#Thermoacoustic

[fuckyeahfluiddynamics]

Searching for Stability in Cleaner Flames

Spiking natural gas power plants with hydrogen could help them burn cleaner as we transition away from carbon power. But burners in power plants and jet engines can be extremely finicky, thanks to thermoacoustic instabilities.  (Image and research credit: B. Ahn et al.; via APS Physics) Read the full article

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Tourism in Brazil could benefit from climate agenda

Different tourism sectors are coming together to create itineraries aligned with the climate agenda in Belém, Pará state, combining experiences of immersion in the forest, and regional cuisine, and promoting sustainable production systems. The idea behind the initiatives is to take advantage of the opportunities brought by sustainable tourism—such as attracting investment and increasing competitiveness—and also to overcome the challenges in bringing together the major players from the two agendas.

Parys Fonseca, an entrepreneur in the lodging sector, has created a business model combining the experience of immersion in the Amazon rainforest with sustainable lodging. After consulting the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (Sebrae) in Pará, he learned about a recyclable modular structure which not only has less environmental impact at a lower cost, but also keeps room temperatures stable without artificial refrigeration.

“The installation process was really quick. In just two weeks I was renting it out as accommodation. And I thought it was better because the work was simpler, the module adapts to the environment, and it’s also thermoacoustic,” he pointed out.

Located on Murucutu Island, one of the 42 islands that make up the city of Belém, Fonseca’s resort offers visitors not only a chance to spend a night’s sleep immersed in the Amazon rainforest, but also gastronomic experiences with local products from the region’s sustainable production chain. “The next step is to create a route for tourists to learn about açaí palm production, just as there’s route on cocoa on Combu Island. Sebrae is supporting me with training and management, which has been key for the local residents and entrepreneurs alike,” he said.

Continue reading.

[maklodes]

Stirling-electric hybrid vehicles are an idea that I keep coming back to, even though this is an idea people far smarter and better at engineering than I have been trying to tackle for a very long time. (The earliest example I can think of is the GMC Stir-Lec from 1969, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if someone was trying to build a Stirling electric hybrid when Stanley Steamers were still battling Ford Model Ts.) All the current trends – and regulatory frameworks – are toward full electrification based on giant batteries, but Stirling-electric still captivates my imagination.

A Stirling engine has a lower power-to-weight ratio than an internal combustion engine, but how bad is it? Well, the 1986 NASA project said they had gotten it to 3.35 kg/kW. (Has there been any progress since 1986 on Stirling engines? I don’t know. There have been some new developments with thermoacoustic Stirling engines and such, but I’m not sure they’d be any better than traditional Stirling engines for this application.) With a hybrid, the most sensible approach is to make the heavy Stirling engine as weak as it can be while sustaining a desired top cruising speed – bursts of acceleration are better handled by electrical motors with better power-to-weight ratios.

It’s commonly said that a car only needs maybe 20 hp (15 kW) to cruise at a highway speed of, say, 60 mph/100 kmh. That’s not very marketable, though. If we supposed that a top sustainable speed – the top speed at which you’re burning fuel, but not draining your batteries – should be more like 90 mph, then we might want 1.5^3 = 3.375 times that much power (this is on the pessimistic assumption that air resistance is basically all resistance, since it scales worst (cubically) with speed). Other situations besides speeding, like towing or going up a long-enough upward incline that it wouldn’t just be cleared on battery alone, might also be occasions for sustained power higher than the ~15 kW highway level.  So maybe 50 kW. A stirling engine capable of producing that might weigh 170 kg.

For our electric motors, we might want, say, 150 kW, for a marketably peppy response. The motor of a Tesla Model 3 (cited in Wikipedia on a list of power densities) has got 6.26 kW/kg.  That might require 30 kg. If we’re going for a serial hybrid rather than a parallel hybrid – with no direct connection between the Stirling engine and the drivetrain, only a connection that bypasses the battery to feed electrical power to the motors directly – then the power going to the tires is just from the electric motors, not the Stirling engine. This might simplify the engineering, though..

Then there are the batteries. If we wanted four minutes of battery power at near-maximum power  – making sure to compensate for any lag in the Stirling engine heating up – then we’d want ~100 kW * ~250 seconds = 25 MJ. This is also close to the minimum for an American tax-break eligible plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, which requires a battery of at least 7 kWh, or 25.2 MJ. If we got 0.4 MJ/kg then that’s another 65 kg. One question is whether the battery has enough power, not just enough energy. I am having a hard time finding sources on this. Wikipedia pages on power density seem too pessimistic given what we see out of electric vehicles like the Model S Plaid. (100 kWh battery, 1020 hp ~=760 kW, suggesting that a battery can discharge itself in 8 minutes at most, depending on whether the Plaid is basically designed with motors that are as powerful as possible given its battery.) We might need to double the size of the batteries to power the motors enough.

So we’re adding 265-340 kg to the vehicle so far. There will probably be a bit more – regenerative braking systems, power distributing linkages, etc. On the other hand, we’ve gotta remember that we’re also taking the internal combustion engine out.

Is 280 kg too much? I suppose a comparison might be plug-in hybrids, which are rather heavy on account of an ICE-electric hybrid energy system and a rather large battery. A Subaru Crosstrek conventional has a curb weight of 3298 lbs, while the PHEV weighs in at 3,717 lbs, a difference of 190 kg. The Kia Sportage has a curb weight of 3,373 lbs, while the PHEV version weighs 4211, a difference of 380 kg.

Perhaps with some sort of modular system could add versatility to the fueling types, with different modules for gasoline, compressed natural gas or hydrogen, waste vegetable oil (perhaps a preheater would be good for something that viscous). The Stirling engine might lose a little peak power on some fuels relative to gasoline, but for ordinary, not-too-fast, not-too-hilly cruising that might just mean it runs more and it doesn’t affect the performance too much – although in times of persistent high demand for power, like climbing up a hill, towing a trailer, or just speeding, you might notice the deficiency.

One possible issue is hydrogen embrittlement. If the Stirling engine has a working fluid other than hydrogen, it would be less efficient, while if it’s using materials that are resistant to hydrogen embrittlement, then that might make it less rugged and heavier. I think they used sufficiently embrittlement-resistant stainless steel and hydrogen as a working fluid in the 1986 NASA project, but one way to cheat for a short-term test of a relatively powerful, light Stirling engine would be to just use hydrogen as a working fluid and regular steel engine parts, and if they crack like a week later, that’s after your tests are done.

I don’t really know that much about the details of obstacles to alternative ideas for cars, though. I guess I’ve been a bit car-brained since I became a car owner almost a year ago. I suspect that when you first get a job as an engineer at Ford or Honda, the first thing in your inbox is a Powerpoint attachment titled “Here’s Why We’re Not Going to Consider Your Stupid Alternative Powertrain Ideas.” Maybe if someone could leak that to me that would give me some clarity.

I guess Dean Kamen tried to get some kind of Stirling-based car going, and there's some guy, Josh MacDowell, who turned a Ford F-150 into a Stirling-Electric hybrid? Given that there's no IP protection on Stirling engines, though, I think there must be more practical obstacles that I'm not considering.

Update: One consideration I omitted was volume. Although the batteries of battery electric vehicles are infamous for being heavy, they are convenient geometrically, being dense, mostly homogeneous, and capable of being fit in almost any shape so long as the final volume is the same.

[enetarch-innovation]

Breakthrough Thermoacoustic Stirling Generator Converts to Energy With No Moving Parts | NextBigFuture.com

[enetarch-physics]

Breakthrough Thermoacoustic Stirling Generator Converts to Energy With No Moving Parts | NextBigFuture.com

[heatcharger]

New Chinese thermoacoustic Stirling engine breaks power record - Interesting Engineering

http://dlvr.it/SyppwJ

[nawapon17]

Breakthrough Thermoacoustic Stirling Generator Converts to Energy With No Moving Parts | NextBigFuture.com

[stephen-barry]

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/11/breakthrough-thermoacoustic-stirling-generator-converts-to-energy-with-no-moving-parts.html

[xingtia]

Several types of roofing sheets and what is the roofing sheet price?

Although roofing sheets usually require the addition of adequate insulation, they have great benefits when it comes to resisting climate change. They are usually very durable and because they are the right size and weight, they can be easily installed. Roofing sheets can be made in a variety of shapes and add inertia, so you can even find roofing sheets that are self-supporting.

Galvanized roofing sheet prices: Galvanization prevents corrosion and oxidation of the steel, while the sheets are largely maintenance-free and durable. Like other roofing sheets, they have poor acoustic and thermal insulation properties. When it rains, they produce excessive noise. Nevertheless, galvanized roofing sheets are still a good choice because they are lightweight and low in price. Galvanized steel roof panels would be advantageous over any other type of material. For example, they are far less expensive to produce than materials such as clay or stone, and they last just as long. You can expect steel roofs to last 50 years or more, especially those that are galvanized. They won't rust or be affected by external elements like standard shingles. Finally, it is a very easy material to install, as long as it is put in place by a professional. What you will be looking for is a company that produces the best-corrugated steel roofing materials.

Stainless Steel : Although they are not economical, they have a good cost/benefit ratio as they are low maintenance and last a long time. Stainless steel roofing sheets resist corrosion, impact, and weather extremes. Like other roofing sheets, their surfaces can be scratched or dented and are difficult to repair.

Copper Clad: They can be adapted to different forms, but are not economical in terms of material and installation costs. However, copper foil is outstanding for temperature changes, durability, and final decorative effect.

Thermoacoustic metal sheets price: Although they cost more than other metal sheets, they have a great advantage in controlling temperature and noise because they are covered with thermal and acoustic insulation. At the same time, they are durable and do not require greater maintenance.

[eannpatterson]

If you don't succeed, try and try again...

If you don't succeed, try and try again...an update on an unexpectedly difficult project

You would not think it was difficult to build a thin flat metallic plate using a digital description of the plate and a Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) machine which can build complex components, such as hip prostheses.  But it is.  As we have discovered since we started our research project on the thermoacoustic response of additively manufactured parts (see ‘Slow start to an exciting new…

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Putting gas under pressure

Understanding gas flames' response to acoustic perturbations at high pressure should make next-generation turbines safer and more efficient.

Soldiers marching lockstep across a bridge can cause the structure to collapse if the rhythm of their step matches the bridge's natural vibration frequency. Combustion engineers must consider a similar effect when designing the gas turbines used in electricity generation and aero-engines.

Just as soldiers' feet can cause bridge sway to reach the point of destruction, a gas turbine can be damaged, or even explode, if heat and pressure fluctuations produced by the flame couple with the acoustics of the combustion chamber. At a lesser degree, this'thermoacoustic instability hampers efficient combustion, increasing noise and pollution emissions.

Predicting and preventing thermoacoustic instabilities remains challenging for the design of a gas turbine. To improve the models used, Deanna Lacoste from KAUST's Clean Combustion Research Center and her colleagues have measured the stability of gas flames at elevated pressure.

Read more.

[seranavolkihars]

by jove! that milf can make my hole so thermoacoustic

[eretzyisrael]

Whether it’s making drinking water from thin air or sending a private spacecraft to the moon, Israelis have never let bad odds beat them, so it was no surprise when Israel edged into the Top 10 of this year’s Global Innovation Index for the first time. Here, David Legmann takes a look at some of the more out-there ideas emanating from the Jewish state that may just change the world.

1. Using the sun’s heat to create water from thin air

About four-fifths of what we breathe is nitrogen, but the other fifth is oxygen, which makes up a third of water, so it was only a matter of time before Israelis started using the sun to extract drinking water from the atmosphere in any given climate.

The break-through came via researchers at the Technion Institute of Technology, and could be of immense value in regions that lack easily-accessible water resources, such as arid sub-Saharan countries.

How does it work? ‘Phase Exchange Thermoacoustics’ converts the sun’s energy into acoustic waves which then cool down atmospheric water vapour, causing it to rapidly condense into drinking water. It’s so easy, why didn’t we think of that.

2. MRI scanner capable of detecting Alzheimer’s

Many of us have had an MRI scan. Essentially a large tube containing powerful magnets, MRIs typically scan parts of the body such as the brain, bones, spinal column, vital organs and blood vessels.

Now some clever Israelis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have come along and suggested that it might be used for identifying diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. It’s all based on mathematical models, which work by identifying abnormal molecular compositions of brain cells. These in turn indicate a disease, distinguishable from normal ageing patterns.

Using MRI scanners to analyse the brain’s molecular composition is unprecedented, and marks a significant development in medicinal science if implemented more widely. It could even revolutionise the way age-related diseases are diagnosed.

3. Miniature blood-pump to cure heart failure

We all know the heart pumps blood around the body, and that if it ever stops, we’re in trouble. But did you know that there is a start-up company based in Kadima that is developing a mini blood pump inside the heart that takes over if needed?

If it makes its way through all the clinical trials and into production, this amazing bit of kit from Magenta Medical known as the Left Ventricular Assist Device could save lives, allowing heart muscles to rest while still pumping blood. The idea is that the pump is then removed once the heart is repaired.

As the rate of heart disease in developed countries continues to skyrocket, the progress of this little device is definitely something to watch.

4. Algorithm to predict emergence of tuberculosis

Tuberculosis has now passed AIDS as the world’s leading infectious cause of death, killing an estimated 4,500 people every day, so it was nothing if not timely when researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science recently developed an advanced algorithm to predict the onset of bacterial diseases.

These tenacious Israelis now think they can predict the emergence of bacterial diseases like TB and salmonellosis before symptoms appear, by monitoring the reactions of immune blood cells to bacteria, shortly after a suspected infection.

The algorithms were developed by analysing how different types of immune cells respond to bacterial infection, and to what extent they were affected. It is the first time in history that bacterial impacts were observed for each type of immune cell.

5. World’s first all-electric commuter airplane

The world’s going electric – with cars, anyway. Why only cars? That’s the kind of question an Israeli would ask.

In yet another first, Israel’s Eviation Aircraft has created an all-electric commuter plane – aka the ‘Eviation Alice’ – which it exhibited for the first time at the Paris Air Show in June. If all goes well, the firm hopes to start manufacturing the nine-seater e-plane commercially by 2021.

The 12m x 16m craft has one propeller on each wing, plus another at the back, behind the rear fuselage. It has a cruising speed of 300 mph, with a maximum speed of 391 mph, and costs about £3 million. For a step into the future, that’s a bargain.

+ 5 more! Continue to the site for the rest!

[wolfliving]

The Boris Johnson Government is hiring

*This is ranking about a 9.1 on the fubarometer.

https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/

JANUARY 2, 2020

BY

DOMINIC CUMMINGS

‘Two hands are a lot’ — we’re hiring data scientists, project managers, policy experts, assorted weirdos…

‘This is possibly the single largest design flaw contributing to the bad Nash equilibrium in which … many governments are stuck. Every individual high-functioning competent person knows they can’t make much difference by being one more face in that crowd.’ Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI expert, LessWrong etc.

‘[M]uch of our intellectual elite who think they have “the solutions” have actually cut themselves off from understanding the basis for much of the most important human progress.’ Michael Nielsen, physicist and one of the handful of most interesting people I’ve ever talked to.

‘People, ideas, machines — in that order.’ Colonel Boyd.

‘There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire [Hathaway] is run. It’s all about … exploiting unrecognized simplicities.’ Charlie Munger,Warren Buffett’s partner.

‘Two hands, it isn’t much considering how the world is infinite. Yet, all the same, two hands, they are a lot.’ Alexander Grothendieck, one of the great mathematicians.

*

There are many brilliant people in the civil service and politics. Over the past five months the No10 political team has been lucky to work with some fantastic officials. But there are also some profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions. This was seen by pundit-world as a very eccentric view in 2014. It is no longer seen as eccentric. Dealing with these deep problems is supported by many great officials, particularly younger ones, though of course there will naturally be many fears — some reasonable, most unreasonable.

Now there is a confluence of: a) Brexit requires many large changes in policy and in the structure of decision-making, b) some people in government are prepared to take risks to change things a lot, and c) a new government with a significant majority and little need to worry about short-term unpopularity while trying to make rapid progress with long-term problems.

There is a huge amount of low hanging fruit — trillion dollar bills lying on the street — in the intersection of:

the selection, education and training of people for high performance

the frontiers of the science of prediction

data science, AI and cognitive technologies (e.g Seeing Rooms, ‘authoring tools designed for arguing from evidence’, Tetlock/IARPA prediction tournaments that could easily be extended to consider ‘clusters’ of issues around themes like Brexit to improve policy and project management)

communication (e.g Cialdini)

decision-making institutions at the apex of government.

We want to hire an unusual set of people with different skills and backgrounds to work in Downing Street with the best officials, some as spads and perhaps some as officials. If you are already an official and you read this blog and think you fit one of these categories, get in touch.

The categories are roughly:

Data scientists and software developers

Economists

Policy experts

Project managers

Communication experts

Junior researchers one of whom will also be my personal assistant

Weirdos and misfits with odd skills

We want to improve performance and make me much less important — and within a year largely redundant. At the moment I have to make decisions well outside what Charlie Munger calls my ‘circle of competence’ and we do not have the sort of expertise supporting the PM and ministers that is needed. This must change fast so we can properly serve the public.

A. Unusual mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, data scientists

You must have exceptional academic qualifications from one of the world’s best universities or have done something that demonstrates equivalent (or greater) talents and skills. You do not need a PhD — as Alan Kay said, we are also interested in graduate students as ‘world-class researchers who don’t have PhDs yet’.

You should have the following:

PhD or MSc in maths or physics.

Outstanding mathematical skills are essential.

Experience of using analytical languages: e.g. Python, SQL, R.

Familiarity with data tools and technologies such as Postgres, Scikit Learn, NEO4J.

A few examples of papers that you will be considering:

This Nature paper, Early warning signals for critical transitions in a thermoacoustic system, looking at early warning systems in physics that could be applied to other areas from finance to epidemics.

Statistical & ML forecasting methods: Concerns and ways forward, Spyros Makridakis, 2018. This compares statistical and ML methods in a forecasting tournament (won by a hybrid stats/ML approach).

Complex Contagions : A Decade in Review, 2017. This looks at a large number of studies on ‘what goes viral and why?’. A lot of studies in this field are dodgy (bad maths, don’t replicate etc), an important question is which ones are worth examining.

Model-Free Prediction of Large Spatiotemporally Chaotic Systems from Data: A Reservoir Computing Approach, 2018. This applies ML to predict chaotic systems.

Scale-free networks are rare, Nature 2019. This looks at the question of how widespread scale-free networks really are and how useful this approach is for making predictions in diverse fields.

On the frequency and severity of interstate wars, 2019. ‘How can it be possible that the frequency and severity of interstate wars are so consistent with a stationary model, despite the enormous changes and obviously non-stationary dynamics in human population, in the number of recognized states, in commerce, communication, public health, and technology, and even in the modes of war itself? The fact that the absolute number and sizes of wars are plausibly stable in the face of these changes is a profound mystery for which we have no explanation.’ Does this claim stack up?

The papers on computational rationality below.

The work of Judea Pearl, the leading scholar of causation who has transformed the field.

You should be able to explain to other mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists the ideas in such papers, discuss what could be useful for our projects, synthesise ideas for other data scientists, and apply them to practical problems. You won’t be expert on the maths used in all these papers but you should be confident that you could study it and understand it.

We will be using machine learning and associated tools so it is important you can program. You do not need software development levels of programming but it would be an advantage.

Those applying must watch Bret Victor’s talks and study Dynamic Land. If this excites you, then apply; if not, then don’t. I and others interviewing will discuss this with anybody who comes for an interview. If you want a sense of the sort of things you’d be working on, then read my previous blog on Seeing Rooms, cognitive technologies etc.

B. Unusual software developers

We are looking for great software developers who would love to work on these ideas, build tools and work with some great people. You should also look at some of Victor’s technical talks on programming languages and the history of computing.

You will be working with data scientists, designers and others.

C. Unusual economists

We are looking to hire some recent graduates in economics. You should a) have an outstanding record at a great university, b) understand conventional economic theories, c) be interested in arguments on the edge of the field — for example, work by physicists on ‘agent-based models’ or by the hedge fund Bridgewater on the failures/limitations of conventional macro theories/prediction, and d) have very strong maths and be interested in working with mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists.

The ideal candidate might, for example, have a degree in maths and economics, worked at the LHC in one summer, worked with a quant fund another summer, and written software for a YC startup in a third summer!

We’ve found one of these but want at least one more.

The sort of conversation you might have is discussing these two papers in Science (2015): Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines, Gershman et al and Economic reasoning and artificial intelligence, Parkes & Wellman.

You will see in these papers an intersection of:

von Neumann’s foundation of game theory and ‘expected utility’,

mainstream economic theories,

modern theories about auctions,

theoretical computer science (including problems like the complexity of probabilistic inference in Bayesian networks, which is in the NP–hard complexity class),

ideas on ‘computational rationality’ and meta-reasoning from AI, cognitive science and so on.

If these sort of things are interesting, then you will find this project interesting.

It’s a bonus if you can code but it isn’t necessary.

D. Great project managers.

If you think you are one of the a small group of people in the world who are truly GREAT at project management, then we want to talk to you. Victoria Woodcock ran Vote Leave — she was a truly awesome project manager and without her Cameron would certainly have won. We need people like this who have a 1 in 10,000 or higher level of skill and temperament.

The Oxford Handbook on Megaprojects points out that it is possible to quantify lessons from the failures of projects like high speed rail projects because almost all fail so there is a large enough sample to make statistical comparisons, whereas there can be no statistical analysis of successes because they are so rare.

It is extremely interesting that the lessons of Manhattan (1940s), ICBMs (1950s) and Apollo (1960s) remain absolutely cutting edge because it is so hard to apply them and almost nobody has managed to do it. The Pentagon systematically de-programmed itself from more effective approaches to less effective approaches from the mid-1960s, in the name of ‘efficiency’. Is this just another way of saying that people like General Groves and George Mueller are rarer than Fields Medallists?

Anyway — it is obvious that improving government requires vast improvements in project management. The first project will be improving the people and skills already here.

If you want an example of the sort of people we need to find in Britain, look at this on CC Myers — the legendary builders. SPEED. We urgently need people with these sort of skills and attitude. (If you think you are such a company and you could dual carriageway the A1 north of Newcastle in record time, then get in touch!)

E. Junior researchers

In many aspects of government, as in the tech world and investing, brains and temperament smash experience and seniority out of the park.

We want to hire some VERY clever young people either straight out of university or recently out with with extreme curiosity and capacity for hard work.

One of you will be a sort of personal assistant to me for a year — this will involve a mix of very interesting work and lots of uninteresting trivia that makes my life easier which you won’t enjoy. You will not have weekday date nights, you will sacrifice many weekends — frankly it will hard having a boy/girlfriend at all. It will be exhausting but interesting and if you cut it you will be involved in things at the age of ~21 that most people never see.

I don’t want confident public school bluffers. I want people who are much brighter than me who can work in an extreme environment. If you play office politics, you will be discovered and immediately binned.

F. Communications

In SW1 communication is generally treated as almost synonymous with ‘talking to the lobby’. This is partly why so much punditry is ‘narrative from noise’.

With no election for years and huge changes in the digital world, there is a chance and a need to do things very differently.

We’re particularly interested in deep experts on TV and digital. We also are interested in people who have worked in movies or on advertising campaigns. There are some very interesting possibilities in the intersection of technology and story telling — if you’ve done something weird, this may be the place for you.

I noticed in the recent campaign that the world of digital advertising has changed very fast since I was last involved in 2016. This is partly why so many journalists wrongly looked at things like Corbyn’s Facebook stats and thought Labour was doing better than us — the ecosystem evolves rapidly while political journalists are still behind the 2016 tech, hence why so many fell for Carole’s conspiracy theories. The digital people involved in the last campaign really knew what they are doing, which is incredibly rare in this world of charlatans and clients who don’t know what they should be buying. If you are interested in being right at the very edge of this field, join.

We have some extremely able people but we also must upgrade skills across the spad network.

G. Policy experts

One of the problems with the civil service is the way in which people are shuffled such that they either do not acquire expertise or they are moved out of areas they really know to do something else. One Friday, X is in charge of special needs education, the next week X is in charge of budgets.

There are, of course, general skills. Managing a large organisation involves some general skills. Whether it is Coca Cola or Apple, some things are very similar — how to deal with people, how to build great teams and so on. Experience is often over-rated. When Warren Buffett needed someone to turn around his insurance business he did not hire someone with experience in insurance: ‘When Ajit entered Berkshire’s office on a Saturday in 1986, he did not have a day’s experience in the insurance business’ (Buffett).

Shuffling some people who are expected to be general managers is a natural thing but it is clear Whitehall does this too much while also not training general management skills properly. There are not enough people with deep expertise in specific fields.

If you want to work in the policy unit or a department and you really know your subject so that you could confidently argue about it with world-class experts, get in touch.

It’s also the case that wherever you are most of the best people are inevitably somewhere else. This means that governments must be much better at tapping distributed expertise. Of the top 20 people in the world who best understand the science of climate change and could advise us what to do with COP 2020, how many now work as a civil servant/spad or will become one in the next 5 years?

G. Super-talented weirdos

People in SW1 talk a lot about ‘diversity’ but they rarely mean ‘true cognitive diversity’. They are usually babbling about ‘gender identity diversity blah blah’. What SW1 needs is not more drivel about ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ from Oxbridge humanities graduates but more genuine cognitive diversity.

We need some true wild cards, artists, people who never went to university and fought their way out of an appalling hell hole, weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB. If you want to figure out what characters around Putin might do, or how international criminal gangs might exploit holes in our border security, you don’t want more Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news.

By definition I don’t really know what I’m looking for but I want people around No10 to be on the lookout for such people.

We need to figure out how to use such people better without asking them to conform to the horrors of ‘Human Resources’ (which also obviously need a bonfire).

*

Send a max 1 page letter plus CV to ideasfornumber10@gmail.com and put in the subject line ‘job/’ and add after the / one of: data, developer, econ, comms, projects, research, policy, misfit.

I’ll have to spend time helping you so don’t apply unless you can commit to at least 2 years.

I’ll bin you within weeks if you don’t fit — don’t complain later because I made it clear now.

I will try to answer as many as possible but last time I publicly asked for job applications in 2015 I was swamped and could not, so I can’t promise an answer. If you think I’ve insanely ignored you, persist for a while.

I will use this blog to throw out ideas. It’s important when dealing with large organisations to dart around at different levels, not be stuck with formal hierarchies. It will seem chaotic and ‘not proper No10 process’ to some. But the point of this government is to do things differently and better and this always looks messy. We do not care about trying to ‘control the narrative’ and all that New Labour junk and this government will not be run by ‘comms grid’.

As Paul Graham and Peter Thiel say, most ideas that seem bad are bad but great ideas also seem at first like bad ideas — otherwise someone would have already done them. Incentives and culture push people in normal government systems away from encouraging ‘ideas that seem bad’. Part of the point of a small, odd No10 team is to find and exploit, without worrying about media noise, what Andy Grove called ‘very high leverage ideas’ and these will almost inevitably seem bad to most.

I will post some random things over the next few weeks and see what bounces back — it is all upside, there’s no downside if you don’t mind a bit of noise and it’s a fast cheap way to find good ideas…