User Blogs
The more I learn how technology was developed, the more I wonder how we will develop it in the future.
Take, for example, Einstein's 1917 paper of Stimulated Emissions. (The "se" in laser.) Einstein first discovered that excited atoms release photons and that light could be formed into coherent patterns. It wasn't until 1958 that these theories built a practical laser which came about from discoveries in radar and that shorter wavelengths of visible light might be more useful than the longer wavelengths of radio waves. Could Einstein have ever foresaw barcoding, laser-eye surgery, or optical storage? At the time, he was just figuring out how photons and atoms interact. His original purpose was to find an efficient way to cool atoms down, which we can now do with lasers, but only decades of discovering other practical uses for the laser beforehand.
The modern computer owes a great deal to the invention of punch cards. The original use was in automation of weaving, the machine had to store a complex pattern of whether to weave up or down and the idea was simply to have a pattern of holes and that pattern would change what the machine did along a single pass. Beforehand, the differential engine, the first attempt to build a mechanical computer was extremely limited because it tried to store information in rotations of gears which could slip and malfunction. Punch cards was a way to store information binarily, redesigned the concept of the modern computer and was the first attempt to store a computer program into a tangible medium for use later.
I was stunned to learned that research in astrophysics allows better understanding in magnetic resonance imaging to discover the location for potential blood clots by revealing locations of relatively slow moving blood. I would never think, "Something's wrong with his heart and I can't figure out this MRI, quick, find me an astrophysicist!"
I was skeptical that the WRSC and GENI could work together. At times, it seems the only thing their philosophies have in common is they both present road maps towards the future. WRSC talks about how we're going about to set new policy and integrate new technologies, GENI is all about uniting the world in one electric grid with a policy that was designed more than thirty years ago. WRSC is all about cutting-edge technologies while GENI has an extensive paper-based archive.
Paul Romer gave a TED talk in 2009 on Charter Cities and for the first time, I can finally see some common ground between GENI and WRSC and see how a hybrid of these two different philosophies might work together mutually in harmony.
Paul Romer's 2009 Talk (Charter Cities): http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
Paul Romer's 2011 Talk (The First Charter City perhaps in Honduras): http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_the_world_s_first_charter_city.html
I can't help but think of The Three Little Pigs when I hear about these two Japanese power plants. The first nuclear power plant built a 10 meter (33 foot) wall, which was built to government standards, and it was hit by a tsunami. The second nuclear power plant built a 14.8 meter (48.5 foot) wall, based on data that on a tsunami that hit on year 869, and was also hit by the same tsunami (the same one that made the first plant a radioactive mess). The second plant also was built so that the water intake would still work when the tsunami was expected to suck back the water right before it hit. Long story short, Onagawa still stands and does not have nearly the problems that Ishinomaki had.
This was all done because of one man, Yanosuke Hirai. According to one of the workers who worked under him: "From the perspective of corporate social responsibility, we cannot say that there is no need to question a company's actions just because they are not a crime under the law."
Source: http://mdn.mainichi.jp/perspectives/pulse/news/20120319p2a00m0na020000c.html
A twenty chapter course of how the next twenty years will not be like the previous twenty years by Chris Martenson.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse/chapter-1-three-beliefs
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have combined a liquid catalyst with photovoltaic cells to achieve a super efficient (nearly 100%) electrolysis.
This becomes a very effective storage system. One obvious extension of this would be the cost-effective storage of daytime solar energy for night-time use. Excess capacity during the day could be stored as hydrogen and oxygen, then used in fuel cells at night when needed.
- "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon." -- Daniel Nocera; Science; July 31, 2008
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:MIT:Daniel_Nocera:Catalytic_Electrolysis
In the near future, it will be possible to grow meat. The practice promises to be more humane, sustainable, and efficient than conventional meats, with one analysis suggesting it would:
- use 35 to 60 percent less energy
- emit 80 to 95 percent less greenhouse gas
- use around 98 percent less land.
In a world where nearly half of all crop production is used to feed livestock, a move towards artificial meat may be inevitable.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/11/us-science-meat-f-idUSTRE7AA30020111111
It started with a simple idea, how do you stop computers from flooding a website with an automated program? The answer was text recognition known as a CAPTCHA. The annoying picture of text that humans can translate into actual characters of text. Which wasn't a bad idea, but it wasted 500,000 man-hours of human effort per day.
The next step was to invent ReCAPTCHA to use those hours into translating old books into digital format. ReCAPTCHA requires two words (one that the computer knows and the other it does not) and by comparing answers with other humans, it can report with some confidence what the second word actually is written digitally. ReCAPTCHA, it is estimated to be “the equivalent of 1500 people working full-time and transcribing 60 words per minute,” It is also fairly accurate, normal OCR is about 84% accurate, when combined with ReCAPTCHA, the accuracy is 99.1%, on-par with professional translation. 100 million words are digitalized everyday using this process, the equivalent of 2 and half million books per year, one word at a time. It is estimated that roughly 10% of Earth's population has been called to help translate a book into a digital format. In comparison, large projects like going to the moon, the panama cannel, the pyramids of Egypt, all are done on the order of 100,000 people. Because it is difficult to coordinate beyond that in the pre-internet age.
A new process is being developed called Duolingo. It's ambitious project is to get 100 million people to help translate the internet into different languages. The two problems is a lack of motivation and a lack of bilingual people that have the skill to do it. The solution was quite clever, get people who want to learn another language and while teaching them to learn another language, use their new ability to translate small pieces of the web. It starts slowly, using simple sentences and gives you the literal translation for each word. The amazing thing about this, is people can learn a new language by this method. It is more interesting (uses actual, real web content) and it is as accurate as professional translators.
To give you an idea of how powerful this is, it is estimated that 500 million dollars worth of translation (translating the remaining 80% of Wikipedia that hasn't been translated into Spanish) could be done in 5 weeks (with 100,000 users). And because it is free, the poor can learn a new language rather than spending $500 (the cost to buy language learning software) by using the effort that they would have spent learning a new language to help translate the web.
This is what the power of Amplified Intelligence has to offer us.
Sources:
http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.htm
http://www.sitepoint.com/recaptcha-awesome-use-of-wasted-time-that-works/
One of the problems with getting all our electrical energy from renewables, is that they are not a constant supply of energy. Geothermal is the rare exception, it produces heat energy constantly. And even with a steady supply, electrical demand isn't constant, spiking in the daylight, especially in the summer with air-conditioning and going to almost non-existent at the late night hours.
This isn't a problem currently, because as long as there is an electric grid, you can sell back the excess power (and thus reduce the amount of nonrenewable energy) and draw on nonrenewables when it becomes necessary. This usually works great with solar, since demand is usually the highest when the sun is shining the brightest. But what if there was no nonrenewables to fall back on?
One solution is to carefully balance all renewables so that it is always possible to fulfill demand. As much as I like this idea, it seems unlikely that all possible demands can be readily supplied by all sources of renewables. And even given that it was possible, you would still have large amounts of surplus energy just waiting to be used, in case demand suddenly increased or supply suddenly dropped. So you would still need large size energy storage to store energy for a rainy day (literally in the case of solar).
Another solution is to have electric cars and all of those batteries would be in service to store excess power and release it back to the grid when needed. That might work, but it requires to have a large number of electric cars and some sort of smart grid to figure out whether to charge the car or discharge the car to assist the grid. And who wants their gas tank lowered (even if you were credited the cost of the energy transferred) just to power someone else's air conditioning? Now maybe there would be energy stations that would have excess batteries, and instead of charging a car battery, they swapped batteries. So they would keep a bank of batteries. A large size battery would be useful for these energy stations, buying cheap electricity and using it to recharge car batteries to sell, and possible selling electricity back to the grid when demand was high (thus making a profit). [1]
What type of battery technologies are there currently being used? Zinc-Air and high-density sodium-sulfur batteries. The sodium-sulfur batteries are already being used in Japan. There, two units each produce 48 megawatt-hours of energy storage for daily load leveling applications, which reduce the amount of generation needed during hours of peak usage. They have an energy density of three times that of the common lead-acid battery and is more efficient and durable. The huge drawback with them, is they required the internal parts to be maintained at 600F, so they are limited to huge storage rather than say battery backup for a house. Zinc-Air are smaller, but more expensive, and thus better for a replacement for backup generators. [2][3]
I don't know why battery technology doesn't get the same sexiness as other renewables. It is not a energy generator, but it prevents the need for peak-supply power plants and overall more efficient used of the energy generated. So, I hope in the future, batteries are included.
[1] Shai Agassi's bold plan for electric cars - http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars.html
[2] Zinc-Air batteries by Eos - http://www.eosenergystorage.com/technology
[3] American Electric Power’s sodium-sulfur batteries - http://www.aep.com/newsroom/newsreleases/?id=790
Today marks the day that sites like Google and Wikipedia will show what the internet might look like if Draconian laws are passed to stop infringement. Such laws would require constant vigilance, patrolling for whatever the government defines as illegal and silencing it before the government takes down your site. Under the auspice of copyright infringement, it could easy grow into policies similar to North Korea or China where unpopular ideas would simple vanish under the crushing weight of the law.
If you want to learn more, I suggest Wikipedia. While it's main site is down in protest, This link is available to explain why.
I've always been fascinated by the idea of the false dichotomy. It is either A or B. For or Against. Paper or Plastic. Working with computers for most of my life, you would think that I would be the first to go "Well, sure, things are either True or False. 0 or 1." But ironically, when you start coding, you learn that most solutions exist as a linear combination, more like 20% A, 35% B, 37% C, and the rest is Pure Freaking Magic.
TED 2012 came out with a rather unique combination: "The Earth is full" by Paul Gilding and "Abundance is our future" by Peter Diamandis. Paul explains the earth is full, that we're running at 1.5 Earths and as if that wasn't bad enough, the United States wants to quadruple output in less than 40 years and China wants to get there in 20.
Peter, on the other hand, explains that while we have had serious problems in the past, they were all temporary, and in the long view, they have never slowed progress. His best example was aluminum, once an extremely rare and precious metal beyond gold or platinum, it became cheap and commonplace due to an amazing technology of electroplating. From that, he extrapolates that we have the best tools ever to turn global problems of scarcity into reasonable abundance.
While there is a debate of whether Paul or Peter is correct, they do not actually contradict each other. Paul points to lots of serious problems which are a reflection of consuming beyond our means and 50 years of ignoring warnings of what the consequences will be. He points that until everything seriously breaks down and literally the lights go out on the global economy, that is when we will move forward. Stating that the next war will not be "a war between civilizations but a war for civilization".
The only question left is how much more famine do we need before we invite ourselves to the feast?
In our modern lifestyles, we often have to make difficult choices. But the most difficult choice may be realizing that there is just a completely better way.
http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy.html