Smart Energy

Just imagine: Instead of sending Grandma a holiday photo of the family for her fridge, you call up the image on your computer monitor, click “print,” and your printer produces a three-dimensional plastic model ready for hanging on the holiday tree. Scenes like that — in which homes have 3-D printers that build solid objects on demand – are fast approaching reality, according to the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s weekly newsmagazine.

In the article, C&EN Associate Editor Lauren K. Wolf explains that 3-D printers are on the verge of a personal revolution akin to the one that began in the 1970s and transformed computers from room-size machines to devices that fit on tables and now in pockets. A similar transformation is taking place in the world of 3-D printing, where machines are shrinking and the ability to create detailed objects from a variety of materials is growing. Engineers are now able to create objects out of a number of plastics, metals, ceramics and even foods like chocolate, sometimes with details as fine as a human hair.

The technology promises to foster revolutions in venues ranging from kitchens to hospital operating rooms. Some surgeons, for instance, envision printing bone grafts or replacement blood vessels with embedded proteins and cells that will help them fuse naturally. Chefs could print designer chocolates and gourmet meals with unique textures and tastes. “In 20 years, many people will have a 3-D printer in their kitchen for printing designer foods and other products,” the article quotes one scientist as saying.

via Personal electronics’ next revolution: Home printers that make 3-D objects.

Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century, and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end U.N. estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wildlands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth.

The real possibility of fertility decline stopping before the two-children level is reached requires demographers, policy makers, and environmentalists to seriously consider that population growth in the coming century will come in at the high end of demographic projections. The U.N.’s middle-of-the-road assumption for sub-Saharan Africa — that fertility rates will drop to three children per woman and population will reach 2 billion by 2050 — seem unrealistically low to me. More likely is the U.N.’s high-end projection that sub-Saharan Africa’s population will climb to 2.2 billion by 2050 and then continue to 4.8 billion by 2100. The dire consequences of such an increase are difficult to ponder. If sub-Saharan Africa is having trouble feeding and providing water to 880 million people today, what will the region be like in 90 years if the population increases fivefold — particularly if, as projected, temperatures rise by at least 3.6 degrees F, worsening droughts?

via What if population grows faster than the experts project? | 7 billion: What to expect when you’re expanding—a special series | Grist.

I just posted this to my blog at work:

Philip Leigh has a really interesting piece about the future of publishing on MediaPost.

He writes that just as “the printing press transformed publishing, the true cultural significance of blogging — which is only incipient at present — will be a consequence of its production process. ”

When I was in comm school, we called that technological determinism and, after much debate, arrived at the conclusion that in fact cultural change is so complex than attributing change to any one cause is always going to result in fallacy and misdirection.

That said, there is certainly some great insight into Leigh’s analysis. The invention of the rotary press circa 1830 resulted in an explosion called the newspaper industry. (Which had previously been low-budget, low-circulation affairs that mainly announced ship movements.)

But we have to ask a question here: was the rotary press invented out of whole cloth or was it invented because there was a need for high-speed print-production capability?

via A Little History, and the Future of Publishing – Marketing, News, and Educational Communications.

A World Without Ice by Henry Pollack

Henry Pollack is a venerable scientist with a thousand stories to share. He’s been doing ice science for over 40 years. He’s also been explaining what he does, and the implications of what he and his colleagues have learned, for nearly as long. All of that experience makes A World Without Ice a great introduction to climate science.

Pollack doesn’t bother to tackle the climate change deniers head on. At this stage of the game, there’s really no point. Although surveys inform us that Americans remain stubbornly pig-headed about the subject, the rest of us are innovating and positioning ourselves to capitalize on the inevitably growing demand for greener, cleaner technology. For example, roughly thirty percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the buildings we live and work in. Reducing emissions from buildings (either by building new ones right or by retrofitting existing ones) not only lowers our overall carbon footprint but lowers utility bills, as well. So the deniers can fume all they want; they’ll modify their tune soon enough when their wallets are empty. Read the rest of this entry »

Flyfire is an MIT project that “aims to transform any ordinary space into a highly immersive and interactive display environment.” This reminds me of David Marusek’s novels, in which billboards in space constantly blare advertising messages down on global populations.

In its first implementation, the Flyfire project sets out to explore the capabilities of this display system by using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.

The threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth has captivated the imaginations of movie audiences for years. Now, however, Russia is working to develop a very real plan to counter such a threat.

The Russian space agency says it is working to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth.

Without giving many details, a spokesman for the agency said it is working on a way to divert the path of the asteroid, named Apophis, without destroying it.

NASA’s latest calculations put Apophis at having only a one in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth by, or during, the 2030s.

via Russia, US at Odds Over Future Asteroid Hit | Science and Technology | English.

There’s more! Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid

Dan o’ Xark! has an interesting piece on narrative journalism and its evolution. I’ve commented on Dan’s thinking before and admire his intellectual creativity and restlessness.

What he’s up to in this piece is arguing for an end (or at least an alternative) to long-form narrative journalism in favor of…. something else.

Journalism schools have taught view-from-nowhere, AP Style-compliant, mass-media-voice long-form feature writing for decades, and readers just aren’t interested. Educating another generation of students to file 75-inch profiles of local United Way executives, written for the annual press contest judges who determine next-year’s promotions, just isn’t much of an answer to the market-side questions that demand our attention.

True enough. But the really interesting point he makes comes a bit further down:

Classic narrative follows a subject through a conflict to a resolution. And if our primary means of understanding something as complex as global warming is just a series of narratives about conflict, then we’re not going to make much progress. This is one reason why American mainstream news organizations kept emphasizing critics of global warming, even though the most credible peer-reviewed studies favored the anthropogenic warming theory championed by Al Gore…. We didn’t need better narrative journalism about global warming, we needed less of it. We needed a way of communicating that encouraged the evaluation of facts instead of the balancing of rhetoric. It’s a shift that requires a radically different theory of the press.

It’s difficult to see how a “different theory of the press” is going to change something that has nothing, really, to do with the press and everything to do with cognition. You can present things in ways that encourage an evaluation of facts (e.g., charts and graphs or, as Dan suggests by way of example, box scores), but we’re still going to contextualize those facts by way of a conflict-driven narrative.

If the facts don’t move us, we don’t care. And in order to be moved, in order for facts to move, they must in some way, an engine-like way, face resistance. We need to at least imagine counterfactuals: I’m not here, I’m there, in that person’s shoes.

So Dan’s example of the critics of global warming getting face time in the media makes sense. If you want to do something about it, start by reporting from the critics’ point of view: the climate isn’t changing, you report, and then give many column inches to the critics of that view.

Dan argues that, without box scores,

how many at-bats would never have been recorded for future historians because they didn’t fit into the narrative the writer picked as he hammered out a story on deadline?

Fair enough. But those historians will do nothing with that information without first recontextualizing it as conflict-driven narrative. Indeed, lovers of baseball routinely recontextualize box scores, mentally pitting pitcher against batter and so on.

It’s not journalism that needs to evolve to address your concerns, Dan; it’s the human brain that must change.

The death of newspapers?

I like Steven A. Smith’s take [dead, Sept. 2010] on the need for a debate among journalists about the future of journalism as newspapers die a (not so) slow and horrible death. Smith is the former editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review (a newspaper I love to hate for its conservative editorial page and lack of attention to agriculture as anything but an end product for restaurant reviews).

As Smith points out, the newspaper industry’s “central debate ought not to be about saving newspapers and, in fact, that hasn’t even been an open question for some time. The American newspaper as we have come to know it in the post-war era is not going to survive.”

Publishers who continue to argue their papers are strong despite massive cuts in newsroom staff, are twisting the truth in order to save their businesses. They talk about the migration to niche products, to smaller, leaner papers and efficient websites. Saving journalism isn’t part of their agenda. To be fair, especially in the current marketplace, they can’t save both. They always will default to the money side, they have no choice. So a niche website devoted to golf may generate revenue for the business. But it will not serve citizens who rely on journalists to reveal civic truths.

As a former indie publisher, I’m intrigued and hopeful that Smith sees a possibility “for a single journalist, operating on her own, to cover a legislature somewhere in a format as crude as a newsletter or pamphlet and generate enough from her efforts to make a modest living.”

Dubious, but hopeful. A model here might be Cockburn and St. Clair’s CounterPunch, which  charges for a print addition of its free web content (and asks for donations to support its web publishing).

In any case, we can’t let publishers ruin the business and calling of journalism: “take back the page!” is Smith’s rallying cry: journalists “ought not to be allowed to kill the vital public-service journalism that serves citizens. It’s time to stop debating the obvious. It’s time for journalists to take back the debate and save themselves.”

See also: Newspaper Death Watch.

Good news from Harper’s weekly email:

Scientists discovered the “magnetosphere,” a layer of ions and electrons surrounding the earth described by one physicist as a “warm plasma cloak,” and a study suggested that the Milky Way is traveling through space 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, meaning it will collide with the galaxy Andromeda far sooner than predicted. “The galaxies will be dramatically stirred up,” said Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, “but they are very squidgy, so they will stick together and eventually all the stars will die out, and it will become one huge, dead galaxy.”

“Squidgy” is Brit English for “soft and squishy” and “maybe a bit fat,” according to the Urban Dictionary. But in the case of colliding galaxies, I think it may mean “zorch strokin’, fast and bulbous.” Just a guess.

In any case, another delightful union to look forward to.

Joni Mitchell's I Ching guitar

essay by Brian Charles Clark and Nisi Shawl

In the Jan. 1994 issue of Acoustic Guitar, Rick Turner wrote,

Steve Klein built this amazing and beautiful guitar in 1977.

This guitar was built for Joni Mitchell, and it is a great example of what can happen when a musical and visual artist teams up with a luthier. It was designed for Mitchell’s low open tunings, and the removable soundhole rosette/ring allows the guitar’s air resonance to be tuned accordingly for different amounts of bass. Mitchell collaborated on concepts for the inlays, which include I Ching symbols in the fingerboard and around the soundhole; the I Ching’s hexagram number 56, the Wanderer, graces the face and the upper bout. Don Juan’s crow flies on the peghead, and the wandering theme continues on with the mountains and the road.”

In fact, the eight trigrams run up the neck of the guitar, heaven at the nut and earth at the top of the neck. Heaven is bass! Hejira, one of Mitchell’s several masterpieces, was recorded and released in 1976, the year before this guitar was made. Lu, hexagram 56, pretty much describes the album’s mood of not staying together, of fire on the mountain that “does not tarry,” in Wilhelm/Baynes’ words, of a wanderlust that drives one onward toward the greener pasture on the other side of the hill. Read the rest of this entry »