technology Archives - Page 8 of 11

Links for the week of Jul 16th

You can also search or subscribe to my linkstream over at Delicious.

Wal-Mart To Become Green Umpire – Wal-Mart arguably has more control over and insight into its supply chain than any other company on earth. The information they need in order to be able to force their suppliers to produce the goods as cheaply as humanly possible overlaps substantially with the information required to provide transparent information about the environmental impacts of those same products. Wal-Mart says they want to use this power for good… for telling, in condensed form, the sustainability back-story for their products. But will they tell the truth? Will it be transparent? Will it be verifiable? And even if it is… will their customers care? Might it change their customer base?
Howtoons – A series of comics which both tell stories, and inspire kids to build their own toys and tools. Wonderful hacker propaganda.
Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing? – A story about a computer scientist talking to physicists who have hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and don't know what version control or unit testing is. Hmm. I guess I don't really know what unit testing is either.
Software Carpentry – A Python based tutorial for scientists and engineers who need to learn how to (actually) program. How could it have taken this long to appear?

Shared Links for Jun 26th – Jul 7th

You can also search or subscribe to my linkstream over at Delicious.

Christian high school discussion of climate change – Kurt Klein's AP Environmental Science class is reading Richard B. Alley's Two Mile Time Machine, about paleoclimate, ice cores, and abrupt climate change events. (tagged: climate ice science greenland education religion )
Prefabricated Passive Houses in the USA – Bau Technologies is attempting to bring pre-fabricated (or rather off-site constructed) passive houses to the US. Looks awesome. (tagged: architecture sustainability energy efficiency passivhaus design )
Yogurt making tips – Detailed instructions on how to make yogurt, and also a source for equipment and cultures. (tagged: food yogurt homemade cooking recipe )
Climate Wars – A Canadian radio show exploring some of the climate change scenarios which have been studied by the US Dept. of Defense in a personal, "War of the Worlds" kind of way. Be forewarned, this is apocalypse porn, and probably not productive unless you need to get yourself riled up. (tagged: politics climate sustainability future war )
Our Passive House — the first passive house in Utah. – A Utah couple chronicles the design and construction of their passive house, with blog posts and photos. Great to see these things going up on this side of the Atlantic finally! (tagged: passivhaus sustainability design architecture buildings )
Will Allen: Street Farmer – A long profile of Will Allen and his intensive urban farming project in Milwaukee: "Growing Power". Aquaponics and vermicomposting of donated food wastes. This is realistic urban farming at a moderate scale. (tagged: sustainability urban food agriculture compost )
Gini coefficient | Wikipedia – A wonderfully simple and general mathematical measure of the non-uniformity of a distribution, mostly used in economics, but applicable elsewhere just as well. (tagged: economics math wikipedia research science finance )
Here comes the data: OECD Factbook eXplorer – There are terabytes of interesting data out there that nobody can actually understand, because we don't have good interfaces for playing with it, and poking around. This is the OECD's attempt to offer a window into its own demographic treasure trove. Obviously inspired by the gapminder, from Google and Hans Rosling. (tagged: data maps statistics visualization demographics oecd economics )
The Choice of Cities – I'm not convinced we really know why the humans are coming to the cities. Whether it's a pull, or a push. How the migrants feel about their lot. Is it, globally, the same as the push we had in this country a hundred years ago? Or was it a pull? What happened when the frontier closed, when all the land was spoken for, and the factories and mines and mills were opened for business.
And what will cities look like once everyone has arrived? If we actually reach that day, when the countryside is emptied, and the flow staunched, then how will cities develop going forward? What will their margins look like? Will the slums filled with newcomers vanish? What will they be replaced with? (tagged: technologie urban design economics history technology poverty )
Bike Among the Ruins – Detroit is half abandoned. The houses are almost free. The streets are empty and the people are poor. It's also flat. Could a cyclone of bicycles wipe clean the slate, even within the sight of our beloved, bankrupted, and now employee owned husk of an industrial titan… GM? (tagged: bicycle transportation urban design economy )
Behind the Veil by Eve Arnold – A series of photographs of women, from Afghanistan and the middle east from 1969. Very different from our "Summer of Love"… (tagged: photos islam afghanistan women )
The Revolution Will Not Be Digitized – Iran is one of the first places we get to see old school blood in the streets mixed with the new age of instantaneous, ubiquitous communication. We've tended to focus on the positive aspects, while briefly forgetting the potential powers of an electronic police state, which is to some degree what Iran has built. No massive army of eavesdroppers and informants is needed in such a regime. A few deep packet inspection boxes from Siemens sitting on the fiber backbone, and a few on the microwave towers from Nokia. Technology is largely neutral. (tagged: technology politics internet privacy government twitter web2.0 iran )
55 km to Amsterdam – A day of inter-city transportation by bicycle in the Netherlands. Can it really be that idyllic? (tagged: bicycle transportation netherlands infrastructure )
1993 Y Hike Pictures – Wow, pictures of myself from 1993 on the Y Hike. I still remember just about everyone in that group. I look so… young! (tagged: caltech yhike backpacking wilderness sierras )
Traitor Joe's | Greenpeace – Trader Joe's doesn't make any effort to source sustainably caught fish. Unfortunately, with 70-80% of global commercial fisheries in collapse, it's virtually impossible to sell (or buy) most tasty fish species ethically. (tagged: sustainability fish traderjoes ocean food )
Organic Farms as Subdivision Amenities – Housing developments that incorporate small organic farms, CSAs even, instead of the usual golf-course crap. How would one adapt this for denser living I wonder? (tagged: design agriculture urban csa food architecture )
Enphase Energy System Monitoring – Another real-time and historical solar power monitoring system. This one is installed on the roof of one of the Boulder Housing Coalition Co-ops in Boulder. Pretty awesome! Smart grid indeed. (tagged: solar energy technology transparency electricity )
Caltech Building Dashboard – A near real time view of the power being generated by Caltech's 200 kW PV installation on the Holliston parking structure. Also shows historical data and weather information. Pretty cool. Would be great to just have the raw datastream available via an API too… and be able to see all the Caltech's per-building consumption too. (tagged: energy solar caltech pasadena technology transparency data internet )
How To Destroy Half the Planet for the Low, Low Price of 5% of Global GDP – Never mind the possibility of unforseen climatic consequences. Even if the pessimistic IPCC scenarios are right, and even if they "only" reduce global GDP by 5% over the next 100 years, that purely economic metric is not sufficient, because it turns out you can wipe 2.5 billion people and their nations off the face of the Earth, mainly in the tropics, and only reduce global GDP by 5%. Cold comfort, that. (tagged: climate economics gdp )
Walter Mebane's statistical analysis of Iran's election results – Walter Mebane at UW Madison has done several statistical analyses of the Iranian election results, and finds significant irregularities in the Ahmedinejad results. (tagged: election iran statistics democracy fraud system:filetype:pdf system:media:document )
Carbon Cap and Trade Debate – Ralph Cavanagh (legislative council for NRDC) and Jim Lazar, an economist, debate the merits of Cap and Trade, for an hour and a half. Looks interesting, but don't have time to watch it at the moment (tagged: video towatch climate policy economics )
Property Assessed Clean Energy Bonds – PACE bonds are a way of overcoming the capital intensivity of many energy efficiency retrofits which make sense in the mid to long-term, but not on the typical short term investors time horizon. They also allow homeowners who may move before their investment in efficiency has paid for itself to pass on the obligation to future owners, instead of losing the investment. They also shift the costs of doing energy efficiency from capital expenses to debt servicing, which is advantageous in many jurisdictions for tax purposes. Berkeley, CA and Boulder, CO pioneered them for municipalities, but they can also work in a commercial context. (tagged: energy efficiency sustainability finance green debt investing bonds )
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado – Colorado has taken its first tentative steps down the road to legalizing… rainwater harvesting. I hope they go all the way. I'd hate to have to end up breaking yet another immoral law. (tagged: environment colorado water law sustainability rain green architecture design )
Welcome to Tällberg – A "conference" analogous to the WEF in Davos, but held in Sweden, in the woods, and with sustainability as the given goal, instead of economic growth. Would be an interesting stop on the Green Cities Bike Tour. (tagged: green economics technology politics policy design conference )
Power Struggle – A commentary on Steven Chu's position that we need major basic scientific and technological breakthroughs to successfully tackle our energy problems in the context of global warming. The hope is that in the short term, the vast array of incremental changes we have available is enough to get us started, and that by mid-century, the major breakthroughs will have been forthcoming. Ah, non-linear dynamics. (tagged: technology science energy climate non-linear sustainability policy )
The Great American Bubble Machine – An article from Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi, on the endless bubble building shenanigans that Goldman Sachs has engaged in over the years, and their supposed current machinations to engineer a bubble in the as-of-yet uncreated market for greenhouse gas emissions. Markets, I like. Markets run by some Great American Gangster Kingpin, not so much. Especially not this particular market. Remember: Nature doesn't do bailouts. (tagged: economics finance goldmansachs capitalism climate bailout )
The Economics of Ideas – An article about Paul Romer by Kevin Kelly, musing on the problems and benefits of having an economy which is primarily driven by informational goods. (tagged: economics technology non-linear )
Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application – Paul Romer talks about two different kinds of informational goods: "technology" and "rules". The former being knowledge about how to re-arrange the material world to increase its value to humans, and the latter being constraints on the ways we interact with each other. His "new/endogenous growth" theory suggests that overwhelmingly, wealth creation throughout history has been due to these two kinds of goods, and that they are virtually infinite resources. What he does not explicitly admit in the talk though, is that much of our increased apparent wealth has come at the cost of virtual liquidation of material resources. Truly sustainable growth absolutely must close the materials loop somehow. Better sooner than later. The rest of his idea is wonderful: we need a system which enables rule set entrepreneurs, or we aren't going to get sufficient innovation in the field. He suggests myriad autonomous city states, and I agree emphatically. (tagged: economics urban society non-linear politics longnow )
The Swimming Cities of Serenissima – Improvised and chaotic houseboats built from found bits, floating down the Mississippi (2006-2007), or the Hudson (2008), or sailing the Adriatic from Slovenia to Venice (2009). Like a tiny maritime Burning Man. Only a couple of boats today… What if it were an armada? (tagged: art boat performance sailing )

A Letter to David Bodansky

Hello Prof. Bodansky,

I’m a PhD student in geophysics, and I just finished reading your book, Nuclear Energy. I appreciate the trouble you went to in the book to remain effectively neutral as to whether we ought to be pursuing the development of nuclear power. While I can’t say that the book made me into a nuclear advocate, I am less opposed to it in principle now, and believe that it does represent a potential long term energy solution, albeit one with non-trivial caveats. Then again, that seems to be the case with all of our options at this point.

Continue reading A Letter to David Bodansky

Shared Links for Jun 16th

Is There a Better Word for Doom? – Six disparate views on the value and ethics of actively re-framing the public discussion surrounding climate change. (tagged: politics policy environment communication propaganda climate change science )
Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history – A talk given by Clay Shirky to the State Dept. a month or so ago, on the global, social, ubiquitous and cheap media landscape of the 21st century. Especially relevant in light of Iran's elections and protests at the moment. (tagged: web2.0 media propaganda technology social twitter politics transparency )
Iran's Disputed Election | A Revolution in Pictures – Images are streaming out of Iran. Hundreds of thousands of people marching. Guns, fires, roads blocked by burning busses, riots and blood in the streets. The para-military storming the University. Protesters improbably evacuating an injured riot cop. Tear-gas ping pong. All revolutions look the same on the ground. They are not in practice ideological affairs. (tagged: iran politics election 2009 photos protest police )
Gadget Teardowns – How to completely and utterly disassemble… just about anything, from a banana to your brand new Macbook Pro. Unclear whether you can put it all back together again! (tagged: technology design maker )
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online – An essay by Wired editor and Long Now pundit Kevin Kelly, making analogies between the "socialism" of the 20th century, and the open collaborative systems which have taken hold of the Internet. Larry Lessig hates the fact that he used the S-word, since it's got such a black name in the US, but I'm not so sure it was a bad idea. Actually I think that more than anywhere else, "socialist" ideas can probably work in the world of pure information. We're certainly nowhere near the limits of sharing online yet. (tagged: technology economics politics internet web2.0 socialism lessig longnow )

Shared Links for Jun 15th

Being “Used To” Our Lifestyle Makes Change Seem Difficult – The range of lifestyles which people have been able to become accustomed to and enjoy throughout history and spread out over the globe, is immense. Some of them are sustainable; ours is not. The willingness to experiment and accept change, to be flexible at a societal level, is of paramount importance today, and has in the past meant the difference between survival and obliteration for countless other civilizations, as detailed in Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse". But change is hard, whether you drive an SUV and have managed to shave your lifestyle requirements down to 8 earths from 10, or whether you're the child of a prostitute in Calcutta. We are creatures of habit, quite literally. (tagged: sustainability film energy green stuff money )
The Need for Geoengineering – A WSJ op-ed advocating near term geoengineering, of the stratospheric sulfate aerosol variety. It would be fast acting, relatively easy to reverse, and of the options on the table today, is the least mysterious, since it's not so different from the effects of a large (historically speaking) volcanic eruption like Mt. Pinatubo. The author cautions that even at best, all this would do is give us time: we still need to get the atmosphere back to ~350ppm. What a fascinating modern age it is we live in! (tagged: climate technology geoengineering )
Early Reviews of NYC’s New High Line Park – A round up of several reviews of the High Line Park, which has just opened in NYC. (tagged: architecture urban design landscape garden parks nyc )
The High Line – An abandoned elevated freight rail line in Manhattan is reborn as a long linear park three stories above the streetscape. I love how the design incorporates the rails and the overgrown feeling that the old line had developed on its own. This and the closure of Broadway at Times Square makes me want to visit New York. Inspiring to see that this kind of change is possible. (tagged: urban design architecture green garden parks nyc )
Pedalpalooza 2009 – Wow, a two week long bicycle festival in Portland, spanning the summer solstice? Sounds like a wonderful way to start a bike tour! Hopefully it will still be going on next summer. (tagged: bicycle transportation oregon portland festival activism )

Shared Links for Jun 12th

Your Backyard Farmer – A couple of women in Portland who will do your organic vegetable gardening for you! They visit dozens of personal gardens all over Portland every day to tend their micro-fields, and can help teach you how to grow too. If we're willing to pay people to come do landscaping (and certainly "we" seem to be willing to do that in Pasadena), why not vegetables too? I've thought about this business model in the past too. Seemed like it would probably be a lot of work, and not a whole lot of pay, but it does have the advantage of starting up with virtually no capital. Just hand tools, seeds, and smiles 🙂 (tagged: gardening food green urban sustainability business )
Are we ready for honesty? | Jerusalem Post – A right-wing Israeli talks about what an honest discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict would look like. Should they annex the West Bank formally, and set up a greater Israel in which the Arabs cannot vote? Should they expel the Arab Israelis in exchange for removing all the settlers? It might sound like crazy talk… but at some level, the questions he brings up are the real questions Israel has to deal with, no matter how ugly they might be. (tagged: israel palestine obama war policy westbank gaza terrorism )
China Begins Its Transition to a Clean-Energy Economy – Lots of great plans from the Chinese leadership, but are they actually enforceable, implementable, or verifiable, even by China's own government? And even if they are, the terrifying fact is that they don't end up reducing emissions, they just end up slowing the rate of increase, what what we really need is a virtual cessation of CO2 emissions worldwide. The universe is not required to be accordance with human ambition. (tagged: energy china climate policy politics )
Wordnik – A site for anyone who loves words and language. More than a dictionary, different from the Wiktionary, fun and social. Give words a life of their own! (tagged: education language dictionary technology web2.0 )
Conservative Cyclists Transcend Cultural Stereotypes – As with sustainability more generally, we're only likely to make progress on cycling when it can stop being a partisan issue. Thankfully I'm not the only one who likes it because it's cheap! (tagged: bicycle transportation politics )

Shared Links for Jun 7th

Home by Yann Arthus-Bertrand – It's like his photography, but moving. Visually stunning. About 2/3 of the film is great, especially the almost mythologized story of our creation. Poetic, without being flowery or playing too fast and loose with the facts. Short on concrete suggestions for what to do, unfortunately. (tagged: sustainability green earth climate film )
Web Site Helps Bicyclists Avoid Crash Hotspots – LA's local CBS affiliate did a story on Bikewise, featuring… me! (tagged: bicycle transportation technology maps google urban planning tv )
The Artvertiser – Ad replacement technology not for your browser, but for your ad encrusted urban reality. Augmented reality goggles not included. (tagged: urban art technology advertising )
L.A. County raids homeless camp under 10 Freeway – This is like something out of a William Gibson novel. A vast vault underneath the 10 freeway called "The Cave" by its denizens. Drugs, cooking, bicycles, babies, rats. What would LA be like today with 30% unemployment I wonder? (tagged: losangeles freeway homeless society police urban design architecture )
HEET: Home Energy Efficiency Team – HEET is a bunch of collaborative energy efficiency "barn raisers", volunteering their time and knowledge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get home weatherized, insulated, and otherwise energetically improved. Now, it might be even better if one could, um, get some support (or at least a lack of obstruction) from the powers that be for this kind of behavior, but failing that, this is nothing short of brilliant civil disobedience. (tagged: sustainability architecture energy efficiency volunteer cooperation )

Shared Links for May 29th

Post-Scarcity Prophet: Economist Paul Romer on growth, technological change, and an unlimited human future. – Reason Magazine – An excellent interview with Paul Romer from Stanford, who has apparently been thinking along the same lines as I have about the deep differences between material and informational goods (he calls them "things" and "ideas"). I don't think he's skeptical enough about the motives and powers of large "market" players to subvert the markets they participate in, but he certainly gets that all growth, in the fullness of time, must be based on knowledge and not stuff. Malthus and Erlich aren't wrong, they just haven't been right yet. Will have to look up much more of his writing! (tagged: economics science history capitalism technology growth non-linear wto corporations interview )
This is not "socialism" – Semantic arguments are both catastrophically boring, and necessary. What does "socialism" mean? Is the Wikipedia socialist? Is the Internet inherently socialist? Do the ideas associated with "socialism" even have meaning when considered in the context of informational goods that once produced, are non-rivalrous and non-excludable? Why are so many people unwilling (unable?) to try and understand what a speaker or writer actually means, instead tending to just attach all their own cultural baggage to the words they use. All important words subtly change their meaning… (tagged: economics capitalism politics internet socialism copyright technology lessig )
bikewise – Hooray!!! Somebody implemented basically exactly what I wanted in a bicycle issue reporting system, and licensed under Creative Commons to boot! It lets you report hazards, crashes, and thefts, register your bike, subscribe by e-mail or RSS to changes in your area, etc. Absolutely fantastic, clean, and easy to use. I'll populate it single handedly for Pasadena if I have to! (tagged: bicycle transportation maps wiki google planning policy )
Housing and Transportation Affordability Index – a nice little application that allows you to browse geographically through several interesting slices of census tract data, looking at transit and housing affordability in various big metro areas in the US. (tagged: maps economics transportation economy urban )
A Low Impact Woodland Home – A beautiful hobbit hole in wales. Left alone for a century, it would just melt back into the hillside, like many well-designed things. (tagged: sustainability green design architecture )

Shared Links for May 21st

Car-Free Housing in European Cities – A survey of sustainable residential development projects across Europe, including Vauban, outside Freiburg. The study is from 2000, so it's a little out of date, but an interesting overview anyway. It would be great to have a decadal survey of such developments, to see how they evolve and deal with growing pains, and issues which arise in their experimental settings… (tagged: urban design sustainability architecture europe bicycle )
Nuns arrive at eco-convent and leave behind high-carbon habit – An interesting set of design choices by an organization with what one would imagine is a very long time horizon. Their old (stone) convent was certainly built to last centuries, structurally. I wonder if the new one is too, or if the construction methods, while minimizing energy consumption while the building functions, will ultimately require more embodied energy as it has to be re-build more frequently? Most homes today aren't built to last much more than the length of a mortgage contract. In the US anyway. (tagged: sustainability religion architecture design green environment )
28 Reasons to Bike – A list of reasons why biking is good for you, for others, and for the city you live in. Of varying importance, quality, and subjectivity. But a good list to discuss in any case, with references for more extensive information. (tagged: politics transportation bicycle green urban sustainability policy economics )
The Solipsist and the Internet – Larry Lessig offers a (very) lengthly review of of Helprin's "Digital Barbarism", which is an argument (an abjectly bad one in Lessig's view) in favor of infinite copyrights. Oh. My. God. And I thought *I* knew how to rant! (tagged: law internet technology copyright )
sea kayaking patagonia – This looks like an awesome trip, 50 days paddling south through Patagonia from Puerto Montt. Now, can it be combined somehow with a bike ride from Buenos Aires? (tagged: travel kayak spanish patagonia chile paddling )

Shared Links for May 11th

Where can you get Cheap Natural Fertilizers and Soil Amendments? – A nice concise list of natural sources for garden nutrients, when your compost pile just isn't quite enough. (tagged: gardening food organic fertlizer compost biology )
Pinko bastion spawns capitalist solution to solar financing – Boulder city/county passed the same kind of property-tax based financing of energy efficiency (and solar) improvements on the Nov. ballot too – modeled on Berkeley, but with enabling legislation at the state level (to avoid the kind of lawsuit Berkeley had to fight over whether or not they had the power to issue such bonds). The biggest worry I had in reading the Boulder initiative though, was that they had not yet come up with a good mechanism for ensuring that the improvements which were being proposed (more insulation, solar hot water, whatever) would necessarily save enough energy in order to justify the value of the bond being created. Hopefully they’ve fleshed that metric of value out much better by now (in both Boulder and Berkeley) and it’s not possible to abuse it… otherwise I suspect you’ll get deployment of faddish fixes (e.g. sexy-sexy PV instead of solar hot water, or better insulation, or super-windows, etc) instead of the best energy improvement per dollar invested. (tagged: finance capitalism investing energy efficiency sustainability green solar berkeley boulder bonds )
Campaign for a Car-Free Lincoln Park, Pt. 2 – A lack of car-free options for arriving at Lincoln Park, coupled with poorly lit, unsafe parking far away from the park's main attraction means everyone just drives their cars all over the park, on the grass. Across the street, the DMV has a huge parking lot which is totally unused after business hours, which is when the park gets the overwhelming majority of its use. Why not (gasp!) timeshare the DMV lot? Hopefully no small children have to get crushed by the marauding death machines for someone in the state and city government to take this idea seriously. (tagged: cars parking transportation urban planning design )
FlyingConcrete – Beautiful biomimetic architecture. Curving vaulted ceilings and stairways. Rounded sleeping nooks and pillars like trees. Traditional rectilinear construction is so boring. This is lightweight concrete (cement with perlite, pumice, and other lightweight filler added instead of sand and gravel) laid up on a mesh that's been shaped such that when the cement hardens, it's a load bearing compressive structure. (tagged: architecture art concrete design construction buildings sculpture )
Drew Endy and Jim Thomas Debate Synthetic Biology – An unusually good discussion about the future of biotechnology, and maybe the only time I've ever really seen the "debate" format work, and elicit relatively thoughtful interaction. I think they're both dancing around the fundamental question though, of to what extent (if any) society even *gets* to make a choice on this topic. (tagged: biology biotech genetics technology science future debate longnow engineering )