easily recyclable. In addition, decentralised compressed air energy storage doesn’t need high-tech production lines and can be manufactured, installed and maintained by local business, unlike an energy storage system based on chemical batteries. Finally, micro-CAES has no self-discharge, is tolerant of a wider range of environments, and promises to be cheaper than chemical batteries.