Ideas

I have been waiting for the time when my brain will settle enough to start having some good ideas.
You know you say to yourself “if only life wasn’t so hectic and I just had a moment to myself”?
Well I guess that time has come but I am surprised it has taken 4 weeks. It was really busy before we went away and I think having the children with us means there is less quiet time since we are all in one room most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying that part but I recharge my batteries by being quiet and still so it took until the children had found a really engaging park before we got that peace. Jenni got her nose into a good book and I pondered. The luxury of this has not escaped me and I felt very privileged to just “be”. There is this pressure, perhaps I perceive something that is not there or make it real but pressure nonetheless to do something really constructive with this time.

Life at work is upside down enough to park trying to solve world information security problems by studying how nature does it and making extrapolations, theories etc. but I have had a crack at safe drinking water in hot countries! I guess the science centre about oil exploration was timed perfectly with my mind quietening as we looked at renewable energy. I was looking up how reverse osmosis (ro) for drinking water works as most of the bottled water out here is made that way. It explains that oil rich countries use this because the amount of energy required for ro processing is high and can easily be met by burning oil resources.

It occurred to me that whilst solar energy is unlikely to meet the scale needs of a population in replacing oil a more personal production method could be created for very poor countries with a non-potable water source.

Maybe someone has thought of this already but my idea is to use a solar parabola furnace to condense the dirty water and then to take this condensate and pass it through an ro filter maybe using steam to provide the positive pressure required.

It is not going to generate large quantities and clearly needs a consistent light source but the strength of the sun should not have to be high if the right conductive element is chosen to heat the water.

Anyway where was I? Ah right the blog. Well today we visited the Lake Gardens which has a huge play area. We got on well with the man driving the road train on account of him driving us round twice before asking where we wanted to go and then within 5mins of getting there asking him to take the girls to the loo! Ultimately it was just too hot to really enjoy the gardens, people do say to see it before 10:30 in the morning and we were there English style at 12:00 midday!

We are back in our hotel now really enjoying the aircon and having booked our hotel for Penang on Friday. With that and the bus tickets organised we have completed any pre-planning before we go to Sumatra now so all we have left to do is enjoy ourselves.

We are horribly bitten from the onslaught of mosquitoes yesterday at KL tower forest. We had not predicted the existence or tenacity of the rotten insects and so even though we didn’t stand still through the 59 minute episode of traipsing up and down myriad flights of stairs in the forest the volume meant we could not escape. Emma has been so badly bitten that she is now on anti histamine pills and looks like people have been throwing tomatoes at her legs.

I have downloaded some nice pictures from the camera though so lets see if they come out.

This is where we are now [geolocation]

Susie loves the shower caps provided in hotel rooms!