From Streetcars To Spaceships

Some things are so huge that words really don't encompass them.

I'm having a lot of trouble these days trying to encompass a profoundly important trend within a repeatable phrase. Or even just a few pages of approachable text. Not doing so well, I've got to tell you.

Something vast is happening right now. After several hundred years of design engineering built around adding function through ever increasing complexity some of us are moving to a subtler, wiser paradigm of functionality brought closer to some functional ideal through things like further optimization of proportion, materials choice and simplification.

Our computers and cars show where we have been. Each year there are more parts per car, more lines of code per application, more expensive and scarce materials to increase speed, decrease fuel usage.

A Flip video camera gives us a taste of new ways of doing things, providing a better user experience at much lower cost through unrelenting simplification, fewer parts, fewer functions, and simple, transparent design.

Are we perhaps, as a civilization, finally ready go grow past our nouveau riche adolescence into a way of living characterized by doing fewer things well rather than ever more things more flamboyantly?

For a hundred years we have told and read stories of elder races who live lives of beauty with minimal but flawlessly designed possessions, of disciplined grace, in close relations with the living beings surrounding them. Lives that accept a certain degree of vulnerability that comes from that connectedness but also achieve a degree of awakeness and capability from that same interrelated way of being.

Maybe, after this past hundred years or so, we're finally ready to explore what it will take to head towards that way of living rather than just conceding the high ground to fictional elves and fairies and dome-headed space aliens.

I really do hope so.

Speaking of movement-powered devices…

A team in Belgium has been making real progress on one of the holy grails of portable electronics, a system that harvests the waste body heat of the user and turns that heat into power to run things like a call phone. And, bonus for constantly overheated guys like me, the surface area covered by the device, be it armband, headband, or whatever, stays cool no matter how hot the weather gets.

The physical principles of this have been known for decades. What makes the work of this team special is that, from what I can see, they're putting in the time to figure out things like "how do we build such a system so that it can be put in the laundry?" and "how do we optimize manufacture for price and durability?" as well as aggregating the knowledge out there from the work of others. In short, this isn't a bunch of theoreticians. It's a bunch of folks working to get practical, real world products to market. Soon.

Picture walking around mid-summer in miserably hot, exhausting weather, with a nice wide band of cool material along your inner arm, back, or neck. Makes the prospect of all kinds of things look a lot more realistic and fun to me. Back when I still hit the massive tech trade shows at infamously poorly air-conditioned venues like The Boston Menace That Must Not Be Named, there were always guys wearing those dorky-looking Sharper Image neck chiller dealies and I've got to admit, they reliably punked all the rest of of us at a whole bunch of things at the shows because they simply didn't get tired as fast.

Reading the actual paper I see that "the produced power depends on the thickness of a [thermal energy generator] and its size: the thicker the TEG, the better its power generation, while the larger the TEG, the less power per unit area is produced." Interesting. This gives us a good sense of the dynamics of it. Also "if … PV cells cover the TEG, the joint power generation improves with no increase in the system weight and size."

Given the megadorky headband they're demoing, clearly the technology has a ways to go but I'll betcha we'll see early implementations at Burning Man in a couple years, hopefully sooner.

Keep in mind, such systems can be used for a hell of a lot more than recovering heat generated by the human body. Picture some of these on a laptop turning that waste heat back into usable power. Kinda like regenerative braking or cogeneration. Or, on a much more massive scale, picture these things recovering waste heat from a car engine. Now we're talking serious amounts of power.

In addition, this kind of thing may well be useful for the implementation of other non-photovoltaic "solar power" systems. Picture some of these hooked up to fresnel lens on the roof of a car to power the fan. If the price goes down far enough, maybe even to power a modest chiller for the vehicle or for a remotely-placed small structure.

Also keep in mind that if such systems become widespread, they will cut down considerably on demand for batteries. Not only is this good for the environment simply because that's so much less in the way of toxic manufacturing, it also cuts demand for batteries, which makes things like fully electric cars more realistic by cutting the purchase and ownership prices.

To say the least, I wish them the very best.

-R

Put half a pound of equipment in orbit for $8,000.

Seriously. The PongSat and the CubeSat have been succeeded (joined?) by the TubeSat. You can find the Slashdot thred here. What better proof do we need that the cost to orbit of all kinds of goods is going to way down? At the very least, the kind of expertise that comes from this many iterations will be wonderful and will help more people make a living and build credentials in helping get humans really living out past the earth's surface. Which, among other things, makes more obviously viable a nobody-owns-it successor to the internet, with groups of techies just shooting up an open-protocol sat or three whenever they get some cash put together. Tell that to the big telcos and government bluestockings.

Ya know, there's just no way that anybody could have anticipated a thing like this.

Oh, yeah. Right. I did. Over ten years ago.

To all of you MBA-types, techies, and cocktail party sages who took considerable and condescending glee in "explaining" to me that I "just didn't understand how the real world works", allow me to take this chance to say, once again, fuck you.

-Rustin

Antitrust enforcement may finally return from the dead.

There is an article in the New York Times that says that the new antitrust enforcement director at the Justice Department wants to do something new, enforce laws against trusts. This would be amazing if she can pull it off and, frankly, just by trying she is making public the resistance to real reform of far too many people in and around the Obama administration.

I'm not going to reiterate the article. It's quite a good piece. But I do wish that it had handled one crucial point differently. Over and over again it brings up the most common argument that people like General Motors and ConAgra and Microsoft use to justify their positions, that these corporations are "more efficient" at providing good products for good prices than smaller operations.

Oh, you mean like the Hummer? Like Windows Vista? Like an economy where everything but dish towels is made with high fructose corn syrup?

Yeah, sure. Looks really efficient to me.

It would have been nice if just once the article had thought to mention that this "efficiency" argument may be wrong.

Don't believe the hype.

-Rustin

We could sure use some cheaper polyimides.

I just got the latest email from NASA Tech Briefs, which included an invitation to a web seminar about Vespel. Now, I haven't worked with Vespel, per se, but I have very fond memories of some other polyimides. Back in my prototyping days I played around with any number of very tough materials since my fiber bending device required that I be able to soften high-temperature fiber optics, which required a heating system and surrounding framework that would have melted most conventional components.

Anyway, the point is, plastics really do enable lots of wonderful things. Things that we would be much impoverished by having to do without. But we need to have ones that forgo some of the typical weaknesses. Creation from petrochemicals. VOC outgassing. Vulnerability to heat. Well, since the days that NASA built silvered kapton polyimide sheets as insulators for the space shuttle it's been obvious to me that we should pay more attention to this class of materials. Can you imagine what it would do to the viability of fabric structures like yurts to be able to incorporate a massively tough silvered bubble wrap that didn't significantly outgas and could tolerate temperatures up to 300 Celcius?

So the next time somebody asks you why we should be working to get more American kids to study math and science, this is a mighty fine example of a technology that could still use a hell of a lot more work. One where improvement could result in products right out of science fiction that would enrich our lives. One that is not about software or sales or any of those other clean fingernail professions that everybody seems to think are the only important ones anymore. (Aside, of course, for our fetishized enthusiasm for any job that involves the chance to beat up and/or kill people.)

Keep it in mind. Cheap polyimides. The kind of thing that will never be on the cover of Time Magazine could really make our world a better place.

What is a refrigerator, really?

I've got a few simple questions.

Why don't we use colder air from outside during winter and fall to keep our food cold? A computer controlled vent that routes cold air to the fridge would be cheap to make with modern technology. Any Pentium II would not only have enough computing power, the fan would be strong enough to power the airflow. Even in some of the hottest parts of the country, like Texas and Arizona, it gets pretty doggone chilly at night and a system that "harvested" that nightly cool air would cut energy usage no little bit, especially if it were designed with an evaporative cooler built-in.

Why do we put one of the hottest things in any house (the fridge compressor) right under the thing we're trying to keep coldest? A dozen or so feet of insulated tubing would do just fine at letting the compressor chill the fridge while that hot compressor motor is kept in a nearby enclosure. In most private homes or a well-designed apartment the compressor could even vent right to the outdoors and not heat up the inside of the house at all. This would definitely cut summer air conditioning costs. The rest of the year that heat can go right into the house air vents, where that heat is a feature, not a bug.

Why isn't a big mass built into the inside bottom of every fridge? Whenever there's a crisis we're told to do things like keep sealed gallons of water in the fridge so that their mass will keep the temperature more stable and cut energy use. So why don't we just build in a foot thick slab of cement into the inside base of every fridge in the first place?

Why are fridges built and sold as appliances? Technology has moved a long way in recent years and there's no reason that the fridge couldn't be built as just one more set of matching cabinets, but with a wipe-down finish and insulation built into the sides and door.

Seems to me that the food chilling area should just be included along with the cabinets and plumbing when a kitchen is built. Maybe line the inside with wainscotting (good insulating properties) with a few coats of soy-based sealer. Cover the top of that cement slab with an inch or two of marble or slate. Make the door a good, serious five inches thick to further insulate it. Maybe even build in a removable (and hence washable) version of those curtains of overlapping strips of clear vinyl for those of us who hold the door open and try to figure out what we're in the mood to eat.

And when you think about it, since the kind of system I'm talking about would use about a third of the energy of a conventional system in most of the country, our building codes should encourage this kind of approach. What would it do to energy bills in, say, Colorado, to switch to something like this? Let alone colder states like Vermont and Minnesota.

The "modern" refrigerator is an agglomeration of dozens of outdated and/or ill-considered decisions and it's long since time that it went the way of the shoe store x-ray machine. We can, and should, do far better.

What does Ike mean for implementation of off-grid tech?

I'm still reluctant to try to estimate damage. Last night I was predicting as many as 400 dead within a week and 200,000 people whose lives will be substantively damaged by something like their house being badly flooded or losing their job. I'm sticking with those numbers, though none of the reports I've seen have mentioned any fatalities at all. Note, btw, within a week. One of the things that 9/11 taught me is that many of the deaths and other casualties happen days or even weeks after a disaster looks to have passed. Not just from inability to reach medical attention but from folks like a client of mine who have strokes or were otherwise already vulnerable and don't make it through the resultant chaos of moving, bad access to medication, or simply infections, connective tissue damage, and other treatable problems that are left untreated for too long.

But I have a completely different question. What will sales of home renewable power technologies like solar panels do over the next couple of months in areas hit by the storm? I'm curious as to what correlation there will be between storm damage in an area and shifting of load to renewable power and other off the grid technologies relative to demographically similar places that haven't been through crises. We know that sales of things like generators and water purifiers went way up in California after several of their endless disasters. But how long does that increase last and how much of that equipment gets integrated into daily use versus how much gets put in a box for use only when the next disaster strikes?

And what does this do to reevaluation of off-grid technologies that people already own? How many households are now getting all of their light from solar-powered garden lights? How many people will be bringing those lights indoors at night for the next little while for use in the house? How many of those people will then take these technologies more seriously or, if this attempt is too onerous or ineffectual, now dismiss them? What will this do to theft rates for such systems (which I've found are already quite high).

I have no numbers on this. I don't even feel like I'm ready to give an educated guess. But I do know this much: if makers of off-the grid-technologies aren't doing massive marketing blasts in Ike country over the next couple of months they're out of their minds. And if governments are serious about reducing peak load, they should be out there handing out solar ovens and battery-charger solar cells and shake-and-use flashlights like nobody's business right about now. There'll never be a better time to get people to try alternatives.

Postscript: A few weeks after I wrote the piece above I found this article about hurricane fatalities and casualties by a woman who grew up on the Gulf Coast of Texas. It doesn't give numbers but I think that it's a good window into some of the less covered aspects of these kinds of disasters. And she also does a good job of articulating the thrill-hunting nature of so much media coverage and how that results in their leaving too soon to see much of the story. I think that Katrina has changed that for a good long time but we certainly still have quite a ways to go.

General Motors is "stitching the fabric of our country"? Oh, really?

 "The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C.S Lewis

So I see that General Motors is running an ad campaign crowing about how wonderful they've been for America this past hundred years. Oh, indeed, nobody could doubt that they have affected the fabric of America, but I wouldn't call it "stitching".

How about we go with "infesting"? Sounds about right to me.

A lot of you know about the documentary, Taken For a Ride. Maybe about Who Killed the Electric Car. Maybe some of you are familiar with the Snell Report, which documented how car companies, most notably General Motors, worked for over thirty years to undermine mass transit in America and anywhere else they could reach. Those of you who've been reading this blog know that before and during World War II General Motors conspired to price-fix the market for bus service along the west coast, profiteering at the expense of the country and our citizens during wartime. In my research I also discovered that the Supreme Court found General Motors guilty of having bankrupted the only other remaining makers of freight locomotives, crippling our ability to keep rail going in America and wiping out a major American export industry, replacing it with a half-hearted occasional attempt to pull in a few foreign orders when they weren't too busy exploiting Americans to remember to focus on exploiting people abroad.

Or we could talk about their persistent efforts to fog the issue of fuel efficiency, which has left us in the state we are now, beggars hoping that Muslim extremists like the Saudi government and totalitarian regimes who hold our debt like the Chinese will be merciful instead of f*cking us over as they perceive, with no small justification, we did them for the past five generations.

Let me be plain. General Motors is a criminal enterprise. Their activities have been dependent on fraud, sabotage, and collaboration with other criminals from the day that they were created, a combine from day one, founded not by inventors or drivers but by financiers who chose the very name GENERAL Motors because it successfully portrayed their intent, to combine, to monopolize, to control and exploit, with contempt for the particulars of the product and contempt, sadly justified by their success, for the legal system that has over and over and over allowed them to steal and lie and bully.

And get away with it.

We all know that Michael Moore goes for the easy targets. For the easy win against the most egregious offenders. And we all know that's he's a pretty smart guy, a notable success in his own brand of self-promotion.

Well, then, that makes it perfectly appropriate that he chose G.M. for his first movie and that it did so well. Because they don't even need to hide their fundamental pustulent, parasitic actions and the well-trained leeches who implement it. After all, it's worked for a hundred goddamn years. Why should they change?

Well, let me remind you all of a basic fact. They are losing money. Have been for years. Their pension obligations, much though they work to evade them, are bleeding them dry. Their bull-headed refusal to face the changing world leave them yet again playing catchup as Americans stop buying the shoddy goods they try to foist off on us.

So keep in mind, WE CAN KILL THIS BEAST. AND WE MUST.

I and my research partners have been studying American infrastructure for going on ten years now. We have dug through fifties trade journals and eighteen-hundreds advertising, and court cases that are pending right now. And I tell that we are only now waking from a hundred year delirium of irrational consumerism and self-destruction inflicted upon us by a few hundred corporations and their government coconspirators. And our only chance of making through the crises we are seeing descend upon us now is to tear ourselves free of our delusions, look with appropriate attention upon the practices that can get us through, and leave the rotting shells of our former mesmerizers behind us on the road, starved of our money and effort, unable to survive by honest labor, and hence utterly removed from our lives.

Do not buy General Motors products. Do not support General Motors products. Do not work for General Motors companies. And spread the word about what they really are.

Or, quite literally in coming years, disasters that make Katrina seem like a mild breeze, disasters on a truly Biblical scale, will overtake our world. The seas will roll over us, our cities will be enfolded in flood, fire, and disease, and we will go to our deaths watching their repugnant faces through the weatherproof glass of their shelters as they leave us to die and try to figure out who among themselves to sacrifice next.

So what about open standards rail transit?

I've been rethinking my conclusions about streetcars recently. Increasingly I'm thinking about America's self-identification as, well, an ownership society. We like to own what we use and mass transit is pretty completely no longer thought of that way. Which is interesting because back in the twenties or thirties and before, this wasn't true.

My friend Sara and I had a talk about this a while back. I called her up and started with the statement "Watergate was part of what killed the streetcars". We agreed that people used to talk about "our" streetcars but now talk about "the" mass transit system. It is now a thing apart from people, a service grudgingly and poorly provided by an untrustworthy and unresponsive government.

Now, we can talk about how and why this has changed, but I'm finding myself thinking instead about more radical and, I think, actually more practical approaches to transit that might, among other things, address this. And, to get more specific, I find myself thinking more and more recently about the possibility of very small-scale multiprovider mass transit systems.

Would it be possible to have rights of way be public but some or all of the rolling stock and even trackage be owned and managed by local neighborhood groups or private companies? Should we look again at what rail transit is?

Yet again open source leads the way. Within the software and telecommunications world we are finally seeing that organizations and individuals can and will work together in a complex way if the protocols are built right, if open standards are agree upon, stuck to, and enforced. That is how the internet works - millions of organizations sharing tasks according to a shared set of rules, routing arrangements, and traffic management references.

After all, that is what HTTP means, Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. It means that the document at a particular "http" address is formatted in an agreed upon way that is compatible with this communications system called "the internet". This will then be accessed, as are most networked devices in the world, according to a system called TCP/IP, which is a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. In essence, a set of rules for routing things.

Just to put this all in perspective, to close the loop, some of the first work done to invent the modern systems computers and networks are built with was done by the model railroad club at M.I.T. They were looking for more sophisticated ways to route multiple trains around a complex network of interconnected tracks. Communications routing grew out of rail logistics; maybe it's time that the innovations of communications routing were better applied back to rail.

I think that it would even be possible to have a diverse "ecosystem" of rail vehicles and trackage that could intermingle just fine, certainly with fewer accidents than roads, without any need for a central government authority to own and run it all. Governments could be participants in this ecosystem, perhaps functioning as providers of last resort, ensuring that a minimum of service is provided to a broader range of users. But not sole providers.

I do worry that this would lead to private entities cherry picking all the best lines and leaving the government with all the most thankless jobs, not to mention creating a multi-tier system where riders in wealthy areas would get better service, more often. But I think that recent examples like the east coast "Chinatown buses" refute that fear to no small extent. From what I've seen, underserved, poor areas have a solid habit in recent decades of giving rise to gloriously, even rabidly, energetic capitalists who compete fiercely with each other to provide better, more diverse services for less money.

Okay, now we come to our ability to judge what is doable, what "makes sense". And I'm betting that most of you who have some continuing interest in these issues are reading this and thinking that your knowledge of past transit systems speaks against this idea, one way or another.

Well, there has been a lot of talk for a long time about "what we know"  about rail based on past systems but if you study it, as I have, you discover that using American case studies is damn near a complete waste of time. Most passenger rail companies in America were built and run as some degree of instrumentalities of stock frauds or semi-frauds (see RCN for a recent comparison), excuses to negotiate other things, political footballs with huge monopolies, subsidies, and penalties, and various other kinds of enterprise whose commitment to actually paying the bills by fares from moving people and goods from one place to another was spotty at best.

I've tried. I earnestly set out and read piles of books and articles about various rail ventures, streetcar and otherwise, and they're a morass of externalities, agendas still being pursued, and intentionally destroyed records.

So, in other words, I'm now down to concluding that it's better to start clean.

That being the case, I've reached some conclusions, one following from another.

- In certain markets there is a staggeringly huge potential demand for small, light duty vehicles that we can viably call trolleys.

- Such trolleys, from an engineering perspective, could be built for about a hundred thousand dollars apiece. Far less if surplus parts and creative approaches are used. It's worth noting that there is a huge reserve of old schoolbuses out there and that a used school bus sells for about a thousand bucks.

- Many of the old streetcar lines that did run semi-rationally were actually set up and initially run by private entities who simply wanted a more effective way to get workers to their plants. I think that those entities, given the opportunity, would reenter the market.

- With modern materials and approaches, a light duty streetcar would weight far less than we're used to, requiring far less energy to move and stressing the track below it far less.

- Given such cars as the rolling stock, rights of way that wouldn't actually be quite what we're used to calling "rails" would work just fine and could be built for much less than we're used to assuming.

- Maintenance could be done far more cheaply for such systems than people assume.

There are, to put it mildly, regulatory and design obstacles to such an approach, not to mention plenty of big contactors and other established interests who would come out swinging, trying to discredit the idea utterly.

Even so, I think that municipalities should consider creating open standards for light-duty rail (not the same as "lightrail" by any means) vehicles and track and then encourage BIDs, organizations with large bodies of workers, real estate developments, neighborhood groups, people seeking customers, and so on, to put in track, stations, and rolling stock where and how they will.

Personally, being me, I would prefer to see this tried out several times in small towns, where mistakes could be made without fubaring too much. But I'm old enough by now to realize that most people violently disagree with me on this and that if this is to happen at all, it will probably be done as a multi-billion dollar, rabidly disputed project in some city that will have to endure all sorts of chaos and create all sorts of misleading impressions as they try to get this thing running.

*sigh*

I also like, I must admit, that it is a classic opportunity to build a very free-market friendly system of the sort that Chicago School types love to talk about that requires just the sort of strong central administration that gives them hives :->

I discussed this all with Sara again tonight and she suggested London, Ontario as an ideal hypothetical place to implement such a system and I think that she's right. London is large enough to have diverse needs and geography, has an unusually interwoven and uniform cultural base. (The several times I've been there, I've heard from everybody from Lebanese fry cooks to elegant WASPy ladies-of-a-certain age how everybody in London seems to know everybody else.) It is prosperous but does not have rail. It has several thriving commercial areas, including one long street that would be ideal for light duty rail and a sizable college that is big enough, both geographically and in terms of student body, to be able to justify a small system of it own.

Anyway, at some point, after the Zine Symposium is over, I'll come back here and better address things like right of way mechanics. But for now, think about this. I know that it must seem odd, but give it a bit of time. You may, like me and Sara, come to see it as a hell of a good idea.

-Rustin

So how do we access the ISS now?

As a number of people are pointing out, with the Russians invading Georgia, which is both an E.U. candidate and a U.S. ally, the option of using Russian craft to get to the ISS is fading fast. Even if we assume that the U.S. government is willing to use Russian launch systems, it's damned near certain that they would charge rates that make Halliburton look like a non-profit. After all, Putin and his new proxy boy have made it pretty clear that they're none too fond of the U.S.A. and selfless they ain't.

So what do we do now?

Personally, I say that Congress should immediately, as in within the next month, put another billion or so into scholarships for engineering students and another billion into funding for U.S. manufacturing startups. Because not only are we going to be desperate in coming years for the kind of labor that engineering students and engineers provide, we're going to need a hell of a lot more people who can help aerospace ventures tool up. Admittedly, I was convinced of this *before* Ossetia became the new word for "place where people are shooting at each other a heck of a bunch" but I'm still convinced that I'm right.

Beyond that? Will, first of all, NASA should be reactivating the X-38 program with a quickness, including open-sourcing as many of the specs as possible. NASA is running behind and letting the rest of us understand and take our shot at improving the designs should help us to catch up.

There are plenty of other options, as this article lays out nicely.

But the other big lesson we should be taking away from this is not to make our strategic assets dependent on the cooperation of a totalitarian regime. This should be a no-brainer but evidently it wasn't. I have been as happy as anybody to see the U.S. coming up with reasons to keep the aerospace community in the former Soviet Union employed and equipped doing relatively non-military work but there really need to be limits.

Will this experience keep our government from doing this again? Probably not. We've got a long history of cozying up to dictators of all stripes to do our work for us. But that's a subject for another day.