I have spent time doing yard work with my brother to help make the outside of our home beautiful. First, we cleaned the driveway in front of our house, then we got rid of the spider webs around the windows. Afterwards, we were able to go inside & do some personal work. After that, I went to get groceries from Walmart and get sea food from the restaurant Captain Ds. It was a mildly busy day, especially since we had to clean the driveway after a massive thunderstorm that hit last night, but it was decent exercise and a nice way to spend a Sunday.
Now, for the American-Made Solar Prize Round 5 contest I wrote about in my last entry, I am working on creating a distributed ledger that can be used for solar energy peer-to-peer transactions. Thanks to someone on Quora, I was able to learn how to get started on such a project and how it can be utilized to help with solar energy:
"The electricity market has utilities on the supply side and consumers on the demand side, with blockchain you can integrate consumers with renewable power assests like solar, wind into the local grid to act as Prosumers. The inherent decentralised nature of blockchain technology allows to create a network of multiple nodes embedded into the electricity distribution grid creating a so called smart grid. The blockchain acts as the accounting ledger for such a grid storing the transaction records of production and consumption by each prosumer/consumer for billing purposes. This allows to create a more competitive market where the prices cannot be dictated by utilities alone." -Hiten Parmar, Solar PV Consultant
Basically, it might be best to work on a distributed ledger for a Peer-to-Peer Energy trading model for solar energy like I mentioned in my previous post. This should help excess solar energy be accessible to the average American. In addition to using distributed ledgers for solar energy, I have read about how blockchains can help to make mail-in voting safer and wrote an answer on politics stack exchange on how this system will probably be utilized in the United States:
"...blockchain and public ledgers can be combined with mail-in voting to create a better mail-in voting system. The USPS is filing a patent for a blockchain system that could help with mail-in-voting to add more security and make said votes easier to count. According to the patent itself, the system works when “a registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain.” - Me, politics.stackexchange.com
There are so many potential uses for distributed ledgers that people are only just discovering. Hopefully, more people will start using this technology to its fullest potential and me using my own version to help the United States Department of Energy expand solar energy usage could be the start...
On an unrelated note, I have read about the world's longest diary. Said diary is over 35 million words long and is believed to be the longest journal ever. It was written over the course of twenty years by Robert Shields of Dayton, Ohio. It would be cool to beat his record, but I am not sure I will be able to have the ability to write as much as he could. He literally wrote about 4 hours a day for two decades, which is an impressive feat. The diary filled 91 boxes and was longer than the journals kept by many professional writers like journalist Edward Robb Ellis (21 million words) and the poet Arthur Crew Inman (17 million words). It would take years to accomplish even a fraction of that, even with the technology advantage I have with my computer. Even if I wrote at a rate of 400 words a day, it would take me over 257 years to beat that record, so I would have to figure out how to extend my life by many years to even have a chance to turn this rambling online journal into something world record worthy (and by then, someone who is probably much better at writing and more dedicated than myself would have probably found a way to defeat the previous record). However, I should not focus on this historical tidbit: I should focus on finishing this challenge and see if having this journal will have any positive health benefits for me if I keep writing. By the way, the journal could have been longer, but Shields suffered a stroke in 1997 before dying in 2007 at 89 years old.
Robert Shields basically spent his entire day writing in his journal, not just 4 hours. For every activity he did, he would write down, including how much he toilet paper he used and what others around him said or did. Also apparently that 37.5 million words is an estimate, and no one knows the actual count. No one can even open up his journal or read them or do a word count, until 2057. As quoted, "Under the terms of the donation of his diary to Washington State University, the diary may not be read or subjected to an exact word count for 50 years from his death."
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