The Carbon Disclosure Project is helping industry adapt to climate change. It’s almost painfully ironic that some of their biggest customers are electrical utilities, mining, and, of course, oil and gas. 75% of the Alaska Pipeline is built on permafrost. And it’s melting. And they’re sure not gonna let the PR department keep them from shoring up the footings, just because they don’t believe it’s getting warmer.
From the Motor Breakers to the Sample Room
A fantastic photographic journey through the reverse supply chain from Shanghai Scrap. This is how we close the material resource loop. Today, anyway. No doubt it can be made more efficient in the future if we design for this portion of the product lifecycle from the beginning. Apparently 40% of China’s copper production comes from recycling, and the shredded automobiles whose residues we use to cover our landfills? Their fist sized metal bits are sorted here. Wow.
A bicycle reverie from Clever Cycles
Oregon’s plans to legislatively enable peer-to-peer car sharing have put cargo bike retailer Clever Cycles into some kind of (wonderful) bicycle trance, envisioning a world where the motorcars simply rust away. They already sit 92% idle after all.
High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit
High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit. Virtually all the damage resulting from “sexting” is done by the law, not the digital nudity. Eighth graders get naked. With each other. Theyve been doing this for a long time actually. And unlike getting pregnant at 14, having some nude pictures floating around is only serious if we choose to make it serious. It wasn’t so long ago that that was the age when people started getting married, after all. Instead of destroying their lives by registering them as sex offenders and trying to scare the other teens, why not accept it and change our norms surrounding nudity?
Thoughts on Fukushima
Whatever the outcome, I don’t think anyone should be surprised by the situation at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Like virtually all nuclear plants, they’ve been safe and quiet for decades. But they’re not the kind of thing you can walk away from. And sometimes, you need to walk away. Volcanoes erupt. The Earth trembles beneath your feet. There are floods, and famines, epidemics and wars. We do a good job of ignoring these things when they aren’t pressing concerns. It makes life simpler and more enjoyable, especially since historically, we’ve had little power to do anything about infrequent, terrifying events.
I’m not categorically against nuclear power. If we can do it in a responsible, scalable way, then great. Making 10,000-100,000 year commitments is not responsible. We can’t keep those promises. Extracting only a couple of percent of the fuel’s energy isn’t scalable to tens of terawatts for centuries or millennia. So any scalable, responsible nuclear power will involve breeding fissile fuel, and re-processing spent fuel to remove fission products that inhibit the chain reaction. Additionally, to be responsible in my mind, a nuclear power station should be something you can walk away from at a moment’s notice, with no fear of catastrophe. It should be something that an invading (or perhaps more likely, retreating) army cannot use as part of a scorched earth campaign without a major engineering effort that would take months of work.
But obviously, that’s not where we are today.
Cornell refuses to sign journal pricing NDAs
Many academic journals require their library subscribers to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep their pricing structures secret. This is obviously anti-competitive, and precludes any kind of free market from forming. Cornell has decided it’s had enough of this, and will refuse to sign any such agreement in the future, while making the (often exorbitant) prices it pays for journal subscriptions public.
Big Brother Loves Your Phone
A great visualization of one person’s location, as tracked for 6 months by their cell phone carrier. The person is Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany. He fought a legal battle with Deutsche Telekom to obtain their records of his movements. This kind of data is collected on essentially everyone with a cell phone, and last year in the US carrier Sprint provided it more than 8,000,000 times to US law enforcement via a convenient online API. Many of them also sell the data in aggregate for marketing purposes.
Why I Won’t Be Turning Off Any Lights for Earth Hour
A GOOD (Magazine) summary of why Earth Hour is lame. First, it’s symbolic — turning lights off for an hour has a negligible effect on your (and the globe’s) energy consumption. Second, the symbolism (which is all it’s got) totally sucks! Want to be environmentally sound? Then sit shivering in the dark. Great. Widely publicizing an action which is both unnecessary and turns people off (ha!), isn’t gonna win any hearts or minds. It just reinforces the needlessly “hair shirt” vision of “green” that most people have.
Moms market
Further developments in India’s commercial surrogacy market. As the government mulls more detailed regulations, existing rules are already being neatly side-stepped. For instance, sex-selection is not permitted in India, but it is in Panama, so the embryo screening is done on the isthmus, with those selected forwarded to the subcontinent for implantation. Egg banks in India now stock a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds from international donors. It’s a baby smorgasbord. Gattaca, here we come!
All Transportation Infrastructure is Development
A good post from Fort Worthology on the perils of continuing to build late-20th century sprawling car-centric cities, and the fallacy that transit/bike/pedestrian infrastructure is a “handout for developers” while highways are not. All public infrastructure — especially transportation infrastructure — has consequences for developers, and economic development, and you get the development you build your transportation systems for. Who wants to be the next Detroit? Who wants to continue supporting the petro-dictators? Not me, thanks.