Mathing with Theo

I am very proud to announce that my years (3) of research into the stock market have paid off.

I will now be working with Northfield Trading LP here in Denver to develop automated trading algorithms for futures markets.

Should be alot of fun, growth and learning.

The other day I was trying to explain the concept of constrained optimization to an artist.  As I was fumbling around a bit, my friend (who was also a Math nerd) said:

Constrained optimization is like fishing… you have a limited amount of bait, you don’t know what the fish want, how many fish are out there, or what type/proportion they are but the goal is to catch as many as possible in a few hours.

While it’s not a perfect analogy… it’s pretty good.  What’s your favorite analogy for constrained optimization?

This week expanded my first heliostat by adding another 8 sq. ft of mirrors (bringing the total to 24 sq. ft) and have also added a second heliostat.  The second sun collector uses 12 1 sq. ft mirrors (mirror tile from Home Depot or Lowes, $10).

I tried to take temperature readings of the second colletor, but ended up frying my thermometer.  Regardless the temperature on the brick gets well over 150 degrees and is unbearably hot (can’t but my hand on it for more than about 1 second).

Overall, the heliostat project is a success and I have determined that the second more circular collector will make a good space heater for the office.  The plan is to put the bricks inside the office window and the mirrors outside.  As the day progresses the brick will heat up and heat up my office.  By the time the sun goes down I’ll be done with work and wont need any more heat.

As for the water heater collector, there will be too many drags on heating efficiency and transfer too and from the house.  I’ve decided that it will likely be better to build a flat panel with small pipes to collect the heat and to move the panel much closer to the house.

Overall, this project has been fun and has really shown me that for a really low cost (<$40 for the second circular collector) one can build a solar powered heater.

In the future I’d like to test what the effect of concentrating the sun on a real PV panel would be.  I’d like to set up two panels  relatively close to each other and test how much more efficient one can make the panel by concentration.  I exepect that a factor of 1.5-2X power will be acheived by focusing 2X the solar area. Perhaps with a third row of mirrors to the circular collector it might be possible to push the efficieny up to 2.5-3X. If this turns out to be the case it will enable the average person to go Solar, bringing down the cost of solar by about half.

The trusty ol’ T43 got sick this weekend with the “Windows Anti-Virus 2008″ virus.  Try as I might, I could not get it off of Windows XP.  I tried everything and every software to no avail.  Luckily I didn’t decide to the buy the “anti-virus” software they were pitching to solve the “virsuses” they had detected on my computer (this particular virus is actually mal-ware which tries to convince you that you have viruses and to buy their software to fix it).

I read tales of woe of those who “bought” the software only to have their accounts drained.

But as I was giving up and cursing windows for making such an insecure Operating System (really? Windows, you couldn’t have prevented such an attack?), I remebered that ntaylor0909 had just given me a copy of Ubuntu Server 8.04….

So I wiped ‘er clean and am now up on Ubuntu Linux.

I have to say so far I’m quite impressed.  It’s free… it works… all the programs for it are free… and they work too… and I hear that it’s even quite secure.

Thank you Linux!

While I was in Africa this summer I worked out how I could aim several mirrors at my old water heater.  I had already stripped off half the casing and foam insulation on the water and heater and painted it black knowing that I wanted to acheive some sort of solar water heating but had never really worked out how to position the mirrors to make it really hot!

So, being a mathematician I set about working out the requisite formulas which would help me to space out the mirrors and determine at which angle I should keep them.

It turns out that instead of tracking the sun it’s actually quite simple to place the water heater perpendicular to the sun, and array the mirrors facing north.  Aligning the mirrors in the center with the long edge running perpendicular to the sun means that at midday there will be an additional 8 sq. ft of solar power to heat the water that will eventually be contained in the heater.

In the first picture we can also see that there are 2 additional mirrors placed at 45 degrees in either direction to the middle mirrors.  These mirrors are testing my hypothesis that at about 11 am (a little past quarter day) and 3pm there will be some additional sunlight that could be caught.

Once I get a little more funding for this project I’ll add a few more mirrors (4-10) more and also start work on a smaller concentrator for my home office.

Later I’ll connect up some actual water pipes, and circulate the hot water into the house for our new radiant heating system that I’m hoping to install this fall.

If you’d like to code for your own project please contact me.