Obama is committing stimulus funds for high-speed rail projects in Florida, California, and elsewhere!
Here’s a good overview of the proposed U.S. projects from this month’s Wired.
And here’s Time Magazine’s take.
It has been an exciting couple of weeks for eBooks!
O’Reilly Publishing has adopted Bookworm, a web site for online eBook reading and storage. Bookworm is built on open software and the open epub standard. Bookworm looks pretty slick!
Once you upload your ebooks, you can transfer them from Bookworm to the Stanza app on your iPhone. Unfortunately, Stanza is still kind of rough around the edges. Paging is little different from Palm-era ebook readers, and pre-formatted text often gets cut off at less than its full width.
Still, my enthusiasm for the epub standard makes me think Bookworm itself has a good chance to succeed, at least to some extent. epub piggybacks on HTML, and consequently has good support for things like tables. There is also support for generating epub content from books expressed in another attractive format, DocBook XSL.
Then, Amazon released a Kindle App for the iPhone.
Kindle for iPhone seamlessly downloads all your purchased Kindle content and can sync your current page across iPhone and Kindle Wireless Reading Device (”Kindle”).
The App is pretty well done. Paging is accomplished using the cool finger-flit motion familiar from other iPhone apps.
However, unlike Stanza and the Kindle Wireless Reading Device, there’s no integrated search. And the Mobi format underlying Kindle content still lacks support for real tables.
Perhaps most disappointingly, there appears to be no way to load content that was not purchased through Amazon into Kindle for iPhone. Hopefully, this facility will come soon, along with some way to read Kindle content on a Desktop.
Nevertheless, having all my Kindle content available to my iPhone has proven to be convenient. It’s especially useful for reading when your range of motion is limited, like on a crowded train. The iPhone also makes it possible to read in the dark or in extreme cold. The e-ink technology that underlies the Kindle Wireless Reading Device looks great, but it isn’t backlit and the tiny little colored spheres that underly it won’t spin properly at low temperatures.
Picking up a thread from a few weeks ago, what would be a good way to conserve energy? Here’s a suggestion that I don’t remember reading elsewhere:
At work, don’t just focus on your own work space. Focus on your whole work place!
I used to be a big fan of the Washington Metro Rail System. Years of delays, crowding, appalling customer service, and even accidents changed that. Certainly, inadequate funding has been at least as much to blame as mismanagement.
Luckily, there have been recent indications that things may be on the mend. These include ground breaking on the Dulles line, the installation of a new, platform-level public address system that riders can actually hear, and the successful handling of huge-gantic Inaugural crowds. So I’ll try and mute my grumbling about the 50 minutes I spent on the phone the other day (hopefully) transferring the balance from my dysfunctional SmarTrip card.
Here’s one Metro-related item that I will not attempt to mute my grumbling about: I hate this Chevron ad!
I am generally skeptical of conspiracy theories. I’m inclined to think that GM & company were just stupid rather than that they “killed” the electric car. But I’ll be danged if this sign doesn’t look like it actually seeks to discourage readers from buying a hybrid electric car. The guy is holding his head in despair! Oh, hybrid cars are manifestly inferior and weak. But I will at least consider getting one.
That’s ridiculous. Hybrid cars are awesome! They look great, get great gas mileage, perform awesome, run quietly. Oh yeah, and they won’t mortgage the next generation’s inheritance.
This holiday season, I received two books describing how we can help the environment.
The first one, the New York Times’ green book, was a disappointment. The celebrity vignettes were well-intentioned, if at times bizarre (William McDonough and Cameron Diaz?)
Some of the advice in this book isn’t very good. Take the following travel tip:
Seek out locations that aren’t overexposed, overcrowded, or in environmenmentally sensitive areas. Overcrowding in already densely populated areas can lead to increased pollution by wastewater, garbage, heating, noise, and traffic emissions.
Unfortunately, the impact of tourism on the environment is more complicated.
As any trail designer will tell you, concentrating visitors in certain areas can actually be good for the environment, because it limits overall damage. Similarly, it hurts the environment less to ride the teacups at “overexposed, overcrowded” Disney World than it does to ride an airboat through the environmentally sensitive Everglades.
But you can also visit the Everglades without particularly hurting the environment, provided you stay on the boardwalks and paved paths. In fact, you might become so enchanted with the amazing bird, alligator, and otter populations that you are moved to reduce your environmental impact upon returning home.
What’s more, income from legitimate eco-tourism empowers some communities to avoid unsustainably harvesting their natural resources!
We generate pollution everywhere. In a densely-populated city, the larger shared buildings waste less heat. Destinations are closer together, so we don’t have to drive as far. That means less pollution, not more.
The chapter on school advises:
Try using a digital library or the World Wide Web instead of traveling to your local branch to do research. You’ll save time and money. The circulation of books from public libraries is 1.9 billion a year, or about 7 items checked out per person. If every American checked out and researched online a single book a year, we would save three hundred million trips to the bookshelves.
These numbers sound fishy to me, but let’s assume they’re right. Let’s further assume that no one ever walks or bikes to the library, which has minimal environmental impact.
I’m all for the Internet, but do we really want to discourage kids from using the library? The Internet is a gigantic but profoundly non-authoritative source of information. Information published in books has to pass a higher threshhold of quality and suitability.
Electronic books are great, but the availability of titles remains limited. And e-book delivery platforms are still pretty expensive.
In order to function as citizens of a participatory democracy, it is imperative that we remain well-informed. Without resources like libraries we wouldn’t be able to cope effectively with the challenges that affect our environment.
Then the chapter on work goes on to give this contradictory advice:
More than two hours of the average office worker’s time is used per day sending e-mails and surfing the Internet. Internet data servers use as much energy in the United States as is used by all U.S. TVs combined.
And the final fifty-one pages of the book are, you guessed it, references to Internet data servers! Why pulp trees to print web addresses that will already be out of date when the book is published? Why not set up a single web site, include the URL at the end of the book, and maintain links to everything from there?
Clearly, there is work to be done improving the energy efficiency of Internet server farms. Instead, the authors of the green book would have us to communicate and read less! Unless we’re using the Internet to avoid a trip to the library.
It is unreasonable to expect that we should stop living our lives to help the environment. Ultimately, the whole point of environmentalism is to enrich our lives by securing the wonder of nature for ourselves and our descendants.
The book’s saving grace is a page on which Will Ferrell recounts the “limitless joy” that driving his electric car to the hazardous waste facility affords him. For my money, they should have let Ferrell write the whole book.
I’m glad to say that I really did enjoy Living Like Ed, A Guide to the Eco-Friendly Life, by Ed Begley Jr. Ed is the real deal. His book is full of great information, much of which I had never read anywhere else.
First off, Robert Reich has just written much of what I wrote here on Tuesday, but way smarter. Here’s hoping this guy gets a prominent cabinet position.
Next, this weekend’s Green Festival at the Washington DC Convention Center. If nothing more, it was great to see so many people show up in the name of living in harmony with the environment… even if some of it did involve holistic vegan Yoga massage.
I got to meet William McDonough at a book signing (not sure whether his bow-tie was biodegradable) and talk to several solar contractors. I was pleased to see The Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Anacostia Watershed Society were there to represent.
One group that was new to me was The Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington DC. These folks brought a Prius modified with a kit to permit recharging by plug, without gasoline. It was neat to see and hear about one of these things first-hand.
Another interesting attendee was Burr Technologies. This company is trying to assemble computers that use less power, primarily by the use of more efficient power supplies that can be passively cooled, without resorting to a fan. In the same vein, this month brings the news that researchers at Penn State have made progress with the use of electrocaloric plastics for high-efficiency electric cooling, which would be perfect for computer chips. Having grown disenchanted with “Sleep Mode”, I think these folks may be onto something.
Computers have to load instructions into memory when first starting up. This process can take a long time. As Peter Gibbons learned in Office Space, the same is true for shutdown, when your computer has to clean-up open resources.
Well-intentioned engineers came up with Sleep Mode as a solution: instead of turning a computer off, just dump the system state to the hard drive, power down most components, and reload the state later, if needed.
Unfortunately, sleep mode hasn’t worked out so well. Even today, many non-Mac laptops struggle to wake when opened, presumably a consequence of poor software/hardware integration.
But even systems that wake up successfully when roused by an operator have come smashing up against a broken abstraction of the Network Age.
A “server” is any computer that provides services to another computer. When most clients were little more than screens or teletypes, this was a useful distinction. Today, it’s often hard to distinguish the server from the client. If you stream downloaded television shows from your desktop computer to a set-top box, or sync your calendar from your desktop to a mobile device, which machine is the server? And what happens if that “server” happens to be asleep when you need its services?
Efforts to address this, like Wake-on-LAN mode, have not seen wide adoption. So maybe the better solution is to reduce the computer’s energy footprint all the time.
Heart-felt congratulations to Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the United States of America, and the Earth.
Audio I recorded from the celebration in downtown Washington DC at 2:34 AM Wednesday morning.
Government is not perfect. But properly managed, it can harness our collective genius in times of challenge.
Government investment brought us the Internet, put us on the Moon, and built a system of trails and highways that reach from one end of this country to the other. New investments like these in energy technology can save us from global climate change and from our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. The money we spend will also put Americans to work and help jump start our stalled economy.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy
It’s Election Day in the United States, everybody. Let’s do this.
We got to see many of the Maryland homes on the DC Solar Tour this weekend. The center of Maryland solar activity is clearly Takoma Park. Sadly, Roscoe the Rooster and Chris Carter’s Lone Gunmen have moved on. But happily, the hippies endure. They are a little grayer and have traded in their VW Buses for Toyota Prii.
Several photovoltaic technologies were on display. “Green All Over” on Conway Avenue has SunPower panels. These are traditional, crystalline Silicon panels… very effective and very expensive, not just in terms of cost but also input manufacturing energy. I read in Scientific American that SunPower is able to squeeze out a few more watts by moving the conduction wires to the back of the cells, where they don’t block the sun.
Lots of innovative companies are now hard at work on “thin film” solar panels. Thin films can essentially be painted onto a surface using printing technology, and can be bent or rolled-up without damage. Alternately, they can be incorporated into ordinary building materials like roofing tiles.
The cheerful, marigold “Hutchinswasser Haus” on Holly Avenue employs UNI-SOLAR thin film panels. These are thin film, amorphous Silicon cells. UNI-SOLAR is manufactured by Energy Conversion Devices. Another, prominent competitor in this space is Innovalight.
No Takoma Park solar tour would be complete without Mike Tidwell’s Clean Energy Home, and in fact he and his Chesapeake Climate Action Network give them regularly, complete with endearing descriptions of his “pancake-powered” push lawnmower.
Mike was able to score BP (formerly British Petrolium) thin-film panels before they gave up and ceased production, re-focusing on traditional Silicon. BP’s effort, like that of the more successful First Solar company, employed Cadmium Terlluride.
The other thin film technology on the horizon involves CIGS cells (Copper Indium Gallium Selenium) and is being pursued by companies like nanosolar and Miasolé. (source, Earth: The Sequel.)
Hyattsville residents are generally up on Hyattsville, but none of us like the mosquitos. Mosquitos aren’t just annoying, they are also big-time disease vectors.
When I lived in Tampa, the problem was addressed by periodically spraying the heck out of everything. I remember hearing the helicopters and running to my car before I was lacquered with sticky Malathion.
Is there a more environmentalsome answer?
When I bike home from work at dusk, I often am delighted to see bats swoop down alongside me on the Northwest Branch Trail to gobble up bugs with admirable precision.
Could our bat friends provide the solution to the mosquito menace? I think it’s time to install a bat house and see.
I just ordered one on eBay… I’ll keep you posted.
In different bat-related matters, the editors of tmbw.net, the otherwise cool They Might Be Giants wiki, remain unpersuaded by my arguments that the lyrics of The Deranged Millionaire refer not to “The Genome of Bats”, but rather to a baseball team called The Genova Bats. Starting my own They Might Be Giants wiki seemed excessive, so I decided to post here, instead.