From Streetcars To Spaceships

Almost every kind of job is going away. Really. I mean it.

A few years back I wrote about how automation, changing demand, and resource depletion were going to result in far fewer jobs relative to level of prosperity. That for a population of constant size to maintain the same degree of material prosperity will, in the not too distant future, require far fewer hours worked. That even the creation of a new multi-billion person middle class only delays this shift. It doesn't prevent it. And I wrote that this automation would encompass not only "brute force" jobs but also white collar skilled work such as skilled cooking, most legal practice, and service jobs.

Well, look at this article in Slate. And the discussion on Slashdot that it has engendered. The links and refs here should give you more if you want to dive that deep.

This is real, folks. It's happening right now. 

Which, among other things, makes even further hash of the bullshit that the executive class-backed media is trying to sell us that anybody who is unemployed somehow deserves it. If for ten adults to live to the limits of a "middle class" income only involves four of them having jobs then no amount of badgering or sermonizing or even retraining will make that unemployment go away. And, as precictably as gravity, that wealth will tend to concentrate in the hands of a subset of that shrinking percentage who have jobs.

Let me go over each of those again in more detail.

- Assume a world where for ten adults to live "well", ten of them must have jobs.

- Change the means of production and other factors such that only four of them need to work to maintain that same degree of prosperity. Not only does this leave the majority of people unemployed, it also, means (under most forms of government) that a minority of the people will be making most of the choices about how that work gets done.

I'm not only talking about the big decisons here. I'm talking about the ten thousand little ones of which each of those big ones is made. If ten of ten people do the cooking then everybody knows how the ingredients get used. If one does the cooking then there will always, ALWAYS, be a power imbalance where that one person can put goodies aside, give them preferentially to their friends, sell them off for bribes, etc. Try to stop this with thousands of descriptive rules and mostly what you'll do is create black markets and end up micromanaging the person doing the work. Which almost never works out well.

- Therefore, when the percentage of people with jobs decreases, power and wealth concentrates.

- And once power and wealth become unevenly distributed, those who have wealth already will push to even further gather that wealth to themselves and others like them.

And if you think that this can be countered by having everything done by consensus or some such then I recommend that you spend some time working in your local food coop and see how that works out for you. And a food coop, mind you, is a case where participants have the option of withdrawing and so there's constant pressure on the group to not get too caught up in bureaucratic idiocies lest everybody walk out.

It is past time that we admit the truth. Now and more so every year those with wealth need to get used to either subsidizing or at least giving access to land and other resources to a population that is on its way to being bigger than that which is "gainfully employed." It's either that or starvation followed by brutal repression and almost certain violent revolution.

Note, please, my second option. When I write "giving access to land…" I'm talking about changing zoning codes to allow any number of things that we now consider squatting. I'm talking about not persecuting those who choose to live disconnected from the grid. I'm talking about making it expensive and difficult for property owners to "warehouse" those properties, either to create scarcity or simply because they can't be bothered to keep it in use. I'm also talking about not treating it as a sin to be short on money. About raising our children to understand that a person can be honorable and disciplined and smart and hard working by nature and still not have any money.

This also means a world where the obligations of citizenship are less frequently denominated in money. When a few percent of the people control just about all the money and where our government "does its business" entirely in money then it's very simple. That three or four percent will own the country. And, sooner or later, will reduce most of that other ninety-something percent to peonage. Slavery.

How do we counter that? We should start by admitting that all of us inherited most of the wealth extant now. And that morality alone should compel us to provide basic means of sustenance for everybody, refusing to do so only in cases of severe scarcity.

What does that mean? Again, let's take that part by part.

1.) We have vast reserves of wealth. If one includes the resources that we keep idle or use profligately, we have almost incomprehensible amounts of wealth.

2.) Even correcting for increasing raw materials scarcities, wealth creation is getting easier and the rate of that increase is accelerating. So our children, if we just sit still, will have even more wealth per citizen than we do.

3.) Most of our wealth was here when we got here. We inherited it, as Elizabeth Warren articulates very well in this video clip.

4.) Therefore, nobody now alive can legitimately claim to have created most of it or even found it.

5.) Therefore, we're all, to some extent, living on the backs of somebody else's labor, innovation, and sacrifice.

6.) Therefore, it is morally unsound for some to hold to themselves the resources that none of us "earned."  (Some of you may disgree with this but I'm not going to get sidetracked right now.)

7.) Therefore we have the means and a moral pressure to let loose at least enough of that wealth from private ownership to ensure subsistence for all.  

8.) Such a transfer is not a favor. It is not charity. It is giving property over to people who already have legitimate claims to it.

9.) It is crucial that our citizens, and in particular our children, be taught to see such systematic and permanent distribution of wealth as just, reasonable, and normal.

Obligatory, several year, separated periods of duty national service would also be a damn good start. Not just as people with guns. But serving in the ways that we pioneered quite well in the thirties and forties. As teachers. Park rangers. Builders. Many, many things.

And yes, this would break most of the unions.

But let's be honest please for a minute. As constituted now most of them are dying and/or zombified already.

All of this comes down to one conclusion. Our world as it is shaped now won't work for the circumstances ahead. Either we change voluntarily now, with minimal disruption, tragedy, and waste or we wait. And get to watch something like the French Revolution get enacted with over five billion likely combatants, modern propaganda techniques, and nuclear weapons.

That's the truth. Period.

 

Let's look at ecoroof implementation and why it's so much less than it should be.

As some of you know, greenroof design is nothing new. When Cortez marched into Mexico City, he and his soldiers were amazed at the beauty and food-growing capacity of the rooftop gardens they found. In Scandinavia grass-covered, super-thick sod rooftops have been around as long as the ancient sagas. But somehow, we've lost most of that and, as with so many things, now we're starting over. And while from an energy-savings standpoint alone, vegetated structures should be a home run, getting used routinely on buildings from average private homes on up, instead, greenroof is still seen as a boutique sort of thing. A luxury reserved for special case use by large institutions, the wealthy, and corporations anxious to buy some good press.

Almost all of our modern "experts" in this field start by assuming that maximum possible rewards are quite small, so they start by assuming a total budget that must be even smaller. Since they are assuming a very small budget per square foot, anything that would take "real money" is, right off the bat, declared "impossible."

They don't consider significantly strengthening the rooftop. Or having a few deep wells of soil bridged with a shallower bed of growing medium. Or trellises as part of that rooftop setup. Or sacrificing any space inside the building to gain room for either better roof access or for area for those possible structural reinforcements. Nor do they consider vegetating approaches limited to areas near existing load-bearing members. Or relocating any building tenants, either permanently or just while construction is under way.

So they then pre-emptively dismiss most buildings as "unsuitable" without ever having even considered most of the possible options. They are mixing up their prejudged idea of reasonable with the vastly larger range of what is possible. And then telling others that greenroof is "impossible" for most buildings.

At Portland's recent ecoroof show I think I was finally able to put a last few crucial pieces into place in my understanding of why.

When I first starting looking into greenroofs and doing my first small experiments, long about 1991, the people I talked to about it, most notably Paul and the other folks at the Gaia Institute, justified it first and foremost as a means of superinsulating the roof. Once one of these puppies goes in the top floor tenant's in the cool shade forever. And finds it much easier to keep warm when the outside gets cold. It was also something thought of as being done on older buildings such as five to seven story rowhouses in poor neighborhoods. Some of them about a hundred years old. And it was being done largely with variations on the mix the Gaia Institute was then pioneering, made almost entirely of post-consumer materials like styrofoam and food waste.

Let's go over that again. How things were then:

• Biggest known advantage: massive reduction of energy consumption.
• Typical project: old building rehabbed on a small budget by a small team.
• Typical composition: heavy membrane covered with a growing medium made mostly of processed "waste".

Those of you who knew me in the early nineties were subjected to my endless lectures on this, as well as "guided tours" of whatever my latest planter design was turning into or whatever plants had just done whatever unexpected thing. I know that a few of you also saw the displays that the Gaia Institute had up in the Cathedral of St. John or the projects visible on nearby rooftops.

And I can tell you that in the years after that I saw greenroof stay marginal and continue to be unknown to most builders I discussed it with. Or, at best, perceived as impractical or simply impossible for their sites. Part of the reason that I spent the years that I did with This Old House Magazine, Architectural Record, Engineering New-Record, and others in the "shelter" world was to keep track of this field and get access to their experts and libraries. And I found there and elsewhere that marginal position was pretty constant, in terms of projects planned, funded, and completed, as well as in perception among engineers, architects, and even landscape designers. Even among squatters, who were sometimes more than willing to build photovoltaic systems and other ambitious "green" projects, it just wasn't taken seriously.

But as time passed I noticed a trend. The publicly cited "experts" shifted from being builders and experimenters with dirt on their hands at small, out-in-the-field, practical firms to being paper-pushers and desk jockeys at massive, glossy firms like SOM who had been designated the in-house suit for coordinating elegant, high-budget implementations on purpose-built small segments of hundred million dollar corporate complexes. Greenroof became a way that wealthy firms provided a last, small touch of class to a large, institutional project. A rooftop courtyard garden for a very rich hospital. Vegetated swaths on the one rooftop of a corporate campus most visible from other campus rooftops. I started to see a lot more CAD flythroughs and considerably fewer self-managed projects.

But I also found a non-obvious limiting factor. One trend in that period had annoyed the bejabbers out of me. With all that nineties enthusiasm for breaking free of the anonymous glass box, they started building all these things with setbacks that just begged to be done as greenroof. In fact, some of them explicitly referenced Edwardian and Deco architecture such as Rockefeller Center, that had originally been designed to be overflowing with living things. So with their wealthy corporate clients and all their desire for high valuations, why the frack weren't these "New Traditionalists" planting all these rooftop courtyards and balconies, etc.?

It wasn't until I was at a presentation by some of the senior team members of New York City's Worldwide Plaza that I got an answer. At the reception afterwards I was blunt in my enthusiasm and my frustration and was all ready to go into evangelist mode. And they cut me off and started going into rich detail about how the original plans had included intentions to vegetate every last horizontal surface larger than a stick of gum. Oh, they were quite eloquent and very well-informed. So what had stopped them?

Insurance, they said. No insurance company would provide a policy for those surfaces. How did they know tenants wouldn't go out on them and fall off the building or even just snap an ankle or drop a glass off the side? How did they know the membrane wouldn't tear and pour water and soil on the tenants below? And so on. No data, no actuarial tables. No actuarial tables, no precise, controllable calculations for risk. No risk tables, no policy.

And while in the decade and half since some data has been put together and that issue has faded, at the time it, as far as I can tell, considerably dimmed the flame and discouraged another generation of designers from building vegetated structures.

And then it all changed.

Several factors were all creeping up on us. Municipal budgets were getting stripped. City populations were growing without proportional additions to infrastructure. And laws about public exposure to toxicity were being passed and/or stiffened, sometimes with real enforcement powers. Add all of this up with global climate change and a few other factors and cities began to be in a crisis about managing stormwater peak loads.

For those of you not familiar with this issue, there are a few parts. First of all, many cities were built so that when the drains off city streets and from downspouts and so on that were meant to handle runoff during storms reached capacity, they overflowed into the sewage system. Which then sometimes itself overflowed. With a mix of stormwater and sewage. Into rivers, parks, estuaries, and so on.

Ew.

And the most commonly accepted "solution" to this was building treatment plants where that stormwater could now be routed, pretreated, tested, and released "in a controlled fashion" to some adjacent waterway.

Well, let me tell you, from a typical city hall perspective, this sucks ass. Now you need to go hundreds of millions of dollars into debt, force some neighborhood to let you build this huge muckin' grey, ugly, government facility next to them, and, now that your citizens think of it as toxic waste, they're going to fight you tooth and nail about the smell (even if you prove that there is none), how you store and ship away the resulting "collected matter", and where you release the resulting cleaner (ish) water. That they won't really believe is clean. You're looking at possibly fifteen years of expensive, unpopular and required activity and the citizens will, no matter what, blame you. After all, they were doing well enough *before* you got there, right? And why can't you just put it all somewhere else?

Other than the excuse to eventually maybe grant government consulting and construction contracts to some of your favorite campaign supporters, this is pretty much one enormous barrel of aw, sh*t. And one that, unless you find a route-around, you can expect to be drinking out of for the rest of your time in office.

Now the biggest factor in increased loads was runoff per square block. Not total city size but population density. And what increased that runoff was replacing "soft" and therefore permeable surfaces (lawns, fields, street tree planters, etc.) with "hard" and therefore impermeable surfaces (asphalt, concrete, and so forth). Even if a "soft" surface was thin, it still reduced runoff somewhat and, usually good enough, what runoff did come anyway trickled through it to drain off over the course of hours or even days, instead of what happens on a surface like an asphalt-surfaced rooftop which starts adding load to the stormwater system in as little as a minute.

Because, you see, it's all about minimizing those peak loads.

So this all changed when the city of Toronto was found to be required by law to build a stormwater treatment plant.

Well, like all cities, partially they just contested the findings. And did all the usual stuff of preparing to review plant design bids and so on. But they also did something new. Some folks up there did a very smart analysis. They said, "wait a minute, each square meter of greenroof reduces peak runoff by X and costs Y to build and operate. While a plant to treat X amount of runoff costs (greater than Y) to build and operate. So instead of building this great muckin' water treatment plant, we could save money by instead subsidizing greenroof."

*light dawns*

So governments started, one by one, encouraging greenroof. Mostly with tax write-offs and incentives that were structured in ways that appealed most to large organizations. Places where their stormwater tax bill added up to serious money. Places of the sort where adding a few dozen more pages of forms and documentation to their yearly tax filings was no big deal.

So, at long last, that become the way that greenroof starting getting more penetration. And it meant that the people inside the client's companies who were put in charge were people from the departments seeking to cut their annual taxes, from the departments seeking to avoid fines for violating environmental regulations.

In other words, the projects were being run and judged on efficacy by people like compliance officers, who saw this as just one new tool to keep government problems minimized. The cognitive framework wasn't first and foremost about positives pursued because it (greenroof) inherently appealed to them but rather about compliance with regulations and minimizing of risk. "How little expense will make them go away?" not "how much of this desirable thing can we afford?"

And the people in government in charge of encouraging this were (and are still) judged by the same kind of standard. Not "is our city now a healthier/more fuel efficient/biodiverse/whatever place?" but "how much closer have you taken us to not needing to build a goddamn hundred million dollar water treatment center?

And, as with so many other things, the relevant municipal official were given very little money or new staff to accomplish this with. Even in cities like Chicago and Toronto and Portland, those being put forward as the trailblazers, in reality funding support was really a sad few civil servants with maybe a few graduate students from a local architecture school and some projects being built as part of some new government-funded facility.

So just about every project involves six rounds of proposals. And maybe a few of bids. And a lot of the time the funding falls through. Or the project is refocused. So a new committee is formed and it all starts over again. And every time the whole shebang needs to be rejustified. Largely to people who don't see the point, are short on funds and time, and are asking (reasonably enough) for good, hard numbers on why this is even being considered.

And I can tell you that most of the time the numbers of those justifications are described the same ways over and over and over. "Our stormwater tax is X2. The Incentive funding available is Z. The cost to build is Y2."

And I'll bet that by now most of you reading this have forgotten the biggest reason that greenroof had been getting pushed in the first place.

Remember what I said in the very beginning?

Heat. A properly built greenroof cuts your heat loss to pretty much zip. And in our new world of triple-glazed windows and air walls and so on, especially for a new-ish large building, the losses from the sides of a building that takes up half a city block and is twenty feet tall just aren't that big a percentage.

So, I ask you, how big is your water bill? How big is your heating and air conditioning bill?

If shrinking your water bill is your total justification, how big a budget makes sense?

If NOT HAVING a heating or cooling bill is a possible justification, how big a budget makes sense?

But somehow, as I walked the (pretty much empty) aisles of the Ecoroof show (I would guess that there were about sixty tables and fewer than three hundred attendees) I always asked for the selling points of every (growing medium/contractor's work/tray system/etc.) and nobody even mentioned comparative insulating value. Or mentioned it as a reason to build a greenroof.

The range of reasons they *did* give has broadened and improved, partially because the greenroof work now being done has also improved. In addition to stormwater, people mentioned heat island effect. They mentioned species diversity. They mentioned improving real estate values. But nobody said any variation on "this will reduce your heating and cooling bill." They had charts and graphs with information on water held per square foot, cost per area installed, cost of maintainance, species range, animals found nesting on similar systems, and so on. But on insulating value? Nothin' and nothin'.

And after a while I started asking everybody the same question. "Have you or anybody ever collected temperature performance data on installed greenroofs?"

You know. Put one sensor each above and below a bare section. Another matching pair above and below a vegetated section. Hook them up to a computer. Log the data. Do this on a few dozen buildings. Publish the results.

I talked with everybody I could reach, including the relevant Portland city officials and several of the other speakers, considered world-class experts, including quite some time talking with the Director of the International Green Roof Association, Wolfgang Ansel, who flew in from Germany for the event.

And as far as any of them knew, nobody has ever done this simple thing. There is no real statistically usable, controlled, significant scale data of the sort that would make it possible for greenroof to get remembered to be in addition to the things it's thought of as now, a vastly more capable potential cost-reducer and resource-saver.

For the lack of what most of them readily agreed was about a $10,000 study, we are ignoring one of the fastest, cheapest ways we have to massively cut world energy consumption.

Because most of the relevant people have forgotten to even think about it and those who haven't have all decided that this job is simply somebody else's problem.

And because this factor is usually thought of as an undocumented "oh, by the way" HVAC operational cost reductions don't get included when people calculate when greenroof is appropriate. Which leads to that crippling fallacy. As I wrote at the very beginning of this essay, most of our "experts" (Paul Kephart being one glorious exception) start with the presumption that a greenroof project is being done as a bit of a cost game by a grudging organization whose total maximum return on investment will be quite small. So they START by throwing away consideration of every option that would cost "real money".

No serious bracing of the roof. Certainly no bracing that would reduce in any way the amount of space available inside the building.

No large, enjoyable staircases or new elevators up to this wonderful beautiful place.

No incorporation of new ductways or service shafts, let alone an internal "dumbwaiter" to move all that heavy water and plants and so on up and down. So the builder/contractor will be, in effect running a huge landscaping job with nothing but cranes and equipment that they will have to bring with them every time they have work to do.

No consideration of the viability of getting the building repermitted to allow residences or a restaurant or some other installation that would further turn that newly green surface into a revenue generator.

And on and on and on.

By starting with ignoring the relevance of some of the biggest relevant cost justifications, our engineers/architects/project managers are throwing away any willingness to consider most of the means they have available to make greenroofs work.

Having then started by reducing their options to almost nothing, they they sit on their high perches and dismiss most projects as "impossible". And keep in mind that I still haven't even mentioned some other key factors. For example, facilities managers all over the world are finding themselves these days needing to provide new seismic retrofits. And yet none of the contractors I spoke to mentioned those considerable projects to add beams and brace walls and otherwise do comprehensive structural revamps as chances to make a building better suited to deep bed greenroof or even for greenroof at all.

Nor have we gone into how many commercial districts are converting to mixed use, complete with children and schools and, rather frequently, in areas where all the land is already long since spoken for, new pressure to create more park space. This is frequently now addressed by spending millions of dollars and going through a vast, many year circus of public hearings and funding rounds premised on buying existing buildings, forcing out the tenants, demolishing everything, and creating parks where those buildings once stood. Mightn't it make more sense to instead build greenspace right on top of the one of the shorter buildings that are there right now? Perhaps with a nice twenty foot wide ramp up to the new public space from street level?

But that's now what we do. Instead, we have a paltry few hundred buildings in even the best cities, usually partly covered with thin, near-monoculture beds of very short plants, all installed at massive cost per square foot by people who tell us that this is the only option we've got.

Does this seem like the right approach to you?

Greg Mortenson should be no model to anybody.

Greg Mortenson and his group have built some very admirable things in the mountains of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of that part of the world, material and organizational. But I am convinced that he, deep down, is a dangerous and willing tool of the authoritarian right wing and that we should all be damned careful before giving him or his group a penny of our money or a second of our support. You want to help children in that part of the world? Wonderful. Find other ways to do it.

Not only that, but any techniques his group, the Central Asia Institute, put forward as models for wider use should be strictly cost-accounted, broken down to their constituent tasks, and then reviewed with a fine-toothed comb and run past others for confirmation who have done similar work in similar parts of the world before being adopted or publicized.

I'm taking this opportunity, with the New York Times having just name-checked him yet again, to say again that I find many things about "Three Cups of Tea" and Greg Mortenson morally repellant and that I look forward with fervor to the day that people realize that it's no coincidence that Mortenson's strongest Congressional supporter featured in his books, Mary Bono, is a mainstay of the authoritarian Christian right.

I found it interesting and non-coincidental that his writing partner for his first book, David Oliver Relin, is never even mentioned in Mortenson's second book. I suspect that they are no longer even on speaking terms. I'm betting Relin's patience ran out. That the mixed feelings he alluded to in the introduction to Three Cups of Tea shifted further over to the negative as time passed and that Mortenson and his people have erected as tall a barrier as they can manage to block off any role Relin might have in speaking about what's really going on. In fact, I'd give it about one in three odds that Mr. Relin is under continuing pressure to keep his mouth shut or be faced with attack by Mortenson's allies. Allies who I would equally bet have long since threatened Mr. Relin in no uncertain terms with retaliation if he should say "the wrong things" in too loud a voice.

As I read Three Cups of Tea and then Stones Into Schools, a lot of subtle things kept sounding somehow off to me. Credit seemed oddly disproportionate to contribution and was weighted far further to authoritarian, conservative sources than their role would seem to merit. Groups I had heard about doing related work seemed oddly absent. Major help from people here in the Pacific Northwest was glossed over, while much smaller efforts by midwesterners got paragraph after paragraph if not page after page. An especially odd thing given that his coauthor was a Portlander. Gender issues in the areas he was working in were addressed, but in an odd tone. One that would fit well in a 1980's Mormon document trying to show that, no, we're not racist at all. Never were. And some of his actions in the mountains just somehow didn't sit right with me. Didn't quite match what I had heard from mountaineers and other people who had been there about what was possible, viable, advisable.

But, well, I've never really even been out of America's big cities. Certainly never really spent time overseas. Maybe I was wrong. I'm just a techie and publishing guy. What would I know?

So I asked around a bit. And I've got to admit the details escape me at the moment. Well, other than my sources being able to rattle off half a dozen agencies getting more schools built with far less fanfare. Or the mahooah I already knew he was spouting about the availability of earthquake-resistant building techniques. Or the presumption that nobody could have been expected to notice the massive fraud his later "partner" was pulling off as his first big third round funding came in. Or the details of his "lucky" chat with Congresswoman Bono and the military connections thereof.

I've spent plenty of time in my life around the charismatic leaders of do-gooder organizations, from senior officials in the Salvation Army to managers of anarchist community centers, and they all have a certain vibe to them, to some degree or other. A certain sense they give off of how much they're sanding off the serial numbers of other people's work to build their own legend or clouding up the record to cover up the shortcuts they've taken or making their agendas seem more in line with what the general public will find palatable. And I'm telling you that based on those two books and a bit of looking around I've done, Mortenson is over on the greasy-haired preacher end of the equation.

I'm telling you, eventually the honeymoon will end and left and right people will be distancing themselves from Greg Mortenson. And, crucially, making heavy pronouncements that "there was no way we could have known".

Yeah, well. I knew. And I'm just a crippled guy with no special access reading a couple of library books and making a few phone calls in a barely heated studio in a cheap part of town in a city far away indeed from the halls of power.

But even so, I'm telling you, don't believe the hype.

Good education can be found in more places all the time.

With all the negative things I have to say about mass media in general, you might think that I want all of us to hide in forest caves with no more than a quill pen and a few sheets of paper. T'ain't so. Occasionally I'll get wind of something coming out of the market-directed media that I find not only admirable, but useful. More specifically, I am convinced that we get closer every day to being able to build small, world class educational institutions simply from a building body of works. Works that can serve as superb tools for learning that depend neither on equally superb teachers to be effective nor on conventional textbooks or course-length curricula.

Seems to me that the new documentary about Allan Ginsberg's Howl is an excellent example. As this NY Times article lays out, this movie is itself (according to the author), not only literary criticism, but a solid introduction to what literary criticism is. Even, to some extent, to what it means to be a writer and to write well. Seems to me that a well-built five page teacher's guide to using this film should enable any basically competent teacher to get most kids over the age of twelve up to speed on these dynamics in six or seven hours of class time, including time to see the movie twice. In, let us remember, a way tied to enough emotionally rich stimulation to be considerably easier to retain than most pedagogy manages.

Add to this such resources as the much-discussed M.I.T. online materials initiative and sites such as Khan Academy, and we're well on our way to considerably attenuating our dependence on conventional schooling or the arduous, not entirely accepted approaches to home and community schooling available now.

Every day we get a little closer. We just need to learn to use these new resources and spread the word of what we find.

OLPC V3, Too Little, Too Late. At Best.

I'm delighted that the OLPC project has happened. I agree with those who say that most of what they accomplished is seen not in their own devices or projects but in the prod they gave and occasionally still give to other organizations, most famously Asus, who openly stated that the OLPC project inspired the EEE PC that massively shifted most people's perception of the possible and launched the netbook revolution. I'll even say that I think that Sugar has been unfairly maligned and may yet turn up as a valuable part of something six market segments away.

That having been said, the current agreement with Marvell to create a computer on a chip and build the new OLPC around it, well, it looks nice stated briefly on paper but I just don't believe that they'll get there. Maybe eventually. Not soon enough to matter to most of us. Especially with so many other projects moving ahead, even taking into account the new revelations that India's "$35 laptop" was largely a rebranded existing el-cheapo design. And most especially with Pixel Qi having gone independent.

This article in Forbes lays it out pretty well.

Me? I'll be dropping by Amazon and watching Liliputing, UMPCPortal, and Shanzai and the iPad jailbreak sites and choosing my next computer from what turns up there.

Sorry, Nicholas, you've cried wolf too often now. I'm done and so are most of the rest of us.

It's the engineering, stupid.

I was just pointed to this article by my friend Erik Smykal. If it doesn't scare the ever-living piss out of you, you're not paying attention. Unless, that is, you're Iranian or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever and you're sitting there right now feeling smug.

A nation without productive capacity is a hot-house orchid and will not endure. A nation whose citizens don't understand the workings of its machines and homes and organizations is, well, 1990 Kuwait just waiting to get used, abused, and broken by the first people capable enough and self-justifying enough to do it.

And, oh by the way, programming and engineering and factories that make real salable goods are the keys to great buckets of money and them what don't know it or do it don't get that money.

If you have children, raise them to be competent. Raise them to be able to understand how wood shrinks when it gets dry and what makes a plant grow tall. Raise them to understand Boolean algebra and why languages are built the way they are. Raise them to understand their world.

Because our nation is wealthy and indolent and rude and has pissed a hell of a lot of people off on a regular basis for a couple of centuries now. Unless you want our future to look like that of French aristocrats circa right about 1760, then do your part.

And even if you don't have kids, you're not off the hook. Ask yourself, what have you done to make the next generation competent, honorable, and strong? If you don't a solid answer right on the tip of your tongue then it's time that you started doing your share.

Speaking of wind turbines

Okay, so this one has been drifting around in my head since high school. I keep thinking that any day now I'll come across it in some alternative energy article but the decades pass and I don't. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Some lethal flaw. Maybe not.

Build a wing cross section. Just for this case let's say that it's two meters long and half a meter from leading edge to trailing edge. Just to keep it simple, the cross-section stays the same from left to right.

Place the wing parallel to the ground with a piston on each side. Put the whole thing on a turntable with a vertical wing above and below to keep the turntable facing into the wind. The wing points slightly downwards such that the wind will push the wing down, just as we've all learned from keeping one hand sticking out of the window of a moving car. The piston has a ratchet so it can go down but not up. As time passes, the wing will push the piston down to the end of its range of travel.

Now it reaches the bottom.

SNAP!

The ratchets realign and the wing does too. Now the wing points slightly up, so the wind will push it to the top of the range of travel of the piston. Up it goes until it reaches the top.

SNAP!

And back down. And up. Forever and ever. Or at least until it breaks.

I'm simplifying the mechanism to explain what it does. Obviously, the whole thing could use chains or cables instead of pistons, the ratchets can be done without in plenty of variants as long as the wing can realign, etc., etc., etc.

So, there are plenty of wind turbine designs out there already. Why should anybody care about this one?

A - Done right, it should be almost silent. Even the realignment can be muffled. In fact, the wing can be built of fabric or something equally plastic and the realignment done just by shifting cable tensions. Motion, typically, can be set to be slow, almost drifty. It's all about how you tweak the pressures needed, ratcheting, and so on.

B - It can be horizontal, not vertical. No complaints when put on a rooftop that it's ruining everybody's view.

C - it can happily sit in intermittent wind of changing speed and direction, blithely pushing up and down, up and down, a simple little pump that just keeps generating power or pumping water or what have you, no matter if it's a quiet spring day or a hurricane. Yield will change but it won't need to shut down or, if built right, get damaged by high winds.

D - It can be built of inexpensive materials. Simply. Any airplane modeler knows how to build a wing. In fact, most of it, including the pistons, pump, etc. can in many cases be built of surplus. Just to test this, I built a test section of wing with steel guide rods back around '88 and it was just as simple as I had expected it to be. Fiberglass from Canal Plastics for the skin. Cut pieces of MDF for the supports. Doped with whatever I had sitting around. I stuck to a 90 degree realignment so the ends of the guide rods were, woo-hoo, squares. No biggie.

Of course, one could spend the rest of one's life coming up with eccentric gears and cogs and sprockets for variations on the beastie but afaic, that's a feature, not a bug.

Just a simple design for a wind turbine. Simple, low profile, almost silent. Suited to cities and areas with more handcrafters than money. I would love to see it start turning up in cities. And over the shops of ambitious auto mechanics in countries most of us haven't even heard of.

Anyway, make of it what you will. There it is.

 

-Rustin

 

The best way to biofuels is gerrrrrms.

Over at the University of Texas, they're breeding bugs. Buuuugs.

Well, actually cyanobacteria, but "bugs" sounds better.

Anyway, what they're breeding for is bacteria that excrete sugars and easily processed forms of cellulose. Ones that can be readily converted to fuels.

What this means is more fuel created per acre, fuel created without using either land or fresh water that would otherwise be used for growing crops, and, let's not forget, a fuel creation means that can be done, at least on a small scale, in any frackin' wet place that can take the load and gets any sun. Not a lot of sun. Any sun. After all, Fresnel lenses and mirrors really are pretty cheap. So concentrating a whole bunch of sun on, say, squares of a Louisiana parking lot that is kept flooded with brackish water should work just fine. And, in some cases, it may even make sense to provide artificial or piped in supplementary light to areas that get lots of waste heat and will "feed" the microorganisms partially on that. Say, the area on top of a bakery.

It will take some expertise and effort and there will be lots of trial and error involved, but you get the idea.

We should note, however, that like most biofuels production means, this is fundamentally conversion of sunlight to high stored-energy organic compounds. In other words, the more sun per area, the more fuel produced. Seems to me that we're probably heading towards a time when biofuels are largely a thing produced in sunny places with long days, available "scrub" land, and plenty of water. Ideally water that's too salty or otherwise "low value" to be good for watering conventional crops. So my beloved Oregon will never be a good contender, east or west. Malaysia, otoh, may do very well, indeed, especially since they're already investing in biofuels infrastructure.

Another factor is that this looks like it will create yet another round of plantation agriculture. Look to see horrific worker abuses in the future from massive, corporate owned pond farms and tank complexes destroying human lives to cut that last tenth of a penny off their production costs.

I've written about related research before, most notably my note about gliocladium roseum. Now that microbiologists understand what to look for and breed I suspect that we'll be seeing hundreds of species of microorganism being put forward, which is wonderful.

In fact, I wonder if the best solution for most people will turn out to be some "cocktail" of several microorganisms so as to keep the tanks more resistant to changing conditions and better able to fight off unwanted "intruder" microorganisms coming in and bullying out the desired ones. After all, we're seeing folks breed bugs for maximum energy retention, which, by definition means that that they're, shall we say, kinda fat, and therefore, not up to fighting off less aggressive energy burners.

A tank of the organisms we want are kinda like a village full of couchpotatoes who just sit around and eat steak and cheesecake all day. Steak and cheesecake that we provide. People chosen precisely because they were the ones who moved around least and got the fattest. So what happens when a bunch of Mike Tyson and Bad Xena bugs decide that they want some of that steak and cheesecake?

So I'm guessing that corporations will go for their usual monoculture bullshit, complete with expensive and resource hungry "narrow range" control while homebrewers will discover a community of various bugs that may not yield as high (in theory) as the "pure" cultures of the corporate tanks but will be a lot more tolerant of the occasional intrusion of uncleaned air, water, and food.

But what's the bottom line? In about five years we can expect to see significant fuel production coming from tailored microorganisms. In about another three it should be enough to have a significant economic and international policy impact. In fifteen (if we all survive that long as a society), we should see petrochemical producers getting caught moving beyond disinformation (like the recent Exxon takeover of a biofuels study group such that it then announced that biofuels just weren't practical) to flat out sabotage.

Because by then they should be running scared.

-Rustin

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